April 25 to June 22, 2013
20 West 57th St, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212 244 6055

Installation shot of the exhibition under review. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

Particularity: some paintings have it, some don’t. In a painting that has it, specific material and visual attributes eclipse whatever genre, medium or aesthetic ideology that work might embody. The viewer’s experience of such a painting is rooted in the minutia of its physical constitution, rather than in its significance as a statement of purpose, an intellectual position, a conception of space, or what have you. Particularity is located somewhere in triangulation with Michael Fried’s “presentness” and John Waters’ definition of beauty as “looks you can never forget.”

And there is sometimes a fine line between particularity and its absence, as John Zurier’s current exhibition at Peter Blum’s new 57th Street space demonstrates. On view are 11 paintings dated 2012 or 2013 and one from 2007. In that earlier oil on linen, , Oblaka (for Mark), a pale bluish film of paint is methodically but imperfectly scraped over viridian green underpainting, leaving green glitches that might remind you of fingerprints on a steamy mirror, or skittering fish beneath the water’s surface. The painting measures 38 by 31 inches.  What is interesting to me is that the six paintings in the exhibition that are smaller than Oblaka (for Mark) are far more memorable than the five that are larger, and the difference, I think, is owing to the smaller paintings’ particularity.

The very smallest canvas, Sorgin (21 by 15 inches), painted in a close range of pungent reds, attests to Zurier’s coloration of touch. A dense, though not particularly thick, cloud of brushstrokes — both fast and slow, fat and lean — gives way to raspy pinkish areas at top and bottom where the brush has barely swept the surface, or missed it entirely. A faint impression of the stretcher bars, which painters generally try to avoid, inflects this quizzical painting’s skin with a reminder of its rudimentary mechanical infrastructure.

Öxnadalur (oil on linen, 72 by 44 inches) is ten times the size of Sorgin, but that size does not translate into a commanding sense of scale. To be sure, it is beautifully painted—in a silvery-purplish gray broadly worked wet-into-wet over a whitish ground—but it lacks the density of Sorgin’s material factuality. The paintings do, however, have in common a faint representational suggestion: a rough trail, angling up from the bottom edge (hence into pictorial space) and into a bosky wood indicated by silhouetted treetops.

John Zurier, A spring a thousand years ago, 2012. Oil on linen, 72 x 44 inches. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

This footpath scenario is even more distinct in A spring a thousand years ago, a painting in glue tempera on cotton. Brushily painted in a watery slate blue, the image exhibits just enough variety in mark making to break down spatially into the classic foreground/middle ground/background landscape organization. The inclination to interpret sparse compositional cues as a representation of believable space is more interesting as a study in the psychology of perception than as metaphor for the act of painting as a trek into unfamiliar territory. In any case, what particularity this painting possesses emerges not from the spectral sylvan iconography but from a few slightly discordant, strictly ruled horizontal and vertical brushstrokes that echo the painting’s framing edge.

A less literal order of narrative is embedded in the odd Mosfellsbœr (distemper and oil on linen), where the fabric support itself, puckered along the right side as it meets the stretcher, contributes to the story of the work’s making. A translucent whitish wash, loosely applied, backs a constellation of five tiny black rectangles resembling bits of electrical tape which in turn align in an upward-curving sweep as if caught in a current of wind or water. Nothing about the painting feels arbitrary. The very fact that, when working small, Zurier apparently avoids standard formats supports the impression that their every detail is the more considered.

The two largest paintings, Hellnar (108 by 75 inches) and Härnevi (75 by 108 inches; both distemper on linen) are the most generalized, nearly monochrome, and placid almost to the point of dissipation. While they may well have one foot in the sublime, so to speak, they nevertheless lack the visual crackle of, for example, After Paolo Schiavo. Named for a Quattrocento Florentine painter, this compact work (17 by 21 inches) succeeds in depicting an expansive, mysterious space in a very few variations on blue-black. It is horizontally bifurcated by a surprisingly concrete horizontal stroke of the brush, which, amidst the exhibition’s abundant atmospheric effects, looks solid enough to do chin-ups on. While Zurier’s quite lovely larger paintings may be seen as contemporary examples of lyrical abstraction or color field or neo-monochrome, a painting like After Paolo Schiavo defies categorization.

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September 6 to October 13, 2012
520 West 23rd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 242 0599

Stephen Ellis, Untitled, 2012. Oil and alkyd on linen, 39 x 60 inches.
Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery, NY

For at least a generation now, characteristics of the computer’s distinct appearance have been invading most aspects of existence, including how we respond to paintings. As a metaphor for the picture plane, the computer screen has joined those old standbys, the mirror and the window. In seven paintings (all oil and alkyd on linen, dated 2012) the New York-based Stephen Ellis embraces digital space as he had, in the past, photographic and cinematic space, too. Formally poised but playful in spirit, the paintings are bracing, buoyant and convincing.  This is his tenth solo exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery.

It’s not that the hues Ellis uses evoke digital color, as seen for example in the L.A. painter Patrick Wilson’s exhibition at Ameringer McEnery Yohe earlier this year. Ellis’s palette, though lively certainly, generally conforms to the familiar oil pigment range. The color dazzles in large part because the paintings look like they are backlit like a lightbox, and in an optical sense they are: ambient light bounces off the white ground (or areas of high-keyed underpainting) and passes through subsequently-applied glazes. The result—a glowing film that seems at times to detach from the substrate—is a variant of a technological light also seen in David Reed’s paintings, though unlike Reed, Ellis employs a full range of values and intensities. (Ellis is also engaged with the transformational effect of a rugged surface attack typical of David Row.)

Like all the paintings here, Untitled (39 by 60 inches) is oriented horizontally. It is subdivided and compartmentalized in a way that suggests architectonics, though not solidity; notwithstanding its many reiterations of the geometry of the support, the painting is unexpectedly unstable. The lower section centers on a magenta rectangle in a cobalt blue surround, both luminous; the edge where they meet sizzles. The magenta appears to drift forward despite the pair of dark, emphatic horizontals that pass through it and extend to the painting’s edge. Boxy rectangles of brown and brick red range across the top of the painting, alternately masking and layered under a blue glaze that is partially scraped away with an undulating but generic gesture,a programmatic “autographic mark.”  Slightly but decisively above the painting’s centerline, a horizontal bar in a stark white fully leveraged as hue occupies an ambiguous position in space even as it precludes reconciliation of the top and bottom sections.

Stephen Ellis, Untitled, 2012. Oil and alkyd on linen, 39 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery, NY

That mechanical gesture spoofs the familiar humanistic equation of painting as calligraphy, short-circuiting paint’s plasticity and repudiating its tactility. Untitled (39 by 60 inches) features two bands—across the top and along the bottom—in which continuous, ribbon-like trails of multicolored under painting are exposed, a scraper or stiff brush having been moved through a wet bluish or purplish paint film. Their repetitious peaks and troughs evoke computer-modeled waves, mountains, or beating hearts.  Between these bands, the middle third is a steamy region of luscious coral pinks and tropical fruit colors glowing hotly and, like the painting as a whole, suggesting infinite extension in both directions.  Untitled (33 by 72 inches) combines several such iconographic/symbolic systems, including horizontal, aqua-and-orange bands, nominally gestural glazes, and off-kilter, hard-edge grids. These elements are intricately entwined but not integrated, overlapping one another yet dead flat, and pushing forward visually to the picture plane like a liquid crystal display. The overall chromatic environment is red/orange, but bits where the aqua filters through reddish glaze are—disconcertingly— the color of grape jelly. There’s an earth green in there too, a result somehow of the complex optical information the accumulated membranes of color provide.

Ellis gets a lot of mileage out of body color, as well, both alone and in combination with glazes. The smaller of two paintings titled Marine (26 by 36 inches) is the most compact in the exhibition, its scheme the simplest. The upper half is a subtly modulated field of crimson laid with a soft brush over a blue-black ground; the region beneath the sharp centerline is crowded with saucer-sized, yellow-ochre swirls applied, one surmises, with a lot of wrist action. These are scraped down while wet and hence blurred, but still discernable as figure against the surrounding dark ground. A recurrent motif in Ellis’s work, such semi-illusionistic knots of paint have in the past been endowed with a distinctly rosette-like appearance; here they could be a collection of tiny, two-tone whirlpools the color of hot sand and the deep blue sea.

The large, Untitled (48 x 84 inches) also recalls Ellis’s earlier work. Its slanted, broken grid (rendered here as faux gaffing tape) supports a scrim-like, dark-bluish expanse broken by two parallelogram apertures. These frame smudgy, remotely anthropomorphic blurs that suggest photographic distortion—overexposed negatives, or radically enlarged details. As enjoyable as it is to revisit Ellis’s erstwhile vocabulary of painterly moves, the real excitement of this exhibition is in watching a veteran practitioner of “conceptual abstraction” break into new territory by substantially expanding his technique.

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Reflections in storefront display windows have been a staple of street photography since it emerged as a genre early in the last century. Understandably so: the pictorial potential of this seemingly ubiquitous feature of the urban fabric is irresistible to any eye beguiled by the interpenetration of indoor and outdoor space, the disjunctive recombination of anecdotal iconography, or the surfeit of visual information with which pedestrians contend. It is, then, right up Lee Friedlander’s alley, and in the 103 photographs in Mannequin, published in May by San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery in conjunction with a related exhibition, the veteran photographer takes possession of this familiar device and makes it entirely and unmistakably his own.

Lee Friendlander, New York City, 2011 (plate 79 of the book under review). Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco 

 

The pictures are black-and-white, vertically oriented, and shot with a handheld 35-mm camera mostly in New York City in 2010 and 2011; excursions to L.A., San Francisco, New Orleans and other U.S. cities are also represented. In the documentary manner, they are titled by location and date. Each features a female mannequin (or two, or three) in fashionable flower in its glassy hothouse cell; many are factory-equipped with that combination of haughtiness and lack of affect that human models frequently emulate. Reflections of the clamorous streetscape invade the dummies’ glamorous domains, so that trashcans and moving vans appear superimposed on meticulously displayed eveningwear, lingerie and furs.

Friedlander’s critique of consumerism shouldn’t be overstated, however, as he seems rather fond of these hapless creatures, treating them like exotic beasts in a chaotic zoo. The photos’ greater fascination lies in their procedural transparency, which yields complex compositions and bizarre hybrids that might be mistaken for double exposures. In New York City, 2011 (plate 79) a sun-drenched cast-iron façade appears to be endowed with a pair of long, shapely legs in white stockings and chunky platform heels, and a hairless head. The method is in perfect synch with Friedlander’s wont of packing the picture frame nearly to bursting with visual incident and felicitous alignments of subject matter. Occasionally that includes the photographer himself dimly reflected in the glass, as in New York City, 2011 (plate 46), in which his knuckly paws play off a headless, perky-breasted mannequin’s rigid claws.

The vantage point of this and most of the other shots is low, which grants a monumental stature to the figures and frequently frames them against the reflected skyline. If they were not so visually rich, these pictures might suggest an analogy between the mannequin’s impassive persona and the unblinking hardness of city life. But they aren’t grim—a bit caustic, maybe, but ebullient in a funny way too; conflicted in a way that implies ambivalence toward the unrelieved crassness of the mercantile sphere.

Friedlander has said that books are the best way to look at pictures, and he has made scores of volumes. Mannequin is a gorgeous addition to that oeuvre. Two duotones face off across every spread, and each image is separated from the edges of its page by a mere quarter-inch border. With so little white space, the book’s visual pace is relentless, both exhausting and exhilarating. At the age of 78, Friedlander shows no sign of slowing down.

Lee Friedlander: Mannequin (San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2012). 112 pp, 103 duotones. $49.95

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February 23 to April 7, 2012
537B West 23rd Street
New York City, (212) 675-7525

For her fourth solo exhibition since earning her MFA from Bard in 2004, the prolific Allison Gildersleeve refines her take on the painterly interpretation of the natural landscape in nine paintings dated 2011 or 2012, in oil and alkyd on canvas, that are rooted in perception but only loosely tethered to the world of appearances. Her ostensible subject matter is the verdant woodlands of her native New England, but the greens of chlorophyll do not dominate these lushly chromatic compositions, shot through as they are with vibrant magentas, shadowy violets, slithering oranges and murmuring grays. The liberties the artist takes with hue; her autographical, apparently improvisational mark making; and her boxed-in, anti-panoramic compositions imply a landscape subjugated to her pictorial will. Beyond the artist’s sheer painterly virtuosity and coloristic panache, the exhibition foregrounds questions about the contemporary relevance of the centuries-old tradition of landscape painting.

Allison Gildersleeve, Slippery Pink, 2011. Oil and alkyd on canvas, 52 x 52 inches. Courtesy of Asya Geisberg Gallery

The works range in size from the three-foot-wide Thin Line to Squall, which is 68 by 72 inches.  In the latter painting especially, the range of Gildersleeve’s virtuoso paint-handling is on display; its streaks, swipes, smears, spots and splats catalogue the ways that a loaded brush might contact a canvas. A turbulent surface is pitch-perfect for this picture, in which a damp wind whips a line of scraggly treetops under a churning sky.

Insofar as pictorial space emerges despite aggressively physical paint application, Gildersleeve is a descendant of Cézanne, but her palette brings to mind the unbridled color of the Fauves. The bottom two-thirds of Candyland (58 by 54 inches) is thicket of sugary yellows, bubblegum pinks and a reddish tan the color of caramel. Delivering on the title’s promise (and every child’s fantasy) of ubiquitous confectionary, even the shadowy foliage spanning the top of the painting is speckled with the colors of cinnamon and chocolate.

The artist is adept in her use of neutralized color. A cluster of closely related grays spilling across the midsection of Slippery Pink (52 by 52 inches) is a wonderfully understated foil—a “ground” in two senses—for the painting’s tangle of stems, stalks and twigs in lively tints of lime, lemon and watermelon; further, the grays  facilitate the chromatic functioning of black and white, which ripple through the painting as fully invested hues.

While Gildersleeve’s touch is animated and her color sumptuous, her compositions are abruptly cropped, hedged in by the edges of the canvas as if the viewer is wearing blinders. There is no suggestion of awe-inspiring, expansive space—no “sublime” in the Romantic sense—but quite the opposite: a sort of tunnel vision that eliminates the periphery and induces a disquieting absence of context. Beyond the snaggle of sticks and tattered rags in the foreground of Hide-Out (52 by 54 inches) is a deeply recessive space that splits into two or three routes among the distant trees. Inward-slanting diagonals at the upper left and right subtly imply a vanishing point just above the top edge of the canvas, channeling space further.  Similarly, in The Day Needs Fixing (54 by 60 inches) a tumbledown wall or embankment—an ancient boundary between properties?—and the sun-dappled path that parallels it recede in radical perspective to a clearing in the distance. The likelihood of becoming disoriented in these woods, of getting lost, is nil.

In a recently produced video now posted at Gorky’s Granddaughter website, Gildersleeve notes that her locations cannot be taken for wilderness. The presence of some artifact or evidence, however subtle, of human culture or habitation significantly qualifies the experience of nature. Indeed, crisscrossed by trails and obsolete stone walls, spotted with overgrown fields that once were farmed, Gildersleeve’s favored milieu is an exurban interzone where nostalgia for an agrarian past meets the exigencies of upscale housing in a postindustrial economy. Acreage buffers us from the neighbors, and vice versa.

The anxiety this conflict produces is subtle but insistent. Giants (60 by 54 inches) depicts a stand of majestic white birches bathed in midday sunlight. But for dazzled bits of whitish sky at the top, the composition is all-over, a variegated edge-to-edge field of relatively naturalistic greens and ochres in chromatic dialogue with the quirkier elements of Gildersleeve’s palette, which lurk in the shadows. The trees’ lower trunk and branches, as well as the ground plane, are cropped out of the frame; the unobstructed view is from a distance, maybe across a lawn or a parking lot. We are at an unbridgeable experiential remove from the motif; we scrutinize the vagaries of sun and shade in the foliage for meaning as if we are reading tealeaves. Here as elsewhere in this convincing exhibition, Gildersleeve’s manifest self-consciousness about her relation to the modalities of landscape painting provides a welcome bit of friction to her otherwise smoothly enjoyable blend of chromatic audacity and tactile finesse.

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Robert Rauschenberg, Cy + Relics, Rome, 1952. Gelatin silver print. Photo © Estate of Robert Rauschenberg/VAGA

Most of the exposures assembled in Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs 1949-1962 were shot during the period in which Rauschenberg produced his “Combines”—his greatest artistic achievement, according to prevailing opinion. It is not difficult to discern echoes of those game-changing painting-sculpture hybrids in, for example, the book’s three dozen or so photos taken in North Africa and Europe in 1952 and ’53. In the open-air markets of Tangiers and Morocco and the streets of Venice and Rome, textures, patterns and images play off each other in a kind of inadvertent, walk-through assemblage. In works like Madrid Park (IV), 1953, Rauschenberg’s camera organizes the information in loosely geometric subdivisions that reiterate the picture plane.

The artist would later move to color photography, but even in black and white Rauschenberg, then in his mid-twenties, was already feeding the voracious visual appetite that resulted in such feats of pictorial reprocessing as the paint-spattered quilt that became Bed (1954) and the stuffed-goat-and-spare-tire-bedecked Monogram (1955-59). Photography was a natural medium for the idea, which composer John Cage promulgated, that art might be a re-presentation of the overlooked and undervalued (sound; visuality) in everyday life.

, 1953. Contact print 2-1/4 x 2-1/4 inches. Photo © Estate of Robert Rauschenberg/VAGA”]

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled [Merce (II)

There are still moments of clarity amid the clamor, reminders of the shift in paradigm, in Rauschenberg’s work of the early 1950’s, from the void to the net—from atmospheres to accretions. Untitled [Bathroom Window, Broadway studio], ca. 1961, depicting a pale, hazy expanse of dimpled, chicken-wired glass flecked with paint, looks back to the well-known “White Paintings” and Erased De Kooning Drawing of nearly a decade earlier.

Unmistakably, however, throughout the work of this period Rauschenberg valued process as much as product—his works’ becoming as much as their realization. This comes through in the near-autonomy of his works’ parts in relation to the whole. In the book’s last image, Untitled [elements for Oracle, Broadway studio], ca. 1962, remnants of duct work, auto parts, conduit and other mostly metallic street finds are arranged on the studio’s wood floor. At the ready, in the midst of the clutter, sit a sack of bolts and a power drill.

Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs 1949-1962. Edited by David White, Susan Davidson. Text by Nicholas Cullinan. (D.A.P./Schirmer/Mosel, 2011. 232 pgs / 136 duotone / 31 color. ISBN: 9781935202523. $75)

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Willem de Kooning, Painting, 1948. Enamel and oil on canvas, 42-5/8 x 56-1/8 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

STEPHEN MAINE Thank you all for agreeing to share your thoughts on de Kooning: A Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art. As I made my way through the exhibition, I was struck by the emphasis on drawing as a studio tool–drawing as visual thinking.

First of all, a generous sampling of actual drawings is on view, including a few “working” drawings and others of which the primary value is to illuminate this artist’s process. Then, in the very first gallery the 1940-41 pencil drawing Portrait of Elaine is presented as the gateway to the first Woman series, implying that through the activity of drawing de Kooning found this iconographic leitmotif. Also, a number of the wall texts describe or refer to de Kooning’s procedure of replicating and repositioning particular shapes within a composition using tracing paper–the evidence is especially noticeable beginning with Pink Angels (1945). Even the image MoMA uses to promote the show is a 1950 Rudy Burckhardt photo of de Kooning roughing out a large charcoal drawing for Woman I, a photo ARTnews used to illustrate Thomas Hess’s 1953 article, “de Kooning Paints a Picture.”

This emphasis on drawing as thinking, making, shaping, is a great way in to this work, don’t you think?

JENNIFER RILEY I believe that drawing is the initial separation of idea from self, and this exhibition is a goldmine for demonstrating that idea in the work of de Kooning, whose great contribution to painting retained, combined and  overtly exalted numerous drawing skills. The early figure drawings demonstrate his powers of observation, skill in rendering and a sense of touch whose delicacy was as keen on probing form and composition as it was on exploring spatial aspects of the page.  Line, which early on describes edge, space, depth, and perspective in the later work becomes the wide range of marks and strokes of paint transporting qualities and information.

DAVID COHEN With de Kooning, in Sickert’s phrase, “drawing is the thing”.  This despite the carnal painterliness that comes to mind as soon as we hear de Kooning’s name.  In that romantic-versus-classic trajectory that pits disegno against colorito, de Kooning squares off against Pollock along the lines of Rubens versus Poussin, Delacroix versus Ingres, Matisse versus Picasso—on the painterly side.  And yet, it is not only with incredible works on paper that this exhibition puts forward drawing as de Kooning’s probity but in an abundance of works where there is drawing within paintings.  And I don’t just mean drawing with a brush by that, but actual, linear, graphite pentimenti expressively animating pictorial surfaces, starting off the bat with those seated pink figures.

DAVID CARRIER I would not speak just of drawing, but of control of paint. The great deKooning, in my opinion was the artist who could deal with the medium in such various ways. The contrast with his contemporaries is startling

IVAN GASKELL In terms of technique and procedure, de Kooning was in certain respects as traditional as Morandi. Drawing was one means of exercising control, and perhaps to the extent that he adhered to its practice he managed to produce viable paintings. Where he succeeds in paint, he is extremely precise and economical, though often complex; where things get out of hand (perhaps owing to impatience, or false “inspiration”?), they go wrong.

Yet in Dutch practice (in which de Kooning was evidently steeped) drawing has always had an equivocal position. He presumably carefully studied works by his fellow countryman, who got to most places he tried to go (including the representation of vigorous women) three hundred years before him, Frans Hals. No drawing by Hals is known. He presumably worked directly in dead painting (underpainting). Seeing the relatively modest Hals exhibition at the Met after the de Kooning show was highly instructive. I can only think, poor de Kooning.

Willem de Kooning, Woman,1951. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 21-1/2 x 16 inches. Private collection © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

JOAN WALTEMATH The drawings got me thinking about how deKooning rehearsed and executed the kind of gestures that constituted his painting. Painting is a very physical act and especially the scale of deKooning’s works demand physical acuity. Like any sport one learns, repeating a gesture over and over again allows the body (and mind) to develop the muscles necessary to preform that gesture without self-consciousness.  And then those muscles remember how they moved and can refine and vary that movement as the muscle develops.

In the show we see how the drawings move from a concern with representation, to the formulation of movement.

STEPHEN MAINE Ivan, Where do “things get out of hand”? I’m inclined to agree with you, except that while I love the drawings from the late 1960s/early 70s, I’ve always had trouble with those slack, sloppy paintings. Okay, The Visit (1966-67) is wonderful–the grinning, spread-legged figure always reminds me of a leaping frog–but in a lot of other paintings from that period he seems to lose his way. Two Figures in a Landscape (1967) is just awful. Montauk I (1969) is less arbitrary, but insipid next to the clarity and snap of the paintings from the mid-70s (e.g., Whose Name Was Writ in Water). In the drawings, though, de K’s highwire walk between structure and illegibility is convincing.

IVAN GASKELL I feel that the vaunted canvases of women are failures, in part because he didn’t exercise the physical control you see in some other works. I don’t care for these works because as David put it to me, de Kooning didn’t know when to stop. His paintings work when he exercises a fine control of the kind that Joan described the process of acquiring. I actually see this to an extent in some of the very late works, which many revile (I don’t). I see it (control and economy) in some of the early ‘50s landscapes, such as Merritt Parkway. He had an occasional facility that can impress, but I consider de Kooning a relatively minor talent in the grand scheme of things.

JENNIFER RILEY I find fewer failures in the selections on view,  however I can see why you might dismiss those canvases. Comparing the women canvases with Merritt Parkway whose figure-like shapes and large patches of tightly locked brilliant color  are downright restive verging on elegant, the women canvases we are speaking of are a riot of awkwardness. I happen to like the possibilities I see in the simultaneous control and lack of control.

It matters somewhat that you think de Kooning a minor talent. I am a painter with great respect for the forward push achieved by this artist for painting at that time.

JOAN WALTEMATH As I went through the installation I started to see deKooning’s work in terms of the limits he was setting for himself in order to open up an arena in which he could play.  As a strategy it seemed to bear out though these rooms.  It’s constructed as if to read:  he exhausted one arena and then his work evolved into something else. After we get through the first rooms where we see how he was riding the currents of his time and bringing those aspects formally into his realm, one of the problems I see that lingers with him is how is he going to deal with the break up of the picture plane.  He begins to fragment his figures: Elaine’s face and arm drifting up and off.  The studies for the large theatre back drop are a good example of this as well.

I feel him trying to come to terms here with the multifaceted nature of reality inherited from Cubism.  This may be the single most important problem he had to contend with in his era.  But deKooning was never going to work with planes; it wasn’t his language.  His was all wrapped up in and around the body.

STEPHEN MAINE In the skeletal quality of the late work, in which color is secondary to drawing (in the sense of graphical organization), there is a direct connection back through the decades to the late-1940s white-on-black paintings (pre-Excavation) and those wonderful black enamel drawings, possibly interiors–even in deKooning’s use of the knife to spread the enamel to a thin film.

In the catalogue, Lauren Mahoney connects these drawings to Matisse’s brush-and-ink drawings from about the same time. Both are materially sparse, but to scramble figure and ground clearly did not interest Matisse. For me, that figure/ground interpenetration is the end to which deKooning applied his draughsmanly means. He extended the implications of Cubism out of the café and into the world. A line is a contour, but is the form on one side of the contour and the void on the other, or the reverse? Space becomes solid, matter evanescent.

Richard Hamilton, The citizen, 1981-3. Oil on canvas, 207 x 210 cm. Tate Collection

IVAN GASKELL I could admire some of the work without especially liking it; I could actually like some of the work.

How are we to regard Richard Hamilton’s The Citizen of 1982-8 (Tate, London) in the light of de Kooning’s work? [It contains] the kind of “expressive” mark making with paint that we associate with de Kooning; but it is not merely paint itself, but a representation of something else in paint, and like paint: the Citizen’s own excrement that he has smeared on the walls of his cell as part of his protest against his confinement and its terms.

I’m tempted to see this as an indictment of solipsistic triviality on the part of artists such as de Kooning whose concern with personal expression and the figure-ground puzzle pales into utter insignificance when set beside the circumstances that Hamilton represents in his art. Hamilton asks his viewers to consider on what terms Abstract Expressionism and political imprisonment can exist in the same world.

STEPHEN MAINE No doubt Hamilton intends a critique of Abstract Expressionism in the Bobby Sands portrait, but note that the autographic mark (here, fecal smearing) is the badge of rebellion and assertion of the individual’s will in the face of the apparatus of the State. I have understood Abstract Expressionism (in its youth, before it became academic) in the context of the age of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, as an implicit protest against mass cultural conformity–not trivial, not insignificant.

IVAN GASKELL I’m not convinced that Hamilton’s critique implies a simple contrast between “trivial” Abstract Expressionism and “urgent” representational commitment. Rather, he seems to me to describe a world in which both exist in a vital dialectical relationship, each in some sense needing and depending on the other. To the extent that Abstract Expressionism could be thought of as an oppositional move as you–surely rightly–point out (however swiftly appropriated and suborned by those very men in gray flannel suits) I rather agree with you: but can the bite of either de Kooning or Hamilton, in their different ways, ever cause real pain? I like to think so, but…

JENNIFER RILEY Many cases like this, as we all know and have witnessed in perceived aesthetics, expose our own closed systems of expectations. What was de Kooning’s intent and what was the world’s reception of it then?  Why it makes sense in his time (in his world)  vs.  the world’s reception of it over time is, in my opinion, what Hamilton’s work may suggest. To address your last question, the terms for  political imprisonment and the terms of Abstract  Expressionism overlap as position or attitude. De Kooning’s attitude represented the ultimate in individual freedom—an escape from an oppressive history and demands of dogmatic imperatives.

DAVID COHEN Hamilton, the founder of Pop and a key figure in the rehabilitation of Duchamp, is totally knowing and deconstructive in his use of painterly tropes.  The artist acknowledged a “compulsion to defile” hallowed techniques which led the late Peter Fuller to write of “Hamilton’s crabbed little anal corner-shop imagination” years before the Citizen painting.  An excremental theme runs (no pun) through much of his Pop and conceptual work, from Sunset (1974), an image of two romantically entwined turds on a beach, through extended series of faux pastoral images of nymphs and Andrex toilet rolls, turds and flower pots, etc.  But I make a back-to-Willem plea.  The tension between representation and expressivity is deeply alive in all his work, and hardly therefore needs extraneous comparisons to put the issue on the agenda.

Ivan’s affection for the late work and his conviction that the authorially uncontested canon contains so many failures are of a piece.  If you like the late works best then you probably just don’t get de Kooning.  Do we really think he wanted to produce thin, repetitive, pretty pictures?  Do we think that in his vigorous prime he would have taken kindly to assistants choosing his palette and canvas size for him and telling him when the work is done?  The chronological hang could have finished a room earlier and the last room given over to some of the late-1960s masterpieces (the Montauk series, etc.) crammed along a long wall in the penultimate gallery.

JENNIFER RILEY Perhaps these sweeping retrospective installations could one day follow a more filmic structure where the ‘End’ of the story is presented first and we are shown sectional ‘flashbacks’ that end with the central achievement rather than the waning years… David, that said, it is hard not to peer into the late paintings and enjoy the fugue-like reprise of drawing and shape being arranged on the canvas.

IVAN GASKELL I don’t believe that The Citizen is shallow in the least; nor do I think Hamilton’s art can be reduced to anal fixation any more than de Kooning’s can be to some notion of expressivity, or pursuit of chimerical freedom. I may not “get” de Kooning in some canonical manner, but I see things to admire in some of his work. I have no patience with want of economy or control in art, which is why I admire both Poussin and Rubens (and, among de Kooning’s contemporaries, Rothko).

What puzzles me is [the] claim that De Kooning’s attitude represented the ultimate in freedom. I’m afraid I don’t really understand this, with the greatest will in the world! All I can infer is that operational notions of ultimate freedom are likely to be contingent, when they apply at all.

Willem de Kooning, Seated Woman on a Bench,1972.Bronze, 37-3/4 x 36 x 34-3/8 inches. Private collection © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

JENNIFER RILEY What I mean  in terms of  ’ ultimate freedom’ is  de Kooning’s much written about desire to be free of order. Though he did speak about a higher order, I believe his notions of freedom were much more grounded in earthly, social sources: his assertion of individual sensibility, his extreme  concentration on the sensory rather than the political,   his ideas of fluidity, vitality, continuity as they pertain to his practice. He said, “Order, to me, is to be ordered about, and that is a limitation.”

Mikhail Bakhtin employs the term ‘unfinalizabilty’ as an all-purpose carrier of his conviction that the world is not  only a messy place,  but also an open place. It designates a complex of values: innovation, surprisingness, the genuinely new, openness, freedom, potentiality, and creativity. (From Creation of Prosaics)

JOAN WALTEMATH Freedom has always meant to me, the freedom to set your own limits and not to be subjected. It takes a lot of control to move all that goopy liquid around and end up with something anyone would want to ruminate over for any length of time. Pictorial issues, largely unconsidered in discourse since the anti-formal epoch, are complex and illogical. It’s what I look for and think about in relation to other painters work: how do they solve problems, what are the problems posed by the era, by the artist.  It’s an approach modeled on George Kubler.  It seems at times so far from an art historical dialogue, I wonder even that we are talking about the same subject.

In the black and white enamel pieces,  I see him transforming the cubist plane and its resulting multifaceted space into a vocabulary based on form and void relationships.  No one in history is more masterful at this than Tintoretto, hence the great adoration he receives from architects.  It is all about the body and the volume between bodies.

JENNIFER RILEY We see economy of means and technique [in the enamel drawings]. It seems deKooning laid down thin meandering lines [and with] a flat scraper, perhaps paper, and drew the ink from the line  thus creating the large ragged edged shapes.  Here is an instance where he didn’t revise nor could he erase and I find them remarkably complete.

JOAN WALTEMATH The form/void relationship emerges from those pieces in a way that fragments the space, beyond the kind of pictorial space that the cubists created. It’s a shallow space – no distant horizons – but you can enter and move around in these pieces.  That is how I’m reading the black and white paintings, you have to look at them for a few minutes to let the coordinates register in your mind, but then it comes clear. I see these as his breakthrough works, yet once he is successful he redefines the limits of his game.  One of the things that emerges out of these paintings is the loss of composition as a way of locating the subject.

STEPHEN MAINE Those are among the most exiting works in the show because of the irreversibility of that smudge or scrape, and because of the economy and ease with which they shuffle figure and ground. Also the scraped enamel is not black like the line but a dark gray, as just a bit of light filters through from the paper underneath. A triangulation of value: black/white/almost black.

It is as if de Kooning felt compelled somehow to qualify nearly every mark he made, to complicate it, to second-guess it, to mess it up. The mid-to-late-50′s landscape-based abstractions may be where he comes the closest to finding in the brush stroke the equivalent of a declarative statement, with no “and yet…” attached.

This kind of relentless qualifying of what is already on the page or canvas is what I love in de Kooning and thus, to my mind, the sculpture is an ancillary achievement.

IVAN GASKELL The sculpture may be generously described as an “ancillary achievement,” but what place does it play in de Kooning’s artmaking? Is this no more than dealer inspired flummery? Do people not care because of a persistence of the (modern) hierarchy of media and method that places painting at the pinnacle?

JENNIFER RILEY As a student in Boston I remember seeing the MFA’s de Kooning bronze for the first time and being disappointed that it felt not so far from Rodin, and I was also reminded of Bernini’s clay models for the Angels for Ponte Sant’Angelo. My second thought was that  he was a much better  as painter because there really was no one immediately jumping to my mind other than himself when I first encountered his painting. The sculptures which are not without achievement, but not so great,  because de Kooning’s most imaginative work is intrinsic to the picture plane.

STEPHEN MAINE Since the distinction between sculpture and painting becomes ever less important as those traditional disciplines blend, I can’t think many informed observers would see much of a hierarchy, let alone a pinnacle. Yet one trades primarily in actual space, and the other in the illusion of space. As Jennifer suggests, de K’s fundamental concern–and, in my view, his gift–has to do with the picture plane, the illusion of spatial articulation, which his sculpture does not engage.

IVAN GASKELL I’m afraid I see the sculptures as possibly—I stress possibly—an instance of “getting in on the act,” perhaps commercially inspired (i.e. not necessarily de Kooning’s idea) but prompted because such things were part of the repertory of older artists of a certain standing: Degas, who never knew any of the bronzes cast in his name; Matisse, who did; Rodin, for whose beneficiaries endless poor casts have been a goldmine; Picasso, who actually did something with sculpture; Giacometti, whose work must have been in certain respects a touchstone; and surely others. In other words, to join the club of the great and the good as an artist, you had to produce sculpture.

DAVID COHEN The issue of freedom in our discussion has been presented as somehow earned at the price of economy and control, [two] virtues we all hope to find in the art we admire.  But these are perennial qualities germane to great exemplars of any style, including styles where exuberance and exalted manifestations of freedom abound.  By a similar token, someone working in a minimalist idiom (a style that fetishizes economy and control) can actually be deficient in those qualities—can be uneconomic in the efforts at reduction and out of control in their denial of facture and improvisation.

IVAN GASKELL Ingenious, though I’m not sure quite how one would discern these wants in the things concerned. I fear we see here a transfer or projection of qualities proper to a person (such as “out of control”) to things made by that person. A painting cannot be out of control, though it might exhibit the results of its maker having been.

STEPHEN MAINE As to the exhibition itself,  my only quibble is the space wasted on the vitrine of very small sculpture in the Montauk room. I would love to see a selection of sketchbooks and/or other small-scale flat work, in the manner of the recent Richard Serra Drawings: A Retrospective at the Met. Of course, Serra works in sketchbooks incessantly when he is on site and I don’t know that de Kooning ever embraced this practice, but there are reams of drawings in existence. To all: your “most memorable moment” in viewing the retrospective?

Willem de Kooning, The Cat's Meow, 1987. Oil on canvas, 88 x 77 inches. Collection Jasper Johns © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

DAVID COHEN At the risk of repeating myself, I already stated my major quibble with the installation which is that the late work is given too much wall space and, disastrously, the last word too. I proposed ending the chronological sweep early so that the last room can give generous space to genuinely summating masterpieces rather than last demented efforts.  Jen made a brilliant point that exhibitions could take a cue from cinema and experiment with chronological dislocations to great effect.  I felt that the Montauk and other big figure/landscape paintings needed more space and were the one spot where the hang felt crowded.  But Elderfield is a hanging genius, as his Puryear installation proved and the current show confirms.

JOAN WALTEMATH The honesty of those later paintings was very moving for me.  I felt him reaching back to the black enamel paintings we’ve all talked about, looking for a breakthrough again – wanting to again redefine his limits.  I kept thinking that if you put an image of those black and white early pieces on photoshop and hit inverse it would pretty much look like the later paintings.  It would be interesting to see how it doesn’t.  Here he picks up again a kind of form/void vocabulary to construct his pictorial dimension and uses only what memory remains in the body to create those flowing lines. Some of them are more coherent in this regard that others.  There is no point of reference for them in the outer world, only inside where the body holds memories of the movements we have made, knows them intimately.  The highlights for me are the two on the left side as you face the exit, spare and elegant they underscore how he has given up everything he invented, everything we want to use to identify him, and he still makes a painting. He challenges us to be able to let go of it, too!

IVAN GASKELL I was impressed by his relentless experimentation: he never got into a groove and became complacent, it seems. In this he resembles Poussin who also relentlessly reinvented his mode of art making again and again, though perhaps to greater moral purpose; that is, I emerged from the Poussin exhibition some years ago feeling that I have been given the opportunity, thanks to his art, to become a better person. I emerged from the de Kooning exhibition admiring, with certain reservations, and somewhat bemused.

For me, the thrill moment was turning away from the dreary row of Women in which so many people have invested so much, in a variety of senses, to find the late ‘50s-early ‘60s landscapes (or landscape abstractions). Merritt Parkway (Detroit Institute of Arts), which I have mentioned before, and its neighbors impressed me in a way that nothing else I saw did. This is scarcely a revelation, but in my mind lifted his overall achievement from also-ran to worthy of repeated attention.

DAVID CARRIER For me what’s most memorable were the mid-period landscapes, showing de Kooning’s control at its best. The woman I don’t have any political objections to, but my formal concern is his need to hang the paint on an outlined figure. In the end, deK comes from what feels a very distant world. When Sue Williams paints in something of his fashion, she has to be very different- ironical, political. It’s not a technical question. At least unless you are very senior and European.

JENNIFER RILEY Standing in the room with the luminous, lush, exuberant large format paintings c. 1975-1977 was one of the highlights of my experience of this wonderful exhibition. Until this sequence of paintings my viewing experience was located solidly between mind and body. Here, however, I felt a bit blown backwards. For example, the group of late 50′s early 60′s parkway paintings, including “Merritt Parkway”  and “Bolton Landing” are absent the vitality, luminosity, and warmth of the 70′s  abstract landscapes. There is a certain distance, dullness and cool in this group (not to mention some relatively unfortunate spatial  bloopers).  Are the 1975-77 landscapes,  which are also full of movement, landscape sensations and color and rich brushstrokes that embody the velocity of the paint effective because of the ambience of surroundings in which they were made? (They were made in the Springs [on the eastern, rural end of Long Island -ed.] whereas the earlier ones were derived from sketches, small notational responses he made of his trips on the parkway then painted back in NYC.)

Willem de Kooning, Montauk I, 1969. Oil on canvas, 88 x 77 inches. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

STEPHEN MAINE The wall of mid-70′s landscapes was a revelation. Something clicked for him, and he found a balance between allowing the paint to unravel and nudging it back into place. Also his color here is fantastic, never better before or after. I can’t explain the effect of light, Jennifer, but I do think he regained his touch. By that I mean a variety of touch–in contrast to the relentless slathering that I find so dispiriting in the paintings of a few years before. The catalogue has a good description of the methods de Kooning used to add substances to his paint–including water–to get unusual textures and other effects. The heightened tactility contributes greatly to the vitality of these paintings.

JOAN WALTEMATH He uses the materiality of paint and the means of moving it around to create a pictorial dimension that is neither classic  foreground, middle ground and background space nor an organically construed cubist space.  The push and pull method of Hoffmann lingers around here, you can feel that as an overall spatial configuration in some of the paintings.  It never comes across to me as if it was used with any specific intent, more of a default mode for some one trying to carve out what hadn’t really been figured out yet by anyone else.  Or perhaps so much in the air that it was one accepted formulation of what a non-objective pictorial dimension could be in the era where the flatness still counted.

DAVID CARRIER De Kooning took a while to open up; in earlier rooms he works on smaller scale. These are resolutely unfussy paintings. Maybe this sense of liberation reflects his move out of New York City. The light is really interesting. Are there earlier, equally bright, large Western paintings?

JENNIFER RILEY Church. Turner, Burchfield…

Maybe we should try a hang of these three, plus de Kooning and … ??

DAVID COHEN There is a common line of praise one hears from artists about old master exhibitions: it makes them want to go home and paint.  I have exactly that feeling – and I don’t paint! This urge to manipulate materials that comes over you as you look at his work is a direct response to the haptic, if not the carnal aspect within the work itself.

The body-consciousness in de Kooning isn’t just about the woman series or the “ab-flab” sculptures or the paint-as-flesh impasto and palette of works from various periods or the stray limbs and deconstructed musculature that animate works like Attic and Excavation. Rather, the relationships of paint to drawing and surface to structure each constitute pictorial equivalents of flesh on bone. De Kooning’s is an art of supreme embodiment.

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August 6 to September 17, 2011
Open Fridays and Saturdays, 12 to 6 pm
98 4th Street
Room 204 (Buzzer #28)
Brooklyn,347.525.4628

Installation view of Pointing a Telescope at the Sun, MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY, 2011

In April 2006 a three-year-old, web-only virtual gallery called Minus Space made the leap from pixels to bricks and mortar, launching an old-fashioned, white-walled gallery in a nondescript brick building in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. 98 Fourth Street boasted all of 175 square feet of exhibition space. Minus Space began to present an ambitious program relating to the pictorial strategy of “reductive art” and proceeded to establish itself as a primary voice, out of proportion to its diminutive size, in the field of concept-driven abstraction.

Five and a half years and dozens of shows later, Minus Space has mounted its last exhibition in Gowanus, and will soon relocate to a gallery-filled building in Dumbo. “Pointing a Telescope at the Sun,” on view through September 17, embodies both the felicities and limitations of the gallery’s physical restrictions. Bringing together one canvas apiece by five painters associated with the Hunter College Color School, the show’s necessarily understated elegance prompts speculation about the ground that might be covered by an expanded version seen in more capacious surroundings.

The exhibition’s title signals an empirical approach to the perception of the colors of the spectrum. The pictorial space of Doug Ohlson’s PU-011 (2004-2006) is primarily a function of its palette; compositionally neutral, vertical bars of variously saturated colors (including flamboyant pinks and electric blues) visually advance from a surrounding ochre-ish field while nuzzling or buzzing the painting’s edges. A gradual shift in the scale of the brush stroke establishes the space of Robert Swain’s Untitled 7-25-6 x 11-25-6 x 23-25-6 (2011). Restricted to three equally saturated hues—red, purple and pale blue-green—the precisely positioned marks diminish in size from the upper right corner to the lower left and imply distance, compression, atomization.

The expansive scale of Vincent Longo’s Four Time (2006) transcends its compact size, its earth-bound palette of sullied yellows, neutralized greens and a pale terra cotta pink somehow achieving a weightless evanescence. Sanford Wurmfeld’s II-27 #1+B (V-RO/N-Y) (2006) gently animates a half-inch wide grid. Subtle shifts in saturation and hue from one unit to the next form a veil or membrane of exquisite delicacy. With Untitled (2011), in which a square field of vertical bands is abruptly cleft by a shallow, oblique seam, Gabriele Evertz continues her investigation of how the presence of spectral colors (in this case, the yellow/orange/red range) affects the perception of gray.

Doug Ohlson, PU-011, 2004-2006. Acrylic on canvas, 26-1/4 x 24-1/8 inches. Courtesy of MINUS SPACE

Matthew Deleget and Rossana Martinez, the husband-and-wife team behind Minus Space, met in 1994 while students at Pratt Institute. While their artistic means differed—he was (and is) primarily a painter, she a sculptor and printmaker (now working with installation and performance)—they shared a conceptual orientation and a desire to foment dialogue among artists that would go beyond the chitchat of openings and become “a platform for community-building.”

The site went live in 2003 and in short order saw the “highly local” response from a handful of Brooklyn painters expand to become global in scope. Building on the social premise of their project, Deleget and Martinez hosted weekend-long shows in their Brooklyn apartment. In 2004 the couple met painter Don Voisine, soon to be elected president of American Abstract Artists, at an opening at Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn Heights. “I first heard about Matthew from Chris Martin,” recalls Voisine. “He said he’d met a young guy into minimalist stuff and he was starting a web site dedicated to that kind of work…  [Deleget and Martinez] were interested in certain kinds of art, and saw little of a like-minded community around them so they set about creating one and discovered there was a like-minded need all around the world. I drew inspiration from them for ideas to revitalize the AAA. Matthew and Rossana helped me drag the AAA into the latter part of the twentieth century.”

The pair outfitted their Gowanus studio to accommodate exhibitions, and began presenting artists’ projects in 2006. The Minus Space archive includes exhibitions by the likes of Michael Brennan, Linda Francis, Li Trincere and Mark Dagley, among many others. A flat file has been established, containing work by over 70 artists. (The author is among them). Outside-curated projects include “Escape From New York,” an influential “suitcase” show of very small (read: portable) works that traveled to three venues in New Zealand and Australia, including Sydney Non Objective. In 2007 Deleget curated “Machine Learning,” seen in New York at The Painting Center before it hit the road. Comprising paintings by Henry Brown, Terry Haggerty, Gilbert Hsaio, and Douglas Melini, the show proposed a breed of “pattern painting for the Information Age.

The Minus Space suffix, “reductive art,” may suggest a minimalist orientation but Deleget is at pains to dispel that notion. He objects to being characterized by a term such as Minimalism, which is “carried forward by public usage but is inaccurate to describe where our interests lie.” If anything, the gallery’s vigorous advocacy of abstraction is set within a context inflected by social utility and engagement, not art-for-art’s-sake. Examples are recent shows of vintage LP album covers designed by Bauhaus stalwart Josef Albers; the art-historically based, map-like paintings of Loren Monk; and the mathematically-derived work of the famously networked and networking Michelle Grabner. The common thread is pictorial incident as information—what Deleget calls “strategies for saying more with less.”

Reductive-art-watchers await indications of how the new, much larger Minus Space at 111 Front Street will affect the operation’s overall dynamic. The gallery will be open to the public four days a week, adding Wednesdays and Thursdays to the current Friday and Saturday hours. The inaugural show, titled “Ted Stamm: Paintings,” opens the evening of Friday, September 23. Its press release argues that the work of this New York painter, who died at age 39 in 1984, “anticipated the conceptual strategies and material inquiries of subsequent generations of artists who came of age in NYC during the past three decades.” With two-and-a-half times their accustomed exhibition space, Deleget and Martinez will have plenty of elbow room with which to make that case.

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Alice Neel, David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock, 1970. Oil on canvas, 60 x 56 inches. Courtesy of David Zwirner

In 1974, a decade before her death, Alice Neel was the subject of a career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Spanning the previous 40 years, the exhibition included 58 portraits, the genre for which, then as now, Neel is best known. In her absorbing biography, Phoebe Hoban quotes Neel on her approach to her work and her interest in the dark side of her sitter’s psyche: “I am never arbitrary. Before painting I talk to my sitters and they unconsciously assume their most typical pose—which, in a way, involved all their character and social standing; what the world has done to them and their retaliation” (p. 305). Such is the unending fascination of her work: her knack for getting under her sitter’s skin, behind the façade of physiognomy and comportment, and expose something raw and real. The reader of Hoban’s study gathers that Neel’s portraiture was, sometimes quite consciously, itself a form of retaliation against what the world had done to her.

Neel’s struggle began early, as a high-strung, unhappy girl caught in the conformity of small-town life in Colwyn, PA. Her mother was tough, stern, and misogynistic in her abysmal view of what young women—including her daughter—should hope to achieve. But her dominant personality provided an emotional and intellectual focus for the young Neel, who later attributed her own powers of observation to early training in reading her mother’s face for clues to her mood. (Her father was meek and distant; when in her mid-30’s, Neel attempted suicide by putting her head in an oven, her father mused aloud at how high the gas bill would be.)

Neel received her most salient art training at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, where she was strongly influenced by the pedagogical philosophy of Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit. Wildly popular when it was published in 1923 and still widely read, the book proselytizes for everyday subject matter, emotional expressiveness, and a direct, alla prima method of which drawing was to be the basis. Neel would put these principles into action in her own work, with a twist.

She married the Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez in 1925 and spent much of the next year in Havana living with her husband’s family and traveling to the poor sections of town to paint. Her work from this period, which was in synch with the concern for the “emotions of everyday life” championed by the painters of the Vanguardia movement and the Grupo Minorista, positioned her in sympathy with the social realism that would preoccupy American artists on the Left during the 1930’s.

Meanwhile Neel’s personal life was a mess. After returning to the States, the impoverished couple lost their first daughter to diphtheria at the age of six months; Carlos left Neel shortly thereafter taking their second child, also a daughter, from whom Neel remained permanently estranged. For decades, she had several troubled, sometimes destructive relationships with men. One lover reportedly slashed a number of Neel’s paintings in a jealous rage; another, a “brilliant autodidact” and a volatile, sadistic bully, mercilessly persecuted her sons.

But then, Neel “seemed to thrive on drama and discordance” (p. 208); she painted continuously. In this she was greatly aided by the WPA’s Easel Painting Project, which employed her from the mid-1930’s until its cessation in the early 40’s. (Hoban’s overview of the radical political and artistic cross-currents of this milieu is superb.) Surrounded by kindred spirits in then-bohemian Greenwich Village, Neel’s nonconformist streak blossomed. Her gift—and it was awesome, even then—was her ability to nail her subject’s vulnerabilities and the effort to mask them. This facility was feared as much as admired. Joseph Solman, a painter and friend from the WPA years, said, “If she did a portrait of you, you wouldn’t recognize yourself, what she would do with you. She would almost disembowel you, so I was afraid to pose for her” (p. 108).

Of her dual portrait of Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff, the critic Harold Rosenberg suggested that Neel “have that in a tent and charge a dollar admission.” In ARTnews, Valerie Peterson wrote that the portrait “really belongs in the closet with the skeletons” (p. 245). The homeless, eccentric Village character Joe Gould was pleased with his 1933 portrait in which, with a gleeful smirk, he displays his three sets of genitals. Said Gould of the bizarre painting, “it was not really a nude because I insisted on a cigarette holder” (p 94).

Her portrayals of the innocent and beloved could be tender, as in her paintings of her sons, Hartley and Richard, and of her neighbors in Spanish Harlem where she lived and worked for twenty years. Her nonfigurative work is often richly introspective, as if an elevated train track or snow-covered fire escape might symbolize human aspiration or frailty. And in portraying Andy Warhol (1970) she gives herself over to her subject’s predilection to remain a cipher; drawing his eyelids closed, he displays his lurid scars and his pristine footwear.

But her most brutal portraits combine the grotesqueries of Ensor, the bleakness of Munch, and the subtlety of a sledgehammer. She renders the unpopular director of the WPA’s Artist Project, Audrey McMahon (1940) in joyless grays and browns, as a sort of desiccated vampire with eyes like trapdoors, a nose like a newel post, and a clenched, lipless mouth. Ellie Poindexter (1962), a dealer who did not warm to Neel’s professional advances, looks, with her beady eyes, slit of a mouth, and prominent breasts, like a python who has just swallowed a pair of hamsters. Even Frank O’Hara, the much-liked poet and curator whom Neel sought out in the hopes of interesting him in her work, comes in for some rough treatment in a 1960 portrait. Reproduced in ARTnews, it was a career milestone, but Irving Sandler turned down Neel’s request to paint him because “she was like a voodoo person who would stick pins in me” (p. 246).

Photograph of Alice Neel by Sam Brody, 1944

Despite or because of this aspect of Neel’s output—the “deliberate hideousness” ARTnews had chastised her for in the 40’s—her work struck a chord with the art world in the early 1960’s. Having achieved some visibility in the heyday of class-struggle art for her depictions of the downtrodden (who were often, in fact, her friends and neighbors), Neel was marginalized during the ascendency of Abstract Expressionism, the “great broom that swept everything else away.” But in the context of renewed interest in the human figure that was a hallmark of Pop, Neel’s tenacity gained traction.

Not that she was universally popular. Elke Solomon, curator of prints and drawings (not paintings) at the Whitney in 1974, organized the Neel retrospective. “A nasty piece of work,” she said of Neel years later (p. 289). The artist May Stevens rejects the notion that Neel was some sort of protofeminist: “She wasn’t a feminist—she was an Alice Neelist… She was totally antifeminist and antiwomen… I didn’t want anything to do with Alice” (p. 267). With her outrageous anecdotes and salty humor, she was a hit on the college lecture circuit, but feminist intellectuals felt she contributed to a cliché by discussing her work in an autobiographical, rather than a conceptual and/or historical, context. Nothing if not self-aware, Neel no doubt judged that the spectacle of a sweet-faced, gray-haired older woman giving voice to a libidinous turn of mind and a profoundly nonconformist world view would have a broader appeal—a bit of the old “drama and discordance” played for laughs.

All of which is to say that Neel did not much care whose feathers she ruffled. The world had roughed her up pretty good but she gave as well as she got. Hoban theorizes that Neel “didn’t see her subjects just as victims; she also saw them as survivors, however scarred. As such, almost all Neel’s subjects mirror her own identity” (p. 331). This seems right, but it doesn’t go far enough. The invasiveness of Neel’s portraits became her persona. Under the guise of probing others she used portraiture to retaliate against the world for the many psychic wounds she sustained. This is what made her tick, and what makes the uncomfortable, aggressive edge of her work so compelling.

Phoebe Hoban: Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (New York: St. Martin’s Press, December 2010. ISBN: 978-0-312-60748-7 512 pages, plus one 8-page b&w photo insert and two 8-page color photo inserts. $35 ($16.99 ebook)

Lucian Freud with Martin Gayford. Photograph: David Dawson

What does a portrait depict? In directing his inevitably subjective perception to his choice of subject, and bringing to bear upon it the idiosyncrasies of his powers of visual description, the portraitist reveals as much of himself as he does of the sitter, and often more. Richard Avedon summarizes this paradox: “Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is… the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.” [Quoted in Peter Weiermair, Americans: The Social Landscape from 1940 Until 2006. Bologna: Damiani Publishers, 2006.]

A recent book suggests a more complex answer, that the subject of a portraitist working at the highest level of the genre is neither himself nor the flesh and bone before him but a complex and evolving matrix of relationships, a tissue of observation, expectation, and ego that proceeds from the painter’s perception but rapidly outpaces it. Art critic Martin Gayford is as sure a guide as one could wish for through the psychological labyrinth of the sitting, and in Man With a Blue Scarf he describes a nuanced exchange between intellects and imaginations that unfolds over time and is captured in paint.

In requiring little but relaxed alertness and the following of very simple instructions, “the experience of posing seems somewhere between transcendental meditation and a visit to the barber’s,” according to Gayford. Or that is how it seemed to him at the outset of the seven-month period during which he sat for Lucian Freud and which resulted in the oil-on-linen “Man with a Blue Scarf.” By the fortieth and final sitting, on July 4, 2004, his view had deepened considerably. His verbal portrait of Freud, based on notes he kept of their conversations; his private thoughts; and his observations of the painter at work, emerges as inexorably as does Freud’s likeness of him. It is a pleasure to read for the insights Gayford provides into this painter’s method and temperament, and for the light and playful touch with which he probes the conceptual core of portraiture, the nature of the self.

Lucian Freud, Man with a Blue Scarf, 2004. Oil on canvas, 66 x 50.8 cm. Private Collection. Lucian Freud archive, photography by John Riddy. Works by Lucian Freud © 2010 Lucian Freud.

Gayford is forthright in his profound admiration of Freud’s work, asserting that Freud and his friend Francis Bacon are to British painting of the twentieth century what Turner and Constable are to that of the nineteenth. But he is not fawning: artist and model have been close acquaintances for years. His voice is droll, his humor unlabored, his diction precise but relaxed, focused but desultory—quite like the conversations he and Freud pursued during those many sittings. The book is a gem of pacing; wandering from the narrative thread long enough to outline a subtopic, flesh out a characterization, frame a paradox, or provide historical context to an observation, his account repeatedly snaps back to a description of the experience of being scrutinized by this particular painter, in this particular leather chair, in this room in this house in London.

Of course, Gayford scrutinizes right back. He reports that Freud, full of nervous energy, murmurs to himself and moves around a lot while at the easel. (Small and nimble, fond of horses, the young Freud seriously considered a career as a jockey.) He works extremely slowly, beginning in this case (after an initial roughing-out of the composition in charcoal) with a dab of paint in the middle of the forehead and working methodically across and down the face. He contemplates each brush stroke, assiduously covering the canvas inch by inch. Then, sometimes, he wipes out and repaints.

Often but not always, he talks — about old friends, chance encounters, memorable meals. We learn which painters he likes (van Gogh, Chardin, Goya, Ingres), dislikes (Raphael, Vermeer, Leonardo), and loathes (Dante Gabriel Rosetti: “the nearest painting can get to bad breath”). He prefers Matisse’s emotional authenticity to Picasso’s pictorial derring-do. He greatly trusts his instincts and often makes impulsive decisions—including whom to ask to sit for a portrait. Thus sitting for Freud is “a pleasure, an ordeal, and also a worry,” as Gayford is dogged by trepidation that his will be among the many portraits that have foundered when the interpersonal chemistry went wrong. (The book’s dust jacket is the spoiler, with a reproduction of the finished painting: a mound of black hair, gray at the temples; heavy eyebrows; a severe, somewhat elongated nose; and—a rarity in Freud’s oeuvre—a faint smile.)

The book’s best-known precursor in the tiny genre of sitters’ memoirs is A Giacometti Portrait by James Lord, published in 1965. Lord, a New Yorker visiting the great Swiss artist in his Paris studio, looks on helplessly as Giacometti, apparently angst-ridden and miserable, obliterates successive attempts to convey the essence of his sitter. Respectful of Giacometti’s obsession with failure as a method, Lord also wants the painting done and craftily intervenes in the nick of time. Mirroring Freud’s steady, workmanlike approach, Gayford’s book is devoid of such high drama, of crisis and catharsis. It hums along with a calmer but no less compelling consideration of the problematics of painting, and of being painted.

Puzzled by his own misplaced but understandable sense of propriety toward the bit of linen that bears his likeness, Gayford experiences pangs of existential anxiety. A brief mention of lunching with the California collectors who own the picture subtly underscores the idea that the activity of portraiture is itself an exchange between interested parties in which the sitter barters his time and his face to appear in a place in which time itself stands still.

The writer ultimately concludes that this particular portrait depicts a period of mutual, concentrated observation. It is an index of an interaction, testifying to a prolonged exchange of close attention symbolized, perhaps, by the “gimlet eye” Gayford fancies his friend has given his nuanced and now-permanent facial expression.

Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud. (London/New York: Thames & Hudson, 2010. 248 pages; ISBN 0500238758 $40)

January 30 to June 5, 2011 (Attie closes May 30)
258 Main Street
Ridgefield, Connecticut 06877 (203)-438-4519

Jenny Dubnau, S.A., Dark Ground, 2010. Oil on canvas, 32 x 44 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Putting into play a new curatorial strategy that has been in the works for over a year, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut recently opened six thematically linked solo exhibitions. “Portraiture at The Aldrich” marshals new and recent work by Jenny Dubnau, James Esber, Hope Gangloff, Thilo Hoffmann, Timothy White (all on view through June 5) and Shimon Attie (through May 30). While a bold concept, in practice the new scheme is off to a shaky start. Under one roof but not clearly orchestrated, the selection of artists ironically feels even more arbitrary than previously at the Aldrich, when visitors had to assess for themselves whether and how exhibitions interrelated. Of uneven interest, the current shows collectively constitute a portrait of an institution in transition.

The high point is “Head On,” seven oversized portrait busts in oil on canvas by Queens-based painter Jenny Dubnau. The artist works squarely in the realist tradition, eliciting a sense of the subject’s unvarnished presence through deft rendering of the glow of skin, the sheen of hair, the glint of an eye. Her compositions are a bit off-kilter, as in M.K., Pale Ground (all works 2010), in which the sitter’s elegant, oval face is mostly below the painting’s midline. The upper half of the canvas contains little but her forehead and that expansive, neutral ground—a silvery gray—which mirrors her inscrutable, unflappable expression.

Other paintings capture their sitter with an unflattering, impossible-to-hold expression, making it clear that photography is essential to Dubnau. With arched eyebrows and pursed lips, the subject of M.B. in Midsentence appears to wince as he makes some unknown rhetorical point; T.H., Glancing Sideways looks downright shifty-eyed, stealing a peek at the camera from his profile position. Self-portrait with Earrings is a monument to social anxiety. Flushed, her eyes bugging a bit, the artist lists to her left while licking her lips as if about to speak, spit, or whistle up some moxie.

The prolonged contact the portrait painter traditionally has with the sitter is in Dubnau’s practice replaced by a photo shoot; her considerable descriptive skills are focused not on skin and bones but on a layer of photographic emulsion. Dubnau asks if those awkward moments when our guard is down are more real, more true, than our poised, composed selves allow. The only one of her subjects who seems unaware of the camera is a bemused-looking fellow with a goatee and a prominent left ear, depicted in J.E. Looking to the Side.

That would be James Esber, whose exhibition, “Your Name Here,” is just down the corridor from Dubnau’s. Implicit in “Head On,” the subtheme of collaboration is overt in Esber’s ongoing “this is not a portrait“ series, of which over 100 examples are on view. Using a photocopy of the Brooklyn artist’s 2005 brush-and-ink drawing of Osama Bin Laden as a template, participants in the series have been briefed to “remake” the drawing according to instructions that stress line quality: “They should have whatever character is natural to your way of making marks.”

Hope Gangloff, Sarah VanDerBeek in Her Bath Closet, 2010. Acrylic on canvas, 54¼ x 82¼ inches. Collection of Cynthia and Stuart Smith

It is thus inevitable that some aspects of the original would be amplified and others supressed, but the range of variations on Esber’s distorted, spectral caricature goes well beyond matters of touch. In one (artist David Sandlin’s—though there’s no indication of the collaborators other than their signatures), a web of wrinkles on Bin Laden’s left cheek morphs into a pair of jet airliners. To hers, the painter Ann Pibal imparts volume and spatial clarity that is lacking in the others, including even Esber’s; painter Tom Burckhardt’s attention to shape over line resembles a photographic negative. Some look a mess; assuming an autographical presence exists in the trace of anyone’s “hand,” and allowing that each drawing is “by” both Esber and the collaborator, are those several in which the image is almost impossible to discern significantly less Esber’s? Here, collaboration is not a 50/50 proposition, but a sliding scale.

Interspersed with six barely-legible portraits of the fleetingly famous (e.g., pilot Sully Sullenberger; disowned adoptee Artyom Savelyev) fabricated directly on the gallery walls in colored plasticine, the drawing installation extends in a broken grid toward the gallery’s double-height ceiling. Regrettably, many are hung far too high for proper viewing. Intended, I suppose, to suggest the internet’s near-instantaneous proliferation of sensationalistic images (“viral” in fashionable parlance) and the voracious 24-hour news cycle, this treatment of the work privileges conceptual over material values in a self-defeating exhibition expedient. Bad idea.

Speaking of bad ideas, photographer Thilo Hoffmann takes his cues from the teenagers whose candids he shoots, using a large-format camera. His “High School Portraits” includes fourteen 45-by-32-inch color prints (all dated 2010) in which the subjects dictate the location, pose, props—all the creative input. Hoffmann enables the work by supplying the technical means, and squeezing the shutter.

The kids are at that phase when the imperatives of identity and self-image take hold on the psyche like the jaws of a bear trap, and daily behavior takes on a performative dimension. Some display the attributes of their professional ambitions by locating themselves at a piano or on Broadway; in an aggressively decorated bedroom or dockside by a placid lake, others contextualize themselves with indicators of leisure. Their self-absorption seems authentic; the problem is that there is little about the the photographs that is particularly distinctive. A video attests to the collaborative nature of the shoots, but it does not improve their results.

Katy Grannan has used a similar device to searing effect, but most of these “High Scool Portraits” are bland. One striking image transcends Hoffmann’s cumbersome conceptual apparatus: One More Year, Sophia Stoop/Katonah, NY in which an antsy young woman with kooky hair and a black portfolio, having positioned herself on a suburban train platform, scouts the tracks for the train that will whisk her to The City. Shot from a low angle, she is framed against a blue morning sky as clear and intense as her determined expression. Like Mary Richards in the old “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” you know she’s gonna make it after all. In assuming a role—that is, acting—Ms. Stoop lets Hoffmann (and the viewer) closer than do her contemporaries to the real self.

As with Hoffmann’s high schoolers, the inner lives of Hope Gangloff’s young professionals are revealed through their activities and accoutrements rather than a seismic reading of the subtleties of physiognomy. The nineteen paintings and drawings in “Love Letters” demonstrate this artist’s penchant for bold composition, local color, consistency of touch and anecdotal narrative detail—the hallmarks of illustration.

As a painter, Gangloff is in dialogue with Matisse and Schiele in her interest in combining retina-pleasing pattern and keyed-up color with the supple contours of the  human form. In an attitude of regal repose, the sleek dressmaker in E. Starbuck (60 by 108 inches, all works 2010) pauses among bolts of parti-colored fabrics; to a wall parallel to the picture plane her sketches are affixed, with bits of red-orange tape. A gooseneck lamp mimicks her boney physique, a bit too obviously. Sara VanDerBeek in Her Bath Closet is an odd painting. A stylish brunette gently contorts herself while focused on the task of painting her toenails; her foot is bigger than her head, the unfurling toilet paper sticks to her leg, and the mirror’s reflection is an inscrutable, dashed-off abstraction. But the contrast between the buzzy pattern of her kimono and the muted greenish grid of bathroom tiles is so overstated as to steal the scene.

In no hurry to dress, the sitter seems both languid and poised. In fact all Gangloff’s subjects preen a bit. The appearance of smugness is amusing in small doses but, like the pervasive doe-eyed ennui in Elizabeth Peyton’s oeuvre, this quirk has become a tic and, in “Love Letters” at least, a liability.

Thilo Hoffman, MANCHILD, 2010. Archival inkjet prints mounted on Dibond, 45 x 32 inches. Courtesy of the artist

Once you read the brochure, it’s hard not to admire the intentions behind “MetroPAL.IS,” Shimon Attie’s 12-minute video installation in which a fry cook, a transit worker, a skate punk, a cross-dresser and other stereotypical urbanites are seen full-length on eight screens arranged in an inward-facing circle, declaiming fragments of official-sounding language like amateur thespians and gesturing obscurely. That text, it turns out, is a blend of the Palestinian and Israeli declarations of sovereignty—separated in time by forty years—and the players are immigrants to New York City from those communities abroad.

The stilted performances are meant to introduce elements of Classical Greek theater and sculpture, in a nod to the origins of Western democracy. But the speakers appear brainwashed, as if they memorized nationalistic boilerplate like poetry. Creatively ambitious, technically masterful, the work is admirably open-ended. Does Attie assert that a real “conversation” about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, even those who have gained distance from it, is forever precluded by exigencies of statehood? Who knows. The experience of standing among those policy-intoning wraiths is overwhelmingly claustrophobic—which might also be the point.

The consciousness reflected in Attie’s work is global, in marked contrast to Timothy White’s “Portraits.” About evenly divided between black-and-white and color, these thirty-seven immaculate giclée prints are supremely accomplished examples of the celebrity photographer’s craft, but functionally indistinguishable from commercial advertising and helpless to expand anyone’s understanding of the world. Each subject’s practiced control of his or her persona sucks the air out of most of them. An angular, angsty Nicolas Cage mugs mock-threateningly for the camera (Nicolas Cage, San Francisco, CA, 1998); Bruce Springsteen slumps in the dirt, romancing his Fender (Bruce Springsteen, Malibu, CA, 1991); James Gandolfini, very much in character as Tony Soprano, stares icily from the far end of a smoldering cigar as if considering whether the viewer is worth the trouble of whacking (James Gandolfini, New York City, 2006)

A shot of a still-girlish Shirley MacLaine would melt a heart of glass (Shirley MacLaine, Los Angeles, CA, 1991). A trouper, she smiles wanly in her dressing room mirror, slightly crinkly but still devastatingly pretty. Her tightly framed face is all that is in focus. And even while tooling around Central Park on a comically undersized motorbike, Paul Newman reflexively offers the camera a three-quarter view of his singular jawline (Paul Newman, New York City, 1988). No doubt White’s work appeals to a broad audience, and one understands the desire of any museum to draw visitors. But a worthwhile exhibition somehow challenges the viewer’s sensibilities or preconceptions, and it is difficult to imagine a less challenging exhibition than this.

Four years ago I had the honor of curating an exhibition at the Aldrich, so I write with some insight into the pressures and challenges that it and institutions like it routinely encounter. A group show, mine would be inconsistent with the Aldrich’s new programming paradigm, but the trouble I find with the exhibitions now on view is rooted more deeply—in the museum’s effort to ensure that the work it presents is accessible to a broad audience. Plenty of recent shows there—by the likes of Elana Herzog, Tom Burckhardt and Ted Victoria—have demonstrated that accessibility is not inconsistent with a deeply personal vision, compellingly expressed. While I’ve no doubt that the Aldrich will regain its footing, missteps currently delay the way forward.

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