January 4 to February 2, 2013
529 W 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues
New York City, 212.463.9666

Mario Naves, Outsourcing Picabia, 2011. Acrylic and oil on canvas and wood, 18 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery

The abstract collages in Mario Naves’ previous shows at Elizabeth Harris spoke eloquently of a particular approach to image-making, one involving a mixture of the tactical and the serendipitous. Constructed of painted and torn bits of paper, the collages were small in scale, but broad in their explorations. Their ragged contours and repositioned sections of brushwork probed formal possibilities within larger investigations of texture, materiality, atmosphere, and the allusive potential of shapes. For me, his highly tactile surfaces occasionally overwhelmed the formal events within.

Naves’ sixth show at Elizabeth Harris reveals something new: a change in medium, and a more efficient attack that privileges composition over texture.  Although still abstract, the works on view are all paintings with highly orchestrated geometric shapes. Close inspection reveals overpainting of areas of many canvases, but the smooth surfaces minimize the show of struggle. The physically layered depths of his collages are gone, replaced by another kind of depth, one purely pictorial in nature. This movement from suggestive textures towards definitive form brings some notable rewards.

Most gallery-goers will be familiar with Naves’ extensive writings on art, and the formal rhythms of these paintings brim with the same directness and conciseness of thought. Newly evident is his eloquence of color, apparent in measured sequences of hues that run the full scale of tones and temperature, and most of the full range of intensity. Surface rhythms intensify the action of these colors. In Louder than God (2011), for instance, the retiring luminosity of a large, medium-blue plane partially surrounds a disk of a barely lighter, more exuberant purple, turning it into a buoyant punctuation mark. A wedge of heated yellow-brown counters it at the canvas’ opposite edge; shards of lighter hues deploy across the crest of the blue. But the chief competition is a red circle—identical in size to the first but more insistent in hue—that, perched precariously above the blue, seems miles from its secured, purple twin. Together, the pressures of color and shape impart fullness to the rhythms: varieties of scale, necessity of location, contradictions of presence.

Mario Naves, A Pigeon in Catalonia, 2011. Acrylic and oil on canvas on wood, 24 x 18 inches. Courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery

This is exciting to someone who, like myself, sees painting as a formal art revealing itself in irreducible elements of color and line. With these ingredients taking the lead, each painting in the exhibition follows a new tack: the deck of cards deals itself anew, so to speak.  In Sundays Only (2012), broad polygons—limpid green, subdued blue-gray, ruddy terracotta, ethereal cerulean— descend luminously from huddling disks at the canvas’ top. (As for most works in the show, the title perplexes, even as the image convinces.) In Outsourcing Picabia (2011), a tower of seesawing triangles lifts a “background” blue, despite the sinking pressure of a dark, orange-rimmed disk.

At times compositions seem driven more by ideas than visual exigencies. The dominant event of “Obscure Reference” (2012), for example, is its horizontal division into planes of deep red-orange and warm gray, with the in-between contour continuously curling and kinking in a long journey to a singular blue swirl at the opposite edge. Though playful in design, for me the curls and kinks simply signify a conversation among elements rather than embodying it through color. This imparts to the canvas a somewhat over-pondered effect. In some paintings, the variety of color slackens when it comes to the highest-pitched intensities.

More typical of this revelatory exhibition, however, is my favorite painting, A Pigeon in Catalonia (2011). Here, variously inclined shapes—pure white, heated rust-red, a pale, absorbent gray—commune noisily at the center before launching an ochre-and-cerulean wedge to the canvas’ edge; a small, sedate package of triangles observes from above.

The full impact of such works, however, eludes words.  Best to see them in person, in the flesh, where they speak as only colors and lines can.

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April 26 – June 30, 2012
531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-630-0722

Just what is it about America’s love-hate relationship with French culture? There was a time when it tipped to love: Americans were among the most significant collectors of 19th- and early 20th-century French art. By the postwar era, however, Clement Greenberg was arguing for the “force” of American painters over the “charm” of the French. Donald Judd was even less enamored. In a 1964 interview, he dismissed the “structures, values, feelings of the whole European tradition,” adding for good measure, “It suits me fine if that’s all down the drain.”

Jean Hélion, Mannequinerie en solde, 1978. Acrylic on canvas, 57-1/2 x 45 inches. Courtesy of Schroeder Romero & Shredder

The change of heart, of course, paralleled the waning of the French School and the ascendancy of New York. But it also had something to do with the nature of French art itself: its very stylishness, and its predilection for the fastidious and idiosyncratic. When we were seduced by it, we fell hard; when we weren’t, we wouldn’t go near it.

Art, though, is not fashion, and style not the final measure of an artist. There’s no better reminder of this than Schroeder Romero and Shredder’s remarkable retrospective of nearly thirty drawings and paintings by Jean Hélion (1904-1987), an artist whose work powerfully combined the raw and the elegant, the primal and the complex. Curated by Deborah Rosenthal, the exhibition spans over fifty years of the artist’s work, illuminating the consistency of his aesthetic even as it evolved from pure abstraction to the highly figurative. Coinciding with the exhibition is the reprinting of “They Shall Not Have Me” (Arcade Publishing, $24.95), Hélion’s gripping account of his two-year incarceration and escape from a Nazi prisoner of war camp.

Given his propensity for crafted forms, massaged contours and provocative color, you’ll seldom find a more distinctly French painter than Hélion. But what really matters is that he was a great artist—a forceful draftsman, a superb colorist, as well as a first-rate modernist: a cerebral painter who didn’t conceal strategies inspired by a profound understanding of the masters.

Mondrian was an early influence, and Hélion found original ways of re-creating the Dutch master’s climactic sequences and intervals. In one of the earliest pieces in the show—a small, briskly executed gouache from 1934—rough pairings of shapes sea-saw and clamber up the paper, each uniquely characterized: a heavily incised rectangle balancing a lighter, rounding form; smaller shapes above, echoing and extrapolating on these tensions. Imagine a painting by Mondrian, loosened in motif and technique, but relinquishing not a spark of its rhythmic intensity.

Hélion wrote eloquently about art, and he described his process in a 1937 essay titled “Avowals and Comments”:

By all kinds of successive manipulations, some instinctive and dark, some intellectual and conscious, I reach a structure which, at certain times, becomes strong, dominant, individual.

The nearly four-by-five-foot canvas Équilibre (1936) reveals a far higher degree of finish than this gouache, but its forms are every bit as energetic. The design circulates between four cores of overlapping, shield-like forms, each articulated to a different degree, with angled planes stretching in-between. Some shapes orbit others, or speed towards a stable point, or pace out an extended passage. The pressure of colors—dense, vacant, burning, limpid—charges the measure of each interval with emotion. Or do colors measure the emotions of forms? Like all Hélion’s work, Équilibre seems simultaneously propelled by the rational and the sensual.

Describing one of the Louvre’s great Poussins in his 1938 essay “Poussin, Seurat and Double Rhythm,” Hélion illuminates the animating effect of color:

Thus a current is running though the picture, carrying the spectator to all points, everywhere gaining an acceleration, a new speed, a new quality. By a series of rebounds, the color transforms itself. One red jumps over to a blue to an orange. One brown jumps to red over a black…

In Équilibre no element is more crucial than one of the smallest: a slender, horizontal wedge of blue near the canvas’ lower edge that anchors the circulating masses, and holds them just below our point of view. It serves as a kind of floor line, establishing the support of earth, the departure of verticals, the density of space around them: in other words, the most primal sensations accompanying our own occupations of space.

Jean Hélion, Abstraction, 1939. Oil on canvas, 17 x 71 inches. Courtesy of Schroeder Romero & Shredder

Stylistically, Hélion’s paintings from the late ‘30s bear some resemblance to Léger’s, but Hélion is drawn more to strange, glancing particulars. Though highly abstracted, his images conjure surprisingly earthy effects. Bobbing at one end of the long horizontal canvas Abstraction (1939), for instance, two faceted forms have all the presence of heads, though lacking any kind of facial features. At the canvas’ opposite extremity, a condensation of arcing and minutely overlapping forms becomes a cloven mound, viewed from slightly above. The intensity of its presence, and of our relationship to it, is uncanny. “In a picture an element is real when it behaves like nature, when it coincides with its currents,” Hélion wrote in his essay on Poussin.

It’s really not that much of a leap, then, to the figurative images he pursued from the late 1930’s on. The small gouache Pegeen (1944) tangibly captures the presence of the artist’s wife—despite her absurdly long neck and highly abstracted hair—in front of the fellow-forms of a sport coat in a store window and a wall’s patch of flaking paint. Again, colors weight all: sidewalk below, storefront held above, figure before, our viewpoint held by punctuating details. We’ve seen this conviction of form before in Courbet and Matisse, but Hélion edits his perceptions in an original way, extracting his subject out of raw events with almost unsettling poise.

Considering its intimate scale, “Jean Hélion: Five Decades” touches on a surprisingly wide range of the artist’s explorations. A crisply angular portrait of a be-hatted man in a 1939 painting seems just a stone’s throw from the earliest abstractions. A 1949 canvas of a seated nude reveals the outlined arabesques and odd, rippling details of work from the late 40s. A number of more realistic drawings and paintings, dating to the 50s and 60s, combine multiple studies of a particular motif on a single sheet or canvas. In each of the ten scenes comprising Page de Musique, (1962) the artist employs a “simple” palette—buoyant off-whites, retiring blue-grays, deeply absorbent earth-reds, insistent green-ochres—to vividly locate the curves of a tuba between an angling skylight and the floor’s diagonal shadows. By some magic, Hélion makes the resilient contours sensuous, and the sunlight concrete.

Jean Hélion, Page de Musique, 1962. Oil on canvas, 23-5/8 x 28-3/4 inches. Courtesy of Schroeder Romero & Shredder

Though more painterly in technique, canvases from his last active years reflect the same eye for the essential and oddly telling moment. The shadows cast by an umbrella in Mannequinerie en solde (1978) crucially advance one’s eye through a web of color-located spaces, each hue preparing the leap to the next: soldier to manikin, to bucket, to object-laden table. For me, Hélion’s late paintings sometimes have the aspect of flamboyant exercises—cerebral rhymings between objects and their stand-ins, arrangements for the sake of arranging—rather than the spontaneous, portrait-like summations of even his most abstract works. Elements, at times, locomote without gaining momentum. But more often the late work simmers with Hélion’s usual energy, as does the small pastel-and-gouache Suite Pucière (1978), which potently measures out a procession of piled hats and pitchers along a bench top.

Expectations of art have changed a great deal since the Havemeyers bought Monets and Albert Barnes acquired Matisses. We’ve grown more sophisticated about art, and have added auras of appreciation to the art we encounter. Abstract Expressionism showed us how a painting could measure the psychic tremors of an artist’s searchings. Pop Art demonstrated that an artwork might magnify cultural purposes by recontextualizing them. Minimalism showed us how a sculpture could recall the transcendence of life by incarnating the transcendence of art.

None of these auras illuminate the work of Hélion. Rather than presuming a role for art—as transcendent object, or omniscient sign—Hélion simply absorbed, with a remarkably astute eye, great instances of traditional painting, and pursued its possibilities in his own way. While many a postmodernist artist might toss all of tradition down the drain, Hélion found it vibrant and rich enough to re-invent from within.

And yet, a wide, anarchic streak informs Hélion’s process, relying as it did on independent and spontaneous experience. In the same “Poussin” essay, he wrote: “Art is not the praising of eternal values; it is the permanent transformation of those values.”

And though the New York School, a decade later, practically fetishized the idea of being “in” the painting, Hélion affirms that for the best artists of any era, whatever their style, the connection to the work is always consuming, evolving, and regenerating. From “Poussin,” again: “The created form becomes creative. What is built, rebuilds the conception. A continuity between man and his work is started.”

Love or hate his style, you should include Hélion in your personal canon of notable artists. He’s our best recent link to Mondrian, Poussin, Giotto, and beyond.

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October 20 – December 17, 2011
41 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue
New York City, 212-755-2828

The discrepancy between technique and expression is one of the fascinating paradoxes of art. Who would think that Ingres’ corseted technique could lead to such expansive descriptions? (Or, that Seurat’s careful building of tones would culminate in such gutsy massings of form, or Soutine’s thrashings—which stylistically seem to say, “Take me anywhere but here”—bring his subjects closer to the viewer?) Ingres’ obsessive details and distortions are an entertaining symptom of his loving Raphael not wisely but too well, and we may find ourselves in the peculiar position of admiring him despite his intentions.

Brett Bigbee, Abby, 2005 – 2010. Oil on linen, 70-1/32 x 53-7/8 inches. Courtesy of Alexandre Gallery

Like Ingres, Brett Bigbee brings formidable rendering skills to idiosyncratic figure paintings. Nearly 20 drawings and paintings by the artist, who was born in 1954, recently graced the walls at Alexandre Gallery. Producing only one or two paintings a year, the artist has perfected a singular style that seems to combine the iconic reserve of American colonial portraiture and the descriptive effulgence of French academic painting. His precise modeling imparts to his figure and still life paintings both a glowing intricacy and a slightly surreal exactitude. Bigbee’s attentions are actually quite selective: he invariably renders reflections on the irises of eyes, but no eyelashes to speak of; their whites always include that tiny fold of flesh at the inner corner, but nary a vein. One might expect to find a vulnerability in his portraits, given his painstaking method and the fact that all are members his family, but, if anything, they seem inoculated by their brilliant rendering. They have a porcelain opacity that triggers, for me, an “Ingres reflex”: an admiration for the work at odds with its intentions.

The forms in the seven graphite drawings in the exhibition feel as much incised as drawn. In several portraits, the exquisite detail—the finely cracked lips, the darkly opalescent pools of eyes—impart an Ingres-like effect of self-generated organisms. Study for James (2000) is typical in that all forms become more diffuse as one proceeds away from the riveting eyes, until one arrives at a uniform tone at the sheet’s perimeter, the hair melting into an enclosing vapor. In this respect, Bigbee’s approach is distinctly unclassical; great traditional artists such as Ingres would locate a necessary role for each element, from encircling jawline to embellishments of hair, in characterizing the whole of a face.

Like George Tooker or William Bailey, Bigbee appears to approach drawing as an additive modeling process. Neighboring adjustments of tone actively create sensations of volumes, which accrue, in rather passive rhythms, to fill the surface. Opposite to this “from-the-inside-out” approach is the “outside-in” process of Matisse or Ingres, who, though fully capable of shading, start by locating and relating points across the paper, and building through the tensions of intervals. This is an approach based in composing, and it makes for different expression: the singularity of an arm extending through space as opposed to forms emerging evocatively from the depths. (In truth, great artists from Watteau to Degas had a foot in both camps, pacing their rich, modeled tones with vigorous intervals. But I’ll admit I’m keener on outside-in composing. Modeling without composing takes you to light-weight seductions—to Greuze and Bougereau—while composing without any tonal modeling at all can take you to such extraordinary places as Picasso’s line drawings or Rembrandt’s pen-and-ink sketches.)

Consequently Bigbee’s drawing is indeed muscular in its modeling, but not in the quantifying of human gesture. His infinitely patient approach to all parts of bodies produces some intriguing effects. For instance, the younger boy’s head and left arm pop out disconcertingly in the five-foot-tall drawing Joe and James (2001-2003), while both bodies seem to drop from the heads, rather than grow from the support of earth, imparting to them something of the aspect of pinned specimens.

But might this be the result of a conscious decision? Consider the small, remarkable drawing titled Abby (2004) Here, the slight pursing of lips, the shading about the eye sockets, and shadows about the base of the nose, eloquently lead from one to the other as asymmetrical pressures, all within the tangible embrace of a head. Honoring the mobility of features, the artist turns the subject’s eyes, wondrously, into the summation of a vulnerable entity.

Brett Bigbee, Abby, 2004. Graphite on paper, 11-1/2 x 8 inches. Courtesy of Alexandre Gallery

In fact, lingering a while in the exhibition at Alexandre, one may sense in many of the works a particular kind of magic.  Academic artists are frequently strong, if conventional, draftsmen and less than active colorists. Their hues tend to fill rather than direct, adding simply an evocative sheen to what’s already there. Bigbee, however, appears to be the rare painter whose expression is more coherently expansive in color than in drawing. Indeed, his color sometimes weights elements left at loose ends by his iron-willed drawing.

In James (1999-2001), a portrait of a mother and her baby, the face of the baby is a marvel of modeling, and not just tonally, but with colors eliciting the movement between lit and softly shadowed areas. It represents what must be an extraordinary amount of work, yet it feels limber. Bigbee deftly catches even the curiosity in the baby’s gaze. Colors lend tangible weight to certain other sequences, too: there’s a luxurious depth in the movements between the baby’s shadowed ear, the deep absorbent red of his mother’s dress, and the pure blue of sky visible in the window—all coexisting within an inch of canvas space.  But such are the peculiarities of Bigbee’s attack that the entire remainders of the figures’ bodies have less sculptural presence. One recognizes strategies in the drawing; the baby’s curling fingers just broach the encompassing contour of his mother’s shoulder, while his other hand, resting atop her wrist, launches the larger echo of her fingers. But the drawing fails to build to such affecting events, and in this case even Bigbee’s empathetic color can’t enliven them rhythmically.

The exhibition includes five still life paintings, and here Bigbee’s precise descriptions avoid of the surreal overtones of some of the figural work. He also brings to them the stronger aspects of the portrait paintings, with simpler compositions again showing more momentum of rhythm. The six fruit in Quince (2000-01) vividly capture the orbiting energy of orange spheres in a leafy world. Dark Earth (2010-11) catches the singularity of a bright clover blossom arcing from a darkened patch of soil; behind it, the division of a glowing rock, by two blades of grass, sounds a telling response.

Dominating the exhibition, however, is Abby (2005-10), a portrait of young girl standing alone in a field. One imagines that Bigbee summoned his full powers for this six-foot-tall canvas, and in technical terms it’s a tour de force. Yet it impresses also as pictorial expression. Bigbee’s colors impart to the figure a palpable presence, as if she had precipitated out the scene’s thick, darkish air. Though the face and hands still flirt with that porcelain inertia, her vertical form holds powerfully in space against the taut horizontals of distant water and the rocks at her feet. Far-away treetops connect in an uneven wave that buoys the pale shoulders of the girl, who stands awkwardly, as if she wasn’t quite sure how she got there. The artist clearly knows, though—at least on some intuitive level—having conjured it through some remarkable chemistry of color.

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Simon Carr, School Girls, 2010. Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the Painting Center

There’s a paradox at the heart of how we experience art. While we may take pride in being art-literate, we absorb much of our knowledge of art (as for life itself) in unconscious fashion. Scrupulous study and debate may guide our understanding, but these are no substitute for the education we continuously and unknowingly receive through our eyes.

This is a very particular kind of education. Eyesight may be no more than the recording of countless ricocheting electromagnetic vectors, but it permits a startlingly rich connection with, say, a tree; the act of looking is a miraculous mapping of another miracle in the natural world. It’s an experience unknown to a person born unsighted, who may otherwise acquire every bit of knowledge about history, science, and human nature.

It’s no wonder that over a quarter of our brains are involved in processing visual stimuli, and that it takes new-born babies months to fully see. And no wonder so many great artists said they wished they could see like a child. Seeing truly, without habit or bias, was crucial. Many an artist could muster a sense of style and technique, but the masters surpassed at something more intuitive and unique to painting: the ability of giving pictorial momentousness to a figure’s gesture, or an apple’s location. Thank your eyes, then, and that quarter-part of your mind, if some mysterious power in a Titian, seen in the flesh, moves your sensibility in ways that defy your intellect.

This is an aesthetic not well suited to our time, when communications too often resemble talking points: fast, smart, exchanges that are instantly transmittable and promise quick mastery of a subject. We settle for very imperfect substitute-images in print and computer screens. Rather than asking ourselves if we are really seeing, we tend to seek new analyses of what we habitually see.

Deborah Rosenthal, Uphill and Down, 2010. Oil on linen, 38 x 38 inches. Courtesy of The Painting Center

All of which highlights the indispensability of exhibitions like “Nature is the Teacher” at The Painting Center. “Nature lies in the faithfully observed motif and equally in the analytically invented form,” reads a sentence from the unsigned essay accompanying the show, and indeed the work of the four participating painters—Simon Carr, Stanley Lewis, Thaddeus Radell, and Deborah Rosenthal—argues cogently for the interdependence of visual awareness and artistic tradition. Connecting this diverse group of artists—and having become acquainted with each of them over the years, I can attest they are thoroughly different spirits—is the common urge to re-create nature in the language of paint. But their styles vary tremendously, and their diverse pursuits of narrative, symbolism, or process make for an exceptionally handsome installation.

Carr’s scenes of subways come the closest here to traditional realism. His heightened colors, however, lend remarkable robustness to figures, locating not just their physicality but their character. In one lushly scumbled canvas, the dramatic depths of a subway car interior, viewed from one end, encompass a nuzzling couple, kinetic drummers, and a distant LED sign, with colors somehow imparting independent life to each. In another, commuters bustle across a subway platform, but the scene centers about the yawn of a single child. In Carr’s canvases, all means of description and technique ultimately serve humanist ends.

Though his landscapes also depict real scenes, Lewis’ narratives concern the processes of observation and painting. Pictorially, the artist risks the most of any painter in the show, working with a kind of steady ferocity to rebuild appearances in fragmenting marks and planes. Weighted color and line yield poignant truths: a tree, thickly encompassing space among its branches, presides above a yard with a toy cart; totem-like structures punctuate the unfolding panorama of a public garden.

Radell’s surfaces, too, have the quality of weathered layering, but in more luxuriant, affirmative fashion. The artist constructs figures in arabesques of looping black outlines, with interior pinks set off by luminous blues and green-grays. The matte depth of his wax medium and his feathering colors conjure an idyllic atmosphere, with actual volumes mattering less than sensations of movement, light, and depth. Though identities are unclear—the figures might be warriors or shepherds—the paintings hum with the impulse to leaven modernist idioms of painting with echoes of tradition.

Stanley Lewis, Janie's Garden, 2008. Oil on canvas, 18 x 35 inches. Courtesy of The Painting Center

Although the most abstracted work here, Rosenthal’s compositions of organic, geometric forms and calligraphic marks abound with intimations of lyrical events. Peaked shapes, lofting across the upper portions of “Uphill and Down” (2011), might be distant mountains or sheltering tents. Exact significations are less clear, and less crucial, than the sense of a poetic journey and its attendant tribulations. The canvas is one of the artist’s two largest in the show, which both use color especially effectively, their varied, deep reds sounding against subdued violets and jolts of vivid green.

Time was, painters learned through their eyes, just as musicians did through their ears and dancers through their bodies. Due to the sheer complexity of nature, and the infinite possibilities of paint, it was a lifetime education. “Nature is the Teacher” reflects these four artists’ shared commitment to this learning, and reminds us how the one faculty of sight can lead to very different truths.

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Dubrow: January 8 to February 7, 2009
37 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212 750 0949

Stuart Shils, Looking Down from Monte Castello, A Garage with an Open Door 2007. Oil on linen mounted on panel, 13-3/8 x 11-1/8 inches. Courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery

One suspects that few young, ambitious artists these days would try to base a career on faithfully painted landscapes. But two mid-career painters – Stuart Shils and John Dubrow (who paints the figure as well) – have spent many years doing just that, and with a good measure of success, as underscored by recent shows at their respective galleries, Tibor de Nagy and Lori Bookstein.

Landscape (and its close relative, cityscape), of course, has quite a tradition. Masters ranging from Pietro Lorenzetti to Claude Lorrain and from the Limbourg brothers to Diebenkorn have explored its special qualities of sunlight, atmosphere, and panoramic depths. From our vantage point, we can see that technical proficiency and stylistical charm count for less than a landscape painter’s temperament; we value Corot more than Daubigny, and Seurat more than the pointillist Ker Xavier Roussel. The traditional requisites, few but daunting, begin and end with avid observation and finding vital equivalents in a language of paint. The landscapes by both Stuart Shils and John Dubrow show a refreshing awareness of this, and both approach their motifs with considerable focus and little posturing or fuss.

Stuart Shils’ exhibition of nearly 20 paintings reflects his familiar technique of layering and blending colors to produce rich atmospheric effects, usually on small canvases and panels barely a foot across. Close inspection revealed extensive, careful reworking, with colors scraped or wiped down and reapplied to create quietly throbbing depths. Lines, drawn in with a pencil or scratched with a pointed object, serve as a kind of framework defining the edges of buildings and ground planes. With their soft edges and inner incandescence of color, they come close to ethereal, almost nostalgic visions of urban and country life.

Shils’ subtle feel for the effects of light was much in evidence at Tibor, in, say, the difference between a building’s sun-drenched walls and the absorbent depths of its shadowed portions. Some of the paintings also revealed other qualities of particular interest. For instance, in the painting Umbria Farmhouse on the Road up to Corciano (2008), the simple rhythms of the blocks of color describing a house – a blazingly bright warm white for the first floor, a slightly more retiring ochre for the recessed second floor – culminate in an awkwardly angled eave that holds vividly before the deepest of medium-blue skies. One senses forms commanding the dimensions of the canvas – like they might in a Courbet — rather than being mere receptacles for atmosphere.

Similarly luminous tensions animate From Ray’s Kitchen Window, Near Union Square(2008), a very horizontal composition in which the boxy intervals of high-rises deftly pace the 42 inch width. Traveling its length, the eye circulates among myriad reddish and yellowish facades that convey not only a particular weather but also the full breadth of the scene, which is measured out by sudden, small glimpses of the sky at the horizon.

Elsewhere, such intervals are often eclipsed by the atmospherics. The indefinite divisions between ground plane and buildings in A Field Toward the Edge of Georgetown, Late Afternoon (2008) drain the impact of a small and especially pinkish building within an indefinite zone of burnt sienna facades. At such points the scratched and penciled lines seem like decorative means of maintaining identities rather than concentrators of impulses. However, Shils is on top of things – artistically and topographically – with Looking Down from Montecastello, A Garage with an Open Door (2007), which imparts a jewel-like precision to the sun-drenched structure, tiny in its poignant distance. And yet, and yet — that evocative haze of ochre-greens and blue-greens in the foreground leaves one longing, just a bit, for the quirky rigor of Bonnard’s trees, which manage to claim their pictorial real estate no matter how fuzzy they appear.

John Dubrow, Umbria 13 2008. Oil on linen, 7 x 9-1/2 inches. Courtesy of Lori Bookstein Fine Art

At Lori Bookstein, John Dubrow’s nearly 30 landscapes are tiny by his usual standards.  Even at eight inches in width, though, they evince the efficient brushwork and decisive, reductive descriptions of his larger work.

Dubrow has always been a capable and strategic colorist, one who tangibly weights the location of forms with subtle pressures of hue. Near the left edge of Weaver’s Farm 1(2008), for example, the fringe of leaves around the top of a tree gleams improbably next to the cavern-like deeper greens at the tree’s core. This, however, perfectly conveys the actual, galvanizing effect of strong sunlight. Up close one can see how the artist has dragged a duller beige over the field at center – a move that, again, settles it palpably among the nuanced surrounding greens. Such local light effects, moreover, add up to complete descriptions of atmosphere, giving a warmer, slightly misted impression to the panoramas of Italian scenes (installed on two opposite walls) and a cooler, closer ambiance to wooded scenes of upstate New York, hanging in-between.

These small paintings all have the aspect of studies, in that they seemed intended for the artist’s own education. They evince no egotism or hunger to be anything greater, and also a faith that nature will supply any necessary drama: whatever moments of expansiveness, contraction, resolution or relenting that might engage the eye. This reticence turns to downright passivity of perception in Umbria 1 (2008), which registers differences of hue but not of weights of colors, leaving it rather inert. But Umbria 3 (2008), shows more active observations of color; here mauve and green and yellow ochre shapes stir about the painting’s center, setting the distant and foreground fields centripetally into the corners. Why does Umbria 19 (2008) remind me, ambivalently, of Brice Marden? Perhaps because it records a hillside as an undulating, fishnet-like patchwork of forms – as elements in constant movement, but towards no abiding direction – and one realizes that it is a truthful, if not particularly urgent, experience of a hillside rising evenly before one’s eyes. Such paintings show considerable merit, but the subject matter reminds one of how actively inventive Corot’s Italian sketches are. (The French master was known to move a tree as needed, even when he worked on-site.)

But when nature provides the occasion, Dubrow rises to the challenge. Umbria 13 (2008) uses generous shifts of scale to measure out a journey of events: the exceptionally dark tone of a foreground tree, leading to a scramble of spreading fields dotted by the singularly bright note of a road or house, and settling, at the diagonally opposite corner, in the compact note of a cloud above distant hills. Here – as in work of the masters – adventure seems not just consistent with faithful observation, but its indispensable partner.

The exhibitions of Shils and Dubrow overlapped by only a couple days, just enough to allow fresh comparisons between the two. Their differences intrigue: could it be that Shils seeks evocative means of representing, while Dubrow peruses the workings of representation itself? In any event, both painters in their latest exhibitions seem at times to proceed by rote, as if fulfilling public rather than personal expectations. Their best work, however, confirms that the genre of landscape remains a vehicle for original observations, and for their realization in paint.

Max Weber Sign Carriers 1938. Oil on canvas, 13-1/4 x 17-1/8 inches © 2008 Estate of Max Weber, courtesy of Gerald Peters Gallery

Think of the first stirrings of American modernism, and certain images leap to mind: John Marin’s flamboyantly fractured skyscrapers, or Marsden Hartley’s obtuse, mystical landscapes. If Max Weber (1881-1961) has not worn quite as well, it is not for lack of an impressive resumé. In 1905-09, he was in the very thick of things as a young painter in Paris. He fell in with Gertrude Stein’s circle, helped organize Matisse’s school, and introduced Henri Rousseau to Picasso. By 1912, back in the States, he was producing the America’s first truly cubist paintings. He was the first American modernist to be granted a museum show (at the Newark Museum in 1913), as well as the first to be awarded a retrospective at MOMA (1930). As is the case with any groundbreaking artist, his work at first offended conservative critics, while inspiring his colleagues. He was appointed director of the Society of Independent Artists in 1918, and in the late 30s served as national chairman of the American Artists’ Congress.

Currently on view at Gerald Peters is a selection of more than 40 paintings and works on paper from the Weber estate. The exhibition concentrates not on his early, inventive forays into Cubism, Fauvism and Futurism, but on the lyrical work from his last three decades that secured his widespread popularity. These still lifes, landscapes and figure paintings show the artist having settled into his mature style, with arabesques of spry, tripping lines set upon multi-hued backgrounds. Many express sentiments about working class struggles, family life, and his Jewish heritage. Cézanne may have been artist’s greatest influence, but the paintings more often suggest Picasso, once-removed (or, with their draped, veiled colors and knots of details, a cubist version of the younger painter Arshile Gorky.) Overall, the selection makes a good case for Weber’s steadfastness, knowledge and capability as a painter, but also confirms that his most intense inventions date from earlier decades.

Woman Holding Tablet (1946) Oil on board, 8-3/4 x 6-1/2 inches. All images © 2008 Estate of Max Weber, courtesy of Gerald Peters Gallery.

Woman Holding Tablet (1946) pleasingly and convincingly locates a seated figure within a geometric environment, with ochre tints and warm blacks set deftly against notes of bright coral and medium blue. The rather strenuous engineering of the pose and surroundings, however, give the impression of an exercise – a demonstration of the plastic re-creation of a generic event. Similarly, the tumbling, teetering characters of Acrobats (1946) evoke not so much freewheeling investigation as rote playfulness. In such paintings, Weber’s colorful, angular planes are adequate to forging a style and a sentiment, but don’t seem compelled by unique perceptions; by contrast, when a Picasso figure holds aloft a mirror, one feels the visual urgency of the suspended facet of a reflected world. (Weber’s lack of urgency becomes even more apparent as one comes repeatedly across Picasso-esque elements in various paintings: the face viewed simultaneously from two angles, the beak-like facial profiles, the musicians with tapering horns, the statuesque legs and uplifted, clenching hands.)

The exhibition nevertheless offers substantial rewards, especially among the smaller, simpler works like Farm House (1944). Here the nuances of notes of gray and warm red briskly convey the frontal density of a cottage perched at the end of a slightly rising road. Rabbi with Hat (1953) neatly animates a skeptical countenance, with a lively play between the horizontal arches of shoulders, chair back, eyebrows, and hat brim. Sign Carriers(1938), with its pulsating row of heads – each quickly but distinctly located by black outlines – has some of the glimmering intensity of Rouault. The sole charcoal drawing here, Pensive Woman (ca. 1940s), evocatively contrasts the broad, rounding forms of a head with the fragmented paintings hanging on a wall behind. And my personal favorite is the paintingLeaning Woman (1949), which is a mere six and a half inches wide, but delivers a weighty impression with subtle means: soft, ochre-ish forms expanding across the surface – and into space – their dimensions fixed by the agile notations of face and hands above and below; the supporting table beneath, secured by a single, glowing yellow; abrupt angles of red establishing the distant containment of a window. (Or is it a door? A cabinet? One needn’t know.) The formal tensions of Weber’s paintings don’t always live up to the dynamism implied by his style, but this small work evocatively conveys the alert restfulness of the figure – and the artist’s own extraordinary alertness to visual events.

Louisa Matthiasdottir, Maine Landscape with Figure (1976). Oil on canvas. All images courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery

Art, arguably, is the perpetual rediscovering of one’s environment. It periodically circles back to earlier concerns and subjects, continually extending previous discoveries, and adding new viewpoints and layers of context.

Or does it? These days, some of the hottest artists in the resurgent genre of figurative painting – artists such as Elizabeth Peyton and Luc Tuymans – bring to it a multi-disciplinary approach that combines aspects of “high” art and illustration. These artists tend to address the semantics of representation – the parsings of the implications of style and narrative – more than with the purely formal language of painting. For viewers attuned to traditions ranging from Mantegna to Matisse, the loss may well outweigh the gain.

Such traditionalists will be amply rewarded (and reassured) by the paintings by Louisa Matthiasdottir (1917-2000) currently at Tibor de Nagy. Matthiasdottir, a native Icelander who studied with Marcel Gromaire in Paris and Hans Hofmann in New York City (her home since the early 40s), devoted her long career to painting vividly hued, somewhat abstracted paintings of the subjects around her. Roughly spanning the artist’s last 25 years, the nearly two dozen paintings at Tibor present a handsome sampling of familiar themes: her hieratic still lifes and self-portraits, views of Reykjavik streets and Maine forests, sheep-dotted mountains of Iceland. (Disclosure: I personally knew the artist and have been friends of her family since the mid 1970s.)

At a glance, these images charm with their vivacious brushwork, their frequently exotic scenery, and a brusque, reductive modeling reminiscent of folk art. A longer look, however, uncovers far more. The exhibition catalog’s essay recalls her statement from the early 80s: “The reason I paint is because I want to paint what I see. But to paint what I see, I must build with color.” And indeed, in these paintings, so strangely mute in terms of narrative and style, her colors speak volumes. They record not one-to-one correspondences of hue, but an overall impression of sunlight that weights and animates individual objects. How to convey thousands of leaves overhead, infinite skies, and countless blades of grass below? In “Maine Landscape with Figure” (1976), colors weight forms, and forms direct the pressure of colors. Racing diagonals of grass-greens, buoyant in sunlight, stream around a reclining figure, whose skintones – half-illuminated, in a zone of open shadow – are perfectly captured by thin washes of burnt sienna. On either side tree trunks dart upward, some adamantly straight, others kinking and summing up one another as they clamber above our point of view. Facing us at the canvas’ center, a spiraling tuft of denser greens – a lone bush – hugs the ground just before the earth slips suddenly away to a distant sea. In terms of technique, the fleet brushstrokes and vivid hues are quite beautiful; but formally they are absolutely gripping in their continuous measuring of intervals – the fast recessions, adamant swellings, and anchoring details –that characterize each element.

Louisa Matthiasdottir, Two Horses in a Landscape (undated)

Contradictions abound in her paintings, just as in life, so that the greens surrounding sheep and horses acquire at some points the vacancy of air and at others the earthiness of the ground plane. These are moments in the cohering perceptions of the artist, who proceeds not as an illustrator (a compiler, in believable but stylistically evocative fashion, of details we already know) but as an adventurer in form (a synthesizer of nature’s innate paradoxes.)

Throughout Tibor’s selection of paintings, one senses a luminous reserve – a private temperament joyfully submitting to an exacting task. We’re rewarded with extraordinary evocations of the observed: the pert attitude of a horse, its tilting head framed as if in a snapshot in the coursing diagonals of foreground and distant hills in “Young Brown Horse with White Feet.” (The exuberant rigor of this small, undated canvas makes it a highlight of the show.) Or, the orchestration of the forms of man, trees, and dog – sweeping, holding, then sweeping again – through a taut composition of “Man and Mishka, Skowhegan” (1976).

Viewers of a literalistic bent may be disappointed by Matthiasdottir’s disinterest in detailed, sculptural modeling. But detailed description in itself was never a determinant of great art. What distinguishes Titian or Rembrandt is a gravity and economy of depiction that makes detail count; one arrives at the extended hand or tightened lip as the denouement of larger, scale-setting gestures. Matthiasdottir may not achieve the rhythmic intensity of detail of these masters – but then, who has in the last century of art? As with Matisse’s work, one finds in Matthiasdottir’s an acute intelligence about painting, as well as humility in its pursuit. I experience it as the drive to live the language of painting, rather than to comment on its processes and cultural implications.

The medium of words, as always, is inadequate to this language, but consider the remarkable coalescence of inventions that is “Two Horses in a Landscape” (undated). This medium-sized canvas unfolds as a meditation on paired objects. Two sturdy horses occupy a field of humming greens, whose contour firmly reserves them to the foreground; twin cabins nestle among hills beyond; way above, a pair of clouds, at once distant and immediate, hover in the ultramarine vacuum of sky. Within this luminous journey, the sheen on the horses’ flanks, and the stretching of their necks to graze, become wondrously necessary moments – arresting insights within the expanding movements of a complete world. There’s no better testimony today to the unique, fluid intersection of observation and re-creation that is painting.

Ying-Li, Jim, 2007. Charcoal on paper, 30 x 23 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

on show until November 22 at the Painting Center (Project Room), 52 Greene Street, between Broome and Grand, 212-343-1060

Ying Li’s attack in these ten charcoal portraits shows the same unique blend of impetuosity and rigor as her paintings. Outlines criss-cross and flail, contours twist, and details emerge and dissolve without discernable method. And yet we’re left, remarkably, with likenesses that seem all the more human for the struggle. Seldom is orneriness so empathetic, and ferocity so astute.

This was an artcritical PIC in November 2008.

April 8 to June 13, 2008

Peter Heinemann, Summer Still Life 2007, oil on linen, 52 x 38 inches Courtesy Gallery Schlesinger and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects

Despite the exhibition title, bluebirds appear in only two of the seven paintings in Peter Heinemann’s latest exhibition at Schlesinger. Far more evident are their pursuers: the three cats that frolic, groom and pounce through his quixotic canvases. Their half-comic, half-fearsome demeanor could sum up the tone of the artist’s own curious investigations in paint. The exhibition, Mr. Heinemann’s twelfth with the gallery, is presented in conjunction with Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects.

Compared to the brooding self-portraits that the artist painted for some 30 years, these recent paintings suggest domestic harmony – or perhaps something more like household rollicking, because on closer inspection they turn out to be far from tame. Heinemann’s intensity, always apparent in his incisive, schematized shapes and hues, now describe with awkward purposefulness the trappings of rustic life: still lifes of dry good scales, vases, and lawn ornaments, and outdoor scenes populated by bird feeders and flower gardens – and, most notably, by the cats which by turns resemble inert, furry spheres or rocketing pillows with lethal teeth.

Heinemann leans on a few modernist devices, such as simplified outlines, flattened, single-color backgrounds, and, occasionally, the combining of frontal and overhead views. These he employs, however, towards thoroughly original ends. In “Studio Still Life,” (2007) an array of ordinary objects – kerosene lamp, scale, and a life-size sculpture of a chicken – disport themselves across two small tables in a lively circulation of angles. Subtle rhymings soon become evident: the blade of a fan, mirroring the chicken’s tail; the tip of a cat’s ear passing the corner of a table; the tiny orange note of a distant cat – glimpsed through a window – echoing the chicken’s red comb.

Things get curiouser and curiouser in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion, with charm and threat mixed in equal proportions. In “Pink Tree & the Bluebird of Happiness” (2008), the same orange cat, now up-close, hurtles towards a bird, its leap measured inch for inch by a climbing vine of flowers. The tips of two sneakers at the canvas’ extreme lower edge indicate the presence of the artist, who proceeds to fix on his own targets. These include the odd, pink, shield-shaped tree facing us squarely in the mid-distance, its frontal impact matched by a square bird feeder framed by another tree trunk. Little clouds scoot above a woman in a remote field, while, a few canvas-inches away, a squirrel – equal in size because of its proximity to the viewer – shimmies up the birdfeeder’s pole.

Every domestic event in these paintings takes on aspects of the paranormal as Heinemann dissects it for pictorial possibilities. In “Prophet Pirate Poet” (2007), the mouth of a vase of daffodils on a table echoes the curling tail of a cat on the floor behind it. Curving flower stems play against the loops of the birdfeeder’s post and a lantern’s handle in “Summer Still Life” (2007). Heinemann’s colors support such conundrums throughout, giving weight to each visual pun. In this respect the images recall the arcane intensity of Arnold Friedman’s paintings, or perhaps the early work of Milton Avery, only charged through with a sly edginess.

Die-hard devotees of Bonnard or Matisse might wish for more climactic outcomes – for a gathering of these tensions towards a singular effect: the edification of an interior unified by a particular illumination, or the broad counterposing of interior and exterior light. But this is nitpicking; the artist’s affectionate mistrust of his world is contagious.

“Cement Chicken” (2007) strikes a high note, of a sort, with its reverberations of intersecting pursuits. Here the orange cat leaps towards an unseen object, while tiers of flowering plants arc behind like a succession of ocean waves – and in-between, a cat, a longitudinal stretching of yellow-gray fur, snares a hapless bluebird. Taking in the scene with impassive, beady-eyed curiosity is the chicken sculpture – and, one suspects, Mr. Heinemann too.

Gustave Courbet, The Valley of the Loue in Stormy Weather 1849 oil on canvas, 21-1/4 x 25-5/8 inches Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg

Envy the nineteenth–century French citizen. He or she witnessed a procession of art movements headed by remarkable painters: Neo-classicists David and Ingres; Romantics Géricault and Delacroix; Corot, the bridge between classicism and Impressionism. Today’s museum-goers might prefer Manet, whose flattened planes and down-to-earth nudes sounded some of the first notes of modernism. Monet and van Gogh might be the most popular of all.

And then there’s Courbet (1819-1877), who occupies a category all his own. Founder and chief proponent of the school of Realism, his paintings shocked his contemporaries not because of their verity but because of their unsentimental depictions of the ordinary. Philosophically, his libertarian views were actually rather confused and self-serving, and his stated goal – “I have simply wished to assert the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality within a total knowledge of tradition” – could have led to the tritest of results in lesser hands. His formidable talents and focus as a painter, though, show in some of the most riveting canvases of the 19th century. His stunning gifts for recreating his environment in the plastic forces of paint – forces lending themselves poorly to theorizing or wall texts – inspired countless later artists, including Matisse and Picasso, who both owned paintings by the master.

Courbet’s achievement as a painter vastly outweigh his contributions as a philosopher, but it’s the intellectual ramifications of his work that has kept it in the critical limelight over the last several decades. Historians and critics such as Linda Nochlin, Sarah Faunce, and T. J. Clark have variously addressed the political and sexual implications of Courbet’s work, his self-identification with rural society, and his entrepreneurial drive and manipulations of his audience and the press.

The Metropolitan Museum’s extraordinary retrospective marks the second major exhibition of his work in New York in the last two decades, following the Brooklyn Museum’s 1988-89 “Reconsidering Courbet.” According to the exhibition catalogue’s introductory essay, the installation represents an attempt to view the artist in the context of his own time, rather than through a postmodernist lens. The installation in fact seems to strain to engage both popular and scholarly interest, emphasizing sensational aspects of the artist’s work, his entrepreneurialism, and the impact of photography, a medium that has only acquired critical cachet in our time. Scaled back from its previous installation at the Grand Palais in Paris, the installation at the Met omits key works too large and fragile to travel. Nevertheless, this leaves much to savor in the 130 paintings and drawings by one of the 19th century’s artistic giants.

Gustave Courbet, The Preparation of the Dead Girl ca. 1850-54 oil on canvas, 77 x 99 inches Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. Purchased with the Drayton Hillyer Fund

Courbet was essentially untutored, and, one suspects, untutorable. Apart from early studies near his hometown of Ornans, his art education consisted mostly of copying the masters in Parisian museums. This study instilled a powerful sense of the classical pacing of a composition, though one not necessarily connected with svelte, three-dimensional modeling or logical plottings of space. By traditional standards of rendering, awkward moments abound in his paintings: the flattening contours in his portraits of Jo Hiffernan, for instance, or the floating overlaps in his commemorative portrait of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

Above all, a singular sense of color animates and coheres Courbet’s paintings. His hues are not necessarily pretty or bright; he mines their profounder, subtler powers, measuring the weight of one against the other, so that they press upon and give way to each other in extraordinary, tense orchestrations bound by his bold and eccentric drawing. His mountainsides and bouquets, no less so than his human figures and hunted beasts, preside monumentally in his canvases. Put another way, his images are vitally real within the artifice of painting, rather than inventories of descriptive moments.

The works at the Met are arranged largely by the themes that successively preoccupied the artist: self-portraits, monumental figure compositions, nudes, landscapes, hunting scenes, and still lifes. A gallery full of early self-portraits reveals a naïve, meticulous romanticism, which becomes increasingly robust and confident under the influence of the masters. Courbet’s hues capture the folds of fabric and sheen of fur and hair with luxurious restraint in “Self-Portrait with Black Dog” (1842), in which the broad contours of drawing – the sweep of hat containing the up-tilted head, the rising arc of the spaniel’s spine – restrain their pressures. As with most of his figure paintings, the artist’s expression is one of impassive self-absorption. The spaniel’s evokes the native intelligence that would reappear in later portraits of hunting dogs, trout, and stags – and arguably, trees and rocks as well.

In another impressive self-portrait, “The Wounded Man” (1844-54), the arcs of facial features again energize a tilting head. The brow, in fact, peaks improbably above one eye, but Courbet’s constructions are emotive rather than literal, concentrating on the dramatic emergence of the head from the splay of collar.

The theatrically wide-eyed, hair-tearing image of the artist in “The Desperate Man” (1844-45) adorns all of the exhibition’s promotional materials. The catalogue entry describes this very untypical self-portrait as a key work, as if revelatory of an inner state not apparent elsewhere in his paintings. This strikes me as an underestimation of Courbet’s purposes; its masterful modeling suggests a conscious exercise, and a consistency of attack rather than inadvertent self-exposure.

In a gallery of paintings illuminating the impact of his Ornans upbringing, an early landscape shows his peculiar painting powers already fully in place. “The Valley of the Loue in Stormy Weather” (1849) locates with sensuous rigor the broad elements of earth and sky: elusive blue-grays streaking across the top, concentrating in a plunge to the horizon; a band of pale cliffs emerging immediately below, held by the late-afternoon sun – they seem touchably close in their precise distance; hugging the canvas’ lower edge, a leafy foreground that launches the unrolling of space to the cliffs. The horizon lies just over half way up the canvas, but so charged are hues of sky and land that we sense proximity and release rather than bisections of a surface. Here Courbet has made a kind of secular cathedral out of nature’s luminous topography. In the far larger “Young Ladies of the Village” (1851-52) hanging nearby, his hues give regal weight to several figures in an enveloping landscape somewhat similar to that of “Stormy Weather.” (His vibrant characterization of the scene was lost on contemporaries who found the figures indecorous.)

The three most important works of this early period – “Afterdinner at Ornans” (1848-49), and the two colossal canvases “A Burial at Ornans” (1849-50) and “The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up a Seven Year Phase of My Artistic Life” (1855) unfortunately stayed in France. But the installation does include a life-size diagram of “The Painter’s Studio,” with Courbet’s actual portrait studies superimposed over the corresponding portions of the image. Several contemporaneous photographs join these paintings, among them an image of one of Courbet’s models, posing somewhat as she does in “The Painter’s Studio”; it hints intriguingly at the artist’s working methods. The purpose of two unrelated photographs of laborers is less clear. The thinking seems to be: Photographs, as unblinking records of life, are relevant to Realism; Laborers signify the artist’s proletarian sympathies; Photographs of laborers are especially evocative of Courbet’s purposes. This post-modernist multi-media collage, plus the more sensational aspects of the exhibition – the wall texts’ endless assertions of how the artist courted controversy, the foregrounding of the over-the-top “The Desperate Man,” the stereoscopic viewer with contemporaneous pornographic photographs stationed among the paintings of nudes – suggest that the museum, unsure on which points to engage its audience, tries every means at hand.

Luckily, the astonishing, unfinished “The Preparation of the Dead Girl” (ca. 1850-54) provides some notion of the impact of “The Painter’s Studio.” Some historians believe this large painting actually represents the preparation of a bride for her wedding, but despite these wildly divergent interpretations, Courbet’s pictorial convictions are unequivocal. Broad swathes of green, ochre and pale blue gray become the walls of a large interior animated by the movements of over a dozen female figures. To one side, the vigorous, horizontal gestures of two women folding sheets form part of a series of concentric enclosures of space, with each interval richly evocative of a new degree of illumination. On the other side, figures lean at various, countering angles into a lighter, open space. At the center, the gestures of two women swirl magisterially about a mirror held by the corpse/bride. Once more, colors are restrained, but lend a gravity to poses that gather with eloquent force.

Gustave Courbet, Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine 1856-57 oil on canvas, 68-1/2 x 81-1/8 inches Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris

A series of society portraits mark Courbet’s rising stature in the 50s, among them the impressive “Madame Auguste Cuoq” (ca, 1852-57) and “Woman in a Riding Habit (L’Amazone)” (1856) from the Met’s own collection. But Courbet’s most striking and provocative foray into contemporary Parisian society is “The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine” (1856-57), which shows to full advantage the strange combination of sensitive observation and brute manipulation at the heart of his attack. Courbet’s unerring color wondrously captures the half-illumination of a scene under a shadowing tree, with the multiple, shaded greens joining as the grassy plane supporting the two great forms of the figures. The two young women recline one in front of the other, with the massiveness of “ships passing in the night,” as a former teacher of mine memorably put it. The dramatic shifts of scale turn a journey across the canvas – from uncurling forefinger, across folds of garments and rustling leaves to the patch of sky diagonally opposite – into a momentous event.

And a horrible one, too. Viewed less sympathetically, the face extends like a bulbous growth from a linebacker’s neck, while her body, with its twist of garments and relentless horizontal thrust, recalls the rhythms of a steamship’s giant propeller. Courbet obviously intended to provoke his audience with the image of a sultry-eyed, half-undressed woman – and a gentleman’s hat perched on the nearby rowboat – but this notion would be forgettably banal without the shocking power and bizarre mixture of finesse and ungainliness with which he consummates it. Courbet is one of the very few painters to rival Titian’s breadth and weight of gesture, but his machinery for achieving it tends to be considerably less graceful.

“Sleep” (1866) and “The Origin of the World” (1866), which have inspired so many discourses about the male gaze, occupy places of honor in a section devoted to nudes. Their imagery is certainly lascivious, but it’s telling that both were commissioned works that indulged the taste of a collector. Moreover, both reflect Courbet’s usual discipline of color and line. The current critical infatuation with the splay-legged “Origin” – a catalogue essay places this small composition among his “most ambitious and most complex” nudes – says more about current tastes than Courbet’s; the painting intrigues, ultimately, in exactly the same manner as his landscapes: in the palpable intensity with which hills roll and overlap, and present themselves and retire. Similar claims can be made for “Sleep,” which is notable for the authority with which the two intertwined nudes ply a diagonal across the canvas before dividing into delicate divergences of legs. As a painter, Courbet ravishes a nude in the same manner as he would a tree or a trout: for the visual evidence of its expressive physicality.

One unexpected feature of the exhibition is a roomful of contemporaneous landscape photographs by Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884). These show how the practitioner of another, then-new medium found his own ways of capturing the mysterious gleam of light on water and the lowering of dark clouds. His means are completely different from a painter’s, his manipulations limited to selecting and broad adjustments. Though beautiful in their own right, for me these photographs shed no more light on Courbet than would samples of contemporaneous literature or music.

Courbet moved with some freedom between figures, portraits, and landscapes, which means that in the thematically-arranged installation, adjacent canvases may date from the same year or decades apart. This makes for some fascinating comparisons. Among the nudes, the very early Bacchante (ca. 1844-47), with its careful, evenhanded rendering, hangs next to the “Sleeping Blonde” (1849); the second painting, although produced a mere few years later, is far more focused, with forms building massively towards the distant gesture of the turning head. (The wall text records the assessment of its owner, Henri Matisse: “Now he brings me back to Rembrandt.”) The planes of a pond and field wheel beneath the dominant, rising bluffs of “Rocks at Mouthier” (ca. 1855); this muscular image seems almost baroquely complex compared to “The Wave” (1869), with its dense, primal bands of water and sky. Among the many hunting scenes, a man and dog step delicately through a scene of elegantly opposed trees and highlighted antlers in the “German Hunter” (1859); in “After the Hunt” (ca. 1859), locations are so clumsily fixed that a rabbit could be either a loose projectile or another bit of kindling on a heap of stiff animals.

The exhibition exits into the anteroom for the entrance, so one can immediately re-enter the show. Visitors who do may be struck by the immediacy and coherence of certain early works like “The Cellist” (1847) that anticipate works produced two decades later. Or, museum-goers can wander back down the hallway lined with work by academic painters – the Regnaults and the Messioniers – to measure the height and breadth of Courbet’s achievement. It’s tempting today to celebrate Courbet for his celebrity, and savor just the peccadilloes of his personality. But better to find what originally earned him the admiration of Delacroix and Manet and Cézanne. Courbet claimed to record visual experiences purged of all rules and conventions. To a startling extent, this is exactly what he did, and to glorious effect.