Gallery Chronicle (September 2016)

THE NEW CRITERION
September 2016

On “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One of the many revelations to come out of “The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913,” the excellent exhibition organized three years ago by Gail Stavitsky at the Montclair Art Museum, was a small watercolor of a rowboat on a lake. A blond woman leans over the stern, nearly submerging it in water as she seemingly smiles back at us. Behind her, standing on the upturned bow, a man twists on one leg as he attempts to remove his trousers—startled, it would appear, at our arrival.

Immediate, part quick illustration, part louche intrusion, the work may have been as shocking for its content in 1912 as it would be to us, today, for its attribution. Titled Romance or The Doctor, this watercolor was one of five examples to be put on display in the 1913 Armory Show by none other than Stuart Davis (1892–1964), the American modernist whose work would soon take a bold turn away from such realistic scenes towards angular shapes, flattened colors, and the interweaving of text and imagery.

At the time the promising disciple of Robert Henri and “The Eight,” just twenty-one years old, Davis was among those American artists most affected by the radical examples of European modernism that came stateside for the Armory Show’s infamous three-city tour—a “masochistic reception,” he later recalled, “whereat the naïve hosts are trampled and stomped by the European guests at the buffet.”

Yet with his watercolors exhibited alongside eye-opening examples of modernist painting by Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, and Duchamp, Davis also saw the “vindication of the anti-academy position of the Henri School, with developments in undreamed of directions.” The awakening was pure Davis, telling us a great deal of how he saw through the surface of style and looked to deeper meaning, always staying independent of trends. At that time, Davis was one of the artists whose interest in saloon life and popular entertainment would earn him the label of “ash can,” a term meant as opprobrium for his focus on the underbelly of American culture and the one that came to define the movement of his older contemporaries.

The particular genius of Davis’s subsequent modernist direction was how he went on to integrate European stylistic innovation with his unique Ashcan vision. Through the flattening, flickering, fleeting perspectives of modernist composition, Davis did not so much abandon his Ashcan beginnings. Instead he found ways to electrify them, to broadcast the frenetic American century with the syncopation of jazz and to illuminate it with the glow of neon.

Just take his House and Street (1931), from the Whitney’s collection, where windows, fire escapes, garages, smoke stacks, scaffolding, advertising symbols, and campaign signs all come together like the colorful pieces of a jigsaw puzzle framed by the shadows of an elevated train. Or consider the frenzied cataract of Ultra-Marine(1943), a favorite of mine from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where any lingering sense of single-point perspective is overtaken by Davis’s development of “serial centers” of focus. And then there is The Paris Bit (1959), also from the Whitney, a late masterstroke where colors, silhouettes, signs, and shadow lines seem to reassemble not as a single image but as a long-remembered impression—a deep feeling coming together out of forgotten sights.

So the fact that “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing,” a major, traveling exhibition now at the Whitney Museum of American Art, would omit Davis’s entire early Ashcan development, and instead start its show in the 1920s, would seem to do a curious disservice to both Davis’s own achievements and the understanding of the museum-going public.1

That this omission of “Davis’s decade of apprenticeship” turns out to be a deliberate “interpretive gambit” meant to “depart in significant ways from their predecessors,” as the co-directors of the Whitney and the National Gallery explain in their catalogue preface, is a startling revelation of curatorial intent that hints not only at Davis’s evolving place in the canon of American art but also at the shifting interests of the contemporary American museum.

We are therefore left with an exhibition that is both required viewing for what it reveals of Davis’s American vision but also a flawed, precariously off-balance presentation of that vision. With approximately one hundred works on display, there is, it should be said, much to be thankful for here. Despite the over half-century of Davis research that has followed the artist’s death in 1964, a complete chronology has only recently come to light with the publication of his catalogue raisonné by Ani Boyajian, Mark Rutkoski, William C. Agee, and Karen Wilkin in 2007, as well as—finally—the full access to his archives granted by the artist’s estate. Through her catalogue essay and wall texts, at least, the Whitney’s Barbara Haskell, our most dutiful curator of early American modernism and the co-curator of this exhibition, gives every indication of a deep interest in the full span of Davis’s development, including the early history. Her extensive catalogue chronology, starting with Davis’s childhood in Philadelphia, where his father was a graphic artist and art editor, on through his life and career at the center of bohemian New York, furthermore offers a singular addition to Davis scholarship.

At the same time, it must be increasingly difficult to propose a major museum survey of a canonical artist that relies on scholarship alone and does not attempt realignment and revisionism. Writing in 1965 at the time of Davis’s memorial exhibition, H. H. Arnason of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum summed up the then-established consensus: “Davis is almost the only American painter of the twentieth century whose works have transcended every change in style, movement, or fashion.” Such an appreciation only occurs when you consider Davis’s development in his own time. Yet in a reversal of priorities that is fast becoming the norm of museums today, rather than allowing history to challenge our present assumptions, the past must now conform to contemporary diktats. In Davis’s case, this means understanding the artist not on his own terms but for the movement he inadvertently foreshadowed—pop—the one art movement, it would seem, that is now unquestionably allowed to occupy our own time and place.

There is no other reason to start a Davis survey with his paintings of illusionistic flattened packaging of the 1920s than to frame him as a pop artist. And indeed, “framed” is right, since there is reason here to suspect that Davis has been framed. Calling these paintings of consumer products “Davis’s breakthrough,” the exhibition narrows Davis’s achievements to one that merely “merged the bold, hard-edge style of advertising with the conventions of European avant-garde painting.” Forget the fact that this particular imagery is part of an older tradition going back to the nineteenth century in American trompe l’oeil and might be considered something of a tributary in the main currents of his artistic development. Why not instead look to his more innovative cubist still lifes, also from the early 1920s, and now in the collection of the Vilcek Foundation?

Framing the far end of his career, the exhibition likewise gives disproportionate meaning to Davis’s interest in returning to older compositions. The observation that Davis revisited his earlier work is nothing new. In 1965 Arnason noted “how often he experimented with a theme or motif, put it aside, and then years later returned to it and developed it into a major painting or a series of paintings.” Yet here this is treated as divine revelation, of what? Pop seriality, and then some.

In creating this exhibition, Barbara Haskell was joined by Harry Cooper of the National Gallery, who gets equal billing. I suspect much of the pop obsession has originated with this co-curator whose credits include a role in the recent Roy Lichtenstein retrospective. Cooper’s catalogue essay, titled “Unfinished Business: Davis and the Dialect-X of Recursion,” is certainly guilty of blanketing Davis in theoretical cant and, simply put, offering one of the most overwrought examples of art writing I have ever seen—repeatedly exhorting his readers to “let us” join him in his leaps of incredulity. Just let us consider, for instance, Cooper’s take on the painting Memo, a mystical composition from 1956 of angular white lines, letters, and numbers folded into fields of red, green, and black:

Let us take the final step: Memo is a Marxist abstraction . . . the Marxism is present in its absence. (Canceled and preserved: such is Hegel’s mind-bending logic.) It has disappeared and keeps disappearing. Marx is a four-letter word beginning with m.

“Present in its absence” might describe much of the logic in this essay on Davis’s “recursive” imagery, which concludes by again choosing to see what is not there in Davis’s moving final painting:

Finally, the loop has a rapport with the spiral, that geometric figure often invoked to visualize Hegel’s dialectic in its back-and-forth winding ascent to the far-off goal (in The Phenomenology, 1807) of Spirit in possession of itself, outside of time, no longer divided. . . . His last painting, left on his easel at his death and still swaddled in masking tape, includes the word fin, possibly inspired by the last frame of a French movie he had been watching on TV. The word is often taken as a premonition of death, but who can say? Another possibility is that the word, like many of Davis’s, like the painting itself, is just incomplete, unFINished.

The great shame of this exhibition’s pop psychology, or more likely pop psychosis, is how its archival research has indirectly illuminated a more relevant understanding of Davis’s methodology. Far from the superficial coolness of pop, Davis was the hottest of artists. He incorporated the visual landscape of popular culture not as pop commentaries but as personal expressions. He deployed modernist innovations such as cubist simultaneity but, unlike European examples, he looked beneath the surface. Mere “visible phenomena,” as Barbara Haskell explains, “ignored what he believed was true about perception—that it involves the totality of one’s consciousness. He reasoned that if his art were to be truly realistic, it must include his ideas, emotions, and memories of other experiences.”

Davis’s recursions were part of these personal excavations that folded memory, sound, and feeling into ever-evolving compositions. This means that his Rapt at Rappaport’s (1951–52), a painting from middle age, could convey the polka-dot paper of the toy store on Third Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street where his parents once shopped—and where he, at one time, could have been “rapt” in its wrapping. The legacy of Stuart Davis is a similar gift, a feeling for the twentieth century wrapped in its own unique, wonderful packaging.

1 “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on June 10 and remains on view through September 25, 2016. The exhibition will be on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. from November 20, 2016, through March 5, 2017; the De Young Museum, San Francisco, from April 8 through August 6, 2017; and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, from September 16, 2017, through January 8, 2018.

What can the tech bubble learn from the art bubble?

James writes:

What can the tech bubble learn from the art bubble? I offer some thoughts in this piece by Gary Sernovitz in The New Yorker.

The art world knows about prices floating ever higher on abstraction and hope. The resonances aren’t completely coincidental. Both venture capitalists and art buyers are in the business of valuing the invaluable. Both stake their reputations on exquisite selection. Both nurture talent before it can support itself. Both have a soft spot for youth, for unbowed ego, for the myth of solitary genius, for the next new thing. Both operate in a world of frustratingly limited information and maddeningly unpredictable success. Both depend on consumer culture while holding themselves superior to it. And both the art market and venture investing have become increasingly winner-take-all games, with more clout to the companies and artists backed by the most powerful dealers or venture capitalists.

Complete article here.

Gallery Chronicle (June 2016)

Philip Guston, Fable II, 1957, oil on illustration board/Courtesy: Hauser & Wirth

THE NEW CRITERION
June 2016

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Philip Guston: Painter, 1957–1967” at Hauser & Wirth and “The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman” at the New-York Historical Society.

Are galleries the new museums? The “mega-galleries” would certainly like us to think so. Those four or five commercial empires upon which the sun never sets, and which cast an ever lengthening shadow over the global art trade, now look to confer prestige on their artists by mounting their own “museum-quality” exhibitions. For this they can deploy their museum-sized venues. They can bring in one-time independent scholars and former museum professionals to secure high-end loans and publish voluminous catalogues. They can create a market, usually for name-brand artists with overlooked (and therefore undervalued and available) bodies of work. The business plan is often similar: at Gagosian, the biographer John Richardson with “late Picasso,” or the esteemed moma alumnus John Elderfield looking at Helen Frankenthaler beyond Mountains and Sea. The firewall that at one time separated museums from the commercial art trade has become a revolving door—hello, Jeffrey Deitch—or at the very least a popular and lucrative means of egress.

But is this all such a bad thing? Not for the biggest galleries, at least—that’s business. Not for the museum people—finally free of the funding squabbles and baroque progressivism that has come to define institutional culture. Not even for the public—since this can really lead to “museum-quality” shows, free to see and, at least, more free of political baggage than many of today’s museum exhibitions. One need only contemplate the recent rehanging of the American floor at the Brooklyn Museum—where didactic wall texts regard art as little more than examples of massacre, genocide, and environmental devastation—to realize that our museums now often treat their collections with all the nuance of how “decadent” art was once presented in the Soviet Union. In contrast, free of mercenary fundraising concerns papered over by a circus of neoliberal acrobatics, the galleries can still present art as is, cleanly and visually, without textual over-determination.

The latest big museum–gallery shakeup has been the forced 2012 departure of Paul Schimmel from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles—hello again, Jeffrey Deitch—and his arrival a year later at the mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth. This past March the international conglomerate, with locations in Zurich, London, Somerset, and New York, opened its latest venue, called Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel, in a 100,000-square-foot former flour mill in downtown Los Angeles. Boasting “museum-style amenities,” the gallery offers 30,000 square feet of exhibition space, roughly equivalent to the old Whitney Museum.

Back in New York, Schimmel has now brought this gallery’s full commercial might to bear with “Philip Guston: Painter, 1957–1967,” at Hauser & Wirth’s 23,000-square-foot Chelsea space on 18th Street (itself a temporary location as a new building goes up on 22nd).1Expertly deployed over the gallery’s four large exhibition rooms, label-free and optimized for visual discovery and investigation, the exhibition is truly of museum quality, if museums are even still the measure of such qualifiers.

The Guston “narrative” is by now one of those origin stories of contemporary art. A painter of glittering abstractions in the 1950s, Guston re-emerged in the 1970s as the creator of cartoonish and nightmarish imagery, of Klan hoods, hobnailed boots, and bare bulbs. These works have become shorthand for the turn away from overly serious abstraction to the “new imagism” of “bad painting” that has come to dominate the contemporary art scene. That Guston’s 1970 coming-out at Marlborough Gallery was slammed in The New York Times by none other than Hilton Kramer as a “mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum” has itself become a part of the mythology, an indication of saintly status, and a central aspect of a marketing strategy. To defend Guston against Kramer’s now sacrilegious statements is itself a settled precept of the contemporary art catechism.

But of course, Hilton was right. Guston was the ultimate insider, a tenured don of the New York School when he came out as a schizoid caricature of the “bad” outsider artist. He employed the kind of imagery that might be dreamed up by the insane, scrawled on some asylum wall, but, as Hilton observed, Guston’s facility as a painter was the giveaway of a more controlled calculation. Calling the transformation a “pseudo-event,” Hilton wrote:

In offering us his new style of cartoon anecdotage, Mr. Guston is appealing to a taste for something funky, clumsy, and demotic. We are asked to take seriously his new persona as an urban primitive, and this is asking too much. . . . The very ease with which he has adapted this slang to his own elegant usages is itself a measure of its established place in the pictorial vocabulary of our time.

The intelligence of the current Hauser & Wirth show is how it looks exclusively to Guston’s experimental transition years of the late 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the subtle visual shifts Guston tested out during this period while only hinting at what was to follow. Yes, we already know what came before and what comes after. If this were a museum, didactic imperatives would have mandated the inclusion of some early lyrical Gustons to sing to us at the start and some sinister Klan men to clobber us at the end.

Schimmel says more through their absence. He signals that here is not just a period between two others, each better known (and more highly sought-after—again, this is a mega-gallery out to promote a name-brand artist with an undervalued body of work). These middle years were instead open-ended, poignant, and charged, argues this exhibition—and worthy of their own appreciation outside of the story arc (while still indisputably framed by it).

Philip Guston, Painter III, 1963, oil on canvas/Courtesy: Hauser & Wirth

 

For all the facility and over-determination that I find in both early and late Guston, middle Guston indeed strikes me as the one period where he seems truly adrift. The work therefore seems most vulnerable, moving in fits and starts, and unsettled. Beginning with the Rite and Fable II of 1957, Guston’s bright lyricism, his “Abstract Impressionist” palette seemingly of melted crayon, darkens in shade. Out of his white ground surrounding his Crayola shapes emerges an occluding mist. Over the next few years, this increasing density subsumes his forms, swirling and mixing and clouding his canvas. Out of the murk, more ominous shapes finally emerge: a bloody square in an untitled painting from about 1959, the shadowy legs of an easel, or the artist, in Painter (1959), here on loan from the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Schimmel divides the gallery rooms up by color, creating immersive environments of Guston’s haunting purples, grays, and pinks. Meanwhile increasingly darker, more defined forms come to the foreground. With our knowledge of late Guston, it becomes easier to see that there was always some visual source code informing Guston’s filtered impressions—he was never a pure abstractionist. This exhibition ends with a wall of forty-eight drawings, simple scratches of charcoal and ink on paper. Here is the coda to the middle period, the moment from 1967 through 1969 when Guston finally stripped out his last abstract fittings to reveal the underlying armatures upon which he would hang his new, stumbling, 1970s self.

Unidentified makers, Milliner’s heads, mid-19th century, Carved wood, papier-mâché, New-York Historical Society, purchased from Elie Nadelman, INV.8708, INV.8709, and INV.8707/Courtesy: New-York Historical Society

Unlike the modernists of Paris who looked to Africa for their “primitive” influences, the sculptor Elie Nadelman (1882–1946) largely drew on the rich folk traditions of his transplanted home in America and their deep European roots. Born in Poland to a middle-class Jewish family, Nadelman found early artistic success in the avant-garde circles of Munich and Paris before immigrating to the United States in 1914. In 1926, he and his wealthy wife, Viola Spiess Flannery (1878–1962), created the Museum of Folk and Peasant Arts on their estate in Riverdale, The Bronx, which came to house some 15,000 objects. Spanning six centuries and thirteen countries, this first museum of its kind traced the origins of American folk art while inspiring Nadelman’s own penetrating sense for plastic form.

Suffering financial reversals following the stock market crash of 1929, the Nadelmans were forced to close their museum and, in 1937, sold what remained of their collection to the New-York Historical Society (where Elie for a time served as its curator). Now with “The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman,” and an accompanying scholarly catalogue published by D Giles Limited, the n-yhs has mounted a survey of this singular collection that draws on new research into its creation and influence over Nadelman’s own body of work.2

If Nadelman is recognized today, if he is known at all, it is through his two colossal white marble statues that flank the grand promenade of the Koch (née New York State) Theater at Lincoln Center. Manufactured some twenty years after his death, based on his tiny, mangled figurines that lined the tables of his Riverdale home at the time of his death, these two sculptures came into being through his curatorial champion, Lincoln Kirstein, the co-founder of the New York City Ballet who had mounted a major Nadelman retrospective. Credit also goes to the artistic sensibilities of the theater’s architect, Philip Johnson, and the folk-art interest of the Rockefeller family, which had first collected the models for these particular sculptures in 1931 and purchased a selection of Nadelman’s folk art in advance of the n-yhs sale for Colonial Williamsburg. (It also so happens that Governor Nelson Rockefeller controlled the theater’s development as an extension of the state’s involvement in the 1964 World’s Fair. It was no small undertaking for Johnson to tap a new vein of pure Carrara marble from the same quarry used by Michelangelo and ship the two massive blocks to
New York.)

Elie Nadelman, Tango, ca. 1920–24, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York/Purchase, with funds from the Mr. and Mrs. Arthur G. Altschul Purchase Fund, the Joan and Lester Avnet Purchase Fund, the Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch Purchase Fund, the Mrs. Robert C. Graham Purchase Fund in honor of John I.H. Baur, the Mrs. Percy Uris Purchase Fund and the Henry Schnakenberg Purchase Fund in honor of Juliana Force, © artist or artist’s estate

The last time Nadelman appeared in a New York museum in any significant way was in 2003 with the Whitney’s own survey (see my review in these pages in March of that year). A decade is far too long for an artist whom Kirstein called “among the last sculptors of quality to provide service on the scale of Renaissance master-craftsmen.” Co-curated by Margaret Hofer and Roberta J. M. Olson, the relatively small but penetrating exhibition now at n-yhs might make me rethink everything I’ve just said about museums were its quality not such an exception to the rule, so well does this exhibition present the examples and history of its Stoneware, Chalkware, Mochaware, Rockingham Ware, Gaudy Dutch, and Penny Woodens. To understand what these all are, you must see the show, but their names indicate the range of materials once employed in object-making before our plastic present. In his own sculpture, exhibited alongside these examples, Nadelman explored not only the craft but also the use of the arts created through these materials, distressing his surfaces, such as in the polychrome cherrywood sculptures of Tango (ca. 1920–24), to signal a history of human touch.

Kirstein saw the challenge of maintaining Nadelman’s reputation as “the fate of artists strongly attached to tradition in crisis.” Nadelman was one of those rare moderns who looked to tradition over progress. “The art of today has neither past, future, nor ambition to be compared with other art of long survival,” Kirstein observed in his Nadelman monograph of 1973, still the best book published on the artist. “Nadelman’s craft was rooted in continuity he wished to extend, adapting rediscovery to new considerations of scale, material, and use, suiting his own time, seen not as a fading year, but as one fixed date.” Here, through his obsession with the arts of the everyday, we can see how, in Kirstein’s choice words, Nadelman was always “salvaging the monumental by the miniature.”