Saturday, December 27, 2014

More on Henri Matisse, The Cut-Outs

By Charles Kessler

Sorry for the blogging hiatus – sometimes life intrudes.

Wednesday I went yet again to see the Museum of Modern Art's Henri Matisse, The Cut-Outs (extended until February 10th). There are a couple of things about the work that especially struck me this time.

It occurred to me that while Zulma, 1950, is commonly referred to as a nude, this figure is at least partially clothed, unlike Matisse's other cut-out nudes.
Henri Matisse, Zulma, 1950, 108 x 60 inches, gouache on paper, (Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark). 
The blue, especially around her wrists, looks like the sleeves of a shirt or dress, whereas the long vertical yellow/orange shape in the center (added after the blue figure was made, according to his assistant, Paule Martin) looks like a nude. And her breasts are delineated by a darker yellow/orange line (actually rounded blue shapes on top of the yellow/orange, sized just small enough to reveal a yellow/orange outline).
I think what's going on here is the yellow/orange forms are Matisse's imagination. The eighty-one year old Matisse is evoking the act of undressing a woman with his eyes.

The other thing that struck me this time is how important small details are to Matisse's art. They help animate his work and give it life. This can best be seen in one of his largest and most abstract works, The Snail, 1953.
Henri Matisse, The Snail (L'Escargot), 1953, Gouache on paper mounted on canvas, 113 x 113 inches (Tate Gallery, London).  
The ragged edges play an important visual role. (Unlike his other cut-outs, for this one Matisse tore and ripped the paper by hand as well as cut it with a scissors.) For example, the ragged edge on the top left of the purple shape at the upper left of the painting emphasizes the physicality of the paper and makes it clear that the shape is on top of the golden yellow border of the cut-out, thus keeping the shape from visually creating a hole in space.

In fact, because of the way the shapes slightly overlap at their corners, or barely butt up against each other, they are all anchored together and are visually pushed out into the viewer's space.
Detail center, Henri Matisse, The Snail (L'Escargot), 1953.
By the way, now is not a good time to go to MoMA.
MoMA lobby soon after it opened on December 24th. 
Even the members-only "Early Hours" (in which member's are allowed to view certain exhibitions an hour before the museum opens to the public) was packed. You might want to wait until school starts up again.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Thomas Hart Benton’s "America Today" Mural at the Met

By Charles Kessler

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection (until February 16th). It consists of a promised gift of eighty-one paintings, collages, drawings and sculpture by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger –  the four seminal Cubist artists. I wasn't disappointed; it's an impressive body of work, and it fills a major hole in the Met's collection. In one stroke, this magnanimous gift elevates the Met to the status of one of the world's major repositories of 20th-century art.

And to Lauder's credit, it comes without restrictions. Curators can display the work any way they want, or not display it at all, and it can be loaned to other institutions. Lauder didn't even require a wing be named for him, unlike almost every other philanthropist (e.g., see below).
The new plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It inexplicably seemed to take forever to complete – inexplicable since it's not all that different from the original.
But I don't want to write about that show; Cubism isn't really my thing. If you're interested, there's a pretty good article by Julian Bell in the New York Review of Books.

The big surprise for me this time at the Met, and a delightful one, was the exhibition Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today Mural Rediscovered (until April 19th).
View into the re-creation of the New School for Social Research's boardroom that originally housed Benton's ten-panel mural.
I always had a hard time with Benton. I loved Abstract Expressionism and, as if I couldn't like them both, I considered Benton's work to be hokey and aesthetically retrograde. Well this exhibition turned me around. These murals are bold, passionate, often funny and downright beautiful.
Detail, Instruments of Power panel of Thomas Hart Benton's America Today Mural, 1930–31, egg tempera with oil glazing over Permalba on a gesso ground on linen mounted to wood panels.
In 1930,  the New School for Social Research (now simply called "The New School"), the then progressive college on West 12th Street, commissioned the mural for it's boardroom which after a few years was converted into a classroom.

In 1982, the New School decided to sell it, and, sparked by a campaign to keep the mural in New York, AXA Equitable insurance company bought it for the lobby of its new headquarters on Seventh Avenue. In 2012, AXA donated it to the Metropolitan Museum where it's now installed in a re-creation of its original boardroom setting. 

Benton was a passionate socialist, and the mural is a broad panorama of 1920s America as Benton saw it.  I managed to take some good detailed close-ups that show Benton's passion, humor and masterful painting.

When it came to depicting workers, Benton was serious, and he portrayed them as heroic and hard-working.
Steel worker from the panel entitled Steel.
The panel titled City Activities with Subway has many good examples of Benton's often biting, and sometimes raucous, humor. 
Burlesque dancers with evangelist preaching.
The heavyweight champions Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney were wildly popular at this time. Note the expressive, angular figures which look pretty advanced today. Note also the low blow.
Boxers from the panel entitled City Activities with Subway
Benton had some fun with his friend Max Eastman, then editor of the Marxist magazine New Masses. He depicted him seated on a subway staring at the breasts of the famous burlesque star Peggy Reynolds.

In addition to the mural in its re-created original setting, the show includes preparatory drawings and studies for the mural (the guy can draw!); and, from the Met's collection, a selection of work from the circle of artists around Benton, including photographs by Berenice Abbott, an abstract painting by the Synchromist Stanton MacDonald-Wright and, most notably, a painting by one of Benton's students (who posed for some of the figures in this mural), Jackson Pollock.

After the exhibition, the mural will be re-installed in a permanent location, appropriately near the Met's other period rooms. 

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Miscellaneous October Events

By Charles Kessler

October is the beginning of the art season, and this year it opened with a bigger bang than usual. Here are the high points since my last post on October 10th.

MATISSE'S CUT-OUTS
I may as well begin with the best: Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs at the Museum of Modern Art. To give you an idea of the impact of this show, at the opening MoMA had eight or so full bars scattered around the ground floor, and they were practically empty for the first hour. Free booze and everyone would rather be upstairs looking at the art! I've also never been to a MoMA opening where everyone was smiling – the joy derived from these cut-outs is palpable.
Henri Matisse, The Swimming Pool (La Piscine), late summer 1952, gouache on paper, cut and pasted, on painted paper, overall 73 x 647 inches, installed as nine panels in two parts on burlap-covered walls, 136 inches high (Photo from CultureGrrl's essay in the Wall Street Journal).
I don't have anything to add to my post on the cut-outs exhibition when it was at the Tate, London, other than to say seeing MoMA's newly restored Swimming Pool covering a large room and hung using map pins, the way Matisse hung them in his studio, reinforces my opinion that Matisse's late cut-outs should be experienced as physically present environments.
Detail close-up of The Swimming Pool, photo from CultureGrrl's essay in the Wall Street Journal. 
There is, however, a photo in the show I'm curious about. Does anyone know anything about the calligraphy hanging prominently among the cut-outs in this photo of Matisse's studio? I haven't been able to find out anything about it.
  Matisse's Studio at the Hôtel Régina, Nice, 1952; close-up of the calligraphy.
PICASSO
Not to be outdone by Matisse, even after death, there are THREE major Picasso exhibitions in New York right now. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art is Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection, (until February 16th). This is an exhibition of Lauder's promised gift to the Metropolitan Museum – a staggering eighty-one paintings, collages, drawings, and sculptures by the big four: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger.
Pablo Picasso, Two Nudes, spring, 1909, oil on canvas, 39 x 32 inches.
And in the galleries are: Picasso & The Camera at the Gagosian on 21st Street (until January 3rd) – an exhibition any museum in the world would be proud of; and Picasso & Jacqueline: The Evolution of Style at PACE Gallery (until January 10th).

DANCE
I've been seeing a lot of visually striking dances lately. Not just dances with props that have nothing to do with the dance (like Rauschenberg made for Cunningham), but sets that are integral to the dance. Among them are RoseAnne Spradlin's dance g-h-o-s-t c-r-o-w-n at New York Live Arts;
RoseAnne Spradlin's g-h-o-s-t c-r-o-w-n (working title) at New York Live Arts.
Gisèle Vienne's Kindertotenlieder, also at New York Live Arts, where the dancing was minimal, and the set predominated;
Gisèle Vienne, Kindertotenlieder at New York Live Arts 
and The Shua Group's, Steel Meeting with percussionist Sam Sowyrda, performed in a former metal-working garage in Jersey City. A final performance will take place November 9th at 3pm.
The Shua Group, Steel Meeting with percussionist Sam Sowyrda
Also in Jersey City was Your Movean ambitious modern dance festival produced by Art House Productions and the choreographers Meagan Woods and Morgan Hille Refakis. This was their fifth year, and with dances by 24 different choreographers, it was bigger and better than ever.
Arielle Petruzzella/Zella Dance at Your Move Dance Fesival (Photo: Jason Troost). 

JERSEY CITY ART AND STUDIO TOUR
The Jersey City Art and Studio Tour has very few artist studios in it anymore; it's mostly group art exhibitions now. There were, however, a few impressive studios on the seventh floor of 150 Bay Street (the headquarters of A&P supermarkets in the early twentieth century), where there are still some low-income artists' spaces in the sadly, pretty much defunct, Powerhouse Arts District.
Jinkee Choi.
Jonathan Wolf.
Robert Kogge.
The group shows I saw were mostly miscellaneous collections of art with no particular point, which is fine, except not very interesting. The shows I liked best had clear themes, such as Whisky Rebellion at Village West Gallery (until November 21st).
Opening reception, Whisky Rebellion at Village West Gallery. 
(Whiskey seems particularly hot right now – a lot of the studios at the Greenpoint studio tour offered whiskey; it was provided at some Bushwick gallery openings; and they passed around a bottle of bourbon at Ghost Quarteta recent play at the Bushwick Starr theater.)

And there were two other well-focused theme shows, both curated by the Curious Matter Gallery, called OBSOLESCENCE – one in their intimate Downtown gallery, and one at Art House Production's beautiful new space in Journal Square (both open until November 30th). 
Curious Matter Gallery, OBSOLESCENCE, at Art House Productions, Journal Square. 
BROOKLYN
My favorite gallery exhibition in the entire city – until Gagosian opened Picasso & the Camera – was a large-screen video by Ragnar Kjartansson featuring the Brooklyn indie band, The National, at Luhring Augustine's Bushwick gallery.
Ragnar Kjartansson and The National entitled A Lot of Sorrow (photo: Elisabet Davidsdottir).
It's a simple idea, but surprisingly affecting. The National played the same 3½ minute song continuously, over and over, for six hours, before a live audience at PS 1. They are really good, professional, dedicated musicians, who have played together for 15 years, and they interact with each other and subtly vary the sad song which begins:
Sorrow found me when I was young
Sorrow waited, sorrow won
Sorrow they put me on the pill
It's in my honey, it's in my milk


You can find the full lyric here, and there are several short videos on YouTube from the original concert here, but none of them sound as good, or are as beautifully filmed and edited – or  are as moving and intense, as the one at Luhring Augustine. The last hour (from 5:00 - 6:00 at the gallery), when the band is clearly getting tired but is still very focused on the song, is moving to the point of tears. See it if you can; it'll be there until December 21st.

Exchange Rates, or what the organizers referred to as "The Bushwick Expo," was an international affair involving about 20 Bushwick galleries that exhibited local art along with the art of more than 30 galleries from all over the world including Zürich, Seattle, Paris, Beijing, Glasgow, Birmingham, Berlin, Manchester, and Los Angeles, among other cities. In addition to the exhibitions, there were talks, workshops, panel discussions, performances -- and a lot of partying.
L-R: Ben Street, Karl England & Charlie Levine from Sluice__ in London. (Photo from their Twitter feed.)
And it was an international effort, conceived and produced by Paul D'Agostino of the Centotto Gallery and Stephanie Theodore of Theodore:Art, both from Bushwick, along with Karl England, Ben Street and Charlie Levine – all from from Sluice__,  a London-based art organization.

Beat Nite
Coordinated with Exchange Rates was a special edition of Beat Nite, a recurring event where ten Bushwick galleries stay open late, organized by Jason Andrew of Norte Maar. This was the eleventh Beat Nite, and it focused on galleries involved with Exchange Rates. This time, sixteen galleries were included.
Daniel Keller, Attractions, Signal Gallery, Bushwick.
I was pleased to be invited to go on a bus that travelled to the galleries – especially pleased since it was cold and windy that night, and the galleries were spread out. If I had to do it on foot, I would only have been able to see a fraction of them.
Abstraction and Its Discontents at Storefront Ten Eyck Gallery, Bushwick.

Brooklyn Performance Combine 
This extravaganza, also produced by the preternaturally energetic Jason Andrew of Norte Maar, took place at the Brooklyn Museum's vast Beaux-Arts Court on November 1st.  It was a two-hour mashup involving 5 poets, 10 painters and sculptors, and 9 dance companies and musicians.

Paintings were paraded around (sometimes it reminded me of fancy auctions);
Painting by Brooke Moyse.
while music played;
Mariel Roberts performing Tristan Perich's piece for solo cello and six-channel 1-bit electronics.
and dancers performed.
Vangeline Theater, directed by Vangeline.
To some degree, the inclusiveness of this event was a response to the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond, and the Museum's claim to be exhibiting “the 35 hottest artists from Brooklyn.” The Brooklyn Museum doesn't show nearly enough Brooklyn artists – inexplicable since they are otherwise very Brooklyn-oriented, and Brooklyn is one of the hottest art scenes in the world right now.  For them to come up with such a limited exhibition after years of neglect is insulting. (One of the paintings paraded around during the Brooklyn Performance Combine event was a painting by Loren Munk that listed about a hundred important Brooklyn artists who were not in the museum show.) And frankly, I wasn't impressed with most of the work that was included.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

About Susan Roth And Her Art

by Carl Belz

Authors note: Artist friend Susan Roth invited me to contribute the following essay to the catalog of the comprehensive survey of her work at the Luther Brady Art Gallery, George Washington University, Washington DC, which will open on Wednesday October 22, 2014 and extend to January 30, 2015.
Age of Bronze, 1987, acrylic and canvas on canvas, 88 x 96 inches

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W. B. Yeats, Among School Children
Susan Roth would fully appreciate the question Yeats poses to the great-rooted chestnut tree, the question of identity that’s central to her own art and thought--and the question that likewise motivates and defines modern art and thought generally through their entwined history--so she’d likely not hesitate in responding that leaf and blossom and bole are each integral to the tree’s identity, to its existential being that would be radically altered, even diminished, in the absence of any one of them. The image of the artistic self presented in the tree metaphor is in itself many sided and ample and open, while the quintessential expression it seeks, which is also the inspirational urge that drives Susan Roth’s artistic enterprise--and continues to drive much of the art of our time--is deftly limned in the summons to oneness embedded in the poem’s memorable concluding line, the oneness of part and whole, of form and content, of the dancer and the dance.
Texcatapoca, 2012.
Which is not to say the identity of the artistic self is in any way routinely known or secured. On the contrary, in the modern world we inhabit our artists are required to find and nurture and express themselves on their own without institutional guides or sanction, and in response and of necessity – their freedom can be both a curse and a blessing--they’re regularly inspired to discover and invent multiple routes to that end. These may enable the clarification, even the resolution, of already nascent concerns and in some cases can take the form of a breakthrough revealing aspects of the creative self that had been inaccessible to the artist’s preceding work.

A handful of notable examples come to mind:

  • Following a visit to Helen Frankenthaler’s studio, Morris Louis began pouring and staining liquid pigment into raw canvas and seemingly out of nowhere emerged as a colorist without parallel among the first generation of the New York School.
  • After habitually relying on black to remedy problematic areas in his abstract pictures--because it was his least referential option--Frank Stella decided to run with it and so produced an entire series of all-black paintings now regarded as launching Minimalism in the 1960s.
  • Joan Snyder collaged onto her paintings the children’s drawings she saved from classes she taught in order to express more convincingly the vision of innocence she sought to picture.
  • Jules Olitski sprayed clouds of color onto expanses of raw canvas and in a complete reversal of conventional procedure then proceeded to crop and stretch and thereby determine the compositions that would be his newest paintings.
  • Gripped by pique and frustration, Susan Roth impulsively trashed the canvas on the floor of her studio with gobs of paint and sundry detritus she had at hand and returned the next day to find herself face to face with a facet of her artistic self she hadn’t known before.
Coney Island, 2010, acrylic, box top and canvas on canvas, 60 x 26 inches. 
That incident took place in 1980 and within a year led to the gesturally brushed and stained and occasionally collaged raw and unstretched canvases that in the creative process were forcefully pushed about and folded and radically shaped into bas-relief paintings boldly declaring Susan Roth’s first full and fully personal maturity. Fully mature in the scope and sureness of their ambition, and fully personal in the freshness of vision through which they expand and deepen our understanding of painting’s arsenal of resources, above all in what they have to say about the drawing/painting connection.
Heart Murmurings, 1984, acrylic and canvas on canvas, 67 x 107 inches.
While painterly, color-oriented drawing is varied and plentiful throughout the pictures, drawing wrought by arm and hand with brushes or rags or sponges and occasionally even flung in skeins and streams, linear drawing is no less essential to their character. It first and last defines graphically the pictures’ framing edges, which in each case assume a unique configuration in response to the pictorial field they enclose--to what the artist calls their geography--and thus do they assert themselves as integral to each picture’s content. But equally significant is the drawing that accrues to the paintings’ internal fields, to the ridges and grooves and folds and furrows of the wrinkled and crumpled canvases, all of them insistently physical pictorial vectors, all of them humming with movement, yet none of them feeling willed by human agency, none feeling actually drawn with the urge to delight or describe--drawings’ usual jobs--but drawing instead that feels like a force of nature. Sensing its authority and presence, we begin to see for ourselves the artistic identity that drawing is made to reveal in these pictures--specifically, the expressionistic potential the artist recognized and seized upon in her morning epiphany that had been unimaginable the night before.
Yoga Sutra, 2002, acrylic and acrylic skin on canvas, 71 x 55 inches.
Countess of Alba, 2012, 65 x 30 x 5 inches. 
Susan Roth submitted her art to a second radical transformation when she began making painted steel sculptures in 2008, nearly all of them frontal in their address and wall-mounted and as such, like the series as a whole, openly acknowledging their identity as the progeny of the artist’s shaped bas-relief paintings. Alike as the two series presumably might be in issuing from the same artistic self, their visual effect and emotional register are nonetheless significantly--and surprisingly--different. As immediately and insistently physical as the bas-relief canvases are, so are the painted steel sculptures as immediately and insistently pictorial. Everywhere clean and sharp and without incident, as if unblemished by human touch or handling, their powder coated surfaces appear disembodied and weightless, as if purely visual, as if being foremost meant to be seen. Against the bas-reliefs’ expressionist passion and urgency they feel coolly detached and idealized and otherworldly, more classical than romantic, Apollonian rather than Dionysian. Where the bas-reliefs everywhere reveal evidence of the process that brought them into being, the steel paintings appear to have taken shape effortlessly, like the one-shot paintings that painters’ painters--Susan Roth among them--forever dream about.
View of Fuji, 2013, 46 x 57 x 10 inches.
Yet, drawing remains central to their achievement, drawing that’s everywhere crisp and clear in decisively marking edges, describing planes and screens, and generating elegantly curving and sweeping spatial trajectories. In concert with the works’ uninflected color it is likewise instrumental in accounting for our impression of their overall lightness of being and their openness to the spaces within and around them, which they seem not merely to occupy but actively to embrace. If drawing in the shaped bas-reliefs is modern in being meant first of all to articulate the impulse to self-expression, it is here modern in being meant first of all to articulate the realization of autonomy.
Sweet Jane, 2011, powder coated steel, 86 x 56 x 13 inches.
I see the two series comprising Susan Roth’s enterprise as reciprocal, as mirror-like reflections of two aspects of a multifaceted creative identity that may be reversed in orientation but nonetheless remain firmly bound to one another, as if twinned. Like partners in a long term relationship they vitally sustain and complement and enrich one another, share common artistic ground, and sometimes seem even to complete one another’s pictorial sentences. Yet each in the process remains itself and retains its individuality, while the two series in turn become one and render her art whole. But how in that case do we--and they--answer Yeats’s question, how do we know the artist from her art? Based upon my encounter with its bountiful oneness, I want to say that Susan Roth’s art, like the dancer’s dance, tells me all there is to know about her--and all I need to know.

Here are links to Roth's paintings and sculptures.


Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.

Friday, October 10, 2014

Greenpoint Open Studios Plus

By Charles Kessler

Last Sunday I went to Greenpoint Open Studios (GOS). It's an annual tour, and this time a whopping 265 artists signed up. In addition, other artists (including some shown below) unofficially left their studios open without committing to the entire two-day event. I got to 25-30 studios and two galleries, and selected ten artists for this post. Links to their websites are provided if you want more information.

I'm embarrassed to say this was my first time in Greenpoint. It's only accessible by the G train, which doesn't go into Manhattan, so getting there is somewhat inconvenient. One would think that would keep the rents affordable, but most of the artists I talked to say it's still expensive. I can understand why. Greenpoint is a diverse, lively area with some beautiful, tree-lined residential neighborhoods,
Shady Greenpoint residential neighborhood near Noble and Lorimer Street.
a large, thriving commercial district, lots of great restaurants (especially Polish restaurants), good bars, and abundant industrial loft-type space suitable for art studios.
276 Greenpoint Avenue.

Here chronologically are my highlights:
Emily Noelle Lambert, 960 Manhattan Avenue.

Ann Chisholm in her studio, 276 Greenpoint Avenue.
Close-up detail of blue and white three-panel painting above by Ann Chisholm, Territory, 2014, mixed media collage, each panel 48 x 12 inches,  276 Greenpoint Avenue.

276 Greenpoint has a gallery for artists in the building (below).
Leonard Reibstein with his work in the art gallery of 276 Greenpoint Avenue.

Warren of small studios in 276 Greenpoint Avenue.

Victoria Duffee, 276 Greenpoint Avenue.

Auxiliary Projects, one of my favorite galleries, recently moved from a tiny second-floor space in Bushwick to this somewhat larger former garage in a residential area of Greenpoint. Jennifer Dalton (who along with Jennifer McCoy founded and run the gallery – two excellent multidisciplinary artists) told me they are getting more people visiting the gallery then they did in Bushwick, probably because they are on the ground floor.

Auxiliary Projects is unique in that they work with artists to help them create small, hand-made works that can be sold for under $300. Their goals are to: "facilitate wider distribution for artists’ work we admire and to enlarge the community of people who can collect art." It's a lot of work for these two very busy people, but they appear to be succeeding – at  the very minimum, aesthetically.
Installation view, Adam Brent, Good Hill Drift, Auxiliary Projects, 212 Norman Avenue, until November 23rd.
Adam Brent, The Pumpkin and the Oriole, 2014, PLA plastic, ceramic. 8 x 7 ½ x 8 inches, Auxiliary Projects, 212 Norman Avenue.
The plastic parts of Brent's sculptures (PLA plastic) are made with a 3D printer.


Joshua Johnson, 67 West Street.

Hein Koh, 67 West Street.

Heather Guertin in her studio, 67 West Street.
Heather Guertin's art is on view at the Brennan & Griffin Gallery on the Lower East Side until October 12th.


Stephen Eakin, 67 West Street.

Stacy Fisher, 61 Greenpoint Avenue.

BONUS!
Wednesday I visited Catherine Cullen's studio on Staten Island. I'm really excited by how poetic and inventive this work is, and so (deceptively) simple. Cullen is an artist to watch.
Catherine Cullen, Staten Island.
Catherine Cullen, Staten Island

Obligatory photo from the Staten Island Ferry (Jersey City is on the left, I don't know what city is on the right).