(An Appropriate Distance)

 

FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP

Since the spring of 2018, I have been pondering Mayor Bill de Blasio's plan to "diversify" New York City's three specialized or "elite" public high schools by getting the state legislature in Albany to abolish the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) that is required under the Hecht-Calandra Act of 1971 for all students who wish to enter these high schools.

De Blasio's argument is that these tests prevent all but a very few African American  and Latino children from being invited to attend these schools, and that such de facto segregation makes a mockery of the city's professed claims to be truly liberal and democratic.

He wants to diversify the student bodies of these schools by increasing the number of African American and Latino children enrolled in them even if these children don't perform well enough on the SHSATs to be admitted on the same basis as the white and Asian-American children who currently occupy almost all of the seats at these schools.

This places me in a quandary.

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 Helen Frankenthaler was a great artist and a sympathetic personality – for me, at any rate. Though we were never that close, I feel privileged to have known her.  When I met her, on the occasion of her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1969, she was at the peak of her form and the work bowled me over.  I wish I could say the same of "Helen Frankenthaler: Selected Paintings" at Yares Art (through May 18).  Still, despite the problems inherent in putting together a show of work by an artist now eight years dead, there is much at Yares to be enjoyed and appreciated (or at least there was, when I last saw the show on March 27). Read More 

Although the venue didn't send me, there is a lively, exhilarating show of 20 abstract paintings by as many artists in the grandly-styled "Gallery of the American Fine Arts Society" at the Art Students League on West 57th Street (through May 1).  The show is entitled "New York – Centric" and it was curated by James Little, the hard-edged abstractionist whose work I most recently mentioned in my March 1 posting on "The Art Show." Read More 

What, after all, is – or was – "Lyrical Abstraction?"  You wouldn't believe what a web of confusion Wikipedia manages to weave around the term!  But that shouldn't inhibit you, gentle reader, from going to --- and enjoying – a highly diverting show of 13 pocket-sized works entitled "Lyrical Abstraction: Small Scale" at Bookstein Projects, at 60 East 66th Street on the Upper East Side (through April 13). Read More 

A few weeks ago, in my review of Judith Godwin's work, I discussed the first generation of abstract expressionists, and observed how each one of the original ten "created a single hallmark or image that stamped every one of his paintings with his individual personality after he achieved his mature style."   But did Adolph Gottlieb, one of the greatest of that great generation, leave it at that?  For the answer, I strongly recommend "Adolph Gottlieb: Classic Paintings," his absolutely stunning show at Pace in Chelsea (510 West 25th Street, through April 13).

For the answer to my question -- did Gottlieb leave it at that? -- I find myself thinking of a line from Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra."  There a character called Enobarbus describes the hold that Cleopatra has over Antony. "Age cannot wither her," he says, "nor custom stale/ Her infinite variety." 

And this seemingly infinite variety is exactly the magic that Gottlieb (1903-1974) worked so well.  A hallmark image can so easily become monotonous and even boring, if the artist doesn't ring enough changes on it. Variety, to quote another very old saying, is the spice of life.

Gottlieb's best-known image was the "burst," which in its original form set two forms on a white field, with a round red "sun" above and a bushy black "earth" below. This was not his only image, and the show at Pace has a few examples of others as well (most notably, variants upon his "frozen sounds" series). 

However, 15 of the 20 paintings in the original checklist (which contains many loans from major museums) are variants of the "burst," as done between 1956 and 1973.  And what a lot of changes he managed to ring!

These changes fall into three principal categories: changes in color, changes in shape, and changes in scale.  Closest in shape is "Purple over Green" (1960), the painting that leads off the checklist and appears in the first of the four large spaces in the gallery. But as the title suggests, its color is far from red above and black below.

Another painting in the front gallery that is close to the original format in color is "Cadmium Red above Black" (1959), but instead of a disc above, there is a solid oblong shape.

Next we get to a radical variation in both color and shape, in "Descending Arrow" (1956), which hangs in the second of the four large spaces.  As this painting is owned by the Museum of Modern Art, it may be one of the artist's better known images. 

Even though it depicts an open black pentagon up top and a downward pointing arrow below, all on a mostly rose-colored field with a band of pink across the top, it remains somehow instantly recognizable as a Gottlieb.

At 8 feet by 6 feet, this is one of the larger paintings in the show, and to that extent characteristic, but right next to it hangs an untitled painting from 1969 that differs radically not only in color and shape but also in scale. 

The field is a deep maroon, with a small greige disc up top and two small, straight horizontal strips of color (black and pink) instead of the bush below.  It measures only about 20 by 16 inches, and looks even smaller by comparison with "Descending Arrow."  It struck me as very witty -- and hilarious.

And so it goes, throughout the entire show – endless variety, endless variations on a theme.  "Burma Red" (1973) is a tall, narrow painting with a small round sun above, on a field of white, but instead of a black bush below, we get an impish, ethereal and very Miró-esque upward-trending spatter of black below.

"Expanding" (1962) has a large blue sun above, and a rust-colored bush below all set on a field of green.

My own favorite of the four spaces was the side space adjoining the second space, where the colors were especially rich and Augustan, and the images varied the most from painting to painting.  

The image I've chosen to illustrate this review is from this gallery, and the inclusion of a spectator gives a good idea of the scale of some of these majestic paintings as well as their remarkable color and variety in image.

To the left of my image, you see "The Crest" (1959), owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art.   At 9 ft. high and 7½ feet wide, it's one of the largest paintings in the show, and with some of the most off-beat coloring – blackish-brown for the sun above, and pink for the earth below, all on a field of golden-brown.  

Catty-corner, to the right of my image, you see an even more radical revision of the theme in "Aftermath" (1959), with no bush at all below, and only a very small sun up top – colored a deep gold on a field of very warm gray.

It's really too bad that neither the Whitney nor MoMA can be bothered to show the work of this great artist in their own space.  No, no, no, we must have trendier art instead!  But that's all the more reason to make a beeline for Pace and get to enjoy this marvelous show for yourselves…

When Rich Timperio was staging his "Nation" shows at Sideshow, I often saw small sculptures by Harvey Citron there.  They were very realistic, nay even academic, but well done and I have an appetite for realism (when well done), so I'd mentioned them in a few of my reviews.   Thus when the New York Academy of Art, where Citron teaches, staged "Harvey Citron: Faculty Sabbatical Exhibition," the artist sent me an email about it. I regret that I only got down to Tribeca to see this show day before yesterday, and I am only writing about it now, two days before it ends.  Still, if this review makes you want to see it, it's right there in the lobby of the building at 111 Franklin Street, and open today (Friday) and tomorrow (Saturday)from 9 am to 9 pm, as well as on Sunday from 12 to 8 pm. Read More 

It looked like curtains for the 2019 Armory Show. Just over a week before it was scheduled to open on Piers 92 and 94 on the Hudson River, a city inspection revealed that Pier 92 was too dilapidated to support the expected crowds, and it looked for a moment as though the whole show would have to be closed down.  However, the show's resourceful organizers managed to oust Volta, a rival art fair, from neighboring Pier 90, and so The Armory Show was able to open on time – with all the 60 booths originally intended for Pier 92 relocated to Pier 90.  The bulk of the show –135 booths – were as they had been in previous years – located on Pier 94. Pier 92 was consigned to a lounge and restaurant area – which presumably wouldn't overtax its weight-bearing potential. Read More 

In this year of the woman, it is assumed that any woman painter calling herself "an abstract expressionist" never achieved the renown she deserves because the "old boy's network" of painters like Pollock & de Kooning and critics like Greenberg & Rosenberg discriminated against her.  But does this really apply to Judith Godwin, eighteen of whose paintings, dating from between 1953 and 2006-2007, are on view at Berry Campbell (through March 16)?  The only way you're going to arrive at an answer to this question is to go and see this frequently rewarding show for yourself. Read More 

I do enjoy "The Art Show" sponsored by the Art Dealers Association of America and staged in the roomy but blessedly not overwhelming Park Avenue Armory at 67th Street (through Sunday, March 3). True, I can unreservedly recommend only four of the displays offered by its 72 dealers, but I also saw individual works of note at several others.  And it's so civilized, with lots of visitor seating, and predominantly two- and three-dimensional art:  paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and (mostly little) objets d'art.  No need to steel oneself against an onslaught of supposedly "hot" dada, though certainly the visitor in search of that could find traces of it, too.

PROBLEMS WITH LANGUAGE

Or should I say "cool" dada? I am sadly behind in the latest adjectives to describe what we in the '60s would have called "trendy" or "with-it" art. I don't seem to hear the various adaptations of "cutting edge" around much these days, but I don't know what's replaced it—

unless it's identity politics, by which I mean the wholesale abandonment of looking at the art for guidance and basing one's evaluations of it solely on the racial or sexual characteristics of the artist making the art: female artists to be praised, no matter how inferior the art/male artists to be ignored unless gay or belonging to an ethnic minority or suffering from some disability.

This form of standard-lowering has been growing for some time, of course, but it does seem to be reaching new highs – or lows – these days. And not even good female artists are necessarily flattered by such homage – Helen Frankenthaler (to the best of my knowledge) never participated in all-female shows. 

Like me, she seems to have felt that unless her work could compete on a level playing field with that of men, superlatives proved nothing. 

Moreover, if the Oscars are any indication, some African-Americans are not necessarily flattered either by being condescended to.  Writer-Director Spike Lee, I understand, nearly bolted for the door when "The Green Book" won the Academy Award for best picture.

Although I haven't seen this movie myself yet, it has been called a rather cliché-ridden buddy movie that sentimentalizes race relations, and could only have been chosen because it dealt at all with that subject, and not because it was a good movie.

 Lee, who had won his first Oscar earlier in the evening for best adapted screenplay (of "Black KkKlansman"), might have felt (as I see it) that awarding the top honor to this second-rate movie in a sense vitiated his own achievement—the carry-over implication  being that he, too, had been given his award not because he was a top-notch script writer but only because he was an African-American.

(Postscript added after the rest of this review went online: Now that I've seen the movie myself, I can understand Lee's dismay maybe a little better.  I enjoyed it, I confess, because I go for feel-good movies with happy endings, but this is my own middlebrow taste -- any true highbrow knows that Life doesn't always end happily so why should a movie that claims to be true to life? 

(In this case, part of the feel-good feeling came from  seeing how horribly African-Americans were treated, especially (thoiugh not exclusively) in the South, back in 1962. It allows Caucasians at least to feel that we  have made progress in this department over the past 57 years, but to African Americans, there is still too much discrimination and prejudice, so they may not be impressed by the same indications of progress that impressed a Caucasian like myself and may even be suspicious of any movie which underlines them.

(The other thing that saved this movie for me was all the music in it. This is really a very middlebrow thing of mine, but I've so far seen three feel-good movies this year which derived a large part of their feel-good quality from the delightfully cheerful music in them: "The Green Book," "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Mary Poppins Returns"  Yes, gentle reader, I even enjoyed "Mary Poppins Returns."  Now go ahead and shoot me and put me out of competition for the role of movie critic).

At any rate, as far as I am concerned, there are plenty of African-American painters and sculptors who are very well known and much admired, but if I don't think well of their work myself, I don't praise them. 

The same goes for women artists.  Even in "the year of the woman" I will only praise the work of a woman artist when I think it's good.

This is more than I can say for Will Heinrich, who reviewed "The Art Show" for The New York Times this morning (March 1). The headline to his review: "Women Dominate This Year's Art Show Fair."

He then proceeds to itemize and discuss quite a number of what to me are really inferior works of art by female artists– meanwhile ignoring even the better work of women artists -- and men artists --in the show.  

Oh, he wasn't entirely wrong all the time – I too could, for example, work up a certain amount of enthusiasm for the beach-side nudes of Joan Semmel at Alexander Gray Associates (though I was more intrigued by the small semi-surrealist abstracts of that legendary dealer, Betty Parsons¸ at the same booth -- which Heinrich didn't mention).

 And I was fascinated by the joint exhibition of San Francisco's Fraenkel Gallery and New York's David Zwirner, who combined the photographs of Diane Arbus with the paintings of Alice Neel to produce a really astounding convocation of harmonies. 

Not were only the media of these two artists different, but (as the labels point out) Neel knew her subjects and posed them at will, while Arbus liked to choose subjects at random, off the street. 

Nevertheless, they shared the same Upper West Side neurasthenic and voyeuristic female sensibility, so some amazing parallels emerge with the juxtaposition of some of their (carefully-selected) images.

This is the third out of the four displays that I can unreservedly recommend.

Among the other work all or predominantly by women that I found worth looking at – although they escaped Heinrich's eagle eye – were the stately slab-like abstracts by Sam Moyer at Sean Kelly, and the pure little green-and-yellow painting by Anne Truitt at Matthew Marks. (Incidentally, I didn't realize Sam Moyer was a woman until I looked the booth up in my press kit.  So much for characteristically "feminine" art.)

Nor could I overlook the playful little felines and canines at Mary-Anne Martin, whose "Reigning Cats and Dogs, 200 B.C to 2019 A.D." featured small two-and-three dimensional work by both men and women from Mexico (the knockout is a reproduction of a painting by Frida Kahlo, but I noticed lots of other amusing pieces as well).

Well, now, and how about the men?  I should say that what I liked among the men in terms of numbers was mostly the handiwork of Dead White Males.  True, they were mostly Americans and mostly from the 20th century, but Jill Newhouse reached bravely back to 19th century France to offer "The Enduring Power of Image," a show that juxtaposed sketches and oil studies by Eugène Delacroix with more recent representational artists. 

She tried the same thing, last year I believe it was, with Vuillard, and  my reaction to it was the same as my reaction to this year's effort: in both cases, the old guys were better.

Two galleries were offering early 20th-century Americans with often very handsome results: Meredith Ward and Thomas Colville Fine Art.  

At Colville, the emphasis was on the American Abstract Artists, the group that was carrying the ball in America for modernism in the 1930s, with work by George L. K. Morris, Werner Drewes, Charles Green Shaw, Emil Bisttram & John Ferren – some of this work even dating back to the 1930s. 

My own favorite in this booth, however, was a hilarious 1947 work on paper, "Figures at Curtain," by the abstract expressionist William Baziotes.

At Ward, the accent was on even earlier work, with a sweet little selection of early John Marin – from before, during &  after World War I (I didn't ask this time around, but the last time I did, this gallery represented the Marin estate).

Also on view here were some other early Americans, not only Charles Green Shaw & Charles Biederman from the American Abstract Artists, but also curiously primitivistic cityscapes by Edward C. Tiffin, Glenn Coleman and others.

Not a DWM but also belonging to an earlier era is the moving show at Michael Rosenfeld of small-to-medium-sized oils and studies by Henry Ossawa Tanner, the African-American academic artist who achieved fame in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th century for his religious paintings. 

This is my fourth most favorite booth at The Art Show – it is so quiet and restful, with soothing colors and simple compositions.  The centerpiece, "Sodom and Gomorrah (ca. 1920-24) is mostly built up of towering blue clouds, against which the small figures of Lot and his family, fleeing the wickedness of those twin cities, serve as no more than accent notes down at the bottom of the canvas (Lot's wife has already turned to a pillar of salt because she looked back).

In photography, Pace McGill has a nice, large color photograph (measuring 60 x 74 inches) of "Yosemite in Smog"(1988)  by Richard Misrach (of whom I'd never heard). 

Gordon Parks, on the other hand, is so well-known that it didn't surprise me to see that Howard Greenberg had his whole booth dedicated to him.  Once again, I got to see his lovely picture of Helen Frankenthaler in her studio, taken for Life in the early mid-1950s, and unsurprisingly there were many photos of African-American worthies, but the image which stayed with me longest was the shot of Ingrid Bergman from 1947 I think it was, and entitled "Stromboli." 

This was the famous moment when she was turning from saint to whore in the eyes of Hollywood because she'd gone to Italy to make a movie with the director, Roberto Rossellini, and become his mistress, then pregnant, and finally his wife (having had to divorce her prim-and-proper Swedish husband in order to do so).

The photograph shows Bergman's pure face in the lower right; in the background is a group of witch-like female figures clad in black shawls and clearly about to cast stones at her.  The whole story of her "degradation" is captured in that image – a masterpiece of story-telling.

Checking out the first generation of abstract expressionism, I found it in short supply (beyond the Baziotes drawing).  I did see a lively, very abstract and brightly-colored image on paper by Hans Hofmann from 1946 hanging outside the booth of Donald Morris of Birmingham, Michigan. 

And there was a piquant pale blue-and-white "Blue Elegy"" by Robert Motherwell hanging front and center in the booth of Susan Sheehan.  Sheehan's a New York print dealer and this Motherwell, done in 1981, is a lithograph and etching.  The whole gallery was prints, and done in spring-like colors of pale blue and green.  Very pretty.

It was also one of the three booths facing the entrance to "The Art Show." It was to the left of center.  In the center was a large Sperone Westwater booth devoted to a display of works on paper by Susan Rothenberg, best known for her participation in the neo-expressionist craze of the late 70s and early 80s.  Not my thing.  And I wonder whether it will be anybody's thing. 

Why should Rothenberg be anything beyond yesterday's newspapers, when all her male contemporaries are pretty much forgotten?  But admittedly this is a market I know nothing about….

To the right of the entrance is the third booth in this lineup, and it's my second most-favorite booth.   Here June Kelly has an absolutely beautiful display of the abstract paintings of James Little.

Four of the works on display are the "Slants," composed of diagonal bands of color, and four are the "White Paintings," in which little circles on white fields open onto colored circles of underpainting. 

Both of these types were featured in Little's last show but the slants in particular here have been carefully selected to show the variety of their color schemes and composition, with one of them in warm colors, one in cool colors, and two in various blends of warm and cool. 

A member of the Class of 1974 at the Memphis Academy of Design, Little followed that up with an MFA from Syracuse University. He is therefore not exactly a spring chicken, but he does belong to a generation of gifted abstract painters who have yet to receive the recognition they deserve.

The generation immediately preceding them did receive recognition in the 1960s, and their appeal – for me at least – has worn exceedingly well.   They are in command at my Number One choice for excellence at The Art Show: Yares Art. 

It has handsome examples of work by Larry Poons, both recent and from 1978. Morris Louis is represented by a flaming stripe painting, "Number 9" from 1961.  There are not one but two Kenneth Nolands,  a delicate, smaller 1961 "target" and a muscular big chevron, "Blue-Green Confluence" (1963).

Finally, the show includes a tough but melodious Jules Olitski, "Patutsky Passion" (1963), and a big Helen Frankenthaler, "Pavillion."

This last in some ways is the most challenging of the lot – if only because it was done in 1971 and I often have trouble with Frankenthaler's work from this decade. 

This one I think I am fascinated by, but as Yares is about to open a whole show of work at its Fifth Avenue gallery by this artist, and I plan to review it, I am going to forego reproducing "Pavillion" and entertain you instead with an installation shot of Olitski's looming "Patutsky" and  Noland's towering chevron.

I couldn't face all those talks at the annual conference of the College Art Association this year, but as the conference was held in Manhattan, I did mosey on down to the New York Hilton to enjoy the Smithsonian's reception for its alumni and to look at the CAA's book exhibits.   As with the art world as a whole, postmodernism and identity politics for the most part upstaged esthetics, both in the choice of subjects for books and in the way that these subjects were dealt with, but still I found a handful of tomes that interested me and that I would have bought had I a) the money b) the space to put them in and c) the time to do them justice by reading them carefully and all the way through. Read More