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.

A Hard Nut to Crack

If you are looking for the perfect Christmas album, cue up (or queue up) The Nutcracker Suite by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. This 1960 version arranged by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn adds new energy to old Pete Tchaikovsky’s holiday classic. When Ellington was in the studio, he explained to Columbia Records that “I thought Tchaikovsky to Strayhorn to Ellington might be a pretty good parlay.” Starting this week at The Joyce Theater, and running through January 5, the tap choreographer Michelle Dorrance continues the parlay with the premiere of her own Nutcracker set to Ellington’s recording, an album she says she has been listening to since childhood.

As America’s original dance form—and arguably its most profound—tap is the synthesis of history in movement, the sound of the melting pot of America boiling over. Its syncopated athleticism alone is thrilling. Just watch the Nicholas Brothers in 1943’s Stormy Weather—a routine shot in one take—to witness what Fred Astaire thought was the best dancing ever filmed.

A white jig reforged in the black diaspora, tap connects us to the antebellum South through minstrelsy, vaudeville, and Hollywood. This fraught past has more than once sent tap through cycles of death and revival. Its great practitioners have therefore been its great revivalists bringing the form to new audiences, from Master Juba to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Peg Leg Bates to Gregory Hines, and Savion Glover to, now, Michelle Dorrance.

While Glover bears the weight of history in his tap, Dorrance dances over its surface through satire. Her routines are Busby Berkeley channeled through Bugs Bunny. A certain ironic detachment may just be the only way a white woman, dancing with a mostly white company, can reach the soul, or sole, of tap.

For her opening week at the Joyce, Dorrance and her company, Dorrance Dance, paired the new Nutcracker with All Good Things Come to an End. This 2018 work set to the music of Fats Waller tells its own history of tap through vaudeville-like routines—all danced, the show lets us know, by the last four people on earth. After sweeping the theater in radioactive gear made of papier-mâché, the tappers perform a cane dance in “Cain and Abel” and shiver-tap down a river raft in “The Myth of the American Dream.” The dancer Josette Wiggan-Freud’s ingenious platform tap, in which a scarf becomes a noose, fuses the history of Jim Crow and Howard “Sandman” Sims together in one harrowing spectacle.

Dorrance approaches her Nutcracker with ironic remove. She riffs on Balanchine as much as Tchaikovsky. She also makes the most of Ellington’s swinging but short recording. The holiday party is transformed into a hopping Lindy. The “Waltz of the Snowflakes” becomes an evocative and silent sand dance. The Sugar Plum Fairy also becomes the Sugar Rum Cherry (as named in Ellington’s recording). Wiggan-Freud and her sequined Sugar Blossoms update the dance from a saccharine treat to an intoxicating tonic. Her brother and dance partner, Joseph Wiggan, fills out an extraordinary Cavalier. Their toe-tapping pas de deux would make Balanchine proud—ballet’s greatest choreographer, after all, once worked with the Nicholas Brothers on Broadway.

And yet, something here seems rushed, especially in the divertissements. Clara is played by one of the tallest men in the company. While the miscasting gets laughs, the satirical update strips the original ballet of its youthful innocence. If we can’t see the divertissements through the true eyes of childhood, the story arc is lost. The magical dances become mere punchlines, with little need for elaboration.

Michelle Dorrance is onto something with this inspired concept. I just hope she gets to retake the exam with more time on the test. A tap-dance Nutcracker continues the great synthetic potential of the form. Now, just further stretch out Ellington’s thirty-minute Suite and find a Shirley Temple to dance the Clara, and we’ll have a swinging sensation that’s still alcohol-free.

John Simon, 1925-2019

THE NEW CRITERION, January 2020

John Simon, 1925-2019

Remembering the cultural critic and longtime New Criterion contributor.

James Panero on the legacy of John Simon (1925–2019), the inimitable critic and longtime contributor to The New Criterion.

Early in my magazine apprenticeship, I received a memorable telephone call from one of my writers. Hello? “Whom do I have to f— to get a callback around here?” replied the raspy, Mitteleuropean voice on the other end of the line. It was John Simon, our legendary critic who died in November at the age of ninety-four.

Only John, I imagine, would have used “whom” rather than “who” in his salacious salutation. He was not about to make an error of grammar at his own demotic expense, even for a joke. After all, “there are those to whom ‘whom’ is sacred, and those who have forgotten that they ever heard it, if indeed they did,” he wrote in Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline, his 1980 book on the falling standards of English. For John, which interrogative pronoun to use was never a question.

It wasn’t mere provocation that made John so memorable, although he could memorably provoke. It was his way with words, and especially American words, that played out over so many decades on the written stage. Born in the former Yugoslavia in 1925, John was a late arrival to our linguistic shores. English was the fifth language he learned, after Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, German, and French. So he handled our American words and phrases like hard-earned gold in his pocket. He appreciated their luster with the turn of his fingers. He understood their richness in a way that native speakers never would or could. And he stacked them on the page again and again in a tireless doubling-down of opinion.

John made a career out of criticizing the vicissitudes of stage and screen—of books, music, movies, theater, and just about every cultural space in between. His extensive writings have been collected in some dozen books, most recently a three-volume set from Applause Books extending over two thousand pages. That his latest review appears in the very same issue as his obituary speaks to how dedicated he was to his craft. He was a critic to the end and the last of a generation.

Whenever John came by our office, he was the first to lie on the floor and crawl through our slush pile of review copies destined for the Strand Bookstore. He then had us hold onto whatever he found while he made judicious disposals from his bookshelves at home—a concession to his wife, Patricia. There on our floor was the man we knew had received one of the most famous wounds among criticism’s legionnaires. At a party for the New York Film Festival in 1973—it now bears little repeating—the actress Sylvia Miles dumped a plate of steak tartare on John’s head after he had called her a “party girl and gate crasher” in a review. The exchange soiled a jacket he had purchased on Rodeo Drive. When John sent her his dry-cleaning bill, she refused to pay. A veteran of the culture wars with a laureled suite at the Hôtel des Invalides of criticism, John died with the acid still fresh in his pen and the paper-cut scars of battles won and mostly lost.

Like many, I grew up reading John on the theater in New York magazine. It was a post he commanded for nearly thirty-seven years with unparalleled intensity. He panned much more than he praised, upsetting many. Still, the theater world never hesitated to proclaim his favorable judgments, which were not always expected. He called Cats, for example, a “delightful albeit trivial Gesamtalmostkunstwerk.” He also dared to see theater as a visual experience rather than some disembodied political statement. At times he even discussed the bodies on view. He once picked at Barbra Streisand’s prominent proboscis. When the actress Calista Flockhart took the stage, he commented that here was “Ally McBeal in the flesh,” but “be forewarned: There is very little flesh on dem bones.” Of Wicked he wrote that “Kristin Chenoweth is cute as a button, but rather makes you wish for a zipper.” He called Liza Minnelli a “performer whose chief diet is audience adulation” and whose “comeback” was “from alcoholism, [being] overweight, and an overlong absence from regular performing.”

These offenses and then some were too much for Adam Moss, New York’s new editor, who pushed John out as one of his first acts in 2005. John was too controversial. He was bigoted. He was sexist. He was old-fashioned. He made fun of Liza Minnelli’s looks. Throughout his career, the complainants lodged their grievances against such supposed nastiness. Over time, they won. Not only was John defenestrated from his high-rise column at New York, which was never again as important in theater criticism, he also lost his lofty aeries at venues ranging from Channel Thirteen and National Review to Bloomberg News and The New Leader. Some of these falls were more his doing than others, to be sure, but a critic gains honor through each venue lost, no matter the reason.

The critic John Simon in 1975. Photo: Michael Tighe/Donaldson Collection, via Getty Images

At The New Criterion, we were proud to be one of the last remaining venues to feature John regularly and at length. At the end of his life, he otherwise made do with a blog called Uncensored John Simon—underwritten by his surprise friend Yoko Ono—and appearances on local Westchester television. John wrote seventy-six pieces for The New Criterion from 1989 through, now, 2020. The essay in this issue that carries him over the decade line, a review of a new collection of writings by Vladimir Nabokov, was in edits when he died on November 24. Even at the end of his life, John wrote in a distinctive style of erudite prestidigitation and playful idiom: “obiter—or arbiter—dicta” . . . “cream of a much larger crop.” The piece bears his precise and unmistakable accent.

The subject matter of Nabokov also seems right for a final act. The two shared linguistic affinities. Each delighted in their adopted, “richer” English language. Wordplay abounds for both writers, although John was quick to point out that Nabokov did not know German—unlike the reviewer of the present volume. A “special, poetic prose that depends on comparisons and metaphors” came to define Nabokov, John writes in this review. In Paradigms Lost, he made a similar observation about himself:

I suppose I must credit my coming to English relatively late with my especially analytical, exploratory, adventurous approach to it. I am always surprised when people marvel at the way some foreigners—Joseph Conrad, Karen Blixen, alias Isak Dinesen, Vladimir Nabokov—wrote English. If you have a sufficient feeling for and facility with language, coming to a specific tongue later rather than earlier can prove a distinct advantage. . . . There is a sense in which one is both an insider and an outsider in that language, and the interplay between the two becomes creative play.

As an outsider, John reveled in the new language at his fingertips. “English became eroticized for me,” he said. Beginning in Belgrade and moving on to study in Cambridge, England, he finished his high school years at New York’s Horace Mann. When he enrolled at Harvard, where he went on to earn a doctorate in comparative literature, he tested the potential of his adopted language by writing “ardent verses to a number of Radcliffe girls.” He says his “poetry ran dry before there was enough of it for a volume; by then, however, my prose had begun.” One must also wonder at his poetry’s amatory successes. He described one story as involving a “rutilant princess and a dainty redhead with a steamily rubescent epidermis.” His first love was words.

John defended the significance of words while bristling at their devaluation. He did not genuflect to identity politics. Nor did he come to our shores to carry America’s cultural baggage. The shocks of the Sixties only clarified this critical vision. He saw our cultural debasement as stemming from “some sort of populism, Marxism, bad social conscience, demagoguery, inverted snobbery, or even moral cowardice.”

Even in the 1970s, he questioned the rising Orwellian impositions of the new Left. “Should we Genderspeak?,” he asked in one essay for Esquire. “I understand and even sympathize with a woman’s desire not to be called a poetess or an authoress, because there was once a kind of female-ghetto poetry and prose that gave poetess and authoress a bad odor. But actress was never pejorative, nor, certainly, were empress, priestess, duchess, and the rest.” Contrary to the prescriptive dictates of our political ophthalmology, John was not about to start wearing rose-colored glasses.

The decline of criticism was just as much his concern as the decline of culture. “Insensitivity is the coloring of the age,” he told Mike Wallace in 1978. “The only way that you can pierce all that protective, or maybe not protective, coloring is by calling people’s attention to the fact that another opinion exists. You can’t do that by whispering. You can’t do that by a polite little rap on the knuckles. You have to make yourself felt.” Some years ago, my wife and I took John out for dinner in the theater district to be followed by a show (which he left at intermission). When she asked John’s opinion about another critic, his voluble response nearly sent the proverbial record scratching and plates crashing to the floor. I will reserve his remarks to the grave.

We “read a critic for the writing,” John says in “Critics & criticism,” his essay in these pages in November 2018. “If the critic goes beyond information and adjudication, if he or she can add wit to the review or critique, the resultant effect is at least doubled. . . . This is scarcely less important than the critic’s yea or nay.” As the explosion of the summer blockbuster paralleled the rise of pop criticism and hot takes, the thumbs-up, thumbs-down school of criticism was never for him: “Except from the palsied or mentally defective, it takes no dexterity whatsoever, let alone art.”

Nor did John have a style well suited for the proliferation of mass media. Up against the imperial forces of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, in 1983 he waged a one-man rebellion on Nightline against the dark side of Star Wars:

The raves for the early Star Wars have been so violent and so extravagant, that I feel one cannot afford to mince one’s words if one dislikes these things. I feel they’re so bad because they’re completely dehumanizing. Obviously, let’s face it, they are for children, or for childish adults. They are not for adult mentalities, which unfortunately means they are for a lot of my fellow critics, who also lack adult mentalities.

Rather than watch Return of the Jedi, John suggested that children—and Roger Ebert—read Huckleberry Finn or see Tender Mercies.

Good opinions may never be popular, but they need to be stated. Serious criticism often stands against majority rule and what one wants to hear. A year ago John joined me in my office to record a discussion about his life in review. Do you have any advice for aspiring critics?, I wondered at the end.

I mainly give them a piece of advice, which may not be helpful, or maybe it will, but is to trust themselves: to review in the way that they really feel or really think. Not in the way the audience, the readers, the editors, the public might think. But they themselves, what their true feelings, true opinions are. That is what you heed, and what you put on paper or on the internet.

John was not anything but himself. His departure leaves us without a friend to call and a culture desperately in need of his criticism.