PAINTED LADIES

Is a painting more than a drawing? One can say that drawing is about line and painting is about surface, offering richer physical and imaginative depths. The Jewish Museum’s exhibit Modigliani Unmasked intends to show that early in his career, between 1906 and 1915, the artist used drawing as his primary medium, exploring ideas that would shape, later, his iconic painted portraits.

Some artists produce drawings that are as compelling as their paintings and sculpture. Richard Serra’s oilstick drawings have the same density, gravity, and alchemical potential as his steel sculptures. Picasso’s drawings capture the inspirations, intellectual and cosmic, that lead to a painting. Modigliani’s drawings, in contrast, seem merely like tests. They map, with pencil line on paper, a composition before it’s committed to canvas. They are as tidy, as free from ambiguity, as a simple architectural plans. At the Jewish Museum, Modigliani’s drawings are hung beside the paintings that supersede them. In most cases there’s a direct translation from paper to canvas. The paintings have a gorgeous jewel-like sheen, but no more spatial or dramatic complexity than the drawings beside it. In fact Modigliani’s best known paintings retain the same strong graphic quality as the drawings; they’re lovely, stylized, emblems.

The first artwork one sees entering the exhibit is a portrait of the painter’s mistress Maude Abrantes called Nude in a Hat, and it is so good that it shames all the works that follow. The surface is heavy and clouded, build up in fat flat strokes of paint. Abrantes is glimpsed from above the waist from an odd angle, as if in passing, ready to slip out of the frame. She doesn’t offer herself easily; she is haunted, haughty, and willful. Her figure dissolves into her big black hat at the top, and into bare brushstrokes at the bottom. The painting is stormy and unsettled, raw and physical. A drawing might offer the same effects, but not one here does.

Amedeo Modigliani, Nude with a Hat, 1908. Oil on canvas. 31⅞ x 21¼ in. (81 × 54 cm). Reuben and Edith Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, Israel. Courtesy of the Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, Israel. Image courtesy University of Haifa.

January 20, 2018 by Nalina Moses

A STRANGE CHARISMA

The Met Breuer’s survey Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason 1950-1980 offers works that don’t conform to canonical modernism. Taking in the selection of painting, sculpture and videos installed in the building’s grand fourth floor gallery, against kookily skewed partitions, is like walking through a playground; it gives great pleasure. The artworks are, for the most part, eccentric, personal, whimsical, political, confusing, ugly, and viscerally powerful. A wall of Hanne Darboven’s tablet-sized paintings, each crowded with X’s and O’s on a quarter inch grid, evokes both the sterility and infinite possibility of Cartesian space. Eva Hesse’s ottoman-sized cube of metal grate, threaded with hundreds of lengths of dark rubber tubing, is oddly, warmly organic. Paul Thek’s painted wax models resembling raw chunks of flex, sealed inside cool acrylic vitrines, are both revolting and fascinating; one can’t turn away from them. These artworks posses a strange charisma; they give a middle finger to modernist cool.

Delirious impresses as a group show of outsiders – of stubborn, brilliant postwar artists who followed the visions in their heads rather than intellectual and commercial trends. In most cases the artist involves himself or herself actually, physically, personally. Bruce Nauman videotapes himself performing an abstract choreography, raising his leg and turning at fixed angles like a jewelry-box ballerina. Lee Lozano keeps a personal calendar of upcoming performances with felt-tipped marker, in text, in a spiral notebook. Ana Mendieta takes self-portraits with her face smashed against a square of glass, distorting her fine features into the mask of a hysteric, producing images as gruesome as Charcot’s nineteenth-century portraits of the insane. (In addition to everything else, this show is a love song to obsolete technologies, including videotape, xerox, analog photography, CRT television, and handheld calculators.)

One senses that these artist aren’t constructing a parallel modernism, but working in causal disregard to modernism, turning instead towards more intimate narratives of gender, race and brute power that at the time remained unexpressed. In that sense they were decades ahead of their more convention-bound contemporaries.

Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints—Face), 1972. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum and Art Resource.

January 13, 2018 by Nalina Moses

MIXING MOODS

Diller Scofidio + Renfro call the building they concocted for The Broad in downtown Los Angeles The Veil and the Vault. A better nickname might be The Worm in the Box. This museum opened in 2015 to house the contemporary art collection of Eli and Edyth Broad. It’s a three-story concrete block with, at the center, a knot of dark, narrow passages enclosing the escalator and stairs. The building’s functional spaces – offices, archives, restrooms and mechanical rooms – are packed on the second floor. At the stair landing here there’s a window into the vault, where hundreds of canvases are hung, as if asleep, on metal racks. The main gallery is on the top floor, where daylight falls through sculpted ceiling coffers.

The veil is the building’s exterior screen of lozenge-shaped concrete panels. Each one is the size of a car door, with an opening at the center the size of a basketball. Along the front facade, on Grand Avenue, these panels are suspended, dramatically, six feet off the building’s glazing. One enters through the corners here, where the panels have been sliced away. There’s nothing veil-like about this outer shell. It’s a stark, brutalist element that allows only pinched views of the outside (especially north, looking to Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall) and virtually nothing of the inside. From the sidewalk below or across the street, the building’s inner organization remains a mystery.

The parametric geometry of the concrete panels give The Broad a slick contemporary sheen. But its interior staircase feels neolithic, a rupture through layers of geological time. Its low, dark, rounded passages, finished in smooth concrete, have the contours of a cave dug by hand. The stair folds back on itself at a pinched angle on the second floor, as if its route hadn’t been plotted beforehand. The contrast between the building’s clotted, intestine-like passages and its hyper-modern shell give it an energy and tension that’s missing from the bloated contemporary artworks inside. At its heart are two very different tempers.

Photograph by Iwan Baan. Courtesy of The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

December 25, 2017 by Nalina Moses

LA GOTHIC

I use to think of David Hockney as a decorative painter. His work has a strong graphic quality – all flat fields of sweet pastel color – that’s poster-ready. Reproduced in magazines, his paintings look like pretty pictures for pretty people to hang in their pretty houses. So seeing the current Hockney retrospective at The Met is eye-opening. His canvases are substantial, over six feet tall and as wide as twelve feet. And each one commands the space in front of it, luring visitors for closer consideration. Its surface holds together in tension.

Hockney most famous paintings, from the 1960′s and 1970′s, that depict the homes of his well-to-do Los Angeles friends and collectors, make their own cultural anthropology. Outside there are tiled patios, flat green lawns, whistling sprinklers, and palm trees. Inside there are overstuffed chairs, low glass-topped tables, shag carpets, and primitivist sculptures. This glossy, untroubled world is populated by regal white-haired ladies in caftans, and fashionable young men in flared trousers and tube socks. It’s a place of wealth and repose. Southern California sunlight – wistful, shimmering, white – washes objects and people evenly, and gives the scenes an awesome quiet.

The richest canvases incorporate one of more human figures, nearly life-size. Hockney renders them with particularity and vitality; we believe that they are real, and that the world they inhabit is too. In The American Collectors Fred Weisman appears officious and detached, and Marcia Weisman appears direct and critical. The scene is clear, but rendered without pure perspectival logic. The lines of the gridded tile floor lead to different points, so that space seems folded right up against the surface of the canvas. The sky is an even blue fill, the tiles are a dotted pattern, and shadows are puddles of color. Fred and Marcia seem unfixed, disconnected from their landscape and also each other. They stand close to one another but stare – unperturbedly, expressionlessly – in different directions. They are objects in a strangely elegant still-life, energized by movements that we don’t see.

Image courtesy of David Hockney. American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), 1968, Acrylic on canvas, 84″x120″.

December 24, 2017 by Nalina Moses