Apollinaire Bandaged

John Perreault as Apollinaire. Halloween, 2005

1. NEVER USE THE FIRST PERSON.

In in the late ‘60s, art critic Lawrence Alloway said that, like the poet Apollinaire, I was of the peripatetic school of art criticism. When, in ancient times, I was writing for the Village Voice I walked around looking at art and made it seem part of ordinary life. He did not mean I was Aristotelian, for the same term is used for Aristotle’s (and Socrates’)  ambulatory style of philosophizing .

Although I am decidedly anti-Aristotelian, I am indeed a teacher. Some mean-spirited folks might call me parenthetic rather than peripatetic, for, yes, I think of everything I write as if it is in one big parenthesis or parenthesis within a parenthesis within a parenthesis within a parenthesis. Well-knit or not, peripateticism is also the composition solution when you want to encompass a lot of art.

So I thought I would try a re-run. A little of this, a little of that. And a lot of walking around.

2. NEVER OFFER PERSONAL INFORMATION

The High Line Park Snakes Through Chelsea Art District

I plan ahead. There are over 350 Chelsea art galleries. I glean my itinerary  from announcements, listings, ArtNet, ArtDaily and a few other places — even taking into account the scant number of announcements I now receive by snail mail, their function largely subsumed by email. Artists still seem to want physical announcements sent, so thousands are printed. But I want to see the proof that they are all mailed out at today’s postage cost and at the throw-away rates. I remember that artist, writer and former Berlin coffee-house girl, Lil Picard handed out art announcements she had received, from two huge shopping bags, as a Street Work in 1969. Now I recycle announcements by doing instant coffee drawings on the envelopes.

Nevertheless, some believe posterity will demand a paper-trail, little cards to archive as proof that something really happened. This is a USPS conspiracy to forstall the total decimation of its services, all so 20th-century.

So how and where to start?

In one afternoon – art critics never appear anywhere before noon —- you simply cannot cover Chelsea, midtown, uptown, SoHo, Tribeca, the East Village, the Lower East Side,  DUMBO, Williamsburg and now Bushwick. So obeying the new rule that you should go where the moneys is, I decided on Chelsea. I grouped the target galleries by street and planned my path.

Arrived there by taking the  R uptown to the L, then the L crosstown to 8th Avenue and then, rather than switching to the uptown 8th Avenue Local, just walked the long crosstown then uptown blocks from 14th and 8th to 19th and 1oth. Too Much Information!

Getting home? Darn it. Just take a cab!

3. NEVER ADMIT YOU WERE WRONG

When the Chelsea Gallery District was just sprouting, I proclaimed it would never work. Too hard to get to. I was wrong. I now think the transportation difficulties are part of the glamour. People somehow had already managed to find their way to the Piers, full of what I call sports dungeons, so why not art venues between 10th and 11^th Avenues?

And now there is the glorious High Line park. You can walk from 30^th to the Meatpacking District along an old, elevated railroad track, wonderfully planted with native grasses and wildflowers. The High Line was once used for delivering meat but is now for  delivering tourists. One day, I predict, it will sport a monorail. In the meantime, the design conceit is that of a river running downtown, widening as it meanders. It works. Even in winter. And you can finally see bits of the Hudson River, at least until the view is totally blocked by high-end hotels, ritzy condos, and designer showrooms.

New York City grows in weird and unexpected ways. As you know,  the Whitney will be the High-Line anchor where once there was butchery of cows, pigs, and chickens; then leather bars and S&M establishments. 

New York City has a mind of its own. It wants to reclaim ancient river views. It wants new places for high-end boutiques.

4. NEVER REVIEW YOUNG ARTISTS; NEVER COMPARE

My first stop was  the Grayson Cox installation, “The Water’s Fine,” at the Gasser and Grunert Gallery, 531 W. 19 (closed.) I had seen an intriguing video on ArtNet, in which Cox is  interviewed by artist Jon Kessler and Fia Backstrom, in situ. If you don’t have the patience for the video, then Imagine this: single-stemmed cafe tables for stand-up dining, but the displaced tabletops are perfectly round holes, everything else is a single- height platform, wall-to-wall, filling the gallery. So to see the things on the walls I had to to crawl under the platform, then pop-up through the holes near the “art” on the walls. The wallpieces are – I hope intentionally — stand-ins for art. Or art for prairie dogs. They are basically weak Richard Artschwager,   which is saying a lot, since that artist’s work is weak to begin with. Or are they reinforced Neil Jenny’s?

So what I really saw was other visitors popping up through gopher holes. You could  also lean against the edges of the holes and chat with whomever popped up.

5. NEVER ADMIT YOUR FAULTS

Whenever there is a grid in Manhattan the even numbers are on the south side of the street and the odd ones on the north, but there is no telling if the numbers on  adjacent blocks are lined up. The length of the street and the frontage of the various buildings is what determines where the numbers end up. At least it’s better than in Tokyo where the numbers are according to  the age of the building. #1 is the first built; #2, which may be five buildings away, is the second built, etc.

Since I can never quite remember how the numbers play out in Chelsea  and am too lazy to Google, I always have to guess. Is it easier to go to 11^th Avenue then swing around the next block or shorter to go back to 10^th?   It’s a meaningless throw of the dice, since you never know what new art in what new gallery you may come upon, or what awful artist or art critic you might avoid.

Audrey Flack: Self-Portrait as St. Teresa

6. NEVER FIND FAULT. NEVER ADVISE

The day of my art search, Audrey Flack, like Cox, was near the end of her run. She was represented at one of my favorite galleries, the oldies-but-goldies Gary Snyder (529 W 20). The show consisted of her  bronze statuettes, plus two gigantic, mix-media heads; one of her  iconic Photo-Realist still-life paintings was visble off the playing field. Flack, by the way, is not the only woman Photo-Realist, for there is also Idelle Weber.

Flack’s edge is sharpest when she confronts kitsch head on. More power to her!  She is at her best when I am forced to question myself.  What am I looking at?  Is Flack serious? What century are we in?

The bronze sculptures, however, have a scale problem that the paintings never had. Sofia (Vanitas), 1995, is  much smaller than the announcement photo had lead me to believe.  I was nonplussed. It is the best of the allegorical statuettes, but would have been great, fantastic, stupendous if it had been life-sized. A scull-headed female figure – half skeleton, half- anatomical model —  dripping with jewels? And holding a crystal ball? Why not?

The gigantic,  Maya-like, mixed-media Daphne, 1996,  is 72” tall. But even better is Self-Portrait as St. Teresa at 68″.  I want Flack to do another self-portrait head like this, but of herself as Medusa; the Medusa statuette is not scary enough.  Or of herself as Eleanor Roosevelt  or Wonder Woman.

7. NEVER COMPARE, DISMISS, OR REMINISCE

Douglas Heubler (1924-1997), at Paula Cooper 534 W 21 (closed), was one of the artists selected by art promoter Seth Sieglaub for his “breakthrough” conceptual art show at Leo Castelli in 1969.  I always found Heubler’s early work droll.  We cannot easily forget: The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do no wish to add anymore.   “Crocodile Tears,” a collection of photo/text pieces derived from a screenplay of the same name, however, is of little interest. These wall-piece story-boards are even worse than the meaningless juxtapositions of John Baldessori. What was Heubler thinking? He should have followed his own advice.

8. NEVER REVEAL ARTISTIC ROOTS.

Ernesto Neto: Installation

Ernesto Neto, at Tanya Bonakdar, 521 W. 21 to May 25 is the Brazilian known for updated participatory art, pioneered in its “tropicalia” form by Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica.  Neto uses nets. The new installation is crocheted and, of course, if visitors remove their shoes they may crawl in and bounce around, wildly cellphone-pixing each other. Photo op alert!

Since last year, when I found myself  tangled up in Gustav Metzger’s drop-cloth at the New Museum, I resist most forms of art that require me to get under or into them. But come to think of it, I have a long history of resistance to participation; I had no problem shaking hands with Lygia Clark when she first visited the U.S.A., but I resisted crawling into Oiticica’s “nest” when it was shown at MoMA as part of the Information show. I don’t know why I was seduced by Grayson Cox’s gopher holes. Maybe it is anything resembling Fiber Art that I should resist.

9. NEVER WRITE ABOUT CRAFT

Sheila Hicks, of course, is the exception. A big sampling of her work is now at Sikkema Jenkins (530 W. 22., to May 25).  Most are on the small side; a mistake I think. They look like samples. With some editing, she would easily be seen as one of the great ones, which, in any case, was the Craft World consensus before  that World disappeared and was transformed into  Everything Art (or MAD Art). Everything Art is not art, it is everything. So why bother? Are we to compare Hicks major efforts to Robert Morris’ felt pieces or to the hanging threads and latex of Eva Hesse? Hicks’ fiber pieces can anchor an atrium or decorate an airplane cabin and that may be enough. But they are not in the least bit anxious. 

10. NEVER REPUDIATE YOUR OWN OUTDATED OPINIONS.

“Gilbert & George: London Picture” at both Sonnabend at 536 West 22^nd  and Lehmann Maupin at 540 West 26th and in the Lower East Side at 201 Chrystie Street to June 23 is disappointing.   After the voluminous show at Sonnabend, not only did I not want to visit Lehmann Maupin, I never wanted to see another Gilbert & George artwork again. These are made up of black and red headlines  (shades of Barbara Kruger) lifted from London tabloids. LONDON TERROR BOMB TARGETS…..MOTHER RAPED AT TRAIN STATION. Help! Why did I ever take them seriously?

11. NEVER COMPARE PERIODS OF AN ARTIST’S WORK

Bryce Marden’s “Ru Ware Project” (2007-12) , Matthew Marks, (502 W to June 23) tries to recreate from memory the super-rare colors of 11^th century Chinese Ru Ware the artist saw in Taipei in ‘07. It is splendid. But here is the problem. Seeing  the RuWare panels, followed by Marden’s new oil-on-marble paintings (at 526 W. 22^nd) and then walking into a back room and seeing one of his recent tangled strand paintings gives one pause. The marbles are tasty. But suddenly we are forced to realize that the tangled yarn paintings are…weak. Now they seem to owe more to Rosenquist billboard spaghetti than anything else

Joseph Nechvatal: asstrOnOmnical affected autOmata, 2011

12. NEVER PRAISE AN ARTIST WHO HASN’T HAD AN ARTFORUM COVER.

Joseph Nechvatal’s  nOise anusmOs,  at Gallery Richard 514 W. 24, to May 21, is one of those exhibitions you won’t be able to forget.

What are viruses? Viruses live. Maybe. To biologists and the like, they are totally confusing. They don’t fit into the Three Domains or the Six Kingdoms. Where did they come from? They require host cells to replicate. We fear them. The HIV virus causes AIDS. 25 million dead!  Although deadly, viruses are also metaphors. We dread computer viruses, but everyone hopes their YouTube clips go viral. The artist/writer/composer Nechvatal has even proposed that humans may be viruses, living off the earth.

Nechvatal, once associated with the now-historical Co-Lab and ABC No Rio venues, is the virus guy and has been for quite awhile. He has figured out how to use algorithms to act as “viruses” on images and sounds, in effect programming artworks that make themselves……Always anti-postmodernist, his new exhibition is strangely alluring. What I like more than their mode of construction is the de-stabilization they cause. The end-products of his algorithms and robotic ink machines  look attractive indeed. But then: Aha! They are close-ups of anuses. I think we all have them –males and females – but they are taboo.

Nechvatal, the virus guy, risks becoming the anus guy. Good for him. He posits an anus cosmos, without even quoting Artaud. Wide awake and a bit of an activist during the denial stage of the AIDS/HIV crisis, he knew what he was doing when he began using “virus” programs on his own art to produce robot-paintings. And we always liked the mysterious surfaces  of his layered “drawings.”

He is a thinker too. Visit his website for such essays as Emergence of the New Paradigm: Viractuality. Chew on this:

After a long period of temporal disjunctions following the demise of the modernist project and the excessive abuses of the post-modernist non-project; I wish to now suggest that a new clarifying paradigm has emerged based not, however, on the ideals of the raw, the pure or the reduced – but rather on the internal tic-tic-tic bomb time of the embedded and patient viral attack.

So I am suggesting here a seething project of critique within critique that re-energizes the broken gaps of temporal displacement that followed the demise of modernism and the appearance of now listless – super fragmented – irresponsible – glut of post-modern de-construction.

You can also get a taste of his Viral Symphony on YouTube.

13. NEVER PRAISE A PAINTER WHO BREAKS THE RULES.

The mystery of Ron Gorchov (Cheim and Read, 547 W.25^th, closed) is why he is not more celebrated. He is what used to be called  a painter’s painter. Is that the kiss of death? Maybe we do not care what serious artists think of other artists. Gorchov has respect – possibly another curse. He even has a signature look that dates far back. You can always recognize his saddle or shield-shaped canvases reliefs, minimally inscribed with flattened-windshield forms. They are wonderful to look at but impossible to figure out. That is their glory. Maybe we are looking at pre-antediluvian art or extra-terrestrial paintings. Speaking of which…..

14. NEVER  REMINISCE

When I was a youth, I came into the city as much as I could. And I looked at art. My first ah-ah moment, I like to say, was listening to artist Budd Hopkins giving a gallery talk at the Whitney – which  then, by the way,  had free admission. In a building behind MoMA then, there was an open door between the two institutions. Hopkins “explained” Adolf Gottlieb’s Frozen Sounds, standing right in front of it. Years later I became friendly with Budd through his wife, critic and curator April Kingsley. By then he was deeply involved in the alien kidnapping conspiracy, hypnotizing people to help them remember needles stuck into their stomachs and other places by the bug-eyed demons. He played tapes that were hair-raising, but for me not as hair-raising as his short talk on Gottlieb years before — even more hair-raising than the photos of Pollock in Life magazine  that I had seen when I was in high school. Yes!

So, of course, I had to take a look when I came upon the unexpected Gottlieb show at Pace at 534 W 25^th street (now closed): “Adolph Gottlieb, Gravity, Suspension, Motion: Paintings  1954-1972.” Not all of the paintings are great, but they all look good, better than the Gottliebs in MoMA’s 2010 Ab-Ex show. My favorite: Four Square; a horizontal with a “sun” and two-auras on the left, and four circles on the right. You can see some others here:

Liked four Square of 1964 best….this and others can be seen HERE.

15. NEVER ATTACK OR COMPARE

And then, of course, I figured I might as well take a look at the Beverly Pepper sculptures at Marlborough, 545 W. 25^th, across the street (also now closed). Four  Cor-Ten exercises in curves knocked the ground-floor ceilings. Did I like them? Anything that bumps a Chelsea ceiling  is bound  to be impressive. But picturing the sculptures  outside, turns them offensively corporate and offensively Cubist. The poet Apollinaire, who was the first to write about Cubism, would roll over in his grave. Competent work, but not transcendent. Where is my old friend Lila Katzen now that we need her? She was rolling steel way before Pepper and had the added virtue of a stock of stories about her pal Franz Kline in P-town.

Olek (?): Shopping Cart

16. NEVER WRITE ABOUT ART OUTSIDE THE GALLERIES

And then, off-list, I came upon a shopping cart fastened to a pole. The cart was covered with a crocheted skin of yarn. Must be Olek, I immediately thought. She has crocheted unexpected, temporary coverings for the Wall Street Bull and for  Tony Rosenthal’s Alamo at Cooper Square,  among other things. I did find a shopping cart on her website. Was this the same one? How did it get here in Chelsea?  Polish-born Olek is the Queen of Yarn. There are guerrilla crocheting groups, it’s true. They cover bicycle racks and fences and benches. But Olek thinks big. She has a good yarn:

A loop after a loop. Hour after hour my madness becomes crochet. Life and art are inseparable. I crochet everything that enters or leaves my space. Sometimes it’s a text message, a medical report, found objects. There is the unraveling, the ephemeral part of my work that never lets me forget about the limited life of the art object and art concept. What do I intend to reveal? You have to pull the end of the yarn and unravel the story behind the crochet.

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum/Naropa University catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition ran from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. And is now at  the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., until May 15; thence to Gallery 125, Bellport, N.Y., from June 23 to July 15.

For easy access to previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

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John Perreault is on Facebook and now on Tumblr.  You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault. Main John Perreault  website. More of John Perreault’s art.

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Clyfford Still: 1954 PH-11231, 1954.

Way Out West… 

Since I was in the Denver area, I decided I just had to see the Clyfford Still Museum that opened late last year. Mark Van Wagner and I finished the installation of our travelling show, “Drawing from Sand,” in one day flat, so there was some breathing room. I call it “a small show with a global impact.”

Van Wagner and I  met through Facebook because we both use sand. One thing led to another, and although we never spoke to each other, 100 emails later our joint show opened in the Kauai Museum in Hawaii, and thence to Boulder, Colorado (after that to Bellport, N.Y.).

My fear of being pelted by stones thrown by hippies in tie-dye outfits because I was wearing New York black was groundless. Boulder is fine. Naropa University, site of our show, is very Buddhist, very cool. Although the student garb is far to colorful for my taste.

Now, of course, I have to figure out what to do about Clyfford Still.

Still’s one-artist museum is right next to Daniel Libeskind’s “cutting edge”  Denver Museum of Art, which is right next to Ponti and Sudler’s  PoMo building, itself once called cutting edge. Will the DMA keep adding buildings every time there’s a new architectural fad?

In contrast, the Clyfford Still Museum is sedate. The art is not, nor was the man.

Clyfford Still Museum, Denver.

Still claimed to be the first Abstract-Expressionist and would allow no contenders.

Still: 1944-n-no2, 1944.

Although he showed with the Betty Parsons Gallery — along with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman — he reserved all laurels for himself and was quite cranky about it. Furthermore, he did not countenance unapproved interpretations of his art and worked himself into a snit. My Uncle Barney had obviously stolen the zip from him. But “Big Blue,” now on display is dated 1951 and Newman’s Onement is 1948. Who stole what from whom? More research is needed.

And Still’s old friend Mark Rothko had gone commercial. In fact, Still blustered and fumed and withdrew from the art world and would not let anyone buy or see his paintings. Later he apparently gloated over Rothko’s suicide, but he did not see a contradiction when he was  lured  by the deep pockets of the Marlborough Gallery. If that is not going commercial, I don’t know what is.

Still: 1951 PH-2472, 1951

Still held back over 800 of his artworks, which seems to be about 80%. And willed the lot to whatever city would put up the cash for a Clyfford Still Museum. It could not show the work of any other artist, because he was beyond compare. Nor could there be an auditorium or a restaurant. 

Was Still crazy? Or just crazy like a fox?

The first floor of the one-man museum is devoted to educational displays — including a rather paranoid letter to critic Clement Greenberg and an equally mad  letter to Betty Parsons that announced his withdrawal from the evil art world — the same art world that is still with us. If you want further evidence of Still’s hubris see Tyler Green’s three-part story. Click here.

And Green actually likes Still’s paintings!

Here is a link to  Mr. Still’s letter to Greenberg.

Clyfford Still in his N.Y. studio, 1959-52. Unknown photographer.

The more I know about Still the less I like him. He was, according to Green, a McCarthyite, and he called the Museum of Modern Art in New York the “Great Gas Chamber of culture.” Perhaps he had heard that Philip Johnson, who co-founded the Department of Architecture, had been pro-Hitler in the Thirties. Maybe, but I doubt it. When MoMA wanted a painting he pawned off what he thought of as an inferior copy he made just for them.

Should he go to the head of the Ab-Ex pantheon? Or was his boast much bigger than his light?  Now, at last, we can see for ourselves, but I think it will take awhile to digest such gnarly, willfully difficult paintings. And the man sure was full of himself.

On the second floor of the Still Museum is a chronological installation, beautifully displayed in a succession of well-proportioned rooms. In contrast to the externally  ultra-photogenic  Libeskind next door, there is not one obtuse or acute wall in the whole museum; there is not one dead space or “spear closet.”

The early work offers the same old story. Provincial paintings, WPA, and then the breakthrough moment: a vertical, crooked streak of red on a stygian plane, supposedly made in 1944. This is followed by a fully fleshed-out survey of the Stills that really look like Stills — mostly big bruisers with inflections that make many think of shredded wallpaper or birch bark or peeling billboards. Gloom provides the continuity with his  WPA work. And doom haunts every abstraction, save for  the requisite opening up to joy that we now seem to expect of old men.

Matisse was the forerunner of this “late works” phenomena;  and then de Kooning. There’s a  “late works” trope in classical music that tortures musicologists. One could characterize the “late works” trope in art as simplicity and light , whereas in music it is characterized by the depths of Beethoven’s last  string quartets, or Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosis —- rather than Schoenberg’s turn to tonality, which confuses everything. Maybe Schoenberg was really a painter.

“My work in its entirety is like a symphony in which each painting has a part,” Still wrote. If this is the case, then his last movement is a kind of triumph of talent over a pompous, paranoid  personality. And thus so is the entirety. Gestures in a void. A bit like a few corn flakes in an empty bowl.

And then a triumph?

Late unidentified Still.

As much as Rothko and Newman, Still came up with a signature style. But perhaps we could say a language rather than a style. A style is too easily reinterpreted as a brand.  That is not quite how art works. You need style plus spirituality. And you need biography. Unfortunately the Still biography stinks. The back story is loathsome.

Can we really separate the man from the art? If knowledge of Matisse’s passivity, if not quite outright collaboration, under Vichy, has soured me on his late work, then how can I look with favor upon the work of a right-wing crank like Still?

Still is being pitched to the Denver locals as a maverick. Was he? He seems to have had too many teaching jobs to be a maverick. Nevertheless, when you stand in front of his paintings, you get the picture; you get  grandeur. Or is it a full dose of the grandiose?

More than anyone else, except de Kooning, Still privileged tactility. The paint application, usually in large vertical “shreds”, brings you back to the surface of the canvas and ruptures the light. There’s a struggle akin to de Kooning’s gnostic fraktur, but unlike de Kooning, the war is not made tolerable by insouciance or wit.

Just as with de Kooning, you wonder when Still knew a painting was finished. Are the paintings finished? Some of them are scary. They are not paintings that can kill, as he claimed; but they are not to die for. Perhaps like de Kooning, Still  just walked away. Paintings are not made; they are abandoned. If this is the case, that moment of turning his back is Still’s true act of creation. If he was the first abstract expressionist then his work is the synthesis of his successors. So what stood in his way? He didn’t get along with anybody. He was a grouch. And an egomaniac. And he was the only artist in the world.

Clyfford Still is a bad influence.

Still Jigsaw Puzzle, Still Museum Gift Shop

The John Perreault Museum 

Now, as an artist,  I am no longer merely content to demand a retrospective at MoMA or the Whitney. The stakes are higher. I want my own museum. But, like Still in his will, I have stipulations. Not just any city will qualify. After all, what did Still have to do with Denver? Nothing.

The place that wins the honor of hosting the John Perreault Museum, unlike the Still Museum,  must have something to do with the life of the real John Perreault. Clyfford may have passed through Denver a couple of times, taught at the then far-distant Boulder for one meager semester, but he had as much to do with Denver as he had to do with Oshkosh or Sheboygan. The City of Denver put up the cash.

The John Perreault Museum must be in New York City, where I was born, preferably in the East Village where I have lived so long.

The John Perreault Museum must continually have all my unsold artworks on display and they should always be in  the majority. Otherwise, the museum may show examples of work by any artist I  have written about as an art critic, even artists I have attacked.

Unlike the Clyfford Still Museum, no part of the John Perreault Museum may be rented out for events of any kind. Strollers will be forbidden, as well as humans under 16. As at the Still, photography will be allowed, but even with flash. And pencils and pens, if used to take notes, will also be permitted, unlike in the Museo del Barrio and the New Museum in NYC. Snapshots and note-taking spread the word.

Clearly the John Perreault Museum will be even stricter than The Still.  Like at The Still, no auditorium or restaurant, please. Absolutely no gift shop; absolutely no Perreault jigsaw puzzles. No dance or music concerts anywhere in the Perreault Museum. No docents, gallery lectures. No loud talking. Only whispers. No poetry readings except of poems by Perreault.

Sumptuary laws will apply.

All clothing worn by visitors must be black. Perfume is forbidden. As are cowboy boots with or without taps and click-clack high-heeled shoes of any sort. No one must be taller than my art. Jewelry will be confiscated, especially jewelry that jingles and jangles, including the 14 k. gold watch bracelets worn by very rich lawyers and accountants.

No starch, no pudding. And above all, no art criticism.

____________________________________________________

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum/Naropa University catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition ran from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. And is now at  the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., until May 15; thence to Gallery 125, Bellport, N.Y., from June 23 to July 15.

For easy access to 200 previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com 

John Perreault is on Facebook and now on Tumblr.  You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault

For Art Cops cartoons and other videos on Youtube: John Perreault Channel.  

Main John Perreault  website. More of John Perreault’s art.

]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2012/03/clyfford-still-in-the-still-of-the-night.html/feed 0 http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2012/03/clyfford-still-in-the-still-of-the-night.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/artsjournal/OmRC/~3/m6UH2k-YrcQ/cindy-sherman-against-photography.html http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2012/02/cindy-sherman-against-photography.html#comments Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:02:19 +0000 John Perreault http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/?p=1517  

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #466. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 8' 1 1/8 x 63 15/16" (246.7 x 162.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel in honor of Jerry I. Speyer. © 2011 Cindy Sherman

Since one critic has already deemed Cindy Sherman “the successor to Cézanne, Picasso, Pollock and Warhol,” I feel I am free to delve into other things. The headline to his preview panegyric was The Last Star, so one of these days I will have to write a pithy essay explaining why we don’t need any more stars, thank you; and the last great artist is me. The need for heroes or heroines is perennial, even in something as pure and as uplifting as art.

Upon the occasion of the must-see retrospective now at MoMA until June 11, another critic announces that Sherman’s career is the first of a woman artist that resembles those of Picasso, Johns and Bruce Nauman.

However, I will go all out and say that Sherman’s 2008 “Society Lady Portraits” are as good as, if not better than, her career-making “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-80). She has avoided the male slump, which I define as the usual decline of male “upstarts” who are inspired and then should be retired. But no names here; you can fill in the blanks.

This Is Not A Photograph

I will also boldly assert that Sherman is not a photographer, and her works are not photography. She is an artist. Stuck in the sausage of language, if you call yourself a ceramist, a woodworker, a glassblower, a weaver, or a photographer, you are not an artist. It must be a slip of the tongue or false modesty when Sherman calls herself a photographer. This may still work when potters humbly call themselves potters, implying that their calling is higher than art, but it works for little else.

Sherman’s “photographs” are against photography. They require interpretation.

Take a look at them now at MoMA. Although under the aegis of the Photography Department, and co-curated by an associate and an assistant curator of same, Sherman’s works are being shown in the 6th floor galleries, usually devoted to much higher forms of art than photography.

Likewise, along with location and manner of display, I learned yet another way of judging art. Rather slow about such things, I came upon a piece on Sherman on Bloomberg News:

Shortly after a major Cindy Sherman retrospective opens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on Feb. 26, one of her most famous images will be sold at Sotheby’s. The combination could boost her prices after last year’s career high auction total of $13.7 million.

In a nutshell, some track annual auction sales totals of various artists, for investment potential, I would guess, and not just for the fun of it. Mind you, unless you are Damien Hirst who auctioned off his own work in 2008, artists usually do not directly profit by auction sales of their art. Not in New York City. The merchandise is usually sent to the gavel by other hands and the profit returns to same.

Missing: How does Sherman’s projected annual auction sales figure of $13.7 million compare with those of others we might know? Hirst? Jeff Koons? Or photographers like Nan Goldin or Annie Leibovitz ?

But there’s another reason besides her annual auction figure that Sherman’s work cannot be photography. Be honest. Do her images give you that good-old photo feeling? Decidedly not. They will not make you weep for the poor or give you false information about the indigenous peoples of the world. They will not cause you to wax nostalgic about families, ancient resorts, or puppies. They will not afford the frisson of images of sexual outlaws, soldiers on battlefields, literary giants, or skate-boarders. They will not make you confuse pictures with reality.

Photo-Homeopathy

If photography is a disease, than Sherman is the cure. Her work is homeopathic. It is sly. She does not preach, the way so many photographers find themselves doing. No deep captions give add-on meanings to her images.  She is not producing a sub-set of literature or illustration.

And she is not producing self-portraits. In some sense, every artwork is a self-portrait, but for Sherman using herself as a model is merely a convenience. She is always there. She does not fret or object. She works cheaply, and for long hours. If the viewer, despite the artist’s protestations in interview after interview, persists in seeing the works as self-portraits, then a great deal is lost. The message becomes trivial. Sherman is myriad. So what. Aren’t we all? Walt Whitman said it first.

What is more interesting is that under all the make-up, costuming, and prosthetics we still recognize her, in image after image. She is the star of those Noir and Neo-Realist films we can never exactly identify. Later she is the model, the clown, the matron. She is each of the carnival giants on the wallpaper mural  that provides the required photo-op at the entrance to the exhibit.   She is the actress who never quite disappears.  Nevertheless….

It’s Not All About Me

Beginning with the brilliant, black and white “stills,”  Sherman’s influence has been enormous, which is usually another sign of greatness. Media critique and gender politics were instantly enriched. She has been an inspiration to other artists. Her work has been copied, riffed, mimicked, extrapolated, but never quite enlarged upon. Although we see her face lurking in almost every made-up image, not one of her descendants has inscribed loss of identity or pseudo-empowerment the way she has. Men may be crazy, but womankind is all mythed up.

Does she parody femininity by using the Max Factor disguises that many women feel they still have to don? When my mother, who had lived through the Depression and World War II, wore make-up, she called it putting on her war paint, once a not uncommon phrase. But men wear disguises too. And I don’t just mean just facial hair or the eye-liner affected by rock stars. Both men and women wear roles, are sometimes oppressed by them, but also play with them. I can be a soldier, a doctor, an auto-mechanic, a banker…..oh, no. It’s the Village People!

Of course, some boys dress up as girls, but that is another story. That merely balances out all the girls who dress up as guys.

But women are expected to be in disguise. Men like them that way. And women claim that glamor is power. The Max Factor Factor is not a trivial trope.

Sherman is recording impersonations, roles, fantasies. And at the same time getting over her girl-guilt about dressing up and play-acting.

Another Artopia Motto

To the degree that Sherman’s work parodies photographic genres, like Hollywood publicity stills, fashion photography, pornography, and most recently and most gloriously, the aging but perfectly coiffed and facially altered grande dames of her Society Portraits series, her art is against photography. When she parodies well-known paintings, she is slamming the photography-imitates-art genre. But — oh, yes — most photography imitates art and little else. Just as photographs originally tried to imitate paintings, digital imaging now tries to imitate photography. Sherman now works digitally, an even more intense way of framing photography.

Sherman’s images are wantonly conceptual. You cannot look at Sherman’s viscous oeuvre without thinking of the Artopia motto: Photography is the mother of all lies.

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum/Naropa University catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition ran from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. It will travel to the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., opening March 16; thence to Gallery 125, Bellport, N.Y., from June 23 to July 15.

For easy access to 200 previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com 

John Perreault is on Facebook. You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault

For Art Cops cartoons and other videos on Youtube: John Perreault Channel.  

Main John Perreault  website. More of John Perreault’s art.

Damien Hirst: LSD. Courtesy Gagosian.© Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

International art-star Damien Hirst, who in the late-’80s helped incite the Young British Artists fracas, has produced vitrine art (sharks and other taxidermist beasties suspended in formaldehyde), spin paintings, spot paintings, medicine cabinets, butterfly collages, and bad Bacons. Only the latter have been deemed total failures. But stick around. They will be back. In his poly-headed oeuvre (including spectacles such as the lucrative ’08 auction of his own works) Hirst’s middle finger is always prominent.

The spot paintings, for instance, are now deployed globally in the 11 Gagosian sales venues. No museum could offer, as does the Empire of Art, “THE COMPLETE SPOT PAINTINGS 1986-2011.” The closest rival to such global outreach, the Guggenheim franchise, only has five platforms: New York, Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, and Abu Dhabi.

How global can a gallery get? The Gagosian website lists: three galleries in New York (980 Madison, 555 W. 24, 522 W. 21; to Feb. 18 ), two in London, and others in Beverly Hills, Rome, Paris Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong. The gallery gamble is to cover all squares. Or is it to pander to impulse buying? Gain points for jet fuel savings?

The not unrelated museum game goes something like this: how many branches can you have – all more or less showing the same kind of art – without wrecking tourism. The so-called MoMA syndrome goes global. Art made familiar by media will always disappoint.  Surely, in the case of museums one might have the buildings themselves as a draw. Alas, the Bilbao Effect seems only to apply to Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim. Rarely does anyone go to a museum just to see the building. In terms of the Guggenheims, alas, once you are inside, the art is the same as the art you have already seen back home. What you have experienced  is a brand. When you visit any of the Gagosian/Hirst eleven spot-painting show, you double your fun. What you experience is two brands: Gagosian and Hirst.

Hirst: Cuff Links.© Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

Existing Through the Gift Shop

I have only viewed the three New York spot displays, so I will never qualify for the signed print offered to those who make it to all eleven, the print that will be “dedicated personally to you .” I can say this though: in New York both the 24th Street and the Madison Ave Gagosians come with gift shops. First there was Keith Haring’s stand-alone Pop Shop; then there were Marakami hokum shops in museums showing that artist’s retrospective; and now here’s the Hirst Spot Shops. Has the joke gone too far? No, not really. Is this art for the people (as it was with Haring) or is it Hirst making fun of museums?

Even we who are not jetsetters or eschew such anti-ecological transports can participate. Souvenirs abound. I myself would have sprung for a scarf, but none were offered. A missed opportunity, I think. But then again, the art itself,  once sold,  is merely a souvenir of the spectacle of 11 simultaneous exhibitions, right?

And the Twain Shall Meet

Is there any other way we can spot the convergence of galleries and art museums? Both produce catalogs of the requisite weight and verbal persiflage. Whereas museums can be rented for special events, but as  high-end art galleries resist that income stream as too messy. Galleries sell art; but, when necessary, so do museums. It’s called refining their collections. And whereas most museums, but not all, have collections, commercial art galleries have stock.

Damien Hirst: Installation at Gagosian Chelsea (W. 21 St.)

© Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012
Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

Spots Before Your Eyes

The spot paintings are done by hired help, according to Hirst’s designs.  These  are generated by two simple rules: (1.) Equidistant deployment of spots and (2.) no color repeated in any dot in any one painting. Those who may think it has all been done before, by Kusama (on her body or everywhere) or Sol LeWitt (on walls instead of canvases, but with lines) are wrong. We still find it hard to believe that Kusama is sarcastic and Sol LeWitt was incapable of such.

Kusama: Self-Obliteration, 1968

Take a look at this website that show some spot/dot paintings by other artists. None have the insouciance of the Hirst spots. Or the commercial monomania.

Francois Morellet, Untitled. 1954.

Walter Robinson: Untitled. 1980s.

John Armleder: Untitled. N.D.

The good thing is that it doesn’t take long to look at the Hirst spots. You can speed right through, although it is not exactly the case that when you have seen a few you have seen them all. I found some surprises here and there. All are in the Madison Avenue three-floor venue. Amidst the majority of standard spot paintings, there are really, really small spot paintings, spot painting with half-dots at one edge, one spot painting clearly labeled “Controlled Substances” (giving away the pharmaceutical subtext of all these art pills), and, best of all, one painting with drippy dots, the canvas resting on the floor against a wall. Has it fallen? Is this a spot sport or a mistake? In terms of the first theory, I doubt it. There are no nails or screws on the wall above, and here, as everywhere, there are neatly attired guards in every room. More than in any museum.

One thought I had was that, at least in Chelsea, the Hirsts are more about the architecture of the galleries than about art, more about display. They make those all-white post-industrial rooms look gorgeous. Just imagine what they will do for your private airplane hanger or your Olympic size indoor swimming pool or the lobby of your condo in Abu Dhabi.

These dead –pan paintings are place holders for art. Rather than artworks, they are symbols of art.

Hirst: Controlled Substances.

When Bad Boys Collide

For what it’s worth, former Bad Boy of Brit-Pop, David Hockney, now showing at the Royal Academy in London, has been quoted as casting aspersions upon Hirst for not actually painting his own works and using assistants instead:

Hockney, seen as Britain’s greatest living painter, believes that artists should produce their own works. He said: ‘I used to point out at art school, you can teach the craft, it’s the poetry you can’t teach. But now they try to teach the poetry and not the craft.’

Hockney quoted a Chinese proverb that to paint ‘you need the eye, the hand and the heart. Two won’t do’. He added: ‘The other great thing they said – I told this to Lucian Freud – is, ‘‘painting is an old man’s art’’. I like that!’

                                                                               Mail Online…Jan. 3, 2012.

David Hockney: Portrait of an Artist, 1971.

Really, hasn’t Hockney ever heard of Duchamp or LeWitt? Let’s face it, Hockney peaked with his California scenes. Thereafter he might as well have let assistants paint for him. He has been so out of touch. Since it is obviously good to be bad, no pretty cellphone drawings or British landscapes will bring Hockney back to reality, or make him bad again.

Is David miffed that recently when Hirst wavered and decided to actually paint, he riffed on Francis Bacon and not on him? Bacon was really bad. You know, falling in love with and living with the man he caught robbing his house. And, I am told, drunk for 60 years.

I look at it this way. There are MGM artists and Warner Brother artists. And then there is Poverty Row. Hirst aspires to MGM. Hockney has always been sort of Republic Pictures. Maybe Disney. Bacon, with all those tortured bodies and Inquisition scenes,  was always rather Hammer Studios.

And now in the wings, there’s Banksy who is definitely Warner Brothers. Banksy’s success probably mean we may soon have to call last year’s Bad Boy, Sir Damien.

In terms of Hirst’s on-the- spot extravaganza, some sequences are better than others. I hate the Op Art results when Hirst deploys the large spots so that there is one lodged in each corner of the canvases. Ouch. All-over is best. Tondos end up too Op also. So, as the wise guy used to say, if some are better than others, then it must be art.

Hirst is in the long line of artists who want to have their cake and eat it. It’s art against art. Is he more like Duchamp or Dali? Is he more like Picabia or Warhol? Hirst is our greatest satirist, the Daumier du jour.

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum/Naropa University catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition ran from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. It will travel to the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., opening March 16; thence to Gallery 125, Bellport, N.Y., from June 23 to July 15.

For easy access to 200 previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com 

John Perreault is on Facebook. You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault

For Art Cops cartoons and other videos on Youtube: John Perreault Channel.  

Main John Perreault  website. More of John Perreault’s art.

Edwin Dickinson, The Fossil Hunters. Not on view at the Whitney.

Can artworks survive once they have fallen out of fashion? Or no longer inspire further art? Are off the grid? Are not part of the ongoing dialogue, but come across, if at all, as dead ends? As orphans, bachelors, old maids?

Roberto Matta (1911-2002) at Pace to Jan. 28, Diego Rivera (1886-1957) at MoMA to May 14, and Francis Picabia (1897-1953) at Michael Werner to Jan. 14 were each at one point vital to the art life, so probably deserve a new look.

The Artist’s Artist, the Painter’s Painter

But Edwin Dickinson? When was he central? He didn’t fit into American Scene painting or Modernism. He was not a Dadaist, a Cubist,  or a Surrealist. Although he was briefly saved from starvation by the Works Progress Administration’s easel-painting subsidy, he did not produce overt socially conscious art. He certainly never tackled murals. On the other hand, his art was just too strange to be considered academic. Maybe too poetic?

The way art history has been written, he has no heirs. That needs to change. Different times require different views of the past. And different family trees.

Dickinson(1891-1978) is well-worth looking at and thinking about. There are lessons to be learned, particularly if you yourself are that rare thing, a true oddball, lone wolf, keeper of your own secrets, priest or priestess of art rather than of career.

Three Strikes and You Are Out

The Babcock Gallery (774 Fifth Ave., to Jan. 22) is now offering “Edwin Dickinson in Retrospect.” All three faces of Dickinson are sampled: the lovely premier coups (some of them pre-de Kooning action paintings); hints of what went on in his big paintings, but only hints; and the self-portraits.

The  premier coups or first strikes are masterful. This method simply requires that mistakes be jettisoned right there on the spot. Doesn’t look right in front of the subject? Scrape it down! The results range from delicate to dynamic.

This comes right out of the Munich tradition. The difference is that Dickinson did not treat his first strikes as outdoor sketches, meant to be used in larger, finished works, but offered them as finished works themselves. They are raw, special. You participate. You not only feel where he was standing in front of his subject and at what angle he was viewing it, but you can identify his movements in applying pigment.

In contrast, the  “machines,” or what curator Douglas Dreishpoon and Pollock-expert (!) Francis O’Connor in separate essays persist in calling the “symbolical” paintings in the catalog for “Edwin Dickinson: Dreams and Realities” (Albright-Knox,Buffalo, 2002), are diabolical.

Symbolical as opposed to symbolic, or like the Symbolical Rites of the Masons? Dickinson’s masteful The Fossil Hunters might have been painted by a modern-day El Greco in a severe fit of depression.

The first strikes are about the known, what we can see with our eyes and can jot down with our paint rags, palette knives, and little pinkies (one of Dickinson’s favorite outdoor tools). Here is Dickinson’s philosophy:

“If you do not bring anticipations to the sight of an object when drawing it, anticipations which are connect with associations in your lay life, it is easier to get it right then to get it wrong.”

The machines or the subject paintings or the “winter paintings” done entirely in the studio were also not preplanned, according to Dickinson. He just went ahead. They are about what we cannot know. The angle of vision is either too high or too low; one object blocks another or turns it into a splinter or shard. Bodies are cadavers. And the light is always dimmer than twilight. Stygian. Faces are in shadows or otherwise blurred and incomplete.

Dickinson, The Cello Player, 1924-26. De Young Musuem.

The Big Ones: My List of Dickinson Machines

Interior, 1916.

An Anniversary, 1929-21. Albright-Knox,Buffalo,NY

The Cello Player 1924-26. De Young Museum,  San Francisco.

[Dickinson’s list of depictions: “14 books; two potatoes; 2 saucers; 3 sheets of music [Intermezzo from Cavalieria  Rusticana, violin allegro from Marriage of Figaro]; 2 china pitchers; 7 shells; 1 photograph; 1 trilobite; 3 kettles; 1 rose; 1 music stand; 1 chair; 1 organ; 1 piano, 1 cello….John Cordes…..” Cordes was the model for the cello-player. Dickinson, who did not read music, played the cello by ear.]

The Fossil Hunters, 1926-28. Whitney Museum of Art.

Woodland Scene, 1929-1935.

Composition with Still Life, 1933-37.  Museum of Modern Art.

Ruin at Daphne, 1943-53. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[His last “machine,” the depiction of a made-up archeological site, evincing too much red pigment for my taste, took 10 years and was never finished, or only “finished” when it was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and thus left his studio.]

Dickinson, An Anniversary, Albright-Knox.

Masterpieces Gone Missing

At Babcock, the closest thing to one of the “winter paintings”  is  Francis Foley (1927), only 50 by 40 inches, but exhibiting the silvery tonalities and skewed perspectives of the big works. And the fabric. A must-see. And the first-strike paintings are also worth braving jolly Christmasy midtown Manhattan.  Self-Portrait in Uniform of 1942 (it’s a Civil War getup) is also special, self-portraits being his third specialty, developed in the second half of his life. They too are destabilized. Are they vain or introspective?

Dickinson, Self-Portrait in Uniform, 1942. Courtesy Babcock Gallery

In the survey now at the Brooklyn Museum called “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” (to Jan. 29), you can see Dickinson’s  Helen Souza, 1929, which, although hardly one of his “big ones,” is twilight gray, utilizes a surprising perspective and point of view, and is a startling exercise in surface, texture, and varied paint-application. Is it unfinished? What is the struggle that it embodies? Plastic or psychological, or both?

Dickinson, Helen Souza, 1929.

Alas, neither MoMA, the Whitney, nor the Metropolitan have any of their once very popular Dickinson“subject paintings” on display right now. They are — dreaded term — in storage.

Dickinson painting outdoors in Provincetown, n.d. Courtesy Provincetown Art Associaion.

He Was Not a Hermit

Whatever happened to Dickinson? Although he eventually moved to New York, he is associated with Provincetown, Massachusetts. Too New England. Furthermore, in the battle between Provincetown and Woodstock to become the summer art capital, East Hamptonwon. Dickinson lived in P-town and later in nearby Wellfleet year-round. However, let us not think Dickinson was unsociable because he spent 14 bone-chilling Cape Cod winters in uninsulated studios making art.

From his spare diaries we learn how disciplined he was. Up early, out on the beach, then scraping paint in whatever draughty workspace he could afford. But he also keeps track of a full social life.

Still feeling ill – up late painted myself AM.. PM painted eve home…..AM painted – PM painted. Eve saw Manon. Rec’d valentine scarf from Tibi. Bright moonlight on snow. Cold…AM in & out – walk on dunes. Wretched day. PM worked at office. eve at Tibi’s.

The early death of his long-suffering mother from tuberculosis and the suicide of his older brother were anniversaries dutifully noted each year in the pages of his day book, with never a comment. Just there, like winter, like ice.

His definition of art was “something that moves the spirit through the eye.”

When asked about his influences, he replied: “I suppose being alive and awake.”

When queried about the meaning of his art, he replied: “I wouldn’t be able to say.”

Dickinson, Laboratory Beach, 1935. Private Collection.

Dickinsonwas the last of the art line that goes from the Munich School to William Morris Hunt, William Merritt Chase and Charles Hawthorne. Dickinson studied with both Chase and Hawthorne, the latter when he had an art school in Provincetown.

In many ways, he was also one of the last of the independent artists.

He was accustomed to the largesse of juried exhibitions and exposed his art that way, as did many others before the advent of the full-fledged gallery system. For long stretches he was ‘”commercially unaffiliated” and seemed not to have minded. Although he had shown at the then prestigious Carnegie Institute, the Albright-Knox, and the American Academy of Art., his first solo exhibition in a commercial art gallery was in 1936 on 57th Street in New York at the young age of 45.

After 1942, he went without a gallery until 1961. Of course, he was nicely represented in curator Dorothy Miller’s MoMA show “Romantic Painting in America” in 1942 and again in her “15 Americans” of 1952 (along with Rothko, Still, Pollock, and Bradley Walker Tomlin). When asked to submit an artist’s statement, he submitted a self-portrait.

Elaine de Kooning’s “Edwin Dickinson Paints a Picture” (Ruin at Daphne) appeared in Art News in 1949. She wrote that he was “A great artist [who] reconciles poetry with perspective.”

He was not invisible.

Otherwise, he saw nothing wrong in teaching. From various accounts, his students at Cooper Union and the Art Students League were in awe of him, but appreciated that his critiques were strictly one-on-one. He treated students as if they were fellow artists. Here’s an interview with painter George Nick, a former student.

But perhaps he should have stayed in Provincetown or Wellfleet and froze to death. Perhaps he should have walked out to the tip of the Cape Cod curl and just waded into the icy brine to join his beloved brother in the afterlife, leaving behind his wife and two children to go it alone. His brother in the ‘20s had leapt from a sixth-floor window in Greenwich Village, almost in front of his eyes.

When economic necessity forced Dickinson and family to move to New York City, where there were more teaching jobs, he clearly did not have the time or energy to paint more of his large paintings. Francis V. O’Connor, in the big Buffalo tome mentioned above, offers more than enough intuitive psychoanalysis in his essay, “Allegories of Pathos and Perspective in the Symbolical Paintings and Self-Portraits of Edwin Dickinson.” Once Dickinson was safely married, his oedipal conflicts were resolved. His father could be forgiven at last for marrying so soon after the first Mrs. Dickinson’s death. Of course, no more “winter paintings” were in the offing.

An Unfinished Life

The story of Dickenson’s life has not much to it; but his art does. Sometimes the large paintings were cut down into smaller paintings. Sometimes just abandoned. He told arts writer Katherine Kuh:

None of the large paintings is really finished. there comes a time when I stop because to go on would mean reorganizing the canvas from the bottom up. I can’t throw away the investment of so many years — nine years in the case of Ruin at Daphne. So I make the best of a bad job by finishing them as well as I can. In other words, they all topple over when they are about three-fifths done.

So like Willem de Kooning!

In fact he and de Kooning, 13 years his junior, became friends. Dickinson, the elegantly bearded art teacher, valorized spontaneity and indecision or struggle, which may have influenced the younger man. Certainly, as Elaine de Kooning (who introduced them) might have predicted, there was a resonance between the two.

Oh, to see some paintings by each side-by-side!

Dickinson, Nude Figure, Marie, 1939. Courtesy Babcock Gallery

What Goes Around Comes Around

Why are Dickinson’s six big paintings so spatially and emotionally unsettling? Is it because they simply do not fit any known style-category?

I hypothesize that their previous popularity can be accounted for not because they seemed antimodernist, but because they are doom-ridden, anxious, nerve-wracking. There is always a market for doom. You can stand only so much Matisse.

Antimodernism we can deal with. It is just the other side of the coin. But Dickinson’s upsetting machines stand clear of the game. They are not morbid like the rotting figures of Ivan Albright. They are wreckage, if not debris. The viewer is  flummoxed, puzzled, fascinated, transfixed, like the South Pacific trading partners of the Trobriand who were paralyzed by the ornately carved canoe prows they confronted. No normal man could have made these complicated paintings. (Yes, I have finally gotten around to reading Alfred Gell’s witty, insightful, game-changing Art and Agency, An Anthropological Theory.)

In the recent Dickinson literature, romantic hopes abound. He will be the new Ryder or the new Hopper, rediscovered in the nick of time and saved from unjust oblivion by an unforeseen bend in art history. Have we come to that bend?

Can’t happen. Won’t make a good enough story.

Throughout his life, Dickinson loved going to the movies, beginning with the silents. Perhaps they influenced his machines and even his first strikes: tilted points of view, views from above, truncated subjects. But picture a film in which we see exact, real-time recreations of Dickinson painting, scraping down and repainting his machines indoors, the artist wrapped in coats and scarves; then intercut with the spontaneous, outdoor first strikes; then reels of him teaching class after class at Cooper Union, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Art Students League until, with the exception of the self-portraits and a few first strikes, the teaching takes over the art-making.

“One learns to draw faces better by painting torsos,” he tells a class.

“Love,” he tells a stymied student, “will find an answer.”

Or, my favorite, “Taste is the enemy of art.”

And then there is the total strangeness of his most famous painting, The Fossil Hunters, which took 192 sittings. It was mistakenly exhibited sideways, not once but twice. Is this because he signed it vertically on the right side? The first time was at the 1928 Carnegie International. Corrected for an exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, it was then shown sideways again and stayed that way at the National Academy of Design in New York,  where it won the Altman Prize for Landscape.  That would be the center of my allegorical biopic.

Dickinson: The Fossil Hunters.... On its side.

1. Don’t get married and have children.

2. Don’t teach.

3. Don’t make more than one kind of art.

4. Make lots and lots of product. Picasso made 40,000 artworks; Warhol clocks in

     at 10,000, not counting prints (in some sense they are all prints). Damien

     Hirst, who has so far made only 4,800 works, not counting prints, was quoted

     by the  L.A. Times as determined to beat the both of them.

5. Always be able to explain what you are doing.

6. Always sign your artworks at the bottom, front or back; and indicate the top on

     the back. Never, never sign vertically down the side. That’s just asking for

     trouble.

7. Eschew tactility, varied surfaces, paint-handling.

8. Produce artworks that are photogenic.

9. Never be ahead of the curve.

10. Don’t be too original; just be original enough to make your product a brand.

     Too much originality is always punished or ignored.

_______________________________________________________________

Fast Track:

*****     An Edwin Dickinson Retrospect, Babcock Gallery

****       Late Works of Matta, Pace Gallery

***         Diego Rivera Murals, MoMA

**           Francis Picabia, Michael Werner Gallery

*             Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, Brooklyn Museum

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition runs from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. then travels to the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., opening March 16.

For easy access to 200 previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com 

John Perreault is on Facebook. You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault

For Art Cops cartoons and other videos on Youtube: John Perreault Channel.  Main John Perreault  website. More of John Perreault’s art.

Who provided bail? Who were they working for? Whose side are they on?

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition runs from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. then travels to the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., opening March 16.

For easy access to 200 previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com

John Perreault is on Facebook. You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault

For Art Cops cartoons and other videos on Youtube: John Perreault Channel.  Main John Perreault  website. More of John Perreault’s art.

Surely we all agree that artists are the center of art, if not the art world. In order to get more artworks out of them, we try to be kind and as far as possible let them call the shots. High hopes are endemic. Nevertheless, sometimes gallerists, curators, and critics are more talented than the artists they serve. When an artist verges on megalomania, failure is likely. Even Picasso listened to gallerists, curators, and critics. Maybe not enough, but they had his ear. As did some poets.

Artists fail because curators and museums let them.

“Sherrie Levine: Mayhem” (at the Whitney to Jan. 29, 2012) and “Maurizio Cattelan: All” (at the Guggenheim to Jan. 22) do not have the finality of the Pompidou’s  ”Voids: A Retrospective,” which in 2009 signaled the end of  20th-century art.

The Cattelan and Levine surveys mark an ending too, but with a whimper. The Pompidou’s “Voids” had at least one great nothing: Yves Klein’s empty gallery of 1958. The exhibitions at the Guggenheim and the Whitney – neither of them proper midcareer surveys – offer esteemed artists doing next to nothing, or a nothingness of no import, seemingly begging to be downgraded as minor.

Cattelan’s first solo exhibition in 1989 was an empty gallery, so perhaps the now-empty bays of the Guggenheim refer to that. Critic Thomas Hess once said about certain abstract paintings: Empty center, empty head. But we can now say: Empty gallery….

And Levine’s dull exercise is empty of emotions, too.

Could it be that the ‘80s and ‘90s are finally over?

If only some curator had made some hard decisions, then we would not be so disillusioned with the illusions both these artists once created.

From Linda Yablonsky’s N.Y. Times report:

In the Cattelan catalog, Nancy Spector, the show’s curator, admits that Cattelan’s idea for the show was ‘challenging.’ The more you read, the more you get the idea that he drove everyone at the museum crazy.

From the Whitney web page about Levine’s “Mayhem”:

This exhibition, developed as a project by the artist, includes works ranging from well-known photographs, such as After Walker Evans: 1-22,  1981, to recent sculptures, such as Crystal Skull: 1-12, 2010. The exhibition, conceived by the artist as offering constellations of older and newer works, will provide juxtapositions that provoke new associations and responses.

Basically, what the artist wants is what the artist gets.

But artists — bless them — are sometimes their own worst curators. Rarely can they glean or cull. Or, as I told an art dealer when asked to choose some works of my own for a show: How can I choose? Could you choose which of your three little daughters you like best?

If left to their own devices time, art history or, even worse, the art market do their own randomized curating. Remember please that we are constantly coming upon overlooked artists or, contrariwise, surrounded by overrated ones. We all know artists who don’t stand up to scrutiny. I need not remind you that the list of duds lingering from the ’80s and ‘90s is sobering. I mean, times change and chutzpah is not eternal.

Nor is humor.

Yes, both artists under consideration here are jokesters, although neither will make you think of Mark Twain. Cattelan is not Steve Martin. Levine is not Joan Rivers.

In Artopia we prefer wit.

Cattelan Gives Up Making Art: Art World Applauds.

      M aurizio Cattelan: The Ninth Hour,1999

But doesn’t it remind you of someone? Maybe Marcel Duchamp?

Levine Quips That People Don’t Get Her Humor

       Sherrie Levine, Large Gold Knot: 1, 1987.

It is hard to get Levine’s humor when she is surrounded by and protected by layers and layers of theory. The sales pitch buries the sly tricks. This, of course, is not her fault. But, really, it is kind of embarrassing to hear a spokesperson trying to explain Levine’s “After Walker Evans” photo-cribs by saying that the artist works in many media but that art history is her main media. Hasn’t our gallery lecturer heard of art-about-art, which has existed forever? Or at least since Manet paid homage to Goya’s Naked Maja.

In grammar school it was a sin to copy. But we are no longer in elementary or high school, so Levine’s joke plays out weirdly. Her art is not as uncanny as she intends. It’s far too canny. It is really about the presentation.  If you can’t afford a Brancusi, buy a Levine.

Yes, it means something different when a woman “appropriates” a work by a male artist than if a man does. Yes, yes, but … what exactly does it mean? How is Levine’s urinal after Duchamp different from Mike Bidlo’s? Answer: it costs more.

I want to see Levine copy the sainted but dreadful Georgia O’Keeffe. She would be incapable of copying Lee Krasner or Elaine de Kooning, or too smart to bother. But I bet she could copy Louise Bourgeois. Or Louise Nevelson.

If you get my joke here, then you get Levine. Her art is penis envy. Which is I guess all right since male artists often suffer from Venus envy — male artists like Courbet, whose in-your-face vagina Levine copied over and over again from a postcard, of course. This is the image forbidden by Facebook, whether of the painting or the postcard or the postcard copied by Levine. In Levine’s hands, Courbet’s vagina might be read as a kind of putdown of women and not a celebration of womanhood, male lust, or nature. Wrong, wrong. His 1866 painting, after all, was titled The Origin of the World.

Then theory rears its academic head. Although commissioned for a private collection of erotic art, Origin  ended up on the auction block and was purchased in 1955 by every academic’s favorite psychoanalyst, Jacques Lucan, in 1955 for 1.5 million francs.

Change of material must mean something too; the fake Brancusi sculptures made of glass, for instance, are nonsensically exhibited on two grand pianos. Does this degrade music or reduce Brancusi to a decorative whatnot sitting on a piano lid?

And making a 3-D version of something originally in two dimensions — e.g., the sections of bachelor parts grabbed from The Bride Stripped Bare by Bachelors, Even. Or the four 3-D versions of Man Ray’s paint-on-canvas pool table (La Fortune, 1938) must signify something, too. But whatever it is, it is not profound.

To further complicate my argument, in an interview Levine admits that the pool-table multiples were the idea of her dealer at the time, Mary Boone. Maybe there are some gallerists artists should not  listen to.

In the same interview, Levine unexpectedly maintained she wants her works to have aura. But, offers the interviewer, Walter Benjamin claimed that replicated works (like photographs) could not have aura. She laughs. I agree with her laugh. But the joke’s on her: Her works do not have aura. The real question then becomes why, when some other appropriated art does. As I have mentioned elsewhere, even tin saints and tintypes can have an aura, Uncle Benjamin notwithstanding.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain 19171964. Remade in 1964.

Sherrie Levine: Fountain (Madonna), 19.91

Mike Bidlo: The Origins of the World (detail), 1995.

And the Bad News Is …

In spite of the photo-op provided by Cattelan’s All  — cameras allowed! — and the revelation (ha, ha) that even the works we liked depend on context and were floor-bound for a purpose, we would have preferred a best-of show, not this spectacular hanging mess. If Cattelan really stops making art, the huge motionless mobile of almost his entire oeuvre certainly offers the spectacle of an artist going out with a bang. Most of it, alas, is junk. And, just think, he short-circuited curatorial selectivity. Or was he merely afraid his pope and his Hitler, situated on Frank Lloyd Wright’s slopping ramp, would have looked like they were sliding down to the lobby?

Cattelan’s eccentric chandelier proves that the main purpose of art is to provide backdrops for snapshots. How cool it is to photograph friends smiling artificially in front of big-time art. Smile on, smile off. And,  unintentionally, images of the art are spread around the globe and preserved for eternity in The Cloud.

Although its cold-blooded deployment of art products denies its title, Levine’s “Mayhem” is more complicated than Cattelan’s floating mashup. Like Cattelan (who is in many ways her opposite), Levine has subverted the midcareer survey so many artist dread, but she has done so at the expense of her chops. Her orchids and botanicals are dreadful. These simply were not worth copying. Her skulls likewise. Even her Ignatz and Krazy Kat are laffable.

I would have stripped the whole thing down to the Walker Evans rephotographs  and the Duchamp urinal, plus a single version of the Man Ray pool table. Multiple pool tables and multiple skulls make only a weak comment on Minimalism and serial art. Like Hirst and Koons, Levine seems to be exploiting the notion that expensive materials are the proof of art. Paintings on mahogany and cherry wood are a waste of wood. Everything else, including the plywood-knot paintings, is filler. Each idea would have been better served by one choice example, not a product line. They seem to be here merely to prove at last that Levine’s  collectors made the right financial decisions. One of each was always the way to go.

Visitors point and shoot at the Guggenheim. At the Whitney, the customers simply race right through. I wish I had a stopwatch. Been there, seen that, and on to theNewMuseum, where currently you can slide down a shoot and ride a merry-go-round. In comparison, Cattelan and Levine are as serious as Kandinsky and Mondrian. The silliness war has finally been won.

************************************************************************************************

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition runs from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. then travels to the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., opening March 16.

For easy access to 200 previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com

John Perreault is on Facebook. You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault

For Art Cops cartoons and other videos on Youtube: John Perreault Channel.  Main John Perreault  website. More of John Perreault’s art.

John Perreault as van Gogh in Les Levine's Analyse Lovers, The Story of Vincent, 1990. Still from video.

A new biography, Van Gogh: The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, suggests Vincent did not commit suicide, but was shot by a perky local of 16 named René Secrétan, who was wearing a cowboy costume.

The bullet’s trajectory showed the shot could not have been self-inflicted and had to have been fired from afar.

But if this is true, why did Vincent protect his assassin? The bully had been tormenting him for months by putting salt in his coffee and setting up fake dates with farm girls. You would have thought he would want some revenge.

Vincent was a Christian. Thus forgiveness should have been part of his character. Maybe that explains it. Or, and this is now the preferred interpretation, he committed suicide-by-hooligan, the way those too afraid to off themselves sometimes taunt the police into doing the job.

I have a better theory. Vincent had been having his way with René; and the lad, clearly not the brightest bulb, decided to defend his honor. From afar. The cowboy suit made me suspicious from the beginning. Even in the 19th century a cowboy costume on a 16 year-old was not the mark of maturity. He should have been knocking up farmers’ daughters or planting potatoes, not playing cowboys and Indians or whatever he was doing. Maybe he was dressing up for the artist.

Michiko Kakutani, in her N.Y. Times Book Review, is on the suicide side:

The deeply unhappy van Gogh, the authors argue not altogether convincingly, “welcomed death,” and Secrétan may have provided him “the escape that he longed for but was unable or unwilling to bring upon himself, after a lifetime spent disavowing suicide as ‘moral cowardice.’”……. There is no hard evidence for this theory, and it is laid out, discreetly, in an appendix to this biography.

On 60 Minutes, one of the biographers, Gregory White, is at least more forthcoming about the murder:

.

Yet  the segment ends with a quote from an unidentified BBC art critic. He claims  the van Gogh death-bed statement was:  ”Do not accuse anyone, it was I who wanted to kill myself.”

Why the cover-up?  A martyr is a martyr, right? What difference does it make if Vincent was killed by culture-clash, class-conflict, hatred of art or by his own hand?

Media cannot bear corrections or ambiguity. Myths are not allowed to be changed. It would be too destabilizing. We can no more change the van Gogh ending than we can change  Little Red Riding Hood.

Are museums immune? No. There’s also a wait-and-see statement from the Van Gogh Museum, quoted in the above broadcast. The museum’s curator Leo Jansen told Dutch News  ”the findings are not sufficiently supported by the facts…The interpretation is interesting but there are still a lot of unanswered questions. The museum thinks it is too early to change the cause of death from suicide.”

Are they afraid that if it becomes generally known that Vincent did not put the gun to himself, it will effect their gate?

In print,  even the biographers who amassed the anti-suicide evidence hedge their bets. Vincent was depressed.  So what else is new? He felt guilty that Theo, his art-dealer brother — who had been supporting him — had not been able to sell one paltry painting. He wanted to die. Wait a minute. Shouldn’t Theo have been the one that felt guilty about not selling any paintings? Oh, I forgot; art dealers never feel guilty.

The real issue is not whether or not Van Gogh killed himself but why there’s the need to cling to the suicide myth. Theo, who rushed to Vincent’s bedside,  seems not to have investigated, even though the locals thought their rowdy René did the dirty deed. If you were Vincent’s brother wouldn’t you have wanted to seek justice?

Not if you were his brother and his art dealer.

Another art dealer, Amboise Vollard, a few years later, apparently advised Paul Gauguin, Vincent’s old buddy,  to stay put in the South Seas although he inexplicably longed for Paris. We know from recent excavations of Gauguin’s well that at the end, the artist was drinking a lot of bottled beer from New Zealand and shooting up with morphine. If he returned to France he was told his paintings wouldn’t sell.

Theo van Gogh died of syphilis six months after his beloved brother Vincent passed away from a festering bullet. Theo’s widow then made a fortune off of Vincent’s paintings. The suicide story worked.

I once channeled Vincent in artist Les Levine’s Analyse Lovers: The Story of Vincent, for Dutch National Television (commissioned for the 100th anniversary of van Gogh’s death). Levine thought I looked like van Gogh, a fatal mistake. At the press preview, the reporters  only wanted to know where he had found such a talented actor to play Vincent.

On camera, I went into a kind of trance. I revealed the truth about cutting off my ear for Gauguin. But the end game, the shot to the chest, was never part of the video. Yes,  chest.  Not head. I bet you have always imagined a shot to the head, perhaps to the temple. But that self-portrait I did with the bandage was years before, when I cut my ear.

Now I can reveal, speaking through John Perreault, that I lied on my deathbed —  not to shield the naughty culprit, but to incite posthumous sales and please my brother.

Myth is all. Suicide makes a better sales point than death-by-yokel.

Why We Need Myth

Own up to it. Aren’t we disappointed that the laboriously decoded Maya hieroglyphs reveal nothing more than when to plant maize and the succession of Mayan despots? We already knew the Mayans had independently invented the concept of zero. That should have been enough. But we have secretly been hoping that they had predicted the end of the world. We adore apocalypse.

And, confess, you felt let down when you read that Vincent didn’t kill himself. Too messy.

We need closure. We need the myth of the crazy, tormented, self-destructive artist to convince us that painters, poets, and musicians are all nuts, so their larger-than-life lives can continue to offer escapism from the bourgeois armchair of our own lack of freedom. And also, paradoxically,  make us feel relieved we are not artists. In our dreams, van Gogh must commit suicide, otherwise the story doesn’t have legs.

______________________________________________________________________________________

To sample John Perreault’s  sand paintings you may preview  online the Kauai Museum catalog for Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand, with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank.  Click  Here.  The exhibition runs from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20,  in Lihue, HI.

For easy access to 200 previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.

NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com

John Perreault is on Facebook. You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault

For Art Cops cartoons and other videos on Youtube: John Perreault Channel.  Main John Perreault  website. 

More of John Perreault’s art.

Willem de Kooning, Untitled XIX, 1983.

Willem de Kooning’s difficult masterpieces, recently so unfashionable, can now be seen with new eyes. De Kooning’s work for decades was virtually blacklisted by Greenbergian formalists, but MoMA makes amends with a well-chosen and complex survey. “Willem de Kooning, A Retrospective” at MoMA to January 9 is the must-see of the fall season. Jackson Pollock was great, but so was de Kooning, and we are here reminded why.

Of course, the single minded cannot allow anything but a single line. Art-historical descent does not allow dissent, or anything beyond clear-cut teleology. De Kooning’s error is that he seemed not to have left behind descendants who needed justification by patrimony to boost their prices, whereas Pollock supposedly fathered Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski, and maybe, just maybe, Kenneth Noland. We need a new schemata.

Last season’s MoMA survey of Abstract Expressionism was not good enough to bend the curve. The MoMA de Kooning show might.

Anger, angst, and ambiguity can no longer be repressed. De Kooning descended from Picasso; Pollock from Thomas Hart Benton.

Certainly we have had splatter, scatter, and sputter art, but it has been art about splatter, scatter, and sputter without emotions or struggle. It has been Abstract Expressionism without the expression. It has been Anti-Form Post-Minimalism.

De Kooning, c. 1950.

Time Is Not a Series of Boxes

De Kooning outlasted Pollock and so there are distinct periods as identifiable as Picasso’s. For starters, MoMA lists:

Men, Women and Interiors, 1938-1945
Pink Angels to Black and Whites, 1946-1948
Around Excavations 48-50
Women To Landscapes 1950-56……..

LINK

The above link will bring you to the “Periods” section of MoMA’s ambitious online educational exposition of the retrospective exhibition, complete with images….

Squeezing de Kooning’s work into “periods” results in a certain awkwardness, to say the least. These periods (i.e., “Pink Angels to Black and Whites, 1946-48” or “Women to Landcapes, 1950-56”) refer to a few years at a time and not to stylistic periods (i.e., Picasso’s Blue Period or de Chirico’s Neo-Impressionist Period). As far as I can see, de Kooning did not focus on one idea or stylistic set and then move on to another distinct constellation of attributes.

Very inconvenient.

On the other hand, unlike his peers Newman, Reinhardt, Rothko, and Still, he did not fasten upon a signature style. He probably could have gone on making grimacing women for the rest of his life. But — this critic maintains – his touch, his hand, his manipulation of surface and color, his complex interplay of figure and ground make up his signature. The means were the ends.

To get closer to the way de Kooning actually worked MoMA’s enumeration and illustration of Themes LINK is the more helpful deposition:

Over the course of his long career, Willem de Kooning continually shifted his painting style, using innovative techniques and always searching for a different means of expression. Several themes, such as the female figure, permeated his work along the way. This section of the website allows viewers to see the artist’s works thematically rather than chronologically, highlighting the extremely varied approach to a particular theme or subject matter at different points in his career.

Thus we are confronted with an unidentified, Artopian braid. Say it: braid. There’s a strand for each theme as it weaves in and out of other themes. Suddenly the variety makes sense. That no one at the time was painting this way makes it all the more important to clarify the de Kooning braid. In his own practice he was objectifying the way art works historically.

Of course, critic Harold Rosenberg (who saw what his rival Clement Greenberg did not want to see) was right. The paintings are about action, struggle, process more than form. De Kooning ate ambiguity for breakfast. And doubt.

Jackson Pollock in his best work showed no signs of doubt. Newman, Still, and Rothko made doubt heroic or single-minded. Or simple-minded? De Kooning made doubt part and parcel of everyday life.

To doubt is to live.

Is this painting finished? He mixed up great messes of salad oil and pigment so the paint wouldn’t dry. An emulsion compulsion. He did not finish paintings; he abandoned them. Even in his endgame, the paintings were taken away from him, rather than concluded. Bossy Elaine de Kooning (now back on board since 1975) and one hired hand or another would point out empty areas on the canvas they thought he had forgotten. He was urged to go beyond his now favored red, yellow, and blue on a white ground and even whipped up some ghastly greens and purples for him.

Is this painting resolved? Is life resolved?

De Kooning is what I call an oil-and-water artist. He refuses to give up either figuration or abstraction, happiness or fear.

And then there is the constant unfolding of what’s there. Or not there.

The Goddess Is Not Modest

The Women had to do with the female painted through all the ages, all those idols, and maybe I was stuck to a certain extent. I couldn’t go on. It did one thing for me; it eliminated composition, arrangements, relationships, lighy — all this silly talk aout line, color and form — because that is the thing I wanted to get a hold of.

I wasn’t concerned to get a particular kind of feeling. I look at them now and they seem vociferous and ferocious. I think it had to do with the idea of the idol, the oracle, and above all the hilariousness of it.

  Willem de Koonng: Collected Writings, Hanuman Books, 1988.

 

Woman-hater? No, he loved them perhaps too much. His biography is replete with love mistakes. We have been taught to think, misguidedly, that his notorious and career-making “Women” paintings represent contempt. Sorry. They are fear and comedy. He himself once said they were inspired by his wife Elaine:

“I had a quiet profile. I used to paint quiet paintings,” he told interviewer ¬Edvard Lieber. “Before I met Elaine I painted quiet men. Then I started to paint wild women” (Willem de Kooning: Reflections in the Studio, Abrams, 2000, p.129¬).

After reading De Kooning, An American Master by Mark Stevens and Analyn Swan (Knopf, 2004) you might easily conclude that Elaine Fried de Kooning was a hard-drinking, self-centered monster. In Artopia we never thought much of her as a painter. And she could never be compared to her husband, before or after their long separation. She did an official portrait of Jack Kennedy; he painted Marilyn Monroe, parkways, clam diggers, and freedom.

Harsh words?

Read the Stevens and Swan biography and you will wonder why de Kooning was so wimpy when it came to women. Passive aggressive? Too busy painting? And then we learn that in spite of his reputations for conviviality and brawling, he was pretty much a loner. Away from New York, he lost touch with his old neighbors — dance critic Edwin Denby and photographer Rudy Burckardt — and New York School poet friends. Battling binge-drinking and failing, stuck with only a bike in lonely Long Island, minded sometimes by assistants who were too often drunks themselves…age crept up.

Fortunately, he was more right-brained than left-brained. He thought with his bright blue eyes, his hands, his arms, his whole body.

But just remember this: in spite of his hard drinking, chain-smoking, and Alzheimer’s, he outlasted most of his competitors! Including Elaine Fried de Kooning — who had come back to claim her share of the proceeds of his life in art. At one point, he thought she was trying to take away his house and studio.

Nevertheless, she kept him painting in the ’80s on the theory it was helping him stay alive. And to make sure there was an estate to inherit? Who knows. The assistants sometimes made drawings on bare canvas based on previous paintings to start him off. There was even a contraption to rotate the paintings so he could determine which end was up.

If this were a movie no one would believe that the long-gone wife would suddenly return when hubby, who somehow neglected to divorce her, still had a market, still was painting, but was mentally in bad shape.

As it turned out, Elaine died first in 1989, leaving behind, we are told by biographers Stevens and Swan, a collection of high-end shoes so large that it had to be curated, a stash of expensive jewelry, and the love of her relatives who had received gifts of Bill’s paintings. When de Kooning died in 1997, his daughter (by Joan Ward) inherited all the estate, not just half, which would have been the case if Elaine had survived her old flame Bill. (He was one of many old flames, including Milton Resnick and critics Rosenberg and Thomas Hess.)

The beloved daughter, one supposes, selected music of Alan Hovhaness and the triumphal march from Aida for de Kooning’s East Hampton funeral, not what he had wanted, which was Frank Sinatra singing “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week.”

De Kooning, Door to the River, 1960. Whitney Museum

The Test

Recently I was sickened by the ill-conceived “Real/Surreal” selection from the Whitney collection. Except for great but out-of-place paintings by Sheeler, Hopper and Hartley, it reminded me why Abstract Expressionism was necessary. Then I thought to myself, because I remember liking some of these very same paintings when I was a kid, that maybe I am just in a bad mood. After all, I didn’t like the Ree Morton wallpiece upstairs, and I used to like her work, too.

Fortunately, there was a test. Off to the side, but also on the second floor, was a de Kooning unrelated to “Real/Surreal” and all by itself in a kind of alcove (shrine?). One of the parkway landscapes. It was glorious. So, no, it wasn’t my mood — which, though I possess an inexplicably sunny disposition, can effect the way I see art. It was the art in “Real/Surreal.” More Magic Realism then true Surrealism. Ghastly stuff.

I didn’t particularly like the Whitney’s “David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy,” either. An academic corrective to the notion that this formalist-favored sculptor came to rectangles only in his late Cubi series does not disguise that even in his last, supposedly greatest, period he was still chained to the figure. All the sculptures have fronts and backs. They are cutouts or silhouettes, therefore hardly sculptures at all. The man couldn’t think in three dimensions, never mind that he owed everything to Picasso. How’s that for revisionism? And it wasn’t my mood. I went back upstairs to the fifth floor. The Robert Morris Minimalist sculpture looked great.

De Kooning, Woman Sag Harbor, 1964.

De Kooning Did Not Repeat Himself, Nor Should I

Is there anything new to be said about de Kooning? We don’t want to go through the same old shrink-wrapped palaver. Surely there is something deeper in de Kooning than his worship of and rage at the White Goddess, as she was once called when all the rage. No one even remembers that terrible British poet Robert Graves, who uncovered her grave. To old-type feminists, I would suggest that men are not the only ones who hate their mothers. Mother-daughter conflicts are just as bad as father-son ones. Can’t we look at de Kooning’s women in the same way we look at that other post-war phenomenon, the bigger-then-life big, bad dames of film noir? To know them is to love them.

And we don’t want to repeat the stories told over and over about de Kooning in his cups, throwing Franz Kline through the front window of the Cedar Bar. Kline probably deserved it.

Is de Kooning’s greatness confirmed? Has it even begun to be parsed? Like the founding “dear leader” of authoritarian North Korea, de Kooning also had the required “three greatnesses.”

Here I should confess I have been watching a number of Netflix streaming documentaries about North Korea and one hilarious mockumentary (Jim Finn’s avant-garde The Juche Idea). The Danish The Red Chapel is hilarious and awfully sad, too. Daniel Gordon’s Crossing the Line, about an American deserting to North Korea, is mind-blowing.

In the meantime, please memorize:

1. Leadership. Many tried to follow in de Kooning’s footsteps, but most of the second-generation Action Painters were a sorry lot. He led them over a cliff. His true successors (open for revision) were Robert Rauschenberg, who erased a de Kooning, Alan Kaprow, John Chamberlain, Alice Neel, Joan Mitchell and Joan Snyder.

As someone once said: Not all of my children need to look the same, nor should they.

2. Ideology. Art is the only thing worth doing; art is the only life worth living.

3. Aura. Even as an old man he had drop-dead good looks. But aura isn’t just looks, it’s being at center-stage no matter where you are. Aura is the spotlight that never dies. The follow-light that always follows. The silence that gets attention. Most important, his aura was mysteriously embodied in his paintings, in the gestures, the enjambment, the wreckage of Cubism.

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GAG SHOP MAD AVE VENUE SHUTTERED

NOT the gallery, for all you fans of schadenfreude; only the books, trinkets, and art souvenir outlet. Can the landlords now command a higher rent? LINK. Story and image, thanks to artnet.com

NIEMEYER MUSEUM CURTAINS AFTER 62 DAYS!

103-year old master-architect Oscar Niemeyer, who designed Brasilia, must be in shock; his new museum in Spain  just opened….. and then, after 62 days, closed. To expensive to run! What will happen to it? More proof that the Bilbao Effect is a canard. Can we change the meaning of the phrase from: “build an iconic museum and you will bring in all the tourists and put your little city on the map” to “it only happened with a Gehry in Bilbao and will never happen again.” The Bilbao Effect also  now means false hope, or lightning never strikes twice. Niemeyer’s museum looks great; other new museums  strain to be photogenic, iconic, mind-boggling and just look ugly. And, yes, are impossible places to show art. I don’t have to name the chief villains, you know who you are. LINK. Courtesy The Guardian.

DALLAS WOMEN’S MUSEUM KAPUT….ART AND ARTIFACTS RETURNED TO DONORS

The Women’s Museum in Dallas to close after 11 years. High upkeep; not enough revenue…..Collection to be returned to donors….. “There were topical issues not usually found in a museum venue, such as ‘Family Gathering: A Look into the World of Eating Disorders,’ 2007; ‘Apron Chronicles: A Patchwork of American Recollections,’ 2006; and ‘The Purse & the Person: A Century of Women’s Purses,’ 2009.” LINK. Story courtesy Huffington Post.

AND DOESN’T LOOK GOOD….

WHERE HAVE ALL THE CHILDREN GONE?

National Gallery in London had 100,000 fewer children visit each of the past two years. School tours are a thing of the past, as are art assignments, art classes. Cut-backs? To much focus on what will later be marketable skills? Art is  no longer important. Britain needs computer drones, not well-rounded citizens. Is the same thing happening in the U.S.?  LINK courtesy AAM Newsletter

BUT THE GOOD NEWS IS…….

LACMA REDEEMED!

A movie museum will open in 3 – 5 years in the May Co. building in L.A., as a partnership between LACMA, owner of this moderne landmark, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  We have our fingers crossed. Movies are history. So  LACMA has gone from eliminating its film department, to starting a new one  headed by Artopia filmcrit favorite, Elvis Mitchell, to partnering a movie museum. Turns on a dime, that LACMA.   Moral: Shake it up, Baby. LINK.

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