Why 'Forgot He Was Black' Comment Spells Trouble for President

James writes (from Big Government):

One of the most talked about lines from the State of the Union came not from Obama but from a comment the MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews made after the President’s address: “He is post-racial by all appearances,” Matthews observed. “You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and passed so much history in just a year or two.”

I am prepared to take this comment seriously. No doubt Matthews meant it as a compliment. A cheerleader for the President, Matthews once famously remarked that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” following another Obama speech. But the observation of a “post-racial” President spells trouble for Obama. For one, judging by Matthews’s backtracking, the comment has inadvertently exposed the subject of Obama’s race to be a continuing taboo for any meaningful discussion. Why is it taboo? Because race remains the key issue through which one can unlock and understand the power that brought Obama to office, and Obama’s defenders do not want to give that key away. Harry Reid’s recently reported comments about Obama being a “light-skinned Negro” raised hackles for similar reasons.

Also, if race has played a key role in the making of this President, the concept of a “post-racial” Obama means the President could be losing his “racial” gloss with the electorate. If the voters have indeed “Completely forgotten it…. Completely forgotten it,” as Matthews claims to have forgotten that Obama is black during the duration of the SOTU, then the President may be “transcending race: only to lose the source of his political power.

Since the attacks of 9/11, the sociological effects of a war on terror have made the electorate more fluid, harder to define, tending towards extremes, and looking for salvation. They have also been more willing to take risks on candidates. The Obama election was a consequence of this dynamic. After the perceived fatigue of the Bush presidency and the war in Iraq, the electorate desperately needed to be liked, and the election of Obama provided a way for the electorate to prove its likability.

Obama tapped into the main artery of the electorate and ran on an undefined, broad platform of hope. But what is hope? Hope implies risk. Hope can be a gamble. The instinct that brought Obama to office was the same instinct that fed the economic bubble. The electorate doubled down on candidate Obama and purchased a complex political instrument they did not really understand.

The 2008 election was the demonstrable event. The perceived importance of electing America’s first black President cannot be underestimated. Little may have been known about candidate Obama, but everyone could appreciate Obama’s race. Race was so prominent in voter calculus and media coverage, in fact, that Obama did not need to address it himself in a direct way, except when compelled by Jeremiah Wright. The issue was obvious.

There was only secondary concern for how Obama would lead once elected. The electorate wanted and needed to show that it could elect a beautiful man and put his family in the nation’s first home–a “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Norman Lear, “Sesame Street” fantasy. The election of this symbolic figure alone would then address our international standing, it was assumed, appease the Muslim world, and solve our own racial psychosis at once. The problems of the world would be half-solved by the time he took office.

Of course, the problems of the world have not ended. We now get to spend four years with a president we don’t really know. And a year in, we are still not liked.

I think Obama has changed much less than the public perception of him has changed. We got what we elected, an unproven freshman politician as President, a terrible leader who manages to project weakness even when he does something forceful (as in rightly sending more troops into Afghanistan).

Hope has evolved to distrust. The electorate is moving on. If the election of Obama, rather than the governance of Obama, was the thing, now that this act has been completed, the variable of Obama’s race has become far less important for the Chris Matthews of the world.

It is undeniably significant to elect America’s first black President, given the sordid history of race relations in this country. It is, however, far less significant to *reelect* America’s first black President. With the aura of race quickly dissipating, Obama is losing a source of his power. He had the world on a string before the election. But in office, his Midas touch has left him, which is why his emergency appearances could not rescue Democratic candidates in New Jersey, Virginia, or Massachusetts and will provide little uplift to Democrats in the mid-term elections.

Obama was a good campaigner because he understood how to manipulate race to get elected. This had been David Axelrod’s specialty, after all. But Obama has not evolved into a popular President, in part because he has not figured out how to keep his race significant. He was supposed to be an agent of change, but I doubt whether he can change *himself* in time to keep up with the electorate’s changing expectations. A year ago the voters thought they were getting a black version of Abraham Lincoln. Now they need a Ronald Reagan, and any color will do.

The Vanishing Benefactor

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
JANUARY 14, 2010

The Vanishing Benefactor
By James Panero

The six-month disappearance of Harvey S. Shipley Miller, the sole trustee of the Judith Rothschild Foundation, reported in Wednesday's New York Times, shows us the perilous nature of charitable governance and the surprisingly limited oversight through which foundations, especially charitable trusts, can operate.

Before a little-known abstract artist named Judith Rothschild died in 1993 at the age of 71, she tapped Mr. Miller, her best friend, to be the one trustee of her multimillion-dollar charitable trust. Its mission was to promote her reputation and support artists of her generation. The appointment left Mr. Miller with a six-figure salary, free room and board in the artist's Park Avenue townhouse, several million dollars in cash to advance the foundation's mission, and several million more in real estate and fine art that could be liquidated for foundation purposes. The story seemed to have all the hallmarks of a feel-good movie. But it has taken an unpleasant turn for the people who were promised the foundation's help.

According to the Times story, Mr. Miller had neither been seen nor heard from by his grantees from July of last year until this month, and none of the foundation's 17 grants for 2009, totaling more than $100,000, have been paid. Grantees discovered that the Rothschild Foundation's telephone was disconnected and that registered mail was being returned. Emails to Elizabeth Slater, the foundation's grant-making officer and its only other employee, bounced back. Ms. Slater, the Times reported, had been dismissed in a cost-cutting move early last year. Meanwhile, the foundation's troubles have refocused attention on a controversial foundation gift of drawings to the Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Miller's curious behavior has renewed scrutiny of how this charitable trust has been managed, with the New York state attorney general's office having contacted the foundation's attorney.

"We are a very small institution," says Tim Detweiler, who runs the James and Janie Washington Foundation, a 2009 grantee based in Seattle dedicated to the work of James W. Washington Jr., a self-taught African-American artist. "It would have been very helpful to have that $4,000. They have done a lot of good, but with no communication you fear the worst—that someone ran off with the money."

The primary mandate of Rothschild's bequest has been the promotion of her posthumous reputation through the exhibition and sale of her art, followed by management of other art in her collection and "facilitating and funding the acquisition by public galleries and museums of work primarily by contemporary American artists who died after Sept. 12, 1976 and before March 6, 2008"—artists of her own generation—according to the foundation's tax returns.

As the foundation's only trustee, Mr. Miller enjoyed broad discretion to use the funds as he saw fit. With the power to buy, sell and donate art, he became his own cultural force. Since he assumed his position at the foundation, MoMA and several other major institutions invited him to join their own boards of trustees.

Between 2003, when he joined the MoMA board, and 2005, Mr. Miller used foundation funds to buy 2,500 drawings by nearly 700 mainly contemporary artists. He hand-selected the works—by very well known older artists such as Cy Twombly and several hundred younger artists entering the MoMA collection for the first time—through an $18 million run through commercial galleries and art fairs. His supermarket sweep, subsequently gifted to MOMA, became the Judith Rothschild Collection and the subject of the show "Compass in Hand," which closed at the museum on Jan. 4.

"Judith Rothschild was concerned with a community of artists she could have known," says Christian Rattlemeyer, the Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawings at MoMA and the show's organizer. (Asked about the endowed curatorship, a MoMA spokesman said it was funded with a donation from Mr. Miller's personal funds.) The collection is in the spirit of "a community of living artists who have a dialogue with each other." Erik J. Stapper, the attorney for the foundation and Rothschild's estate, concurs that Mr. Miller's actions were consistent with the foundation's mission. "We had long discussions with the attorney general's office about this kind of program: How do you advertise an underrecognized artist? Judith had the fullest confidence that Harvey would be the one to do it."

Not all observers familiar with Rothschild's life believe it fulfilled the spirit of her wishes. "This was the worst of the excesses of art-market gambling, of young artists and helping their careers and putting them in the museums," says Wendy Snyder, who represents the estate of the artist Sam Glankoff. "Nowhere does the mandate mention gleaning public recognition for Judith Rothschild by giving drawings of young contemporary artists to one of the most elite museums in the world." Other than the mention of her name, visitors to "Compass in Hand" were left with little sense of who Judith Rothschild was or what she had done.

Natalie Edgar, director of the Pavia Trust, was moved to contact the New York state attorney general, whose office has oversight over charities and foundations. "Harvey Shipley Miller [has] been spending foundation assets on a shopping spree to buy 2,500 drawings of emerging artists," Ms. Edgar wrote shortly after the new year. He could not pay the grantees, "but he could spend millions on the shopping spree for the MoMA."

Unusual for a donation of this kind, the manic speed with which the gift took shape and entered the museum presented its own problems. Even Mr. Rattlemeyer remarks on the unorganized assortment he first confronted. "If you acquired 2,500 works in two years, you acquire three or four a day, which means they come, they go to a warehouse, and they move to the museum and the museum received 2,500 pieces at once."

Finally there is the question of a single trustee leveraging resources of one charitable organization to benefit another where he also maintains a board seat. "When you are sitting on the board of two different organizations, you really ought to be careful to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest," says Raymond Dowd, a lawyer at Dunnington, Bartholow & Miller who specializes in art law. "Usually that is resolved by recusing yourself or getting an independent judgment of counsel."

Just this week, Mr. Miller re-emerged after several more grantees began filing notice with the Charities Bureau of the New York state attorney general's office. But the circumstances of his disappearance remain murky. "He was very seriously hurt in a car accident," just before Christmas, Mr. Stapper says. This account contradicts Mr. Miller's own account of his convalescence. In a phone conversation on Tuesday from his home outside Philadelphia, he said he had slipped on a waxed floor. "I fell in my house. I broke my neck. Then it turns out the halo they put on my neck didn't work. Then they had to operate with bone chips harvested from a corpse. Oh my God, I am Frankenstein! Really, it was just insane. I was so out of it."

Mr. Miller says the checks did not go out earlier because the foundation's assets are mainly illiquid and he was waiting for the proceeds from the sale of work. He now promises to honor the grants within 30 days. "Our big problem is we have assets but we can't sell them easily. I haven't been paid since [last] January." Neither story takes into account the months of silence from Mr. Miller.

What is clear from this episode is the danger of unaccountability in single-trustee charities, which lack the kinds of checks and balances provided by the presence of a full board of directors. "It is really difficult when you have a board of one," says Mr. Detweiler. "A lot of things can happen. That's why most nonprofits have larger boards, so decisions are not made on personalities."

To his credit, Mr. Miller has fulfilled his mission of bringing greater attention to the legacy of Judith Rothschild. Just not the way she fully expected.

Gallery chronicle (January 2010)

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (911-3)(2009), © Marian Goodman Gallery

THE NEW CRITERION

January 2010

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

on “Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings 2009” at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, “Pearlstein/Held: Five Decades” at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York & “Ray Parker: The Simple Paintings” at Washburn Gallery, New York.

The abstractions of Gerhard Richter tend to be mediocre paintings and polarizing works of conceptual art. An aura of academic theory surrounds them. To first encounter them in person is generally a so-so affair. There is much to look at but little to see. Once you get to know them, however, and to know about them, you either love them or hate them. (I have always come down in the latter camp.) The artist has built his career around this response. Now, an exhibition of several large new “monochromatic” abstractions at Marian Goodman Gallery has put this model of response in doubt, because I liked seeing some of the work in the show.[1] It left me wondering whether the aging German is off his game.

Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter escaped the RAF firebombing and later the Eastern Bloc to renounce all ideology. “I believe in nothing,” he said. This nihilistic position encouraged him to construct an artistic system out of (he claimed) moral and aesthetic equivalents. The traditional distinction between abstraction and representation became one such example. Here Richter took pains to occupy a middle ground, actively painting in both modes for much of his career. On one side, he appropriated a wide range of desultory images, often settling on the macabre, to create photo-realistic paintings of Allied bombing raids, Nazi relatives, Leftist German terrorists, snow-capped Alps, and burning candles. On the other, he labored to create facsimiles of mid-century gestural abstractions—like what is now on display at Goodman. In both approaches, Richter scrapes and pulls his paint across the canvas to blur the particulars, a process that effaces his hand from the work’s creation.

Self-effacement has enabled Richter to be taken up as both a Dadaist trickster and a top-selling commercial painter. He can bemoan the death of painting while making a living out of manipulating oil on canvas. He can leave his visual questions unanswered knowing that others will answer them for him. A cadre of theoreticians follows Richter from show to show, adding their own layers of varnish. The Dean of the Yale School of Art, Robert Storr, and the Harvard savant Benjamin Buchloh have been long-time boosters—Storr curated Richter’s large touring MOMA retrospective in 2002; Buchloh has recently worked at the American Academy in Berlin on a monograph of the artist. As an indication of what is to come, in the catalogue essay for the Goodman show, Buchloh shills for Richter with an opacity of language that reflects the artist’s own handling of paint on canvas.

In his essay, Buchloh attempts to link Richter with the history of avant-garde monochrome painting. The comparisons seem forced, because Richter’s one true antecedent has always been Andy Warhol. Richter saw his first Pop paintings in reproduction in 1962 and identified himself as “German Pop” a year later. His images of ruin, his aestheticization of violence, soon reflected Warhol’s, to the point where they both painted grieving portraits of Jackie Kennedy in 1963. Richter’s machine-like paint handling, which emerged from his training in Soviet Realism, also finds parallels in Warhol’s silkscreens (as do his exorbitant price tags).

Clement Greenberg once identified a certain style of paint handling as the “Tenth Street touch,” after the abstract artists who congregated on that block in Manhattan. “The stroke left by a loaded brush or knife frays out,” Greenberg explained, “when the stroke is long enough, into streaks, ripples, and specks of paint. These create variations of light and dark by means of which juxtaposed strokes can be graded into one another without abrupt contrasts.”

In his repetitive pulling and stripping of paint, half a century later, Richter takes the intentionality out of Tenth Street brushwork. Richter’s extended output of abstract art has made him into one of the most high-profile abstractionists working today, but he has mostly created Pop serializations of Abstract Expressionist gestures—work where the humanizing freedom of abstract paint handling has been numbingly beaten down and stripped away.

When Richter’s abstract paintings began appearing in galleries and museums, they resembled the rusting hulks of high modernism—another cold-hearted depiction of a ruined empire. What surprised me, and undoubtedly other observers as well, was the intensity with which Richter went on to develop his abstract idiom. You would think that once you’ve seen one Pop appropriation of an Ab-Ex painting, you’ve seen them all. Moreover, the evolution of an abstract style would seem to cut against Richter’s pose of non-belief. It would reveal an artistic mind making conscious decisions in the studio.

But Richter’s abstract work has evolved to display greater thickness and I might even say painterliness over the years. In his latest large work at Goodman, all from 2009, Richter took a series of polychrome paintings in the making and worked them over in a gauze of white oils. Bits of old colored paint show through where his knife cut down to the under-layers. Abstract Painting (911–4) (2009) even displays areas of wavy brush handling that seem to be nothing less than personal gestures. (The title's oblique reference to September 11, 2001 strikes me as a failed attempt to impute the painting with political significance).  

Buchloh goes to great lengths to justify Richter’s studio decisions as just another goose step in the march of the avant-garde. If Richter had left the polychromatic paintings as they were, Buchloh argues, the “obsolete chromatic constellation … could have been easily associated with a tradition of multi-chromatic abstraction that continued to govern long and large segments of twentieth century and pre- and postwar art, ranging from Hans Hoffmann [sic] to Howard Hodgkin, all of whom had claimed Henri Matisse as their legitimizing ancestor… . Contemporary spectators would inevitably have felt deceived by a color scheme that shows no evidence of any reflection whatsoever on its deeply problematic illusionistic desire and unconscious naturalistic agenda.”

Buchloh’s academic dialect requires trans- lation. Once deciphered, his argument reveals its flimsiness. “Problematized” art is great for what I might call “solutionatized” academics, those who spin political theories of the visual world, but I wonder if the mind games grow wearisome for the artists who supply them.

In his monochrome series, Richter seems to luxuriate in his own paintings. The sensuality of the finished work, which still reflects a high gloss shine and has not been worn down through the usual effacement, moves closer to Matisse, not further away. Has Richter found faith in the enduring life of paint? His latest work seems less like Pop appropriations and more like straight abstract canvases. He would probably consider this conclusion a failure. I consider it a success.

The pairing of Philip Pearlstein (b. 1924) and Al Held (1928–2005) in a comparative show makes more sense than you might think. Both artists arrived in New York around 1950 and exhibited in the same circle of Abstract Expressionists. They also became friends. Most significantly, they both matured from an early apprenticeship in the thick paint handling of the Tenth Street touch to a cooler, more hard-edged style. A five-decade side-by-side survey of notable work from each of their careers is now on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery.[2]

What becomes immediately clear from the Cuningham show is the importance of stylistic evolution to both artists, and how well this evolution has been documented in the selection of work assembled for the exhibition. These artists have confronted a similar set of challenges and arrived at different solutions (but not all that different, it turns out).

As evidence of their similar beginnings, the exhibition starts with a brushy figuration by Pearlstein (The Capture [1954]) and a thick abstraction by Held (Untitled [1958]). A decade later, both artists had already developed what we might consider to be their signature styles: Held’s hard-edged, rounded color abstractions (Echo [1966]) and Pearlstein’s domestic portraits of coolly aloof nudes (Female Nude on Yellow Drape [1965]). As if to complete the circle, there is also Pearlstein’s (clothed) portrait of Held and his wife Sylvia Stone from 1968, on loan from a private collection.

In the decades that followed, both artists went on to complicate their pictorial arrangements within their particular systems. Pearlstein increased the sharpness of his perspective angle, twisting and cropping his Female Model on Ladder (1976) against the picture frame. From the 1980s through the present day, Pearlstein filled his paintings with artifacts to make them into more complex tableaux. Held followed suit in his own way. By the 1970s, he also introduced volumetric space, first in black lines on white canvas. In Northwest (1973), he suggests a puzzle of three-dimensional geometric shapes that never fully break with the picture plane. His most accomplished and largest work, Roberta’s Trip II (1986), follows on as a tour de force of spatial architecture and color flatness.

Pearlstein’s paintings from the same time period looks right at home alongside it. When you see their shared infrastructure, these artists’ individual developments stand out in even greater relief.

Ray Parker (1922–1990) was the master painter of the edge. A second-generation Abstract Expressionist, sometimes called a Lyrical Abstractionist, Parker made his most well-known work as part of a series he executed in the 1960s called “Simple Paintings.” Many of these paintings are now on view at Washburn Gallery.[3]

Simplicity is a gift. It also requires a command of complexity. Parker’s great talent was to activate the edges of a simple arrangement of two or three color-forms in a white field through complex yet subtle means. The results are lush, energetic, and gestural but also naturalistic. Many of his shapes recall the pleasantness of clouds. The living quality of the work emerges from the careful arrangement of forms to each other (the color harmonies combined with the white space between them), as well as the modulation of paint around their edges. The underlying colors peaking out behind the forms speak to the history of a developing composition while also giving the forms extra chromatic resonance. In For My Love Denise (1961), reds, tans, and browns all emerge from what we first take to be a shape created by a single color. The results influenced decades of post-painterly and process artists. They remain as fresh today as they were nearly fifty years ago.

Notes

Go to the top of the document.

• “Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings 2009” opened at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, on November 7, 2009 and remains on view through January 5, 2010. Go back to the text.
• “Pearlstein/Held: Five Decades” opened at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on November 19, 2009 and remains on view through February 13, 2010. Go back to the text.
• “Ray Parker: The Simple Paintings” opened at Washburn Gallery, New York, on November 5, 2009 and remains on view through January 9, 2010. Go back to the text.