January 12 to February 9, 2013
536 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-627-1018

Lawrence Beck, Roman Aqueduct II, 2012. Archival pigment print mounted dibond, 60 x 73 inches. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, NY

Italian Pictures, Lawrence Beck’s exhibition of landscape photography fills Sonnebend’s cavernous galleries.  Beck has familial ties and childhood memories of Italy, and his images of gardens, villas and monuments, both privileged and public environments, constitute a kind of 21st-century Grand Tour: we gaze upon the views and imagine we are there.

Like stable mates Bernd and Hilda Becher, Beck makes large photographs.  Using an 8 x 10 field camera, they invite us to observe and scrutinize hard facts. But the artist captures mood as well.   The sheer size of these images, nearly six feet, coupled with a high clarity of detail, serve to draw the viewer in.

Beck is at ease with a historical landscape tradition that dates back to Giorgione’s moody Tempesta.  Ninfa V, a complex landscape composition, beckons entry into its intimate architectural ruins. Beck also demonstrates sensitivity to shadow play and tonal gradation, particularly when capturing the hypnotic effects of reflective light on water in images such as Marlia I, Villa Borghese I and Caserta I.

Beck addresses the relationship of architecture within landscape, of both the tension and harmony of artifice and entropy.  The botanical garden and water lily series of the last fifteen years has sometimes included genus identification tags within lush compositions, mediating beauty with indexation. Today Beck reassesses the stagecraft associated with the classical virtues of balance and frontality. But how does one approach the grand symmetry of a villa or opulent garden that has for centuries signified cultivated beauty and established viewpoint?  Conventional perspective – whether in Anselm Kiefer’s interiors and landscapes or Julie Mehretu’s stadiums – amounts, in these examples, to an effective use of symmetry in painting and graphic collage respectively.  In straight photography, symmetry is a tougher proposition.  In darkened theatre interiors, Hiroshi Sugimoto has mastered it.  Even Atget found the idea challenging at Versailles and Luxembourg Gardens.

Beck’s approach can seem disarmingly neutral, as in Villa Pisani II.   Here, seemingly deadpan frontality suggests a ready-made portrait with its symmetry, timeless beauty and cultivation.  By including unexpected detail and establishing warmth and subtle value, Beck negotiates the pitfalls of calculated classicism.  In Villa Della Porta Bozzolo I, the spatial recession of richly textured vessels is bathed in subtly scraping sunlight. Golden tones emerge from stonework and foliage alike. Beck’s real power lies in the aesthetic choices he makes about detail. His subjects are obviously robust, but content resides in the soft power of subtle formal decisions.  Resistance is futile, our buttons have been pushed, the image is simply, undeniably present. We can try to look away but can’t shake the expectation and desire of experiencing the scene.

Lawrence Beck, Ninfa V, 2012. Archival pigment print mounted dibond, 60 x 73 inches. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, NY

Beck’s weirdly captivating Roman aqueduct images document a still fading classical past.   Once essential to a functioning Roman infrastructure, the successive arches and flat planes of these monumental structures appear to have been put out to pasture in an arid no-man’s land.  His seemingly standard frontal point of view is anything but.  He is not documenting but reassessing and reframing the subject.  In Roman Aqueduct II, the stark simplicity is surreal, bringing to mind the landscapes of Yves Tanguy and the exaggerated scale of Magritte. Through Beck’s astute cropping and iconic frontality, these Stonehenge-like monumental ruins dance like calligraphy across a page.  As our eye weaves and darts in, out and around the openings of the aqueducts, the fundamental elements of contemporary visual imagery stare back at us.  Our contemporary lens senses repetition, seriality, decoration and void.  Beck also ekes out incongruities as close inspection reveals soft inclusions and traces of contemporary life.  The small dome of a twentieth century church peeks out over the horizon line on the far left. Through an arch in both Aqueduct I and Parco Degli Acquedoti I, appears a seemingly anachronistic horizontal sliver of recent housing construction nearly indistinguishable from the bushy landscape of the horizon.

These details don’t announce themselves but are given to the attentive viewer. The assertion is that at some point, the newest entries in the landscape will be long gone while the Roman ruins remain.  That fatalistic yet romantic notion connects Beck’s images to Andre Giroux’s painting of the Claudian Aqueduct (1826) to be seen in the Metropolitan Museum’s current exhibition, Path of Nature – French Paintings 1785-1850.   Giroux’s romantic notion of the grand tour is barely operational for a contemporary audience.  But it’s important to note that Giroux himself took up landscape photography shortly after making this painting, pointing the way for an artist like Beck to re-imagine the subject once again.

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November 3 to December 10, 2011
558 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City,  917.226.3851

Arizona-raised Charles Andresen – who has been painting under the radar in New York City for the last 20 years – has been given the inaugural show at Guided by Invoices, a new gallery in Chelsea.  The exhibition demonstrates just how deep New York’s abstract painting talent pool is.  Densely packed, colorful, and rhythmic, Andresen’s acrylic blobs jostle for position within each composition of these eight modestly sized paintings.   Including paintings from 2001 to the present, curator Chris Byrne has indexed Andresen’s aesthetic from the raucous to the sublime.

Charles Andresen, Gelb, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 38 x 33 inches. Courtesy of Guided by Invoices

These are tirelessly jubilant gestural abstract paintings.  The excessive pile-ups of thrown paint splats yield so many successful accidents they seem to rewrite the unwritten laws of action painting.  Andresen’s quirky, mediated process can be likened to making an omelet – the base, pigmented gel, is poured on a smooth surface to receive the fixins: streams of colored lines and dots.  But instead of folding the omelet, it is scooped open-face by spatula and flung, creating striking effects and patterns upon impact with the canvas.  Andresen prohibits himself from any further manipulations on the canvas support.  He calls these gooey paint assemblages “Throw Paintings.”

In the Baroque composition Gelb (2007), Andresen’s finely tuned, in-the–moment paint decisions make for an effortless viewing pleasure.  Our eye just keeps sailing in and out of this marbled, greenish yellow surface with blue veining and Polke-esque orange dots.  And Andresen easily demonstrates how gestural surface activity can produce sudden illusions of depth.  David Reed wrote that Dave Hickey told him “Liquidity is the new depth.”  For Andresen, liquefied chaos coagulates to serve an emergent lyrical narrative, within the structure of an allover field.   And in light of the current de Kooning retrospective at MOMA, Andresen’s paintings underscore the ongoing significance of those incisive 1948 black and white enamels, languid paint gushes of the 60 and 70’s, and soaring white cut pastel ribbons from 1981-85.

Andresen also adulterates the material excesses associated with Larry Poons, the bizarrely underappreciated Stanley Boxer and Jules Olitski, particularly his iridescent, taste-bending, luxuriant lathers circa 1990.  In Densities of Intensities (2009), Andresen’s distanced hand and insistently impure process serve to heighten the phantasmagorical nature of this image and deepen space.  Using the weighty physicality of adjacently layered paint blobs to create color contrast, Andresen builds a web that both frames and connects multifocal events.  Peppered throughout, Cheshire stripes and toadstool dots stretch and shrink gesture and space like mirages on a desert highway.  Striated ribboning characteristic of Murano glass pulses through the acrylic paint, injecting velocity, directionality and warped perspective into the forms. Glassy greens glisten, and an enamel-like powder blue punches holes into the sky.   This dense assembly of raucous color, texture and evocative form would make a sympathetic pairing with Daniel Weiner’s riveting polymorphous sculptures were reviewed  here at artcritical recently.

Drenched in rich browns, the tonality of O’odham Rhythm (2001) is a welcome respite from the abundance of color in the rest of the exhibition.  Like a box of assorted chocolates, a brocade of caramel toffees, mochas and swirling dark and milk concoctions spins out from the opulent bilateral draping top and center.  And Bear Dance (2010), likely influenced by the Native American ceremonial dances that Andresen observes regularly, is a vibrant relief of concretions that provide hall-of-mirror distortions and melted glyphs.  That Andresen creates eye candy is undeniable.  In Frozen Jesters (2011) twisting lanes of candy cane stripes that allude to brushstrokes appear to converge with accumulations of gum-splatted, swirling peppermint rounds.

Some of these surfaces seem to want to jump the canvas for a larger one.  I for one hope Andresen finds a way to “throw” a few big ones up as well next time around.

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Carrie Moyer, Rock Candy Chrysalis, 2011, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of CANADA

Carrie Moyer continues to agitate…beautifully.  Over the last decade she has used a layered graphic aesthetic to express solidarity with ideals of political, social and sexual equality.  In her 2006 exhibition, titled The Stone Age, she breathed new life into still life and abstract painting alike by fusing modernist painting from both sides of the Atlantic with silhouetted Paleolithic figures. Today, Moyer continues to reap the benefits of pluralism while joyously surfing in the wake of “the death of painting”, casting a net that is smart, wide, and fearless.

In Canonical at Canada Gallery, Moyer charts new and unexpected territory. Rock Candy Chrysalis unfolds bilaterally within a flat, black-winged lattice that frames our view of diaphanous, coral-c-olored forms emerging from a neutral ground.  The architectonic lattice and patterning throughout acknowledge a comfort with Pattern and Decoration artists such as Robert Kushner.  Textural contrasts between black line, raw canvas, and glistening or matte paint drive the formal interplay throughout this exhibition. And when Moyer drops a lightly patterned, transparent veil against or behind a flat plane, hints of illusionistic shading appear.  Though this painting is but one frame, Moyer’s methodology creates a sense of flickering natural phenomena.

Carrie Moyer, Frilly Dollop, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. Courtesy of CANADA

In the six-foot square Frilly Dollup, Moyer shuffles ten layers of imagery while achieving spatial lift and slippery movement.  I am tempted to say that Frilly Dollup is the best biomorphic painting of the new century.  A seemingly effortless play of contrasts between texture, color, and line masks complexity and maintains clarity of image.  The formal ease, large size, decorous color, and elegant composition push beauty to the edge of current taste.  Frilly Dollup divides horizontally into three strata.  The lower portion articulates an expanding terrestrial womb that envelops and nurtures itself, while the upper third of the canvas parades an assortment of floating, colorful shapes that both nestle and pass by one another.  One mottled, stony white figure seems part Casper the Friendly Ghost, part Ken Price sculpture, but may be culled from Moyer’s resonant Shebang or Stone Age figures of 2006.  Rifling through the last 100 years of painting with indexical panache, Moyer’s biomorphs also nod to Picasso’s 1930’s beach bathers, Miró, Arp, Richard Lindner and Elizabeth Murray but function together as if she snapped a shot at the right moment at a party.  There is an interesting tension between what is guided and what is a more randomized gesture.  Though process is present, it is not as assertive as the gestures of Pollock, Lynda Benglis or Dona Nelson.  This tact allows the imagistic nature of the painting to move forward.  But ultimately it is the choreographic arrangement of pouring, staining, coaxing, patterning and sinewy charcoal line that animates Moyer’s pictorial projection.

The Tiger’s Wife intertwines psychological landscape and bodily form.  Moyer’s intelligence is haptic; she and by extension we, sense and recognize by her touch.  A softer, more modulated approach to color, form and line playfully emphasizes transparency and off-register articulations.  The smooth transitional flow between painting passages heightens the chthonic breadth of The Tiger’s Wife, deepening pictorial space without abandoning abstract peripherality.  Here, Moyer resistance to a flattened iconic field in favor of a feminine space of the possible, reflects how women artists from Carolee Schneeman, Lee Bontecou, and Murray to Moyer herself have changed painting.  A sense of multivalent form engages the viewer in a creative act of free-associative thinking.  Forms resembling eggs, tubes, a phallus, a breast, and fingers float in an amniotic cosmos outlined by a vaguely pelvic shape.   The glint of S.W. Hayter’s line and dust of William Baziotes’s atmosphere are bits of useful code that affirm Surrealist methods.  That Moyer can sink into and then pull content out of a viscous, liquid-soaked canvas enables her to dismiss a list of hooks often called upon to justify contemporary abstraction.  Moyer power lies in her ability to imbed content into the plurality of form that she has found painting still offers.  Overwrought referencing, clock-punching announcements about “the work”, psychedelic allusions, and goofy self-deprecations are absent.  Instead we are met with color, beauty, spirit, ebb and flow, the comings and goings of nether regions, experiential knowledge, and our common humanity.  In a sense Moyer reframes a question posed by one of color field’s progenitors by asking… Who’s afraid of beauty, facility and feminism?

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Heatwaves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield at the Whitney Museum of American Art

June 24 to October 17, 2010
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York City, 212 570 3600

Charles Burchfield, The Song of the Katydids on an August Morning, 1917, Watercolor, gouache, graphite, colored chalks, and pastel on off-white wove paper, 18 × 21-3/4 inches, Courtesy Karen and Kevin Kennedy Collection.

The sight of a cypress tree can suddenly flood our consciousness with Van Gogh’s stylizations.  Charles Burchfield may not have the sheer transformative force of Van Gogh, but when I exited the Burchfield exhibition at the Whitney Museum and walked across 75^th street, I was surprised when some foliage touching a wrought iron gate suddenly announced itself as a Burchfield arrangement poised for his trademark enhancements.  Although he was the first American to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Burchfield’s visionary, and at times, treacly, modernism has kept his achievement by the wayside.  I first saw Burchfield’s watercolors in a group show at Kennedy gallery around 1980 and didn’t know whether to be more astonished by his paintings or by his marginal standing.  Perhaps the success of pop infused and neo-romantic landscapes by such artists as Laura Owen and Peter Doig has softened the ground for a reassessment of the mannered achievements of Burchfield during classic modernism.  The smartly structured retrospective of his watercolors at the Whitney Museum, curated by sculptor Robert Gober, makes an eloquent case on Burchfield’s behalf.

Burchfield’s astonishing early watercolors of 1917-18 kick off the show.  Most evocative here are the sparely composed, ominous and brooding compositions such as The Night Wind (1918). Burchfield’s flattened construction of space and bold composition employ the lessons of Ryder and Dove, as ominous clouds and blustery winds bear down on a modest human dwelling braced for a rough winter’s night.  By linking specificity of locale with existential dread and alienation, Burchfield tackled themes later explored by such luminaries as George Ault and Edward Hopper.  In Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night (1917), Burchfield further heightens the state of fear and dread, with visualizations of sound.  One senses the impact of avant-garde treatises such as Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Besant’s Thought Forms.  Bells peal from the totemic church tower, and clouds vibrate, ushering forth a plague of menacing black rain on the miserably enchanted houses below.  Burchfield transforms doors into owls, and windows into grimaces by utilizing a set of self-styled forms he called “Conventions” that symbolize and summon states such as imbecility, evil, insanity and morbidity.  The net effect of the “Conventions” is one of emotional heightening in which elements of landscape anthropomorphize and attain an animist status.  A small drawing series of the “Conventions,” comprised of symbolic linear motifs and visual abbreviations, receives its own room within the exhibition.  This vital, working set of motifs is deftly encoded and nearly concealed within the paintings.

In the twenties, Burchfield abandoned this early breakthrough work and settled into a Regionalist scene-painting mode that provided some acclaim.  This fine but comparatively unremarkable period is included in the exhibition, boldly installed atop one of Burchfield’s own floral wallpaper designs

By the early forties Burchfield readjusted his course and faced the promise of his early watercolors.  Using a puzzle-piece strategy of associative-relational composition, he began to physically expand earlier paintings by attaching new sections of paper to them and by editing less effective areas.  Autumnal Fantasy (1916-44) is a clarion call heralding Burchfield’s rapidly developing mature phase.  His signature sun-star, a softly emanating light, appears fully formed.  Burchfield’s compositional inventions of echoing arches, receding diagonal boomerangs, and hazy atmospheric perspective of pale blues and yellows in this fifty-four inch watercolor crystallize this new period.  The saturated color and layered detail of the tree, foreground area, and squawking birds provide a counter focus to the commanding rough-hewn, painterly treatment and muted color elsewhere throughout.  Burchfield pushed watercolor conventions by dragging concentrated pigment, pummeling paper, and coaxing barely tinted dilutions into subtle form.  His declared affinity with Chinese painting is evident in the calligraphic strike-and-respond gestures.

Charles Burchfield, Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon, 1961-1965, Watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and graffito on lightly textured white wove paper faced on ¼-inch thick laminated gray cardboard, 56 × 39-5?8 inches, Courtesy Karen and Kevin Kennedy Collection

The fifties and sixties are characterized by atmospheric paintings of domed forest cathedrals of transparent light and color.  Even Burchfield’s seemingly generic snow scene, The Constant Leaf, suddenly unfolds, captivates and transports the viewer as we eerily experience the silent atmospheric hum of the snowy environment. His occasional flirtations with magically kitchy, Shangri-la woodland settings must have strained cultivated modernist taste.  But this is the period in which Burchfield hit his stride, as he painted with a freedom and responsive touch reminiscent of John Marin.  Burchfield felt like “Don Quixote tilting at windmills” while executing a full seasonal cycle within a single painting in his Four Seasons (1960). But Robert Gober gets it exactly right when he writes Burchfield made “great art in old age.”  Burchfield’s prescience is noteworthy; Orion in December (1959) is in tune with some recent Chris Martin paintings.  And Dandelion Seed and the Moon (1965) is a standout for its large scale, pitch-perfect simplicity, soft luminosity and transcendent vantage point.   Upon close inspection, it is amazing how extraordinarily absent the surface is.  Using raw paper, muted grays, a few tiny strokes of green, the barest hint of yellow, and a tiny daub of orange, Burchfield summons a tremendously powerful image with great economy of means.  I’m hard pressed to think of a more poetic dismissal of the chasm between landscape and abstraction within American modernist painting.  Burchfield died two years later in December 1967, at the age of 75, having merged the streams of avant-garde, Chinese landscape, and American illustration into a current of his own.

James Siena, Earthless 2009. Enamel on aluminum, 38-3/4 x 30-1/16 inches

Steve DiBenedetto, Untitled 2008. Oil on canvas, 36 x 24 inches

The shape-shifting biomorph continues its 100-plus year march at David Nolan Gallery.  Tracking the various frequencies on the pliant bandwidth of Biomorphism, Morphological Mutiny brings together paintings, drawings and prints by Steve DiBenedetto, Alexander Ross, and James Siena.  Incorporating abstraction and figuration, these three artists deliver an absorbing mix of the transformative, illustrational and apocalyptic strains in current painting.

Siena spins out maximalist effects from discreet minimal units.  His deceptively understated work yields a wealth of form and content, ranging from geometric abstract progressions and softly liquefied, optical grid flows, to cosmic-comic characters and sexualized tricksters.  In the middle zone, drawings titled Liminal Spaceand Liminal Pathway probe the ambiguous and interconnected play between unfolding space and figurative embrace. In Liminal Space, Siena dissipates form and charts the expansion of space that accompanies increasing formlessness.  Conversely, Liminal Pathway manifests embodied form that inhabits space.   Remixing high and low with a scratchy line and a fuzzy scrawl, Siena rehatches Biomorphism.  And in Angry Forms, a study sheet of five agitated shapes, he aptly insinuates a connection to Thought Forms, a 1901 treatise by Annie Beasant and Charles Leadbeater about the correspondence of emotion to shape and color.

Siena’s Earthless , with its smooth, enamel-painted aluminum surface, requires only a few seconds of attention before it works its magic and takes your breath away.   The labyrinthine spaces suddenly coalesce and rise and fall, optically vibrating as if an animated topographical map were pooling and waving its peaks and hollows.  For those interested in the psychedelic effects of retinal painting rooted in archetype, Siena offers an amazingly effective delivery system.

Across the gallery hangs Ross’s Untitled 2008-9 painting of a glam, klieg lit, sci-fi biomorph ready for its close up.   Glistening and chiseled, the figure is a world away from Siena’s expansive tail-biting interiority.  Instead, we face a caffeinated realm of enhanced, bright but relatively normative space.

Utilizing a computer collage aesthetic, Ross manipulates photo images of his plasticine sculptures and paints the results with sumptuous color and graphic finesse.  His seductive and precisely organized gradations of volume announce an ultra-mediated process.  Inspired by the microbial, Ross restyles the surrealistic figure via YvesTanguy and Gumby, shelving any vestige of automatism.  What remains is an emphatically descriptive, photo-realized affair with mutations from the lens.

Alexander Ross, Untitled 2008-9. Oil on canvas, 43 x 58 inches. All images courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York

In Untitled 2008-9 Ross’s highly articulated figure is set against an abstract ground; the ensuing construction of pictorial space is simple and graphic.  The preening alien seems grafted onto the decorative backdrop, an effect oddly reminiscent of Cecil Beaton’s 1951 Vogue shots of a model in front of a Pollack painting at the Betty Parsons Gallery.  In Untitled 2009 however, the ground is a dynamic field that creates a compelling tension with the figure, as both share a structural DNA that intimates the possibility of infiltration through a porous border.  It will be interesting to see if Ross will allow the figure to burst its container and break on through to the other side.

Unstable and apocalyptic, Steve DiBenedetto’s mesmerizing drawings and energetic paintings are intriguingly complex.  In DiBenedetto’s Untitled and Quantascape drawings of 2009, colored pencil and graphite seem to scatter and coalesce in rhythmic pulsations across the sheet.  Using a protean array of line and color, in which figures slip into fields, architecture and constellations, DiBenedetto distinguishes himself as one of the best drawing practitioners around.  In Untitled 2009, shape-shifting grotesques meander across the oscillating fields, and freely associate like Rorschach blots in a psychedelic blur of color.  In Quantascape the punchy and economical use of white ground nearly upends the colorful swirl of effects.

There is a method to DiBenedetto’s sympathetic and synaptically connected free flow of imagery; the continuity between the paintings is undeniable. In Untitled 2008 DiBenedetto uses a relatively modest paint application against which he incises a web-like scaffolding by drawing paint away from the surface.  White and amber paint is then reapplied to openings within and around the structure creating a golden glow. He conveys an experiential ethos reminiscent of late Surrealist paintings of the 1930’s and 40’s by the likes of Matta, Gordon Onslow-Ford and Jerome Kamrowski.

Dibenedetto along with his comrades Siena and Ross have defined an architectural endoskeleton within the body of the biomorph, a decidedly third millennium proposition.

In 2007 Anselm Kiefer stated “Americans think there is good and bad.  That’s not true.  The truth is wandering around.”  Fair enough, but some of Kiefer’s themes have sharp moral divisions.  The Metropolitan Museum has mounted a mini retrospective of about 30 small pieces selected from its Kiefer holdings, one as recent as 2004.   The early watercolors from 1969 – 85 represent the bulk of the show.   Although technical distinction is rarely evident in his watercolors, Kiefer’s keen and decisive knack of finding and assembling his signature themes and compositions is astonishingly present from the start.  It is content rather than painting ability that speaks loudest here.

Anselm Kiefer Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven (Jeder Mensch steht unter seiner Himmelskugel) 1970. Watercolor, gouache, and graphite pencil on joined paper, 15-3/4 x 18-7/8 inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Denise and Andrew Saul Fund, 1995 © Anselm Kiefer. Photo credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome Of Heaven (1970), a diminished, isolated figure, enveloped in a transparent dome, assumes the Nazi salute within a deeply receding landscape.  From text we understand that Kiefer mocks the salute, but context is relative and meaning is subject to change.  That the salute is summoned in several pieces is plain to see. Regarding the image, Kiefer has equivocally stated “every man has his own dome, his own perceptions, his own thoughts.  There is no one God for all.”   Despite the moral relativism, Kiefer is certain that he is a soldier artist recovering historic facts from the ground of recent memory.  And as an agent of Neo Expressionism, Kiefer assumes that although there are pauses, everything is in play and that everything old rises new again with a twist of the eternally recurring historical spiral.

In his colorful On Every Mountain Peak There Is Peace (1971), and the sepia toned Reservoir(1971), Kiefer delivers both the romantic landscape of dreamy escapism and the reverent nostalgia of the forest as a repository of strength and national identity.  If Kiefer is trying to grapple with the aftermath of National Socialism or offer a critique, it is unclear.  Functionally these pieces reinforce the symbolic status of the forest used in German and Norwegian landscape painting of the 1820’s. By pointedly reviving the brooding, animistic portraits of heroically silhouetted trees via C. D. Freidrich, Kiefer advertently rekindles the slippery, errant ideologies inherent to the subject matter that he is drawn to.  The legendary status of trees merged with the purity and heroic invincibility of the German soldiers when the Roman attack on Germainia was repelled at the Battle of Teutoburger Forest in 9AD and continues to resonate nationally today.

In Winter Landscape (1970) Kiefer paints a head floating over a landscape.   Given the nature of this subject, the degree to which this head relates to Bernini’s St. Teresa in Ecstasy is jarring.  The disembodied head bleeds from the neck, spotting the ashen-speckled, snow-covered landscape below.  In this saturnine romanticization of death Kiefer depicts an ascension, while blood and ash settle on the ground in seeming reference to the Jewish extermination. As the Nazis believed in purifying the land from Jews by fire, so Kiefer, in an act of creative hubris, counters by cleansing the disaster through belief in the alchemic ritual of his art process.  Although mass shootings of the Jewish population occurred across the landscape of Eastern Europe, the constancy with which Kiefer entwines the Holocaust into the eternally recurring woodland heritage of German Volk is disconcerting.  Kiefer operates under the assumption that land is still a living testament to German identity.  As recently as 1983 Chancellor Helmut Kohl declared: “Mythology, Germans and the forest – they all belong together.”  Kiefer posits that such land, recently fertilized with a tragic layer of ash, can be sanctified by confession, creative ritual and representations of nature as culture.  Such a premise seems bewildering, if not profane.  To this end Kiefer dons the shamanistic uniform patterned from the eminent sculptor and legendary former volunteer Luftwaffe pilot Joseph Beuys, and attempts to mediate fact by reenacting a drama of myth and symbol.

Unlike most Adenauer-era kids raised in the crosshairs of the Soviet presence and the Marshall Plan, Kiefer bucked, and resisted the notion of a divide separating German generations.  Instead, Kiefer strategically implicates himself and by extension, his post-war generation as inheritors of the totality of German history.     As such Kiefer is a complicated independent, one who adopts the revanchist Neo Expressionist mode of his peers, yet embraces and exposes the repressed and tangled complexities of German life.  Mere mention of the Jewish extermination was still taboo in Germany until very recently.   Yet this is the debased standard to which Kiefer’s stance as a self-professed sufferer of his nations deeds is compared and lauded.

In Stefan! (1974), the head of German poet Stefan George oddly hovers and merges with a mountain top.  Kiefer applies himself to the task of rehabilitating George from the fascistic flirtations, messiah complex, heroic German idealizations, and elitism that all earned George reverence from Nazi officialdom.  One can speculate that George’s self-absorbed mysticism particularly engaged Kiefer.   George’s anti modernist views and advocacy of artists’ independence from political clarity may have also struck a chord with Kiefer’s own brand of subjectivism during a period of conceptualist dissolutions and authorial death.  In this instance, Kiefer assumes the role of judge and redeemer who will liberate George from the misinterpretations of cumbersome readers.

Anselm Kiefer, Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom 2000. Gouache, sand, ash and charcoal on two torn and pasted photographs, 50-1/4 x 30-1/4 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joseph H. Hazen Foundation Purchase Fund, 2001 © Anselm Kiefer. Photo credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In the pieces from 1985 thru 2004 Kiefer moves beyond usual expressionist tropes.  Painted on chemically manipulated photographs, and incorporating lead and shellac, these pieces renew our interest beyond the subject.  There is a fluidity of composition and freedom in these pieces that Kiefer’s watercolors and large, theatrical, stage-set paintings don’t achieve.  In these small paper works, Kiefer has relaxed his grid: the high horizon line and deeply furrowed perspective borrowed from Van Gogh.  In Miracle of the Serpents (1985), Kiefer layers diaphanous image and gesture within the activated photo emulsion.   There is a seemingly effortless and randomized approach to the field that allows the symbols of the Exodus narrative to almost flicker and move.  Additionally, in Strike and Heavy Cloud (1985), Keifer’s use of lead slabs affixed to the surface of the paper creates a physical connection to the viewer.  The emphatic material surface fittingly co-exists with the indication of landscape and depth of field in the photo image.  Kiefer may have clocked in, but we’re not faced with the labor-intensive insistence of the large paintings.  Instead, formally speaking, these are wonderfully immediate, ah-ha moments.

Similarly constructed with manipulated photos, paint and shellac, Emanation (1985) and Aziluth(2004) display a similar buoyancy and immediacy.  Unfortunately the agenda-driven content elbows its way in and betrays a distracting pseudo-spirituality, in which kabalistic thought, a recently popularized aspect of Jewish philosophy, is cherry picked and assumed by the outsider in the name of spiritual healing and repair. But for whom?  Kiefer posits that with just the right dose of national soul searching and memoriam, artwork can set you free, but his multivalent formulas remain woefully paradoxical.   Touching upon such life-extinguishing events is best left to an artist who passed through and left myth behind, an experienced practitioner of the timeless and tragic, such as Mark Rothko.

Ralph Albert Blakelock, Moonlight 1886-1895. Oil on canvas, 28-1/8 x 37-1/8 inches. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, William A. Clark Collection

Everyone knows Albert Pinkham Ryder, but mention of Ralph Albert Blakelock, also born in 1847, is rare and seldom passes beyond a fleeting reference to his Romantic moonlight landscapes.  Underrated and misunderstood in his lifetime, Blakelock remains hobbled by his near inclusion in the 1913 Armory show, an exhibition which eventually sealed Ryder’s modernist credentials.   In 1867 Blakelock exhibited his first landscape at the National Academy of Design; fortunately the same National Academy is now offering a reexamination of Blakelock’s achievements in The Unknown Blakelock.

Unlike the young American Impressionists, who embarked on grand tours to Europe, Blakelock remained in New York City.  He painted the ramshackle Shanties (1864) within a stones throw from where the Draft Riots had occurred a year earlier.  In these intimate yet forceful paintings, inspired by Adriaen and Isaac van Ostade’s Dutch genre scenes, Blakelock approaches his subjects with the urgency of a documentarian.

During the introspective post-Civil War period, from 1869 until 1873, Blakelock traveled the American west alone.  In Western Landscape (1871), Blakelock features a sharply focused foreground and deep atmospheric perspective that are emblematic of the crystalline naturalism of Hudson River School painters such as Cole and Bierstadt.

While Blakelock stoically experienced an authentic, primeval American landscape and studied life at various Indian encampments, he was aware of recent developments in European painting as well.  Blakelock’s European influence was indirect but significant.  Like the Hudson River School painters, he emulated Ruysdale, Lorraine and Turner.  Additionally, the shockwaves of Constable’s 1824 exhibition at the Salon de Paris, which helped galvanize the Barbizon School, would eventually impact Blakelock’s own burgeoning subjective expression.  For Blakelock, Constable’s declaration that “painting is but another word for feeling” rang true.

Blakelock’s rejection of tonalism is evident in Maiden of the Midst (undated).  Here, he transmutes a typically cropped view of Niagara Falls into a Symbolist themed, kaleidoscopic swirl of rainbow color and impasto. In Seal Rock (undated) he seems to have hot-wired the Impressionist palette.  Fusing Turner’s V-shaped light with Odilon Redon’s colorful Pegasus-themed pastels and Gutave Moreau’s  Europaand the Bull psychedelics of 1869,  Seal Rock is bizarrely incongruent, gaudy, and forward-looking.  (Blakelock’s own late version of Pegasus is included in the exhibition.)

Ralph Albert Blakelock, Moonlight, Silver and Old Lace, undated (c. 1880s). Oil on canvas 16-1/8 x 24-1/8 inches. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Graham

In the 1870’s, in order to heighten color effects, Blakelock lightly abraded the wooden cigar box surfaces upon which he occasionally painted. By the 1880’s he was loading his canvas with pigment, infusing it with light color, allowing it to harden, and polishing some ridges down with a meat cleaver and pumice stone. He would repeat the cycle multiple times, reacting to the surface without regard for the final image.  Because of the long drying time, Blakelock processed several paintings concurrently and often varied his method, which to some degree explains the variety of effects from painting to painting.  The moonlight landscapes of the 1880’s are striking examples.  In Moonlight Silver and Old Lace, the flickering light is achieved by exploiting the uneven relief of the surface.  At first glance, the telescoped view seems like a detail of sky cut from a much larger canvas. But the suggestion of a stream at the bottom edge of the painting suddenly recalibrates the scale and affirms the wholeness of the composition.  And so it is throughout this exhibition, as each painting reveals its own individuated resonance and singularity.

The strange surface of Moonlight Sonata, a landscape of 1889, emits a deep glowing blue from a glassy, backlit source. The effect of color immersion is similar to that of wearing big wraparound sunglasses. The process is inscrutable, as the surface appears to be leather infused with colored glass.  The dramatic flat silhouettes of the trees are informed by the haunting, romantic symbolism of Caper David Friedrich.  The placement of trees as a framing device also evidences the continuing model of Claude Lorraine.

In At Nature’s Mirror (1880), Blakelock unpacks the pastorals of Giorgione, Titian and Poussin with a new attention to the autonomy of paint on the surface. Certain areas look as if they are imprinted or stamped in paint. Viewed up close, the low hanging white sky floats assertively in the foreground; from two steps away, it recedes, glowing and distant in the background. It is a startling manipulation.  Hard contours yield to soft ones, and stippling turns into dry brush drags and scrapes.  Skirmishes for spatial dominance abound throughout the treeline, as foliage and sky tussle in tit-for-tat reiteration. A proto-Richteresque smear in ochre appears in the lower middle ground on the left.  It is a move Blakelock used with greater abandon in his later period, as the material process dissociated from the image and increasingly became what the painting is about.  Later, in Woodland Brook (undated), this tendency increases in scale and effect, producing a painterly activity and spatial ambiguity throughout the surface that, via Venetian painting and Romanticism, is prescient of Abstract Expressionism.

Ralph Albert Blakelock, Pegasus, before 1913. Oil on board, 9 x 13 inches. Denver Art Museum, The Edward and Tullah Hanley Memorial, Gift to the People of Denver and the Area

Blakelock was known as an exemplary colorist by his contemporaries.  And as Blakelock reexamines theme, material and process, so does he color.  In Twilight (1898), he applies new processes as he revisits the glowing golden light of his western Indian encampment sunset scenes from twenty years earlier. As in Church’s landscape of the same title, the amber sky grabs the viewer’s attention from across the room.  The recapitulated theme and strangely waxy, raised, encaustic-like surface are compelling testaments to Blakelock’s unquenchable curiosity, experimentation and non-linear progression.

Blakelock seems to have leap-frogged Impressionism, Divisionism and Cubism, arriving at an early form of Abstract Expressionism. Later, during his institutionalization for a mental breakdown, Blakelock returned to the small wooden panel format of his early years.  Again he abraded and merged the raw surface within the image, which now bore resemblance to those of Augustus Tack, Clifford Still and Franz Kline.  Also late and undated is Early Autumn, the most extraordinary painting in the show.  It hosts a dizzying array of expressive painterly techniques that liquefy the landscape.  In addition to his spontaneous brushstrokes, Blakelock explores a decalcomania-like technique of load, press, smear, and lift. This emphatically material-based process creates a raised, textural web of paint activity with a few scattered red, orange and yellows flecking a surface that is eerily similar to Jackson Pollock’s and as interesting to ponder.  Unknown Blakelock indeed.

March 14 – April 19, 2008

Norman Bluhm, Untitled Drawing #3 1984 acrylic and pastel on paper, 49-1/2 x 60 inches Courtesy James Graham & Sons

Norman Bluhm threw down a gauntlet.  He collided the gale force wind of action painting into the figural contortions of de Kooning and plied the result into a baroque schema of High Abstract Expressionism.  But unlike de Kooning, who in the end unfurled his lasso-like line into the airy sublime, Bluhm recalibrated and condensed the energy into an undulating volcanic swell.

The five large scale works on paper from 1984 currently at the James Graham Gallery remind us how Bluhm forged new territory and distinguished himself from the second wave of New York School abstraction.  Bluhm landed in France through the GI bill and, like Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis, lived there in the 50’s and 60’s absorbing local color.

One large 1958 canvas is also on view and typifies Bluhm’s violent gestural slashes from this earlier period. The force of impact as the brush splays against the canvas creates a spraying splatter similar to those of Alfred Leslie. By the 1970’s Bluhm moved from all-over composition to associative-relational design.  Suddenly, swelling, cartoonoid, bulbous shapes, reminiscent of Gorky’s drawing, emerge and nestle in overtly sexualized female anatomical configurations. Bluhm’s penchant for building a wall of curling female anatomy side-to-side and top-to-bottom is reminiscent of Ingres’ Turkish Bath, a connection acknowledged by the poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein, who linked a Bluhm title to the work.  In Bluhm’s hands it’s as if Gorky and de Kooning, also admirers of Ingres, collaborated on a new version of Turkish Bath – via Disney.

Squirmy, steadfast, and biologic in their surging rhythmic climax,  Bluhm’s forms bulge and push up against the edges of his support, creating an explosive pressure. His use of bilateral symmetry heightens this effect.  Untitled Drawing # 3frames a quivering, gelatinous mass of stacked parts that ascend toward a central dark void silhouetting two ejaculatory sprays of white paint.  In the lower third of the painting, salmon-pink lines carve arabesques into an undulating field of pale orange. A lemon yellow middle section is likewise incised by a curling pastel blue line. Above, Bluhm lays down a stratum of Matissian pink followed by orange.  Given the compact, stacking of intestinal forms articulated by incised, looping lines, one might guess Bluhm must have also admired Mayan paintings and stelae.

In Untitled 1984, floating yellow biomorphs resembling angels co-mingle with other fleshy manifestations. The central focus however is a dark cave-like opening at the bottom, reminiscent of Christ’s decent into limbo by Mantenga or Becafumi.   Lyrical as Bluhm often is, he can blow dark and moody, at times even evoking Munch’s and Rothko’s melancholic palettes, as in Drawing 1 and Drawing 7.  Despite the purgatorial plunge, Untitled 1984 remains decidedly upbeat; Bluhm generously drips whites, pale greens and yellows that pop like light filled beads against the dark recess of the open cave.

Bluhm’s instinct to retain his drip, splatter and bash in a measured but vital way gently dethrones the figural forms by seasoning them with the threat of obliteration.  By tweaking these forms through a back-and-forth process of give-and-take revision, Bluhm dances between specificity and indeterminate chaos.  Just as he verges on painterly overflow and obliteration, he pivots and reaffirms the innards of his design. His hand is in and out, on top and behind, applying counterpoint to each move and indexing his instinct to ride between affirmative application and gestural negation.

Each painting revels in the gestational dance between sex and death.  It is a bacchanalian revelry and Bluhm came to own it.  He reinvoked the gods of the ages and restaged their dramas.  From the heights of Tiepoloian excess and vertigo to the erotic posturing in Hindu temple statuary, the cup of Bluhm’s inspiration runneth over.  His painterly embrace of a mannered, floridly colored, biomorphic-cartoon form may yet be an untapped way forward from the illustrative, surreal-graphic style that has recently devolved from the great Philip Guston and Peter Saul.

Jan Steen, The Dissolute Household ca. 1665, oil on canvas; 42-1/2 x 35-1/2 inches, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, (all images) The Jack and Belle Linsky Collection, 1982 (1982.60.31)

Rembrandt van Rijn, Flora ca.1654, oil on canvas, 39-3/8 x 36-1/8 inches Gift of Archer M. Huntington, in memory of his father, Collis Potter Huntington, 1926 (26.101.10)

In conjunction with his newly released two-volume catalogue on the subject, Met curator Walter Liedtke has literally unshuffled the Met’s Dutch collection.   The Age of Rembrandt chronicles the trail of paintings and money given to the Met by several key benefactors. The rooms are organized by collector in sequence, and as the narrative of the groundbreaking purchase of 1871 and subsequent major donations unfolds, the varied strata of seventeenth century Dutch painting are revealed. The Dutch golden age was a cacophony of genres and styles, and the inspired installation by Liedtke and the deep holdings of the Met give each room the feel of an authentic picture collection.

The first room highlights a painting from each major donor.  We are faced by three stylistically different Rembrandt portraits from 1632-33 and three grand landscapes by Ruysdael, Hobbema and Cuyp.  Remarkably, the young Rembrandt could paint Bellona, a mythological portrait that weaves Rubens’ international style with mannered intonations, and then turn on a dime and conjure up Man in an Oriental Costume with an alchemically dazzling display of romantic light and color – a masterpiece of historical portraiture.   In the third portrait, the 26- year-old Rembrandt assumes his place alongside Velazquez, Titian and Van Dyck in Portrait of a Young Woman with a Fan. We are simply floored.

Adjacent to the portraits, Hobbema’s enchanting landscape is insular and distant, while Ruisdale reaches out and pulls the viewer into the countryside via his signature path.  Four rooms into the show, another landscape grouping by Ruisdale, Hobbema and Cuyp appear, and our memory is delightfully jogged back to the first grouping.  Such repetitions continue throughout the exhibition, a refreshing change from the usual, often staid groupings that tend to isolate artists and leave the viewer without a perspective of the larger painting culture.

Relationships abound.  Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer reinforce the picture plane by building their modernist compositions like so many overlaid computer windows, while Gerard ter Borch accentuates the picture window with a diagonally placed mantelpiece, bed, or table in his interiors.  Not to be outdone, Gerrit Dou uses the “window niche,” a framing device that he pioneered, to mediate our voyeuristic gaze into the private realm of the sitter. And Gabriel Metsu seems to have taken a page from everyone.   There is, as well, something wonderful about the riotous scenes of debauchery by Jan Steen and Franz Hals elbowing their way into our consciousness when the favored Vermeer a few feet away so perfectly mirrors our current obsession with the serenity of house and home.  Luckily for us and the Met, Benjamin Altman purchased three first-rate Hals around 1906 against the orthodoxy of prevailing taste.  Sometimes the art of cool, optical enhancement must yield to the dystopic places of delight – as in the bristly-brushed tavern scene.

It seems we can always pivot in this show and make comparisons.   Margareta Haverman’s Vase of Flowers (1716), an ode to observational perfection, ultimately wilts once we’re reminded of Rembrandt’s transformative power to paint far beyond depiction.  In Rembrandt’s Flora (1654) the subject’s sleeve is also a flower, her bodice a canvas, and her face the antecedent to Picasso’s proto post- modern, neo-classical figures.

A nexus in the exhibition is the chapel-like room built to house Hendrick ter Brugghen’s Crucifixion(1625).  One immediately thinks of Grunwald’s famously grotesque rendition of the subject, but on closer inspection the two flanking figures and their delicately flowing pastel-colored drapery and beatific dispositions seem reminiscent of Pontormo’s Deposition of 1528.  It seems northern Gothic painting continued to inspire for a hundred years.  Exiting the little room one is struck by the contrast between this devotional Crucifixion and two excellent interiors of a stark white-walled protestant church by Emanuel Witte (165?) and by Hendrick van Vliet (1660).

At this point two large, licentious Steens loom from the periphery, and an orgiastic blast of Mannerist form and color explode from Abraham Bloemaert’s Moses Striking the Rock (1596), acquired in 1972.  Suddenly we are reminded that the Dutch artists expanded Italian Mannerism with great flourish. Also present is Joachim Wtewael’s diminutive The Golden Age (1605), an exquisite Mannerist version of an Arcadian figural grouping, acquired under Liedtke in 1993.  It is a sad fact that paintings from this potent, late 16th century/early 17th century school were largely ignored until recently, and the Met holdings in this area suffered as a result. Fortunately Liedtke is filling in this gap. Ironically, the drawing department already has many quality works by Hendrick Goltzius and Cornelis van Haarlem, but did not include any in the separate but thematically related exhibition in the drawing and print hall.  Perhaps the inclusion of a mythological subject by one of these artists might have given viewers a less staid impression of the period.

Still, Liedtke’s show does not disappoint.  Toward the end of the main section we are treated to the inaugural viewing of the Markus Bequest of 2005.  Willem Claesz Heda’s meticulously descriptive detail in Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza and Glassware (1635) abuts the expressionistic brushstrokes and golden tonality of Jan van Goyen’s  A Beach with Fishing Boats (1653).  The tension between the optical and the painterly is again at play.

In addition, several paintings, such as Philip Koninck’s Landscape (1649), are revelations in their new locations. With its breathtakingly Rothkoesque scale, divided field and pressurized atmosphere, Koninck’s landscape innovation is a significant leap within the northern Romantic tradition.  But more specifically, Koninck seems a kindred spirit to the Hudson River landscape artists, some of whom also played an important role in the Met’s inception.  Perhaps now that the moneyed class has been given their due, the painters’ role in the making of the Met may one day be featured in the American wing.

November 17, 2006 to March 28, 2007

Diego Velázquez, Francisco Pacheco, c1619–22, oil on canvas, 40 x 36 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Pablo Picasso Portrait of Jaime Sabartés 1939, oil on canvas, 45.7 x 38 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona, Gift of Jaime Sabartés, 1960

What to think of yet another in the procession of general surveys the Guggenheim has served up?  In 2000, the late, great Robert Rosenblum presented the 1900 show as an expansive index that mirrored our own pluralistic, institutionalized, post avant-garde era.   The current exhibition, of Spanish painting from El Greco to Picasso, includes a magnificent array of  paintings and again puts the onus on us, by questioning how historical painting is currently viewed.  Can we truly accept a portrait of the artist as a ravenous, time-traveling marauder who steals and cannibalizes the immediate and distant past in an attempt to break new ground?  In 2004 the Guggenheim answered affirmatively in the smaller-scaled, less ambitious exhibition, Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition, which charted Mapplethorpe’s course as he pillaged classical sources depicting the sexually objectified male nude.

This time, Guggenheim curator Carmen Gimenez unfurls Time, Truth and History –  El Greco to Picasso, a theme-based show positing that the historical avant-garde, as exemplified by Picasso and Gris, was fueled by Spanish painting and cultural memory from as far back as the 16th century. And that cubism is, as Gertrude Stein quipped, Spanish.  The same claim is made for surrealism here.

While Gimenez’ thematic strategy does project continuity of subject matter, such as still-life or women, throughout centuries of Spanish painting, it doesn’t support the idea of an inherent Spanishness in Modernism.  And although the nationalist agenda is a stretch, the exhibition is a refreshing and bracing challenge to the notion that the contemporary epoch of the last 100 or so years sprung from Picasso’s head in an immaculately conceived rupture with the past. The usual suspects and heirs exemplar from Barr’s and Berenson’s cannons are trotted out and extolled, but this time they not only kiss and make up but have a roll in the hay.  We are treated to a celebratory mix of painting that reveals 350 years of swirling influences, and the sheer enormity of the presentation allows for other conversations, about foreign influence and formal innovation, to happen between the paintings.

The advertisements in the subway for the show offer an introduction.  The copy reads “El Greco to Picasso,” beneath which are two portraits, presumably one by each artist.  The Picasso looks like a Picasso –  a man’s bespectacled head, sporting a ruff collar, twists in a cubo-surreal tug-of-war.  Juxtaposed is an exquisitely observed portrait of a man in a sumptuous ruff collar.  But contrary to the headline, the image is not in fact by El Greco, but by Velazquez.  This thwarted expectation underscores the curator’s unfortunate preference for thematic rather than formal comparison.  Happily, El Greco painted a ruff collar too, albeit a less flamboyant – and less photogenic – one, in his Portrait of a Man (1600), which is installed in the exhibition with the other two portraits. And the conversation here is clearly between El Greco and Picasso — decidedly two-way and thoroughly modern, although the traditionally buttery Velazquez can listen in.

Establishing an unadulterated Spanish line of painterly influence is ultimately compromised by the looming presence of the Italians.  By Caravaggio’s death in 1618, Velazquez had fully embraced the Lombard’s use of dramatic snapshot naturalism and concentrated detail set in a dark vacuum of space. Velazquez’s superb Peasants at the Table (1619) exhibits all these qualities.  Caravaggio’s influence was so pervasive that as late as (1660) even Murillo, who was known for his fondness for Raphael’s classical idealism, was employing the new naturalism in Four Figures On A Step.

Ribera, perhaps Caravaggio’s greatest admirer, had a particularly ravenous appetite for cannibalizing Italian sources.   In Apollo and Marsyas (1637), Ribera directly borrows from Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul in the treatment of Marsyas in the lower half of the painting.  And Marsyas’ facial expression is influenced by the Bamboccianti school in Rome of the 1620’s. Yet in the upper half of the painting, the rich color and loose paint handling of the sky, background figures and flowing drapery of Apollo, is an homage to late Titian.  It is a breathtaking combination of opposing influences. Yet somehow Ribera makes it all work beautifully.

Despite the overwhelming Italian influence on the major Spanish masters, some lesser known painters expressed a more distinctly Spanish aesthetic.  It is here that this remarkably expansive exhibition taps the intrinsic power of Spanish painting, the power to evoke with deafening silence a heightened psychological state of existential quietude and foreboding.   Spain’s long-term political and cultural isolation spawned a reflective, insulated environment that drove Spanish still-life painters to develop their own darkened stage-set.  Amazingly, the stark, reductive space and dramatically lit volumes associated with Caravaggio were concurrently used by the marvelous Spanish still-life painter Juan Sanchez Cotan as early as 1602.  It was Cotan, with his hard-boiled observation and simplified compositions, who deflected the influence of Dutch still life’s over-abundance.  Cotan’s paintings, along with those of his brilliant follower Juan Van Der Hamen, are installed here with Gris and Picasso. But the hyper-real bent of 17th century Spanish still life was part of a different trajectory from that of Cubism’s inter-planar agitation. Eschewing the use of overlap, Cotan often staged his objects like overdetermined ducks in a row, and to great effect.  Most of the museum goers prefer to hover around Cotan’s and Hamen’s glistening gems rather than the more demanding examples by Picasso or Gris.  The Spanish preference for spare, evocative still life finds expression in Salvator Dali’s precisely defined bread-basket table settings and blood-and-sand landscapes, the final and decidedly uncubist destination of Cotan’s trajectory.

The unnerving yet magical stage-set of 17th century Spanish still life may have affected Francisco de Zubaran as well. The small atrium off the Guggenheims lower ramp is filled with Zubaran’s haunting paintings and has never looked quite this good.  Interestingly, Zubaran, the master of the aura-drenched lone figure, could not breathe a sense of interpersonal dynamics into his figural groups.  Instead they remain isolated, and psychologically dissociated from each other as if they are objects inhabiting the strictly compartmentalized, separately ordered world of Spanish still life. (Zubaran’s own still lifes were entirely indebted to Cotan.) One example where this tendency toward alienation works to great advantage is in the sense of foreboding between Jesus and Mary in his House of Nazareth (1644), of which there is an equally splendid second version in Cleveland.

The bold expressions of individual Spanish genius from Las Meninas to Guernica are astonishing.  And Zubaran, with his unique vision, reductive impulse and expressive power, is still greatly underrated.  Zubaran’s remarkable use of white hadn’t been approached until Robert Ryman’s assessment in the late twentieth century.  And in the midst of continued national isolation, Goya emerges, presaging symbolism, expressionism, and late Guston , and surpasses every European painter in  penetrating  the human condition.  Manet certainly thought so when he modeled The Execution of Maximillian (1869) on Goya’s  The Third of May (1814).  And it is Manet who perfectly exemplifies the roving art-historical eye.  By single-handedly resurrecting El Greco and touting him along with Velazquez and Goya as a magnificent triumvirate, Manet changed the way we look at art history.  When Manet brazenly stole the figural group from Raimondi’s TheJudgment of Paris (1520), and inverted the identities of the flagrantly sexualized male nude and modestly poised female, for his seminal modern work Luncheon on the Grass some 350 years later, he showed how a modern artist could re-evaluate painting tradition, charting the way for Picasso and Matisse.  In the wake of Manet’s and Picasso’s connections with historicism it should not be startling how much Lucian Freud’s Leigh Bowery and Fernando Botero’s figures owe to Juan Carreno’s excellent full length portraits of “La Monstrua” (1680) in the Freaks section of the exhibition.  Carreno’s monumental sense of proportion, framing and scale are remarkably contemporary.

In spite of the specific themes and domestic schools of Spanish painting emphasized by the curators, international cross pollination of style within historical movements has a messy life of its own.  Ribera, though born in Spain, lived all his adult life in Naples and adopted Caravaggio’s practice of using live models.  And what of El Greco, born in Greece and active in both Spain and Italy?  His greatest influence is undoubtedly Tintoretto, whose compression of figure and ground, use of elongation and diaphanously sketchy painting technique can at times appear agitated to the point of seeming unfinished.  Of course this is something Tintoretto, El Greco, Cezanne and Picasso all have in common.  Does that make Cubism Italian?  Aren’t El Greco’s figures in Vision of St. John , on loan here from the Met, and Lacoon, at the National Gallery, the template for Matisse’sDance and Cezanne’s bathers?  Surely many of Cezanne’s paintings satisfy the defined criteria of analytical cubism.  Does the fact that Picasso spent the vast majority of his life and all his innovative years outside of Spain determine his artistic nationality? If not, El Greco is Greek.