Head for the Hills

An opening at the Morrison Gallery, Kent, Conn.

ART & ANTIQUES
June 2010

Head for the Hills
by James Panero

Long known for antiques, Litchfield county, conn., has developed a serious contemporary art scene.

One of the best-kept secrets of the New York art world isn’t a neighborhood of converted lofts or gritty garrets. It’s a stretch of Connecticut countryside 90 miles north of the city called Litchfield County. “It’s very countryish, but much more sophisticated,” says Nicholas Thorn, vice president of Litchfield County Auctions. “It’s New England.” In 2008 Jane Eckert moved her gallery, Eckert Fine Art, from Naples, Fla., to Kent, an unassuming village at the center of Litchfield County’s growing contemporary scene. “To have as many galleries as we do in this area is unique,” she says. “They are just really first-rate, high-quality galleries.”

Occupying the northwest corner of Connecticut and incorporated back in 1751, Litchfield County takes its name from the even older Litchfield township (founded 1721), at one time the county seat. Two hundred years ago, Litchfield was one of the largest commercial towns in the state. America’s first law school was founded here in 1773 (its first graduate was Aaron Burr). In the early 19th century, the Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher arrived to preach the gospel of temperance. His daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield in 1811.

Like much of New England, the area’s commercial fortunes declined in the late 19th century, but industry’s loss proved to be tourism’s gain. Opting out of the crowded beaches and hectic scene of other weekend destinations, successive waves of New York gentry gravitated to the preserved historical character and charm of the Litchfield Hills. In 1965, the private antiques dealer Peter Tillou became one of them. Tillou helped turn the historical hamlet of Litchfield into a center for American and English antiques. Peter’s son Jeffrey now runs one of America’s finest antique shops, Jeffrey Tillou Antiques, off the Litchfield village green and anchors the town’s antiquing district.

In the 1980s, a different scene took shape in nearby Kent. The furrier Jacques Kaplan, best known as the creator of “fun fur” and an eccentric collector of contemporary art, bought a second home in the area. In 1984, out of an old caboose parked on a rail spur in town, he founded a contemporary gallery that he called the “Paris-New York-Kent-Gallery.” Kaplan, who died in 2008, supported the opening of other Kent galleries and the arts of the area. “Jacques started it all. He put Kent on the map,” says Rob Ober, the owner of Kent’s Ober Gallery, founded in 2006. Now Kaplan’s efforts have been taken up by another transplant, James Preston, the former CEO of Avon. Along with his son, Matthew, Preston has been developing a 12-building complex of stores and gallery space, called Kent Village Barns, at the main intersection of town. “What Jim Preston did in these spaces, it added this modern spark,”says William Morrison, the owner of a soaring 7,000-square foot gallery at the center of the complex.

Kaplan’s promotion and Preston’s development have given rise to a host of sophisticated galleries within walking distance of each other and the other shops of Kent (the hot chocolate at Kent’s Belgique Patisserie is not to be missed). Morrison recently had a show of Hans Hofmann, and regularly shows monumental work by the painter Wolf Kahn and sculpture by Peter Woytuk, an area artist with a growing international reputation. Ober has shown Russian avant-garde art from the 1920s and satisfies his hunger for contemporary Russian work by inviting Russian artists to work in New York for a season and showing the results in his gallery. Both gallerists’ exhibition programs match artists who live and work in the area, like Allen Blagden, Tom Goldenberg and Sally Pettus, with established artists’ estates and up-and- comers from the city.

Many of the county’s small towns now boast their own art destinations. A gallery crawl (or drive, or bike) can extend to venues like The White Gallery and Argazzi Art in Lakeville, New Arts in Litchfield, Joie de Livres in Salisbury, KMR Arts and Behnke Doherty Gallery in Washington, and Ella’s Limited and Traces Fine Art in Bantam. Several of the area’s artists have open studios along the way. The painter Curtis Hanson operates what is perhaps the best known. His studio, in a converted church called Cornubia Hall tucked in the valley of Cornwall Hollow, is one of the most picturesque sites in the region.

Weekend antiquing is one thing, but the area’s thriving arts scene has been supported by a singularly sophisticated demographic that calls Litchfield home, or at least second home. “When I look through the top 200 collectors in the world, there’s here,” says Morrison. “Aggie Gund comes in. Jasper’s been in here.” Johns, that is, who lives in a large estate up the road in the town of Sharon.

“You’ve got some of the biggest collectors here,” says Ober. Ray Learsy and Melva Bucksbaum, whom Ober calls “the Medicis of Litchfield County,” live in Sharon. “They are huge supporters of the arts,” says Ober, “and their taste is eclectic.” The husband-and- wife collecting team have just completed a state-of-the-art private museum and storage center on their property called the Granary. Their invite-only vernissage in mid-December was complicated only by an ice storm that descended on the county and kept several of the guests away. The unaccommodating weather served as a reminder that while its art scene may be international, Litchfield County remains true New England—and no one would want it any other way.

Patricia Watwood, Fate (2010), courtesy of the artist

THE NEW CRITERION
June 2010

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Patricia Watwood: Portraits 2010” at Open Source, Brooklyn, “Michael Klein: Recent Paintings” at Arcadia Gallery & “Paul Resika: Recent Paintings” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art.

For years beaten down, another victim of the assault on representational art, traditional portraiture nevertheless endured. Although it had to cede its place in the limelight of high art, a premodernist style of portraiture survived the last century largely as a commercial form. Traditional portraiture filled the walls of libraries and law schools, government offices and private homes, but it remained largely absent from the nation’s art museums and the critical press. An argument could be made that, in the bargain, the last century’s portrait painters helped preserve the knowledge of the academic tradition. Untangle the genealogy of today’s realist revival—who taught whom in the movement sometimes referred to as “Classical Realism”—and the line often passes through a generation of portraitists living and working outside the mainstream.

A critical mass of younger painters in this art world in exile, the students of revivalists and illustrators, has emerged to challenge traditional portraiture’s second-class status and to reassert its place in the main currents of art. As these painters enter the full flowering of their talents, they are also discovering a culture that has grown more amenable to portraiture’s importance. We may be living, once again, in portrait-friendly times.

Recently I took part in the Portrait Society of America’s annual “art of the portrait” conference, this year in a suburb of Washington, D.C. Established in 1998, the PSOA began as an educational clearing house for the portrait trade. Its annual conference has become something more. Along with its displays of natural pigments and tutorials on such concerns as “Hands: What’s the Point?” and “Simplifying the Mystery of Flesh Tones,” the conference has become a watering hole for the country’s best young revivalist painters, who aim to take the art of the traditional portrait beyond the commercial commission.

My official role at this year’s conference was to appear in a panel discussion on “Realist Revolution and Critical Relevance: Is The Mainstream Media Missing an Important Cultural Trend?” My co-panelists were the painters Jacob Collins, the New York-based champion of the classical atelier, and Alexey Steele, an L.A.-based exile who made off with Soviet Russia’s entire reserve of charisma. Rounding out the panel was Vern Swanson, the director of the Springville Museum of Art in Utah, one of those few national institutions amenable to contemporary art painted in a traditional mode. The moderator was another young painter, Jeremy Lipking, also from Los Angeles.

The quick answer to the topic question was, yes, the mainstream media is missing out on realism’s revival, brought about by a renewed study in the classical painting techniques of the nineteenth-century academy. Why? Because of a political correctness that has associated representational art, at various times, with both Fascism and Communism —and because Pop and its market champions have elevated bad technique over good. For most critics the story of this revival remains tainted by politics, while the paintings’ craft remains outmoded.

But that’s all in hindsight. How about the future? At the time of the panel I had little to offer—just certainty that, were this particular “realist revolution” to come, the critical establishment would be the last to know. In the days and weeks after the conference, a more satisfying answer came into view: Today’s young realists, trained in the classical tradition, are a social group. I absorbed the full meaning of this note-to-self only after I returned home and checked in online. I discovered that these realists are connected. The fact that they do not appear to despise each other’s work, like so many other artists do, is itself revelatory. I doubt that any other artistic milieu, per capita, maintains a more active social network of Facebook, Twitter, and weblog accounts. These artists posted so much about the conference—videos, sketches, photographs, discussions, notes from the field—that they must have analyzed every moment of our time at the Hyatt Regency Reston.

Of course, much of their sociability has emerged out of necessity. Without the patronage of museums or traditional schools, realist painters have been forced to find ways to organize themselves outside of regular art-world channels. They have to be extroverted. But their networking also speaks to a renewed cultural interest in the connections of society, to which traditional portraiture can contribute. There is a reason an ever growing number of artists is lining up for portrait classes. Unlike the inward vision of modernism, in portraiture we find a social art for a social generation.

Like a form of social networking, portraiture is a display of connections—here between artist, subject, and viewer. In this understanding we may find a secret to the portrait artist’s success or failure—not necessarily in the quality of the paint handling, but in the vitality of the network. Portraiture has long been building connections to the real world in a network that only grows over time. Even back in the dark days, the traditional portrait painter’s standing could be based, in part, on the social ranking of the commissions: Presidential, royal, and ecclesiastical portraitists at top; the corporate, judicial, and celebrity painters in the middle; and finally the university-dean trade. Many of these painters have become the elders of the Portrait Society: Everett Raymond Kinstler, Daniel Greene, Burton Silverman, and William Draper, to name a few.

Today’s younger portraitists build their network on the creativity of their connections rather than on the heft of the commissions. Informed by Classical Realism, they often have a more fundamental approach to the canvas than do their predecessors trained in commercial illustration. By eschewing photographs and other modern conveniences, these younger artists often trade expediency and the gauzy conventions of commercial work for greater aesthetic vitality and a more fundamental connection among painter, subject, and viewer—connections that can be lost when a painter works from photographic studies.

The careful selection of subject has long been a secret of non-traditional portraiture’s success in the mainstream. Think of Chuck Close on the composer Philip Glass, or Lucian Freud on the performance artist Leigh Bowery. More recently, Kehinde Wiley has built a cottage industry out of painting hip-hop celebrities in the mode of Jacques-Louis David. Elizabeth Peyton has turned cocktail-napkin doodles of rock-star friends into prized creations. One might even consider Warhol and his Factory subjects as a sort of portrait circle. Now it falls to the classically trained portrait painters to extend their craft to a population that calls out for a more genuine connectivity free of celebrity culture.

One realist who has taken up this call is Patricia Watwood. Fresh from the conference, Watwood has mounted an exhibition of her portraits in a small gallery called Open Source in Gowanus, Brooklyn.[1] An artist who both works and lives in the area around the gallery, Watwood finds her subjects in her own neighborhood: a student, a filmmaker, two members of her local congregation. She writes in her artist’s statement: “The connection of the spirit between painter and subject, and between the subject and the viewer, shows the resonance of all human interaction.” Unlike many of her classically trained contemporaries, Watwood had developed an idiosyncratic palette that often casts her images in greens and blues rather than the “brown sauce” of traditional painting. The effect leaves her work with an alien glow, strange and other worldly. Her best portraits, like her figurative nudes, are those that capitalize on this strangeness. Dorothy (2010), the “church lady,” is a fine example: an unnaturally centered head-shot frames the subject in a totemic gaze. The longer portrait of Fate (2010), a “gospel and jazz singer,” has an equally compelling face, but I found the rendering of the shirt distracting. When set against Watwood’s particular affinity for physiognomy and skin, such materials lack urgency. A smaller self-portrait, Myself (2010), in which Watwood gazes out of the canvas with an inquisitive expression, is the show’s most compelling painting as the artist-subject brings the theme of the series full circle.

Another realist from the conference, Michael Klein, also has an exhibition of recent work on display. Like Watwood, Klein is a product of Jacob Collins’s ateliers, and his work hews closely to the Water Street style—so-called after the street address of Collins’s first school in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Klein has just returned from living with his wife in her native Argentina. His extensive selection of paintings at Arcadia Gallery in May placed her and her family in genre scenes of rural life.[2] The Wash Girl was last on display at the portrait society conference, where it was a finalist in a competition that also featured excellent work by Kate Sammons, Scott Burdick, as well as Lipking—an artist whose paintings go up at Arcadia in June. The curve of the wash girl’s pose, which finds her holding a pail by a stream, is nearly flawless. Her heavy eyes combine with a small half-smile that speaks of heavy labor and, perhaps, relief at our arrival. The background landscape, alas, is less convincing. The rendering of the water is clichéd. In the hanging at Arcadia, which put the painting in unfair light, the flesh tones lacked the suppleness of Collins’s work. Klein adopts Collins’s approach to paint handling, but here the technique has left too many regions of the large canvases incomplete. The open background of Late Night seemed unfinished. Where Klein excels is in his fine rendering of fabric and other objects. The galvanized metal of the wash girl’s bucket is exquisite, as is the satin sash and pillow of La Juventud and the black tulle of The Bride. Klein’s locates his connections in the exotica of a foreign world filtered through his contemporary family.

A final word about a must-see show. The painter Paul Resika has now found a home, after the collapse of Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, at the new Chelsea beachhead of Lori Bookstein Fine Art.[3] His first show at the gallery takes up the three bugaboos of modern subject matter—sunsets, sail boats, and lighthouses—and makes every brush stroke count. This latest work could be the basis of a tutorial on how to put paint on canvas. The geometry of the taut series marks out space in a constructivist shorthand of ships at sea. For such familiar subject matter, the work is a rare delight. Abstract and representational tension is at play while the color-rich brush work fills each shape with energy. Resika is a modern master delighting in his supreme command of color, line, and form—and it is a delight to behold.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Patricia Watwood: Portraits 2010” opened at Open Source, Brooklyn, on May 7 and remains on view through June 2, 2010. Go back to the text.
2. “Michael Klein: Recent Paintings” was on view at Arcadia Gallery, New York, from May 13 through May 28, 2010. Go back to the text.
3. “Paul Resika: Recent Paintings” opened at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, on May 5 and remains on view through June 5, 2010. Go back to the text.

Gallery Chronicle (May 2010)

Joe Zucker Amy Hewes (1976), copyright: Joe Zucker, courtesy Mary Boone Gallery.

THE NEW CRTIERION
May 2010

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Joe Zucker” at Mary Boone Gallery, “Bruce Gagnier: Incarnate” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art & “Shirley Jaffe: Selected Paintings, 1969–2009” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, “Lois Dodd: Second Street Paintings” at Alexandre Gallery & “Deborah Brown: The Bushwick Paintings” at Storefront, Brooklyn.

Joe Zucker was born in 1941 to a Jewish family on Chicago’s South Side, at a time when the Irish and Italian gangs of the area sparred over territories embroiled in black migration and white flight. He got out through varsity basketball and found a moment of jock glory on the squad at Miami University in Ohio. Yet Zucker also happened to be blessed with one of the more interesting minds in American art. This complicated his athletic career and his artistic one as well. Zucker has long been out of step with the dullness that has come to dominate contemporary artistic production.

In 1961, Zucker gave up playing basketball and returned to Chicago to enroll at the Art Institute, where he had been drawing in his spare time since the age of five. His teachers were thinking Braque and the School of Paris. Zucker was more interested in potboilers and the narrative art of Thomas Hart Benton. He passed through the Institute’s bachelor’s and master’s programs, and followed this up with a teaching stint in Minnesota. He arrived in New York in 1968, one of modern art’s more fruitful moments, when the avant-garde had just passed through the rabbit hole of minimalism and was beginning to re-embrace the craft and process of painting.

At the time, modernism’s recursive instinct seems to have reached its end-game. Minimalist art and sculpture had folded form back on itself to an infinite and emptying degree. Like other artists of his generation, Zucker used minimalist logic to structure his artistic practice, but he sought to expand this logic to maximal effect.

“You can be tempted into reducing and reducing to the point of emptiness, simply repeating terms dictated by the perimeter of the paint,” Zucker noted in an interview. “I wanted to breach the perimeter and get into the very substance of the painting. I saw that as a way of evading the self-defeating outcome implicit in the reductive logic of modernism.” By infusing his work with narrative and humor, Zucker charted out a singular artistic path.

From his graduate-school days, the subject of the painter’s canvas has been one of Zucker’s recurring interests. It was the material of oil, after all, that received the lion’s share of attention by the Abstract Expressionists. Taking a cue from the revival in weaving and craft-based art, Zucker turned this relationship around and moved the canvas to the foreground, from surface to subject matter. An early series of Zucker’s work consists of abstract weavings of colored strips, recalling the warp and weft of a painting’s canvas.

In the 1970s, Zucker developed work based on the “history of cotton,” which he first showed at New York’s Bykert Gallery, run by Klaus Kertess and Jeff Byers. A one-time assistant from the Bykert Gallery has now brought five of these large works back together for an important show. The fact that this assistant has become the mega-dealer Mary Boone may indicate her turn from the over-hyped painters of the 1980s to overlooked artists like Zucker, who came of age a decade before.[1]

Or maybe Boone is now turning to Zucker because this work from the 1970s appears to be the most politically charged of his career, and somehow relevant and palatable. On their face, these large canvases depict various sepia-toned scenes of the antebellum South: a paddle boat in Amy Hewes (1976); slaves and an overseer in Brick-Top, The Field Hand, and Lucretia Borgia (1976); bales of cotton stacked and hauled in Reconstruction (1976) and Paying Off Old Debts (1975); and the neoclassical facade of Old Cabell Hall in University of Virginia Law School (1976). Yet the layers of representation in Zucker’s cotton constructions complicate this single reading.

Zucker built his paintings through a self-invented process where craft, image, and logic came together in one worked-out puzzle. After dipping cotton in pigmented Rhoplex, a thick acrylic binder, Zucker applied the balls to canvas. The effect recalls pointillist brushstrokes frozen in high relief. By forming an image of its agricultural origin, the painting’s canvas becomes both medium and content, a work depicting its own history of production as much as the American past.

Just as minimalist logic can be air tight, even airless, Zucker’s systems risk closing up through their own hermetic seals. Zucker’s more recent work has consisted of drawings of container ships and pirates, constructed in various ways from rolls of canvas and paper, some illustrated, some literal, and all in need of unpacking. Zucker’s history of modernism has become Roger Fry by way of the Jolly Roger—a picture plane shot through with cannon balls.

The 1970s series stays more accessible by tapping into a main current of the evocative American narrative, when cotton was king. The rigor of Zucker’s flights of logic can still astonish. The craft that went into these works is remarkable to behold. Boone has done us a service by bringing together these history paintings that are a part of history, at a time when museums remain oblivious to the most important paintings of the living past.

Since Elie Nadelman first rubbed down the surface of his vernacular sculptures, modern artists have understood how the quality of an object changes through handling and care. Nicholas Carone has long been carving sculptures that resemble classical fragments, ones that could have spent some time at the bottom of Lago Maggiore. Such works have a sense of their own history sculpted right into them. The sculptures of Bruce Gagnier, whose art was recently on view at Lori Bookstein, show a similar physiognomy of neglect, maybe this time of self-neglect.

Some of Gagnier’s statues, like Seaman (the drowned sculpture) (2009), seem to have attracted barnacles while ingesting some brine. With mottled, raisin-like skin and distended bellies, other figures appear almost pickled, tipsy, as though their more uninhibited selves are showing through their classical skins. Gagnier molds each of his figures in hydrocal, a plaster-like medium, then applies a finish of pigment and wax. The unique surface treatment leaves the work with a worn, marble-like sheen.

Granted, these sculptures can be more than a little creepy. I am not sure I would want to share a studio apartment with one of the life-sized works—but I wouldn’t mind a visit. Odd figures have tales to tell.

The painter Shirley Jaffe is eighty-six-years young and has been a fixture in Paris for over half a century, yet the work of this native New Yorker can still be new to the American public. So much the better for us, as we get to discover her again and again. Following its exhibit at The Art Show earlier this year, Tibor de Nagy last month launched its third exhibition of Jaffe’s work with a survey from the last thirty years.[2]

Jaffe has led a career in reverse. The oldest work in the show, the hard-edged arrangement of The Gray Center (1969), is a mature construction of color planes and gentle surfaces. Jaffe’s more recent work, by contrast, shouts youthful indiscretion. In Hop and Skip (1987), Jaffe tossed those earlier, mature color planes sky-high and captured them mid-flight. Hard-edged confetti now spirals and twists against a white background.

The more the paintings open up, the more energy Jaffe manages to contain in them, even when hints of bricks and roofline pop through, as in the “New York Collage” series of 2009. The result, a mix of hard-edged color theory and expressionist line, has a comic boldness that seems both of the moment and for the ages, fresh and timeless.

For the past several years, Alexandre Gallery has been regularly showing Lois Dodd’s gem-like scenes of Maine, often oil on masonite measuring at most two feet square. This past month, Alexandre brought together a selection of Dodd’s older work matched with two recent cityscapes of the same scene painting over forty-years on.[3]

When Dodd first painted the city view from her studio window in the 1960s, she brought a hard-edged sensibility for structure and line to the urban scene. The highlight of this period on view at Alexandre was Men’s Shelter, April (1968). In this large oil on canvas, an ordinary back window opens to a geometry of rooflines, colors, and shadows, which come together like an abstract jigsaw puzzle. Planes of color edge up against each other and seem to pulsate from their edges.

Over several images, Dodd depicted the same scene at different times of day and different seasons. In another series from the same period, she captured the garden view from her apartment in April, October, and a foggy day in February.

When Dodd returned to this same “Second Street” view from her window many years later, she brought her growing lyrical sensibility. In the two works from 2009, hard edges gives way to color and fullness, as though the urban landscape has entered full bloom.

I wrote about the painter Deborah Brown three months ago in my survey of Bushwick and its new Storefront gallery. Brown’s urban skyscape was the show-stopper of this gallery’s inaugural group exhibition. Now a solo show of her recent work is on view in this vital little space.

Unlike many of her Bushwick colleagues, Brown arrived in this neighborhood as an established mid-career artist, but she quickly tapped into the community’s youthful, shared experience. Her lush representational work, which regularly shows at Lesley Heller Gallery in Manhattan, has often depicts flora and fauna. In Bushwick, Brown found an urban contrast in industrial ruin and natural growth.

In “The Bushwick Paintings,” her latest series, an accretion of vines and wires, flowers and fences vies against a background of factory towers and enveloping skies. The images glow through scrims of pigment, which bathe the atmosphere in vibrant reds and greens. Brown finds renewal out of the blight of a ruined landscape. Her vision, which comes out of Romantic sensibility, reflects the spirit of this rough landscape and the artists who now share it.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Joe Zucker” was on view at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, from March 25 through May 1, 2010. Go back to the text.
2. “Bruce Gagnier: Incarnate” was on view at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, from March 31 through May 1, 2010. Go back to the text.
3. “Shirley Jaffe: Selected Paintings, 1969–2009” was on view at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, from March 11 through April 24, 2010. Go back to the text.
4. “Lois Dodd: Second Street Paintings” was on view at Alexandre Gallery, New York, from March 31 through May 1, 2010. Go back to the text.
5. “Deborah Brown: The Bushwick Paintings” opened at Storefront, Brooklyn, on April 2 and remains on view through May 16, 2010. Go back to the text.