Bernard Langlais, Thirteen Cats, ca. 1967, wood and paint, 48 x 96 x 2 inches. Courtesy of Alexandre Gallery

New York’s American Art Week is dominated by the auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s taking place May 17-26.  To coincide with the week’s theme, fourteen dealers team together for their own event, Just Off Madison: An Open House. Spanning the blocks between 67th-80th streets along Madison Avenue, these private dealers are rarely open to the public.  So it’s worthwhile to make your way over for three hours this Wednesday.

These specialists in American art will mostly be showing paintings and works on paper dating from the mid-1800′s through present day.  One example is Al Held’s Untitled (1961) at Betty Krulick Fine Art. Ltd.  The other participants are Avery Galleries, Jonathan Boos, Connor – Rosenkranz, LLC, Debra Force, Fine Arts, Inc, Graham, Kraushaar Galleries, Menconi & Schoelkopf Fine Art, LLC, MME Fine Art, LLC, James Reinish & Associates, Inc, Franklin Riehlman Fine Art, Gavin Spanierman, Ltd, Lois Wagner Fine Arts, Inc and Meredith Ward Fine Art.

Also in the neighborhood, Alexandre Gallery, very much open to th public as a matter of course, acknowledge American Art Week with a special display of members of the Stieglitz Group along with their current exhibition, the redoubtable Bernard Langlais, as Americana as they come.

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Photographs by Robin Siegel, Installation shots by Allyson Shea, Report by David Cohen
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Installation shot, Mark Greenwold: Murdering the World, Paintings and Drawing 2007-2013 at Sperone Westwater, May 10 to June 28, 2013

A Mark Greenwold show is hardly less rare than a new painting from this OCD master of minutiae:  to give the fellow a normal-sized show you pretty much need to stage a mini-survey.  That’s what his new dealers,  Sperone Westwater, have done for the veteran fantasy realist on the third floor of their Norman Foster-designed railroad gallery on the Bowery, in a show that takes its title from a line of Stanley Cavell’s hand-inscribed at its entrance: “The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.”

His admirers were out in force the Friday night of Frieze weekend, including a number of sitters in his bizarre psycho-dramas.  Amongst the latter category were Chuck Close and James Siena who besides their visages and birthday suits also contribute to Greenwold’s visual vocabulary in the form of their trademark pictorial marks – Close’s lozenges, Siena’s algorithmic zags – that the artist uses as kind of thought bubbles hovering over his dramatis personae’s heads.

In his New York Sun review of Greenwold’s last survey, at DC Moore Gallery in the Fall of 2007, artcritical editor David Cohen wrote in terms that still apply that “Mr. Greenwold revels in capturing each hair on a dog, or each thread in a carpet, with a nutty regard for exactitude

Like psychoanalysis, around which these strange dramas revolve, Mr. Greenwold’s painting mode supposes that no detail is to be ignored and that time is no object. Psychoanalysis is the key — if not to decoding these bizarre, narcissistic soul dramas, then at least to understanding the strange genre in which they occur. For Mr. Greenwold’s pictures occupy an ambiguous space nestled between allegory and narrative. Each of the figures feels highly isolated, and yet each one plays a function in relation to the action unfolding around them all.

On view at 257 Bowery between Houston and Stanton streets, New York City, 212.999.7337 through June 28, 2013

Mark Greenwold and Chuck Close. Photo: Robin Siegel (c) 2013

Mark Greenwold, center, with Peter and Sally Saul. Photo: Robin Siegel (c) 2013

James Siena, Jim Torok, Alexi Worth. Photo: Robin Siegel (c) 2013

Jim Torok, Elena Sisto, Mary Jo Vath. Photo: Robin Siegel (c) 2013

Courtesy of Sperone Westwater. Photo: Allyson Shea

David Cohen. Photo: Robin Siegel (c) 2013

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Jene Highstein, Grey Clam, 1990/2001. Site specific sculpture. The Wanås Foundation, Sweden Photo: Anders Norrsell

Jene Highstein died April 27 at his farm in upstate New York.  He was 70.  The cause was lung cancer, diagnosed this past January.  A postminimalist sculptor of elegance and idiosyncrasy with a keen interest in architecture, Highstein was part of the storied alternative space 112 Greene Street in the 1970s.  He went on to show widely in the United States, Europe and recently in Asia.  Following his well-received exhibition of towers and elliptical forms at Danese Gallery in 2011, Highstein’s  most recent exhibition was of drawings from Cape Breton at 56 Bogart in Bushwick this past winter.  An exhibition of early works is now being planned at the Clocktower in Lower Manhattan.

A tribute to the artist will be posted here later this week.

Jene Highstein with his sculpture, Totem, 1980, installed that year in downtown Manhattan. Courtesy of Public Art Fund.

Cora Cohen, Small Creature, 2012, 16 x 21 inches, acrylic mediums, Flashe, pigment, water color on linen. Courtesy of the Artist

This year’s fellowship awards from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation were presented to a total of 24 artists working in the field of Fine Arts; 14 artists in the category of Film-Video; 11 in Photography. The Fine Arts fellows include seven diverse painters, all women: Leigh Behnke, Cora Cohen, Harriet Korman, Carrie Moyer, Ann Pibal, Susan Wanklyn, and Elena Sisto. Cohen and Korman have been active since the 1960s. Cohen, known for her large-scale, dense and washy, mixed-media oil paintings, also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award in 2012. The Responsibility of Forms, an exhibition of her new paintings was recently at Guided By Invoices in New York, reviewed in these pages by David Rhodes.  Sisto, a long-time teacher at the School of Visual Arts, opens an exhibition of new work on April 25, titled Between Silver Light and Orange Shadow, at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, her first show with that gallery.  She describes her recent paintings as “centering around the artist’s experience of being in the studio, and the passage into adulthood of young women artists.”

Philip Kennicott chief art critic for The Washington Post, has received the Pulitzer Prize in the category of criticism this year for two long-format reviews of exhibitions, and one personal essay, all written in 2012. The three highlighted articles are: a critical analysis of the photography of Taryn Simon at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a review of an exhibition at the National Building Museum devoted to the architect Kevin Roche, and an essay, titled “What Are We Losing in the Web’s Images of Suffering and Schadenfreude?” that examines our relationship to the over-abundance of disturbing and grotesque imagery found online and in-print. Kennicott, a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer, has been a critic for the Post since 1999.

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NEW YORK CITY: Wednesday, April 10.  The Drawing Center honored Sean Scully at its annual gala this year in true Irish style with the artist’s buddy Bono proposing a raucous, poetic toast.  The honoree responded in kind with a stirring tribute to his hosts. Bucking a trend in which institutions double their footprint or decamp to trendier locales as soon as the itch to expand takes hold, the Drawing Center, under long serving executive director Brett Littman, has remained true to their roots in SoHo, skillfully reshaping and upgrading their premises but staying put on Wooster Street and in the idea of drawing, albeit in a seemingly ever-expanding definition of the activity. Scully’s traveling exhibition, Sean Scully: Change and Horizontals, currently in Rome, focusing on a key transitional year in the 1970s, was organized by the Drawing Center, where it will show this fall.  The gala, meanwhile, at the Tribeca Rooftop, attracted an assortment of the artist’s rock star friends, including one from the kitchen!

Mario Batali, Michael Stipe, Bono and Sean Scully at the Drawing Center Gala, April 10, 2013. Photo by Hal Horowitz

Sean Scully, Brett Littman, Corban Walker (front) and David Cohen at the Drawing Center Gala, April 10, 2013. Photo by Hal Horowitz

Waqas Wajahat and Elizabeth Schwartz at the Drawing Center Gala, April 10, 2013. Photo by Hal Horowitz

Nova Benway, Lisa Sigal, Lucy Freeman Sandler and Irving Sandler at the Drawing Center Gala, April 10, 2013. Photo by Hal Horowitz

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Walter Richard Sickert, Visions, Volumes and Recessions, ca.1928/29. Etching.

David Cohen, founder and editor of artcritical.com, has been invited to deliver the inaugural lecture on April 16, at the gallery, 530 West 25th, 4th floor, at 7PM.

His title is “Canons for Contrarians” and offers something of a personal manifesto, he tells artcritical.  “I have often felt a particular kind of heat when it comes to juggling certain anti-establishment, personal tastes I have with what I’d call civic responsibilities, whether as critic, educator and publisher.  You want to tell it as you see it but you have to give an accurate, fair picture of the way things stand.”   The lecture also draws on what he feels are paired lectures he has delivered in the last few years on his maverick painter heroes, Walter Sickert and André Derain, as well as his ongoing fascination with the influence and reputation of Alex Katz, “an artist caught between the stools of established and alternative taste.”

The second lecture in the series is to be given next year by Jennifer Samet, and fund raising is ongoing for the series, as their website explains.  Revisionism is a gradual process, as is – be warned – taking the elevator to the fourth floor of 530 West 25th Street when there is a crowd!

Chantal Akerman
Photo Courtesy of the Artist

On the eve of Chantal Akerman’s solo exhibition of new video works at The Kitchen, the Belgian avant-garde filmmaker will read from a new autobiographical text, My Mother Laughs. The story is centered around the artist’s aging mother, and promises to be a distillation of the major themes of her career: memory, family, and the complexities of narrative. Akerman’s most recent film is Almayer’s Folly (2011) based on the Joseph Conrad novel of the same title.

Chantal Akerman: Maniac Shadows, curated by Tim Griffin and Lumi Tan, opens on Friday, April 12, and will be on view until May 11, 2013

The Kitchen is located at 512 West 19 Street, New York, NY 10011

(212) 255-5793

Jay Muhlin, Neighbors, from Guilty Pleasures, 2012. Digital c-print, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Vox Populi

Once again serving as prelude to Armory Week in New York City, Zürcher Studio, the Lower East Side satellite of the respected Paris Galerie Zürcher, offers Salon Zürcher.

In previous years this micro art fair has showcased galleries in the neighborhood.  This year, neighborhood goes national in a show of half a dozen regional dealers in a title that wears provincialism on its sleeve: Out of Town.

Zürcher hosts Andrew Rafacz from Chicago, Anthony Greaney from Boston, Gallery Diet from Miami, Heiner Contemporary from Washington DC, Romer Young from San Francisco and the Philadelphia alternative (weekend) gallery, Vox Populi.

A show at Vox Populi, incidentally, was featured an installment, last fall, of artcritical.com’s Review Panel Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy.  Among four artists they are bringing to Zürcher is Jay Muhlin in a work that echoes the ethos of the salon in title: “Neighbors,” from his Guilty Pleasures series from 2012.

Out of Town runs Tuesday through Saturday, 18 to 8 pm and Sunday, 12 to 5 pm

Please send CV, names of references and a message of interest to David Cohen at artcritical@gmail.com with ASSOCIATE EDITOR POSITION  in subject line.

Portrait of a Scholar. By Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, detail. Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg