The Bushniks: Art Museums and Galleries, Fall 2018

After my saturation with Dutch Golden Age paintings in the Netherlands, I was pleased to find out that the Met had mounted a show featuring their Golden Age art, with all their Vermeers and Rembrandts installed in the Lehman galleries while the European galleries are renovated. It was interesting to seem them away from their usual place in the European galleries. The light and the arrangement made you look at them differently.

One of the wonderful things about New York is the sheer quantity and variety of art available for viewing. While other cities may be the equal of New York in terms of museums, I don't think any other city has the tremendous variety of galleries and institutions of all kinds the show interesting art. While there are certainly plenty of ways to find fault with today's money-driven gallery scene, it is also true that you can see many stimulating shows of all kinds in galleries and more obscure institutions. For example, I saw a show of recent work by the painter Stanley Whitney at the Lisson Gallery in Chelsea. I had seen a show of his work at the Studio Museum in Harlem a few years ago, and this show confirmed my opinion that he is great painter. He works with large square canvases and big chunks of color, arranged on grids. At first glance, there is not much o see; but the longer you look at them and the more you absorb the colors and the rhythms of their arrangements, the better it gets. The Lisson Gallery's installation was ideal; a large open space with bright natural light, and most importantly absolute silence. The gallery was virtually empty. Art like Whitney's needs this kind of exhibition space, and I found myself much more impressed than I have been by many high-profile exhibitions in the noisy and crowded galleries at MOMA, for example. With effort, at MOMA I can usually tune out the world around me in crowded shows, but it's so much better when you don't have to do that.

I had another similar experience at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passloff Foundation, a newly opened museum/institute situated in an old synagogue building in the Lower East Side. Resnick was a abstract expressionist in the 1950's who eventually went in his own directions. The Foundation had an interesting display of his work on three open floors of the building; the most interesting works were large canvases in which he masses thick layers of paint, mostly in very dark colors. Like Whitney's, Resnick's work demands time and concentration. I was the only person there for the the entire time I was there (other than the staff members. Most of the work resisted my attempts to photograph it.

I also saw an exhibition at the Pace Gallery which juxtaposed the works of Agnes Martin with a selection of Navaho blankets (she lived for a long time near the Navaho lands).
The point, obviously, was to suggest a possible influence on Martin's work. There were certainly, to my eyes, some superficial similarities, but somehow the juxtaposition of Martin's sublimely radiant canvases with the coarse textures of woven blankets didn't really work for me. Though when you put the photographs of next to each other, it immediately became more convincing.

Seeing Martin's work reminded me of the Guggenheim retrospective of her work, which we saw recently, and my feelings about the light. Thinking about how light informs our perception of paintings, I reminded myself that every showing of a painting (or other visual art work) is influenced of the space in which it it exhibited. And that a gallery exhibition is like a performance of an art work, and that the variations in light and space can be thought of in the same way we think of acoustics in the performance of music. This is not an original idea, to be sure, but it is one, like acoustics, that tends to be given little importance in many people's perception of a concert or museum exhibit. I think that's partially due to the fixed nature of museums and performance spaces, and the resultant fact that you can't do much about changing them, except in the very newest of museums and concert halls. Thus a discussing a performance in a concert hall like Vancouver's Chan Centre, which has the most dreadful acoustics imaginable (walls made of concrete blocks!), means that you either mention the bad acoustics every time, or else simply ignore the acoustics and proceed as if everything was normal. (The Chan Centre has in fact a very specialized mammoth acoustic altering apparatus poised above the stage which is meant to alter the acoustics for different ensembles, but there is no one qualified to manipulate it, so it is never used.) Similarly, museums have each their own particular lighting schemes, involving natural and many different kinds of un-natural light. Though no one has tried it, to my knowledge, to illuminate paintings with candle light. (Though I have seen Broadway shows with candle light.) Most paintings from the Nineteenth century and earlier, of course, were seen with daylight or candle light. The Met Museum is now renovating its European painting galleries with the express purpose of improving the lighting, which involves skylights and natural light.
All of which to say that it can be quite stimulating to see a painting as it is "performed" in different spaces. So seeing the Met's Dutch paintings in the basement of the Lehmann galleries was quite different than seeing them in the old European painting galleries. And like musical performances, you can sometimes say that a performance is good or bad, but you can also say that different performances reveal different aspects of a work.

I also visited the big fall auctions of modern and contemporary art at Christies and Sotheby's. I have written about these before, but the truth of the matter is that you can see a large quantity of amazingly good art. It's like visiting a museum that would be the envy of any town outside the biggest cities in the world. And you also look at the paintings with the knowledge that is quite possible that you (and most other people) will never have a chance to see them again. The sold paintings could very well be destined for the various "art vaults" that art investors use to store their paintings. Robert Hughes once wrote that the job of art today was to hang on walls and become more expensive. Now the job is to sit in a vault and become more expensive. There were great things to see, in any case, along with endless rooms of second rate impressionists.

Alma Thomas:

Schwitters:

This was painted before WWI

Two wonderful Kandinskys:

A cubist orchestra!

A relatively small sized Pollock. Sold for around forty million dollars. (You have to ask yourself how many individuals there are in the world there are who can spend this amount of money for a painting. Far more than we can imagine, I think.)

Hopper's "Chop Suey", which could become very famous if it doesn't end up in a vault:

A Cornell box:

One of the highlights of the fall was an exhibition at the Petzel Gallery by the German-American painter Charlotte von Heyl, whose work I was unfamiliar with. She immediately became one of my favorite painters. Her work is a bit difficult to describe. It combines both the abstract and figurative in ways that challenge your perceptions. There is no singular way of looking at them, but rather you feel that you are simultaneously looking in different ways. Again, it takes time and mental energy to see what she is doing.

Detail:

There was a nice show of Joan Mitchell's work:

Another highlight of the fall was the Hilda af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim. I had known about her work through books, but this was my first time seeing it in person. (The Kirsten Stewart character in Assayas' film "Personal Shopper" conspicuously carries a book about Klint with her; the reference is to Klint's communication with the spirit world.) A great deal has been made about Klint being the first "abstract" painter; thus preceding Kandinsky, Malevich, etc. and upending our conceived notions of the history of painting. Not to mention her being female and doing it before the guys did it. Though one could argue whether her works were really "abstract", since she thought of them as direct representations of what the spirits told her to paint. In any case, the works are wonderful to look at, and they nicely resonate with the Guggenheim's history of being a temple for "non-objective" painting.

I saw a show at the Met Museum entitled "Epic Abstraction". I wasn't really sure what the title meant. Did they mean "epic" as in "Like, dude, man, that was really epic", or did they mean "epic" in the traditional sense of grand story telling? Who knows. What the show was was some mostly large scale abstract paintings; but I didn't really detect any coherent logic to the whole thing. Which isn't really a bad thing. I was perfectly happy to view some of the Met's large scale abstract paintings, along with a few loans. It began with the Met's Pollocks and Rothko's and one Rothko loan which might have been my most intense experience of the color yellow ever. But this was not just another big show of the Abstract Expressionist guys; in fact, it became clearer as the show went on that it was about including as many works by women and people of color as possible. Which made me happy; I saw many things I liked. But really, does on consider a work like one of Tinguely's grand machines as abstract expressionist art? Whatever....

Since I wrote this, I have read several reviews of this show. All of them have been amongst the worst reviews I have ever read for a major museum show. They probably should have just hung the paintings and not called it anything.

Then I went to look at Persian miniatures; they always intrigue me.

This looks European, yes? In fact some of the patrons of Persian painting encouraged artists to copy European models of paintings. It makes you realize, that, of course, these artists were not as isolated as one might have thought.

The Jewish Museum had a wonderful show of works by Chagall, Malevich, and El Lissitzky, dating from the early Soviet revolutionary times, when they all taught at the same school in the town of Vitebsk in what is now Belarus. It was fascinating to see Chagall, who was by nature not very sympathetic to the more radical tendencies of his colleagues, try to fit in with the program. He didn't last long.

Chagall looking very Cubist:

I like these lithographs by El Lissitzky, connected to the production of the futurist opera, "Victory of the Sun"

The blockbuster show of the fall was the big Delacroix retrospective at the Met. It was arranged by subject; Delacroix painted for the market, and if pictures of animals were wanted, he did it. He really loved color, and it shows. Some of the most fascinating parts of the show were his sketches: