SCRATCHINGS

To see Michelangelo’s drawings, on display now at The Met, is to see mastery. Even the tiniest, earliest studies for paintings and architecture projects – his scratchings – have an awesome sense of certainty. Michelangelo draws a lot, at different scales, and to different levels of finish, but he never draws incorrectly or unnecessarily. All his work, even his painting, is sculptural, about the expression of three-dimensional form. He seems to be continually pulling forms out of the air and pinning them down on the page.

Some drawings have a quick, off-the-cuff quality, as if noting an idea that might or might not be pursued. On a facade study for the Church of San Lorenzo, the left half is expressed with light ink strokes in shadow and ornament, while the right half remains in outline, as was the convention when presenting symmetrical designs. Simple shadows pop columns and frames forward dramatically. Figural sculptures along the roofline, depicted in rough streaks of ink, spring to life. They are recognizably human, and look as if they might jostle with one another or jump off the ledge. Even a drawing this diagrammatically conceived, non finito, has a rich physical and emotional presence.

Among many gifts, Michelangelo has a gift to see the reality of a thing in its smaller parts. Many drawings on display are fragments, sometimes surreal, depicting a single arm, thumb, claw, doorway, or base molding. Though most are studies for larger realized works, each is rendered with such sculptural richness so that it is, in itself, fully realized. The paper these fragments are drawn on, small squares of faded parchment, act as a film between this and the next world, upon which the figures leave a swift, bold impression.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564), with additions and restorations. Demonstration Drawing for the “First Design” of the Facade of San Lorenzo. Pen and brown ink, brush and two hues of brown wash, over underdrawing in leadpoint, compass work, ruling in leadpoint and stylus, black chalk, on six sheets of paper. Casa Buonarroti, Florence.

February 10, 2018 by Nalina Moses

DEMOLITIONS

A retrospective at The Bronx Museum of the Arts (BMA) honors Gordon Matta-Clark, whose work falls, alluringly, somewhere between theater, sculpture, land art, performance art, and political protest. (The exhibit’s subtitle is Anarchitect.) It might be best understood, loosely, as architectural intervention. Though I’m enamored of his work, the exhibition didn’t hold my interest.

The show has been thoughtfully curated and handsomely mounted. But the physical artifacts from Matta-Clark’s projects are inert. A patch of floor cut with a machine saw from a wood frame house looks, simply, like a chunk of building debris. It doesn’t have the mythic aura or syntactic richness of one of Rachel Whiteread’s architectural casts. Even photos (like the ones from Conical Intersect in 1975, offering views through a giant cone carved through a Parisian house) and video (like the one from Day’s End in 1975, showing the artist on a harness, with a blow torch, cutting a three-quarters-moon shape through a warehouse wall) have little effect.

What’s most remarkable about Matta-Clark’s work is its sense of the prehistoric. In Day’s End, by simply removing a chunk of wall, the artist connects us – simply, powerfully, mysteriously, unsentimentally – with the cosmos. Light falls through the opening onto the rough concrete floor of the building like a blessing; the sky tumbles inside. Matta-Clark’s work carries memory of a time when we were tethered indelibly to the movements of sun and stars. It also carries memory of the primal power of architecture. The structures he operates on are, typically, unoccupied and abandoned. After his transformation they become shrines, havens, temples. Matta-Clark’s actions aren’t merely tactical or intellectual; they allow magic again into the everyday world.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Day’s End (Pier 52), 1975, choromgenic print, 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm). ©Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York/London.

January 28, 2018 by Nalina Moses

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