After the holiday madness at the new MoMA, I cooled my ire considerably with a quick visit to the Guggenheim, accompanied by V21 member Barbara Rachko, to check out the show “The Fullness of Color: 1960s Painting." We speed-walked our way down the spiral, not spending much time on yet another artists’ choices show (Amy Sillman was enough, thank you, though I note that Jerry Saltz named her MoMA jumble one of the best shows of the year) when my gaze was arrested by Alan Shields' tour-de-force “tapestry” Nina Got It for 100 Francs (1971). Says the wall text, the work “epitomizes the artist’s interest in ‘high’ art and ‘low’ craft, divisions between painting and sculpture.” And how!
Alan Shields, Nina Got It for 100 Francs (1971), cotton yarn, acrylic paint, wood, metal, glass and plastic
The Gugg show of Color Field painting comprised only a handful of canvases, and what there was gave a mere glimmer of why this movement electrified critic Clement Greenberg and inspired legions of younger painters to take up spray cans and staining (as V21 member Leslie Parke remarked when I posted a magnificent Morris Louis on Facebook and Instagram, “This was the neighborhood I grew up in"). I only dimly recall ever seeing works by Alma Thomas, a Washington, DC-based painter whose works looked to nature for inspiration and are built up through short and uneven brushstrokes.
Alma Thomas, Cherry Blossom Symphony (1972), acrylic on canvas
Afterward we ambled down to the Met Breuer (sadly about to close as an outpost for contemporary art) to spend some meditative time with the Vija Celmins retrospective (which also sadly just closed). I could have made do with fewer choppy seas and starry nights, but these are subtly explosive drawings and paintings, particularly the grisaille canvases of military aircraft and a pair of homely student lamps, which fix the viewer with an inquisitive stare, like some creature from another planet.
The day after New Year’s I set off with high hopes of finding a new venue to trash, specifically the recently built Pace mega-gallery in Chelsea, featured in a couple of glitzy spreads in Vanity Fair, and described in the New York Times as offering “a more full-service visitor experience [with] food, performance spaces, research libraries and open storage.” (Why is open storage important? Will we be able to go in and browse among the racks? I very much doubt that.) I’m not sure what I was expecting, something like Saks Fifth Avenue meets the white cube, but really the place, at least when I dropped by, was as anodyne as a hospital waiting room but with better reading material, like catalogues for some of the gallery’s stable of art stars, past and present, including Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Claes Oldenburg, Kiki Smith, and Chuck Close. The ground-floor gallery was a show of several canvases by the 75-year-old California-based artist Mary Corse, stripped down silvery white-on-white slabs that glowed expensively. There were no wall labels, no checklist, no way of knowing medium and price. But the show was apparently precious enough to require two security guards to protect maybe five works.
Mary Corse at MegaPace
The other floors were closed for installation and the performance space was eerily empty, though the view over Chelsea was spectacular and it must have been a gas when The Who opened the gallery in September (I was not invited. Sniff.) A library on the ground floor looked like a wan outpost of Barnes & Noble, with not much in the way of books. Call MoMA or the Frick if you really want do serious research. And who goes to an art gallery to read?
Down the street at another Pace venue, the ever witty and ingenious Richard Tuttle, my neighbor in Abiqui, NM, was showing two sides of his protean post-minimalist affection for trash and flash. Some sculptures offered stark white platforms that held twisted bits of metal and duct tape; others leaned toward the baroque, incorporating plastic spoons and cut plywood shapes sprayed with bright splotches of paint. Fun and sly and lighthearted.
Richard Tuttle at the Pace flagship gallery
Of graver import were the huge charcoal drawings of Robert Longo, around the corner at Metro Pictures. Since I have an ingrained distrustof art that hopes to raise our consciousness about the current political situation (you’re only preaching to the choir in Chelsea, or so I would guess), I was at first suspicious of these. But they are so superbly executed—I did wonder, though, how much Longo hands over to assistants—and cinematically riveting, I found myself haunted for days by images of a defaced Jewish cemetery and a portrait of Adnan Khashoggi, disappearing in Richter like smudges. Thoroughly memorable hyper-realism, no matter how it’s accomplished.
Drawings were also the focal point of a fine show called “One Hundred Drawings” at Matthew Marks (through January 18) billed as a celebration of “the medium of drawing with works in every possible style and technique.” Spanning about 160 years, the exhibition kicked off with a figure study by Edgar Degas and ended with a Jasper Johns untitled sketch of a skeleton, dated 2019. My faves along the way included Elaine de Kooning’s Portrait of Bill and Suellen Rocca’s Beware of My Mouth. But this was a show of many treasures, only reaffirming what I’ve been broadcasting in post after post—that drawing is alive and well among artists of every different stripe.
Suellen Rocca, Beware of My Mouth
So is sculpture, as evidenced in a curious show at the Hill Art Foundation, a public exhibition space on 10th Avenue near West 24th Street, underwritten by financier and art collector J. Tomlinson Hill. Called “Three Christs, Sleeping Mime, and the Last Supper; Pagan Paradise,” the exhibition is curated by Charles Ray, described in the the New York Times a few days ago by critic Jason Farago as a “deep-thinking and slow-working Los Angeles sculptor.” Included are four of Ray’s own pieces along with intimately scaled bronzes made by Italian, French, and Netherlandish sculptors of the 16th and 17th centuries. Why diminutive statues of the Crucifixion are sharing the same gallery with Ray's gleaming Sleeping Mime or Mountain Lion Attacking a Dog is not entirely clear to me, but Farago claims that “what makes these sculptures compelling…is the cryptic and unfathomable faces they offer as we circle them in the gallery, beholding them from all sides, scrutinizing their chasing and their patinas.” Certainly the galleries alone, spartan and bathed in wintry light, are worth the trip (the show is on view through February 15).
Charles Ray at the Hill Art Foundation
If a ferocious mountain lion whets your appetite for the animal kingdom, photographer Simen Johan offered up large-scale visions of beasts given a kind of MGM treatment by “merging digital manipulation with traditional dark-room techniques,” says the press release for Yossi Milo Gallery, adding that “the artist travels near and far to photograph his source material, finding inspiration anywhere from the local zoo to the jungles of Costa Rica or the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. Countless hours are then spent assembling disparate images into a unifying whole as he edits, composes and populates each mise-en-scène.” Like too many of the shows I visited, this one closed soon after the new year, but below are a couple of images to remind you that Mother Nature is seldom as sweet-tempered as “The Lion King.”
Simen Johan at Yossi Milo
All the galleries discussed above were within a short walk of each other and offered a couple of hours of quiet enjoyment, at absolutely no cost. A reminder that you don’t have to plunk down 25 bucks to sample just a fraction of what this city has to offer by way of visual experiences. Perhaps the journey from Renaissance bronzes to Tuttle’s homely assemblages is a bit of a head trip, but no stranger, I would maintain, than tossing Faith Ringgold in with a bunch of Picassos.
On my last weekend, I was glad also to have caught an excellent show called “Picturing Space: Artists Imagine Architecture” at the Art and Design Gallery of the Fashion Institute of Technology at 27th and Seventh Avenue, which also just closed after about a two-month run. V21 member Cora Jane Glasser was my guide to this intriguing exhibition about the many inspirations the built environment offers, and I was delighted to see works by others from the site, including Gwyneth Leech’s myriad views of the construction work around her studio and Krista Svalbonas’s mixed-media amalgams of architectural details that reference buildings old and new. Glasser’s impressive two-part installation is made from a long laundry list of materials (including Masonite, duct tape, dichroic film, fabric, and steel cables) with a floor component representing architecture no longer in existence and an imaginary high-rise, suspended from the ceiling and symbolic of all the glitzy new needle towers sprouting throughout New York.
Cora Jane Glasser and a study for her installation at "Picturing Space"
Krista Svalbonas at the FIT gallery
Gwyneth Leech's urbanscapes of construction near her West Side studio
Saturday the 4th was the annual Vasari21 holiday (or, in this case, post-holiday) party, and I’m pleased to report it was a far better attended soirée than last year. Julian Hatton and Alison Berry provided a homey venue for about 30 in one of those legendary New York lofts that once made lower Manhattan an art mecca for those in search of big cheap spaces (yes, there was such a time!). You could almost feel the ghosts of an art world long gone, before dealers built empires (or went to jail!) and nobody had ever heard of websites or an Internet. It’s all very well that Facebook, Instagram, and even Vasari21 offer a virtual community for like-minded souls, but nothing compares with an in-the-flesh encounter over good food and wine. We’ll do it again soon! (A few pics, some already posted on social media, below.)
A boffo Julian Hatton canvas offers a backdrop to memorable lasagna and conversation
Valeri Larko and Arlene Rush
Left to right: Arlene, Barbara Lubliner, and James Austin Murray...and a woman whose head of hair I don't recognize. If you see this, dear guest, please remind me
All in all the two weeks offered wonderful experiences. It was a joy to do a few studio visits, gorge on great art, and meet up with old friends.
There is simply nothing like New York, where even the subway stops offer drop-dead visual distractions, such as the Chuck Close portraits I encountered in the Q Street Station at 86th Street. Below, a Close likeness of Kara Walker.
The trip home was harrowing. (I missed my connection, arrived at the tiny Santa Fe airport around nine p.m., and could not find my car! A kindly and intrepid security guard tracked it down on the far edges of the Siberian parking lot. And then it was a 1.5-hour drive to get to Taos.)
Next week, as promised, we will resume our regular programming, with new editorial and a run-down of what members are up to in the nascent weeks of 2020.
Just let me catch my breath!
P.S. A big smooch to Saugerties-based dealer and curator Jen Dragon, who did her best to organize a post-Christmas dinner for upstate supporters at her lakeside house, but only four could make it because the weather turned suddenly foul. Nonetheless, the food and wine were splendid.
Top: Melissa Stern’s studio, my last stop before trundling off to the airport yesterday
