Gstaad with Bill

James writes:

A friend's upcoming nuptials in Gstaad, Switzerland bring me back to the winter I worked at the ski resort as a writing assistant to William F. Buckley Jr.

In 1999 Bill called me into his office at National Review, where I was an editor, and asked if I liked to ski. I did (and still do). On the way out, I said, "Thank you, Mr. Buckley." He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Call me Bill." A day later he phoned up and asked me to come to Gstaad for the winter to help him write his next novel.

The book writing was a yearly activity that Bill devised to kept his busy mind occupied during the resort's social season. His goal was 2,000 words a day and a novel in thirty days. He just about did it. Working away in a study in Rougemont, down the valley from the town of Gstaad, we hammered out a novel called Spytime: the Undoing of James Jesus Angleton--a fictionalized history of the real-life American head of counter-intelligence James Jesus Angleton. (A few years after the book came out, Angleton became the basis for the movie The Good Shepherd, but our account was better.)

Bill and I started early every morning, never took off weekends, but still managed to ski for a few hours after lunch. We then did a round of late-afternoon editing and, at 7pm, his chef brought two kirs down to the study and a box of cigars to transition us into the dinner hour, which might include a visit from Roger Moore, Taki Theodoracopulos, deposed and pretender royals, and other stars of the Gstaad Constellation.

Not bad work from a classics major a year out of college. When Bill died in 2008, Leon Neyfakh wrote a nice story in the New York Observer about WFB's lucky class of young assistants.

Before I left for Gstaad a colleague at National Review introduced me to the art of Super 8 movie making. The method was anachronistic then--I still had my parents' equipment from the 1970s. Today it looks like a machine-age time warp, which is why I find it appealing. I plan to digitize more of these old movies in the next few months. But first, here are two of my Super 8s from that winter in Gstaad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeOuWzY2t1Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFv_CyE76MQ

3/12/12 UPDATE: Great to be back

Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011): 'the bridge between Pollock and what is possible'

Helen Frankenthaler Mountains and Sea (1952), National Gallery of Art

In honor of Helen Frankenthaler, the great artist who died today at age 83, we offer these essays on her life's work and the painting that first made her famous, Mountains and Sea (1952).

James Panero on "Frankenthaler at 80" (2009):

Living masters have it rough, and Helen Frankenthaler has been living as a master for over half a century. In 1952, at the age of only twenty-three, she created Mountains and Sea, an iconic painting that forever secured her place in the history of art. It was a work that at once defined Frankenthaler’s style and changed the visual texture of abstract painting. Mountains and Sea built on the achievements of Jackson Pollock with its poured paint and rolled-out canvas—but it also outdid Pollock. With its thinned pigments soaked directly into linen, it displayed a new artistic temperament, subsuming the artistic ego into forms of color that absorbed the Abstract Expressionist gesture into an all-over stain.

A Recollection by the late dealer Andre Emmerich (2004):

Her work has been celebrated with more museum exhibitions than any other American artist represented by my gallery, more books and articles, and an avalanche of honorary doctorates. With it all, Helen has also managed to have more fun than most other artists do. A great party-giver, she helped me celebrate innumerable birthdays in her studio. There was always music to match, mostly Sinatra, to which she danced for hours with great style and enthusiasm.

Karen Wilkin on Frankenthaler at the Guggenheim (1998):

Mountains and Sea, with its luminous hues, diaphanous shapes, and detached fragments of line, has become a kind of icon, regarded as the Urtext of stain painting because of the way Frankenthaler disembodied color by physically merging thinned-out pigment with the very fabric of the canvas. At once landscapelike and wholly about the way paint responds to the gestures of a particular individual, at once flat and spatially suggestive, Mountains and Sea issued a challenge to the wet-into-wet, dragged paint-handling and loaded surfaces that were the hallmarks of ambitious abstraction at the start of the 1950s. Mountains and Sea was startling when it was first painted and, as anyone can attest who visited the picture in the past few years at the National Gallery, Washington (where it has been on long-term loan from the artist), it continues to look astonishingly fresh, bold, and inventive.

Karen Wilkin on Frankenthaler and her critics (1989)

I suspect that the persistence of these ideas owes more to current cynicism about how today’s art world functions than to real information. What is unquestionable is that the early Fifties were a heady time to be a young, pretty woman striving to make art in New York, especially if she had the benefit of an informed outsider, arguably the most perceptive critic of the period, as a guide. The city’s art community was a smaller, more cohesive place in those days, not yet split into Pollock vs. de Kooning vs. Rothko factions. (A position on the Stalinist purges could still make people cross the street in order to avoid one another, but that’s another matter.) Frankenthaler looked at everything—hard— and drew her own conclusions. The more aware among Frankenthaler’s commentators point out that she quickly realized, as she once put it, that “you could become a de Kooning disciple or satellite or mirror, but you could depart from Pollock.” This usually leads to the most celebrated story in the Frankenthaler corpus, the one about her making Mountains and Sea, soaking its transparent, intense colors into raw canvas, and working abstractly, although with the memory of a recent trip to Nova Scotia, as she said, “in my arms.” Aged twenty-three. It’s the picture Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, young visitors from Washington, saw when Greenberg let them into Frankenthaler’s studio, in her absence, one weekend in 1953, the one that provoked Louis’s frequently quoted description of Frankenthaler as “the bridge between Pollock and what is possible.”

Best of 2011: "The Year of the Munk"

Munk recording "The James Kalm Report" at the opening of Joe Zucker's latest show

James writes:

"Do It Yourself" just did it.

Loren Munk, the apostle of DIY, whom I have written about in several columns this past year, gets his own Christmas Day profile in The New York Times in a piece by Jed Lipinski:

Several nights a week, he rides his mountain bike to art shows across the city from the 3,800-square-foot loft he shares with his wife in Red Hook, Brooklyn. His videos — recognizable for their unseen narrator’s labored breathing, jerky camera work and informed but uncritical commentary — run about 10 minutes and are shot with a tiny Canon Elph digital camera.

“There’s the great Chuck Close,” he said while filming a recent visit to Gavin Brown’s Enterprise gallery in Chelsea, before comparing the exhibiting artist’s technique to that of the post-painterly abstractionists.

“But he doesn’t just go to Chelsea,” said James Panero, an editor at The New Criterion, a conservative culture journal, who has written about Mr. Munk. “He goes to the most out-of-the-way places and treats them with the same level of importance. I think his videos will one day be in the Archives of American Art.”

Last February I predicted that 2011 would be "The Year of the Munk"--the time when Munk would rise to prominence for his work in the alternative art scene.

The year began with Munk's exhibition at Minus Space in Gowanus, reviewed here. The show featured paintings that chart Munk's idiosyncratic interpretations of art history.

Munk's understanding of history relates to the multidisiplinary approach of his artistic practice, which manages to combine painting, videography, writing, and (yes) biking. When I visited him in his Red Hook studio last January, he showed me a bumper sticker he had printed up (a few of them were used to hold his bike together). It said, "we are our own art history."

The statement goes to the heart of Munk's philosophy: that art-world outsiders, the vast "dark matter" of under-recognized artists like himself, need to write themselves into their own art history.

This principle energizes Munk's paintings, his criticism, his social commentary, and his new media project known as the James Kalm Report and James Kalm Rough Cuts--DIY videos of out-of-the-way galleries and artist studios to which he travels by bike. There are now nearly a thousand of his videos available for free online.

In September a solo exhibition of Munk's work, called "Location, Location, Location," went on view at Lesley Heller gallery. For Munk's first showing in a Manhattan venue in a decade, "Location" led me to consider the role of urban density in artistic innovation. Roberta Smith declared: "Mr. Munk gives dizzying visual expression to some of what lures the art-driven to the city: the sense of possibility in the air and of history beneath our feet." I agree.

Yet not everyone has praised Munk's paintings or his new-media work created under the James Kalm pseudonym. Charlie Finch and the Web 1.0 writers at artnet.com have gone after Munk (and myself). In one article, Finch declared Munk to be a "likeable, dimwitted observer who has recently emerged as the darling of the most reactionary element in art criticism, James Panero." Such denials only confirm the success of Munk's project. 

This success means greater recognition for the alternative art scene that he has championed for decades. In 2011, Munk wrote the dark matter back into art history.