Detail of an installation of Zhan Wang at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2008. Zhan is an artist featured in Karen Smith’s book discussed in this article

David Carrier: Karen, what is the relationship between these two books?

Karen Smith: There’s no direct relationship really. Following Nine Lives I had been working on a second volume (Nine Lives was about the big picture, the birth of the new art movement; the second volume, Bang to Boom, follows a year by year account of the events from 1989 to 2002. I had spent an awful lot of time looking at art in 2010 and 2011; unconsciously it seemed. I realized when I discovered how many images I had been collecting of works I had seen, and when I found myself lamenting all the interesting new developments that I was not able to write about for being preoccupied with Bang to Boom. As I reflected upon the inordinate amount to time that Bang to Boom was absorbing, I realized too that my procrastination and the difficulties I was having in arriving at a confident take, was that the art itself, key iconic pieces, that I had seen all those years ago, were now disappeared from view. I had photographs I had taken of exhibitions but which were tantalizingly restrictive in the views they offered, especially the details necessary to write comprehensively about them. I felt trapped by the absence of these works. That’s when I decided to take a break from Bang to Boom and to use the responses to the new developments in art that I could see as the basis for As Seen.

Unlike Nine Lives, As Seen 2011 includes a number of female artists. When I taught at CAFA and Tsinghua in 2009, the majority of my students were female, but almost all the faculty was male.

The premise for Nine Lives was to identify pioneers, founding fathers (how we are trapped in the trope of language…). The absence of women reflected the real situation of the 1980s. Bang to Boom begins with the women Xiao Lu who fired her gun into the installation Dialogue in the China Art Gallery. It also features a number of women artists: Yu Hong, Jiang Jie, Chen Yanyin, Yin Xiuzhen, Lin Tianmiao, Zhang Lei, Shi Hui, Cai Jin, Peng Yu and others. The proportional rise in the number of women artists at work in China today reflects the changes in society. Women are no longer primarily home-makers and mothers. They also have support from mothers and mothers-in-law to free them from the daily chores of motherhood. They also receive more support from galleries and institutions. But all of these advances are predicated on the fact that society here has evolved and matured to arrive at more open-minded attitudes towards women, which had has a knock on effect on the way that women approach art and the content and subject matter they explore. They have been liberated from the box of feminism.

Recently the Asia Society Museum in Manhattan had an exhibition of Wu Guanzhong. He died recently– and his sensibility seems extremely distant from that of all your artists. There are, however, younger figures doing traditional ink on paper painting in China. Do any of them interest you?

They do, where their work seeks to engage with the present. I have always been interested in the progressive end of art, rather than just what is good art; looking at ideas that will change the face of what is understood to be art, or at least push the boundaries. If this is done in ink—as with the work of, say, Yang Jiechang, Zhang Jianjun, or Qiu Zhijie—then I am looking at the field.

There is a great deal of translation into Chinese of the more esoteric English-language art writing? What role do such translations have?

This type of esoteric writing encourages Chinese readers (artists and critics) to see it as a standard to be matched, followed etc. All ideas, the exchange of ideas, are useful in developing a dialogue or new trains of thought. However, in being written for a Western—European or American—audience, I think that a great deal of this writing presents a challenge for the Chinese reader since its frames of reference lie outside Chinese cultural experience. Thanks to “globalization”, in time, those references will be less “different”, but to date they still exist even though in light of change in China many Chinese readers might feel they are on the same wave-length.

Cover of the book under discussion

Your focus in this book is on individuals, not on broad sociological trends. Is it possible, however, to generalize? What are the shared concerns of Chinese artists of the present generation?

I am not sure it is possible to generalize. Given the framework of the As Seen project, which is do complete a similar volume that highlights works shown in public spaces in China each year for at least five years, I hope that through this approach to documenting a prominent or influential slice of artistic activity, that at the end of this period, certainly in years to come, it will be possible to extract some kind of overview of what the social undercurrents were within the concerns of this generation.

Some of the works in your new book could be by Western artists. Liang Yuanwei’s oil paintings, He Xiangyu’s Man on Chairs or Shi Qing’s Plant Republic are examples. The same is true the paintings of Aniwar Mamat, though your account of their sources might change how we see them. Except when figurative art shows Chinese people or recognizably Chinese street scenes, or uses calligraphy, I have the sense that the ‘Chineseness’ of this art is hard to identify. When, for example, you discuss Zhang Enli’s paintings of utilitarian objects, they don’t look obviously Chinese to me. Often as when you associate Song Dong with Mark Rothko, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin and Bridget Riley, the frame of reference plays to the Western reader. But perhaps this is a concession for the English-language readers?

I think you are correct. But I have been in China for twenty years now and I am aware that my take has acquired a degree of localness, meaning that my points of reference relate to ideas abroad in Chinese society/the art world. Also, I find it easier to reference neutral examples as opposed to Chinese contemporaries—this is less for reasons of inciting criticism than of the volatility of artistic careers here. Styles change fast, and at times dramatically. Even those artists who established a recognized motif as their “brand” in the 1990s have moved far from it today.

In the West, Chinese artists seem caught in a trap. On one hand, they must speak in our up to date terms. (No ink on paper paintings.) But they must appear to be Chinese. Hence the tendency of the figures who exhibit here to Sinify familiar art forms- installation, performance, video. Is this an issue for your artists.

This was very much a topic of the 1990s, but it is increasingly less of a consideration today. Conversely, courtesy of the focal point Chinese art has become under “the art market”, China’s artists have a sense that they are beginning to lead; that the days of following are behind them.

Philippe de Montebello has spoken of how very much art is a cultural hybrid. The Chinese Silks of Zhuang Hui & Dan’er are a great illustration of this thesis, for while they are Chinese, they are based upon products designed for the international monument. And Gao Weigang shows imags of the Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley! Could we generalize: are your artists oriented in part, at least, towards the international art market?

That’s true nowadays everywhere! I think the market hit China like a tsunami, a phenomenon for which nobody can ever be prepared. It knocked everyone for six.  Having said that, the majority of artists who are included in As Seen 2011 veer towards the less commercial end of the spectrum. I have been asked repeatedly by artists and interviewers here why such and such an artist is absent from the book when they are ‘so famous and sell so well’. To which my answer is that when that artist has a good show or shows a good work then they will be represented.

When I was in Beijing in 2009, I certainly saw a great many art galleries. But how well developed is the domestic market for art in China?

It’s not. It’s very much at the early developmental stage. A real market, buoyed by meaningful collections can only exist when potential buyers have access to quality information. I think there is still too little of that available—hence one reason for doing As Seen and the approach to describing the art rather than simply locating it in theory.

We see a great deal of contemporary Chinese art in Chelsea’s galleries and in the New York museums. But I have the impression our view is highly selective. In the Foreword you speak in a personal way about why you chose the artists. I wonder, then: is it possible to generalize about the situation of art in China today? In New York, it’s very hard to find trends—there simply are lots of diverse individuals. Your new book deserves comparison the big Phaidon volume Defining Contemporary Art—25 years in 200 pivotal artworks which also reveals the extreme difficulty of identifying trends. From As Seen 2011 I infer, the same is true in China.

That’s rather amusing since it was a similar volume, which provided the original spark to As Seen. I was together with an artist, a curator and a gallerist. Phaidon’s Vitamin P had just arrived in China. They were excited to see a number of Chinese artists included, but we were asking when China would have a quality publication to match Vitamin P, and that reflected the real situation of the Chinese art world. I figured an entire volume on Chinese painting would lack dynamism, but that the approach brought to As Seen might temporarily fill the gap.

It’s impressive to me that you, a foreigner been able to develop this remarkable close-up record of contemporary Chinese art.

I have moved from being student/contemporary to curator and “critic”. The things I have been able to do are things that were made possible by the special characteristics of China, as it changed and matured along the way—by this I mean meetings with important people, with an extraordinary range of art world figures, politicians, tastemakers and industrialists. I can’t imagine having been afforded those opportunities in Europe or in America. There has also been the involvement with artists on a personal level, in being able to further careers through making connections for them in China and abroad, and to contribute to the building of a scene here—working with ascent art spaces and galleries, curating exhibitions both here and abroad, and with the voice that writing about art affords. To be in a position to participate in the activities of this new scene and to make things happen, has been a privilege. The strange thing is that having been involved in so much, having done so much, in China there is always a sense that this is only the beginning. There’s so much more to do.

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Students of Clement Greenberg are already much in debt to the critic’s widow Jenny  (Janice Van Horne).  Under her exemplary editorial care, the stash of youthful letters to his friend Harold Lazarus from 1928 to 1943 was published in 2000, six years after the critic’s death, while his riveting and legendary Bennington lectures had been masterfully collected in both transcribed and published forms under Greenberg’s title for an unwritten work, Homemade Esthetics, in 1999.  Four volumes of Greenberg’s collected criticism, edited by John O’Brian and covering his oeuvre up until 1969, had begun to appear during the critic’s lifetime, published by the University of Chicago Press. Van Horne entrusted a collection of late writings, mostly consisting of talks and interviews, to Robert C. Morgan and Minnesota Press.  She bequeathed his papers to the Getty and sold what was left of his art collection to the Portland Art Gallery in Oregon.  Any major intellectual would be lucky to be dealt with so tidily and diligently.

Jenny and Clement Greenberg on the steps of the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna, in 1959, from the book under review

Now we have a volume from Janice Van Horne herself, A Complicated Marriage: My Life with Clement Greenberg.  For the Greenberg nut, like this reviewer, news of the publication was extremely welcome.  Simply put, Greenberg is an inexhaustible source of fascination to students of American art and culture. A woman he marries is expected to have an interesting life and know how to write about it – both of which prove to be the case.  And insight into Greenberg’s character written with a degree of warmth is much needed to counterbalance Florence Rubenfeld’s now widely dismissed 1997 biography and the more scholarly but mean and unconvincing portrait by the late Alice Goldfarb Marquis.

It has to be acknowledged, however, that Jenny Greenberg has delivered a hybrid publication, less “My Life with Clement Greenberg” than “My life, by the Widow of Clement Greenberg”. For the book is in fact autobiography masquerading as memoir.  There are whole swathes in which Greenberg is hardly referenced.  Even in the artist vignettes – “double-dating with the Newmans [Barnett and Annalee] was not high on my hit parade” – Clem remains a supporting player as it is still much about Jenny: how to be a famous artist’s or critic’s wife is a particular fascination.  Slights endured from a gruff David Smith dismayed that she is washing dishes with water that he has lugged up to Bolton Landing commands more attention than Greenberg’s relationship to the sculptor.  His later travails as Smith’s executor are not mentioned.

Van Horne describes meeting her future husband as a young and insecure Bennington graduate, Greenberg on the rebound from a stormy affair with Helen Frankenthaler.  She breaks with most of her family over their anti-semitic stance towards her marriage. Being the stepchild of an alcoholic, about which she writes touchingly, is good training for marriage to a functioning alcoholic and witness to the death of Jackson Pollock. She deals in copious detail with Clem’s decline and passing, and their being swindled in a Ponzi scheme, but is absent from the scene in what for many readers are crucial years of hegemony and fall from grace.

Van Horne is an engaging writer, but sans Greenberg, is there intrinsic interest in her tale? There is a hilarious account of training with fitness pioneer Joseph Pilates, and genuine insights aplenty into the worlds she enters as a toe-dipping career woman and glacially gradual feminist – as a trade magazine editor, a semi-professional underground actress, a heart-not-quite-in-it swinger.  But extracting hard information about Greenberg himself from such a memoir is not so much a mining operation as fracking.

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Tellingly, the most riveting part of the narrative is told through Clem’s meticulous daybooks charting their first trip to Europe.  But details do accumulate to portray a softer side of Greenberg than comes across in other accounts.  Laid off from Commentary where he is an editor, Clem argues against switching from his preferred Tanqueray to Seagrams as an economy, saying that “if you expect less you will get less.”  He loves Lenny Bruce, the young Barbra Streisand, and any music he can dance to, including the Bee Gees.  He enjoys surprisingly warm relations with Jasper Johns thanks to shared Southern connections.  He is a nature enthusiast, feeling special affinity for dolphins, stopping at every reserve on their Florida vacation with an aquarium.  And he is a doting father to their daughter Sarah, especially as the couple had lost a child to miscarriage, and despite the misery of his relationships with his own father and his son by a first marriage.  He is also super-tolerant of his young wife’s antics, agreeing, for instance, to a divorce she demands, by her own account, for purely feminist reasons as they have a happily open marriage.  In an endearingly and typically pragmatic way, Clem insists one lawyer draws up the divorce contract, strikes the incompatibility clause because he says they are compatible, puts the contract in a drawer, and continues with life exactly as it had been already.  Later they trundle off to City Hall and remarry.

Clem’s relationship to the older mentor artists like Hans Hoffman, the excruciatingly pretentious Newman and the insanely cold Clyfford Still is presented as largely passive.  Where roles might be expected to have reversed – when he in turn is mentor to the likes of Larry Poons, Jules Olitski, and a host of much younger artists, Jenny is absent – either during the California phase in her life, or just mentally. She is able, however, to offer a perceptive contrast between Greenberg’s outlook and that of the painters in his life.  Artists like Smith, Hofmann, Rothko and even Pollock are mistaken as “teddy bears” by their female admirers whereas “all too often, the heat within did not spill over into warmth toward others.

Hans was a hard call.  As compelling as I found his robust energy, it was tamped down by an impenetrable layer of detachment.  As if he were saying, ‘What doesn’t serve my art doesn’t serve me.’  On the other hand, Clem, who never, to my knowledge, had been called anything even faintly resembling a teddy bear, and despite his relentless passion for art, was an outspoken believer in life before art.  And how grateful I was for it.

Janice Van Horne, A Complicated Marriage: My Life With Clement Greenberg (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012.)  387 pages, illustrations, ISBN  978-1582438214. $27

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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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Excerpt from "Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama" by Alison Bechdel. Copyright © 2012 by Alison Bechdel. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Alison Bechdel’s engrossing new graphic memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama is a worthy successor to the work of Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, William Steig, and Bill Watterson. Bechdel’s book follows by six years her widely acclaimed Fun Home, which memorializes an aesthetically absorbed, emotionally constricted, closeted gay funeral director—Bechdel’s father—who putatively committed suicide when Bechdel was twenty.  This synopsis, however, conveys nothing of Bechdel’s originality and erudition, her meticulous drawing, her sensitivity to suggestive design.

Fun Home opens with a young Bechdel perched on her father’s upended feet for an airplane ride she calls “Icarian.” Casting her father in the role of Daedalus, she cherishes this game because, in the “arctic” gloom of their gothic Victorian mansion in rural Pennsylvania, it provides her with rare moments of physical contact.  (Her mother stopped kissing her goodnight when she was seven.)  At the end of the book, Bechdel draws herself as a slightly older child in a swimming pool with her father who holds out his arms as if to catch her. She ponders what would have happened if instead of plunging to his death (like her father, who fell under a truck), Icarus had lived and inherited his father’s talents? A coda to the Daedalus-Icarus myth—not mentioned by Bechdel—explains that Daedalus was involved with a talented young apprentice called Perdix of whom he was jealous and whom he managed to drown for fear of being surpassed.  His own beloved son’s subsequent fall to doom, therefore, can be read as a punishment visited upon Daedalus. This silent back-story shadows Bechdel’s art.  For in her personal fantasy, her father doubles as craftsman-perpetrator and victim.

Are You My Mother? is a title borrowed from another pictured quest for a parent published in 1960, the year of Bechdel’s birth.  In this now classic children’s book by P.D. Eastman, available even on YouTube, a newborn bird goes in search of its mother who has left the nest to forage.  With no idea what to look for, the small bird wanders off; after a string of zany and dangerous mistakes, it eventually finds her. In Bechdel’s case, the finding involves not her mother per se but an understanding of her.

Excerpt from "Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama" by Alison Bechdel. Copyright © 2012 by Alison Bechdel. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Through her unsparing pictorial narration, we see, hear, and swallow the struggles that lacerate every childhood.  (Not by accident does a mirror adorn this book’s jacket). This is American life at its most candid.  It stops mattering very much that the author hails from a Catholic family, that Bechdel is a lesbian, or that she has created this work while her mother is bristlingly alive and cognizant of the project.  Bechdel’s journey—backward in time—brings her in contact with a host of non-mothers (including a famous psychoanalyst, a pair of warmly caring women psychotherapists, and lesbian lovers) — but also iterations of her actual mother, who proves beautiful, highly literary, self-disciplined, and who morphs repeatedly according to decade fashions.  However, Bechdel’s mother remains enduringly remote:  “’I can’t help you. You’re on your own,’” she announces tersely when told about her daughter’s need to do the Fun Home memoir.  A child hearing such words knows with a pang that he or she is actually chained to the parent who says this.

Smarting like a slap, her rebuff occurs in an exchange so dreaded by the artist that, anticipating it, she almost crashes into a truck.  “I hope that in time you’ll come to understand,” she imagines herself saying as she steers along a road with a background sign that reads: “No Shoulder.”  The ensuing letdown foreshadows much that is to come. But unlike authors of smarmy bad-mother diatribes who in retaliation sharpen knives of resentment, Bechdel achingly wants not to fight but to understand:  what has her withholding mother not withheld from her? Sharing each hard-won insight, she welcomes readers to re-think their own less than perfect parents.

Generous without sacrificing honesty, Bechdel twins herself with her mother by drawing both characters with strikingly matched jet-black hair, a color code she accentuates by making all the other significant women blonde.  This twinning holds even when Bechdel’s mother turns gray, for in those images her short bob mimics her daughter’s boyish cut.  Like so much else, the visual pairing performs its effects subliminally.

Chapters begin with pictured dreams. The first of these appears transparently birth-like in that the artist must escape through a tiny window and plunge in fetal pose into turgid water.  Icarus comes readily to mind.  Each chapter’s title, moreover, cites a theoretical premise by the late British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, the artist’s adoptive intellectual mentor. She even resuscitates Winnicott in imaginative scenarios as she does likewise Virginia Woolf.  Interlarding well-chosen snippets of literature and psychoanalytic theory with the wrenching details of her life, she offers transferable interpretive insights. The book itself becomes a teaching tool.

Several times Bechdel informs us of her mother’s spider phobia and, elsewhere, of her own childhood horror of vomiting.  In a riveting page, she connects the two in a session with her first therapist. Awakening her mother in the middle of the night, Bechdel (age 10) vomits a mess that uncannily resembles a spider.  Her mother’s affect is uncharacteristically kind, but a phobia ensues.  The principal link concerns unconscious aggression and rejection, for a mother’s most primitive function is to feed her child, and vomiting reverses this completely.  Children feel shame and sometimes even terror as their bodies lurch out of control.  As for the spider, it condenses every constructive and destructive maternal impulse into one irregular black shape.  Louise Bourgeois’ Mamans materialize as we read. Bechdel, twinned with her mother yet painfully distant from her, eventually learns that she cannot find her in this book, but she can recreate her.

A paradigmatic scene constitutes the book’s climax, and it occurs twice.  Needing special shoes to correct her arches when she was small, Bechdel was taken for repeated visits to a hospital where she witnessed severely crippled children and found herself envying them just as Bemelmans’s Madeline is envied by the other little girls because of the attention won by her appendectomy.  In Madeline, Miss Clavel silences them, but Alison Bechdel enjoys a superior fate.  Bidding hard, she pretends to be a crippled child herself.  With bated breath we watch as an amazing scene unfolds.  Her mother joins in, makes believe with her, offers her imaginary leg braces, even pretends to lace up a pair of special shoes.  What Bechdel comes to realize through this re-animation is how her mother actually gave her some of what she needed to become an artist.  The mother-spider cripples you but also helps you walk.  The family’s background, in which a mother is sexually sidelined by a husband who preferred young men, a mother moreover who was taught long ago by her own mother to favor sons over daughters, begins to fade.  What matters is that she plays!  And that Bechdel can use her now, in Winnicott’s sense, of discovering that, no longer compelled to experience her as a need-gratifying object, she can recognize what has been offered all along as well as what was denied.  And the book closes with measured gratitude and the words: “She has given me the way out.”  This “meta-book,” as Bechdel’s mother called it, is a masterful meditation on growing up.

Are Your My Mother? A Comic Drama By Alison Bechdel. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Illustrated. 290 pages, ISBN 0618982507  $22.

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Of these two generously illustrated biographies of the wonderful mid-20th-century painter David Park, the first, from three years ago, is by the elder of Park’s two daughters, and the second, newly published, is by an expert historian of modern art in California. Read in tandem, they are distinct and complement each other perfectly.

Helen Park Bigelow’s is a family memoir, in which her father and the paintings of his that mean the most to her are central but not the only active characters. She has good stories to tell and zigzags apace from one to the next; she chats, surmises and casts a wide, sympathetic gaze on almost everyone within range. Her responses to the pictures are instinctive and often eloquent. About Park’s late-1940s abstractions, she recalls, “It was as if the colors took my gaze for a ride, made it travel all over the terrain with no guidance from me,” while the figures in the late-50s pictures, are “heavy with being.”

David Park, Head of Lydia, 1953. Oil on canvas, 25 x 24 inches. Reproduced in Helen Park Bigelow’s book reviewed in this article

Nancy Boas’s book also is sympathetic, though more impersonal, a balanced and analytical account; her passion shows in how persuasively she argues for a wider recognition of Park’s importance as more than the locally esteemed leader of the Bay Area Figuratives, which now in any case seems on the way. (A couple of years ago, complaining of the New York art scene’s general shallowness and offering a number of suggestions for heightened perspicacity on the part of local curators, Roberta Smith wrote that Park “could do with another New York retrospective. He’s the kind of artist who can light a fire under a young artist and also teach the public a great deal about looking at painting.”) Boas moves readily from moment to moment of the life and work, her telling quickened on nearly every page by revealing quotations from Park’s friends and colleagues––viz., Elmer Bischoff ‘s description of Park around 1946, when he was in his mid-30s, having recently joined the full-time faculty at the California School of Fine Arts and a few years short of realizing his true originality as a painter: “He had a powerful, sculpted head and a large, Martha Raye mouth. . . . His eyes were prominent and bulged bit.” Park’s attire, Bischoff concludes, was “casual academic.”

Park was born in Boston in 1911 and died in his California home at age 49, in 1960. Both Bigelow’s and Boas’s narratives start from his childhood in and outside of the confines of a genteel Back Bay family, the “outside” part being his absorption–– inviolable from the get-go, it seems––in painting, playing the piano and wandering in “secret places,” those woodlands and waterways where he developed what soon would become manifest as his extraordinary skills of observation and memory. To Boas, Bischoff also passed along a joke Park liked to tell that illustrates how briskly he had separated himself from his upbringing––his father’s parlor-size Unitarianism, in particular––and something of his attitude toward art making, as well:

Some Christians . . . . died and went the other side and came to a fork in the road. One of the signs said ‘To Heaven,’ and the other sign said ‘To a Lecture on Heaven,’ and they all went to the second one.

By age twelve Park was producing drawings and watercolors of figures in idyllic settings, imagery that would recur throughout his career but most tellingly in the extravagantly lathered paintings of his last few years, those works Boas sees properly as “integrating people and nature and paint.” (Among Boas’s illustrations is a painting called Man and Woman Reclining, made when Park was twenty-six, that shows him already capable of the deep sensuality that is a major part of his late work’s power.) By the time he left for California, a seventeen-year-old prep-school dropout, he was pretty much a committed artist. (“The East was never my medium,” he said, in a characteristic word-choice twist.) In 1930 he married his friend Gordon Newell’s sister Lydia, whose vivacity and affection and all-out support for her husband’s art were subverted periodically by migraines and depression––a mix that, along with the heavy drinking that was endemic at the time, both Bigelow and Boas handle candidly while taking care not to overdramatize it.

A glimpse of how, on occasion, love and art could dovetail in Park’s sensibility comes from an interview by Boas of one of his lifelong friends:

He said that the night before, when Lydia was undressing, she pulled off her slip, and the slip was in that electrified stage that some slips sometimes get into, and that as she pulled it over her, suddenly the electricity, the light, flickered across, so that her whole body was outlined in shadow against the slip, and he was just overcome by how beautiful it was. The scene was tremendous to him––the light that showed off the figure. He spoke almost in a tone of reverence . . . .  I think it was partly that his love for her shone through. I always remember his speaking of it. It was a visual experience for him which had great emotion.”

Bigelow, too, tells how her father “collected light, like the thin cast of blue as he went up and down the steps of the house in Boston where he was born.” Park, she writes, “reached into his repertoire of light,” applying it to the work at hand. Right there the terms become clearer of that peculiar equation his astonishingly straight-ahead art proposes: Bodies plus light make life.

Helen Park Bigelow, David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back (Manchester and New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2009). Foreword by Richard Armstrong. ISBN 978-1-55595-320-1. 207 pages. $60.

Nancy Boas, David Park: A Painter’s Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012).  ISBN 978-0-520-26841-8. 357 pages. $49.95.

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An unflinching poetry inhabits the pages of the recently published Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph: Fortieth-Anniversary Edition, a reissue of the volume that accompanied her posthumous 1972 MoMA retrospective.  The book’s introduction consists simply of Arbus’ words, compiled from interviews, recorded lectures, and jottings. And then, again very simply, there are the photographs: the midgets and giants, the sagging nudists, the middle-aged battle-axes with their pearls and jowls, and most powerfully, seven of the late photographs taken at institutions for the mentally disabled. (Fifty-one of these are collected in Untitled, published by Aperture in 1995.)

Diane Arbus, Patriotic young man with a flag, 1967. © The Estate of Diane Arbus

Arbus is a practically canonized artist whose work is now acknowledged for its rough empathy. Her influence can be seen in the work of photographers from Sylvia Plachy to Robert Mapplethorpe to Rineke Dijkstra. Like other artists such as Ana Mendieta, Sylvia Plath, and Francesca Woodman, her narrative carries with it an often gendered quality of martyrdom and neurosis, which can distort her work’s clarity of intent. She has been described as the photographer of the marginalized, the ugly, and the impaired, for which she has had her detractors, notably Susan Sontag. In her 1973 essay Freak Show, Sontag argued that Arbus’s work is ethically and artistically compromised because of the photographer’s vulnerable, flawed subjects, who seemed to Sontag “pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive.”

What strikes me as I leaf through this book is Arbus’s convincing sensibility of the world, and how thoroughly her subjects inhabit it. Reducing Arbus to the Photographer of Freaks does not begin to capture the delicate feeling of otherness pervading the images. When Arbus photographs people without external flaws, she often finds the off moment, the odd framing, the disturbing lighting that un-normalizes them. Loser at a diaper derby, N. J. (1967) shows a baby close-up, weeping inconsolably, his fat fists clasped in a keening gesture of mourning, his mother an uncomforting silhouette. It’s a moment of existential loneliness that disturbs the field of cute baby photos. In one of her most iconic images, Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., (1967) two perfectly lovely twin sisters stand so close together that they seem to share an arm. The inner hems of their dresses curve up toward each other, an uncanny symmetry. We travel along the edge where their bodies meet, and look back and forth from face to face, noticing similarities and differences, feeling creepily as though we are contemplating a zygote actually splitting apart.

But, in what I find to be a lovely twist, many of Arbus’ most “othered” subjects are normalized by her lens. Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th street, N.Y.C. (1963) is just what the title describes. Three elderly midgets sit in a living room, hands on each others’ knees, directly meeting the camera’s eye. Friends, they lean in towards each other, and they lean forward as well, slightly, into the space of the room and towards us. We are given license to gaze at their tininess and their wizened faces, but there is no question that they are unflinchingly themselves, and they stare right back at us. They are not ashamed, and Susan Sontag need not have been ashamed on their behalf. Says Arbus in the book’s introduction, “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

To acknowledge the empathy and identification that Arbus clearly felt with her subjects is, of course, not to gloss over the photographs’ darkness and, at times, biting satire. The artist acknowledges photographic portraiture’s potential for cruelty: “The process itself has a kind of exactitude, a kind of scrutiny that we’re not normally subject to… We’re nicer to each other than the intervention of the camera is going to make us. It’s a little bit cold, a little bit harsh.” Patriotic young man with a flag, N.Y.C. (1967) might actually flirt with contempt. The subject seems deranged, and his acne-covered face, receding chin and bad teeth become editorial weapons employed by Arbus to undermine the I’M PROUD American flag pin on his lapel. The more marginal to American society her subjects are, the more dignity Arbus affords them: though these people are unquestionably vulnerable, it is her wealthy, Caucasian, or reactionary subjects that she allows herself to really skewer.

Images of the mentally impaired in the late series Untitled could be the most troublesome but to my eyes they are also Arbus’s most devastatingly beautiful, and rich with meaning. The subjects are almost all women, and are often pictured in strange, dark fields, wearing nightgowns. Sometimes they wear masks. (I have often wondered who got there first, Arbus or her contemporary, photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard.) Untitled (6) (1970–71) shows three dumpy, awkward women striking calisthenic poses on the grass. Their lack of self-awareness is painful to behold because we are able to see what these subjects cannot know about themselves. Untitled (7) (1970–71) depicts a band of these brave fools sallying forth, their nightgowns glowing in unearthly fashion against a dark sky. Two of them wear masks; some have mustaches drawn on their faces. Arbus could be quoting Breugel’s The Blind Leading the Blind, or one of Ensor’s danses macabres. Is this an image of retarded adults dressed for a Halloween party at their institution? Probably. But it is also an uncannily poetic moment: the central figure looks off to the side, pausing, his hand lingering in the air, while the others surge forward. They seem to be questing after something; the moment becomes elevated. Arbus makes us know that they are just like us.

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph: Fortieth Anniversary Edition. Edited by Marvin Israel, Doon Arbus (Aperture; 40 Anv edition, September 30 2011. 184 pgs ISBN: 1597111740 . $65)

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Pages from one of the publications under review

Phaidon is an inveterate experimenter in art book formats.  When it was founded in Vienna in the 1920s it was a pioneer in affordable books of quality design and accessible scholarship.  The company fled to London with its Jewish founders and, in the seventies and eighties, went through what its own website calls a “rough period” of different owners, laboriously following a tried and tested essay/plate formula—the bread and butter of art publishing, albeit one that many actually find rather filling.  Phaidon are perhaps best known today for their handsome if somewhat one-size-fits-all Contemporary Artists series.

In recent years, however, there has been a teasing of the boundaries between classic art books and other reading experiences.  Two recent ventures exemplify different ways to go.  And while both these publications have attractions and merits, a certain built-in obsolescence almost willfully pits these books against the an ethos of art books for the ages.  Many of the most prized volumes on this reader’s shelves are vintage Phaidon books by the likes of Heinrich Wölfflin and Jakob Burckhardt, art books that have no sell-by date.

As if to acknowledge their ephemeral if tonic quality, the respective series from which these two books emanate take titles from the pharmacy and the farm: sculpture is served by Vitamin 3-D (it’s related to theirVitamin P, for painting; D, for drawing and Ph, for photography series) while the publication on upcoming artists titled “Creamier” relates to their Cream series.

Vitamin 3-D actually feels like the catalog for a biennale or sprawling museum survey that happens never actually to take place.  117 artists or collaborative teams are profiled.  Each receives a pair of double-page spreads with a few paragraphs of blurb, a different one for each artist, and around half a dozen illustrations.  It is a responsible-enough cross section of fully emerged if still almost “emerging talent” aged artists, but the format is conducive to a year-book than an encyclopedia.  Of course, it sells itself as “The definitive book on contemporary sculpture and installation art from around the world” but, well, we’ve all got to earn a living. Definitive or transient, at $75 it is priced as an enyclopedia.

Vitamin 3-D is both a useful and an enticing volume, except that those who will use it have as competition the world wide web for updated information and images of the artists they might want to look up here, and for those seeking to be enticed, there is no curated sequence or considered juxtaposition in a volume that simply lists its artists alphabetically.  As such the venture might find itself falling between stalls.

Creamier makes no bones about its ephemerality, or rather, plays with it, because again, price prohibits one treating it as the newspaper it tries to look like with its tabloid format, pink paper (more New York Observer than Financial Times by the way) and lack of spine.  It is doomed to get grubby quickly but is too nicely produced to warrant wrapping up anyone’s fish and chips.  The concept of ten curators choosing ten artists each is cute: it frees publisher and reader alike from the tyranny of a singular view.  But in a way such halfway-house democracy is even more imposing: if you just had one guy’s view then it would just be that; the hedge-funding approach makes it seems too good a chance than anyone significant ought to be included.

BOOKS UNDER REVIEW

Editors of Phaidon Press, Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation (New York: Phaidon Press Inc., 2009). ISBN: 9780714849744. 352 pages. $75.00.

Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture (London: Phaidon Press, 2010). ISBN: 9780714856834. Special Format: 420 x 295 mm., 16 1/2 x 11 5/8 in. 448 pages. 700 color illustrations. $39.95.

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The history of publishers Lund Humphries is intimately bound up with that of British sculpture.  Originally based in the Yorkshire town of Bradford, this printing press was at the forefront of avant garde typography and color processes by the 1940s when, under the editorship of Herbert Read, it produced what would become the first in an ongoing series of catalogues raisonée of Henry Moore, a sumptuous production that defied wartime austerities.  Subsequently the firm, now part of Ashgate publishing, formed a significant relationship with the Henry Moore Foundation, which is a foremost sponsor of scholarship and publishing in British sculpture.  Jonathan Blackwood’s monograph on John Skeaping is part of a research series that includes titles on William Tucker, Reg Butler and F.E.McWilliam.  Skeaping was a pioneer of direct carving in Britain, and first husband of Barbara Hepworth—whose subsequent husband, Ben Nicholson, was an early subject of a Lund Humphries title.  A consummate animalier, Skeaping’s career as a figure carver followed a trajectory of classicism into primitivism into organic abstraction familiar to students of Hepworth and Moore.

Barbara Hepworth holding a file with the plaster for Curved Form (Bryher II) (November 1961) © Bowness, Hepworth Estate

Moore is the meridian line of British scupture: There is an AM and a PM, the latter characterized by long anxiety-inducing shadows.  The midnight hour to avoid, however, is exact contemporaneity, as the illustrious yet in some ways wallflower career of Hepworth exemplifies.   Without it ever quite being possible to say who came first, her successes and developments were in uncomfortable near-kilter with the fellow Yorkshireman she once dated in Leeds, whether in the form of publications, representation of Britain at the Venice Biennale, moves into and out of abstraction, official honors and so on.  The major new museum opened in her name in her hometown of Wakefield this year has been accompanied by a volume edited by her granddaughter Sophie Bowness that documents the gift from her estate of the plaster originals from which her late bronzes were cast: once again, a recall to Moore, whose gift of plasters formed the bedrock of the wing devoted to his work at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario.  The volume includes an essays on Hepworth’s process by Bowness, on her relationship to Wakefield by Gordon Watson, and on the museum building by its architect David Chipperfield, whose streamlined purist aesthetic seems an offshoot of the same cultivar as Hepworth’s.

Anthony Caro, Midday, 1960. Painted steel. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Wiesenberger Fund, 1974. Photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wilson Santiago

The protean nature of Sir Anthony Caro is attested to in the modernist sculptor’s bibliography: Dieter Blume’s catalogue raisonné, for instance, runs to 14 volumes, while Lund Humphries have brought out a set of five uniformly designed and presented books offering interpretations of his career with different thematic approaches—more phenomenological that chronological in their range.  The series is understatedly edited by one of its authors, Karen Wilkin, whose same preface runs in each volume in much the way Read’s did in the Moore catalogue, although only implicitly does this text acknowledge her leadership role.  Her own volume echoes the thematic approach of her 1991 Prestel monograph by examining Caro’s inside-outside sculptural preoccupation.  Paul Moorhouse, in “Presence,” explores the denial and recurrence of figuration in the more monolithic of his larger sculptures.  Moorhouse, who is now a curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery, was curator of a significant overview of Caro’s work at the old Tate Gallery in Millbank, and draws closely on the sculptor’s own words.  Other volumes in the series explore the recurrence of figuration and narrative in his later works, his Smith/Picasso-like drawing in space, and his small, table-top sculptures.  If there is one theme strikingly overlooked I would nominate Caro’s extensive reworkings in sculpture of old and modern master paintings and his allusions to sculpture history.

Phaidon’s weighty monograph on Anish Kapoor is a doorstopper at over 500 pages worthy of the Bombay-born, London-based sculptor’s global popularity and almost corporate success.   David Anfam, who is a long serving commissioning editor at Phaidon and one of the leading authorities on Abstract Expressionism, charts the sculptors evolution from an arte povera aesthetic (scattered piles of pigment on the gallery floor) to spectacular, breathtakingly monumental sculptures and installations that dominate city skylines.  Kapoor’s ongoing obsession with the void unites efforts in divergent materials and scales.  The volume also includes essays by Johanna Burton and fellow “new generation” British sculptor Richard Deacon.

The handsome volume on Thomas Houseago – oddly tall in a way that befits his lanky sculptures – keeps alive the Lund Humphries tradition of charting the efforts of acclaimed Yorkshiremen.  Born in Leeds in 1972, Houseago makes loud, boisterously clumsy tragic-comic figurative sculptures that directly reference modern exemplars like Brancusi, Jacob Epstein, Germaine Richier, Rodin, Giacometti, and de Kooning in a mix of critique and adulation.  Lisa Le Feuvre contributes the main essay while Rudi Fuchs offers an appreciation that draws on his aquaintance with Houseago as a student in Amsterdam.

BOOKS CONSIDERED IN THIS REVIEW

Jonathan Blackwood, The Sculpture of John Skeaping (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2011). ISBN: 9780853319313. 152 pages, 12 color and 210 b&w illustrations. $90.00.

Sophie Bowness, Barbara Hepworth: The Plasters (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2011). ISBN: 9781848220669. 200 pages, 85 color and 115 b&w illustrations. $70.00.

Paul Moorhouse, Anthony Caro: Presence (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2010).  ISBN: 9781848220539. 152 pages, 73 color and 9 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

Julius Bryant, Anthony Caro: Figurative and Narrative Sculpture (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2009). ISBN: 9781848220324. 128 pages, 55 color and 23 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

Karen Wilkin, Anthony Caro: Interior and Exterior (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2009). ISBN: 9781848220317. 152 pages, 80 color and 14 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

Mary Reid, Anthony Caro: Drawing in Space (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2009). ISBN: 9781848220300. 152 pages, 66 color and 20 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

H.F. Westley Smith, Anthony Caro: Small Sculptures (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2010). ISBN: 9781848220515. 152 pages, 82 color and 14 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

David Anfam, Anish Kapoor (London: Phaidon Press, 2009). ISBN: 9780714843698. 304 pages. £59.95.

Thomas Houseago, What Went Down (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2011). ISBN: 9781901352504. 240 pages, 211 color and 7 b&w illustrations. $70.00.

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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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Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane

Caravaggio, The Crowning with Thorns, c1602-07. Oil on canvas, 50 x 65.2 inches. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Caravaggio is the old master artist who today inspires large personal public interest. Piero della Francesca and Vermeer are also much loved, but very little is known about their lives. Caravaggio is different—we know that he was seriously rebellious, murdered a man, fled his enemies, died young; and he is thought to have been homosexual. The history of Caravaggio’s fame during his lifetime, the long eclipse of his reputation, and then his rediscovery in the mid-twentieth century is part of this story. Because he thus is the James Dean of baroque artists, there is a tendency to interpret his art in highly autobiographical terms. And so there are many novels and films about him. The best novel Christopher Peachment’s Caravaggio (London: Picador, 2002) offers a highly imaginative albeit entirely fictionalized version of his death.

Bernini and Pietro da Cortona were at least as influential in their time; Borromini had as strange a personal life; and Artemesia Gentileschi legitimately fascinates feminists. But none of them are remotely as famous today. Andrew Graham-Dixon presents Caravaggio’s life with close scrutiny of the paintings, lively curiosity about the background of the social history and careful attention to recent archival discoveries. A Life Sacred and Profane has useful accounts of Caravaggio’s early life and career in Milan; a plausibly skeptical reconstruction of attempts to identify him as a homosexual; and nicely constructive discussions of what exactly happened during his tumultuous years in Rome, and his flights to Naples, Malta and Sicily. Graham-Dixon is good at explaining why Caravaggio is so popular today. He has suggestive comments about the painter’s sources from Northern and, at the end of his career Southern Italian art. And he offers a good explanation of how exactly his hero was perceived in Rome and Naples as an artistic revolutionary. The iPad edition has good full color illustrations of Caravaggio’s paintings, and maps charting his career.

Myself, what I would most like is an idiomatic translation of Longhi’s Caravaggio, but until that happens, this book provides good accounts of the individual paintings, and up to date discussion of the attributions and archival research. What I found most instructive was considering the implications of Graham-Dixon’s common sense research. Probably Caravaggio had male lovers, but he also might have been a pimp for his female models. By providing nicely detailed reconstructions of Caravaggio’s swordsmanship, Graham-Dixon nicely explains one important feature of his art. Nowadays punks typically employ guns, but in Rome circa 1606 you needed to get in close to win a duel. And so the violence of Caravaggio’s late paintings is based, one would naturally conclude, upon the artist’s own direct experience. Without anachronistically treating Caravaggio as a Romantic hero, Graham-Dixon offers a plausible reconstruction of the artist’s early death.

Caravaggio speaks to our time as, a century ago Botticelli spoke to early modern aesthetes. But now when, it would seem, most of the lost paintings have been recovered and the archives and picture galleries have been ransacked, what’s next? Once an artist has been so thoroughly discussed, then it’s natural for commentary to move on. What other old master now speaks to our present concerns in the way that   Mostra del Caravaggio e dei Caravaggeschi, organized by Longhi, Caravaggio spoke to very many people in 1951?

Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011). ISBN-10: 0393081494. 514 pages. $39.95.

This review draws on my “The Transfiguration of the commonplace: Caravaggio and his interpreters, “Word & Image, III, l (l987): 41-73. The best account remains Roberto Longhi, Caravaggio (Rome: Editiori Riuniti, 1977), not yet translated, which written in very difficult Italian; my thinking was most influenced by André Berne- Joffroy, Le dossier Caravage (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1959), recently translated with a new introduction as Il dossier Caravage: Psiologia della attribuzioni e psicologia dell’arte, trans. Arturo Galansino (Milan: 5 Continents, 2005).

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