Gallery Chronicle (March 2010)

Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses, Black Horses (1942) © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York.
Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York

THE NEW CRITERION
March 2010

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On "Seventy Years Grandma Moses" at Galerie St. Etienne, New York & “Carolanna Parlato: Vortical” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York.

Grandma Moses deserves more than a Hallmark greeting. The paintings by this self-taught artist should be in any museum that lays claim to the history of American art. An extensive loan exhibition on view at Galerie St. Etienne endeavors to make the case that the elderly woman behind millions of Christmas-card reproductions is a pivotal American artist.[1]

Moses’s personal story is compelling, in turn amplifying and diminishing her artistic reputation. She lived from the age of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of John Kennedy. She was born Anna Mary Robertson in upstate New York in 1860, the third of ten children. At twelve she left home to work as a maid on a nearby farm. She spent most of the next fifteen years as a farm girl, obtaining scattered schooling alongside the children of her employers. In 1887, at twenty-seven, she married Thomas Salmon Moses, a farmhand. Relocating to Virginia, they farmed in the Shenandoah Valley, where Moses gave birth to ten children, losing five in infancy. Eighteen years later, in 1905, the family returned to upstate New York, this time to Rensselaer County, just south of her birthplace, to a farm they called Mount Nebo, near the hamlet of Eagle Bridge. The landscape of the surrounding countryside formed the underlying topography of her subsequent artistic output.

It was not until the mid-1930s, following the death of her husband in 1927, that Moses began to paint in earnest. “I had always wanted to paint, but I just didn’t have time until I was seventy-six,” she later said. Arthritis led her to give up needlework in favor of oil on board. She submitted her first work to the county fair, but she took home a prize for her preserves rather than her paintings. Then, in 1938, a collector named Louis Caldor spotted Moses’s artwork in the shop window of W. D. Thomas’s pharmacy in the town of Hoosick Falls, New York. He purchased as many works as he could carry and returned to New York City. The next year Caldor landed three of the paintings in a members’-only group show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A year later Caldor convinced Otto Kallir, a Jewish refugee from Austria with a newly opened commercial gallery in New York, to mount the artist’s first one-woman show. The name of Kallir’s shop was St. Etienne; the gallery, now run by Hildegard Bachert and Jane Kallir, Otto’s granddaughter, has represented Moses ever since.

Otto Kallir may have been the first to call her “Grandma” Moses, a name journalists have delighted in ever since. His gallery has shepherded Moses’s career from obscurity to popular success. A painter beloved in reproduction, she was abandoned by the artistic establishment. By the time of her death in 1961 at the age of 101, Moses had met presidents, appeared on the cover of Life, been visited by Edward R. Murrow, and seen her licensed images appear on 100-million Christmas cards. Yet the initial critical support she received at the time of her first show in 1940 was soon eclipsed, as Regionalism, Primitivism, and the American Scene fell out of favor with sophisticated taste. Moses’s work never entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the site of her first exhibition.

“One of the first artists to be hailed as a media superstar,” notes Jane Kallir, “and possibly the most successful female artist of her era, Moses is nevertheless surprisingly invisible when it comes to histories of postwar American painting.” Moses never found a place in America’s projection of postwar international style. Nor was she taken up by the theorists of the 1970s, despite her success as a woman painter.

The misunderstanding of Moses hinges on her initial status as a primitive, unschooled artist. Rural living in fact provided Moses with its own aesthetic education. The crafts of farm life—needlework and quilting—gave Moses an appreciation of bold colors and a neo-Impressionist sense of paint application. Three of the earliest pieces in the show—Mt. Nebo on the Hill (1940), Untitled (House and Barn in Landscape) (c. 1940), and Shepherd Comes Home from the Hills (c. 1940)—are “worsted pictures” made of embroidered yarn and fabric.

Like other resourceful self-taught artists—Henry Darger and John Kane come to mind—Moses freely appropriated imagery from prints and photographs. She transferred figures from Currier and Ives and popular advertisements to her paintings by tracing them with carbon paper. Several of her more “realistic” paintings from the early 1940s are based entirely on the compositions of colored lithographs. When Leaves Turn (1943) follows a series of paintings she made called Autumn in the Berkshires—one of them painted directly on top of a commercial print. A Fire in the Woods (1940) and The Burning of Troy (c. 1939) are similarly based on documentary material. Moses’s historical knowledge of local events provided its own narrative template, further drawing on documentary illustrations. The Battle of Bennington in 1777, the burning of Troy, New York in 1862, and the Checkered House inn, built in 1765 on the nearby turnpike road, are all recurring motifs.

Moses had taken up mapmaking in childhood. As she combined a technique born from folk traditions with an intimate knowledge of local history and geography, she distinguished her art with a unique sense of pictorial space and an urge to record her world. She put equal weight on foreground activity and on distant topography. Her sensibility to represent all space with even focus resembles cartography more than conventional painting based on visual perception.

In her paintings, Moses did not simply reproduce geographical reality. She crafted diagrams of rural life, often drawing from the pre-industrial past. One can see a mapping instinct in every decision she made, down to the way she reproduced buildings. Like architectural isometric projection, she unfolded shapes so that right-angle planes were equally drawn out. The results are didactic representations rather than illustrations in single-point perspective. Moses loaded her paintings with such information to create visual maps of a shared rural memory. The people in these scenes—traced and transferred figures performing various tasks like sugaring, catching the Thanksgiving turkey, and riding a sleigh to grandma’s house—are not faithfully depicted. Rather they stand as representations of activity: more like street signs than cognizant human beings.

That St. Etienne would mount a museum-quality exhibition of Moses while actual New York museums continue to ignore her ies noteworthy. It is also noteworthy that an extensive show called “Grandma Moses in the 21st Century,” which toured through six national museums in 2001, never found a New York venue. Writing at the time in the New York Observer, Hilton Kramer called the omission a scandal.

Regardless of Moses’s aesthetic achievements, her place as a popular artist commands our attention. Yet as the St. Etienne show makes clear, Moses’s work can be exceptionally good. Certainly, it wasn’t always great. Sometimes her untrained hand got away from her, or her compositions became over-filled with genre figures. While there are elegant exceptions, her late work with its more impressionistic line seems crude. But certain paintings, especially her expansive landscapes, can hold their own in the history of art, beyond her designation as a self-taught outsider.

Black Horses (1942), on display in the current show, is the work that convinced Kallir to appreciate Moses as a serious artist. This painting can do the same for us today. Moses is much more than a footnote to an artistic movement. With her memorialization of a rural past, she transcends even the history of American art. She has become, simply put, a national treasure. The time has come for the art world to understand what the rest of the world realized decades ago.

I predict that the art of the 1970s will find new relevance in the coming years. The expressionist 1950s returned in the 1980s. The pop 1960s struck back in the last decade. Now the legacy of the 1970s has reemerged to hash it out in another recessionary period. What matters is how this decade gets remembered—for its theory or its practice. The Conceptualism of the decade has long been championed by the cultural establishment, while the rigorous studio practice of 1970s painters has been ignored.

This oil-on-canvas generation never disappeared. The artists who came of age in that decade continue to work and, in many respects, get better. What didn’t change was their sense of community and, regrettably for them, often the price of their work. The public has yet to catch on. This past month, a large group show at Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg brought several artists of this generation together under one roof with many younger painters and even some older ones. By last count, 380 works climbed the walls in a Barnes-style hanging. At times the cement bunker of a gallery, run by Richard Timperio, seemed like the Alamo of 1970s process painting. It was an outstanding group show, with studio painters in conversation across the generations. A work on paper by Jake Berthot was a standout. I was also excited to see Ronnie and Noah Landfield, father and son, in one room. A promising recent graduate of Hunter, Noah is now up for a solo show at Sideshow.

One artist at Sideshow—younger than the 1970s generation but with a shared sensibility—was Carolanna Parlato. She now has a solo show at Elizabeth Harris.[2] Working in bold acrylic, Parlato seeks to collaborate with her paint rather than over-manipulate it. She pours her paint onto her canvas and tips the wet surface back and forth. She allows the drips to run. The happy accidents that result come out of Parlato’s understanding of paint’s chemistry. Through her own experimentation, Parlato now uses extra medium, even soaps, to encourage the controlled movement of her pigments, which she layers over one another. Sometimes the compositions become overpopulated. Coronal Loop (2009) has too much going on—although particular details, like the sweep of brush, are beautiful effects.

In her best work, the fields of paint, often juxtaposed in two different forms, have an energy of their own. Undercurrent (2009) pairs a shape melting down with another dripping up. Orbital (2009), the best painting in the show, has an oozing amoeba foregrounding an explosive burst of green and red, reacting together in a bath of clear medium. Building on each new painting, the work develops through Parlato’s own process. Like all good artists, she is her own best teacher.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Seventy Years Grandma Moses: A Loan Exhibition Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Artist’s ‘Discovery’” opened at Galerie St. Etienne on February 3 and remains on view through April 3, 2010. Go back to the text.
2. “Carolanna Parlato: Vortical” opened at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on February 11 and remains on view through March 13, 2010. Go back to the text.

Strike the Set

CITY JOURNAL
Winter 2010

Strike the Set
by James Panero

A militant union smothers New York theater.

You’ve got to hand it to New York’s stagehands’ union. Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) has been collective-bargaining the life out of New York theater for over a century. Just how much does this union of carpenters, electricians, and prop masters bleed from city arts organizations? Carnegie Hall’s tax returns for its 2007–08 season suggest an answer.

Dennis O’Connell, Carnegie’s properties manager, has pulled down headline-making salaries from the concert hall for years. Between 2001 and 2003, for instance, his annual salary ranged between $309,000 and $344,000. But for the fiscal year ending in June 2008, O’Connell’s earnings topped $530,000, making him Carnegie’s highest-paid employee after its executive director, Clive Gillinson. Four other stagehands—carpenters James Csollany and Kenneth Beltrone and electricians John Goodson and John Cardinale—came in just behind, with salaries exceeding $400,000 apiece.

The Carnegie payouts received wide circulation in the New York media last fall after being reported in Bloomberg News. Yet the story only hints at a deeper truth well known in the New York arts community—one that affects Lincoln Center, all of Broadway, and numerous other venues. Because of the stranglehold of Local One–negotiated contracts, New York theater owners must all pay a sizable tribute each day just to keep the lights on. The pay rates that Local One secures for its stagehands far exceed the deals struck by other IATSE chapters nationwide, and many employees can pad their base pay with multiple surcharge triggers—overtime, missed meals, and tasks that mandate excessive staffing.

The money comes out of arts organizations’ bottom lines, driving up production costs and ticket prices and inhibiting the evolution of New York theater. “Any programming that does not resemble programming 30 years ago is prohibitive,” explains one theater manager. Pricey union contracts have “absolutely prohibited arts organizations from doing new things, particularly in difficult times.” The contracts also prevent organizations from expanding their reach through advances in technology like webcasting and simulcasts in movie theaters. The Metropolitan Opera had to spend years at the bargaining table to launch its Live in HD program.

The union has established a closed network of unchecked power. (To get a sense of its might, just try to speak to someone on the record.) When Local One workers talk about their “brotherhood,” some of them mean it literally: the chapter president, James J. Claffey, Jr., is the son of a Local One member and counts five brothers in the union. The leadership is predominantly Irish and male, and of the union’s 3,000 members, only about 130 are women. Thanks to a tiered salary structure and a union-controlled promotion system, not all of the members benefit from the big payouts. One anonymous blogger who identifies himself as a rank-and-file member rails against what he calls the union’s “Irish loop” system of preferment: “2500 victims plus the 350 to 500 plus relatives and loop boys (white, Irish, males).”

In better economic times, when theaters were flush, Local One’s impositions were bad enough. Now, as arts organizations are failing in the recession, the union’s compensation packages should receive the same scrutiny as the pay rates of top management. Keep in mind that the high salaries commanded by maestros and executive directors, which can exceed $1 million, were determined in an open marketplace. Could another prop master do O’Connell’s job just as well, and for less pay?

You can’t fault O’Connell: he performs a service and enjoys his legally agreed-upon compensation for doing so. The true blame rests with an arts leadership too weak-willed to fight union demands. The former general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Joe Volpe, showed that such fecklessness wasn’t necessary. A former stagehand himself, with sons working as union extras, Volpe knew how to play tough against Local One. “At labor negotiations, for example, I can whoop and holler and scream and carry on like a wild man,” he once said. “I’ll shout that they can burn the place down but I’m never going to give in. And I’ll walk out. And their attorney will come over to me later and tell me it was great—that my act really helped him because until then the union was stuck in its position and he couldn’t get them to change.”

While Local One protects the lucky few at the top of the stagehand food chain, many more New Yorkers in the arts, unionized or not, are seeing their positions eliminated or their salaries cut during the current downturn because of unsustainable budgets. Arts leaders, who need to start controlling costs at all levels, also need the backbone to stare down the threat of a Local One strike. And if negotiations break down in the future, the arts community must overcome its unwillingness to cross picket lines for a justified cause that will help all workers. You don’t have to be antiunion to confront the inequity of Local One. You just have to be anti–Local One.

James Panero is the managing editor of The New Criterion.

Gallery Chronicle (February 2010)

Deborah Brown, Green Sky (2009), courtesy of the artist and Storefront.

THE NEW CRITERION
February 2010

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On the Bushwick art scene, the "Inaugural Exhibition" at Storefront, “The Wells Street Gallery Revisited: Then and Now” at Lesley Heller Workspace, “Works on Paper” at Danese & “Jack Tworkov: True and False” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

The neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn is the art world’s recession special. In the last decade, this broken quadrangle, a one-time hellhole of riots, arson, and drug violence, has become an artist haven. The urban renaissance that lifted even the bleakest corners of New York City left this gray landscape of low tenements and light-industrial factory buildings with some room to grow. At the same time, a wave of rising rents pushed many of the city’s artists from west to east—from the East Village to Williamsburg and Greenpoint and finally to Bushwick. Inexpensive, just a subway ride from Manhattan, the neighborhood presented a gritty and expansive urban tableau.

Several of the city’s outlying neighborhoods, from the South Bronx to the Gowanus Canal, have seen an influx of artists in recent years. Still, Bushwick became a community unto itself, a latter-day commune of youthful energy in the shadow of an industrial wasteland, a world away from downtown. The trust-fund bohemians of the Bowery School and the Lower East Side may have landed shows at Deitch Projects and overdosed on their de Menil credit cards, but the Bushwick School seemed content to remain obscure. For those on the outside, Bushwick appeared impenetrable, even unappealing.

The neighborhood’s affordability and open spaces allowed its artists to develop largely independent of market forces. The factory-style production that defined the art of the last decade was disregarded in favor of a more intimate, material-based studio practice. Skim off the froth, and many members of the Bushwick School might be seen as the spiritual descendants of the process-based painters who first settled in Soho in the 1960s and 1970s.

Its slow maturation has left Bushwick vibrant but ephemeral. The question has been how to make its idealism sustainable. Hundreds of the neighborhood’s artists have been organizing annual Bushwick Open Studio weekends each June. Several artists run informal year-round galleries out of their studios. A few commercial spaces have opened (and often closed) in basements and garages and storefronts, with names like Pocket Utopia, English Kills, Factory Fresh, and Famous Accountants. Nevertheless, the Bushwick School’s market presence has remained limited, which has been both its defining feature as well as a growing practical concern.

A sympathetic curator named Jason Andrew, who lives in Bushwick but often works in the world of blue-chip New York, has been trying for years to bring some professionalism and maturity to the Bushwick scene without compromising its off-the-grid ethos. A curator of the Jack Tworkov estate, Andrew has created a non-profit arts organization called Norte Maar out of his living room on Wyckoff Avenue that exhibits local artists, holds performances (broadcast onto the street), and works with neighborhood children.

Buying art out of someone’s living room may be intimate, but it is also awkward, which may be one reason why Bushwick’s popular artist-run exhibitions have often failed to find buyers. Now Andrew has opened a small gallery on Wilson Avenue in partnership with the accomplished mid-career painter Deborah Brown. Called simply Storefront, the prosaic-looking, fluorescent-lit gallery that was until recently an accountant’s office (the awning still reads “TAXES”) is an attempt to give art retail in Bushwick a better name.[1]

Storefront’s inaugural group show delivers on a promise to feature “the work of artists we know, the artists we like, and the artists we’d like to get to know better.” The exhibition presents a solid cross-section of Bushwick’s artistic production, with art- ists who work, live, or regularly show in the neighborhood. Deborah Brown’s own contribution, a painting titled Green Sky (2009), is an homage to Bushwick, with a loft of pigeons flying above a chain-link fence (pigeon coops are common there, and birds often circle above the rooftops).

The exhibition ranges from abstract drawing and painting (Rico Gatson, Aurora Robson, Michele Araujo, Theresa Hackett, Brooke Moyse, Kevin Regan, Mary Judge), to intimate realism (Matthew Miller, Amy Lincoln, Bill Adams), to collage (Ellen Letcher, Andrew Hurst, Hilda Shen). A number of works feature an unusual mixture of various media (Justen Ladda’s shellacked cedar wood, Stephen Truax’s sewn fabric, Steve Pauley’s granite, Austin Thomas’s assembly of paint, collage, and newsprint).

A young sculptor named Jimmy Miracle —his real name, by the way—reminds me of Christopher Wilmarth, another spiritual artist who sought to “depict not the thing but the effect that it produces,” in the words of Mallarmé. Miracle, who was last on view at another Bushwick gallery called Sugar, works with common materials like string and paper to evoke ineffable space.

Andrew and Brown have done a service to the artists of Bushwick with the opening of Storefront. They have also opened up the Bushwick School to the larger arts community with well-selected, affordable work that is representative of the area and now easy to see. Storefront offers a one-stop shop for anyone who wants to support the serious art coming out of this unique neighborhood.

Art is not produced in a vacuum. The context of creation, while never a complete explanation, can provide a point of access to a body of work. In the 1950s, a group of young abstract artists in Chicago decided to buck the city’s entrenched establishment and form their own cooperative gallery. Many of these artists eventually moved away to become well-known names: Robert Natkin, Aaron Siskind, and John Chamberlain. Lesley Heller Workspace on the Lower East Side now brings the Chicago group together with work from the 1950s and today in a show called “The Wells Street Gallery Revisited.”[2]

That Bushwick’s own Jason Andrew is the curator of this exhibition might further demonstrate his neighborhood’s affinity (or at least Andrew’s affinity) for the studio-based art communities of the past. The Heller show is thankfully light on social history and tells its story through the works on display.

Judith Dolnick’s Untitled (1957) is a standout, as is Ernest Dieringer’s small work on paper, Sketch for Zig Zag (1961), Donald Vlack’s carefree drawing Untitled (1955), and Gerald van de Wiele’s Voices of Caves (2008), a sculpture of carved wood. If one attribute connects the work, it is the Chicago School’s light-heartedness when compared to the Ab Ex angst of New York.

In an economic downturn, it can be a challenge for artists and galleries to sell new work without undercutting their own established prices. A great majority of artists who never benefited from the over-inflated market now face devaluation as more art chases after fewer collectors.

One answer can be to produce smaller work. Not only does the banal statistic of square inches often determine an artwork’s price, but with the housing market still in flux, who knows what will happen to that wall space above the sofa. Fewer collectors have the confidence right now to purchase large works of art.

Another smart tactic is to branch out into other media with a less established price point, such as works on paper. Paper operates in a different economy from oil on canvas. A work on paper can sell for much less than a similar sized oil without devaluing a painter’s market.

From what I understand about the general demands of the art market, works on paper are also less desirable. Here is a prejudice I could never get my head around. Paper gives us access to the artistic process in a way that a finished oil cannot. Paper also reveals a delicacy of line that often gets lost in the thickness and vibrancy of paint.

The curators at Danese must be on the same page, so to speak. The gallery has pulled together an extensive, wide-ranging group show of works on paper.[3] I tend to gravitate toward drawing that leaves things open. Smudges, erasures, and a general lack of finish best reveal the artistic process and leave you with the taste of graphite and ink.

My good friend Tom Goldenberg has contributed a stick-cracking landscape, Damm Hill (2008), to the Danese show. Barry Le Va has an electrifying black ink abstraction, Twin-Diode-Pendode from Electrode Series (Plan Views for Sculpture) (2002). Richard Serra has a gummy mess, Stratum G (2006), that looks like it saw the business end of a tire.

Danese has organized the show through an intelligent hanging, but many of the smaller pieces still get overwhelmed in the gallery’s cavernous space. A few temporary walls could have broken things up and brought us closer to the drawings. Unlike oils on canvas, works on paper are often at their best in confined environments—ideal, you might say, for apartment living.

Should I have titled this month’s column The Jason Andrew Chronicle? Probably so, because Andrew helped organize a Jack Tworkov exhibition now on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.[4] It was a sign of the times when the UBS Gallery closed its doors for the last time following its exquisite Tworkov retrospective, which I wrote about in these pages in September. Like UBS, the Mitchell-Innes & Nash exhibition gives us an opportunity to evaluate Tworkov’s often dismissed later work from the 1960s and 1970s, when he adopted a more structural and less expressionistic style. And again, this work looks better and more active with each viewing. Idling II (WNY-70 #1) (1970) operates through subtle tonal modulations to arrive at a mysterious vision barely perceptible through a thicket of paint. Trace (1966) has a similar effect. P73 #7 (1973) uses thin white borders to create the illusion of prismatic screens of paint layered on top of one another.

The later work is anything but sentimental. One tends to miss the heroic, tattered heraldry of earlier abstractions such as Barrier Series #5 (1963). Still, Tworkov was on to something. They may not be his most likable canvases, but the mark left by Tworkov’s innovative late paintings is most distinctly his own.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

• “First Exhibition” opened at Storefront, Brooklyn, on January 2 and remains open through February 6, 2010. Go back to the text.
• “The Wells Street Gallery Revisited: Then and Now” opened at Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, on January 20 and remains on view through February 28, 1010 Go back to the text.
• “Works on Paper” opened at Danese, New York, on January 8 and remains on view through February 6, 2010. Go back to the text.
• “Jack Tworkov: True and False” opened at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, on January 15 and remains on view through February 20, 2010. Go back to the text.