Stayin' Alive in '75

SPECTATOR USA, January 2020

Stayin' Alive in '75

Meryl Meisler’s photographs captured the family life and nightlife of Seventies New York

‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’ was the headline of the New York Daily News. To which the City said to Ford, you first. When the Daily News ran that famous headline on October 29 1975, New York was teetering on bankruptcy. President Gerald Ford had declared he would veto a federal bailout. It looked like the Big Apple was stewed.

The world had written off New York. The feeling was mutual: the city had written off the world. Between 1970 and 1980, the city lost nearly a million residents, over a tenth of its population. Still, New York attracted people who, against the reigning wisdom, would not or could not live anywhere else.

In 1975, some hundred thousand new New Yorkers were born within the city limits. I was one of them. In the same year, the photographer Meryl Meisler left the middle-class comforts of North Massapequa, Long Island and moved to ‘the city’, to focus her lens on the lives of New York. ‘What’s so great about New York? I mean, it’s a dying city,’ Annie Hall says in Woody Allen’s 1975 film, a tribute to the neurotic splendor of 1970s New York.

The worlds of that New York were smaller, more contained and more vivid than today’s sprawling, serious and somewhat sanitized city. Back then, if the town was really going under, those who remained to live through the decay were determined to dance among the ruins.

Camera in hand, Meryl Meisler captured the demimonde dancing on the city’s grave and then some. But she also looked for the life and the humor of the city’s broken streets. She did not indulge herself in the spectacle of wreckage; she set out to document its many humanizing moments. Compassion radiates from her viewfinder and lights up her subjects. In a flash, the faces of the city of my youth come alive in her images.

Members of the Village People at Xenon, June 1978

In the early 1980s, Meisler turned from Downtown to the outer boroughs and became the original Bushwick beatnik. She brought her camera to the classroom when she took up her job in 1981 as an arts teacher at Bushwick’s I.S. 291. The Bronx was burning, and blocks at a time of this north Brooklyn neighborhood had burned too, leaving families to live among the ruins. Meisler set out to tell their sides of the story.

She never stopped taking pictures, even as her teaching life took over. Thousands of images came to rest on Meisler’s negatives, slides and, eventually, digital chips. Only after her retirement a few years ago did she begin to develop this archive into exhibitions and the books Purgatory & Paradise: Sassy ’70s Suburbia & the City (2015), A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick (2016) and a new selection, New York Paradise Lost: Bushwick Era Disco, to be published in the fall.

Through images that have not been seen for 40 years, Meisler juxtaposes the worlds of Bushwick and bohemia, following the highs and lows of a city in decadence and decline through day and night. Her dance-club shots, taken on a medium-format camera, are flash-filled black and white.

‘Two Queens’, Hookers Ball at the Copacabana, February 1977

Cross-dressers preen at the Hookers Ball at the Copacabana on East 60th Street, and a near-naked man gyrates at the Jungle Party at the Paradise Garage discotheque on King Street. Famous faces such as Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and the Village People are caught in Meisler’s viewfinder.

These records of a club culture gone by contrast with Meisler’s Bushwick scenes, which she took with a point-and-shoot camera and developed as full-color slides. One consequence of the destruction of Bushwick was the opening up of the neighborhood to the sun. Bushwick, unlike the shadowy canyons and caverns of Manhattan, radiates a ruinous light. As in a city after a bombing raid, the residents of 1980s Bushwick stumble through the rubble.

Despite all the outward appearances of junked cars and the rubble-strewn streets in such photographs as ‘Red Stairs’ (1982), life goes on. Kids play among the burned-over remains or wait for the school bus by a line of wrecked cars. A toddler dresses up for Halloween, an old lady picks her way across a destroyed lot. Ladies dress up for church. Families picnic next to an abandoned car while the children make toys out of the wreckage. The day redeems the night.

George Herbert, the 17th-century metaphysical poet, said that living well is the best revenge. Even in the worst of times, New Yorkers made the best of bad circumstances. This isn’t to mythologize the destruction of 1970s New York or wish for its return. The radical play-acting nostalgia among New York’s current political class mainly appeals to out-of-town hipsters who moved into their gentrified Bushwick sublets last week. The real achievement of the true urbanites of 1970s New York is that they held on and saw their city through the genuine darkness. In the end, the city never did go bankrupt. Its salvation became a testament to everyone who now looks out at us from Meisler’s photographs of paradise regained.

Stalin at Yale

SPECTATOR USA, January 29, 2020

Stalin at Yale

Art history for the age of identity politics

Are we in our own revolutionary moment? Many of our leading institutions clearly believe so. Yale University has been working overtime to prove it is on the right side of history. ‘Problematic’ colleges have been renamed. ‘Offensive’ stained-glass windows have been knocked out. Only the leadership of an Ivy League school could spread such a poisonous rash. Heading the charge against the Dead White Male has been a progressive Yale bureaucracy that is, for the most part, pale and stale.

Now the task of dismantling Yale’s famous art history survey course has fallen to a scholar I respect, Tim Barringer. British-born, Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University and has been a leading curator at the Metropolitan Museum. He even mounted the Met’s exceptional 2018 exhibition on Thomas Cole.

Following a 2017 mandate to ‘decolonize’ Yale’s Department of English, Barringer is giving over the keys of Yale’s famous art survey course to the identity vandals. According to the Yale Daily News, instead of one class that will tell the story of art from ‘Renaissance to the Present’, new courses will, Barringer says, be devised to consider art in relation to a five-step history lesson, ‘questions of gender, class and race’, with further discussion of art’s ‘involvement with Western capitalism’. Of course, ‘climate change’ will also be a ‘key theme’.

Art doesn’t fare well in revolutionary times. Likewise, revolutionary sentiments are often revealed in the treatment of art. If only Professor Barringer had looked more carefully at another five-step history lesson, Thomas Cole’s ‘Course of Empire’ tableau (1833-36), he might have seen how civilizations burn down from decadence as well as assault.

Russia, after all, was once a leading promoter of modern painting. Then the Bolsheviks arrived to make sure their Picassos suffered the same fate as their Romanovs. Yet the murder of art is rarely immediate. The death occurs over time. In the early years of the Russian Revolution, the painting collections owned by the industrialists Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov were first ‘nationalized’. You could still see them, now in those new proletarian museums, but they were mainly on display for the purposes of public derision by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate.

Then Stalin came along. He declared that this art was too ‘politically harmful and is contributing to the spread, in Soviet art, of hostile, bourgeois, formalist opinions’. Want to see the Matisse? Sorry, comrade, now you were out of luck. Modern art was deemed to be ‘composed mainly of ideologically inadequate, anti-working class, formalist works of Western bourgeois art devoid of any progressive, civilizing value for Soviet visitors’. The paintings all went to the vaults of the State Hermitage and Pushkin Museums, not to be seen again for decades. In their place went up a three-year ‘Exhibition of Gifts to Comrade Stalin From the Peoples of the USSR and Foreign Countries’. A thousand busts of Stalin replaced the great modernist works. Expect a thousand busts of Comrade Thunberg at Yale.

So it’s down with ‘Art for art’s sake’, and up with art for the sake of political expediency. No surprise, but Yale undergraduates have rushed to sign up for the final survey course taught in the traditional sequence. The story of Western art is the story of Western civilization, and that’s just the problem. Perhaps Barringer, like those early Soviet curators, believes that his art will be saved by the new political order. Or maybe the move was merely a prerequisite for Yale’s 2020 receipt of a $4 million bequest from the Mellon Foundation to support ‘race studies’.

It’s only a matter of time before the history of art ends up underground. Maybe even next semester. Meanwhile, the students surely know better and are voting by signing up for the old course, capitalism and all. As Stalin would have said, wisdom is sometimes with the people, not the commissars.

Gallery chronicle (February 2020)

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2020

Gallery Chronicle

On “The Expressionist Legacy” at Galerie St. Etienne; “Depicting Duchamp: Portraits of Marcel Duchamp and/or Rrose Sélavy” at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art; “Gabriele Evertz: Exaltation” at Minus Space; “Rob de Oude: Light of Day” at McKenzie Fine Art; and “Eric Brown: Longhand” at Theodore:Art.

The declining fortunes of all but the biggest New York galleries continue to have a chilling effect on the world of art. By nurturing artists, cultivating collectors, and opening their doors to all, galleries write the first drafts of art history. New York has been spoiled with such an abundance of great galleries, and for so long, that I imagine we thought they would always be around. Now not a month goes by without another closing, or downsizing, or shifting to private sales, or some other form of retreat from the public square.

The reasons put forth for these changes are many—the globalization of the art market, the rise of the auction houses, and the burden of the art fairs are but a few. Yet I suspect the answer goes deeper, to major shifts in our sociological and visual experience. Much as the rise of online shopping has emptied out Main Street, it could be that a virtual world experienced through digital screens, among many other effects, is pushing the real-world galleries off of Fifty-seventh Street. That gamified, toxified, blue-light mirror in our hands, otherwise known as our smartphone, through its dazzling presentism blinds us to the light of history. A day will come when we will look back on these devices, now caressed like idols in the fingers of nearly every man, woman, and child, as we do a pack of cigarettes. Until then, blink before it’s too late.

This past fall, Galerie St. Etienne, the oldest gallery in the United States dedicated to Austrian and German Expressionism, announced its transition from a commercial enterprise to a non-profit foundation. “Either pursue scholarship or commerce,” declared Jane Kallir, the gallery’s director. “The two don’t work in tandem the way they once did.” Founded in New York in 1939 by Otto Kallir, Jane’s grandfather, this institution has roots going back to Vienna, where in 1923 Otto began a gallery for new art called, appropriately, Neue Galerie. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because Ronald Lauder named his New York museum after Kallir’s first influential home of the Vienna Secession.

Egon Schiele, Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, 1910, Oil, gouache, and charcoal on canvas, Private collection, courtesy Neue Galerie, New York.

In exile in New York, over many decades, Otto Kallir built the market for the modern art of pre-war German-speaking Europe. In a city more enamored with the École de Paris than the Wiener Sezession, that wasn’t always an easy sell. “During the gallery’s early years, Austrian artists like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt were completely unknown here,” Jane Kallir wrote in these pages in 2011. “We couldn’t give Schiele’s work away.” Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, even turned down the donation of Schiele’s Portrait of an Old Man (Johann Harms) (1916), which Otto Kallir then gave to the Guggenheim Museum.

By the time of Otto Kallir’s death in 1978, the opposite had become true. The reputation of Austrian and German modernism was ascendant. As Hilton Kramer wrote of Galerie St. Etienne in 1981, “Certain aspects of the modern art of Austria are nowadays so much admired—and in some quarters, indeed, so chic—that an entire generation has come of age on this side of the Atlantic with no memory of the obscurity that once surrounded its great achievements.”

Earlier exhibitions tied to the gallery’s eightieth year recognized the role of its directors, in particular Hildegard Bachert, who died last year at age ninety-eight and launched the unexpected late career of Grandma Moses. Now, for its final exhibition, Galerie St. Etienne has mounted a survey on “The Expressionist Legacy,” with a selection of over fifty works by Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, Otto Dix, Richard Gerstl, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Marie-Louise Motesiczky, and Egon Schiele, befitting the gallery’s history in the establishment of their stateside legacy.1

For the city that gave birth to Abstract Expressionism, the legacy of German Expressionism should be an easy fit. Yet this art remains uneasy, even forbidding, so much so that its manners and mores can still cause a stir. The Neue Galerie’s excellent recent survey of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, reviewed in these pages last month by Karen Wilkin, attributed Kirchner’s acidic colors, in part, to the rise of artificial illumination. Kirchner’s rotting pinks and gangrenous greens reflected the preternatural arc-lamps and limelights of the Dresden stage and the Berlin street. In contrast, the selection now at St. Etienne reveals what happens to Expressionism when the lights go down and the colors fade away. These anxious paintings and drawings can seem even more ominous in the dark of day than the light of night.

For all of its flesh, the mangled eroticism of Kokoschka’s watercolors ultimately seems desiccated and burned-over. Schiele’s bloody, bony Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff (1910) looks flayed of skin, while his dry landscapes maintain the chromatic range of tobacco juice. Corinth, a generation older than Schiele but here represented by his late work following World War I, found expression in his earlier Impressionism. His Garden Terrace on the Walchensee (1923) is an agitated torrent of mud wiped across the painting’s surface. Gerstl’s pen-and-ink self-portraits from 1907 are likewise dripping ghosts nearly sprayed into oblivion. Klimt is also well represented here, with decorated surfaces that subsume their subjects. Uptown from St. Etienne, in Klimt’s bedazzled Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907), the painting brought to the Neue Gallerie from Vienna in a famous case of Nazi-era restitution, the “woman in gold” drowns in her opulent splendor. So too for Klimt’s Baby (Cradle) (1917–18), now at St. Etienne, who is storm-tossed in a sea of bunting. That painting is here on loan from Washington’s National Gallery of Art. It was given in 1978 as a gift of Otto and Franciska Kallir—one of the many bequests given to our country by this family gallery.

Arnold Rosenberg, Marcel Duchamp Playing Chess on a Sheet of Glass, 1958.

Just downstairs from St. Etienne at 24 West Fifty-seventh Street, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art has mounted its own final exhibition. A scholar of Duchamp and the gallery’s eponymous owner, Naumann in 1994 wrote the definitive book New York Dada 1915–25. For two decades the exhibition program of his small gallery has gone for substance over style, even (especially) in the case of the often substanceless work of the idea-driven avant-garde of the early twentieth century.

Duchampianism long ago turned into that dead albatross around the neck of contemporary art, cursing us with yet another overpriced banana duct-taped for our sins to the gallery wall. Yet, curiously, Duchamp himself, that old slippery banana, reserved his final pratfalls, withdrawing in his later years to play chess and never benefiting from the spume churned up in his wake. “It is ironic that work by contemporary artists sells for more than work by the artists who inspired them,” Naumann notes, citing Jeff Koons in particular. So even Duchamp, that artist who, for better and worse, saw the future, is left to the dustbin (and urinal) of history. “There are fewer and fewer collectors of twentieth-century art,” says Naumann, “because the younger generation wishes to identify with the art of their times and feels that the art of the past is—by definition—passé.”

For his final show, Naumann has gathered together “Portraits of Marcel Duchamp and/or Rrose Sélavy.”2 Duchamp’s punning, cross-dressing alter ego reveals how this artist foresaw the free-floating identity crisis of our present day. We are (mostly) all Duchampians now.

The many artists gathered for this tribute, some old and some new, capture the shape-shifting artist in oblique and often inventive ways that reveal much about the original Duchampian. Inspired by Duchamp’s Self-Portrait in Profile (1959), a silhouette of negative space made of torn paper on velvet, shadows here illuminate more than light. An ingenious wall sculpture by Larry Kagan, Duchamp Self-Portrait in Profile (2015), turns a steel abstraction, when lit just so, into a shadow of a shadow. Tom Shannon’s Mon Key (2003), which at first resembles nothing more than the key to a filing cabinet, likewise betrays the signature profile when hanging against the wall. The selection of historic photographs of the artist are especially compelling, as they try to uncover something in his Sphinx-like visage. Arnold Rosenberg and Victor Obsatz each used multiple exposures to capture the chimeric artist. In the Oculist Witness (Marcel Duchamp) (1967), Richard Hamilton depicts the artist through a pane of glass on which he has superimposed a collage of silver metallized polyester. Rosenberg’s Marcel Duchamp Playing Chess on a Sheet of Glass (1958) likewise looks at the artist through glass, here mid-move from a perspective below the transparent gameboard. Before his death, Duchamp became a competitive “master” chess player. He was known (as might be expected) for radical opening gambits that kept his endgame deep in the shadows.

Gabriele Evertz, ZimZum, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, Minus Space.

Despite the closings, many galleries are still thriving, or at the very least mounting exceptional contemporary shows. Gabriele Evertz, a scholar of color, uses contrasting and conflicting stripes of super-saturated pigments to dazzle the eye and accelerate the pulse. Her large works now at Brooklyn’s Minus Space may just be paint on canvas, but their effect in person is dizzying and disorienting as the eye looks up and down for solid ground.3 Colors melt into stripes of gray as surfaces seem to ripple in and out. For this current exhibition, Evertz relies on a combination of formula and improvisation to arrive at her final compositions. I especially enjoyed the lighter ones, where fields of white serve to cool her radiant color temperatures.

Rob de Oude, Feature Focus, 2019, Oil on canvas, McKenzie Fine Art.

On the Lower East Side, the Netherlands-born, Brooklyn-based artist Rob de Oude weaves together strands of paint into textile-like wonders. After years of working in moiré patterns—the effects that emerge from conflicting arrangements of lines—de Oude now uses subtle variations in color and washes of tone to create squared-off compositions that seem anything but linear. Now in his first solo show at McKenzie Fine Art, on New York’s Lower East Side, rather than radiate out, light appears to glow from beneath and illuminate his designs from within.4 Through an intensity of surface rigor, which he achieves by working with the help of a self-made jig, de Oude finds depth in his penetrating kaleidoscopic effects.

Eric Brown, The Mystic, 2019, Oil on canvas, Theodore:Art.

Meanwhile, in Bushwick, the hard-edge abstractions of Eric Brown have a softer side. Last month, in “Longhand,” his second solo exhibition at Theodore:Art, Brown’s intimate designs on paper and canvas were stitched together in lines of acrylic and oil.5

As the one-time co-owner of Tibor de Nagy Gallery who has left the commercial world to become an artist and seminarian, Brown works by feel. Through a meditative touch, simple patterns belie deeper complexities and find variations across shapes and materials. The handmade quality of these minimalist forms resonate with a casual outer-borough aesthetic. They also bear Brown’s sensitive signature style, now written out in “longhand.”

Against the mesmerizing absorption of our digital world, here are exhibitions that remind us just what analog art can do.

1 “The Expressionist Legacy” opened at Galerie St. Etienne, New York, on October 22, 2019, and remains on view through February 29, 2020.

2 “Depicting Duchamp: Portraits of Marcel Duchamp and/or Rrose Sélavy” opened at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, on January 10 and remains on view through February 28, 2020.

3 “Gabriele Evertz: Exaltation” opened at Minus Space, Brooklyn, on January 11 and remains on view through February 29, 2020.

4 “Rob de Oude: Light of Day” opened at McKenzie Fine Art, New York, on January 10 and remains on view through February 16, 2020.

5 “Eric Brown: Longhand” was on view at Theodore:Art, Brooklyn, from December 13, 2019, through January 26, 2020.