Thoughts in Maine

Old Mistress-Maine-She Makes You To-LUG-LUG-LUG
-she makes you to-pull-pull-pull-she makes you to-haul-haul-haul
-and when she's thrashed you a plenty-between those thrashings

She's lovely
she smiles
she's beautiful

with an unforgettable loveliness-an unforgettable beauty
-Turns masculine-borders big and mighty-against-the big and mighty Atlantic-

John Marin, letter to Alfred Stieglitz, August 28, 1932

Driving the coast of Maine you'll surely be struck by the amazing light, ever changing, but always decisive, as it plays from sky to water to land. The sky - incredible arrangements of clouds, the water - constantly moving, through tidal flow or reflection, the land - often dark mysterious rocky ledges, slammed by bursts of frothy waves, grounded by stands of green spruce and every now and then this all disappears into a thick rolling fog; for me it's a visual paradise.


For centuries artists have been coming here for insiration: Winslow Homer, Thomas Cole, John Marin, the Zorachs', Marsden Hartley (this image from a recent Bangor Daily News reminded me of a Hartley painting), Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, the family Wyeth and the original painter of light, Edward Hopper.

Louise Nevelson grew up in Rockport. Before she married, moved to New York, and made her way as a sculptor, she painted the Maine landscape. Some of her early work can be seen at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland. I have no doubt the dark rocky coast had some influence on her work.


A painter whose work I always look forward to seeing, Lois Dodd, has a mini-retro of her Maine-inspired work, Lois Dodd: Directly Considered, at the Center For Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport. It's a small exhibit, spanning the 60s to the present; a nice insight into her progression. Dodd is quite prolific, painting most anything that captures her eye, a rocky landscape or some of my favorites, wind-blown sheets hanging on a clothes line. As always, in her pared down style of simple gestures.

Down the road in Rockland, the Farnsworth Museum is showing Celebrating Louise Nevelson: An American Master, mentioned above, and Alex Katz and Friends, a selection of work that Katz has donated to the museum over the years. He has summered in the area since the 50s; some of my favorite Katz paintings are his Maine-inspired landscapes.

OK, now it's time for me to get to work. I'll cover some galleries next. For more images from Maine, visit my Flickr site.

In the King's Grill

As reported in 2006, the curators of the Château de Versailles decided to recast the grille royale, a fence that used to separate the king's part of the courtyard from the common area. Designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, this barrier created a sort of royal clôture, a space set apart. Not surprisingly, for reasons both practical and symbolic, it was removed and melted down during the Revolution. The conclusion of the work was announced for the end of 2007, but it was just completed, as reported in Le Figaro (Versailles retrouve sa grille royale, July 1) by Marie-Douce Albert (my translation):

It required several years of study and two years of work to transform 15 tons of iron and 100,000 gold leaves into fleurs-de-lys, many points, masks of Apollo, and crowns. And let us not forget the scrolling capital L's representing the sign of Louis XIV. This golden lace forms the fence that formerly enclosed the royal courtyard of the château of Versailles. More precisely, the detailed enclosure, whose central gate was unveiled yesterday morning, again separates the different courtyards leading to the residence of the Sun-King. [...]

While some question the decision to recreate it, it was decided to restore this fence, notably to allow the monument to reorganize the flow of its millions of visitors. "And this great work returns all of the symbolic force of that space in front of the château," notes Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the president of the organization. "Versailles was the residence of a king, and the entire arrangement was intended to demonstrate that one was coming near to his sacred person." Adorned with this gold, the royal courtyard thus recovers its rank as a holy of holies.

The financing, some 5 million euros, was partially provided by the company Monnoyeur. The official dedication of the new space is scheduled for July 8. This raises all sorts of questions: do the French really want to bring back Versailles as it was? Isn't this akin to what Viollet-le-Duc did to Notre Dame de Paris and other monuments, destroying the actual building, or what's left of it, to "recreate" a historian's approximation of what it may have -- or even should have -- been at one point in history? Discuss.

Tombes de Mes Aïeux!

My great-great-great-great-grandmother, Josephine Gladieux, is the root of my proud French ancestry. As a child, she came from Vellescot, a little town in the Doubs (near Besançon) in 1844, with her parents, Jean-Pierre Gladieux and Rosaline Rossat. They settled in the aptly named Besancon (pronounced, à l'américaine, with the accent on the middle syllable instead of the last, as in French), a little farm town outside Ft. Wayne, Indiana. My mother's hobby is genealogy, and she has documented this part of our family's history. When we were living in France in 1997, my parents and I traveled to the town of Vellescot on a winter day and had a look at the cemetery. Researching things on this end, she has discovered that several of the Gladieux are buried in the cemetery by the Church of St. Louis in Besancon (shown at left -- note the Indiana limestone blocks carved to look like rusticated stone). The Gladieux family even paid for one of the windows in that church (shown at right), which bears the names of Jean-Pierre (Josephine's father), Célestin (her brother, born in America), and François (her eldest brother, also born in France). Records even show which pew they sat in at Mass.

Giorgio Morandi at the Pope's

Even on a non-peak day, visiting the Vatican Museum is a trial. Like a corpuscle in a pulsing artery, one is swept along in a vast crowd that grows more intense as you approach the Sistine Chapel, through hallways and chambers that were never meant to accommodate that number of people. On a visit earlier this month, something leapt off the wall, as we passed from the Stanze painted by Raphael back toward the Sistina. The route you take if you follow the detour to see the Stanze is through the papal collection of modern art. Most people do not even bother to stop there, because there is just so much in the antiquities and Renaissance. If you do pause there, however, you can see some amazing things, including five exquisite still lifes by Giorgio Morandi. My favorite one of the five is shown here. Sorry, no further information.

Puryear @ the National Gallery

It would be near impossible to top the installation of Martin Puryear's incredible sculptures in the atrium at MoMA this past year: the space was made for his work and the white cube galleries allowed for a clean viewing for the remainder of the collection. I was, however, looking forward to the next venue, the neoclassic background of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The atrium of the NGA's East Building proved to be a challenge, swallowing the work in granite and Tennessee marble, treating them as toys under the floating Calder mobile. (In response to a question at the press preview about a relationship to Calder's art, Puryear spoke of his nine months working at Calder's studio in France, getting to know his family, his work regimen and deep respect for Calder's mixture of playfulness and seriousness; qualities he considered were in his own work.)

As with the East Building, unfortunately, the rotunda of West Building is not very gracious to Puryear's Ladder For Booker T. Washington either. When I first heard of its placement there I thought it was a perfect choice -- dueling cultural aesthetics; however, the piece seems insignificant, hung off center to the rotunda's massive black marble columns and fountain.

What works best, as I had hoped, are Puryear's works displayed in the more intimate formal galleries of the West Building, especially how these masterfully crafted yet often quirky forms relate even between rooms, such as the long graceful shaft of Desire against the rugged structure of Thicket. Desire, which could owe its origin to some form of antique farm equipment or maybe a lighthouse, grandly occupies its own gallery, a very different experience than the MoMA exhibit, another example of how sensitive the work is to location. I'm going to let Ionarts summer intern Hannah finish with her observations of the day.

---

Morning was something I had been looking forward to, but the reality of the early hour wake-up had made me, for a moment, a little less excited for the journey. My day seemed to be all about journeys really: first our car ride to the train station, the subsequent hour we spent on the train and finally our 5-something block walk from the train station to the National Gallery. When finally arriving and after listening to Mr. Puryear speak about his work, I realized that the subjects he chooses to focus on in his work are his own journeys, the experiences that have brought him to where he is today.


As is true of any artist, the works of Martin Puryear seem to me to be a personal representation of his travels, experiences, and interests throughout his life. Mr. Puryear's unique life has led to the creation of a select group of sculptures that highlight the path and his learning that he has gained from journeys throughout the world.

While speaking of his love for nature as a child he recalled finding himself in a city -- Washington, D.C. -- that was separated into two different worlds within. During his early years family vacations such as camping or trips to the Natural History museum would take him away from the discomfort. Searching for a new environment Mr. Puryear enrolled in a university in Sweden, where he studied Scandinavian building and furniture crafting. Much of his work shows the tools and skills he was taught during that time. Pieces such as Lever No.1, which has the distinct characteristics of an early Scandinavian viking ship. The work feels like a modern interpretation of an old world vessel, using the same simple techniques as would have been used hundreds of years ago. Other pieces such as Bower have cage structures resembling the ribs of a ship. He connects his interest in nature and the craft of ship building and the correlation between shipbuilders and their uses of the animal form to keep their ships afloat.

The scale of each piece gives one the sensation of walking through a field planted with crops that are head high: one is not able to ignore a single piece as you walk immersed in each. When standing in this space I was made to feel quite literally small by the size of these sculptures, in particular Desire. The immense size shuts me up, to have the experience Puryear hopes for rather than allowing me to try to (by my nature) define so much. Mr. Puryear has said he wants his work to "delight" those who take the time to stop and appreciate them. By better understanding Puryear's story, I was able to appreciate his sculptures as being single thoughts that make up his intriguing and truly original tale, while seeing a bit of his own personal journey.

Martin Puryear opens on Sunday, June 22nd, and runs through August 28th at the National Gallery of Art. More images of the exhibit on Flickr and from the MoMA exhibit here and in my MoMA post.

Grimaldis @ Area 405

It's a long way from from its perch on Charles Street, and culture shock comes to mind when thinking of the C. Grimaldis Gallery teaming with Area 405 to stage a sculpture exhibit. Grimaldis, consistently one of Baltimore's best galleries, is known for its high-end stable of artists, clean white walls, and polished wood floors. They made a bold move by choosing to stage an exhibit at Area 405, a down and out former factory, in a neighborhood known more for the flashing blue lights of police surveillance cameras and stray bullets than art galleries. That said, it's one of my favorite art spaces in town, with a buzz of studio activity and very cool living spaces, an art fortress in East Baltimore.

In conversations with gallery owner Costas Grimaldis over the past few years I got the feeling he was thinking more about retirement than pushing boundaries and expanding his roster of artists, but he's gotten a second wind and lucky us. Grimaldis @ Area 405, a selection of large-scale sculpture from gallery artists, is as close to a perfect fit as a show could be.

I've seen several exhibits at 405 in the past few years. The space, for several reasons, is challenging at best to display most work in, but it has met its match: with generous spacing and a tactical use of spot lighting these large-scale works by eight artists inhabit the space organically, as with John Ruppert's tall slender cast wood Lightning Strike Series, freezing the mysterious remnants of natural disaster. Jene Highstein's carved wood form, similar to an enormous shovel handle, has a striking ghost-like presence. Next to it is another Ruppert, one of his formed chain link orbs, which sits among his cast stones. I thought of the recent NASA probe landing on Mars, scooping up soil samples. (The piece has a video component that wasn't working at the time.)

Jon Isherwood's stunning black granite obelisks, standing side by side and titled Both and Between, passionately explore the material and as always are precisely executed, the work of a true master craftsman. The Isherwood relates nicely with Christina Iglesias's large steel, glass, and plaster pieces in the front gallery. Maren Hassinger bundles wire roping like Van Gogh painted wheat bales, an agrarian in a factory setting.

John Van Alstine's mixture of stone and steel would be amazing on a huge scale. I'm going to get my wish when his piece Rings of Unity -- Circles Of Inclusion is unveiled at the Beijing Olympic Park -- very cool, John. Sir Anthony Caro, probably the most noted sculptor in the group, is represented by small welded ribbons of rusted steel, propped on a pristine plywood display, titled Table Piece CCL.

The biggest surprise and attention-getter at the opening reception was Chul-Hyun Ahn's dazzling Mirror Tunnel. I'm still trying to figure out how he created this Alice in Wonderland illusion, but as with a good magician, I really don't want to know -- just do more!

Here's to more collaborations at 405: maybe the Walters or the BMA could be next? More pictures on Flickr.

Bridget Riley in Paris

The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in the Palais de Tokyo, is one of my favorite museums. It has just opened a Bridget Riley retrospective, the first one in France, which will run through September 14. The point is to resituate our understanding of the artist, in terms of the movement with which she is usually associated, Op Art. Harry Bellet has a review (Bridget Riley, couleurs solaires et effets d'optique, June 14) in Le Monde (my translation):

Riley has her roots not in Vasarely but in Seurat. The sense of rhythm comes from the Italian futurists, and her move into abstraction follows the same process as Mondrian. The first room, where one is recommended to linger, makes this clear.

On the left, a copy of Seurat's Pont de Courbevoie, testifies to the young artist's desire understand the function, as much optical as pictural, of the theory of simultaneous contrasts, of the interaction of one color on its neighbor, of the virtual appearance of a third tone when two complementary colors are placed side by side. On the right, a series of drawings, rhythmically animated like a crowded gym: these are not men in movement but Tuscan vines. Nearby, some trees, in pencil, are so synthetic that almost become abstract.

For lots more information, see this PDF file.

I've Seen Things

I've been traveling quite a bit lately, seeing lots of art, but haven't been able to balance studio work and blogging: ahh these times. A few weeks ago I was in L.A., and thanks to a trusty GPS system in my rental car, gallery hopping was fairly easy. The only glitch was that Chung King Road, the heart of the China town arts district, is a pedestrian walkway and I circled several times before figuring it out (duhh). Now that I have my L.A. gallery bearings -- Chinatown, Culver, Santa Monica, downtown -- the next trip out I'll have my wits to even write about it.

Meanwhile, back in the East, I made a quick swing through Chelsea this past Tuesday and got to see the gigantic Mark di Suvero sculpture inhabiting the main gallery at Paula Cooper: it's a beauty. The spiraling center piece, kind of channeling Frank Stella, was cut from a solid steel plate and expanded with a crane in his studio; that's old school macho cool. I have lots of pictures and video of two smaller sculptures with moving parts on my Flickr site.


Neo Rauch has returned to David Zwirner. Still as mysterious as ever with his imagery and as inventive at moving your eye around the canvas. I don't care for Kerry James Marshall's new paintings at Jack Shainman, but I think the boat installation, covered with photos in medallions, is a very powerful piece.


Schroeder Romero has a gallery full of Charles Browning's reinterpretations of a Romantic 19th century we may be familiar with. Browning is a skillful painter with a sharp sense of humor: he made my day.

In the coming weeks I hope to post about a few exhibits that look interesting here in Baltimore. One is Paper Airplane at Paperwork Gallery and the other is Cottage Industry, which has installations spread around town via The Contemporary Museum, by Fritz Hoeg and Andrea Zittel, among others.

Difficult to find Baltimore based artists? Paperwork Gallery's co-director and artist, Cara Ober has recently gone online with The B-list, a soon to be comprehensive list of area artist's personal websites. Now there is one more way to browse and spend that huge rebate check!

Beer and Art, So Right

It’s always nice to spice up your art-viewing treks in NYC with something new, an artist I haven’t met before, something stranger than usual happening on the street, or a new spot to eat with a clean bathroom -- you know, the simple pleasures. This trip I ended my day in Park Slope, Brooklyn, at a very cool place called The Beer Table. It’s a tiny, dimly lit sanctuary with the most unique and extensive collection of brews I’ve ever come across. There is even a daily menu of at least 25 varieties. It’s a perfect respite to contemplate a day of gallery hopping.

The painter Thomas Nozkowski’s work seems to be everywhere lately. His recent switch to the Pace Wildenstein Gallery most likely has had an effect on his higher profile, and good for him -- I can’t get enough. His current show at Pace fills the gallery with more than 40 paintings on canvas stretched on board and paintings on paper. The washy layers of paint, chipping and scratching, the gorgeous crescendos of color, on a structure of real and ghostly grids; each work has its own inventive organic form to decipher. Amazing! Nozkowski is my current favorite painter.


I gushed over more paintings at, of all places, The Painting Center in SoHo. The seven-artist exhibit Painting Structures: Specificity and Synthesis has some well-known names like Rackstraw Downes and Sarah McEneaney, but I fell hard for Sharon Horvath’s dreamy nighttime stadia-scape Dunn’s Field (shown).

I liked Anthony Pontius’s surreal twist on history in his paintings at 31Grand. They in turn brought me back to Jake Berthot’s latest paintings, which I had seen at Betty Cunningham earlier in the day. Both artists' dark, lush, and moody landscapes kept reminding me of George Inness -- full circle.


Unrelated but working through the darkness never the less at Jack Shainman are the unsparing drawings of Bitterkomix creator Anton Kannemeyer. He skewers the post- apartheid South African government, in a way that polite society and the press dare not.

I’m writing this at 30,000 feet over Kansas (hi, Dorothy!) on my way to Los Angeles. Time permitting, I will have plenty of art to share along the way and maybe a celebrity sighting or two. As always check my Flickr site for more pictures and comments of my wanderings.

Double Double Toil and Trouble

A distaff is a tool used to hold unspun wool during spinning. Over time it became a reference for anything domestic, the mother's side of the family, then women in general. In Reimagining the Distaff Toolkit, now at the Bennington Museum, contemporary artists personalize the tools of daily chores and toil. If every picture tells a story, then the domestic tools that women have historically used also have a human attachment. Frying pans didn't cook a meal by themselves as the ghost-like faces in Alison Saar's cast bronze pans, titled Mirror/Mirror, suggest or even more directly in her mother Betye Saar's iron washboard, National Racism: We Was Mostly Bout' Survival, with a photograph of an enslaved laundress; it had a real soul attached.


In Tatana Kellner's Ironing installation, the science and history of ironing are imprinted/burned onto the back of white shirts, and a monitor plays a video of a self-propelled iron with the sound of steam escaping; it's monotonous, repetitive work by a tool with an intelligent, sweating, thinking person attached to it. Lisa Alvarado's Mexican Woman's Toolkit is a large floral tote bag hanging on wooden pegs, which visitors are invited to rummage through. The bag belongs to a Mexican domestic in WWII-era Chicago: her life is service to others, she has no privacy.

When I pass by an old farmhouse or abandoned factory I think of the people and lives that passed through it. That was my response to Marie Watt's Blanket Column. It is what must be a 12' stack of donated blankets, each with a hanging tag attached with notes of the known history of each blanket, bought at a flea market or recently given up by a growing child, very touching, very personal. I had to run my finger along the edge of one of the blankets.

There is humor here, too. Mildred Johnson took a 20th-century advice book for young girls, What Young Girls Ought to Know, and folded the pages, creating some clever book art. A second book, The Joy of Cooking, is shredded and gracefully hung from an old grater; it's one of the most striking pieces in the show. Then there's Dave Cole's Trophy Wife, reminiscent of a 50s captive housewife.

Artists have a long tradition of reconfiguring domestic objects, and of course this is a perfect exhibit for them. Tracy Krumm's Yoke/Folded and Cavity/Strainer have graceful dignity and cast dreamy shadows on the wall. Judith Hoyt's clever Bucket Woman and Grater Woman follow a more traditional folk way. Tiffany Besonen's Mini-Ambiotic consists of flowers crafted from sewing pattern paper, wax, and the artist's hair bursting forth on a vine of wire from a child-size ironing board, perhaps daring to dream a fantastic alternative as only a child can.

Reimagining the Distaff Toolkit, curated by Rickie Solinger, will be at the Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont, through June 1st. More on Flickr.

Les Journaux

Cultural news bits from the European press.

One of the things I wrote about on my recent trip to New York was the Poussin exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Souren Melikian just wrote a review (Souren Melikian: The hidden conflict in Poussin's landscapes, April 11) of that show for the International Herald Tribune, which contains the following observations:

An interplay of allusions to the Ancient Testament and to Greek mythology has been read into one of the painter's most famous compositions, "The Finding of Moses." In an improbable landscape, clouds touched by sunlight float in the distance over Egyptian pyramids and obelisks, Greek temples and an ill-defined square pediment topped by a circular tower. Women clad in Roman-style drapes are gathered around a baby resting on a wicker basket, as if it were some Nativity, while nearby a nonchalant bearded man in the nude reclines with his arm resting on an overturned urn.

Rosenberg points out that here, too, Poussin took care to find authentic ancient models for some details. An Egyptian harp or sistrum lies on the ground. In the distance a hippopotamus hunt is modeled after the mosaics of Palestrina. These, the French scholar comments, are linked to a meditation on Ancient Egyptian religion and on the destiny of the daughter of Pharaoh and Isis who found her son along the Nile. [...] The problem with much of Poussin's art is that reading such allusions to mythology or the Scriptures is beyond the ability of most 21st-century viewers. The literary connotations that gave 17th-century cognoscenti immense intellectual pleasure are now viewed by many as stale artifice.

The Fondation Beyeler, near Basel, has an excellent exhibit on Action Painting (through May 12), reviewed by Harry Bellet (Le geste et la spontanéité du peintre, April 10) for Le Monde. The organization is known for being able to borrow exceptional collections of paintings, and this show, combining the works of 27 artists, is no different. To understand how much money must be required to insure this show, one of the paintings on display is Jackson Pollock's Number 5 (1948), rumored to be the most expensive painting in the world, having reportedly been purchased for $140 million dollars, privately, in 2007.

Bellet was critical of some of the selections made by curator Ulf Küster, noting the absence of the work of Georges Mathieu (who helped make Jackson Pollock known in France) and the inclusion of works by Arman, Eva Hesse, and Cy Twombly, whose connection to the subject is distant at best. You can look at the list of artists, a selection of high-resolution scans of the paintings, and some photographs of the artists in action at the Web site (if you can stand the Flash interface). Bellet names as "the icing on the cake" (cerise sur le gâteau) several paintings one Pierre Soulages, who began working in the style in 1946 and is still at it. He was present at the opening, where his work was praised by the foundation's new director, Samuel Keller, former director of the Art Basel fair.

A Mt. Vernon Walkabout

About a week back I posted about the controversy of the golden fence that was preventing animals from fouling the fresh spring grasses of Mt. Vernon Park, here in Baltimore. The fence, now removed to great applause, was one segment, literally, of Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square, a collaboration between Maryland Institute students and the Walters Art Museum's Maps: Finding Our Place in the World exhibit (here is a map). What remains are some impressive temporary installations by the other MICA students and their interpretations of mapping. After the brouhaha over Lee Freeman's golden fence and its removal, spring has come to Mt. Vernon Park: the grass is green, flowers are popping, and discovering the remaining works felt like an egg hunt.

Um-Gi Lee's Exploring Mt. Vernon Park highlights five prominent architectural elements throughout the area, inviting the public to travel from station to station, keeping track of your travels by stamping your booklet/passport with an image unique to that location. The stamps are contained in plexiglass boxes with an etched 3-D image of the building. It's an engaging, intelligent and fun project. Daniel Allende's Historian, Mapping History is a reinvention of history that had me laughing out loud. His nine faux-bronze plaques describe a Mt. Vernon past that works for me, like Romance Of A Romantic or A Place Of Invention, ha! Emma Fowler's Right, Left, Or Straight is in her words a "self-guided journey" by the use of small ceramic balls embossed, as for the seeing impaired, with the key to your travels. The balls are lined up on a long wooden trough, making your choice of direction seem like a lottery.

Nothing changed the public atmosphere surrounding this project quite like Jonathan Taube's Sweep Action: Towards the Center. Instead of fencing the public out, Taube organized a massive community clean-up. From the Sun photos Taube seemed like a Harry Potter figure, saving the day with lots of hugs and a very cool monument constructed of brooms and waste remains to commemorate the project; it has a Zen feel to it.

Three other projects focus on community involvement. Rebecca Nagle's Boundry Block Party: Bench Project, and Rachel Faller's Knitted Bridge. A second one by Nagle, Peabody's New Outfit, asked community groups to design new outfits for the monuments that would rotate between them every two weeks. It's a real eye catcher as you drive up Charles Street.

Involving the community is key to the success of any project in public spaces, but it can also be the nightmare portion. I am grateful for the sacrifices and dedication of neighborhood and community organizations. They do amazing work and the block parties can be fun. But it's a tough way to produce challenging art when so many opinions and conditions need to be appeased. As a student project Beyond the Compass has been a perfect learning experience resulting in some thoughtful, engaging art. Many more images on Flickr.

Note: At post I was unable to confirm the identity of this work at the foot of Charles Street, but my crack team is on it.

Bring on the Fairs!

So much art to see, my eyeballs hurt. The New York art fairs opened and the hardcore collectors are all over it: alcohol consumption just doubled in NYC. I lost count of the total number of fairs this year -- ten, I think, on the piers, hotel rooms, office buildings, and containers on the street in Chelsea. Because of their amazing success as an efficient way selling art, fairs have grown in size and number. Many galleries make most of their income for the year, living a gypsy life, setting up four or five fairs in London, Basel, Miami, or here in NYC.

The jewel of the New York fairs is the Armory Show on Pier 94, with 160 galleries showing more than 2,000 artists. Last year's sales here were in excess of $85 million, with many of the sales in the first day/hour. No matter your point of view, that’s quite impressive. But, with the economy on everyone’s mind there is much anticipation this year.

Well, not to worry, a little price adjustment wouldn’t be so bad. There were no show-stopping, bizarre installations. Katie Grinnan's exploding cheerleaders in ATM's booth were probably the most adventurous; let's take one for the team! Galleries tended to played it safe: lots of paintings, many small works. I was happily floating from booth to booth noticing a few good paintings, like the three by Tom Nozkowski at Pace Wildenstein; a celebrity sighting here, an art star there; or the large Daniel Richter painting at that Berlin gallery (pictured); or better yet, the Herman Bas at Lehman Maupin.


If you're playing it safe, with gold over $1,000 an ounce, try a John Miller construction covered in gold leaf -- sorry, it sold in the first hour. A British Turner Prize winner famous for his cross dressing, Grayson Perry, had $30-90,000 ceramics that were selling well at Victoria Miro.

I enjoyed the Armory Show. The crowd was enthused, many of the European galleries had work I rarely get to see, and it's fun to eavesdrop on conversations -- is that my price? What if I get three? There's nothing quite like it.

A short trip down the Westside Highway to the Pulse Fair on Pier 40 (which happens to have a very cool parks and rec athletic field in the center). Pulse, in its third year, has grown to 90 established and newer galleries. It is a bit more laid back, a place where you're able to talk more freely with dealers and artists.

Two stand-outs were the booths for the British gallery with the coolest name, Pippy Houldsworth, with nice graphic drawings by Julie Nord, and the Dublin gallery Rubicon, showing Nick Miller's impastoed landscape paintings (he paints in a mobile van on location, and his canvases may seem off square but he also paints in the frame of the truck), and in Maud Cotter's over-sized furniture, ordinary objects take on grand significance.

Martin McMurray's simple paintings of typewriters at Jeff Bailey had me nostalgic for a bit, until I remembered how often I need spell check: he's also got a show up at now, the gallery in Chelsea.

Saatchi Online, an offshoot of the Saatchi Gallery of London is a free online Web space for artists to show and sell their work at no charge. It's an amazing venture for which I was one of the original 1.000 or so contributors. The project has expanded in several areas and now has over 80,000 members. They're at Pulse to give a little more credibility to the online venue.


In addition to Andy Yoder's giant licorice shoes -- yes, licorice and matching pipe -- Winkleman Gallery has a very interesting, often funny set of letters from corporations in response to artist Yevgeniy Fiks's attempt to "donate" a copy of Lenin's Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, to their corporate libraries. Of the 100 books sent he got 30 responses, from J.C. Penney, Target, Amazon, and others. Most companies didn't know what to do with the donation but always responded kindly; the response from Disney was the most detailed.

Also of note at Pulse was Federico Solmi's video The Evil Empire, a year-long project composed of over 1,000 small paintings, with each image getting eight seconds of screen time. Although at times hilarious, it's not a flattering portrait of the Pope and was banned from an exhibit in Rome.

As always great things to see at San Francisco's Catherine Clark Gallery, and welcome back from hiatus, DCKT Gallery, whose new Lower-Eastside space I haven't visited yet.

Whew, the final stop was across town at Red Dot, at the Park South Hotel. This fair has 38 galleries or private dealers occupying rooms in the hotel in very creative ways, some not so. The best part is, you're in NYC, this fair gets a good crowd, make the best of it.

Of note at Red Dot are Julian Hatton's paintings at Elizabeth Harris and also William Carroll's silhouette scenes of NYC. Baltimore's Gallery Imperato took a first plunge into the art fair pool: the room looked great, with Cara Ober's paintings and Gwyneth Scally's oil on gesso creations. Philadelphia's Projects Gallery had Alex Queral's acrylic on carved phone book -- see, there's still a reason for them. GV ART of London had a gorgeous small painting by Vicki Clark.

I've only covered a few standouts at the fairs and I only went to three of the nine. It would be a Herculean effort to see it all in one weekend, but you can visit my Flickr site for more pictures and descriptions. Here is a two-part James Kalm video of the Armory an Pulse and Vernissage TV with John Waters. I'll link to articles and other images as they get posted online.

Ionarts at the Met: Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait, 1650, Musée du Louvre

Part of my last day in New York was spent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, especially in the exhibit Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions. It opens with the Louvre's self-portrait of Nicolas Poussin (not officially part of the exhibit and not in the catalogue), a beautiful painting pregnant with meaning. Painted in 1650 for Poussin's friend and supporter Paul Fréart de Chantelou, it shows the painter in front of several of his paintings, crowded together. The only visible part of a canvas contains the allegorical figure of painting, identified by the crown she wears, bejeweled with the eye of discernment (see the close-up). Painting is enfolded into the arms of friendship, a tribute to the importance of friendly patrons.

Poussin may not be the most popular painter, a lesser status indicated by the small attendance in a museum generally mobbed with people, but he was revered by just about everyone who came after him. The exhibit, organized in conjunction with Bilbao's Museo de Bellas Artes, focuses on Poussin's skills as a draftsman, with a large number of drawings, and as the creator of a celebrated type of pastoral landscape, the Arcadian vision of the title. The paintings here are not his most famous, but the chance to see so many lesser-known works, drawn from private collections and small museums from all over the world, is worth the effort. For example, Poussin's most famous painting, Et in Arcadia ego, is not here, but a lesser-known painting, from the Devonshire Collection in Chatsworth, on the same subject is. Shepherds and nymphs in the carefree, idyllic realm of Arcadia examine the inscription on a tomb: death (or the dead person), too, has a place in Arcadia, one of the themes evoked in Jacopo Sannazaro's Arcadia and Philip Sydney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.

Other Articles: Holland Carter, Classical Visions, Romantic Eye (New York Times, February 15) "And for a painting like Landscape With a Calm, no narrative seems intended. What we have instead is a Classical pastorale, an Arcadian souvenir, a golden-age snapshot of placid water, grazing flocks, palatial buildings and sun-brushed Olympian peaks. If the scene looks too good, too innocent of corruption, to be true, that is surely the point, and Poussin makes it clear. In the near distance a mounted horseman streaks out of the picture. Where is he off to, and why the rush? Shadows are seeping from the stand of lush trees to the left, casting a watchful shepherd in shade, dimming the color of his poppy-red tunic. Even in Arcadia time is passing, noon moves toward night. That’s why the painting’s mood is both sweet and stabbing, almost shockingly elegiac, like the sound of certain music by Handel, like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing Ombra mai fu." Manuela Hoelterhoff, Snakes Strangle Mortals in Poussin's Serene Scenes: Interview (Bloomberg News, February 28) Rachel Spence, Lord of the landscape (Financial Times, March 1) Arthur C. Danto, Just Looking (The Nation, April 7) Andrew Butterfield, The Magical Painting of Poussin (New York Review of Books, April 17)

More than one critic has singled out Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake for special consideration. Now in the collection of London's National Gallery, it was once remarked on by Denis Diderot for its evocation of terror in a peaceful rural scene. Paintings with similar compositions in this exhibit include a Death of Eurydice, from a private collection, and a Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe. Looking at all three of them on Wednesday, it occurred to me that perhaps Poussin is the background for Max Ernst's Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale: the odd juxtaposition of calm and panic, the tilted pose of the running figure.

A nice visual counterpoint to musical settings of the four seasons are Poussin's four canvases, matching the seasons of the year to four Old Testament stories. Two from the Louvre are in the exhibit. In Spring, the first couple, Adam and Eve, think about how the fruit of a certain tree would taste real good right now, as God the Father flies above on a cloud (his form directly recalling Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling). In Summer, the widow Ruth throws herself at the mercy of Boaz, not realizing that they will soon be happily married. In the two not shown at the Met, Autumn is matched with an image of spies bringing grapes from the Promised Land, and Winter with the story of the flood. Another major discovery is the moody Landscape with Three Monks (La Solitude), shown here outside Serbia for the first time since 1934. One of the curators of the exhibit claims to have seen it hanging in Tito's office. In return for the chance to show it, the Met has undertaken a lengthy restoration of the painting. Catch it before it goes back to Serbia.

Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11. Here are some other images.

Also recommended at the Met:

• Gustave Courbet (through May 18)
  Favorite images include the self-portrait (The Desperate Man) that is the promotional image of the exhibit, made at the time of his jury rejection from the Salon. Of course, any chance to see L'Origine du Monde should be taken, shown at the Met in an alcove with a polite warning about "explicit nudity." It is accompanied by a viewer showing one of the nude photos by famed 19th-century pornographer Auguste Belloc that was likely Courbet's inspiration.
  
• Jasper Johns: Gray (through May 4)
  See the comments of our own Mark Barry last month.

The View from NYC

I'll post soon about the Armory Show and as many satellite exhibits as I can take in. In the meantime, view my Flickr site for my pictures of the events.

Ionarts at the Guggenheim: I Want to Believe

Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2008, photo by David Heald/Guggenheim Foundation More images

The exhibit that everyone, even those friends who are not art-heads, told me to see during this trip to New York is Cai Guo-Qiang's I Want to Believe. It is both a retrospective of the Chinese-born artist's work and a site-specific installation that has taken over almost all of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. At its center is the new piece conceived for the exhibit, Inopportune: Stage One (pictured), which is an ingenious use of the iconic helix-shaped atrium space of Frank Lloyd Wright's problematic building. Nine identical white Chevy Cavaliers, on a pedestal and hung from the ceiling at various elevations, trace a scenario all too familiar in the era of the terrorist: a car parks in the atrium of the Guggenheim, is exploded from within by a blast represented by arcing fiber-optic rays, flips upward and over backwards, and lands on the top level of the rotunda.

The piece is given some context by a video also shown at the ground level of the rotunda, Illusion. On a normal night in Times Square, people are driving and walking, seemingly oblivious to a car that rolls through the scene, lit by a fireball of pyrotechnics exploding inside it. That explosions could be so normal to our lives today as to go unnoticed is at the heart of the almost comic-book levity of the violence in Cai Guo-Qiang's work. It is a medium and approach that is perfectly suited to art in the post-9/11 world, all the more so because he began working with gunpowder and explosions in the late 1980s. His work was not begun as a reaction to 9/11, but in a sense he was ideally prepared to react to those events and to the particular challenges of today's omnipresent conflicts. The artist himself sets out his thoughts about the work shown in this exhibit, in an editorial piece for NY Arts Magazine.

Cai began using gunpowder in the 1980s, for example in Self-Portrait: A Subjective Soul. A video in the exhibit shows the artistic process: assisted by a team of collaborators, Cai attaches little packets of gunpowder in lines and shapes, or spreads it out with a broom over the canvas, paper, or other surface. After the gunpowder is ignited, shadowy images and burn marks remain, which are augmented by the artist with written annotations. All of these qualities connect these works with the most important tradition in Chinese art, the Confucian calligraphic landscape (Cai's preferred formats are, not coincidentally, multifold screens and scrolls). Later, the paper works became plans for actual explosion events, video records of which are also included in the exhibit. To document such ephemeral creations, many of which existed in time only for a few seconds, he sometimes displays scientific records (seismic measurements, graphs of his own heart rate) collected during the event. With the exploding light and resulting smoke of firework-distributed gunpowder, Cai can "paint" the sky with abstract patterns in striking ways, with a kinetic element provided by the wind that recalls the work of Alexander Calder.

Other Reviews: Roberta Smith, Cars and Gunpowder and Plenty of Noise (New York Times, February 22) Edwin Heathcote, The blast picture show (Financial Times, March 1) Ariella Budick, China's Cai Guo-Qiang captures horror at Guggenheim (Newsday, March 2) Richard Lacayo, The Big Bang (TIME, March 6) Ed Pikington, New York minutes: Sparks fly at the Guggenheim (Guardian Blog, March 6) Alexis Wang, Cai Guo-Qiang makes an explosion at the Guggenheim (Washington Square News, March 7) Carol Strickland, Cai Guo-Qiang has a blast with explosive art (Christian Science Monitor, March 14) Todd Jatras, Floating Cars Take Over Guggenheim (Wired, March 17)

The other side of the coin here is preservation, the natural obverse to destruction, which is the focus of many of the large-scale installation works in the show. In Reflection: A Gift from Iwaki (Smithsonian, 2004), Cai excavated the wreckage of a wooden ship and filled it with shattered porcelain dishes and Buddhist idols. In the piece that made him a finalist for the 1996 Hugo Boss prize, Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan, Cai combines the past (sheepskin bags associated with Genghis Khan) with Western fears of rising Asian industry (three noisy Toyota engines). In An Arbitrary History: River (Lyon, 2001), visitors are invited to ride in a yak-skin raft down a bamboo watercourse, viewing art pieces with live animals in them. (Most of the takers on this offer are children, and in general this exhibit is great for kids.)

The most profound pieces in the show deal with the issues of both preservation and destruction, in a sense, as part of the confrontation with, and simultaneously embrace of, totalitarianism. Head On, originally conceived for the Berlin Guggenheim, shows a pack of replica wolves running toward an invisible wall (set at the same height as the Berlin Wall), beginning on the ground and then lifted through the air, only to crash into the plexiglass barrier and tumble back to the ground. In Inopportune: Stage Two (2004), replicas of nine tigers (the number and the title recall the exploding car piece) are pierced with arrows like pincushions, at first eliciting sympathy and then raising questions about the cartoonish depiction of violence (also evoking the taxidermy sources of Henri Rousseau's animals).

Both Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard (1999 Venice Biennale) and Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows (2000) deal with episodes in Chinese history, the first contemporary and the latter farther in the past. In the former, adapted specifically for New York, soft clay replicas of a famous Chinese communist propaganda piece are recreated, showing the suffering of heroic Chinese peasants under tyrannical warlords. A work in progress, to the point that tools and materials are left strewn about the exhibition space, the figures gradually dry, crack, and crumble to pieces, a reference perhaps to "finishing" element of time in some works of Marcel Duchamp. Even with Stephen Spielberg and artist Ai Weiwei pulling out of the artistic efforts to stage the Beijing Olympics this summer, the participation of Cai Guo-Qiang (along with film director Zhang Yimou and composer Chen Qigang -- reportedly not Tan Dun) will make the games of significant cultural interest, although the fear of the Chinese regime's interest in the event as propaganda must also be noted.

Cai Guo-Qiang's I Want to Believe will be at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in Manhattan, through May 28. At the same time, the smaller From Berlin to New York: Karl Nierendorf and the Guggenheim (through May 4) is also well worth seeing, a collection of paintings and other works at the nexus between post-figural work and real abstraction.

Bill Schmidt @ Paperwork

An artist I've admired since moving to Baltimore, quite a while ago, is Bill Schmidt. Bill, a multi-talented musician (playing the banjo, guitar, ukulele and fiddle) and a long-time teacher at the Maryland Institute and sculptor, has returned to painting, after a residency in Roche-en-Terre, France. The paintings in the exhibit at the Paperwork Gallery, Bill Schmidt: Outside of Time, are all gouache and colored pencil on paper along with several sculptural works.

A bit of an homage to Paul Klee's organic shapes and color, Schmidt's small (7"x5" and under) works are infused with organic forms, but also radiating electronic-like signals and, for me, what feels like an internal world of the human body, with its complex vascular system, molecular structures, and pulsating organs, held in their virtual world by a base of colorful grids. This patient is doing quite well.

The sculptures, for which Bill is most known, are either gently altered found objects, arranged on a shelf (pictured), or larger forms such as Pendule, made of stained wood and found objects, gracefully hanging from its perch. The shadow it casts creates a depth as seen in and around the shapes in the paintings.

Bill Schmidt: Outside of Time is at Paperworks Gallery through May 2nd, and there are more images on my Flickr site.

Don't Fence Me Out

I've haven't had the time to get out of the studio for some art viewing lately, but I have been keeping track of events. Here in Baltimore we're having a debate turned shouting and spitting match over an art collaboration between the Walters Art Museum and students from Professor George Ciscle's exhibition development seminar at the Maryland Institute. What started as a simple collaborative public art project, if there is such a thing, has turned into a heated debate over the public's right to the park, outrage over an unsightly-looking fence, whose paying for this, and even a public safety issue. The safety issue may be from the dog pooh left in plastic bags on the fence -- yuk.

Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square is an exhibit which is intended to bring attention to Mt. Vernon park, in collaboration with the Walter's current exhibit Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. The park, a designated National Landmark, is part of the neighborhood that surrounds the Museum. The controversy is over a tall, gold spray-painted chain link fence that surrounds each of the four public park squares radiating out from its centerpiece, the city's symbol and the country's first monument to George Washington. The monument itself had a controversial beginning, with complaints over its cost and fears that it would collapse, crushing the neighborhood. The fence is student artist Lee Freeman's contribution and will be removed on March 29th, allowing the public to access the park and view the work of nine other artists, whose interactive works will be set up throughout the four park squares.

The following concern was expressed to me by e-mail from George Ciscle:

We hope at some point everyone realizes this is only one artwork, not one exhibit of only one artist. Our fear is that once the other nine artists' works are installed in time for the March 29 opening/community celebration that the context of what has transpired will be lost in sacrifice to the exhibit as a whole.

I don't think it will. If anything the attention will draw more curious visitors to the site; it's turned into a perfect hands-on learning experience. Nothing grabs attention more than a public art project, especially when spring flowers are beginning to sprout and dog walkers want access to the park. I'll follow the progress of the collaboration and look forward to seeing the rest of the artwork. Sun article here.

2008 Whitney Biennial

The good, the not so, and the I don't get it? That pretty much sums up this year's Whitney Biennial. That's not a complaint either. Every two years the museum undertakes the impossible task of giving us a survey of the contemporary art scene. It will never be perfect, or inclusive enough, but it's totally worthwhile, at times profound, and I'm often left thinking, what? I find it best to arrive with an open mind and watch your step; so many artists, so little room, and lots of fragile art.

The 2008 installment valiantly shows the work of 81 artists, covering three floors of the museum and also using the Park Avenue Armory as an annex. In addition to exhibits the Armory will have a 24-hour dance marathon/endurance piece, in which the public is welcome to join, and a sleepover with ambient sound and a DJ. There will also be portrait sessions by artist Ellen Harvey, or if you're at your wit's end, a therapy session with artist Bert Rodriguez in a cube space of his design. Tequila from the Eduardo Sarabia-designed bar may be more effective.

A favorite of mine at the Armory is MK Guth's Ties of Protection and Safe Keeping, an interactive sculpture that asks the question, What is worth protecting? Visitors can write a response to this question on a piece of fabric that will be woven into an ever-growing braid, a wonderful heartfelt inclusive piece.

At the entrance to the museum is a project by Fritz Haeg entitled Animal Estates. The project examines the effect of displacement on wild animals by human development and is essentially an experiment in creating structures that enable resettlement of species in neighborhoods by experimenting with habitat design. In addition to the Whitney, so far the project has commissions in six other cities, including here in Baltimore. Check out the huge eagles' nest over the entrance: there are already birds chirping away inside.

Other standouts this year are Charles Long's thin sculptures of mixed media, papier-mâché, and found objects, reminiscent of Giacometti. Steven Prina's sound room packs away into custom crates that also double as seating: great sound. Amanda Ross-Ho creates very cool patterns and designs and the largest cat box ever!

Mika Rottenberg's barn yard with video monitors playing scenes of goats and girls still has me scratching my head. Jedediah Caesar has formed a huge block of resin material that resembles rainbow-colored candles melted together after a long night of partying. In addition to her portrait sessions at the armory, Ellen Harvey also has an installation at the Museum that I liked, titled Museum of Failure: Collection of Impossible Subjects & Invisible Self-Portraits: it has to be seen.

Familiar to New York gallery-goers, Mathew Brannon's clever word and image works are fun and spotlessly executed, not easy. A surprise in this whirlwind of video, sculpture, and installation is a painter who is a master of his craft, California artist Robert Bechtle. I rarely get to see his work, and the four pieces here are a real treat. They have a somber, introspective, Hopperesque feel to them; great painting.

There are many ways to fault this show, and in the next few weeks we'll get to hear many opinions. The point that bothers me most about this and other biennials has to be the quality of the work. This is a chance of a lifetime, and in many cases the work is sophmoric in execution. This is show time, folks! Thousands of visitors will descend on this one event, and too many of the works pass as a senior thesis. I feel like Simon on American Idol, but there is a responsibility for the curators and above all the artists to present their absolute best -- no dogging it.

The Whitney Biennial runs from March 6th through June 1st, so enjoy! Visit my Flickr site for many more pictures and content about the art and artists. I'll add to it over time.