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

In what proved to be his last public event, Jene Highstein, who died on April 27 at his upstate farm of lung cancer, described his childhood summers swimming and fishing off the white sand beaches of North Carolina.  This dialogue took place in late February at ArtHelix, Bushwick, where a selection of his recent Cape Breton drawings formed an exhibition curated by Bonnie Rychlak.  Cape Breton was a place where many of his friends had bought land in the 1960s although he visited it for the first time only in 2002—and instantly fell in love.  It reminded him of the idyllic holidays of his youth although the landscape was northern and very different.  But he loved the “wildness” and “remoteness” of Nova Scotia, the restless, constantly changing weather that re-drew sky, sea, and earth.  And above all, he loved the light.  So he, too, bought land, spending parts of summers and sometimes other seasons in this private arcadia. The light-flickered, delicately colored Cape Breton drawings are a Postminimalist sculptor’s musings on phenomena, on what disappears, what changes and what remains, one whose work over an almost 50-year career was more typically characterized by refined, although enormously scaled, weighty, often distinctly architectural forms in monochrome, in shades of blacks, whites, grays and the natural coloration of the material. Yet a rebellious sensuality could almost always be detected in these austere, potent sculptures of metal, stone, wood, concrete, plaster, glass, their geometry softened by the artist into something more idiosyncratic, humanized by a curve, a swell, an irregularity, as it was in his playground-sized sculpture for the Wanås Foundation in Sweden, a sloping, irregular ovoid that he dryly called Grey Clam (1990/2001).

Like any good artist, Highstein liked to challenge and be challenged, and like any good artist, he was compelled to experiment.  He was at ease within a range of media and disciplines, collaborating at times with other artists, dancers, musicians, and architects such as Steven Holl with whom he constructed a resplendently luminous nine-meter tall ice edifice in Finland in 2003.  Called Oblong Voidspace, this piece was, as Highstein explained, “about the absence of sculpture: the outside being more architectural and the inside more experiential.  Like a ceremonial space, the interior focuses attention on the convergence of body and mind.”  Highstein also designed sets for theatre productions, working with the ELD Dance Company in Stockholm for many years. The evolution of his work, he had often stated, depended upon finding new forms.  These forms were abstract, not taken directly from nature but from experiences of nature, associations with nature, steeped in nature but conceived in the studio.  These memorable configurations were distinctively his own in the particular integration of the abstract and the biomorphic, an empathetic, substantive “convergence of body and mind” that is present in all of his works, seen most recently in New York at Danese in a well-received show of his towers and elliptical sculptures.

Jene Highstein on a visit to Nova Scotia. Courtesy of Kitty Highstein

Jene Highstein was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1942 and attended the University of Maryland, then the University of Chicago in the mid-1960s, where his major was philosophy.  He later studied at the New York Studio School and the Royal Academy Schools in London, earning a degree in art in 1970.  His first exhibition was at Lisson Gallery, London, in 1968.  Returning to New York, he showed at 112 Greene Street for a time, part of the utopian-minded, fiercely independent, artist-run alternative space that included much of the downtown avant-garde such as Jeffrey Lew, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Nonas, Alan Saret, Mary Heilmann and Vito Acconci.  By 1976, Highstein was showing with Holly Solomon among other galleries in New York and soon after with Ace Gallery in Los Angeles and in New York. More recently, he had solo exhibitions at Texas Gallery, Houston and Danese, New York, as well as in Europe and Asia. His many one-person museum shows include those at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California (1980); the Philips Collection, Washington, D.C. (1991); MoMA PS1, New York (2003); and a solo throughout Madison Square Park, New York (2005).  An exhibition of early works is scheduled to open at the Clocktower in Lower Manhattan this June.  Highstein received four National Endowment of the Arts awards over the years and a Guggenheim Fellowship among other honors and his work is included in numerous private and public collections, including every major museum in New York.

Extremely well-spoken, well-read, and well-traveled, a student of Buddhism, deeply committed to art, a keen observer of the world and the art world with an elegant, highly original turn of mind—he was trained as a philosopher, after all and reveled in argument and paradox—Highstein also had a bracing streak of irreverence and a dislike of pretension. When an audience member approached him after the ArtHelix talk and asked if a statement he had just made was contradictory, he replied, laughing, “don’t believe anything I say, I’m making it up as I go along.”  Which of course meant, don’t believe that—or do.

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James Lee Byars, The Angel, 1989. 125 glass spheres, each sphere 7-3/4 inches diameter. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery

For some years, one of my reliably stimulating pleasures was my evenings with Thomas McEvilley.  I would come to the East Village, walk up to his third floor apartment, and then we would talk in his book-filled study before going out to dinner. His large library was double shelved, the volumes of a classics scholar mixed together with publications devoted to art history. On the wall was the Frank Jewett Mather Award given by the College Art Association in 1993—Thomas, not a vain man, was proud of that honor—and his place were filled with many works of art, including a painting by Julian Schnabel . Sometimes I would bring a younger friend along, someone I wanted to introduce to this famous critic. On other occasions we met in the country, at the house of our mutual friend Bill Beckley. Tom was great fun to be with because he could listen; because he had many great stories; and because he always was amazingly attentive, even (or especially) at the end of a long evening.  Once over two happy successive dinners he told me the marvelous story of his career. He couldn’t legally drive and so I had the chance to hear more taking him home.

Tom was trained as a classicist. And so when Ingrid Sischy, who wanted to introduce new writers into the art world, brought him into Artforum around 1981, his essays about his great friend James Lee Byars and a whole host of other figures introduced a challenging new sensibility. Soon his critique of MoMA’s “Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” (1984) made him famous. Most art world disputations are of merely parochial interest. This was one of those rare moments when a critic hit a nerve, touching in an exhibition review upon issues with larger resonance. The debate that followed was seminal to ‘postmodernism.’ “When I first met Tom,” Bill Beckley recalls,

it was to negotiate a truce between Tom, [William] Rubin and [Kirk] Varnedoe. I wanted to include the essay and exchange of letters in Artforum in Uncontrollable Beauty.  The problem was that upon the publication of the anthology fourteen years later, all three parties wanted to continue the argument.   It had to stop somewhere, but truly, it never did.

After that–although, or so he told me, he was boycotted by the major Manhattan museums– Tom published a great deal of art criticism, all of it good.  His anthology, The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism, (2005) gives a great sampling of his discussions of such varied figures as Marina Abramovic, Les Levine and Yves Klein. In the 1980s, there was a seriously felt need for criticism to find some novel grounding, an alternative to formalism, which was exhausted. Most art writers looked to the French deconstructive literature in translation. Tom’s particular perspective, which must have seemed very exotic, was that of classical scholarship. In his critical discussion of the Hegelian conception (made famous by Arthur Danto) of “the end of art,” Tom observed that this “was not a new idea but in fact was known to the ancients—it occurs, for example, in Pliny’s Natural History. . . “

Luca Del Baldo, Thomas McEvilley – The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality, 2010. Oil on Belgian linen, 40 x 30 cm. Collection of Thomas McEvilley. Courtesy of the Artist.

Tom was a classicist with an unusual bias- he was also a major scholar of Indian philosophy. “When I was young,” he once explained, “I tried to learn a new language each summer.”  In the early 1970s, sitting naked with a guru in a cave, he seriously considered moving to India, in the way I suppose that a century earlier American aesthetes moved to Tuscan villas.  I was stunned by his boldness. Tom’s magnum opus was his comparative study of Indian and Greek philosophy, The Shape of Ancient Thought, published by the School of Visual Arts and Allworth Press. The philosophers of ancient India, he argued, worked out their ideas in parallel with, though without necessarily borrowing from, their Western peers. He was very pleased when an affordable Indian edition was published. Aware of the pernicious history of imperialism, the many recent art writers who take an interest in art from outside Europe tend to be defensive. Thanks to his travels in China and India, and his linguistic skills, Tom was able, without undue moralizing, to offer a judicious cross-cultural perspective. He loved to tell an anecdote of Diogenes, which nicely comments on this situation: “When asked why he wished to be buried upside down, Diogenes replied, ‘Down will soon be up.’” The authors of every future global art history will owe an essential debt to him.

When in 2006 I invited Tom to a panel on critical disagreement at the New York Studio School, he gave a show-stopping presentation of an example from John Baldessari’s art. I haven’t yet, I fear, fully absorbed its implications. Afterwards I was pleasantly astonished when Leo Steinberg, who was a very critical critic, praised Tom. Tom was a great art writer because he was madly inquisitive; because he loved a great variety of art; and because he was a gifted stylist. His most recent book is the definitive biography of Sappho. Developing his doctoral thesis (1967-68), each layer of this book “represents the poet and her work in a certain way, and each represents my mind and its interaction with a finite body of text at a different stage of my life.” The place where we imagine her, he concludes, “is still somewhat empty—to be filled by other Sapphos yet to come.” Ancients, Moderns, and Postmodernists alike, inhabiting eastern spheres and west, will miss his brilliant and beautiful mind.  He is dearly loved.

Richard Serra’s 4-5-6 (2000) in the courtyard of the Colby College Museum of Art

Hugh Gourley, director of the Colby College Museum of Art for the best part of four decades, died July 29 in Portland,Maine. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island where he received his degree in Art History from Brown University, after which he served as a sergeant in the US Army and was stationed in Eritrea, where he discovered that country’s architecture and design. After graduate work at Yale he was curator of decorative arts for seven years at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Toward the end of his RISD period Hugh was approached by James Carpenter, Chair of the Department of Art History at Colby College in Waterville, Maine who asked Hugh if he would consider becoming the director of the Colby College Museum. And Hugh said yes.

What followed were 36 years of dedication and service to art which led to the creation of the superb museum of today – 28,000 sq ft of exhibition space and more than 7000 works of art. The artists in the museum’s permanent collection are too many to mention but I will just add, Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley, Fairfield Porter, James McNeil Whistler, Lois Dodd, Neil Welliver, Bernard Langlais, Abby Shawn, Robert Indiana, Daphne Cummings, Dan Flavin, Chuck Close, Yvonne Jacquette, Philip Guston, Louise Nevelson, Kara Walker, Agnes Martin, Georgia O’Keefe.

From a staff of 2, Hugh and his assistant, the path of the museum’ s rise was fixed. “Hugh loved artists,” according to Lois Dodd. When he eventually retired, Alex Katz simply said of him, “He is not replaceable,”

There is a sense when looking back that Hugh knew from the start what the museum would become.

Three collections had entered the museum before Hugh’s arrival. In the early 1950s Miss Adeline and Miss Caroline Wing gave important work by William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer and others. Following came the Willard H. and Helen W. Cummings collection of Early American Art, and the Elerton Jette American Heritage Collection of 75 works of American Folk Art. But from 1966 the museum’s steady climb continued because of Hugh’s vision, and the close friendships forged in proximity to the art world in general and New York in particular.

One such, for instance, was between Hugh and the renowned Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. This relationship lasted throughout his time at Colby. The school was filled with powerhouse students and visiting, very highly regarded artists from all over the country. And Skowhegan had the reputation of being on top. When at school there in 1972 I remember seeing Hugh, Louise Nevelson and Bette Davis all on one weekend. Bonds with such people led Hugh’s horizons to expand and these relationships flourished.

With his natural grace and his quiet tone, Hugh was the kind of person who people allowed themselves to become close to. People watched him and sensed that they could trust him. They sensed that when they met him. Greg Williams, Assistant Director of Operations at the museum today, and close friend to Hugh, described his “tone of quality” and called him a “nobleman.”

Hugh was also a man of quiet power, with excellence of eye, taste and character. Daphne Cummings, another close friend, calls him a “remarkable gentleman. He encouraged so many outstanding artists. He was very sensitive to their work. And also under Hugh’s curatorship the Colby Museum has been best in the state of Maine and beyond in terms of contemporary art.” She identifies his particular strengths as his “great love of art and his generosity and loyalty both personally and professionally.”

In 1973 John Marin, Jr and Norma B Marin gave the museum 25 works by John Marin. In 1992 Paul Schupf established a wing for the work of Alex Katz, now 700 works in all. He also promised the museum more than 150 prints and drawings by Richard Serra. In 1999 the Lunder Wing for the exhibition of Colby’s renowned collection of American Art was created. And the Jere Abbott bequest established an exhibition endowment, enabling the purchase of major works of contemporary art.

Hugh Gourley with the author’s Doberman Pinscher, Mookie. Courtesy of Daphne Cummings

Hugh’s collecting affected me, personally, in a very big way. One day I was walking down the corridor toward the museum and was stunned to see Richard Serra’s piece, 4-5-6 , through the window. I was completely unprepared. I had just gone all the way to see Serra in Bilbao and here he was, in Maine! Another day Hugh said to me in his quiet way, “I’d like to show you something” and he took me outside, across the lawn, to Sol LeWitt’s 7 Walls, one of the most beautiful works of sculpture I had ever seen. And with Hugh, it was always “tell me what you think.”

Painters Nancy and John Wisseman knew Hugh for many years.”He was an unusual combination of great sophistication and yet so supportive of Maine artists. He was always so welcoming. He had a unique vision, very modest, patient. So many people really liked him. He made one feel so important, everyone. He had very interesting shows and in the beginning there was not much in Maine then.”

In addition to the wider art world Hugh mentored young students at Colby. He was very sensitive to their work. Perhaps some of their paintings entered his private collection of work by friends.

My experiences with Hugh were beautiful. It felt good to be next to him, I felt he was a guide and protector. I felt he would be a good person to keep a secret. One of my fondest memories of Hugh was one day when he took me in to see the Alex Katz wing and he said he wanted to show me the top of one of the paintings and said how much he liked it. “Have a look, let me know what you think.”

I had a show at the museum in 2000, after Hugh had come to see an exhibition of mine at Maine Coast Artists in Rockport, Maine. When the time came I asked him where in the museum would he like my paintings to go and he said, “Wherever you want,” but he had a certain idea where they should be and it was just right. When it was time for my opening trays of chocolate-covered strawberries were floating around but there was not a big crowd. Hugh said to me later, “There were not a lot of people but those who came were very important.”

Hugh Gourley: small in stature, handsome, reserved; an occasional smile; thinking, quietly looking, filled with art. Art had been his choice for life.

Thank you to Daphne Cummings for her valuable help in the writing of this tribute.

Denyse Thomasos in front of her monumental wall-painting at Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn in 2006. Courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg Inc.

Denyse Thomasos, a painter whose works are at once conceptual and abstract, intimate and monumental, died suddenly on Thursday, July 19th.   The cause was an unexpected allergic reaction during a medical procedure.  She was 47

Born in Trinidad, her family moved to Canada when she was 6 years old.  She developed an interest in art early on, and in 1987 she graduated from the University of Toronto with a BA in painting and art history. She then attended Yale, where she received an MFA in painting and sculpture in 1989. Upon graduating, she immediately moved to New York and began teaching at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.  In 1995 she became an Assistant Professor in Painting at Rutgers.

Thomasos’s bold, sometimes monochromatic, gridded abstractions have a visceral kick that immediately draws the viewer in.  Layered fat strokes of acrylic paint hover in a constant state of flux, sketching out the frameworks of architectural structures that exist on the edge, caught precariously between full formation and total collapse. Though successful on a purely abstract level, Thomasos spoke of more earthbound, often darker themes when asked to discuss her work.  A frequent world traveler, she spent a great deal of time studying prisons and slums, looking at ways disenfranchised people are constrained, both physically and socially.  Coming from a privileged background herself, she struggled intellectually and emotionally to understand how culture can warp self-perception and, ultimately, destiny.  Taken in this light, the super-enlarged crosshatches cascading across her canvases are not a loose representation of actual places, but an attempt, repeated consistently over many years, to create a multi-dimensional map for understanding the world as we live in it.  The intensity and passion Thomasos brought to this project, as much as the subject itself, are inextricably woven into the palpable frisson her paintings elicit.

Denyse Thomasos in her studio, 2006. Courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg Inc.

Thomasos exhibited regularly and had over 15 solo-exhibitions. Olga Korper began representing her in Toronto from 1994, and Lennon Weinberg in New York from 1996, and both continue to do so.  She received numerous prestigious awards and grants, including multiple grants from the Canada Council, a regional NEA grant, two Pew Fellowships, grants and residencies from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Ucross, NYFA, the Guggenheim, Marie Walsh Sharpe, the Bellagio Foundation, P.S. 122, Mac Dowell, and Yaddo.  Her work is in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, along with many other major corporate collections.  Reviews of her shows appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artnews, Artforum, Art in America, and the Village Voice among many others.

Interviewed for Rutgers Observer TV in February 2011, Thomasos said, “I have had the most magical life I could imagine…every dream I’ve ever dreamed has come true…to travel around the world.  Being an artist you have the opportunity to live a creative life every minute of the day…it feels like I’m an explorer…and I get to translate everything that I’ve seen, show it in a gallery, and get feedback from audiences. I love every aspect of it…”

Thomasos is survived by her husband, documentary filmmaker Samien Priester, and her daughter, Syann.

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With Hilton Kramer’s passing last month, American high culture lost a fearless – and at times feared – dissenter.  He was also among the last of a remarkable generation of New York intellectuals.  A sometime idealistic anti-communist liberal turned neo-conservative, Kramer reshaped debates about politics and culture with unstinting passion and erudition.  His enduring legacy was The New Criterion, the journal he co-founded in 1982.

He had a long career in criticism that came to include almost two decades as the chief critic of the New York Times, his other posts – en route or subsequent to that defining appointment – including stewardship of Arts Magazine, critic’s chairs at The Nation and the New York Observer, influential teaching posts at Columbia, Berkeley, and Bennington, and the authorship of books and monographs.

Hilton Kramer, 1928-2012. Photo (c) Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, 1985

While his politics shifted significantly to the right, his artistic tastes, it can be claimed, remained consistent: the art world changed around him and he stuck to his aesthetic guns.  He was what can be called a soft modernist: he admired the historic avant garde, but strictly for its advances to the language of plastic expression, rather than for its revolutionary or subversive aspirations.  He was an ardent student, for instance, of the Russian Constructivists, planning later in his life to write a monograph on the subject, while having no particular affection for its political or theosophical ideals.  Among contemporary artists, beauty was invariably his criterion.  His critical mentors were John Ruskin, Roger Fry, T.S. Eliot (from whom of course he borrowed his journal title) and Julius Meier-Graefe to whom he owed more, in his formalism, than he did Clement Greenberg albeit that relations and interests were close with the latter.  His entry to critical debate was tellingly reactive: a rebuttal to Harold Rosenberg’s existentialist reading of action painting.

He was a curmudgeon, but to say this made him a maverick would constitute a misreading of American art writing: a majority of critics at any given moment pretty much subscribe to the less than augustly phrased observation by Charlie Finch that “most art sucks”.  Considering that his predecessor on the Times was John Canaday and that the three most illustrious art writers he patronized at the New Criterion were Jed Perl, Mario Naves and Karen Wilkin, it is difficult to single out his tastes as unusually conservative.  His negative tastes were also largely commensurate with those of Robert Hughes, Donald Kuspit and Peter Fuller, though each critic would have different cut-off dates as to when modernism went off the rails,  selective enthusiasms and varying political slants.  A Venn diagram, in other words, would see more of the circles of all these people’s tastes overlapping than not.

Unsurprisingly for a retinal hedonist, Kramer favored Matisse over Picasso, and gravitated strongly towards Americans who extended Matisse’s chromatic sensibility.  He was a dutiful advocate of Color Field Painting in the 1960s, but his heart seemed really to lie with Milton Avery.  Some of his most lyrical and persuasive art writing was devoted to figurative and landscape artists who emerged in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, artists who satisfied his longing for an art that reconciled social acuity, humane wit and visual pleasure.  William King and Richard Lindner occasioned some of his best criticism, while the “inspired insouciance” of Alex Katz takes us “out of the Existentialist wood, basking in the clear, bright light of an easy sociability.”

But Kramer will always be remembered less for his avowals than for his put-downs, most infamously the one meted out on that now unassailable contemporary art saint Philip Guston, whose 1970 Marlborough Gallery show, signaling a turn from polite lyrical abstraction to the rambunctious personalism of his late style, earned him the epithet “a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum.” In a way, however, Kramer’s cutting phrase became a boomerang, for increasingly the reactionary Times critic became not merely out of step with a conceptual, post-modern art world, but a necessary fixture whose dismissals served as an avant garde validation.  A stumblebum, in other words, still wearing the mantle of a mandarin.  Kramer became a latter day Louis Vauxcelles, the critic who – in backfiring attempts to bury them – ended up christening Fauvism and Cubism.  As Alex Katz intimates below in his note of tribute to his sometime scourge and later champion, a bad review from Kramer could be worn by a self-respecting artist as a badge of honor.

Milton Avery, Blue Trees, 1945, Oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches. Permanent Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York; Gift of Roy R. Neuberge

What is likely lost in reading Kramer’s excoriations of the NEA or lambasts of academic political correctness and trendy sexual politics is that Kramer was actually a remarkably judicious man with enduringly liberal tastes.  He was a fastidious attendee of press previews and conferences, a diligent note taker, an old-school scholar-journalist.  He cared about details, an attitude that came across in his editorial work.  I remember proposing to write a review of a big Calder show in DC for him, after publishing a couple of short pieces at the Criterion; he had to go see the show himself before assigning it, and actually decided that serious flaws in the curatorial process didn’t make it worthy of attention in his pages after all.

I had first met Hilton as a wet-behind-the-ears graduate student visiting New York in the mid-1980s.  I went to interview him about Patrick Heron, the British abstract painter and staunchly anti-Greenberg but nonetheless formalist critic.  Kramer heard me out and methodically refuted all of my queries and contentions, defending Greenberg against all of Heron’s charges.

A couple of years later I had a call from Hilton’s secretary saying he would be in London and would like to meet for a drink.  I immediately assumed that they had me confused for someone else, that so important a figure couldn’t possibly mean to waste precious time on me, even calling to good-humoredly explain the mix up.  But I was wrong, he meant me, and in fact,  I would discover, Hilton thrived on the company of younger people.  Despite seeming set in his thinking he liked to hear what others had to say—although he certainly also enjoyed an audience for his own ideas and anecdotes. I recall the salacious delight of his recounting the tale of one of his erstwhile protégés (none of those cited above, incidentally) found tied-up on the roof of his apartment building after a romantic tryst.

I have fond memories also, on that London visit, of taking Hilton to dine at St John, the trendy eatery specializing in offal and innards, much frequented by the YBAs. He was totally in his element, unfazed.  In turn there would be the great pleasure, for me, of lunch as his guest at the Century Association where he was a bow-tied fixture.  I will never forget, when a demure lady nodded at him as she passed our table, his expression of ever-so wistful regret that a court order had obliged the club to accept women as members.

Hilton was an early guest of my series of dialogs with American art writers at the New York Studio School, the Craft of Criticism.  One great line I remember was his describing the effect on his spirits of a Soho afternoon of particularly desultory art.  He had to go to Dean & Deluca, he said, and look at some fruit and vegetables just to restore a sense of nature and color to his mind.

Photograph of Peter de Francia by James Hyman. Courtesy of James Hyman Gallery

Peter had the demeanour of a dishevelled, rather droll, down-to-earth ouvrier, in a blue cotton ‘French worker’s’ jacket. He habitually had a pipe, which he mostly seemed to be in the process of filling, rather than actually smoking. He had Romano-Gallic good looks, with heavy bags under the eyes, a shock of grey hair, and a deep voice and distinctive laugh that came from low in his chest. He directed my interview with great authority, for all his apparent informality. I had brought a large painting of a figure playing bagpipes (based on a 17th-century Dutch sculpture in the V&A museum, where the Royal College was also housed at the time). The painting led to a discussion of the French painter Jean Hélion, whose work indeed interested me a lot, and of the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, whom I had met briefly when I was an undergraduate at the Central School of Art. These were the right sort of references for Peter, and I was in.

Once I started at the RCA though, we didn’t really get on. He wasn’t comfortable with the small, rather cryptic and skeptical paintings I was mostly making. My interests in artists also turned out to include not just solid men of the Left and the Résistance like Hélion, but dubious types like Picabia, or like André Derain who Peter said ‘should have been shot’. (Derain had submitted to an obligatory artists’ tour of Germany during the Occupation.) Peter’s politics seemed very black-and-white. He was massively informed about political affairs across the world, and with him it was basically ‘which side are you on?’ Nuance and complexity he swept aside as weakness, and simply conversing with him could be difficult as a result. My natural equivocation exasperated him. At one point he asked – as if it might explain, if not excuse, my general ambivalence and perverse interests – if I was ‘some kind of Catholic’. I said no, I was an atheist from a Protestant background. He shrugged and walked away.

At the RCA in the early ’80s Peter liked to insist that the age of art ‘stars’ was over. He was thinking of the celebrities of Pop and abstract art that the college had produced in the ’60s (David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Bridget Riley); and one sensed he was glad to think that such notoriety for artists was a thing of the past. But of course, even as he spoke, Goldsmiths College in London (where he had been a former principal) was fomenting the YBA phenomenon, a yet more rampant and market-enmeshed star system. The Royal College at this period was – to its credit perhaps – no route to fame, and certain students of my generation jumped ship in search of a smarter career path. Peter did have favorite students whose careers he promoted, but this tended to mean landing them in good teaching jobs rather than in hot galleries. I think I had been earmarked as a likely golden boy, but now I wasn’t playing the game. He liked to use his influence generously, and he was infuriated when I went to Paris and sought out Hélion without first seeking an introduction from him, Peter. He exploded when I didn’t want to apply for a certain post-RCA opportunity he thought would suit me.

Nevertheless a few years after I had left the Royal College he learned that I had work in an exhibition in Paris and could not afford to go out for the opening. A check arrived in the post for the fare and a hotel, with a note saying this was a gift not a loan, and that he wanted to hear no mention of it again. I was hugely grateful, and went to Paris. Later on he asked ‘Did you get that money I sent you to go to Paris?’ which amused me in the light of his stipulating that he wanted to hear nothing of it. But I thanked him then, profusely.

After that we would meet up periodically in central London. He favored a continental-style bistro called Pélican, in St Martin’s Lane, despite his disapproving of nostalgia for an “Americanized” cliché of continental cafe society – something of which he accused his one-time comrade Kitaj. I was in contact with Kitaj, and Peter would say “Don’t mention that you’ve seen me – he’ll pump you for information!” Kitaj had included Peter in his “School of London” notion in the ‘70s, and in the associated Human Clay exhibition. The two men had since become estranged, I gathered, though Kitaj always spoke warmly of him. Peter could clash with allies as much as opponents. I once went to see him with the painter and writer Tim Hyman, closer to him personally than I was, also in terms of artistic “style,” and probably ideology. Peter got so irascible as the afternoon wore on that we eventually had to flee in disarray. But people tended to forgive Peter. He was a charmer as well as a tyrant, and very attractive. He addressed everyone as “my love,” and though it was often intoned with irritation, it did signify a basically benign intent. I think he had quite a few romantic relationships, and the impression was that when they ended it was without rancor.

At Pélican I would always have a Kir, a drink to which Peter introduced me, explaining it was named after a mayor of Dijon who created the drink when the German army had commandeered all red wine in the area. Peter would have Burgundy. I don’t think the symbolism of our differing dilutions of red was ever commented on, but he seemed to have accepted what he must have thought my rather bloodless socialism. He was great talking about European film, and literature. I was trying to catch up on some classics of French and Italian cinema and on non-Anglophone poetry. The painters I knew in more depth and I think it gave him pleasure to talk to someone of my generation who actually cared about post-war figures he felt close to and who were little known in the UK. Sometimes I would come with my then partner, a figurative sculptor whose work he liked. Again he was delighted that she was interested in artists like Zadkine or Laurens (he corrected our pronunciation – the S is sounded), or Ipoustéguy whom he especially supported.

Peter de Francia, Automated Soldiers 3, 1988. Charcoal on paper, 22 x 30 inches. Courtesy of James Hyman Gallery

With the exception of Philip Guston, he didn’t have much time for the New York School and its descendants. He seemed basically opposed to America – again politically, first of all, and then by extension culturally. “You actually like New York?”he’d ask, skeptically. I once made the mistake of saying I’d been quite impressed with Julian Schnabel’s film about the persecuted gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Peter erupted with disapproval. He was vetoing the film, and it was clear that what was unconscionable to him was the implied criticism of Cuba, especially by a director who probably personified the worst of American capitalism. Any possible inherent virtues of the film, or real injustices of the Cuban régime, could simply not be entertained. I was on safer ground when the conversation turned to the Tate Gallery’s acquisition of a group of work by the long-neglected French social realist André Fougeron, including a huge anti-American propaganda painting.

The Tate finally acquired a group of Peter’s work also, and hung a room of it, clearly bringing some satisfaction, for all his professed indifference and grumbles at how long they took to pay him. In 1983 he had had a retrospective at the Camden Arts Centre in London, and then periodically there were shows in more or less alternative venues (one at Wimbledon School of Art I remember), and sometimes with commercial galleries. From the ‘80s onwards he had been mostly drawing. His earlier paintings on canvas had always been very graphic, like his major piece The Bombing of Sakiet (1959), a big canvas indicting French actions during the Algerian war of independence. For years this work — which is now on long loan to the Tate — had slightly mythic status, locked in storage in the Tunisian Embassy in London. The jagged, narrative charcoals Peter came to concentrate on were – and are – widely admired for their poignancy and expressive energy. They sometimes have mythological motifs, sometimes historical ones. I recall him in his studio bringing out one sheet with a tremulous tenderness that evidently reflected his feeling for the subject itself – the death in prison camp of Robert Desnos. At other times his drawings are more poetically unspecific – an old man with a flower, a woman with a bird. Peter didn’t have a gallery at that time, and conflicts had often scuppered relationships with dealers. The inherent contradictions of functioning as an anti-capitalist artist in a capitalist system of course make for great tensions. In recent years, however, James Hyman Gallery has been representing his work and facilitating a reconsideration of his achievement.

When Peter got older and more infirm I visited him more at his house, in a handsome terrace hidden behind Elephant and Castle in south London. The studio was on the ground floor, and I was only allowed in there once, fleetingly. He lived mostly in the basement, where the kitchen and bathroom opened off the study/living room and were admirably old fashioned in their plumbing and appliances. The place teemed with books, letters, journals and papers. A typewriter was lodged in the middle of everything, from which issued his roughly typed and much-corrected letters. He would talk of his current correspondences, conferences and campaigns with Left-wing organizations all over the world. It felt like an international operations room. I sensed he had many contacts like myself, making periodic visitations.

In his last years he could no longer go down annually to his house in rural France, which was a great sadness to him. On one of my visits I brought a bottle of rough red from roughly the right area. As we drank he examined the label amusedly and declared that the wine was “probably made in Norwich,” emitting his inimitable, chesty, machine-gun laugh.

Photograph of Mike Kelley by Cameron Wittig. Courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Addressing early-on his distaste for popular culture, Kelley was perhaps an unlikely pioneer of the postmodern movement, yet his penchant for disassembling, appropriating, and remixing has made him a poster-child for the period.  By reconfiguring thrift store finds, Kelley ingeniously played upon the tension between their surface qualities and cultural significance.  Critic John Welchman explained Kelley’s particular style of “aesthetic disobedience” as a political tool designed to expose and reject the social mores inherent to American culture.  This notion was first evidenced by his collaboration with Tony Oursler during the late 1970s for Destroy All Monsters.  Part performance art project part noise band, Destroy All Monsters enjoyed resurgence in the 1990s when Thurston Moore rereleased a collection of the band’s music on his label Ecstatic Peace.

Kelley’s collaborations with fellow provocateur Paul McCarthy throughout the late 1980s and 1990s always felt like a natural pairing. One of the duo’s more hilariously disturbed works was the 1987 video Family Tyranny in which McCarthy demonstratively smushes wet plaster into the face of a crude mannequin, chanting “they’ll remember it, don’t let them forget it.”  Mike Kelley plays an infant for the tape, shown crawling on the floor in a desperate attempt to escape the scene.

The artist’s first retrospective “Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes,” appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993 before traveling to Los Angeles and Munich, and was succeeded by a survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 1997. A third survey took place at Tate Liverpool in 2004.  More recently, Kelley produced the installation Day is Done (2005) for Gagosian Gallery, creating a sensory-assaulting environment jam-packed with shrieking voices, a maze of installations, and three hours of videotape.  While Ben David at artnet Magazine called the work nihilistic, Jerry Saltz preferred the term “Clusterfuck Aesthetics.”  The artist’s legacy continues with yet another retrospective of his work slated for the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam at the end of this year, traveling to LA MOCA in 2014.  Just last month, Mike Kelley was announced as a featured artist in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, his eighth appearance in the show, capping off a thirty five-year career embracing a wide host of media.  The skeptic of popular culture is now imbued in the very fabric of our visual world.  He will be sorely missed.

What would Mike Like? Tributes to Mike Kelley by Jane Hart, Dave Kudzma and Janese Weingarten

Mike Kelley, Arena #7, 1990. Found stuffed animals, wood, and blanket 11 1/2 x 53 x 49 inches. Courtesy of Skarstedt Gallery, New York

The tragic news of Mike Kelley’s death reverberated throughout the art world with countless individuals already expressing their grief, shock and – initially  – disbelief that it could be true that an individual so passionate about his art and life could be gone. A tribute concert was held in Los Angeles for him on February 7 with throngs of those who loved and admired him in attendance. A poignant memorial shrine continues to evolve in Highland Park (and a related Facebook page), accumulating a fitting hodgepodge of detritus in an abandoned lot minutes from where he lived and worked.

I met Mike while living in Los Angeles. We had collaborated on a large-scale photographic project for a solo show he had at Metro Pictures in the late ‘90s. His unique vision and dedication to his art were unwavering. I feel so very privileged to have had the chance to get to know him through our varied encounters.

Now living back in South Florida, I had the opportunity to reminisce about Mike with two friends that had both been among his longtime studio assistants: artists Dave Kudzma and Janese Weingarten, both also recently moved back to Miami. We each felt a sense of being disconnected from all of those– his nearest and dearest– back in Los Angeles who have experienced the full force of this loss to the contemporary art community.

Mike had a very loyal circle of close friends who in a sense made up his “family”:former loves, Anita Pace and Emi Fontana; contemporaries Jim Shaw and Paul McCarthy;and many younger artists who had come into contact with him through studying with him or working at his studio compound. He touched peoples’ lives in a very substantial way—through his tremendous sense of humor, unquenchable curiosity of the human condition, and an all-encompassing devotion to his work which spanned so many forms.

Though undoubtedly among the world’s most acclaimed artists, Mike shunned the more glamorous aspects of the art world. Throughout his success he remained very down to earth, although always driven where his work was concerned. He was both accessible and private. Dave and Janese remarked how he enjoyed simple pleasures of life’s daily routines — lunch at a handful of local spots, sharing odd stories of the news of the day, the silly thrill of a cool thrift store find— all the while reveling in the arduous process of putting together his often monumentally sprawling projects.

For those who knew him and/or were touched by his work–life will not be the same. What will be remembered most are his boisterous laugh, rebellious yet tender exuberance and a transformative expression of all that sparked his unbridled imagination.  Jane Hart

Dave Kudzma adds: Working for Mike Kelley could be challenging and difficult as he was so involved in the production of his work, but that said, he was also a really great human being who was inspiring and fun to be around. I went out to lunch with him almost every day and it was always as Mike’s friend. He would never talk about what was going on at work; instead we would usually amuse ourselves by discussing pop culture, music or television and movies. Funny thing about those lunchtimes was that Mike only went to five or six restaurants in the immediate vicinity of his studio.  I would occasionally try to get some other place added to the roster, but the only one I ever succeeded with was Sizzler. I will always remember those good times at those few special restaurants. Lunch with Mike was always the highlight of my workday at Kelley Studios.

Janese Weingarten adds: When I first started working for Mike Kelley I made costumes for his movie “Day Is Done.” Some costumes were made from thrift store clothes that I would modify. At the thrift store I would look for cool, vintage tchotchkes that were inexpensive. When I would show Mike the finished costume I included the tchotchke as a present in order to hear the big laugh I loved so much. Sometimes it was hard to tell if Mike liked the project that you were working on, but, if you got the “big laugh” you knew you were on the right track. So, forever more in life I will always think of Mike when I thrift shop. I will think ….What would Mike like?

Dorothea Tanning, New York. Photograph by Peter Ross, 1998. (c) Peter Ross

Long assumed to be already dead, often confused with someone else, Dorothea Tanning managed to maintain the mystique of the true artist, muse even, whilst all her contemporaries fell victim to the obligatory museum retrospective and illustrated biography.

Yes, she was still alive, and all of 101, and no, she was neither Leonora nor Dorothea Carrington, but what Tanning maintained above all else was the grand patrician aura of the lover of arts, connoisseur and patron, the ‘amateur’ in the French and best sense of the word, for whom literature, music, theatre, civilised conversation were as important as her own work.

What made this the more refreshing was that unlike certain self-promoters and media darlings, unlike those who hustle to maintain their supposèd importance, Tanning had actually produced a handful of major, significant and influential art works.

Whenever I went past that rather noble corner of Fifth Avenue where she resided I thought with a discrete, private pleasure, “Ah, the last of the secret society of Surrealists is still hidden here, being herself, even in our own ghastly era” and would tip the metaphoric hat up at her curtains, chintz even I recall.

Thanks to that unusual name, and no Surrealist should be called ‘Smith’, every passing sunbed-emporium blaring TANNING would make me think of her, I hardly knew her, triggering a brief flow of pleasant associations, bus-musings, until the next shop should catch my eye.

She loved poetry – she wrote it and supported it, financially and more importantly morally, and actually actively read the stuff. She loved flowers and was expert upon them. She was witty, sharp, smart, had known ‘everyone’ and still knew a vast range of intriguing, important people. And I really liked her apartment.  Everyone loved to talk about her in terms that recall those Japanese ‘Living National Treasures’, whether America’s greatest contemporary composer, Robert Ashley, to whom she was somehow related, or the Filipacchi family who rightly treated her with utmost reverence.

The first time I went to interview her, after more than an hour of highly enjoyable dirt dishing she paused dramatically, “And now I think it’s time….” So I scrambled to my feet agreeing I certainly should be on my way, I could not exhaust her any further, after all she was already over ninety, “No, no… it’s time for the champagne!”

Two bottles and as many hours later I emerged onto the sparkling mica of the midsummer pavement, “drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue” filled with a bonhomie, an old-fashioned wellbeing worthy of Sedona, Arizona in 1947 or Paris in the early fifties.

Dorothea Tanning, Birthday, 1942. Oil on canvas, 40-1/4 x 25-1/2 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

She did not like being labeled a ‘woman’ artist and she did not like being branded a ‘Surrealist’ and she would have surely hated the boom in exhibitions, books, Phd dissertations and catalogues devoted to the theme of ‘Female Surrealists’, one of which, inevitably, is currently duitfully trundling round the institutions.*

Indeed Tanning had lasted long enough to already fall prey to a first flurry of such academic researchers coming round to prove their already-fixed assumptions, and had given them suitably short shrift, exploding their neat categories: “I am not even a woman, let alone a Surrealist!”

I had read her book Birthday (proud she signed it for me) which was incredibly good, an exceptional piece of writing quite aside from all art-historical interest, a book I remain surprised is not better known nor regarded as a ‘Modern Classic’ or whatever they call them nowadays. In fact, if she had done nothing else the creation of Birthday would have been achievement enough.

I also got her to sign a collection of poems that she had chosen and paired with her own paintings, many by her many writer friends, which made clear the literary affinities, the skein of poetic associations, within her own work, ‘Surrealism’ having of course been first and foremost a literary rather than visual movement.

To tell the truth I was never really interested in Max Ernst anyway, his looks, though obviously impressive, were too Aryan for my taste, and thus luckily I had no temptation to dwell on him.

Likewise Leonora Carrington, also Ernst’s lover and hence the occasional confusion, never struck me as particularly engaging. For she even shares her name with another woman artist, that Dora of Bloomsbury-fame (who even had a feature film, the eponymous Carrington all about her) and the first duty of any artist is to have a unique name that not one other artist shares. Dorothea Carrington’s work also seemed a bit kitschy and derivative, an impression confirmed by a recent exhibition at Pallant House, Chichester, where such sketchy whimsy failed to awe.

By contrast Tanning’s work never seemed overtly indebted to Ernst, or any other artist, and her most famous painting Birthday of 1942 is a key Surrealist image, resonant, disturbing, long-lasting, and closely-matched by Eine kleine nachtmusik of the next year.

Anyone who knows about poetry knows that one only has to write one good poem, in terms of posterity that’s all anyone is likely to achieve, more than most of us will manage. Likewise one really great, really memorable painting is sufficient to go down in the annals of art-history, and with Birthday Tanning had won her immortality already. And in terms of her own poetry I would suggest that just one really good title is something, and no title was more appropriate than her perfect invention of ‘Sequestrienne’.

But that’s not all! For even if her later paintings are perhaps not quite one’s tasse, there was to be yet one more major breakthrough in an entirely different medium, namely the soft-fabric sculptures she started in 1969. These not only prefigure the work of Louise Bourgeois, who certainly saw them, but also that of Sarah Lucas, who had not seen them but was later astonished by their similarities. These are truly weird, utterly uncanny objects, especially when assembled in tableaux groupings, such as the installation Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (1970–73) at the Pompidou. And they broke completely new ground in their compound of corporeal presence and ‘women’s-work’, all that stitching, synthetic fur and sensual softness. With this clearly female concentration on the body, on sex, fatness, femininity, Tanning single-handedly kick-started a whole style, heralded an entire sub-genre of such work.

Dorothea Tanning, Canapé en temps de pluie (Rainy-Day Canapé), 1970. Tweed, upholstered wood sofa, wool, ping-pong balls, and cardboard, 32-1/4 x 68-1/2 x 43-1/4 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I would prefer to remember her as an elegant dilettante, an Grande Dame in eternal exile, a latter-day society hostess, the Dada Mrs Dalloway, one who never had to try too hard, but the truth is that Tanning was also a damn good artist, despite herself.

Just three of her major early 1940s paintings and a room of her early ‘70s sculptures should be enough to convince anyone of her continued importance.

The last time I talked to Tanning was on the phone and after that classic clatter of all nonagenarian telephonic openings, distant kitchen noises and female-helpers and several false starts, she could not have been clearer. “ I’m just too old to talk to anyone….I have to die, it’s been going on for far too long, I’m far too old, I’m sorry but I really have to die. It’s time I died now.”

Tanning has at last achieved her ambition and as she put it in that perfectly entitled poem for herself, Secret: “Why hear congratulations for doing nothing but live?”

* In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, January 29 to May 6, 2012.

Vita Petersen (1915-2011). Still from a video from 2007. Courtesy of the New York Studio School.

Vita Petersen, one of the last survivors on the New York School, died this last October in her ninety-sixth year.  She was indefatigable in her pursuit of sensual form; when an eye condition made it impossible for her to continue to work in color she switched to black and white.  It is not fanciful to see in her last works, which opens tomorrow evening  (January 26) at the New York Studio School, a nostalgia for the vibrancy and surprises of color evoked despite its absence.

It is fitting that the Studio School should host her tribute as Petersen gave countless years service to that institution as a teacher, governor, trustee and doting, and in turn doted upon, confidant of students and deans alike.  Mercedes Matter, the founder of the school, was one of the first people who befriended Petersen when she arrived as a refugee from Nazi Germany in 1938.

She came from an aristocratic, assimilated Berlin Jewish family: a descendant of Moses Mendelssohn,  she was younger sister of the future renowned medieval art historian, Otto von Simpson.  Through Matter Petersen befriended legendary figures of the New York School, among them Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and fellow emigre Hans Hoffman.

When, in 2007, as gallery director at the Studio School,  I worked with Vita on an exhibition of her recent pastel paintings, I had the immense honor of interviewing the artist for a short film about her work,  click here to view video (Courtesy of the New York Studio School).  In it she speaks of the founding of the school, her own training and how it contrasted with that offered at the school, and her love of specific forms in art and nature.   As comes across vividly in this film, shot  and edited by Graeme White, Vita was a fearless though gracious lady who balanced generosity towards others with voracious painterly hunger for sensual delight.

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Frankenthaler at work in her New York studio in 1969 © The Estate of Ernst Haas

Helen Frankenthaler, who died on Tuesday after a long illness at the age of 83, defied categorization.  Although one of few women artists to achieve recognition in the macho art world of New York in the 1950s, she didn’t want to be known as “a great woman artist.” She wanted to be known as a great artist, period (which she was).  Although she was also the founder of the “Color Field” school of painting, having provided Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland with inspiration at a crucial stage in their careers, she was not often written about by critics who shared the tastes of Clement Greenberg, and practically never by Greenberg himself.  She’d gone around with him in the early ‘50s, but they’d split up in ’55, and the breakup had left him with very mixed emotions about her. The result was that for most of her life she had to make her own way,  finding her own admirers and followers. Her reward was that ultimately she became a bigger star than Greenberg (which is the way it should be between artists and critics).

I met her in 1969, at the time of her first major retrospective, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, when I was still writing the Art page for Time. I had seen this show, loved it, and wanted to put her on the cover of Time, but my editors overruled me.  To my surprise, Frankenthaler wasn’t distressed—said she’d thought it over, and didn’t want to be on the cover of Time. I think she was concerned that her story might be vulgarized if dealt with at cover length. She did, however, like the two-page article that I wrote instead, accompanied by four pages of color photography of her paintings, among them The Human Edge (1967) and Interior Landscape (1964). Those beautiful paintings were what told her story. I could have been writing the alphabet and it wouldn’t have made much difference.

Still, some things she said wear well.  Born to wealth and privilege, she’d attended Manhattan private schools, including ultra-traditional Brearley, where she’d discovered that she could paint, and progressive Dalton, where she was able to further her painting studies with Rufino Tamayo, the Mexican modernist.  She’d gone on to progressive Bennington College where she studied with Paul Feeley, and then organized an exhibition in Manhattan of Bennington alumnae in May 1950, the year after she graduated. She invited all the critics in town to the opening, including Greenberg (already an art-world celebrity, thanks to his writings on Pollock and other rising first-generation abstract expressionists). Greenberg didn’t like Frankenthaler’s painting, but he did ask her out for a drink, and for the next five years, the pair underwent what she described to me as “a painting bath.”

They went to every exhibition in town, from Pollock to Sir Alfred Munnings, the  English horse painter (and an enemy of modernism). They’d get the catalogues to each show, and grade the paintings in them.  “One check meant we liked it. Two checks was pretty good. Three was wow!”  And always a lot of talk, about what made one painting more successful than another.  “This seems the opposite of that lofty beautiful experience that art is supposed to be,” she recalled. “Every painting is supposed to be a valid expression and interesting.  But the truth is some work and some don’t. That happens with all painters in every age.”  Greenberg had a great “eye;” he could tell a first-rate painting from a second-rate one, but Frankenthaler wanted to make paintings that worked, so she looked and looked, seeking to develop her own eye.

Helen Frankenthaler, Interior Landscape, 1964. Acrylic on canvas, 104-7/8 x 92-7/8 inches. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. © Helen Frankenthaler/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

When I met her, she’d been married since 1958 to Robert Motherwell, youngest of the first generation abstract expressionists (Greenberg cattily called them  “the Princess Grace and Prince Rainier of the art world”). To me, Motherwell maintained that Frankenthaler had “internalized” Greenberg’s eye.  She’d also painted Mountains and Sea (1952), her first major “stain” painting, and the one that so impressed Noland and Louis. It had two sources of inspiration. One was the Nova Scotia landscape that she and Greenberg had visited that summer, to paint late impressionist pictures sur le motif.  The other was her visits with Greenberg to Pollock’s studio, seeing how Pollock was making the “black stain” paintings that succeeded his “classic period” of 1947-50.  For Mountains and Sea, Frankenthaler used Pollock’s principle of staining a canvas laid on the floor, but thinned her oils with turpentine so that they sank into her unprimed canvas, using her shoulder instead of her wrist, and a sponge in addition to a brush. The image was cloudlike, more gentle than Pollock’s, but with a lively zest all its own.

Dozens of artists have since carried on with that technique; few have achieved the range and vitality that characterize Frankenthaler’s staggeringly large total oeuvre, created over six decades.  In general, I prefer the paintings of the ‘50s and ‘60s, but there have been many top-quality individual paintings since, and many of Frankenthaler’s most exciting works on paper (particularly her woodcuts) date from these later periods. Because the colors of Mountains and Sea are pastoral colors—pinks and light greens and blues—many critics tried to pigeonhole her as a painter of abstract landscapes.  But this is another category she defied. In her old age, she was more willing to speak in interviews of her closeness to landscape painters like Turner, and to paint pictures that could more easily be read as landscapes, but to me, in ’69, she contrasted painting landscapes with painting abstracts, saying that with landscapes, one was stuck within a tradition where pretty much everything had been said, but that with colors and shapes, there was still a lot to be said.

I found her work almost invariably ambiguous, in the best tradition of true abstraction.  Shortly before Christmas, I saw her luminous Paris by Night (1986), a deeply rich brown canvas with two floating white and off-white ovals on it, in the Ernestine and Bradley Wayne Collection, at the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery.  In the catalogue essay, Dorsey Waxter suggested a resemblance to street lamps in the Place de la Concorde. Before reading that, I’d been reminded of the cheery windows of a Paris café, shining through the evening darkness.  Obviously, both of us had been influenced by the title, but the fact that we were reminded of two very different images tells me that the painting still inhabits that refreshingly free (though still invisibly circumscribed) magic world of abstraction, Frankenthaler’s truest home.

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