Gallery Chronicle (April 2016)

Meryl Meisler, Self-Portrait, A Falling Star North Massapequa, NY, January 1975 Vintage gelatin silver print, printed 1975, 10 x 8 inches/Courtesy: Steven Kasher Gallery

THE NEW CRITERION
April 2016

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Meryl Meisler” at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York; “The Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts” at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; and “Michelle Vaughan: Generations” at Theodore:Art, Brooklyn.

Photography becomes powerful when it combines inscrutable complexity with instinctive attraction. While we may understand little of a medium that engages our lives with ever-greater frequency, we can be compelled by its magic the less we know. After all, on its surface a photograph presents a moment of refracted light captured through near unfathomable means, either through digital impulses or analogue emulsion, imprinted largely without comment for our interpretation of its point of origin. Yet this surface works in contrast with a photograph’s absorptive depth, a space that draws us in almost automatically, and where we find reflections of our own emotions in a light of strange and often disorienting affinities.

In his 1980 book The Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes drew a distinction between a photograph’s cerebral propositioning, what he called the studium, and its emotional hook, which he called the punctum. I like to think that Woody Allen hit on something similar a few years before Barthes in his character Alvy Singer’s famously ill-received words with Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall: “Photography’s interesting, ’cause, you know, it’s—it’s a new art form, and a, uh, a set of aesthetic criteria have not emerged yet.” For which a subtitle appears as translation: “I wonder what she looks like naked?”

The photographer Meryl Meisler arrived in New York City in the mid-1970s at just the Annie Hall moment, bringing her own sensibility for revealing the disquieting humor of urbane sophistication in dialogue with middle-class Jewish values. Her work is both a fascinating document of a lost time and a delivery vehicle for its intoxicating, riotous sweetness. “I see funny,” she recently said. “People come out funny.”

Now at Steven Kasher Gallery, Meisler is showing her earliest photographs from the treasure trove of her rich body of work, which has only surfaced within the last few years since she retired from a career as a New York City Public School teacher in Bushwick, Brooklyn.1

For an unassuming retired civil servant, Meisler has been on an astonishingly meteoric rise since her work first started coming to light following the publication of two recent books of her photography, A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick andPurgatory & Paradise: SASSY ’70s Suburbia & The City.

The titles speak to the boundaries Meisler once regularly crossed with her camera: from her family home in the Long Island suburb of North Massapequa, to the demimonde of the clubs and dancehalls of the city’s punk, disco, and burlesque scenes, to the school children of Bushwick finding life in the burned-out streets following the blackout riots of 1977. Rather than indulging in the decadence and decay, Meisler looked for the humanizing touch in the wreckage, the sleaze, and the schmaltz, often positioning herself and her own maturation at the comedic fulcrum.

The selection at Steven Kasher brings together Meisler’s Massapequan adolescence with her first penetrating forays into the nightlife of the city. Black and white and square in format, the photographs draw on the work of Diane Arbus, an acknowledged influence, in both their stark appearance and offbeat eye. Yet Meisler manages to capture a warm light that ultimately eluded Arbus, a depressive who took her own life in Greenwich Village just a few years before Meisler’s own arrival.

In contrast to the stripped-down punk aesthetic of the city, Massapequa of the 1970s was high suburban rococo. In Meisler’s photographs, the postwar refuge of middle-class flight have become its own overgrown cul-de-sac. Clean mid-century modern lines have been inundated by the wild patterns and overwrought furniture indicative of a period we might call the South Shore Regency.

Meisler first took up the camera while studying illustration at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s. Returning east, she enrolled in classes with Lisette Model, the photographer who had taught Arbus. Meisler first turned the camera on herself, posing in her childhood uniforms back home. In Self-Portrait, The Girl Scout Oath, North Massapequa, NY, January 1975, she sits in the family “rumpus room” giving the three-finger salute while wearing her old uniform and former hair braids, both saved by her mother. Meisler looks out with a deadpan gaze from the near-camouflage patterns of the matching cushions and drapes. The odd symmetry of the scene is undercut by an incongruous barbell intertwined by her feet, sweatily wrapped in grip tape and on loan, it turns out, from her brother. Another image, Self-Portrait, A Falling Star, North Massapequa, NY, January 1975, finds her in what appears to be an old tap-dance outfit, smiling as she slides headfirst off the La-Z-Boy. Look closer and her frivolity amidst the suburban order of the decorous side cabinet and framed wall prints appears imperilled by a porcelain tiger prowling in her direction out of a collection of chinoiserie.

Urban archeologists will undoubtedly appreciate the grit and glamor Meisler soon found in the city’s nightlife. Stringer contracts and late-night tenacity brought her past the velvet rope of Studio 54, backstage at cbgb’s, and into even more risqué after-hour venues, where she also worked as a hostess. Yet through a 1978 ceta Artist grant, Meisler then returned to North Massapequa to create a series of photographs on Jewish identity for the American Jewish Congress. Back in the hair salons, wedding halls, dens, bedrooms, and Rosh Hashanah dinner tables, she found a world even more exotic than the exotica of the adoptive city she temporarily left behind.

Installation view of the 2016 Invitational Exhibition of the American Academy of Arts and Letters with work by Cullen Bryant Washington, Jr., Lisa Hoke, Guy Goodwin, and Patrick Strzelec/Photo: James Panero

Now through April 10, “The Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts” offers one of the few annual opportunities for outsiders to visit the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the fantastical honors society encased in beaux-arts amber at the far end of Archer Huntington’s Audubon Terrace, at Broadway and 155th Street.2

Behind the scenes, we can only imagine that this “invited” exhibition is a battleground of competing interests among the Academy’s august membership. Yet what regularly results is often one of the best annual survey shows of serious and lively contemporary art. Well displayed, and spanning a wide variety of media and styles, from abstract sculpture to hyperrealistic figuration, light installations to watercolor sunsets, this year is no different, with thirty-seven artists selected from two hundred nominations, displaying over one hundred works spread across the Academy’s campus.

The Invitational is the first part of the Academy’s series of honors. The Academy then annually distributes $250,000 to the artists of the exhibition through awards, prizes, and purchase funds, with the winners returning each May for the Academy’s “Exhibition of Work by Newly Elected Members and Recipients of Honors and Awards.” This year’s recipients, just announced at press time, reveal the Academy’s catholic interests—and good judgment. Top prizes go to Guy Goodwin’s intriguing colorful abstractions of acrylic, tempera, and cardboard; Anthony McCall’s sculptural light installation created by “computer, Quicktime movie file, video projector, and haze machine”; Nancy Mitchnick’s painterly abstractions found in the profile of Detroit’s demolished buildings; Joan Snyder’s joyful kitchen-sink assemblies of oil, acrylic, papier mâché, rope, wooden hoop, burlap, silk on linen, etching fragments, rosebuds, twigs, and glitter; and Lee Tribe’s haunting, dissolving portraits in charcoal and steel. Also honored are the lyrical-, fantastical-, and hyper-realisms of Patricia Patterson, Carmen Cicero, and Aleah Chapin, and the expressionistic abstractions of Chuck Webster. Still others, including the fraught patterning of McArthur Binion and the riotous sunsets of Graham Nickson, have been purchased for donation to American museums.

All told, the “Invitational Exhibition” again confirms that no single style holds an exclusive ticket to that “funicular up Parnassus,” in Alfred Barr’s choice phrasing—and how fortunate we are to have exhibiting institutions that operate outside of museum mandates. While the exhibition is free, visitors should be mindful of the Academy’s limited hours, while also leaving time to see the reinstallation of the Charles Ives Studio, Anna Hyatt Huntington’s sculptural program lining Audubon Terrace, and the jewel-box museum of the Hispanic Society, now fortunately chaired by the Metropolitan’s legendary retired director, Philippe de Montebello.

 I would point out that the Bushwick galleries of 56 Bogart Street are having a particularly strong month, but exceptionalism there now seems to be the rule. Among standout exhibitions are the sound pioneer Audra Wolowiec at Studio10, the disaster artist Joy Garnett at Slag, a vertiginous, cubistic interpretation of the L Train by Isidro Blasco at Black and White Gallery, and a group painting show at Life on Mars featuring Glenn Goldberg, Steve DiBenedetto, and Brenda Goodman, along with their selection of younger artists in the project space.

Michelle Vaughan, King Charles II of Spain, coefficient 0.25, 2013, Archival digital print, 30 x 22 inches/Courtesy: Theodore:Art 

An exhibition called “Generations,” on view at Theodore:Art, may be the most unnerving.3 The artist Michelle Vaughan uses a variety of copying processes, from digital reproduction to pencil drawings, to explore the history of European portraiture—in particular, the “consanguineous unions in Europe’s royal houses” from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. By overlaying portrait faces of the Spanish and Austrian lines of the Habsburg dynasty—such as Spain’s King Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, both his niece and second wife—Vaughan demonstrates how their shared physiognomies revealed increasingly compromised genomes through generations of planned and ill-fated inbreeding.

 

Working with genetic historians, Vaughan uses artistic means to show how the repeated intermarrying of the Habsburgs led to high and ultimately destructive “inbreeding coefficient numbers” that eventually “ranged higher than the offspring produced by a brother and sister” due to sequential uncle–niece marriages and prior intermarrying. For anyone who has wondered at the strange faces staring back at us from a Velázquez, it is both interesting and terrifying to realize that these deformations were not the mannerisms of Spanish style but most likely artistic improvements over genetic reality.

A degraded digital print of a 1685 portrait by Juan Carreño de Miranda of Charles II of Spain, the son of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, is the most haunting of the exhibition. With a quarter or more of his genome consisting of identical pairs, or “coefficient 0.25,” Charles II was riddled with recessive abnormalities, leading to pronounced mental and physical retardation. Known as “the Bewitched” (el Hechizado), Charles was defined by his elongated face, a protruding “Habsburg jaw,” and a tongue so overgrown that he could barely speak or chew. Just as this print’s digital data has dissolved into a cloud of bits, Charles was an ineffective and impotent monarch, childless and heirless, whose rule marked the end of the Spanish Habsburg line.

Vaughan brilliantly overlays science, art history, and creative practice in a confluence of interests. Here is a museum-quality exhibition (attention, Met Breuer) that will change the way I look at museum portraiture.

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1 “Meryl Meisler” opened at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, on February 25 and remains on view through April 9, 2016.

2 “The Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts” opened at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, on March 10 and remains on view through April 10, 2016.

3 “Michelle Vaughan: Generations” opened at Theodore:Art, Brooklyn, on February 26 and remains on view through April 3, 2016.

The New Old Masters

A self-portrait of the artist (JACOB COLLINS, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST)

CITY JOURNAL
Winter 2016

The New Old Masters
by James Panero

New Yorker Jacob Collins and his devoted students seek a radical reclamation of artistic tradition.

The Lake Shore Limited comes up fast in Freedom Tunnel, racing up Manhattan from Pennsylvania Station along the old trackways of the Hudson River Railroad toward the Empire Connection, then on to Spuyten Duyvil and points north and west—Albany and Chicago. At 72nd Street, the passenger train appears momentarily through a chain-link fence, under the ruins of the elevated West Side Highway, before returning underground, entering a tunnel that runs more than two miles beneath Riverside Park to 123rd Street. Robert Moses covered over the Hudson River tracks in the 1930s with a public works project twice as expensive as the Hoover Dam, but he never imagined the massive graffiti gallery that would go up inside it, an epic blight to those who glimpse it through train windows. Two decades ago, whenever he felt like escaping class work at Tisch, Ted Minoff tossed his spray cans into a backpack and made for the tunnel by jumping the ballfield fence on 72nd Street. Minoff, like others, called the tunnel after one of its graffitists, Chris Pape, who was known as “Freedom,” but also for the freedom that came with its obscurity.

On a cold day in Freedom Tunnel, Minoff met Tony Curanaj, another graffiti tagger, known as Sub. Their conversation drifted to a backpacking trip through Europe. “I was like, ‘I love Michelangelo,’ ” Minoff remembers saying. To his surprise, Curanaj said that he loved Michelangelo, too. “It came out that we were both copying Michelangelo drawings when we were 11,” says Minoff. They rattled through the classical pantheon: “Van Dyke, Rubens, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Titian,” recalls Minoff. “We were both really interested in Prud’hon.” Over the next few years, Minoff and Curanaj cemented their street reputations as members of a graffiti gang called the DF Crew, while both took day jobs illustrating at MTV.

Then, in the mid-1990s, Curanaj heard about a night class at the National Academy of Art on the Upper East Side. Word spread that a young teacher named Jacob Collins was reclaiming the lost secrets of paint on canvas and taking in the most promising students for private study. Curanaj and Minoff enrolled, and within a year, they had started frequenting Collins’s home in Brooklyn. They soon quit their commercial jobs and left graffiti behind to paint with Collins full-time. Today, Curanaj and Minoff dedicate their lives to teaching and exhibiting alongside Collins as classical painters. Minoff specializes in seascapes; Curanaj incorporates his old spray-paint mask into meticulous trompe l’oeil on board. Few know about their Freedom Tunnel past.

The stories surrounding Jacob Collins all tend to go like this: a young artist, lonesome in a love for pre-modernist painting, stumbles upon Collins, who has built a life out of the premise that the twentieth century nearly ruined art. Collins opens his doors to those who feel the same.

Ayear and a half ago, Collins opened his biggest campus in a converted warehouse on 11th Street and 46th Avenue in Long Island City—just a block from the Museum of Modern Art satellite PS1, he enjoys pointing out. At 12,500 square feet, the Grand Central Atelier is an art school, an art incubator, and an artist clubhouse for at least 50 painters who have come out of Collins’s intense multiyear program over the past two decades, along with hundreds of students who now flock to his classes and workshops.

The Long Island City headquarters is an outgrowth of the master-apprentice tutoring that Collins has been leading in increasingly large settings for years, expanding as his students graduate to become teachers in the programs themselves. Nearly a decade ago, when I started dropping by, the school was smaller, located on the ground floor of Collins’s Upper East Side carriage house (itself once the headquarters of a then-traditional school called the Sculpture Center). The visitor stepped off the Manhattan streets into a darkened, otherworldly space. Mixed in with the family minivan, a small library, and a student lounge with ratty couches were two painting studios—one for Collins and one for his students. Back then, Collins called his school the Water Street Atelier, after its even earlier incarnation in waterfront Brooklyn, where Minoff and Curanaj first joined him. Today, even as students have moved on to the larger space in Long Island City, the townhouse remains unchanged as Collins’s home studio. Cardboard and gaffer’s tape focus the spotlights. Rembrandt-esque portraits surround the visitor, floor to ceiling. Add to this fluttering tapestries, plaster busts of Franklin, Jefferson, and Homer, fragments of the David, sculptures of a horse’s head and a flayed man, and monographs devoted to nineteenth-century painters like Charles Bargue. Collins doesn’t just want to revive premodern painting; he wants to live like a classical painter.

At his decidedly unaccredited school in Long Island City, a year of Collins’s four-year “core” instruction costs $9,000, with merit-based scholarships available to the most promising students. Collins’s own rigorous studies—starting with classical fundamentals and working up to the live figure—form the basis of the pedagogy. In the first year, students dedicate mornings to cast drawing and cast sculpture, and afternoons go to master copies, block-ins, figure drawings, and perspective. The next year, students spend mornings on cast paintings and afternoons learning figure grisaille and anatomy. Year three involves figure painting in color and color theory, and year four focuses on figure painting in color, figure sculpture, and still life.

The students file in at 8:30 each morning and make their way through a forest of easels. Advanced students make ébauches, grisailles, and other studies for painting the nude, which is, in Collins’s mind, their highest calling. “You have to break yourself,” he says of his process. Students are expected to work on a single drawing “four hours a day for six weeks, two or three months. Sometimes people have trouble concentrating. They are leaping about. It’s about keeping an intense focus.” On one of my early visits with Collins some years ago, Jason Boudreau, wearing a newsboy cap, blocked in a drawing of Donatello’s bust of Nicolò da Uzzano. Colleen Berry touched up a cast drawing of Hercules’ foot. In a corner, a pierced girl named Twila stared at a fragment of a statue of Hermes. Guns N’ Roses competed with Bach for stereo time. Finney, Collins’s black Labrador retriever, knocked Stephen Bann’s thick book of Paul Delaroche’s paintings on the floor.

For the live sessions, a model drops a robe and steps up onto a small stage. Collins or another teacher critiques advanced students one by one, encouraging them to see the musculature beneath their painted studies. “That’s the trapezius curving behind the head of the humerus,” he explains to one student. “That’s the muscle over the latissimus defining the rib cage. I think that’s the erector spinae.” He steps over to the model. “If I plumb the pectoral, the sternal angle goes past it. Do you see the deltoid?”

In another space sit the freshmen, focusing on cast drawing—a grueling, boot-camp introduction to draftsmanship in which they depict plaster sculptures in charcoal drawings. Collins might add some marks to the curls of Homer’s beard in one drawing. “Accelerate into the foreshortened part of the turn,” he would say. “That’s what foreshortening is—always accelerate.” He claps his hands together at the revelation. “The illusion drifts away from your consciousness, and you believe you are carving. Your pencil reaches through the paper and reaches in space as a carving tool. It’s like a trance. A form dream.”

Collins explains: “My general feeling in terms of art making is the train got off the rails in the 1860s and 1870s, and my practical instinct is to go back to where it was, try to put it back, fix it up, and start going again.”

“Our culture,” he continued, “has inherited the idea that if artists are not avant-garde they cannot have a significant role. That’s a fallacy we’ve inherited from some Parisian nut-job radicals. The rejection of beauty is so accepted. It’s high time that we as a culture attend to our beauty position.” To much of the New York art world, Collins’s “beauty position,” which he applies to his own paintings of nudes, still lifes, and landscapes, might look embarrassingly retrograde. He enjoys the support of a small minority of critics and writers—most of whom, like him, regard modern art with skepticism. Novelist Tom Wolfe has called Collins “certainly in terms of skill, one of the most brilliant artists in the entire country.” But you would never find the Collins style in a commercial gallery in Chelsea, say, or in a museum survey of contemporary painting. Morley Safer of 60 Minutes, another Collins admirer, told me that he believed that the “current art establishment, the so-called gatekeepers, hate the kind of skill and craft and vision that an artist like Collins has.” Even among representational painters, Collins is a world away from fashionable realists like John Currin or Elizabeth Peyton, portraitists whom he sees as steeped in the ideology of detachment. Yet to a growing number of young students, Collins clearly satisfies a deep urge to reconnect with tradition. To them, he’s a radical artist in the true meaning of the word—“going to the origins.”

On one of my earliest visits, I ran into clean-cut, twentysomething Josh LaRock, then one of Collins’s star students and now a teacher in the atelier. LaRock told me that he had been working for the manager of the Dave Matthews Band and ran across the term “atelier” when reading about John Singer Sargent; a Google search brought him to Collins. I heard a similar story from Boudreau, who went to purchase a book about the outré nineteenth-century painter William Bouguereau at the Met; the clerk there slipped him Collins’s information.

“This is not our parents’ art,” explains Will St. John, then one of Collins’s most outspoken students. “Their generation is not able to teach me to do what I want to do. You get some hippie teaching the class and she’s stressing that you need to loosen up, be free, express yourself, like therapy,” St. John says dismissively. “I was inspired by Michelangelo and Da Vinci, and my parents’ generation can’t teach proportion and accuracy. The moderns had their say. Now it’s our turn.”

“No one teaches like Collins,” agrees Berry. “Collins is like a lion—fierce, charged, ready.” St. John and Berry met several years ago in another of Collins’s schools, the Hudson River School for Landscape, a summer residency program in the Catskill Mountains, where the students paint up Kaaterskill Falls, in the footsteps of the nineteenth-century artist Thomas Cole. “It’s really this guerilla operation,” St. John says of the summer retreat, a cross between a commune and a canoe club. “All these crazy painters in these houses in the woods drinking beer and painting all day and partying hard and working hard.” St. John and Berry have studied full-time with Collins. He grew up in Virginia and attended the New School; she graduated from Dwight School in Manhattan and opted out of college to paint beside Collins. “Eventually, my dad trusted I knew what I was doing,” Berry says. “This isn’t anything like a bunch of guys with sticks up their asses,” observes St. John.

Indeed, if anything, Collins’s atelier can resemble a youth club, with group instructions tacked to the wall: “Grease trap cleaning; office supplies bitch; Music library maintenance—make sure classical music is playing 2/3 of the day.” His students often live hand to mouth, waiting tables, selling a painting or two when they can. They have little connection with students in mainstream university art programs such as Yale and the Art Institute of Chicago, where, they say, an MFA is the new MBA. Some come to Collins merely to learn lost technique, but most take on the movement’s paradoxical self-segregation. They become radicals by despising the avant-garde. They forgo the lingua franca of photography and of video, conceptual, and installation art while dismissing the celebrity of young art stars like the late Dash Snow. (“A complete charlatan,” St. John says, “like a magician who doesn’t do any tricks.”) Instead, they try to paint like the nineteenth-century landscape painter Frederic Church, or like Bouguereau, the French technician who depicted gamins and angels and became the bugaboo of the Impressionists. But, like Collins, they don’t just want to paint like the pre-modernists; they also want to live like them.

“Susan’s Back,” 2006 (JACOB COLLINS, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST)

Collins is not entirely alone in embracing this older approach to art. Today, you can find traditionalist schools in Florence and dozens scattered across the United States—such as the late Nelson Shanks’s Studio Incamminati in Philadelphia—with the largest clustering in the New York region, practicing what is commonly known as “classical realism,” a term for which few artists in the movement seem to care. In New York City, the Art Students League, the National Academy of Design, and the New York Academy of Art all offer master classes—though Collins purists would argue that these larger schools merely teach traditional technique for postmodern ends. Classical academies and ateliers connect with one another through magazines like Fine Arts Connoisseur and Modern Arts Quarterly, museums such as the Dahesh, and websites like artrenewalcenter.org.

Still, it’s a small world, and Collins casts a singular spell within it. No one else approaches classical teaching with such dynamism. Plus, Collins provides social space. “I want my world to be fun,” he says of the parties he throws at his home, “a Dionysian revelry built around really beautiful art.” Collins also helps students find representation at the few galleries in the country responsive to his classical mode—John Pence in San Francisco, Laura Grenning in Sag Harbor, Frost & Reed in London, Meredith Long in Houston, and Adelson, Arcadia, Forum, and Hirschl & Adler in New York.

But Collins is not about to become another bohemian artist. His largest paintings, of fleshy nudes and old-fashioned landscapes, lead the market among his peers and can command up to six figures. “I don’t think his style needs to emerge,” notes Warren Adelson of Adelson Galleries, Collins’s blue-chip gallery, now housed in the Crown Building, which also exhibits John Singer Sargent and Andrew and Jamie Wyeth. The latest exhibition of Collins’s work went on view there last spring. “It may not be a sensation of Sotheby’s, but there is a great propensity for people—a strong, silent majority—to like art that they can identify with.” What about the art establishment? “It’s almost easier to sell paintings by Collins to old master dealers and collectors and people trained in traditional painting than a curator of a modern museum,” says Greg Hedberg, a gallery director at Hirschl & Adler. Collins foresees creating a parallel world of museums, galleries, collectors, and schools to embrace his artistic vision.

Achampion wrestler at the Dalton School who has retained a wiry, bundled intensity, Collins comes from a distinguished New York family, and one gets the sense that his revolution, should it ever come to pass, would be a distinctly familial drama. His forebears embraced the modernism of their times. His great-uncle Meyer Schapiro, the Columbia University medievalist and Marxist intellectual, championed modern art. Collins’s maternal grandmother, Alma Schapiro, was a painter who once studied in Paris with Fernand Léger. Aesthetically, at least, Collins rejects them. “He repudiates me and my husband and everyone in our generation for our enthusiasm for the painters we thought were exciting—de Kooning and the rest,” says Collins’s mother, Linda, a novelist and onetime classicist who is mildly shocked but also pleased by her son’s exceptional passion. Today, Collins’s schools are largely funded through a family foundation named for Alma and Morris Schapiro, Collins’s grandfather, a highly successful Wall Street financier. (Collins has tacked a picture of Morris as a boy in knee pants, recently arrived from Lithuania, to his studio wall.)

Collins’s artistic drive seems all-consuming but not in the typical sense: his goal is not to compete with today’s artists but with those of a distant past. He aspires to be a “new” old master, and he has constructed his life—the studios, the apprentices, the dogged study, the old-fashioned style and subject matter—to approximate the conditions that allowed the old masters to create. In his quest for greatness, at least, he resembles his aspirational Schapiro forefathers, Morris and Meyer.

As a child, Collins developed a reputation for intense concentration, making meticulous copies of his bus passes and reproductions of his violin. “Collins was almost a prodigy,” Aaron Kurzen, his high school art teacher at Dalton, told me. He remembers entering the boy in an interschool art competition, though Collins didn’t win. “I suddenly realized that judges didn’t think a high school kid had done these things. They were not open to his style.”

When Collins enrolled in Columbia, he found himself bored by class work. “I went out dancing every night for two years,” he says. “I wasn’t a very serious student. I read. I knew what I was going to do since the age of 14.” One afternoon during exam period, he sat across from a student studying philosophy in Butler Library. He drew her portrait in his notebook and soon after invited her for a date at the Hungarian pastry shop. “At the end of the night he hugged me and said, ‘I love you,’ ” remembers Ann Brashares. “I said, ‘No you don’t.’ But 20 years later, I believe he meant it.” The couple dated for seven years and married in 1993; they now have four children. (Brashares, writing from the top floor of their carriage house, has authored a succession of bestsellers, includingThe Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.)

After graduating from college in 1986, Collins set out to become his own painting teacher. “I was convinced there wasn’t anyone alive who could teach me anything I wanted to know,” he says. He began gaining recognition in the early 1990s, with an exhibition at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries and a teaching position at the National Academy of Art. That’s when the students arrived. “I remember going to the director of the National Academy and proposing they put me in charge of the place,” says Collins. They declined, so he has been taking in his own students ever since, teaching and painting to exhaustion. “I saw how he beats himself,” remembers Sabin Howard, Collins’s onetime wrestling teammate at Dalton, who also became a classical sculptor. “If he would mess up a painting he’d go into a rage and throw his paintbrush and paint across the room. There’s this self-flagellation.”

Good technique and great art are separate things, of course, and Collins has been criticized for willing his way to artistic enlightenment through an obsession with detail. “I could learn how to do it,” said the writer John T. Spike, describing what he sees as the classical movement’s flaw. “It’s like Berlitz.” One of Collins’s harshest critics is the dealer who put on his first exhibition in the 1980s. “After the show, I knew there was no chance we could work together,” Larry Salander told me, before his gallery went under in what proved to be a $100 million swindle of his artists (he is currently serving out a jail term). “This kid should go off all by himself where he has no acolytes and paint 20 paintings a day for two years, grow a beard, and never brush his teeth. His own fans are hurting him. He’s an important person in his own world. But he’s too good a painter for that.” Will St. John sees it very differently. “As it stands now, this is one of the most humble movements there ever was. Our generation still has a chance to do something. A youth movement doesn’t have an investment in anything but its teacher.”

One summer, I went to visit Collins in the Catskills, where he was running one of his retreats at the Hudson River School for Landscape. The weight of work and ambition showed in his exhausted face. “You push yourself so hard,” he said. “You get wrapped up in every detail. You go into some deep debt of confidence.” In a lawn chair beside Main Street in Hunter, New York, unshaved, letting his hair grow, he sat from sunup to sundown, painting sky studies. “Those people who never lose sight of beauty and power are attractive,” he said. “I’m trying to make things beautiful in a deep way. Poetic. Transformative. Mysterious.” He looked up to the mountains that inspired the Hudson River School painters a century and a half ago. “This is where it all began.”

Gallery Chronicle (March 2016)

Thornton Willis, The Congregation, 2012, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 50 inches

THE NEW CRITERION

March 2016

Gallery Chronicle

by James Panero

Over the last century, abstract art has gone from the radical periphery to the mainstream center. But its accommodation into our visual landscape hasn’t necessarily meant a greater understanding of its forms or a greater acceptance of its language. After all, would it be too much to say we now live in an age—seemingly more than ever—when form must follow function? When abstraction must follow concreteness? Or the visual must follow the literal? Perhaps these observations are themselves unacceptable abstractions. But it does seem that the shape of things is more and more only permitted to be a product of their descriptions. Where abstraction presents formal questions, we expect literal answers.

The present moment leaves little time for the contemplative demands of the pure forms of abstract art. So we have come to rely on established institutions, serving as the self-appointed guardians of abstraction, to place literal frames around abstract forms, to put abstract art in the safe context of history, of its artists and materials—and to tell us, often through extensive wall labels, what it all means. But such a reliance on the function of abstract art naturally weakens the power of its forms. Even though we are surrounded by the raw language of shape, we nevertheless arrive as foreigners to form’s native vocabulary.

Over many years, the experience of encountering contemporary abstract art in the studios and galleries, outside of the functional mandates of the museums, has helped me understand form as a living language. Foremost among these artists has been the abstract painter Thornton Willis, whose art looks to form’s most basic elements to explore its most basic energies. “We are the primitives of a new culture,” said the Futurist Umberto Boccioni in 1911. By stripping down his compositions, Willis has taken a primitivist approach to the tensions of color, the compression of gesture and edge, and the dynamics of figure and ground to make manifest the power of form.

Willis is just one member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA), a remarkable organization dedicated to promoting the understanding and acceptance of this language of form. The mandate of this artist association, now celebrating its eightieth year, continues to be as relevant as it was at the time of its founding in New York in 1936, when the nativist art movement known as the American Scene dominated the artistic landscape. At that time, the then-new Museum of Modern Art showed little interest in American abstraction, and politics, from the WPA to the Communist Party, made strict functional demands on artistic forms.

To mark its anniversary, AAA has organized a major member exhibition, curated by my colleague in these pages Karen Wilkin, at the 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, called “The Onward of Art.”1 (A separate exhibition recently brought some of the same AAA artists to the Abrons Art Center and Morris-Warren Gallery, both on the Lower East Side, but without the breadth and clarity of the Midtown show.)

Wilkin approaches today’s abstract art not as a foregone conclusion but as an open question. “In today’s art world, when verbally expressed ideas are often valued more highly than the forms that embody them,” she writes in the show’s comprehensive exhibition catalogue, “the kind of wordless, imageless eloquence that the first members of AAA embraced has once again come into question.” With work selected from submissions by AAA members made over the past three to five years, Wilkin sought to show the “undiminished vigor and relevance of art that communicates directly through the eye, reaching our intellect and our emotions without words.”

The exhibition draws on the unusual architecture of the space—the lobby of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s 1961 Equitable Life Assurance Building, the International Style skyscraper that for many years housed the Paine Webber Art Gallery and, more recently, the gallery of UBS. Rather than a continuous wall, the gallery presents a series of panels arranged like dominos around the building core. With work hanging in a loose, salon-style arrangement, Wilkin uses each of these wall units to organize the sixty-five member artists on view.

Free from the literal explanations that intrude upon today’s museum exhibitions, the open, mostly wordless assembly becomes a tutorial on form, encouraging the viewer to find affinities among the abstract art on view. One unit built around Thornton Willis’s The Congregation (2012), a composition of colorful, Tetris-like forms floating over an orange field, becomes a conversation on the blocking of space and the tensions of figure, ground, and depth of field, especially when it is positioned next to the deeply bending forms of Lorenza Sannai’s Il sogno di Artemide (2015) and Exactly, exactly now (2015) and the halo-like loft of Lucio Pozzi’s A Fact(2015) and Fugue (2015).

“Pushing often even towards the edge of meaninglessness,” Pozzi has written of the shared spirit of the American Abstract Artists, “is one of the most precious assets we can cultivate in a culture that tends to package any and all activities into sensational or publicizeable instant explanations.”

Freed of literal meaning, abstraction gives visual license to keep looking. “Stripped of these superimposed tasks” of narrative, noted Ibram Lassaw, a founding artist of AAA, in 1938, “the underlying structure of art becomes clear. Colors and forms alone have a greater power to move man emotionally and psychologically.” Connections emerge the more you look, but the discoveries remain open-ended, encouraging further close viewing.

At “The Onward of Art,” a wall panel with Manfred Mohr, Katinka Mann, and Sharon Brant (whose work is aptly subtitled “from An Uncertain Geometry”) is tied together through a shared interest in line—which in turn binds it to the pleats of David Mackenzie, the scratches of Jane Logemann, and the creased stamps of Stephen Maine on the opposite wall.

On another wall, lines dissolve in Gilbert Hsiao’s dazzling triangleGTO (2015), a shaped canvas that connects to John Obuck’s square casements in Window (2015) and rounded bricks in Dome (2015) and Stephen Westfall’s diamond tiles in Otherwise (2013). Other arrangements similarly find affinities in the stripes of Kim Uchiyama, David Row, Li Trincere, Steven Alexander, James Juszczyk, and Mary Schiliro; the monochromes and hidden metallics of Gabriele Evertz, Marvin Brown, and Mark Dagley; the sweeping gestures of Mark Williams, Vera Vasek, Phillis Ideal, and Iona Kleinhaut; the triangles of Joanne Mattera and Roger Jorgensen; the diaphanous textures of Dorothea Rockburne, Emily Berger, and Claire Seidl; the spreading stains and hard edges of Don Voisine, Judith Murray, Nancy Manter, and Alice Adams; and the cloud-like forms of Ce Roser, Naomi Boretz, and Anne Russinof.

Themes recur, and geometry often plays a supporting role, but no single style dominates the exhibition. Any membership organization has limits, but by and large the artists here avoid fussiness and mannerism. Stephen Westfall has written that AAA “owes its longevity in part to the relative absence of a party line. The will to abstraction, after all, is generated by a variety of private impulses and historical interpretations.” Sculptures of wood and stone are mixed in among paintings, drawings, monoprints, and textiles. As an example of range, Raquel Rabinovich’s work on paper is made of “Arno river mud and glue”; Gail Gregg gilds the constructivist forms of shipping cardboard; and Edward Shalala photographs a “raw canvas thread flown with a kite with 5–10 mph winds forming a random permutation.”

Wilkin is right that the challenges of abstraction have evolved over the last eighty years. Today, she writes, “abstraction is often assumed to be empty unless it is fully bolstered with irony or a complex conceptual justification.” Such a description might easily apply to “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World,” MOMA’s failed attempt last year at a survey show of recent abstract art.

For perspective, Wilkin has added a historical section to “The Onward of Art,” which is mostly presented in the secure display cases that line the western corridor of the lobby. Here are some of the AAA’s leading historical members, including Esphyr Slobodkina, Ad Reinhardt, Jack Tworkov, Charmion von Wiegand, and, on view for part of the run, Piet Mondrian.

The connections between the current and historical work are undeniable. Reinhardt’s black-on-black squares become Voisine’s springy diagonals in Dimday (2015) and Jig (2015). It’s the amplitude of the work that has evolved. The historical abstractions here convey soft-spoken quietude. The current work enjoys no such luxury. Noise is today’s ultimate challenge. So contemporary abstraction has learned how to raise its voice, still without saying a word.

If the art of the outer boroughs is any indication, abstraction is enjoying a renaissance of late, with some of the most interesting recent work re-imagining and re-engaging with a century of abstract form. Often the best examples find ways to add impurities to abstract art’s pure nature, with new sensibilities bleeding into the edges.

Paul D’Agostino, Zeit, 2016, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 60 x 60 inches/Image Courtesy: Life on Mars Gallery

This past month, the artist, poet, translator, collaborator, and unofficial mascot of Bushwick, Paul D’Agostino, opened his much anticipated solo show at Life on Mars Gallery.2 Called “Scriptive Formalities,” the exhibition explores D’Agostino’s “shared origins in matters of language, translation, and narrative.”

A new series of paintings, “Chromatic Alphabet,” represents an alphabet of colorful abstract shapes, while “Floor Translations” continues his storytelling around anthropomorphic paint splatters found on his studio floor. The Translations series, here collected into a catalogue of charcoal and ink drawings, with whimsical stories written out in schoolboy cursive, turns abstract stains into “The Bucktoothed Knifebeak and Althusser the Albatross.” The Alphabet paintings go the other way, transforming literature into a series of assured, hard-edged abstractions.

Sharon Butler, After Frank Stella?, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 32 x 26 inchesImage Courtesy: Theodore:Art

Meanwhile just down the hall in the gallery building of 56 Bogart Street, Sharon Butler’s latest paintings were on view last month at Theodore:Art.3 The proprietor of the art blog Two Coats of Paint, Butler has been at the center of outer-borough abstraction and coined the term “The New Casualism” to describe a new abstract sensibility. At Theodore:Art, she took a formal turn with a series of small, lyrical paintings of tail lights and other forms drawn from her studio view overlooking the Manhattan Bridge—abstractions, again, imbued with a personal narrative.

As an alternative to greater amplitude, the future of abstract art may be found in such a turn to sentiment that nevertheless manages to avoid sentimentality.

1 “The Onward of Art: American Abstract Artists 80th Anniversary Exhibition” opened at the 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, New York, on January 18 and remains on view through March 25, 2016.

2 “Paul D’Agostino: Scriptive Formalities” opened at Life on Mars Gallery, Brooklyn, on February 5 and remains on view through March 6, 2016.

3 “Sharon Butler” was on view at Theodore:Art, Brooklyn, from January 8 through February 24, 2016.