An Awful Rainbow

Paul Behnke with d'Artagnan (2013, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 50 in).
All studio photographs by James Panero

CATALOGUE ESSAY

Paul Behnke: An Awful Rainbow
by James Panero

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York.
April 18 through May 18, 2013

Paul Behnke is a painter of layers. He paints less in strokes than in slicks. In the studio he uses spatulas, sticks, brushes, and rags to build up, scrape back, rebuild, dig out, and pull up his acrylics to the point where there is no front or back, top or bottom, figure or ground. His contentious colors conceal as they reveal, add as they subtract, draw as they erase.

Paul Behnke, Blue-Green Bow Street (2013 Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 50 in)

“I like that jostling, jockeying for position. It gives an anxious feeling, a push and pull,” he tells me as we survey his latest work in the studio.

His paintings, all square, act more like descriptions than depictions. They are not horizontal like landscapes or vertical like portraits. They are real things as much as the images of things.

Paul Behnke with A Pink Grotto Near the Bay of Naples (2013, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 50 in)

“I like the square because it isn’t a strong image,” he says. “In my high school I used a large-format camera. I got used to composing in that square. I want them to be like objects and I want them to be non-objective.”

What results are layered objects of sedimentary colors. They mean what they are. They become what we make them. Their final layer is the meaning we apply.

But while their future is open, these paintings have a past. Their layers speak of the processes that made them. Their paint tells of the artist behind them.

“My paintings are very process oriented,” Behnke explains. “I want, whatever happens, for me to react to that. Painting. Scraping down. Just alternating back and forth. I’m trying to achieve a coherent painting in the end, but you can’t think too much while you’re painting. Then I’ll sit down and think about it, about what I want to do next. It’s like solving a puzzle.”

Behnke’s work connects with the studio practices now coming out of the alternative scene of New York’s outer boroughs, where he continues to paint. He has been tapping into the intensifying energy of Bushwick, Brooklyn and Ridgewood, Queens since he first moved here as an artist pioneer in 1999.

Drop a pebble in water and its energy ripples out from the center to the margins. So it has been for New York’s peripheral communities. As artists have been pushed out of Manhattan, once marginal neighborhoods have risen up to become new centers of activity and innovation.

The greatest centers for art have often developed along such margins. Montmartre and Montparnasse, the two neighborhoods that fueled the studios of Paris’s modern masters, were the north and south poles around which that city once spun, tied together by the Nord-Sud Metro line, which opened just after the turn of the last century. A century later, Bushwick has developed as the leading edge of New York eastern momentum, as artists have moved from the East Village to Williamsburg on out through the L line. With cheap rents and expansive spaces, Bushwick has evolved as an artistic center almost entirely apart from mainstream New York, with a culture that has embraced studio experimentation, do-it-yourself independence, and communal interaction.

The view from Behnke's studio

“It was certainly a culture shock for me,” says the Tennessee native of his early days in the neighborhood. “I came up here and it was, like, literally, every night there were cars on fire. There were packs of dogs wandering the streets. We lived in this building on White Street—9 White Street, between the Morgan Stop and Bushwick Avenue—and almost everyone living there was mugged. The first time we came to look at the place, my wife had just come off from her job and was wearing her work clothes, and the driver who drove us to the address looked at us and said, what are you doing here? But it was 1,000 square feet. It was cheap. I was just off from school.”

For influence Behnke says he looks to the German Expressionists, to the Fauves, to Hans Hofmann, to the Neo Expressionists of the 1980s, and to the British abstractionists of the 1960s--John Hoyland, Sandra Blow, Albert Irvin and Roger Hilton, among others.

Paul Behnke, A Kind of Grail (2012, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 50 in)

The old roughness of Bushwick, an industrial landscape now far more gentrified than a decade ago, combines with these influences to give this work its particular feel. Behnke’s use of charged acrylic colors, straight from the jar, quick and provisional, with splatters and runs, reflects the neighborhood’s unsentimental spirit and its embrace of imperfection.

Paul Behnke, Sleepwalker (2012, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 50 in)

“If I need a hammer,” he says, “I would not make one by hand if I already had one in my tool box. I feel the same way about color. The purity and artificiality of the color will inevitably be dulled by mixing. The color will lose its impact. I take what comes to hand and use it in any way that will facilitate spontaneity, intuition, and recklessness.”

Flushing Avenue

His search for edge may be one reason why Behnke has continued to move farther afield. The studio where we meet, north of Bushwick in the warehouse district of Ridgewood, is a solid walk from the closest subway stop and up a windblown corridor of Flushing Avenue. A railroad line cuts through the block. A tributary of Newtown Creek, known as the East Branch, begins a few buildings further on. Now a stagnant, poisonous canal, the East Branch once served as open drainage for the neighborhood’s defunct industry. Fifteen feet of pollutants, popularly known as “black mayonnaise,” have now silted up along the banks.

Paul Behnke, Columbic (2013, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 50 in)

Behnke’s layers of colors reflect the peeling, painted-over, derelict quality of this environment and its walk-up studios. Buried marks appear along the edges of the paintings, between layers, and in the open spaces of the slicks. There is the pink and black behind Fleet and Green, the cursive edges around the squares of Blue-Green Bow Street, the greens in A Pink Grotto Near the Bay of Naples, the unpainted gap in the center of Sleepwalker.

Paul Behnke, Glory of Glories (2013, Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 48 in)

At the same time, the bright colors of Behnke’s palette pick up the sunlight and sky of Bushwick’s open streets. They radiate the post-punk optimism that seems to permeate this community. The title of the show, “An Awful Rainbow,” which comes from a line of Keats’s poem “Lamia,” speaks to this dual position. These paintings have a terrifying beauty.

Behnke is a close observer of the scene around him and engaged in supporting its alternative networks. His blog, Structure and Imagery, offers profiles of local artists and serves as a valuable record of the neighborhood’s studio culture. I have particularly benefited from his photo essays of artists at work. As an important counterpoint to his painting, the blog keeps Behnke’s eyes open and reveals his great sensitivity to the innovations around him.

Paul Behnke, Fleet and Green (2013, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 50 in)

The project goes hand in hand with the boldness of these abstractions. Both demonstrate an artistic energy that is inspirational and inspired. Layers upon layers, layered on layers, the influences come together in the layers of Behnke’s paint.

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Time to Free NY's Museums: The Met Responds

James writes:

Thomas P. Campbell, the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has issued an "important message" responding to the criticism I and others have raised over the ticketing policies at his and other public-private institutions in New York City. The Director's affable but ultimately defensive message tells me the Met has heard the criticism but hasn't listened to it.

Two weeks ago in the New York Daily News, I wrote an editorial titled "It's Time to Free N.Y.'s Museums." Here I argued that "institutions on public land, supported in part by public funds," are designed to serve the public good. According to the Department of Cultural Affairs, this means providing "cultural services accessible to all New Yorkers”--regardless of their ability to pay. "Unfortunately," I wrote, just as "many members of the CIG [an alliance of public-private institutions] have improved their facilities over the years through better administration and aggressive fund-raising, they have also become far less accessible to ordinary people" through confusing ticketing policies designed to extract a greater toll at the turnstile.

The Metropolitan is now party to two lawsuits over the "recommended" language of its tickets, claiming that not all museum-goers understand the nuances of the suggested price. My survey of other NY's public-private institutions reveals that many of them impose even more restrictive and confusing rules at the turnstile.

In his response, Campbell says "our costs—everything from guards to insurance to publications—have increased." The Met plans to defend its admissions policy "vigorously."

The Met is clearly facing a growing crisis over its ticketing policies. The museum therefore could and should be using this opportunity to lead the way towards creating better admissions policies to the city's cultural institutions. At the Met this could mean bigger, better signage--in multiple languages--about the meaning of its "recommended" admissions fees. It could mean a new ad campaign in city neighborhoods about the availability of great art for a penny a subway ride away. Considering the Met draws significant taxpayer support and other benefits from city government--just under $25 million a year in direct city support and passed-through costs such as electricity, according to the report of its CFO--the Met could propose a new initiative to give free access to city residents, which would compel other institutions to do the same.

Instead, the Met has doubled down on its current policy. The reasons are predictable. Campbell is right that his museum needs the turnstile revenue to cover increasing costs. These costs include the salaries of Met employees. As I mentioned to Fred Dicker on "Live from the State Capital" (available at the top of this post), according to the Met's publically available tax returns from 2011, Mr. Campbell earned over $1 million in salary and benefits. At least ten Met employees bring home over half-a-million dollars a year while working (according to their own tax returns, at least) 35 hours a week . Here is a breakdown of those salaries from the museum's 990 tax filing. What if the Met were to post these numbers at their ticket gates?

This need for greater turnstile revenue may be one reason why the museum has turned to mounting critically panned, populist exhibitions such as "Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years." It's also why the Met has brought on a DJ as its new artist in residence and decided to open on Mondays.

But big business can be bad business at a non-profit designed to serve the public good. The ever-increasing demands of what I call the museum-industrial complex was the topic of my essay in The New Criterion a year ago, titled "What's a Museum?"

On the letter of the law, there may indeed be nothing to the Met lawsuits. But that doesn't mean the city's public-private institutions are fully living up to the spirit of their public mandates. When you are earning $1 million a year, indirectly in part through the taxpayer dime, it can be hard to understand the museum goer who can't afford $25 or regret the one who didn't know to pay less. It takes three hours working at minimum wage to earn enough to pay the Met's full "recommended" price. Working 35 hours a week, Tom Campbell earns that same amount every two and a half minutes. 

Throughout their history, the Met and the city's other public-private institutions have benefited from the generosity of New Yorkers. Their admissions policies should be as equally generous in return.

Gallery Chronicle (April 2013)

Thornton Willis; Real Deal, 2012; oil and wood on canvas; 15" x 13" x 2"

UPDATE: Welcome readers from Painters' Table!

 THE NEW CRITERION
April 2013

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Thornton Willis: Steps” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, “Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959” at Gagosian Gallery, “Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966–2013” at the Hunter College/Times Square Gallery, “Judith Braun: May I Draw” at Joe Sheftel Gallery, “Paul D’Agostino: Twilit Ensembles” at Pocket Utopia, and “Joe Zucker: Empire Descending a Staircase” at Mary Boone Gallery.

Late into dinner with some art teachers a few weeks back, I impressed on them the urgency of what they do. Our conversation passed at a Twitteresque 140-character rate through much of what I’ve been thinking about recently, from the history of the Internet to the independent networks of New York’s outer-borough art scene. We talked about walking across the barren landscape of Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, that pile of sand that might one day be a strip of museum franchises, and discussed the potential of massive open online courses—better known as MOOCs—to alter the landscape of education. One of the teachers described his interest in the microscopic views offered by the “gigapixel” images on Google Art Project and what it means to see in this new and unintended way.

What keeps coming up for me is how quickly our landscape is shifting and what a challenge it is to keep up. The only certainty of the next few decades is that they will be nothing like the previous ones. As I leveled with the teachers at the end of our evening, it falls to their students to make sense of it all. Maybe it sounded a bit much, but I meant it. Artists have a power to illuminate what otherwise can’t be seen.

Since I started following his work several years ago, Thornton Willis is an artist who has opened my eyes to the continued possibilities of paint as a means of illustrating the invisible. As an abstract painter, he is about as concrete as it gets. His simple designs of elemental shapes and bold colors become groundbreaking explorations, especially for the many artists who admire him. Willis is a painter’s painter, and if more people were to value visionaries over noisemakers, he certainly would be a household name. Until then, we should consider ourselves fortunate, because at least we can know his work.

Willis’s latest exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery may be his most focused to date.1 The son of an itinerant minister from the Deep South, Willis has followed his own artistic calling since first arriving in SoHo in the 1960s. His paintings combine geometry and an instinct to look closely at the particles of paint. Now in his current show, his large compositions have reached a new order of magnification, with shapes that are sharper and bolder than ever before. Willis is an artist who has long evinced an interest in physics and scientific research. These latest paintings are like his own Higgs boson breakthrough, revealing for the first time new building blocks of elementary forms.

Thornton Willis; The Ceremony, 2013; oil on canvas; 72" x 60"

Willis breaks his shapes apart into free-floating zags and els. Drawing on his canvases from the 1970s, he creates an ambiguity between figure and ground, often by layering high-key complementary colors that give his paintings a radiant energy. The Ceremony (2013) resembles red lightning stepped across a black ground. The pencil marks inside also dematerialize the red forms, pulling the thick black forward.

Willis brings a master’s hand to paint on canvas. He first maps out his shapes in thin acrylics. He then fills in with his own blend of oil and medium. This extra layer adds a shimmer to the forms and often leaves traces of his brushstrokes in the paint that seem wet and fresh but never greasy.

The latest show also includes wall assemblages made of layered strips of painted wood. After seeing these tough little sculptures in the studio, I am glad Willis decided to display them in the show. They bring his structures into even greater relief. Here Willis has taken his painterly analysis and synthesized it—abstract vision made real.

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952; Oil and Charcoal on canvas, 86 3/8 x 117 1/4"; Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc., on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. © 2013 Estate of Helen Frankenthaler/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever

When it was revealed last year that John Elderfield would become a consultant to Gagosian, many speculated about the big fish this former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art would pull in for the mega-dealer. The biggest so far has been Helen Frankenthaler, the great abstractionist who died in late 2011. Elderfield’s first Frankenthaler show is now up in Gagosian’s soaring Chelsea gallery.

“Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959” looks at the thrilling first decade of this artist’s career after she graduated from Bennington College, landed in the center of the New York School, and became a leader of its younger generation.2 This period includes the development of her “soak-stain” technique of applying thin oil onto unprimed canvas and the most famous painting of her career, Mountains and Sea (1952).

Helen Frankenthaler, Painted on 21st Street, 1950; Oil, sand, plaster of Paris, and coffee grounds on sized and primed canvas, 69 1/8 x 97"; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Museum purchase. © 2013 Estate of Helen Frankenthaler/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Cathy Carver

Much has been made of the influence of this one painting, which is the center of the Gagosian show (so associated with the National Gallery of Art, this painting in fact is on extended loan to the institution from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation). After seeing it in her studio in 1953, Morris Louis called Mountains and Sea “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.” His visit directly informed what became known as Color Field abstraction in the 1960s.

Cutting against this influence, Elderfield says one purpose of the Gagosian show is to “deemphasize the bridge, and to defend Frankenthaler’s art of the 1950s as its own destination.”

Of course, Elderfield wants to show the influence of the soak-stain on Frankenthaler’s own work. Breaking up the exhibition into two large rooms that roughly divide the decade in half, he singles out the staining years of 1956–1960 as the “four-year sequence of abstract/figurative compositions that constitutes her greatest run of paintings of that decade.”

Helen Frankenthaler, The Jugglers, 1951; Oil and enamel on sized, primed canvas, 51 3/4 x 101"; © 2013 Estate of Helen Frankenthaler/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever

I left with a different thought. One revelation of this show is how experimental and vocal Frankenthaler’s work was in the early part of the decade. “There are no flat rules for getting at the workings of a painting,” she wrote in her journal in the spring of 1950, “but I feel more than ever that the secrets lie in ambiguity: ambiguity that makes a complete final statement in the painting whole.”

Painted on 21st Street (1950), a primed canvas of oil, sand, plaster, and coffee grounds, is a work of swirls and spills that feels like it literally came off the pavement of 21st Street. So too The Jugglers (1951), a flurry of color and forms that was “street art” before there was such a thing. Then there isEd Winston’s Tropical Gardens (1951), a long mural named after a popular nightclub that shows off Frankenthaler’s great smile along with her skill. Against these paintings, Mountains and Sea appears not as the perfection of a formal technique but rather as part of a fast and innovative cycle of production. Its freshness is why it still stands out as her best painting of the decade.

Helen Frankenthaler, Ed Winston's Tropical Gardens, 1951; Oil, enamel, and pencil on paper, mounted on board, 37 1/4 x 191"; © 2013 Estate of Helen Frankenthaler/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever

By the second part of the decade, just as the stain allowed her pigments to soak into the canvas, so too did Frankenthaler’s voice get subsumed in the work. In the 1960s this fact revealed itself in brilliant canvases that wholly speak for themselves. In the late 1950s, at Gagosian at least, that voice often comes across as trapped halfway between the artist and the canvas soaking it in.

2659: III-Walk Through, 1970 (recreated 2013). Cast acrylic sheets, each 4 x 8 ft. (21.9 x 243.8 cm); 8 x 22 x 26 ft. (243 x 670.6 x 792.5 cm) installed; photo by Louis Chan

The Times Square Gallery of Hunter College occupies the first floor of a doomed loft building in the chthonic depths of midtown. A final exhibition before the building is demolished reminds us why we’ll miss it. Sanford Wurmfeld was the Hunter professor most involved in creating this labyrinthine exhibition hall. It’s only appropriate that the final show is dedicated to him. Organized by William C. Agee and five students from thema and mfa programs at Hunter, “Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966–2013” will certainly be the last to reveal in all its size and fullness the legacy of color painting that was once at the heart of this program.3

“Color Visions” shows Wurmfeld to be far more than an optical painter, however much his rainbow gingham patterns might exercise the optic nerve. The standouts are those works that depart from the flat canvas. His colored columns from the late 1960s are mesmerizing crystals that bend in light. His “walk through” sculpture of translucent acrylic sheets from 1970 comes with its own warning—“sculpture may cause disorientation”—that should be taken seriously for the way its colored panels react when viewed together. Near the end of the show, Wurmfeld’s small watercolors of triangles and squares are intimate handmade gestures referencing early color-theory illustrations. Then there is the model of his “Cyclorama,” from 2009, a walk-in space that takes the nineteenth-century panorama into the twenty-first and the age of pure color.

"Judith Braun: May I Draw"; Installation View, South Wall

Two exhibitions on the Lower East Side show this alternative arts neighborhood at its best. For “May I Draw,” Judith Braun calls herself a “quantum amplifier” and limits her drawings with three requirements: “symmetry, abstraction, and carbon medium.”4 The results are swirling mandalas and radiant waves of graphite on paper. By imposing limitations, artists focus their work. With a visual mind and a steady hand, Braun best channels her results in the denser, blocked-in drawings with black backgrounds. She also captures the organic nature of symmetry in pointillist, spherical shapes that resemble luminescent deep-sea creatures. In a few examples, the exhibition hints at Braun’s most recent rule—to draw entirely with her fingers. Last year at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia (and currently in the "Graphite" show at the Indianapolis Museum of Art) Braun created a mural landscape of fingerprints that brought to mind the animism of Charles Burchfield and revealed the flowering energy grounding all of her work.

Paul D’Agostino, Floor Translations 2: The Legendary Fish Monster, 2013, sequence of five serialized drawings

Paul D’Agostino is the Renaissance Man of Bushwick. Since 2008 he has run Centotto, one of the neighborhood’s more unusual galleries, out of his apartment. A Professor of Italian at Brooklyn College, D’Agostino is a translator of both language and art. For “Twilit Ensembles” at Pocket Utopia, D’Agostino creates “floor translations” by recasting paint stains found in his studio into fanciful narratives of graphite on paper and sculptures.5 D’Agostino’s strength is a conceptual one. Compared to the earlier work in the exhibition—which packs too much in a tiny space—this latest series shows the humorous side of D’Agostino’s mind. I was not entirely taken by the execution of the drawings, which seemed unnecessarily crude, but I like the way his work is unfolding.

Joe Zucker, Mughal Empire, 2012; 48 x 48” watercolor/gypsum, plywood; © Joe Zucker; Courtesy: Mary Boone Gallery, NY

Joe Zucker is the thinking-man’s painter, or perhaps the painting-man’s thinker. For “Empire Descending a Staircase,” his latest exhibition at Mary Boone, Zucker’s vision combines the appearance of antique iconography with mosaic tilework, all created out of watercolor applied to carved gypsum board.6

This is the second show at Boone to display Zucker’s labor-intensive technique, in which he hand-scores gypsum drywall into a grid, peels off the paper front, and colors the squares of powdery gypsum one by one. This time the images are flatter and almost entirely monochromatic, with less illusion of depth, and they work even better than before. The images of shaking columns now seem to speak less to a ruined scene and more to a ruined vision. The exhibition includes both square and tall, narrow works that are themselves columns seeming to hold up the gallery space. Whether he’s depicting shaking ground or altered vision, Zucker sees ahead by looking back, or maybe the other way around.

1 “Thornton Willis: Steps” opened at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on March 14 and remains on view through April 13, 2013.

2 “Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959” opened at Gagosian Gallery, New York, on March 8 and remains on view through April 13, 2013.

3 “Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966–2013” opened at the Hunter College/Times Square Gallery, New York, on February 15 and remains on view through April 20, 2013.

4 “Judith Braun: May I Draw” opened at Joe Sheftel Gallery, New York, on March 3 and remains on view through April 21, 2013.

5 “Paul D’Agostino: Twilit Ensembles” opened at Pocket Utopia, New York, on March 3 and remains on view through April 21, 2013.

6 “Joe Zucker: Empire Descending a Staircase” opened at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, on March 1 and remains on view through April 27, 2013.