(An Appropriate Distance)

 

FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP

Our review this week is of "Randy Bloom" at Emerge in upstate Saugerties, NY (through September 11).  And do I ever have a distinguished guest critic for you!  The review below is by Katherine Crum, whose Ph.D. is from Columbia, and whose museum experience includes founding the Baruch  College gallery at CUNY, directing the art museum at Mills College in California, and working as chief curator at the Parrish Museum in Southampton.  As owner & co-director of the Nicholas Wilder gallery in Los Angeles, back in the 60s, Ms. Crum represented Frankenthaler, Noland and Barnett Newman, among others, and she has published on figures as diverse as Dan Christensen and Pat Lipsky.    Herewith her review & many thanks to her:

"Randy Bloom's current show at Emerge in Saugerties is a perfect introduction for those who don't yet know her work and a delightful taste of new directions for those who do. Strong work, good choices and a thoughtful installation highlight three phases of her work in one compact space.

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I've long thought of Manierre Dawson (1887-1969) as "the pink cubist."  I'd only seen individual paintings by him in exhibitions of early American moderns and pink seemed a conspicuous part of his color schemes, while the dates of his paintings and their angular, convoluted shapes reminded me of Picasso & Braque during their heroic period of Analytic Cubism. I am a great fan of Analytic Cubism, so I welcomed the chance to see Dawson's work in greater depth.  On view at Schoelkopf on Manhattan's Upper East Side is "Manierre Dawson: Early Abstraction" (through August 26).  On view are 17 oil paintings done by this elusive master between 1906 and ca.1921 -- and with twelve done between 1910 and 1915, roughly the heyday of Analytic Cubism. Read More 

In the middle of a hot-hot summer, we have a whole show of cool, cool pictures (both in a literal sense, meaning with the shapes within them mostly carefully-and dispassionately defined, and in a slang sense, that is to say "hip," "with-it" or "the cat's meow" in the slang of other eras). This modestly-scaled but nonetheless ambitious show of 20 paintings by 10 artists is called "Hard-Edged: Geometric Abstraction" and it's at the newest branch of the newish Upsilon Gallery, the branch at 23 East 67th Street (through August13).  

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