PERSONAL STATEMENT

The pitch of the Hilda af Klint solo show at the Guggenheim is that this early twentieth-century Swedish painter, a woman, mastered an uncompromisingly abstract style before all the men who are ordinarily credited with it (i.e. Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky) did, and that she has been tragically under-recognized. The former may be true, and the latter certainly is. But a better pitch would have focused on the extraordinary personal language she forged. I can’t think of another modern painter who’s syntax is so rich and remains so internally consistent. All the works here are of a piece; all were clearly crafted by one person.

Klint’s forms are simple and evocative. The graceful, non-representational globules, strips and swirls she employs have a rational bent. These marks have precise meanings for her, which she documented neatly with pencil in ledgers, which are also here on display. They are deployed unerringly, on door-sized vertical canvases, against dull blank backdrops, in bright, slightly acrid, fruit-colored hues. The compositions recall biology illustrations, geometry diagrams, foreign alphabets, religious talismans, and alchemical equations. They have intellectual authority and graphic ease.

The paintings command attention from viewers rushing down the crowded ramps, a perfect foil for the blank white curving walls behind them. Klint wrote with hope that her great late-in-life series of canvases The Paintings for the Temple would one day be shown in a spiral temple. Now they have been.

Hilda af Klint, Altarpieces, Group X, No.1, 1915

August 14, 2019 by Nalina Moses

The most vivid element of anthropologist Mick Taussig’s multi-media happening Berlin Sun Theater, performed at the Whitney Museum last month, were the dances by Kyle Bukhari. Taussig’s goal was "the re-enchantment of nature in the age of global meltdown.“ Specifically, he examined ways our diminished experience of the sun has ruptured elemental physical and mythological connections. The piece unfolded around a personal, poetic text that Taussig read out loud on stage. Enriching the narrative were musical passages, film clips, project images from Taussig’s notebooks, and Bukhari’s dances. Cutting through the shadowy, ground-floor atrium of the Museum, Bukhari enacted routes, rotations and repetitions that recalled planetary motion. At certain moments, moments explosive with feeling, the dancer illustrated specific details from Taussig’s stories. He became, fleetingly, a tree wrestling upwards from the ground, a cloud of fireflies interrupting the darkness, and, in a big bubble-headed mask, the moon.

I had always thought that dance was inevitably tied to human stories because of its dependence on the body, that it was, essentially, about a person moving through the world. But Bukhari’s remarkable transformations showed otherwise. The ease with which he made himself a moon, spooking and enchanting audience members as he emerged among them, got at the majesty of that celestial body. It made clear that a dancer isn’t limited to human actions – he can be anything he imagines.

March 25, 2013 by Nalina Moses

The Met’s exhibit Matisse: In Search of True Painting takes a close look at the painter’s process. In the 1900’s, when he was still painting in ways that seem, now, amusingly conventional, he began making paintings in pairs, depicting the same subject (a still life, the view from a window, or a woman sitting in a chair) in two different styles. By the 1910’s, when he was working in ways that are more recognizably his own, he often made paintings in series of three or more, depicting the same subject in shifted styles and perspectives. Then, in the 1940’s, he began photographing a single painting at key stages in its development, as many as ten or twenty times, and examining these photographs as he finished the canvas.

In each of these methods, which are all illustrated at the show, Matisse began by drafting a scene from observation and then depicting it with more and more stylization; he moved from naturalism to symbolism. And yet he remained primarily concerned with the brute physical presence of things: the rootedness of figures in a room, in the landscape, or on a table. In each series of paintings in the exhibit the final depiction, which is achieved with the fewest number of elements (brushstrokes, colors, and shapes), communicates more swiftly and powerfully the presence of things. In one series from 1918, of the inside of a room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Nice, the artist begins by depicting things in great detail, showing us pieces of furniture and the view through the window, and even the pattern on the rug and the scalloped edges of the curtain. In a later painting from this series he narrows his focus to the scene around the window, showing figures sculpted in light and shadow, broken into brazen blocks of flat paint. Matisse’s method emphasizes the irreducibility of the chair, the violin and the window, of the space inside the room and the space outside the window. It makes a poetry of the concrete.

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin (Room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage), 1918. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

March 19, 2013 by Nalina Moses

It was with considerable reluctance that I moved off my couch on Friday evening to see the exhibit of Josef Albers drawings at the Morgan Library. I had little interest in seeing more of the artist’s canonical, clinical square-on-square (Homage to the Square) compositions that I felt I already knew too well. So I was taken aback at the work on display, which included studies for those square paintings, and wells as more robustly figural works that I’d never seen before. These drawings revealed a warmth and workmanship that, for the first time, brought the artist’s work to life for me.

Most remarkable were a series of studies Albers made while living in Mexico from 1947 to 1948 called Variant/Adobe. Based on the serene, severe geometries of a native house facade, they’re painstaking investigations into the alchemy of color and form. In each panel the artist constructs the same basic figure – an oblong house front with two windows – from different color schemes. There’s a gorgeous hesitancy to these pieces. The shapes are outlined lightly in pencil on rough blotter paper. Then Albers takes a color, straight from the tube, and, after applying some daub of it, selects another to try right alongside. It doesn’t look as if he’s always working incrementally, trying to pin down the exact right shade of yellow within a spectrum, but following crazy hunches, doing everything he can to allow the correct color, whatever it is, to reveal himself. Albers had always seemed like the most tiresome of painters, a pedagogue who painted what was already known to him in order to make it perfectly clear to everyone else. These drawings, that show him searching and struggling, show otherwise.

September 10, 2012 by Nalina Moses