At the Galleries

Over the past year or so, as I’ve said in these pages, I’ve begun to suspect that the art world’s fascination with unripe talent is diminishing. Witness last season’s trio of wonderful exhibitions by Varujan Boghosian, Albert Kresch, and Kenneth Noland, all of them well into their eighties, when their shows opened. I kept thinking of Clement Greenberg’s often repeated advice to young artists, “Live a long time.” He usually backed this up by saying that if van Gogh hadn’t committed suicide at thirty-seven, he would have lived to see his paintings sell for high prices and died a rich man. But Greenberg, who believed that making art demanded a lifetime’s commitment, not short-term enthusiasm, was also advocating longevity as a means toward achieving greater richness and complexity in one’s work.


“Richness and complexity” were certainly characteristics of “Varujan Boghosian: Constructions and Collages” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, in its new Chelsea location. The exhibition brought together a splendid cross section of this hard-to-classify artist’s mysterious mixed-media constructions and paper collages. Many were made in 2008 and 2009, but a few dated from the 1980s and ’90s, subtly revealing the persistence of the artist’s obsessive themes and the seamlessness of his evolution. Boghosian can be described with equal accuracy as a poet and a magpie. He is a connoisseur and avid collector of the tattered, the neglected, and the strange. He spots and rescues things once meaningful or cherished, now abandoned: vintage photographs, obsolete postcards, foxed prints, battered toys and games, scraps of ancient wallpaper, antiquated penmanship exercises and expenditure accounts, chipped souvenirs and much, much more.


Boghosian brings together utterly disparate things and creates new meanings from their connections. That objects removed from their habitual context and placed in unlikely proximity gain significance is a fundamental tenet of Surrealism—hence the famous “encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating theater table”—but Boghosian avoids Surrealism’s self-consciousness and its desire to shock. His generating elements are subsumed by their new relationships to embody deeply serious visual puns and oblique allusions, from arcane references to mythology, folklore, and high-minded literature to antic, gleeful jokes. As in the best Surrealist art, the elements in Boghosian’s combinations slide from meaning to meaning the way they do in dreams. A lion’s head merges with a nineteenth-century head of a man; an overscaled butterfly becomes both head and headdress of a vaguely Edwardian bride; cubes of pale wood—child’s blocks? scrap lumber?—are ranged on a shelf to create a three-dimensional “Morandi” at once like and unlike any existing Morandi; the much-abused metal bust of a jester—a mechanical bank?—chomps on a heart-shaped “cookie” in the wryly titled Eat Your Heart Out.


Boghosian is as sensitive to the material qualities of his components as he is to their implicit associations. He layers and orchestrates textures, adjusts densities and patterns, erases and tears to reveal and conceal images as adroitly as he combines wildly diverse elements. The cumulative effect is to make us simultaneously aware of both the long histories of these worn components and their new existence within Boghosian’s invented worlds. The best works in his recent exhibition made us smile as we grasped their allusions or understood their unexpected reenactments of familiar phrases. But at the same time, we found ourselves invaded by a rather melancholy awareness of the passage of time. And the longer we looked, the more engaged we were.


“Landscapes/Landshapes: Paintings by Albert Kresch” at Lohin Geduld Gallery was, in some ways, the diametrical opposite of the Boghosian show. Boghosian, who has a long and distinguished exhibition history, as well as a long and distinguished teaching career, is something of a cult figure to his many collectors and admirers but can also boast of a significant public presence. Kresch, who has been more interested in making art than in exhibiting, throughout his long life as a painter, is a cult figure of a different kind, an “artist’s artist,” highly esteemed by his colleagues but not, until relatively recently, known to a wider audience. And while Boghosian is a visionary who conjures up a private universe out of unlikely materials, Kresch, who studied with Hans Hofmann early on, is essentially a perceptual artist in love with the material of paint; he translates his enthusiasm for the space and light of the natural world into hot color, robust textures, and bold strokes.


Kresch’s recent landscapes at Lohin Geduld derived from specific locations—Upstate New York, New Mexico, and more—but they were as much celebrations of the sensuality of paint and the excitement of loaded color as they were evocations of place. It’s not that Kresch’s landscapes read as “disguised” abstractions or that his responses to varying terrain and different qualities of light were interchangeable. Each painting in the show had its own mood, temperature, quality of light, and sense of locale, even though most of them shared a sweeping viewpoint and included generous amounts of sky. But our attention was first captured by Kresch’s energetic gestures and fierce hues, and captured, too, by the sticky materiality of pigment, independently of what was invoked of the natural world. The small size of these vigorous pictures made them more intense and, for some reason, more unconventional; large versions of similar motifs might have had less intensity and seemed more familiar.


The contributors to the show’s modest catalogue, Mary Hrbacek, Gabriel Laderman, and Martica Sawin, point out affinities between Kresch and such painters as André Derain, Albert Marquet, and Georges Rouault. But there’s a lingering flavor, too, of Kresch’s early teacher, Hofmann, himself a master of thick paint and saturated color, and of Marsden Hartley, especially his passionately felt, late landscapes of Maine—where Kresch, too, has painted. Like Hartley’s muscular images, Kresch’s panoramic views are built of broad swipes of substantial, luminous hues; like Hartley’s, Kresch’s glowing colors seem to have been pulled up to the surface by sheer willpower, so that the resulting image appears to have only momentarily taken form as we watch.


Yet whatever his affinities, Kresch’s tough little paintings are his own. The simultaneous economy and disarming specificity of his landscapes —disarming because of the paintings’ lack of detail—combined with their charged, Fauvist hues, are extremely distinctive. Kresch’s intensified palette is never simply derived from local color; instead of striving to recapture the particular chroma of the scene before him, he uses it as a point of departure, ratcheting up contrasts and intensities, exaggerating tonal contrasts, and shifting hues towards opposite ends of the spectrum. Paradoxically, this exaggerated color, which cancels out any echo of the literal, also helps to create the specificity of Kresch’s canvases. In one painting from 2004, in which fields and trees are hinted at with patches of red and gold, sharpened with “escapes” of green around the edges, there is an upper zone of sky suggested by wide strokes of cerulean blue, imposed on staccato sweeps of lavender, mauve, and a darker blue; these broad passages conspire at once to arrest the eye with syncopated, abstract rhythms and suggest the heat and clarity of a brilliantly sunny day. Kresch, whose career started with a bang, exhibiting as a member of the prestigious Jane Street Group (which included several other Hofmann students) in the 1940s, has shown very little since then. Let’s hope that we’ll see more of his potent little pictures, more often, from now on.


At Leslie Feely Fine Art, uptown, “Kenneth Noland: Shaped Paintings, 1981–82” offered a welcome opportunity to see again a remarkable series of infrequently exhibited works: slender, eccentrically shaped canvases in which unpredictable relationships of unnameable hues animate wildly inventive geometries. That they looked as startling, fresh, and unexpected today as they did when they were first shown, more than twenty-five years ago, gave special poignancy to the news of Noland’s death, at 85, early in 2010, and turned the show into an eloquent memorial. Noland has said that he thought of these paintings as being “almost like cut-out figures without being figurative”—a remarkable statement from a painter whose work seems to test the expressive possibilities of color completely detached from reference of any kind. Yet the body seemed to resonate in the works at Leslie Feely. The exhibition’s twelve elongated irregular polygons were all oriented as verticals, at Noland’s request (some had previously been shown as horizontals). The tall, narrow, irregular canvases—ranging from slightly over six feet to slightly over eight feet high, none was more than two feet wide—appeared confrontational and watchful, confirming Noland’s 1990 statement: “I think of them, in some way, as being like figures. They remind me of figures in vertical Cubist paintings. It’s not exactly a reference, but the relation of length to width in the rectangles is like a person.”


Color gave Noland’s uncanny “sentinels” their power, determined their emotional resonance, and informed our perception of their distinctive character. Their indescribable shapes were accented with colored bands sparsely deployed along some of the edges. Sometimes the bands appeared to exert pressure on the expanses of radiant hues, so that the canvases’ bold compressions and deviations from familiar geometry seemed to have been generated by the pull of the sharply angled strips of contrasting hues. In some, the bands seemed to repel one another, while in others, judiciously placed bars of color appeared to assert the boundary between the painting as an expressive object and what was not the painting. Whatever their visual dynamic or the emotional temperature, each of these extraordinarily self-possessed paintings demanded that we spend a long time with it, despite the apparent simplicity of its chromatic construction—each work depended on three colors, two widely dispersed on the bands and played against a third uninflected, luminous hue of the “field.” Differences in the width and intensity of the bands implied spatial shifts, no matter how much we denied them, which intensified the sense of animation inherent in the declarative shapes, so that the implausible geometry of those shapes created fleeting suggestions of perspectival readings. These suggestions, however, disappeared as soon as they were acknowledged. Noland’s chromatic combinations always seemed at once surprising and absolutely right, tense and harmonious, but the shapes that carried these marvelous hues never fully yielded their logic. We could count the number of sides and try to attach the concept “hexagon” to a sharp-edged, intensely blue, six-sided “boomerang,” bracketed with ochre-tinged pink and moody grey bands, but in the end, the poised, floating shape resisted identification with any known figure. This instability and elusiveness was part of the strength of these wonderful paintings, at once “classical” in their elegance and lucidity, and “dionysian” in their exuberance, mystery, and glorious color.


Noland was one of the stars of “The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works,” at the National Gallery, Washington, through April. He was represented by two fine canvases of the 1960s, a crisp Circle of 1961, with concentric rings of astringent oranges, and a long, radiant Stripe of 1968 with a field of indescribable rose-salmon-pink, framed by contrasting stripes of lavender, gold, and green. These classically severe, ravishing paintings asserted their potency among works by artists espousing very different aesthetics—Pop Art icons such as Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Rauschenberg, for example. Organized by Harry Cooper, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, the exhibition showcased 126 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from the remarkable group of works assembled by the Meyerhoffs between 1958 and 2004, the year of Jane Meyerhoff’s death. The collection emphasizes the work of six artists—Johns, Kelly, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, and Frank Stella—but Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Hans Hofmann are also well represented. So, too, as the splendid Nolands attested, are other key figures from the period during which the couple collected; in addition to the Nolands, the exhibition boasted of strong works by Philip Guston, Ad Reinhardt, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Jean Dubuffet, and Joseph Albers, among others. Now totaling nearly 300 works, of which forty-seven have been donated to the National Gallery since 1987, the entire collection is a promised gift to the museum.


Cooper organized his selections according to ten categories: “Scrape,” “Concentricity,” “Line,” “Gesture,” “Art on Art,” “Drip,” “Stripe to Zip,” “Figure or Ground,” “Monochrome,” and “Picture the Frame”; these classifications, described as each exploring a “principal visual theme or material device of twentieth-century art,” seemed designed to permit maximum flexibility in the groupings. This, along with an incisive selection of apposite quotations from artists and critics of the period, stenciled on the walls of the galleries, encouraged viewers to seek connections among the diverse paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings on view, connections that were sometimes formal, sometimes conceptual, sometimes examples of curatorial wit. If Cooper’s thematic groupings imposed an illusion of logical organization on a notably wide-ranging collection of works, they also allowed him to have some fun with the installation. “Concentricity,” for example, included, among other exemplary works, the Noland Circle, an Albers Homage to the Square, from 1950, with its overlapped geometric figures, a 1990s Johns with an image of a spiral nebula, a square 1969 Stella with nested bands of spectrum hues separated by systematically shaded greys, and a 1987 shaped monochrome canvas by Kelly that could conceivably be construed as a shallow wedge sliced from an enormous red disc. Visitors, please compare and contrast.


In “Art on Art,” Cooper concentrated on such unequivocal examples as Lichtenstein’s 1974 Cow Triptych (Cow Going Abstract), in which a cartoon-y Holstein in a schematic landscape morphs into an arrangement of black, white, and yellow straight-edged shapes. Also illustrating the theme was a 1984 Johns “trophy wall” with images of the Mona Lisa and a Barnett Newman lithograph (itself in the Meyerhoff collection and in the show), and a photograph of John’s dealer, Leo Castelli; it’s perhaps significant that only the Mona Lisa bore a helpful identifying label. The category also allowed for Lichtenstein’s 1992 version of van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles, translated into Ben-Day dots and other graphic conventions, with van Gogh’s sturdy wooden farmhouse chairs turned into Marcel Breuer designs. Lichtenstein and Johns dominated this section, because of their habit of quotation. It was harder to account for the presence of a tough late Guston, apart from the “drawings” tacked to the wall behind a cigar-smoking Klansman and a garbage can filled with studio detritus, but Cooper clearly regarded his categories as elastic.


It wasn’t clear which category Stella’s wall-mounted reliefs from the 1983 “Playskool Series” belonged to—labeled “Gesture, Take 2”—although the impact of a gallery full of these rowdy, uninhibited, polychrome constructions made justifications irrelevant. I’ve always been of two minds about the series, however. The forms and the orchestration of textures and patterns in these aggressive “collages” are brilliantly inventive, so much so that the identity of individual elements is subsumed by the new wholes that they compose. Yet the expedient quality of Stella’s original materials—wood, cardboard, French curves, a ninepin, leftover builders’ supplies, packaging, and the like—seems to remain important to the improvisational nature of the series. Or it does until we realize that the reliefs are not built with recycled discards but instead have been carefully fabricated from bronze, aluminum, and other pricey metals to look exactly like the repurposed castoffs in which they were conceived. I’m aware of the conservation issues associated with scrap and the acidic properties of wood, cardboard, not to mention the collector’s resistance to ephemeral materials, but it’s difficult to reconcile this physical contradiction with the initial appearance of the reliefs. Happily, the vitality of the series almost made me forget my reservations.


Ultimately, the most provocative questions raised by Cooper’s selections were about what wasn’t there. While it’s often the idiosyncracies of private collections that make them interesting, the Meyerhoffs, for all their concentration on their six preferred artists, appear to have aspired to a fairly comprehensive overview of the years in which they were active. The National Gallery exhibition included works by Agnes Martin and Howard Hodgkin, as well as by such younger painters as Julian Lethbridge and Terry Winters. So why, given a couple of Grace Hartigans, were there no Helen Frankenthalers, a far more compelling painter and one with important connections to other artists in the collection? Where, since the press materials claim “all of the leading Abstract Expressionists” are represented in the collection, were Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb? Where, among the next generation, were Morris Louis and Jules Olitski? The last survey—190 works—of the Meyerhoff collection at the National Gallery was organized in 1996; perhaps when another selection goes on view, we’ll find answers to these questions.


One of the most impressive exhibitions of the past season required a trip to Italy: Beatrice Caracciolo’s Tumulti —riots—at the Académie de France à Rome, Villa Medici, from mid-January through mid-March. (The Italian-born Caracciolo, who lives in Paris and was educated largely in the U.S., has shown quite regularly in New York for the past decade or so.) Tumulti was a mid-career survey, a selection of the protean Caracciolo’s works on paper, collages, canvases, constructions in metal, sculptures, and photographs spanning roughly fifteen years. The Villa Medici’s exhibition spaces are among the most beautiful anywhere, an irregular series of well-proportioned rooms, each one different, connected by a stairway of shallow honey-colored brick steps and inter- rupted by the villa’s formal garden of fragrant hedges. Some rooms are fairly generous, some intimate, some have high vaulted ceilings. The two garden spaces, off an elegant open loggia, are themselves exercises in contrasts, one an harmonious rectangular former studio, the other a small oval room. The place is so seductive that it can overwhelm whatever is placed there, but Caracciolo managed to co-opt the setting for her own ends, turning the sequence of spaces into a kind of installation that complemented the carefully chosen works she placed within it. Rather than experiencing the show as a chronological account of the artist’s evolution, we read each grouping of her shimmering collages and her gestural drawings and paintings both as a self-contained expressive unit and as part of the larger whole that was the entire exhibition.

Caracciolo’s work, whatever the medium or approach, depends on telling gestures, an eloquent sense of touch, and elegantly adjusted tonal nuances. In her two-dimensional works, she creates palimpsests by manipulating surfaces, imposing, erasing, and canceling out accumulations of marks, to create “fields” in which the opulence of her accumu- lated interventions contradicts the austerity of her palette of greys, off-blacks, and murky whites. Caracciolo’s work is usually resolutely abstract and frontal, but hints of landscape space or the unstable edge of the sea often insinuate themselves. Her fluid, torqued line and layered, shifting imagery can suggest the forces of nature, growth, moving water or people in conflict, at the same time that it can remind us of preliterate mark-making or illegible writing. We begin to think about classical Chinese landscape painting, with its wide vocabulary of marks and gestures, and its vertiginous spaces, as well as the work of such Western masters of contingency as de Kooning and Guston (before 1970), and even Leonardo’s explosive studies of water currents and weather. At the Villa Medici, Caracciolo’s photographs of confrontational expanses of landscape and of breaking waves (the latter, large, with images layered and offset to create a subtle visual flux) reinforced our associations of her tangled line with the natural world.


Gradually, we began to decipher complex interrelations among the works in various parts of the exhibition, uniting apparently diverse series. Sometimes, Caracciolo helped us by revealing her sources. Among her most recent works, installed in the rectangular “garden studio,” were four large horizontal Riots. Their loosely knotted drawn configurations were, we learned, derived from a celebrated 1949 photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson of a crowd of desperate Chinese during the last days of the Kuomintang, Shanghai. But we also began to read the four Riots in terms of the harmonious rhythms and energy of Caracciolo’s sea-inspired Water Marks series, installed elsewhere, here translated into slightly threatening, charged, disjunctive but no less rhythmic or energetic images. A family resemblance was evident, although perhaps because we knew about their inspiration, the scale of the Riots seemed human, rather than landscape-like. The flux of the Water Marks and the urgency of the Riots were combined in a piece made specially for the exhibition, a dense, roiling cascade of weathered zinc panels, recycled from Paris roofs, piled the length of the stairway. A small space off the stair, with a heavy wooden door at one side, was occupied by a slender, coiling ladder of zinc and wire, slowing and domesticating the rush of the staircase “waterfall” and suggesting (but not permitting) an alternative means of escape. A zinc, wood, and glass chariot and a wall-mounted zinc construction, like a disciplined section of the “waterfall,” at the bottom of the stair, at once reminded us of mobility and blocked our exit.


What united all of these works—three-dimensional or two, constructed, drawn, assembled, or worried into being—was Caracciolo’s sensitiv- ity to the physical properties of her chosen materials. With often minimal interventions, such as piling the narrow, curling sheets of battered zinc on the brick staircase or imposing a flurry of inflected lines on a rubbed, worked surface, she elicits multiple associations in her viewers. I’m grateful I was able to see Caracciolo’s survey exhibition in the ideal setting of the Villa Medici, but let’s hope she’ll be showing again in New York before too long.