At the Galleries
Crowded exhibition openings followed by celebratory dinners, well-attended art fairs, and the like, this past season, suggested that the New York art world had regained much of the energy lost after the Covid lockdown. But this optimistic note was marred by news of the imminent closing of two highly regarded institutions—both dedicated to significant artists and oblivious to trend, both highly personal antidotes to the dominance of multi-location mega-galleries—Betty Cuningham Gallery after twenty years in its present incarnation and Elizabeth Harris Gallery after thirty-two years. The surprising announcement that the ultra-establishment, apparently iron-clad Marlborough Gallery was ceasing operations internationally after nearly eighty years soon followed, abandoning, it seems, such well-known figures as Alice Aycock, Deborah Butterfield, Red Grooms, and Dennis Oppenheim, and the estates of Jacques Lipchitz and Beverly Pepper—although it’s likely that they will resurface elsewhere, given Marlborough’s worldwide connections.
“The Last Picture Show,” Betty Cuningham’s closing exhibition, showcased artists represented over the years, including William Bailey, Jake Berthot, Rackstraw Downes, Andrew Forge, Judy Glantzman, John Lees, Graham Nickson, Joan Snyder, Mia Westerlund Roosen, and Alison Wilding, among other distinguished painters and sculptors. What united their works, some dedicated to perception, others to imagination, some celebrating the physicality of materials, others meticulous handling, was excellence, intensity, and often unexpectedness. Ms. Cuningham’s discerning eye has been a valued force in the New York gallery world since she opened her first exhibition space in 1972. The varied, engaging works in “The Last Picture Show” brought home how important shows at the gallery have been. Let’s hope Ms. Cuningham’s artists all find worthy new homes very quickly.
Elizabeth Harris Gallery’s diverse offerings have ranged from Thornton Willis’ geometric abstractions to Elisa D’Arrigo’s personable, quirky ceramic sculptures, from Julian Hatton’s lively distillations of landscape into ambiguous shapes to John Monti’s translations of the natural world into aggressively contemporary materials—a group of artists, who, like those shown at Betty Cuningham, we hope we will continue to see. The closing exhibition included “Second Sight,” a group of Ron Milewicz’s small, uncanny landscape paintings. At once apparently specific—we feel we are presented with real places—and otherworldly—everything is bathed in magical light—they also emphasize the act of putting paint, very delicately, on a surface. Milewicz says that his images begin with drawings of places he knows well, near his Upstate home, which become points of departure for what happens in the studio. One delicious, moody painting conjured up the diffuse light of a winter evening with a blurred off-white expanse that suggested distant woods and more distinct bare trees close to us, like actors on a stage. Others translated a conical cedar in an open glade into sharp geometry and golden light. Milewicz presents us with an idealized vision of familiar surroundings, perfected by transubstantiation into diaphanous paint.
Uptown, at Yares Art, the celebratory pairing of recent paintings by Larry Poons, “One for Baby,” and recent sculptures by Frank Stella, “Mirrored Boxes & Atlantic Salmon Rivers,” became an elegiac tribute after Stella’s death a week short of his 88th birthday, in May. The two rebellious, inventive abstract painters, Stella born in 1936, Poons about one and a half years later, in 1937, were longtime friends and the youngest artists in the legendary “New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970,” organized by the equally legendary Henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Museum. Stella’s early Black paintings, with their implacable, confrontational bands separated by narrow slots of bare canvas, tested the very nature of painting, just as Poons’s early Dot paintings, gorgeously colored and animated by pulsing lozenges, tested the nature of perception. As the works at Yares attest, each moved in very different directions, as Poons became increasingly engaged by the physicality of paint on canvas, explored in many different ways, while Stella queried the nature of space, fictive and real, illusory and constructed, in Western art, embracing new technologies with enthusiasm. Color in Poons’s recent paintings at Yares is as unstable and unpredictable as it always has been, with fabrics of strokes threatening to unravel and relationships to shift, if we look away, but several are more fluid and loose-limbed than in the past, with paint often applied in broader, more liquid sweeps. Color seems to flow across the brushy canvases, defying our awareness of Poons’s busy hand, knitting together a vast range of marks and orchestrating unprecedented gatherings of hues. Like Stella’s Black paintings, Poons’s recent works make us think about the essential nature of painting, but where Stella’s works were all about will and insistence, Poons’s are about the flowingness and responsiveness of pigment itself and about how orchestrations of surprising colors can stir our emotions.
Stella’s Mirrored Boxes are probably his most sculptural sculptures to date, more concerned with articulation in three dimensions than earlier works, which usually read as exploded paintings, meant to be experienced, like paintings, from a single viewpoint. The small, polychrome Atlantic Salmon Rivers sculptures, their layered, nested planes of color suspended and stacked on rather elaborate scaffolding, demanded to be read as paintings, despite being airborne. But the stainless steel Mirrored Boxes kept us moving around them, peering into and through their implied (and sometimes literal) enclosures, engaging us with their repurposed cutout fragments, their declarative four-squareness interrupted by unexpected reflections, tangles of metal, piercings, and occasional projections. Had Stella been looking at David Smith’s “house sculptures,” themselves homages to Alberto Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 a.m. and Egyptian house and shop models, meant for inclusion in tombs to insure a well-furnished afterlife? Whatever triggered these elegant but rough-hewn works, they pointed to a new direction in Stella’s long and varied approach to art making. If only we could see what this irreplaceable innovator was going to do next.
Another elegiac show was the pop-up of works on paper, “John Bjerklie: Do Not Be Afraid” at the Coral Door exhibition space in the West Village. Organized in memory of Bjerklie, who died last spring at 70, and commemorating an impossible to classify phenomenon—serious abstract painter and sculptor, plein air landscapist, portrait painter, draftsman, printmaker, installation and performance artist, ironist, antic wit, and more—the show assembled drawings, watercolors, and lithographs spanning all aspects of Bjerklie’s entire working life. There were gems throughout, from early perceptual landscapes to improvisations on invented geography, “illustrations” of fictive events, evocative views of Maine, Brittany, and Spain done on residencies and travels, sensitive portraits, and geometric compositions relating to sculpture.
Most dramatic were large, intensely colored self-portraits of BigHat, Bjerklie’s unruly alter ego, who harks back to his “boss’s” days as a plein air painter who wore a big straw hat to shade his eyes. For years, BigHat collaborated with artist friends to paint each other’s portraits while seated on opposite sides of a tank-like machine, seeing each other only on a primitive video feed. The isolation in response to Covid-19 provoked BigHat and a host of colleagues, often in far-flung locations, to make portraits via FaceTime. The only rule was that BigHat wore his hat. The rollicking self-portraits at The Coral Door were part of that project, emblematic of Bjerklie’s (and BigHat’s) exuberance, generosity, and virtuosity. Among the most delightful and resonant of the drawings was John Quixote, with a tiny BigHat, mounted on a long-legged steed, about to attack an enormous canvas with a brush as long as a lance. Like Stella, the two Bjerklie personae are irreplaceable.
On a more cheerful note, John Bradford’s “All the World’s a Stage” at Anna Zorina Gallery, in Chelsea, continued his most recent explorations of how unlikely subject matter and downright raucous, insistent paint handling can be combined in improbably playful and arresting images. Bradford loads on pigment, so that pictorial events and recognizable allusions all but disappear into a carpet of thick, textured paint. Yet we still read the generating theme without difficulty. We can identify just about all the instruments that accompany the mass of black-robed choristers in Missa Solemnis (2023) and single out, as well, each of the singer-soloists and the conductor, downstage. Then the physical presence of dense pigment takes over, and we become engrossed by the way blacks and grays thread together, by flickers of bright hues, and by the authority of the textured wedge of the performers against the gray rectangle of the canvas. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons—Summer (2023) similarly threatens to become an abstraction but offers, at the same time, a richly inflected, geometric grid of black-and-white-clad string players against an expanse of pale water, dotted with gondolas, and a narrow, distant view of Venice, under a red canopy. Other works departed from the tradition of seventeenth-century portrait painting. Most enigmatic, in some ways, and certainly among the most rewarding, was Signing the Constitution (2023), a figure-studded swirl of delicate blue, conceived, Bradford says, as a freewheeling homage to the structure of the U.S. federal government. Casually indicated men in eighteenth-century dress occupied the center, within a low-railed circular enclosure. In the foreground, female figures, a pair close together, one mounted on a horse and one with the scales of Justice, were emblematic of the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches. It’s as if the Philadelphia State House and the Paris Cirque Medrano merged. Or not. Bradford always keeps us guessing, offering clues, concealing with loaded paint as much as he suggests, and rewarding us if we pay close attention.
Uptown, at Acquavella Galleries, “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” was a paean to vernacular delights and seductive paint. A selection of works from the 1960s to the 2000s gave us the vision of America Thiebaud taught us to expect of him—ice-cream cones, diner cakes and pies, a club sandwich tidily cut in four, a cheese display—and, to remind us of the breadth of the artist’s concerns, a profile portrait of his dark-haired wife; some distant, omniscient views of people on beaches; a few ramshackle, seaside hot dog stands; and an ecstatic dog leaping in the surf. Everything was bathed in the radiant California light that Thiebaud, who spent just about his entire long life on the West Coast, seemed to capture effortlessly. (Born in 1920, he died at 101 on Christmas Day 2021.) And every image made plain his love of moving juicy paint on a surface. The sweeping gestures surrounding a wonky hot dog stand evoked loose, sun-warmed sand without ever losing their character as expressive arcs of pigment, while the layer of cerulean blue encapsulating a cloudless sky also revealed its existence as brushstrokes overlaying a mysterious lavender brown. Thiebaud draws us in by presenting completely familiar (and often delicious) things and compels lasting attention by orchestrating geometry and color in surprising ways: the blue outline that turns the hot dog sign on that beachside shanty into a reverberating nest of ovals or the sharp-edged, brightly colored planes that simultaneously describe wedges of cheese and function as independent abstraction. In Thiebaud’s work, the highest levels of formal invention and pictorial intelligence coexist with the most ordinary aspects of American culture.
A little farther downtown, at Van Doren Waxter, “Richard Diebenkorn: Figures and Faces” brought together an impressive group of early works by Thiebaud’s close friend and near coeval. (Born in 1922, Diebenkorn died in 1993.) Small, broadly painted heads, distinct individuals brought to life with a few bold, seemingly casual strokes, along with some equally broad wash drawings of studio interiors and nudes, all from the late 1950s and (mostly) early 1960s, reminded us of Diebenkorn’s connection with David Park. The older Park acted as a kind of mentor to younger Bay Area artists of Diebenkorn’s generation, encouraging them to address the figure at a time when abstraction was vaunted as an essential for serious art. Park had famously loaded his car with as many of his fairly generic abstractions as it would hold and taken them to the town dump, concentrating on forthright, generously stroked figure paintings for the rest of his too brief life. (Born in 1911, he died in 1960.) Influenced by Park, Diebenkorn had similarly, if less dramatically, abandoned abstraction to make the kind of direct, uncompromising works seen at Van Doren Waxter. The connection between the younger and older men was made explicit not only by Diebenkorn’s light-struck David Park on a Hot Day (1956), with the bare-chested artist shown at his drawing board, but also by the standing figures in Two Nudes (1960). Stretching just about the full height of the seven-foot canvas, the rosy bodies against a blue ground acknowledged their debt to Park’s economically suggested bathers, at the same time that they announced Diebenkorn’s lifelong admiration for Matisse; the glorious standing and seated nudes in his Bathers with a Turtle (1907–08, Saint Louis Art Museum) haunt Diebenkorn’s painting.
The small urgent heads at Van Doren Waxter, like Thiebaud’s still lifes, were far more complex than a rapid first glance suggested. A few slashing strokes gave us eye sockets and the plane of a nose; an assured gesture described the soft swell of a cheek. Again, as in Thiebaud’s paintings, intense Pacific coastal light animated everything on view. For some of us, Diebenkorn’s pared-down, lushly painted figurative works are the high point of his evolution, more compelling than the geometric Ocean Park paintings for which he is best known. In recent years, Van Doren Waxter has organized many rewarding Diebenkorn shows, examining different aspects of the artist. “Figures and Faces,” with its sensuous paint and elusive imagery, was a special treat.
Another special treat was to be had at Berry Campbell, in Chelsea: “Dorothy Dehner: A Retrospective,” an overview of this infrequently seen artist’s sculpture and drawings. Dehner (1901–1994), a ravishingly beautiful sophisticate, knowledgeable about all aspects of Modernism, from modern dance to Cubism, had a profound influence on her husband David Smith. They met almost immediately upon his arrival in New York in 1926 and married in 1927. “I owe my direction to you,” Smith wrote to her. During their life together, Dehner painted and drew. After the marriage dissolved, in 1952, she began to make sculpture. The Berry Campbell exhibition begins with a still life painting from 1936 and a gouache drawing from 1948. A wall of delicate ink and watercolor drawings documents 1950 to 1952, while a few other related works on paper and one canvas date from the early 1950s, post-divorce. The rest of the installation mainly presents sculpture made between 1962 and 1993.
Dehner constructed her sculpture from a lexicon of geometric planes—triangles, circles, squares, and rectangles—often sliced to create new shapes, their thickness varied. Sometimes she arranged her components on supporting “scaffolding” or fanned them out, while at other times, she stacked them, as in the personable Couple (1988), a “crouching,” zigzagging “figure” topped by an inverted fragment of a circle, like an enormous hat, beside a much taller element—almost five feet high—with a circular “head.” The five-foot-tall, rather four-square Portal (1990) is similarly constructed of paired vertical elements, studded with projections, here flanking a disc. Alerted by the title, we begin to think about passage and penetration, as well as metaphorical architecture. Most surprising? The I Ching series, made in the mid-1970s, a group of vertical constructions and reliefs incorporating spiky wooden elements, plastic, and polychromy. In one, an open square, expediently constructed, frames a sunburst of radiating wooden elements. The most engaging and tallest is a stack of horizontal slabs and spikes of different thicknesses and characters. Among the most compelling works are the small, delicate bronzes made in the late 1960s and early 1970s, all very linear and open, but richly developed in three dimensions. Their intimacy is part of their appeal, but so is their apparent fragility.
Dehner’s larger works, such as the tall, sturdy Prelude and Fugue (1989) or the athletic, tilted Demeter’s Harrow (1990), are robust, muscular, and clearly articulated, aware of the force of gravity. She seems to have reveled in the sheer physicality of planes of a notable thickness and bulk, which makes the opportunity to see Dehner’s drawings from the 1950s in relation to her sculpture particularly valuable. Her works on paper are completely about the possibilities of working in two dimensions. Most sculptors’ drawings read as surrogates for three-dimensional objects, represented as if they were to be produced, in the round, in some “real” material. Dehner’s drawings, often heightened with watercolor, are frail assemblies of fine lines, dots, spatters, and transparent wash that exist only on a responsive surface. Yet a brooding oil painting, Dark Passage (New City) (1953), offers a firmly constructed assembly of planes, apparently supported by a horizontal base. The implications of that image seem to have been realized decades later, in 1990, in Portal, with its twinned but differentiated verticals. Happenstance or design?
Up to now, Berry Campbell has concentrated on exhibiting paintings, sometimes by contemporaries, often by women of Dehner’s generation or a little younger. This is the gallery’s first venture into sculpture. Let’s hope there are many more.