Gallery Chronicle (February 2016)

Katherine Bradford, Fear of Waves (2015), Oil on canvas.

THE NEW CRITERION
February 2016

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Katherine Bradford: Fear of Waves” & "Elisabeth Kley: Ozymandias" at Canada; “Carolanna Parlato: A Delicate Balance” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery; “Ronnie Landfield: Five Decades” at Stux + Haller; & “Lori Ellison” at McKenzie Fine Art.

Over the last few years, the haunting work of Katherine Bradford has been hard to miss. Her small paintings have popped up in dozens of group exhibitions. Roughly painted images of ships or supermen or space aliens: the iconography may shift, but the mood conveyed is unmistakably her own. Her paintings might be new works, but they feel like old souls, like rediscovered artifacts or shop signs. In their studied distress, her paintings recall the wear that Elie Nadelman might rub into his sculptures, or Albert Pinkham Ryder bake into his ships—objects once tightly held but now forgotten. Bradford’s primitivist paint handling reflects her lost subject matter, fragments of fuller, once glamorous stories that have now been effaced, or even submerged.

The specter of water has been a recurring theme for Bradford, a longtime fixture of New York’s alternative art scene, both in her paintings of ghostly ocean liners and in her faceless divers, traveling down in the opposite direction of her rising supermen. In Bradford’s subtle hand, water has a reactive, mystical, ultimately ominous quality, refracting shapes, oxidizing colors, and overwhelming her subject matter.

Now on view at Canada gallery on the Lower East Side, Bradford has reached a high-water mark with large, ambitious canvases that heighten the mood and raise the anxiety around, as the exhibition puts it, a “fear of waves.”1

In his 1950 book The Enchafèd Flood: or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea, W. H. Auden writes that “the sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the effort of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse.” In the modern age, water is sold as a luxury: deluxe ocean passages, summer days at the beach, oceanfront vistas, dips in the pool. But reality still cuts against these leisurely ideals. Floods, sinkings, and drownings pull us under. The dread of disaster is never fully washed away from our primitive consciousness, or our modern view.

Bradford takes the images of water-bound recreation—swimming, diving, playing in the waves—and subsumes them in a mood of uncertainty and peril. In Fear of Waves (2015), one of the larger paintings here and the one that gives its title to the exhibition, a crowd of beachgoers observed far off from an elevated perspective, like the view from a bluff, assembles waist-deep in a pool of light blue. A set of white waves rolls towards them from the right side of the canvas. At first they appear to be relaxing in the surf. On closer inspection, they are revealed to be attempting to swim away from deep water, reaching for an unseen shore as their lips scream out in terror.

A similar sensation comes across in Surfer (2015) and Surf Party (2015). The bottom half of each painting shows figures in the water at play. But the top half conveys something else: the rising spray of an oversized wave, the potential for disaster. The outcome is a mystery. A halo of color predominates each canvas, erasing and blinding us to the particular emotions of the distant figures.

This feeling for the unknown has only increased as Bradford has located her scenes in increasingly ethereal settings. Bradford has long worked through the iconography of cosmic kitsch, with comic-book UFOs, planets, and stars appearing in her work. In her most recent paintings, some of them dated 2016 and seemingly still wet from the studio, Bradford elevates her water-bound figures into the astral plane. These settings make literal Auden’s understanding of the sea as the “symbol for the primordial undifferentiated flux, the substance which became created nature only by having form imposed upon or wedded to it.” Oversized galaxies appear in the black sky ofFloaters (2015). In Swim Team Miami (2015), divers prepare to jump from orbiting planets. Swim Team Outer Space (2015) floats on the curving surface of a purple planet illuminated by a glowing moon. While in Fathers(2016), the largest and most fraught canvas in the exhibition, nude figures face each other around the edge of a circular pool, which itself floats in a starry void.

Katherine Bradford, Couples Swim (2015), Acrylic on canvas.

With her sense for mood, Bradford comes across as a latter-day Symbolist. The smaller painting Couples Swim (2015), a favorite of mine that features two figures floating under a midnight sun, recalls nothing less than the work of the Symbolist Edvard Munch. In Symbolism, his 1979 study, Robert Goldwater observed how Munch put “the meaning of his pictures into design and colour, and into the stance and gesture of the whole human body, whose pose and contour flowed and fused with a larger composition that gave direct expression to the mood and substance of the theme.” Bradford shows a similar sensibility, and a similar fearlessness around fearful sentiment.

Elisabeth Kley, installation view at Canada.

Meanwhile, in Canada’s second gallery, Elisabeth Kley presents striking black-and-white ceramics that appear pulled up from an unknown deep. Working with “homemade underglazes, with wax resist and sgraffito,” Kley impresses rough designs of unknown ethnographic origin onto her hand-made vessels of flasks and lobed bottles. Abstract trees, crosses, seraphim, eyes, tulips, leaves, axes, and flags decorate these objects in matte black-and-white, and, on the reverse, white-on-black. Prints and wall-painting round out the monochrome space, contrasting with Bradford’s colors next door, with the earthenware objects arranged symmetrically on pedestals in museum formation. In the art world, we are in a ceramic moment. Kley’s clay looks to the future by unearthing the forgotten past.

Carolanna Parlato, a delicate balance (2015), Acrylic and molding paste on canvas, 64 x 84”.

Carolanna Parlato knows how to move paint around a canvas. Five years ago, she was pouring acrylic, tipping her stretchers, and allowing her pigments to spread across her canvases, reacting with her medium. Her self-made technique created remarkably accomplished compositions. So I was surprised to see her move beyond this mode into what might be considered more traditional paint handling. But seeing Parlato’s latest exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, I am glad she did.2

The first sensation I experienced entering “A Delicate Balance” is the smell of paint. I might even say it was the smell of white paint, but that could be the scent of the gallery wall reacting with my perception of this latest work. Parlato now layers splotches of color on white canvas. Her shapes resemble paint tests, the way you might spread out a fresh coat on a white wall. But just like her poured canvases, these shapes congregate not as random marks but rather as well-assembled compositions.

Here “balance” is achieved not just among her colors but even more significantly with her use of white. I have long felt that primed white canvas rarely works when left as unfinished surface in painted compositions. Unlike works on paper, where unfinished white ground forms a transparent and even illuminating surface, bare primed canvas has an invasive presence that usually requires further treatment. Parlato senses this as well. Her latest work is most importantly white-balanced, with scrims of white overlaying both her color blocks and her white ground.

Parlato’s use of thin acrylics is especially well suited for such subtle layering, as the squares and squiggles of a delicate balance (2015) seem to dissolve into her background—an effect I find more convincing than in the smallerBurst (2015), where her colors sit more on the surface. Meanwhile Clouded Memory is another show-stopper, with a more forward composition of red, purple, orange, and yellow surrounding earth tones of greens, browns, and blues. This composition contrasts her shapes, not between figure and ground, but center and frame, as a thin rim of bolder colors compresses subtler shades in, again, a delicate and accomplished balance.

Ronnie Landfield, Installation view at Stux + Haller.

Ronnie Landfield was one of the young painters of the 1960s Soho scene who looked into the emptiness of minimalism and found his own light beyond the darkness of the void. “I realized that [Donald] Judd and his minimalist philosophy was wrong,” Landfield explains in an illuminating interview with Daniella Hansen and Stefan Stux accompanying his current retrospective at Stux + Haller.3 “What he was doing was representing the essence of the void, but that’s just the beginning—it’s just the doorway.”

So Landfield looked deep and began to find landscapes in his designs, part traditional watercolor, part colorfield stain, enlarged to loft-size proportions. It might be hard today to imagine the alarm that Landfield’s illusionistic turn once posed to the supposed direction of modern art. Not only was he abandoning flat abstraction for deep space. He was also drawing his real vision from fictive imagination. Neither a realist not an abstractionist, he was an impure in-between.

With work assembled over five decades, this latest exhibition demonstrates Landfield’s consistency of vision along with his evolution and revisiting of techniques. Landfield’s imagined landscapes have a childlike appeal: colorful, hill-like shapes settle into lakes and dappled valleys beneath a rain-soaked sky. Water feels like a constant presence as his colors mix and bleed into the warp and weft of his canvases, a reflection of his water-based acrylic medium.

The ease of Landfield’s paint handling is masterful. If anything, his likeable visions come too easily. As a nod to his minimalist beginnings, at times Landfield introduced more hard-edged elements into these soft designs. Especially in the early work, I can understand their origin: his color bars form a minimalist frame, the reminders of a more concrete present from which to enter his maximal vision.

In his interview, Landfield reveals that Clement Greenberg disagreed with the imposition of these blocky forms, saying he should paint one way or the other, not both. Clem had a point: these impositions still seem like half steps. Landfield is at his best when he allows our full immersion into his lush found space, from the early Blue Wall (1970) to the more recent The Wind and the Rain (2012)—a drenched composition with colors to touch and space to breathe.

Lori Ellison, Untitled (2014-15), Ink on notebook paper, 11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches.

A final word about the artist Lori Ellison, a quiet person of outspoken conscience who died last August after a battle with cancer and years of health challenges. Ellison appeared in this column many times. Her obsessive work deployed seemingly simple patterns on provisional materials—often lined notepad paper and ballpoint pens—to dazzling effect. In an age that expects its art to be big, she worked notably small, inviting us into her private world while drawing connections among the artists of the Lower East Side and the outer-borough art scenes. Reflecting her captivating work, she was also an absorbing presence on social media, part aphorist, part provocateur, who wore her heart on her virtual sleeve. “Some ideas are responsible for the people who believe in them,” she posted online in the weeks before her death.

We are fortunate that Ellison could dedicate her energies to the planning of her final exhibition of new work, which went on view this past December and January at McKenzie Fine Art.4 One new chromatic series she developed of gouache on small wood panels took its inspiration from the undersea cutouts of Matisse. But it was her work on paper that, to me, remained her strongest, with intimate thoughts drawn out to their ultimate conclusions.

1 “Katherine Bradford: Fear of Waves” opened at Canada, New York, on January 9 and remains on view through February 14, 2016.

2 “Carolanna Parlato: A Delicate Balance” opened at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on January 7 and remains on view through February 13, 2016.

3 “Ronnie Landfield: Five Decades” opened at Stux + Haller, New York, on January 13 and remains on view through February 20, 2016.

4 “Lori Ellison” was on view at McKenzie Fine Art, New York, from December 11, 2015 to January 31, 2016.

This Week: the Van Cortlandt House Museum

Van Cortlandt House c. 1840 George Harvey (Anglo/American 1800-1878)

"Christmas in the Colonies," at the Van Cortlandt House Museum (Through January 10): Celebrants of Twelfth Night well know that the Christmas season is still upon us through this Wednesday (or thereabouts, depending on your custom). The Van Cortlandt House Museum, the former home of Frederick Van Cortlandt, famed Dutch patron, in New York's Van Cortlandt Park, offers a final week to experience the holiday the colonial way.

This 1748 high-Georgian home of dressed fieldstone welcomed Rochambeau, Lafayette, and Washington before becoming the city's first house museum in 1897.

The National Society of Colonial Dames in the City of New York, which has warmly operated the house for a century now, continues its old holiday traditions by laying out clogs of carrots and hay (rather than milk and cookies) for Saint Nick, reminding us of the good luck of "First Footings," and presenting a luscious Twelfth Night dessert in the home's East Parlor—all in the heart of the Bronx.

Gallery Chronicle (January 2016)

The Joan of Arc Memorial in Riverside Park today. via

THE NEW CRITERION
January 2016

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On the Joan of Arc Memorial in Riverside Park.

Early last month, New Yorkers had a new opportunity to revisit an old monument. On December 6, the Joan of Arc Memorial, on Ninety-third Street and Riverside Drive, turned 100 years old. As you might expect, the occasion did not make national news. We live in a time increasingly overwhelmed by the present moment, suspicious if not outright hostile to the symbols of history. This birthday for a monument of bronze and stone, unmoved by current fashion, could have gone completely unnoticed. But three days earlier, an assembly of local grandees, historians, and neighbors (of which I am one) came together in the park’s sculpture precinct to honor the centenary with remarks and the laying of a ceremonial wreath, just as had been done a century ago at the dedication. The celebration brought worthy attention to this moving statue and its remarkable creator, the sculptor Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (1876–1973)—as well as to the volunteers and organizations that quietly care for the work and the surrounding park, in particular the Riverside Park Conservancy and the tenders who volunteer their weekends to maintain the area. The ceremony also welcomed France’s Consul General to the site just three weeks after the terrorist attacks in Paris, giving the event a tragic poignancy. Against the news of the world, the occasion offered a chance to reflect on the art and architecture of historical monuments that stand increasingly in defiance of the dictates of the present moment, and what the future may hold for these reminders of the past.

Like all of the thousand-plus historical monuments in New York City parks, which include some three hundred major works in what is one of the world’s most impressive and unsung public galleries, the Joan of Arc Memorial has had its own unique and now largely forgotten past.

On the eve of the First World War, a public-minded organization calling itself the Joan of Arc Sculpture Committee in the City of New York, led by the philanthropist J. Sanford Saltus and the mineralogist George Frederick Kunz, set about honoring the Franco-American alliance and America’s oldest ally by commissioning a monument to the Maid of Orléans, the quincentenary of whose birth was celebrated on January 6, 1912. The site selected was a rise along what is now known as Joan of Arc island, one of the slivers of green space delineated in Frederick Law Olmsted’s original 1875 park plan by the separation of Riverside Drive and the residential access road to the east.

At the time, the City Beautiful movement was transforming the development of Riverside Park into a promenade of monuments and memorials. Even without a master plan for the sites, Olmsted’s elevated and winding Riverside Drive, which broke from the 1811 street grid to follow the contours of the Hudson highlands, was ideally suited for such monumental works, with sloping sightlines that were framed by the Hudson River on one side and the grand residences and apartment buildings on the other. Then as now, most prominent, at West 122nd Street, is the General Grant National Memorial, the 1897 tomb modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides (as well as inspiration for the riddle of who is buried therein). The 1902 Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument at West Eighty-ninth Street, modeled after the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, serves as a southern bookend to Grant’s Tomb (for which it is often confused). Joan of Arc is one of the half-dozen major monuments located on the heights of the drive between the two, an assembly that also includes the Firemen’s Memorial and monuments to Samuel J. Tilden, Louis Kossuth, and Franz Sigel.

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington. via

According to Anne Higonnet, a professor of art history at Barnard College who mounted an exhibition of Huntington’s art two years ago, the selection of this unknown female sculptor for the memorial was as radical as her female subject matter. Huntington’s father, Alpheus Hyatt, was an animal scientist, a professor of zoology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University. Inspired by the community of naturalists that surrounded her childhood upbringing in Cambridge, Huntington launched her artistic career at the turn of the century as an animal sculptor, in particular an equine sculptor, producing tiny works on commission. In New York, she passed through the Arts Students League and the studio of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, while creating studies on site at the Bronx Zoo. She then moved to Paris and dedicated herself in 1909 to the subject of Joan of Arc, the French hero and martyr of the Hundred Years’ War, who was beatified that year.

Gathering a ton of clay in a Paris studio, Huntington worked for four months nonstop. She applied her zoological expertise to the mass and flesh of Joan’s horse, which she modeled on a heavy Percheron used for wagon deliveries, lent to Huntington by the stable of the Magasin du Louvre. Huntington imagined Joan riding a workhorse that, even at rest, bristles with muscles and vascularity, standing with a front leg raised over an impressionistic ground of licked abstract form.

For the figure of Joan, little is known of the historical teenager, so Huntington drew on more current literary accounts, such as the work of the French romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine and Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, published in 1896 under the pseudonym Sieur Louis de Conte. Huntington chose to emphasize Joan’s spiritual devotion, which infused her personality even during her military campaigns. “It was only her mental attitude, her religious fervor,” Huntington explained, “that enabled her to endure so much physically, to march three or four days with almost no sleep, to withstand cold and rain. That is how I thought of her and tried to model her.”

Huntington's plaster cast of Joan of Arc (ca. 1910). via

Huntington placed Joan on her horse rising out of her stirrups, holding her sword skyward in divine revelation. To gather the historical accuracy of Joan’s armor, Huntington says she consulted Dr. Bashford Dean, the Metropolitan Museum’s expert on arms and armor. (Or perhaps not: Higonnet believes her research may have uncovered evidence to the contrary, since the armor was designed before Huntington’s return from Paris to New York. The rivets and articulation of Joan’s armor may have come out of Huntington’s imagination as much as the Met’s permanent collection.)

When she submitted the plaster cast of her clay model to the Paris Salon of 1910, the jurors at first refused to believe a women had completed the sculpture on her own. Yet one of the reasons Huntington had refused visitors to her studio was to convince the Salon that she had, in fact, made the work herself, and she eventually received the Jury’s prestigious Honorable Mention.

The 1915 dedication of the memorial to Joan of Arc. via

When the Joan of Arc Statue Committee considered models for their monument two years later, they selected Huntington’s—meaning that New York’s first public statue of a historical woman was also created by a woman. Over the next three years, Huntington reworked her Paris Salon model up to one-and-a-quarter life size. The architect John Van Pelt landscaped the elevated site on Riverside Drive and designed the statue’s gothic pedestal. Stones taken from Joan’s cell at Rouen, as well as a fragment of a pilaster from the Cathedral at Reims, where Charles VII was crowned, were worked into Van Pelt’s design. Symbolically, the figure of Joan rises out of her prison while building the foundation for the coronation of the French king.

After it was unveiled on December 6, 1915, amid a crowd of thousands lining Riverside Drive, the statue of Joan made Huntington’s artistic reputation. Replicas of the statue were subsequently created: for Blois, France; Gloucester, Massachusetts; San Francisco, California; and Quebec, Canada. In 1922 Huntington was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. A year later, she married the great cultural philanthropist Archer Huntington, leading to her Spanish equestrian sculptures—the freestanding knight El Cid and bas-reliefs of Don Quixote and Boabdil—that now adorn Huntington’s Hispanic Society and his cultural campus of Audubon Terrace at 155th Street and Broadway. An interest in more recent Hispanic history also led to Huntington’s final major work, the equestrian statue of the Cuban nationalist José Martí on Central Park South, which she created at age eighty-two and dedicated in 1965.

Joan of Arc in Riverside Park soon after dedication. via

The present is not necessarily kind to the monumental past represented by the aspirations of this memorial to Joan of Arc. As the public’s interest in the city’s classical art and architecture has waxed and waned, the importance of this statue, as well as the sculptor behind it, has been eclipsed. Today a campaign for preservation and upkeep, represented by the great civic associations such as New York’s conservancies that have brought parks back from the brink, must still make a case against the tide of “the new” and more pressing political distractions. While the Grand Marnier Foundation supported a major restoration of the Joan of Arc statue in 1987, for example, the sculpture’s grounds remain overgrown, with pavement in need of repair.

More generally, such monuments also face an existential threat. It is is doubtful that a similar monument could be built today, since little agreement could be reached over its design or its meaning. Just look to the drawn-out catastrophe of Frank Gehry’s postmodernist memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, proposed for the National Mall. Joan of Arc is now a polarizing historical figure in France, adopted as a symbol by nationalists, and shunned by the internationalist Left.

The specter of worldwide vandalism brought about by the iconoclastic fever of political Islam is one that I documented in “The Vengeance of the Vandals,” my essay for these pages last month. A similar impulse, acted upon to lesser degrees, infuses much of contemporary political culture. In New York, an alarming precedent was set in 1955, when Charles Albert Lopez’s statue Mohammed was removed from the pantheon of lawgivers on James Brown Lord’s 1899 Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State, another City Beautiful design, on Madison Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street, after protests from Muslim nations.

For those who see history as a series of injustices, monuments now represent the embodiment of those grievances. When public works lose their didactic function, contemporary culture, seeing little value in their historical or artistic importance, abandons or destroys them. For this very reason, George Washington regretted the destruction of the leaden statue of George III, pulled down by a mob from its pedestal on Bowling Green in lower Manhattan at the start of the Revolutionary War. From the Buddhas of Bamiyan to statues of John C. Calhoun, monuments today must justify their continued existence. Even when a new and worthy monument is proposed, the pitch today is based not on the merits of the subject matter but on the injustices of what already exists. A worthy proposal, for example, to build a monument to women’s suffrage featuring Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at Central Park West and Seventy-seventh Street has largely been based on mocking and attacking the “bronze patriarchy” of the Park’s existing statues, embodied by its acerbic URL, centralparkwherearethewomen.org. NYC Parks Commissioner Mitchell J. Silver has spoken in support of the proposal for similar, politicized reasons, claiming the mayor’s “administration is fully committed to promoting gender equity across New York City—and that includes our parks.”

Given this commitment to equity, even over our park’s historical statuary, the Joan of Arc Memorial may avoid being burnt at the stake of political dictates longer than others. But what happens if an atheist takes offence at the saintly Joan, or an Englishman finds grievance in her jingoistic French militarism? Not even Joan of Arc faced an adversary as fierce as our censorious contemporary culture.