Gallery Chronicle (February 2018)

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2018

Gallery Chronicle

On the controversy surrounding the Berkshire Museum, and on “Ann Purcell: Caravan Series” at Berry Campbell, “Ben Godward: Sculptures” at Sean Scully Studio, and “Katherine Bernhardt: Green” at Canada.

“All of the paintings that are scheduled for sale are in the care of Sotheby’s.”

Such is the welcome you now receive upon a visit to the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The phrase might as well be the museum’s new motto, emblazoned on the banners by the entryway. Times are tough. Forget the past. Everything must go! Through a $50 million liquidation sale, the leaders of this century-old institution have been flaunting their decision to monetize the most valuable non-performing assets, as the saying now goes, of what was once known as the permanent collection.

On the auction block are forty objects selected purely for appraised value, regardless of their ties to the institution, its history, or its mission. Most notable: two innovative motorized sculptures by Alexander Calder, purchased by the museum’s pioneering director Laura Bragg in 1933, the year she gave Calder his first museum exhibition; works by the nineteenth-century painters George Henry Durrie and Albert Bierstadt, both of the local Connecticut River Valley; and two paintings by Norman Rockwell, Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950) and Blacksmith’s Boy—Heel and Toe (1940), given to the museum’s permanent collection by Rockwell himself, who lived and worked in nearby Stockbridge. Through a sale that has been directly opposed by his heirs, one Rockwell painting alone could fetch $30 million at auction.

“Securing the future of this museum requires bold and imaginative thinking,” says Elizabeth “Buzz” McGraw, the president of the Berkshire’s board of trustees. In an interview with Berkshire Magazine, Van Shields, the museum’s director, explains what this “bold and imaginative thinking” will mean: “We envision almost being like in Harry Potter.” With the revenue from the sale, “We are going to elevate the museum into becoming a higher-tier attraction. By differentiating in the marketplace, we are going to fit into the cultural mix better.” The collection, or whatever will remain of it, “is going to be on view in a way that is going to be pretty spectacular.”

The Berkshire Museum was already “pretty spectacular” to anyone who cared to notice. Located in the largest town in the Berkshire mountains, the museum was founded in 1902 by Zenas Crane (1840–1917), an heir to the Crane paper company, to be an encyclopedic museum inspired by both the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Just a stone’s throw away from Arrowhead, the farm where Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick (the view of Mount Greylock from his writing desk was his “hump like a snow-hill”), the institution maintained a singular relationship with the artists and writers who congregated in the Berkshire mountains and who enriched the museum’s collection—in particular, Calder and Rockwell.

Norman Rockwell, Shuffleton’s Barbershop, 1950,  Oil on canvas, Sotheby’s

The museum’s Renaissance Revival design, which will be gutted along with its collection should the sale go through, was the work of the notable local architect Henry Seaver, who also designed halls at nearby Williams College. Exhibits of natural science were built into the lower levels, while the upper floor, illuminated by skylights, was set aside for the art collection. Alexander Calder’s first works of architectural sculpture were commissioned in 1932 as site-specific mobiles for the museum’s central auditorium, which would be destroyed in the redesign.

Shields, in pushing his “New Vision to Serve the Community,” has been markedly unsentimental regarding both the collection and the history of his institution. “These paintings, it is not like we are throwing them out the window,” he gracelessly explains. By selling his collection, he promises to underwrite “learning experiences that will teach skills that foster success in the twenty-first century: critical thinking, creativity, and the ability to collaborate.” “Art,” “donor intent,” and the “public trust” will, presumably, not be on the new curriculum. Nor do such antiquated notions have a place in this future of museum stewardship. “If the paintings leave here, so be it,” Shields concludes. “There’s a Rockwell museum right down the street.”

At press time, Shields has stepped aside on a medical leave, and a court order has temporarily halted his sale. But the museum is moving ahead with plans for the auction, and the Berkshire’s collection still appears on Sotheby’s website. The Pittsfield community has rallied valiantly against the sale of its treasures. Several museum professionals have also spoken out against the “deaccessioning” of a permanent collection to generate operating and capital income, which violates the peer-reviewed standards of American curators and would prevent the Berkshire Museum from borrowing art in the future from member institutions.

Yet through the brazenness of its “bold and imaginative thinking,” the leadership of the Berkshire Museum is seeking to push a “New Vision” not only on its own institution but also on the museum world at large. Other institutions seem to be picking up on the slumlord approach to arts management, where even the copper pipes might be ripped out of the walls, it would seem, for the right return on investment.

Just last month, Philadelphia’s La Salle University consigned forty-six works of its collection to Christie’s. According to the university’s spin, the proceeds from this sale would fund a “five-year strategic plan—a blueprint for La Salle’s sustainable and vibrant future, and a pathway to enhanced student experience and outcomes.” A bumper crop of editorialists has likewise sprouted up to push the new anything-goes mentality: “Art museums should sell works in storage to avoid raising admission fees,” declares Michael O’Hare, a professor of public policy at Berkeley, in the San Francisco Chronicle; “9 Works the Met Should Sell Right Now to Avoid Raising Ticket Prices—Forever,” speculate Menachem Wecker and Margaret Carrigan at Artnet.

And indeed, far from an anomaly, the Berkshire Museum’s “New Vision” is the logical next step to a gestating and pernicious ideology that has long sought to repurpose museums founded to preserve their collections into collections “monetized” to preserve their museums. As I wrote in these pages in December 2016, this drive to transform museums from “being about something to being for somebody” will result in a museum for nobody.

Any place, after all, could encourage “learning experiences that will teach skills that foster success in the twenty-first century.” Through the integrity of its collection, the Berkshire Museum is the only place where visitors can experience a unique institution deeply rooted in the arts and culture of this community. Filled with great art, at least until press time, its value is far greater than the sum of its shamelessly broken-up parts.

Ann Purcell, Race Point, 1982, Acrylic and collage on canvas, Berry Campbell

The paintings of Ann Purcell are a tour de force of abstract mechanics. At Chelsea’s Berry Campbell gallery, an impressive selection from her “Caravan Series” of the late 1970s and early 1980s is now on view.1

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1941, Purcell studied with the Washington Color School painter Gene Davis, who became a mentor. Color and movement have likewise been hallmarks of her own work. The force of Purcell’s compositions is not so much based on a tension of in and out, surface and depth, but of up and down. Her paintings owe much to a sense for the choreography of shapes and the effects of gravity on forms. In particular, she uses collage, with strips and squares of canvas adhered to free-form acrylic designs, to explore the implications of movement. These forms seem to hang and swing, twist and turn, as though pinned at odd angles. The blue rectangle of Gypsy Wind (1983) tips like a lever. A jumble of shapes leap from the ground in Race Point (1982). These actions then appear to interact with the paint beneath, wiping and stirring her colors into dynamic compositions.

Ben Godward, Pilgrimage (The Narrow Place), 2017,Pigmented resin, Sean Scully Studios

Ben Godward is the wild man of Brooklyn sculpture. Working with quick-drying foam, he creates colorful accretions that often absorb whatever detritus happens to be in the path of his Superfund creations. The plastic cups that he uses to mix his two-part urethane medium lodge into the sides of his swamp things as he flips and turns them into their final state. The casualness of their making and the colors of their execution are all absorbed into the final work, which is part performance and part product. A few years ago I watched him build a molten tower during the first half of a performance of Norte Maar’s “Brooklyn Combine” at the Brooklyn Museum, only to see him chop the thing apart and hand the pieces out to the audience in the second.

“Ben Godward: Sculptures,” now at Sean Scully Studio in Chelsea, is therefore both a departure from and a continuation of these wild beginnings.2 Working with liquid urethane resin, rather than the foaming variety, Godward has poured his medium into box molds, drying them into sheets. The results compress his wild expression into silky panels that resemble stained glass, all built out of layers of translucent pigment. Propped up against the studio walls (in the case of the larger panels) or arranged standing in series (in the case of several smaller compositions), the objects occupy a space between sculpture and painting. In their swirling colors, they also recall abstracted landscapes, like rays of light, or sedimentary rock.

There’s much to see in these absorbing creations, even if they miss out on some of Godward’s reckless spontaneity and the flotsam and jetsam of his more free-form sculptures. A stand-alone object here called Aspirational Sculpture (2018), made of a dirty ladder with urethane panels poured between the rungs, seems the most “Godward” of the lot. And, indeed, his name is scrawled right on its side.

Installation vew, “Katherine Bernhardt: Green” at Canada. Photo: Canada

If “Brooklyn Color School” isn’t yet a popular coinage, it’s time we made it one. The Brooklyn-based painter Katherine Bernhardt deploys color that is fast and heated, part Matisse, part Myrtle Avenue. At Canada, a Lower East Side gallery that has been exhibiting another Brooklyn Katherine (Bradford) to great success, Bernhardt uses acrylic and spray paint to lay down a complex matrix of images, often on enormous scale, often (it would seem) in the time it might take for the next elevated J Train to come screeching into the station.3

The results can be visual explosions glimpsed from a passing window. The best are semi-sensical jumbles, such as the cigarettes, smoothies, watermelons, and birds that populate her expansive Direct Flight (2017). Lima Cola (2017) is a similar rebus of Coke bottles, r2d2s, and Stormtroopers, all in the vibrant complementary colors of blue and red. Up close, her paint soaks and drips. Farther back, her images read as coded messages you just about get. Only in the middle do some paintings fall flat, such as her smaller portraits of Stormtrooper + Round Watermelons #1 (2017) and Dole + Darth Vader (2017). Here you just wish the compositions had the space to go fully bananas.

1 “Ann Purcell: Caravan Series” opened at Berry Campbell, New York, on January 4 and remains on view through February 3, 2018.

2 “Ben Godward: Sculptures” opened at Sean Scully Studio, New York, on January 4 and remains on view through February 8, 2018.

3 “Katherine Bernhardt: Green” opened at Canada, New York, on January 5 and remains on view through February 11, 2018.

WSJ: A Brief History of Idol Smashers

WALL STREET JOURNAL, January 20, 2018

A Brief History of Idol-Smashers, From Moses to de Blasio

By James Panero

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio set up an Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers last September to review “all symbols of hate on city property,” as he said in a tweet. The commission’s conclusion, released last week, is that there is but one offending object in need of removal: a statue of J. Marion Sims, a founder of American gynecology who experimented on slaves, on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.

Although several members pushed for a harder-line approach, the commission’s sensible findings—which also recommend adding context to existing monuments and erecting new public works—would seem to signal an end to last summer’s monument fever. They are also politically expedient for Mr. de Blasio, allowing him to trumpet leftist sympathies while still appealing to voters who like their monuments the way they are.

Yet the problem with monuments is not going away anytime soon—and the trouble long predates the issue of Confederate memorials and the deadly protests of August 2017 that surrounded one of them in Charlottesville, Va.

A contempt for false idols is written deep into human nature. It is found in the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” History is punctuated by waves of symbolic destruction, both sectarian and secular, left and right.

Exodus 32:20 tells of Moses ’ angry discovery of one problematic symbol upon his descent from Mount Sinai. His brother, Aaron, had grown anxious during Moses’ 40-day absence and forged a golden calf as an idol for worship. When Moses saw what Aaron had done, “he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.”

In the year 455, a horde of Vandals from the Germanic north sacked Rome in a schismatic dispute with the empire’s Nicene Christians. According to Victor of Vita, a contemporaneous African bishop, the Vandals “gave bent to their wicked ferocity with great strength against the churches and basilicas of the saints, cemeteries and monasteries, so that they burned houses of prayer with fires greater than those used against the cities and all the towns.”

Today we recall this episode through the term that resulted, “vandalism,” a coinage that gained currency during the French Revolution—another period of iconoclasm that saw churches and relics targeted, alongside the monarchy during the Reign of Terror. In 1789, a statue of Louis XV was torn down in the same square, renamed the Place de la Revolution, that saw the execution of Louis XVI four years later.

A few generations later, during the Paris Commune of 1871, France witnessed another round of destruction, which culminated in the toppling of the Vendome Column. This 72-day radical takeover of the city inspired the “communism” of Lenin and the wholesale demolition of Russian churches following the 1917 October Revolution.

By every measure, we are again in an era defined by a hostility to graven images. Islamic terror draws on that faith’s contempt for idolatry as a psychological weapon and a tool of recruitment. The Mughals, the Persians and the Afghan kings all turned their guns on the Buddhas of Bamiyan, in today’s Afghanistan, before the Taliban finally obliterated the sixth-century Silk Road statues in March 2001. “We are destroying the statues in accordance with Islamic Law,” declared Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s supreme commander. “Muslims should be proud of smashing idols.”

The 9/11 attacks on the U.S. six months later were as much about the destruction of the monumental symbols of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon as they were about the murder of the people inside them. So too was the Islamic State concerned with “cultural cleansing” along with its campaign of murder—the Roman city of Palmyra, the Assyrian Lamassu sculptures of Mosul, and irreplaceable churches and Shia mosques were all targeted in ISIS ’ Sunni Salafist march across the Levant.

Symbolic violence often signals real, and uncontrolled, human violence to come. In the case of terrorism, the two types of violence become one and the same.

As George Washington warned, the erasure even of bad symbols should not be undertaken impulsively. Many Americans point proudly to the toppling and disfigurement of the statue of George III, in Manhattan’s Bowling Green, by the Sons of Liberty in 1776. Its lead was melted down into 40,000 musket balls to be used by the Continental Army. Yet Washington resented his soldiers’ engaging in this show of “popular effervescence,” according to Washington Irving’s “Life of Washington,” and he “censured it in general orders, as having much the appearance of a riot and a want of discipline.”

America’s Confederate monuments are false idols to a “lost cause” rooted in systematic racial supremacy. Yet their destruction or removal has signaled a radical zeal that is not easily contained. This fervor led hundreds of academics to write an open letter last month to Mr. de Blasio’s monument commission urging the elimination of New York’s grand public statues of Christopher Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt and others, each an “embodiment of white supremacy.” The broadening scope of censoriousness suggests this frenzy is less about Confederate monuments and more about a toxic relationship with the past itself.

And despite the commission’s report, landmarked city monuments, such as the Bronx’s Hall of Fame for Great Americans, have already been effaced without review. Last summer New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered busts of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson removed from this outdoor sculpture gallery designed by McKim, Mead & White. The statues of Roosevelt and Columbus are also routinely defaced by latter-day vandals.

Injunctions against false idols now target paintings, statues, buildings and all matter of material culture. Yet in our hyperdigital present, public monuments stand as a tangible connection to the ideas of the past and a bridge to the people who held them. This connection can be their ultimate offense. It is also the one most in need of preservation.

Gallery Chronicle (June 2017)

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2017

Gallery Chronicle

On the 2017 Met Gala, “Frieze New York” & “TEFAF New York Spring.”

When it comes to the life of art, there may be nothing less gala than the Met Gala, or at least what this annual boondoggle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has become. The scandal of this year’s iteration should serve as a sobering wake-up call for the increasingly besotted priorities of too many American museums, including our greatest institutions.

If you have not heard of the Met Gala, do not worry. You were not invited. Since 1995, on the first Monday of every May, the Metropolitan has handed its keys over to Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine and the artistic director of Condé Nast. Here her purported aim has been to raise funds for the museum’s Costume Institute—I’m sorry, make that the “Anna Wintour Costume Center.” Her lording over the gala’s invite list has become notorious and the subject of a documentary called The First Monday in May.

Of course, the potential conflicts of interest that exist between Wintour’s commercial concerns and her museum trusteeship are blatant. The specter that she has conjured up with her gala has followed priorities far beyond fundraising and certainly beyond the realm of art. Along the way these extra-artistic interests have risen up from the Institute’s basement galleries to infect not only the museum’s spaces but also its institutional tenor, and by extension the tenor of American museums at large.

Tweet of an image from the 2017 Met Gala

Like much else in the world of art, the Met Gala and the Costume Institute itself have become unrecognizable deformations from the Institute’s founding and the event’s inception in 1946. Consider that for nearly twenty years, from 1979 to 1995, the gala was helmed by the singular society doyenne Patricia Buckley. During this time the Institute mounted exhibitions such as “Fashions of the Hapsburg Era” (1979–1980), “Victorian Dress 1837–1877” (1988–1989), and “The Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire” (1989–1990). The historical programming more than fit, so to speak, the seriousness of the institution that presented it.

The Wintour era has wrought, by contrast, “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” and “Punk: Chaos to Couture.” Even beyond its superficial, contemporary turn, Wintour’s Costume Institute has exposed the museum to the predations of celebrity culture. Worse still, the museum as a whole, a once-protected precinct of our cultural inheritance, has learned to revel in Hollywood’s demotic attention. “The Met is a place that you consider very very correct, very formal,” the fashion editor André Leon Talley explains in the Wintour documentary. “Anna has taken that out of the mix.”

Tweet from the 2017 Met Gala by Marc Jacobs

The 2017 Met Gala became the apotheosis of this transformation. With the pop singer Katy Perry serving as the year’s honorary hostess, the hordes of bold-faced names, amply stocked with Jenners and Kardashians, marched up the museum’s Fifth Avenue steps and made a public mockery of the institution. “The celebrities were like animals . . . acting like they were at the Playboy Mansion!” one informant explained to Radar magazine. “Some didn’t even know it was a museum. They thought it was an event space with old stuff brought in to make it look like Egypt!” Many of the attendees, clearly uncertain of their surroundings, came to loiter in the museum restrooms. Here they sprawled out across the floors, spilled drinks, smoked cigarettes, and took “selfie” shots in the mirrors, which they disseminated through social media.

Some may perceive such spectacle as a tolerable distraction—even a welcome frivolity for an overly stuffy and off-putting institution. I fear the pantomime is far more anti-civilizational. It is a takeover—a commercial-grade, mass-culture affront to an institution held in disdain. Guarded by a phalanx of bodyguards, these latter-day vandals take barbarous license amidst the greatest artifacts of history. They smoke. They fornicate. They sprawl across the floors in mockery of the art around them, merely to focus on themselves. And all the while they record their debauchery on social media for millions of fanatics to emulate their cultural annihilation.

There have been many cringe-worthy moments during the reign of Thomas Campbell, the disgraced director of the Metropolitan Museum who departs this month. Perhaps the curator once dubbed “Tapestry Tom” thought he could take a major carpet ride to new money and popular adulation. Instead he opened the floodgates and drowned his institution in ridicule and debt while forsaking his scholars and curators. There should have been only one response for any proper museum steward to this year’s Met Gala: to sweep the trash out of the galleries, and to keep Wintour’s damage deposit with the suggestion never to return. Short of that, Anna Wintour’s Met Gala should be interred alongside Tom Campbell’s ignominious career.

Frieze New York. Photo: Mark Blower / Frieze

The sixth annual art fair known as Frieze New York opened on the same week as the Met’s inanities, but seemed a world apart.1 My first thought upon entering Frieze’s elevating, light-filled tent was how the value of seeing, as opposed to seducing, has been abdicated by many museums to be taken up by commercial galleries, which in turn increasingly coalesce around these quasi-institutional art fairs.

Six years ago I was bullish over the first stateside Frieze, a remarkable art encampment on New York’s Randall’s Island at the confluence of the Harlem and East Rivers by the Hell Gate to Long Island Sound. The setting alone is a stunning retreat. Of course, many of us already know this island to be that which exists beneath the roadbed of the Triborough Bridge. There was a time I played after-school sports beneath its dingy overpasses, and I attended a grungy rock festival there in 1994. But one of the surprises of Frieze is how Randall’s Island has been recently transformed into a bucolic sanctuary in the heart of the city with flowering paths and woodpeckers tapping on trees. The first year I took a ferry there. More recently I walked across a footbridge from Manhattan.

Admittedly over the past few years I grew somewhat weary of Frieze’s formula of trendy, transposed eateries and art as lifestyle retreat, mixed with some showboating and the dumbing down of the art on view. Access to Frieze has become increasingly daunting, with inscrutable online directions, unreliable transportation, and the feeling during storms that the whole operation may become a runaway bouncy castle. But this year seemed different, at least once the clouds parted, and far less frivolous—a place set apart, and well engineered, for the contemplation of art in exile.

In 2012 the architecture firm SO-IL designed the Frieze tent from pre-fabricated rental components to snake along the edge of the Harlem River overlooking Manhattan for more than a quarter mile. Made of white translucent material, supplemented by minimal artificial illumination, its 225,000 square feet are awash in natural light. The visual effects can be uncanny, cooling colors and bathing both painting and sculpture in an indirect, northern-like light.

This year many of the two-hundred-plus galleries, brought together from thirty-one countries by Frieze’s London-based curatorial team, took best advantage of these light-filled surroundings not just to give us something to look at, but also something to see, with minimal labels and misdirection. Alexander Gray Associates, with a prominent booth by the southern entrance, singled out a late geometric abstraction by the painter Jack Tworkov called Triptych (Q3-75 #1) (1975), a contemplative fugue of gridded form and spontaneous brushwork. (This Chelsea gallery, it should be noted, is currently showing a survey of the artist Betty Parsons, a central figure of twentieth-century art better known for her singular dealership of the Abstract Expressionists.)

Sculpture by Carol Bove. Photo: Mark Blower / Frieze

Both David Zwirner and Sculpture Center exhibited pas-de-deux sculptures by Carol Bove of scrap metals punctuated by urethane dots. The paintings of Henry Taylor were released from the circus of the Whitney Biennial to show to best effect at Blum & Poe. The Symbolist abstractions of Gabriel Lima were new to me at the Portuguese gallery Múrias Centeno. I liked the worn paint textures of Marina Rheingantz at the Brazilian gallery Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, while the bold lines of James Nares’s abstractions at New York’s Paul Kasmin directed us to the American road. London’s October gallery testified to the modernist innovations of contemporary African art, especially Romuald Hazoumè’s Benin-style masks crafted from gasoline canisters.

There was some regrettable selfie bait, in particular Karl Holmqvist’s sign paintings at Gavin Brown’s “Enterprise” instructing fair-goers to “Hug a Hooker!” Yet these were anomalies in a fair that dedicated much of its real estate to its selection of “Spotlight” galleries exhibiting solo shows of work created exclusively in the last century, which included many of the best booths in the fair: Judith Linhares’s dreamscapes at San Francisco’s Anglim Gilbert, Paul Feeley’s color-forms at New York’s Garth Greenan, and, in particular, Alfred Leslie’s stark portraiture at New York’s Bruce Silverman.

TEFAF New York Spring at the Park Avenue Armory. Photo: TEFAF

A depression in interest for European antiquities may say as much about the state of the European past as it does of the European economy. Founded nearly thirty years ago in Holland, TEFAF Maastricht has long been a preeminent art fair featuring an advertised “7,000 years of art history,” but one particularly known for its selection of Old Masters and antiquities. Looking to expand from Maastricht while educating an American collecting public that may know little beyond the latest Jeff Koons, TEFAF came stateside last fall with a fair that transformed the Park Avenue Armory into an ethereal treasury of art history.

I wish I could stay so enthusiastic for tefaf’s spring edition, which returned to the Armory over “Frieze Week” to exhibit ninety-three galleries showing modern and contemporary art and design.2

Booth at TEFAF New York Spring. Photo: TEFAF

There were some highlights: the New York gallery Hans P. Kraus Jr., dealing in the “old masters of photography,” as always showed a remarkable selection of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century prints. Bernard Goldberg featured scenes by Thomas Hart Benton from his “American Historical Epic” of 1924 through 1927. David Zwirner smartly positioned Josef Albers next to the equal (if not superior) work of his wife, Anni Albers. London’s James Butterwick offered a selection of Russian and Ukrainian modernists, and Lisson featured the Cuban-American painter Carmen Herrera, while Bergamin & Gomide focused on South American modernism.

But overall TEFAF New York Spring was a letdown, a largely directionless retread of other modern fairs underscored by an often garish arrangement of work. Once again TEFAF included jewelers and other such retailers in the mix, which gave its fair an aura of the international departures terminal “duty free.” The selection also leaned awkwardly towards postwar European painting, and I can only gather that a memo went out suggesting exhibitors display every sliced-up Lucio Fontana canvas in inventory, rendering the fair both a whodunit slasher and a vagina monologue. Perhaps there’s a future for TEFAF New York Spring. For now I will simply look forward to the opening of TEFAF’s next revelatory fall production of Old Masters.