Chelsea Walk

The art galleries in Chelsea are always worth a look, but yesterday’s walk was unusually rewarding. An hour before lunch at the Cookshop and 90 minutes after gave us time to wander 20th and 22nd Sts. and not much more, with the following highlights:

Benny Andrews at Michael Rosenfeld. Andrews is one of those artists I’m vaguely aware of but never seen in depth. The show at Rosenfeld was not a survey but presented one whole body of works almost in its entirety. Following the lead of Jacob Lawrence, Andrews painted a Migration series, notably the forced move westward during the Dust Bowl/Depression era. His lean figures previewed Ernie Barnes’s later style, but unlike Barnes his canvases were open and bright. He also included bits of hemp and other materials, something you wouldn’t get in a reproduction. I was surprised that so much of a series produced in 2004-2006 was still available; apparently the estate (Andrews died in 2006) has held back Andrews’s’ production, presumably to keep the market strong. What a show like this does is give me a familiarity with an artist that will enhance my viewing for years.

Kay Walkingstick at Hales. Based on limited exposure I’ve been skeptical of the attention Walkingstick has recently received. Most recently I was taken aback by the Met’s displaying her work in its Renaissance gold ground gallery, an example, I thought, of woke over art. The works at Hale were all from the last year or two, extraordinary output for an artist of 91. They all had a similar format–I don’t know yet if this is a Walkingstick trademark or a more recent style choice: atop a schematic Western landscape she superimposes a Native American pattern. She researched the patterns at the Smithsonian and uses them with the land to suggest “an enduring ancestral connection to place.” In other words from the gallery, “she reclaims the land not as a territory to be conquered but as a site of cultural memory and continuity.” As with Andrews, another newly hot artist added to my repertory.

Giuseppe Penone at Gagosian. A spectacular exhibition: in one gallery beautifully patinated bronzes sit on cork walls. I thought this was just the Gagosian display, but it turned out the cork backgrounds, 15 feet high, 10-to-20 feet wide, are part of the works. In the next room were large bronze tree trunks, including one with a living maple tree in the middle. At 79, Penone has been around and is, according to Wikipedia, “known for his large-scale sculptures of trees,” so here again I was catching up to the art world.

Anselm Kiefer at Gagosian. I’m a huge fan of Kiefer, but this show of eight new, large canvases was disappointing. The great Kiefer at Cleveland, where I’d been earlier in the week, is almost monochrome, brown and greys, with jagged lines and an intensity of feeling (guilt? anger? dread?). By contrast, the new Kiefers were boldly splashed with mushy colors; the bleakness was missing and the reference to mythological Greeks seemed a stretch.

Gerhard Richter at Zwirner. Another Big Name, and this did not disappoint. I have been dubious about the respect, and prices, given to Richter, but this show of soft-focus (blurred) landscapes and wild abstractions, painted concurrently over several decades has substantially softened my disdain. In short, the two Seascapes on view are among the most beautiful modern paintings I have seen. The abstractions (all sharing the same title) are not the striped works I don’t get, but Joan Mitchell-like explosions of color. There doesn’t seem to be logic or pattern, but somehow there is a power that makes you want to keep looking.

Jasper Johns at Gagosian. A minor show devoted to “Copy/Trace” in Johns’s prints, with his body often the subject. No revelations, but it’s always pleasant to revisit Johns’s technique and some familiar images.

David Hockney at Pace. I like early Hockney as much as the next person but have been less enthusiastic about his later adventures in more experimental art-making, including recent pictures constructed on his iPad. The show in a darkened gallery at Pace presented a new suite of prints (edition of 15), views of the moon from his country house, and I rather liked them. You could trace the marks made on the iPad–squiggles of white creating light from the moon. The pictures didn’t try to do too much; they were modest and they succeeded. A show of Paul Thek on the floor below missed me, while the ground floor housed large paintings by Julian Schnabel of an Italian pine from a recent stay in Italy. The ones with old maps in the background were fun; the ones made of Schnabel’s trademark broken dishes were not.

Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian. I thought I had seen enough Frankenthaler, but a gallerist’s tip caused us to make a stop at Gagosian’s second outpost. Working with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, they had assembled twenty large canvases from four decades, 1960 to 1992. The ’60s works were threadbare and not engaging, but Frankenthaler hit her stride in the ’70s and the following rooms all had strong examples. I prefer her paintings with slashes or blocks of color to ones with biomorphic blobs, and this show gave me the chance to solidify my taste.

Guy Billout at Philippe Labaune. Walking into a random gallery we came upon a solo show by the French-American illustrator Guy Billout. These were watercolor and airbrush drawings, mainly published in the Atlantic, which the 84-year-old artist is finally selling. His drawing was crisp and clear, his colors appealing, his absurdist sense of humor charming. The pictures seemed straightforward scenes of Americana, but when I got the joke I often laughed out loud.

There were other quality shows we stopped at but didn’t have quite the impact or presented less important art. Among these artists were Vik Muniz, Deborah Dancy, Charles Ritchie, Vija Celmins, Hans Josephsohn and our friend Carin Gerrard. We also went to a show of a couple’s collection at Zwirner, but other than a nice Fairfield Porter concluded that our taste was different. And I might also note the name artists with shows in Chelsea that we didn’t have time to take in, such as Lisa Yuskavage, Romare Bearden, Philip Guston, Kenneth Noland, Hughie Lee-Smith, Leon Kossoff, Sanford Biggers, Katharina Fritsch, Joan Brown, Mark di Suvero, Seth Price, Pacita Abad. Not to mention 30 or 40 more waiting to be discovered.