Submitted by Brett Baker on May 13, 2013
Nicolas de Staël at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 1018 Madison Avenue, New York, on view from May 2 - 31, 2013.
In the United States, an eerie silence surrounds the work of Russian painter Nicolas de Staël. His name is rarely, if ever, recommended to or cited as an influence on an American painter. The first reason for his relative absence from the American consciousness is simply bad timing. As Eliza Rathbone explained in 1997: "The very fact that [de Staël] began to achieve fame and recognition during the same years as the New York School was establishing its reputation on native soil, made a challenging environment for the work of an artist steeped in artistic culture and traditions of France." 1 The romantic image of the New York School remains powerful today. Struggling inwardly in a studio on 10th Street continues to capture the imagination of young American painters more than painting light and heat on a beach in Antibes.
Nicolas de Staël, Paysage Méditerranée 1954, oil on canvas, 23 5/8 by 31 7/8 inches (courtesy of Mitchell-Innes and Nash)
Perhaps the main reason de Staël’s reputation has languished in recent decades, though, is the inaccessibility of his work. The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. has been the only reliable venue to see de Staël’s paintings in the last half century. After regular showings in the 1950s, only four other shows of de Staël’s paintings - in 1963, 1965, 1990, and 1997 - precede the small, but well-selected show of his works now on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s Madison Avenue space.
Submitted by Brett Baker on March 5, 2013
Installation view, Alan Uglow at David Zwirner, New York, 2013 (image courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery)
An exhibition of works by Alan Uglow is on view at David Zwirner, New York, on view from February 19 - March 23, 2013.
Submitted by Brett Baker on October 29, 2012
A retrospective exhibition of works by Gillian Ayres is on view at the Jerwood Gallery (in cooperatation with Alan Cristea Gallery) thorough November 25, 2012.
This 1988 video interview with Ayres by Geoffrey Robinson (below) was recently re-edited for the web. During this extended look into the artist's studio, viewers see Ayres at work and hear her thoughts on painting. She remarks:
"Painting is about the area or size of the canvas you choose and how you relate marks on that area... you're doing area against area of color. On that area, this chosen area, the thing has to work. It doesn't only have to work... one hopes it touches the soul... at the end of it. It has to do a lot more things at the end of the line but it also does have to work visually in that way. Perhaps surprise too, and shock... I mean in those areas of color, I don't mean shock in an other sort of literal way. I mean within itself... It probably sets up moods, it probably sets up poetry... it has to do lots of things, but you still only read it as it's put down, as these marks."
Submitted by Brett Baker on October 18, 2012
The landscape has inspired painters from Courbet, Monet, and Cézanne to Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell, the immensity of nature acting as a catalyst for each of their highly individual visions.
Tenses of Landscape, on view at the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center Gallery through November 4, 2012, takes a look at the influence of landscape in the work of nineteen contemporary painters: Ricky Allman, Julie Cifuentes, Mike East, Emily Gherard, Grant Hottle, Michael Kareken, Tim Kennedy, Carla Knopp, Michael Krueger, Mark Lewis, Kristin Musgnug, Joseph Noderer, Margaret Noel, Casey Roberts, Claire Sherman, Kimberly Trowbridge, Shane Walsh, Megan Williamson, and Jenn Wilson.
In the exhibition introduction, Sam King writes that the show “presents both broad and dynamic depictions of landscape revealed as motif. Moreover, each artist examines the terrain dictated by these approaches and in turn addresses the act of painting itself.”
In addition to publishing statements by the artists each Monday on their blog MW Capacity, exhibition co-curators Sam King and Christopher Lowrance agreed to share their thoughts on putting together the show with Painters’ Table.
Submitted by Brett Baker on June 17, 2012
Faust and Other Tales: The Paintings of Jan Müller at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, May 3 - June 23, 2012.
A career shortened by an early death and a vision that flowed against the current of art history have undermined the contributions of painter Jan Müller (1922-1958). Banished from the official narrative, Müller is likely a to remain a footnote to the history of the New York School. Thus, an exhibition now on view at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New York that showcases a number of Müller’s mature, large-scale paintings is a welcome, if short lived, opportunity to see his monumental Abstract Expressionist allegories.
Jan Müller, Walpurgisnacht-Faust I, 1956, oil on cnavas, 68 x 119 inches (courtesy of Lori Bookstein Fine Art)
Müller accomplished what more well-known New York School artists, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko (at least in their early careers) could not - he made paintings that embraced myth and allegory while engaging issues central to the most forward-thinking painting of the time. While Newman and Rothko abandoned their mythological paintings of the early 1940s to pursue a purely abstract visual language, Müller took the opposite course. He renounced pure visual abstraction concluding “the image gives one a wider sense of communication.” 1
(detail) Jan Müller, Walpurgisnacht-Faust I, 1956 (courtesy of Lori Bookstein Fine Art)
Müller remained a painter of abstract ideas, however, if not abstract forms. Without backsliding into still life or portraiture, he used allegory to address the question central to New York School painters: does an artist need to be a purely abstract painter to be “original?” 2 His paintings are original precisely because they take this question as their subject.
Submitted by Brett Baker on April 23, 2012
"I went back to my own idioms, envisioned, created, and thought through. And the insight and the momentum established altered the character of the whole concept of the practice of painting." - Clyfford Still 1
The Clyfford Still Museum's inaugural exhibition provides new insight into the development of Clyfford Still's groundbreaking abstract paintings. In addition to rarely seen early landscapes and early figure paintings, a gallery of never before seen works on paper reveals the process behind Still's visionary work. Though only a small selection of Still's 1,500 drawings are on view, they reflect a practice of lifelong visual inquiry and show drawing to be an important, perhaps crucial, tool in Still's dramatic evolution from regional artist to icon of the New York School.
Clyfford Still, PP 241, 1936, pastel on paper, © Clyfford Still Museum
Still's transformation from a regional painter of the pacific northwest to a celebrated avant-garde artist has, until now, seemed uncanny. The shocking way Still's paintings fused figure and ground so completely left his 1940s contemporaries (as well as art historians) flummoxed and awe-struck. His 1946 show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery was, in Robert Motherwell's words, "the most original. A bolt out of the blue. Most of us were still working through images... Still had none." 2
Still's works on paper suggest the key to his originality lay in his willingness to explore, test, and reflect upon his vision. Still's drawings contain clues to his initial motivations and to what interested him within his own work. In them, we also see Still as an artist committed to direct observation and investigation. A traditional approach, it seems, provided the starting point for Still's innovation.
Submitted by Brett Baker on March 7, 2012
Dark Matters, Paintings by Andrea Belag, Ryan Cobourn, Arthur Dove, Bill Jensen, and Ellen Phelan, curated by Jennifer Samet, at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, February 23- March 18, 2012.
In his Theory of Colors, Goethe observes that "the greatest brightness short of dazzling acts near the greatest darkness. In this state we at once perceive all the intermediate gradations of chiaro-scuro, and all the varieties of hues." In Dark Matters, currently on view at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, the theme of darkness unites dazzlingly nuanced explorations of color and painterly approach in works by Ryan Cobourn, Arthur Dove, Andrea Belag, Bill Jensen, and Ellen Phelan. The superb selection of paintings spans nearly a century, adding a temporal dialogue to the mix.
Ryan Cobourn, Neighborhood, 2012 Oil on canvas, 46 x 52 inches (courtesy Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects)
Painting darkness is a new and highly successful direction in the work of Ryan Cobourn, who has turned his searching, energetic brushwork from evocations of flowers and light on water to a sensate exploration of the indistinct. Painting the winter city at night, Cobourn embraces the challenge of observation in the absence of light. Masses of dark, uncertain forms are punctuated by far away lights - blinding touches that momentarily disrupt the ability to perceive the dark passages. Forced to actively focus and re-focus, neither painter nor viewer can locate forms with certainty, and Cobourn's paintings remain an active visual experience. They present the difficulty of seeing; darkness compels their forms and focus to remain constantly in flux.
Across the gallery hangs Arthur Dove's Music from 1913. For Dove, the difficulty of rendering forms in darkness proved a useful step in the early-modern march toward abstraction. Instead of painting sights, here Dove painted sounds - the Cagian cacophony of the night city. Dove’s sound-forms fan out rhythmically as their spiraling dark mass echoes, fills, and obscures a distant skyline.
Arthur Dove, Dark Abstraction (Woods), 1920 Oil on canvas, 21 x 18 inches (courtesy Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects)
In Dark Abstraction (Woods), 1920, Dove paints a forest landscape hovering between darkness and light. He connects two worlds, representation and abstraction, through a shared palette of muted, rich color. On the opposite wall, Ellen Phelan's Autumn Bay, 2003, investigates a similar duality, but her painting, shrouded in a nocturnal mist, seems more like a reminiscence whose shadows derive from the vagueness of memory. Juxtaposing these works from different centuries underscores the concerns specific to each. In Phelan's 21st century painting the tension between representation and abstraction, so palpable in Dove’s time, has been demystified and become a thing of the past.
Other paintings in the show by Phelan, Bill Jensen, and Andrea Belag mine another lineage of dark painting, that of Goya and El Greco. In this tradition of dark painting, psychological tensions replace formal ones.
Submitted by Brett Baker on February 8, 2012
Click below to watch Per Kirkeby discuss his work while visiting his retrospective exhibition at BOZAR Brussels, on view through May 20, 2012.
In the film, Kirkeby discusses the experience of seeing his entire body of work represented in a single exhibition. He notes remarks that "it doesn't care too much if it's from the 60's or from last year - it's kind of the same thing... apparently there are certain structures, certain ways of organizing a painting that's there, that I'm born with as a painter."
Submitted by Brett Baker on January 31, 2012
David von Schlegell, Grey Over Yellow, 1992, Oil, Polyur on Aluminum with Wood, 19.25 x 22 inches (courtesy China Art Objects, Los Angeles)
David von Schlegell at China Art Objects, Los Angeles on view from January 7 - February 4, 2012
David von Schlegell is known primarily for his large scale, outdoor, and public sculpture projects; however, he began his career as a painter - learning to paint from his father. He returned to painting late in life. His final show was at Althea Viafora Gallery in 1991, and it focused on monochrome, poured paintings on wood. These last works form the core of a new exhibition at China Art Objects in Los Angeles. Images of von Schlegell’s early paintings are difficult to come by, but an early expressionist landscape in the Smithsonian evokes a romantic approach to nature still evident in the later paintings.
David von Schlegell, Horizontal Blue, 1961, oil on canvas 40 x 48 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum
Von Schlegell’s experience as a sculptor, however, is the primary influence on these paintings, which reveal a fascination with the material states of paint and poetic transformations that occur from one elemental state to another. The paintings are made from a viscous mixture of oil and Polyur - an industrial paint - poured onto wood panels. The resulting effect, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer noted recently in Artforum, is that “each panel is a gradient field of darkly pooled pigment with a concentrated opacity that simulates surprising depth.” Though solid, Von Schlegell’s pooled fields of paint retain their aqueous appearance while their resinous quality alludes to both amber and varnish, a material made by combining burned amber with linseed oil.
In these final paintings, material is subjected to both a physical and philosophical alchemy that returns von Schlegell the sculptor to his romantic, painterly roots.
David von Schlegell, Cerulean Blue, Light to Dark, 1992, Oil, Polyur on Wood Panel, 48 x 48 inches (courtesy China Art Objects)
David von Schlegell, Dark Red Over Blue, 1991, Oil, Polyur on Aluminum with Wood, 19.5 x 22 inches (courtesy China Art Objects)
Submitted by Brett Baker on January 23, 2012
Siri Berg, It's All About Color, Installation View (courtesy of The Painting Center)
Siri Berg, It's All About Color at The Painting Center, New York on view from November 17, 2011 - January 28, 2012
Siri Berg in her studio (Photo courtesy of Mats Petersson)
Coinciding with the exhibition Re-Generation, which maps the lasting effect of Josef Albers teaching on three successive generations of painters, is a small but exuberant show of paintings and works on paper by another teacher of color theory, painter Siri Berg.
The exhibition, entitled It’s All About Color, is dominated by three polyptychs, each consisting of progressions of monochrome panels. Though all three share a visual language, their arrangements are varied, and each stakes out its own chromatic territory. Carrie Patterson, who curated both shows, notes that “one set of nine canvases are shown in sequence; the second series is far more playful and invites the viewer to mix and match the canvases in different order where the viewer chooses the orientation and gradation of the series.”
Working in such series is not new territory for Berg. Heli Haapasalo noted in a 2003 review that Berg’s “modular" systems are "a flexible method of creating and combining work, a process by which [her pictures] can each stand apart or join others as an ensemble, with no loss of visual integrity.” In the current exhibition Berg’s signature serial deployment of colored panels results in an optical recreation of the process of mixing color.
Although Berg’s formats and surfaces are cerebral and calculated, she has stated she wishes to “Embrace the Expressionistic!” 1 Conceptual restriction, in Berg’s hands, does add up to exuberant expression and has a painterly feel. Berg’s language of pure color and forms (formats, really) is simultaneously precise and animated. Berg’s works are, thus, a paradox - exuberance born of control.
