Gallery Listings

ACA Galleries, New York City

“Layered Luminescence: The Art of Egg Tempera,” a show focusing on contemporary practice in the historical medium, featuring Doug Safranek’s miniature urban scenes, Suzanne Scherer and Pavel Ouporov’s Symbolist iconography, Fred Wessel’s early Italian Renaissance-style portraits and works by acknowledged master practitioner Robert Vickrey. March 26–May 2, 2009.

 

Allen Gallery, New York City

“Four Seasons,” Martin Weinstein’s oil-on-acrylic-sheets paintings combine a Romantic’s love of cloudscapes, in the Constable manner, with a surreal manipulation of picture planes. Through March 14, 2009.

 

D.C. Moore Gallery, , New York City

Janet Fish, colorful, loosely brushed still lifes by a painter fascinated by the effects of light, transparency and distortion. Through March 14, 2009.

 

Eleanor Ettinger Gallery, New York City

Glenn Harrington, the painter’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Harrington’s loosely brushed oils have a low-key anecdotal charm, and his interiors mix natural and artificial light to good effect. March 12–April 5, 2009.

 

Fischback Gallery,New York City

Colin Brown, “The Sunless Sea,” striking views of New York City by night. Brown’s technique for his “Blackboards” entails applying a pitch-black layer of nickel, carbon or charcoal to a white undersurface, then picking out urban lights using a jeweler’s tool. March 5–March 28, 2009.

 

Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York City

“Thirteen Miles from Paradise,” four large-scale ( 90-by-75 inches) scenes of an industrial town, Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Composite images of surprising beauty, the four canvases are also meditations on the four seasons. Through March 14, 2009. Travels to the Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (April 10–June 14, 2009).

 

Sears-Peyton Gallery, , New York City

“A Natural Order,” serene landscapes by Clay Wagstaff, who uses the Fabonacci series to capture the “blueprint or spiritual design behind everything”. Beyond the mathematics of composition, the artist layers color in subtle ways and has a keen eye for natural detail. Through March 28, 2008.

 

Forum Gallery, Los Angeles

Bo Bartlett, new paintings by a contemporary realist as interested in oblique storytelling as he is the effects of light. Through April 18, 2009.

 

Hackett-Freeman Gallery, San Francisco

Raimonds Staprans, abstracted landscapes and still lifes with strong geometric compositions and boldly colored negative space. March 12–May 2, 2009.
 
Marc Trujillo. The artificial light-boxes of fast food drive-throughs are depicted with unexpected compositional rigor in these oil paintings. March 12–May 2, 2009.

 

Klaudia Marr Gallery, Santa Fe

“Evenly Scattered,” a group show of paintings, photography and assemblage by eight artists. The sharp-edged realism of Toby Boothman and the brushy, decorative figure printings of Gregory Calibey stand out. March 6–April 6, 2009.

 

Museums

Guggenheim Museum, New York City

“The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia: 1860–1989,” a sprawling exhibition of 250 objects, including literature as well as the visual arts. Works by Whistler, Cassatt and La Farge highlight the section on Aestheticism and Japan, while Dove, O’Keeffe and Noguchi illustrate the Asian cross-currents of early modernism. January 30–April 19, 2009.

 

Morgan Library and Museum, New York City

“The Thaw Collection of Master Drawings: Acquisitions since 2002,” another installment in a series featuring promised gifts by collector Eugene V. Thaw. This group of eighty works includes sheets by Gauguin, Matisse, Monet, the talented amateur artist Goethe and the Nazarenes. Through May 3, 2009.

“Studying Nature: Oil Sketches from the Thaw Collection,” more promised gifts, concentrating on the nineteenth-century heyday of the genre. Through August 30, 2009.

 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice,” fifty-seven paintings by the great sixteenth-century masters, focusing on their career rivalries and their development of the craft of oil painting. Standouts include Titian’s Flora and Danäe, and Tintoretto’s Susannah and the Elders. March 15–August 16, 2009. Travels to the Musée du Louvre, Paris (September 16, 2009–January 4, 2010).

 

National Academy Museum, New York City

“American Waters: Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of Hudson, Fulton and Champlain,” a collection show with fifty works, from 1850 to 2000, depicting the nation’s vital waterways. Artists include Albert Bierstadt, Asher B. Durand, Daniel Garber, Wolf Kahn, John F. Kensett, William Trost Richards and N.C. Wyeth. February 4–April 5, 2009.

 

National Gallery of Art,Washington, D.C

“Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age,” forty-eight paintings and twenty-two maps illustrating how Amsterdam, Delft and the Hague became subjects in themselves as centers of artistic and economic success in the seventeenth century. Featured artists include Jacob van Ruisdael and Gerrit Berckheyde. Through May 3, 2009.

 

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian,” forty oversize and multipart woodcuts and engravings from a golden age of graphic art, suggesting the epic pictorial ambition of Northern and Italian Renaissance masters. January 31–April 26, 2009.

 

Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington

“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery,” a traveling exhibition of paintings, prints and decorative arts from the Colonial period to the Gilded Age. Fresh evidence of why university art collections are vital to the nation’s cultural well-being. Through May 25, 2009. Travels to the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama (October 4, 2009–January 10, 2010).

 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut

Renwick Gallery, “The Art and Craft of Greene & Greene,” 131 objects—including furniture, stained glass, architectural drawings and photographs—from the California masters of the Arts and Crafts movement. March 13–June 7, 2009.

 

Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery, Washington, D.C.

An exhibition of egg tempera paintings by contemporary master Robert Vickrey, in association with the publication of Philip Eliasoph’s Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism. March 23–April 26, 2009.

 

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland

“Saint John’s Bible,” featuring pages from a project undertaken by Saint John’s University in Minnesota, a handwritten and illustrated manuscript Bible by contemporary scribe-artist Donald Jackson. Supplemented by a demonstration of scriptorium practice. February 15–May 24, 2009.

“The Romance of the Rose: Visions of Love in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts.” The thirteenth-century Old French allegorical poem, immensely popular and lavishly illustrated in its own time, became one of the seminal influences in the evolution of the Western notion of romantic love. January 24–April 19, 2009.

“Rembrandt Peale’s Portrait of John Meer: A New Addition to the American Art Collection.” The principal work is supported by another of Rembrandt Peale’s portraits, Rubens Peale with a Geranium, as well as Renaissance, Baroque and modern paintings using skull iconography, a signature element of the Meer portrait. March 4–August 23, 2009.

 

Early natural philosophers, including Aristotle, the tenth-century Arab philosopher Alhazen and the eighteenth-century Isaac Newton were enchanted by the rainbow, the behavior of light reflecting and refracting into a spectrum of perceivable colors (although no one in ancient times seemed to agree on what the rainbow’s were). Darkness and Light have long been metaphors for Evil and Good, for ignorance and knowledge; but Lucifer, the “light-bearer,” comes from the dark side of a Manichean universe. Since Goethe’s Farbenlehre of 1810, darkness can no longer be defined merely as “the absence of light.” Darkness and light conspire to create color, according to his findings.
 

The late-nineteenth-century Mangaaka Power Figure (Nkisi N’Kondi) leans forward menacingly into the center of the gallery. Although it lacks some of the feral power of earlier works retrieved from the Congo (as European colonialists called it then), its ferocious mien and metalwork are startling, particularly when installed alongside the classical and Renaissance objects in the handsome interiors of the Special Exhibition Galleries, on the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. Nkisi stands alone, totally out of context, defiant, its arms akimbo, hundreds of nail-studded spikes bristling from its resin-caked wooden chest, arms, legs and feet. Its “stomach,” an abdominal concave hole shaped by an inverted ceramic bowl, appears to be the focal center of some internalized energy which is partially expelled between the sharpened teeth of its open mouth. Transferred from the Met’s Africa, Oceania and Americas galleries, the Mangaaka Power Figure here confronts Peter Paul Rubens’s masterpiece Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment and Their Son Peter Paul (c.1639).

Aesthetically speaking, George Tooker (b. 1920) is a traditional painter—his works are consummately refined art. But emotionally speaking, he is a modern iconoclast: his figures, often classically derived, have a troubling tension—a very modern anxiety. Thus, for all her apparent composure, the figure in Girl with a Basket (1987–88) is not exactly comfortable with herself. The basket of fruit and vegetables is a traditional symbol of abundance, but her anxiety is evident in her eyes. They stare blankly outward, avoiding the viewer’s eyes, suggesting that she is lost in troubling introspection. She has a wonderfully Pre-Raphaelite flavor and may even be an updated Botticellian Venus. She is as young and blonde, however broader her face, giving her a stranger beauty (all the more so because her chin seems to be narrowing towards a point), but she seems less emotionally fresh and less gloriously herself. The unevenness in her neck—its right side is absurdly foreshortened, compared to the manneristically elongated right side—suggests that she is inwardly unbalanced, however outwardly together. She is at odds with herself, the victim of a nameless suffering. It’s an unsettling portrait, fraught with contradiction between outward appearance and inner reality, but integrated by Tooker’s suave handling. At first glance, his girl is a picture of female perfection, a sort of allegorical personification of a goddess, a higher being—a Venus, as her strange beauty suggests, but also Mother Nature, as the basket symbolizing her fertility implies. But there is something all too human and thus imperfect about her. Ripeness may be all, as the basket—a familiar symbol of the womb—indicates, but the girl is a virgin, and perhaps anxious about love, that is, being impregnated, another paradox.

Koo Schadler’s December exhibition at J. Cacciola Gallery in New York City, titled “Illuminated,” revealed a deep appreciation for Italian and Northern early Renaissance art. She achieves jewel-like effects using the traditional medium of egg tempera and mimics historical formats, such as the manuscript page and the altarpiece. Her approach is intimate and idiosyncratic. Heroic subjects—saints, gods and kings—are ignored in favor of still-life elements and contemporary figures. The loveliest of these small-scale works are nature studies, often incorporating texts. In the devotional-size (81⁄2-by-127⁄8-inch) framed triptych Smallest Parts (2008), the central panel presents two apples—one vibrant red with glossy leaves, the other spotted and sallow—along with a sinuous orange lizard. The flanking wings depict, respectively, a clear vase of wild flowers and a butterfly atop a pile of three stones. Everything rests on a stone shelf, running continuously across the three panels, with a text: “If you wish the whole to refresh your heart, you must be whole in the smallest parts.” It takes a moment to decipher the subtly chiseled letters, which adds to the trompe l’oeil illusion; the shadow of the lizard crawling across the stone face is a nice touch. Schadler uses two kinds of text in her framed diptych Love Conquers All (2007). The name of Virgil, the author of the quotation, the painter’s initials, KS, and the date in Roman numerals are incised on a marble block. Gold letters spelling out the Latin text, “Omnia vincit amor,” provide a flat backdrop. The featured players are two bright-eyed birds with gracefully delineated plumage.
 

Most of Homer’s many references to weaving have to do with working at the loom as one of women’s prescribed activities. That is what Hector had in mind when he ordered Andromache back to her loom and away from the concerns of men. Though there have been enough male weavers over the centuries to dispel the notion of weaving as a feminine craft, Hector’s bias continues to lurk in our cultural exaltation of paint over yarn, brushwork over needlework. It takes a man to be an action painter, some think. Yet the most vigorous and innovative abstraction in New York this season was not painting at all. It was a series of miniature textiles by master weaver Sheila Hicks, on view at Davis & Langdale in Fall 2008. “Minimes: Small Woven Works” presented twenty small—less than ten inches high—irregular rectangular structures that testified to her early studio training as a painter. It was a stunning display on an intimate scale that proved the falsity of lingering uncertainty over the status of textile art. Born in Hastings, Nebraska, in 1934, Ms. Hicks is internationally known for her role in the so-called fiber revolution of the sixties, which sought to transform textiles into a three-dimensional contender as an art form. She studied painting at Yale (1954–59), immersing herself in Josef Albers’s color courses and absorbing a passion for the ordered relationship of hues. She taught his approach, in Spanish, at the Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile, during a Fulbright year there. Before taking up permanent residence in Paris in 1964, she studied weaving techniques in Chile and Mexico.

So successful was the advent of modern poetic, musical and visual art in disrupting the critical vocabulary that we have all but lost the means to account for how art actually works. So blinding was its revolutionary blast that we sometimes fail to distinguish the various courses these arts took during the modernist period and often assume modern art effected more radical changes than it did. Abstraction in painting, dissonance and atonality in music, and free verse in poetry stand of a piece, historically, insofar as they denote the singular attributes of modernist art, but their evident formal differences signify very different relations to what I argue is the exemplar all art imitates—narrative. Most critics of modernism have long contended that it sacrificed narrative in favor of some kind of rarefied formalism, but what has been less fully appreciated is that such sacrifice was imperfect at best and deluded at worst. Modernist artworks, especially at the thought-silencing extremes of abstraction, have themselves become characters in the story of art, no more “liberated” from the conditions of time and narrative than their predecessors. This is a detour in the historical practice of art, the classical understanding of the fine arts as poesis, the making of plots.