Another reason why later Cezanne is better than early

I read this passage from Annie's Dillard's Living By Fiction , her exploration of what makes writing meaningful, and thought it could be applied to painting just as well: We judge a work on its integrity. Often we examine a work's integrity (or at least I do) by asking what it makes for itself and what it attempts to borrow from the world. Sentimental art, for instance, attempts to force preexistent emotions upon us. Instead of creating characters and events which will elicit special feelings unique to the text, sentimental art merely gestures towards stock characters and events whose accompanying emotions come on tap. Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls. An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given. That is why scenes of high drama--suicide, rape, murder, incest--or scenes of great beauty are so difficult to do well in genuine literature. We already have strong feelings about these things, and literature does not operate on borrowed feelings....

Playing with Paul McCarthy

Here's a funny video of Paul McCarthy lampooning Willem De Kooning. McCarthy, of course, is an internationally famous artist whose work is closer to "South Park" and "Pee Wee's Playhouse" than De Kooning. His work is full of one-liner antics and the chaos of creative destruction. McCarthy gained notoriety outside the artworld for making an inflatable dog poop the size of a house in Switzerland. The wind caught the poo, flying it several hundred yards into power lines and a children's home....

Sex with trucks

I stumbled across a hilarious interview between Allen Ginsberg and conservative columnist John Lofton from 1990. Lofton begins the interview aggressively asking if Ginsberg is crazy. Ginsberg talks about seeing a shrink and Lofton is mystified why the poet doesn't know his psychiatrist's religious beliefs. GINSBERG: I know some, through body language and the response to the immediate situation in front of me, which is what I am really interested in, rather than, say, this conversation. I'm dealing with you in terms of how you display yourself here, not the history of your thoughts. I'm trying to deal with the evidence or manifestation of how you present yourself here--your harshness, aggression, and insistency and-- LOFTON: Why not call it my perseverance? Isn't that a nicer word? Or guts? Or tenacity? GINSBERG: I would say there is a little element of S&M in your approach. Power. LOFTON: No. I would say this is more like the kind of sex you like. GINSBERG: And I would say this is the kind of power relationship you like, judging from your behavior. LOFTON: Well, that's certainly what S&M is all about--power.. GINSBERG: And you seem to like that don't you? Have your sexual fantasies...

Your diploma is garbage

They say the only part of the economy that does well during recession is education. So now that I'm jobless, I'm looking forward to the opening of the University of Trash at SculptureCenter this Sunday. The University of Trash is an experiment in alternative architecture, urbanism, and pedagogy taking place in SculptureCenter's main space. Drawing from utopian ideals and radical urban projects undertaken since the 1960s, the artists will create an installation that functions as a temporary, makeshift University - hosting courses, lectures, presentations, and workshops. A Free Skool program will operate within the University, offering the public the opportunity to propose their own courses - open and free for all sign up and attend throughout the duration of the exhibition. Working collaboratively with students, local organizations, activists, and academics, the artists have been gathering and researching material related to activities of the 1960s countercultural Appropriate Technology movement, experimental pedagogy, adventure playgrounds, Non-plan, emergency and low-impact design, the vernacular of informal housing, and historical sites of activism. The LMCC has a good interview with Cataldi....

Louise Fishman at Cheim and Read

Louise Fishman uses thick brushes to set down bold abstract marks on big canvases. Her work strikes me as modest but adventurous, like someone who sets out walking from their home and winds up at Tierra del Fuego. She accumulates honest, limited brushstrokes in a way that's deliberative but fierce. Her titles are emotional: "Fugitive," "Swarm of Dreams," "A Certain Marvelous Thing." Her current show at Cheim and Read is a must-see. She uses a lot of strong vertical and horizontal marks, usually modest in length and ambition, but with incredibly bold, clear colors that seem to vibrate and create a deep space. This canvas is like an impenetrable thicket of blues and blacks, forming a kind of basket to project your thoughts and feelings. These photos don't do the work any kind of justice. Sorry Louise -- but these should inspire you to head to C&R. Louise Fishman, Telling, 2007 Louise Fishman, Concealing and Revealing, 2008 Louise Fishman, Geography, 2007 Louise Fishman, Cooked and Burnt, 2007...

Defending Lisa Yuskavage

I have a bad habit of defending the indefensible. So let's get this out of the way: Lisa Yuskavage doesn't need defending, especially from me, for the following reasons. I don't especially like her work For better or worse, her place in the history of painting over the past 15 years is pretty solid She will continue to collect incredible sums of money for her painting But in a recent article by Jerry Saltz, the New York Magazine art critic calls her work dated and welcomes a new guard into the current mess of the art world. Reviewing her last show, Saltz says it feels "stuck in another time." Other critics, like David Cohen, focus on the abstract, painterly qualities in Yuskavage's latest work. I think Saltz gets it absolutely right when he catalogs her influences and what the work looks like. Yuskavage's beanpoles, voluptuaries, and ugly ducklings make it clear that her work is less connected to classical art than to calendar illustration, cheesecake, dirty playing cards, Vargas, and Thomas Kinkade. These aren't meant as insults. Yuskavage's influences also include Hallmark greeting cards, Russ Meyer, the Hudson River School, Maxfield Parrish, seventies Penthouse, Impressionism, third-string Italian masters, and the...

'Jesus' doesn't save, and that's O.K.

On my last birthday, people asked how old I am. I confessed to being 34 years old, and expressed relief that I've made it past Jesus's age. I thought it was a stupid joke, but people laughed. They would laugh to the point that I had to keep saying the joke. All day I was telling a joke I didn't believe fully in because it got a positive reaction. It was better than just telling the truth, plainly. Now I know how Bob Saget feels on stage, and now you know a little bit about what it's like seeing the New Museum's current show, "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus." The premise of the show is that it's a global review of artists who are under the age of 33. There's a lot of provocative, interesting work in this show, and it's varied enough that most visitors will find something they connect with. Not surprisingly, artists raised in the internet era like working in different media and are willing to create an overload of material. It's not about crafting objects as much as it's about the rapid churn of creativity. That idea, which has been around for a long time, is...

Robert Motherwell on abstraction

From his essay "What Abstract Art Means to Me," 1951: Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come into existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience--intense, immediate, direct, subltle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic. Everything that might dilute the experience is stripped away. The origin of abstraction in art is that of any mode of thought. Abstract art is a true mysticism--I dislike the word--or rather a series of mysticisms that grew up in the historical circumstance that all mysticisms do, from a primary sense of guly, an abyss, a void between one's lonely self and the world. Abstract art is an effort to close the void that modern men feel. Its abstraction is its emphasis. One wonders what Motherwell would say about "funky abstraction," or someone like Mary Heilmann, or even Al Held....

Peter Saul's exploding America

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in Peter Saul's world. He's an artist drawn to the shocking and outrageous. He twirls everyday forms around his finger like a wedding ring; he's married to the wild explosion of surplus and junk in American life. A stellar show of his early work is on view at George Adams Gallery in Chelsea (through April 11). Saul's later work becomes more dayglo and provocative as it gets more character-based. In the early drawings, though, we see Saul beginning to grapple with comic books and highways and refrigerators while the art world was still in its abstract-expressionist hangover. Everyday objects tend towards the abstract and become occasions for whimsy and endless whirl.In some ways these drawings remind me of Antonioni's great finale to Zabriskie Point, where a brand new suburban home explodes in the American desert, sending all manner of consumer goods tumbling through the air to a Pink Floyd soundtrack (go to 3:30 in the video below for the explosions. Trust me: it's worth it).But where Antonioni is making a movie about the catastrophe of modern relationships that are intertwined with suburbia and consumerism, Saul is taking a bumpercar ride through their birth. Peter...

Must... post... more...

There's been a lull in my posting recently since the sweetest thing came into my life: Iris Ellington Swartz Turfle, my baby girl, born February 12. For all the cute pics of baby drooling, and adults drooling over a baby, check out my Flickr account. I'm sure loyal DG readers will understand why art blogging was one of the last things on my mind. That doesn't mean making art has gone to the back burner, however, as I've entered an extremely productive phase and have been very busy in the studio lately. I'll post pics soon of what's bubbling out in this very green time. And, as life with a newborn becomes more manageable, look forward to more regular posts here. In the meantime, I thought I'd share a great quote I found from an interview with Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman that relates to a lot of my past year in the studio. As the religious aspect of my existence was wiped out, life became much easier to live. Sartre said how inhibited he used to be as an artist and author, how he suffered because what he was doing wasn't good enough. By a slow intellectual process he...

Fred Sandback's world on a string

"My work always exists in an interior space," sculptor Fred Sandback wrote in Notes from 1975. Sandback, who currently has a show at David Zwirner until Valentine's Day, made minimal sculptures with string. Like his teachers Donald Judd and Robert Morris, Sandback can sometimes seem cool, but he is always engaged in something very specific to a material, to a room, to a moment. Sandback uses string to creates imaginary planes. It's so simple. It's a bit like Les Nessman's imaginary office on the sitcom WKRP only, you know, less lame. Sandback takes a simple, playful idea and pushes the tactile and imaginary qualities as far as they will go. The black string seems to float off the floor, while red looks like it's firmly planted. He uses intervals and repetition to give and take solidity of the planes, and shadows to bend space. This is conceptual sculpture anyone can understand and take joy in. Photos don't do justice to the architecture the string makes you start seeing. I love that when I went, Zwirner had run out of press releases but was still giving away copies of Sandback's tips for children to appreciate the sculpture. In that essay, "Children's...

Newman's own

John Newman is a materials guy. His small, quirky sculptures mix different materials in strange ways that create particular little worlds. Things that don't ordinarily go together - like heavy bronze and Japanese paper - somehow play nicely. Over a dozen of Newman's sculptures are on display in a show at the New York Studio School gallery. From a distance the room looks like a high-end toy store, with bold colors and strange forms. Up close, each work reveals itself slowly in the materials. One work, "bamboo from sail to plow," uses bamboo in a way that compliments and supplants nature. We know how bamboo grows, but Newman cuts it and reassembles its sections in a related way to natural bamboo sectioning, as if twisted while growing. It's this eye for the natural behavior of materials that lets Newman pull this kind of cheeky behavior. It's not about accumulation of different objects, or the pastiche of unlikely partners. Newman sees the properties in different forms and materials and respecting them enough to see a conversation with other materials. In the end, there is an organic whole not because of the materials but because of something else that's embedded in them....

When beauty is enough

Painter Pat Lipsky gave a talk last night at the NY Studio School on "The Right Color." Ms. Lipsky, whose work is mostly abstract and geometrical, gave a cool and elegant defense of painting as the formal practice of creating beauty. She quoted Mark Rothko, saying, "An expression of beauty is an expression of rightness." "There has been a devaluation of beauty," Lipsky said, referring to a review by art critic Robert Hughes where he asked if creating beautiful objects is enough to make good art. She recalled creating her early color field paintings in 1969, which were made by applying acrylic paint to wet canvas with sponges. These were "one shot" paintings that she would do in one sitting in order to capture a particular spirit (and they were very big, some as long as ten feet or so). If she made one of these paintings and it didn't work, she threw it away. "There was nothing else to do with them," Lipsy said. "Either you hit it or you blew it." A painter to the core, Lipsky gets excited at the technical details. She enthusiastically recalled creating over 100 different tones for her painting "Episcopalian Pandemonium," which is...

'Our City Dreams' opens tonight

I like women, I like art, and I like New York. So of course I'll be seeing Chiara Clemente's portrait of five female artists living and working in NYC. It's showing at Film Forum. Here's their press release: It's an affecting love letter to the city which strings together the self-told narratives of five women artists (ages 30 - 80), each of whom has a passion for art-making inseparable from her devotion to New York . Swoon, the youngest, exhibits cut-outs directly on city walls and subways, and exudes idealism and energy while carrying a two by four the way some women would carry a briefcase. Cairo-born Ghada Amer mixes media -- embroidering with painting -- to confront sexual taboos that cross cultural boundaries. After experiencing the New York Dolls in San Francisco , Kiki Smith realized she needed New York 's energy to create her wildly influential paintings and sculptures; Marina Abramovic, originally of Belgrade , is a performance art pioneer who often uses her own body as a canvas. And Nancy Spero returned from Paris with artist-husband Leon Golub in 1964, to meld art and activism during the Vietnam War and become, in her own words, "a woman...

'Is that a real unicorn or fake?'

A young girl asked this of her father while they looked at Børre Sæthre's "Stealth Distortion (...must have seen it in some teenage wet dream)" at P.S.1 on Sunday. The dad said he thought it was fake, but didn't elaborate. This is what I imagine it would be like to visit Universal Studios Oslo....

California dreamin'

Looking at the work of Guy de Cointet is like house-sitting for a stranger. There are suggestions of a complete life and the openness to imagine one's self living it. The empty spaces and incomplete artifacts of foreign ideas encourage flights of fancy. De Cointet, who died in 1983 before reaching his 50th birthday, was born in Paris and worked in Los Angeles. He would overhear bits of conversation or take lines from soap operas and create a graphic space for them to live. He also performed dramatic readings of nonsensical books and staged pseudo-soap operas. A video of some of this work, along with over 20 drawings, is on view at Greene Naftali until Feb. 14. In combining found text with invented geometric shapes, de Cointet is the precursor to an artist like Tucker Nichols. The disjunction of text and image seems related to another California artist, Raymond Pettibon. There's a special appreciation for montage with these artists that may be the influence of movies, although instead of Hollywood it seems more like Godard's experiments with juxtaposing sound and image to create more than the sum of parts. The seduction happens in the viewer's reconciliation of fragments....

Christopher Isherwood's last days

I encourage anyone interested in the art of drawing to go see Don Bachardy's show at Cheim and Read, "Christopher Isherwood; Last Drawings" (ending Feb. 7). Bachardy, who was Isherwood's partner for over 30 years, documented the writer's last years with large, quick drawings that are direct, deceptively simple, and quite moving. More pics after the jump....

Curtain's falling: Terry Winters

Terry Winters' "Knotted Graphs" at Matthew Marks closes tomorrow. Winters creates a conceptual space with layered transparent paints based on scientific ideas of knot theory. This has been in my "write about" list for almost two months now because there's something profound in the way Winters combines personal brushwork and line with seemingly impersonal patterns and scientific illustration ideas. I think a bit of Matthew Ritchie, who also has this fascination with how scientific ideas can be made fleshy. I ran out of time to write about it, but this show is worth taking the time to see. Winters did a recent interview with the Brooklyn Rail....

Do they have a secret handshake?

Last week I wondered what it meant to be a Yaddo Artist. As it turns out, you can decide for yourself on Jan. 24 (my birthday!), when there will be a Yaddo Artist Studio Crawl through Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. More info here. Participating artists include: David Baskin Andrea Belag Louise Belcourt Peter Sumner Walton Bellamy David Brody JoAnne Carson Patty Cateura Emily Cheng Lisa Corinne Davis Joe Diebes James Esber Rochelle Feinstein Jane Fine Joshua Fried Joanne Greenbaum Stacy Greene Sally Gross Dennis Kardon David Kramer Melissa Meyer Amy Myers David Packer Oona Ratcliffe Gina Ruggeri Katia Santibanez Jonathan Santlofer James Siena Joan Snyder Natasha Sweeten Alexi Worth...

The most terrifying color?

"Sometimes I'm afraid of yellow." -Willem de Kooning "As a picture painted in yellow always radiates spiritual warmth, or as one in blue has apparently a cooling effect, so green is only boring." -Wassily Kandinsky Make up your own mind by listening to The Scene is Now's "Yellow Sarong" (which was later covered by Yo La Tengo). Watch Ken Nordine's "Yellow" put to animation:...

Spring lectures schedule at the Studio School

The agenda is on at the NY Studio School. Artist lectures every Tuesday, scholars and critics every Wednesday. David Salle, Mark Greenwold, Joyce Pensato, Jerry Saltz and more. Full schedule after the fold-...

The Swiss Institute's Yankee Swap

As part of their show "Regift," the Swiss Institute is sponsoring a project by artist Maria Eichorn. Here's the press release for anyone who may have an unwanted Texas-shaped jello mold hiding in their closet: REGIFT, curated by John Miller, will be on view FEB 18 - APR 4 2009; the exhibition focuses on the chains of obligation that gifting generates, on one hand, and the incalculability of gift values, on the other....

Small comfort for big letters of rejection

I happened upon an exhibit at the New York Public Library that celebrates the storied history of Yaddo, the artists' retreat in upstate New York near Saratoga. Yaddo has hosted many great writers, artists and composers, from Langston Hughes to Philip Guston to Sylvia Plath. The list goes on and on, one luminary following another. I remember when a former teacher of mine told me she was headed to Yaddo; I hadn't heard of it. By the time I Googled it, I was in awe. My teacher kicks even more ass than I thought! Walking through the documents and letters in the show, I began to wonder and dream: Would I ever wind up spending a summer at Yaddo? What does it take to get in? And what does it mean to be a "Yaddo artist"? That's when I stumbled upon a precious display case that deals with sculptor Eva Hesse's application to Yaddo - and subsequent rejection. Hesse is now celebrated as an innovative sculptor whose pioneering use of unorthodox materials, like rubber and fiberglass, blazed the way through post-minimalism. She died of a brain tumor in 1970. But in 1967, Hesse applied for a stay at Yaddo. She...

Postcards from the Edge

I've given a piece to this worthy cause. For only $75, you could buy a Jeff Koons and make the world's first Koons paper airplane. Or use it on your Swiffer. Or you could get an Ida Applebroog or Robert Longo and keep it on your wall forever. No matter what, the money goes to a worthy cause. What's to think about? The 11th Annual Postcards From the Edge A Benefit for Visual AIDS Start the New Year off right -- over 1,600 postcards unveiled at Metro Pictures January 9-10, 2009 Hosted by Metro Pictures 519 West 24th Street, NYC The Benefit Sale -- ONE DAY ONLY! Saturday, January 10, 11:00 AM - 7:00 PM Over 1,600 original postcard-sized works of art. $75 EACH. Buy four, get one free! Works are signed on the back and displayed anonymously. Artists' name revealed only after purchase. First-come, first served $5 suggested admission The Preview Party Friday, January 9, 6:00 - 8:00 PM $75 admission* includes one raffle ticket. Additional raffle tickets $20. Your only chance to get a sneak peek at the entire show! No sales, but one lucky raffle winner selects the first postcard. More prizes: Keith Haring the new 10lb...

A special secret in Brooklyn

Clearly I don't take the Q train enough. I haven't seen Bill Brand's subway zoetrope in person yet, but the NY Times has an article on its restoration. Created in the late '70s, Brand's zoetrope is based on the 19th century invention that showed movement with a series of still pictures seen through slits. Decades later, the subway zoetrope was abused and in disrepair from graffiti and neglect from the city. Brand, getting access with an MTA key someone slipped him long ago, spent years lovingly going back to clean graffiti from his work in this abandoned train station until it was a hopeless cause. Now, after getting funding for clean up and proper lighting, it's back in full force. Below is good video of it since the Times's stinks. I love how the passengers totally dig the suprise in the first video. Here is great vintage news footage from the early '80s, including interviews with passengers and artist Bill Brand talking about the zoetrope's conception and construction....

Beyond the canon

Sometimes I love a show that's messy and sprawling. "Beyond the Canon: Small American Abstraction, 1945-1965" at Robert Miller is one of those shows. The point is to complicate the history of abstraction, to go beyond the Art History 102 roster of Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, etc.The space is chock full of all manner of abstraction, creating a real map of what American abstraction looked like during the era. There were some real gems from many artists I hadn't heard of, and the range of abstraction was even greater than I thought. Honestly, there are a lot of paintings that don't work in this show. But it's like looking at old newspapers instead of history books. There's a real virtue in bringing a contemporary eye to a more unfiltered body of work. Below are a few that caught my eye....

Curtain's dropping: Elmer Bischoff

Elmer Bischoff, Untitled, 1952 Here's your last chance to see a room full of great jazzy abstractions from Bay Area artist Elmer Bischoff at George Adams gallery. The show closes tomorrow. Though I love his later representional stuff even more, this work from the late '40s and early '50s shines with his rhythm and evocative West Coast color sense. Click here for more info and images at George Adams....

Merry Christmas from Jorge Fick

Joanne Mattera has some great pics from the Red Dot Fair in Miami. I was struck by Jorge Fick's work, which is all about color and shapes forming a simple but dynamic space. I love how he uses tone and his figures get a lot of movement. The picture above, called "Two Potatoes," is appropriate for both Christmas and, obviously, St. Patrick's Day. Humor is undervalued in abstract art....

'Surrounded by a lot of woman'

James Kalm takes a look at the Marlene Dumas show at MoMA in a recent video. I haven't seen the show yet, but it looks really good....

The point

"The primary subject is the surface, which has its colour and its laws, beyond the objects." -Pierre Bonnard...

The state of art

"When I walk into a gallery now, I don't see anything. It's as if the artists spent all their time trying to find ways how not to do anything. Just because you don't do anything, doesn't mean you've said something. And, as Harold Rosenberg once pointed out, just because you don't say something doesn't mean it's true." -Willem de Kooning, 1966...

Feeling Zoe

Zoe Strauss is an American artist. Which is to say she's pragmatic, works too much, and is completely crazy. The Philadelphia photographer talked at FIT on Saturday. She told a crowd of students that she only started taking photos three years ago, didn't go to college or study photography, but has already appeared in the Whitney Biennial and now has a book coming out (called America, in celebration the Robert Frank's The Americans). Until three years ago, she was a babysitter. Strauss is impulsive, tentative, and talks in circles about her work. She said she feels uncomfortable teaching because the students don't work enough, and she has a hard time divorcing herself from personal feelings about the work during critiques. My favorite part of the talk came when Strauss talked about the photo above, and navigated us through her feelings about the composition. The swath of black on the far right drove her "nuts," she said, but she just had to live with it. Similarly, she beat herself up over whether to center the photograph on the vertical line on the wall, or the line on the sidewalk. She couldn't figure it out, and the small difference loomed large...

Franz Kline on Andy Warhol's Coca-Cola

"Now that's one hell of a social realist painting!"...

Grand Theft Art

Walking around Soho, I saw a poster from about 50 feet away and had to do a double-take: Why would a gallery plaster the street with posters of an Alex Katz self-portrait? Once I got closer, I realized the mistake. It's just an ad for Grand Theft Auto IV that happens to feature a character that looks like the artist (and in Katz's flat style). But still. Since this is the fourth installment of the notoriously violent game, maybe they're trying a different approach to keep it fresh. Summering in Maine, cocktail parties, lunches with poets... The kids are going to love it!...

Finding subject matter

Given the infinite number of possible subjects in the world, it's hard to believe any painter has ever been strapped for an idea of what to paint. But it happens. It's happened to me. Last night, painter Wolf Kahn gave a talk on "Finding Subject Matter," along with a four-point program to get through the problem. Kahn is a total pro. With his shock of white hair and a grandpa sweater, he speaks with the ease and assurance of an artist who knows who he is and who has done this kind of talk over and over again. He is a funny storyteller and an engaging personality. He began his talk by apologizing for repeating anecdotes, but that certain stories are the best illustrations of certain point. He said he tries to keep people from taking his workshops more than once because the facade of clever spontaneity crumbles once you've heard the same story a few times. His four ideas for finding a subject matter were: 1. Explore the visual field. Look around you, and try to paint the things you don't know the name to (his examples were the space between a figure's ear and shoulder, and the...

Willem de Kooning on Clifford Still

"His paintings have a defensive stance: they leer at you with argumentative edges, as if he expected you to criticize them."...

Petah Coyne Living

It's true: Petah Coyne has a Martha Stewart problem. Which is to say she's thoughtful, gracious, interesting to meet -- and emotionally impossible. Her current show, called Vermillion Fog (at Galerie Lelong until 12/13), made me swoon on first seeing it. There's something so engaging in her sprawling sculptural installations of bubbling, waxy flower blobs that pulse with taxidermied birds clawing and brawling....

The shape of Ben Shahn

I picked up Ben Shahn's "The Shape of Content" from the library a few weeks ago. I've always admired his engagement in the political and social realities around him, although sometimes his work veers into illustration. But some pieces hit me hard. His painting of "The Passion of Sacco and Venzetti" in their coffins haunts me. Shahn believed in the innocence of both Sacco and Venzetti, and painted them compassionately as corpses laying below a triumvirate of academics, bureaucrats and the judge responsible for allowing a travesty of justice. I believe Shahn was wrong about the two Italian men being wrongly accused. I don't think both Sacco and Venzetti were innocent; there is a lot of evidence to indict Sacco and plenty to exonerate Venzetti. As I read more about the case, a strange thing happened. Instead of dismissing Shahn's work, I began to appreciate it even more....

Moms say the darndest things

"He'll never win a beauty prize." -Annetta Giacometti's mom, on her son Alberto's sculpture...

When to say when

Painter Leopold Plotek reflected on his early work last night during a lecture at the New York Studio School. Skipping over the first five years of his "juvenilia," Plotek showed slides of paintings based on shadows and fragments of architecture he saw in Italy. Although the paintings might look abstract they were based on things he saw in reality. "I've never actually painted a non-depictive painting," he said. After working in this particular mode for years, Plotek said he reached a point where he wasn't interested in painting like that any more. "You run out of steam when you can actually give instructions to someone else to do your painting," he said....

1-900-BRA-DLEY

The art blogs and critics are abuzz over Joe Bradley's show at Canada, which I'm not interested in seeing. Holland Carter tips his hand when he says "because the artist doesn't call on painterly competence, the work stands out in a gallery scene that has, overall, the ready-for-prime-time surface sheen of an M.F.A. show." Carter is a critic whose job is to see lots of shows. Of course he's looking for standouts. It's like a chef saying the glass souffle was exceptional. Well... yeah. There's a tie to art as commodity here that makes the duty of art to be new and different. The Joe Bradley brand is certainly soaring. Bradley's work is to art what phone sex is to real relationships. Real relationships can be soulful, maddening, heart-breaking, and always stay with you. It's not the gossip about the relationship that's worth talking about; it's not the things your friend said, or how the relationship relates to the history of gender. There's an actual, direct experience that's worth something, even if it ends poorly. Phone sex? Not worth talking about....

'All painting is abstract': Ruth Miller at NYSS

In an artist talk at the Studio School Tuesday night, painter Ruth Miller boiled down her life's work: "I love still life. I love objects. I love looking." That affection has carried Miller, 78, a very long way. She returns to the same subjects, painting the same tree over and over, or doing multiple canvases from the same still life set-up. "I never tire of working from the same tree, as long as I can find more challenges," said Miller. "It's like entering a world that I can slowly take possession of."...

Gallery gripes

I had a talk about Chelsea yesterday that ended with a group of artists cheering the idea of galleries going under during the economic downturn. We were talking about the art world in general, but Carol Diehl at Art Vent has a different side of that coin: only the professionals might survive. And there aren't a lot of professionals out there. Carol took a group of collectors to several galleries and was met with frustration: Highlights: waiting for more than 20 minutes while gallery assistants looked for someone who could give us a price (all the pieces in the exhibition were priced the same--$200,000). The impeccably dressed young woman who rattled off a canned speech about the artist's political intentions for the work without regard to the glazed-over look of her audience. The gallery associate who referred to my clients as "You guys" and told us the price was "like $75,000." The dealer who joked about the price of a painting and another who asked my clients how they felt about the elections. And finally, in a gallery rife with assistants, asking to see work by a particular artist and being told that anyone who could show it was "in...

Peyton's Michelle and Sasha

Now that Obama's been elected, the New Museum with install Elizabeth Peyton's "Michelle and Sasha Obama Listening to Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention August 2008" at the artist's current retrospective. The painting is in Peyton's typical Isn't-life-touching-and-fleeting mode and fails to capture any of the strength or individuality of Michelle Obama, who's a hell of a woman and deserves a better portraitist. As Intelligencer predicted, as soon as Obama won the announcement was made. It makes sense - Peyton's subjects are always winners, aren't they?...

Art's long, strange trip

In 1957, psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term "psychedelic," a conflation of two Greek words meaning "soul manifest," to describe drug experiences that altered one's perception of reality. The same year, Life magazine published an article on the visionary qualities of hallucinogenic mushrooms. "The genie was out of the bottle," said New York Times art critic Ken Johnson, in a lecture at the New York Studio School on Wednesday. And art hasn't been the same since. To be sure, Johnson wasn't talking about the commercial excesses of psychedelia, or art meant for stoners. It's more about a theory of mind that shifts after using drugs like LSD, shrooms, mescaline, or pot. Johnson's idea about the post-psychedelic shift in art is interesting and far-reaching, and difficult to talk about if only because of the stigma that comes with talking about drug use -- even if it was mild experimentation 30 years ago. Johnson has interviewed a number of artists for whom the psychedelic experience permanently changed the way they perceived the world. Artist Chris Martin said "For many artists of my generation, it is crucial." Art by Chris Martin...

Scissor sister

David LaChappelle's show at Tony Shafrazi included giant pieces made of corrugated cardboard (which the gallery makes sure to note is recycled). Although there was a piece featuring Paris Hilton, the imagery was certainly original -- including a funny piece with moving parts called "Art in Heaven."...

Two women X 3

There are some incredible paintings on view for Christie's Impressionist & Modern sale this week. Three caught my attention and I realized they had a similar subject matter: two women in domestic interiors. Matisse's women are maternal, Vuillard's are quiet and luminous, and Milton Avery's are sophisticated and chatty. It's beautiful stuff, and I've listed the auction prices in case anyone wants to surprise me with a package. Just make sure to get signature delivery -- those punks in my building already made off with my birthday presents....

List of art shows in New York

For a few years now, I've kept a list of art shows I want to see at galleries and museums in New York. It's a little file on my Mac and I've updated every few weeks or so, as information comes to me. I try to keep a copy of the list on me at all times, since I never know when I'll find myself in midtown or the Upper East Side with a little time on my hands. Of years of ridiculously hording this knowledge, it finally occurred to me that other people might find this list useful in the quest to find quality art shows. So, without further ado, I give you Harry's List. It's a page that I will update on a rolling basis and users can check into to see if there's anything interesting showing. I've put a handy graphic up on the right for easy access. Since I haven't seen most of the shows on the list, I can't guarantee quality. Let me know if you've seen a show that you don't think deserves to be on the list, or a show that should be on it but isn't....

Is that Kurt Cobain in my ass?

"Oh, forget it. You could sit on that work and not know it." -Photographer Duane Michaels, on the size of Elizabeth Peyton's small canvases...

Ron Gorchov, doing what he wants to do

Speaking at the NY Studio School last night, artist Ron Gorchov recalled seeing a frustrated painter friend kicking work off a balcony in the mid-1960s. At that moment it occurred to Gorchov that "It's important to do something you really want to do." For Gorchov, the elusive goal has been to get fields of color to float in a room. At 78, he feels like the work he's doing is the "most fluent and fertile of my life." Gorchov first came to New York in 1953, meeting Mark Rothko on his second day here. It was a different time, he explained, and meeting famous artists was as easy as going to their bars. At the end of meeting Rothko, Gorchov made an overture and said they should get together soon. Rothko balked, saying "No. Have a few gallery shows. It's a small place, and we'll meet." When Gorchov tried to get an introduction to painter John Russell through a mutual friend, the friend said no. "Nobody would introduce each other," Gorchov explained. The atmosphere was competitive. "They were all jealous of each other."...

Leon Golub Did It!

Or didn't, depending on what 'it' is. Golub's work is ugly. During the 1960s, while American boys were being sent overseas and the Vietnamese were getting fire bombed, the New York art world became ever more interested in minimalism and formal approaches to art that were divorced from the reality of people's every day lives. But Golub, working in Chicago, insisted on engagement. He achieved renown painting scenes of mercenaries, killers, victims of napalm attacks, anonymous third world fighters, and dogs attacking (like the drawing below). I was fortunate enough to hear Golub speak in 2000, four years before he died. I found him charming and erudite. He was a man with a lot to say. But a show currently at Ronald Feldman (until Nov. 15) demonstrates the limitations of his approach....

Gerhard Richter quotes

I returned a book of writings by German artist Gerhard Richter to a friend today. The book, called "Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, Writing from 1962 - 1993," is a compilation of Richter's notes, interviews and exhibition writing. As much as I dislike Richter's especially German pretense to objectivity, and as much as I find his subjects boring, and his approach half impotent, his writing is challenging and engaging. What follows are some of the best quotes I found in the book. Some I agree with; some are nonsense. The idea that art copies nature is a fatal misconception. Art has always operated against nature and for reason. All we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it. To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art....

New options for artist books

Sharon Butler (of Two Coats fame) has a good piece in the Brooklyn Rail about how artists now have better options to do short runs of books because of digital technology. Until recently, publishing options for artists, unless funded by dealers, publishers, grants, or trust funds, have been limited. In theory, book projects were aimed at bypassing the gallery system to the artist's economic advantage, but in practice, the need for outside funding simply added another gatekeeper. Enter cheaper digital resources like Lulu and Blurb. If I can ever finally finish my presidents project, perhaps this would be a good outlet?...

Last chance: Judy Glantzman and Jeronimo Elespe

Two shows worth seeing in Chelsea close tomorrow. Judy Glantzman's work (pictured above) features layered images of body parts -- faces, hands, feet -- in mysterious, mandala-like configurations. (Sorry for the crappy photo -- it really doesn't do this work's subtle shimmer any justice.) Sometimes the figures emerge from unprimed canvas in the colors of bruised skin. Faces turn into other faces, spout tears which become animals, and then out of the shape will form a bird. If it sounds strange, it is. Sometimes the paintings are like a Renaissance sketchbook, with exuberant lines searching for forms. Judy Glantzman at Betty Cuningham Gallery, through Oct. 11. Jeronimo Elespe's work can be the reverse, like forms searching for a subject. He creates his small oil on aluminum panel work over long periods of time, layering colors and shapes in a way that ends when masses start to develop. I like this his work is so small (yes, that's my beefy finger next to one of his landscapes). It's quite intimate, and the process of attention shows in waves as layers emerge, one over the other. Elespe works from memory, which alters how things look as people and places start to...

Vik Muniz: Foolishness and flamboyance

This is why art isn't philosophy. Vik Muniz, the artist famous for recreating iconic artworks in different media and then photographing it (think the Mona Lisa in peanut butter and jelly) has moved on to a kind of sculptural painting that recreates the backs of great works of art. The photo below should help demonstrate how lame and uninspired this idea is....

Go west! Don't go west! Alison Elizabeth Taylor's bind

Artist Alison Elizabeth Taylor came to the NY Studio School last night to talk about her work, which is full of contradictions. It's full of wildness, but also tight control. Sometimes her work, which these days is made of different shades of wood veneer, seems stilted. Sometimes it seems crazy and out of control. Her medium itself demands purposefulness and planning, but her imagery is wild and seems very personal. When she was talking about her early work, she called them her "anti-history paintings." Of course, to have such a thing means you feel burdened by history. The object of disaffection becomes a kind of controlling factor. Call it a theme....

Julian Hatton: From landscape to abstraction

Painter Julian Hatton spoke last night at the NY Studio School about his work, some of which I review here. Hatton spoke about his experience of nature, frequently invoking his childhood in Michigan, where he said there's about two months of good weather each year. He contrasted the cold, flat landscape there, across the lake from Fond du Lac, with his experiences on the east coast, in Maine, and also in Brittany, France. He recalled painting in the late winter and early spring in France and seeing how cold the colors in that landscape are. Then, one day in early June, he experienced the entire landscape awakening with color. He connected Bonnard's experience in the north of France with the cold color palette that becomes very warm and intimate. Hatton said he'd never experienced anything like it, and clearly there was an affinity for that liveliness in a cold landscape....

What's a signature mean?

I ask because I don't know. It could mean nothing. It could add to the meaning of a work. In Jasper Johns' case, it certainly means at least one thing: big $$. But I want it to mean more. I started thinking about Johns' signature because I went to his show of drawings from 1997-2007 at Matthew Marks Gallery (NYC, through April 12). I noticed in the end of his show that he marked some of his drawings with very precise signatures. It's not just his signature on this handful of pieces. It's "J.Johns / March '06 / St. Martin, F.W.I." I recently wrote about Johns' "Gray" show at the Met. The show has been trashed online, but I thought it was a tidy retrospective of someone who is still a major force. To sum up: I love his early work, and his later work (after the cross-hatching hayday) leaves me cold and confused. I've been thinking about it since I first wrote about Johns, but now I've got a few thoughts I'll try to add. It's easy to focus on the ways Johns broke from the previous generation. Johns' debt to the abstract expressionists used to escape me....

The rough sheen of Faris McReynolds

Faris McReynolds makes paintings like good baseball pitcher throws spitballs. It's nasty stuff, roughed up and delivered with a predictable inpredictability. There's an amazing moment where you lean in and ask "How did he do that?" And as soon as the question is asked, he's got you. Check out the photos above, of a painting in his current show at Goff + Rosenthal (NYC, until April 26). One is a detail from the other. It's a big painting of a bunch of cowboys looking at strippers on a stage. The close-up makes one the of the dancers look like Christ, as drawn by a 5-year-old with a pocket knife. It's angular and direct. Colors are bold and contrasting. Like so many good paintings, you lean in and it looks abstract; you step back and it coheres as an image. McReynolds observes with a touch of rock 'n' roll and a lot of sass. Check out his blog here, and his music here....

Taking the train with Robert Morris

Artist Robert Morris spoke last night at the New School as part of the Sculpture Center's "Subjective Histories of Scultpure" series. I have a soft spot for Morris' sculptures. In 1991, I saw a small collection of his work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It was like a miniature retrospective of his work. I was just in high school, and growing up in a Richmond suburb, I hadn't been exposed to minimalism or any of the more radical artistic developments from the last 50 years. Entering the gallery, I saw one of Morris' felt sculptures. I looked at the tag on the wall. It said the artist's name was "Robert Morris." It was a big, thick piece of felt, slashed horizontally and attached to the walls at the corners, so the middle formed a slow arc. Interesting. I didn't know if I liked it or not. Was it really art? Did it mean anything?...

Katy Moran, downright Constable-esque

In the same way we can be moved by the rustic paintings of Lascaux, seeing something innately human in their creation and stroke, we can look at Katy Moran's paintings and be moved at something that will last as long as our DNA does. They are like cave paintings of the future, descended from those damp, rough walls via Delacroix and Joan Mitchell. There's just something about Katy Moran's paintings that is very, very old. Or really, I mean "old masterful." Old master-y. Whatever the kids call it. (Spray Glue calls them "Victorian.") Moran, a 33-year-old from Great Britain, has her first show at the Andrea Rosen Gallery currently on view in New York until April 19. Strolling around the gallery, Moran's small oils seemed very reminiscent of Constable's cloud studies. It might be in color selection, especially those seductive greenish-blues and earthen browns, or in her delicately descriptive stroke, or maybe she uses old-fashioned mediums. Even though there's an aged patina about them, they seem very current. The press release for the show says Moran uses images she finds from the internet or magazines and works until they become abstracted. They are post-abstraction, but clearly refer to something....

Julian Hatton's folded landscapes

Julian Hatton isn't exactly a cubist, but his approach to landscape is that of an artist trying to compress multiple perspectives into one flat canvas. His colorful landscapes, currently on view at Elizabeth Harris Gallery (in NYC, until April 12, so act fast), are suggestive, evocative, and ultimately satisfying in themselves. His work can be a bait-and-switch where, in the end, you're happy to be fooled. The color is extrapolated, which is to say it's not realistic but nor is it unrealistic, exactly. He'll use perspective lines that evoke a fence by a country road, or a round-ish shape that evokes a pond, but stack them so it's impossible that these things were observed with his feet planted in one place. You're left going through a space that doesn't make sense, like one of those screwed-up perspective rooms in a science museum. Bathe it in a Mediterranean, Matisse-esque color scheme (by way of Michigan, where Hatton was born) and you have challenging painting that feels like silk....

Thomas Nozkowski at Fisher Landau

Painter Thomas Nozkowski spoke to a crowd gathered at the Fisher Landau Center in Long Island City, Queens. The occasion was a small survey of his paintings there (until April 14). Pace Wildenstein also has a show up, of Nozkowski's most recent work (until May 3). The show at Fisher Landau spans all of Nozkowski's mature period since the early 1970's, and includes 20 of his small-ish canvases. Mr. Nozkowski, who arrived in his Suburu just as I got to Fisher Landau, is a pleasant and modest man with big ideas and an unassuming manner. He talked about going to art school at Cooper Union in the early 60's, when the main concern was systemic painting -- creating canvases based on a set of rules. Like, what can I come up with if I confine myself to vertical dotted lines or just these colors, etc.? Nozkowski recalled going to a gallery in Soho as a young painter and seeing a show with just one 40-foot long abstract canvas. He realized that something was off in the context of abstraction. "Our rhetoric was totally someplace else." He said he thought these huge works were paintings designed for people downtown painters...

Art bloggers around a table

If bloggers have a roundtable and no one blogs about it, is it still a media event? I'm not sure, but I'll do my duty and blog about it any way. Hung over and in not a great mood to look at art, I was pleased to listen to the Red Dot Art Fair's blogger's roundtable at the Park Hotel. It featured Carol Diehl (ArtVent, Edward Winkleman, C-Monster, Paddy Johnson (Art Fag City), Sharon Butler (Two Coats of Paint) and Joanne Mattera was moderator. My favorite part was bloggers recounting their favorite big-traffic headlines. Who can top "How to preserve a chocolate Santa butt plug"? I didn't get a chance to ask a question, but I would've asked: is there something innate in the medium that makes a successful blog unable to have thought-out critical writing? After all, it takes time to look and to think and to write this kind of material. Can meaningful ciriticsm be Twittered?...

Christie's contemporary

I took some time today to stop by the Christie's in Rockefeller Plaza for the First Open Post-War and Contemporary Art preview. The auction happens April 1. There were a lot of shocking sticker prices that made me wonder how long the art market can maintain this. The place was packed, however, and there was a lot of good work there. This is one of those cases where I didn't photograph all my favorite work -- just what struck my fancy for one reason or another. See photos below, with Christie's estimated prices attached -- and my totally unqualified commentary on those prices. Ida Applebroog, Untitled (Knife), 1995. Estimate: $5,000-7,000. DG estimate: Completely worth it. Applebroog seems underappreciated. Andy Warhol, Untitled (Furniture), circa 1960. Estimate: $20,000-30,000. DG estimate: Worth it... if you must buy a Warhol. Seeing this charming tempera work reminds me of how much I like Warhol's illustrations. They're much better than the horrific star-fucking icon paintings. As a painter friend of mine is fond of saying, Warhol was a genius because he painted icons. Who doesn't want Marilyn in their living room? If I were a museum (and I understand that I'm a relic, at least) I...

Reading John Ruskin

Reading John Ruskin is like sitting in a living room with that good old grandmother of yours who lived through the Great Depression and World War II and everything after. Not the annoying one who talks about being part of "the Greatest Generation" (though that seems to be more of an anxiety-born boomer label for them). I'm talking about the one known for her patience, thoughtfulness, inner strength and forgiveness. Perhaps she's named Mildred or Barbara and she's tougher than you and twice as kind. Reading John Ruskin's thoughts on art reminded me of her. "Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life," says John Ruskin, in his long essay "The Nature of Gothic," originally published in 1853. He continues: It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom, --a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom, -- is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and...

Jasper Johns: Gray at the Met

There is an orgy of art happening at the Met these days and I encourage everyone to check out the Poussin show (which converted me to playing in the fields with nymphs), the Courbet show (wowsers) and last but not least, Jasper Johns. There were several surprises for me in the Johns "Gray" show: first, the show is big. I was thinking a small gallery of a handful of paintings. No. It's pretty much a Johns retrospective in black and white, as if you've bought a cheap used copy of a '60s book on Johns -- only they're the real fucking paintings. The second surprise for me was that I like Johns again. I used to count him as a living giant, but after the exhaustion of his MoMA retrospective in 1997 and a few sightings of his current work, I'd forgotten how great his early work is. During this "Gray" show, I even came to like pieces that I never cared for, and it may be because I'm reading a book on David Hockney right now and I realize the two share a lot. Hockney came to art school in the '50s at the height of abstraction's dominance...

'Unmonumental' at the New Museum

After hearing so many negative things about the inaugural show at the new New Museum, I really draged my feet before heading down to check it out. Since the waves of negativity primed me for a bad show, I was in the best possible place to go see it: Things could only look up from what I was expecting. Right? Right. It's not as bad as you've heard, but let's face it: it's still not good. The show features lots of work using disposable materials, magazines and cardboard boxes and couches found on the curb. This doesn't make it a bad show. What makes it a bad show is the lack of originality or ambition. Since it was my first trip to the new space, I kept thinking about the shows I saw at the old New Museum. One of my favorites was Tom Friedman, whose work was done with fingernail clippings, bubble gum, and construction paper. I loved his show because he seemed to think long and hard about his mediums and what strctural power they had embedded inside their physicality. When he made a bird skeleton out of fingernail clippings, it made sense. The shapes and endurance of...

The new New Museum

I finally made it out to the new New Museum on Bowery. I have fond memories of the old building in Soho, although I would always leave that space remembering the awkwardness and particularities of a museum shoe-horning itself into a very old building not designed for museum display. The first thing I noticed approaching the new building on Bowery is that it looks like a prison, except designed for Dr. Caligari. I understand the steel fence is supposed to operate like a scrim, filtering out light to a shimmering effect. Instead, it just looks like constrictive chain link. WIthout many windows, the steel looks like it's designed to keep people in. The charming, weird character of the old space -- the space I was sometimes frustrated with, but always remembered -- is gone. No more mini-mezzanine or exposed brick or little spaces for curators to figure out. That's been replaced with a lot of new space for exhibits. There are three floors for New Museum shows. The space is generic. Large white box warehouse space that could be in Chelsea or Cleveland or anywhere. It's monumental space with high ceilings that can actually house monumental sculpture and painting...

Whitney Biennial, off the top of my notes

I went to the Whitney Biennial today. I plan on writing a longer review, but I thought I would draw up a list of words and phrases out of my notebook to maybe give the tenor of what's up. Like most Biennials, it was a mixed bag of work. Very few stand-outs for me, but the mood was very strong -- like a lo-fi Indie rock album. If it's supposed to be a portrait of the artworld moment, then the curators did a good job. Here's my list : found objects involuntary medium slap-dash rickety DIY boring games shifting perspective transferrence one thing becomes another antiquated realism nostalgia consumer expression mixed media, mixed message optimism rebuilding creating a 3-D experience unfinished space seduce, reuse, recycle disappeared past fragility juxtaposition permeable escaping the museum jerry saltz is excited publicly private multiplying perspectives personal response to mass media at an intersection life-sized collage faux decadence nature is gone if artists are questioning art, curators aren't...

Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner

It's test time. Which of the following words best describes the above painting? 1) Soft 2) Luminous 3) Monochrome 4) Gruesome...

Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cuningham

For anyone who believes painting's connection to an artist's observation of nature, Rackstraw Downes is a hero. Downes can spend months on a canvas, going out to a site every day for a half hour or so -- so the light remains the same each day -- observing a scene and making sketches from nature. And when I say nature, I don't mean the glorious American escape of the Hudson River painters, or even Downes' classmate Neil Welliver. I mean the complicated and well-trodden landscape of populated America. Much of Downes work, in fact, is of busy urban street corners. The first thing you notice about Downes is how realistic is paintings look. And then the second thing you notice is how unrealistic they are. The straight lines can curve, the colors can get flat. I wondered at first whether he was using some kind of wide-angle lens. But upon third and fourth looks, his canvases become complicated and personal. His dedication to repeated, specific observation has not taken out his choices. Downes is only cold in reproduction. In person, his canvases are alive. From the rough texture of his canvas to the controlled elegance of his brush strokes...

Juan Usle's organic geometry

I apologize for the photos above--it's impossible to convey the charms of Juan Usle's warm, charming paintings. He paints in thin, translucent layers, grids mostly, to which the press release for the show credits his living in New York City part time. I'm not sure about that, but the discrete blocks in much of this work makes me think of the many discrete days Usle had to sit down to get his canvases to glow like they do. At Cheim & Reid until March 15....

Chris Martin

Chris Martin is at the end of his rope. The top of the ladder. There's nowhere to go. So why not play? If Pollock was melted Picasso, Chris Martin can be melted de Kooning with shellacked Wonder Bread (really!) sorted by a hairbrush. Most of his work in the current show is abstract and contains added collage elements to make the paintings three dimensional. I was reminded of Joan Mitchell's roll-up-your sleeves ethic to get every last drop out of a surface. Her canvases always look like she's worked hard to make her surfaces shimmer. But those were the days of abstract-expressionism religiousness. These days, when abstract paintings are just abstract paintings, Martin's look like he's worked hard to create something novel, with loud clashing colors, bulbous islands of cushion affixed, lines of gesture dragged through a dump of paint. His real spiritual forbearer is Stuart Davis' jazz-inspired abstractions of commercial art and American signage. Chris Martin has said that he's "turning up the volume" of painting. It's hard not to listen. At Mitchell-Innes & Nash until March 1....

Weschler's Robert Irwin

It says a lot about artist Robert Irwin that my favorite work of his has never actually been created. Irwin is a conceptual artist, horse race afficionado and dreamer whose artistic career is sketched in Lawrence Weschler's superb book "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees." This book gives Irwin's conceptual art a humanity that experiencing it in person does not. Weschler's book traces how Irwin went from being a precocious teenager winning national figurative drawing contests to joining the second generation of abstract painters in Los Angeles, to becoming a mature artist stretching a rope in the desert for no one to see. Until the 1980s, he refused to allow his work to be photographed or reproduced because he believed the context for art as important as the piece. In the late '70s, Irwin pushed the Marcel Duchamp art-as-context idea into boredom, like when he transformed an empty room at MoMA by replacing the lights and running a string along the room. The point was to get people to notice the environment in which art is situated. Most artists working today know where this line of thinking ends, and lucky for us Irwin did it so...

Georg Baselitz remixes German history

Georg Baselitz, at Gagosian Gallery, NYC. Through Dec. 22. The German painter Georg Baselitz rose to fame in the '70s and '80s for his fearless and direct confrontation with his nation's disgraceful 20th Century. At a time when his teachers and the German art world embraced American pop art, Baselitz went art brut. He was kicked out of his East German art school and came west to make big, sloppy canvases that snaked with wide swaths of bright color, black outlines, sloppy drips. He painted an infamous canvas of the child Adolf Hitler with an erection the size of a salami. It was all very scandalous to a nation trying to forget the past. For years, Baselitz painted all of his canvases upside down. It's hard to say why. There's the formalist's explanation: that modern paintings are always about the surface of the canvas, and nothing could reinforce that like a decade or two spent seeing form first, subject second. The painting painted upside down (and not just hung upside down) is seen as abstract form instead of as a picture of known objects. I've never been satisfied with the formalist explanation, since I think most successful drawing and...

Sophie von Hellermann: Sleepwaking

I almost walked through Sophie von Hellerman's show at Greene Naftali without thinking, which is to say without really looking. My eye went to a canvas that features a group of figures gathered around a table with a huge drawing or map unfolded on top. I couldn't figure it out visually, what it was. Then I marvelled at how little von Hellerman used to suggest a figure -- a dash of line here and a blotch of color there -- and became enchanted. Her work looks soft and sloppy, but don't be deceived. It's strategic and suggestive. She is often described as dreamy or Romantic, and it's easy to agree. Her imagery is magical and her method is to work around the concrete facts. Instead of drawing the meat of a subject, she'll dash a minimal outline or wash a color field that's very non-specific. She applies pigment directly to unprimed canvas -- like Morris Louis -- so the colors have a subtle glow. Take the photo above: two faces looking at a group of bees. One face washes out, as if a shadow. The bees could be a threat or a discovery. It's Sophie von Hellerman's art to...

Will Ryman is dreaming

Will Ryman, "Tuesday Afternoon" at Marlborough Gallery, NYC. Through Dec. 8. Will Ryman's work can look like hell, which is absolutely perfect for the monster hangover he's laid out in Marlborough's new Chelsea space. Ryman spent ten years as a writer and dramatist and first created sculpture for one of his plays in 2001. Narrative and character tension is still there in these playful sculptures that wear their handmade qualities pretty raw. "Tuesday Afternoon" is made of two large sculture groups. One is a teeming city street with all sorts of characters and a beautiful lamp post. The other is a larger than life portrait of a man in bed, surrounded by a pack of cigarettes, Doritos, and beer. These two sculptures are designed to be read as happening at the same time -- a Tuesday afternoon. The bed is amazing. There's a larger-than-life slapdash quality to the intimate way Ryman has formed each cigarette and Dorito with wire mesh and paper mache that's reminiscent of Claes Oldenberg. It takes disposable culture seriously not for irony's sake, but because junkfood and beercans are the props in our lives. Is the man on the bed asleep with a cigarette? Closing...

Robert Longo: Children of Nyx

These are not photographs. Robert Longo's charcoal drawings are incredibly life-like -- and huge (note the scale in the second photo, where you can see the first photo reflected, along with other gallery-goers). His latest show, called "Children of Nyx," is a small group of drawings of children and infants. The children all seem to be asleep, eyes closed and lips slightly parted. Seeing these kids is like seeing a movie theater from the outside. You can only guess at the dreams inside. Nyx was the Greek goddess of the night and creation, mother of Sleep and Death. Longo's drawings capture these associations perfectly. The children are slightly unsettling. Their faces are luminous but surrounded by a coal black, as if they're being seen by flashlight. The black void, combined with the six-foot scale of these drawings, makes them suggestive and towering and slightly ominous. What seems peaceful at first can become precious, precarious, in danger. Is this what it feels like to have children? Robert Longo at Metro Pictures, NYC, through Dec. 8....

Artist Julie Armbruster talks sharks and gesso

There's nothing like eating a southern breakfast under a team of manatee angels. I was eating biscuits and gravy at the Early Girl Eatery in Asheville, NC, when I became enchanted by these small, colorful paintings on the walls. There was a swarm of blubbery angels and a potato boy. They were cartoony but very textured. The paintings have a beautiful, milky encaustic surface that makes the wild imagery even more mysterious and dreamlike. I decided to e-mail artist Julie Armbruster about her work. [Pictured left: Her Evil Nature Could No Longer Remain Hidden. 4 x 5 inches. Click on photo for larger image.] Gusto: How did you become an artist? Julie Armbruster: I have always loved the idea of becoming an artist, but I originally studied to be a teacher. After I tried teaching at a private school/cult in Connecticut I decided I needed to be a better artist if I wanted to be able to teach. So, I enrolled in the most fantastic MA program at NYU to study painting in Venice, Italy. It never occurred to me that being an artist was a viable option, but I spent months enjoying the idea of it. I had a fantastic studio in Venice off of the Zattere and spent every waking hour working out my ideas. The more [time] I spent painting and drawing the more I became addicted to the idea of making a go at exploring my personal vision more seriously. I spent the next two years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn trying to keep my head above water and make enough money to earn free time. It was a losing battle and I decided to move to a place where I could work less for money and more for myself. I moved to Asheville, NC in 2005 and have been working on my paintings ever since. I spend about 30 hours a week in the studio and feel that I have just scratched the surface of where I want to be as an artist. There is a unique balance here of creative people, affordable living, and natural beauty in Asheville and I feel that the energy and creative support I’ve found here keeps me going. More specifically, it was my first show at Early Girl Eatery that helped me to believe that this was a real option. When I proposed the show to the owners I had no new work. I wanted to make it site specific. I wanted to incorporate the quirkiness of Asheville with the diner colors of the restaurant with my own personal vision. Three months later, I made over 40 paintings for the opening and worked out my current process. Within a year I sold over 100 paintings and have set up two studios and maintain a 30-hour studio work week. I currently have a new show up at Early Girl. It is becoming more real to me with every show; I grow more and my paintings are becoming increasingly involved, detailed, and personal.

Lisa Yuskavage: 'People take me too seriously'

Lisa Yuskavage gave a talk yesterday at the New School for the Public Art Fund. She showed slides of her work since college and how her work evolved from somehwat precious, quiet paintings about light to big, outrageous canvases of caricatured naked women. She talked about the breakthrough moment when she had her first New York show in 1990 and actually hated the work she put up. "I remember thinking 'oh my god my work sucks'," she said. She took a year off from painting but came back with the kinds of canvases she's so well known for now. She talked about how her breakthrough involved thinking of herself as the master of the figures she created, and how she took great pleasure in being cruel to them. She likened her new painting style to Dennis Hopper's gas-snorting sadist in the movie "Blue Velvet." Here are some of the choice quotes from her talk. "It was as if I switched places, now I was the top and painting was the bottom" On not understanding when people talk about her "technique": "Every way I start a painting is different and every way I end a painting is different." "I couldn't stand...

David Salle's "Bearding the Lion in His Den"

In his evocatively meaningless art installation from 1977, David Salle manages to mathematically determine just how many elements an art work should have to seem important. The answer is four. A recreation of "Bearding the Lion in His Den" currently fills the back room at Deitch Projects (until March 24). Although it was made before Salle painted the towering collage work that made his name, "Bearding" is a 3-D form of the basic David Salle idea. That idea is to come as close as possible to making a work that means something without crossing the line. In the middle of the dark room is a wooden plank with ten lightbulbs. A large black and white photo is on either side of the room, each illuminated by a dim grey lightbulb that's suspended from the ceiling. On the left, the photo is of a speeding Formula One racing car. On the right is a photo of a group of black children holding hands in a circle. A song is playing (Tim Buckley's "Song for the Siren"). While the song plays, the light bulbs are dark. When it ends, the gallery becomes quiet and the ten lightbulbs on the floor flash and...

Overheard at hip Williamsburg art gallery

The art was ok. The conversation was lacking. DUDE: Dudes, don't ever get married. HIPSTER: Not. In. The. Plan. DUDE: Good, because my wife manages to find my money no matter how well I hide it. HIPSTER #2: Cha! That's their specialty....

Give 'em the razzle dazzle

Camouflage fashion has become so passe. It was great when Public Enemy did it. But Gwen Stefani? Let her eat MREs!. The opposite is much better: when fashion designers take over the military. (Thanks, Angelo)...

Saul Bass wears the crown

Movies used to have boring credits. Saul Bass changed that. In his intros to Vertigo and The Man With the Golden Arm, he married graphic design and motion pictures into a new art form. Check it out....

Art day: Van Gogh with a side of Bacon

Check out the great site built for the Met's van Gogh drawing show. And six degrees of (ear) separation... there's audio of Kevin Bacon reading van Gogh's letters!...

Seth! Seth! Seth!

I've raved before about him. Now it's time again for me to plug Seth, a comic book artist whose new book "Wimbledon Green" has just hit stores. He's got an elegant line and a wistful style. He's graced the cover of your favorite Aimee Mann record. Now read the Onion interview with Seth (and check out the great photo)....

Seth, the "Self-Pitying Melancholic" We Love

Your DG editors are big fans of Seth, born Gregory Gallant*, the Canadian indie comics artist (or "graphic novelist," in the parlance of our times). In fact, we like him so much that we bought an original drawing a few years ago at a signing at Million Year Picnic in Cambridge, Mass. Interviews with Seth are fairly rare, so we were thrilled to see this one in Bookslut, in which he discusses, among other things, his notorious nostalgia: The modern world is very ugly… and the pop culture is so mind-numbingly dumb that you have to make a conscious effort to shut it out. That’s why I’m considered a “nostalgia guy.” I just like things from the past better. I don’t want to live in 1932, but I sure wish some of the elements of that time had survived into this time. Though obviously, their fascination with “progress” is the worm in the apple that created this shitty culture we inhabit. It’s a complicated question. And believe me, no one is more confused about his feelings about the past and the present than I am. I find, as each year passes, my understanding, and feelings about the 20th century are...

Danny Gregory's Portraits of Homeless Men at TMN

Because we like to keep you updated on artist and storyteller Danny Gregory... The Morning News has posted his three portraits of homeless men. Is it me, or is Mr. Gregory just getting better and better? p.s. We just got Everyday Matters, and it's definitely worth every cent....

I Know, I Miss His Posts, Too

Since Harry has been too busy at work to blog, I thought I'd post some links to some excellent fairly-recent art articles. I'm no art scholar, so you'll get just the facts from me. The New Yorker on Agnes Martin. The Guardian Online (I get all my links from the Guardian these days, it seems) on my sister's favorite, Alice Neel and Edward Hopper, as well as a Robert Hughes piece on "defend[ing] art against the degrading power of the wealthy collectors" (bring on the "art fascist" epithets!)...

Hutcheson's Hosanna

Gusto alumni R. Hutcheson has cooked up a delicious art project to see how many people he can get to view one of his paintings. His sideshow circus style will bring a smile to your face. Take a look....

Our Favorites are the "Fudge Packer" (Not What You're Thinking!) and the "Gymnast's Guillotine"

How did we miss this? Gusto seldom misses an opportunity to plug Danny Gregory, particularly his lovely collaborations with The Morning News. Anyone who has ever flown in an airplane (or, incidentally, watched the "Props" game on Whose Line is It Anyway -- Anglophiles' version, please) will appreciate The Sky Mall Pop Quiz....

I'm feeling Wet, Wet, Wet

The fine folks over at Sharpeworld have scanned in two full issues of seminal 70's punk rock/new wave rag Wet for your viewing pleasure. Don't you owe them a big kissy thank-you? Wet had outlandish DIY collage, loud graphics, and innovative typography. It was L.A. at its finest. Visit an archive of Wet covers here, and read a brief intro to the magazine here....

Creative Taxidermy

People always object to boxing as a barbaric sport that insults human decency. But would those same people object if squirrels were outfitted with gloves and went 12 rounds? I think not. Pictured at left are real animals in a real boxing match. Of course, these animals have been dead for over a century and have been posed by 19th century taxidermist Edward Hart (b. 1847 - d.1928). It's just one of the many wondrous discoveries over at A Case of Curiosities. (via brokentype)...

My pet peeves about artists all involve whiskey

"This my pet peeve about artists," the former buffalo rancher said. "They assume buffalo have horns like cattle. But they're built differently, damn it."...

May is not Rasterbation month

As hard as it is for me to believe, the internet does occasionally wander into being useful. Witness the Rasterbator. It takes a small photo and blows it up to billboard size, dividing it into handy printable portions. Now we can all be Gilbert and George!...

The "Provocatively Unfashionable" Mr. Freud

Ok, I'm a freak for Lucien Freud. First I post about the London showing of Freud's latest work, and then I get into a long philosophical argument in praise of Freud in comments at TMFTML. Now I'm going to repeat: Freud is here. In New York. In America. Come one, come all! In an ideal world, retirees would hop into their RVs and camp outside the Acquavella Galleries on 79th Street and make their autumn years full of Freud's feisty paintings. NY Times critic Michael Kimmelman reviewed the show yesterday....

Meanwhile, at the pool...

Artist Danny Gregory is back from his vacation in the Dominican Republic and has the sketchbook to prove it. I first discovered Gregory's watercolor sketches on The Morning News, where he spent a day at the Martha Stewart trial and came back with great unexpected drawings. He's also collaborated online with TMN editor Rosencrans Baldwin to draw characters from Baldwin's Brooklyn neighborhood. In his latest book, Everyday Matters, Gregory documents his daily life by drawing the things around him and writing a observations on his life and community....

Galleries 57

There were a few good art shows on 57th Street yesterday; fortunately I got there on the last day of one the of the better ones. Kraushaar Gallery showed Leon Goldin's "Five Decades of Works on Paper" (which ended on April 10; work shown left). Goldin's abstract charcoal drawings seem drawn from life, but yet are completely abstract lines and shapes. The one exception is probably the most beautiful and haunting of the works on display. You can immediately understand the trees, horizon line, and pathways in his "Riverside Park" from 1964. Goldin will scratch and rub charcoal into the paper and then erase it so a ghostish gray emerges from the heavily-textured paper. The battle between the neutral grays and blacks of the charcoal and the warmth of the paper keep the drawings vibrant. In "Riverside Park" Goldin the allows the creamy paper to be as strong and surprising as his stout chalky line and foggy erased grays. Goldin's work is about proportion and balance, how to harmonize line, mass and color within a rectangular surface, and how to organize a seemingly random marks with a muscular poise. In the same building at Tibor de Nagy, Jane Freilicher is...

Britain's Greatest Living Artist

Robert Hughes reviews painter Lucian Freud's show currently on view in London, and appearing in New York at Acquavella from April 28 - May 27. The Guardian has a bunch of good stuff for the Freud obsessive -- a short profile, a piece on his horse's ass, and a sneak peak at his portrait of artist David Hockney. One of Freud's models describes what it's like to sit for Freud. Check out the catalog for Freud's first show at that gallery here. (via TMFTML)...

Looking at Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton is a conceptual artist masquerading as a painter. She is most famous for painting images of Kurt Cobain and Leonardo DiCaprio and other pop icons. Peter Schejdahl, reviewing the current show at the Whitney for the New Yorker, describes Peyton as "the moral center of the Biennial." Peyton's work is charming and very likeable. Its small scale (her paintings are usually less than 20 inches tall or wide) and recognizable subject matter make the work inviting. She has certain skills as a colorist and decorative designer in the tradition of Matisse and David Hockney, with whom she shares a room at the Whitney. But in a more sane art world, Peyton would not be in the Biennial yet. There are no surprises in her work. There's no sense of her confronting a formal problem and finding an innovative solution. In one of Hockney's paintings at the Biennial, he renders a living room couch with huge stripes of orange and white that curve over at the top. It's simple, gutsy, and unexpectedly pleasurable to look at. And it sticks with you long after you've seen the painting. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Peyton has a bored, scratchy drawing of a photograph of...

Whitney Biennial: Crappier Than You Think

Just because the NY Times describes this year's Whitney Biennial as "easily the best in some time," don't expect big changes in the kinds of work that are shown. The Biennial is always about the art world, and the art world has been astray for a long, long time. But since there's so much wrong about the show, I'd like to point out what's right. I'll be returning to look at many of these artists again, and probably revise my opinions. But here are my highlights. Amy Cutler uses surrealistic imagery (like women's torsos on bicycle wheels) and trees in a sparse, patterned way that keeps her canvases full of intensity but still very quiet. Barnaby Furnas is the Quentin Tarantino of the show, using the subject of violence as a tool for dazzling formal experimentation. Some painters quietly go to abstraction when they want to squeeze, squirt, and spray on their canvases. Furnas paints bodies disintigrating, bullets whizzing, and heads exploding on the Civil War battlefield. My favorite work in the show may have been Amy Sillman, whose palette pits warm and cool temperatures against each other, oranges and reds against purples and blues. She refers to landscapes in...

Dionysus at the Met

If you're coming to New York for dirty pictures, don't bother going to Ninth Avenue. Right now the lewdest show here is at the Met. "Playing with Fire: European Terracotta Models, 1740–1840" features small clay sculpture. Among these are neo-classical pieces modeled on Greek and Roman myths, and a common theme was the grappling/embracing of the man-beast Centaur and a fiesty lass. One sculpture features the Centaur spreading the woman's ass while the two struggle, and his fingers going into regions Hugh Hefner would find a tad shocking. Perhaps Camille Paglia's right about the high porn of classical antiquity. If you go, be sure to catch "Poets, Lovers, and Heroes" for more old-school nasty....