(An Appropriate Distance)

 

FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP

Well, and so Stanley Whitney is still with us.  When I walked by Lisson (on my way to Berry Campbell, further along West 24th Street), I glanced through Lisson's big windows and spied within "Stanley Whitney: Twenty Twenty" (through December 18).  According to the online installation shot accompanying my first review of Whitney's work – discussing his show at Team in 2012 – neither the colors nor the compositions of his larger and more prepossessing paintings have changed that much in the past nine years.   But hey, they look great – in fact, so terrific that I couldn't resist walking right into Lisson to examine them in more detail. Read More 

Though I've reviewed the paintings of Stanley Boxer (1926 – 2000) many times, mostly it has been his work from the '80s and '90s that I discussed, the pictures covered with glittering, glistering accretions of matière. Only occasionally have I glanced at let alone reviewed his work from the early 1970s, but these are the paintings now featured in "Stanley Boxer: The Ribbon Paintings (1971- 1976)" at Berry Campbell in Chelsea (through December 23).  And they form a wonderful chapter in pure painting.

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In 2021 I skipped "The Armory Show."  Its ratio of annuals to perennials in recent years has been roughly 200:10 at best   -- and I consider a work "perennial" if to me it has staying power, whether it is new or old. At "The Art Show," staged by the Art Dealers Association of America at the Park Avenue Armory (and held this year for the first time in November), the ratio is more like 70:10. This makes it for me much more worthwhile. I'm afraid I'm picky, though, – so when I say I found ten booths out of seventy worthy of praise, and several  more at least worthy of mention, that signifies enthusiasm for me!

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At Yares Art on Fifth Avenue is a stupendous show.  It is entitled "Kenneth Noland: Context is the Key -- Paintings: 1958-1970" (through January 22, 2022).  I don't know quite what "context" Yares refers to.  Certainly the socioeconomic and political troubles of that far-off era, while they may seem trifling in retrospect, were no less dire at the time than our current evils seem today. Maybe the gallery is thinking in esthetic terms of the '60s as a period when the sun of modernism wasn't yet as nearly obscured by the clouds of anti-modernism, the way it is today. Whatever. Anyway, it's a helluva show.

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