Tyler Green
Art-focused Journalism by Tyler Green

Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

The Modern Art Notes Podcast: Donald Judd

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Marianne Stockebrand, the curator of “Donald Judd: The Multicolored Works” and the former director of the Chinati Foundation. The program was taped before a live audience at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, where “The Multicolored Works” is on view through January 4.

This is the first museum exhibition to focus on Judd’s use of color, and more specifically Judd’s use of color in the 1980s, when he discovered a process that enabled a new kind of sculpture. “The Multicolored Works” includes 23 Judd sculptures as well as works on paper and collages from the collection of the Judd Foundation that reveal Judd’s creative process.

Stockebrand and I discussed:

  • How Judd quite suddenly shifted from making works with no more than two colors to making pieces with many colors;
  • Why Judd thought artists had to reclaim color from science;
  • How Judd came to the colors he used — and how a painting he remembered seeing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art helped him to one of the colors he used; and
  • The relationship between Judd’s early paintings and these late sculptures.

How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunesSoundCloudStitcher or RSS. Stream the program at MANPodcast.com.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license. Special thanks to Philip Matthews and Shane Simmons for their help with this week’s show.

For links images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, please click through to the jump.

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Ten thoughts on the new St. Louis Chipperfield

The Saint Louis Art Museum opens its new David Chipperfield-designed wing next month. The addition provides the museum with 30 percent more gallery space than it has now, 21 new galleries in all, including new galleries for special exhibitions. (The museum’s former special exhibitions space has been converted into European painting, sculpture and works on paper galleries.)

With the exception of one antiquities gallery that serves as one of the bridges from SLAM’s 1904 Cass Gilbert masterpiece into the Chipperfield, all of the new art spaces have been installed with modern and contemporary art. Construction of the new wing cost $130 million. As part of the campaign for the building, the museum raised $32 million for its endowment, raising its endowment total to $127 million. (The museum’s most significant source of funding is Saint Louis city and county taxpayers, who fund the museum through a regional property tax.)

So how is it? I previewed the building and the installations last week. Some thoughts (with one nota bene: over the years I’ve noticed that links to SLAM’s collection are notably fugitive, so here’s hoping…):

1.) Viewed from almost anywhere in Forest Park, the grand city park in which the museum is sited, the building is decidedly unobtrusive and low-profile. Heck, from many popular parts of the park, such as the Grand Basin or along Lagoon Drive, it’s invisible.  The building is almost as unnoticeable when you’re standing right in front of it. That’s the right design decision: The front and rear exterior facades of Gilbert’s original building (below left) are among his best work, and among the most awesome museum facades in America. Nothing Chipperfield could have done could have successfully competed with them. So he didn’t. (Forest Park factoid: It’s 50 percent bigger than New York’s Central Park.)

2.) Visitors may enter the museum the traditional way, through the Gilbert, or in two new ways: Through a just-built parking garage under the Chipperfield addition or through the front door of the Chipperfield. The museum expects the three entrances to receive roughly equal use. Visitors entering the Chipperfield will see a modest, low-slung desk which will provide information and ticketing for special exhibitions. The museum’s opening exhibition is of German contemporary art from the museum’s outstanding collection (SLAM is second only to MoMA in the U.S. in collecting German contemporary). SLAM is a free museum, by opening with an exhibition from its own collection, even the special exhibition galleries will be free. Upon entering the Chipperfield visitors will immediately see art: If they come up a set of stairs from the parking garage, they’ll be greeted by this Georg Baselitz. Visitors entering from the park will be greeted by an El Anatsui on the right and a David Smith and a Richard Diebenkorn on the left.

3.) What visitors will not see is a football-field-sized party-rentals space anywhere in the Chipperfield. SLAM has bucked — and hopefully begun the end of — the trend of museums expanding in part to build massive voids that they may lease out for events. (Spaces for this purpose at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond damaged those expansions by cleaving the new galleries from the long-time galleries, that is,  from the whole of the museum. Cleveland has done it too, but I haven’t seen that one yet.) St. Louis deserves significant credit for prioritizing the experience of art over party-rentals.

4.) The museum’s new galleries are exceptional and vary widely in size. There is no obvious route through them. The architectural detailing is impressive (I’m not sure I found a single spot where the floating walls in the gallery ever touched the ground) and the light is terrific. Forest Park is visible from many places in the galleries, peek-a-boos that recall the way Yoshio Taniguchi let New York into his building for the Museum of Modern Art. The light in the collection galleries is filtered through square concrete vaults, which soften it and which seem to spread it evenly throughout spaces. Sound-dampening material, embedded in the gallery walls, leaves the spaces unusually (and blissfully) quiet.

5.) The high quality of Saint Louis’ collection of modern art is well-known, but because of a lack of significant space for contemporary art, those holdings are less well-known. The new wing will change that. The museum has stuffed all 21 galleries with contemporary art (a couple of galleries feature pre-Vietnam art from Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and the like). [Image: Jackson Pollock, Number 3, 1950, 1950.]

6.) Starting with the first painting in the contemporary collection galleries, this terrific 2006 Julie Mehretu (below), the initial installation is chock full of great art. Listing particularly strong works would require a near-recitation of the entire hang, but my favorite moments included seeing this substantial Richard Long in natural light, arguably the first great large Frank Stella, a wonderful sight-line from a wonderful Sam Francis to this 1994 Christopher Wool, a two-Philip Guston wall that provides a rare opportunity to compare a black-and-white abstraction to a colorful one, And I loved seeing this Jane Fonda painting by the underrated Mel Ramos.

7.) And the Germans! As I noted above, SLAM is opening the Chipperfield with its seven special exhibition galleries hung with highlights from its collection of contemporary German art, from Polke to Beuys to Bechers to von Heyl. The installation includes what might be the two best Richters in America, Betty and the 1989  November, December, January triptych, which may be Richter’s most significant squeegee paintings. (Chicago might have a case to make.) The museum has particularly strong examples of Penck, Baselitz, Kiefer and Lüpertz. [Image: Julie Mehretu, Grey Space (distractor), 2006.]

8.) As in any initial installation, there are a few missteps: Numerous artworks that should be placed on the gallery floor, such as a Larry Bell and this Anne Truitt, are sited on platforms. Seeing a sassy Duane Hanson removed from the gallery floor is to not see a Duane Hanson at all. The museum’s intent is obviously to protect the artworks, but the result neuters the art and defies the artists’ intents. For example, at six feet tall, the Truitt is scaled to the human body. Putting it on a plinth destroys that relationship, and with it much of the power of the work. In another gallery, curators effectively bisected this 1969 Donald Judd by installing it on top of a long floor vent.

9.) One artwork should generate headlines and buzz: SLAM has installed Richard Serra’s fragile masterpiece 1968 untitled cast rubber sculpture. It is an enormously powerful piece, a mixture of power and delicacy in orange.  (It is one of the many, many great Serras in St. Louis, America’s best city for Serra.) The rest of the artworks in the gallery — including strong work by Lynda Benglis and Bruce Nauman — are rendered invisible by its gravity. I believe that the piece has only been installed one other time since the early 1970s, in 2003.

9a.) Interesting: A wall-sized Leonard Drew, installed in the gallery next to the Serra and visible from a sightline that includes the Serra, stands up to it pretty well. [Image: Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1988.]

10.) Part of the success of curators Simon Kelly and Tricia Paik’s initial installation is that it suggests that SLAM under-built. On opening day, the Chipperfield will be stuffed to bursting with SLAM’s collection, and in a few months one-third of these galleries will be given over to special exhibitions. With the exception of a couple of weak Kenneth Nolands (they droop in the presence of marvelous the Ellsworth Kelly, Stella, Morris Louis and Judd with which they share a gallery) and an inert Helen Frankenthaler, there’s no filler here. In a few months, about one-third of this art will move into storage. (And, of course, the museum continues to collect.)

I don’t know if SLAM suffered from a failure of imagination, timidity or from something else. Certainly credit the museum for building within its means and for raising what seems to be enough new endowment (and adding a new revenue generator: the garage) to cover increased operating costs.

But still: While what’s here is very good, it seems a step rather than a culmination. The museum’s fundraising goal was a relatively modest $145 million. It raised $160 million. (Kansas City, a metropolitan area smaller and significantly less wealthy than Saint Louis, raised $370 million in its last capital campaign.) Ironically, the initial installation of the Chipperfield is of such high quality that it argues SLAM should have been significantly more ambitious. Hopefully the new building and the great art within it will motivate the museum in that direction.

Back Wednesday

I’m traveling today. Back tomorrow.

Weekend roundup

The Modern Art Notes Podcast: Eric Fischl

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Eric Fischl. His new memoir “Bad Boy,” co-written with Michael Stone, has just been published by Crown. In the book, Fischl talks about growing up on Long Island, his mother’s alcoholism and suicide, his discovery of art, his meteoric rise in the New York art world during the cocaine-fueled 1980s, how he was motivated to become sober and how his travels and life experiences have fueled his work in the decades since. It’s a strikingly good read. Art students and young artists, no matter whether they’re painters or ardent conceptualists, will find it particularly interesting: Fischl talks about the process of figuring out how to become — and remain — an artist with candor and insight.

Fischl was one of the most prominent American painters to emerge in New York in the 1980s. He was featured in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986, just four years after his first solo gallery show. Since then he’s been the subject of exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Musee Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld and more. His sculpture of Arthur Ashe (2000) at the Billie Jean King U.S. National Tennis Center is one of the most popular public artworks in New York. Images of much of Fischl’s work is available on his website.

Among the topics we discuss are:

  • The rules Fischl wrote for himself when it came to meeting the demands of the then-newly booming art market;
  • How his mother’s alcoholism and eventual suicide helped fuel his art;
  • Why “emotional content,” a phrase Fischl uses repeatedly in the book, is important to his art; and
  • Painters about whom Fischl thinks a great deal, including Ribera and Richard Diebenkorn.

On the second segment, Kate Shepherd talks about her work, particularly her interest in the primary colors. Her work is included in the group show “The Artist’s Palette: The Primary Colors on Paper” at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. It’s on view through June 2. Shepherd’s work has been the subject of exhibitions at the Chinati Foundation and at The Phillips Collection. Her work is in the collection of museums such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Seattle Art Museum. Many images of Shepherd’s work are available at her website.

How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunesSoundCloudStitcher or RSS.Stream the program at MANPodcast.com.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license.

For links images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, please click through to the jump.

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Considering Winogrand’s “Women are Beautiful”

Garry Winogrand’s “Women are Beautiful” photographs are curatorial darlings: In the last couple years they’ve been on view in half a dozen museums. (Right now many of the pictures are up at the Art Institute of Chicago.)

One place you won’t find them — at least more than two or three of them — is in Leo Rubinfien’s Winogrand retrospective, which is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through June 2. After the show leaves SFMOMA it will travel to the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jeu de Paume and to the Foundacion MAPFRE. It’s something I asked Rubinfien about when he was a guest on Episode No. 70 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast. And I’m not the only one to lock in on that question: Take a look at what Nick Shere had to say here. And Denver Art Museum curator Eric Paddock exhibited the photographs in 2012 and we discussed them here.

For my column in the May issue of Modern Painters magazine, I went back and looked at the photos myself, to see if they worked or if they were aestheticized voyeurism. Here’s part of what I found:

Certainly nubility is abundant. Some of the pictures, such as 1971’s Aspen of several waitresses at an outdoor eatery, veer toward ogling. Plenty of others are so obviously the gelatin silver print version of teenaged gawking that I wonder if Winogrand picked up his jaw up from the sidewalk before taking the picture. Particularly uncomfortable is a photograph of women emerging from a park bathroom.

But by no means is that all that’s here. In a number of pictures, Winogrand seems to be riffing on the history of painting (a common thread that runs through the work of otherwise unalike photographers of the era, such as Lewis Baltz and Ray K. Metzker). In 1970’s Toronto Winogrand riffs on the lake-park-and-tree composition of Seurat’s 1884-86 A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.

Several pictures play with the traditional painting subject of Arcadia. An untitled photograph from around 1970 shows a woman reclining in a park while reading a book in front of a tree. It’s a traditional Arcadian image, perhaps informed by Matisse’s 1905-06 Le Bonheur de Vivre or his 1908-09 Nymph and Satyr, with only a Pan missing from the pastoral. (And then you realize that in place of the satyr, Winogrand was there with his camera.)

For the rest, check out this month’s issue. It’s a good one. Look for it at a newsstand near you, or subscribe for $20!

Huntington acquires rare Watkins album

The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens has acquired a rare, intact Carleton Watkins album of the Sunny Slope farm and distillery. The album, which dates to the 1880s, includes 27 circular photographs that measure five inches in diameter on six-and-a-half-inch-square paper. Intact Watkins albums are rare, and a number of  albums have been broken up in recent years. The Huntington album is, as far as I can tell, the only known intact album of Watkins’ circular prints.

“It’s so unusual,  so rare,” Huntington photography curator Jennifer Watts told me. “Basically through neglect there may be some Watkins albums that are still out there. I can’t think of another album like this that I’ve seen. There’s certainly never been an example here going back many decades.”

The album was donated to the Huntington by the great-grandson of L. J. Rose, a Bavarian immigrant who developed Sunny Slope. According to the Lewis Publishing Co.’s 1899 “An Illustrated History of Los Angeles County, California,” Rose came to the United States with his family as a 12-year-old. His parents settled in New Orleans before moving up the Mississippi River to the Waterloo, Iowa area. As an adult, L.J. tried to make a go of farming in Iowa and later Missouri, but after a couple of devastating winters in 1858 he decided to try his luck in California. Rose was one of the first migrants to use the just-opened route west along the thirty-fifth parallel. The journey was so rough that Rose stopped for almost two years in Santa Fe, where he operated a hotel called “La Fonda” (which is unrelated to the La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe today).

When Rose finally reached California in 1860, he plowed the $14,000 he made from his hotel into a property about two miles from the San Gabriel Mission (which still stands). The estate eventually covered 2,000 acres, on which Rose planted fruit trees and grapes. In time, the Roses became some of the first Southern Californians to make wine and brandy. By the mid-to-late 1880s Sunny Slope was producing 750,000 gallons of wine and 125,000 gallons of brandy per year and the farm’s brands were considered among America’s finest. Like many self-made men of the era, Rose loved to raise and train horses, though it’s not clear if Rose kept his horses at Sunny Slope or at Rosemeade, his other, nearby estate, or at both.  (Rosemeade which later gave its name to the Los Angeles suburb of Rosemead.) Many of Rose’s horses, such as “Stamboul,” were among the fastest and most valuable steeds in America.

The Sunny Slope estate wasn’t just a working farm and distillery, but a popular tourist attraction as well. This provides one possible reason the album exists: Watts told me that it was unclear if Rose commissioned the album from Watkins or if Watkins presented it as a gift in the hopes of drumming up future work or in the hopes of providing images to tourists who visited Sunny Slope.

“One of the things that intrigues me about this album is why,” Watts said. “If Watkins does it after 1880, which he must have, was he trying to get money and offered the ability to make a deluxe album for the family? Or did the Roses come to him and commission this? I can’t figure out the timing and why they’d do it.”

One possible reason is that it is marketing: The Rose family sold Sunny Slope to British investors for over $1 million in 1887, a sum equal to about $25 million today. It would not have been unusual for Watkins to have produced a series of photographs that a property-owner might present to prospective investors or buyers. (This was a function Watkins fulfilled for clients as early as the late 1850s.) Watkins is known to have been in Kern County, California in the late 1880s, but to date it is not known that he was as far south as San Gabriel in that period. However, as we’ll see in a minute, there are pictures in the album that wouldn’t seem to fit this potential use.

I saw the album last November before the Huntington formally acquired it. At just slightly longer than 10 inches square and an inch-and-a-half deep, the album was barely too big to fit into my hand. The pictures themselves are extraordinarily good and are in extraordinary condition. While Watkins’ so-called mammoth-plate pictures and his stereoviews have been extensively studied by historians, far less is known about the range and depth of Watkins’ production of medium-sized pictures such as cartes de visite and images of the size that make up the Sunny Slope album.

“The mammoths have been studied and are of interest for all sorts of reasons and they’re spectacular,” Watts said. “But I love this smaller size. These are so, so beautiful because of the way they’re vignetted and because of the way Watkins masked them and conceived them. They’re much more beautiful than what you see in a stereo format. Watkins composes these pictures in a way to use the circular format, compositions that you can’t use with a square format. In this album you see him really thinking through composition in the circular format.”

The pictures are part of Watkins’ investigation of what was a new landscape for him: For the first 20 years of his career, from the late 1850s through the late 1870s, Watkins photographed the dramatic landscapes of the Sierra Nevada and northern California. In the late 1870s Watkins began to travel to the southern half of California, particularly to Los Angeles and Kern counties, where he encountered land that was flat and open. The landscapes of the Southland presented new challenges: How to make this intensely horizontal landscape as visually engaging as the pictures he took elsewhere in the West? The Sunny Slope album, full of tight, layered compositions, seems to come after Watkins had solved that riddle. One particularly magnificent example is the picture of fields shown above, on the right. here Watkins juxtaposed a field of ground-hugging crops against a dark, distant orchard. Beyond the orchard lies a short hill, with taller foothills beyond. In the middle of the photograph these faint diagonal lines dramatically come together, compressed into about three-quarters of an inch of picture. [Clicking on any of the images in this post will expand them to actual size.]

Another superb image is the picture below and to the right, wherein Watkins uses a path, and the line of the back of a field to guide the viewer’s eye through the picture and ultimately to the San Gabriel Mountains, which rise faintly in the background.

Watkins more commonly addressed the question of the circular format by building compositions that press in from the edges of the circle toward the center of the picture. In paging through the album I noticed that in picture after picture, it doesn’t matter where the viewer’s eye starts, Watkins most often guides it toward the center of the picture. This is acutely different from his rectangular mammoth-plate pictures, which rarely guide the viewer toward a single point. In the photograph of a Sunny Slope farm building at left ,Watkins uses a path, lines of planting and building lines and shapes to guide the viewer to the horse and farm works in the upper left of the picture.

Taken as a whole, the Sunny Slope album presents a visual narrative of Rose and his farm, a kind of short-story told in pictures. Watkins starts the album with a photograph of Rose (above, right), followed by a still-life of a bouquet of roses. (Rose’s farm was also known for its bountiful rose garden.) This kind of punning would become common in art after cubism, but to see it here, at least 20 years before Picasso and Braque worked together, is striking.

The album then presents a narrative that starts with pictures of Rose’s farmhouse continues down a road to the fields, and then through the orchards. It continues through fields of a plant that is hard to identify, but that may be related to spirits as Watkins soon includes distillery buildings in his compositions. After the agricultural pictures, Watkins focuses on the distillery operation (complete with a picture of some men enjoying a drink at a shaded table) before concluding the album with a photograph of the ass of one of Rose’s horses, “Sir Guy.”

While the narrative is pretty straightforward and easy to follow, one picture is a particular puzzle: The next-to-last picture, slotted between two photographs of horses, is of a Native American family and the two huts in which they presumably lived or worked. Like other Western photographers, Watkins only rarely showed Native Americans or their homes in his pictures. And it’s hard to believe this picture would have been included in an album meant to market Sunny Slope to potential buyers.

Watts said that the Huntington has no immediate plans to display the album because of its fragility, but that all of the images in it will soon be available on the Huntington’s website.

The MAN Podcast: Live in St. Louis!

This is terrifically exciting: The Modern Art Notes Podcast is going back on the road for a live-audience taping! Join us at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis on Saturday at 11am for a taping with “Donald Judd: The Multicolored Works” curator and former Chinati Foundation director Marianne Stockebrand.

This is the first museum exhibition to focus on Judd’s use of color, and more specifically Judd’s use of color in the 1980s, when he discovered a process that enabled a new kind of sculpture. “The Multicolored Works” will include over 20 Judd sculptures and 30 works on paper and collages from the collection of the Judd Foundation that reveal Judd’s creative process. It will be on view from May 10 through January 4.

If you’re able to come to the taping, please be sure to say hi!

Weekend roundup

Friday exhib: “Spectator Sports” at MOCP

This week’s Friday exhibition is “Spectator Sports” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago. Curated by Allison Grant, the exhibition is on view through July 3. Grant’s essay is available here.

Katja Sutke, from the series Supernatural, Beijing, 2012.

Susken Rosenthal, Portugal-Greece, Final Match 2004 Series EURO 2004 in Portugal, 2006-10.

Charlie White, The Americans: U.S. Gymnastic Team, 2005.