Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2012/07/revisiting-pollocks-mural/
Tyler Green revisits a two part interview with Pepe Karmel co-curator of the 1998 MoMA Jackson Pollock Retrospective, about Pollock's monumental, breakthrough painting Mural, which is currently undergoing a well publicized conservation.
In part one Karmel notes that "It's an important painting for Jackson Pollock because it's the moment that announces his future as a painter of large, mural-scale paintings that become environments, and furthermore paintings that are in this distinct, all-over style that changes people's idea of what a painting might be."
In part two Karmel remarks that at the time "I don't think it had the kind of impact the later paintings had. It was a bit of a one-off, after which he went back to making smaller paintings. It probably didn't make that much sense to people. They may have been impressed by it, but by itself it didn’t announce a new style. Aesthetically, looking back, we go, 'Aha, this is it. This is when he gets there, even prematurely, and then goes away from it.' I’m guessing other people, including artists, who saw it didn't understand its implications for some time."
Link to Post:
http://text.chrisrusak.com/2012/05/25/clyfford-still-untitled/
Looking at Untitled, 1951, a largely monochromatic canvas by Clyfford Still, Chris Rusak finds clues to the contradiction between Clyfford Still's caustic rhetoric and the obvious "joy" he took in his work.
Rusak writes: "when an artist decides to introduce a proportionally diminutive amount of color into an otherwise achromatic composition, the power of each magnifies. Still's proportions of chromatic and achromatic space in Untitled serve to illuminate the canvas as a whole, to intensify the textures that build space and create dynamism, to voice the joy of his gestural process, and ultimately to challenge historical conventions about the interaction between viewer and art." Rusak also compares Still's near-monchrome to the painting Grau, 1976 by Gerhard Richter.
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.
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/53059/gandy-brodie-ten-tenements-steven-harvey-fine-art-projects/
John Yau re-introduces painter Gandie Brodie (1924–1975) whose work is on view in the exhibition Gandy Brodie: Ten Tenements at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, through July 1, 2012.
Yau writes: "In contrast to the loaded brush and aggressiveness we associate with [Norman] Bluhm and [Joan] Mitchell, Brodie's work is slow to reveal itself. A self-taught artist, Brodie's method of painting is all his own. His paintings' rough, uneven surfaces compress the gritty exterior walls of the Lower East Side with its multilayered interiors, painted over and over like tenement apartment walls while left unprotected against the ravages of time and the elements."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/52890/interview-with-regina-bogat/
Jillian Steinhauer interviews painter Regina Bogat on the occasion of the exhibition Regina Bogat: Stars at Art 101, Brooklyn, NY, on view through July 1, 2012.
Of her recent series of Stars works, Bogat remarks, "It originated with octagons, which was an architectural motif I found in a friend's house. It reminded me of Christian fonts - baptismal fonts - and that led to a fascination with shapes that have that kind of significance and deep meaning... What they did was they helped me form a painting surface; they were the forms I based the painting on. I needed that - I needed the structure. I construct the painting, I build it, and the stars help me. And then I found they led to this freedom of expression, which is the way I use paint. Anything that releases that impulse in you is very valuable."
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://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://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."
