Gallery Chronicle (January 2016)

The Joan of Arc Memorial in Riverside Park today. via

THE NEW CRITERION
January 2016

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On the Joan of Arc Memorial in Riverside Park.

Early last month, New Yorkers had a new opportunity to revisit an old monument. On December 6, the Joan of Arc Memorial, on Ninety-third Street and Riverside Drive, turned 100 years old. As you might expect, the occasion did not make national news. We live in a time increasingly overwhelmed by the present moment, suspicious if not outright hostile to the symbols of history. This birthday for a monument of bronze and stone, unmoved by current fashion, could have gone completely unnoticed. But three days earlier, an assembly of local grandees, historians, and neighbors (of which I am one) came together in the park’s sculpture precinct to honor the centenary with remarks and the laying of a ceremonial wreath, just as had been done a century ago at the dedication. The celebration brought worthy attention to this moving statue and its remarkable creator, the sculptor Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (1876–1973)—as well as to the volunteers and organizations that quietly care for the work and the surrounding park, in particular the Riverside Park Conservancy and the tenders who volunteer their weekends to maintain the area. The ceremony also welcomed France’s Consul General to the site just three weeks after the terrorist attacks in Paris, giving the event a tragic poignancy. Against the news of the world, the occasion offered a chance to reflect on the art and architecture of historical monuments that stand increasingly in defiance of the dictates of the present moment, and what the future may hold for these reminders of the past.

Like all of the thousand-plus historical monuments in New York City parks, which include some three hundred major works in what is one of the world’s most impressive and unsung public galleries, the Joan of Arc Memorial has had its own unique and now largely forgotten past.

On the eve of the First World War, a public-minded organization calling itself the Joan of Arc Sculpture Committee in the City of New York, led by the philanthropist J. Sanford Saltus and the mineralogist George Frederick Kunz, set about honoring the Franco-American alliance and America’s oldest ally by commissioning a monument to the Maid of Orléans, the quincentenary of whose birth was celebrated on January 6, 1912. The site selected was a rise along what is now known as Joan of Arc island, one of the slivers of green space delineated in Frederick Law Olmsted’s original 1875 park plan by the separation of Riverside Drive and the residential access road to the east.

At the time, the City Beautiful movement was transforming the development of Riverside Park into a promenade of monuments and memorials. Even without a master plan for the sites, Olmsted’s elevated and winding Riverside Drive, which broke from the 1811 street grid to follow the contours of the Hudson highlands, was ideally suited for such monumental works, with sloping sightlines that were framed by the Hudson River on one side and the grand residences and apartment buildings on the other. Then as now, most prominent, at West 122nd Street, is the General Grant National Memorial, the 1897 tomb modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides (as well as inspiration for the riddle of who is buried therein). The 1902 Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument at West Eighty-ninth Street, modeled after the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, serves as a southern bookend to Grant’s Tomb (for which it is often confused). Joan of Arc is one of the half-dozen major monuments located on the heights of the drive between the two, an assembly that also includes the Firemen’s Memorial and monuments to Samuel J. Tilden, Louis Kossuth, and Franz Sigel.

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington. via

According to Anne Higonnet, a professor of art history at Barnard College who mounted an exhibition of Huntington’s art two years ago, the selection of this unknown female sculptor for the memorial was as radical as her female subject matter. Huntington’s father, Alpheus Hyatt, was an animal scientist, a professor of zoology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University. Inspired by the community of naturalists that surrounded her childhood upbringing in Cambridge, Huntington launched her artistic career at the turn of the century as an animal sculptor, in particular an equine sculptor, producing tiny works on commission. In New York, she passed through the Arts Students League and the studio of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, while creating studies on site at the Bronx Zoo. She then moved to Paris and dedicated herself in 1909 to the subject of Joan of Arc, the French hero and martyr of the Hundred Years’ War, who was beatified that year.

Gathering a ton of clay in a Paris studio, Huntington worked for four months nonstop. She applied her zoological expertise to the mass and flesh of Joan’s horse, which she modeled on a heavy Percheron used for wagon deliveries, lent to Huntington by the stable of the Magasin du Louvre. Huntington imagined Joan riding a workhorse that, even at rest, bristles with muscles and vascularity, standing with a front leg raised over an impressionistic ground of licked abstract form.

For the figure of Joan, little is known of the historical teenager, so Huntington drew on more current literary accounts, such as the work of the French romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine and Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, published in 1896 under the pseudonym Sieur Louis de Conte. Huntington chose to emphasize Joan’s spiritual devotion, which infused her personality even during her military campaigns. “It was only her mental attitude, her religious fervor,” Huntington explained, “that enabled her to endure so much physically, to march three or four days with almost no sleep, to withstand cold and rain. That is how I thought of her and tried to model her.”

Huntington's plaster cast of Joan of Arc (ca. 1910). via

Huntington placed Joan on her horse rising out of her stirrups, holding her sword skyward in divine revelation. To gather the historical accuracy of Joan’s armor, Huntington says she consulted Dr. Bashford Dean, the Metropolitan Museum’s expert on arms and armor. (Or perhaps not: Higonnet believes her research may have uncovered evidence to the contrary, since the armor was designed before Huntington’s return from Paris to New York. The rivets and articulation of Joan’s armor may have come out of Huntington’s imagination as much as the Met’s permanent collection.)

When she submitted the plaster cast of her clay model to the Paris Salon of 1910, the jurors at first refused to believe a women had completed the sculpture on her own. Yet one of the reasons Huntington had refused visitors to her studio was to convince the Salon that she had, in fact, made the work herself, and she eventually received the Jury’s prestigious Honorable Mention.

The 1915 dedication of the memorial to Joan of Arc. via

When the Joan of Arc Statue Committee considered models for their monument two years later, they selected Huntington’s—meaning that New York’s first public statue of a historical woman was also created by a woman. Over the next three years, Huntington reworked her Paris Salon model up to one-and-a-quarter life size. The architect John Van Pelt landscaped the elevated site on Riverside Drive and designed the statue’s gothic pedestal. Stones taken from Joan’s cell at Rouen, as well as a fragment of a pilaster from the Cathedral at Reims, where Charles VII was crowned, were worked into Van Pelt’s design. Symbolically, the figure of Joan rises out of her prison while building the foundation for the coronation of the French king.

After it was unveiled on December 6, 1915, amid a crowd of thousands lining Riverside Drive, the statue of Joan made Huntington’s artistic reputation. Replicas of the statue were subsequently created: for Blois, France; Gloucester, Massachusetts; San Francisco, California; and Quebec, Canada. In 1922 Huntington was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. A year later, she married the great cultural philanthropist Archer Huntington, leading to her Spanish equestrian sculptures—the freestanding knight El Cid and bas-reliefs of Don Quixote and Boabdil—that now adorn Huntington’s Hispanic Society and his cultural campus of Audubon Terrace at 155th Street and Broadway. An interest in more recent Hispanic history also led to Huntington’s final major work, the equestrian statue of the Cuban nationalist José Martí on Central Park South, which she created at age eighty-two and dedicated in 1965.

Joan of Arc in Riverside Park soon after dedication. via

The present is not necessarily kind to the monumental past represented by the aspirations of this memorial to Joan of Arc. As the public’s interest in the city’s classical art and architecture has waxed and waned, the importance of this statue, as well as the sculptor behind it, has been eclipsed. Today a campaign for preservation and upkeep, represented by the great civic associations such as New York’s conservancies that have brought parks back from the brink, must still make a case against the tide of “the new” and more pressing political distractions. While the Grand Marnier Foundation supported a major restoration of the Joan of Arc statue in 1987, for example, the sculpture’s grounds remain overgrown, with pavement in need of repair.

More generally, such monuments also face an existential threat. It is is doubtful that a similar monument could be built today, since little agreement could be reached over its design or its meaning. Just look to the drawn-out catastrophe of Frank Gehry’s postmodernist memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, proposed for the National Mall. Joan of Arc is now a polarizing historical figure in France, adopted as a symbol by nationalists, and shunned by the internationalist Left.

The specter of worldwide vandalism brought about by the iconoclastic fever of political Islam is one that I documented in “The Vengeance of the Vandals,” my essay for these pages last month. A similar impulse, acted upon to lesser degrees, infuses much of contemporary political culture. In New York, an alarming precedent was set in 1955, when Charles Albert Lopez’s statue Mohammed was removed from the pantheon of lawgivers on James Brown Lord’s 1899 Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State, another City Beautiful design, on Madison Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street, after protests from Muslim nations.

For those who see history as a series of injustices, monuments now represent the embodiment of those grievances. When public works lose their didactic function, contemporary culture, seeing little value in their historical or artistic importance, abandons or destroys them. For this very reason, George Washington regretted the destruction of the leaden statue of George III, pulled down by a mob from its pedestal on Bowling Green in lower Manhattan at the start of the Revolutionary War. From the Buddhas of Bamiyan to statues of John C. Calhoun, monuments today must justify their continued existence. Even when a new and worthy monument is proposed, the pitch today is based not on the merits of the subject matter but on the injustices of what already exists. A worthy proposal, for example, to build a monument to women’s suffrage featuring Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at Central Park West and Seventy-seventh Street has largely been based on mocking and attacking the “bronze patriarchy” of the Park’s existing statues, embodied by its acerbic URL, centralparkwherearethewomen.org. NYC Parks Commissioner Mitchell J. Silver has spoken in support of the proposal for similar, politicized reasons, claiming the mayor’s “administration is fully committed to promoting gender equity across New York City—and that includes our parks.”

Given this commitment to equity, even over our park’s historical statuary, the Joan of Arc Memorial may avoid being burnt at the stake of political dictates longer than others. But what happens if an atheist takes offence at the saintly Joan, or an Englishman finds grievance in her jingoistic French militarism? Not even Joan of Arc faced an adversary as fierce as our censorious contemporary culture.

In the Fishbowl: "Print is Forever"

JAMES PANERO, DIANE CLEHANE AND LISA LINDEN

James writes:

Heads turned at Michael's yesterday as I sat down with Diane Clehane of AdWeek's "FishbowlNY" and Lisa Linden to explain why print is here to stay. Diane writes:

I was joined today by James Panero, executive editor of The New Criterion. Our mutual friend, Lisa Linden, CEO of LAK PR, arranged our get-together. James and his wife, poet Dara Mandle  author of the new book, Tobacco Hour, live in the same storied building that Lisa calls home. When she suggested I meet James, she described him as “fabulous, fascinating … a quintessential New York star.” I wasn’t disappointed...

“We haven’t changed the look of the magazine in 34 years and it’s helped us,” James told me. “We haven’t had to do a redesign, we got it right the first time."

Here is Diane's full account of our print-power luncheon. 

Gallery Chronicle (November 2015)

Philip Taaffe, Ophiuran, Prismatic (2014), Mixed media on canvas, 76 1/2 x 70 inches. © Philip Taaffe; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. From "Painting Is Not Doomed To Repeat Itself."

THE NEW CRITERION
November 2015

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Painting Is Not Doomed To Repeat Itself” at Hollis Taggart Galleries; “Checkered History: The Grid in Art & Life” at Outpost Artists Resources; “Tempos: Selected Works by Elizabeth Gourlay, 2013–2015” at Fox Gallery NYC; “Diphthong” at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center; “Todd Bienvenu: Exile on Bogart Street” at Life on Mars; “Occo Socko!” at Stout Projects.

There may be no better indication of the health of contemporary painting than declarations of painting’s demise. “From today, painting is dead!” Every recent generation of art has faced such a prophecy. The painter Paul Delaroche gets credit for the original observation, attributed way back to 1839, the year that Daguerre first introduced his method of photographic duplication. In fact, it is this very rise of new reproduction technologies that tends to occasion painting’s supposed doom. After all, painting was itself at one time its own advanced reproduction technology, projecting the outside world onto the caves of Lascaux, receiving regular updates and tech support through the Renaissance with the development of oils and the portable canvas. So one might assume that the eventual arrival of even more advanced means of visual reproduction, whether it be the photograph or the television or the computer, would finally eclipse the need for trained specialists to simulate sight by spreading toxic liquids around a prepared surface. Painting either should or must give way to the new media of the times.

As it turns out, painting has shown remarkable resilience despite, or just as likely because of, the assumptions of its irrelevance. Perhaps the greatest boon to painting has been the notion of the quote-unquote “death of painting,” or at the very least an indication of its ongoing presence. Our own generation’s digital landscape has not driven artists away from paint. Instead we have seen a new flourishing of paint in the studios and galleries as artists have explored its modes of analog expression, whether as a form of revived older media, or as a way of transcending the limits of digital reproduction, or as a means of drawing some connection between the two, or because of some other motivation entirely.

Surprisingly, for some observers, painting’s continuing importance has still not spelled the death of the “death of painting.” Just the other week, Holland Cotter, a critic for The New York Times, bemoaned the recent “hype around painting, specifically abstraction, that has encouraged the equivalent of a fancy airport art for newly rich collectors.” For him, the only form of painting that still deserves attention “goes beyond a fixation on form to focus on ideas that tie art and artists to life.”

A year ago, the Museum of Modern Art came to a different but similarly narrow conclusion. In its first survey show of contemporary painting in years, called “The Forever Now: Contemporary Art in an Atemporal World,” MOMA focused exclusively on work that was turned in on itself—painting about the history of painting, or, even more likely, painting about the “death of painting.” As the critic John Yau observed, “by exhibition curator Laura Hoptman’s standards, the only choices open to a painter are copying, sampling, or being reductive.”

This past month at Hollis Taggart Galleries, Yau was the curator of his own exhibition meant as an answer to MOMA. The title said it all: “Painting Is Not Doomed To Repeat Itself.”1

Drawing on work that Yau hoped “testifies to painting’s resiliency, its ability to morph into something fresh and engaging,” the exhibition showed the wide range of painting being done today. While the work on view may have had “little in common,” as he claimed, Yau nevertheless focused on artists who “resist style and branding.” As Yau wrote in his catalogue essay, the artists in his selection make “uncategorizable hybrid objects. They work in oil, acrylic, and ink. They use brushes, spray cans, and silkscreens. They work on traditional stretched canvas, shaped canvas, multiple panels, and wood that has been cut up into blocks. They span everything from trompe l’oeil to abstraction, from image to language.”

Daniel Douke (b. 1943), Wanted (2014), Acrylic on canvas, 38 (H) x 20 (W) x 14 (D) inches. ©2015 Philipp Scholz Rittermann. From "Painting Is Not Doomed To Repeat Itself."

The sculptural paintings of Daniel Douke were a standout, or at the very least a remarkable demonstration of how far painting could go beyond what we think of as “painting.” Taking trompe l’oeil into the third dimension, Douke shapes his canvas into an astonishing verisimilitude of everyday objects but leaves one side open, so you can see the canvas, staples, and stretchers that make them up. There is no other way you could tell that Wanted (2014) is anything other than a galvanized steel street vent covered in graffiti and stickers. Or that Folding Table (2008) is an intricately hand-sculpted painting and not just another white molded plastic picnic table.

Much of the other work here was similarly hyper-expressed. Brenda Goodman tapped into paint’s hyperemotional pull through thick daubs of color; Catherine Murphy painted hyperrealistic images of cushions and reflections of furniture; Joshua Marsh amplified his colors and forms into a cross between Peter Saul and spray art; Philip Taaffe continued to explore his mastery of paint-based reproduction techniques that can range from stamps to stencils, silkscreens to paper marbling.

While demonstrating painting’s continued potential, the exhibition also approached visual incoherence. I wonder if such a show in fact comes out of an equal fallacy to “painting is dead.” Is it just as much of a rhetorical trap to exclaim that “painting is NOT dead”? Even if true, I worry that its declaration may be another side of a false argument, here overly broadening rather than narrowing our field of observation while flattening our perspective of painting from a process into a point. Painting is not “dead.” Nor is it flamboyantly “alive.” Painting just “is,” in infinite variety.

Cathy Nan Quinlan, The Laws of Attraction, Oil on canvas 24x24” 2010. From "Checkered History."

Last month the small non-profit Outpost Artists Resources, located in a row house in Ridgewood, Queens, continued its run of exceptional programming with a group exhibition called “Checkered History: The Grid in Art & Life.”2 Here sixty contemporary artists, many of them painters, used the grid to structure their compositions. Even as these artists came to the grid through a wide variety of means and for a wide variety of purposes, the show made visual sense. Assembled by David Weinstein and Ruth Kahn, who describe themselves as “curators, organizers, producers, and sheetrockers,” the exhibition also seemed to tease out some interesting conclusions.

The grid is a digital-like format that cuts against the analog mode of paint, which more easily lends itself to free forms than straight lines. The grid is the basis of classical perspective. To our contemporary eye the grid also references mechanical modes of reproduction, whether it be the moiré flicker of a television screen we might see in the work of Cathy Nan Quinlan or Rob de Oude, or the patterned designs of Robert Otto Epstein and Meg Atkinson that call to mind both machine-made textiles and low-resolution computer games. Here this final connection was made even more explicit through a video piece by Cory Arcangel of a hacked version of the Mario Bros. Nintendo game and textile computer chips by Crystal Gregory.

Elizabeth Gourlay tarang (2015), graphite, flashe and collage on canvas, 48 x 48" At Fox Gallery NYC.

“Tempos: Selected Works by Elizabeth Gourlay, 2013–2015” at Fox Gallery NYC is another exhibition that sees the grid bringing structure to paint.3 I wrote about Fox Gallery in this space last January to praise the patterned paintings of Claire Seidl and Kim Uchiyama. I also wanted to draw attention to the pleasures of seeing a gallery exhibition in a domestic space—here, in the apartment of a gorgeous (and recently cleaned) terracotta pre-war building by Blum & Blum. Just last month Gourlay appeared in the flat files of the exhibition at Odetta Gallery on “seeing sound.” For Gourlay the painterly sound is rhythmic. She mutes her colors of melody to emphasize the syncopation of her forms. In her large square canvases, often named after instruments, she she uses collage to layer horizontal strips of paper that have been tinted along their edges, then adds additional squares of paint like regular punctuations. In other examples she stacks her square blocks of color. In others she plucks an edge into a triangle. The overall results are quiet and harmonic, like an ensemble of world music in otherworldly form, here arranged in sublime surroundings.

Rosemarie Fiore, an artist in "Diphthong," creating a Firework Drawing. 

“Diphthong” is yet another exhibition that relates to artists who appeared here last month: both Gelah Penn, part of “seeing sound” at Odetta, and Stephen Maine at Hionas Gallery.34 At the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, a block north of Ground Zero, Penn and Maine are the co-curators of this group exhibition of seventeen artists working in “process-based abstraction.” Coming out of the post-Minimalist movement of the 1970s, the idea of “process” art is that the means of fabrication become a subject of the art’s completion. In practice, and as revealed through the range of materials and forms in this exhibition, process artists employ unorthodox modes of production to reach unusual conclusions. For example, there is the evocative imagery that can result from Maine’s own process of stamping carpet textures onto canvas; or the “acrylic, stains, and spray paint on wood panel” by Jaq Chartier that somehow come to resemble photographic emulsion; or the acrylics on canvas by Thomas Pihl of subtly gradated color that seem like translucent screens of light. At its best, letting the process take over the project removes the intentions of design and lets more distant visions come through. At the same time, I want to know how this work is made, and I wouldn’t mind some additional transparency. Process artists are known to be resistant to explanation, but what might be lost in mystery would be more than gained in understanding.

Todd Bienvenu, Exile on Bogart Street (2015), Oil on canvas, 76 by 67 inches. At Life on Mars Gallery.

This month two Bushwick-area galleries serve as bookends to the story of paint in the contemporary scene. Through different styles, both demonstrate how today’s overriding sense for paint is one of joyous affection. Against the ash heaps of our digital world, the boldness of paint, its colors and its textures, gets fully embraced.

At Life on Mars, Todd Bienvenu indulges in the paint-heavy brush to create cartoonish fantasies of our prosaic environment.45 In some cases this can be a trash can filled with flowers, or sneakers hanging from lampposts. It also looks back to childhood fantasies: an epic-sized treehouse, women by the pool, or ringside at a professional wrestling match, with garish colors and bulky modeling that recall sixteen-bit video games.

Rebecca Murtaugh (2015) Aperture: Tempo Teal and Gladiolus, reclaimed house paint, wood and mixed media, 10 x 10 x 4 inches. At Stout Projects.

Nearby at the new Stout Projects, the abstract painters Paul Behnke and Matthew Neil Gehring layer pools of painted color (Behnke) and gestural strokes (something new for Gehring).6 At Stout this fun is foregrounded by the work of Rebecca Murtaugh. Working halfway between a painted sculpture and a sculptural painting, Murtaugh shapes “reclaimed house paint” into clotted masses that resemble minimalist sculptures covered in riotous growths of medium and pigment. Murtaugh calls these “apertures,” for their ocular forms. For me, I just want to look through, look at, and touch these crazy things, which are head-over-heels valentines to paint.

1 “Painting Is Not Doomed To Repeat Itself” was on view at Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, from September 24 through October 31, 2015.

2 “Checkered History: The Grid in Art & Life” was on view at Outpost Artists Resources, Queens, from October 2 through October 30, 2015.

3 “Tempos: Selected Works by Elizabeth Gourlay, 2013–2015” opened at Fox Gallery NYC on October 13, 2015 and remains on view through February 13, 2016.

4 “Diphthong” opened at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York, on September 29 and remains on view through November 14, 2015.

5 “Todd Bienvenu: Exile on Bogart Street” opened at Life on Mars, Brooklyn, on October 9 and remains on view through November 8, 2015.

6 “Occo Socko!” opened at Stout Projects, Brooklyn, on October 16 and remains on view through November 13, 2015.