New York ’23 – Spring

Just as the Guggenheim vaulted Hilda Am Klimt from obscurity to the canon in 2019, it has put on a retrospective for Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt) that will require her future inclusion in any survey of 20th-century abstraction, and not just listings of female or South American artists. With her wire sculptures she invented not just a style but a medium that is engaging as well as instantly recognizable. Paul Klee described his paintings as “taking a line for a walk”: Gego does the same, but in dizzying three dimension. Her artistry, however, was not limited to wire. She made prints and drawings that stand on their own as great art, and late in life she wove strips of fabric into beautiful patterns. As Matisse went big, Gego went small. Inventiveness was on display in every Guggenheim nook.

Sarah Sze was also on display at the Guggenheim. I have liked every installation of hers in the past, but this left me cold. One was too much, and here we had five or six, all competing with each other. After the simplicity of Gego, the excess of Sze’s installations, which combined video, kinetic art, found objects, mass upon mass, with no clue how to enter let alone understand, simply palled.

The Asia Society mounted a tasteful loan exhibition of “Hell,” as variously depicted in the Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Jain traditions. Surprisingly, Hieronymous Bosch would have fit right in. There were different philosophical constructs, but all faiths shared the basic idea that bad behavior in this life would lead to horrific punishment, so you’d better be good for goodness’ sake.

An Arthur Dove mini-retrospective at Alexandre Gallery followed our annual visit to the American Art Fair and reinforced my taste in American art. There was not a single work by Dove that I liked or would care to see again. This has held pretty true ever since my exposure to Dove as a docent at the MIA, where a greenish-yellow painting was on permanent display. I don’t like biomorphic shapes and I don’t like mushy colors. (This is partly why I didn’t see anything I liked at the Bonnard show at Acquavella, either.) I’m not against abstraction per se: I love the Abstract Expressionists almost universally and unequivocally. But the abstraction known as “American Modernism” leaves me cold. This has been the big field in recent years at New York galleries: Schoelkopf, Debra Force, Meredith Long, et al. Warner Drewes, Charles Green Shaw, Charles Biederman are some of the names I encountered over and over at the Art Fair–all descendants, in some way, from Dove. Then, dotted among these offerings, I see Prendergast, Bradford, Silva, even David Johnson, and I can’t but think that this is the art that will last. It tells a story, it conveys a picture of the culture that created it, it’s engaging and makes me want to look again. The market, for the moment, is against me; I can’t believe it will last.

Since they are routinely displayed and written about together, it was telling to visit MoMA’s show of Georgia O’Keeffe shortly after the Dove. Primarily works on paper, but in various media, the O’Keeffe exhibition covered her entire career and focused, instructively but not exclusively, on series. And as much as I disliked Dove’s works, I loved the O’Keeffes. Why? The simple answer: whereas Dove took off from landscape into seemingly unmoored abstraction, O’Keeffe kept one foot firmly in realism as she explored shapes and designs. Whereas Dove’s shapes were muddy, biomorphic and unbalanced, O’Keeffe’s were, for the most part, clear, precise and stable. Some had obvious antecedents, like a sunrise; but when they didn’t, they still felt recognizable. They struck my beauty funnybone; Dove’s never did. Maybe it’s my taste–the same reason I like Kandinsky more than Arp, say. Or maybe O’Keeffe had a better eye and more to say.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at the Whitney is a wonderful show, a chance to “discover” a major artist who, at 81, is near the end of her career but near the start of her recognition. The MIA displayed one of her works, and Kaywin Feldman recently purchased a piece for the National Gallery, their first by an Indigenous artist; but this survey gave a full sense of her oeuvre and was all new to me. First, let me say how beautiful her paintings are, most covered in dripping washes of brown, ochre, sienna, yellow that create a comforting painterly effect. Next there is usually a large silhouetted shape that establishes the Native American context: a canoe, bison, tepee, buckskin dress. Then, as you get closer, you see fragments of type, newspaper clippings, advertisements, all making some ironic point about how the White man has mistreated the Native American. Not exactly subtle, but never strident and with a touch of humor, so it goes down easy. You get the point but somehow aren’t offended. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are obvious influences, in the handling of paint, the use of type and newspaper collage and most obviously in her renditions of targets, the U.S. map and the American flag. Smith is original, but while working in an established tradition it is easier for us to see her art and absorb her message.

The Met’s current effort at “woke” is a show of and about Juan de Pareja, Velazquez’s slave and assistant who went on to his own career as a painter when freed in 1654. Showing four or five works by Pareja, including his two “masterpieces” from the Prado, didn’t do him any favors in terms of establishing his reputation. Anyone would come off second-best to Velazquez, who had eight remarkable works in the show, including the eponymous portrait, but Pareja’s derivative and mediocre efforts justified the obscurity he has heretofore been accorded. The two highlights of the show, beyond Velazquez’s sensational Kitchen Maid from Ireland, were the gallery devoted to Morton Schamburg, who went from Harlem to Spain in 1923 to study and preserve the legacy of Black culture there, and the show’s general theme: the story of Spanish art in the 17th century has to include the presence and contributions of Blacks (while pointing out that slaves in Spain at the time weren’t all Blacks).

“Arrogant” is the second word that came to my mind in the Mark Bradford show at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea. The first was “ugly.” Of course, my view doesn’t matter: the gallery lady told an inquiring couple that the show was “all sold, in the $10 to 30 million range.” Paintings 15 x 25 feet (!) took up entire walls and were laden with colorful globs of paint (and occasional rope and other materials) that defied any inference of pattern. I couldn’t imagine that Bradford had something to say that couldn’t have been said far more economically. Works of that size say, my only market is institutions and multimillionaires; I don’t care about anyone else. Bradford’s not the first to play the game this way–think of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, for starters–but when the product is so unappealing I’m turned off. I should note that I very much liked Bradford’s early works, where he layered papers and cut and peeled to create a design. The works on the 5th floor of H&W were closer to those, especially in their tendency to monochrome. But overall they still gave off the vibe, If Anselm Kiefer can work on this scale and in this way, I can too.