Never Mind the Pollocks Here’s the Bauhaus

Never Mind the Pollocks Here’s the Bauhaus

by | 27 May 2019 | Art History, Contemporary Art, Re-Enactments© and MashUps

Never Mind the Pollocks Here’s the Bauhaus

This article originally appeared with the title Fear of a Black Mountain: Tampa Museum of Art’s Elevation of Abstract Expressionism in the 24 May 2019 edition of ArteFuse.

There is a formidable father figure hovering over the powerful double exhibition of broadly-defined Abstract Expression at the Tampa Museum of Art, just not the one some seemed to be expecting. Rather – and appropriately given that this year marks the 100thanniversary of the Bauhaus – it is Josef Albers whose spirit dominates. Exacting, meddling, and critical, yet so inseparable from his own theoretical concerns as to be cold and distant, it is the students – damaged, rebellious, reverent, brilliant – of Albers and their patrilineal inheritors who are the stars of this show. Albers, who, upon being uprooted from his role as handicrafts master at the Bauhaus Dessau in 1933 immediately became head of the painting school at Black Mountain College, also forcefully reminds us that modern and contemporary art, and its presence in museums, is a shared international terrain that should be marked by continuity, not competition. Even artists not engaged in comparable processes of production must, in this time when it has become fashionable to repudiate the “moment of Modernism,” recognize this import network of systems and influences that traces its origins to fin de siècle Munich, then radiates from North Carolina to the Eastern Seaboard.

To be clear, this is my reception of the paired shows at the Tampa Museum of Art, which are intended as a celebratory retrospective. Despite the name-embedded implications of one, Abstract Expressionism: A Social Revolution Selections from the Haskell Collectionit is the pre-colon title of the other, Echoing Forms: American Abstraction from the Permanent Collectionthat better captures the spirit of this superbly curated and installed grouping of works. In fact during the time we tend to think of as “peak AbEx” – the years between Jackson Pollock’s 1947 Full Fathom Five and 1952’s Convergence Abstract Expression was anything but revolutionary. Pollock and his drip-pour paintings had been successfully apotheosized by patrons and champions Peggy Guggenheim and Clement Greenberg. The Wyoming native was further catapulted to art-stardom by the exaggerated creation myth of Mural (1943) and Hans Namuth’s adoring short film Jackson Pollock 51. Pollock appeared in cover stories in Life magazine hanging out with Alfred H. Barr and the buttoned-down board of Manhattan MoMA. It doesn’t get much less revolutionary than that.

This however is a boon to the show at the TMA. Both Social Revolution and Echoing Forms are mercifully devoid of Pollock, and minus his suffocating figure, we see clearly the underestimated quest for freedom and honesty of sensation of other artists working to test the limits of the embodied painting process.

The intelligent hanging of the show offers guidance for first-time encounters as well as clever subtexts. In one of the Echoes galleries, a set of serigraphs and silkscreens by Albers faces a series of silver gelatin prints by Black Mountain alumni Aaron Siskind, who would become an art professor himself. Each set was made over decades. Albers sought the nondescript form of the square to elaborate on his colour theory, using repetition to create abstract art without a subject or context outside formal constructions. Siskind photographed quotidian objects – gym equipment, paint peeling from walls, wrought iron gates – in such a way as to erase their recognizable meaning. Pattern repetition is important to both Albers and Siskind, but the curatorial stroke of placing the series together is suggestive of Jeff Wall’s conception of photographic tableaux as a paradoxical means of reclaiming the primacy of painting – an idea this grouping seems to refute.

Above: Josef Albers, Day and Night I, 1963, serigraph; I-S LXXIII, 1973, silkscreen; Midnight and Noon I, 1964, serigraph.

Right: Aaron Siskind, Morocco 49, 1982; Martha’s Vineyard 2, 1952; Westport 73, 1988; Salvador 82, 1984; Salvador 16, 1984; Salvador 81, 1984; all silver gelatin prints; Tampa Museum of Art permanent collection. Photos: Jean Marie Carey

The radiating scarlet of Albers’s tiny 1964 Study for Homage to the Square shows his effort to control perception through a focus on colour. Placed on a supporting wall next to the enormous rod- and cone-searing high-intensity Temple to Royal Green (1983), Homage [both to left] holds its own. Templeis the work of one of Albers’s students, Richard Anuszkiewicz, who applied the brilliant paint in the geometric configurations of the square to entirely different effect. Practically pulsating off the canvas, the combination of colour, lines, and shape challenge the teacher’s controlled experiment by revealing the instability of our perceptions of stillness and movement, contrast and complement.

A work seen for the first time fascinated me for hours. Kenneth Noland, a North Carolina native, attended Black Mountain College with three of his brothers and was intrigued by the stories Albers told of the Bauhaus, drawn particularly to the work of Paul Klee. Noland was classified in the “post painterly abstraction” movement of the 1960s, working in the soak-stain technique associated with Colour Field before arriving at the shaped canvases he is best known for today. Summer’s Gold (1983), though making use of Noland’s signatory chevron, does not easily fall into any of those categories. The nested “V” shapes in green, white, and yellow with a wedge of black are bled into by patches of violet and pink. Erratic, energetic impasto creates an opposite sense of soothing. In looking more closely at the grey space on the canvas and the application of the paints, I eventually realised Summer’s Gold’s acrylics are layered over another painting, giving it the nostalgic feeling of a fading sign slowly disappearing from a building, even as the still-bright arrow-angles maintain definition of line.

The placement of the Noland next to Frank Stella’s New Caledonian Lorikeet (1980) is the exhibition’s best juxtaposition. An extension of Stella’s “Exotic Birds” series begun in 1977 as Stella became more interested in both printing and three-dimensional work, Lorikeet’s gestural animation meshes with Summer Gold’s rich texturing. Taken together these works reinforce the notion that abstraction, in its original meaning, is a form of radical simplification with direct references to the physical world.

Above: Kenneth Noland, Summer’s Gold,1983. Below: Viewers take in the best juxtaposition of the exhibition, Kenneth Noland, Summer’s Gold,1983, left, and Frank Stella, New Caledonian Lorikeet, 1980. Photos: Jean Marie Carey.

The narrative characteristics of other works offer counterpoints to the misuse of the term “abstraction” to which this genre is particularly susceptible. One such assemblage (which I am astonished to see in Tampa) is Gerhard Richter’s Abstract Painting (613-3), 1986. Created just before Richter’s 18 Oktober 1977 series, Abstract Painting is composed of photographed sketches of brushwork then transferred to the canvas. Joan Mitchell’s diptych Aires pour Marion (1975-1976) feature’s Mitchell’s characteristic touches of patterned oil paint. The left panel is primarily orange and reddish earth tones with blue underpainting; the right side reverses the palette as a dark blue rectangle looms up from the bottom left corner. Perhaps this is the space referenced in the title of the painting.

 One of the joys of the Social Evolutionpart of the show is that these pieces come from the private collection of Jacksonville builder Preston Haskell and thus have rarely been seen in public museums spaces. Another favourite discovery was Sam Francis’s Untitled (1988-1989). The painter’s use of layered acrylic techniques, contrasting colors surrounding two blue-green whale-shaped forms, and a crisp white background, create incredible depth and gives the painting the three-dimensional presence of a sculptural object.

The exhibition also offers opportunities to jostle some pedestals. I have always thought Willem de Kooning (who fled Black Mountain College, leaving Elaine de Kooning there to finish the lessons that would lead to her greatly under-studied body of portraits, landscapes, and collection of art criticism) was not in the same league as many of his contemporaries – Robert Rauschenberg improved de Kooning’s work by erasing it, after all. Woman II(1961) is another of de Kooning’s flattened women, an oil painting de Kooning somehow makes look like a sketch.

Above: Willem de Kooning, Woman II, 1961. Oil on paper mounted on canvas. The Haskell Collection. © 2018 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Right: Morris Louis, Pillars, 1962. Photo: Jean Marie Carey. Above: Helen Frankenthaler, February’s Turn, 1979. Oil on canvas. The Haskell Collection. © 2018 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Having recently re-readMichael Fried’s high-spirited defense of a show at New York City’s Mnuchin Gallery of Morris Louis’s Veils (responding in full Fried “T.J. Clark takedown” form to a comment by The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl that Colour Field Painting was “lightweight” along with the insinuation that viewers had to be drunk to enjoy it)[1]I was, as a fellow Louis fan, especially curious to see a work at the TMA from the last phase of Morris’s career, Pillars (1962). Louis had worked on a series of themed works called the “stripe paintings” through 1960 and 1961, several with the word “pillar” in their titles (Pillar of Delay, Pillar of Celebration), extreme vertical monoliths in variables of delineation and opacity. Louis was diagnosed with lung cancer in the spring of 1962 and died that September; Pillars would have been one of his final works. How potentially poignant! Instead Pillars, a cascade of autumn olives, oranges, and golds on an ecru unfurled, finds Louis as unflustered and methodical as ever, in what was perhaps a moment of respite. February’s Turn, Helen Frankenthaler’s adjacent work from 1979, is a last blast of shades of fresh and dried blood, a last gasp before Frankenthaler retreated to the stained-glass forms of her late career. Frankenthaler’s and Louis’s paintings, like each work in the show, is not an answer but an atmosphere, an out-of-time event, in every sense of the expression, meant to be inspected and contemplated.

[1]Michael Fried, “Morris Louis: Veils,” ArtForum, December 2014, pgs. 266-269.

Louis, along with Noland, helped found the Washington Color School which was active during the 1950s-1970s. One of the TMA’s great treasures from its own collection is by a member of this group. Alma Thomas made New Galaxy in 1970. This intriguing painting has a celestial name, but its cascade of blue tiles with a pale peach border also suggest an incoming tide, or a hopeful, Blakesian view of a “New Galaxy” on earth, seen from above. Thomas, who was the first graduate of Howard University’s fine arts program, had spent her life as an educator in addition to her lifelong pursuit of abstraction; through the 1960s Thomas organized civil rights marches and protests against the war in Vietnam.

While Thomas was collaborating with Albers’s student Noland, across the ocean, two more Black Mountain alumni – John Cage and Merce Cunningham – profoundly influenced another social revolution, Fluxus, which brought together black American double-bassist Ben Patterson, Korean performance and technology art pioneer Nam June Paik, established Düsseldorf provocateur Joseph Beuys, and atelier organizer Mary Bauermeister. Rather than Cage’s notes of nothing, this environment was punctuated by the continuous tone of each generation’s semi-successful art academy jailbreak. Almost all ended up as both artists and educators, Albers’s’ children as parents of the women and men of the neo-avant garde.

These complicated influences and interactions can only be disentangled in hindsight, and there is much we have yet to learn about art in the 20thCentury, for its own sake and to inform our understanding of artists’ concerns in the 21st. Yet several prominent museums have ceded to popular demand to divest from AbEx, with SFMoMA’s declaration to put Mark Rothko’s monumental Untitled(1960) on the block at Sotheby’s this month, the anticipated $50 million sale earmarked to diversify the collection. MoMA NYC will close for the summer, opening in the fall with thematic galleries featuring a pared down Modernist roster. William Poundstone, founder of the blog Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, pored over the 600-page-plan for an architectural expansion of LACMA only to discover that the project actually reduced the museum’s gallery space by 110,100 square feet, intending to eliminate the museum’s permanent displays in favor of rotating exhibits emphasizing trendy topics.

Above: Alma Thomas, New Galaxy, 1970. Tampa Museum of Art, Gift of Douglas H Teller in memory of Julian H. Singman, 1997.017.

The Tampa Museum of Art’s Abstract Expressionism: A Social Revolution Selections from the Haskell Collectionon view through 11 August 2019 and Echoing Forms: American Abstraction from the Permanent Collection; Farish Gallery, on view through 28 July 2019; Saunders Gallery on view through 18 August 2019. Catalogue: Joanna Robotham, Valerie Hellstein and Michael A. Tomor, Abstract Expressionism A Social Revolution Selections from the Haskell Collection (Tampa: Tampa Museum of Art, 2019); 56 pages with 24 colour plates and other illustrations.

Though the curators and benefactors of the Tampa Museum of Art tend to remove themselves from these controversies and Social Revolution/Echoing Forms has been long in the works, it is serendipitously timed as a reminder of the importance of history in art history. Further this group of paintings reinforce how under-representative reproductions of artworks in print or on the computer screen are of the real thing. It is stunning how much of the experience of the paintings shown in this article are missing when viewed only as photographs. In person many of these works are mesmerizing, and the TMA’s white-walled second-floor galleries and austere high ceilings are made for Abstract Expressionism. The curators have succeeded in presenting a part of the canon of Modern art some would like to turn over to social justice Savonarolas as a matter of vital and important contemporary interest.

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Piazzetta Provenance Project CFA: Raubkunst at the Ringling: A Catalogue in Absentia

Piazzetta Provenance Project CFA: Raubkunst at the Ringling: A Catalogue in Absentia

by | 4 May 2019 | Expressionismus, Franz Marc, German Expressionism / Modernism, Raubkunst

Piazzetta Provenance Project CFA: Raubkunst at the Ringling: A Catalogue in Absentia

Circle of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta 1682 -1754), Pastoral Scene, c. 1750. Oil on canvas, (92.1 x 134 cm). The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Object number: SN627.

 

Raubkunst at the Ringling: Franz Marc’s Schöpfungsgeschichte has got a lot of attention. Surprisingly many responses have come from people who think they might be in possession of some Raubkunst themselves. I confer with trusted colleagues on these tips, but we keep this information to ourselves. We’ve been tantalizingly close to some long-missing works we would all love to see returned to the public view.

I have found though that what most inquirers are seeking is not absolution but verification. I have been asked to authenticate two works by Franz Marc just in the past year. I am reluctant to do so in these conscience cases. For one thing, as the recent book by Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm, Falsche Bilder Echtes Geld: Der Fälschercoup des Jahrhunderts – und wer alles daran verdiente makes clear, art forgers have become increasingly wily and technically proficient. The current interest in Provenienzforschung created almost as many opportunities for grift as the thieves and opportunist of the Third Reich themselves did in the 1930s and 1940s. The well-meaning art historians who mistakenly declared the fakes by Wolfgang Beltracchi to be long-lost works by Georges Braque, Max Ernst and others had their careers and reputations destroyed. There is a movement toward creating a professional standard for authenticating lost works, likely by a panel of experts in the work of the artist in conjunction with the formidable forensics of the Doerner Institut.

But for the moment in this respect we keep a low profile and our ears to the whispers in the wind.

While avalanches roar above, business continues below, on the tasks that can be accomplished: reuniting artworks whose authenticity is unimpeachable with the families or museums to whom they once belonged. To that end, a researcher and writer is being sought to investigate the provenance of a quartet of quirkily shaped, sized, and framed 18th Century oil paintings associated with the work of Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682-1754). The genre pastoral scenes are in the collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, having been purchased by the museum in 1949. The destination for this research is the collaborative book project Raubkunst at the Ringling: A Catalogue in Absentia, scheduled for publication in 2020. A worthy publisher and esteemed contributors are already aboard, though like me, their expertise is in Modernist art, hence our quest.

The Piazzetta-esque works were sold to the Ringling by the German-Jewish art, antique, and textiles dealer Adolph Loewi, who operated galleries in the Veneto as well as New York City and Los Angeles. In 1939 Loewi fled Italy with his family, losing some of his files in the process. Whether the documentation for the Piazzetta-adjacent works was among those documents is not clear; in any case, no record of their provenance exists prior to the Ringling purchase.

Circle of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta 1682 -1754), Pastoral Scene, c. 1750. Oil on canvas, (56.5 x 92.7 cm).The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Object number: SN629. Header image: Circle of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta 1682 -1754), Pastoral Scene, c. 1750. Oil on canvas56.5 x 92.7 cm). The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Object number: SN630.

Circle of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta 1682 -1754), Pastoral Scene, c. 1750. Oil on canvas, (92.1 x 134 cm). John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Object number: SN627

[1]Recent books such as Simon Goodman’s The Orpheus Clock: The Search for My Family’s Art Treasures Stolen by the Nazis (2016) and The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (2015) by Anne-Marie O’Connor detail the eventual triumph of the resourceful Goodman and Altmann families pitted against adversaries in museums and galleries over the course of lengthy and expensive court battles. Some cases turn less flamboyantly but more emotionally. The Austrian art dealer Lea Bondi-Jaray lost her beloved Portrait of Wally, a 1912 painting by her friend Egon Schiele, in the Anschluss in 1939. She went to her grave fighting to have the painting returned from private gallerist Rudolph Leopold who had acquired the painting in collusion with the Austrian government in 1954. Bondi-Jaray’s family continued the battle, eventually taking on no lesser adversaries than Ronald Lauder, the Museum of Modern Art, and Austria’s Leopold Museum. The case turned when the family produced pre-war photographs of Portrait of Wally in Bondi-Jaray’s Vienna apartment, convincing the United States Customs Service to seize the painting  and United States District Court for the Southern District of New York Judge Loretta A. Preska to allow the case to proceed to trial. The Leopold Museum settled with the family in 2010.

As I’ve noted, because the Modern Art that had been declared entartete – degenerate – by the Third Reich was seized by the Germans from German government-sponsored museums it is – technically – not considered Raubkunst, stolen art, though certainly the Nazis profited from its sale. Works that were stolen from private owners and collectors, or procured through forced sales, are truestolen objects, and subject to return to the families of their original owners.

Even in seemingly clear-cut cases, this process can be challenging. In many instances, entire families were murdered in their homes or in concentration camps, and no heirs exist to lay claim upon what should have been prized heirlooms. The few remaining survivors of Nazi art theft or their descendants must file official claims with the German government or bring private litigation against museums and auction houses. Claims to works must be substantiated by proof of ownership – a paradox that ends many legal proceedings before they begin since receipts, ledgers, diaries, and documentary stamps were often destroyed, dispersed, or concealed by those who had stolen the artworks in the first place.[1]

Because of their appealingly peculiar nature and the seeming completeness of the grouping of four, it seems likely that the Piazzetta workshop paintings came from a private collection. But whose? The task of the writer-researcher who takes on this investigation will be to unravel this mystery. The outcome may be as simple as a lost receipt establishing a chain of custody that puts the Ringling in the clear, or as profound as reuniting the quartet with a family who thought them lost decades ago.

 

I began this project in 2016 when I discovered two woodblock prints by the Blaue Reiter artist Franz Marc (1880-1916) in the Ringling collection, identified them as Raubkunst, and eventually traced them back to their original owners in Stuttgart and Mannheim. My findings were accepted as a “closed case” this past February by the Commission for Looted Art in Europe. So the investigation has since expanded in scope, to say the least. I would welcome collaboration with, as well as questions and advice from, members of the “Raubkunst Research” community. Contact me and I’ll get back to you.

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Condensation Cubes

Condensation Cubes

by | 26 Jun 2018 | Animals in Art, Art History, Contemporary Art

Possibly Etruscan horse, bronze, c. 3rd Century BCE

Possibly Etruscan horse, bronze, c. 3rd Century BCE

Over the summer I began writing for Arte Fuse with this review of Vapor and Vibration: The Art of Larry Bell and Jesús Rafael Soto at the Tampa Museum of Art. I quite like the show, and thought the curator was quite successful with this experimental pairing of two artists with no personal connection. It’s been so soothing to just sit quietly in the Animals in Ancient Art gallery at the TMA too, so I was sad to learn its last day is 1 July. The TMA also has a lovely collection of Etruscan mirrors.

While at the museum I saw for the first time some paintings of birds by Hunt Slonem. I got to observe many macaws in Miami and cockatoos, a nonnative species who have crossed the Tasman Sea to make themselves at home in New Zealand, are also very familiar. I thought the two paintings shown here used some interesting techniques to get to what’s essential about these clever and beautiful members of the parrot family. The focus on the pink tones and sociability of the cockatoos and of the strong beaks and feather structures of the macaws, absent their brilliant colors, is quite thoughtful.

Until soon. – JMC

Hunt Slonem, Cockatoos, 2004.

Hunt Slonem, Cockatoos, 2004.

Mernet Larsen: Getting Measured, 1957-2017

Mernet Larsen: Getting Measured, 1957-2017

by | 9 Feb 2018 | Art History

I have known Mernet Larsen from her role as professor as professor at the University of South Florida’s art studio department, and from her many trenchant and witty remarks on the art situation in Tampa, as well as from her kindness to students and fellow faculty. She made some very telling and compassionate comments at the small memorial for Bradley Nickels some years ago.

Nonetheless I felt as if I could give this retrospective at the Tampa Museum of Art a fair review and was glad I took the chance to do so for Empty Mirror. Larsen’s painting are intellectually engaging and unclassifiable. Many from Getting Measured, 1957-2017 are reproduced with the article so I will let you look at it on the Empty Mirror website, and it’s also archived as a PDF at the Humanities Commons Core Depository.

Larsen Eggs 1961

Eggs, 1961. Oil on canvas, Courtesy of the artist. © Mernet Larsen

Franz Marc Photo Discovery

Franz Marc Photo Discovery

by | 21 Jul 2017 | Art History, Franz Marc, German Expressionism / Modernism, LÖL, Re-Enactments© and MashUps

Much as I enjoy burying the lede, the headline on this story is that I found a heretofore unpublished photo, and this is the Franz Marc photo, taken in the spring of 1914 by the artist’s brother, Paul Marc, in Munich:

Franz Marc photo

Franz Marc, 1914, in Munich. Photo by Paul Marc. Germanisches Nationalmuseum | Des Deutschen Kunstarchivs | Nürnberg

The whole story of finding the Franz Marc photo and a thorough analysis of why it might be that significant images of people and animals are overlooked is forthcoming in the second part of the “Exposing Animals” sequence of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture in September, and this photograph and some others will be reproduced there, but it is also appearing in a different kind of work I did for Empty Mirror Books that comes out this week, so I decided to post it, finally (I first found it in 2015!), here today.

Beyond standing as a strong reminder that there is so much we have not yet learned about the historical avant-garde, this is just a wonderful photograph, “eerie and magnificent,” as Marc would say, so I will just leave it at that for now.