German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse exhibition at MOMA

Kandinsky's Picture with Archer

Dix's "War"

Dix's War

Dix's "War"

Dix's "War"

Beckmann's "Hell"

Beckmann's "Hell"

Beckmann's "Trip to Berlin"

Beckmann's "Trip to Berlin"

Pechstein's "Lord's Prayer"

Kollwitz

Kollwitz

"German Expressionism:  The Graphic Impulse" exhibition just opened this weekend at MOMA and it is an absolute must see!!  I got a sneak peek on Friday before it opened and it really blows you away.  The crux of this show is the importance of works on paper, in particular, the editioned print, played in German Expressionist art.   The wild spread of printmaking in German by young artists was due to several reasons.   It was an affordable means of making art and there was an immediacy to the images' messages in the reduction of colors to black and white.  Also, getting "back to basics", young artists embraced an old technique (such as the woodcut which early Northern Renaissance artists such as Durer used) and used it for contemporary subject matter.  The proliferation or editioning of prints, portfolios and books helped spread the artistic images that were socially critical and relevant to the devastation of war and the ensuing corrupt government at the time.  The growth of the print market in Germany (during hyperinflation of the Weimar republic - the upper middle classes thought buying art was a good investment) supported the artists projects.

This exhibition's theme is by no means new or innovative, some of the works I have seen before in the past decade at the Neue Galerie in similar themed exhibitions, and also some on their own in the permanent collection of MOMA.  However, what is special about this exhibition is that it spans over the first three decades of modern German (and some Austrian) art in the 20th century, covering Die Brucke, Der Blaue Reiter, Neue Sachlichkeit, and contemporary Austrian Expressionism movements.   You get a very clear picture that these movements were not created in a vacuum and that that artists were not necessarily always working closely together but whose loose association was also critical.   The influences of early movements or the reaction of later movements on earlier movements were essential to the artistic progression of art during and in between the wars in Europe and in Germany.   Also, more importantly, there are works that haven't been shown before or often.  In particular, there is an amazing early Kandinsky "Painting with an Archer" (from his time spent in Germany), still very much a figurative image before his work became much more reductive and abstract.  It is gorgeous and looks like a quilt - as his attachment to color theory seemed to be realized in this work.  The colors are saturated and vibrant and are painted in thick, highly textured lozenges adjacent to contrasting colors.  The painting looks as if it hasn't see the light of day - its in perfect condition and it looks energized, fresh and new.  And it was painted in 1909.

Of work that hasn't been seen before are the many portfolios of prints that were produced during that time.  MOMA has done an exceptional job in showing the portfolios in their entirety when possible and the show is installed in the most optimal way to view these (grouped closely together - the beautifully painted walls of the galleries in deep rich red, ochre and warm gray showcase these works well).  For example, I have seen only a few images of Otto Dix's "War" portfolio which he made in 1923-1924.  In this exhibition the entire portfolio, all 50 images are together on one wall.  They are heartwrenching images of death, destruction during war and the aftermath of crippled wounded soldiers and a crippled demoralized society.  Seeing these together, its  overwhelmingly emotional and painful to experience.  You can understand why many of the artists during this period suffered and died from many medical problems and nervous breakdowns after their own participation on the war front.  Dix amazingly used the corrosive nature of the printing process in these works, which was etching, which lent itself in the description of horrors that took place in the images.

Many of the portfolios are also shown in their entirety and with their covers.  In many cases, in later years, the portfolios were split up for sale or between heirs of a family, but seeing the images all together, such as Max Beckmann's "Hell" and "Trip to Berlin", it is obvious that the images related to one another and can be read like a narrative.  MOMA, in its vast print archives, brings these images back together.  (Most of the works in this exhibition are from the MOMA permanent collection.)

Also, despite all the destruction that war had on society, Max Pechstein's "The Lord's Prayer" series of prints, is a small glimmer of hope.  Although the images seem to have less religious affliation than the title would imply, it is an expression of the relinquishing of contemporary suffering in hopes that He will answer their desperate calls for help.

The exhibition is well represented in Heckels, Kirchners, Kandinskys, Marcs, Rotluff-Schmidts, Dixs, Beckmanns, Grosz, Schieles and Kokoschkas as well as some that you don't see as often (Felixmueller, Corinth and Campendonk).  Feiniger, an American working in Germany at the time, is included in this context.  These artists captured the rise of modernism in bohemian circles as well as the zeitgeist of anxiety of the modern man.  This was followed by the depictions of war, its devastation and effects on society - the millions of young men lost and ostracization of the wounded, the heartbroken and impoverished widows and orphans, the corruption of the men in power and resulting hyperinflation.

In my opinion, what the exhibition is lacking in is something that seems to occur in all these exhibitions - never enough Kathe Kollowitz, one of the few recognized women artists at the time, who devastatingly lost her own son to war, who takes the demoralization of war and social affairs at the time and brings them to a whole new level of heartbreaking reality in her works.  They are intensely emotional and will lead you to tears.  I always wish I could see more of her work as well as other women artists creating during this period.

Although these works were produced a few generations ago - some of them are close to a century old - are very important for us to look at and understand during the time we are living in now.  We are not living with a war on our own soil as we sit comfortably in front of our tvs and computers and watching the devastating effects that war has on people abroad, but we need to understand how destructive and demoralizing it is to people on both sides and to civilians.  This reality is captured in these works.  They are a real expression of what people at the time were feeling emotionally, but at the same time, they are timeless - as war and corruption continue through time.  You can't help but feel moved by looking at these works and although they are overwhelmingly depressing and devastating, you can walk away grateful that there was a spark of genius creativity and proliferation amongst these young artists to record what happened and remind us how a society can be destroyed by what their government decides for them and puts them through.

Link to exhibition at MOMA

Photographs by Mona Kuhn



from "Venezia"





from "Venezia"





from "Venezia"





from "Venezia"





from "Venezia"





from "Venezia"





from her previous "Brazil" series




from her previous "Brazil series"




from her earlier "France" series





from her earlier "France" series





from her earlier "France" series



The AIPAD photography fair is taking place this weekend at the Park Avenue Armory and one of the highlights for me was seeing the new Mona Kuhn Venetian Series at the M+B booth.  Not unlike her past series, they are photographs of beautiful landscapes, with model-gorgeous young people in a stunning palette.  What I love most is her play of foreground and background - the tension between depth and the picture plane and blurred and focused images.  I also love her art historical references as well. In the earlier series, the subject matter of her outdoor scenes reminded me of the carefree zeal of the bohemian colonies that the early German expressionists used to depict, while the nudes of the dark indoor nighttime scenes play in and out of the shadows like a Caravaggio.  In one, a woman reclines like les grandes odalisques of Ingres and Matisse.  Her last project was in Brazil and the jungle greens are reminiscent of the colors in Rousseau's paintings, I think.

In this series from Venice, there is a much lighter palette and water dominates most of the landscape photos - which is a departure.  The well-known Venetian architecture is cropped by the water and waves. Droplets of water on the lens are playful while the undulating waves of the water create an immense amount of movement as opposed to the solidity of the buildings in the background.  The point of view of these photographs are taken as if coming up from underneath the water which makes them even more dynamic,  as opposed to her nudes that are still, quiet and reflective.

The women (no men in this series) are unique in their beauty and have elongated, mannerist like limbs.  My favorite is of a copper red haired young woman sitting primly on a bed in a lush interior.  The paleness of her skin contradicts the deep, colors of the fabrics and the flowers in the background.  The scene is timeless except for a remarkable little still life in the bottom right hand corner of the photograph with a very contemporary Financial Times.  These works can be seen locally in Chelsea at Flowers, on the West Coast at M + B and in Atlanta at Jackson Fine Art.

Link to more of Mona Kuhn's phots

Malevich and the American Legacy

Malevich

View of Serra prop piece on the left

View of Grotjahn on the right

View of Carl Andre floor piece

You have ample time to go check out another museum-caliber exhibition at Gagosian (this time at the uptown space - make sure you go to all three floors or you will miss out!!) titled, Malevich and the American Legacy, which is up for the next two months.  Malevich, who can be considered one of the fathers of abstract painting, was one of the founders of a Russian art movement called Suprematism in the early 20th century, whose main goal was non-objective painting and sculpture as the purest form of art.  In this show, there are six fabulous examples of Malevich's work, in pristine condition that have just be acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago.  Just going for these works alone is worth it!!!  The colors of the planes and geometric shapes are saturated and vibrant and the white of the background almost glows from within.  They are small and feel like little jewels.

Walking around the rest of the exhibition, at first the theme seems contrived - that the works only seem to have in common the use of planes, geometry and play on perspective and surface - and it can be a little bit.  The crux of the exhibition is that Malevich's paintings that were exhibited in New York, primarily in 1936, 1939 and 1973 and also through publications that promoted his work, influenced modern and contemporary American artists.  But after a while,  it's not just about the artists' use of boiling down the work in geometric forms, but also the conceptual argument that pure art should be about the non-objective.  Whether this is true or not, is not the issue.  Its interesting to see the minimalists such as Ellsworth Kelly and  Donald Judd as an extension of this idea rather than a movement that just came out of a reaction to Abstract Expressionism.  Its great to see that American artists weren't just influenced by the art of their own country, but influenced internationally as well.

Also, in this context, I found that I was looking at the works in the show, such as Ed Ruscha, who focuses on text, and John Baldessari, who usually appropriates film stills into his works, with new eyes after focusing on the more abstract, geometric forms in their works.

Many of these works are fantastic to view on their own outside the idea of the show.  After the Malevich paintings, the highlights of the show are for sure the Richard Serra prop pieces.  I could stare in a amazement at these all day (a three-dimensional realization of Suprematist painting!!) as these heavy slabs of steel seem to defy any sort of physics.  Also, there is a Sol Lewitt wall drawing that must have been extremely time consuming and labor intensive to recreate for this exhibition - it is dizzying!  The Dan Flavin work on the 5th floor is just beautifully placed in a corner of a room by itself and feels like a tribute or memorial, which is exactly what it is.  The whole room just glows with a somber blue.  And it's always fun to be able to walk on a Carl Andre floor piece - you feel like you are getting away with something.  And the Mark Grotjohn works are exceptional - especially the oil on linen on the 6th floor which you don't get to see that often - I usually see the colored pencil drawings. 

Enjoy!!  Make sure you see it, because many of these works were lent by museums, private collectors and the artists themselves and it will be difficult to see them again.

See more images on the gallery website (for some reason the images were not reading well when I tried to post them)  See below.


Link to the exhibition

Light sculptures by Ivan Navarro

Don't miss the current show of Chilean-born, Brooklyn-based artist, Ivan Navarro, currently up at Paul Kasmin gallery.

Navarro is known for his sculptures in which he uses light bulbs or fluorescent or neon light paired with mirrors and text.  His more well-known works include wall-mounted sculptures which appear to be glass doorways that look as if you could walk deep into a dark tunnel by his clever positioning of reflective and one-way mirrors. 

In the new exhibition, the pieces consist of wall-hanging and floor sculptures.  The works are various shapes of the footprints of well-known, architecturally important buildings, primarily those that are innovative in engineering, throughout the world.  Some of the buildings that are represented are the Flatiron Building, the Empire State building, the Sears Tower, the Towers in Dubai, and the Center in Hong Kong.  You can discuss these works in terms of the race for superiority in design and technology but also in economic growth coupled with the idea of globalization.  Unlike his earlier sculptures, the neon intentionally flickers on and off in his interpretation of the Sears Tower, further animating the sculptures and playing with viewers perspective of the depth and the surface of the work.  Many of the works have text etched into the mirrors such as "Surrender", "Shelter", "Decay", "Sway", "Burden" and "Want".  Its unclear if these words are descriptive or demanding, but it adds another layer of meaning and interaction with the sculptures. 

By far the most powerful works in the exhibition are the floor sculptures that are imprints of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.  Without text, they are quiet, sober, humbling, vertiginous and sad.  Leaning over these floor sculptures, you feel that you are going to fall into a large hole in the floor. 

Link to gallery exhibition


 

P.S.  The Paul Kasmin booth at this weekend's Armory Show, the biggest annual art fair held in NYC every March, was a site-specific sculpture by Ivan Navarro.  It was a constructed tall neon fence around the booth.  It was both beautiful (I know I use that word too much!) and also humorous.  It was a bold statement for a gallery to make, especially because so many galleries depend on the various art fairs held throughout the world throughout the year to make a substantial amount of their annual income and also rely on the fairs to draw new followers to their artists and their gallery.  Here was an impenetrable fence around the booth that contained nothing else.  I have attached some first-hand photos below.

Although these sculptures are imbued with meaning, for the most part, they are playful and just play cool to interact with!

Photographs by Christopher Williams

Christopher Williams, a mid-career artist, has an exhibition of photographs up for only a few more weeks at David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea. Although he does not have the "household name" like status of his contemporaries, he has a cult following - in terms of those that loyally continue to collect his work and the younger artists and photographers that are influenced by him. He studied in the early 1980s with other conceptual artists at the California Institute of the Arts under John Baldessari (who just had a spectacular survey at the Metropolitan Museum). His photographs seem to straddle between art, commercial and industrial photography happily defying any categorization. In this show, the works are self-reflective, in a way, especially the photo of the bisected camera, the light gauge and model and the picture of the dark room chemicals and equipment which are, on the surface, direct and documentary, but have layers of meaning after further observation. In my opinion, I see them as a possible reaction against digital photography both in subject matter and medium. In this time of the popularity of C-print (Chromogenic color prints), which most digital photographers are using these days, and whose conservation over long periods of time has been called into question, Williams uses archival pigment prints on cotton rag paper and gelatin silver prints in small editions which make them very unique in this age of digital photography. The color, texture and crispness of the images are quite stunning in person, and despite all meaning, they are beautiful to behold.

Works (with) on Paper by Adam Fowler

My own personal taste in art work normally trends away from abstraction to the more figurative with some social or political content thrown in for good measure. However, my usual "that's gorgeous, but its been done before" response to non-figurative work was stifled and I was rendered speechless after seeing Adam Fowler's works on paper at Margaret Thatcher Projects on Chelsea's West 23rd. The show is up only for a few more weeks and its important to see them in person (I am sure they will be happy to show you some even after the show ends) because the jpegs just do not do them justice. Fowler freely and gesturally draws a line on a paper (not unlike the Abstract Expressionists or Cy Twombley's scribbles) and then cuts out the drawn line from the paper. After laboriously doing this a couple hundred times, he arranges and layers these cut out lines within a frame. Some works, which can be categorized as "Works on Paper" but are also very sculptural given their three-dimensionality and texture within the frame, range from the very large, where you can enjoy the dualistic nature of the symmetry and asymmetry of his arrangements, to the very small, where you can revel in the delicate forms he has created (almost like looking at lace). There is a strong tension between the very obsessive, intense elements and the kind of quiet zen from the repetition of layers and the kind of naturalistic quality of the work (I am reminded of tall swaying grass in the wind). The work is graphite on paper which creates a varying degrees of gray and white in the work. There is no color to distract the viewer from really studying the process of the artist and the forms that he has created. For me, the process of the artist is completely unique, as was this rare experience I had with his body of abstract art works.

Paintings and Works on Paper by Hope Gangloff

Right now there are two great solos exhibitions by the young artist, Hope Gangloff. The exhibition at the Susan Inglett Gallery in Chelsea will be open until March while her exhibition at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut will be open until June. Gangloff, who began her career as an illustrator, draws from a multitude of historical styles and specific painters but her work is completely contemporary and her own. In her paintings and works on paper, you can see vivid colors and forms of the German expressionists in the early 20th century, the whitish, ghostly skin of her figures which reminds one of Egon Schiele, the cropping of space, and the merging of foreground and background creating a compressed, claustrophobic space which was utilized by the modernists, and the use of obsessive line and focus on patterning and decoration found in Klimt. What jars the viewer is the deft combination of these techniques and stylistic devices with the contemporary subject matter of her work. Gangloff works from life and from photographs of her close group of friends, some musicians and other artists, and the ephemera of their life(books, cards, cigarettes, beer bottles). There is a feeling that you are joining the party or the aftermath of the party with her friends and an intense decadent, psychological treatment to her subjects. There is both a comfort and relaxation in their attitude and activities that you would find in an intimate group. Her paintings, acrylic on canvas, are quite large and the figures close to life size and she uses a variety of brilliant colors, while her very intricate smaller drawings, she uses a honed down palette of whites, variations of blue and red inks on clay-coated paper which creates a chalky opacity and serves to intensify the hues. They are beautiful!!

Paintings by Cameron Martin

Currently, there is a exhibition of beautiful and unique paintings by Whitney Biennial artist, Cameron Martin, at Greenberg Van Doren. The paintings, almost monochromatic and devoid of color, are of untouched scenes in nature - sunlight and shadow playing across broken rocks, a wooded wall of skinny birches, a water fall and trees with their snake-like roots. The works, acrylic on canvas, are painted in whites, creams and varying shades of gray and once you find a good position in front of the painting, you must take the time and be patient to capture all the subtle details of his subjects. The lack of pigment and the bleached out effect of the canvas reminds one of faded photos or postcards, which is further emphasized by his use of cropping and thick white borders around his scenes. These borders are made more apparent by the artist placing the whole scene off center. If you look even closer, there are horizontal striations throughout the painting - reminiscent of lines through an old tv screen. There is a tension between seeing and not seeing and there is a presence of the idea of memory and memories that fade over time. While you are looking at the painting, it seems to disappear in front of you at the same time. Whether there is an environmental message here or a simple contemporary study of nature, Martin's canvases are a serene and quiet respite from our daily urban life.