Hogwash, abstract & the rest: an exchange

Interior of the 1913 Armory Show

THE NEW CRITERION
February 2013

Hogwash, abstract & the rest: an exchange

To the Editors:

It mystifies me that, continuing under the editorship of Roger Kimball as previously under that of Hilton Kramer, The New Criterion persists in intermittently admiring in the visual arts the very decline and fall of culture that it so well and rightly militates against in government, politics, theater, music, and the media. Not seven pages after the editor, in his obituary “Jacques Barzun, 1907–2012” (The New Criterion, December 2012), gives with one hand by approving of Jacques Barzun’s apt indictment of the modern art scene—“ ‘When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent’ ” and suffers “a progressive loss of resistance to humbug”—James Panero takes away with the other hand in a review that sets up the Armory Show (“The Armory Show at 100”) as embodying the work of “like-minded souls who helped nurture and propagate a renewed vision for culture.” “Renewed vision for culture”? Whom is he kidding? The Armory Show itself was the beginning of that end of art of which even The New Criterion disapproves.

Though Panero seconds Barzun in objecting to the present-day “professionalized museum class [that] dictates the story of art to an increasingly passive public,” he praises the “energy” of the Armory Show, which consisted of what he calls a “resurgence in art [that captured] the vital spirit of the times” in revolt against “the dry bones of a dead art.” He fails to see the modern decay as the inevitable fruit of the deracination set in motion by the radically revolutionary Armory generation. Is it now possible to deny that Mondrian, Kandinsky, Brancusi, and Duchamp have led the art troops onward and downward inevitably through Pollock, Moore, and Warhol to the present-day depravities that Barzun rightly deplores? Does a legitimate critique of late nineteenth-century academic formalism require Panero to lionize the Armory as a “vital” reaction to it when the show, despite displaying some works admittedly excellent of their kind, initiated the long succession of spiritually empty self-absorptions marching toward oblivion—abstract expressionism, pop, op, conceptual art, postmodernism, and blah, blah, blah?

Look, we’re all fighting losing battles here, complaining of a decay of culture that no amount of complaining but only vision could counteract, and there is no secret storehouse from which vision might be stolen. It comes, like the inspiration of the muse, in its own time in its own mysterious way. But can’t we at least get together in The New Criterion and agree that the extravagant claims for twentieth-century abstract art and the rest were hogwash?

Gideon Rappaport, Ph.D.
San Diego, California

Armory Show poster, 1913

James Panero replies:

Dr. Rappaport, Ph.D., is entitled not to like “twentieth-century abstract art and the rest,” just as an admirer of Mozart may find distasteful the innovations of Beethoven. This is true even as some of us believe, as I do, that modern forms of aesthetic experience, rather than contributing to the “decline and fall of culture,” can in fact offer comfort, reflection, and beauty that mitigate against this decline.

Dr. Rappaport is not entitled to insinuate, however, that his particular taste should dictate ours, or, worse, that a reductive reading of history should dictate to us all. The New Criterion is a magazine about critical distinctions. This is why we can identify differences among “Mondrian, Kandinsky, Brancusi, and Duchamp . . . through Pollock, Moore, and Warhol” in a way that Dr. Rappaport seems unable to do. We will furthermore defend these critical distinctions from the mindsets that see artistic achievement only in black and white.

On the subject of the 1913 Armory Show: It says something about this particular achievement that the discussion of modern art it inspired continues today. We may come down on different sides of the conversation, but I hope we can agree with the Armory’s mission statement: “We do not believe that any artist has discovered or ever will discover the only way to create beauty.” For this reason we should consider art broadly and find the joys in its contemplation.

The Smells of Commercial Success

The perfumer Oliver Cresp

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 6, 2013

The Smells of Commercial Success
By James Panero

A review of "The Art of Scent 1889-2012"
Museum of Arts and Design
Through March 3

New York

Should "scent art"--perfume, that is--be critically considered alongside music and painting? In "Against the Grain," an influential 1884 novel by J.-K. Huysmans, the decadent character Des Esseintes makes a case that it should. "After all, he argued, it was no more abnormal to have an art that consisted of picking out odorous fluids than it was to have other arts based on a selection of sound waves or the impact of variously coloured rays on the retina of the eye."

Like much of what Des Esseintes says in Huysmans's fanciful and wonderful book, his case for perfume is both logical and absurd--an aestheticism taken to an extreme. But he is right to argue that scents should command a more respectful place alongside sights and sounds, with a critical language that includes more than merely "good" and "bad." By appreciating each sense on its own, says Des Esseintes, we better enjoy its harmony with others, "co-ordinating them to compose the whole that constitutes a work of art."

Just like food and wine, perfume has recently enjoyed a renaissance of sorts among latter-day Esseintes-ists. Independent perfumeries create their own blends. Professionals and amateurs write sophisticated perfume blogs. The 2008 book "Perfumes: The A-Z Guide," by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, has become something of an Oxford English Dictionary for scent.

Now add to the mix "The Art of Scent: 1889-2012" at New York's Museum of Arts and Design.

Claiming to be the "first major museum exhibition to recognize scent as a major medium of artistic creation," the show strips perfume of its extensive packaging and advertising and presents it as an "olfactory art" in a purpose-built white-cube gallery. Curated by Chandler Burr and designed by the architectural firm Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, the spare exhibition consists of 12 smelling stations seamlessly cast into the gallery walls, a side room with a table of perfume oils, and mouthlike formations sculpted into another wall that spit out scented cards.

The perfumes on exhibition begin chronologically with Jicky, an 1889 blend by the perfumer Aimé Guerlain--considered the first modern perfume for its use of synthetic aromatics and still in production--and concludes with Daniela Andrier's Untitled (2010, designed for Maison Martin Margiela). Along the way we encounter Ernest Beaux's magisterial Chanel No. 5 (1921), Pierre Wargnye's odious Drakkar Noir (1982, for Guy Laroche), Olivier Cresp's diaphanous Angel (1992, for Thierry Mugler) and Jean-Claude Ellena's Osmanthe Yunnan (2006, for Hermès), a scent that starts with an infusion of tea and finishes with a rinse of dental fluoride.

An exhibition of scent is a fresh idea. Too bad "The Art of Scent" is so fishy. With elaborate stagecraft, it is more interested in making the case for commercial perfume as high art, with the rights and privileges accorded therein, than in revealing the artistry of perfume design. For all the hoopla, the show conveys even less than what you would learn walking through the ground floor of Saks Fifth Avenue—which, unfortunately, might be the point.

The urinal-shaped smelling receptacles abstract perfume to absurdity. Paired with illuminated labels that fade to white the moment you want to read them, this is more a show of prestidigitation than olfaction. For a museum of design, MAD seems oddly contemptuous of the design elements that went into these commercial products. "The Art of Scent" gives only passing reference to perfume chemistry and history. It includes an all-too-narrow survey of well-known brands and ignores the independents. It disregards the packaging and advertising that is integral to what these products become. Until the day we have wall-mounted smelling stations in our homes, perfumes are high-end consumables with elaborate marketing campaigns and exotic packaging—a thriving multibillion-dollar industry--and there shouldn't be anything wrong in acknowledging that.

And therein lies the fallacy of this exhibition. Here, everyone is an "artist." Perfumers are "scent artists." Perfumes are "aesthetically influential works of olfactory art." Miuccia Prada, who in 2004 commissioned the perfumers Carlos Benaïm, Max Gavarry and Clément Gavarry to create Prada Amber, is not a fashion executive but a "patron of the arts."

"The Art of Scent" purports to strip away the commercial side of perfume. Instead, it merely adds another layer of packaging, covering over the existing labels and selling the elixirs as high art. At times these gimmicks are all too apparent. The room with the smelling table includes a museum staffer whose hawking of the fragrances is little different from a department-store floor-walker's. The "catalog" of the exhibition is a "limited edition box set" of fragrances that costs $285, with a text that is more sales pitch than scholarship.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that "The Art of Scent is made possible by The Estée Lauder Companies--a Founding Major Donor--and other Major Donors, including Chanel, Inc., Givaudan, Hermès Parfums, International Flavors & Fragrances Inc, L'Oréal and P&G Prestige. Additional support for The Art of Scent is provided by Funders Arcade Marketing USA and Guerlain, as well as Diptyque and Women in Flavor and Fragrance Commerce Inc." There is nothing wrong with corporate sponsorship, but here the sponsorship seems to have gone to supporting a nonprofit front for Madison Avenue. With "The Art of Scent," the Museum of Arts and Design has left a good idea smelling rank. Des Esseintes would be the first to turn up his nose at that.

Gallery Chronicle (February 2013)

Lois Dodd, Windows, Awning, 1981, oil on panel, 15 x 15 3/4 inches, ©Lois Dodd courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

THE NEW CRITERION
February 2013

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Lois Dodd: Selected Panel Paintings” at Alexandre Gallery, “Paul Resika: 8+8, Eight Paintings from Eight Decades” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, “Paul Resika: 8+8, Eight Recent Paintings” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, “Mario Naves: Recent Paintings” and “Brett Baker: Paintings” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, and “Sharon Butler: Precisionist Casual” at Pocket Utopia. 

Surely the most beguiling artists to emerge from the New York School were those painters who turned to representation. Lois Dodd came of age at the very heart of the 10th Street avant-garde scene. Born in Montclair, New Jersey in 1927, she studied at the Cooper Union in the 1940s. In 1952, she was one of the founding members of the cooperative Tanager Gallery, next door to the 10th Street studio of Willem de Kooning.

Like the Tanager artists Philip Pearlstein and Alex Katz, Dodd lived in the world of Abstract Expressionism but was not of it. She took an abstract feeling for paint and applied it to representing the world around her. For her ninth show at Alexandre Gallery—perhaps her fiftieth show overall—this vision comes across in small landscapes, oil on board, that are uniquely felt.1

In other hands, such likeable vignettes of country life—of gabled roofs, weathered shingles, snow-covered brooks, and wind-blown clothes drying on the line—might be clichéd. Yet Dodd’s paintings go the other direction. They get more singular, less rote, with time. In the way that Giorgio Morandi could give life to natura morta, Dodd takes the feeling, as much as the vision, of her surroundings and preserves it in paint.

Lois Dodd, Tree Shadow on Snow, 1995, oil on panel, 13 x 17 inches, ©Lois Dodd courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

No one captures light, for example, in quite the same way. The honey sweetness of late-afternoon summer sun reflecting on the shingled wall ofView from Corner of Chicken House (small) (ca. 1983) is as present as the flat whites of Snow Covered Outcroppings (1977). Objects and shadows are equally real. In Tree Shadow on Snow (1995), the blue shadows of branches on white snow are tangible. So are the shapes cast by the white dormers inWindows, Awning (1981).

Dodd makes stripped-down paintings of stunning simplicity. She captures the rhythm of nature, such as the branches of Moonlight in Woods(1977), while avoiding artificial pattern. There is no formula in her work, which is undoubtedly a reason art history has largely overlooked her unassuming greatness. Starting in January, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, where she lives, has addressed this injustice by mounting her first career retrospective. At Alexandre, New York offers a stunning preview of the Maine event.

Lois Dodd, Snow Covered Outcroppings, 1977, oil on panel, 15 x 15 3/4 inches, ©Lois Dodd courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

Paul Resika must be the most interesting journeyman of modern painting. Born in New York in 1928, he took up the brush at age nine and began studying with Hans Hofmann at sixteen. After his apprenticeship with this German-born mentor of American abstraction, Resika followed a circuitous route through the history of art. He sought out the classical foundations of art that he saw buried beneath Hofmann’s own abstract constructions. In the 1950s he began traveling to Europe to study the old masters, returning to work with the figurative painters Paul Georges and Fairfield Porter on Long Island. In the 1960s he went to Italy to walk in the footsteps of Corot. In the 1980s he began taking on the light of Provincetown in glistening seascapes. Most recently he has circled back to Hofmann, with paintings that have became increasingly abstract. “I’m with him,” he said of Hofmann in 2000. “I’ve been with him for many years. He’s been in here. I don’t see him anymore, but he’s been here.”

What ties these waypoints together is Resika’s nonconformist sensibility, which he attributes to Hofmann, and a unique sense of touch. One could say a line runs through all of Resika’s work. Just as the Venetian masters did not need to sign their own paintings, since their brushstrokes served as their signatures, Resika has a signature way of handling paint that is entirely his own.

This facility is now on display in two paired exhibitions, both called “8+8.” Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, on the Lower East Side, offers an eight-painting survey that covers each of Resika’s eight decades of work.2Hard to believe such a chronology is possible, but there it is. The show begins with Composition, April ’47, a work of triangular origami, and continues through Three Sails (2009–10), a constructivist abstraction where triangles return as sails floating on an angular sea.

Because of a studio fire in 1971, little of Resika’s early work survives, so what’s assembled here may be surprising. The Visitation (1958) is a moody, Symbolist work of an angel reaching out to a painter sitting outside his shingled studio. The Bridge, Vaucluse (1967) is a Barbizon landscape. Self-Portrait (1974) offers up the artist as an intense neo-Romantic, complete with beard, beret, and scarf. Provincetown Pier (Blue) (1988) and Bright Night (1996), both port scenes, show Resika’s increasing fluidity, with a light that shimmers off the dock houses and boat topsides. In Dream of Jack’s Island (2006), my favorite of the show, not a curve or dash seems out of place. Resika’s signature is the sheer calligraphy of his brush.

For a survey of Resika’s most recent work, eight examples are now on view at Lori Bookstein in Chelsea.3 Turning from the sea, Resika now focuses on the geometry of the pond. Lily pads offer up a particularly intriguing shape, and Resika makes the most of it. Sometimes he abstracts them into notched circles (Pond #9, 2010). Other times they are more illusionistic, dissolving into sun-drenched reflections (Blaze, 2010–12). It is hard not to think of late Monet when seeing these works. The exhibition includes one monumental canvas, Pond Galaxy (2010), nine feet across, that doesn’t hurt the association. Here so much of art history seems to rise to the surface in circles of color. This includes Resika’s own colorful legacy, joyfully circling back on itself.

Paul Resika, Pond Galaxy, 2010,  Oil on canvas,  60 x 108 inches

Elizabeth Harris Gallery now features two painters who are also writers on art—Mario Naves, a longtime contributor to The New Criterion and other publications, and Brett Baker, the founder of the art blog “Painters’ Table.”4 Writing on art can be a humbling experience. This is especially true for those writers who are artists themselves, who can be either enfeebled or enabled by their understanding of the work around them. Fortunately for Naves and Baker, the writing experience seems to have empowered the art.

This is not to suggest studio developments should be attributed to writing alone. Yet an intelligence runs through each of their paintings that speaks to an informed self-criticism. Both artists have dispensed with the decorative qualities of earlier work and distilled things down to essentials, with results that are refined and potent.

After two decades of working in abstract collage, Naves has returned to paint in this latest show. The results are haunting. Layers of paper give way to geometric shapes seemingly folded in acrylic on panel. Often the compositions resemble collage in silhouette. Through the flatness of the acrylic, the shapes variously convey depth and redaction. The white center of The Doubtful Suitor (2012) represents both the absence of form and a covering over of what’s beneath. The best work is the simplest, with each shape whispering to the next. With a wave of blue, the possibility of perspective, the hints of underpainting, and a red circle balancing on top,Louder than God (2011) is for me the most stripped-down and haunting of all.

Mario Naves, The Doubtful Suitor, 2012, acrylic and oil on canvas on wood, 24 x 30.25 inches and Louder than God, 2011, acrylic and oil on canvas on wood, 12 x 16 inches

Baker has recently taken his large canvases of vertical dashes and shrunk them down, sometimes way down, into obsessive devotional objects. The dates on these small paintings often span several years. While Naves goes deep, Baker’s paintings boil their mysteries on the surface. The rough paintings show years of accretion, as one stripe of oil is added to the next. The work might call to mind The Rose (1958–66), the 2,300 pound canvas by Jay deFeo, a work into which, as Baker recently wrote on “Painters’ Table,” “she poured her entire vision and energy” over an eight-year period. Baker’s compositions have a similarly compulsive, outsider-artist intensity, with all their self-defeating labor, especially in the smallest canvases. Just consider that Axel’s Forest IV (2010–12), at five by three inches, took two years to complete. The effort is plain to see, even if we cannot imagine why it was done.

Brett Baker, Little Novel, 2009-2011, oil on canvas, 5 x 4 inches

Sharon Butler might best be known for “Two Coats of Paint,” the influential painters’ blog she founded in 2007 that has become its own cottage industry. Writing for this and other venues, including The Brooklyn Rail, Butler is one of our more observant painting critics. In June 2011, she wrote an essay for the Rail identifying a trend in abstraction she called “the new casualism.” Looking at Martin Bromirski and Amy Feldman, among others, Butler saw abstract painters “saying goodbye to all that didactic thinking and exuding a kind of calculated tentativeness.” They employed “old tropes and methods with a certain insouciant abandon” in work defined by “abrupt shifts” and “crosscurrents.”

Sharon Butler, Egress, 2013 Pigment and silica binder, staples on laundered linen 12 x 12 inches

In “Precisionist Casual,” her first show at Pocket Utopia, it is impossible not to see these ideas incorporated into her own work.5 Butler matches the “precision” of hard-edged lines, usually masked with tape, with a more casual approach to form and function. By function, I mean her use of stretched canvas, which she deconstructs in various ways. In Egress (2013)—the recent dates themselves convey a casual freshness—laundered linen, painted with a few stacked squares of brown and white, is stapled to the front of a wooden stretcher. Metal tacks, frayed edges, and bits of wooden support are all out in the open. Soaked (Hurricane) (2013) wraps the tarp around the stretcher but leaves the corner folds untucked. The linen tarp ofUnderpainted HVAC (2013)—where tape has traced the outlines of some structure in gesso, metallic pigment, and binder—exudes an un-ironed wrinkledness.

I mention these examples first, because, while I appreciate the experimentation that went into them, the unorthodox stretching seems too intellectualized to be truly casual. Pre-distressed, stone-washed—the look resembles an expensive pair of jeans, a business casual that is more studied than insouciant. Matched with, at times, an overabundance of formal doodads, these paintings have two too many things happening in them.

Sharon Butler, Pink Unit, 2013 Oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches and Blue Unit, 2013 Oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches

Which is why, in those examples where Butler does a little less, her paintings do much more. The three examples of oil on canvas at Pocket Utopia, all stretched in a normal way, were standouts. Pink Unit (2013) is little more than an irregular polygon on a white ground, but the shape is evocative, with hints of volume and shadow. So too with Blue Unit (2013), where a tripod-like shape is masked out from a white ground, revealing the underpainting beneath. Here is a perfectly strange painting that is both casually precise and precisely casual.

1 “Lois Dodd: Selected Panel Paintings” opened at Alexandre Gallery, New York, on January 10 and remains on view through February 16, 2013.

2 “Paul Resika: 8+8, Eight Paintings from Eight Decades” opened at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, on January 6 and remains on view through February 10, 2013.

3 “Paul Resika: 8+8, Eight Recent Paintings” opened at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, on January 10 and remains on view through February 9, 2013.

4 “Mario Naves: Recent Paintings” and “Brett Baker: Paintings” opened at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on January 4 and remain on view through February 2, 2013.

5 “Sharon Butler: Precisionist Casual” opened at Pocket Utopia, New York, on January 6 and remains on view through February 17, 2013.