Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2012/10/the-man-podcast-clyfford-still-pre-photoshop/
Tyler Green talks to art historian David Anfam about the Clyfford Still estate.
Anfam remarks: "Before the Clyfford Still Museum opened all the world really knew of Still were the classic abstracts." After seeing the paintings in the Still bequest, however, Anfam continues, "my understanding has been completely transformed by the sheer scope and variety of Still's achievement from the mid 1920's onward... I honestly do not believe that there is another Abstract Expressionist artist with quite the range and variety of Clyfford Still."
Link to Post:
http://www.artnews.com/2012/10/22/still-figures-run-deep/
Patricia Failing reports on a new catalogue Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Museum, which highlights Clyfford Still's lesser-known figurative work.
Failing quotes David Anfam, who contributed to the book: " 'I’ve long suspected a figurative substratum lurking in his abstractions,' Anfam observes, "and now I’m convinced. What we get with Still is a productive fusion of a draftsman with a good empirical eye for catching forms and outlines, but also a very, very powerful symbolic imagination. It’s the fusion - or, really, the collision - of these two qualities that seems to be responsible for so much of what is distinctive about his work.'" Failing continues, noting that "Still’s aptitude as a draftsman was overshadowed in part because he rarely displayed his representational drawings, and also because, by the mid-’40s, the representational forms in his early paintings were powerfully refigured in jagged flashes of pigment and textured surfaces."
Link to Post:
http://www.artcritical.com/2012/10/05/gutai/
David Carrier reviews the exhibition A Visual Essay on Gutai at Hauser & Wirth, New York, on view through October 27, 2012.
Carrier writes: "Nowadays any history of contemporary art has to be a worldwide history, looking at the contributions from every culture. It’s astonishing to look back forty-some years and find serious commentators like Michael Fried writing as if the future of painting depended just upon a few New York artists. This exhibition is a salutary reminder that historians of modernism need to expand their range of examples. Thanks to Pollock’s inspiration, the Gutai worked out quite independently in their own country something like the developments of abstraction, which took place in New York."
Link to Post:
http://www.artnews.com/2012/09/13/jacksonsotheractions/
Robin Cembalest writes about Jackson Pollock's little-known sculptures from 1956, on view in the exhibition Jackson Pollock & Tony Smith: Sculpture at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, through October 27, 2012.
Cembalest writes that "the lowly status of Pollock’s object-making has its roots in the artist’s own day, when painting was considered the pinnacle of Abstract Expressionism—and sculpture, as Ad Reinhardt famously put it, was 'something you back into when you look at a painting.' It didn’t help that Pollock’s sculptures hardly resemble his drip classics. The humble objects don’t scream 'Pollock,' or action, never mind painting. Most of his extant sculptures, under a dozen, don’t even resemble each other. And their hands-on quality—hammered copper, hand-built clay—contradicts the popular image of Pollock conjuring his abstractions in a rhythmic ritual dance."
Link to Post:
http://mnaves.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/art-of-another-kind-international-abstraction-and-the-guggenheim-1949-1960-at-the-solomon-r-guggenheim-museum/
Mario Naves reviews the exhibition Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960 at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, on view through September 12, 2012.
Naves writes: "The exhibition includes an inescapable array of artists and some stunning works. But the problem -or part of the problem - is how many of the works aren’t stunning, but merely diverting or symptomatic of the time. Art of Another Kind isn’t intended to be a definitive retrospective of an era -roughly speaking, the decade in which Abstract Expressionism achieved Grand Manner status. The curatorial focus, rather, is on one institution’s accounting of the avant-garde and, as such, is both defined and limited by the museum’s permanent collection. All the same, certain artists are conspicuous in their absence and too many of those present-and-accounted-for are represented by near misses, transitional pieces, or out-and-out failures."
Link to Post:
http://eyelevel.si.edu/2012/08/why-i-am-not-a-painter-on-michael-goldbergs-sardines-.html
Howard Kaplan blogs about Michael Goldberg's painting Sardines (1955), the inspiration for Frank O'Hara's poem Why I Am Not a Painter, which documents the painting's progress.
Kaplan writes: "O'Hara was a very generous friend. He was particularly giving to his painter friends, including Goldberg, in looking at their work and responding to it. Joe LeSueur in his invaluable Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara states that O'Hara offered his painter friends 'encouragement, inspired them with his insights and his passion; they impinged upon and entered his poetry, which would not have been the same and probably not as good without them.' One can say in turn that the painters he knew and cultivated would not possibly have achieved all they did without O'Hara's enthusiasm and feedback."
Link to Post:
http://www.thoughtsthatcureradically.com/2012/08/ruth-abrams-microcosms-yeshiva.html
Caleb De Jong reviews the exhibition Ruth Abrams: Microcosms at Yeshiva University Museum, on view through January 6, 2012.
De Jong writes: "Sometimes measuring only a square inch on either side, these paintings, if such a big word can be used to describe these objects, conger corners of landscapes, moons and mountains. Whereas her larger paintings appear muddled in their intention and of their moment, the smaller paintings on paper achieve what Abrams discusses in her video, ‘The Paradox of the Big’ in which the smaller a paintings becomes the more space and infinitude it can contain."
Link to Post:
http://www.on-verge.org/essays/cy-twombly-and-the-school-of-the-fontainebleau-hamburger-bahnhof-museum/
Pac Pobric reviews the exhibition Cy Twombly and the School of the Fontainebleau at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin, on view through October 7, 2012.
Pobric writes: "If saying that Twombly was an artist and not a historian seems obvious, the implications of that probably aren’t. When we say that Twombly was a painter interested in art history, all that means is that his working through the history of art was material and not theoretical. Whatever affinity he had for the School of the Fontainebleau is therefore going to be mediated through the material practice of his painting. That filter—the process of making work with influences in mind—therefore obscures the connection between the final picture and the influence, making the connection highly tenuous."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/55657/flying-blind-de-koonings-closed-eye-drawings/
Thomas Micchelli discusses the "blind" drawings of Willem de Kooning, now on view in the exhibition Eyes Closed/Eyes Open: Recent Acquisitions in Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through January 7, 2012.
Micchelli writes: "De Kooning’s hand... feels out the image in two dimensions, creating space and volume that exists in its own enclosed precinct. I speculate that the sensation would not be far removed from the way he squeezed clay between his fingers to make his gangly, clotted sculptures, which were always one or two steps removed from being bas-reliefs. These drawings would be marvelous by any standard; that they were done blindly is astonishing. The sensitivity of touch, the rawness of the sexuality, the tactility of the forms, the wit and invention of the imagery, and the ethereal gradations of the charcoal line are masterful even by de Kooning’s very high bar."
Link to Post:
http://www.walkingoffthebigapple.com/2012/07/conversation-with-alfred-leslie-onthe.html
Teri Tynes talks to painter Alfred Leslie about his recent exhibition The Lives of Some Women at Janet Borden Gallery, New York.
Tynes writes: "The images of women in 'The Lives of Some Women' similarly reflect... unnatural realism, pictures where light sources are unjustified. Beyond this approach, the images reflect on the layering, semi-erasures and collage-making properties of digital image making. He compared his practice of using multiple parts of an image to the sculptor Rodin's practice of reconfiguring his inventory of body parts. 'Once I created an eye I liked, a small alteration was all that was needed to use it again. Memory is basic to the reality of digital files - alter it and reuse it - musical notation through pixels. Pixel scores are what I think these pictures are and what I call them.' "
