Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

I’ve written a lot here about how New York art critics seem to be unable to write about art without mentioning the art market, complaining about the art market, moaning that the art market makes everything else irrelevant, and so on. My point has been pretty simple: You, the published critic, are in a privileged position. Assert yourself rather than complain that you can’t.
So along comes this from the book world: In an effort to assert itself in the face of the (book) market, the National Book Critics Circle board of directors is starting this clever idea on its blog. [via]

There’s more content coming later today, but…
As I’ll be traveling next week, I’m delighted to announce that MAN will be guest-edited next week by Jen Graves, the art critic for The Stranger, Seattle’s influential alt-weekly. (I’ll do the weekend roundup on Monday, but after that it’ll be all Graves, all week.)

Here’s a show I’m bummed that I’m (probably) not going to see: Michael Auping’s Declaring Space (featuring Fontana, Newman, Klein and Rothko) at MAMFW.
On the occasion of the show, Titus O’Brien and Auping do the Q&A thing on Glasstire. Auping gives great Q&A — he describes now as “gluttonous,” drops an Yves Klein pun — so dig it. [via]

Thanks to reader Aleks Rdest, who has the Photoshop skills that I lack. This is Martin Puryear’s That Profile at the Getty, juxtaposed against a c1450 portrait of a woman which may (or may not) be by Paolo Uccello. For more, scroll down to the post below this one or click here.
Previously: Puryear at MoMA: considering perspective; Puryear and Augustus Vincent Tack. Puryear and Ellsworth Kelly. Puryear and Uccello.
Related: Puryear at the Getty on Flickr.

A few months ago, when I was working on a writing project, I discovered that many 19th century art history texts were available, in their totality and for free, on Google Book Search. I had a good bit of fun poking around, reading Vasari here, Baedeker’s descriptions of art there.

When I started thinking about Puryear and perspective I thought I’d let Google Book Search help me go back in time…. which brings us to Paolo Uccello, described thusly in [Michael] Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical: Uccello “painted landscapes, with ruins and figures, which, from his knowledge of perspective, were designed with a correctness and intelligence unknown to his contemporaries.”

EH Gombrich shared Bryan’s assessment, writing that Uccello was so impressed by his own perspective-related discoveries that he stayed up night after night, trying to make his studies all the more realistic. Gombrich says Uccello’s work was substantially successful, that his efforts were not in vain. (Giorgio Vasari did not agree, writing in his Lives of the Artists: “It is certain, that the man who has not the needful endowments, let him labour as he may, can never effect those things to which another, having received the gift from nature, has attained without difficulty; and of this we have an example among the old masters in Paolo Uccello, who struggling against the natural bent of his faculties to make progress on a given path, went ever backwards instead.”)

Which brings us to Martin Puryear, who was fascinated by the Renaissance painters who developed perspective — and by the 20th century artists who abolished it. (I’ve been writing about this all week, see the bottom of this posts for links to background, previous posts.) One of the artists Puryear has cited as an influence is Uccello, who was brilliant, driven to madness, both, or, given Vasari’s reliability, neither. I think that his 1999 installation at Getty Center, That Profile, is straight out of Uccello.

The painting above, from 1450 and in the Met’s collection, has been variably determined to be by Uccello, the circle of Uccello, another unknown painter entirely, and my favorite art historical dodge: “attributed to Uccello,” with its implied parenthetical ‘but also maybe not.’ (At the moment the Met doesn’t consider it a Uccello.) While I don’t mean to suggest that Puryear cribbed directly from this painting, the shape of That Profile and the form of the woman’s head, presented in profile, is unmistakable. (If I knew how to use Photoshop better I’d overlay the two images, but I’m just a dumb writer.)

Several days ago I talked about how Puryear often mixed flatness and depth in individual works; this is one of them. As we can see from this sideview of the Getty sculpture, that’s pretty much what This Profile is all about: It presents a flat ‘face’ to Richard Meier’s Getty Center, but when viewed from the side it also recedes into space, toward the hills north of the Getty.

Previously: Puryear at MoMA, considering perspective; Puryear and Augustus Vincent Tack. Puryear and Ellsworth Kelly.
Related: Puryear at the Getty on Flickr.

Martin Puryear doesn’t sit for a ton of interviews, so I wanted to be sure to post a couple recent ones:

After reading this SFMOMA press release about an upcoming show “from the Logan Collection,” I understood that SFMOMA was exhibiting works in the Logans’ collection, rather than Kent and Vicki Logan gifts to SFMOMA. I complained. Today a museum spokesperson shares this: “The exhibition includes works from SFMOMA’s collection (fractional and promised gifts from the Logans) as well as works that are strictly in the Logan Collection (some are on loan from the Denver Art Museum). We’re still working on the final checklist.”
So my post, which was based only on the SFMOMA press release, may have been completely incorrect. My apologies for the confusion.

Previously: Puryear at MoMA, considering perspective; Puryear and Augustus Vincent Tack.

Obviously Martin Puryear was influenced by minimalism: His surfaces are exquisite and tactile, recalling Donald Judd. Many of his forms from the early 1970s recall Robert Morris and Carl Andre so directly that Puryear’s objects (several of which are reproduced in the show’s catalogue) appear to be only minor departures from their work. As early as 1977 the classic modernist cube — here’s Tony Smith’s heroic minimalist version — began to appear regularly in Puryear’s work. (More on this later in the week.) And of course to this day Puryear’s sculptures are reductive, almost tidy in their banishment of anything even potentially, remotely extraneous.

But in keeping with our theme this week — Puryear and perspective — there’s a key way in which Puryear, who started out as a painter, responded to both minimalist painting and to painting that was flat and reductive. Puryear grew up and attended college in Washington, DC during the peak years of the Washington Color School, when super-flat painters such as Morris Louis and Gene Davis dominated DC art. Ellsworth Kelly, who famously married line with picture plane, was also ascendant in the late 1950s and in the 1960s. Puryear assimilated their work — and then brought back the third dimension.

The image at the top and at the left is Puryear’s Bask (1976), from the Guggenheim’s collection. In the photograph at the top, Bask appears to be almost completely flat. That’s a little bit what it looks like in person: Bask (made from stained pine) is a light-soaking black, and when it is installed on a white slab (as it is at MoMA) the light-dark juxtaposition seems to flatten it even more. But as you can see from the photo at left it has plenty of depth and multi-dimensional curve. (I’ve included a detail from a MoMA installation shot in the jump if you’d like to see more.)

Bask appears to be a direct riff on Ellsworth Kelly’s curve paintings, a series that Kelly started with a series of black-and-white paintings in 1958 (in paintings on wood) and continued them into the 1960s. Like Kelly does in many of his curve paintings, Puryear reduces Bask to a single, uniform color. The object is line… but he adds depth, the element that Kelly expunged. (At right is Kelly’s Green Curve, installed at the High Museum.)

Back in September, when I was talking about art, artists and 9/11, MoMA curator Ann Temkin and I discussed the ways in which a traumatic event effects art, how it seeps into work that might appear to have nothing to do with it.
Which brings me to a short piece on Artinfo by Robert Ayers about Richard Misrach. Back in 2004 Pace was the first to exhibit Misrach’s On the Beach photographs, a series of extra-enormous c-prints of people sunbathing or wading in the shallow surf. The pictures are the subject of a new book from Aperture (40% off!) and were recently exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago. From Ayers:

[Misrach] discussed [with me] the “paradigm shift in the collective consciousness” that he feels occurred on September 11, 2001, and its importance for this body of work. “One of the key inspirations were the images of bodies falling from the towers that I pulled off the Internet,” he says. “These people were in a horrific situation, but they were falling through space with such strange grace and ambiguity.” Misrach kept three small prints of World Trade Center jumpers on his studio wall for the four years he worked on On the Beach. “On one level or another,” he says, “they inspired the whole project.”

In 1942 Duncan Phillips made his largest acquisition of the war years: He bought half of Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration of the Negro series. The Phillips Memorial Gallery, as it was then called, bought 30 panels and the Museum of Modern Art bought the other half. It was an early example of the two museums cooperating. (My favorite: Duncan Phillips picked out the first Pierre Bonnard that MoMA acquired.)
Fast forward 65 years for another example of two museums cooperating: Most of the Phillips’ half of the Migration series was due to go on view at the Studio Museum this month. Unexpectedly — and just before installation — the Studio Museum found itself with a humidity issue. So last Friday afternoon Studio Museum director Thelma Golden called her Whitney counterpart Adam Weinberg and before long the Whitney had agreed to take the show. Over the course of four days the Whitney, which has some fine Lawrences of its own, cleared space on the fifth floor and installed the works. They’re up through January 6. Don’t miss ‘em.