Between the trade show atmosphere of AIPAD at the beginning of April, the photography fair that has struggled to stay relevant since its inception, and the lackluster offerings and mood in the sales rooms of the three photography auctions in the week that followed, it felt like the month began with low blood sugar in the world of photography. AIPAD was busy as hell, but the offerings were not, for the most part, dazzling outside of things being big, colorful, or dramatic. Whereas the auction rooms were nearly empty, and while the three sales were different enough from one another, they were full of the usual fare: lot’s of Ansel Adams, some Weston, street photography, etc. The story being told in the pages of those catalogs was neither inspiring nor exciting, and it’s a disservice to just how complex and wonderful photo-based work is.
THE DRUTT REPORT: Artists to watch and notable trends and events in the market.
The Whitney Chapel
I was walking to an appointment in SoHo yesterday, without thinking about the route I was taking, and I ended up walking by Team Gallery on Wooster Street. What I saw through the window stopped me dead in my tracks. On view are three large paintings by Stanley Whitney. They’re not just eye-catching; they are mesmerizing. I met Whitney only recently, but I’ve known his work a bit longer, not well but well enough. Now I’m smitten. One of the things I’ve always liked about his practice is the persistence he applies to his idea of stacking color. It’s a familiar commitment to endurance in compositional strategy for artists working in reductive vocabularies from the dawn of the 20th century right through Minimalism and Postmodernism. But Whitney’s art doesn’t come across as doctrinaire or hierarchical, as one would rightly expect of abstraction. Rather, these paintings celebrate the lyricism of painting, the joy of color and harmonic composition. They are rhythmic, melodic, and intense. I’m not implying that they are absent a cerebral dimension; but they are the opposite of the more scientific approach to painting that he has been compared to in the past, like Albers and Reinhardt.
The Painter of Dreams
In the summers of 1987 and 1988, I took a detour from my graduate studies at Yale focusing on German and Russian modernism to work at the National Museum of American Art in Washington (today’s Smithsonian American Art Museum). Elizabeth Broun, its chief curator, was preparing what would turn out to be the most comprehensive and copiously researched exhibition of Albert Pinkham Ryder’s work ever mounted, and I ended up working there not because I was looking for a diversion but because a man I was working for at the time, Richard S. Field, told me to get my head out of my ass and broaden my horizons. It was good advice. Not only did it turn me onto a field of study yearning for critical interpretation–studies in American Art were not then what they are today–, but it blew open an investigative journey for me that made art historical research feel like navigating a rowboat on the ocean in a hurricane. The information I was after was enveloped in controversy, hidden and protected by jealous scholars unwilling to cooperate unless they were given control of our project and protected by families who wanted to keep information in archival letters confidential for no fathomable reason. In the end, we reached our destination buoyed by great works of art and sly navigational tactics, but along the way we stumbled across a few other unexplored waterways, some of which remain uncharted even today.
Survey This
A lot of mostly good commentary on the merits (or the lack thereof) of the latest Whitney Biennial had already found its way into print before its gala opening last week, so few people went expecting to be surprised by anything. In fact, in contrast to years past with lines around the block and a crowd so densely packed that the fire marshal lurked amid the glitterati, the opening was a mellow, almost ambient affair. As one colleague and I commiserated with one another, it was not only easy on the eyes (meaning that it wasn’t overinstalled), but also easy on the ears, with everything given enough space to breathe and be seen and heard without one piece cancelling another out. People seemed curious, but few had that look of expectation, bemusement, or outrage, with a lot more being said about design and layout than content.
An Expanding View
Figure 1 Cindy Sherman, Untitled (Film Still #13), 1978
