Link to Post:
http://dailyserving.com/2013/02/camaraderie-on-canvas/
Hayley Plack blogs about the exhibition Angels, Demons and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet at the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., on view through May 12, 2013.
Plack writes that "The exhibition traces the relationships between Jackson Pollock, Alfonso Ossorio, and Jean Dubuffet, three artists working simultaneously across continents in similar abstract styles during the period of 1945 to 1958. The 53 paintings and prints in the exhibition tell the story of how Pollock, Ossorio and Dubuffet influenced each other through not only their close friendships, but also through the sharing of ideas, techniques and even studio spaces... All three grappled with abstraction versus figuration, and each had an interest in process and materials."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/65500/in-painting-we-discover-demons-if-we-dont-exorcise-them-they-devour-your-ass/
Kyle Chayka reports on a lecture by painter Jack Whitten on the occasion of his exhibition Jack Whitten: Erasures, on view at the SCAD Museum, Savannah, Georgia, through March 31, 2013.
Chayka writes: "New York’s frenetic milieu allowed Whitten to refine his practice, moving from derivative Abstract Expressionism to an automatic form of painting informed by manufacturing, speed, and minimalism. He adopted a physical materiality from African sculpture and focused on questioning the faith in gesture of the New York School. 'I stopped using the word ‘to paint,’ and said ‘to make,’ ' he explained, showing images of canvases he created by dragging saw-toothed planks across expanses of pooled paint. These paintings, which saw Whitten reduce his work down to a single gesture, are currently on view at the elegantly renovated SCAD Museum of Art. In contrast to some Abstract Expressionism, the work still feels fresh, largely due to its mechanical clarity. Whitten described that he thought of these paintings as having the qualities of a single line — a discrete piece of visual information."
Link to Post:
http://thesilo.raphaelrubinstein.com/artists/bluhm
Raphael Rubinstein blogs about the need for a reappraisal of Norman Bluhm's work and his impact on painting in the 20th century.
Rubinstein writes that Bluhm "knew that he would finally arrive at an approach that combined his early architectural training, his debt to Abstract Expressionism, and his passion for old masters. But if he knew where he was going, he also knew that there were no shortcuts, at least not for someone who respected the integrity and craft of painting, who never wanted to reject his own past, whose work was always about reconciliation, even when the only thing he was reconciling was the painting he was working on and the painting he’d just completed.... In the 1990s, Bluhm’s multi-panel, mural-scale paintings offered a compelling summation of his own career (he never turned away from gestural painting, but daringly assimilated it into geometric structures) and, even more importantly, an audacious project to reconcile some five centuries of painting history, stretching from the Lorenzetti brothers in 14th-century Siena and passing through Botticelli, Rubens, Tiepolo, Cézanne, Matisse and de Kooning."
Link to Post:
http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2013/01/milton-resnick-1917-2004-three-poems.html
Jerome Rothenberg writes about Milton Resnick's poetry and posts three unpublished poems by the painter.
Rothenberg also writes that "Resnick was a very visible & dynamic artist when we met him in the early 1960s, but beyond that he was also a persistent practitioner of poetry, less in a public sense than as a release for feelings & ideas that were a necessary supplement to his life’s work as a painter" Rothenberg continues, noting that Resnick "left behind at least 16 envelopes of unpublished, often handwritten poetry with some 40 poems in each. The poems that follow (the last one in particular) were written in the desperation of his later years, when the overall brightness of his early abstractions had changed to figurative depictions of what I would take, rightly or wrongly, as the terror (still luminous) within."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/hassel-smith-a-free-spiri_b_2545493.html
John Seed blogs about the painter Hassel Smith (1915-2007) on the occasion of an exhibition of Smith's work at Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco and the publication of a new monograph on the artist edited by Petra Giloy-Hirtz.
Seed writes: "Smith first gained notice as a representational painter in the 1940s: his works from that period have an energy and graphic insistence that predicts some of the qualities of the Bay Area Figurative style that his friend David Park would pioneer a few years later. In the 50's Smith -- who was very close to Clyfford Still -- developed the feisty calligraphic abstract paintings that earned him his reputation as an 'underground legend.' ...The peripatetic life that followed after Smith left Los Angeles -- he was back and forth between California and England for many years -- combined with his constant stylistic tinkering, meant that the art world never quite managed to get a read on Smith during his lifetime."
Link to Post:
http://dailyserving.com/2013/01/jay-defeo-spatial-relations/
Rob Marks writes about the last works of painter Jay DeFeo on view in a retrospective of DeFeo's work at the San Francisco Museum of Moden Art through February 3, 2013.
Marks notes: "If you back your way into the Jay DeFeo exhibition... you’ll discover, as I did, a group of five oil paintings in the final gallery. The works are small by today’s standards of monumentality and smaller still by the standards of DeFeo’s most famous work, The Rose... all created in 1989—the year of the last big San Francisco earthquake and the year DeFeo died of lung cancer. The earthquake gave no notice of its imminence, but the intimacy of these paintings, their seeming modesty, might be interpreted to represent DeFeo’s attempt to contain the uncertainty of the time, an attempt to ground herself in an ungrounded world.[1] But for me the paintings demonstrate something very different—something that might be said to characterize all of DeFeo’s work."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/63065/the-rose-is-not-a-rose/
John Yau considers the work of painter Jay DeFeo. A retrospective of DeFeo's work is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) through February 3, 2012. The exhibition will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York from February 28 - June 2, 2013.
Yau writes: "DeFeo was a religious painter in secular clothing that wanted to integrate the sacred and the profane. Her works repeatedly suggest that one never quite escapes dirt and decay. At times, there is something grim and joyless running through her work, which is another reason why it strikes me as more medieval than anything we associate with the Renaissance. Paradoxically, in the drawings there is a lightness of touch that folds another level of feeling into them. DeFeo seems to have lived a messy life on a number of levels, often saving things most of us would throw away — the handle of a broken coffee cup, the discarded orthopedic cast worn by her dog wore when he had a broken leg, and the Christmas trees she kept while living on Fillmore. These things would become inspirations for various artworks. In them one senses DeFeo’s belief in talismans and occult power."
Submitted by Brett Baker on December 30, 2012
Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 3, 2013. It will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from February 28 - June 2, 2013.
Jay DeFeo, The Rose, 1958-66; oil with wood and mica on canvas; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of The Jay DeFeo Trust, Berkeley, CA, and purchase with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and the Judith Rothschild Foundation; © 2012 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jay DeFeo's reputation as an imporatant painter was established before the eight year period (1958-1966) in which she poured her entire vision and energy into a single work -The Rose. Perhaps the most mythic of the great Abstract Expressionist paintings, The Rose rivals masterworks by Pollock, Still, or Rothko. In 1959 DeFeo refused the invitation to exhibit The Rose in Dorothy Miller's 16 Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, choosing instead to work on the painting for seven more years.
DeFeo remarked at the time:
"Only by chancing the ridiculous, can I hope for the sublime." 1
In 2003, curator Marla Prather succinctly captured the scope of DeFeo’s commitment to the work:
“[DeFeo] was twenty-nine years old when she began the painting, turned thirty-seven the year she completed it, and reached forty before she began making art again... After 1974, then the painting was encased in plaster, she never saw the work again...” 2
The two videos below are part of the Voices and Images of California Art series produced by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In the first video, Bruce Conner discusses the development of The Rose. Conner famously documented the removal of the painting from DeFeo's apartment in his 1967 film The White Rose.
Link to Post:
http://www.theartblog.org/2012/12/flanz-kines-roots-in-coal-and-steel-at-allentown-art-museum/
Elizabeth Johnson reports on the exhibition Franz Kline: Coal and Steel at the Allentown Art Museum, PA, on view through January 13, 2013.
Johnson writes: "Highlighting Kline’s childhood and attachment to the industrial Lehigh Valley, Coal and Steel unites Kline’s early realism with his late abstraction, framing the artist’s development within the beautiful but harsh environment we still experience today... Several never-before or rarely-seen urban paintings that Kline made in New York following the Ashcan School and American Precisionist styles sparkle in the exhibition." Johnson continues noting that curator Dr. Robert S. Mattison connects Kline's early work with that of "George Bellows, George Luks and John Sloan, and sees it as foretelling the structure of Kline’s later abstract art. Seeing 'Lower East Side Market,' a lovely, prismatic urban scene made in the Ashcan style, together with 'Chatham Square (circa 1948),' made in the Precisionist style, reveals Kline’s broad search for meaningful subject matter and a personal style."
Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/article/painting-and-performance/
On the occasion of the exhibitions A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance at Tate Modern (through April 1) and Explosion! The Legacy of Jackson Pollock at the Fundació Joan Miró (through Feb 24), Stephen Moonie considers the history of "painting and performance in relation to one another." He asserts that "it is evident that painting can no longer be taken for granted: instead it operates within an expanded field across and between media."
He concludes: "What is clear... is that performance and painting are closely intertwined, and that the relationship between the two works both ways: painting is not only a pathway into performance, but that many aspects of performance equally lead back into painting..."
