The Museum of Non-Objective Art

There was a show at the Guggenheim Museum entitled "Visionaries".   The visionaries were the founders of the museum, Solomon Guggenheim, his artistic adviser Hilla Rebay, and other art world people who made major contributions to the collection.  The show was taken entirely from the Guggenheim's own collection.   Rebay and Guggenheim were passionate about "non-objective" art, that is, abstract art that had a spiritual dimension.  They felt that art could only reach a higher dimension of meaning by abandoning the notion of representation of the objective work, i.e things and people.   Kandinsky was the ideal exponent of this art.  And they gradually amassed a huge collection, which ultimately became the Guggenheim Museum, to be housed in the building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.   The building was designed as a "temple" for this art, with the notion of ascending the ramp evoking the notion of a spiritual ascension.
Those who have been going to the Guggenheim over the years will have noticed that the Guggenheim has entirely abandoned this notion of art, unless you think shows like the Armani one and the motorcycle one are leading you to a high spiritual plane.   But they still have most of the collection.  (Though they have sold some of it over the years to buy other stuff.)   So what you saw in the show was a fabulous collection of modern art, mostly exemplifying the classical paradigm as constructed by art historians of the twentieth century.   Cezanne to Kandinsky to Pollock, it is all there, some familiar, some not.  It was a pleasure to see, if not exactly earth-shaking.    For me, the most interesting part was seeing a few works by some relatively unknown artists, mostly Americans who were in the circles of Rebay and Guggenheim.   And it's always fascinating to see who became well known and who stayed obscure.   I was fascinated by the works of one "Penrod Centurion", who was listed as born around 1895, but with no death date.   Googling at home, it turns out he was a very mysterious figure who seems to have disappeared.   Penrod Centurion was a pseudonym  (Penny Cent!), and he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.
Here are a few examples from the show:

Penrod Centurion:

An Albert Gleizes painting of the Brooklyn Bridge:

An outstanding Kandinsky, one of many:

Robert Delaunay in widescreen:

This small collage by Georges Valmier was made in 1920 and entitled "Fugue"

There were a number of works by Hilla Rebay, including this collage:

And this by Victor Brauner.   This was part of the Peggy Guggenheim collection, which was not so focused on non-objective art, and included a number of surrealists.

A stunning Pollock, owned by Peggy:

There was another show at a gallery in Chelsea of early works from the Museum of Objective Art.   There were more interesting examples that could have easily been in the Guggenheim show.

Penrod Centurion:

Irene Rice Pereira, a very interesting painter.  The painting has some very complex and interesting surface textures.

While at the Guggenheim I did get to experience a very famous piece of non-objective art, a worked entitled "America" by Maurizio Cattelan.   This is in fact a fully functional solid gold toilet, installed in one of the restrooms at the Guggenheim.   It is guarded by an attendant, and no chisels (or anything else) are allowed inside.  But you do get to use it as you would a normal toilet.  In the age of Drumpf, it seems more appropriate then ever.  Peeing on solid gold.     I took a picture. It looked spectacular as you flushed it.   Vera asked me why didn't I take a selfie while on the toilet.  I didn't.   I have my limits.

I went to some other galleries recently.   One show I saw was of recent work of Vija Celmins, an artist in her mid-eighties, originally from Latvia.   I really liked her work; it reminded me a bit of Agnes Martin in its subtlety.   A lot of the work in the show was what might be called starry sky paintings, which, at first glance, look like what you might produce if you tried to paint a night sky filled with stars.   But, like Martin's paintings, things start to happen after you look for a while.  Subtle colors begin to emerge, and what might look at first glance like stars in the random patterns of outer space start to become something else.   You can take pictures of these paintings, but they don't do justice at all to the experience.    This was about five feet square:

An inverted sky:

Another set of small sized paintings in the show was a series of variations on painting from the same photograph of the sea.   Again the subtlety of what Celmins is doing doesn't transfer in photographs.   They were truly fascinating.

On the opposite end of the subtlety spectrum, there was a show of the work of Katharina Grosse at the Gagosian Gallery.  Grosse works on extremely large canvases, about twelve feet tall in this first example, and works with a wide spectrum of colors.   She also uses spray painting as well.  (She has been known to spray paint entire buildings.)  With my weakness for color, I throughly enjoyed these paintings.  She does create an interesting sense of depth in her images, and seeing these large colorful canvases in the large and spacious white galleries at the Gagosian is striking.

But if you really want to understand the paintings, read this from the Gagosian website:

Grosse approaches painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity. With a spray gun, she disconnects the artistic act from the hand, stylizing gesture as a propulsive mark. The resulting pictures are distinct, but never predetermined. Spatial tensions rise through shifts in chromatic temperature. Challenging boundaries, she reintroduces her body as an active agent within a vision of contemporary existence that is at once physically isolated and densely networked.

Does she hold the spray gun in her hand?   How is it disconnected?

A detail from the above painting, which is about 20 feet long.

Finally, there was a interesting show by Jack Whitten.   His current work involves layering acrylic paint into very thick slabs, and then chopping them up and applying them to canvas.   Before I read about the paintings, I thought the thick slabs were some kind of ceramic material.    Viewing the paintings is a dynamic process; they look very differently from a distance than from close up.

From a distance...

Then a close up of the same painting:

I passed on the Armory Show and all the other art fairs happening in the first week of March.   Too many people!