Nov/Dec 2010/Jan 2011 www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com Vol. 13 No. 2 New York GALLERY&STUDIO

“Abstract Expressionist New York” at the Museum of Modern Art " (101.6 x 128.3 cm) ½ 1947 Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 Agony. Arshile Gorky (American, born Armenia, 1904–1948) The Museum of Modern A. Conger Goodyear Fund © 2010 The Arshile Gorky Foundation/The Artists Art, New York. Rights Society (ARS), New York

PLUS Like a Rolling Stone another excerpt from Ed McCormack’s Memoir in progress HOODLUM HEART page 18 JOHN WALLACE 60 years of painting Norman Perlmutter “Boxes” New Work Margaret with Pearls” 18" x 12" Oil on canvas “ November 2 - 27, 2010 Blue Mountain Gallery 530 West 25th Street, NYC 10001 646 486 4730 Tues - Sat 11- 6 www.bluemountaingallery.org

MARILYN HENRION

“Pile of Boxes,” Acrylic on Canvas, 40"x30"

November 30 – December 14, 2010 Tues - Sun 2-7pm

Reception: Thursday, December 2, 2010 6:00 – 8:00pm

Red Door 40”x50” Mixed media Marilyn Henrion 2010 2/20 Gallery Soft City 220 West 16th Street November 2 - 27, 2010 New York, NY 10011

530 W. 25 St., 4th fl., NYC, NY 212-807-8348 — www.220gallery.net (212)367-7063 Tues.-Sat. 11-6 Paintings also on display by Frank Bozzo

GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 JESSICA FROMM DRAWING

January 18 - February 12, 2011

NOHO GALLERY 530 West 25th Street 4th floor New York, NY 10001 212.367.7063 Tues - Sat 11-6

Untitled #15 19" x 12" G&S Highlights

On the Cover: It wasn’t the art itself but an existential faith in process, rather than product, that made Abstract Expressionism the “Last Romantic Art Movement” and made lower Manhattan feel like Montmartre back in the day. (p.26)

Plus: Further confessions from our resident test dummy for the crash and burn generation. (p.18)

Marilyn Henrion, pg. 7

Madeleine Kraeler Corbin, pg. 27

Jessica Fromm, pg. 4 Arthur Dworin, Anne Bachelier, pg. 31 pg. 8

Margaret Grimes, pg. 35

Ludmilla John Wallace, Aristova, pg. 29 pg. 32 Stefania Carrozzini, pg. 11 2 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov/Dec 2010-Jan 2011 Imagine: The Watercolor World of Alayne Abrahams magine an oeuvre somewhere between that of the 19th century British I Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” and he may have been onto something. After all, we can strive to know as much as possible, but that knowledge is limited by the world around us. The imagination, however, is limitless. Imaginative art and visionary William Blakecreation isand also limitless, because our new creations spring greatest from the mind every hour of every day—and the creativity of the mind has no end.

In Dreams and Daydreams, award-winning artist Alayne Abrahams shares her boundless creative vision through image and original verse. Spending years in a corporate work contemporary master ofenvironment, the Abrahams subdued picture the artistic voice inside her that strove book,to imagine and create. Realizing the importance of imagination, though, she knew the voice could not be silenced forever.

Dreams and Daydreams is a testament to the creative inspiration in us all. Abrahams uses whimsical images, matched with interpretive verse, to delve deeperp within the meanings Maurice Sendak, and youbehind each image. Itmay is a collection for the consummatehave dreamer—ander—a somethe imaginative voice that whispers, or shouts, in the back of your own consciousness.ess. EmbrEmbraceac the art; embrace the idea of the art of Alayneimportance ofAbrahams. imagination. For like Blake’s “Songs of InnocenceDreamsms andand DaydreamsD eam is theand  rst published collection from acclaimedclaiimed artartistis AlaAlayne Abrahams. Abrahams received her formal  ne artsrts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art andan has been recognized in several national and Experience” and Sendak’s “Theinternationalinternatio art competitions. Night To see more of her work, visit http://www.alayneabrahams.com.http://ww Kitchen,” Abrahams’ exquisitely illustrated book “Dreams and Daydreams” holds appeal for all ages, since it can be seen and read on several levels at once. Cloaked in the cadences of nursery rhymes and enlivened by visual allusions ranging from the Pre- Raphaelites and Arthur Rackham to Maxfield Parrish, Art Nouveau, and psychedelic poster design, Abrahams’ synthesis of words and images defies easy classification. One might venture an oxymoronic notion and call her a “wholesome Symbolist,” if not for the fact that her skillfully executed watercolors are too complexly layered with meanings, both bright and dark, to be saddled with so simplistic a qualifier. For surely a winged wisp of post-adolescent girl in a sleeveless top and a thong, kneeling with a brush to paint a garland of violet flowers around a Botticelli-like face, juxtaposed with the lines “Two fairies (did you see) /Dove straight into a tree/ And slept until the morning dew/ Awoke them, wet and gooey” lends itself to a variety of interpretations. And what of the “The Renaissance man,” a languorous longhaired youth with only a cloth draped over his loins, who looks like Jim Morrison of The Doors on the nod, as he “leaned on some stars in the sky” and “dreamed a sweet dream/Filled with visions of cream / Piled © Zhang Xiuzhu - As Time Goes By Theatrical Life No.01 high on top of his coffee so hot/That the steam curled his lips back in glee”? And then there are kneeling winged nymphets and blissful faces enveloped in psychedelic swirls and illuminated with the poem, “Two women stared into the eyes /Of each other with guile and surprise/ The fairies looked up/ While the angel looked down/And they all dreamt of tea, scones and pies!” Labyrinth Innocence and experience indeed! For like Sendak, Alayne Abrahams refuses to insult youthful intelligence with the lie that childhood is a garden without serpents, even while including doggerel to delight her very youngest readers, such as: “The monkey he heaved with a big of sigh/ As the fairy dripped paint in his eye/Oh my, she exclaimed/ How clumsy and lame/But this paint will no doubt soon dry.” In her independent watercolors and prints, Abraham’s pictures speak abstraction eloquently for themselves, as seen in two tributes to artistic predecessors: In “Ode to Burne Jones,” a Pre- Ronald Himler Raphaelite angel piper flutes ornate loops of abstract rainbow hues; in Dusanka Kralj “Musings on Mucha,” fragmented Lara Nasr faces and full figures, inspired by those of the great Czech-born Paris painter Temo Svirely “Ode to Burne Jones” and poster designer, are embellished Zhang Xiuzhu with flowing Art Nouveau arabesques. Other works, including “Goddesses of Light,” “Summer,” and “Renaissance” encompass a host of mythological and art historical October 29 - November 19, 2010 visions, from fairies, angels, and putti to The Three Graces and Botticelli’s Venus. Taking as her artistic credo, Albert Einstein’s Reception: Thursday, November 04, 2010 6-8 pm statement that “imagination embraces the entire world and all there will ever be to know and understand,” Alayne Abrahams melds them all in her luminous watercolor world of dreams and daydreams. –– Ed McCormack 530 West 25th St., Chelsea, New York 212-226-4151 Fax: 212-966-4380 “Dreams and Daydreams” available through Amazon.com www.Agora-Gallery.com or Trafford.com. Alayne Abrahams’ paintings can be viewed [email protected] on her website: alayneabrahams.com

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 3 Jessica Fromm’s Drawings: The Power of Not Knowing

or any artist, one of the greatest goals is to another’s suffering, there are others, such as and sought in vain to emulate from his own Fsurprise oneself. Yet artists, like everyone “Untitled 7” and Untitled # 12,” in which sophisticated and perfectly sane perspective. else, form safe habits. So most surprises are a prone figure dominating the foreground Nor can Fromm be labeled with the small ones that occur while working in a of the composition is gazed down upon by equally inappropriate designation for very familiar mode: a slip of the brush that results sketchier personages whose interest appears much the same sort of thing that has more in a “happy accident” or perhaps two colors merely morbid or voyeuristic. And these recently come into common usage: “outsider one would never have thought of combining are even more disturbing in their way, for art.” Quite the contrary, in this series at least, before that harmonize –– or even clash –– in while the former images evoke sympathy she has joined the ranks of what the humanist some interesting new way. Precious rare in on the deepest levels of our humanity, these critic Seldon Rodman called “Insiders,” the life of any artist are those epiphanies latter ones implicate us all in the benumbed which is to say: artists who work from their that make one feel as though possessed by a indifference with which our media saturated gut, giving visceral impact to images that demon muse. express our common humanity. For some artists, comfortingly For surely these new images ensconced in a familiar style, have the look of something such a surprise might be a unanticipated and authentic which harrowing experience of Poe-like has chosen the artist, rather than proportions. But for the once being chosen by her. And to try adamantly abstract painter Jessica to ignore such a thing, stay the Fromm, who says “This ‘not- course, and take safer path would knowing is the engine which, be not only unadventurous but as ever, drives my work,” it was self-defeating. For a real artist must exhilarating. seize inspiration in whatever form “For perhaps the first time in it arrives, as Fromm has obviously my career I walked into my studio done in the case of these urgent with some images half formed images dredged up from what one in my mind,” says Fromm, can only assume to be fragments of whose stately abstract canvases, memory long buried deep in the as recently as last year, evoked subconscious. comparisons to Barnett Newman At very least this would appear and Mark Rothko. “In a very to be the case; for as broad and short while I backed away from blunt as the strokes are with which the easel, convinced that I would she has laid them down on paper not get where I wanted to go in –– often with a violent energy paint. I seized upon charcoal then more reminiscent of de Kooning’s added graphite, pastel, wax, ink “Women” than anything by and could not stop.” Kathe Kollwitz or other graphic My phrase “demon muse” was masters of humanist themes –– her not an exaggeration: Fromm’s drawings evoke a sense of specific new drawings possess a near situations and scenes. This point demonic energy and some of seems especially well made by the her subjects, such as the dark, juxtapositioning of two drawings gape-mouthed head in “Untitled facing each other in the catalog # 23,” as well as a sequence published to accompany the of horrifically grimacing faces, exhibition. One, “Untitled # 8” could literally suggest demons. is of an older female, seated “Untitled # 17” Remembering the formal austerity as though on a throne, so of the oils in her show at Noho Gallery last age obliges us to regard the suffering of formidable of figure that she fills the year one cannot be anything but startled. others not directly related to us. entire picture space, her eyes staring out Other works in the series, however, suggest Yet other drawings such as “Untitled imperiously. The other is “Untitled #23,” an underlying narrative and make clear that #5” and “Untitled # 14,” strike closer to the gape-mouthed image that I described these dark visions, executed with frenzied home, forcing us to identify with writhing earlier. Only, viewed anew in relation to the expressionist strokes in varying combinations or contorted figures whose nudity is devoid figure to its left, it now becomes a small child of the mixed graphic mediums the artist of all sensuality by evoking those moments confronted by the wrath of a judgmental mentioned, are concerned with universal in life that reduce us to our quivering elder. themes more humanistic than supernatural. naked meat essence. Indeed, that is what Neither interpretation seems truer than Who among us, for example, has been so Fromm does to the act of drawing itself in the other, given the broad range of possible favored by fate that he or she has never had this series: She denudes it of the distancing human meanings that these powerful to stand at the sickbed of a gravely ill loved device of aesthetics, tears away the protective drawings embrace. Whether they indicate a one like the clustered anxious figures in cloak of what Jean Dubuffet referred to necessary detour or a fertile new direction for “Untitled # 4” and “Untitled # 17”? as “asphyxiating culture.” Yet, for all the her art to explore, one can only be grateful Fromm has stated that she has not given raw emotion in these drawings, being a that Jessica Fromm had the courage not to these drawings descriptive titles because she consummately sophisticated artist, Fromm turn her back on them. –– Ed McCormack wants them to stand alone. And they do, can hardly be defined as an exponent of speaking eloquently for themselves. “art brut,” the term that Dubuffet came up Jessica Fromm, While the two drawings that I have already with to describe the kind of untrained even Noho Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, cited speak of bearing empathetic witness to at times deranged art he was inspired by January 18 - February 12.

4 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 The Paintings of Marianne Schnell: Nature Transformed n Marianne This banner year ISchnell’s recent also brings us retrospective other works in exhibition, the which Schnell works included introduces a sense ranged from early of composition student paintings more akin to the in a realist manner Asian than the to some superlative Western tradition. examples of the She finally tosses airy, botanically off the shackles inspired of the leftover abstractions that Cubist structuring crown her mature that serves as the style. As such, phantom armature the show enabled of much ostensibly us to chart the loose and development of goosey gestural a quintessential abstraction. She New York artist even outdoes whose varied Norman Bluhm in oeuvre provides this regard in one an overview of especially majestic one greatly gifted large canvas pilgrim’s aesthetic where the center, progress over the past half century. evokes the supple limbs of saplings. Viewed although faintly mottled with pale purple Regarded in the Proustian terms, Schnell’s as a group, these pieces forecast the gift for washes is essentially empty, with fiery orange very early realist oils are fascinating not translating elements of the natural world into strokes sweeping in from both sides like the only for their precocious sophistication but the engaging gestural language for which branches of two burning pine trees. also for the hints that they provide of the Schnell was eventually to become known. From here on in, Marianne Schnell’s artist’s formative environment. We know Indeed, like the visual counterpart to signature style, which she would continue to that she grew up in Paris and New York and the literary development of Susan Sontag, refine and open to new possibilities over the began studying painting at age 11 with the the exhibition gave one a superb sense of a next three decades and right to the present, Impressionist Schulein. One gets a sense of precocious young woman artist’s trajectory was firmly in place (if one may employ a this affluent cosmopolitan cultural milieu in from her early promise to the ultimate term that may seem antithetical to the sense Schnell’s already accomplished 1939 canvas mastery of her medium. From the early of constant flux that continues to animate “Mrs. Schulein in her Drawing Room,” to the late 1960s, Schnell experiments her best work). Perhaps it would be more showing the subject at her piano in an elegant restlessly, trying on a variety of expressive accurate to say that at this point the fireworks interior where paintings grace the walls and modes, ranging from sweeping, cursive began, with brilliant, florally suggestive even lean against them. Already present in linear configurations, to overall compositions explosions of color everywhere to be seen. this neophyte work is an exquisite, European- comprised of densely layered and woven Often her radiant gestural effusions occupy inflected refinement that has always been a strokes, to looser gestural works in generally pure white grounds, as in one four-by-six- feature of Schnell’s art, even when she later subdued hues, as seen in a 1960 canvas from foot canvas in a horizontal format from ventured intrepidly into the male-dominated her “Black Line Series.” the year 2000, where the “air” that she lets arena of the New York School. And although One of the pivotal works from this middle into her compositions surrounds a jaggedly it is difficult to imagine Schnell bending period, as far as this writer is concerned, is configured orange shape that appears to elbows with the bully boys of Abstract an untitled (as most of Schnell’s paintings burst like a giant firecracker. Yet that the Expressionism at the Cedar Bar, the later remain to this day) work from 1965, in airy expansiveness of Schnell’s mature works in this show make clear that she more which she really begins to hit her stride. Now compositions arises from something far more than held her own in sheer painterly terms. working in acrylics, a relatively new medium more complex and mysterious than a simple In another early realist painting, “Still Life, that suited the swift buoyancy of her style –– trick of omission is made clear in an easel 1939,” the juxtaposition of fruits, a wine and which she would often use either alone scale painting from 2009, where the florally bottle, and a package of cigarettes suggests or combined with oils from this point on suggestive effusions of color occur against that the adventurous young artist is already –– this largish canvas sets bold, swiftly arching a 24 karat gold ground. For not even the looking beyond the genteel drawing rooms yellow and blue strokes afloat against a pale element of metallic opacity that her painterly of her childhood to a romantically enticing olive green ground. For, here, Schnell begins gestures inhabit so baroquely can anchor bohemian world where her work can grow to approach the striking détente between the untrammeled vivacity at the heart of and flourish. Along with other works in the elements of Abstract Expressionism and Marianne Schnell’s creative project. Indeed, same manner from the same year, “Untitled Color Field painting that distinguishes her it is the energy of nature itself that she taps (Bennington), c. 1950,” makes clear that mature work. into and transforms by virtue of her singular Schnell, now studying with Paul Feeley at It is in the early 1970s, however, that artistic vision. Bennington College, was quickly finding Schnell’s unique painterly sensibility emerges –– Ed McCormack her footing in abstraction. For her vigorous in full force. It begins the first year of the compositions of this time are characterized by decade with a gorgeously sumptuous Marianne Schnell, mostly muted, subtly harmonized color areas, medium size canvas in which graceful curved seen recently at the Broome Street Gallery, bolstered by an energetic linear ecriture that strokes enliven a burnished red ground. 498 Broome Street

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 5 The Lyrical Linear Universe of Fred Mou ine is the essence of form and a delineator since the airy openness of his style suggests an by imbuing Lof character, according to artists in the expansiveness much greater than the actual his work with Asian countries, where calligraphy is regarded size of his paintings. a combination as an art form on a par with painting and its Mou has evolved a personal vocabulary of of strength, greatest exponents generally surpass the linear linear forms, ranging from cursive swirls and grace, and mastery of our best Western artists. Fred sensual arabesques to geometric forms and precision unlike Mou, a Swiss architect-turned-artist trained at biomorphic shapes that appear to be derived anything else the Institute of Architecture, in Geneva, who from natural, often botanical sources. These that immediately began his career at the School of the Beaux sources are spelled out most explicitly in springs to mind. Arts, in Paris, is the exception to the rule. the especially graceful composition entitled Some of his Mou is a painter whose works in acrylic “Bamboo.” Characteristically, however, this compositions on paper consist primarily of colored lines, acrylic painting on paper, with its dancing evoke floral forms, “Bamboo” rather than areas of color in the usual Western green lines and circular pink forms is hardly while others suggest fantastic landscapes or manner. Lines dance and swirl over the naturalistic or formularized in the manner futuristic cities that exist only in the dreams white expanse of the paper with a grace that of traditional Eastern painting, in which of a former architect like himself. All are is uncommonly beautiful for their sinuous bamboo is one of the time-honored genre. possessed of a peculiar magic, sometimes sense of movement. Among contemporary Rather Mou gives his own imaginative fanciful, often mysterious. They invite the American artists only Brice Marden’s “Cold interpretation to the subject in a composition viewer into a fascinating private world, Mountain” series, influenced by Chinese that is essentially abstract. hermetic and rarefied. Unlike so much art calligraphy, seems comparable. But while In another composition called today, they see no need to scream, “Look Marden’s oils on canvas partake of the “Connexions” –– this one in blue and red –– at me!” (Sometimes whispers can be more aggressive scale of Abstract Expressionism, sharper more jagged linear shapes come into seductive than screams anyway.) In any case, Mou’s relatively modest formats lend his play, reminiscent of craggy mountain peaks. the paintings of Fred Mou are a refreshing works an intimacy and a poetic delicacy And in “Flying Metal,” the composition is reprise from the more bombastic aspects of that puts them in a category all their own. animated by flamboyantly flowing yet sharp today’s art world. And one gets the distinct Such intimacy is especially refreshing and edged forms that project an almost antic impression that they will be around long after something to be treasured in an art world sense of movement. much of its more showy talents have been where many works are cumbersome and Fred Mou is an unusual artist for his forgotten. –– Maurice Taplinger overblown, owing to the idea that size unique ability to create considerable equals significance. By contrast Mou, like excitement with a severely limited formal Fred Mou, Agora Gallery, the earlier intimist Paul Klee proves the old vocabulary. However, the austerity of his 530 West 25th Street, adage that “less can be more” –– especially approach works wonderfully in his favor Show closed October 1

HeartShare proudly presents the works of Artists with Developmental Disabilities at the 2nd ANNUAL ARTSHARE for HEARTSHARE EXHIBIT OPEN DAILY NEW CENTURY ARTISTS GALLERY Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010 530 West 25th Street, Suite 406 OPENING through Between 10th and 11th Avenues RECEPTION Saturday, Nov. 13, 2010 New York, NY 10001 Friday, Nov. 5 11:00 am ‐ 6:00 pm 4:30 ‐ 8:00 pm 212.367.7072 • www.newcenturyartists.com

HEARTSHARE CONTACT ‐ Joyce Levin 718.422.3268 • [email protected] GALLERY&STUDIO Subscribe to An International Art Journal GALLERY&STUDIO PUBLISHED BY $25 Subscription $20 for additional Gift Subscription $47 International $5 Back Issues ©EYE LEVEL, LTD. 2010 Mail check or Money Order to: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED GALLERY&STUDIO 217 East 85th Street, PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 217 East 85th St., PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 Phone: 212-861-6814 (212) 861-6814 E-mail: [email protected] EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Jeannie McCormack Name MANAGING EDITOR Ed McCormack Address SPECIAL EDITORIAL ADVISOR Margot Palmer-Poroner DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Karen Mullen City CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Maureen Flynn www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com State/Zip 6 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 Marilyn Henrion’s “Soft City” Series he stark iconography of urban sense of tangential elements that, while not through high contrast photographic Tarchitecture –– most particularly that of immediately apparent in her compositions “flattening,” dramatically emphasizing Soho, New York City –– takes on palpable seem to resonate like phantom presences contrasts between sunlight and shadow, sensuality in the distinguished textile artist from within their painstakingly stitched while strengthening the composition’s Marilyn Henrion’s new “Soft City” series, surfaces. These elements were especially design by binding color and line to the which like Jonathan Raban’s novel of the evident in her 2006 “Disturbances” series, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane. same name, presents a magical mystery in which architecturally allusive abstract Other contrasts enter into compositions tour of familiar thoroughfares. Although forms appeared to implode with organic such as “Soft City: Open Door,” where the the contradiction inherent in the series’ title plasticity, evoking wrenchingly vertiginous mannequin displaying a bathing suit in a may call to mind the “soft sculptures” of associations with the collapsing Twin Towers. narrow, relatively shallow display window Claes Oldenburg, in whose “Happenings” And they continue to haunt the more overtly contrasts sharply with the implied depth Henrion participated as a young member descriptive images in the present series. One within the open door, where shadowy of the downtown avant garde, the appeal of even manages to manifest visibly in “Soft shoppers milling around and the bright bursts Henrion’s mixed media textile works of color from the clothing racks create is considerably more subtle, not to compelling spatial tensions. Here, as mention lyrical, than Oldenburg’s in most of the compositions in the giant, floppy Pop mockups of series, the elaborately hand-quilted mundane objects. elements appear to have a mind of Not that there isn’t an element their own. For they serve to add of Pop in Henrion’s photo-derived textural interest without necessarily images of Soho’s historic cast-iron adhering to the contours of the facades, with their gaping portals imagery depicted, as though the artist and windows as black as the eye- is inviting us to savor them solely for sockets of skulls. Indeed, their their sensuous tactile qualities. graphic impact and combination of These qualities come to the bright color areas can be likened forefront especially in some of to Roy Lichtenstein’s pared down Henrion’s more fully frontal comic strip renditions of modern compositions such as “Soft City: art masterpieces. Only, Henrion Angelika,” a breathtaking night view, dares a more virtuoso approach, apparently from the artist’s studio blithely approximating Impressionist window, of the well-known Soho optical razzle dazzle and the effect of cineplex center, with its lights and chiaroscuro with intricate curlicues those of the surrounding buildings of black stitching that could also and traffic glowing and melting suggest a metaphor for how the into the all encompassing nocturnal infrastructure of the entire city seems blueness. And they are even more to be cracking under the economic prominent in “Soft City: ell,” where strain of the present recession. the cast-iron columns fronting a Don’t put it past Henrion, whose boutique doorway and the large wit often surfaces in her work in pink/red letters of a fragmented logo unexpectedly wicked ways, to make form a dynamic abstract composition such a visual double entendre, in a mode that, while also referencing even when –– or perhaps especially “Soft City: Blue Wall” the close-up photorealism of artists when –– she is interpreting a subject so City: Blue Wall,” an especially rich mixed such as Robert Cottingham, may prove personally beloved. For not only is she a media, hand quilted composition in which more familiar to many of Marilyn Henrion’s native New Yorker whose more abstract Henrion herself claimed not to be aware of longtime viewers. works have always taken inspiration from the shadowy full length figure that emerges Most of those, by the way, would the city’s architecture, but a text issued from a mass of variegated blue forms on the undoubtedly agree with me that Henrion in conjunction with this exhibition also right side of the building. is an artist long overdue for serious tells us that her “needlework skills were Another major attribute of the “Soft reconsideration by those myopic critics handed down through her mother from her City” series is how successfully Henrion has and tastemakers who, because she has grandfather, an immigrant tailor living on maintained the formal integrity which has chosen textiles as her primary medium, the Lower East Side of New York early in the always distinguished her art, while projecting have relegated her work for far too long to twentieth century, just blocks from the Soho a specific sense of place and evoking strong the ghetto of craft. Let us not continue to neighborhood depicted in this series.” atmospheric qualities within the self-imposed penalize this major American artist for being Additionally, it seems relevant here to limitations of her ingenious graphic shorthand. one of precious few who have taken that mention that Henrion lives and works She accomplishes this unique synthesis by medium far beyond its brief popularity during on LaGuardia Place, once the site of the virtue of a technique that combines the digital the feminist era and continued to broaden its Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where 146 manipulation of her own photographs with possibilities and elevate it to the highest level young immigrant garment workers perished ancient needlework techniques, achieving a of contemporary mainstream aesthetics. in a tragic industrial fire in 1911. For timeless fusion that she likens to the following –– Ed McCormack the allusions made to gaping portals and lines from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “Time windows resembling the eye-sockets in skulls present and time past/ Are both perhaps may not be as far-fetched as they seemed: present in time future/And time future Marilyn Henrion One of the factors that has always enriched contained in time past.” Noho Gallery, 530 West 25th St. even Henrion’s most abstract work is a Henrion further “distances” the image November 2 - 27.

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 7 Anne Bachelier: Intrepid Traveler Between the Worlds

“Passe le temps sur la belle au bois dormant (Time Passes for Sleeping Beauty)” ddly enough, although I have been assumption must stand. the painting is possessed of an unutterable Ofollowing Anne Bachelier’s artistic That said, Bachelier’s new paintings are atmospheric beauty, owing to Bachelier’s trajectory assiduously since 1993, it never among her most uncanny to date, darker, exquisite layering of luminous glazes to occurred to me until recently, after being deeper and filled with more unsettling evoke old masterish effects of sfumato privileged with a preview of the new paintings portents than any before. In past reviews and chiaroscuro rarely encountered in that will be in her fourteenth exhibition I have likened her to Fragonard and contemporary painting. at CFM Gallery, that perhaps what this Watteau for the ease with which her brush A more complex mood is evoked in the singularly gifted French artist has been conjured up the foamy fluff of crinolines, larger two-panel oil “Passe le temps sur depicting all along are her intuitive visions the shimmering iridescence of silk, the la belle au bois dormant (Time Passes for of the afterlife to which we are all destined, opulent glimmer of gold, as well as for her Sleeping Beauty).” Here, as in most of her sooner or later, to move on. If so, thankfully orchestration of figure groupings of a rococo work, apart from her book illustrations (a it is hardly the insipidly sweet hereafter that elaborateness comparable to Watteau’s facet of her talent for which her art dealer, the chicanery of organized religion would masterpiece “Pilgrimage to the Island of collector and vociferous champion Neil lead us to believe will be our final reward –– a Cythera.” All of those attributes are still Zukerman provides an outlet in the lavish place that would surely bore beyond death present in Bachelier’s new paintings; only volumes published by his CFM imprint ), any soul trained in the trials and intrigues of now she puts them to the service of starker Bachelier’s interpretation of the theme is earthly existence. Rather, it is an alternate scenes that could suggest Orpheus’ descent hardly literal. In the panel on the left, the reality every bit as complex, challenging, and into the Underworld or an outing on The artist indulges her love of costumes and deliciously, engrossingly ambivalent (at times River Styx. silken finery in the figure of a little girl in an even corrupt) as the one we presently inhabit. In “Arrivera le grand navire (The Great ornate costume carrying a birdcage, in and Whether Bachelier, a retiring woman not Ship Will Arrive),” the figurehead on the out of which brilliant indigo butterflies flit, given to making or confirming outlandish turnip-shaped craft floating above the water, catching the eye of a tall feline-faced figure claims for her work, believes this herself is trailing disgorged roots like tendrils from passing in the background. Since Bachelier’s entirely beside the point. Either way, she its underbelly, with long tattered bandages compositions observe no physical boundaries has always seemed something of a medium, for flags, resembles a vulture. The navigator between pictures and pictures within the mediating between our world and a realm at its helm has a skull-like visage and wears picture, this curious anthropomorphic cat that, up to now, one had assumed to be a shredded suit of tails. The passengers, creature appears to inhabit (along with some wholly a product of her extraordinary all in white lace, appear as ill at ease as the of the indigo butterflies) a large standing imagination. And until some stately spectral stiffly posed Spanish royalty in Goya’s court screen, on which the main figure, in the emissary straight out of one of Bachelier’s portraits, as this ship of fools approaches panel on the right, is a pearlescently pale own oils descends from a mountaintop the craggy peaks of an unwelcoming shore. androgynous adolescent nude, covered only bearing a universally acceptable New Certainly one cannot envy these tremulous from the knees down by plush white billows Holy Writ validating all of the above, this travelers. Yet for all its ominous implications, of bedding floating freely in space, while 8 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 sentries in black four-corner hats slump as Since for this viewer, anyway, though drugged down below. Anne Bachelier’s new paintings In an oil entitled “La Confidence des are decidedly redolent of the papillons (The Confidence of Butterflies),” afterlife in all manner of aspects, a single indigo butterfly catches the eye of and once we dispense with the another androgynous figure in a turban moral constraints of Judeo- holding a small Asian bowl, into which a Christian doctrine, there is really woman tenderly cradling its cheek with one no reason to necessarily assume hand has dipped a finger of the other and that the hereafter would be any is applying pigment the same color as the more devoid of either terrifying butterfly to its lips. Although sexuality is tribulations and sensual rarely overt in Bachelier’s paintings, in these enjoyments than are our dreams two works, we perceive a subtle undercurrent and nightmares –– or, for that for which an intellectual mandarin like matter, the constantly shifting the late, great French semiotician Roland realms of heaven and hell that Barthes may have been tempted to coin a constitute mortal existence. term such as “an erotics of aesthetics.” And In “L’Envol (The if it is decadent to summon sensual titillation Abduction),” a skull-faced through obscure fetishes, well, then the two celestial terrorist spirits a woman combined panels of “Pass le temps sur la belle who may be morphing into au bois dormant” and “La Confidence des a lobster through moonlit “La Confidence des papillons (The Confidence of Butterflies)” papillons” constitute a species of art that gives mists. In “Les Mots sortilèges in a shoulderless gown made up of long decadence a good name. (Magic Words),” a lovely young woman scarlet ribbons and a shapely companion in a feline loup reclining beside her both appear serenely engrossed in an object that one can only hope is not a heavenly device for text messaging. Who can say for certain that both of these magnificent new paintings by the transcendently gifted Anne Bachelier are not prophetic of a world beyond this one? –– Ed McCormack Anne Bachelier, CFM Gallery, 36 West 27th St., November 12th - December 31st.

"D The Geometry ½ of Harriet FeBland new works

October 28 - December 2, 2010

Reception: Thursday, Nov. 4, 5-8pm

the Galleries at The Interchurch Center 475 Riverside Drive (Btw. 119th & 120th Streets) New York, N. Y. 10115 Mon-Fri 9am - 5pm. Closed weekends and Holidays

“Arrivera le grand navire (The Great Ship will Arrive)” 30"Hx3"Wx2 and canvas construction/painting on wood “Diary” wall-relief Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 9 This Group Show’s Theme Was the Art Itself he show simply titled “Artworks” made Marianne V. McNamara made a witty subtly mottled and tonally modulated areas Tno pretense at an overriding theme, yet figurative statement with her large oil on of watercolor or pastel hues. Here, Lanier’s its pleasures were many, starting with Marie canvas, “Two Chicks,” depicting a portly red- most striking subject was “Wellfleet Woods,” Robinson’s modest scale works in collage and haired matron wearing a flower festooned hat where luminous washes of blue and green mixed media. Robinson’s untitled undersea and walking a large chicken on a leash. Like aquarelle impinged on a line of black tree scene in encaustic stood out, the ancient Botero’s corpulent figures, McNamara’s lady trunks just enough to deftly dissolve their wax-based medium lending a luminous had a formidable presence and the artist’s vertical bias with fluidly poetic atmospheres. translucency to the green watery depths. lovingly detailed depiction of her striped The two final painters both displayed In Carole Barlowe’s complex multileveled scarf, speckled wool overcoat, and the proud compositional and coloristic intrepidness in acrylic/collage, four paintings were arranged bearing brought her alive for us. distinctly different ways: Amy Rosenfeld’s to create a long vertical panorama of urban Along with one of her more familiar acrylic on canvas “Colors, Shapes, Designs architecture and pedestrians. Even with such Provence scenes, Ava Schonberg showed relied upon wildly effective combinations details as the tiny figures of workman on a two floral still life subjects in acrylic. In of shrieking pink, blinding orange, neon scaffold, Barlowe imbued her work with an “Sunflowers in Blue Vase,” with its shapely green, and strident blue hues to wreaking austere formal power by virtue of her pristine green leaves, clearly defined yellow flowers, happy chromatic carnage. Broad white stripes hard-edge style and muted color harmonies. the stark geometry of the background was zigzagging this way and that and crisscrossed Jutta Filippelli showed works ranging nicely relieved by the pale blue shadows the tic tac toe configurations complete from small vibrant watercolors to abstract plant cast on the white tablecloth. Rosenfeld’s winningly jazzy statement. Robin landscapes in acrylic with a sense of space Two oils on canvas and a small pastel on Goodstein’s forms have a patchy cragginess reminiscent of Diebenkorn and other Bay paper called “Sea Grasses” showed Linda reminiscent of Clyfford Still at his cranky best. Area painters. Especially fine among the later Lessner’s way with landscape subjects. One But Goodstein is by far the more appealing was a small but bold beachscape with a swiftly canvas called “Patchwork Hills” had puffy colorist than Still, employing combinations of brushed sailboat as its piece de resistance. white clouds floating in a blue sky over smoky reds, warm ochers, and buoyant blues, Beatrice Rubel showed one work in masses of deep green foliage rolling down and sherbet greens that lend her paintings an colored pencil and graphite called “Bands to lighter green and yellow hills, the idyllic almost confectionery lusciousness. and Flags,” which appeared to be derived scene evoked with the broadly brushed vigor from an aerial view of a golf course. In any that lends Lessner’s compositions their juicy –– Byron Coleman case, Rubel transformed it into a vibrant panache. topological abstraction, with bold areas Madi Lanier’s grasp of nature is invariably Recently seen at Broadway Mall Community of green yellow and pink intersected by structured along neo-cubistic lines, with tree Center, 96th and Broadway, Center Island. rhythmic wavy lines. limbs serving as a compositional armature for Discovering the Gritty Newcomer Michelle Louise he story of the painter Michelle Louise “Shhhhh Baby,” the the country. And in Tis one of triumph over adversity. Three loving bond between a another large acrylic on years ago, after leaving an abusive marriage, mother and an infant canvas called “Poppy,” Louise found herself a single mother raising provides solace. In this, the artist not only makes three children with no job, no bank account, one of her strongest a strong formal statement and no car –– almost a necessity in a town paintings, the colors with the large red flower like Sanford, Maine, where her family has are considerably more filling almost the entire lived for three generations. While doing vibrant and perfectly picture space, but also office work, waiting tables, and giving art harmonized. Both the seems to suggest the lessons, she began to make contacts and sell woman and the child flower’s role as the source her paintings, building a reputation beyond that she clutches to of the worldwide heroin her home state. A feature article about her her breast have auburn plague. (At least that struggle in her hometown paper, the Sanford hair, hers flowing is the conclusion this News, provided considerable publicity, and down in luxuriant reviewer draws from the the quality of her paintings took it beyond a waves against her violet woozy, wiggling, pale mere human interest story. blouse. The brilliant blue linear forms on the Louise’s first New York exhibition reveals cerulean background “The Dance” dark ground surrounding her to be a formidable figurative artist whose sets off the softer baby blue of the infant’s the large flower). work is firmly rooted in her life. In “The pajamas. The clear color areas, as well as the It seems to be Michelle Louise’s special gift Dance,” intertwined male and female nudes linear grace with which the contours of the to express such basic sentiments in strong, whose hands reach for each other but don’t figures are defined, suggests something of simple visual symbols that resonate in much quite make contact seem to symbolize the Toulouse Lautrec’s lithographs, had he found the same iconic way as Keith Haring’s famous shortcomings of many romantic relationships. inspiration in nurseries rather than bordellos. “Radiant Child” and Niki de Saint Phalle’s Here, the strongly generalized figures, both In a painting called “Love,” the letters “Nanas.” This impressive debut exhibition of which are are entirely hairless but hardly of the word are combined with gesturing suggests that we will be seeing more of this androgynous, create a stylized effect that hands in a manner that suggests a playful talented and resilient artist who has clearly, enhances the picture’s universality. And while take on Robert Indiana’s famous series of as the saying goes, snatched victory from the Louise is normally a bold colorist, the dull paintings on the same theme. By contrast, a jaws of defeat. –– Maureen Flynn brown hue of the flowers to the left of the more abstractly stylized composition called dancing couple, contrasted with the brighter “Hands of America,” in which joined hands Michelle Louise, Agora Gallery blue background and the pale flesh tones, of different colors encircle a single eye, is a 530 West 25th St., January 11 - February 1, suggests that they are in the process of dying. plea for human harmony in the face of the 2010. Reception: Thurs. January 13, 2011, In another acrylic on canvas called many partisan conflicts that threaten to divide 6 - 8pm. 10 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 Chinese Beauty Inspires Artist Zhang Xiuzhu he renowned Chinese painter Zhang expressions I employ are traditional spiritual of his figures, Xiuzhu is an artist totally enamored expressions of Chinese style. For me the although some Tof the Asian feminine mystique in only difference is just the materials. I have are more linearly the series that he calls “As Time Goes By developed the ability to freely and naturally defined than –– Theatrical Life.” In the West, the phrase transform the spirit of Eastern art expression others. In “As “As Time Goes By” immediately evokes the and technique to a form of contemporary Time Goes By haunting lyrics and melody that accompanied expression.” –– Theatrical the doomed romance of Humphrey Bogart Zhang, who is apparently well versed Life No. 18,” and Ingrid Bergmann in the classic film in Western as well as Eastern art, draws for example, the “Casablanca.” But apparently the phrase had contrasting comparisons in his conception woman’s eyes are “As Time Goes By –– its origins in the Ming Dynasty play “The of women to that of de Kooning, which clearly defines, as Theatrical Life No. 20” Peony Pavilion” and was later used in the great he characterizes as “violent deconstructing, are her breasts and 18th century Chinese novel “A Dream of Red tearing up, squeezing and then hanging their prominent nipples –– as though she (or Mansions.” up.” And indeed, although created in a a lover) has opened the bodice of her ornate Both project the romantic “theatrical” manner resembling the Western style for costume to reveal them. Indeed, in the initial image of Chinese women in ornate garb that which critic Harold Rosenberg coined the work in the series, “As Time Goes By –– inspires Zhang Xiuzhu in the series. At first term “action painting” in the 1950s (which Theatrical Life No.O1,” the woman’s entire glance, his large oils on canvas could appear actually dates to the ancient Zen painters torso is nude, but for a string of colorful beads to be Abstract Expressionists, with towering of China and Japan, who splashed ink freely as though she is in the process of donning or vertical forms splashed and slapped onto several centuries before), Zhang’s own strokes removing her colorful garment, which hangs the bare white canvas priming in vigorous are more lyrical than violent. Centralized off her body in all its floral glory, as elaborately strokes, much in the manner of the American discretely against the pure white ground, embellished in its own way as the robes of artist Norman Bluhm, whose paintings are Zhang’s towering figures have the majesty Gustav Klimt’s Art Nouveau ladies. influenced by Chinese ink painting. Zhang of the mountain peaks in traditional Chinese Zhang Xiuzhu’s exhibition in Chelsea began his career working in the traditional painting, although the many strokes of vibrant introduces American art audiences to an artist medium of ink on paper before taking up reds, blues, and yellows with which the figures in the vanguard of the New Chinese Painting. oils as a medium. In fact, he still works in his take shape also reminds one of buoyant floral –– Maurice Taplinger original medium at times and says, “Whether bouquets. I am working in ink wash, line drawings, On closer inspection, however individual Zhang Xiuzhu, Agora Gallery, sculpture or oil painting, the techniques and features can often be discerned in the faces 530 West 25th Street. Through November 19 Carrozzini’s New Group Show Questions Reality he Italian artist/curator Stefania that title, combined with the painting’s subtle and tie poses amiably with hands in pockets, TCarrozzini’s group exhibitions are blue hues and amorphous cloudlike forms, as if for a casual portrait, sporting a garbage more engaging than most because they are which hover between realistic skyscape and can, overflowing with refuse, including a invariably inspired by philosophical inquiry. color field abstraction, is a warning not to livid brain, instead of a head. In another Reading David Shields’ book “Reality take either interpretation seriously, since every composition, Uncle Sam’s head vanishes Hunger, a manifesto” inspired her most work of art creates its own reality. into the sky in di sotto in su perspective as he recent one, “Reality, What Reality?” But what are we to discern from Clara towers over intact towers. But we recognize The question seems especially relevant Scarampella’s photographic close-up of chain- him from his steeply sloping blue and white in an age of “nonfiction novels,” “reality link as convoluted as a nest of serpents tinted striped trousers and the detached eye that TV,” “social media,” and any number of in delicate pastel hues? Is the artist trying to dangles down on a long string, lacking other contemporary permutations that tend tell us that we only endure the chains that foresight. to blur the line between the literal and the bind us to false notions of reality because they Gabriella Ceccherini’s painting appears fanciful. So perhaps a good place to start are candy colored? totally abstract, until one notices that its form is with Cristina Ruffoni, who appropriates Then there is “Electric Tower Meltdown,” is a ringing cell phone –– perhaps the most the Chinese restaurant setting of Edward another apparently digitalized image by ubiquitous manifestation of our communal Hopper’s 1929 oil on canvas “Chop Suey,” Cheryl L. Hrudka evoking fossilized facets of reality. And Stefania Carrozzini contributes renders it in areas of flat acrylic colors (sans nature such as twigs and leaves woven into one of the artful catalog covers that serve the two women having lunch who furnished perfectly symmetrical and an oddly lovely as supplementary contributions to the its central drama), and superimposes big construct as delicate as a bird’s nest and exhibition, this one suggesting newspaper red stencil-style letters that say “American ominous as an illuminated death’s head. The headlines going up in smoke, as if to bid Beauty.” In doing so, Ruffoni creates the only conclusion to be drawn here is that our good riddance to disposable tabloid reality. new reality of an image that looks more present technical reality may be driving us in a And Maria Savino’s painting of a jagged like one of Stuart Davis’ urban abstractions direction so dire that we will someday only be explosion in the midst of a silhouetted crowd than a Hopper and refers not too obliquely able to find vestiges of natural beauty in the raises the specter of a reality that most of to a popular film that satirizes aspects of the byproducts of a toxic environment. us would prefer not to think about, as does contemporary American reality. By contrast, Geppo Monzio Francesco Pezzuco’s stately abstract diptych Some of the other artists in the show Compagnoni’s images, painted in the suggesting stone and smoke. take more abstract approaches which makes manner of a latter-day Magritte, only –– Ed McCormack the viewer have to work a bit harder at more satirical than surreal, spare the viewer deciphering their meanings in relation to the having to look (or think) beyond the Onishi Gallery theme. Giampiero Reverberi, for example, literalness of his subject matter in order to 521 West 26th Street provides us with a lyrical acrylic painting discern the artist’s view of reality. In one of Nov. 30 - Dec. 15 called “Skies of Painting and Spirit.” Perhaps Compagnoni’s paintings a fellow in a suit Reception: Tues, Nov. 30, 6-8pm

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 11 Mixed Media, Mixed Messages in Three Artist Show “ ixed Media,” featuring works by color altogether might seem a risky venture. order to to be transported by Schlachter’s MAndrea Shapiro, Brigitte Schlachter, However, Shapiro succeeds admirably in paintings of delicate white and blue flowers and Regina Lerman was enlivened by a white-on-white collage painting where in a pale green field or of different shaped complementary contrasts, not only of texture picks up the slack, with sweeping loaves of bread, perhaps in a bakery window, medium but also of style. Although abstract, forms, apparently configured from twisted painted in a manner that somehow calls Andrea Shapiro’s Brigitte Regina Andrea mesh, beads, and other to mind Philip Pearlstein’s nudes. Oddly compositions are materials (possibly enough, however, Schlachter’s painting made dramatically configured augmented with acrylic bread more warmly inviting than Pearlstein’s and variously allusive, modeling paste), rather clinical approach to the human figure. often with suggestions creating dynamic formal Regina Lerman’s watercolors take full of the human figure. rhythms akin to those in advantage of the medium’s swift freshness to For this viewer at least, her color paintings. create urban scenes with a nervous energy the forms in one of The paintings of that recalls early American modernists such as her acrylic paintings, Brigitte Schlachter John Marin and Abraham Walkowitz. Even composed with shimmering vertical streaks are contrastingly realistic yet adventurous without including the pedestrians and traffic of subtly modulated green and blue hues, in their own manner for the artist’s refusal below, Lerman makes skyscrapers or clustered evoked a sense of pedestrians and urban to limit herself to repetitious subject matter buildings exude a jazzy electric intensity that architecture on certain atmospheric rainy in order to cultivate a “signature style.” personifies the urban experience. One picture days in the city, when everything takes on an Rather, seemingly choosing subjects as of the Brooklyn El was tonally muted, while unearthly glow and dissolves in puddles and the spirit moves her, Schlachter makes the another, where brilliant reflections on the reflections. transition from the everyday to the lyrical waterfront deconstructed the city skyline to Shapiro also conjures up considerable with engaging smoothness. In one painting, near abstraction, exploded with fiery hues. coloristic magic in another acrylic painting for example, she depicts cars creeping along The energy carries over as well into Lerman’s featuring more sensually rounded forms and a on a highway under a clear sky into which, in works in oil, such as a painting of vigorously brighter palette of strident yellows interacting the distance, the city skyline rises. Through jotted brownstone stoops and pedestrians on with amorphous areas of blue and purple tight compositional cropping, Schlachter New York’s Upper East Side. The power of violet, in which elusive vestiges of facial places us right in the middle of the traffic jam, Lerman’s work derives from her use of pure features seemed discernible. Such fleeting as though viewing it through a car window, gesture as the driving force of her creative perceptions are entirely subjective, however, inviting us to consider the possibility that a impulses. –– Marie R. Pagano and the painting succeeds primarily by virtue bit more aesthetic contemplation could lessen of its lyrical abstract grace. tensions when we find ourselves in such Seen Recently at New Century Artists, Inc. For a painter capable of such chromatic everyday situations. 530 West 25th St. lyricism, a composition which does away with No such transcendence is necessary in Wayne Wilmoth: Space Creates the Place hotography has turned the corner in Utah, at an expanse of sky and an identical Precent decades, taking its rightful place formation in the distance, its own opening beside painting as a major art form, fetching giving way to the same view in microcosm. big prices in galleries and auction houses. Here, Wilmoth appears to comment on the Wayne Wilmoth a Texan presently living and notion of infinity with winning visual wit. working in Naples, Florida, and a professional Monument Valley, the site of the Navaho photographer for two decades, is in the Nation, where more Western movies have innovative vanguard of the art for his “3-D been filmed than anywhere else in the United landscapes.” He terms them thus because States, is obviously an appropriate subject his use of individually shot images of an for the artist, with its many natural distance entire location mounted on picture panels markers. But the quintessential image, from positioned at different heights creates a sense this viewers’ perspective, is the one simply “Bandon Beach” of depth that duplicates the effect of standing titled “Monument Valley.” For here is a It would seem, however, that Wilmoth in the actual landscape. stunning panoramic view of the monolithic need not go in search of picturesque locations Wilmoth states that his intention is to sandstone structures receding in vanishing in order to create such effects. Such is his “freeze a moment in time for others to perspective and making one feel as if he or talent for evoking a sense of place and enjoy,” because, “Many go to places I have she has strolled right into this magical place, focusing in on its defining characteristics that been but cannot capture it in pictures, as so rooted in the earth and yet so unearthly. he can also engage the viewer thoroughly I do. Many want to go to the places and Another place that Wilmoth brings alive with simpler subjects, as seen in two probably never will.” in one of his most impressive 3-D images prints titled, respectively, “Yellowtail” and Indeed, the sense of depth in Wilmoth’s is Bandon Beach, on the southern Oregon “Blackbirds.” The former captures the swift archival digital prints on panel is truly Coast, home of many majestically craggy movement of fish through brilliant blue remarkable, since he carefully calculates the sea-stacks with names such as Cat and Kitten, water; the latter creates the impression that distances and vantage points from which he Table Rock, and Face Rock –– the latter, one could walk right out onto the rickety photographs the various components of his as local legend has it, the face of an Indian boards of that old pier, footsteps scattering scenes in order to achieve their cumulative maiden ossified in stone by an evil spirit. the birds silhouetted on its poles. effect. Sometimes the pictures that he creates In Wilmoth’s “Bandon Beach,” the huge –– Peter Wiley can verge on the playfully surreal, as seen in sea-stacks recede along the shoreline at dawn, “Double Window,” where the viewer gazes the misty early light evoking a visual poetry Wayne Wilmoth, Agora Gallery, 530 West through the opening in one of the huge reminiscent of a watercolor marinescape by 25th St., through November 19. sandstone formations in Monument Valley, the great British painter JMW Turner. (Reception: November 4, 6-8 PM) 12 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 Life in All Its Fullness Reflected in the CLWAC’s 114th Open Exhibition alon art shows harking back to the “Now, Voyager,” a stoneware clay camel with the expression in her eyes in “Christa Lost,” S“expositions” of the Victorian era, holes in its hump that transform its body Diana DeSantis’ pastel portrait of a female where the works swarmed the walls in lively into a stylized abstract form in a manner pugilist in a leotard and trunks wearing one profusion, creating a dialogue between characteristic of this intriguing sculptor of big padded boxing glove and cradling the different styles and genres, can be a refreshing animal subjects. And Virginia Abbott revealed other in her lap like a stuffed animal. Then change from the spare, sometimes sterile her own innovative approach to assemblage there was a more enigmatic oil portrait by “white cube” presentation that we have come in “The Karl Formula,” a multifaceted mixed Jennifer Fairbanks called “Ascent/Descent,” to expect in today’s art world. Certainly this media semi-cruciform wall-piece juxtaposing in which a pregnant woman, cradling her big was true in the case of the 114th Annual several dangling cast paper masks of the belly and gazing off dreamily leaned against Open Exhibition of the Catharine Lorillard same bearded face and various found objects, a wall beside a trompe l’oeil rendering of Wolfe Art Club, a woman’s art organization including a small empty picture frame and an overturned coffee cup with its spilled named for a nineteenth century scholar clay modeling tools. contents forming a vertical puddle on the and philanthropist who was the only female An amusingly surreal comment on the wall. Here, along with the metaphysical among the 106 founding members of The materials that coffee cup, other departures from Metropolitan Museum of Art. must be marshaled the otherwise meticulous realism Among the many diverse works on view, to make art was of this work are small areas of the Kristin Herzog’s pencil drawing “Tulips,” made by Lucy composition in which Fairbanks the shapely flowers on their slender, graceful K.H. Kalian in loosens her brushstrokes and stems set austerely against the white of the her oil “Ultra lets tiny bits of the canvas show paper, stood out as a rare gem of a sort not Marines,” where through to reveal a sense of often encountered in an art scene where it an anatomical “process.” can often seem that exquisite draftspersonship mannequin Process comes to the has fallen into disfavor. Pencil foreground in “Letters to the was also handled with impressive Editor,” an abstract work in skill by Karen Kaapcke, Linda Gross Brown mixed media and collage by Gay particularly in regard to shading Billich in which typographical and modeling, in her detailed fragments, graffiti-like scrawls, and study of a man holding his splashy painterly effusions converge hands of his eyes, “See No Evil.” vigorously. Indeed, the sheer diversity Beth deLoiselle also captured of subjects, styles, and techniques in our attention with “A Branch of this show offers something for every Budgies,” a solidly painted oil, taste, ranging from “It’s All About depicting a lineup of budgerigars Custard,” a crystalline culinary still life perched on a tree limb amid in oils in the Netherlandish tradition by leaves and lush pink flowers, that Andrea K. Brock, to “Footsteps,” an transcended banality by virtue of evocative winter landscape in pastels by the artist’s mastery of a refined Linda Gross Brown, with bare winter Diana DeSantis Mary Gaynier romantic realist technique. trees casting their shadows over deep However, lest one get the snowdrifts through which passing impression that the show favored people have trod and traced a winding traditional styles and media over path. Other pleasures are provided by the innovation and experimentation, wittily titled “How Many Does It Take the work of regular exhibitor Susan To Change a Lightbulb?” an amazingly Twardus, who creates detailed and intricate mandala-like figurative tour de expressive figurative sculptures force in the delicate and difficult medium from newspaper should be cited. of cut paper by Mary Gaynier; a luminous Twardus was represented here by a floral watercolor called “Strawberries and Andrea K. Brock veritable tour de force called “The Cream” by Doris Davis-Glackin; “Alwyn Manipulator,” bringing a somewhat sinister salutes three paint Court,” a technically accomplished puppeteer to animated life. And that even one tubes standing at photorealist oil of an ornately sculpted of the most venerable sculptural mediums can attention, each building facade with phantasmagoric be innovatively transformed without “gilding with a palette knife reflections in its windows by Sharon Susan Twardus the lily,” so to speak was made clear in Susan lined up like a rifle Florin; and “Reflection,” a Diane Rappisi’s Geissler’s “Mom, Can I Keep Him?,” a and bayonet. How dramatic oil of a woman of a certain age winningly weird bronze of a little girl in a an artist can infuse a portrait with a peculiar ruminating in a mirror with an old wedding blue jumper clutching a big fat pussycat, personal resonance through the use of light picture tucked into its frame, at a dressing meticulously painted to resemble a life-size and shadow was demonstrated skillfully in table amid photographs of children and other 3-D Norman Rockwell parody. Among other “Derek Garlet,” Aubrey O’Meara’s pastel mementos of the family life she appears to be other noteworthy sculptures were, “Lily,” a of an otherwise nondescript man wearing looking back upon. sleek piece in limestone by Freya Gervasi that eyeglasses and a deadpan expression, albeit –– Maureen Flynn transformed a floral subject into an abstract bathed subtly fluorescent auras that hint Art Noveau arabesque with echoes of an at hidden complexities of character. By CLWAC 114th Annual Open Exhibition, Escher staircase; “The Englishman,” a fired contrast, the subject herself projects an National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park clay character study of an elderly chap in a cap affecting combination of belligerence and South, (Ended October 29th) by Marlys Boddy; and Priscilla Heep-Coll’s vulnerability through the set of her jaw and Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 13 At Broome Street Gallery: A Lively Mixed Bag he 93rd Annual Exhibition of the akin to Rockwell Kent’s mythic figures. the mystery, leaving the viewer tantalized by a TAmerican Society of Contemporary Nature is transformed in Linda Butti’s variety of possible interpretations. Artists is aptly titled “What’s New” For mixed media work on paper, “Autumn Another sculpture –– this one by Lea despite its venerable history, the ASCA is one Tree,” with its radiant rainbow auras. On the Weinberg –– makes a quite different of the more forward-looking of such artist’s evidence of this one piece, Butti appears to statement with a similar title, “Entangled.” organizations, less mired in tradition than be a consummate colorist whose variegated The medium is wire mesh and although some others, and its annuals invariably yield a strokes transmit a chromatic intensity that the shapes it takes are mostly abstract, they number of surprises. Since the ASCA boasts imbues even a simple subject with a visionary strongly suggest a couple struggling against close to a hundred members and a good quality. By contrast, Sachie Hayashi imparts the ties of codependency, yet bound by the many participate in this event, it is naturally an almost hallucinatory surrealism to a stronger force of destiny, as they wind around impossible to include all of them in even a desolate landscape where the flesh-colored each other like wisps of smoke. fairly lengthy review. One can only hope to boulders appear to morph into figures, in the Still life also makes an appearance in give a sampling of the show’s quality and oil on canvas, “Ritualistic Dance.” In her distinctly different guises: In her oil painting diversity by selecting a few works to describe intricately configured metal sculpture “Poetry “Still Life with Susquehanna,” Georgiana and reproducing images of others. of Life,” created with copper, brass, and Cray Bart presents us with an arrangement of The ancient medium of encaustic is aluminum, Julie Joy Saypoff seems to present bottles and a bowl of apples, all in subdued employed in a fresh contemporary manner our daily existence as a kind of antic merry- green or blue hues set before a window by Annette DeLucia Lieblein in “Waiting,” go-round. Cutout figures cavort within and looking out upon a body of water and where a long procession of silhouetted figures around an architectural construct suggesting autumnal trees. The serenity of the scene is set against a tactile monochromatic ground. a fancifully stylized skyscraper conjured up by owes much to Bart’s mastery of subtle color The painting has an ominous resonance, Alexander Calder, with whom Saypoff seems harmonies. evocative of breadlines or other situations to share a talent for making metal take flight By contrast, Dorothy Koppelman

Neva Delihas Setlow Barbara Browner Schiller Ray Shanfeld Alan Roland Jeremy Comins

Rose Marie Cherundolo Gerda Rose Hank Rondina Olga Kitt Esther Berman Harriet FeBland

incorporates two red tea pots and various cooking utensils within an abstract grid that morphs on closer inspection into a kitchen in her beautifully Nikolai Buglaj Janet Indick Olivia Koopalethes Allan Simpson organized composition, in which people are stripped of their –– even when the piece is stationary rather “Cooking on a Brick Wall.” individuality, and thus their human identity than mobile. Less covert modes of abstraction also and dignity. Margo Mead, on the other hand, By contrast, Bonnie Rothchild exploits make a strong showing: as seen in Elaine generalizes the human figure to make a more the weighty quality and innate earthiness of Alibrandi’s tactile composition in vibrant political point in her work in watercolor, ink, terra cotta to lend gravity to a semiabstract, yellows and greens, veined by intricately and oil crayon on rice paper, “Dropping the sensually simplified female figure with a Continued on page 25 Ball on Global Warming.” For here, the male mysterious womb-like opening oddly located and female quasi-deities fumbling with the in its upper torso, pregnant with an egg- ASCA, Broome Street Gallery, globe as though it’s a hot potato in a celestial shaped inner form. The title of Rothchild’s 498 Broome Street, setting are symbolically stylized in a manner piece, “Intertwined,” only serves to heighten November 8 - 21

14 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 Ann Chernow’s “Bad Girls” Cry First But Laugh Last ll the world loves a bad girl. Or such her head thrown back and her chest thrust Ais the impression one would get from out, singing her heart out in front of a the runaway popularity of Madonna, microphone with the silhouettes of a clarinet Lady Gaga, Lindsay Lohan, Katy Perry, player, a sax player, and a trumpet guy and company. But they’re just beginners wailing away in the background. Oh, her compared to the bad girls of 1930s and man, she loves him so, he’ll never know ... ‘40s movies and pulp novels, from which But don’t worry, he’ll get his, too, before Ann Chernow takes inspiration for her the love affair is over. series of etching/aquatints of that name. Then there’s “Clean Beds,” in which a While Chernow bases her prints on Harlow clone strides past a sign advertising ‘30s and ‘40s film noir imagery, she uses that bare amenity with a cute little black hat contemporary models, changing their propped on the back of her bottle-blond hairstyles and clothing to fit the fashions head like a slightly slipped halo and her cute of those decades. And although the scenes “Where Are You?” little nose in the air. She never thought it that she draws are her own creations, she the film noir atmospheres in which they ply would come to this; but, hey, she’s a classy employs a complex range of monochromatic their wiles. broad, and as soon as she hooks up with Mr. techniques to give them the look of classic One of the most striking examples is the Big Spender, she’ll be back on Easy Street film stills. print Chernow calls “Where Are You?” In where she belongs. “Once experienced, a movie is never it, a brunette with a pert period hairdo, Like all of Ann Chernow’s bad girls, this totally forgotten. Memories from films can wearing a white blouse that makes her stand brave little bottle-blond fervently believes be channels, metaphor and private reverie out like a moth in a dark room, stands that every cloud has a silver lining. Just don’t through which an artist can address the before a window, parting its slats with her show her the print that the artist modeled human condition.” delicate fingers. The slats throw shadowy after an old-fashioned poster for an imaginary Since the heyday of Pop, many artists have stripes across her pretty profile, dramatically film called “Guilty as Hell,” in which a turned to popular culture for inspiration. illuminated by the harsh light of the neon beautiful stiff is laid out like Sleeping Beauty However, what sets Chernow’s work apart night that she gazes out into. Where is he? under the legend, “Hidden Hands Ended from the often slapdash productions of most Flash back from this moment and you can Her Life!” such Camp followers is her deep emotional envision an entire scenario, maybe with a –– Ed McCormack commitment to her subject matter, her gunmetal gray surprise waiting for the heel painstaking research of the periods she when he finally arrives. Recently seen: depicts, and the highly refined drawing skills In “All That Jazz,” a big, gorgeous blond Ann Chernow, 2/20 Gallery, she employs to evoke her femme fatales and band singer in a sequined dress stands with 220 West 16th Street The Neo-Pointillism of Santina “Semadar” Panetta t a heretofore little explored juncture technique that she employs to create them, she achieves from Awhere pointillism meets optical art becoming entities illuminated by a unique life one composition and color field painting the oils of Santina of their own. to another, “Semadar” Panetta, an artist who was Although at face value the comparison one need only exposed to the classical arts in both her could seem far-fetched given the disparity compare her native Italy and Greece before migrating to of their subject matter, Panetta’s work can oil on canvas Montreal, has staked out her own unique also be likened to that of Chuck Close for “Spring River” territory. the manner in which the separate units that to another oil on Ostensibly, Panetta’s paintings are make up her compositions, while abstract at canvas entitled landscapes. Yet her own distinctive manner of close range, cohere from a distance to create “Day Break.” juxtaposing discrete dots of color that blend the image. However, it is primarily Panetta’s In the former together optically, rather than on the artist’s unique color combinations that set her work, for all the “Spring River” palette, goes beyond the effects of nature to work apart, as well as the manner in which chromatic razzle spark a dazzling chromatic shimmer perhaps she animates the surfaces of her paintings dazzle of the shimmering surface, the forms more akin to early Larry Poons and Brigid through the arrangement of her daubs of of the flowing blue river and the yellow Riley than to those of Seurat. color and the juxtapositioning of different and green foliage along its shore are clearly At the same time, Panetta has obviously hues to capture subtly changing qualities of defined. In the latter painting, however, the studied and absorbed the pointillist master’s light unlike those of either earlier Pointillists landscape is all but deconstructed by the formula for optical painting based on the or their peers in the Impressionist movement. blindingly brilliant sense of light that fills systematic repetition of elements that Neither quasi-scientific in the way that the entire composition, illuminating it to he referred to as “divisionism,” through Arthur Danto meant when he referred to the point of near oblivion. Here, as its title which he hoped to arrive at a more Seurat as “a chilly geometrist, a chromatic implies, the dawn light virtually “breaks” the rational approach to light and color than engineer,” or beholden to the random composition into a glittering array of golden the fleeting effects of the Impressionists. whims of nature in the manner of plein air hues, exemplifying the synthesis of landscape Panetta, however, ups the chromatic ante painters such as Monet, Panetta’s paintings and abstraction at which Santina “Semadar” by employing fiery colors in some works appear to partake of both systematic and the Panetta excels. –– Byron Coleman that her predecessor might not have spontaneous elements in order to arrive at necessarily have chosen and combining the radiant effects that they project. Yet light Santina “Semadar” Panetta, them with contemporary intrepidness. And, is invariably the pièce de resistance in her Agora Gallery, 530 West 25 Street, ultimately, much as Seurat did in his own compositions. November 23-December 14; time and manner, her paintings transcend the In order to savor the subtle variations that Reception: December 2, 6-8 PM.

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 15 AGallery Chelsea New York Armadillo Fine Art Publishing Memory Lingers On New York International A Photography Exhibit Juried Art Exhibition January 26 - February 13, 2011 MAY 1-MAY 31 2011 Curated by Janice Wood Wetzel and Deena Weintraub Opening reception: NO EXHIBITION FEES Saturday, January 29, 2011, 2:30-5:30 PM NEW GALLERY SEEKING EMERGING ARTISTS Closing reception: CHOICES BASED ON SUITABILITY OF THE WORK Sunday, February 13, 2011, 2:30-5:30 PM $ 30 SUBMISSION FEE PLEASE GO TO WWW.AGALLERY.INFO FOR DETAILS OR VISIT Broadway Mall Community Center WWW.ARMADILLOFINEARTPUBLISHING.COM>INFO>AGALLERY Broadway@96St. (NYC) Center Island AGALLERY 141 WEST 28 STREET CHELSEA NEW YORK 10001 Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm 212.947.7638 www.AGALLERY.US [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org

American Society of Contemporary Artists 93nd Annual Exhibition November 8 -21, 2010 Tues.-Sun. 11- - 6 pm/closed Mon. Reception: Sat., Nov. 13th 2 - 5 pm “What’s New” Broome Street Gallery, 498 Broome St., NYC 10013 Anita Adelman Lawrence Alboum Elaine Alibrandi Joseph Amabile ABSTRACT Plus / 2010 Georgiana Cray Bart Esther Berman Marcia Bernstein Nikolai Buglaj Linda Butti Yanka Cantor Mihai Caranica Rose Marie Cherundolo November 24 - December 12, 2010 Eleanor Comins Jeremy Comins Maria De Echevarria Judith de Zanger Elvira Dimitrij Harriet FeBland Sachie Hayashi Judith Huttner Rose Sigal Ibsen Janet Indick Jessica Di Fabio Iwamoto Sueyoshi Iwamoto William Jefferson Ilse Kahane Richard Karp Florence Keveson Olga Kitt A Fine Arts Exhibit Olivia Koopalethes Dorothy Koppelman Helen Levin Estelle Levy Annette Lieblein Frank Mann Leanne Martinson Basha Maryanska Curator: Patience Sundaresan Meredith McIver Marie Mutz Margo Mead Min Myer Hedy O’Beil Gilbert Passarella Lisa Robbins Alan Roland Hank Rondina Bonnie Rothchild Gerda Roze Joanne Beaule Ruggles Julie Joy Saypoff Broadway Mall Community Center Barbara Browner Schiller Neva Setlow Ray Shanfeld Isabel Shaw Broadway@96St. (NYC) Center Island Uri Shulevitz Allan Simpson Sonia Stark Kelley Ryan Stengele Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm Lubomir Tomaszewski Lea Weinberg Raymond Weinstein Marilyn Weiss Miriam Wills Doris Wyman Leslie Shaw Zadoian [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org

Alfred Leslie Open 2010 John Chamberlain November 3 - 21, 2010 A Photography Exhibit Curator: Jennifer Holst November 4 - December 23, 2010 Calvin Eagle • Archie Hamilton • Jennifer Holst Bob Merritt • Jonathan Morrison • Jean Prytyskacz Don Sichler • Thom Taylor Allan Stone Gallery 113 East 90th Street, NYC 10128 Broadway Mall Community Center Tel. 212.987.4997 Fax. 212.987.1655 Broadway@96St. (NYC) Center Island www.allanstonegallery.com Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org

16 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 Wisdom in Line: The Human Empathy of AK Corbin K Corbin, who can arrest about Paris with a very clear a big poster of a woman wearing a sun-visor Aour attention with an elegant mandate to show established and coolly sipping iced tea. pencil drawing of a Greek statue and emerging artists from As with the aforementioned Red lounging casually, as though across the pond.” Hook scenes, Corbin shows her ability to waiting for a bus, in a museum Last year, Corbin created imbue inanimate objects with an almost sculpture court, while an old guy soulful atmospheric views anthropomorphic quality in another drawing reads a newspaper on a bench of Red Hook’s desolate of an old tree in Central Park, its gnarled nearby bench is one of the least industrial streets. More branches and thick, lumpy trunk exquisitely pretentious yet more relevant such views, included in her delineated. Stare at this ancient sentry long artists around. For her subject first show in her new space, enough and its craggy surface begins to is the eternal one of everyday demonstrate once again her suggest grimacing faces and tormented existence and human foibles, uncanny ability to permeate limbs crucified against an overcast sky above caught on the run and depicted even unpeopled scenes with starved, sloping lawns delicately tinted with with a knowing humor precious a haunting sense of a hidden pale yellow washes. rare and highly welcome in human presence. These small Nearly as gnarled and wizened as the tree is today’s clamorous art scene. “On the A Train” mixed media works, some the body of an elderly male bather resting on Although Corbin formerly with collage elements, are his elbows on a blanket on Jones Beach. Since exhibited in Chelsea, the launching of her striking in formal terms as well, with their his leathery back is turned up to the sun, his own exhibition space, closer to home in Red clear color areas reminiscent of Toulouse face is hidden as he gazes off into the distance Hook, Brooklyn, also seems in keeping with Lautrec lithographs. –– perhaps wistfully, at youthful beauty that her populist aesthetic. Just as apropos is her Also featured are small images sketched we, the viewers, cannot see. But Corbin’s decision to give pride of place to city related elsewhere in Red Hook, in and around line, while incisive and unflinching, is never works, mainly her own, but with at least one Central Park, at Jones Beach, and on anything but sympathetic: If this man’s slack show a year reserved for other worthy artists the subway, the majority of which were musculature reminds us what bags of bones (one of whom will be her 88 year old mother completed in the artist’s studio. One we yet may become, well, that’s just the price Madeleine Kraeler Corbin, whose upcoming exception, completed on the spot, is “On the one pays for longevity. And who is to say that debut exhibition is previewed elsewhere in A Train” a strong black and white drawing the simple will to continue is not another this issue). of a weary passenger in rolled up shirtsleeves form of beauty? –– Ed McCormack Small Gallery, as the new space is called, who rolls his eyes heavenward and appears will also include Petit Paris, a sort of annex punch-drunk from the summer heat and AK Corbin, Gallery Small New York, featuring what Corbin describes as “all the bombardment of swarming graffiti and 416 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn. things small and intimate rendered in and advertising messages, he sits on a train under October 31st - November 28th. Lyricism and Freedom in the Art of Dominique Boutaud lthough Dominique Boutaud, who of her modes, like Hartl’s, are obviously (to about nothing.” Since Rothko made that Awas born in Nice, France, became an quote Porter once more) “supremely about statement in 1943, when the principles of American citizen in 2008, she remains a spaces and volumes expressed in the colors of abstract painting were still being debated, French painter in the very best sense of the textures and paint.” And this one can only assume he term. Which is to say: her work has a sense of is clearly part of what lends may have said it in reply to finesse and a love of beauty that harks back Boutaud’s work its subtle one of his more dogmatic to the glory days of the School of Paris. And intensity, as well as its absolute colleagues claiming that while she is primarily an abstract painter who painterly integrity. abstract painting in order says “The U.S. freedom allowed me to direct On encountering Boutaud’s to be “pure” must be my oil painting toward abstract freedom,” oil on canvas, “The Reality,” concerned with formal her work is invariably based in nature. And, for example, one perceives values alone. in fact, it would appear, conversely, that her immediately that this striking Fortunately, in the occasional overtly floral compositions, such composition of numerous tiny more catholic cultural as “Symphonie de Fleurs” are essentially white strokes on a vibrant blue climate of our present abstract anyway, given her bold coloristic and ground is for the painter, first “Symphonie de Fleurs” postmodern era Boutaud compositional sense. and foremost, an occasion for can not only draw Indeed, looking at Boutaud's work overall, exploring the qualities of color and texture inspiration from the bounty of nature but one is reminded of something that the as elements in themselves. And one can also evoke an emotional state in the darkly American painter and critic Fairfield Porter only assume that this is the meaning of its evocative composition “The Pain Received,” (who was close to most of the important title: that the reality exists primarily in the where jewel-like bursts of color emerge from members of the Abstract Expressionist visual and physical qualities of the materials a deep blue field, or create more elusive yet movement, and applied their compositional themselves; the things, in other words, that equally compelling statements such as in her and gestural dynamics to realism) once said make the painting a palpable, independent, minimalist composition “Meli Melo,” where in praise of the floral painter Leon Hartl: “he and autonomous entity in the real world. Yet graceful cursive forms converge on a deep goes against the grain of the existentialist the title also seems double-edged owing to yellow ground. The possibilities are limitless, cult of sincerity that values violence, ill- the cosmic suggestiveness of the composition, and Dominique Boutaud appears eager to adjustment and awkwardness.” For it is clear which evokes another, even larger reality: that explore them all. –– Maureen Flynn that Boutaud as well values none of those of the stars in all their mystery. Boutaud’s dubious qualities in either her totally abstract work seems to tell us that we can have it Dominique Boutaud, Agora Gallery, 530 West or abstractly informed floral paintings. both ways. Or as Mark Rothko once put it: 25th Street, November 23 - December 14, Indeed all of Boutaud’s paintings in either “There is no such thing as a good painting Reception: Thurs. December 2, 6 - 8pm

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 17 After my wife walked out on me, the pictures in her modeling portfolio, which she left behind temporarily in her haste to escape my madness, and which I took to poring over masochistically, suddenly objectified the person with whom I had lived intimately since we were both barely out of adolescence, stamping her indelibly on my psyche as an icon of beauty unsurpassable by any other woman with whom I might ever hope to be. Although other photographs, in which she was posed provocatively in a miniskirt with a sultry expression framed by the long straight hair of the hippie-chick femme fatale, may have been more overtly sexy, there was one image in particular that I carried in my mind as a haunting reminder of all I had lost. Wearing a white lace dress with a high collar and ruffled sleeves, she poses as primly as a bride, her hands clasped in front of her lower body. Her tawny hair is brushed back a bit further than usual from her high cheekbones, which form a parenthesis for her wide-set eyes. Her lips are slightly parted in the most fetching way, and a very large white flower on a tall stem rises like a balloon behind her, giving the initial impression that she is standing in some fantastic garden. But on closer inspection it becomes clear that the flower is fake, a prop probably attached by the photographer to the windshield of a pale-colored parked car, and that there is a barely perceptible blur of moving traffic in the background. The picture always reminded me of the first day I laid eyes on her, on the cusp of a romantic era called Camelot. A recent high school dropout and aspiring beatnik from the Lower East Side pressured by his parents to get a job, I had lied on an employment application about having a diploma and landed on my feet in the Hearst editorial offices on West 57th Street, the personal copy boy of William Randolph Hearst Jr. As for my future bride, her parents had allowed her to come to New York over summer vacation from a boarding school in the Virginia horse country called Fairfax Hall to model junior fashions for an agency called Plaza Five on the condition that she be chaperoned by my boss’ wife, Austine “Bootsy” Hearst, a former model herself and an alumnae of the same ritzy Southern belle hatchery. The picture of my wife Jeannie that I was haunted by after she left me. 18 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 To an apolitical dead-end kid from a neighborhood where the Miss Rheingold Contest, a beauty pageant sponsored by a beer company with ballots in every bar, was taken more seriously (at least by the drinkingclass Irish) than the presidential election, working for Hearst was a glamorous job. Long before JFK’s penchant for presidential cocksmanship became a matter, posthumously, of public record, I was suddenly privy to the inside information that the Democratic candidate was known to his Washington cronies as “Jack the Zipper.” Jackie Gleason would often burst into the office in full “And Away We Go” mode, to spirit the boss out for a liquid lunch at Toots Shor’s or The Stork Club (where my longshoreman father, incidentally, sometimes moonlighted as a waiter during dock strikes). The diamond-dripping blonde movie actress Zsa Zsa Gabor –– with whom the Frank Sinatra Jr. of Yellow Journalism appeared to be having an affair judging from the amount of time they spent behind the closed door of his inner sanctum –– would regularly dispatch me down to the Riker’s coffee shop in the lobby, instructing in her famous Hungarian accent, “Tell dem I vant it in a real cup Me, writer Fran Lebowitz, and Jeannie, in her angry Jane Fonda phase, fed up with the dollink. Tell dem Zsa Zsa does not drink endless press parties, giving the paparazzi the fish-eye. from paper!” But even Zsa Zsa’s glitzy glamour faded * * * climaxed (if that’s the proper word) with my beside the fresh beauty of Jeannie Sanders In the early ‘70s, just before my world good friend and fellow writer Fran Lebowitz Eaton, who showed up in the office that came undone, I was still disingenuous flagging down a flack for the festival after it day like a vision. Forever after, whenever I enough to convince myself that I was merely was announced that there would be “free remembered my first glimpse of her, I would faking making a career out of losing my blowjobs for the press.” think of the unforgettably evocative title of social virginity in my own native city, as I “Are you aware,” Fran asked, just on a short story by Irwin Shaw: “The Girls in churned out regular feature articles and a principle, “that there are female members Their Summer Dresses.” column called “New York Confidential” for of the press?” Less than a year later Jeannie and I would Rolling Stone. But even though I still liked The backtracking flack looked perplexed. elope, choosing the church for expediency to think I possessed that sixth sense that “Well, I don’t know if we have anyone rather than denomination. But we had slick city kids call street smarts, I sometimes available to eat pussy...” already married our destinies in an unused reminded myself of a very young young office in the Hearst Building where I helped woman I once knew who claimed that * * * her rehearse “Romeo & Juliet” for her acting deep, deep down (presumably where not Naturally I was flattered when Jann class. even penises could reach) she would always Wenner, the Editor and Publisher of Rolling “If I profane with my unworthiest hand remain a “psychological virgin.” Since her Stone told me, “Tom Wolfe loved your piece this holy shrine,” I read, reaching out to cup assertion was made somewhat after the fact, on the porn fest. He said it was the best thing her breast, the improvised move provoking a I considered it slightly wistful, until I found in the issue.” coy giggle from my beloved, “the gentle fine myself sacrificing some phantom cherry of Since Wolfe had the first installment of his is this: my lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready my own almost nightly at Max’s Kansas City, book on the astronauts, “The Right Stuff,” stand to smooth that rough touch with a the Hotel Chelsea, Andy Warhol’s Factory, in the same issue, I knew that what he really gentle kiss.” and almost every other gathering place of the meant was not that mine was the best, but “What’re you trying to do,” she replied, hip, the chic, and the fashionably depraved. the most outrageous piece. But that was still putting the script aside, throwing both arms A not untypical article published under my generous praise, considering that the first around my shoulders, and drawing me close, byline around that time began with the line, time I’d met Wolfe, some weeks earlier I had “get me all uppity buppity?” “I am witnessing the first public blowjob ever tactlessly taken my awe of him by the horns administered by a lady in the gentleman’s and parroted something that the great put-on Now, alone in the haunted tenement health club of the Henry Hudson Hotel, artist Andy Warhol (always more generous apartment where we had lived together a New York landmark since 1929.” The with fulsome flattery than proper payment to with our young son Holden, surrounded piece, about the opening night festivities those of us who contributed to his magazine by overflowing ashtrays and empty beer for something called the New York Erotic Interview) had called me. And apparently, my bottles, what I found so heartbreakingly Film Festival, went on to describe the whole chutzpah had gained me a certain notoriety, poignant about that particular picture was catered orgy, as sexual acrobats performed since when I showed up, supposedly to write its combination of purity and pulchritude, on wrestling mats (and one especially agile about him, the first thing Lou Reed asked embodying in one lovely package the couple made out on adjoining excercycles) me was, “Did you really introduce yourself to madonna and mistress dichotomy so dear to for a crowd of fully clothed spectators milling Tom Wolfe as ‘the New Tom Wolfe’?” the heart of every sentimental Italian mafioso around the fluorescent auditorium with “Well, yeah, I did ... But I was drunk, and and Irish Catholic fuck-up like me. champagne glasses in their hands. And it anyway, it was Andy’s fault...”

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 19 face, and announced that the distinguished journalist with him had been pickpocketed of his credentials but needed a ticket to New York, where he had an urgent deadline to meet. And when the clerk explained that he couldn’t put me on the plane without ID, Don Gordeone pointed to the F-27 with the big dollar sign on it sitting out on the tarmac, said it was his, and the matter was settled. “Just spell the name right, baby,” he said, stuffing a C-note in the pocket of my denim jacket for spending money, and I was on my way. Jann had agreed to extend the deadline until the following morning, as long as my cover piece got wired to him at the magazine’s main headquarters in San Francisco from the New York office via the “mojo” –– the Rolling Stone term for the first primitive fax machine. When I got back “Don Gordeone,” “Fast Eddie,” and actress/ photographer Candace Bergen on tour with to our little apartment on 89th Street early Alice Cooper. that evening, the beautiful young woman and the beautiful little boy eating dinner “And what did Wolfe say?” there was turbulence, some passengers would at the kitchen table looked like members “He said, ‘Good luck!’” roll around on the floor, yelling about how of some sane, wholesome tribe to which Lou grinned as if pleased to finally meet that fucking kamikaze at the stick was trying I no longer belonged. The thought filled someone as abrasive as himself. And for a to kill us all. (When one of the more sober me with remorse. But I barely had time to time thereafter we became frequent drinking musicians started chewing the glitter off his greet them, refuse food, crack a beer to wash companions, since my reputation for fingernails, a roadie consoled, “Don’t worry, down a couple of amphetamine pills, and put debauchery and self destructiveness rivaled his it’s a short flight –– just a hop, skip, and a “Whipping Post” by the Allman Brothers own in certain downtown circles. Normally, plunge.”) (the cut I usually used to crank up my prose on journalistic assignment, however, I was I should have taken it as an omen when rhythms) on the stereo, before sitting down able to operate on automatic pilot. Propped that self-elected "stewardess" in the Alice at my typewriter table in the next room to up by just the right recipe of speed or coke, Cooper t-shirt came stumbling out of the write nonstop for the next twelve hours. Quaaludes or Valium, and (always) cannabis pilot's cabin with a plastic bag full of rattling I didn’t hear from Jann until two days and alcohol, I seemed to have total recall. Bud cans, ordered me to stick out my later, when he called to tell me that he and a (I hardly ever took notes because that tongue, and placed a Mandrax on it. couple of other editors had had to work all would have been uncool and might make Five days later, it was deadline day in the day, taping telephone interviews with Alice my subjects self-conscious, not to mention Sheraton Motor Lodge in downtown Detroit and Shep Gordon and sorting through and self-censorious. The trick was to blend in –– with that dreaded D-Day sky looming deciphering my typed and scrawled pages, with the entourage and hang out until all was like an empty sheet of typing paper in the then stay up all night rewriting to salvage revealed.) picture window, as I lay barfing my guts into something publishable out of the pile of But everything finally caught up with me a wastepaper basket down at the end of the incoherent stream of consciousness ravings I on Alice Cooper’s “Billion Dollar Babies” bed. Much of what had transpired since the had sent him. tour in 1973. Since Rolling Stone’s deadline first gig in Pittsburgh was a blank. I barely “Well, do me a favor Jann, and take my this time was especially tight, and I was managed to pull myself together by the time name off of it,” I said. supposed to be writing a cover story on the Shep Gordon knocked on my door to take “I already have,” he answered. But run, a typewriter had been ordered ahead for me to the airport in his chauffeured limo. apparently he didn’t want to take credit for me in every hotel room along the tour route. A former grass dealer gone sensationally it either. The piece was published under the But I never went near any of them. Instead legit, Shep didn’t lose his customary cool byline of a newcomer called “Harry Swift,” I spent all day every day drinking can after (a definite asset for the manager of the rock whose future in journalism appeared no more can of Budweiser with my fellow alkie, Alice, and roll equivalent of a drunken circus geek) promising than my own at that moment in who always performed pissed to the gills back when I discovered while rummaging through time. then. Alice’s hulking ex-marine bodyguard my pockets for a joint that I had somehow The only thing that hadn’t been tampered gave some of us Mafia nicknames: Alice managed to misplace my wallet, containing with was my ending, which described a (whose real name is Vincent Furnier) was my ID, my return ticket, and what was left drunken late night encounter that Alice had “Vinnie, The Boss,” his manager, Shep of the expense money that Rolling Stone had on that last surreal night in Detroit with Gordon, was “Don Gordeone,” and I, for advanced me. two teenage girls who’d been lurking in the some reason, was “Fast Eddie.” “Don’t worry, my man,” he said. “I’ll take hotel corridors all day and their mother, The tour party barnstormed through the care of everything.” who had just got off work in the downstairs midwest in an F-27 with a big dollar-sign on At the airport, he whipped out an coffee shop. They spotted and called out to its tail fin. The poker area was plastered with accordion fold of credit cards, frequent flyer Vinnie the Boss when he tiptoed out into Playboy and Penthouse centerfolds and some cards, police badges, and god knows what the hallway barefoot to prankishly slip a fish of the seats had been torn out to make room other kinds of cards as long as Alice’s pet head from his dinner plate under the door for beanbag chairs and cushions. Whenever snake, dangled it in front of the ticket clerk’s of another musician’s room as a Mafia omen

20 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 of coming doom, and: “Suddenly, he faces had had to pull Chris Blackwell, the president that he wrote for Creem magazine). It was them, spinning towards them on his heels like of Marley’s record company (who had Lester who made sure I stashed my herb a gunslinger, and in one flashing instant pulls reportedly financed our junket to Jamaica) at the hotel before we traveled around down his pants and his jockey shorts, swings aside and assure him that I was not altogether Kingston, where police roadblocks were set it right out and wiggles it at them: the flaccid insane, after Blackwell asked me at the hotel’s up all over city; who watched my back at little beetlenut pecker of the superstar.” poolside bar what I thought of the reggae a hallucinatory Rastafarian revival meeting king’s music, and I shrugged him off with, called a “grounation” in the notorious * * * “Actually, man, I don’t really listen to a lot of tropical slum called Trenchtown, as huge Jann could be an unreasonable bastard. music. I’m more interested in all the weird quantities of speed, the local ganja, and Once I wrote a cover feature about shit that happens around the music scene.” the trancelike rhythms of a troupe of Aerosmith, and he had to junk an entire press Lester, whose ironic but kindly spirit dreadlocked drummers called “The Sons of run after discovering that a Negus” sent me into a picture Annie Lebowitz had dangerously manic state; taken of a groupie going who smoothed things over down on a banana sticking between Peter Simon and out of lead singer Steven myself with his unrelenting Tyler’s fly in a limousine good humor; and generally had somehow slipped into went out of his way to the issue. I don’t know prevent my suffering how he penalized Annie or serious consequences for the editor responsible; all I my reckless behavior. So in know is that he reduced my the long run, I was pleased already paltry freelance fee that I had not let Lester to help pay for the second down –– especially after press run, even though I how he had vouched for had not even been present me with Chris Blackwell –– when the picture was taken. when my article came out But he also gave writers in Rolling Stone with that whose talent he respected now-classic cover photo by a lot of leeway for personal Annie Leibovitz of Marley quirks, eccentricities, and with his arms outstretched, freakouts, as he alluded in as if for a crucifixion. the wry tag-line he attached to my cover story on the Addled memories of the Grounation in Trenchtown from my sketchbook * * * reggae star Bob Marley: My stock was way up “Ed McCormack suffered a at Rolling Stone after that breakdown after writing his piece –– the first major last feature for us on ‘Mary feature to introduce Marley Hartman, Mary Hartman.’ and reggae as a coming We sent him to Jamaica phenomenon to the to take the cure from the United States –– appeared. Rastafarians but we’re not Jann forwarded letters to sure it took.” me praising my writing Apparently, stories had that he had received from got back to him about how, Nat Hentoff, one of his against all good advice, I had early journalistic heroes, insisted on doing business and Peter Rudge, tour with the disreputable street manager for both the rasta dope dealers prowling Rolling Stones and The the parking lot of the Who. My “New York Kingston Sheraton (some Confidential” column was of whom were rumored to also proving useful to him moonlight as hired gunmen as a liaison to the cooler- in the civil war that was than-thou downtown raging in the streets between crowd, as he contemplated the city’s opposing political moving the magazine’s parties) because I couldn’t wait one extra Philip Seymour Hoffman channeled so main headquarters East and replacing its day, until the Island Records press flacks uncannily several years after his fatal overdose laid-back San Francisco hippie vibe with a scored through safer channels, to turn on. in the film “Almost Famous,” was not more cosmopolitan image. So he may have He had also heard how mercilessly I harassed only one of the few so-called rock critics I been trying to shmooze me, when I went to Peter Simon, singer Carly’s photographer respected as a writer but a prince of a guy Los Angeles to cover what I thought was to brother, for politely asking if I might refrain who acted as my “minder” during that be a feature on a Playboy photo shoot and he from smoking in the car in which he was trip (and later referred to me with undo had his secretary book me into a suite at the chauffeuring me around. And, worst of all, he discretion as “Gonzo” all throughout the trendy Chateau Marmont. had heard how the rock critic Lester Bangs wryly affectionate account of that ordeal A stucco castle nestled like something in

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 21 one of Nathaniel West’s Hollywood novels beach ball while he floated on his back on an to ever be signed by an American record in a lush tropical salad high above the Sunset inflatable pool raft, until he had achieved the company, the first to be granted permission Strip, the Chateau, once a favorite hideout barely legal Playgirl ideal, for which I came by their Ministry of Culture to tour the U.S., of Greta Garbo, had a slightly dowdy chic up with the felicitous phrase that served as and the first –– as the lousiest luck would like that of the Hotel Chelsea and over the the article’s title: “Maximum Tumescence in have it –– to have a member, their guitarist years had attracted a clientele of Hollywood Repose.” Tomas Barta, defect. Since rock and roll, hipsters ranging from James Dean to Jim (Counting the banana that torpedoed unlike “Preferred” art forms such as the ballet Morrisson and John Belushi (who would an entire print run, it occurs to me now, and classical music, belonged to a category eventually further enhance its mystique by as I write, that there’ve already been three called “Tolerated” (and that only to keep being found face-down in its swimming pool blowjob references in these few scant pages. a lid on the kids) everybody expected the after his final OD). Be assured that this is neither by design nor Ministry of Culture to disband Locomotive So I felt properly favored after checking due to any particular obsession of mine. It GT. Probably the only reason they didn’t in , as I smoked a joint on my balcony and would seem that feminine genuflection to was because they were so popular among the watched the Mexican gardeners toil like the god of Phallos was one of the recurring rambunctious youth and the government worker ants down below. But what I didn’t themes of that time, even before “Deep didn’t need another Hungarian Revolution know, until I strolled down to the lobby and Throat” came out in 1972. After all, giving on its hands. inquired of that molelike Peter Lorre desk good head, like rolling a tight joint, was a skill “So please, comrade,” Bloom said, draping clerk as to its whereabouts was that at that mastered by every hip chick in the unofficial a fatherly arm over my shoulders as he walked time the hotel had no cocktail lounge. Sure finishing schools of the Sixties. Let a pecker me out to the elevator, “do us all a favor and that this had to be one of Jann’s perverse go limp anywhere in the republic and any try not to bring any more heat on the band jokes –– either that or an attempt to thwart respectable teenybopper or debutante than they already have. Try to steer clear my tendency to run up hefty bar bills –– I could administer oral resuscitation with the of the underage Hungarian groupies, the called Rolling Stone’s Los Angeles office in efficiency of a Red Cross nurse. But that money changers, the black marketeers, and a panic, demanding to be transferred to the the still unimproved ratio of half decent the secret police. And whatever you do, don’t nearest Holiday Inn. I only calmed down cunnilingus to excellent fellatio remained be crazy enough to even think about carrying after an editor named Delores Ziebarth perhaps the last vestige of the old double anything through customs; let the natives got the OK from Jann to advance me extra standard for some woman warriors to tilt turn you on –– if, indeed, the natives turn expense money to stock the suite’s fridge and their dildos at well into the final battles of on at all. But then again, should you choose pantry with beer and booze. (My freelance the so-called sexual revolution is an issue not to heed my advice, just think what a expense account was strictly cash and carry up that may warrant further comment as this great Rolling Stone feature article ‘Inside a front, since I had no credit cards back then memoir of a not altogether misspent youth Hungarian Prison Camp’ would make!” and so little ID that it’s a wonder I was never continues.) arrested for vagrancy.) * * * Crisis over, Delores said, “Everything * * * No sooner had my plane touched down is all set with the people at Playgirl, by By the mid-seventies, I suppose I than I found myself embroiled in a rapidly the way. Their photo stylist Annie Lomax felt about writing for Rolling Stone, the escalating imbroglio in that drab little –– remember the English pop star, Jackie publication that, according to the Columbia welfare state air terminal outside Budapest. Lomax? she’s his wife –– will be picking you Journalism Review, “spoke to an entire All I wanted was a pack of cigarettes, but up at the Chateau in the morning to drive generation,” much the same way that the hysterical crone behind the concession you to the set.” Brendan Gill felt about writing for The counter kept shrieking incomprehensibly “You mean the people at Playboy, don’t New Yorker back in the thirties and forties, and waving my money away like a vampire you?” I asked. when that grand old monolith addressed confronted with a cross. A crowd was Then Delores broke the news that I had itself to the best and brightest of an earlier beginning to gather by the time Joszef (“Call apparently misconstrued the assignment generation. me Joe”) Laux, the drummer for Locomotiv when I accepted it back in New York, and “With The New Yorker serving as my GT, came running over, his long, stringy hair would not have the voyeuristic pleasure passport and letter of credit,” Gill enthused flying out of a floppy denim pimp cap. He of studying the Playmate of the Month in his memoir Here at the New Yorker, “how fished the necessary forints out of his jeans before she was airbrushed. This particular easy I have found it for almost forty years to to buy me a pack of stale Hungarian smokes, deprivation, however, turned out to be a rush pell-mell through the world, playing the and, glancing nervously this way and that, blessing in disguise journalistically, since the clown when the spirit of darkness has moved hurried me out of there and into his silver- relatively new phenomenon of a male nude me and colliding with good times at every gray Mercedes. centerfold shoot yielded better quotes and turn!” Shouting over the stereo din of Frank weirder scenes: The small but prodigiously Those could have been my sentiments Zappa’s “Give Me Your Dirty Love,” Joe hung male model dropping his drawers for exactly. Only, it didn’t dawn on me how explained that the woman had freaked out the first time and Annie Lomax exclaiming, much playing the clown was beginning to because she could have been busted for black “My god, we should paint eyes on it!”; impinge on my professionalism, even when market money changing had she so much Playgirl’s newly hired hetero-hippie staff Howard Bloom, the East Coast promotion as touched my U.S. currency. But when I photographer complaining that his very chief for ABC/Dunhill records, insisted that asked him how I could exchange my dollars job title was a bad pun, and confessing that I drop into his office for a little diplomatic for forints, he said, “No need for money: You he still couldn’t figure “which angle of the briefing before I traveled to Hungary to write are my guest!” Then he told me that as soon dangle turns women, men, or whoever the a feature about Locomotiv GT, the Soviet as he learned what day I was coming, he had hell looks at these hideous pictures, on”; the Bloc supergroup known as “the Beatles of called the radio station and announced that bottle-blond head of the model’s bikini- Budapest.” Essentially, what he told me was tonight Locomotiv GT would be giving a bunny girlfriend, whom he’d brought along that he and his colleagues had high hopes free concert in my honor at the Agriculture as a “fluffer,” bobbing between his legs like a for this band, the first Iron Curtain rockers University right here in Budapest.

22 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 Me (left) backstage on my first night in Hungary with songwriter Anna Adamis and “the boys” of Locomotiv GT. With the KGB tailing them constantly, the last thing “the Beatles of Budapest” needed was this loose cannon from the U.S. “Next couple of nights you vill travel vith to this, Ed, I recorded it from Radio Big Buda.” us to gigs out in the sticks. But me and the Luxembourg to remind me of how great But my host assured me that nobody boys thought it vould be nice for you to everything vas going for us until that bastard took drugs in Hungary (a blanket statement see us play vunce in The Big Buda, vhere ve Barta defected and ve had to come back I found impossible to believe), and added, started out.” home vith our heads hanging down.” somewhat disingenuously, I thought, “Here, All along the road from the airport grim The last several bars of one of his ve have only good strong coffee for energy factories spewed smoke into the darkening band’s songs blasted out, followed by an and powerful plum brandy called slivovitz December sky, reminding me of grainy announcer’s voice: “And that was ‘Jenny’s to mellow out vith.” To mess with anything charcoal strokes in a Cold War political Got a New Thing,’ the American single by else, he assured me, would be certain suicide cartoon. But as soon as we rolled into the city Locomotiv GT. They’re from Budapest, for any high profile band in Hungary –– and proper, Budapest unfurled sufficient scenic you know, first Hungarian group to tour especially for Locomotive GT, “since the splendors to justify Joe’s civic pride, as he the States and they say the kids in the Motor Ministry of Culture is alvays vatching for us shouted above the stereo, “Sometimes it is City and this Hungarian band really came to to make one wrong move, and KGB agents called ‘The Paris of the East!’ ” an International agreement about what rock are following us around all the time. Anyvay, Even as he pointed out the lights starting and roll is about. And now let’s listen to ‘Hot Hungarians don’t need drugs. You’ll see at to blink on and twinkle on the eight little Tramps by the New York Dolls...” the gig tonight how us and the kids get from bridges spanning the Danube River as night I agreed that the spot from the station that the music alone a Natural High!” came down, and called my attention to broadcasts in English all over the world like As we pulled up to the Olimpia Hotel, the picturesque ruins of Hapsburg Citadel a rock and roll Radio Free Europe was way where I would be staying, Joe mentioned spilling down Gellert Hill like so much cool and boasted about having written the that just a few days earlier a member of beautifully broken crockery, all I could think article that got the Dolls signed to Mercury Bergendy, another well known band who about was how best to formulate the urgent Records when they were still a struggling were in Budapest for a gig, tried to commit question I blurted out as soon as he ended cult band known only to a small following suicide by taking a plugged-in radio into his tour guide spiel: “Tell me, Joe, how do of indigenous downtown glitter-tots. Then I the bathtub with him. I had the feeling that people get high here?” tried again: “I figured surely you guys must he was telling me this not only to hint at the Acting as though he hadn’t heard me, he have some kind of wacky paprika dust or stress Soviet Bloc rockers were under, but popped a tape into the deck and said,“Listen some shit like that to get off on here in the also to suggest, not without a certain pride,

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 23 that it was just as possible to freak out here to call coitus interruptus to the adulatory cities outside Budapest. But apparently Joe in the land of the Natural High as anywhere racket. and Anna were not at liberty to level with else. “I hope he’s not about to lead them in a me about this. When I asked the day after Since I knew that he and his wife Anna singalong of the Internationale,” I whispered our trip to Miscolc why the gig had been Adamis, the band’s lyricist, lived in Budapest, to Anna, perhaps imprudently. But she got canceled, Joe gave me some lame excuse I was more than a little puzzled when Joe the joke and giggled before translating for about having learned from the officials at the checked into the room right next to mine, me: “He is telling dem him and the boys Ministry that there was some problem with claiming that he liked the hotel’s heated are happy to be back again, playing in their the promoter. swimming pool. It was my first brush with hometown, Budapest. He apologizes for With no gig scheduled for that night, the hospitality behind the Iron Curtain, where being so long avay, but the boys have been couple took me to dinner and then for a tour if a foreign visitor excused himself to go so busy touring... And now they cheer of some of their favorite nightspots and to the bathroom in a cafe, his host might because he mentions touring in the States, cafes, where the mellow amber Old World say, “Good idea,” and tag along, as though saying, ‘Some of you vere vorried, you atmosphere could not be owed entirely to pissing together, like drinking with someone, varned us not to go... But as you see, ve only the fact I was often viewing them through was a congenial social activity. suffered vun casualty... And now they laugh a tilted beer glass. We finally ended up in a because he made a little joke to introduce hectic strobe-lit “disko-bar” with a muc more * * * James, the new guitarist...” Western ambiance. Tired of having them “So this is you! How handsome, like Speech over, Joe got behind his drums pay for everything, I had asked Joe before Danny Hutton from Three Dog Night! and became the churning motor that drove dinner to take me to exchange some of my I’m so happy you came all the vay across Locomotive GT into their signature song U.S. currency for forints. When he insisted the ocean to write about Joe and the boys! “Rock Yourself.” As the bearish, bearded once again that I was their guest and didn’t Come, give me a big hug and a kiss!” conservatory-trained keyboard player Gabor need my own money, I became suspicious Anna Adamis could have given Zsa Zsa Pressor made Beethoven roll over and over, that he was trying to keep me from having a run for her money. A vivacious blond in a the new lead guitarist James Karocsonyi any contact at all with his fellow Hungarians. leopard-patterned outfit who didn’t perform revealed his Jimmy Page-like virtuosity, And this seemed borne out not only when with the band but was known to their fans and Tomas Somlo’s wailing banshee vocals he once again insisted on escorting me for a as “the fifth member of Locomotive GT,” reverberated through the auditorium, the social piss but also whenever I exchanged a she rushed across the couples’ living room crowd’s ecstatic reaction almost made it few words with any of the people in the disko with outstretched arms to greet me warmly possible for even a cynic like myself to believe bar who spoke a little English. Invariably, when we stopped to pick her up for the that there actually might be such a thing as either he or Anna would intervene and gig. Their “flat,” as they referred to it, was the Natural High. redirect the conversation, as though they hardly your standard socialist housing. It feared that I might be about to ask one had an antique grand piano in the middle of * * * of these local hipsters where I might find the floor and French doors leading out to The mood was considerably more somber some of that “wacky paprika dust” I had a balcony overlooking the Danube and its the following night, when our caravan of cars mentioned on the way into Budapest from twinkling lights. The only incongruous part and trucks pulled into a darkened parking the airport. And although I was initially of the decor was an entire wall plastered, as lot in Miskolc, Hungary’s second largest city. annoyed to be monitored so closely, I began in a teenager’s room, with a floor-to-ceiling Crowds of disappointed kids were hunkering to appreciate why they were so cautious collage of pop posters and magazine photos around in the dark parking lot outside the when we noticed a young longhair, who had of mostly American and British bands. circular concert hall, which was locked up heard us talking earlier and decided to test his Although I didn’t know it yet, Anna was to as tight as the giant drum that it resembled. English on me, being escorted out the door become my other “minder,” sticking to me Clearly, for whatever mysterious reason, by two tall men in dark suits. The flashing like glue whenever her husband had business there would be no gig this evening. As the strobes made the ominous scene seem to play to attend to, which turned out to be during other musicians signed autographs and Anna out in slow-motion, as in an old black and much of my stay in Budapest. It started that clung to my arm as if I were about to dash white horror movie when streaks of lightning very night at the Agriculture University, when off into the night, Joe addressed the forlorn make everything jerk and flicker. she took me by the hand as the band got fans in Hungarian. The only English words ready to go onstage and led me out into the I recognized were “Three Dog Night,” I didn’t even bother to put up much crowd to watch from the front row. Then, before he gestured grandly toward me and of a fight the next day, when Joe got off spotting two dour looking-men in dark announced,“Danny Hutton!” the phone after a terse conversation with suits among all the denim and leather-clad “Because they are so sad, he told them an official at the Ministry and suggested kids, she whispered, “Our friends from the you are him, visiting us from the States,” that, instead of traveling with the band to KGB,” and led me up a steep flight of stairs Anna whispered as the kids began swarming the gig in a city called Ozd that night, I let to a lighting platform above the stage. As around us. Fishing a pen out of her bag Anna show me more of Budapest and treat soon as the band walked out, the thunderous and handing it to me, she said, “Please sign me to “a nice dinner relaxing dinner.” He cheering and stomping started as hordes autographs, ‘Danny,’ to make them a little claimed that while the band was contractually of adoring young Huns chanted in unison: more happy.” obligated to show up, the problems with “Locomotiv Gee-ya-tee! Locomotive Gee-ya- Sometime later, back in the States, I would the promoter had not been successfully tee! Locomotive Gee-ya-tee!” learn from Zoltan Gombos, a Hungarian resolved, and there was a very good chance But instead of getting behind his drum-set, language newspaper publisher who served that tonight’s gig would be canceled as well. Joe stepped forward, glowing like a firefly as the band’s New York representative, that Anyway, I knew I was beat when Anna took in his silver stage-jacket (“Same vun Rick the Ministry of Culture suddenly had second up her husband’s argument, chiming in with Derringer vore on the cover of ‘All-American thoughts about an American journalist seeing mock coyness,“Am I really so unattractive boy,’ he’d told me proudly backstage, some of the “crude workers’ halls and unruly that you don’t even vant to be seen vith me, insisting that I try it on), and waved his arms audiences” in some of the more industrial Ed?”

24 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 After the band left for Ozd, I insisted that Unfortunately, my article was never Nelson regularly sent him cases of Lone Star Anna take me to change some of my dollars published, since the band’s second American Beer that he kept stacked up in his office, into forints and told her there was no point album, which was to have been titled “Ve Chet got us a couple of cold ones from the in arguing: I would be paying for everything Have an Accent,” was never released, making fridge and asked his lissome miniskirted tonight. First I had her take me shopping for them pretty much irrelevant to the music secretary, Iris, to organize some shelves high a souvenir for my son and a peace offering for press here. Later I would learn that Joe had above his desk so we could enjoy the view my estranged wife. Then we went to a little fled the country while Anna stayed behind to like a couple of sly frat boys as we talked cafe, where I kept refilling Anna’s wine glass compose innocuous pop songs with Gabor business: until her tongue loosened and she offered the Pressor, and Locomotiv GT reformed as a “Alice Cooper called Jann personally to opinion that while she admired Bob Dylan, it less edgy musical entity with the replacement request that you be the one to cover his new would be not only dangerous but redundant guitarist James Karocsony as its only tour, ‘Welcome to My Nightmare.’ Are you to write protest songs in a country where remaining earlier member. I can only hope in interested?” to write at all was an act of protest. She was retrospect that none of these developments “You’re kidding! After what I wrote about just beginning to tell me about how she had had anything to do with my visit to Hungary. his little beetlenut pecker?” been coerced by the Ministry into writing the But I didn’t have time to think about it Chet chuckled. “Apparently, he told Jann, songs for a propagandistic rock opera that immediately. As soon as I got back, Chet ‘Fast Eddie is the only guy who will drink was hailed as “the Hair of Hungary” before Flippo, my favorite editor, called to ask if I beer with me in the morning.’ But hey, man, interrupting herself to call my attention to could stop up at Rolling Stone’s New York how’d you get that name anyway? Around two dark-suited men whom she said had bureau to discuss another assignment. here we call you Easy Ed.” been tailing us since we left the flat. A tall, rangy Texan whose homeboy Willy “I guess I’m both fast and easy.” We decided it was a good time to go back * * * to my room at the Olimpia to drop off the presents before going to dinner. We were only there for a short time when someone knocked on the door. When I opened it, there stood our two dark-suited shadows, as though having hoped to catch us in flagrante ASIAN ARTS & CRAFTS delicto. They stepped into the room without being asked. As soon as she saw them through the open door of the bathroom, where she had been brushing her hair, Anna came storming out, waving her brush like a Offering a variety Visit our store weapon, dressing them down with a haughty of artifacts tirade in the native tongue. MAILBOXES & Later, over dinner, we shared a good laugh depicting BEYOND INC. at the memory of how those two black- Lord Ganesh A full supply of suited goons had retreated from a woman’s and a rich shipping needs and wrath, one of them even seeming to execute assortment of services, including an apologetic little bow as he backed out Asian specialty the door and retreated down the hall. But I Fine Art Packaging. could tell that Anna was worried. And I was items and 217 East 85th St. sure that she and her husband would both be antiques. New York, NY 10028 greatly relieved to put me on the plane the [email protected] following morning. Tel 212 772 7909 Broome Street Gallery Continued from page 14 interwoven dark lines, suggesting an arboreal inspiration. And Leslie Shaw Zadoian’s , hovering forms project an inexplicable sense of tension in “Situation,” a darkly brooding mixed media work on canvas. Then there is Rose Sigal-Ibsen, well known for her personal Resolution approach to Asian ink painting, and represented by one of her more January 5 - 23, 2010 abstract excursions, with wet-into-wet washes that flow and spread out in shadowy waves, evoking myriad associations in the manner of A Fine Arts Exhibit a Rorschach blot. By contrast, Miriam Wills, another artist familiar Curator: Sonia Barnett to many New York gallery goers, weighed in with “Coloring Me,” a ynamic composition in acrylic and collage on canvas featuring her Sonia Barnett characteristically fractured and packed neo-cubist planes and vibrant William Hunt primaries. Anne Rudder As the works briefly noted above and the ones reproduced with this and others. review indicate, the ASCA’s 93rd Annual Exhibition is a varied and rewarding free-for-all and well worth adding to one’s gallery hopping Broadway Mall Community Center itinerary. Broadway@96St. (NYC) Center Island Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm –– Marie R. Pagano [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 25 The Last Romantic Art Movement at the Museum of Modern Art ndrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” and didn’t create his first drip paintings until collection. Then again, ABen Shahn’s “Handball Court” were 1947, two years later than the last date on MoMA and Abstract hanging side by side on the dimly lit wall that rather confusing wall label. So while it’s Expressionism grew in the corridor opposite the escalator, and not unheard of for two artists to arrive at up together. Since the the hair-raising primal screams of museum the same idea independently, it’s interesting museum’s mandate visitors invited by Yoko Ono’s “Voice Piece to wonder if Pollock saw that modest little was to promote for Soprano” to stand at a microphone and work, maybe lying around on the floor in both European and yell their lungs out, were shrieking up from Hofmann’s studio, and was inspired to run American modernist the atrium, as we headed for the fourth floor with the technique that ultimately defined art, its founding at MoMA to see the huge survey “Abstract his career. Still, it would be ridiculous to director Alfred H. Barr Expressionist New York.” deny that Pollock did infinitely more Jr. had the good sense To one who makes an with the drip, as major canvases such to realize that this was almost paranoid habit of as “Number 1A, 1948” and “One: the perfect bandwagon making such connections, Number 31,” demonstrate, and was to jump on as soon that the two realist paintings a far more important painter, while as the movement first had been relegated to the Hofmann is mainly remembered emerged in the late hall seemed symbolic of how as a great teacher and theorist who 1940s. When popular Adolph Gottlieb all other schools of art were coined the defining phrase of Abstract magazines like Life, (American, 1903- marginalized almost from the Expressionist practice: “push and pull.” Time, and Newsweek 1974) Blast, I 1957 Oil on canvas 7' 6" minute the New York School More relevant to the theme of got hip to the novelty x 45 1/8" (228.7 x came on the scene. And the exhibition, however, are how value of these brash 114.4 cm) Yoko’s shriekfest seemed just sequences of paintings chart the homegrown painters The Museum of Modern as exemplary of much that Mark Rothko evolution of individual artists’ putting American art Art, New York. Philip (American, born Johnson Fund © Adolph came after the Last Romantic Latvia. 1903-1970) signature styles: Adolph Gottlieb on the world map and Esther Gottlieb Art Movement peaked in the and Mark Rothko both began with (particularly Pollock, Foundation/Licensed by No. 3/No. 13. 1949 VAGA, New York, NY 1960s, making the fourth floor Oil on canvas 7' 1 quasi-primitive symbols, often enclosed the mediagenic art galleries seem an oasis amid the 3/8" x 65" (216.5 x within grids. Gottlieb’s symbols cowboy from Cody, Wyoming, whom they madness. 164.8 cm) grew larger, to float freely in space. dubbed “Jack the Dripper”) MoMA benefited The Museum of Modern Art, If not for everyone: Many of New York. Bequest of Mrs. Rothko finally dispensed with the from the publicity bonanza as well. This great the fresh-faced fashion victims Mark Rothko through The symbols altogether, and the containing show is payback, reviving the euphoria of a swarming the galleries in their Mark Rothko Foundation, rectangles grew into his characteristic moment when downtown Manhattan felt Inc. © 1998 Kate Rothko expensive hipster finery seemed Prizel & Christopher squares of blurred color, which grew like bohemian Paris in the 1920s. A kindred less than overwhelmed by the Rothko/Artists Rights more somber and faded to gray in literary movement called the Beat Generation massive canvases filling the Society (ARS), New York the period preceding his suicide. was also brewing as the painterly pioneers walls with effusions of pure form, gesture, and Philip Guston’s trajectory is traced, from his proliferated in the lofts and cooperative color. They’d seen much more sensational early stylized social realist figure paintings to galleries of the 10th Street scene. stuff by later generations of trendy art stars the lyrical abstract canvases with which he Twenty years later, in the mid ‘60s, when who suspended crucifixes in containers of piss, established his reputation, to the final cartoon- we had only been around for a little over two cast sculpture from their own frozen blood, influenced oils that, in the 1960s, made him decades ourselves, my pregnant wife and I photographed themselves with bullwhips persona non gratis to some of his former schlepped two of my huge canvases over on shoved up their ass, or sliced whole cows colleagues who accused him of betraying the ferry from our little bungalow on Staten right down the middle and displayed them in their movement to join the insurgent Pop Island to the Brata Gallery, on 10th Street and Plexiglas vitrines. Yet they appeared eager to camp. (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Third Avenue, where my first literary hero understand what all the fuss was about and Rosenquist and others give them all the boot, Jack Kerouac had once participated in a poetry properly respectful of what it must have been as they did in the late ‘60s, in the final gallery reading. The movement had long ago moved like when artists didn’t hang out with movie on the fourth floor labeled “On to Pop.”) to posher venues uptown, but the mystique stars or get mentioned on Page Six and lived in We see Willem de Kooning gradually still held as Jeannie and I waited nervously cold-water lofts without cell phones, ipods, or unshackle himself from the Picassoid and in the Brata’s dank cellar, where the last even cool clothes. Surrealist influences of his early friend and vagabond Beat street poet, Jack Micheline, still Oh, babies, could I tell you stories! mentor Arshile Gorky (also well represented kept his army cot, tattered manuscripts, and But this is not the place. What I’m with five major canvases), as he works his books, while a jury of my peers voted upstairs more excited about conveying right now way from biomorphic enamels to “Woman on my bid for membership. And ghosts still is what I learned after spotting a small oil, One” to sweeping late abstractions, becoming surrounded us one memorable Friday night its composition consisting mainly of white Pollock’s main rival, once his Dutch Boy several months later at the Cedar Bar, where rhythmically woven skeins and swirls of off- former Hoboken house painter’s brushes gain Pollock, de Kooning and Kline once drank white liquified pigment, hanging unobtrusively real ballast. There are also some bold black and and brawled, as we fueled up with our rowdy in a corner near the exit door of the first white calligraphic canvases by de Kooning’s droogies before walking over to the opening gallery, which I immediately recognized as a Cedar Bar drinking buddy Franz Kline, terrific reception of my first solo show at the Brata. typical Jackson Pollock drip painting. In fact, paintings by Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, and I can barely believe almost another forty I would have sworn to it, until I got up close Joan Mitchell (the only women artists to buck years went by before it all came back, strolling and read the wall label: “Hans Hofmann the macho buddy system and make the cut), through “Abstract Expressionist New York” at (American, born Germany, 1880-1966), culled from MoMA’s vast holdings. MoMa. Those were the days, my friend. Spring, 1944-45 (dated on reverse 1940), Oil Indeed, one of the most remarkable –– Ed McCormack on wood, 11 1/14 x 14 (28 x 35.7 cm), The things to realize about this huge survey is Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of that the 250 works in a variety of mediums, Museum of Modern Art, Mr. and Mrs. Peter A. Rubel.” including painting, drawing, prints, and 11 West 53rd St., As far as anyone seems to know, Pollock film, all come from the museum’s own through April 25, 2011.

26 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 Madeleine Kraeler Corbin: Everyday Dreams or an artist to have her first exhibition collectors of Pre-Columbian and African Art. is “Museum Visit,” in which a woman Fat the age of 88 seems more remarkable Obviously, she is no reclusive shrinking violet of a certain age confronts an aggressive than ever in an era when agism rules the art out of the Emily Dickinson mold, timidly abstraction dominating an entire wall and world and dealers sometimes trawl the more hiding her work away. She seems simply to threatening to bowl her over, as she dutifully prestigious schools for promising young be one of those artists for whom creating the tours the galleries. Although the composition talents that they can mold into so-called work has provided sufficient satisfaction in is relatively detailed, with other visitors Art Stars, some of whom actually end up itself and whose success in other endeavors perusing other paintings in the background graduating with waiting lists of collectors has eliminated any pressing need to think of and so on, Corbin’s monochromatic washes when the gallerist who are applied in broad strokes discovers them has a great with a vigor to match that deal of clout. of the gestural forms in the This kind of too-much-too- painting that appear to set the soon shortsightedness, which main figure reeling back in can not only ossify a young incomprehension. artist’s work in the long run The forms are more solidly but gives a callow tone to so locked in place to reflect the much contemporary art, is sad stagnation of the elderly something that one can only man seated on a beige sofa assume Madeleine Kraeler in Corbin’s Hopperesque Corbin, the octogenarian watercolor “Lonely Hotel.” artist in question, would The institutional green walls probably find astounding. For and the tall windows, blank when her middle daughter, with white daylight, looming the New York artist AK over the man as he slumps Corbin, opened an art gallery with his hands held together in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to like the gloves of a weary show her own work and that boxer reluctant to rise from of other worthy artists, her his corner stool for the next mother’s advice to her was, round, contribute to the “Just make sure you set a pathos of the scene. Here, standard. Don’t give in.” too, the converging angles Well, it’s highly doubtful of the other furniture in that AK Corbin, the inheritor the cramped room enhance of such integrity, will ever give the sense of oppression and in to the ill-advised trend of isolation, demonstrating choosing malleable neophytes the artist’s sophisticated with lots of presumed shelf use of abstract geometry to life over seasoned artists with heighten an emotional effect. abundant life experience Indeed, although that gives them something “Dancing at the Senior Center” ostensibly a social realist, to say. And she is certainly setting a standard art in careerist terms. Madeleine Kraeler Corbin’s compositions by giving Madeleine Kraeler Corbin her As with poets who support themselves are invariably supported by a strong formal exhibition debut in her venue Gallery Small, outside of academia (The family physician armature of abstract and classical allusions. In dedicated to presenting city related works on Williams Carlos Williams and Wallace her pastel, “At the Beach,” an older woman an intimate scale. Stevens, the insurance executive, are two in a blue robe standing in the shadows of a Born in 1922, the daughter of a woman’s of the most famous examples), certain summer bungalow, glancing wistfully at a clothing manufacturer and a mother visual artists can actually benefit from being couple drying off on a bench could be one of described as “a right hand man to Fiorello involved with the workaday world, rather Canaletto’s Venice burghers. In the ironically La Guardia,” the elder Corbin is said to have than the somewhat cloistered community of titled “Not Bocce Ball,” the huddled men possessed remarkable drawing ability from an artists. In Madeleine Kraeler Corbin’s case, have the downtrodden demeanor of inmates early age. And although her favored medium it appears to imbue her drawings and small in a gulag. And in “Dancing –– Senior is sculpture, it is clear from the mature paintings with an empathy for the struggles Center,” the dapper gent leading with his drawings and small paintings she has chosen of ordinary people that is precious rare in art profile appears oblivious to his partner, who for her first exhibition, she is a draftsperson of today. looks lost in a reverie of years long past. formidable gifts. One gets the feeling that she is an artist Madeleine Kraeler Corbin is said to be an So why, one might wonder, has she waited who might concur with W.H. Auden’s ardent admirer of her late former schoolmate so long to have an exhibition? There seems to famous line, “All Cezanne’s apples I would Diane Arbus’ photographs of dwarfs, be no more mystery to it than why Virginia give away for one small Goya or a Daumier.” giants, transvestites, and other marginalized Hamilton Adair, who was born in 1913 But while the workingclass atmosphere and Americans. Her own pictures, however, are didn’t publish her first book of poems, the period feeling of some of her pictures can just as affecting for what they reveal of the critically acclaimed “Ants on a Melon,” until be compared to the better-known sculptor hopes, dreams, and heartbreak of so-called 1996. Corbin married, had children, and has Jacob Epstein’s drawings for Hutchins ordinary people. had a full life and a busy career as an architect, Hapgood’s classic book “The Spirit of the –– Ed McCormack interior decorator, and author books on the Ghetto,” others deal with the more secular architectural styles of New England. She cultural aspirations of the middle class Madeleine Kraeler Corbin, Gallery Small New York, also created a unique house out of a couple from which she herself evolved. One of her 416 Van Brunt, Red Hook, Brooklyn, of old bull pens and was also one of the first more poignant pictures in the latter regard November 28th –– December 26th.

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 27 Geometry as Constant: The Achievement of Harriet FeBland ew contemporary artists States in the late 1950s, FeBland had a taken with “Zen” a wall-relief construction- Fwhom one can name have formidable reputation as an innovative painting in which three layered gray panels shown such stylistic consistency as constructionist sculptor/painter and play host to alternating red and white Harriet FeBland whose allegiance was featured in museum and gallery horizontal strips. As minimalist as it is, this to geometry has been constant exhibitions with Joseph Cornell, Hans piece projects a meditative grace that is near- running through each phase of Van de Bovendkamp, Marisol, Louise hypnotic. Also outstanding was a tall narrow her work and period of her career. Nevelson, and other artists of comparable wall-relief construction, titled Top Down Yet the variety and expressive stature. A major solo exhibition “Plastics 5770, with a stately quality akin to some of range of the work that she has in Art” at Galerie International, in New FeBland’s more totemic floor sculptures. achieved over the years within this York City, in 1961, gained her further Here, without resorting to specific figuration, self-imposed constraint is truly “Top-Down 5770” recognition as a pioneer in new media, but through the arrangement of geometric remarkable. and she continued to mine and refine shapes, particularly triangles, stacked one Although born in New York, FeBland lived her geometric aesthetic to widespread critical above the other and outlined in a precise linear abroad in England and France for 11 years. acclaim with subsequent exhibitions and fashion on an austere white ground in blue Having started studying at age nine at Pratt commissions for her unique reliefs, boxes, and red, the artist creates the impression of Institute’s Saturday children’s art classes and totems, graphics, paintings, and monumental stacked tribal masks. continued her art education during her teen outdoor sculptures. Frank DeGregorie, the curator of the show, years and later at the American Artists School, While many artists at a similar point in says, “Harriet FeBland’s work never fails to the New School for Social Research, and New their careers tend to play it safe, the new have a dramatic effect on me due to the fact York University, with distinguished instructors pieces in FeBland’s fifty-second exhibition, that whenever I see it I am drawn into it and ranging as the Soyer brothers and Chaim at the Interchurch Center, are among can take my leave only when I promise myself Gross to Stuart Davis and Yashua Kuniyoshi her most adventurous. Featuring several a return visit.” to Will Barnet and Harry Sternberg, she was large totems, small boxes, and medium- No doubt this important solo show by one presumably already an accomplished artist by size wall constructions, the show reaffirms of our most gifted geometric artists in one of the time she traveled abroad. For she worked the innovative richness, as well as the the city’s most handsome exhibition venues with Stanley Hayter at the prestigious graphics unprecedented lyricism in her chosen mode of will have a similar effect on many other visitors studio Atelier 17, in Paris, and exhibited expression, that once caused Paul Mocsanyi, as well. –– J. Sanders Eaton constructions and paintings at the Musée the former director of the New School Art d’Art Moderne, as well as in galleries in Center, to say of FeBland, “She is the Poet of Harriet FeBland, The Interchurch Center, London and elsewhere in Europe. Geometry.” 475 Riverside Drive, through December 2nd By the time she returned to the United Among the new works, one was particularly Chantal Westby’s Paintings Project an Epic Grandeur he Italian phrase di sotto in su, which the surface of the rushing sea, also evoked Generation female artist Jay De Feo’s famous Tmeans “looking up from below,” is in juicy strokes. The picture has a mythic painting, “The Rose,” legendary for its a device for creating spatial allusions via quality that makes one think of epics such as unprecedentedly thick paint application. severe foreshortening often seen in the “Moby Dick” or “Jonah and the Whale,” While Westby’s impasto may not be quite as ceiling frescos of Andrea Mantegna and albeit translated into visceral visual terms by thick in “La Source,” its effect of the work on other Renaissance masters but rarely the viewer is equally mesmerizing by virtue of encountered in the work of contemporary her spatial approach. artists. Chantal Westby, a French painter An opposite mood is evoked in “Blue who moved to the United States in 1980s, Moon,” a work invested with a serene is one of the rare exceptions. Westby often atmospheric mystery, in which the lunar orb employs di sotto in su effectively to add a floats through the night sky trailing long dynamic sense of depth to her large mixed wisps of cloud resembling a woman’s hair media compositions, while sometimes blowing in the wind. Below, rectangular producing an almost vertiginous sensation geometric shapes appear, like refuse floating in the viewer. in a river, suggesting contrasts between the This dizzying feeling is especially strong ethereal and earthly realms. in Westby’s large canvas “Ship Wreck In other paintings by Westby, such as Survivor,” with its tumultuous waves “Delivering the Light” and “Fortune’s reminiscent of Turner’s stormy marine Wheel,” abstraction is employed allusively to scenes. In Westby’s painting, however,a “Ship Wreck Survivor” evoke a sense of the spiritual with imagery huge hand –– presumably that of God that suggests various states of being without –– appears in the starry nocturnal sky, guiding Westby’s bold way with composition and resorting to literal descriptiveness. In a the tiny figure toward the shore. The artist’s materials. composition called “Horizon,” however, the thick paint application enhances the drama The sense of vertigo again invests an even forms of white birds fly low over a rugged of the scene, with tactile impastos that pile larger mixed media and acrylic painting on terrain like aircraft approaching a runway up on the surface of the canvas, making canvas called “La Source” with an unusual and recede in vanishing perspective toward a the white foam on the crashing waves and impact. Here, while the composition is streaked blue sky, sweeping the viewer along the craggy textures of the brown rocks essentially abstract, one gets a sense, not only on the wings of Chantal Westby’s sheer physically palpable. Indeed, the figure of the from the title, but also from the yellow forms painterly velocity. –– Peter Wiley wave-tossed survivor strugglingly swimming streaming down like blinding rays in dynamic toward the shore, as the mast of his wrecked perspective from a central hub, of staring Chantal Westby, Agora Gallery 530 West ship bobs in the distance, is so thickly up at the sun. This picture, in particular, 25th St., November 23rd - December 14th. pigmented that it casts an actual shadow on possesses a power akin to that of the Beat Reception: Thurs. Dec. 2, 6 - 8pm. 28 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 Ludmila Aristova’s “Illuminations” Series Signals an Important Turning Point in a Distinguished Career ooking at “Illuminations,” the new fiber called “Leaf-Fall,” Aristova employs painted of one viewer of a work which, like most Lart works by the Russian-born artist passages in a particularly bold manner, of Aristova’s compositions, is essentially Ludmila Aristova, one is put in mind of the brushing broad streaks of white and fleshy abstract. However, it serves to drive home fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin” by The Brothers pink pigment over tightly stitched diagonal the point that this innovative fiber artist Grimm. For the unique alchemy that Aristova seams further enhanced texturally by myriad has achieved a freedom in her latest work creates with simple cloth and thread appears small triangular extensions. Here, in fact, the which places her on an expressive par with as magically transformative as that of the sewn elements become a kind of backdrop, painting. Indeed this point is also well made miller’s daughter who spins gold from straw. while the painterly passages move to the in some of her more recent pieces where This has never been so evident as in her new series of fiber art works, where the combination of brightly colored and metallic threads in almost every piece catch the light and create shimmering effects that can only be compared to the brush strokes of the Impressionists. Aristova attributes the luminosity of her recent abstract compositions to the fact that she has recently been awarded U.S. citizenship, something that she describes as affecting her as though a great cloud over her life has been lifted. The fall of the Soviet Union, she makes clear, did nothing to erase the traumatic childhood memory of her grandfather’s unexplained arrest during the Stalinist era, never to be seen again by his family. And while she has been a resident of New York City for several years, becoming a citizen, she exults, has opened the floodgates of her creativity in new and exciting ways. She says that the new sense of freedom has caused it to blossom and become more bold in both color and design. Works such as “Illuminations # 2” and “Golden Autumn” seem to back up this claim with particular radiance and power. The former piece presents the viewer with a veritable sunburst of golden yellow hues that create an affect akin to the most brilliant compositions of the Color Field painter “Golden Autumn” Jules Olitski. Indeed the textures that Aristova achieves with needle and thread foreground, playing a magic role in animating this pleating technique also comes into play. can be accurately compared to Olitski’s use and emphasizing the overall diagonal thrust This is especially evident in some of her of painterly impasto to lend his canvases of the composition. Painting also becomes a “Illuminations” on a considerably smaller tactile weight and depth. For not only does prominent, if more subtly integrated, element scale, wherein she appears to be testing the she combine fabrics such as silk and cotton of the work simply titled “Autumn,” where possibilities of creating more Minimalist but also combines hand-painting with more coloristically variegated strokes of compositions. Although most, but not all, of dyed materials to create complex chromatic yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, orange, green these pieces are under ten inches square, she contrasts that are considerably enhanced by and blue, dance and swirl amid variously dyed employs folds of fabric configured in various painstaking hand-stitching with different fabrics and those same tiny, multitudinous directions to create rhythmic and sensual colored threads. Indeed, no painter has at his triangular shapes of a regularity which compositions evoking the sense of a much or her disposal a more richly varied arsenal of suggests that they may have been created larger scale. subtle textural and coloristic effects. with pinking shears. It will certainly be interesting to those of Another recent innovation is Aristova’s Yet another technique that Aristova has us avidly following Ludmila Aristova’s career use of more patchwork elements, as seen to been exploring successfully in her recent to see where she goes with these intriguing particular advantage in “Golden Autumn,” compositions is layered pleats, often used new departures. For whatever direction this where an intricate array of angular shards of with darker, more subdued hues (particularly immensely gifted artist, who has come a long different colored fabrics in the deep yellow browns, purples, and blues), as seen in the way since she completed her studies at the and rusty red range create neo-cubistic piece that she calls “Twister.” Here, given Moscow Textile Institute and started out as a fractured planes that evoke a windswept swirl the evocative title, the raised fabric folds that fashion designer, ultimately takes them in will of leaves. Driven by an energy which also form the bulk of the composition actually be well worth our serious attention. recalls the dynamic vortexes of Futurism, appear as not one but two “eyes of the –– Ed McCormack this is a composition in which the artist storm” in a roughly simplified mask-like Ludmila Aristova, Noho Gallery, appears to harness the force of nature in Expressionist face that also suggests the 530 West 25th Street, an especially accomplished manner. By presence of a gaping mouth. Of course this November 30 - December 24. contrast, in another autumnal composition is a subjective interpretation on the part (Reception: December 2, 6-8 PM)

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 29 Viewing the West Side from Diverse Personal Perspectives he urban scene, one of the great subjects of modern times, has SenSorial Trarely been depicted so affectionately as in a recent group show curated by Carson Ferri-Grant and Anne Rudder under the auspices of the West Side Arts Coalition. Both curators set the tone with their own PerSPectiveS contributions to the exhibition: Carson Ferri-Grant’s “Lilies in Waiting –– Right Outside My Window” gives a close-up glimpse in watercolor of the sort of natural October 29 - November 19, 2010 miracle that brightens the concrete jungle. That his three graceful botanical studies form a triptych in an actual wooden window frame Reception: Thursday, November 04, 2010 6-8 pm makes them all the more apropos. Anne Rudder evokes selfless love in a large watercolor dedicated to Ida Strauss, a New Yorker who chose to stay behind and perish with her husband Isador, a U.S. Congressman, on the Titanic, rather than escape in a lifeboat. A down to earth park on 106th Street is named for the couple; but, characteristically, Rudder aims for the stars in a beautiful Blakean poem/painting, “In the Garden (Strauss Park),” memorializing Ida’s romantic sacrifice, particularly with the poignant line, “If love for me was quick and fleeting for her it was the eternal heart.” Three smaller figure studies by the artist chart the development of both poem and picture. New exhibitor Richard Carlson’s two stately collage paintings, “Transit Stories” and “The Post Office,” incorporate evocative imagery into abstract compositions in which subtle semi-translucent painterly effects float over an underlying grid. In the former a superimposed subway map and female faces appropriated from Roy Lichtenstein comicstrip paintings hint at a complex urban narrative. In the latter, fragments of newsprint and a faded photographic image add depth to formal beauty. Helen Stutz expresses her love of the Big Apple with winning directness in small watercolors of the New York skyline, the George Washington Bridge, and Rockefeller Center, where tiny skaters glide in the rink below Paul Manship’s majestic gilded statue of Prometheus. Stutz’s breezy realism breathes new life into familiar scenes. Anthony Kirov, on the other hand, takes a fanciful view of the city’s ubiquitous cultural riches in his neocubistic oils combining brilliant colors, stylized figures, fractured planes, and Chagall-like whimsy. Here, Kirov showed two paintings depicting musical performances as though Lincoln Center were located in the Land of Oz. In abstract acrylics such as “Standing Tall in the Changing Faces of Harlem” and “Crowded Sidewalk,” Sonia Barnett appeared to protest the insidious erosion of a community with vigorous gestural strokes of thick pigment on a bare white ground. By contrast, Barnett’s Harlem river view evoked a gentler, more elegiac mood suggestive of the blues. Like the great Paul Klee, Elizabeth K. Hill conjured miniature worlds

in a few square inches. Hill’s gift for making microcosmic magic was © Florence Alexandra Vouilloz - Ghost especially apparent in her nocturnal cityscape “Night Thoughts,” with its big full moon glowing through smoky atmospherics, as well as in her brighter architectural composition “Toytown.” In his accomplished oil “A Moment to Reflect,” Nathaniel Ladson depicted an elegant, Jim Lively Garbo-like matron in a straw hat and sunglasses stopping to ruminate near a brick wall in an accomplished realist style. By contrast, Ladson’s Robert Nizamov mixed media/Giclee print “Birds” offered a more lighthearted monochromatic image of pigeons lined up on the ledge of a roof like Julie Smiley gray-coated commuters waiting on a railroad platform. Florence Alexandra Vouilloz Then there was Patience Sundaresan, another insightful realist who sees the city from a profoundly personal perspective, suggesting a subtle poetry akin to that of Loren McIver. In “NYC Intimacy: West 73rd Street,” Sundaresan imbues a close-up of an urban curb and cracked, stained sidewalk with intense mystery. And in “NYC Intimacy: West 72nd Street Tunnel,” she goes even further, making the silhouetted figure traversing the eerie tunnel amid puddles and reflections seem 530 West 25th St., Chelsea, New York symbolic of a soul in transit between this life and the next. 212-226-4151 Fax: 212-966-4380 ––Maurice Taplinger www.Agora-Gallery.com [email protected] “Capturing Our Neighborhood – The West Side,” seen recently at Broadway Mall Community Center, central island, Broadway at 96th St.

30 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 Arthur Dworin’s Imaginative Postmodern Take on the Ethos of Abstract Expressionism urely the major survey, remarked during a conversation S“Abstract Expressionist that I had with him in his New York,” now at the studio in East Hampton Museum of Modern Art, that even his most ostensibly vividly chronicles the abstract paintings were filled movement that, some sixty with “slippery glimpses” of the years ago, initially put this known world. city on the map as the art In some of Dworin’s capital of the world. It would paintings –– particularly be a mistake, however, to “Gordian Cypher l,” “Ode to relegate the movement to the NB,” and “Transliteration” annals of art history as a done wavy linear elements that braid deal. For the tradition that it around each other can suggest spawned continues to inspire slippery glimpses of everything scores of contemporary from mating serpents to painters. entwined jungle vines. In other One of the most works, such as the monumental impressive among them for composition “Breaking the postmodern spin that Through I” and its smaller he puts on that tradition is companion piece, “Breaking Arthur Dworin, who was Through II,” the landscape born in Detroit, Michigan, references are most clearly but has lived and worked in discernible in the rhythmic blue New York City since 1967, curves, emphasized with bits where he has also worked as of green and white shading a scenic artist for TV, movies, that could alternately evoke ballet, opera and theater. mountains with areas of verdant For Dworin’s considerable vegetation or majestic ocean accomplishment as a painter waves. While the completely has been to unite the two circular forms in both distinctly different stylistic compositions could suggest strains that divided The either solar or lunar orbs, the New York School into two “Ode to NB” colorful straight and cursive critically opposing camps: linear and triangular forms in the formalists, championed giving way to an atmospheric sense of depth both compositions are especially evocative by Clement Greenberg, and the “action that jibes with Dworin’s stated hope that of a fanciful sailboat’s masts, sails, and flags. painters,”espoused by Harold Rosenberg, “the spirit in these works will act as a key Of course, such readings will invariably who coined that term. Dworin bridges the to awaken what is already deep within the vary in the eye of every beholder, since the gap by combining hard-edged, primarily observer and anew with each viewing, bring visual vocabulary and possible symbolism in triangular forms with freely flowing shapes a greater awareness of our inner and outer Dworin’s compositions is hardly obvious and and gestures that often verge on the baroque, universes.” therefore open to a variety of imaginative with radiant coloristic pyrotechnics that Harking back to the influence of interpretations. apparently derive from his long-term practice Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and other From this writer’s angle of vision, the of Agni Yoga or “fire yoga,” described as esoteric disciplines of turn of the century work that prompted the most specific “a meditation focused on color frequencies modernist pioneers such as Kandinsky and interpretation was the complex canvas called associated with areas of consciousness.” Mondrian, even as it suggests the mix and “Objectifying.” Dominated by greens, Indeed, along with luminous blues, match attitudes of our present pluralistic era, yellows, and blues, its central area suggested a yellows, and reds, fiery orange hues are this statement bespeaks a radical departure vertiginous nocturnal view of an artificially lit a frequent component of Dworin’s large from the most adamantly abstract diehards landscape bracketed between and truncated canvases, which also partake of the expansive of the postwar era. Peter Selz, former between darker geometric areas suggesting scale and sense of space cited by Clement Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture the wings or open hatch of an aircraft. One Greenberg as a distinguishing characteristic for the Museum of Modern Art, and an is well aware, however, that such a reading of the new “American-Type Painting” that ardent collector of his work has observed of might surprise or even amuse the artist bulldozed European easel painting out of Dworin’s paintings, “Abstract as they are, himself, since paintings are by no means the limelight during the postwar period. they bring a new sense of visual order to Rorschach tests and these works are more At the same time, displaying the pluralistic organic forms of nature.” than sufficiently compelling for their abstract independence of a true postmodernist, Indeed, for his stated willingness to let attributes alone. Yet to stir the imagination is Dworin refuses to adhere to Greenberg’s suggestions of our inner and outer worlds also an important function of significant art, insistence on the absolute flatness of the enter into his abstract cosmos, rather than and Arthur Dworin succeeds sensationally on picture plane as a prerequisite for such insisting on formal purity, Dworin puts both scores. –– Ed McCormack painting, along with the blanket rejection of himself in the good company of two of any vestiges of natural allusiveness. For the the least-doctrinaire giants of The New Arthur Dworin, Viridian Artists, 530 West space in his paintings is often ambiguous, York School: Mark Rothko, who freely 25th Street, October 26 - November 13, with a combination of mostly triangular acknowledged the spiritual content in his Reception October 30, 4 - 6 pm. geometric forms and baroque abstract shapes canvases and Willem de Kooning, who once

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 31 John Wallace, Stargazing Sensualist n the strength of his retrospective Garden.” In this, one of Wallace’s Ospanning six decades, it would appear most hauntingly evocative that John Wallace was postmodern decades paintings, two nude women, one before anyone ever dreamt up that term. standing, the other reclining on Whether this made him avant garde before a rumpled blanket at her feet, his time or the opposite may be debatable. are depicted on an isolated lawn But what is undeniable is that Wallace has with a small gray bungalow in the always been one hell of a venturesome artist. background and the high trees of a Judging from an early oil called “The forest looming against the overcast Red Bike,” he still worked in a semiabstract sky beyond. While the reclining style reminiscent of Braque in 1950. But woman gazes off dreamily, her head by 1956, when he painted “Self Portrait on resting on a forearm tucked behind Stairway,” he had already beat Diebenkorn her head, the standing woman, her to a brushy figuration redolent of Abstract hands resting on her thighs, the Expressionism. The brushstrokes become light catching her thick red hair, more frenzied and the colors more fiery, gazes directly out at the viewer. however in “Self Portrait Wild Horse Creek Although there’s a formal Road, 1960,” in which the painter depicts perfection to the composition, himself as a tall, streaky specter, walking which is filled with all manner straight into a huge red fireball of a sun of little painterly felicities and hanging pregnantly in a pink sky that a draftsmanly touches, such as the gnarled tree claws at with its bare branches. delicate green shadows and cool Here, the young artist seems still in the twilight auras enlivening the flesh process of absorbing influences such as the tones and the firm outlines that Fauves, Munch, and, particularly, van Gogh’s Wallace often employs to define self portraits in landscapes –– or perhaps the contours of his figures, the Francis Bacon’s strident appropriation of scene has a snapshot immediacy. It them in his “Study for a Portrait of Van suggests an exquisitely tantalizing “In a Dark Garden,” 1976 Gogh VI.” moment lodged in a man’s Moon, 1992,” the lighted windows of a Wallace truly comes into his stylistically memory, rather than a situation set up by the country house surrounded by shadowy trees own three years later with a subject closer to artist to create a painting. project as much mystery as the moon and home: “Margaret with Pearls,” a youthful A single female nude appears a year later, stars above. Figurative subjects continue profile of his beautiful wife and frequent standing with the casual grace of a ballerina into the present decade, among them a model, the painter Margaret Grimes, her fiery at the practice barre in a toasty domestic superb large 2003 double portrait called red mane framing her delicate features and interior in front of a picture window with a “Max Beckmann and Quappi –– St. Louis cascading over her bare shoulders. Although view of a frigid winter landscape in the large on June 6 1950,” Showing the German he would still indulge in frenzied painterly oil, “First Snowfall –– Crete.” By contrast émigré artist who inspired Wallace to take up pyrotechnics as late as 1968, in paintings such the nude decapitated by the top edge of the painting wearing an academic gown, holding as “Death of the Monk,” where a shadowy canvas in the playfully surreal 1977 painting a cigarette in one hand and a rolled certificate phantom, presumably representing the soul, “Cosmic Furnace” descends a staircase, in the other, while his wife Quappi stands escapes from a meditating figure within a Zen like a more realistic version of Duchamp’s nearby clutching a bouquet of red flowers. circle, this exquisite little portrait of his wife famous mannequin made up of shattered Apparently, Beckmann is being honored at points the way to the firmer graphic grasp of shingles, into what appears to be metaphysical Washington University, where he taught for his mature style. suburban cellar littered with guns, golf clubs, the last three years of his life. And one can’t Apparently, Margaret is not only his mate and scientific instruments, which magically help wondering if Beckmann’s ambivalent and model but his muse. With her high morphs into a lunar landscape complete expression reflects something of Wallace’s cheekbones, and slender yet voluptuous with hovering astronaut. Perhaps this own feelings about the position of artists form, she haunts his oeuvre and inspires picture forecasts things to come, as Wallace in academia, since he himself is a tenured some of his strongest works, appearing in one increasingly introduces elements reflecting professor at Western Connecticut State painting as “Nyx, Goddess of Night.” Here, his long-term interest in science, particularly University. But if teaching has hampered her nude torso is armless, as in an ancient astronomy, into his compositions. his artistic productivity, there is no evidence Greek statue eroded by time, and her eyes The constellations figure prominently in of it in this abundant and varied exhibition. are devoid of irises or pupils; yet her youthful an intimate 1988 work in watercolor and Since in 2004, John Wallace has increasingly body, replete with bristling pubis, is vibrantly egg tempera named for Philip Glass’ opera trained his gaze heavenward, creating an alive, the marble smoothness of her flesh “Einstein on the Beach,” depicting the father unprecedented series of epic metaphysical contrasting with the looser pink and yellow of Relativity riding a bicycle along the dunes. canvases with titles such as “Solar Eclipse” gestural effusiveness of the surrounding A year later, stellar elements also dominate an and “Solstice Sunrise Flash Spectrum,” in ground. acrylic on canvas called “Supernova 1987A which the solid forms of the monolithic By the mid 1970’s Wallace is hitting with Accelerator & Stephen Hawking,” ruins at Stonehenge are combined with his stride, having arrived at the restrained showing the great cosmologist and ethereal chromatic auras to stunningly painterliness that distinguishes his mature theoretical physicist dwarfed in his wheelchair transcendent effect. style. Although his brushstrokes still retain an by towering stargazing devices. –– Ed McCormack agitated vigor in the skies and foliage of his In “Alignment of Jupiter Moon, Mars, landscape settings, all extraneous vestiges of and Saturn over Tauton Lake, 1990,” a gestural extravagance have vanished or been red-haired woman in blue shorts sits in a John Wallace, Blue Mountain Gallery, subordinated to the solid descriptiveness rowboat under a full moon. In “Conjunction 530 West 25th Street, November 2 - 27 seen in the major 1976 canvas “In a Dark of Venus Mars & Jupiter with Crescent 32 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 Outrage and a Grace-Note of Hope Animate Anowar Hossain’s “Katrina” Series ncountering Anowar Hossain’s new Expressionist paint handling and Social of Abstract Expressionist gestural energy to Eseries of paintings prompted by the Realist subject matter, as Hossain does in convey both action and emotional urgency. artist’s emotional reaction to the devastation his Katrina series. Perhaps the most radical Hossain’s ability to make us feel empathy unleashed on the city of New Orleans thing about our pluralistic, postmodern, through the vehicle of gesture invests other by Hurricane Katrina, the first thing one postmovement era is the freedom it allows works in the series with harrowing impact as thought of was William Carlos Williams’ artists to pursue what Jack Kerouac referred well. At times the paint itself appears to flood famous statement, “It is difficult to get the to as “the unspeakable visions of the the canvas with torrential force, threatening news from poetry, yet men die miserably individual” wherever they might lead. And to submerge the imagery. In one especially every day for lack of what is found hectic collage painting, a ghostly there.” female figure with upraised arms For in an age when the mass simultaneously suggests a woman media constantly bombards us with fleeing the storm and a defaced images at lightning speed, one might angel, suggesting spooky church validly wonder what the venerable statuary in a city where Christianity art of painting has to contribute to and Voo Doo often go hand-in- our understanding of such events. hand. Dripping rivulets of whitewash The answer, of course, is: nothing. like mossy mummy rags, canceled The whims of nature, like the acts as though by a big red X, its mouth of man, are finally capricious and gagged with what looks like a red inexplicable. But what painting and adhesive strip, the figure appears its sister art, poetry, can do perhaps amid cryptic scrawled graffiti phrases better than any other medium in such as “Beware Poker Player,” the hands of an accomplished artist fragments of the stars and bars, is to view public events through the and storm-tossed ribbons of dollar filter of an empathetic individual bills. Here, the artist gives dynamic sensibility and make something visual form to his “anger and coherent and of enduring value from disappointment that the government the chaos that surrounds us. didn’t respond quickly in bringing “I really felt bad about Katrina assistance to the people who needed happening in America because I it most,” as well as his conviction grew up experiencing this type of that “if this impacted on people disaster in the country I was born of greater means, the government in (Bangladesh),” the artist told would have been more prompt in us in a recent e-mail. “I can recall bringing assistance.” many tornados, hurricanes, and tidal Religious and spiritual imagery waves wiping out village after village, is prominent throughout the series. eradicating homes and lives in the One painting focuses on a faceless flash of a moment. There is a sense figure positioned as in a crucifixion of helplessness and hopelessness and eroded, as if in a bath of acid, when this type of thing occurs. It’s by a field of vibrant blue pigment. always the poor that are the greatest “From the Katrina Series” In another work, a head of the victims. Coming from a Third World country Anowar Hossain, the eclectic themes of Virgin Mary, flanked by two floating angels, made me connect to the tragedy . . . The whose exhibitions over the past few years materializes above a group of gospel singers. event, like the ones experienced in my have ranged from the predominantly abstract And in yet other compositions, only eyes childhood, had the same emotional impact. to a recent show memorializing Michael and gaping mouths remain visible in all- However, as an adult in America, I was able Jackson, has been a prominent exponent of consuming expanses of vigorously brushed to turn those events into images.” this trend. pigment. The images that Hossain created out of Hossain’s present series on Katrina is not But even while giving visual voice to this tragedy, like all of his work, are informed only his most deeply moving to date but also our communal grief and outrage, Anowar not only by memories and emotions that his most successful in terms of the synthesis Hossain strikes a resonant note of hope and Katrina provoked but also by his early of figurative and abstract form that he has pays final tribute to the resilience of a vital admiration for the writer Ravindrath Tagore, been exploring most recently. Indeed, given people with a painting of a large smiling face, the film maker Satyajit Ray, the musician the magnitude of his subject, the series resembling the great New Orleans-born Ravi Shanker. Perhaps more obvious is the transcends social realism to approach a new trumpet player and singer Louis Armstrong, influence of Arshile Gorky and Willem de species of history painting. Two new works emerging triumphantly from a welter of Kooning, both of whom, like himself, came in particular, where partially submerged, vibrant blue strokes. Above his head, like a from other countries to make their mark in straining figures struggle against the forces halo, the single word “Jazz” appears, roughly the New York art world. of devastation in a sea of rubble, call to fashioned from fragments of the American But while both of those earlier painters mind Goya’s “The Disasters of War” and flag. had figurative as well as abstract periods, Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa.” However, –– Ed McCormack during their era, when civil (and sometimes rather than from the pathos of particulars, as uncivil) war raged in the New York art was common in an age when visual art was Anowar Hossain, LIC Art Center, world between the factions of art-for-art’s- actually called upon to give the news to some 44-02 23rd Street, Long Island City, NY sake and humanism, it would have been extent, the raw power and human drama November 6 - December 6 unthinkable for an artist to combine Abstract in Hossain’s paintings derives from his use

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 33 Clara Gràcia: The Emotive Power of Nature t has been noted accurately describe her Looking at the perfect purity of her greens, Ielsewhere that while the surfaces, particularly in an the earthiness of a deep shade of red, one can Catalan artist Clara Gràcia acrylic on canvas such as almost smell the freshness of mint, the odor often works on large “Hidden Village,” where of clay. Through her strong instinct for color, canvases, her style is more small rustic dwellings play Gràcia magically transmits to us the “extra- lyrical than aggressive hide-and-seek with the visual” qualities of nature, its mysteriously and does not tend to viewer behind the colorful, elusive components, even as she clearly intimidate the viewer, as confetti-like leaves that delineates the contours of the mountains, the big paintings sometimes dominate the foreground of lay of the land. can. Indeed, standing the composition. Here, too, She is even capable of conveying a before one of her paintings the sky is a breathtaking blue shimmering sense of heat by enveloping an the viewer is enveloped hue, hovering above earthy entire landscape in a single fiery hue (albeit in effusions of color mountain ranges. subtly accented, here and there, with touches and light that have the “Hidden Village” Even while partaking of of other, cooler colors, such as pale blue), as warming effect of Mediterranean sunlight. the naturalistic light of the Impressionists, in the composition “Tramonto.” She brings In this regard, as well as for their lush beauty, Gràcia veers closer to the Fauves for the this vibrant painting alive not only through Gràcia’s paintings share qualities in common chromatic liberties that she takes in many her skillful blending of the luminous orange, with those of Joan Mitchell, that most gentle of her compositions. For rather than simply red, pink and yellow hues that saturate the of Abstract Expressionists. transcribing the colors of the landscape to canvas, but also through the vigor of her However, one of the ways in which they create a realistic impression, what she seems staccato palette knife strokes, which enliven differ is that Gràcia’s work is less abstract to strive for and succeeds admirably in the surface and complete the sense of pulsing and firmly rooted in landscape, combining evoking is the emotional impression that the heat radiating from the solar orb sinking the plein air freshness of the Impressionists landscape makes upon us. low above the hilly land masses silhouetted with the heightened palette of the Fauves. Thus she achieves an even deeper kind on the horizon line. Indeed in both her Working with a palette knife rather than of reality which makes her pictures more landscape and her floral still life compositions brushes, Gràcia piles on pigment in luscious affecting than if they simply duplicated the (the vitality of which give the lie to the term abundance, like a confectioner applying factual appearance of the visual data on hand. “nature morte”), Clara Gràcia proves herself frosting to a cake. Indeed, the texture of her She will put pinks and yellows together in a to be a painter to contend with. paintings is reminiscent of Nicholas de Stael way that nature might not dare in a particular –– Byron Coleman and the Canadian painter Jean Riopelle for its scene, to create a sense of the interplay of Clara Gràcia, Agora Gallery, 530 West sensual tactile appeal. sunlight and foliage or flowers in a manner 25th Street, November 23 - December 14. “Sumptuous” is the only word that can that cannot be conveyed naturalistically. Reception: Thurs. December 2, 6 - 8pm.

The GALLERY&STUDIO THE BROOME STREET GALLERY advertising deadline for Ground floor, 1,300 sq. ft. the February/March issue is Exhibition space rental available January 5 for color, 498 Broome Street, New York, NY 10013 January 10 for black/white. Tel: (212) 941-0130 G&S Classifieds opportunities THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE WEST SIDE ARTS COALITION (WSAC) established 1979, welcomes new members from all •Learn how to use your body corrrectly. geographic areas. There are approximately 14 exhibits per year for Fine Arts, Photography, and Craft Arts. •Improve your posture. Music, Poetry, Theater and Dance programs available. Contact info: Tel. 212-316-6024, •Achieve lasting results. email- [email protected] or website- www.wsacny.org. Or send SASE to the West Side Arts Coalition, A hands-on redirecting of the mind and body that has been used successfuly for over a century. Learn PO Box 527, Cathedral Station, New York, NY 10025. Visit our ground floor gallery at 96th Street & how to use your body in a more efficient way which will have far-reaching benefits. It involves changing Broadway (on the center island) New York City. Open: Wed. 6-8pm, Sat. & Sun., 12-6pm. old habits and learning new ones to last a lifetime. Please call for a private consultation and introductory lesson. Union Square studio, or house and office calls available. Limited Introductory Offer: Consultation, CUSTOM PICTURE FRAMING for artists and galleries. Museum quality, selected frames & photo analysis, intro lesson plus free additional lesson. Sliding scale available. mats. Float & dry mounting, canvas stretching. Jadite Galleries, 662 10th Ave. (betw. 46/47 Sts.) DIANA MULLMAN, AmSAT. 212-734-7875 Hours: 12 - 6 pm, Free delivery in Manhattan. 212-977-6190 [email protected]

MONTSERRAT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY is reviewing artist portofolios for its new Chelsea Gallery. National and International artists are invited to submit. Sase, slides, photos and brief Gelabert Studios artist bio. Send to: Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, 547 West 27 Street, NYC 10001 Gallery NY ART MAGAZINE seeks experienced advertising rep to help expand advertising base beyond offers artists the opportunity to showcase their work in a unique, galleries to include art related cliental. Generous commission. elegant Upper West Side setting. Fully equipped gallery for rent email: [email protected] on weekly or yearly basis. Top quality lighting. Call 212-874- 7188 for rental details or visit our website: NOHO GALLERY is viewing portfolios in all media for our Chelsea location. Visit nohogallery.com www.gelabertstudiosgallery.com. Gelabert Studios Gallery, for application form, or send SASE to Noho Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, 255 W. 86th St. (at Broadway), New York City 10024. NY, NY 10001.

34 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 Margaret Grimes: Reframing the American Sublime “ n art school, we were told to look at nature sublime in smaller, more compartmentalized leaves, weave between them. Ias if we were seeing it for the first time,” increments –– one is put in mind of Thomas Even an ethereal element such as sunlight says the widely exhibited painter Margaret Cole’s statement, “We are still in Eden; takes on painterly weight in Grimes’ Grimes, who coordinates the MFA program the wall that shuts us out of the garden is compositions, as seen in the much larger at Western Connecticut State University. ignorance and folly.” painting called “Dawn Elegy,” where it “Now we look at it as if we were slathers bark of trees like butter seeing it for the last time; hence on breadsticks. Here, too, Grimes the need to meticulously observe.” revels in her coloristic skills, However, while acknowledging employing pastel and candy- that her paintings contain an colored hues such as sherbet elegiac element, “an urgency, a greens and bubblegum pinks to nostalgia for the present which tweak the palette of nature and speaks to the fragility of nature pump up the chromatic intensity and our own mortality,” Grimes of her paintings, achieving the also desires “to find the abstract transcendence for which she aims. in the natural and by close In a century where precious observation of the intensity of little wilderness remains to individual moments approach the compare to the Edenic panoramas transcendent.” that drove the dreams of the The transcendence that Hudson River School and their Grimes not only approaches but less painterly peers in the Luminist apprehends in her paintings harks movement (who were chiefly back to that of the Hudson River concerned with capturing the School –– Thomas Cole, Asher crystalline qualities of water and B. Durand, Frederick Edwin sky), one can only be thankful Church, and others –– who, from that sufficient natural grandeur about 1820 well into the 1880s, survives to inspire a painter such as celebrated an American landscape Margaret Grimes. For along with that was still young and wild Wayne Thiebaud, Neil Welliver enough to inspire awe rather than and very few others, Grimes is eulogies. But the very significant one of a mere handful of artists difference is one of erased distance: who can still muster an authentic while those earlier painters sense of wonder at what was once depicted vast vistas that existed known as The New World. That wherever one looked, Grimes’ its virgin land has been raped and woods and thickets have by now its riches so sadly diminished over been bracketed between cities and the relatively few centuries since strip malls. And while she spares its discovery makes her work all us depiction of the tacky facades of the more relevant and important their K-Marts, Costcos, and Target today, when greater vision is stores (a subject best left to Pop required to evoke that which is and post-Pop dealers in deadpan slowly vanishing than that which irony), Grimes flattens and fastens lies in abundance before one’s her woods and thickets to the two- “Baldwin Hill Road, February 2010” eyes. dimensional picture in a manner Viewing Grime’s new paintings, that bespeaks much, much more than mere Grimes shows her Abstract Expressionist one is reminded that the best of the earliest adherence to its established sanctity as the roots most overtly in “Baldwin Hill Road, nineteenth century landscape painters –– foundation for modernist painterly aesthetics. February 2010” another oil on canvas which is to say, the first sophisticated artists To envision the sublime in a landscape consisting solely of tall grasses, tree limbs, to take on this great subject in the wake painting without the illusion of great tangled foliage, and bits of blue sky depicted of the primitive limners –– were often, like distances that the vanishing points of with a gestural vigor and calligraphic grace her, in philosophical sympathy with the traditional Western perspective imply is not akin to Pollock, albeit without aping his drip transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. only a formidable task but raises the larger technique. The juicy tactility with which And wasn’t it Emerson who said, “The feat question of whether magic can be invoked Grimes handles thick oil impasto is especially of imagination is in showing the convertibility without mirrors and smoke. Margaret Grimes evident here, as well as in a series of gemlike of every thing into every other thing?” provides a resoundingly affirmative reply in small landscape studies such as the “Morning In making that which is vanishing her large triptych “Dawn, Wykham, Road,” Star, Washington” which combines an immutable in pigment, Margaret Grimes where the verdant sun-kissed treetops of a atmospheric mystery reminiscent of the perpetuates and updates one of the truly lush forest flare out splendiferously across reclusive American visionary Albert Pinkham great traditions in American painting. three large panels, set against a luminous sky Ryder with the solemn, darkly glistening –– Ed McCormack in ascending flux from deep orange and pink tachisme of the French abstractionist Pierre to brilliant yellow to delicate robin’s-egg Soulages. In another such work in a small blue. format, “Late Light, Beech Forest V” the Margaret Grimes, Standing before Grimes’ work –– even pink tree-trunks are as palpably fleshy as the Blue Mountain Gallery, 530 West 25th St., at this late date, when what is dubiously limbs of de Kooning’s women, and plump Show ended October 30th defined as “progress” obliges us to take the pileups of green pigment indicating the thick

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 35 Derrick Guild’s Visual “Fictions” Trump Trompe l’oeil he Scottish painter Derrick Guild is to how their painterly hybrids,” Guild succeeds quite Tan artist who seems to go way out of counterparts would sensationally in his creating his way to make certain that nothing that combine in a single “an analogy to the botanists he does appears trendy or avant garde or composition actual blooms from the past who brought looks anything like modernist –– or even from different seasons and back paintings of plants to be postmodernist –– painting as we commonly secondhand sources, such marveled at and created an think of it. This gives his work a sly as scientific books and illusion of the new world.” conceptual edge unlike anything else around those botanical illustrations (Indeed, in this regard the today and makes it avant garde despite itself. themselves. series seems an organic visual Although widely exhibited in Scotland Enamored of how these counterpart of the fantastic and England, Guild first made a major botanical illustrations literary genre known as “steam impression on the The New York art scene “helped reinforce a kind punk,” in which contemporary in 2000 with his solo exhibition of “Bread of Edenic view of the writers, in the thrall of early Paintings” at Allan Stone Gallery, where his newly colonized world,” science fiction masters such as fourth solo show was recently on view. In Guild takes it all further H.G. Wells, fabricate worlds that first show, the strange intensity of Guild’s by creating what he sees where antiquated spaceships exquisite little oils derived from a detailed “not merely as paintings zoom into an imaginary warts and all descriptiveness that made them of flowers but trompe “Ascension Plant I, 2007” future.) even more like Renaissance portraits of baked l’oeil illusions of paintings Along with ten paintings, goods than the Dutch still tradition to which of impossibly hybridized plants.” However, Guild also exhibited three sculptures which one might normally compare them for their he goes even further, for even while creating seemed to comment wryly on the fact that luminous technique. the perfect illusion that these paintings are the island has only three small indigenous Indeed, in his new series,“After Eden,” painted on modest-sized sheets vellum that plants and all of the others in its rainforest created during a 22 month stay on Ascension have been stained by the tropical climate and have been humanly engineered over the past Island, a British overseas dependency in the distressed, folded, and torn over time, he 250 years. In the small oil on resin sculpture middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Guild comes trumps trompe l’oeil by executing them in with jewelry called “Charm,” for example, even closer to the Dutch still life tradition oils on canvas on a relatively large scale. two pearl pendants drip off the outer leaves in other regards. For not only does he In “Ascension Plant I, 2007,” several of a clover-shaped plant like dewdrops. deliberately take inspiration from the 17th flowers, a big, thorny cactus with delicate –– Ed McCormack and 18th century botanical illustrations of buds growing out of it, and droopy green which the Dutch were the world’s leading fronds all sprout from a single thick stem Derrick Guild, Allan Stone Gallery, exponents, but he also merges realism with resembling an oversize leek. Here, as in 113 East 90th Street (ended October 20) elements of artifice in a manner similar other paintings of what he calls “fictional That Magic Moment: The Fantastic Realism of Rania Mesiskli ften having months artist admitted to the Joel Grey in the hit Broadway play (and later Oto kill between Societé Nationale des film) “Cabaret,” this strange personage seems sporadic recording and Beaux Arts, and also a at once seductive and strangely sinister: an touring schedules, many circus aerialist before a emissary from a realm of fantasy that might popular entertainers fall from a trapeze ended well subsume one’s reality. –– among them, Tony her performing career. For Rania Mesiskli, who has also painted Bennett (who paints the One of Mesiskli’s a splendid portrait of Marilyn Monroe and views from his many hotel most sensational has flickering images of her own glamorous rooms) and Ron Wood of paintings in regard to her visage and Marilyn’s transposed on her the Rolling Stones (who imaginative gifts, as well website, is obviously well aware of the pitfalls paints endless images of “The Costume Party” as for demonstrating her that glittering fantasy worlds can entail. his band in performance) –– take up painting meticulous realist technique, is “Costume However, for the most part, it is the bright as a pastime. Few, however, can be said to Party,” a multifigure composition with a and positive side of theatrical life that she have equally serious duel careers in both carnivalesque quality that calls to mind a seems to celebrate in her paintings, of which fields, like Rania Mesiskli, a singer popular in kinder more gentle contemporary James she states, “I am seeking to stimulate and the Greek community, who lives and works Ensor. For here, gathered on a big stage uplift the human spirit with an exciting sense in New York City and is also an accomplished before a backdrop of fanciful graphic of artful energy and joy de vivre. Ballets, painter. symbols is a group of performers in elaborate circus images, theatrical plays and glamour Although self-taught, Mesiskli is no costumes, making up a veritable menagerie of fashion captured at the height of their primitive. Rather, she is a sophisticated visual fanciful animal figures. performances. At the heart of show business artist whose work stands entirely on its own Most prominent among them are four lies the moment, that instant in which dream merits, justly celebrated for her fantastic towering “giraffes,” their long necks tottering and discipline meet.” evocations of theatrical subjects encompassing high above the stage, as a pair of ostrich-like Indeed, it is that fleeting moment the worlds of ballet, circus, theater, and even exotic birds, one with a human rider on its that Rania Mesiskli captures consistently rock and roll in a painting called “Rock back, and other fanciful creatures cavort and renders immutable by virtue of her Star.” However, what sets her work apart in unison. But the central figure of the imaginative vision and meticulous technique. from others who paint such subjects is her gathering is a dwarfish, possibly transvestite –– Maurice Taplinger imaginative approach, inspired by Toulouse ringmaster or “barker” character in what Lautrec, Degas, Chagall and other past appears to be a bare-shouldered, spangled Rania Mesiskli, seen recently at masters –– with perhaps a special place in her flapper’s gown, who gestures histrionically the New Art Center, 580 8th Avenue. heart for Suzanne Valadon, the first woman toward the others. Like a character played by [email protected]

36 GALLERY&STUDIO Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 - 48” x 36” © Santina ‘Semadar’ Panetta - Symphonie Printaniere

VIRIDIAN ARTISTS, INC presents Portals of 16th Year of “Art from Detritus: Recycling with Imagination” PercePtion November 16 - December 4, 2010 Opening reception Saturday November 20, 4-7PM Patricia Alvarado curated by Vernita Nemec Alex Braverman Carolien Adriaansche • Jonathan Bauch • Marcia Bernstein Hellen Choo Annaliese Bischoff • Richard Brachman • Carol Brookes Irene Christinsen • Ursula Clark • May DeViney • Eleanor Elkin Clara Gràcia Matthew Farnsworth • Bernice Faegenburg • Monique Given Santina ‘Semadar’ Panetta Gordon Graff • Travis Graves • Susan Happersett • Julia Healy Ed Herman • Mary Frances Judge • Kathleen King • Henry Klimowicz Paul Pierson Susie Kos • Bernice Kramer • Lynn Kroll • Madeleine Lord Lynne Mayocole • Meryl Meisler • Barbara Minsky Marina Reiter Kazuko Miyamoto • Lisa Moren • Rebecca Muller Zuzana Muranicova • Susan Newmark • Garry Noland November 23 - December 14, 2010 Corrine Odermatt • Laura Osterweis • Kasia Ozga Damon Papakiriakou • Anne Patsch • Carol Quint Reception: Thursday, December 2, 6 - 8 pm Elizabeth Rhoads Read • Librado Romero • Leonard Rosenfeld Barbara K Schwartz • Ben Sloat • Katherine E Smith • Helaine Soller Stephen Soreff • Renata Stein • Victor Struck • Angela Valeria Courtney Lee Weida • Mary Wells • Peter Wilcox • Stella White Bullet Shih • Philip Zuckman 530 West 25th St., Chelsea, New York & others 212-226-4151 Fax: 212-966-4380 530 West 25th Street, NY, NY 10001 www.Agora-Gallery.com Tel/Fax:212.414.4040 [email protected] email:[email protected] www.viridianartists.com

Nov.-Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO