Link to Post:
http://icallitoranges.blogspot.com/2012/05/last-paintings-of-cy-twombly.html
An essay by Ed Schad about Cy Twombly: The Last Paintings at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, on view through June 9, 2012.
Schad writes: "Camino Real is a 1948 play by Tennessee Williams... and when it comes to entering into a dialogue with the works at Gagosian, reading the text can be illuminating... On the set, there is a wall and a gate that separates the town from what is simply out there - an unknown wasteland, a place where no one ever comes back from, Terra Incognita... I think about Twombly at the end of a long journey, which has taken him to places in the old world and the texts of our Western culture that I would like to visit. To find him in the end in Camino Real, in that uncertain and horrible territory, dizzy with fever and crime and impossible dreaming, where one can peek over the wall but cannot see it, is chilling."
Link to Post:
http://youtu.be/5p6t_J9znGA
James Kalm visits the exhibition Faust and Other Tales: The Paintings of Jan Müller at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, on view through June 23, 2012.
Kalm notes: "Considered as an exotic and tragic figure with a cult following, during his brief career, Müller was generally recognized as the first of the Hans Hofmann students to return to the mythic and physiological complexities of figurative imagery. Using the vernacular of Abstract-Expressionism he nonetheless began a vibrant legacy of post abstract painting that continues today."
Link to Post:
http://www.pirihalasz.com/blog.htm?post=855475
Piri Halasz reviews the recent exhibition Adolph Gottlieb: Gravity, Suspension, Motion: Paintings 1954-1972 at Pace Gallery, New York.
Halasz writes: "Irving Sandler, in his trail-blazing 'Triumph of American Painting' (1970) recognized that Gottlieb was important enough to rate a major entry, but couldn't really shoehorn him into either of his two categories of 'action painters' and 'color field painters.' ... the most fascinating [paintings in this exhibition] were the experiments with color. One doesn't normally think of Gottlieb as a master colorist, nor is his earlier work distinguished for its color. However, in the 60s, he appears to have evolved away from his earlier, angst-ridden outlook, the outlook which in 1943 had led him, in a famous letter to the New York Times co-authored by himself, Rothko and Barnett Newman, to proclaim that 'the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.' "
Link to Post:
http://www.thoughtsthatcureradically.com/2012/05/faust-and-other-tales-paintings-of-jan.html
Caleb De Jong reviews the exhibition Faust and Other Tales: The Paintings of Jan Müller at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, on view through June 23, 2012.
De Jong writes: "Müller’s literary subject matter, while seemingly at odds with the high Modernist dictates of 1950s New York, hinted at a truth now more greatly apparent to a contemporary audience. Coming from a German Expressionist tradition that includes Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Müller’s paintings nonetheless partakes of a New World sensibility. Looking back to the medieval world for subject matter, Müller managed to paint a metaphor for the New York school. Wrestling, parallel to St. Anthony, with his own private demons, his heart troubles were contracted attempting to escape the Nazis, Müller attempted to turn his studio into a permanent walpurgisnacht, a place of pictorial sorcery."
Link to Post:
http://artobserved.com/2012/05/ao-on-site-los-angeles-cy-twombly-the-last-paintings-and-photographs-at-gagosian-gallery-through-june-9-2012/
M. Hoetger blogs about the exhibition Cy Twombly: The Last Paintings at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, on view through June 9, 2012.
Hoetger writes: "The Last Paintings includes eight untitled works from 2011—all known under the moniker Untitled (Camino Real) - which are closely related to the Camino Real group that inaugurated Gagosian Paris in 2010. At nearly 100-inches tall, these large-scale works on plywood stand as records of a human scale action. The full-bodied momentum of the circular gestures is sped up by the intensity of the complimentary colors. The bold orange, yellow, and red marks on a neon green background seem to make the surface flicker with energy."
Link to Post:
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/finch/norman-bluhm-5-9-12.asp
Charlie Finch visits Norman Bluhm's monumental painting Coney Island Beauty, recently installed at 499 Park Ave, New York.
Although Finch finds that the painting owes an "overwhelming debt to Pablo Picasso," he writes that "a doubling in the subject at hand restored, for a moment, to me, what is right about the painting, why I wanted to love it. The 'beauty' depicted, you see, could be that chubby wastrel on the shore, but also the billboard of some Botero-sized babe adorning the games of chance, like SkeeBall, on the Coney Island boardwalk itself. In this way, Norman Bluhm sprinkles that rarest of painterly qualities, humor, into his sparkling rolls of color and Picassoid line structure."
Link to Post:
http://www.artcritical.com/2012/05/06/david-park/
Bill Berkson reviews two biographies of painter David Park: David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back by Helen Park Bigelow (Hudson Hills Press) and David Park: A Painter's Life by Nancy Boas (University of California Press).
Berkson writes that "Read in tandem, [the books] are distinct and complement each other perfectly. Helen Park Bigelow's is a family memoir, in which her father and the paintings of his that mean the most to her are central but not the only active characters... Her responses to the pictures are instinctive and often eloquent... Nancy Boas's book also is sympathetic, though more impersonal, a balanced and analytical account; her passion shows in how persuasively she argues for a wider recognition of Park's importance as more than the locally esteemed leader of the Bay Area Figuratives, which now in any case seems on the way."
Link to Post:
http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/clyfford-still-part-1.html
In part one of a two part post Charles Kessler reflects on the life of Clyfford Still and stories he uncovered while writing his masters thesis on Clyfford Still at UCLA in 1973.
In addition to anecdotes about Still's interactions with collectors Fred Weisman and Betty Freeman, and painter Richard Diebenkorn, Kessler addresses Still's notorious hostility noting: "I can understand why Warhol and the next generation reacted against Still's kind of macho posturing and grandiose pretensions - but a part of me admires his heroic ambition and his seriousness of purpose; and I sometimes wish we had more of that today."
Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2012/04/john-chamberlain-crumpled-color.html
Altoon Sultan blogs about the exhibition John Chamberlain: Choices at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, on view through May 13, 2012.
Sultan writes: "This 'right thing at the right moment', as John Chamberlain describes his process, must have been a great adventure for him. I could still feel the excitement and sense of discovery in his earlier work... The totality of each piece had a sweep and drama, but then there were all those marvelous details of color and surface, all perfect, and perfectly thrilling."
Link to Post:
http://www.art-theory.com/
Kent Minturn undertakes and in-depth examination of Clyfford Still's thesis on Cézanne and the clues it provides to Still's early and later development as an artist.
Minturn notest that "In his thesis Still eloquently emphasizes Cézanne’s 'tactual' application of paint and takes pains to describe the way his predecessor 'feels' his way around his forms. Cézanne and Still similarly dismantle Albertian perspective by giving equal emphasis to figure and ground... Although Still points out that one of Cezanne’s 'most important contributions to the evolution of modern art' was his ability 'to realize form in color rather than make color look like form,' he does not argue that one of these plastic elements is subordinate to the other. Rather, he situates them on equal footing and demonstrates the extent to which color and form are inextricably intertwined in Cézanne’s praxis."
