Philip Guston / Untitled / 1968 / Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York/Morgan Library

I’ve must admit I wasn’t too familiar with Philip Guston’s work until the big retrospective at the Met a few years ago, but have become a huge fan since. If you haven’t read Musa Mayer’s biography of her father, Night Studio it definitely a great read. Anyway, as with Nick Stillman in his recent essay in The Nation, I find that what draws me to Guston is his movement between figuration, abstraction, back to figuration. The freedom not to be stuck in a style, a motif, or direction. A process unfolding from personal dictates or needs. It goes without saying that the circumstances of the art world are much different now than they were back in the ’60s and ’70s. More than at any other time today artists have a freedom to choose their own direction, their own materials, process, etc., some have called it a free for all. However, there is a pressure to settle on a style, develop a personal brand, and stick to it. This satisfies both the expectations of the market and helps prevent a type of emotional paralysis in the face of an overwhelming array of decisions and choices by providing a sense of direction. I think it’s an unreasonable expectation for artists to remain committed to a certain style for their entire career. First, with a few exceptions, I don’t think anyone is naturally that obsessive or rigid. Second, it would be no fun to be that rigid. For me it is fun to jump around between abstract, figure, landscape, etc. It helps me maintain that element of play necessary to my own work, which is not to say its not work, it just has to be playful.

Anyway, check out Nick Stillman’s review of the Guston exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum through August 31. Here’s a brief excerpt:

If, like in Clement Greenberg’s ’50s, art critics were still considered arbitrators, I would argue that Philip Guston’s art got better as he got older. His transformation late in his career from a successful and comparatively polite Abstract Expressionist into a conjurer of cartoonish tableaux of internal unrest and lowbrow humor garnished with uncomfortable personal admissions was an act of bravery, especially given the public’s lack of enthusiasm for his ribald new direction. As long as he is remembered, Guston’s need to reintroduce concrete subject matter into his art will be his legacy. This is ground firmly trod on by a gaggle of essayists, biographers, critics and friends of the artist; there’s no shortage of recent literature on Guston’s late work that praises it as deliciously, perfectly, bathetic–work that never descends into the flippancy that tends to mar the majority of art that is expressly funny, explicitly political or both.

Honestly, though, it’s difficult for me to think about Guston from an art critic’s perspective. Among the countless explanations of Guston’s return to figuration, the one I most agree with was pronounced by an artist, Willem de Kooning: “It’s about freedom.” Guston’s black humor, his exploitation of the absurd and grotesque, his merger of the political with the personal and his spirit of defiance in the face of complacency and aging is something to be appreciated on a gut level. You get it, or you don’t. I’m not suggesting that Guston’s work is anti-intellectual or even particularly populist. What I’m saying is that Guston’s work–especially from 1970-1980–is borne of intuition and inexorability, qualities that can be alienating as often as they are inspiring. [Read more...]

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Gerhard Richter / Derwisch 12.3.97 / 1997 / 12.6 cm x 17.9 cm / Watercolour on paper / www.gerhard-richter.com

I did not know Richter worked with watercolor. The watercolor abstracts are interesting, seem lighter and more playful than his oil abstracts.

The 2001 Retrospective at MOMA displayed how diverse Richter’s paintings are. His early work is of blurred figurative paintings, both with and without colour followed by seductive abstract paintings, with a colour palette that is either brilliant or subdued. His surprisingly diverse range of work has received prolonged discussion from critics, especially due to Richter’s disregard for “traditional” stylistic progression and his use of photographs. [Read more...]

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Painting Process/Process Painting, MoMA, Carroll Dunham, 1

Painting Process/Process Painting, MoMA, Carroll Dunham, 2

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Miriam Shapiro / The Twinning of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden / 1989 / 80″ x 116″, (triptych) / Acrylic on Canvas / Flomenhaft Gallery

I entered the Flomenhaft Gallery knowing Miriam Shapiro’s name but unable to recall any images of her work or even how I knew her name. I probably read about her in an art history book, as she is undoubtedly a pioneer and significant figure in the feminist art movement. Growing up in an upper-middle class university town, it could have easily been that I had seen her work, either originals or reproductions, or, if not her work, derivative pieces hanging on the walls in my friends houses. It may even have even been that I had an art teacher in elementary, middle-, or high school that assigned us a project based on her work, echoing and speaking to her influence and importance.

I mention this because the first association I had walking through the gallery was a strong feeling of American Jewish womanhood, coming of age in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and living in the present. It made me think of my friends’ mothers, or other women I know in this demographic. That is in no way meant to diminish the work, categorize it, and put it in a nice easy to handle historically and culturally situated box. It speaks to me of women, struggling to stitch together narratives of identity and self-hood, to redefine femininity and womanhood.

In her work, historical and cultural symbols and artifacts are patched together, personalized and given new meaning. Stories are reinterpreted and retold. Fabric, cloth, and thread are woven together with acrylic and a host of other materials to create rich and exciting surfaces. The colors are lush, saturated, and full of life. The overall effect is that her work can feel simultaneously challenging and comforting, familiar and unfamiliar, radical and ordinary. I would guess, an important piece of our response to Miriam’s work, is determined by our own history, our own identity – whether or not we can see parts of ourselves and our own stuggles with identity reflected in her work, and how we think and feel about what we she reveals to us.

Miriam Schapiro’s Mini-Retrospective, March 13 – April 26, 2008, Flomenhaft Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, Suite 308

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The world was in shock when in 2001 the Talibans destroyed two ancient colossal Buddha statues in the Afghan region of Bamiyan. Behind those statues, there are caves decorated with precious paintings from 5th to 9th century A.D. The caves also suffered from Taliban destruction, as well as from a severe natural environment, but today they have become the source of a major discovery. Scientists have proved, thanks to experiments performed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), that the paintings were made of oil, hundreds of years before the technique was “invented” in Europe. Results are published today in the peer-reviewed Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry.

In many European history and art books, oil painting is said to have started in the 15th century in Europe. But scientists from the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Tokyo (Japan), the Centre of Research and Restoration of the French Museums-CNRS (France), the Getty Conservation Institute (United States) and the ESRF have recently identified drying oils in some of the samples they studied from the Bamiyan caves. Painted in the mid-7th century A.D., the murals show scenes with Buddhas in vermilion robes sitting cross-legged amid palm leaves and mythical creatures. The scientists discovered that 12 out of the 50 caves were painted with oil painting technique, using perhaps walnut and poppy seed drying oils. [Read more...]

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