NO ONE’S HOME

There’s a show of Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi at Scandinavia House called, misleadingly, Painting Tranquility. Hammershøi is famous for the mute, enigmatic tone of his domestic interiors. These are composed like Vermeer’s, with views into small rooms, often populated by a lone young woman. The spaces are uncluttered and shadowed, their surfaces revealed by daylight that spills inside through half-open doors and windows.

It’s a disservice to compare Hammershøi to Vermeer, whose masterful handling of light and volume give them a ravishing optical lyricism. And it’s a disservice to see Hammershøi’s interiors, as they’re displayed here, alongside his portraits, landscapes and street scenes, which are less skillfully rendered. The Danish painter doesn’t handle the human figure, the landscape, or architecture with ease. And his handling of light and color, in all genres, remains muddled, something that’s hard to understand in reproductions. One wall caption explains that he liked to paint through drizzle. This is apparent in the grey cast of the canvases, that feel as if they need to be wiped clean.

Hammershøi is often considered the Scandinavian Edward Hopper, whose views capture a cultural spirit, specifically, that of bourgeois nineteenth-century Copenhagen. The wall texts describe the canvases as “melancholic,” “contemplative and claustrophobic,” with “evacuated narrative.” They’re unsettling because they’re empty, not just of people and activity, but of emotional content. As one approaches a painting, to enter it fully, it dissolves back into paint. One searches these stills scenes for flashes of loneliness, fear and despair, and finds nothing. If anything, one comes away with a new appreciation for Hopper (and Nolde and Munch too), whose paintings are throbbing, haunted, devastating. By comparison those by Hammershøi aren’t tranquil; they’re banal.

Vilhelm Hammershøi, View of Jægersborg Allé. Gentofte, Interior with the Artist’s Easel, 1910. Oil on canvas, Statens Museum for Kunst.

November 08, 2015 by Nalina Moses

STILLED LIFE

Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’s current show at Zwirner scatters digital prints, in various sizes and formats, throughout the rooms of the gallery. There are posters hung on the walls with clips, 3x5 prints set flat on plywood tables, and artwork-sized images in frames. Though eccentric, the installation is elegant and sincere. At a time when anyone with a smartphone and an Instagram account uses photographs to craft a personal identity, Tillmans’ speak richly, and simply, about his life.

These photographs don’t fall into a narrative with predictable crescendos, but, taken together, give a complex, vivid account. There are tender snapshots of lovers and friends. There are archly-composed still-lifes of teeming ashtrays and plates of rotting vegetables. There are views of messy studio spaces and the laundry room in an apartment. There are proofs with random printing errors and misaligned text. There are street photos of a political protest in Osaka. And there are foggy cellphone shots of nightclub goings-on.

Some of these are images of jaw-dropping beauty. One glossy color poster shows weeds rising from the cracks between mossy paving stones. Another shows a field of clouds at daybreak through an airplane window. These views are elegaic. They speak to photography’s ability to still time to one second and also to capture one’s life – one’s fragile, flickering emotional state – at that second. The show’s presentation, that enlarges certain moments and shrinks others, is true to the way memory works – the way significant events (weddings, deaths, fights) can be nearly forgotten, while mundane events (a walk home from a party, a conversation with a stranger on the train, a fragmented dream) can be recalled, forever, indelibly. It’s these moments that matter, and photography contains them.

Wolfgang Tillmans, “Weed,” 2014, Inkjet print on paper, clips, 161 3/4″ x 108 1/8". Courtesy Wolfgang Tillmans and David Zwirner.

October 24, 2015 by Nalina Moses

MIXED MEDIA

Kolumba, the art gallery of the archdiocese of Koln, was designed by architect Peter Zumthor on a site rich with archaeological remains. And while it shows the ruins with abject theatricality, it shows artworks with tremendous grace. The three-story building is planned simply: it has a large, L-shaped footprint, with small box-like galleries dropped inside the corners of each floor. The plan is so simple that it looks foolish in the visitor’s brochure, like a student exercise in space planning. The large central spaces receive daylight from full-height windows, draped in shivering silver silk curtains. And the smaller galleries receive daylight through clerestories of clouded glass. The spaces have generous, cube-like proportions. The concrete on the floors, walls and ceilings has a smooth, cool grey finish. The walls are entirely blank. Daylight rolls through like mist, softening the purposefully reduced interiors. One of my friends, a painter, said, simply, “This is a great place to show art.”

The museum houses changing exhibits, and when we visited there was a show that paired contemporary German artworks with religious artifacts from the diocesan archives. So a vitrine showing a funky necklace of plastic beads sat beside one showing a centuries-old gold cross. A tender Madonna-and-child figurine sat on a pedestal in front of a huge, cartoonish painting of woodpeckers. This arrangement didn’t serve the old or new art well. It diminished the raw, atavistic power of the religious objects, and made the contemporary art seem flaky.

The building’s interiors, in their platonic proportions and astounding luminosity, captured something close to the spiritual. It’s unfortunate that the religious artifacts on display – a tabernacle trimmed with colored stones, a crucifixion carved from ivory, immense gold chalices – didn’t have the chance.

September 14, 2015 by Nalina Moses

THE MODEL IS PRESENT

Is a portrait, in the end, about the subject, the artist, or the fragile connection between the two? Walking through the Met’s expansive exhibit Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, I saw works supporting every point of view. But my favorite portraits were those in the first gallery, of the men and women Sargent befriended when he was a student in Paris in the early 1880′s. These portraits are all about the subject.

They’re composed simply. In each one a handsomely-dressed man or woman sits at the center of the canvas, against a simple backdrop, and addresses the viewer directly. Sargent renders each of their faces with an extraordinary emotional acuity, showing just what the subject looks like, and also, right through this, who he or she really is. (The psychological depth does nothing to diminish the richness of the surface. Sargent’s brushstroke is virtuostic in capturing physical detail: a shadowed corner, a splash of sunlight, the finish of pink velvet, the glint of diamonds.)

From looking at these portraits we understand that the writer and translator Madame Allouard-Jouan is demanding, world-weary, and refined. We understand that playwright Edouard Pailleron is pragmatic, honest, and impatient. We understand, in Sargent’s most famous painting, that Madame X, (Amélie Gautreau) is self-conscious, petty and proud. And we understand, in the most magnificent painting in the exhibit, that Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran, Sargent’s teacher, is intense, intelligent, and unorthodox. Though they follow formal conventions of Victorian portraiture, these works aren’t mannered. In their blunt expression of character, they are wild.

September 08, 2015 by Nalina Moses