Gallery Chronicle (October 2019)

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2019

Gallery Chronicle

On William Bailey at the Yale University Art Gallery, Bruce Gagnier at the New York Studio School and Thomas Park Gallery, Graham Nickson at Betty Cuningham Gallery, Gary Petersen at McKenzie Fine Art, William T. Williams at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, and Joe Zucker at Marlborough Gallery.

Paintings of the nude can still be shocking, just not in the way you might think. The real nudity of “William Bailey: Looking Through Time,” now on view at the Yale University Art Gallery, is painting denuded of contemporary pretense.1 That’s the shock of the career survey of this living master and longtime Yale professor: a love for painting, past and present, without modern adornment. Bailey’s nudes, still lifes, and landscapes reach back to Piero della Francesca and the early Italian Renaissance to draw out compositions of consummate craft and uncanny tranquility. Pairing those with examples of his drawings and prints, this must-see exhibition, remarkably Bailey’s first museum survey, makes us grateful for a painter who looks through time and shares his distant vision.

Born in 1930, Bailey trained under the modernist Josef Albers at Yale, where he earned his bfa and mfa before joining its faculty, teaching there until his retirement in 1995. Bailey was one of the key artists to break with mid-century abstraction and lead a resurgence in representation, mentoring a generation of students along the way. When his Portrait of S (1979–80) appeared on the cover of Newsweek, the magazine’s critic Mark Stevens wrote that Bailey “helped restore representational art to a position of consequence in modern painting.” That painting, here on loan from the University of Virginia, proved to be a sensation for Newsweek due to the portrait’s partial nudity. When the issue appeared in 1982, some newsstands even censored the breasts and removed the magazine to their “adult” section.

William Bailey, Portrait of S, 1979–80, Oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery.

I cannot quite decide which part of that story seems most removed from us today: that there was a painting of a nude on the cover of Newsweek, that Newsweek put a painting on its cover at all, or that there was once a magazine called Newsweek. Today the painting remains startling for its skill and suppleness, but not for the nudity of the otherworldly figure glowing at its center.

Nevertheless, when I went to see this exhibition with my daughter, a gallery guard kindly flagged me down to warn me of its nude contents. Even today Bailey can elicit an unusual reaction. Plenty of paintings past and present feature the nude, of course, but I doubt works by Titian or Raphael would spark the same concern. There is something uniquely present in Bailey’s paintings, something fresh and exposed. It is not the figures themselves, which emerge from Bailey’s own painting-filled imagination. I rather think it is the way he brings his painted surfaces forward into our own space.

The paint itself is sensuous. Bailey’s touch can be as appealing across the creamy walls and shadow lines of Empty Stage II(2012) as along the shelved vessels in Horizon (1991) and the outstretched leg of N (ca. 1965), his astonishing nod to Ingres’ Grande Odalisque. There is much still life here, perhaps too much at the expense of a broader survey that might have included Bailey’s early transitional work. Yet while these vessels repeat, the treatment of their overall surfaces conveys a broad range of response. Perhaps due to his modernist training, Bailey focuses his paintings all-over, with no one part of the composition commanding more attention than another. Walls and other “background” surfaces share equal billing. This is why one wants to linger over the grass of Afternoon in Umbria (2010) and the reflected window light of Turning (2003). The same goes for the hatch marks of his lithographs and etchings and the stunning draftsmanship of his silverpoint, pen, crayon, and graphite on paper. The abstract passages can be just as compelling as the more “realist” depictions of vases, vessels, nudes, and eggs.

William Bailey, Eggs, 1974, Oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery.

And there is something mesmerizing in the repetition, in seeing these forms repurposed in ever-changing ways. The compositions become increasingly familiar and, yet, all the more strange. Curated by Mark D. Mitchell, “Looking Through Time” flattens the distinctions between now and then by mixing work from different periods, just as Bailey seems to paint in a time out of time. Instead, the subtly shifting forms of color and light tell their own story. I was particularly struck by Eggs (1974), with Bailey’s wonderful ova, on loan from the Whitney Museum, here alone on a table without their usual crockery companions. This painting is the first in the exhibition, or the last, all depending on how you look at it.

“Bruce Gagnier: Stance” at the New York Studio School, installation view.

“Bilious” is the word that comes to mind whenever I see the sculptures of Bruce Gagnier. His distended figures all look as if they swallowed something disagreeable. Their humors are off, sometimes way off, as they sway along and toddle about. Gagnier comes out of a classical and Renaissance sculptural tradition. His nude figures and portrait busts are created in plaster and clay and cast in bronze. But with their misshapen heads and out-of-proportion limbs, these are the opposite of Vitruvian men and women. Unusually small in stature, they are not ideal forms but all-too-real creatures of our downtrodden world, nearly verging on caricature but comforting us in their shared burdens and imperfect body image.

Now at the gallery of the New York Studio School, where he is on faculty, “Bruce Gagnier: Stance” brings together ten of these figures in bronze. “Life-size” but seemingly smaller, these sculptures shlump and shuffle through the gallery rooms as projected and exaggerated versions of ourselves, craning and bending and trying to ignore everyone else around. We look at them as they glance at us, putting into question the seeing and the seen, and just who is better off and who is the worse for wear.2

Somewhat concurrent to the Studio School run, “Good Figure, Bruce Gagnier: Plaster Works from 2019 and 1983” was on view last month at Thomas Park gallery on the Lower East Side.3 Compressed into a tiny upstairs room, these small figures were arranged in rows facing the door like a terracotta army, along with a few of his paintings and portrait busts arrayed on a table beyond. Gagnier’s art straddles that fine line between subjects and objects. As both figures and sculptures, his works seem equally worn down, in a way that becomes even more apparent in plaster. Whether as bodies or statues or something in-between, these men and women appear to have been dug up from some contingent state, as though at one time drowned in a peat bog or buried in Vesuvian ash. The wear and tear that Gagnier builds into his work reminds me of Elie Nadelman, the modernist sculptor who also understood that objects need to have a past, even if you must invent it. What results is an unearthing of form and an archaeology of emotion.

Graham Nickson, A.B, 2003, Oil on canvas, Betty Cuningham Gallery.

Graham Nickson paints snapshots of time through a lush abundance of expression. The moments he depicts can be uncomposed portraits that are recomposed in chroma. Very often his figures are turning away or otherwise off view, but in “Graham Nickson: Eye Level,” now at Betty Cuningham Gallery, Nickson focuses on the face head-on.4 The off-moments are still here, even more apparently so. Nickson works from observation, not photographs, but his portraits have the feel of passport images—unflattering, half-blinking, non-smiling, head and shoulders squared up. The captured moments are not necessarily how we want to be remembered. They are rather how we are now identified and recorded. What gives them some life is the expression Nickson puts into them in paint. Nickson balances the awkwardness of these images, which feel like studies, with the richness of his compositions. In the mix here are also some of his paintings of bathers—faces partially obscured.

Gary Petersen, Wonder Lust, 2019, Acrylic and oil on canvas, McKenzie Fine Art.

Gary Petersen combines the histories of hard-edge abstraction and mid-century design to arrive at compositions that razzle and dazzle like flickering signage and televised animation. I cannot help but hear that old drumroll of “a cbs special presentation” whenever I see his acrylics flash and spin into view. His second exhibition at McKenzie Fine Art, “Gary Petersen: Just Hold On,” presents the artist’s increasingly dense compositions, where bursts of color press in rather than spin out.5

There is a lot of electricity here, a neon jungle that is barely contained in the edges and layers that Petersen builds into his work. In addition to featuring rectangles on top of rectangles with not quite squared-off edges, paintings such as Wonder Lust (2019) and Nowhere Near (2019) introduce curvilinear forms and shapes in oil that add to the dynamic snap. A favorite is Asbury Park (2019), a smaller painting where a free-form line of ink adds an extra layer of whimsy to this roller coaster of abstract expression.

William T. Williams, Blues Labyrinth, 1991, Acrylic on canvas, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

William T. Williams is having a moment, deservedly so. His bold geometric compositions of interlocked shapes and swirling lines are hard to miss. As black artists are being written into the canon of American abstraction, Williams’s contributions from the 1960s and ’70s mark out an important chapter. Abstraction is abstraction, of course, but artists such as Williams faced specific circumstances in their reception in American art. Primary among them was an expectation that black artists should be engaged in social content.

Instead, Williams asserted his own place in the abstract sublime. Trained at Pratt and Yale, he moved away from realism towards the freedom of abstract space. “My demographic is the human arena,” he once said. “I hope my work is about celebration, about an affirmation of life in the face of adversity; to reaffirm that we’re human, that we’re alive, that we can celebrate existence.”

Over time Williams looked beyond hard edges for paintings of tiled designs in heavy impasto. An exhibition at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery now features these more recent works.6 Williams’s craquelure surfaces have the quality of drying earth and aging skin. Their patterns recall the quilts of Gee’s Bend and other folkways. Williams gives his surfaces the suppleness of pottery glaze, working color back into the pits and grooves. The effect is more subtle than earlier work, but the result feels raw and exhumed.

Joe Zucker, 100-Foot-Long Piece, 1968–69, mixed media, Marlborough. Photo: Pierre Le Hors.

Fifty years ago, in the age of minimalism, Joe Zucker went maximal. He imposed his own grids and limits and then overran those boundaries of artistic decorum, exploding pictorial space with narrative, history, and humor. Now at Marlborough, an exhibition of his 100-Foot-Long Piece (1968–69) feels like a retrospective seen through a single work.7 Zucker looked through the black hole of formalism to detect not just the surface of materials but also the shadow of history. Cotton and race were early factors in this investigation of art and form, with the warp and weft patterns of canvas making recurring appearances. His 100-Foot-Long Piece looked forward as much as back into the wilds of his image-making to come. Timed to the release of Zucker’s major monograph by Thames & Hudson, this focused exhibition also includes drawings and studio ephemera—as well as new examples of the “cotton ball” paintings, gridded reliefs of cotton and acrylic that first made his reputation by surveying the history of art and soaking it all in.

1 “William Bailey: Looking Through Time” opened at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, on September 6, 2019 and remains on view through January 5, 2020.

2 “Bruce Gagnier: Stance” opened at the New York Studio School on September 9 and remains on view through October 13, 2019.

3 “Good Figure, Bruce Gagnier: Plaster Works from 2019 and 1983” was on view at Thomas Park, New York, from August 21 through September 22, 2019.

4 “Graham Nickson: Eye Level” opened at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on September 4 and remains on view through October 13, 2019.

5 “Gary Petersen: Just Hold On” opened at McKenzie Fine Art, New York, on September 4 and remains on view through October 20, 2019.

6 “William T. Williams: Recent Paintings” opened at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, on September 5 and remains on view through November 9, 2019.

7 “Joe Zucker: 100-Foot-Long Piece, 1968–1969” opened at Marlborough, New York, on September 6 and remains on view through October 5, 2019.

Venice's Last Judgment

James Panero on the beginning and end of the Most Serene Republic, occasioned by "Venice's last judgment" from the September 2019 issue.

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2019

Venice’s Last Judgment

On the beginning and end of the Most Serene Republic.

The Venice Biennale, that strange pageant of contemporary fashions, offers the opportunity, if not the necessity, to explore the real art of La Serenissima. At the furthest extreme from the latest forms on display in the Biennale’s Giardini are the ancient mosaics of the Church of Santa Maria Assunta, on the distant lagoon island of Torcello. I brought my family to Torcello’s desolate piazza on what proved to be the hottest morning of a hot Italian summer. Torcello is an hour by vaporetto water bus from the Fondamente Nove, on the northern edge of Venice’s sestiere of Cannaregio. We cut the time in half by water taxi and sped past the islands of Murano, Burano, and Mazzorbo before idling up to Torcello’s Ponte del Diavolo, where the narrow canal becomes too shallow for navigation.

Since we arrived early, we had to wait for the church lady to unlock the doors of the basilica. We fed the languid fish schooling by the abandoned quay of a nearby channel. Then we huddled in what shade we could find on this barren deposit of alluvial silt. Torcello’s tiny Locanda Cipriani, the fabled retreat where Hemingway wrote Across the River and into the Trees, was closed for the day, so the negronis would have to wait. At one point, we begged someone inside the island’s archaeological museum for some shelter from the sun. Mi dispiace, he said, closing the shutters on us. Our water supply started running low, as did my party’s patience. In the Italian custom, the attendant for Torcello’s lavish municipal bathroom had overslept and missed his ferry, and no one else had the key.

The privations no doubt made the sight of Santa Maria Assunta, once we were let inside, all the more thrilling. On its western wall, the golden vision of its “Last Judgment,” which received a full cleaning and restoration in February, is as profound as any art in Venice. With six vertical registers, the mosaic is filled with an awe-inspiring amount of visual information: scenes of the crucifixion, anastasis (resurrection), deesis (Christ with Mary and John the Baptist), and psychostasis (the weighing of souls) all rest on vignettes of heaven and hell divided in the lowest registers.

The Last Judgment, ca. twelfth century, Gold and glass mosaic.

The decorative splendor of this mosaic barely holds its dynamic forces together. In the upper registers, an expressive Christ pulls the souls of the Old Testament up from limbo to heaven by their wrists. Below, a snaking line of judicial plumbing leads down to increasingly explicit visions of hell. Two demons try to tip the scales of Saint Michael with their pitchforks while pouring out sins from bottles and bags. Meanwhile the damned are subdivided among the lustful, gluttonous, wrathful, envious, avaricious, and slothful, where they endure fiery and icy torments, when not being eaten by worms.

Today Torcello is an overlooked shoal in the northern lagoon, but at one time the island nurtured the first seeds of what became the great Republic of Venice. Torcello flowered as the original center of activity in the Veneto, before its channels silted up and its inhabitants relocated to the nearby islands of Burano, Murano, and the high ground of the Rialto. A millennium ago, at its apex, there were some ten thousand inhabitants on Torcello. Today, only about a dozen remain. Torcello’s “Last Judgment” therefore offers genuine revelation. The end times here have already come.

There was a period when Torcello was the crucible of Venice’s unexpected beginnings. In the final days of the Western Roman Empire, barbarian hordes descended on the old Roman towns still clinging to the shores of the northern Adriatic. As Attila the Hun surrounded the town of Altinum in 452, its residents fled to the sandbars of the nearby lagoon. These Roman holdouts and refugees from the other Veneti towns became lagoon dwellers, incolae lacunae, just three miles south of Altinum on the shifting delta sands of the River Sile.

Today the view from Torcello’s campanile does not look all that different from what those settlers first saw fifteen hundred years ago. In The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin called the sight “one of the most notable scenes in this wide world of ours. As far as the eye can reach, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid ashen gray; . . . lifeless, the color of sackcloth, with corrupted sea-water soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming hither and thither through its snaky channels.”

A close-up of “the Envious,” The Last Judgment, ca. twelfth century, Gold and glass mosaic.

The Venetian lagoon has always been an alien landscape, but its separation from the mainland provided essential protection from Italy’s drawn-out period of Germanic incursions and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. In their exodus, the settlers built houses on pilings of hardwood driven into the mud flats. All of Venice was built this way. It is said that the baroque church of Santa Maria della Salute, the towering domed memorial to the devastating plague of 1630 by the Punta della Dogana, rests on a million wooden piles. The Venetians also organized their new community along Roman republican lines. Rather than be ruled by an emperor or king, they elected their leader—dux in Latin, duke in English, doge in Italian. In this way the Veneti of the lagoon formed their mighty maritime republic that endured for over a thousand years. In the Republic’s final days, before its destruction by Napoleon, the Venetians even counseled the architects of the United States on the secrets of their Republic’s endurance.

The foundation stone of the Torcello basilica was laid in 639, a year after the town’s bishop had a vision that his flock should abandon what remained of Altinum. As Torcello rose in importance, its basilica became a prominent cathedral. The nearby channel, now little more than a shoaled-up estuary that harbors those languid fish, was once Torcello’s bustling Grand Canal. The relics of Saint Heliodorus, the Altinum bishop who accompanied Saint Jerome and was martyred in 390, were carried off from his Roman town and laid to rest beneath the basilica’s altar. His golden reliquary can still be seen there today. Since the Torcello basilica predates the construction of even the first cathedral of San Marco in Venice by some two centuries, one legend maintains that the body of Saint Mark was first interred here, perhaps in the crypt’s Roman sarcophagus, after two Venetian merchants alighted with the Evangelist’s remains from Alexandria, Egypt, which was then under the dominion of the Abbasid Caliphate.

About the time of the height of Torcello’s predominance in 1100, the interior of the basilica received its cycle of golden mosaics, which includes a sorrow-filled image of the Virgin and Child in the main apse above a swirling, tessellated marble floor. Byzantine in form, the selection of a Last Judgment scene for the opposite towering western wall, through which congregants once entered and exited, is said to have been a particularly Venetian touch.

Torcello reveals Venice in its true provisional strangeness, where art gives vision to immanence and relics buoy the faithful to the final days. The great works of Venice have always conveyed these contingent qualities—as a world between worlds. Rather than gaze up to some idealized beyond, the art of Venice looks out to proximate, felt, rough-and-tumble revelation.

A close-up of “the Gluttonous and Avaricious,” The Last Judgment, ca. twelfth century, Gold and glass mosaic.

Art has always played a central role in connecting the Venetian experience to the cosmic story. The particular hardships endured by the disease-prone city can be seen through its adoration of the “plague saints”: San Rocco, in whose scuola and church, in the sestiere of San Polo, Tintoretto painted one of the world’s greatest cycles of Christian image-making; and San Sebastiano, in whose church, on the site of a medieval hospice in the sestiere of Dorsoduro, Veronese painted some of his own masterpieces. For the Scuola Grande di San Marco, which now serves as the entrance to Venice’s hospital, in the sestiere of Castello, Tintoretto painted his breakthrough Miracle of the Slave (1548), along with his famous depictions of how the body of Mark came to Venice (and its miraculous rediscovery after the Evangelist was, for a time, temporarily misplaced).

Art holds a particular power over the city, just as the city conveys a particular power to art. Undoubtedly this is the reason why many contemporary artists come to congest Venice’s art-filled walls: to claim the city’s revelations, even if what they themselves purport to reveal may be facile and false. Of course, the science-fiction didacticism of the group show in this year’s Biennale, full of blinking lights and spinning whirligigs, speaks little to the art of Venice’s resonant past. In our secular age, so enraptured with the present moment, how could it? Yet sometimes connections can still be made: in the United States Pavilion, the sculptures of Martin Puryear, which draw together the classicism of many sculptural traditions, are fraught with memory; an exhibition on “The Nature of Arp” at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection speaks to the aquatic forms of the lagoon; “Pittura/Panorama: Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, 1952–1992,” at the Palazzo Grimani, returns the great modernist to Venice some fifty years after she dazzled in the United States Pavilion with her aqueous compositions; and at Ca’ Pesaro, “Arshile Gorky, 1904–1948” reveals the tragic vision of the American abstractionist who lost his family in the Armenian genocide.

Through plague and pestilence, rising sea waters and sinking salt marshes, in Venice the end has never seemed all that far off. Today the flood that troubles Venetians most is the tourists pouring out of grandi navi, the massive cruise ships that wreak havoc on the Giudecca Canal and may soon be banned, not the city’s frequent inundations of acqua alta, which locals take in watery stride. Last November, when I was previously in Venice for the Tintoretto exhibitions at the Palazzo Ducale and Accademia museums, the high-water siren sounded at daybreak. The sirene allertamento acqua altanow broadcast from twenty-two points across the historical center and islands of Venice. From my window overlooking the Accademia, I listened as the signal broke the morning spell from the alarm atop San Trovaso. As my water taxi motored up the Grand Canal, the flood waters compounded with the morning rain and washed over the calliaround the Ponte di Rialto.

Thirty-five years ago Venice installed its first flood alarm on the campanile of San Marco. A new alarm developed by the Centro Previsioni e Segnalazioni Maree now uses a wireless network and digital signals of various tones to indicate the height of the rising tide. Venetians also sign up for emergency notices by text message, giving them a few extra minutes to slide in the low metal barriers at the bottom of their doorways to hold back the headwaters. In the months of fall, as the sirocco southern wind, the full moon, and other hydrological effects converge on the Adriatic to push water into the lagoon, many Venetians now simply leave the barriers in place.

The waters of the lagoon have always offered protection and destruction in equal measure. With its canals framing an architecture of exquisite lace, the city’s liquid light gives evanescent form to the miraculous story of survival that began, and ended, on humble Torcello. “Without making this excursion you can hardly pretend to know Venice,” Henry James said of his own visit to that island. “It is impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of unheeded collapse. Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, a mere mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental bones left impiously unburied.”

New Podcast: Nightmare at the Museum

A conversation on cultural politics, occasioned by the resignation of Warren B. Kanders from the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Andrew Shea, assistant editor of The New Criterion, joins me to discuss cultural politics, in a conversation occasioned by the resignation of Warren B. Kanders from the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art.