ARCHIVE
OF DAVID COHEN’S FRIDAY COLUMNS AT ARTCRITICAL
Last
week’s column:
“Grisaille Technicolor”, a profile of Ena Swansea to mark
the decision by the Hassam Purchase Committee of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters to purchase and present a work by her to an American museum
Previous
weeks’ columns:
“Painting that’s good enough to eat”, a review of Wayne
Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective at the Phillips Collection, Washington DC,
coming to the Whitney Museum of American Art in Summer 2001
“Academy Notes”, a
review of the Invitational Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures at the
American Academy of Arts and Letters
“Pure Beauty and the Beastly Sublime”, a review of Barbara
Hepworth at PaceWildenstein Gallery
“Nice Photos of Naughty Bohemians”, a review of “Bad
Behavior” by Bill Hayward
“A frolic with David
Salle”, a review of his exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery
DAVID
COHEN every Friday at artcritical.com
March 23, 2001
Ena Swansea Gray
2001, oil on linen 108 x 108 inches
Courtesy Robert
Miller Gallery
SEE MORE IMAGES
BY SWANSEA AT ROBERTMILLERGALLERY.COM
News
is just in that Ena Swansea, one of the thirty eight artists featured in this
year’s Invitational Exhibition of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has
been selected by the Academy’s Hassam Purchase Committee. This committee purchases works for future
presentation to American museums.
Another of the sixteen artists so-honored this year is Nicole Eisenman, whose work was featured in this
column. To mark this significant event,
this week I profile the work of Ena Swansea.
An earlier version of this article was published in Artnet Magazine [see the
article]
on the occasion of the artist’s debut exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery
in November 1999.
ENA SWANSEA paints - as she converses - with voluptuous intelligence. Of course, it’s a bit of a presumption to impose such a statement upon a viewer solely privileged to know her work. What can be stated quite objectively, however, is that compressed within the strange limitations of her palette is an expansive range of hue and tone; that the smooth sheen of her surface understates an elaborate choreography of brushmark; that her ethereal compositions pulsate with living intensity. Subtle and unobstrusive as these pictures at first appear, they are actually rude with painterly activity in the way a person can be rude with good health.
According to Pliny, the first
artist was a woman who painted shadows.
It is recounted in Book XXXV of his Historia Naturalis that a
Corinthian maid, the daughter of Boutades, a potter from Skyon, drew the
silhouette of her fiancé, who was about to go abroad, from the shadow of his
head cast on the wall by a candle. Her
father then filled in the outlines with clay and modelled the face in relief so
that his daughter would have a souvenir of her beloved to console her in her
loneliness.
Ena Swansea's painted shadows
exude such voluptuous intelligence that admirers are lured into mixed metaphor:
"she illuminates shadow". At
the opposite end of history from Pliny's Corinthian maid, she can be said to
paint in the shadow of tradition, but rather than capitulating to
prognostictions about "the end of art history" and playing
fashionable end-games with style, she basks in the light of the masters, whose
techniques she distils.
Initially seductive for their very
coyness, these pictures gradually reveal strengths precisely in those areas
where a given quality seemed sparse.
Compressed within the strange limitations of her palette, for instance,
is an expansive range of hue and tone (her grisaille is technicolor!) The smooth sheen of her surface understates
an elaborate choreography of brushmark.
Ethereal compositions actually pulsate.
One of the minimalists talked about art that's smart enough to be dumb.
Swansea is smart enough just to be quiet, to steer a gentle course between the
histrionics of self-expression, the pedantry of observation, the rhetoric of
reduction.
Painted shadows flutter in and out
of the history of art just like real shadows on a sunny fall day. Sometimes they are a detail to make illusion
the more complete, sometimes an excrescence to be sacrificed on the altar of
artifice. The Impressionists are
credited with the discovery of the color in shadow. Swansea steps back from the expressive overstatement of this
truth to reintroduce an element of surprise. Color, like form, is to be softly
intimated, to pursuade gently. But
let's not overplay this subtlty business: Swansea is cinematic in immediacy and
scale; as in a movie-house - or concert hall - quietness envelops us, nuance is
there for us.
What a wonderful subject shadows
are for an artist negotiating a space for herself between abstraction and
representation. They are nature's
readymade art. To paint them is to
ackowledge a platonic status for art that is at once dismissive and compelling,
for shadows are a byproduct, fleeting, elusive, distortive of the things they
latch onto, a sensation revealed in time.
To fix a shadow is to arrest time more impertinently than virtually any
other kind of mimesis. To paint
shadows is to advertise the affinities between the chosen medium and subject,
the elusiveness and quirkiness of each.
Swansea might have eavesdropped
Gauguin's advice to Emile Bernard: "If, instead of a figure, you put the
shadow only of a person, you have found an original starting point, the
strangeness of which you have calculated."* Her shadows are palpable, but the objects that might have cast
them are spirited away. In a similar
conceit, the responsible light source has been obscured. The compositions are also botanically
impossible, bringing together flowers and leaves which could not, naturally,
cohabit on the same branch. But for all
this artifice, the images register as credible. To feel real counts for more than actually being so.
Although she has played around
with shadow boxes, she has said that the photographic images that resulted from
these experiments were staid in comparison with the mesmerizing compositions
she comes up with from imagination. She
realised that she would have to continue to construct her compositions
formally, painstaking though this process is.
Her approach is traditional, scaling up her big canvases from resolved
sketches. There is, nonetheless, and
despite the supreme painterliness of these images, a kind of photographic
quality. Or maybe not so much quality
as aura. Her images have the authority
of a moment of moving film. The
sensation - fleeting but particular, elusive but gripping - stretches the space
between projection and memory.
* quoted from E.H.Gombrich Shadows: The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art, (London: National Gallery, 1995).
Upcoming books, lectures and
publications by David Cohen
March 9, 2001
Painting that’s good enough to eat
Click title to enter
March 9, 2001
INVITATIONAL
EXHIBITION OF PAINTING AND SCULPTURE, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New
York City
Nicole Eisenman Fishing 2000 oil on board 43x56”
(collection of Craig and Ivelin Robins, Miami Beach, FL;
photo courtesy Jack Tilton Gallery, New York)
Bouvard and Pécuchet pretty much had the right idea about academies. Never miss an opportunity to ridicule them, and never turn down an invitation to join! My own “received idea” about Salon-type exhibitions is largely informed by London’s Royal Academy of Arts which every year delights ladies in tweed (plaid) from the Home Counties and embarrasses the artworld with that time-honored ritual, the Summer Exhibition. Academicians, already an odd-enough cocktail, add to the brew of their own eclecticism by opening their august walls to other talents, new or old. Nothing can be more calculated to offend a modernist sensibility than the double- and triple- hangs with a resulting visual cacophony that typify the RA Show and the comparable Salons (de Mai, d’Automne etc.) arranged periodically at the Grand Palais in Paris and indeed anywhere where exhibiting societies of yore survive. Post-modernists generally find cooler ways to overturn the applecart of modernist purism than throwing in their lot with these meat markets (though one year, as it happens, YBA Michael Landy did submit a market stall to the RA where it held pride of place under a rotunda). Anyhow, this is all by way of introduction to the totally unexpected positive feelings engendered in me by this year’s “Invitational” exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
I
don’t know what others do when they receive an invitation with thirty-eight
names on them, but in a mix of curiosity and vanity I like to circle any
acquaintances, and to my astonishment, when this particular card arrived on my
desk I soon found a baker’s dozen of haloed names. These were all artists I admired and respected; yet in my wildest
dreams I would only curate them into one exhibit as a Surrealist gesture. A sewing machine and an umbrella are more
likely to meet on a dissecting table than Melissa Meyer, Chakaia Booker, Amy
Sillman, and Martha Diamond to exhibit together in glorious, top-lit
nineteenth-century galleries in a complex of like-buildings floating as
incongruously amid the northern reaches of Harlem as the Taj Mahal in modern
Agra. But that’s exactly what’s going
on at the Academy’s Art Galleries at Audubon Terrace at Broadway between 155
and 156 Streets til April 1. For those
of us – shame on us! – who have never ventured to this neighborhood before, the
delights of Velázquez and Goya and much else await at the Hispanic Society of
America next door.
Of
course, the Invitational follows hot on the heels of those bazaars, the Armory
and Pier shows, so New Yorkers may still have the magpie sensibility needed to
extract aesthetic experience from the quagmire of overload. I should say, however, that the Academy show
is installed with remarkable dignity considering the number of artists
included, and the depth given to each artist.
The sculptor Lucky DeBellevue is given better opportunity to do his
thing here than he was in the encyclopedic “Greater New York” show at P.S.1 in
Queens last year. His exquisite mesh of
chenille stems in the suspended canopy The Underneath made for a magisterial
entrance to the South Gallery. A
heightened sense of nature versus artifice is sustained as the visitor turns
left, to find, framed by an alcove, a sumptuous Ena Swansea shadow
painting. The annex revealed a new
artist to me: Justen Ladda, whose sensationally crafted Tree of Knowledge in
glass crystal beads- knowingly, wickedly kitschy - is sorely tempting.
On
a similarly lapsarian note, it struck me on this occasion that Nicole
Eisenman’s slick, slippery, mannerist panel paintings of mean, muscley
ice-maidens (which I had actually seen already at the Jack Tilton Gallery, but
needed a second viewing to be convinced by) could be the work of Adam Elsheimer
angry ex-wife, Lilith! Fishing, 2000
(borrowed from a Miami Beach collection) I have now decided is a
masterpiece. The gleeful, girlish
illustrational quality of this image, of a surly sisterhood lounging around in
tight catsuits on Giotto-like icy hillocks and presiding over the dunking of a
hapless Acteon (hoisted – literally - by his own petard) compounds rather than
distracts from the intensity of the whole.
Sure, this is Bad Painting with a capital B, but there is real aesthetic
communication here, not just art about art, which is why, in my opinion,
Eisenman leaves John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage out in the cold (it’s Nicole who
really “breaks the ice”!). The tight
contorted awkwardness sits well with the erotic energy experienced by painter
and viewer alike in this Rubenesque paean to voluptuous girl-power. But enough... this review is about to get
X-rated!
Seriously,
though, you can see the problem with a Salon review. There are thirty-eight artists here, and I’d like to talk in
similar depth about, say, twenty-four of them.
It’s tempting to delve into the revelations that arise from the
juxtaposition of artists from totally different milieus. I love the way Jacqueline Humphries’s
sparse, sleek drip paintings, commentaries on, as much as essays in,
abstraction are on the other side of a wall with Charles Cajori’s sweaty AbEx
figural abstractions, as if to say, here are two sides of one coin. And it is interesting how, out of the icebox
of Mary Boone’s uptown gallery, Will Cotton’s high-end kitsch ice-cream
paintings melt into the hokey academic still lives by Nancy Hogan hanging next
to them. But still, there is no group
aesthetic, no zeitgeist that I’m smart enough to discern. I guess this is why there’s never an
effective equivalent of Ruskin’s Academy Notes or Baudelaire’s Salon Reviews
for the Whitney Biennial or the Venice Biennale, the modern equivalents of
those sprawling old fixtures. So, I
can’t actually review the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Invitation Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture. But I certainly can recommend it.
Exhibition
continues to April 1, 2001
March 2, 2001
Pure Beauty
and the Beastly Sublime
BARBARA
HEPWORTH: Stone Sculpture, at PaceWildenstein, New York City
As
every kid in New York knows, Albany is the State Capital, Washington is the
Federal capital, and New York City is the capital of the world. The palpable symbol of this last noble truth
is the UN Secretariat Building, whose totem of universality is Barbara
Hepworth's Single Form, 1961-64, that pierced menhir tanning itself in the
world's most famous 1950s swimming pool.
The
sculpture was a memorial for Dag Hammarskjold, the arts-loving Secretary
General who was a personal friend of Hepworth's. Just this once, Hepworth beat her old friend and rival Henry
Moore to a moment of sculptural apotheosis (of course, he had adorned the
UNESCO Building in Paris a few years earlier).
Every other time it was she who came off badly from the inevitable
comparisons invited by their twin-track careers. They had, after all, graduated from the same schools (Leeds and
the Royal College of Art); they were both championed by the same critic,
Herbert Read; they both produced Epstein-influenced heavy limbed
"primitive" sculptures, soon to be followed by modernist essays with
holes and strings, belatedly and reluctantly followed by a turn from "direct
carving" to modeling in bronze, more to meet the commissions spurned by
post-war building boom than out of creative "inner necessity". At every stage it looked as if the female
artist was dutifully following the male, to the chagrin, understandably, of
Hepworth's feminist advocates. The
choice of Hepworth to represent Britain at the 1950 Venice Biennale made her
look like a Moore student, and of course there was no golden lion as there had
been for Moore in 1948. All a bit of a
sob story, and in reviewing the current exhibition of her late carvings at
PaceWildenstein I was determined to leave the beastly bad Moore out of it. But guess what jumped out at me, as striding
down 57th Street on my way to Pace I passed the curvy voluptuous Grace
Building? One of Moore's most memorable
and original mature works, his Standing Figure: Knife Edge, 1961: robust,
earthy, dynamic, morphological, monumental, abrasive, heroic. One hates to submit to gendered dualities,
but there is no escaping the virility of Moore, even with his persistent
feminine subject matter, compared to the soft, subtle, and understated in
Hepworth.
Herbert
Read (and other critics) saw the two sculptors in starkly contrastive terms,
though rarely failing to point out Hepworth's debt to Moore. By contrasting Hepworth's desire for
"loveliness" and a "sense of mystery" with Moore's striving
for "power" and "vitality", Read effectively identified
Hepworth with beauty, Moore with the sublime, to follow Edmund Burke's classic
distinction. In this world view Moore's
vision is grand, fearless, millenial, whereas Hepworth's is refined and
confined. Moore was, for Read, the
artist most significantly in touch with the archetypal collective unconscious,
the artist-seer of his time. Hepworth
was apollonian, Moore dionysian.
Beauty
is, indeed, the only word that will do for the cool, sensual, mystical
modernism of the group of fourteen Hepworth carvings mostly dating from the
last decade of her life (she died in 1975) exquisitely installed - those
gray-blue walls! - at PaceWildenstein.
And it is their wobbly-edged subtly asymmetrical beauty which makes them
fresh. There is an undeniable problem
with Moore, which the Hepworth of the UN Building shares, and that is an
overwhelming mid-century humanist-modernist rhetoric. These late marble sculptures by Hepworth are free of that, and
even of the rhetoric of "truth to materials" and direct carving -
they are impersonal in touch, and were in fact mostly carved by supervised
assistants - that inflected her experimental work of the 1930s. Sophie Bowness, the artist's granddaughter,
points out in her elegant catalogue essay that these late carvings recall the
purist modernism of this earlier period, but in look not strategy.
I
guess what it comes down to is this: the sublime inevitably entails a degree of
theatricality for its effect, which cannot help but wear off, whereas beauty by
its nature touches on actual, physical sensations rather than imagined or
recalled ones. The "loveliness"
and "sense of mystery" of Hepworth's sculptures are precisely what
give them renewable aesthetic potential.
For sure they are period-bound in their utopian sense of purity. She and Moore belonged to a puritanical
modernist generation committed to a notion of universal form as a quasi-religion. Unlike Picasso, they are both
constitutionally incapable of stylistic self-irony. True to her affinities with Arp, Mondrian, Gabo, and Brancusi,
Hepworth's titles invariably incorporate the word "form" and are
pregnant with a vague, generalised sense of growth and life and natural
rhythm. Hepworth's brilliant style
gambit was to connect her abstraction with prehistory - think of all those
"menhirs" – as an alternative to primitivism, conceptually linking
her cool modernist streamlining with a "timeless" human
continuum. Of course
"timelessness" itself dates as surely as hi-tech futurism does
because ideological belief in it rises and falls as relentlessly as hem lines. But the sense of refinement in Barbara
Hepworth is so acute that purity of form and high style are rendered
inseperable.
Barbara
Hepworth: Stone Sculpture at PaceWildenstein, 32 E 57 Street, New York City,
February 10-March 17, 2001
February 23, 2001
Nice Photos
of Naughty Bohemians
Click title to enter
February 16, 2001
I give up! I’m tired of
not liking David Salle. In marked
contrast, on the evidence of his latest show at Gagosian, which continues to
March 3, the artist himself never tires of being David Salle, exhausting
though it must be. For sure, however,
there’s still plenty not to like about this perennial Bad Boy of painting, the
same things, indeed, that have always irked earnest art lovers: his trickiness
and repetitiveness and suspected cynicism.
My repulsion started right at
the outset of my career, before even learning that he was one of the ‘80s
artists one was supposed to despise.
I was in Toronto, writing my first foreign review (of the renovated
Henry Moore wing at the Art Gallery of Ontario) and I was overwhelmed by a
visceral disgust at the bombast and sameness of their huge, clearly premature
Salle retrospective. And I remember,
quite clearly, that it wasn’t the vaguely nasty subjects that appalled me, but the
deathly, enervating form. Right up to
his last show at Gagosian’s old SoHo space, with those teddy bears and Alex
Katz quotations, my antipathy held out.
And by then I wanted to start liking him. He was sufficiently out of fashion to
warrant admiration for his doggedness, plus I had met him at a panel and found
him to be totally charming, plus my whole attitude towards authenticity and
appropriation had swung around in my first decade of artwriting. But the paintings just seemed puny and
inadequate.
And yet now I find myself
ravished (an appropriate term for images with pastoral frolic as its central,
repeated motif) and, well you know what Cicero said about frolicing. There is indeed a kind of post-coital guilt
and confusion when you realise you have been seduced by an artist you thought a
turn-off. Will I now have a revised
view of the earlier work? Will I soon
have the old doubts about this newest work?
Has it changed or have I? Forget
Cicero, it’s Heraclitus I need to worry about (as in “You can never step into
the river twice”).
And now, of course, with these
shifting emotions and distorted memories, I don’t have neatly stored within my
brain the right memories and responses to do justice to the subject here, to be
able to answer the question empirically enough about Salle’s shifts and
mine. Just why is it that this new
series seems strong and fresh and vigorous when earlier efforts from the same
hand, employing similar strategies and in pursuit indubitably of a consisitent
agenda, fell so short?
I have a hunch. There has been a subtle shift of nonetheless
seismic consequence in the balance of power between image and surface
treatment. Before, despite the po-mo
overload and deconstructive disregard of the intended meanings of his appropriated
sources, power was with the image. The
means of putting the image down was subservient to its emotional tenor, even
when this tenor was counter-intuitive to the image, – for example, cold
treatment for erotic subjects. Now, and
it is significant that the central image is of innocents fishing in a rococo
landscape, touch and tone seem to determine choices of image or artist to
appropriate or quote. One feels, say,
that that Derain harlequin came in because the brush demanded it. It is actually better for Salle to tune in
to a Jasper Johns pattern than an Alex Katz figure because – for all his
eclecticism and layering - it is texture not context that his painting were
crying out for.
It is extraordinary, really, how
diverse Salle can be in his painterly effects without ever quite capitulating
and becoming painterly per se. He is
still more relaxed, more intuitive, more form-conscious, with imagery than he
is with shape, gesture, color. It is as
if imagery is the stuff on his palette and paint some fabulous discovery or
invention. What an odd fellow! But his adventures with paint are
invigorating. Like the happy peasant in
his serial stencil he has caught something impressive. The juxtaposition of linen and canvas, the
optical collisions of oil and acrylic, are as constructive as they are
deconstructive. Of course, these tricks
all serve to keep any kind of expressiveness in steel enforced quotation marks. But that’s okay. This is David Salle.
These paintings have the chilly dryness of a strong martini, if not the
purity.
David Salle: Pastoral continues
at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, to March 3, 2001
View images from this show at www.gagosian.com/gg/west24.html
but be sure to come back here!