WSJ: Seeing Her Worldview in a Circle

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, September 4, 2018

Seeing Her Worldview in a Circle

Howardena Pindell’s long career defies easy categorization, but a recurring motif connects a childhood memory to much of her work. A review of "Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen" at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Va. Through Nov. 25

The art of Howardena Pindell comes back around to the circle. In “What Remains to Be Seen,” her 100-work retrospective now on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, there are brushed circles, sprayed circles, and circles punched out of paper. There are paper disks, thousands of them numbered by hand, and the holes from which they were cut. And there are depictions of stars and planets—in her 40s, Ms. Pindell took up the study of astronomy: Orbs of color and light cluster together in dense, spiraling constellations of collage.

In her life, as in her work, Ms. Pindell resists the easy fit. As a black woman, in 1967, she became a pioneering graduate of the Yale School of Art. While continuing to paint, she joined New York’s Museum of Modern Art as its first black female curator. “We owe our vocation as career curators to the trail blazed by Pindell,” write this exhibition’s organizers, Valerie Cassel Oliver of the VMFA and Naomi Beckwith of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where the show originated. (On Jan. 24, 2019, the exhibition will open at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Mass.)

With her wide-ranging style and broad use of materials, Ms. Pindell has long been a round peg in a square hole. Enigmatic at times, didactic at others, she is an innovative abstractionist who also works in photography and video.

Howardena Pindell’s ‘Untitled #5B (Krakatoa)’ (2007) PHOTO: HOWARDENA PINDELL/GARTH GREENAN GALLERY, NEW YORK

Ms. Pindell, now age 75, says the recurring motif of the circle, connecting much of her art, goes back to a childhood memory. While traveling with her father—a mathematician who influenced her own interest in statistics—she stopped at a root-beer stand and looked down at the red circle painted on the bottom of her mug. The symbol designated the mugs for use by blacks only. “I see that as the reason I have been obsessed with the circle,” Ms. Pindell recounts in the exhibition catalog, “using it in a way that would be positive instead of negative.”

Howardena Pindell in her ‘Free, White and 21’ (1980) PHOTO: HOWARDENA PINDELL/GARTH GREENAN GALLERY, NEW YORK

In Richmond, where this exhibition is divided between two sections at opposite ends of the museum, the show opens in a gallery that follows Ms. Pindell’s circular developments on canvas. In her early paintings, such as “Space Frame” (1969), circles appear to orbit in square grids. By the early 1970s—for example in a canvas recently purchased by the VMFA—the circles have become dots, sprayed through the holes of handmade templates, while the hole-punches themselves reappear as dappled chads pasted on the canvas 
surface.

Howardena Pindell’s ‘Autobiography: India (Lakshmi)’ (1984) PHOTO: HOWARDENA PINDELL/GARTH GREENAN GALLERY, NEW YORK

In 1979, Ms. Pindell’s art pivots around two events: her departure from MoMA for a professorship at Stony Brook University, where she continues to teach today, and a serious car crash that affected her memory and sight. Politics, once sublimated in her abstractions, bubbles up to the surface. Words and images appear in her compositions with increasing stridency. Her canvases, now left unstretched, are cut up and stitched back together.

Howardena Pindell’s ‘Untitled #58’ (1974) PHOTO: JK BROWN AND ERIC DIEFENBACH, NEW YORK

While the first section of this exhibition displays Ms. Pindell’s range on canvas, the second shows her diversity of media. Here, works on paper are encrusted in shimmering material. Watercolor, gouache, crayon, ink, punched papers, spray adhesive, and thread may appear in a single composition. Collages made out of postcards from her many travels are cut into mesmerizing designs. Meanwhile, a suite of video work demonstrates the range of her art. In the mid-1970s, and again in 1988, Ms. Pindell took photographs of her television set, which she appended with cryptic notations on sheets of acetate adhered through static to the screen. “Free, White and 21,” a harrowing 12-minute video performance piece of 1980, speaks to her work’s confessional turn, as her biography became her subject matter.

Howardena Pindell’s ‘Space Frame’ (1969) PHOTO: HOWARDENA PINDELL/GARTH GREENAN GALLERY, NEW YORK

“Things cycle back around in Pindell’s work,” note the co-curators of this exhibition. While it may have complicated her career, her art’s nonlinear progression speaks to her aesthetic independence and suits the divided arrangement of this show. I could have used a trail of chads to connect the two sections, but a walk through the VMFA’s encyclopedic collection hints at the many sources of Ms. Pindell’s elliptical art, from Washington Color School painting to African textiles. As her latest works at one end of the museum—swirling abstractions such as “4C the Planets” (2007) and “Night Flight” (2015-16)—recall her earliest paintings at the other, we see her art come full circle.

Shimmering Black History Brought to Life

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Shimmering Black History Brought to Life

A native son of Chicago, Charles White was a radical political progressive with a retrograde artistic talent. A review of ‘Charles White: A Retrospective’ on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through September 3, 2018. 

Chicago

Born on this city’s South Side, Charles White (1918-1979) was already a star of the Black Chicago Renaissance, a Midwestern version of the Harlem Renaissance, by his early 20s. At the time, the artist kept a sketchbook that is one of the first objects in his illuminating retrospective—his first major show in over 35 years—now open at the Art Institute of Chicago. That small book can be easy to miss, but it is worth close inspection.

White’s prodigious talents are already manifest in these pages. Here are studies ranging from the dancers of Degas to the statues of the Baule, a people of Ivory Coast. Here are confident drawings in charcoal, pastel, ink, graphite, pen, and watercolor. Here is a portrait of Langston Hughes that includes “his autograph,” as White annotates with an arrow. And finally here are White’s own “theories on teaching art,” where he writes: “Learn to draw the figure, to compose and express ideas clearly, dramatically. Style will come by itself as a matter of course.”

White emerged at a moment of foment in 1930s black Chicago. His challenge was finding the style that best represented the struggles of African-Americans and the working class, and pursuing it in an era increasingly estranged from the craft of illustration. With a lifelong focus on draftsmanship, which also included astonishing achievements in printmaking, White was a radical progressive with a retrograde talent.

Charles White’s ‘Sound of Silence’ (1978) PHOTO: THE CHARLES WHITE ARCHIVES INC./

Curated by Sarah Kelly Oehler of the Art Institute and Esther Adler of the Museum of Modern Art, “Charles White: A Retrospective” highlights the connections among his roots, his ideas and his art. A map in the exhibition includes points of interest that stretched from his South Side home to the main branch of the Chicago Public Library, where his working mother often deposited him as a child. Here, through books such as Alain Locke’s “The New Negro,” White first engaged with the neglected storylines of black America.

This native son attracted early acclaim in Chicago. White went from a Saturday scholarship student at the Art Institute at age 13 to major commissions for murals of black history in his 20s. When the State of Illinois sponsored the “American Negro Exposition” to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the 13th Amendment in 1940, White’s drawing “There Were No Crops This Year,” a swirling graphite illustration of two downcast figures holding an empty sack, received top prize.

Charles White’s ‘Our Land’ (1951) PHOTO: THE CHARLES WHITE ARCHIVES INC.

White created cycles of visual mythology out of black American history. Take, for example, his mural commissioned for Virginia’s Hampton Institute and completed in 1943 showing the “Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America.” This packed composition inspired by Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals (and shown here only in reproduction) includes numerous historical figures led by an avenging angel fighting against the anti-democratic forces of bondage. White’s studies for the work depict Denmark Vesey and Paul Robeson as luminous figures in pencil, their faces seeming to reflect light as though rendered in metallic relief. A similar study of Sojourner Truth and Booker T. Washington reveals White’s sensuous all-over line, seen in the wood grain above Washington’s head and in the folds of Truth’s headscarf.

Charles White’s ‘Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man)’ (1973) PHOTO: THE CHARLES WHITE ARCHIVES INC./

White’s talents brought him from the heartland to the coasts. He became immersed in the Harlem Renaissance and then the worlds of black and blacklisted Hollywood. In 1965 he took an influential teaching position at the Otis Art Institute, which he held for the remaining 14 years of his life. By traveling to New York’s Museum of Modern Art in October, and then to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in February 2019, “Charles White: A Retrospective” will follow the artist’s personal migration.

But White never changed political direction. His worldview spanned the Old Left of the 1930s and the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s. A journey in 1951 to the Soviet Union even included a special trip to the Republic of Georgia to visit the birthplace of Joseph Stalin. The sojourn exposed him to Socialist Realism and upended his own style, which thereafter became more rounded and naturalistic, focused less on historical figures and more on contemporary images of work and toil. A later turn to collage-like compositions, borrowing neo-Dada tropes and Surrealist symbolism, connected his final work to Afrofuturism and the Black Arts Movement.

One might wonder where White’s talents would have taken him had his interests in black experience not become enmeshed in class politics. Nevertheless, just as White gave vision to black history, so is art history rightfully rediscovering White’s vision. “I try to find and search for answers to three questions,” he said in 1971. “Who am I? What am I? Why?” Thanks to this probing exhibition, we can follow his search.

(June 27, 2018)

Gallery Chronicle (June 2018)

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2018

Gallery Chronicle

On “The Unbroken Line: Old and New Masters” at Robert Simon Fine Art, “Paul Resika: Geometry and the Sea” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects and Bookstein Projects, “Marc de Montebello: Recent Work” at W. M. Brady & Co., “Sculpture 56” at 56 Bogart Street & “LES YES!” at The Storefront Project.

Stoked from dying embers, painting’s classical revival—a rediscovery and return to traditional technique—has been burning underground for decades. Last month the new masters emerged to exhibit with the old in “The Unbroken Line,” at Robert Simon Fine Art, on New York’s Upper East Side.1

One of our best Old Master dealers, Robert Simon has a history of rediscovering lost masterpieces—he’s the one who owned and helped re-identify the Salvator Mundi as a painting by Leonardo. Now working with the teachers and students of the Grand Central Atelier, the classical art school in Long Island City founded by the painter Jacob Collins, he helps us discover the next master painters. “The Unbroken Line” exhibits a selection of Old Master work alongside paintings by Collins and his current and former students, the best of whom have gone on to become the faculty of his growing school.

When it comes to revivals, living matter does not necessarily come to life from dead tissue. The thesis of “The Unbroken Line” is that a knowledge of classical painting, as it was once taught in the academies and practiced in the salons, never fully died out in the style wars of the last century. It was preserved by a handful of painters—and in the masterly work that, at least for now, continues to hang on the walls of our museums, and in galleries such as Simon’s own.

The revelation of “The Unbroken Line” is that this must be true. Or, at least, it has become true as a new generation of painters, many of them only in their thirties, breathe new life into a reviving practice. It would be a challenge for anyone to go through Simon’s survey of forty-eight works and distinguish, with total accuracy, which are from the seventeenth century and which are from the twenty-first. This is in part due to the freshness and depth of Simon’s own collection of Old Master paintings and drawings. A Performance from the Commedia dell’Arte set in a Piazza, by Gherardo Poli (b. 1676), can hang naturally alongside the wonderful drawing of Santa Maria Maggiore, by Anthony Baus (b. 1981), with an archaic street scene fancifully interposed with someone walking a bicycle.

Will St. John, untitled, 2018, Oil on linen, Robert Simon Fine Art.

It is inspiring, and eye-opening, to see still lifes by Sebastian Stoskopff (b. 1597) and Joris van Son (b. 1623) living next to ones by Justin Wood (b. 1982). Portrait of a Young Man, by Simon Vouet (b. 1590), and Christ Blessing, by Vittore Carpaccio (b. ca. 1465–70), settle down inconspicuously among portraits by Collins himself (b. 1964)—one of which, called David, Collins touched up just days before the opening. Emotive figures by Rachel Li (b. 1995) and Will St. John (b. 1980) give the side-eye to a Portrait of a Boy from the Bolognese School of the seventeenth century. (I understand that St. John gave his painting a final coat of varnish once on the wall, in what Simon says was his first literal vernissage.)

Delicate portraits by Colleen Barry (b. 1981) convey a Flemish intimacy. A self-portrait by Edward Minoff (b. 1972), an accomplished painter of seascapes, radiates the classical profile of a Renaissance medallion. Just steps from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this exhibition has introduced a new field of collectors and curators to a generation of young painters; the great Frederick Ilchman, a curator at the mfa Boston and a savior of Venetian art, was on his way up just as I was heading down. The work, old and new, comprises two sides of the same coin. Robert Simon has done a good turn by bringing them both into more common currency.

Now entering his ninetieth year, the latitudinal painter Paul Resika has sailed the seven seas of artistic influence. More than sixty years ago, he embarked from the New York School and his apprenticeship with Hans Hofmann for a rendezvous with the Old Masters, on to the distant shores of De Chirico, Carrà, Sironi, and points unknown. With his latest exhibition, “Geometry and the Sea,” spread across two New York galleries last month—Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, on the Lower East Side; and Bookstein Projects, now on East Sixty-sixth Street—Resika brought home his many far-flung discoveries in angular, poetic compositions, where paint serves as both water and light.2

At Bookstein’s new uptown location, the open gallery room invited comparison of these connected compositions, all from the past three years. Among the circles and triangles, the sea and the sky, Resika finds a great range of feeling in shapes and tone. Rose Dawn (2017) crackles in a morning sun. Red Dunes, Green Sea (2016–17) bakes in a sun-scorched afternoon glow relieved by the sea water pooling into a triangle below. The yellow sun of The White Sky (2017) breaks through a damp mist, while Red Sun (De Chirico) (2017), with its vertical symmetries, conveys the meridian sun with a nod to the surrealist master. Meanwhile, Blue Night (2017) turns day to night with the coolness of moon-shade, as pyramidal forms grow ever taller in the dream-lit air.

Paul Resika, Blue Night, 2017, Oil on canvas, Bookstein Projects.

In his intimate downtown space, Steven Harvey looked to the poetry of Resika’s mysterious forms and their spare surroundings. A Quiet Romance (2017) features a circle and a shell in conversation over a field of blue. The White Moon(2017), Celadon Sea (2017), and Blue (2017) convey Resika’s interest in sensuous, mottled color. In a gallery filled with natural light—as it must be, for Resika’s colors—the illumination from the storefront window highlighted the textures of Resika’s layered surfaces. These latest paintings are often painted over older work, and the pentimenti add to the mystery of the compositions. Self-Portrait with Rag (2017) depicts Resika emerging from the color-rich mist. The great painter looks out as both an abstract vision and a concrete form.

Marc de Montebello may have a recognizable surname. Yet his descent from Jean Lannes, the First Duke of Montebello, the famous marshal of the Napoleonic Wars, should not be held against his own successes. Last month, at W. M. Brady & Co., de Montebello showed the achievement of his recent work—landscapes of diverse locations with a unifying interest in surface and depth.3

Using planes of color, de Montebello carves out sculptural space. The approach is spare and often intriguingly minimal. While certain works experiment with fog, de Montebello flourishes in the bright light of day, with direct sunlight sharpening his shapes in reflection. A room of intimate works, some of casein or oil on paper, brought to mind the spare vision of Louisa Matthíasdóttir, where a field of green might be punctuated by a mere dot of red.

Marc de Montebello, View of Jodhpur, 2015, Oil on canvas, W. M. Brady & Co.

Two large canvases reveled in the rooftop geometries of Jodhpur, the “blue city” of Rajasthan, dominated by its fifteenth-century Mehrangarh fort. Yet the chromatic values of these paintings were so varied, and the effects of light so wide-ranging, that they might be mistaken for two different views—especially as they were wisely divided between the two main gallery rooms.

In the familiar light of Los Angeles, where de Montebello keeps his studio, he seems most at ease. Here he finds interest in simple rear-window walls and a series of seascapes—which is his most daring—conveying an infinity of depth with a minimum of surface detail.

The dozen or so galleries of 56 Bogart Street, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, have arguably evolved into the single best concentration of artistic venues anywhere in New York. No doubt this is due to the galleries’ proximity to one another —and their separation from everything else. In the late nineteenth century, the economist Alfred Marshall described certain places as “having ideas in the air,” where knowledge “spills over” from one person to the other. The central corridor of this one building, packed with serious galleries and the people who create them, has become the Main Street of New York’s alternative art scene.

Julia Kunin, Green Bismuth Head, 2013, Ceramic, Honey Ramka.

Spread over six weeks, these gallerists came together to organize “Sculpture 56,” their first building-wide exhibition, with eleven venues showing various takes on contemporary sculpture.4 Highlights of this exhibition included a bespoke stack of Jersey barriers in “Noah Loesberg: Remote Barrier Storage,” at Robert Henry Contemporary (the co-director Henry Chung was an architect of the exhibition series). I also enjoyed the many examples of contemporary ceramics at Honey Ramka, where Julia Kunin’s unsettling Green Bismuth Head (2013)was my best in show. At Slag Contemporary, Dumitru Gorzo piled old two-by-fours like matchsticks into square towers. Their natural precariousness said more to me than the scumbles of paint added to their surfaces—I wonder if a more minimalist application would have had greater effect. Meanwhile Tom Butter, at Studio 10, constructed an eleven-foot-tall kinetic sculpture, where a mechanized spool of foam cord unwound from a lattice tower onto a pile on the floor. For all the elegance of its construction, I doubt the resulting forms quite justified the elaborate setup.

Spread over two floors at 56 Bogart Street, the dense, multi-gallery exhibition, much of it showing work at a high level, commanded attention. I hope it hints at collaborations to come.

Meryl Meisler,Mr. Katz was mugged by two kids who found him dozing in front of his TV in his living room,  1978, Photograph, the Storefront Project.

The photographer Meryl Meisler arrived in New York City in the mid-1970s. Surrounded by decadence and decay, she looked for the humanizing touch in the wreckage, the sleaze, and the schmaltz of the struggling city. Through a 1978 ceta Artist grant to photograph Jewish life for the American Jewish Congress, she turned her lens on the Lower East Side. Continuing our rediscovery of Meisler’s rich body of work, these photographs are the subject of “les yes!,” an exhibition at The Storefront Project, a gallery on Orchard Street at the heart of a neighborhood that has transformed in the four decades since Meisler captured it in black and white.5

Meisler has an eye for character. In her photographs, often shot in fifty millimeter with heavy flash, great expressions come into bloom for her welcoming lens. Bright-faced rabbis, soda jerks, and garmentos pop out of their darkened shuls, diners, and apparel stores. There are a few striking images of degradation —a drunk lying across the bleak median of Photographing on the Bowery (1977), with a second figure snapping away from the side of this captivatingly framed image. Yet, mostly, Meisler looks for the life of the street and those struggling to keep living in it. In particular she finds Morris Katz, the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Grand Street,” who appears in several images. Looking out from two black eyes, Katz describes “how he was mugged by two kids who found him dozing in front of his TV in his living room,” as one of the images is titled. Resolute and resigned, he does not let his cigar drop from his mouth or his bow tie come undone. The old neighborhood is in decline. He was there to see it through. Thankfully, in the dying light of the late 1970s, Meisler was there as well to find what could be preserved.

1 “The Unbroken Line: Old and New Masters” opened at Robert Simon Fine Art, New York, on May 11 and remains on view through June 1, 2018.

2 “Paul Resika: Geometry and the Sea” was on view at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, from April 18 through May 20 and at Bookstein Projects, New York, from April 19 through May 26, 2018.

3 “Marc de Montebello: Recent Work” was on view at W. M. Brady & Co., New York, from May 9 through May 24, 2018.

4 “Sculpture 56” was on view at 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, from April 13 through May 27, 2018.

5 “les yes!” opened at The Storefront Project, New York, on May 3 and remains on view through June 3, 2018.