Art Review | A Young Colorist, Antennas Aquiver — Helen Frankenthaler, at the Gagosian Gallery

Painted on 21st Street “Untitled” (1951), in a show at Gagosian on Helen Frankenthaler’s early period

Article: The New York Times - A Young Colorist, Antennas Aquiver
Author: Roberta Smith 
Photo: Richard Perry
Published: March 21, 2013 

On Oct. 26, 1952, a 23-year-old artist named Helen Frankenthaler made a painting on unstretched, unprimed canvas laid on the floor, using a freehand stain technique that owed a great deal to Jackson Pollock but was less systematic. She called it “Mountains and Sea,” and it became her best-known, most influential work. Its bounding scale, skirmish of pastel colors and charcoal lines, and mixture of landscape, still life and abstraction were distinctive. But most important was the way it fused color and canvas into a new, streamlined unity. Frankenthaler’s stain painting method, as it was sometimes called, was considered a breakthrough in many circles, the gateway to what would become Color Field abstraction.

Art historically, “Mountains and Sea” was something like Frankenthaler’s 15 minutes of fame, but generally almost nothing is known about where it came from. “Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler From 1950 to 1959,” at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, performs the useful service of setting it firmly in the context of the 1950s, the best decade of the artist’s career. Here “Mountains” becomes the pivot between the all-but-unknown work that preceded it and a lavish, refreshing display of the various if more familiar kinds of wild beauty that it unleashed in subsequent paintings.

Fabulously enlightening and unruly, this show of 29 paintings is the latest example of the historical excavations with which Larry Gagosian, the art dealer everyone loves to hate, regularly redeems himself. He may have a deleterious inflationary effect on the art market and the careers of younger talents and nontalents, but his shows of older, often nonliving artists would do any museum proud. This one has been organized in cooperation with Frankenthaler’s estate by John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. (Its richly illustrated catalog is distinguished by Mr. Elderfield’s thoughtful essay and Lauren Mahony’s wonderfully detailed chronology of Frankenthaler’s passage through the 1950s, built around her letters, exhibitions and reviews.)

Frankenthaler was Color Field’s prodigy and its single-minded glamour girl. Born into a wealthy family in Manhattan, she grew up cosseted, cultured and bent on painting. She attended the Dalton School, where her art teacher was the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, and went on to Bennington College in Vermont, studying with the painter Paul Feeley.

Graduating in 1949, Frankenthaler returned to New York and set up her first studio on East 21st Street. She soon began an affair with the esteemed art critic Clement Greenberg, nearly 20 years her senior, with whom she frequented galleries and museums, visited artists’ studios and traveled abroad. It is a tribute to Frankenthaler’s intelligence and ambition that she was soon up to speed on the latest innovations of the New York School, in addition to becoming friendly with many of its leading lights, including Pollock and David Smith.

Sometime in 1953 Greenberg brought Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, two painters from Washington, to Frankenthaler’s studio, to show them “Mountains and Sea” — in all likelihood when Frankenthaler was not there. (Anyone irked by the presumption of this, raise your hand.) The Washington visitors immediately grasped the implications of Frankenthaler’s singing, thinned-down colors and the way they sank into the unprimed canvas. Louis later described “Mountains and Sea” as “the bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”

The rest, you could say, is mystery. Frankenthaler’s stained-color technique has often been treated like a bit of precocious luck that Morris and Louis adapted and developed. Besides, Color Field’s critical prestige, if not its market share, began to contract after 1960, the year Frankenthaler was given a survey at the Jewish Museum. Frank Stella, a young artist fresh out of Princeton, had already emerged as the next hot thing, and Minimalism was on the horizon.

Frankenthaler’s path to “Mountains and Sea” deserves to be an immutable part of postwar history, and this show should make it so. It conjures a vivid portrait of the artist as a fearless young woman, unencumbered by rules or ideology, who had a remarkable ability to bend other artists’ styles and motifs to her own expressive needs. One advantage was her restless attention to the methods and materials of both painting and drawing, which she tended to combine.

This is evinced by the works in the show’s revelatory opening gallery, starting with the caked, episodic surface of “Painted on 21st Street” (1950), a smeary white-on-white mixture of paint, plaster, sand and scribbled fragments that suggests a pristine cave painting.

Another surprise is “The Sightseers,” a youthful masterpiece from 1951 in enamel and crayon on paper mounted on Masonite. After establishing an open fretwork of looping black lines, Frankenthaler fills the interstices with bright crayon, applied in broad areas accented with sharp scribbles and all kinds of marks and signs. There are periodic glimpses of “sights”: seascapes, mountains, possible figures, a crown. “The Sightseers” evokes precedents including Pollock, Krasner, de Kooning’s great “Excavation” and maybe a little Jean Dubuffet, yet it radiates an assured independence, partly because of the eccentric way it is made.

The same goes for the “Untitled” from 1951, a kind of landscape of tan ground and turquoise sky populated by a screenlike parade of who knows what — multicolored aircraft? sea creatures? plants? — accented once more with the fragmented black lines. Look closely, and you’ll see early signs of the stain technique among several other manipulations of paint. Here Miró and Gorky join the list of possible inspirations. Around the corner, the raucously exuberant “Ed Winston’s Tropical Gardens,” with its bright yellow ground and intimations of plants, trees and fruits, might be a billboard honoring Gorky’s “Garden in Sochi.”

Mr. Elderfield argues that Frankenthaler was more a second-generation Abstract Expressionist than a Color Field painter, especially in the 1950s, and this show bears him out. He also rightly contends that subject matter was essential to her art. It helped that she was as acutely attuned to the natural landscape as she was to the culture of painting. And while most members of the second generation cleaved to de Kooning, Frankenthaler concentrated on Pollock, combining aspects of his early and late phases, when he was most involved with imagery and myth.

Her best works are a kind of swirling, centrifugal mix of form, process, possible meaning and gorgeous, unpredictable colors, shot through with joie de vivre and wit. She wanted her paintings to seem quickly made and to be seen all at once. Yet they sustain concentrated looking, and reward time spent taking them apart and putting them back together, as they slip between legibility and abstraction, control and abandon, lines and seeping forms.

Frankenthaler gave herself a tremendous amount of permission. In “Western Dream,” of 1957, you can almost hear her naming the various motifs as her hand produces them: red insect, black idol, blue vortex, desert sand. In “Europa” she reiterates Titian’s straining goddess as a remarkably accurate blob of bright pink and then crosses it out, as if dissatisfied. In “Before the Caves,” she festoons an orange foot-shaped peninsula with lavender, gray and red and squeezes it between feathery curving lines that whip in from the sides.

Frankenthaler refused to see herself as a “woman painter,” although feminist art historians would later draw parallels between her staining technique and menstrual flow. (The insouciant, almost mocking 1952 “Scene With Nude” — with its tiny splatters of red paint between the outlines of female legs — provides some reason for doing so.) But her sense of freedom is to some extent implicitly female. Any woman making art at Frankenthaler’s level in the 1950s did so, at least in part, from a necessary sense of defiance. It burns bright in these canvases.

“The Sightseers” (1951), one of the works in “Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959” at the Gagosian Gallery.

From left, “Shatter” (1953), and “Mountains and Sea” and “10/29/52,” both from 1952.

An untitled work from 1951.

“Ed Winston’s Tropical Gardens” (1951)

“Western Dream” (1957)

“Europa” (1957)

“Abstract Landscape” (1951), left, and “Open Wall” (1953).

“Painted on 21st Street” (1950)

Art Review | A Suspension of Willful Disbelief (Maurizio Cattelan)

"Maurizio Cattelan: All" A retrospective of the Italian artist at the Guggenheim Museum has a display of 128 works that hang from the rotunda.

Article: The New York Times - A Suspension of Willful Disbelief 
Author: Roberta Smith 
Photo: Chang W. Lee
Published: November 3, 2011

Is Maurizio Cattelan quitting while he’s ahead or before he lags too far behind? The question hangs over that Italian artist’s much anticipated 21-year retrospective at the Guggenheim, where, as is widely known by now, all the art is up in the air, too.

This unusual show has been described by Mr. Cattelan as his swan song. Although only 51, which is young in artist years, he has announced that he is retiring from the job of making art. Perhaps to celebrate, he has turned his retrospective into something of a final blowout artwork, one made of earlier pieces — 128 of them to be precise — and involving some delicate engineering. Mr. Cattelan’s entire artistic output, excepting two works whose owners declined to lend them, hangs in a gigantic distended mass from cables connected to an aluminum truss near the top of the museum’s rotunda. Titled “All,” it fills one of the most famous architectural voids in the world with what surely ranks as one of the largest, most complicated, visually muddled mobiles in the history of art.

It’s an impressive feat, Mr. Cattelan’s seeming evasion of the stultifying grip of the retrospective by “stringing up” his art — to use the words of Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim curator who organized the show, in its catalog. The effect is initially startling, but ultimately disrespectful and perverse. In some ways it may be just the thing for our attention-deficient times. You can zip up and down the ramp seeing everything and nothing at top speed. Yet its entertaining conceit aside, the show suggests that Mr. Cattelan knows what he’s about: he’s always been uneven and now he is running out of ideas. It may indeed be time for him to quit, and his previous, consistently subversive forays into gallery-running, exhibition-making and magazine publishing give him plenty of options.

The self-abnegating spectacle of “All” is completely in character with Mr. Cattelan’s well-known ambivalence about himself, his talent and his art, and his oft-cited fascination with failure. He grew up in Padua, the son of a truck driver and a cleaning woman. He worked from an early age; the biggest impression was made by a stint in a local morgue, an experience that Ms. Spector cites as a source of the continuing fascination with death most evident in his recurring use of taxidermied animals. He backed into art with little formal training after working briefly as a furniture designer.

Viewed from below especially, “All” is a full-bodied catalogue raisonné in the form of an exploding piñata of Cattelania, frozen in midair. As you ascend the ramp, the chaos continues: everything seems to be coming at you all at once. Displayed helter-skelter, for instance, are Conceptual pieces from his early “relational aesthetics” years, when he subverted various social transactions and art-world conventions, yielding works that often make sense only if you know the back story. “Tarzan and Jane,” a large color photograph of two people in lion costumes peering through a door, turns out to be an image of art dealers who gamely wore these suits for the duration of Mr. Cattelan’s show in their gallery in 1993. Equally opaque, if more typically sculptural, is “Lullaby,” from 1994, an oversized blue bag full of something that the catalog tells us is rubble from one of the Mafia-related bombings that swept Italy in the mid-1990s.

Another early work is simply a small plastic sign on a cheap brass chain that says “Torno Subito” — basically, “Be Back Soon.” When Mr. Cattelan failed to come up with satisfactory artwork for an exhibition scheduled with an Italian art dealer in 1989, he purchased the sign and hung it on the door of the gallery, which remained closed for the show’s run, adding another footnote to the long history of the empty gallery as art exhibition. The little sign is at the Guggenheim, but is so hard to find that it amounts to another failure.

One of the first works by Mr. Cattelan that speaks clearly for itself is a large black-and-white photograph of the artist from 1995. Dressed in jeans, a sweater and sneakers, he rolls on his back with his tongue hanging out and his hands and feet raised like paws. The image is comic perfection: a portrait of the artist as an obsequious canine, embarrassingly eager to please. In 1995 he also began his line of taxidermied horses, donkeys, mice and too many cutely curled-up dogs. Dead or alive? You decide. (Very close scrutiny reveals the “Torno Subito” sign hanging from the neck of a golden retriever that is also not going to be back any time soon.) In 1999 Mr. Cattelan began making exquisite life-size wax effigies of various people, including himself, looking young and cherubic; Pope John Paul II felled by a meteor; Hitler as a kneeling schoolboy possibly asking forgiveness; and a little old lady smiling out at us from a half-open refrigerator.

Whatever their strengths, the individual works are radically decontextualized and diminished in this arrangement. For example, Mr. Cattelan’s best-known, most controversial work, “La Nona Ora,” the life-size wax effigy of the downed pope, is usually installed on an immense expanse of red carpet amid shattered glass. It is as if an act of God (who else?) had just plunged the rock through the rose window of a large cathedral during high Mass. (The work’s title, which translates as “The Ninth Hour,” refers to the time that Christ died on the cross.) But at the Guggenheim the carpet has shrunk to a raft-size pallet not much larger than the pope, who now seems not so much a powerful target of heavenly wrath — and a work whose display in a Warsaw museum eventually cost its director her job — as a bit of cargo on the verge of being hoisted into a ship’s hold.

Throughout, there are pieces that never make it beyond the one-liner stage. Nearly a dozen paintings parody the frequent hokeyness of the Argentine-Italian modernist Lucio Fontana’s sliced-canvas monochromes by rearranging his cuts to form Z’s, for Zorro, but two wrongs don’t make a right. An enormous taxidermied white cow with scooter handles where horns might be is merely a bulky reiteration of one of the oldest Surrealist tricks in the book, descended from Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup. Most recent are nine shrouded, horizontal human forms carved from Carrara marble, an evocation of death as obvious as it is opulent.

But other pieces are richly enigmatic. An olive tree planted in a large Minimalist cube of dirt looks great, as if it floated out of a Magritte. As does the ostensibly touching but in fact typically ambiguous “Not Afraid of Love,” which is a very lifelike sculpture of an incredibly cute elephant beneath a sheet (with holes for the eyes) that conjures shyness, Halloween and also the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Cattelan’s exhibition is in many ways the exact opposite of the funhouse of participatory claptrap that Carsten Höller, his fellow traveler in relational aesthetics, has mounted at the New Museum. “All” is a funhouse that keeps the viewer at arm’s length while greatly compromising the art. Ms. Spector writes that it is “a full-scale admission of the inadvisability of viewing his work within the context of a conventional retrospective.” But the show nonetheless does its job, tracing the trajectory of Mr. Cattelan’s career from the obscure to the overly clear, with some memorably resonant moments along the way. Still thumbing his nose at all concerned, Mr. Cattelan has taken himself to task.

A retrospective of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan has a display of 128 works that hang from the rotunda at the Guggenheim Museum.

The exhibition mixes works like “Betsy” (2002), featuring a mannequin in a refrigerator, with taxidermied animals.

Roberta Smith writes: “Mr. Cattelan’s entire artistic output, excepting two works whose owners declined to lend them, hangs in a gigantic distended mass from cables connected to an aluminum truss near the top of the museum’s rotunda.”

An untitled work from 2007, center.

The exhibition, writes Ms. Smith, “fills one of the most famous architectural voids in the world with what surely ranks as one of the largest, most complicated, visually muddled mobiles in the history of art.”

“Frau C.” (2007), center.

“Yet its entertaining conceit aside, the show suggests that Mr. Cattelan knows what he’s about: he’s always been uneven and now he is running out of ideas. It may indeed be time for him to quit, and his previous, consistently subversive forays into gallery-running, exhibition-making and magazine publishing give him plenty of options.”

“Love Saves Life” (1995)

In 1999 Mr. Cattelan began making life-size wax effigies of various people, including Pope John Paul II felled by a meteor.

“Him” (2001) is a wax figure of Hitler as a kneeling schoolboy.

This figure from Mr. Cattelan’s “Daddy Daddy” was previously displayed at the museum floating face down in the rotunda’s fountain.

“Novecentro” (1997), a figure of a horse.

Photography | When the Camera Takes Over for the Eye (At the Venice Biennale, Art is a Photo Op)

Capturing "Hippy Dialectics" by Nathaniel Mellors.

From: The New York Times
Author: Roberta Smith
Published: September 4, 2011

Scientists have yet to determine what percentage of art-viewing these days is done through the viewfinder of a camera or a cellphone, but clearly the figure is on the rise. That’s why Ruth Fremson, the intrepid photographer for The New York Times who covered the Venice Biennale this summer, returned with so many images of people doing more or less what she was doing: taking pictures of works of art or people looking at works of art. More or less.

The visitor as photographer.

Only two of the people in these pictures is using a traditional full-service camera (similar to the ones Ms. Fremson carried with her) and actually holding it to the eye. Everyone else is wielding either a cellphone or a mini-camera and looking at a small screen, which tends to make the framing process much more casual. It is changing the look of photography.

An interactive piece by Norma Jeane.

The ubiquity of cameras in exhibitions can be dismaying, especially when read as proof that most art has become just another photo op for evidence of Kilroy-was-here passing through. More generously, the camera is a way of connecting, participating and collecting fleeting experiences.

Visitors at the Venice Biennale capture Urs Fisher's statue.

For better and for worse, it has become intrinsic to many people’s aesthetic responses. (Judging by the number of pictures Ms. Fremson took of people photographing Urs Fischer’s life-size statue of the artist Rudolf Stingel as a lighted candle, it is one of the more popular pieces at the Biennale, which runs through Nov. 27.) And the camera’s presence in an image can seem part of its strangeness, as with Ms. Fremson’s shot of the gentleman photographing a photo-mural by Cindy Sherman that makes Ms. Sherman, costumed as a circus juggler, appear to be posing just for him. She looks more real than she did in the actual installation.

A man photographs an exhibit by Cindy Sherman.

Of course a photograph of a person photographing an artist’s photograph of herself playing a role is a few layers of an onion, maybe the kind to be found only among picture-takers at an exhibition.


Related Links:
- Wikipedia: Photo op http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_op
- Wikipedia: Kilroy was here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here
- La Biennale di Venezia http://www.labiennale.org/

Arts Beat | Art That Begs to Be Touched

"A visitor interacts with the MetroCard Vending Machine, made by Cubic Transportation Systems and designed by Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger of Antenna Design, and David Reinfurt, Kathleen Holman, and the MTA New York City Transit." Photographer: Caleb Ferguson

From: The New York Times
Author: Randy Kennedy
Published: July 26, 2011

Most mornings, the Museum of Modern Art is as crowded as a Midtown subway station. So it didn’t seem all that odd to witness two middle-school students, Ariel Rogiers, 13 and Javonna Cato, 12, from the Robert F. Kennedy School on the Upper East Side, lining up recently on the museum’s third floor to check the balances on their MetroCards.

A MetroCard machine is now parked on the museum’s third floor, in all its graffiti-proof, scratch-proof, tank-like steel solidity, fully functioning and ready to accept cash, credit card or ATM card. It’s part of the museum’s new “Talk to Me” design exhibition, which looks at how products and devices are growing increasingly sophisticated at communicating with users.

But some visitors who encounter it don’t seem to know quite what to make of a piece of subway infrastructure transplanted into art land. They stop, as if standing in front of a neo-Surrealist sculpture, wondering if the machine is supposed to be touched, in an exhibition where some things are and many things are not. But the screen in the middle of this machine announces invitingly, just as it does underground, to “Touch Start,” showing the familiar floating digitized hand, its big index finger extended. (One of the machine’s designers, Sigi Moeslinger, purposely made this finger abnormally big to make it exceedingly clear to users how to proceed.)

Teenagers seem to be the first to understand that the exhibit is a real machine and should, of course, really be used. “I didn’t believe them, that it would work,” said Melissa White, a teacher from the Robert F. Kennedy School, who had taken a class to the exhibition. “My first instinct was run over and keep them from touching it.”

Susanna Petrin, a freelance journalist from Basel, Switzerland, had no such inhibitions. She struggled a bit with her debit card but eventually managed to purchase a $10 fare card for her collection. (The specially printed souvenir cards come with the name of the exhibition printed on the back.) “I already have two MetroCards but I keep losing them,” she said. “It’s good to have one in every bag and purse, no?”

Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger of Antenna Design, David Reinfurt, Kathleen Holman, and MTA/New York City Transit. MetroCard Vending Machine. 1999.

Exhibition | Pain as an Art Form

Selections from the Pain Exhibit. To see a slide show, click here.

From: Pain as an Art Form

Author: Tara Parker-Pope

Date: April 22, 2008

Pain doesn’t show up on a body scan and can’t be measured in a test. As a result, many chronic pain sufferers turn to art, opting to paint, draw or sculpt images in an effort to depict their pain.

“It’s often much more difficult to put pain into words, which is one of the big problems with pain,” said Allan I. Basbaum, editor-in-chief of Pain, the medical journal of The International Association for the Study of Pain. “You can’t articulate it, and you can’t see it. There is no question people often try to illustrate their pain.”

Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column

One of the most famous pain artists is Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, whose work, now on exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is imbued with the lifelong suffering she experienced after being impaled during a trolley accident as a teenager. Her injuries left her spine and pelvis shattered, resulting in multiple operations and miscarriages, and she often depicted her suffering on canvas in stark, disturbing and even bloody images.

Sacramento resident Mark Collen, 47, is a former insurance salesman who suffers from chronic back pain. After his regular doctor retired due to illness, Mr. Collen was struggling to find a way to communicate his pain to a new doctor. Although he has no artistic training, he decided to create a piece of artwork to express his pain to the physician.

“It was only when I started doing art about pain, and physicians saw the art, that they understood what I was going through,” Mr. Collen said. “Words are limiting, but art elicits an emotional response.”

Mr. Collen wrote to pain doctors around the world to solicit examples of art from pain patients. Working with San Francisco college student James Gregory, 21, who suffers from chronic pain as the result of a car accident, the two created the Pain Exhibit, an online gallery of art from pain sufferers. The images are evocative and troubling.

“Some of them are painful even to look at,” Dr. Basbaum said. In November, he included an image from the site on the cover of Pain; it can be seen here.

Finding ways to communicate pain is essential to patients who are suffering, many of whom don’t receive adequate treatment from doctors. In January, Virtual Mentor, the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, reported that certain groups are less likely to receive adequate pain care. Hispanics are half as likely as whites to receive pain medications in emergency rooms for the same injuries; older women of color have the highest likelihood of being undertreated for cancer pain; and being uneducated is a risk factor for poor pain care in AIDS patients, the journal reported. 

Robert S. Beal, Broken People

Some of the images from the Pain Exhibit, like “Broken People” by Robert S. Beal of Tulsa, Okla., depict the physical side of pain. Others, such as “Against the Barrier to Life,” convey the emotional challenges of chronic pain. “I feel like I am constantly fighting against a tidal wave of pain in order to achieve some quality of life,” wrote the work’s creator, Judith Ann Seabrook of Happy Valley in South Australia. “I am in danger of losing the fight and giving up.”

Judith Ann Seabrook, Against The Barrier To Life

Mr. Collen said the main goal of the exhibit is to raise awareness about the problem of chronic pain. However, he said he hopes one day to find a sponsor to take the exhibit on tour.

“People don’t believe what they can’t see,” Mr. Collen said. “But they see a piece of art an individual created about their pain and everything changes.”

To see a slide show of selections from the Pain Exhibit, click here, or visit the Web site to see the full gallery of photos. Another slide show from The Times in February features art created by migraine sufferers.

Related Links:

- Pain Exhibit

- Pain Exhibit Slide Show

- Migraine Art Slide Show

- Health and Wellness – Well Blog (The New York Times)