The Lush, Gooey Passion of Chaim Soutine

Most painters I know get all gooey when Chaim Soutine's work is mentioned. The lush gooeyness of his paint has something to do with it, but more importantly the passion and exuberance of his regime is what most inspires such awe.

Life in Death: Still Lifes and Select Masterworks of Chaim Soutine is a small exhibit, just sixteen paintings, of grand importance, up now at Paul Kasmin Gallery's alternate space on 27th Street in Chelsea. Kasmin's space is small but museum quality and a perfect venue for an intimate experience with these rarely seen paintings.

To see these works on loan from private collections and not for sale, several artists were visiting the gallery on the day I was there, just a nose length away, inhaling the lush paint of this crazy wonderful artist. Soutine will do this to us. His brush was loaded with medium soaked paint and he worked fast. The slaughtered poultry seems fresh even to this day.

Lush Paint, Badass Swing Set

Edwin Dickinson was a great painter, one of those American originals and an inspiration to the abstract expressionists who followed. At the turn of the last century (can't believe I'm saying "last century") through the 70s he was making wistfully pared-down but lush paintings unlike no other. Only painting what was necessary, if the inspiration waned - full stop. It sounds simple enough, but how many of us know when to quit? We're still talking about painting right?

He studied at the Art Student's League with William Merritt Chase, though Whistler and Sargent were definitely on his mind. At Babcock's mid-town gallery there is a mini-retrospective of his work through January. If you wait until after the holiday rush it may be a little easier to maneuver through the 5th Avenue madness.

Just in time for Christmas Mark di Suvero has a big, bold welded steel swing set titled Paula's Pleasure. Filling the main gallery space at Paula Cooper, this is not a swing you would find in a lust-filled Fragonard painting. This massive bad-ass swing has room for all your closest friends -- what a holiday party this could be!


This is one of the best he's created in a while. Di Suvero just may be the last of the big steel wielders and welders around -- a national treasure.

Out and About: Chelsea Edition

Anton Kannemeyer has a way of drawing you in with his biting satire on race, then slapping you with some very unsettling commentary on post-colonial Africa. Kannemeyer, a co-editor of the South African satirical magazine Bitterkomix is having his second solo exhibit at Jack Shainman and is as unsparing as ever in his critique of colonization and its aftermath, by none other than the civilized world. Oh, the wake we leave.

As I viewed Joan Mitchell: The Last Paintings at Cheim & Read, I immediately thought of Monet's waterlilies, his last works. I've noticed this with several late-career artists, the pond or canvas becomes the ground as the paint takes on celestial dimensions.

To confirm that there is still money out there, Sotheby's this week sold a 60s-era Mitchell for a record $9.3 million. At the auction house that evening the pricey artworks were handled by temporary workers as the art handlers union continued to walk the picket line outside.

Another high-end show at Luhring Augustine is Richard Pousette-Dart's paintings and wire sculptures produced at his then-East River studio. The wire pieces stole the show for me. I've never had the opportunity to see them before, and they are very painterly and spontaneous -- very nice. Tennis star-turned-artist John McEnroe was in the gallery that day, too. I later saw Jessica Alba in Soho -- be still, my heart.

 
Walton Ford wowed me again with his latest large-scale watercolors of natural history and hilarious unnatural acts at Paul Kasmin. But not to be outdone, the fine ladies at Schroeder Romero have an equally off-beat retelling of history with Charles Browning's Beauty Trap paintings. Watteau, Gauguin, Renoir, Cole -- Browning borrows a little from many -- he's a very good painter, and sooo wrong!

From the "Things I want to see soon" category, the Maurizio Cattelan hanging at the Guggenheim, the brand new Clyfford Still Museum opening this month in Denver, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The latter may take a while to negotiate getting there. Crystal Bridges has taken some hits already, but don't underestimate the potential of great wealth. The Waltons could match the Getty dollar for dollar, so it will be interesting to see the direction that they choose.

Lastly, the value of Chelsea real estate continues to rise. West coast and Euro galleries are setting up outposts. This is not all bad, of course, but it makes it difficult for galleries with a smaller operating budget. The latest move is by Lohin Geduld, hopefully to another Chelsea location: "after eight wonderful years, we regret to announce the closing of Lohin Geduld Gallery's 25th Street location."

More Art Ramblings

So the de Kooning exhibit is a must, opening at the Museum of Modern Art on the 18th, but there's much more to see! As I was strolling around Chelsea, fashion week was in full fling. Skinny, chain smoking girls and boys where everywhere. Admittedly there where some stunningly beautiful girls mixed in, but what a freaky world they inhabit; that said, a fitting mix for the Chelsea art scene.

And speaking of art, Anne Neely's dripping, glowing, and otherwise manipulated paintings at Lohin Geduld brought me back for a second look. Very nice, complex surfaces. My Vermont neighbor Anne Pibal's small acrylic-on-aluminum wonders at Meulensteen are great: loving the washy backgrounds on some of them. Courtesy of the Pace Gallery, David Byrne has a huge bulging, inflatable earth sculpture with sound stuck in a garage on 28th Street? Lots of photo-ops with models when I was there.

Nick Cave is back at Jack Shainman with his new fashion week-friendly show, Forever-After. His sound suits, which he calls visual landscapes, camouflage the body, concealing race, gender, and class; they're amazing, beautifully crafted, yet as usual, a little creepy. The video of dancing suits is fun to watch. Digitally manipulated art can be cold and impersonal, and yes -- admit it -- we're all guilty sometimes. With new paintings at Jeff Bailey Kris Chatterson manages to manipulate his imagery and still keep his surfaces hands-on and painterly.

So many 9/11 tributes and I will admit I went underground this past week; however, Woodward Gallery has an interesting take, Charting Ground Zero: ten years after. The exhibit uses aerial shots with cartographic representation, laser imaging, and GPS tagging. It's as complex and impersonal as it sounds, until the image of the GPS locations of remains, fire equipment, and plane parts. Ten years later it's still unfathomable.

I think Alex Katz probably made a good decision moving from Pace to Gavin Brown. Not only is he now the big fish, but his paintings look great in the space. Nicole Etienne, at Sloan Fine Art, is all fantastical and dreamy: good shows, always worth a stop. Sloan's lease is up, and they may be moving to a new location -- watch their site. I happen to be quite proud of myself: I can finally find my way around the LES galleries without a map; well, I peek.

Loren Munk may be better known for his James Kalm Rough Cuts of gallery openings on his YouTube site, but his show up at Lesley Heller should qualify him as a master historian of the New York art world. His paintings or painted maps of the studio locations of art stars, both past and present, are quite thorough and entertaining. He could have a book in this somewhere or, maybe better, a game app.

Looking forward to Agnes Martin at Pace Gallery, opening the 15th, and Degas is coming to Boston. Brace yourselves, Beantown, the buses are coming!

Holy Heat Wave! Playing Catch Up

Was Germany more volatile from 1904/05 through the 20s than what we are experiencing in the world now? The devastation of WWI, the social conscience, the advent of expressionism -- the prints! Maybe it's happening more digitally in this era and I'm just smitten by the ink-pressed paper. Truly, I was in print heaven at the Museum of Modern Art's exhibit German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse.

This show has almost all of my favorites. Woodcuts from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, and Emil Nolde from the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups. Egon Schiele’s watercolors and dry point etchings are divine, including some from Oskar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, and George Grosz.

Otto Dix's series The War is present in its chilling entirety, which immediately brought to mind Ferdinand Botero's paintings at the Katzen Center, about the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Yes, art can still punch back.

I have renewed respect for Emile Nolde: he was so prolific. His lithograph Young Couple, as an example, is an edition of 112, with 68 color variations! That's how you push a print to the limits. He did that on a regular basis -- I am humbled, sir.

Two shows that will remain up until the end of the month that have stayed with me and are worth seeing are the lush, impastoed landscape and portrait paintings of Leon Kossoff at Mitchell-Innes & Nash and Louise Bourgeois's fabric work at Cheim Read, stunning patterns of woven color.

This week's heat wave lingering over New York had one comfort for me, besides the chilled Pinot Grigio: it came in a group show at Lohin Geduld. Lois Dodd's Open Poppy is an 11x11" oil on masonite that just blew me away with its subtle beauty. She does that to me often.

A few blocks over and a world away at Andrew Edlin is ZAP: Masters of Psychedelic Art. Curated by Gary Panter and Chris Byrne, the show's focus is the early days when Zap artists like Robert Crumb and Rick Griffin were reinventing the comic book. It's sick, depraved, and gooey and it's up through the 25th.

If you have never been to the Museum of Arts and Design before, go. Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities, a new exhibit featuring over thirty artists, opened this week. Organized around four themes -- Apocalyptic Archaeology, Dreams and Memories, Unnatural Nature, and Voyeur/Provocateur -- the artists have assembled video, paintings, and scaled models of imagined or actual scenes. Probably most known to Ionarts readers would be Joe Fig's reproductions of artist studios. This exhibit includes the summer studio of Chuck Close, Jackson Pollack in action, and a self-portrait, Fig's own studio.

Amy Bennet's Waiting Room, a depiction of arguably the most unsettling place to spend your time -- a doctor's office -- is spot on. In June Bum Park's video 3 crossing, a human hand orchestrates the movements of a parking lot -- I wish! -- and Tracey Snelling's Foot & Ass, KFC begs the question -- is KFC really American?

Belly Laughs and Haunting Beauty

Much has already been said about George Condo's retrospective Mental States at the New Museum. His riff on old master painting styles -- the likes of Goya, Velázquez, Picasso, and the Surrealists -- is wonderful madness. The regal subjects of Condo's imaginary portraits are oblivious to their bizarreness, driven to madness by a crazed world.

Divided into four sections -- Portraiture, Melancholia, Manic Society, and Abstraction -- this survey brings together over 80 paintings and shinny gold-coated bronze heads (which reminded me of Jeff Koons's Michael Jackson and Bubbles sculpture). I've been a fan of Condo's work for some time: he's a very good painter and when he nails his subjects you can't help the belly laugh. Several broke out in the galleries the day I visited, and that's all too rare and wonderful.

Another retrospective at the New Museum, that couldn't be more removed from Condo, is that of Lynda Benglis,. Benglis, whose career began in the 60s and 70s, creates work out of pigmented latex, cast aluminum, and phosphorous pigmented polyurethane.

Those tongue-twisting materials were at the time all new inventions of modern science, and Benglis boldly experimented with all of it. Luckily the curators have laid out a thoughtful, well-designed exhibit. With the cast aluminum shape titled Wing, it's at times a gravity-defying installation.

And lucky for me, Stephen Haller extends his shows a bit longer, as I wanted a second look at Linda Stojak's ghostly images. The solitary female figures that inhabit Stojak's canvases captivate. These dignified souls have had untold experiences, of which the lush complex painting surfaces are clues.

Skinny Models and Art

As the fall art season begins in New York and the last of the skinny models are sleeping off fashion week parties, I snuck into town and made a spin through Chelsea. I couldn’t stay around for the 50th anniversary party for Pace Gallery, but I understand it was star-packed. Fifty years is a good run for any business and Pace has consistently put up good shows and even expanded the brand to a very cool space in Beijing, which I mentioned from my trip last year. Happy birthday, Pace!

When I say a spin through Chelsea, it usually means I stop at 25 or 30 galleries. I either pop my head in or spend at least half an hour if the work is of interest to me. Here are the shows that stuck with me, in no particular order.

Since I’ve spent the summer gardening and drinking a lot of wine in a very nice garden, I really liked Joan Snyder’s new work at Betty Cuningham. They’re not just paintings but a profusion of splashed color, collaged berries, dirt, and twigs. They’re a physical, earthy embrace of the natural world. Joshua Marsh inaugurates Jeff Bailey’s new space on 27th Street, with his simplified but high-intensity colored (psychedelic-level) paintings. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, which is Marsh’s strength. He makes you pause just long enough to draw you in, and they reveal a gracious subtlety.

More subtlety exists within Kim Uchiyama’s paintings at Lohin Geduld. Small paintings of luscious bands of color, scuffed and layered, a little academic, but this painter enjoyed them. If you’re a Roy Lichtenstein fan, Mitchell-Innes and Nash has some early work, including some very cool study drawings for large paintings. The exhibit coincides with the upcoming Black and White exhibit opening at the Morgan Library and Museum on September 24th. Always keep the Morgan on your list when visiting the city: consistently some of the best exhibits in NYC.

In addition to Michael Mazur's paintings, Mary Ryan Gallery will often have a few gems on display in one of the side spaces. This month it's turn-of-the-century lithos and color woodblock prints.

Andrew Edlin is the exclusive representative for the estate of the outsider artist Henry Darger, and he therefore has some of the best works still in private hands. Darger is best known as the author-illustrator of The Story of the Vivian Girls, also known as The Realms of the Unreal, of The Glandeco-Angelininian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. The story is comprised of over 15,000 single-spaced typewritten pages and over 300 drawings. Darger's long rambling scrolls of watercolor and pencil drawings depict a fantasy world as fragile as the paper he worked on.


A lot of painting has come out of East Germany since the Wall came down. Before the Wall tumbled, artists in the East were subjected to strict censorship; easel painting, associated with bourgeois conspicuous consumption, was discouraged. Communist officials encouraged printmaking and graphic design for its reproducibility and visual communication. Many East German artists toyed with the limits placed on them by party officials, producing some exquisite limited edition posters. Over a hundred are now on view at NYU's Grey Art Gallery through December 4th.

And lastly, just the chandelier I've been searching for!

A Sizzling Summertime Post

One of the benefits of relocating from Baltimore to north of New York City is the train ride from Albany into the city. The Amtrak ambles along the Hudson River. It’s a magnificent sight even in the rain and fog. The river has come a long way from its toxic past, and it’s common to see a half-dozen bald eagles fishing the waters. Of course the Hudson still has a ways to go and will never return to its pristine past, but this week it’s impossible to gaze out the train window at the natural beauties and not consider the tragedy going on in the Gulf region. While the Hudson River has been tormented by industrial wastes for centuries, the Gulf appears to be all but lost, unrecoverable. The Hudson River Valley has long been a draw for artists, writers, and musicians, spawning a host of concerts, festivals, and gallery exhibits. As I’ve mentioned before, the town of Hudson, just a train stop from my studio, has one of the most active art scenes in the region (a great wine bar -- very important) and several good galleries.

John Davis consistently has some of the better shows of painters and sculptors, including this month’s exhibit, which includes Laurel Sucsy’s paintings. Small in scale, Sucsy’s works are a subtle patchwork of painterly strokes that reminded me of an aerial view of a lush landscape or an intently observed still life. At her best, Sucsy orchestrates a quiet unity from potential chaos. That’s a gift we should all be searching for. The current exhibit is up through July 18th.

Here's a list of shows to see further down the tracks, in NYC. Drawing is alive and well with Rackstraw Downes's exhibit at Betty Cunningham. Downes renders his austere forgotten landscapes with poise and grandeur. A.C.M.'s mixed media assemblages are wonders, and Rigo 23's ink drawings of predator drones, on recycled elephant dung (it's apparently available in Thailand), are a strong dose of reality at Andrew Edlin. Right next door at Lori Bookstein's almost new Chelsea space, whose shows have so far consistently wowed me, are Louise Kruger's not so folksy fabric wall hangings and carved wood figures.

Small, though rare at Jack Shainman, is good with Leslie Waynes's organically shaped sculptural paintings. It's a very unique process, with some very interesting results. Another interesting result with paint is at Lehman Maupin and Allison Schulnic's thickly impastoed painting Rug Girl. She's totally exposed and vulnerable, with a come-hither, confident beauty. Also in this show is a wonderful woven straw piece by Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno that seems to have sprouted from the gallery wall across the floor and may inhabit the whole space by August. Continuing with the exposed theme is Kelli Williams at Leo Koening: snakes and lace and flesh, oh my!

Steven Haller has another rare stunner of a painting by Linda Stojak in his summer show. Stojak apparently is not a prolific painter, but her intensely brooding work is worth the wait.

And many prints -- it may be because of the economy, but they're still in the 20k range: Sikkema Jenkins has a new suite of aquatints by Kara Walker and Amy Cutler, Elizabeth Peyton, and Lisa Yuskavage at Senior Shopmaker. Looking forward to a Thomas Nozkowski works on paper show there in February. Lastly for this post, a monumental 60s Mark Di Suvero at Paula Cooper: gotta love big industrial. My postings are growing scarce with summer upon us, but there is much to see and I'll try my best to post, including advanced lobster research in Maine this week.

Art Viewing in a Monsoon

Giovanni di Paolo, The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise

Happy (post-)International Museum Day! I know, who knew? I found out when I got to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and 5 billion people were packing the galleries. I went there to get some play time on Doug + Mike Starn's bamboo jungle gym on the roof called Big Bambú, but it was closed due to the monsoon rains that day. I will return! From what I've seen online it's well worth the visit; pictures to come.

I then attempted to enter the Picasso exhibit, but there was a bottle neck at the entrance -- fugettaboutit. So I took in a little Lippi, Botticelli, and Titian. Then some Velazquez, Goya, and Vermeer, ending up with a few big Gainsborogh portraits. So thankfully, if your Met blockbuster is overwhelmed or closed, the collection is so incredible you could wander for days and be inspired by the unexpected. Truly, an embarrassment of riches.

From the Met I plunged back into the monsoon weather and made my way up 5th Avenue past the Guggenheim, which had several hundred people queued up to enter, to the Cooper-Hewitt's National Design Triennial: Why Design Now?. A great question and some of the answers you may have already seen on news programs or sites such as TED. Several designs are very simple solutions that save lives, like the Solvatten solar safe water system or improved clay stoves for the Sudan, pictured, which are both more efficient and healthier than open pit cooking. Architecture and materials, solar and wind energy and clean transportation will be crucial to our future: this year's triennial has some of the best examples.

D.C. area readers may be familiar with the Loblolly House on the Eastern Shore of Maryland (named after the pine trees growing on the property). The structure is composed entirely of fabricated off-site and ready-made components and assembled with a wrench. The mechanical systems are also integrated into each component. Smart Cars, smart efficient trains, self-propelled cargo ships, folding composite bikes, wind, solar, and wave energy are all represented.

In my last post I mentioned that Amy Sillman hands down showed the best paintings this Spring. Then I saw Paul Resika's show at Lori Bookstein, what a difference a week makes. The long time Parsons teacher and mentor has pared his paintings down more than ever, making his iconic Provincetown lighthouse a near total abstract balancing act. This spring is now an official tie.

I'm getting a feel for the washy Zwirner Gallery style of painting. Luc Tuymans, Marcel Dzama and this month Jockum Nordstrom and Mamma Andersson display that similar washy-ness although their themes vary. Nordstrom pushes a naive/folkart style and Andersson, like Dzama, paints a more formal figure in contemporary situations. Definitely need a second look before this show closes.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has some stunning portraits at Jack Shainman: large, spare, yet boldly painted. I thought of the Goyas I had just seen earlier at the Met.

Lohin Geduld Gallery has been on a roll for me lately with shows of paintings by Kyle Staver, Albert Kresch, and now Sarah Lutz. They feel like wonderful goopy melting still lifes or kaleidoscopic overflowing bubble baths, maybe a wonderland garden that Alice would approve of. They made me smile and they're up through June 5th.

My last stop on this soppy day was to see the Michael Hoeh (better known as Mike @ Mao or super photo collector) curated group photography show at Winkleman Gallery. The theme, pertinent for the day, is American ReConstruction, from disasters of the natural or contrived - thank you again, Wall Streeters. Mathew Albanese is quite literal with his Tornado and Volcano c-prints. Albanese constructs the environments in his studio, then using a variety of techniques and lighting rains the wrath of God on his personal swath of earth. Good stuff and a nice show, Mike.

A Little More from Chelsea

I took another stroll through the Dan Flavin installation at David Zwirner this past week, and it's a rare and fragile beauty. The fluorescent tubes he used are no longer produced, so how many opportunities remain to experience this particular glow? It's up through the 19th.

Another glowing exhibit in a ghostly way is Bill Viola's shifting lights and shadows from video projections at James Cohan. Viola was invited by Pope Benedict XVI, along with other cultural figures, to the Sistine Chapel for a dialogue on the relationship between faith and art. He originally declined the November 21st event but later decided to attend, stating, "In these times of instability and conflict there is growing recognition by both secular and religious institutions that peace and understanding will not be possible without the universal language and common vision that only art can provide. Artists of all cultures and traditions have a vital role to play in envisioning this new future and inspiring the creative dialogue necessary for its success." I wonder what was served for lunch?

Just opened at Andrew Edlin's new space is a 34-artist mash titled Out Of Order, which looked very interesting as the crew was installing it. I shall return.

Next door at Alexander and Bonin, watercolorist and etcher extraordinaire Sylvia Plimack Mangold summons the inspiration of a little-known German artist, Lovis Corinth (1858-1925), for a dual exhibit. Their temperaments are quite different, other than a devotion to nature, especially trees, but what a fabulous display of drypoint etchings. The haunting Mangold drypoint, an aquatint self-portrait, would make a nice Christmas present -- ahem...

The Whitney Museum announced the names of the artists exhibiting in the 2010 Biennial: only 55 artists, down from 100 in 2006, a reflection of the lean times maybe. The event, organized by the Italian-born curator Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, 29, a senior curatorial assistant at the museum, runs from February 25 through May 30. As usual it's heavy on NYC-based artists but has an age range from 23 to 75. I knew all important art is made in the city, but it's nice to know that it can be made past the age of 30. I'll be at the preview and will post lots of pictures and tweets.

And speaking of Christmas, Walton Ford's new work at Paul Kasmin will bring that joyful spirit to you! Red just says Christmas to me.

The Not In Miami Edition

While most art world players were sunning themselves in Miami this past week at the art fairs, crossing fingers that the art market will make a U-turn, it wasn't a bad time to be art gazing in NYC.


For those on a meditative, spiritual quest, Dan Flavin's Series and Progressions is an old school must-see at David Zwirner. Zwirner's galleries and the large garage space are absolutely glowing with gorgeous light from Flavin's signature tubes of color.

I also consider Richard Serra's gargantuan steel caverns to be spiritual in a cathedral-like way as I bravely walk through their maze-like installations. The ones in the latest exhibit at Gagosian Gallery just totally creeped me out! They seem simple in size: maybe once or twice around and I'd be out of the tilting steel walls before they collapsed on me. But no, it went around and around and around, making me feel a little vulnerable. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

I can't say I didn't like David Hockney's big luscious English countryside landscapes at Pace/Wildenstein. They're bold, have moments of pure Hockney genius, but there is something about his acrylic paint that literally falls flat for me. It could possibly be remedied with a gloss medium, maybe not, but it can be disappointing. Nevertheless Hockney is another must-see: since moving back to England we may see less of his work.


Sean Scully's new paintings at Galerie Lelong still hold up well for me. He's been making these paintings for years, always finding another subtle variation. Unlike Hockney he appears to add a thick coat of high-gloss varnish. To varnish or not to varnish, it's a very personal choice for each painter.

With thoughts of the family Thanksgiving table fresh in my mind, Nicole Eisenman jolted my memory back to earth, in her latest at Leo Koening: hilarious, some of her best paintings.

Andrew Edlin has some of the finest examples of Outsider Art, and he just reopened a beautiful new space on 10th Avenue, recently vacated by Belleweather. Lori Bookstein has also moved to Chelsea, opening right next door to Edlin. I enjoy her exhibits but rarely made it uptown to 57th Street. This is a welcome move for me. I unfortunately missed her opening exhibit with Sharon Horvath's paintings, but the current show of Varujan Boghosian's assemblages is quite good. Boghosian has a delicate hand, giving new life and mystery to found and scavenged objects. I'm headed back this week for another look.

Jaime Pitarch has the holiday spirit at Spencer Brownstone. As always more images on Flickr.

Facebook Portraits

Sadly I’m missing the energy and the crowds of the season openings in Chelsea and the Lower East Side, but I’ll get back to see the shows before they close. I did get to see some of the shows that are already open, or in some cases the door was open.

I've been wondering where Facebook will be in a year: will it be as popular as it is now, or will we have moved on to completely new options? In any case Matt Held’s portraits of Facebookers, up now at Denise Bibro’s Platform space, is an archive of a moment in time. You may not recognize any of the faces, but Held certainly captures the essence of the Facebook icon images we have become accustomed to seeing every time we log on to our accounts: the sexy look, the "at the beach" look, or the family group shot. The portraits in this show are more edgy than most may be used to, depending on the characters that you choose to friend: I happen to have a few of them. If you’re a Facebooker you are sure to enjoy this exhibit. Matt is on to something here that goes beyond mere portraiture: he’s capturing a moment in the era of electronic social media, giving it a human face.

In 1971, Geoff Bardon, a 30-year-old white Australian artist, took a job at the Aboriginal relocation community of Papunya, teaching art to the children. Bardon encouraged his new students to paint in their traditional indigenous style, mark making that dates back to well over 10,000 years, instead of the western cowboy and Indian scenes they had been taught. They did, with great enthusiasm. Soon the elders of the community came to Bardon to ask if he would also supply them with art supplies so they too could record their own stories in the traditional manner.

By now we have all seen examples of this work, reproduced in the thousands -- paintings, prints, posters, and all sorts of gift items. It has become a multi-billion dollar business. Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, now at NYU's Grey Art Gallery is an exhibit of some 50 of the finest examples from the original group of artists, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, and Mick Namararri Tjapaltjarri -- the real deal. Many of them are now gone, but they used paint and brushes on wood and canvas, where traditionally they would have made impermanent sand or body paintings. Thus they left us a more permanent record of their dream states and life experiences (finding water in the desert is a common image), using highly personal coded sequences of line and patterns of dots. It literally traces back to the origins of visual language.

Another addition to the Fall Museum Roundup that I look forward to seeing is William Blake's World: A New Heaven Is Begun at the Morgan Library. The Morgan has an amazing collection.

This post was compiled by Wifi @ 30,000'.