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 Indian Artist Sunjoy Jeergall is Ready for His Close-up ndian art is the newest art Iworld discovery. In the past few years, modernist Indian masters such as F.N. Souza, G S M.F. Husain, and S.H. Raza,  having been commanding impressive figures at auction Highlights in all the art world capitols, and obviously the time is right for forward-looking American On the Cover: critics and collectors to catch Why transvestite artist Grayson Perry, up with a younger generation “Dark World–Through The Window” the most wizardly British Potter since of contemporary Indian painters Harry, is more punk than the overblown both abroad and on our own shores. show at the Met. –Page 8 Since being alerted to his work in a review by another writer for Also: a Hoodlum Heart excerpt about this publication in 2007, before the present boon was fully underway, Pollock car crash survivor Ruth Kligman I have felt that one of the most gifted painters among them is Sunjoy with photographs by downtown art luminary Jeergal, the son of a prominent sculptor and art teacher in Mumbai. Anton Perich. –Page 14 For although he has lived and worked in the United States since 1996, Jeergall’s paintings exemplify qualities of his national heritage that, if anything, have been made more indelible rather than eroded by his experience in the New York City art scene. The burnished earthtones in his palette, like those of Souza, Husain, and Raza, are steeped in the clay of an arid tropical landscape; while the more strident reds and orange hues evoke not only its heat but also its pageantry and grandeur. Some of Jeergall’s paintings depict classically proportioned figures in a symbolic setting somewhere between the earthly and the cosmic, with variously colored spheres suspended in the stratosphere above. They take on a monumentality akin to the heroic figures of the great British visionary William Blake, as they gather together in family groups or contemplate their environment in solitude. Other compositions veer toward the abstract, consisting of angularly simplified and interlocked shapes that remain figuratively allusive, even while projecting an autonomous formal appeal unique to Jeergall’s visual vocabulary. The energy of individual human aspiration emanates from these shapes, even as they appear entangled in and anxious to Susan Sills, p. 25 wrest themselves from the ties of codependency. “My artworks are the manifestation of unconscious archetypes Bob Tomlinson, p. 5 predominantly representing the saga of very life on this earth,” Jeergall asserts in an artist statement, “and the constant struggle for survival causing various homogeneous groups tied together in relationships that are either harmonious or conflicting to one another in nature.” One of Jeergall’s most potent recent paintings despite its relatively modest scale (16x20 inches) is “Dark World – Through the Window.” Here, he departs from his usual clearly defined interlocking shapes and subtle, subdued hues for a more aggressively vigorous gestural Malka Inbal, p. 28 approach akin to Abstract Expressionism. A muscular mass of white and blue oil impasto laid down with a brush and perhaps piled on with a palette knife, projects the sense of a solid object at the center of the composition. Because its contours are roughly defined, a viewer familiar with Jeergall’s imagery may be tempted to “Rorschach” angular figurative allusions onto the object’s outer edges. And given the title of the painting and the visceral patches of red within the white and blue impasto, one may envision these figures as if glimpsed through a window, moving amid a dreamlike nocturnal miasma of neon light. Yet that the white and blue central form contains black cavities and is set against a background of crosshatched brown strokes, suggesting an earthen wall, could also evoke a skull in one of those death-haunted 16th century northern European still life compositions known as a vanitas. Thus this painting seems to forecast both a darkening and a deepening in the art of Sunjoy Jeergall. –– Byron Coleman

Sunjoy Jeergall, Berkeley College Art Gallery, 3 East 43rd Street, June 3 - 28, 2013 Barbara Fracchia, p. 11 Deborah Rhodes, p. 21 2 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 “Up-Surd” Showcases an International Roster

mong the artists featured in this oddly of McCusker’s most dynamically rhythmic ranging from children to Japanese geishas in Anamed large group exhibition, curated compositions. Featuring bold flowing forms ornate kimonos. by Basha Maryanska, Ellen Metzger O’Shea that cursively interlock, it creates an almost Flowingly aqueous forms akin to those works in two distinctly different stylistic sculptural sense of mass in two dimensions. of the American abstract expressionists modes: expressionistic plein air landscapes Andrew Kaminski revives the intricate Paul Jenkins and Helen Frankenthaler fill and surrealistic paintings merging large imagery of the psychedelic era in his the abstract compositions of Nancy Stella faces and figures with landscape elements luminous paintings inspired by what he refers Galianos with a sense of expansiveness and by means of collage and photo transfer. To to as “extensive spiritual contemplation.” The grace. In Galiano’s painting “Evergreen,” the first group belong the series she calls faces of people prominent in his emotional cool green and blue hues merge with areas “Going Home,” in which vigorously piled and psychological life merge in some of of yellow and clouds of white spattered with on pigment creates an active surface in both Kaminski’s compositions with diverse forms, stipples of blue and stripe patterns, filling the sky and the landscape below. In one objects, and fantastic figures. In “Ariana’s the entire picture space with a sense of lively such work, a winding road carries the eye Escape,” a young woman with intricately incident. By contrast in Galiano’s “In the homeward between vigorously brushed feathered angel wings grins blissfully in a Heat of the Night,” fiery reds and oranges ocher fields under a creamy blue sky where spacescape of planets and crystalline towers. predominate and determine the mood, sunlit clouds disperse like fork-stabbed While in “Avery,” a bearded man suggesting overlaid by a whiplash linear calligraphy as eggyolk and dark, scrubby pines thrust a hipster wizard appears like a supernatural swiftly and stylishly spontaneous as that of upward along a vertiginously curved horizon vision amid a maze of glowing cosmic the noted French action painter Georges line. Although O’Shea’s compositions may amusement park lights, smaller floating Mathieu. One of her most lyrical works originate with plein air painting, they are figures ala William Blake, and color areas as this time around, although slightly smaller obviously augmented, either out of doors vibrant as stained glass. than the other canvases on view, is “Fleur or in the studio, with freewheeling flights of Kaminski’s black and white drawing de Rocaille,” in which the composition the imagination. In one of her more eerie “Sex violence and American mandalas” is considerably more spare, with stylized works incorporating photo transfer, “Self with its surreal juxtapositions of imaginary stenciled purple floral forms at the center of Portrait,” the artist’s face, veiled by a verdant floral species with fanciful petals made a variegated field of amorphous green yellow wash of semi transparent paint, is seen in up of chain-saws, phalluses, breasts, and and pink. repose within a hill where wisps of hair rise intestinal coils, some surrounded by wiggling Bonnie Shanas, a sculptor born in New like vegetation against a luminous pale blue spermatozoa, reveals not only the draftsmanly Jersey and raised in Israel who returned to sky. In another such work, a large photo skills underlying Kaminski’s paintings, the United States with her husband and two transfer image of a female face with closed but also both the heights and depths of sons in 2009, gives the unlikely medium of eyes overlays a softer vision of halls and fields, this Bosch-like imagination. However, his wire mesh the supple sensuality of human as though inhabiting a pleasant dream. social concerns come to the forefront in flesh. Renée Weiss Chase, a fashion designer “Evolution of Commercialism,” where “As a student of psychology and an as well as a sculptor shows how clothes can consumer symbols such as Coca Cola and enthusiast of human nature,” Shanas says, “make the woman” by sculpting empty Disney logos are intricately interwoven with “I have always been intrigued by underlying dresses in clay that give the illusion of being his characteristically surreal visions. Kaminski allusions and the universal body language. filled with a curvaceous feminine forms. In reveals another, quite contrasting side of The genuine truth expressed through the one such piece the position of the dress, his artistic sensibility in a video presentation subtlety of the unspoken gesture tight and slinky and bent at the waist, evokes comprised of abstract forms with kinetic is my inspiration for sculpture of the human (at least for one viewer) a mental image of appeal of an animated cartoon. The piece form.” Marilyn Monroe’s famously vampy public is reminiscent of the psychedelic light shows Perhaps the wall relief which expresses this birthday serenade to JFK. Another long that enlivened rock concerts by bands like idea most literally in both the psychological formfitting gown, sleekly glazed with a soft Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead in implication of its title and its forms is the one pink patina in hues as subtle as those in Jules the 1960s. that Shanas calls “Coming Undone.” For it Olitski’s color field paintings, suggests a more Maria Angeles Hegglin, on the other depicts a partial female nude, seen from the imperious diva, upright and regal of posture. hand, is a self-taught realist born in Cordoba, shoulders to just below the knees, with strips Yet another evening majestic gown with Spain, and now living in New York, whose of cloth (also made of mesh) unraveling from one empty shoulder strap seductively falling oils on canvas present an idyllic sun-splashed her breasts and lower torso. evokes Daisy Buchanan at one of Jay Gatsby’s vision of the world. Particularly pleasing Although a muscular male torso entitled Jazz Age balls. for their freshness of color and sensuous “Within My Fort” is among her recent Cynthia McCusker is an abstract painter tactile qualities are a series of small (5"x7") pieces, the female nude is the most frequent with a baroque orientation. Her acrylic landscapes on canvas board. In these exquisite vehicle for Shanas’ reliefs, as seen in “My paintings are built on shapes that verge on little pictures, subjects such south western Shadow and I,” where the central figure the sharp-edged ornateness of art nouveau pueblos; firey sunlight reflection on a body of is combined with somewhat less three arabesques, particularly in her nearly water; and snowcapped mountains towering dimensional representations of itself. monochromatic composition in black, white, above a verdant summer field (a memory, Also outstanding for its grace and lissome and tan “Snow Leopard,” where stylized perhaps, of a period during which the artist beauty is “Awaiting,” an almost full length, swirls further enlivened by black markings, as and her family resided in Switzerland) are longhaired nude, viewed from behind, in a leopard’s spots, float freely in the wide evoked in thick, luscious oil impasto on reclining in anticipation of her lover’s arrival. open space between painting and drawing. canvas board in subtly blended hues recalling Like those of George Segal, albeit McCusker’s more full bodied and vibrantly the Impressionists. Along with her thickly somewhat more classically spare in colored compositions such as “Phoenix textured palette knife compositions, Maria Continued on page 10 Risen,” however, combine fiery hues with Angeles Hegglin is also known for paintings shard-like shapes akin to those of Clyfford in a somewhat smoother, more detailed realist Up-Surd: The International Contemporary, Still. Another acrylic painting on canvas based technique depicting luminous landscapes, Art Show, New Century Artists Gallery, on a feline theme, “Mountain Lion,” is one architectural studies, and portraits of people 530 W. 25th St., June 4 - 22, 2013 JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 3 “The Story of Sandy” Anowar Hossain

A New York artist’s response to the Sandy tragedy.

Opening: July 16, - August 3, 2013 Reception: July 18, 2013 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

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Subscribe to GALLERYSTUDIO GALLERYSTUDIO An International Art Journal $25 Subscription $20 for additional Gift Subscription PUBLISHED BY $47 International $5 Back Issues ©EYE LEVEL, LTD. 2013 Mail check or Money Order to: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED GALLERYSTUDIO 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] Name EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Jeannie McCormack 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

4 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 Soul in Exile: The New Paintings of Bob Tomlinson

black American who has lived in Paris for Within a tondo format, James Baldwin have sometimes felt like a fraud: a jazz Elvis, Aseveral years, the painter Bob Tomlinson takes on the mythical quality of a Rococo a fey ofay interloper in the predominantly explores the condition of expatriation, both angel, as he rushes along as though on a Black art form of bebop with all the special literal and figurative, perhaps more intimately mission with the draperies of a wine-red, privileges of popular acceptance his race than any other contemporary artist who yellow-patterned scarf flowing around the and appearance automatically confers. comes to mind. He arrived on Bastille Day shoulders of his blue suit jacket like ornate In fact, Chet Baker’s only adversary was in the early 60s and was profoundly affected wings. Clutched in his hand is his own novel, heroin, which got him repeatedly jailed and by the student uprising of 1968, about which “Giovanni’s Room,” about which Tomlinson eventually cost him his cabaret card. Barred he is at work on a novel called “Careless has written: “By posing the kinship of Black from nightclubs in the U.S., he could only Love,” and of which he has written: “Perhaps and homosexual as racial and sexual exiles, perform in Europe, where he ended up a we were naive and perhaps it was a simpler repressed by the national consciousness, prematurely shriveled and toothless ghost time but our hearts were on the side of the it is not difficult to see the struggle of the of his former self. Tomlinson’s portrait, angels.” European Giovanni and the American, however, preserves Chet Baker’s youthful Tomlinson’s paintings, their elegantly David, as a narrative for the relationship of beauty for the ages, as he dreamily cradles his golden trumpet like James Dean as Gabriel, as seen by Caravaggio. Divas and heroes of earlier eras and myths mingle with modern ones in Tomlinson’s oeuvre. As imagined by Tomlinson, whose art is often fed on literary sources, “Manon Lescaut,” the luxury-craving diva who drives a nobleman to forfeit his hereditary wealth by running away with her in Prevost’s 18th century French novel “Memoirs and Adventures of a Man of Quality,” takes on the haughty imperious air of one of that other worthy expatriate Sargent’s society portraits. By contrast Marguerite Gautier, the tubercular courtesan heroine of “La Dame Aux Camelias,” a novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, son of the mixed- race author of “The Three Musketeers,” James Baldwin has a wan and wistful quality as she gazes in profile past the symbolic camellias Black and White in America.” sharing the foreground of the composition, If Baldwin, already famous by then for his toward a marbleized mass suggesting ocean novels and the scathing indictments of white waves lapping at a beach on the ground of a America in his essays, such as “The Fire Next country sanitarium. Josephine Baker (Singing J’ ai deux amours) Time,” is one of the heroes of this series, Such technical effects literally dissolve Josephine Baker is one of its true divas. And any distinction between abstraction and the sensual forms and soft yet sumptuous colors Tomlinson makes this point by depicting figurative, which the artist believes to be influenced by 18th century Rococo painting, the great dancer and entertainer not nearly nonexistent –– or at very least arbitrary. In are every bit as romantic. Particularly naked in the miniskirt comprised of actual Tomlinson’s compositions oil paint merges appealing in his latest exhibition “Divas & bananas with which she became the toast of with elaborately textured and printed papers Heroes” are a series of portraits of fellow Jazz Age Paris, slyly parodying even while to create effects as rich as the elaborate expatriates such as the novelist James embodying, the patronizing white cliché of patterns in an Art Nouveau canvas by Gustav Baldwin, the entertainer Josephine Baker, and the Black woman as erotic exotic, but as a Klimt. the jazz musician Chet Baker. statuesque figure in an elegant shoulderless “Whether naturalistically depicted or Tomlinson, who moved back to Paris in sheath worthy of Lena Horne. For while Ms. abstracted in various degrees,” Tomlinson 2003, after a period of teaching college-level Baker’s sensual beauty, along with her sassy says, “the ‘object’ perceived in a painting French in the United States, “For me home is humor, won her the tributes “Black Venus” (a figure or a bowl of fruit) is in fact only a a very vague concept.” But of Paris he allows and “Creole Goddess,” she was also a social combination of visual cues. Such objects are as to how “practically speaking there is no activist who during W.W.II worked as a Red not ‘natural signs’ (to use the terminology of question that I live here. When I go to New Cross nurse and an underground courier for semiotics) but ‘arbitrary’ ones, that is to say York, I’m visiting.” the French Resistance, before leaving her only constituted at a second degree by true The same sense of existential homelessness beloved Paris to join the struggle for Civil natural signs: colors, lines and shapes.” haunts his recent portraits, such as one of Rights in the United States. In Tomlinson’s case, the final proof is the novelist James Baldwin, who frequented Although it may be stretching a point to in the paintings, which reconstitute reality a Left Bank cafe called L’Abbaye along attach the term “heroic” to Chet Baker’s and revisit the past in highly subjective with the actor, novelist, and playwright lifelong struggle with drug addiction, he contemporary terms. Melvin Van Peebles, the Beat poet Ted certainly qualifies as an existential exile. As –– Ed McCormack Joans, and Tomlinson himself, among other a white jazz musician with movie star good African-Americans abroad, many of whom looks, an exquisitely sparse trumpet style Bob Tomlinson, Viridian Artists followed the example of the esteemed painter frankly derivative of Miles Davis, and an 548 West 28th St. / 547 West 27th St. Beauford Delaney. androgynously breathy singing voice, he must Through June 8, 2013 JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 5 The Sensate Surface as Visceral Topology in the Paintings of Biddy Hodgkinson he British painter Biddy allied species of the ragged, shard-like shapes of that cranky THodgkinson takes contemporary “New painterly individualist Clyfford Still. Reveling her inspiration from close Naturist” painters in the raw deal of the natural order, reflecting observation of life cycles, with which includes Terry the unspeakable beauty of all living and particular focus on plants Winters, Gregory dying things, the colors in Hodgkinson’s and moulds. Her relationship Amenoff, and that compositions tend toward muted ochres, with nature began during her master of Germanic siennas, deep umbers, mauves and alizarin childhood, growing up on a sturm und drang crimsons, caked like dried blood or smeared farm, where keeping animals, Anselm Keifer. For across the canvas in bold mortal strokes. Her some of which the family ate, like those artists, Biddy shapes appear as if wrested from inside her taught her early on about the Hodgkinson does expansive canvases with great struggle, rather law of survival of the fittest, not merely depict the than applied to them externally. She treats as well as its opposite: the lay of the land, as in topography much as her fellow countryman importance of the nurturing traditional landscape Lucian Freud treats naked human flesh, before the killing and the eating. painting. Rather, she savoring in its warts, its distended veins, its These memories have seeks to extract the mottles and wattles, in compositions that are obviously influenced her recent abstract inner essences never without form, but always adventurously paintings, along with “the lack from nature: “The “un-form-ulated.” of any culture of death in the force that through Hodgkinson’s refusal to mire the forces of West,” as she puts it, which the green fuse drives nature in the formal constraints of landscape has driven her to delve even the flower,” in Dylan enables her to venture into the metaphysical, more deeply into the beauty Thomas’s memorable as seen in “2nd Lifeline,” which refers not to and drama that occurs when phrase. a wrinkle dissecting a human palm but to a plants, in particular, die: “the “The Urbanisation of an English Like those parts of ragged red wound running horizontally over colours and forms which evolve Country Garden” nature itself that most an earthen terrain its browns and arid greens in their decomposition and the other painters ignore Continued on page 10 resurgence and, ultimately, renaissance of for prettier effects, Hodgkinson’s acrylic and Biddy Hodgkinson, Agora Gallery flowers specifically.” mixed media paintings make little effort to 530 West 25th St., June 28 - July 19, 2013 This “inside-out” perspective on nature ingratiate themselves to the viewer. They are Reception: Thursday, July 11, 6 - 8 pm. appears to align Hodgkinson with the loosely rugged entities, often as craggy in texture as New York Stands Out in Black and White in WSAC Group Show “ onderful Town” may sound like could just as easily have been called “After with an image of dancers in a rehearsal studio, Wthe name of a relentlessly upbeat Sandy.” and also employs multiple exposure skillfully new Broadway musical but it’s actually a Deena Weintraub also puts a funky spin to simulate movement within a still image in more complex photo survey of the most on the Big Apple, flying in the face of the another silver gelatin print entitled “Dance multifaceted city in the world. All the show’s ironically optimistic title with a picture Theatre of Harlem.” pictures in the show are in black and white, of a summons-plastered door in a crumbling Janice Wood Wetzel sends out intriguing harking back to those early photographic building facade inscribed with the cryptic mixed signals with a picture of two little boys purists who eschewed color film for years graffiti slogan “Time is a Wobbly Healer.” sitting on milk crates in front of a graffiti- after it became available as a commercial Weintraub also shows a spooky picture scrawled wall. The cardboard sign one of the abomination suitable only for advertising. called “Jewish Cemetery NYC,” in which boys holds says,”Can you please help?” but Without endorsing that now dated bias, tombstones worn wafer thin by time and seen the title of the picture (“Playing Homeless”) Jean Prytyskacz, a participating artist and from the side evoke emaciated white ghosts. and the boys’ mischievous smiles say another. the show’s curator, obviously chose works Carolyn Reus gives us a classic image in the Myrna Harrison-Changar achieves that demonstrate the particular charms and tradition of Stieglitz of old- fashioned stone an almost cinematic effect with a series possibilities of monochromatic photography skyscrapers soaring heavenward, stressing the of pictures called “Nymphs Untermyer as an antidote to the facile technical formal beauty of our architecture before the Fountain.” The Graceful bronze figures trickery dominating much contemporary glass box became the ideal of contemporary of the lithe young girls, akin to the Three photography. developers with no taste for urban aesthetics. Graces, appear to actually dance in a circle Prytyskacz sees the city through an Other photographers find their epiphanies by virtue of Harrison-Changar’s skill in intimate lens soaked in her own peculiar in the lighter, brighter moments of the capturing them from slightly different angles poetry, as seen in “Poster, City Island,” in city: Paul Margolis shows us one happy and positions. which she focuses on the famous myth- citizen on the boardwalk, in his picture of a JD Morrison makes a mysterious enhancing mug shot poster of the young middle aged African-American man gazing semiabstract statement, with the bravura Frank Sinatra that we’ve all seen before, but up in pure delight amid a flurry of flapping painterly blurs of his digital archival print “makes it new,” as Pound advised that all wings, “Feeding Birds, Coney Island.” Celia “Pinhole Rain,” and employs a contrastingly original artists must do, by catching it at a Cruzado contrasts the serene concentration crystal clear technique in “Dumbo,” where slightly askew angle through a smudged and of a young Asian couple, as slender as a the majestic beams of the Brooklyn Bridge streaked plate glass window. In relation to nymph and a faun, playing violins amid Continued on page 10 her other picture of a crudely hand-printed harried passengers rushing along a subway sign hawking flashlights and batteries called platform in “Bach Underground.” In “Wonderful Town,” recently seen at “Before Sandy,” this image of the 1940s “The Twirlers,” Arthur Cajigas reveals the Broadway Mall Community Center, heart throb looking faded and water logged strenuous work behind a public performance 96th Street (center Island). 6 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 The Postmodern Abstraction of Michael R. Grine egarding his artistic philosophy, Michael And the Roman numeral added to its title RR. Grine, a painter from Kenmore, indicates that it is one in a series mapping New York, who moved with his family different states of feeling and of being. to Nashville, Tennessee in 2001, likes to The same blue and red spiral dominates the quote Bruce Lee: “All fixed set patterns are composition Grine calls “Lust,” which is on incapable of pliability. The truth is outside of a larger scale than most of his other paintings all fixed patterns.” and suggests a vortex, since lust, like love, Grine’s oeuvre bears out his agreement is a big abyss, a bottomless pit that one can with the late martial arts film star. No other easily fall into, body and soul. “Escape” is also artist since Forrest Bess, the Texas roustabout “Transition IV 2013” blue and red, but it’s a thick circular maze fisherman visionary, has made of eclecticness “signature style,” for the art market. resembling a coiled snake, its scales textured such an adventure and a virtue. Indeed, for Rather, he embarks on each painting as by thickly pigmented strokes of a palette knife, Grine, as it was for Bess, each work would though inventing abstract art all over again surrounded by utter blackness. When you seem to be an expedition into the unknown. with each new composition. This gives his run away from something, it seems to say, be “I am determined,” he states, “to push work a clarity and a sense of inevitability careful of what you may run into. past the limitations of the process to achieve that comes across immediately in a work An especially small panel painting that an emotional response from the viewer.” such as his mixed media painting on wood Grine calls “Imp ll,”on the other hand, Most of Grine’s paintings in acrylic on “Transition IV, 2013,” in which three bold is as blithe and sprightly as its name, with wood panel or canvas are intimate in size and shapes can be read as allusions to landscape: a central garnish of interwoven, ribbon- possessed of an almost primitive-seeming A bright yellow expanse at the top of the like brushstrokes afloat on a smooth purity of intention akin to homespun composition suggests a sun-saturated sky; an sea of tomato soup red. Then there’s American abstract pioneers like Arthur Dove, amorphous white mass with ragged edges “Rainbow,” a much larger acrylic on canvas Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe. at the center evokes a massive cloud; and featuring vertical matte hard-edge stripes Which is to say, they have about them that a deep blue shape, also ragged around the deconstructing splashily halfway up like a roughhewn quality of the itinerant early edges, descends from a steep precipice near precisely rendered comic book explosion. American limners who went from farm to the upper left corner of the painting into Always a little offbeat, Michael R. Grine’s farm soliciting cameo portrait commissions a low horizon-line stretching to the right paintings exemplify the freewheeling essence during the colonial period. At this late date hand corner. But why is this area the color of of the New Abstraction. –– Byron Coleman in postmodern art history, these qualities the sea, rather then the expected landscape imbue his paintings with a refreshing sense colors? Because this is neither a literal of integrity. Since no two of his compositions representation or a calculated chromatic Michael R. Grine, Pleiades Gallery of resemble one another, one could never heightening in the manner of the Fauves, Contemporary Art, 530 West 25th Street, accuse Grines of cultivating a logo-like but a terrain entirely colored by emotion. June 11 - July 6, 2013 Sirenes: A Sublime Colorist Enamored of Light s a little girl in kindergarten in Norway luminous light blue hues heightened with does not hesitate Athe artist known as Sirenes was fascinated streaks of pearly white, without resorting to to introduce with color. She loved the tactile sensation figurative imagery the painting evokes the recognizable of putting her fingers in paint and applying fanciful spirit of a numinous being. subject matter it directly to the paper. And to this very In another large acrylic on canvas called when moved by day many of her large canvases are created “Joy,” Sirenes conveys an even more elusive the desire to do so. entirely by finger-painting. These paintings in subject by virtue of her mastery of chromatic One such work particular have a smoothness and a lyricism dynamics as vibrant and yet gentle as the is her acrylic on that is always a distinctive feature of her work, music of Ravel. Here, delicately blended canvas, “Lake at but can be seen to special advantage in the and variegated yellows, oranges and reds, Night,” in which intriguingly titled acrylic on canvas,“The Man and pinks, accented with just a few steaks of the white flowers Who Disappears,” in which the softly caressed verdant green, evoke a buoyant sense of the and green leaves pigment, with its subtle tonal variations of emotion that the title describes. Indeed, with on the surface of “Butterfly Over Water” earth tones resembles something more like these colors delicately balance at the center the blue water an amorphous mist of light and shadow than of the composition, floating against a beige appear to pay tribute to Monet, but the a physical surface: an atmospheric miasma background suggesting the raw unprimed sense of their being illuminated by rays from conjured with a finesse that calls to mind the linen of the canvas itself, Sirenes appears the moon rather than the sun lends the 19th century British painter John Constable’s to combine a gestural lyricism that can be composition a more romantic quality in the comment about his great colleague and fellow compared favorably to the early Abstract manner of Symbolism. countryman JFW Turner, of whom he once Expressionist works of Philip Guston with It should be added, however, that here, as said, “Turner seems to have outdone himself; a chromatic complexity that would do the well as in other paintings with prominently now he’s painting with tinted steam!” Color Field master Jules Olitski proud. allusive elements –– such as “Butterfly Over Just as mysteriously allusive in another Her ability to combine these elements so Water” and “Evening” –– it is the underlying manner, exemplifying the unique combination successfully suggests that one might think abstract armature of formal balance informing of coloristic sensitivity and gestural vivacity of her as an “Abstract Impressionist” who her compositions that invariably enhances and that Sirenes brings to bear is a composition often goes beyond the Impressionist goal empowers all of Sirenes’ paintings. she calls “The Fairy.” With a starburst of painting the effect of light on objects to –– Wilson Wong composition akin to the West Coast American make the light itself the pièce de resistance of painter Jay DeFeo’s legendary canvas her compositions. On the other hand, being Sirenes, Agora Gallery 530 West 25th Street, “The Rose,” albeit with that artist’s thick a postmodern painter with all the license July 23 - August 13, 2013 oil impasto replaced by Sirenes’ smoothly for free expression that term implies, she Reception: Thursday, July 25, 6 - 8pm JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 7 Grayson Perry: Great Britain’s Punk Transvestite Pottery Genius of his personal identity. subject, as all too many art historians have Paradoxically, over the years, as the artist a tendency to do ad absurdom, she lets the himself has aged, Claire has grown younger, artist speak for himself, annotating specific evolving from a tasteful Essex housewife’s works and candidly musing on aspects of his version of a Margaret Thatcher type to the personal life in his own inimitable manner. apparition that flounced up to the podium Like some of the musicians and other to accept the Turner Prize in his name. He artists that I knew in the East Village a refers to the subgroup of transvestites who decade earlier, in the early ‘80s Perry lived dress up as little girls as “the crackheads of the with his painter girlfriend in the basement trannie world. For us, its the pure drug; we of a “squat” in northwest London that don’t mess about pretending to be women.” they shared with her sister, a life model and Perry, who says, “In life, as in art, I have performance artist, a couple of filmmakers, been dusted with the perversion brush,” and the poet Angus Cook. He recalls it as makes no secret of his indulgence in a “a weird Dickensian cubbyhole full of smelly variety of specialized sex practices, ranging furniture and dope smoke.” It was there that from reliving in adulthood his formative he started filling sketchbooks with drawings childhood experience in pottery class with and collages in which, as he puts it, “sexual rubber fetishism to sadomasochism to auto- fantasy meets artistic mischief meets political strangulation and suffocation. But the British commentary and confessional diary. In them, (who coined the term “kinky,”after all) have a I could experiment with the vocabulary of high tolerance for such things. Perhaps much my unconscious without feeling ‘this is an n 2003, when Grayson Perry won the harder for aesthetic elitists to swallow was artwork,’ and that was very liberating ... The ITurner Prize, one of the most prestigious that the Turner Prize, named for one of the sketchbooks have been the source of much awards in the art world, he showed up at the nation’s most hallowed painters, was awarded of my later ceramic work in terms of style ceremony at Tate Britain in a short lilac satin for the first time to a mere potter. and imagery. I wasn’t aware at the time what babydoll dress, frilly white ankle socks, and To which Perry replies, “I’ve never a condensed amount of ideas there was in flat-heeled red Mary Jane pumps. seen myself as a potter or as part of the those pages, but even now I refer back to Jake Chapman, another short-list nominee crafts movement. I am a conceptual artist them.” groused that “losing the Turner Prize to a masquerading as a craftsman.” He also made funky found object grown man dressed like a small girl” was his The year after winning the coveted prize assemblages such as “Baba Yaga’s Hut,” a “most embarrassing moment.” (This from a that had transformed him from an artworld spooky little weathered wood house with a man who collaborates with his brother, Dinos oddity to a mass media celebrity overnight, rusted weather vane on top, perched on a Chapman, on the fabrication of eerily lifelike Perry created a pot he called “Taste and pair of actual chicken legs on a rag-wrapped fiberglass mannequins of naked children with Democracy.” Decorated with Pop comicstrip tree-limb. Besides making found object pieces erect-penis Pinocchio noses!) Perry’s ability colors and drawings of ordinary citizens, that appear akin to the junk sculptures and to abash fellow artists in a field permeated here the speech balloons he often includes in outsider-influenced works of Beat Generation with Warholesque irony lends credence to his work contain comments culled from the artists like Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman his observation that “sincerity is the new popular press: “The people’s princess,” scoffs and Paul Thek, Perry and his squatmates put shocking.” For he didn’t appear at one of the an adolescent in a hoody with the Gap logo on nude cabaret happenings in local London most important events of his career dolled up on the front. “This time they’ve given the clubs much like the performance art that like Shirley Temple as a mere lark or publicity Turner prize to someone who is not really an I saw evolving, along with the punk music ploy. In fact the artist, who has a wife named artist,” says one worried looking vacationer scene, in hole-the-wall East Village venues Phillipa and a daughter named Flo, traces in bermuda shorts carrying two styrofoam around the same time. his penchant for cross-dressing back to his cups. “It’s about time a transvestite won the But it was not until he took evening first grammar school pottery lesson, in the Turner Prize,” a muscular bloke in a bathing pottery classes, Klein tells us, that Perry’s workingclass county of Essex at age eight. suit answers, as the buxom girl in a bikini he “attitude of punkish dissent, of ‘going with “To protect our clothes we were made is carrying in his arms declares, “Pottery is the line of most resistance,’ as he called it,” to wear long sleeved smocks made of light the new video!” Meanwhile, a little kid down found its perfect expression in a medium blue rubber. I can vividly recall mine being below waves a wizardly finger in the air and where he could combine the seductive too small as the pretty teacher did up the says, “Harry Potter.” surfaces of ceramics with subversive subject snap fasteners down the back. I became very * * * matter not normally dared by mere craft excited at the feeling of the tight smooth I was planning to write something about artisans. material. In this state I made my first ever “PUNK: Chaos to Couture,” presently at The piece he calls “A Tradition of pot, an ashtray for my dear mother.” the Metropolitan Museum, for this issue. Bitterness,” for example, calls to mind some At twelve he was already dressing up at But after an advance copy of art historian of my favorite lines by the distinguished home in his sister’s frocks; by fifteen he and writer Jacky Klein’s profusely illustrated English poet Philip Larkin: “They fuck you was “swanning about” the local village in a monograph “Grayson Perry,” first published up, your mum and dad / They may not “polyester blouse, dog-tooth check skirt and by Thames & Hudson in 2009 and reissued mean to, but they do. / They fill you up with cut-price wig ordered from the back pages in an updated and expanded edition this the faults they had / And add some extra, of a magazine.” As a young man, he asked June, arrived in the mail, I decided that just for you...” a girlfriend what he should call himself in here was an artist who represented the The artist says of this piece, in which “trannie clubs.” She thought he looked like a transgressive spirit of Punk more vibrantly photo transfers of orderly middleclass house “Claire,” and that has been his “fem name” than any highly hyped high fashion exhibition facades alternate around its circumference ever since. Unlike Marcel Duchamp’s female curated by the Met’s Costume Institute ever with silhouetted figures representing the alter ego “Rrose Selavy,” Claire is not only could. And it is much to Klein’s credit that, hidden private lives of the families within: Perry’s artistic creation but an important facet rather than bloviating theoretically on her “The style of the pot is folky, like embroidery

8 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 stereotypically decorative Asian tree with gorgeous pink blossoms, set against an apple-green glazed ground, we see, in the words of the artist: “raw images of the East End and its grittiness: the Flying Scud pub; a woman lying dead, the victim of some horrendous attack; an aggressive skinhead carrying iron bars; a put upon mother with her pushchair. Placing these scenes of the reality of modern, urban, everyday poverty on a pot challenges us to ask ourselves whether these things really are picturesque.” The jarring juxtaposition of striking aesthetic beauty camouflaging horror that one can only see up close comes across even more starkly in “We’ve Found the Body of Your Child.” Although its intricate composition of figures in a landscape was inspired by Brueghel’s panoramic masterpiece “Hunters in the Snow,” this piece, with its glowing gold glazes evoking the luminous beauty of crisp winter light, was actually prompted by headlines in the sensationalistic British we’ve found the body of your child, 2000, taste and democracy, 2004, glazed ceramic, Press about a child murder. Thus the glazed ceramic, 49x30 (1914 x 1134) 41x26 (1618 x 1014) figures, which could appear almost Picture Credit: The Saatchi Gallery, Photo Credit: 4th Amendment Wear festive from a distance, turn out to be London, photos Stephen Brayne, courtesy an hysterical mother being restrained by Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. a celebration of women of ideas but the title a male search party as her lifeless infant lies or appliqué images, or the sort of thing you was also joking about the fact that women are naked in the snow. might see impressed on a celebratory loaf flesh-and-blood creatures and not just ideas.” Other works by Grayson Perry wittily of bread. The silhouettes are mini fairytales “Moonlit Wankers,” is one of Perry’s elaborated upon by him in this revelation of dysfunction: the son coming down more visually lyrical vases, with its graceful of a book celebrate the reclusive outsider on Christmas morning to find his father rotundity tapering to a lengthy phallic neck; artist Henry Darger; take jocularly obscene hanging; the man discovered wearing his its delicate pink and blue glazes, and its potshots at his fellow English art stars wife’s clothes, being attacked in fury by her.” linearity suggesting the most delicate Chinese Gilbert & George; assure us that, from the As with Kara Walker’s images of slaves and landscape, albeit with the craggy mountains perspective of a workingclass kid from Essex slave owners in the Old South, the everday replaced by figures strolling like sleepwalkers with a punky chip on his shoulder, the British horror is enhanced by the fairytale charm of amid the scrawny trees in various states of class system is still firmly in place. Perry’s silhouetted figures.The housewife dishabille. Only one disarmingly anomalous pot raising a stick above her head to bean her “This is a piece about masturbation,” Perry decorated with big black letters declaring, “I dragqueen hubby, a bra dangling like a snake says. “It harks back to a particular wank I LOVE BEAUTY” (its title) and a folklorically from her other hand, already seems as quaint had when I was about eighteen. There was charming drawing of Claire holding a staff a domestic icon as the logo on the Old an empty Victorian mansion up the road and a bird of prey seems cause for alarm on Dutch Cleanser label –– as does the penitent from where I lived and I used to store my the part of a newly enamored viewer of this husband, cowering on his knees, hardon at secret cache of women’s clothes in one of its artist at his most refreshingly outrageous. half-mast. outbuildings. I would sneak out there and Nor, once again, is Perry’s explication of what In another pot called “Women of Ideas,” try the clothes on, disporting myself about he admits is “a very uncomplicated vase” that a photo transfer of a Gainsborough-like the large grounds. I remember one particular “shows me venturing dangerously close to cameo portrait of a period beauty wearing an moonlit evening with dew on the grass. I making a pure piece of pottery” designed elaborately plumed 17th century chapeau is had the idea that it was like a self-dating to cajole new fans who want him to go on grafted onto cartoonishly sexy body busting experience, which could in fact almost be forever as the Johnny Rotten of ceramic art: out of an S&M bustier and sporting a romantic. ‘Wanker’ is normally an insult, and “I am coming around to the notion that (presumably) strap-on phallus and testicles. yet most people masturbate. Relax and it in terms of positioning myself in the debate She is set against a glossy piss-yellow patina can be quite a thrilling and romantic thing. about craft and art, whereas I started out on decorated with linear images of a leather- So this pot presents an arcadian vision with the art side, I’m increasingly creeping back bound fetish head, a receptacle-tipped people masturbating all over it against the towards the arena of craft. As I gain more condom, and a hypodermic needle, among backdrop of a cliched rural sunset.” confidence, I’m tiptoeing towards crafting other disparate objects. Nor does the artist’s Of another piece called “Poverty decorative art –– while trying to drag the explication appear any more calculated to Chinoiserie,” which initially arrests our definition of contemporary art with me.” mollify the ever-vigilent guardians of political attention with its almost banal Art Nouveau And if you don’t like it, well then –– correctness: “I’ve always gone out with beauty, Perry says, “I started this vase with bollocks on you too, mate! women whose minds I enjoy, and this pot the idea of the idealized peasant as it crops up –– Ed McCormack is like a history of strong women. They all in chinoiserie and oriental ceramic work. We looked a bit mean and frightening on the often holiday in other people’s misery ...” transfers so I capitalized on that. It was partly Under the graceful, sinuous branches of a JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 9 Gerd Rautert: A German Expressionist’s Art of Indelible Archetypes monumental sense of modern dislocation larger, more solidly painted figures. Both are Ain a world that has grown fragmented is seated in chairs as though in a bar or cafe, what comes across most strongly in the large albeit indicated only by the artist’s visual Expressionist works in acrylic and ink on shorthand with characteristic linear grace. canvas of Gerd Rautert, a German artist who Both have their chins in their hand in that states “I feel closer to myself and to God when aforementioned “Thinker” gesture. But I paint.” without breaking this pose the one on the Rautert is a master markmaker, an artist who right spins its head around to glance at the appears to navigate his compositions mainly by one on the left, which appears almost identical intuition. As with the Abstract Expressionists, but wears some hooded garment resembling the canvas is both a place of worship and a the coverall garb of devout Arab women, battlefield. De Kooning once stated “Painting albeit covered with cross-like designs. Is the is not a situation of comfort for me,” and you smoke-like figure floating above them a sense immediately that it is not one for Rautert wistful figment of the male figure’s poignant either. Salvation maybe, but not comfort by fantasies of a better world in which he might any means. The figures that he paints, mostly come to know this chastely covered woman male, are archetypes, like Leo Golub’s giant more intimately –– or simply a formal element mercenaries or the sculptor Ernest Trova’s of the composition? That its meaning is not faceless robotic Everymen. They appear at “Voübergehend” immediately apparent is what makes Rautert’s once heroic and tragic as they sit chin in hand Cocteau and Picasso. Symbols can also appear, personal iconography so intriguing. like Rodin’s “Thinker” or suspend themselves as seen in one eventful canvas centering on For like his fellow German Expressionists strangely in an atmosphere of painterly frenzy masculine profile delineated in beige on A.R. Penck, Jorg Immendorff, Georg Jean-Michel Basquiat might have envied. a shadowy brown figure. The shape of a Baselitz and Markus Lupertz, Gerd Rautert Words often enter the picture, a kind of stylized guitar, almost Miro-like in its bulbous is not in the business of spelling out obvious inner graffiti of the artist’s thoughts while biomorphic contours is suspended where the explanations or telling trite symbolic tales. painting. For the American viewer who has figure’s heart would be, amid a lively array Rather, like Penck in particular, but with no grasp of German, they become purely of word-fragments and shapes that demand greater, less primitive draftsmanly gifts, he is visual symbols and as such are still sufficient no explication, since they compel the viewer a creator of universal archetypes that linger in to command one’s interest. For everything purely on their own plastic merits and as the mind of the viewer long after one has seen in Rautert’s work is a discrete sign anyway, mysterious semiotic signifiers. them. –– Maurice Taplinger another autonomous, mysterious mark in an In one medium-size square shaped canvas entire alphabet of marks, signs, and symbols in the word “Evas” stands out, along with the search of completion but drawing their energy spare calligraphic figure of a female nude Gerd Rautert, Agora Gallery from the struggle of process. evoked with a few graceful lines hovering 530 West 25th St., June 4 - 25, 2013 At times his line is as supple as that of Jean cloud-like or like a wisp of smoke over two Reception: Thursday, June 6, 6 - 8 pm. “UP-SURD” INTERNATIONAL disperse as if in a constant state of flux. The as “Cougar” or “Squirrel to paintings in ROSTER sense of frenetic movement in Lech Ledecki’s which no sign of living creature is anywhere Continued from page 4 paintings makes them true “action paintings” in evidence, one looks at them as if through conception, Bonnie Shanas’ sculptures are in the most literal sense of that term; yet the eyes of a taxidermist contemplating pelts universal representations of the human body they are imbued with of a lyrical sensibility spread out on a worktable. in its many moods and fancies. largely absent in many of the American artists Indeed, but overall, Hodgkinson’s métier The last two artists, Elzbieta Ledecka for whom that name was originally applied. is as unflinching as the finale of the Dylan and Lech Ledecki, both graduates of the Indeed Ledecki’s paintings, for all their sense Thomas poem whose opening line was Academy of Fine Arts, in Poland, where of movement paradoxically also have the quoted earlier in this review: “And I am they live and work as painters, sculptors serene quality, enhanced by the grays and the dumb to tell the lover’s tomb / How at my and designers. Elzbieta Ledecka, the more delicate tonalities of their color combinations, sheet goes the same crooked worm.” figurative painter of the couple, is known of lyrical landscapes seen in ancient Asian –– Byron Coleman for her landscapes, still lifes, and portraits in scroll paintings. ––––Marie R. Pagano which vibrant colors and sublime sense of WSAC GROUP SHOW light bring the image alive. “Color-as-light,” BIDDY HODGKINSON Continued from page 6 to borrow a term coined by the great British Continued from page 6 are seen sandwiched between buildings in a poet and painter William Blake, is a foremost scorched here and there by the acids with composition as dynamically compressed as feature of her work, which burns with a which she often weathers and distresses her one of Franz Kline’s black and white oils. quiet intensity quite rare in the noisy, often thick pigments. Even more anomalous is a Sondra Weiner captures a moment and a gaudy, arena of contemporary art. Elzbieta flatly elongated white disc stretching across pose of cross-gender fluidity with a glammed- Ledecka’s sublime sense of light and color as the center of the composition, simultaneously up transvestite brandishing a cigarette as light as well, can be seen with unique clarity suggesting a mirage of a pool of sperm or though in an old-fashioned Virginia Slims in one picture of light streaming into a blue- fallen flying saucer hallucinated from some ad in “Euphoric Drag.” And Robyn Gecht walled room with a window box of brilliant distance. contrasts the deadpan face our skyline, so blooms below. Another large acrylic and mixed media sadly diminished by the loss of the Twin By contrast, Lech Ledecki is a versatile work,“The Urbanisation of an English Towers, with an atmospheric view in another abstractionist who works in painting, ceramic Country Garden,” features creampuff- picture of the Verrazano Bridge, seen sculpture, and stained glass. His paintings are colored clouds and drips set against a somber through bare winter tree limbs, silhouetted especially dynamic, characterized by vigorous tactile brown ground, suggesting, decay, loss against a dramatic dusk sky. strokes of radiant color possessed of a and absence of a once verdant and budding –– Byron Coleman ferocious sense of energy. Forms coalesce and garden. And when the artist affixes titles such 10 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 Fashion Victims of Barbara Fracchia’s Insightful Brush s any Women’s Wear Daily reporter Ipanema” possibly humming in her head, she retaining the pictorial logic of her adamantly Aor that premier paparazzo Bill sashays down a city street, as though hoping realist style. Cunningham, who haunts Fifth Avenue year to stop traffic. The gently satirical wit one first after year taking those candid shots of chic At some distance up ahead, however, encountered in “Va Va Voom,” the ladies on the go for The New York Times, postures a middle-aged man, balding and aforementioned painting discussed in this can tell you: Style starts on the streets. This mustachioed, with a thickening middle, review, once again comes to the forefront in is perhaps most radically demonstrated in but decked out in a tight, bright orange another oil called “Hairdresser,” focusing the major exhibition “PUNK: From Chaos sleeveless “muscle shirt,” slim black jeans and in on yet another somewhat-less-than-svelte to Couture,”currently at The Metropolitan sunglasses like one of the young male models fashion victim. Her own choppily cropped Museum of Art. in a Calvin Klein ad. They appear to be made hairstyle streaked with a punky green and For the streets are where the most forward for each other, as they prepare to converge orange dye-job, sporting a bold striped looking designers get ideas for what one on a street that the artist, by virtue of her fisherman-style polo shirt, cutoff blue denim will see on the runways in Paris next season, painterly finesse, evokes with a mastery of shorts with rolled hems, semitransparent and where the Jersey-born, California-based Renaissance perspective one rarely encounters floral-patterned stockings, and leather boots realist painter Barbara Fracchia found much in contemporary realism. festooned with silvery buckles and hardware of the inspiration for her exhibition, “Fashion Conversely, like that dissenting realist for that trendy S&M effect, she combs out Statements,” one of the trendiest solo shows colleague of the Abstract Expressionists, the platinum locks of a woman seated in in Chelsea at the moment. Fairfield Porter, Fracchia also occasionally her salon chair who –– at least from a rear One of Fracchia’s most ironic takes on likes to play with the perceptual tension view –– could resemble the Va Va Voom Girl contemporary style is her oil on canvas “First between the illusion of spatial depth and Herself. Date,”depicting a young couple so cool that the actuality of the two-dimensional picture Fracchia’s “Fashion Statements” series is they appear to be totally ignoring each other, plane so sacrosanct to modernist abstraction. divided into four categories, not necessarily in as they sit on a bench on a city street, perhaps She does so with especially impressive the following order: “What NOT to Wear,” waiting for a bus, its title appropriated from the popular TV since the young show; “Accessories,” in which she adopts woman appears to a semiabstract approach to depict more be holding what simplified brightly colored images of shoes, looks like an MTA stockings, gloves, and handbags floating transfer in her hand. flatly in shallow space in a manner upon Her long raven hair which a less ambitiously versatile painter is spilling out of a might base an entire career; then there are white baseball cap, two related categories,“Shopper’s Delirium” down onto her blue and Mannequins Social Series,” in which the denim jacket and artist, who says shopping “is a love / hate black t-shirt. Her thing with me,” explores the air-conditioned crossed legs are nightmare (to borrow Henry Miller’s term) encased in brown of what she calls “shopping hell.” tights that end in The chalky white mannequins that black high-heeled Fracchia paints, invariably devoid of wigs, ankle boots. Her have the eerie look of extraterrestrials in date’s long brown drag. Set against solid-colored backgrounds, hair is held in striking elegant poses, they are among her place by a gypsy most formal compositions, like deStael’s bandanna, his eyes “Red Again?” “First Date” bottles, albeit imbued with a surreal are hidden behind anthropomorphic twist. When seen bathed wraparound shades, his chin is cushioned by postmodern panache in a somewhat larger oil in artificial light, in the otherworldly a scruffy Brad Pitt beard and resting on his on canvas called “Window Shopping.” For, environments created by the display collarbone, as he sprawls in his shiny blue here, the view through a plate glass display decorators of department store boutiques, satin jacket and baggy jeans, perusing a book. window becomes a magical looking glass, in Fracchia’s “Shoppers Delirium” group, They are auspiciously dressed-down for this as in Alice’s Adventures, evoking the crazy the mannequins take on a stylized quality special occasion in a manner that suggests the simultaneously, imageistic fragmentation, and reminiscent of the social realist Guy Pene du blasé nature of modern hipster romance. multiple layers of modern life. Bois’ satirical high society scenes. Among Another painting, satirically titled “Va Va By superimposing the fragmented them, the large oil on canvas “A Blast From Voom,” focuses on a single figure: a rearview reflections of other shop windows, tree the Past,” in which two dummies in elegant of a somewhat buxom woman with dyed limbs, buildings across the street, passing evening dresses, set against a backdrop of platinum hair squeezed into a beige knit dress traffic and distant pedestrians, Fracchia kitsch murals framed in pseudo-classical that fits her like a sausage skin. She is a perfect achieves complexly contradictory effects arches, provides a particularly splendid –– or perhaps one should say imperfect that combine elements of cubistic planar showcase for Barbara Fracchia’s singular –– example of the kind of fashion victim fracturing and surrealism. Indeed, she juggles artistic gifts. who must follow the latest, hottest styles so many elements so successfully in this tour –– Ed McCormack whether they complement her figure or not. de force of a composition that the viewer is Unfortunately, the outfit she has on would finally hard put to decide whether the three Barbara Fracchia, Montserrat Contemporary only do justice to a younger, much more stoic, zombie-like figures commanding Art Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, May 29 slender woman. Still, formidable Rubens- the center of the picture are actually - July 6, 2013 (Also in the year-round Salon zaftig buttocks rolling, flaccid legs wobbling clothing mannequins, window shoppers, or exhibition) Reception: May 30, 6 - 8 pm. precariously on platform wedgies, the tune ghostly reflections themselves! Even more 212-268-0026 Hrs: Wed - Sat. 12 - 6pm of the sexy bossa nova song “Girl from remarkably, she accomplishes all of this while JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 11 Discovering the Abstract Naturalism of Donna Shaffer onna Shaffer paints nature inspired scale can be likened to that of the Seattle incorporated in my work. Clay, that is pit or Dcompositions in colored inks on paper artists Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, both barrel fired, is another major component of and board as though with a brush dipped in of whom take inspiration from the misty my work. I am also raku firing some of my liquid light. At the same time, she admits, “I atmospherics of Asian ink painting, but newer pieces. Recently I have begun to use have never felt that an artist can improve on interpret them in their own abstract manner. glass to provide color. I am always looking nature, but I have always tried to interpret, In for new materials that will bring another through my work, how nature presents itself dramatic dimension to my work.” to me. I consider myself an abstract naturalist contrast It would appear that Shaffer utilizes artist. Simple things like tree roots, the way to the natural materials in her paintings as well as in water washes over rocks, or the color of previous her sculptures, employing them as relief- autumn leaves, give me ideas for my work.” painting, printing materials to create the leaf forms Thus she translates even an olfactory another that enliven compositions such as “Summer sensation into visual terms in “Smell of work Time” and “Secrets of the Rainforest.” While Autumn in the Air,” in which delicate golden entitled the former ink on board has the delicacy breeze-blown leaves swirl against a brilliant “Color of a Chinese scroll painting, albeit with the green and bright yellow background. The Against My monochromatic tones of Asian art replaced picture evokes that elegiac moment at the Garden by vibrant green and yellow hues, the latter end of summer when the sun is still shining Wall” is is a considerably more densely concentrated brightly and some of the foliage remains a warm composition, swirling energetically with verdant, yet the feeling of fall already chromatic rhythmical arrangements of deeper verdant permeates the atmosphere. It is a poetic bath for colors. Even more heightened chromatic epiphany as simple and direct as a Japanese the eyes, “Secrets Of The Rain Forest” contrasts come into play in “Firestorm,” a haiku heralding the change of seasons with a with its completely abstract explosion of blazing reds, few precise phrases. sun splashed yellow, green, and brown forms yellows and purples set against more subdued Another composition in ink on board overlapping in luminous translucent layers. blue and purple hues. In this work, we called “Ice Dreams” encapsulates the essence In a recent artist statement, Shaffer, a glimpse yet another aspect of Donna Shaffer’s of winter in cool blue hues heightened with sculptor as well as a painter, says: “Once I highly personal, sublimely refined aesthetic a small area of red, suggesting nothing less have the mental image of an idea I can begin sensibility. –– Sidney Gilbert than the visceral reaction that a chill can working to capture the varied elements produce in the bodies of human beings and of nature’s design. Most of my sculpture Donna Shaffer, Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th other warm-blooded creatures. The subtlety materials are found in the environment. Street, June 4 - June 25, 2013, Reception: of her compositions, as well as their intimate All types of wood, branches and roots are Thurs. June 6, 6 -8 pm Aspects and Possibilities of the New Abstraction hat the term Abstraction takes on new approached obliquely through overt imagery moods of nature that have animated recent Tmeaning in postmodern art is made by virtue of imparting angular stylization to mega-storms such as “Sandy.” By contrast in explicit in “Abstrax 2013,” an exhibition recognizable objects such as the two potted “Rising Color, No 7,” a drawing in colored curated by Anne Rudder for the West Side plants she depicts in her monochromatic pencil and graphite by Beatrice Rubel, soft Arts Coalition. Collage is the medium where pastel on paper, “Everywhere Leaves.” chromatic waves project a gentle effect with much abstraction was developed in the In other works, such as “Busy Workers,” their regular rhythms. early experiments of Braque and Picasso. It and “Contrast Movement # 2,” two acrylics Dammika D. Ranasinghe’s small acrylics still makes a strong showing in the mixed on canvas by Sonia Barnett, the viewer is on canvas paper are distinguished by a media works on canvas of Francois Ilnseher, challenged to locate traces of the figure in quiet intensity, suggesting lights glowing where photographic architectural imagery is vigorous calligraphic two-color compositions through darkness, until one looks closer and often combined with freely painted areas of suggesting the pictographic origins of notices the simplified faces and figures in the brushwork. language. Emily Rich, on the other hand, ominously titled “London Dungeon.” Leanne Martinson employs brilliant surrenders completely to the power of pure Daniel C. Boyer reveals a dadaistic Marcel primaries with muscular black strokes and gesture in her “Black and White Series,” in Duchamp-like wit in the title of his small roughly torn shards of paper in oils on paper, which forms and tones converge and merge draw in black and blue pen and ink within a such as her “Homage to J. Chamberlain” voluptuously, their monochromes tinged wide mat decorated with gel pen, its central series, some of her more dynamic and sparely here and there with bits of yellow and image an art brut vision of figurative imagery adamantly abstract compositions to date. touches of red. emerging from a linear maze: “The Wimpy The tendency to combine cut and pasted Silvia Soares Boyer takes just the opposite Island Remains Silent at the Slander of the areas with painted areas is also employed approach in “On the Science of Pentagrams,” Radio.” successfully in the vigorous compositions a precise diagrammatic composition in silver Then there is Yukako, whose two large of Celia Cruzado, such as “Through the and gold pen and crystals in which 5-pointed gestural, sensually tactile compositions in Looking Glass,” where a large jaggedly halved stars, circles, triangles within an intricate acrylic, oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas, face suggests shards of broken windowpane. network of fine lines, suggest New Age “I Am Here” and “I Will Live,” display a In work in mixed media, fortified with acrylic spirituality charts, black magic, and other vigorousness worthy of their titles and reveal and metallic paint, such as “Motley Interiors” elements of the esoteric. an impressive flowering for this frequently and “Fiery Sublime, Joseph Boss ties A sense of mystery also emanates from exhibited artist. together various diverse elements, including “Vortex,” a watercolor in which Anne Rudder –– Maurice Taplinger fragments of printed type and a female departs from her more familiar figures and torso swathed in red vinyl in boldly brushed handwritten texts compositions for a swirling “Abstrax,” recently seen at vortex-like compositions. And Arlene Finger cosmic realm in which fiery forms whirl like Broadway Mall Community Center, 96th St. demonstrates how abstraction can now be meteors, suggesting some of the more violent (Center Island). 12 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 Not a “School” as Such, but Four Kindred Painters he shared predilection for a combination who exploits the physical qualities But the flowing liquidity of these Tof color and surface tactility culminate of the materials themselves to works is counterbalanced in Weiner- in an overriding lyricism in a four-woman great effect, Hart leaves small Reed’s oeuvre by more ruggedly exhibition curated by participating artist areas of the white-primed constructed works such as “Night Basha Maryanska. Of the quartet, Maryanska canvas bare around the edges Watch,” where color is more intense appears to be the artist most directly of the composition. The white and the artist’s sculptural beginnings influenced by nature. priming also shows through the come across in the crumpled textural “I actually use landscape motifs to paint sparse lines, like the scratched appeal of the surface, where collage my feelings and emotions,” she says. And “drawing” in one of Dubuffet’s elements are employed in a manner indeed, the emotional content in her work art brut paintings, that Hart approaching bas relief. transforms each landscape into a subjective has scored through the black “I find great joy in the physicality vision possessed impasto. of painting,” Weiner-Reed states, “and of its own unique The pièce de resistance of I stand, sit, stretch across, and walk atmosphere. In “Hope Pit,” however, is an actual on and around my works in a type of Maryanska’s oil hole cut through the upper right improvisational dance unique to each on canvas, “The portion of the composition, painting.” Indeed, as in a Pollock, the Enlightenment,” thus incorporating the wall sense of a rhythmic dance remains an for example, that the work hangs upon into Elaine Weiner-Reed integral element of the painting long jagged white the composition. Indeed, this space, for after it has left the artist’s studio. streaks of all its shallowness, might suggest the pit “A line can represent many things: A line lightning in which hope lies, if not for the length of of duty ... credit ... or thought,” says Kristen enlivening a rope dangling down across it and onto the Morrison.” It can stand for entities such brilliant blue sky tarry black surface like a hangman’s noose. as air, train or coastline. We even trace our touch down on a Here, as in other works in the exhibition, lineage through our ancestral line. When one low-lying skyline, such as the triptych entitled “Traction” and thinks of a line it can have a beginning or an suggesting a “Midnight Diaries,” Kathryn Hart often end. But think of the horizon line. That line Basha Maryanska small town employs irregularly shaped surfaces, clotted is intangible. It has no beginning, middle or bracketed with paint and found objects in a manner at end. It is infinite and changes in an instant. . between the sky above and the equally once funky and oddly elegant to “reflect the . . My recent work is based on the idea of a blue body of water below. Here, as the title human condition, all of its crags and crevices, line.” indicates, an ordinary act of nature takes on what we want In Morrison’s painting “Swimming in the the significance of a singular spiritual event. others to see and Flesh,” a bold black line, at once powerful By contrast an almost apocalyptic feeling what we hide...” and sinuous varied in its thickness, defines comes across in Maryanska’s mysterious Although the sensually feminine contours of a fleshy composition “Secret of the Lake,” where primarily self- pink semiabstract figure reclining in what a fiery sky flares above purplish mountains taught and could appear to be a marine setting from rising over the crystalline lake, the foreground inspired by its combination aquamarine green and blue of which is flecked with points of light “lucid dreaming, hues. Although the title could suggest skinny suggesting a flock of spectral birds in day-dreaming, dipping, it also gives a hint of the sensation flight. Then there is “Promised Land,” a nightmares, during an erotic encounter of literally being composition in a more subdued palette of and stream-of- immersed in the flesh of another’s body. softly blended and subtly harmonized blue, consciousness,” In either case, the dominant form of this ochre and earth hues. Here, Maryanska sculptor turned painting is as overwhelmingly voluptuous as layers vaporous mountainous shapes painter Elaine one of Arshille Gorky’s biomorphic shapes, Kathryn Hart above the darker, sharper peaks of an Weiner-Reed but the composition is anchored, so to speak, actual mountain plane. Magically, cloud shows a strong by another on formations backlit by sunshine appear to be formal orientation in her work, as witnessed the opposite impersonating the solid matter below like the in the neocubistic structuring that serves side of the misty mountains in an ancient Chinese ink as an armature for her composition, painting, painting. Also seen in her mixed media work “Sands of Time,” where vertical linear also in black on panel, “Encountering the Ghost,” where configuration acts as a “spine” supporting outline, but photo images of an ornate white building various rectangular forms. The shapes are contrastingly facade and a transparent linear figure emerge more cursive and the paint application more sharp and from rhythmic abstract strokes, such wizardry vigorously expressionistic in another mixed triangular, Kristen Morrison is part and parcel of Basha Maryanska’s media work by Weiner-Reed called “Fabric which could artistic process. of Time.” Conversely, the overall flow of suggest either a boat’s sale or a shark’s fin, By contrast, the mixed media paintings the composition loosens up considerably in just as the small yellow circle at the bottom of Kathryn Hart are mired in matter, their “Blue Notes Rain,” where paler blue and of the composition could allude to a watery power emanating from their very physical pink hues are more translucently applied, reflection of the moon. Which is to say, palpability and the artist’s unique way of revealing underlying forms in the manner of Morrison’s compositions, even when they imbuing the actual with its own transcendent palimpsests and pentimento. evoke the particulars of landscape to some mystery. Hart’s mixed media work on canvas This painting, like other softer looser Continued on page 23 “Hope Pit” is a perfect example, with most of abstract expressionist compositions such as its surface thickly encrusted with a sensuously the mixed media work on canvas called “Blue Up-Surd: An International Contemporary tactile black tar-like impasto. As in certain Notes Soliloquy,” reveals the kinship that Art Show. New Century Artists Gallery, paintings by Robert Ryman, another artist Weiner-Reed feels with jazz improvisation. 530 West 25th St., June 4 - 22, 2013.

JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 13 POLLOCK DEATH CAR GIRL RUTH KLIGMAN –– an excerpt from HOODLUM HEART: Confessions of a Test Dummy for the Crash and Burn Generation a memoir by Ed McCormack with photographs by Anton Perich Ruth Kligman, the former mistress of Jackson Pollock and author of the mawkish memoir “Love Affair,” came into my life shortly after my wife, Jeannie, weary of having me show up stoned at her new apartment at all hours of the night and badger her about coming back to live with me again, went to stay with some friends in San Francisco for an indefinite period of time, removing the center of gravity from my existence in New York City and leaving me at the mercy of whatever whims might catch my self-destructive fancy. “Death Car Girl,” the New York School poet Frank O’Hara had campily renamed Ruth, as though she were a tabloid headline, after she survived the crash that killed Pollock and Edith Metzger, a receptionist at her regular beauty parlor whom she had brought out to the Springs, East Hampton, to show him off to. If there was some kind of curse or jinx on those who became involved with Ruth, I suppose I got off relatively easy, ending up with only a banged-up elbow and a sprained ankle the first night I spent in her loft, when I woke up groggy in the middle of the night and, forgetting which way the bathroom was, stumbled down the couple of steps that led from her bedroom to her painting studio. At first I had no idea who she was when she zeroed in on me at Max’s Kansas City. I put it that way because, with me, it was a point of pride (and maybe even of lingering guilt over my past sins) to wait for women to come on to me rather than the other way around. The British rock invasion, spearheaded by the Beatles and the Stones, was a godsend, a classic case of the worm turning for pale, ectomorphs like myself, who had grown up identifying with the “98-pound weakling” in the Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads in the back pages of 1950s comic books. Or as Mike Kalina –– a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who, lacking the clout and unlimited access that writing for Rolling Stone gave me at that time, had to get the “inside story” on an Alice Cooper tour I was covering secondhand, put it in print: “McCormack looks like a rock star and several times during Artist Ray Johnson and Ruth Kligman outside Max’s Kansas City in the early ’70s our conversation groupies approached him, thinking he was a member of Cooper’s Ruth’s only offspring, however, was her self- deteriorating life, driving away his wife, Lee group, but he politely corrected them...” invented persona. As a young femme fatale, Krasner, and behaving with a va-va-voom Although by the time she approached according to Mark Stevens and Annalyn flamboyance new to the art world. ” me, Ruth was considerably older and more Swan, co-authors of a 2004 biography of After surviving the crash that killed lived-in looking than most of the prematurely Willem de Kooning: “She had about her Pollock, Ruth lost no time in taking up with painted and tainted girl glitter tots who the air of the earthy, voluptuous movie de Kooning, his main rival for king of the normally sought my company, I would later stars of the era, such as Elizabeth Taylor or Abstract Expressionists, who supposedly learn that in her prime she had apparently Sophia Loren. She wore clingy dresses and boasted to friends, “She really puts the lead been the art scene’s equivalent of a high a sultry, ‘kiss me you fool’ expression, and in my pencil!” Later she moved on to Franz class rock and roll groupie, like my Max’s her voice was throaty and seductive, as if it Kline, whose loft on 14th Street right off acquaintance Bebe Buel, a Playboy centerfold were made for sharing secrets .... In the eyes 8th Avenue she inherited after his death in who was to eventually give birth to the of most artists, she was the hot young thing 1962, and where she still lived when I knew wholesome young movie actress Liv Tyler. who swooped into the drunken Pollock’s her in the early seventies. Stevens and Swann 14 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 pieces, influenced book in 1961, the year Jeannie and I got by Pre-Columbian married and were still living with my parents sculpture, were witty on Staten Island. Having recently moved her and outgoing in a family from a cramped tenement flat on the way that reminded Lower East Side to a roomy second-floor me of drawings rental in a two family house, my mother’s by Saul Steinberg pride and joy was her new “finished attic.” At translated into three least before her prodigal beatnik son –– who dimensions and up until then had been avoiding that “blue- blown up to life-size, collar white-flight backwater,” as I thought of in person Marisol it, like the plague –– came home with a new had always seemed bride and quickly turned her prized attic into a mute, withdrawn a funky bohemian garret. presence with an When I wasn’t painting Jeannie in the almost spectral nude up there with Ornette Coleman’s “Free quality. Her apparent Jazz” LP (the one with Jackson Pollock’s shyness for a woman drip painting “White Light” on the album of such worldly cover) blasting on the stereo, or composing accomplishment love poems to my flesh and blood muse, made her much most likely I was studying the pictures and more intriguing memorizing the names in “The Artist’s to me than her World,” a brand new paperback by Village blatantly flirtatious Voice staff photographer Fred W. McDarrah companion, who that I had shoplifted in the Eighth Street was now talking my Bookshop in the Village. I would pore ear off in that Bronx over its pages for hours daydreaming about yenta way that had moving back to lower Manhattan, where inspired Franz Kline I had grown up and knew I belonged, so Actor Jackie Curtis and Ruth Kligman to affectionately call her “Miss Grand Jeannie and I could get involved in the also reveal in their book that although Ruth Concourse.” gallery openings, “Happenings,” and other claimed to have met Pollock serendipitously “I‘ve noticed you here several times before avant garde scenes the book documented. through a chance encounter at the Cedar with Lou Reed, Tinkerbelle and some of the The section called “Woman in Art” Bar, legendary watering hole of the Abstract other Factory people and I was curious, so I opened with a full-page picture of a young Expressionists, she had actually asked her finally asked Danny Fields who you were,” brunette who (especially in black and white, more art world savvy painter friend Audrey Marisol’s motor-mouthed friend was saying, without being outshone by the actresses’ Flack to name the three most important male referring to a well-known record company trademark violet eyes), did indeed resemble artists in New York City. The big three, Flack publicist, rock and roll manager, and Andy Elizabeth Taylor. The other women in the told her, were Pollock, de Kooning, and Warhol confidante who had been something section, which included Elaine de Kooning, Kline –– in that order. And off Ruth went to of a mentor to me, as well as to more up Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, and the Cedar, where the macho painters drank and coming habitués of Max’s such as Fran Alice Neel, were seen in smaller pictures, and picked up girls, to lay a trap for Pollock Lebowitz and Patti Smith. often at work in their studios, casually as in the Marvelettes song,“The Hunter Gets “Oh yeah, Danny ... Danny knows where dressed. But this showy brunette splashed all Captured by the Game.” all the bodies are buried. I call him Mother over the title page was all dolled up like “a * * * Max’s.” real Delancey Street Beauty” (as my mother I don’t think Ruth began our conversation “I know! When he told me your name used to sarcastically classify a certain species of that first night at Max’s like some lame it turned out I’d been reading your stuff in bargain basement bimbo on the Lower East businessman hitting on a younger woman by Changes and Rolling Stone for quite some Side) in a billowy white summer shift, with asking, “What’s your sign?” But I do recall time. Danny’s right, you know: you really matching heels and handbag –– and even her asking at one point when my birthday are a faaahhh-bu-lous writer,” she said, dainty white Minnie Mouse gloves! –– as she was and exclaiming that we were both mimicking the way Danny himself had of struck a bodacious pose on the street that Aquarians, born in January –– “just one day drawing the syllables of that word out to boasted the Cedar Bar. Since the caption for apart!” make a superlative sound like a divinely bored the picture was innocuous enough (“Artist “Wow, the miracle of coincidence,” I yawn. Ruth Kligman on University Place; she has remarked drily, glancing around for an “Thanks,” I said, never having learned to shown in group shows on 10th Street”), escape route and noticing the Pop sculptor keep up my prickly attitude when my social and since I was still unaware of her role as Marisol hanging back like a sorceress in the armor was pierced by flattery. “But who are “Death-Car Girl,” the irony of its placement swirls of smoke around the bar. Apparently you?” in the book escaped me at the time. But they had been drinking together before her “My name is Ruth Kligman,” she said. I’m sure it was not lost on McDarrah, a friend broke away to talk to me. Jeannie and “I’m a painter but I also write and I just had photographer / entrepreneur with a tabloid I would sometimes see Marisol, a spookily a book published about my love affair with mentality, who a couple of years earlier had beautiful Venezuelan-American with long Jackson Pollock. Jackson was an Aquarius cashed in on the Beat Generation craze with black hair and big almond eyes parenthesized too, you know, just like you and me. For a “Rent-a-Beatnik” agency, dispatching by high cheekbones, at Max’s and at St. some reason, scroungy Village poets to liven up the parties Adrian's, another downtown artist’s bar I’m always attracted to Aquarius men.” of affluent squares. Or why else would the where we sometimes hung out when we were As soon as I heard her name I put it caption for Ruth’s picture be positioned still together. Although her mixed media together with a photograph I first saw in a on the very next page, right above a much JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 15 smaller shot of a much plainer-looking the eternal male groupie woman posing dourly in her painting studio, despite his rugged its caption introducing “Lee Krasner, Jackson physique, Buffalo Bill Pollock’s window,” before going on to list hairstyle, and fringed a much more impressive exhibition history rawhide jacket, fawned than that of the boldly posturing girl? over her like the toadying If anything, McDarrah’s picture of the Irish domestic that he was young Ruth Kligman reminded me when I at heart, plying her with first saw it of an old snapshot in our family champagne and ordering album of my little sister Maureen and his waiters to heap her my cousin Janey preening in the projects plate high with more courtyard on Henry Street in their frilly white shrimp. First Holy Communion dresses. I had always Now, I could been more attracted to the tawny, tousled, hardly get my skinny beatniky screen goddesses like Bridget arms around Odetta’s Bardot and Jean Seberg than the dolled impressive girth when up Liz Taylor types anyway. And even less on a sudden impulse I preposterously decked out in darker hues, leaned over in the back with longer, hipper hair, I can’t honestly seat of the taxi to kiss claim that the more mature, lived-in looking her sloppily on the lips. Ruth Kligman was any more of a turn on to I have no idea what I me than the overdressed ingenue in the book would have done had that had been my bible for awhile. she taken me seriously But since Ruth’s come-on was so blatant, and taken me home with and since my life had by then had become so her: curled up in her transient that I never knew when I might find lap like towheaded little myself in need of friendly shelter, I ended up Brandon de Wilde in copying the telephone number she scrawled that Carson McCullers in Magic Marker across the lifeline on my movie “The Member by then already second nature to most savvy palm at Max’s that night onto the list of of the Wedding,”and enfolded in the big, school girls. names and numbers that I kept folded in my soft cushions of her arms, suckled at her When I looked at her incredulously, wallet to dial before Last Call from whatever monumental Ethel Waters bosom while she she qualified: “Except like in a sixty-nine bar I might end up in on any given 3 AM of crooned me to sleep with “John Henry?” situation, I mean.” the soul. But classy turbaned Afro-African queen Then, batting her mascara-clogged I always carried that list as insurance that she was, Odetta just chuckled like coal eyelashes, she added,“Did you mind, though, against having to sleep alone in the trashed rattling down a chute, then patted me gently that I didn’t swallow?” railroad flat on East 89th Street, once cozily on the head, as if to say, “There, there, Although I didn’t have many “firsts” left warmed by the presence of my wife and our child!” by then, it was the first time I’d ever been young son, Holden, but now so desolate and * * * asked that question. Swallowing, I assumed, haunted that I’d go to any lengths to avoid De Kooning once dedicated a painting must have had some special romantic going back there before dawn. to Ruth called “Ruth’s Zowie.” The story significance to her generation. In any One night, breaking my own rule against went that “Zowie!” was what she exclaimed case, not wishing to give the overwrought ever appearing to be the needy one by when he first showed her the painting, as yet author of “Love Affair” any misleading making the first move, I even went so far untitled. Perhaps, along with her other favors, ideas, I hastened to assure her: “That part is as to desperately, ludicrously hit on the such charmingly adoring girlish enthusiasm, altogether immaterial to me, Ruthie!” legendary folk singer Odetta, with whom I expressed as in a zany comicstrip balloon, * * * found myself sharing a cab back from some was what bowled over one jaded old Abstract The following morning, before I limped dreary after-hours club in some dark and out Expressionist male chauvinist after another. out onto 14th Street on my sprained ankle, of the way warehouse district, for which the By the time we met, however, she was more clutching my bruised elbow, Ruth gave me slick real estate sharks had not yet dreamed than a little jaded herself and apparently up an autographed copy of her memoir to read up a trendy name, that my friend Dave for kinkier kicks, judging from punk rocker while I recuperated. But the prose was so McSheehy, co-proprietor of the uptown bar Richard Hell’s recent memoir, in which he purple, the sentiments so schmaltzy, the called Dr. Generosity’s, had dragged us both remembers a menage with Ruth and a fellow dialogue so wooden and synthetic, that I to one night after closing his own place. band member roughly around the same time couldn’t get all the way through it. More than once, Jeannie and I had that I knew her: “One drunken drug-sodden In the first chapter, earlier in 1956, the shared a table at Dr. G’s with this regal black night I let Richard Lloyd tag along to her loft same year she is to meet Pollock and the woman, several years our senior, whose with me and she was excited to have us tie same year he is to die, Ruth goes out on a startling stevedore’s baritone, which had her to her bed in her underwear, etc. But that date with the famous Broadway producer mesmerized the young Bob Dylan and was comparatively slight as S&M.” David Merrick. He picks her up at the tiny galvanized a generation during the civil rights Perhaps perceiving that in my case she apartment on 19th Street that she shares with movement, seemed to well up from deep was dealing with a slightly more squeamish, a roommate. “The limo smelled of leather, within her more than ample form, as if from a less Clockwork Orange sensibility than Mr. and there were soft rugs under my shoes. I great barrel. And more than once, afterward Hell’s, Ruth played it a little more coy. settled back and fantasized: ‘This is where at home my wife had entertained me with her “It’s actually the first time I ever did it that I belong, here in cars like this with great mischievous and very funny impersonation of way,” she said that first night in her loft, after men who sense my needs, my unharnessed the folk diva’s imperious airs, as McSheehy, performing a former so-called “perversion” 16 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 ambition.’ I thought he was perceptive for rare greatness.’ for dinner, rather than just going home with liking and choosing me.” A quick study, Ruth has already learned her when we ran into each other randomly at At Cafe Nicholson, “We were ushered into much about the schmooze of seduction Max’s, or calling to invite myself over late at the restaurant like royalty; they knew him and firsthand from David Merrick. But even as night when I couldn’t catch anyone else in. bowed down. We sat facing each other; the she is so smoothly Vaselineing Pollock’s ego After she served chicken breasts, steamed seats were plush and cushiony, the candlelight with shameless flattery, Jack the Dripper vegetables, and wine by candle light that flickered. He ordered the most perfect food abruptly turns into Jack the Weeper and made her look a little more like the mature and two kinds of wine, he lit my cigarettes starts drunkenly blubbering,“his huge body Liz Taylor than usual, we went down to and gazed into my eyes, giving me all his rocking up and down, giant tears pouring the bar and drank boilermakers on her tab. attention. Riveted on me he was a master of down his red swollen face...” We drank like a couple of real rummies decision, thoroughly taking care of me.” The way Ruth tells it, whenever she (something she must have learned from ‘You’re very special, ‘ he said, ‘you have flattered Pollock he went all to pieces. Pollock and that I inherited from my father). something rare in you. I know. I see people The only time her writing is convincing is The only other customers in the place all the time, I can spot it.’ when she remembers a stint as a showroom were a handful of old men who raised their ‘What do you mean?’ I squirmed under model for low-rent garmentos in midtown. eyebrows, muttered under their breath, and the table, wrapping my feet around one Now seeming more in her element, her shook their heads disapprovingly when we another. prose is even quite vivid in places: “I had laughed loudly or yelled to the bartender for ‘There’s a desire in you that’s unique, modeled for years before, and hated it with another round. It was one of the best times I an urge to live, to experience, and I sense an uncontrollable passion. I started right ever had with Ruth, because I felt like Charles you’re afraid of your own obsessions. Don’t after graduation from high school. All those Bukowski with one of the over-the-hill lady be. You can have anything in the world. awful Seventh Avenue manufacturers with drunks in his books –– particularly one story It’s easy, you just have to decide.’ I felt his their colorless nail polish that made them where he rhapsodizes about women at the fingertips explore the length of my leg up to look as if they had just finished eating greasy age where “they’re just dangling on the edge my thigh...” chicken with their fingers; their bellies always of falling apart... that’s when they seem most It turns out to be a short cab ride from a sticking out under big brown cigars held sexy to me.” Jackie Collins seduction scene on the Upper with diamond pinky rings or genuine star I didn’t have to share Buk’s sentiments East Side to La Boheme in Greenwich sapphires .... The competition among the about the sex appeal of imminent Village. models was fierce –– the one who got the decomposition to play along, letting this “Where is he?” Ruth asks someone in the best of the styles to wear for the buyers was older woman hang all over me as though Cedar Bar. “Do you know him? Point him the number one model. I was always top I, rather than she, was the “piece of ass,” out to me.” model, which meant I was the leader in the and watching the rheumy eyes of the old “There he is standing by the bar.” models’ room and bossed the other girls barflies hanging on the mahogany follow “Then I laid eyes on Jackson Pollock for around. her hungrily as she swayed back and forth in the first time. He looked tired out, sad, and ‘Ruthie has class’, my boss would say her tight black dress to the jukebox, playing his body seemed as though it couldn’t stand to the out-of-town buyers whom I would Sinatra songs because we seemed to be in up on its own. He was leaning against the see season after season, from Detroit and some kind of timewarp. bar as if for support. He was huge. His head Chicago, aging ladies waiting for the sharpie She told me once again all about what a massive. His torso very developed. A full salesmen to take them to dinner and later to pathetic mess Jackson was, always literally beard covered half his face. Some fantastic the Hotel New Yorker to bed.” crying in his beer, often impotent. Stripped energy emanated from his presence. He was But she descends back into bathos the of the bleary purple mists of her prose, like a magnet, his giant form compelling. moment she resumes the sturm und drang reiterated in plain bar room English, it was His passivity was aggressive and solid. The of her fling with Pollock: “I was not strong, even more disheartening, reminding me bar changed within seconds. Everyone and the bones were broken in my aching of when I first learned that, unlike his cool changed. There was so much excitement heart.” “On The Road” alter ego, Sal Paradise, my from his presence it was staggering. An It was that very line, less than halfway teenage literary hero Kerouac was really an electric current seemed to float through the through the book, that made me finally toss emotional cripple of a mama’s boy. dingy bar. It came alive in a new way. He was it unfinished into the veritable landfill of dead After she had thoroughly demythologized monumental, magical ...” beer cans, overturned ashtrays, dirty clothes, yet another icon of my bohemian-aspiring ‘What do you want from me?’ Pollock asks and other unspeakable rubble that covered workingclass youth, she said, “But you must Ruth the first time she lures him over to her the entire floor of my railroad flat on 89th have some fascinating off-the-record dirt apartment. Street, before my dubious young benefactress on some of the people you’ve written about Ruth replies: ‘I want nothing. Just to The Razorblade Heiress moved in, paid the for Rolling Stone. Now you tell me some tell you how amazing you are to express in several months of back-rent that I owed to stories.” painting what you do. I remember the first the landlord, and had it all carted off to a “Not really,” I said. “If you’ve really read painting I saw of yours about two years ago. dumpster. as much of my stuff as you claim you have, It was all black and white and I remember * * * you already know that under all the sequins standing in front of it, and something On the street level, right down the long and glitter Bette Midler’s an insecure Jewish happened to me. I felt the sensation of you, stone stoop from Ruth’s loft, was an old girl just like you; Elton John’s a pompous your energy came into my body. I felt it in dive bar. Eventually, as the neighborhood, little limey cunt; and Barry Manilow is ... my fingertips. I felt your energy pass into a bridge between the Village and Chelsea, well, he’s actually Barry Manilow! What else me. It was like feeling your veins and the gentrified over the years, it would turn into is new? Anyway, with me, Ruthie, there’s no openings of you pouring into me. I had never a shop selling movie stills and other items such thing as off the record. It’s all in the seen anything or witnessed or felt anything of cinephilia. But back then it was still a fucking articles. . . But if you really wanna like it before. I was so moved by your work.... gutbucket ginmill straight out of “The know, some of the greatest moments of I loved you, you were the only painter to Iceman Cometh.” And that was where we my life were before I even started writing move me so. Yes, you have that genius, that went to drink the one time I agreed to come professionally, when I was still a clueless JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 17 young artist showing my work on 10th black springbinder of typed and handwritten even better when Jeannie and I were finally Street.” pages he always carried around with him: “A called upstairs to the gallery and told I had “Really?” she said. “That’s interesting.” prostitute and a poet stand as one / showing been voted in, and that my two big paintings And even though she was as familiar as I their rags together in the night / her tall would be included in an upcoming group was with that crumbling little area of funky black legs before the moon / the world it exhibition. storefront galleries with whitewashed walls, hungers to us / the world of fallen stars / on But a couple of weeks later, when we splintery wood floors, and hissing radiators, a corner in a winter night / near the bowery ferried into the city for the big event, we went and hearing about it probably bored her / near the bar / always near the voices / the into a panic. It was just an hour or so before to death, like any good groupie she listened sick of the world come to us / with its pain / the reception was supposed to begin, the with a practiced attentiveness flattering to the with its eyes blazing / with its curse of unreal gallery was locked, and we could see through preening male ego, as I reminisced, probably / with its lost love / with its shrill voices / the big plate glass windows that, while all the more for my sake than hers, about what a gas with all its sorrow / it comes in the night / other paintings were already on the walls, it had been to belong to even the tail end of it comes to us blind and groping / We are my two big canvases were spread out in the what had to be the last real bohemian artist’s naked as dawn we are one.” middle of the floor, unstretched. I had paid community in New York City, “before Andy I was sure that, like a lot of the older John Krushenick, a fellow member who ran and Pop mixed art all up with fashion, money bohemians we met around the Village in the the frame shop in the back of the gallery, to and glamour.” late ‘50s, he was trying to impress my pretty mount them on stretchers for the show, but Ruth winced quite noticeably on that 14 year old statutory chicklet of a modern he was nowhere in sight. last word, perhaps flattering herself that dancer girlfriend more than me. But I didn’t John had started the gallery several years “glamour” was a jibe aimed at her. Still, she mind; I knew who he was, since he had earlier with his younger brother Nick soon kept up the show of being a good listener, recently won a poetry reading competition (a after they both got out of the army and as I waxed nostalgic about the day my kind of prototype for today’s “poetry slams”) decided to enroll in The Art Students League pregnant wife and I boarded the ferry over to at the Village Gate, judged by Charles on the G.I. Bill of Rights. Nick Krushenick Manhattan like rug merchants, carrying two Mingus, jazz critic Nat Hentoff, and hipster had since become well-known as a trendy rolled up six-foot square canvases with which radio monologuist Jean Shepherd. hard-edge abstractionist and moved on I hoped to be accepted for membership Micheline was already a notorious Village to a posh gallery uptown. But John, who in the Brata Gallery. One of them was of a character in the vagabond bard tradition painted baseball games, battle scenes, and jazz musician playing a baroquely fanciful of conman bohemians like Joe Gould and other oddball subjects in a less fashionable horn, a serpentine contraption somewhere Maxwell Bodenheim. (“He reminds me of neoprimitive figurative style, was left behind between a bass saxophone and a tuba; the a Jack O’ Lantern with a candle lit behind on 10th Street to eke out a living in the frame other depicted a nude mother and child, their its eyes!” Jeannie said after I introduced her shop. bodies interlocked like pieces of a puzzle.The to him several years later at the bar in St. Painfully shy and polite when sober, latter was probably inspired by my growing Adrian’s.) I once saw a picture by McDarragh he underwent a startling Jekyll-to-Hyde trepidation about become a father, even in the Voice of him and Norman Mailer transformation, turning into a wild man though it would probably keep me out of the chatting with drinks in their hands at one when he drank, challenging men to fist fights army. of a million Village parties –– probably not and chasing woman customers around the Both were semiabstract and I later started the one at which, Micheline liked to boast, gallery like a satyr in one of those classical worrying that they might be too derivative he blew his chance to ever get published paintings he sometimes liked to parody in his of Picasso’s “Three Musicians” and some by Grove Press when he drunkenly pissed own hamhanded style. of Leger’s big stylized figure paintings, as on editor Barney Rosset’s shoe. Mailer was “It just so happens I was one of those we waited nervously in the basement of the sporting a donnish tweed jacket and rep tie, nymphs that he chased,” Ruth said, Brata while the other members of that artist’s yet looking like he wanted to literally butt interrupting my story as we sat at the bar that cooperative gathered upstairs in the gallery, heads with this rough-edged street poet, night. “He was a real beast that guy! –– but voting me either in or out. as he assumed his usual intellectual boxers’ basically harmless.” Of the several cooperative galleries on conversational stance. But Jack, with his high It turned out that she also remembered 10th Street scene, I had chosen to apply pompadour and shirt-collar turned up like Micheline, who had introduced himself to the Brata because Kerouac had once the Bronx hood that he was, was grinning with one of his standard pickup lines: “He given a reading there. And now in its dank his sly little Halloween grin, as a long came up behind me and said, ‘You must be cellar, I noticed another connection to my slender female arm reached in from outside a dancer, baby, ‘cause you got the world in beloved Beat Generation and called Jeannie’s the picture to caress the back of his head. your back pocket!’” attention to an army cot piled with old (Clearly, the Muse was in Micheline’s corner “There was this other guy on 10th Street,” clothes, notebooks, and paperback books in that evening!) I said, “a junkie who supported his habit the corner near the furnace. Since two of the Proud of being known as “the last Beat by stealing brushes and tubes of paint from books were thin chapbooks of poetry that street poet,” many years later (maybe in an neighborhood art supply stores like New I had owned since high school (“River of obit after his heart gave out on a train in San York Central and Utrecht Linens, then selling Red Wine,” which had an introduction by Francisco) I would read that he ended his them to the artists in the galleries ...” Kerouac, and another one with an almost days shuttling between North Beach and “I remember him, too,” Ruth said. “A cornily great title: “I Kiss Angels,”) I was sure New York, splitting for one Coast when Mexican, very handsome, looked just like the the pile of stuff belonged to a poet named he wore out his welcome on the other. It actor Jack Palance, right? He knew all about Jack Micheline. was said that he stored all of his worldly art supplies, he once told me, because he I had known Micheline since I was sixteen possessions in 100 suitcases that he stashed in used to be a painter himself, loved Orozco years old and he walked over to my girlfriend the cellars, attics, and basements of friends on and all those other Mexican muralists...” Helen Aronson and me as we sat on a bench both coasts whose sofas and floors he crashed “Yeah, he told me that too. I don’t know in Washington Square Park. Without any on when he was in town. Obviously the what kind of painter he was, but he was a introduction, he started reading in his finger- cellar of the Brata was one such place, which master thief, could get you anything you popping syncopated way from the beat up enhanced its pedigree for me and made it feel wanted ... Okay, so where was I ?” 18 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 “You and your wife were standing outside enough by now not to regret the tactless you’ll end up being in mine as well.” the Brata gallery on the night of your first emphasis I had put on the word “real,” Later as we headed up Madison Avenue, group show but the door was locked.” before slurring out the next sentence: “And it passing a joint, to another gallery opening, “Right! You wanna hear the rest?” may be interrupted right now... but it sure as Ari said, “Gavalt, man, give me a break “I’m all ears,” she said in that husky old- fuck isn’t over ... As far as I’m concerned, it’ll already! What was all that bullshit about? fashioned movie star voice of hers, catching never be over.” ‘You’re gonna be in my book!’ ‘You’re gonna the eye of the bartender and waving a finger It was Last Call, not only in the bar, but be in my book also!’ I didn’t know you were at our empty glasses. She seemed less than also for Ruth and me. For that was the last writing a book.” enthusiastic, sounded almost sarcastic, but I night we would ever spend together, before “Well, you know, I’m always planning went on with my story anyway, because I was I got very busy with the Razor Blade Heiress to get back to work on that audacious enjoying the memory. “So we’re standing and her roommate Alice Alias. Then Jeannie autobiography I started years ago, before so there on the sidewalk when an artist who came back from San Francisco, looking well- much life and survival mishegas got in the showed at a gallery around the corner walks rested and more beautiful than ever. And I way ... Why the fuck do you think I’m always by...” spent most of the next year trying to kick scribbling in my little pocket notebooks? Noticing how forlornly we were staring my bad habits while relentlessly courting my When I can get around to it, I intend to into the window, he asked what was wrong. estranged wife, until she finally agreed to try make it a real magnum opus like ‘The When I told him, he shook his head, saying, living with me once again. Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.’ Put “John must be on one of his benders,” * * * everything and everyone I know in it –– even then mentioned a couple of the bars where Although I was never so ungallant as to ask you, you schnorrer !” Krushenick usually drank. Rushing over to Ruth her age, I naturally assumed she had to Ari took a deep toke on the joint, holding University Place first, we tried the Cedar, be quite a bit older than me, since I would it in his lungs so long that his voice came and not finding him there, circled back to still have been in junior high school when out high and squeaky, as if he was on Saint Marks Place, to the Dom, a bar on the she was 26 and already stalking Pollock at the laughing gas: “But of course! –– as your neo- ground floor of a former Ukrainian meeting Cedar Bar. Still, remembering how relatively journalistic landsman Tom Wolfe would say. hall that would get painted Day-Glo blue youthful her body was in the early 1970s, I In the meantime, you Celtic Yid, let’s go get and morph into The Electric Circus, where was surprised by the headline on the obituary pie-eyed, shall we?” Andy Warhol staged his first Exploding that appeared in The New York Times in * * * Plastic Inevitable events with the Velvet 2010: “Ruth Kligman, Muse and Artist, Dies I didn’t think about Ruth again until Underground. at 80.” several years later when I read in the Daily “Tell her Khrushchev isn’t here,” The last time I had actually seen her briefly News that she was suing the producers of the Krushenick was yelling back to the bartender, was on one of those evenings in the early ‘ Ed Harris film “Pollock.” who had just yelled to him from the phone 80s, when I used to go around to gallery “Ruth is suing because they left her booth that his wife was on the phone as we openings for the free drinks with my friend no choice,” her lawyer was quoted as walked through the door. Ari Salant, a poet and a lapsed member of saying,“This lawsuit is not about money. It’s Taking his cigarette out of the ashtray and the Lubavitcher Hasidic sect whom I could about copyright infringement.” sticking it into his mouth and his change off tell would make a great drinking companion The attorney went on to explain that the bar and shoving it into his pockets, we the first I heard him “qualify” in an A.A. Harris had contacted Ruth when he started pulled him off the stool and dragged him meeting about all the insane things he had researching the film and she gave him copies back to the Brata, where he hammered two done when he was drunk. Although he was of “Love Affair,” as well as a screenplay sets of stretchers together and managed to considerably younger than the famous Beat she had written based on the memoir. But get my “Jazz Musician” and “Mother and poet, with his balding dome and big black she was “miffed” (especially after rejecting Child” up on the wall, however lopsidedly, beard Ari was always being mistaken for Allen previous overtures from Al Pacino and with just minutes to spare before the opening Ginsberg –– once even by Adele Mailer, William Dafoe, both of whom were willing to reception for the group show was to begin. the ex-wife that Norman had so famously pay up to $ 250, 000) when Harris’ people Then, with his knit seaman’s cap falling over stabbed, who accosted my friend on the 57th offered her only $1,500 as a consulting fee. his eyes, and a Marlboro burned down to the Street Crosstown bus, as we rode over from In “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” transcribed filter in his mouth, singeing his sandy Zapata his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen to a reception by his secretary Pat Hackett from tapes of mustache, John Krushenick stretched out his on the East Side. their daily phone calls, Andy says, “I read the arms to my pregnant wife and me, saying, “Allen! My god, don’t pretend you don’t Ruth Kligman book ‘Love Affair’ ... It’s so “Give me your hands.” know me, Allen! I haven’t seen you in ages!” bad –– how could you ever make a movie of And linked like the figures in Matisse’s Awhile later, we walked into a reception at it without changing the whole story?” famous painting, we danced triumphantly, Tibor de Nagy Gallery on East 57th Street Although I can’t argue with Andy’s literary joyously all around the gallery. and there was Ruth. She was with a group of assessment of the book, apparently Ruth “Believe it or not that was one of the most people but rushed over when she spotted me didn’t think Ed Harris changed the story beautiful moments of my life,” I told Ruth, as at the bar getting some wine. quite enough. In the same diary, Warhol also we sat in the bar downstairs from her loft. “I “Well, hello stranger!” she greeted me. “I goes on about how when “Love Affair” was was still young and stupid enough to believe just had to tell you I’m working on another first published, Ruth originally approached I was finally breaking into the art world. I was book, about my life after Jackson, and you’re him about producing it as a movie: “Ruth going to make all these cool friends and we going to be in it.” Kligman called that afternoon, and I told her were all going to be geniuses together, just “One among a cast of thousands, I’m I was seeing Jack Nicholson and would talk like Picasso and Braque and all of them in sure,” I said; then more to keep her at arm’s to him about starring in the Jackson Pollock Paris in the Twenties...” length than for anything else, I added: movie. She asked me if I would take her to “It sounds like you and Jeannie have a lot “That’s funny, because now that Jeannie and meet Jack and I said no (laughs). I wouldn’t of history together,” she finally said, making a I are back together and my life has settled take her anywhere after reading her book. showy little actressy sigh of resignation. down enough to really write again, I’m She killed Pollock, she was driving him so “Yeah, it’s a real love affair,” I said, drunk starting a memoir of my own ... and I’m sure nuts.” JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 19 * * * my hero, the icon of American art. Others accurate, the fact remains that toward the Along with The New Yorker, every year thought me mad, yet with it all, my life went end of her life Ruth voluntarily took and Jeannie renews my subscription to Vanity on in the most interesting ways after your passed a lie detector test. It must also have Fair, which she jocularly refers to as my death. God I missed you, your flat voice given her some satisfaction to see “Red, “movie magazine.” My high-minded wife, which I adored and your eyes studying me, Black & Silver” credited on the cover of the who rarely reads anything more recent or your murmurs at night, and Jackson the way 1999 edition of “Love Affair” as being “by less esoteric than the Tibetan Book of the you loved me with all your heart.” Jackson Pollock” rather than “attributed to Dead, finds my escapist interest in fashion, There’s lot a more, but as a mercy to Jackson Pollock,” as it was in a Phillips de celebrity, and scandal amusing –– to which, the reader and with no pun intended, we’ll Pury auction catalogue after her death, before paraphrasing one of my favorite Warhol now skip to what I’ve heard filmmakers call being withdrawn “for further study.” quotes, I can only cop a plea, saying, “What the “money shot” in Ruth’s open letter to Sad as it is that she did not live to see can I do? I suppose like Andy I’m ‘deeply Jackson: “I remember the day in July when “Red, Black & Silver” authenticated (if, superficial.’” I asked you to work, to show me how you indeed, it ever will be), those of us who knew But I read a recent issue of Vanity make a painting, I brought the canvas board and liked her can at least take comfort in Fair with more than my usual interest. A to the lawn, you quickly got the paint and knowing that “Ruth’s Zowie” belongs to the long article headlined “The Canvas and sticks and I watched dazzled as you created ages. the Triangle,” was introduced with the it, the sun shining on us, how it materialized following teaser-blurb: “Jackson Pollock’s in front of my eyes, just as the sand paintings mistress Ruth Kligman said she watched you did on the beach at night under the stars him paint it, as a love token, just before his as magic under your hands. The last painting fatal 1956 car crash. But the Pollock-Krasner of your life, so sweet, the silver surface Authentication Board, whose members glowing as the moon shimmers, sterling silver were close with Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, glowing as your aura, thick and then thin, have questioned its authenticity. Pollock, the red enamel shining gesture, poured from Kligman, and Krasner, are all now dead, but above. How incredible, miraculous you were as ‘Red Black & Silver’ heads to auction, that afternoon in the sun, at the house in on the 100th anniversary of Pollock’s birth, Springs, smiling at me, my wonderment, my Lesley M.M. Blume chronicles the dramatic pride mounting, when you made the painting ongoing battle over what may have been an for me. I was thrilled, my heart pounding American master’s last canvas.” ferociously, ‘Here’s your painting, your very In the short time that I knew her in the own Pollock ...” early 70s, Ruth never mentioned owning While it strains credibility to imagine an original Pollock to me. Then again, a booze-soaked growler and snarler like why should she have? I was but a transient Pollock presenting the gift in language quite character in her life, a will o’ the wisp, so to so precious as Ruth has it here, one wants to speak, and probably didn’t appear especially believe her, even though her gallerist friend trustworthy. Still, I was surprised to read in Ronald Sosinski, according to Vanity Fair, the article that only one of her closest friends “claims that Kligman showed the painting claimed to have seen the 1956 oil on canvas in an East Village group show under her board before the 1980s. And I found it even own name in the 1980s and that the work more surprising to learn that the painting was attracted little attention during ‘its ‘first not mentioned anywhere in “Love Affair,” public appearance.’” which I have already admitted to merely Further doubt was cast on the province of skimming. Reading, however, that Ruth had the work by the fact that Ruth was friendly added a brand new introduction to a 1999 with the well known “appropriation” artist paperback edition, in which she tells how she Mike Bidlo, one of whose unabashedly Ruth Kligman later in life watched her lover create the composition, fake large “Pollocks” was seen by Pollock prompted me to track down a secondhand biographer Steven Naifeh in her studio. copy at The Strand Book Store, determined Naturally, Bidlo denies ever having crossed to get all the way through it this time. But the thin legal line between appropriation and once again Ruth’s prose almost weakened outright forgery. Still, the article reports,“his my resolve from the very first paragraph of presence in Kligman’s life made her future “Letter to Jackson After the Crash,” the new attorneys uncomfortable.” introduction: Ruth claimed that the Pollock-Krassner “Jackson, Jackson, Jackson. I loved you so Foundation’s Authentication board much and I made you the promise to keep repeatedly refused to give their blessing that love always, and I did just that, kept to the painting only out of loyalty to Lee my word, for me, for you. You, dear sweet Krasner, the bitter wife Pollock left for her, Jackson, needed my capitulation totally, yes even though more than one independent I remained devoted to you, our love, the expert found its origin questionable. “I am romance you cherished, and in the doing an artist and I don’t lie,” was one of her last I discovered a quality I did not know that statements on the controversy. And while Previous excerpts from HOODLUM HEART, I possessed. An unconditional devotion anyone who has known a number of artists a memoir by Ed McCormack can be read on that has enriched me, and depleted me, would have to admit that the two things galleryandstudio.com a devotion that drove me, possessed me, are not always mutually exclusive, just as and created your romantic myth. My lover polygraphs are not always a hundred percent 20 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 Deborah Rhodes Puts a New Spin on Timeless Themes eborah Rhodes is one of those rare the overall sense of gravity that permeates the Dpainters who has a way of stopping you picture, one of her bare arms draped limply dead in your tracks. Take, for one intriguing over an armrest, the other hand resting in example, her oil on canvas she calls “Occupy her lap. Behind her is a window through Wall Street,” one of the centerpieces of which a pleasant pale blue sky, cottony white her first New York solo show at Broome clouds, and the tops of verdant trees can be Street Gallery. At first glance the painting seen, but Hannah inhabits the safe shadows could appear to depict a Brughelian orgy of of the interior, which complement her mood. avenging Amazons attacking the big bronze Like the blind man in the aforementioned bull, that aggressive symbol of male greed “Not Seeing,” she appears oblivious of the running amok in Bowling Green Park, at beautiful day outside. Her self absorption is the foot of the financial district. Then you also reflected in a full-length mirror opposite notice that some of the voluptuous nudes, her chair, which captures her partial image one of whom has mounted the sculpture as she turns away to cast a baleful gaze at like a rodeo rider, are wearing thongs or the viewer, her large eyes framed by the garters with dollar bills stuck in them, and silky blonde curtains of her long, straight what you took at first to be a flag pole with hair. For its masterly handling of light and a snake wound around it is actually a prop shadow “Hannah,” in its own contemporary for the pole dancers, one of them hanging fashion, is as classically timeless a feminine upside down from it. Notice, too, the portrait as the French painter Constance “Hannah” stacks of cash, another coiled snake, and the Marie Charpentier’s similarly backlit giant rat at the bottom of the composition, 1801 canvas, “Mademoiselle Charlotte and you realize that this painting, like du Val d’Ognes,” in the collection of The its companion piece, a similarly icon-like Metropolitan Museum of Art (which was composition entitled “The Visitation of the for years mistakenly attributed to Jacques- Angels of Diversity,” showing paper money Louis David –– very possibly because the raining down amid cherubs floating over the male chauvinist curators of the time, so sold skyline of Manhattan, are visions of rampant on the superiority of the so-called “Male corruption. Gaze,” didn’t believe a woman artist could In another painting called “Not Seeing,” have possessed the skill to accomplish such a however, Rhodes evokes a more private and picture!) lyrical epiphany with a haunting image of Much of the underlying power of Rhodes’s a blind albino man and his female escort paintings springs from her drawing ability, strolling together down a charming little which can be seen in her bold and flowing street in the West Village, where one of the large charcoal studies of female nudes, as well brownstones is covered with ivy. No one else as in her smaller, more delicately detailed is around. The trees lining the sidewalk are graphite portraits of her children, which are in full bloom with pink spring blossoms; the reminiscent for their formal qualities and pavement is dappled with soft shadows and absence of banal sentimentality as those that silvery white light that can make dusk of Mary Cassatt. Certainly her splendid such a magical hour. But that one of the two draftspersonship informs her oil on canvas strollers is blind to all the surrounding beauty “Leaving Childhood,” which depicts her suggests an inner atmosphere of desolation daughter Honor at a pivotal age, sitting as bleak as “Terror in Brooklyn,” social realist cross-legged with a book on a Persian rug “Not Seeing” Charles Gugliemi’s surreal 1941 painting, in by a blazing fireplace and looking up at her the collection of the Whitney Museum, of mother with that feigned sophistication three nuns enclosed in a bell jar on a similarly and remoteness that only an adolescent deserted street. can muster. And it carries over into her But as Norman Mailer was fond of saying large oils of adult models as well, as seen in of himself, don’t presume to understand a double portrait of a young man known Deborah Rhodes too easily; for she is an as “Romeo,” holding out a muscular arm artist of many facets, as seen in her portraits. elaborately sleeved with tattoos, to show off Especially insightful among these are her the palm of one of his “healing” hands; and paintings of her close women friends, in “Lucy,” a chic blond fashion stylist in stripped which her sensitivity to subtle psychological turtleneck and skinny jeans, perched with one nuances is conveyed by virtue of her refined expensive boot propped up on her tenement realist skills. windowsill with an élan that suits her job The large oil on canvas,“Hannah,” is a description. likeness of a former personal assistant for A prized protégé of the iconoclastic social the actress Kathleen Turner who now fulfills realist painter and popular Art Students that role for the artist herself. The model League instructor Bob Cenedella, Deborah confides that she was “going through a dark Rhodes is one of the most exciting discoveries time, when I was almost a hermit and hardly of the current art season. –– Ed McCormack got out of my nightgown” at the time that the portrait was painted. She is seen wearing Deborah Rhodes, recently seen at that filmy white garment and seated in a Broome Street Gallery, 498 Broome Street. sturdy mahogany chair that contributes to “Occupy Wall Street” JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 21 Western State M.F.A. Thesis Candidates Are Ready For Their n an era when far too many other and their wanton destruction by the abstract and figurative forms converge in Iart schools, particularly the most storm’s ferocious force. As in certain late complex patterns and are brought into trendy ones, tend to emphasize business figurative paintings by Philip Guston, unusual harmony by Hodza’s unerring strategies and self- promotion over in which he preserved the lyrical colors sense of composition. In her large studio practice, the annual Master of and paint application of his earlier collage paintings such as “Volume X” Fine Arts Thesis Exhibitions of Western abstractions, even while depicting where a Fauvist blue tree is juxtaposed Connecticut State University offer a cartoon Klu Klux Klan members and with fragments of high-rise architecture, fresh breath of Spring air. For the MFA other repugnant subject matter, the perhaps suggesting the artist’s migration candidates for 2013 are among the most incongruously aesthetic qualities of the from an urban to pastoral environment.

Pamela Boily Xenia Hodza impressive to date. Showcasing four painters and one illustrator, all of whom apply the time-honored painterly skills that obviously take precedence over “new media” gimmicky and conceptual intellectualization in WCSU’s curriculum, each has developed an original and highly subjective vision that makes this year’s group show especially rewarding. Since Pamela Boily was raised in New Orleans her art has been greatly affected by the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina. At first glance her oil on panel “West End Boulevard” could appear to be abstraction, so strong are the forms, so vigorous is the brushwork, and what painter and famed teacher of the New York School Hans Hofmann referred to as the sense of “push and pull.” And although traditional artists Karin Mansberg of the past steered clear of symmetrical formats for fear of visual monotony, the painting’s execution only enhances its But both are bracketed between perfectly square panel that Boily has overall effectiveness, making its intimate rectangles of pure bright color that could chosen, coupled with the sheer, bursting scale project an impact much larger than just as easily hint at how the process variety of her forms, only adds to the its actual dimensions. of art making itself unifies the artist’s compressed power of her composition. Xenia Hodza, an artist from New vision, enabling her to make a smooth And on closer viewing, the convoluted York City now living in southwestern transition from city to country living. rubble of wrecked and discarded Connecticut, employs a variety of collage Of course such perceptions are purely bicycle bodies and wheels that emerges elements, including oil, string, lace, subjective, and each viewer will doubtless creates an intriguing contrast between fabric, leather, and wax, in her mixed arrive at his or her own interpretation of the pleasant pastel hues of the bikes media paintings on canvas. Diverse the various elements that Xenia Hodza 22 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 UP-SURD PAINTERS New York Art World Close-up in Chelsea Continued from page 13 extent, everything is up for grabs. In merges so successfully in her big bold Richard Diebenkorn –– particularly Morrison’s whimsically titled “Diane & mixed media compositions. Paul Wonner. Carvalho, however, is a Miro Walk the Loop,” for example, there is Working on an easel scale, Sheri more subtle colorist, judging from this a hint of hills in the linear configurations that Schwartz paints portraits in oil on painting, where the combination of the enclose areas of blue, green, and luminous canvas that she refers to as “natural, soft purple background and the subdued apricot pink, yet the upward tilt of one line yet stylized . . . . reductive, almost smolder of the artist’s orange shirt, set into an area that would be the sky belies too minimal.” Her style is precise, almost against the beige hue of his studio apron literal interpretation of the forms. Similarly, pristine, yet not finicky. There is a recalls the exquisite chromatic harmonies the looming black shapes in a vigorously clean freshness and simplicity to her of artists such as Giorgio Morandi and painterly near-monochromatic composition that Kristen Morrison calls “Sleep” retain their autonomous abstract mystery by refusing to conform to our preconception of an ordinary shoreline. –– Maurice Taplinger

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,PS,,µ[µDFU\OLFRQZRRG Sheri Schwartz Antonio L. R. Carvalho technique that reminds one of both Nicolas de Stael. Even the paintings 0LEIADES'ALLERYOF#ONTEMPORARY!RT Alex Katz and Elizabeth Peyton; yet gracing the purple wall behind the TH&LOOR 7ESTTH3TREET Schwartz has evolved her own unique figure, with their predominantly green .EW9ORK .9  quality of classical idealization as seen in landscape hues are made to meld with    her portrait, “Karin.” The young sitter the overall scheme of the composition personifies a particularly contemporary by virtue of Carvahlo’s mastery of tonal *UNE  *ULY  type of natural beauty, with her clear values. blue eyes, her fair complexion, her long, Karin Mansberg, the sole illustrator /PENING2ECEPTION straight light brown hair parted in the in this excellent thesis exhibition has middle and falling below her shoulders. obviously integrated the aesthetic 3ATURDAY *UNE   PM Simply yet elegantly dressed in the casual sophistication stressed at WCSU into her manner of a student in a gray scoop- rendering repertoire, judging from her PLEIADESGALLERYCOM neck polo top with a lighter gray scarf mixed media and digital collage, “Man MICHAELRGRINEARTISTCOM draped over her shoulders, she projects Taming Technology Beast,” a fanciful a sense of serene self-possession, her full image of a wild animal trainer making a lips unsmiling but not tensely set. Yet monstrously huger-than-life bengal tiger Schwartz also captures a subtle sense of leap though a suitably oversized hoop. melancholy in the position of the pupils The animal’s stripes, which are the same of Karin’s eyes, which gaze slightly away bright cadmium red light hue as the The somewhat dreamily, not meeting those of fiery background metamorphose midway the viewer. It is a portrait that conveys a through its body into angular and GALLERYSTUDIO strong sense of individual identity, along rectangular digital signs and symbols. with its admirable formal attributes. Like her painter colleagues, Mansberg advertising deadline In his oil on canvas “Self-Portrait applies her uniquely subjective vision –– for the September/October with Purple Rag,” Antonio L.R. in her case influenced by surrealism –– to Carvalho depicts himself at work at her chosen artistic discipline. issue is his easel in a style that splendidly –– J. Sanders Eaton incorporates elements of abstraction Aug. 6 for color, within an adamantly figurative mode “Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition,” Aug. 13 for black/white. of expression. The blocky bluntness of Blue Mountain Gallery, 530 West 25th Carvalho’s formal simplification calls to Street, June 18 - July 6, 2013 mind the Bay Area Figurative painters Reception: Thursday, June 20, 5 - 8 pm who emerged in California along with JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 23 Grace, Simplicity, and Humor: The art of Kaneko Johkoh “ y concept is ‘Simple and watercolor simultaneously make MNatural,’” says Kanekoh up what appears to be the large Johkoh, a Japanese citizen now face of a clown and suggest living and working in Vancouver, not only the smaller figures of British Columbia. “My aim is to acrobats but also a flying trapeze. express things as they are.” Few other artists either in East or Employing the traditional West, however, manage to evoke materials of Sumi ink and a kind so much with such economical of Japanese rice paper called ease. Washi, Johkoh has evolved One of Johkoh’s most spare a refreshingly contemporary and engaging compositions style. As much as any Abstract is “Self Portrait,” in which Expressionist “action painter,” another shape resembling a she works spontaneously question mark (albeit positioned without a predetermined plan backwards, with its dot appearing or preliminary studies. She also to roll slightly away from its departs from tradition by adding larger curve), is combined with a collage elements to some of her pair of eyes apparently made with ink paintings. However, these “Riverbank Under The Sun” two buttons collaged onto the innovative additions are often onto the paper in the manner of a stamp rice paper. Then there is another charming either pieces of Washi paper pre-painted with with a tube of watercolor dipped in Sumi work called “Riverbank Under the Sun,” colorful marbling techniques –– or small ink, to which Johkoh has added a delicate in which three little ducks, so identical as to objects, such as origami figures that lend an little doll-like head. But don’t look now: the suggest rubber bathtub duckies, are glimpsed almost 3-D feeling to the work. cute little figure appears about to be engulfed through gracefully curving vertical strokes of Johkoh credits Zen Buddhism with by bold, gracefully curves lines made with a a broad brush with the hairs spread so that helping her to maintain the calm disposition broad brush that suggest Hokusai’s famous each produces the effect of multiple blades of everywhere evident in her paintings, which “Wave”! breeze-blown grass. also exude a humor that is another aspect of Pressed to compare Kaneko Johkoh’s Here, too, all it takes for Kanekoh Johkoh the Zen philosophy. personal sign language to Western painters, to bring the entire scene into focus in her In a picture called “Let’s Go Home,” for the two who come most immediately to own inimitable manner is a few spatters of one buoyant example, the beams of the big mind are Paul Klee and Joan Miro, both of diluted red watercolor that evoke the beauty Happy Face sun radiating from it touch the whom have a similarly whimsical imagination of sunlight sparkling on the ripples of a pond. ground making the fiery ball appear to be and fanciful energy. But, on second thought, doing cartwheels while the simplified figures Johkoh also has qualities in common –– J. Sander Eaton standing nearby turn into question marks. with Alexander Calder as well. These are In another spare ink painting mysteriously especially apparent in a composition she calls Kaneko Johkoh, Agora Gallery titled “Nothing and Heart II,” a small female “Circus Folks I,” where a few graceful black 530 West 25th St., June 4 - 25, 2013 figure appears to have been printed directly lines, strokes, and splotches of red opaque Reception: Thursday, June 6, 6 - 8 pm. G&S Classifieds opportunities WEST SIDE ARTS COALITION (WSAC) established 1979, welcomes new members from THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE all geographic areas. There are approximately 14 exhibits per year for Fine Arts, Photography, and Craft •Learn how to use your body corrrectly. Arts. Music, Poetry, Theater and Dance programs available. Contact info: Tel. 212-316-6024, •Improve your posture. email- [email protected] or website- www.wsacny.org. Or send SASE to the West Side Arts Coalition, •Achieve lasting results. PO Box 527, Cathedral Station, New York, NY 10025. Visit our ground floor gallery at 96th Street & A hands-on redirecting of the mind and body that has been used successfuly for over a century. Learn Broadway (on the center island) New York City. Open: Wed. 6-8pm, Sat. & Sun., 12-6pm. how to use your body in a more efficient way which will have far-reaching benefits. It involves changing old habits and learning new ones to last a lifetime. Please call for a private consultation and introductory CUSTOM PICTURE FRAMING for artists and galleries. Museum quality, selected lesson. Union Square studio, or house and office calls available. Limited Introductory Offer: Consultation, frames & mats. Float & dry mounting, canvas stretching. Jadite Galleries, 662 10th Ave. (betw. photo analysis, intro lesson plus free additional lesson. Sliding scale available. 46/47 Sts.) Hours: 12 - 6 pm, Free delivery in Manhattan. 212-977-6190 [email protected] DIANA MULLMAN, AmSAT. 212-734-7875

NOHO GALLERY is viewing portfolios in all media for our Chelsea location. Visit Michael R. Horenstein nohogallery.com for application form, or send SASE to Noho Gallery, Attorney & Counsellor at Law 530 West 25th Street, NY, NY 10011. ± Arts Law, Provenance Concerns ± General Business Law MONTSERRAT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY is reviewing artist ± Contract Drafting & Review portofolios for its new Chelsea Gallery. National and International artists are invited to submit. Sase, ± Corporate Law & Company Formation slides, photos and brief artist bio. Send to: Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, 547 West 27 Street, ± Commercial Litigation NYC 10001 437 East 80th Street, No. 27, New York NY 10075 Ph: (212) 517-7340 Email: [email protected] CATHARINE LORILLARD WOLFE ART CLUB, INC. 117th Annual Open Juried Exhibition at the National Arts Club, NY. October 1 - 25, 2013. Open to women artists. Media: Oil, Acrylic, For health care information please contact Watercolor, Pastel, Graphics, and Sculpture. Over $10,000 in awards. Entry Fee: $35/Members and Associates, $40/Non-Members. Online entry deadline is July 8, 2013. Submit your entries at www. New York Artists Equity Association, Inc. (NYAEA) at 212-941-0130. onlinejuriedshows.com . For prospectus, send SASE to Okki Write for information to NYAEA, PO Box 1258, New York, NY 10276 Whang, 431 Woodbury Road, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724 or download prospectus at www.clwac.org or email: [email protected] or [email protected] . 24 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 Susan Sills: A Retrospective Spectacle Staged on the Steps of the Met he concept Tof the two- dimensional integrity of the picture plane is one of the true staples of modern art. After centuries of struggling to master the illusion of perspective, it was a radical move when the European avant garde masters made “flatness” a paramount component of progressive painting in the Photo by P. Bernstein early years of the twentieth century. Loose: A Walk Through Art History.” having passed muster, one moves on to the For several decades afterward, forward A retrospective culmination of a 20-year middle of the room to be bowled over by looking artists were practically standing on and still growing involvement with the form an epic, panoramic mob-scene straight out their heads in the effort to find ways to make of freestanding life-size two-dimensional a Cecille B. Demille production. Under a their pictures flat. It was relatively easy for sculpture, Sills’ exhibition takes the cutout banner strung across the grand gray facade of those who painted abstract compositions. far beyond the purely modernist concerns The Metropolitan Museum of Art an all-star But suddenly figurative artists were having that prompted Katz, into the anything- cast graces the stone steps. one hell of a problem trying to tightrope goes arena of postmodernism. Which is to They’re all there: The breathtaking on the fine line between the illusion of deep say: Sills’ eclectic aesthetic melds elements blond starlet from Botticelli’s “Birth of space and the actuality of flatness in order to of Pop, Conceptualism, Photorealism Venus,”; that other eternally undraped remain relevant to the formal zeitgeist. Thus and Appropriation in a heady and highly lady from Ingres’ “Odalisque,” as well as it was a brilliant gesture when Katz, already engaging mix. Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background,” now among the flattest of the realists, since he In reaction to an earlier show of her denuded of even the red background of the thumbed his nose at the illusion of implied work a decade ago, I wrote words to the title. It could almost remind you of one of spatial perception by setting his isolated effect that encountering some of the figures those in the buff public “Happenings” that portrait subjects against monochromatic from great paintings that Sills blows up to Kusama used to stage in the Sixties –– only, backgrounds, started cutting some of his life-size standing around in a gallery is “like sans even the colorful polka dots Yayoi figures out of the canvas and mounting them spotting one’s favorite movie stars on the delighted in painting on their bare flesh, upright on wood or steel silhouettes. street.” Taking that notion and running which have apparently all been appropriated “There are you happy now?” he seemed to with it, the announcement card for Sills’ in this timeless tableau by Seurat’s ubiquitous be saying, when his friends in the then small new exhibition features a casual gathering Sunday Strollers! and incestuous New York art world (most of Manet’s guitar player, a dancing couple And at least one of Millet’s “Gleaners” has of whom were abstractionists and tended after Renoir, a geisha admiring herself in a put in an appearance, here appearing in the to sneer at anybody still even attempting to hand mirror after Utamaro, and even a little role of a public spirited citizen leaning over create figurative art in 1959), showed up at girl playing marbles after Norman Rockwell, to pick litter off those beautiful stone steps, the opening reception of his first exhibition of among other art historical celebrities gathered as well as Michelangelo’s “Adam,” sprawling cutouts and encountered slightly smaller than casually on the stoop of the artist’s Brooklyn as languorously as Burt Reynolds posing life replicas of themselves standing around the brownstone, while “Photo Man,” a star for Playgirl, and at least one of Picasso’s gallery. struck Japanese tourist after Sills, leans over, “Two Women Running on the Beach,” now After Katz had made his point by as in a formal bow on the sidewalk below, to resembling one of the many street performers introducing flatness into the deep three- take a cellphone snapshot of Seurat’s daub- who regularly entertain the throngs tourists dimensional space of the real world, his dappled Sunday afternoon strollers. on 5th Avenue outside The Met. abstract colleagues had to concede that, yes, But that’s just the teaser of a trailer for Indeed, “Photo Man” is among them and his paintings were quite flat. So he went what is to come at the gallery: One is greeted no doubt ready to train his cell phone lens back, for the most part, to putting his figures right inside the entrance to the exhibition by on the whole art historical human spectacle back onto the picture plane in his paintings, a life-size cutout of a dark-haired, thoughtful that Susan Sills appropriates and gives new leaving fertile ground for artists of a younger looking woman with her chin propped on her immediacy with such winningly inimitable generation to explore. palm, tastefully dressed in the casual but chic wit. –– Ed McCormack No other artist (including Katz) has manner of a French movie star, in a white done so quite as thoroughly or taken the turtleneck cableknit sweater, black slacks, and Susan Sills, “Cutting Loose: A Walk Through concept of the cutout quite so far into gray musketeer boots. Her dark eyes seem to Art History,” recently seen at Viridian Artists, previously unexplored territory as Susan scrutinize the visitor as though wondering 547 West 27th St / 548 West 28th St. Sills in her recent solo exhibition “Cutting how he or she would look as a cutout. Once www.viridianartists.com

JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 25 Muscovite Painter Elena Shorokhova-Gayun Honors a Tradition Spanning Many Centuries o paraphrase W. Bruce Lincoln, author wavering red and black diamond- Tof “The Romanovs.” Russia is a land shapes of varying sizes and set uniquely suspended between East and West, against a grid of checkerboard red, past and future. So many of us who grew black, gold, and white slightly askew up in the States during the Cold War period squares, suggests the frenetic patterns were preoccupied by the political implications of notes in a vigorous violin solo. of this rival Superpower as to be woefully More organic forms, akin to art unaware of its vast cultural riches. nouveau arabesques, flow and swirl Unlike many other Russian artists today, over the surface of Shorokhova- who follow art world trends to the exclusion Gayun’s “The Master and Margarita of the aesthetic treasure trove that is their Diptych.” The artist interprets national legacy, Elena Shorokhova-Gayun, a Mikhail Bulgakov’s painter based in Moscow, assimilates elements classic modern novel about a visit by of the Byzantine, medieval iconography, and the Devil to the fervently atheistic Russian modernism into her singular artistic Soviet Union in abstract terms. Her vocabulary. palette consists of subtly harmonized One of the most impressive works in deep mustard yellow, blue, green, Shorokhova-Gayun’s New York exhibition is and tan hues. The more sensual “East Harem, East Bazaar Diptych,” in which biomorphic shapes –– some the precise architectural forms, a multiplicity suggesting verdant vegetation; others, of tiny figures, intricate patterns and ornate blue waves after Hokusai brilliant colors bring together many of the –– are set against, and grounded diverse facets of Russian iconography in an by, a more schematic arrangement almost dizzying mix. Its compartmentalized of geometric color areas that firmly composition calls to mind the complexity of anchor their rhythmic vivacity. the 1550s masterpiece “Icon of the Church Thus she marries two-dimensional “Violinist” Militant,” commemorating the storming Byzantine decorativeness to the of Kazan and Russia’s advance into Siberia. childhood interest in “double-headed eagles, modernist picture-plane in her own However, without the pressure imposed by coats of arms, ornamental compositions” unique manner. Ivan the Terrible upon artists to celebrate and other emblematic elements from early The influence of Russian tapestries, stained Russia’s greatness as well as the glory of reading experiences. Her love of animals, glass windows, stone carving and metalwork God, Shorokhova-Gayun is able to indulge particularly dogs, which she breeds in her also add to the richness of expression in other in a secular fantasy of Orientalia evocative of own kennel, also play into her choice of works by Elena Shorokhova-Gayun, a painter “Tales of the Arabian Knights.” subject matter, which for all the fancifulness is who contributes considerably to the national Other works in oil and mixed media always intimately related to her daily life as a heritage she reveres. on canvas by Shorokhova-Gayun explore contemporary Muscovite. –– Maureen Flynn the possibilities of the folkloric vein, with Another painting by Shorokhova-Gayun single mythological animal figures, such as called “Violinist” combines Byzantine “Unicorn,” “Syrin Bird,” and “Grif,” painted intricacy with the brightly colored Elena Shorokhova-Gayun, Agora Gallery in a few red, orange, and blue hues in the geometric forms reminiscent of the Russian 530 West 25th St., July 23 - Aug. 13, 2013 bold manner of Heraldic banners. The artist Constructivists. Here, too, the semiabstract Reception: Thursday, July 25, 6 - 8 pm. traces her inspiration for these works to a silhouetted figure of the musician, filled with

Western Connecticut State University Master of Fine Arts in Painting & Illustration Gallery show to highlight five emerging artists Dreams & Reflections Painting Illustration MF Pamela Boily Xenia Hodza Karin Mansberg Daniel Boyer & Silvia Boyer Antonio Carvalho Sheri Schwartz A with Margo Mead’s Assistance May 29 - June 16, 2013 Show dates: June 18 - July 6, 2013 Artists: Opening Reception: Thursday, June 20, 5–8 p.m. Anne Rudder • Charles Coates • Lynn Lieberman Dammika D. Ranasinghe • Daniel C. Boyer Blue Mountain Gallery Sílvia Soares Boyer • Arlene Finger • Livia Monaco 530 W. 25th St., 4th floor Amy Rosenfeld New York, NY 10001 et al Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11 a.m.– 6 p.m. bluemountaingallery.org %URDGZD\0DOO&RPPXQLW\&HQWHU (646) 486-4730 %URDGZD\#6W 1<& &HQWHU,VODQG *DOOHU\+RXUV:HGSP6DW6XQSP [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org 181 White Street, Danbury, Connecticut wcsu.edu/art/mfa

26 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 Storm Warnings: Anowar Hossain’s “Sandy” Series ur lives in the present century are Oinundated with what writer and educator Robert Brustein refers to as “news theater.” No sooner do cataclysmic events occur than they are not only reported in the mass media but discussed and commented upon via the so-called social media by private citizens the world over. As we learned on 9/11, watching the Twin Towers burn and collapse in what has come to be called “real time,” History is Now. So it seems only fair to ask if there is any valid place in such a world for what used to be called “History Painting,” and was considered during the Renaissance the highest form of art. After all, the term has always been misleading anyway, since most of the scenes immortalized by our most revered Super Storm Sandy series, NYC masters of the genre –– Giotto, Botticelli, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo –– are mythological painter Delacroix to tell him in a letter that placing his slender hand tenderly on the or religious rather than historical. Besides, by had he decided to become a painter rather burly shoulder of New Jersey Governor now myths have lost their imaginative grip than a writer he would have outshone the Chris Christy, as tall presumably industrial and religion is unceremoniously dismissed as artists of their century. structures, appear cloaked like mourners in myth by a large portion of the population, When a less grave subject beckons, as the blackness behind them, as the first light while many others see it as a premise for an in a 2009 series on Michael Jackson (who in the aftermath of the disaster attempts to array of sins and crimes ranging from child died that year and was widely mourned, gild just the edges of the looming gloom. molestation to terrorism. but one would have had to be almost Indeed, few artists in recent memory Almost as many others, however, no pathologically smitten with popular have employed the visual vocabulary of matter how rational and secular, can’t resist culture to consider it a national tragedy), abstraction –– collage, the fractured planes biblical metaphors when contemplating Hossain can be a vibrant colorist. Not only of cubism, the dripped pigment of abstract events like what headline writers recently did bright hues that the artist employed expressionism–– as successfully in the relished calling “Superstorm Sandy.” Nor, celebrate the energy and joy of Michael’s service of figurative imagery as Hossain thankfully, are all contemporary artists music and the dynamic showmanship; his does here. The planar fracturing creates so benumbed by fashionable irony as to vigorous abstract expressionist brushwork a veritable quarry of wreckage on the devalue individual sensibility as a vehicle heightened the effect. In his Sandy series, two-dimensions of the painting surface; for empathetic interpretation of events that however, Hossain’s characteristic gestural fragments of collage, such as a torn photo deeply affect us all. (At least to some extent, thrust serves an opposite purpose: that of of a street sign with only half of the although I would not be so audacious as to expressing the terrible force of the storm’s word “Rockaway” remaining, a similarly suggest that my wife’s and my own dismay at winds and waters. And his palette of darker fragmented atmospheric nocturnal view of learning about the devastation in New Dorp monochromes, only here and there accented building silhouettes, and drips that not only Beach, Staten Island, where we spent the first by lighter or brighter hues, also appears convey the immediacy of painterly “process,” two idyllic years of our marriage was in any entirely appropriate to evoke the grim reality but also suggest the absolute saturation of a way comparable to the misfortunes suffered of nature at its most randomly menacing. flood ravaged terrain. by some more recent residents, whose One of the most iconic images in the But one picture is the most poignant of homes, loved ones, and lives were lost to the series is a painting entirely in blacks and all for someone who once lived with his wife winds and floods of Sandy.) grays of a shadowy urban skyline viewed and newborn son in a rented two-family One of the most persistently concerned from some distance, its towers and spires house on Staten Island that his parents of such artists now living and working in the aimed like useless missiles at a stretch of sky shared with his aunt and uncle and their United States, is Anowar Hossain, who grew looming at the top of composition like an three children. Its address was 111 Marine up in Bangladesh but feels that all artists must oppressively low ceiling. Here, the force of Way and it was (the operative word of this strive for a universal identity. A sophisticated the storm appears to be gathering in the sentence) right up the street from New Dorp painter who is not embarrassed to be seen atmospheric abstract foreground of the Beach, one of the areas hardest hit by Sandy. as a humanist, Hossain follows a previous composition as ominously as the roiling Anowar Hossain’s haunting painting depicts exhibition prompted –– “inspired,” in cases oceanic mists in J.M.W. Turner’s tumultuous three expressionistically distorted figures such as these, might not be the proper word seascapes. We appear to be regarding the emerging from a dark void with their arms in –– by his emotional reaction to the Katrina pathetic phallic fortresses of humankind from the air and their mouths gaping as blackly as tragedy with a new series on Sandy. the monstrously malicious vantage point of that of the single figure in Edvard Munch’s Darkness permeates and haunts these new the storm itself, as it prepares to render them masterpiece “The Scream.” One cannot look works in mixed media on canvas, as it does impotent. at it without a title by the British poet Stevie certain works by Goya, the early charcoal Other compositions as well seemed to Smith springing immediately to mind: “Not drawings and lithographs of Odilon Redon, mirror our helplessness. That even the Waving but Drowning.” and the sometimes surprisingly abstract most powerful among us can offer each –– Ed McCormack imagery that Victor Hugo conjured up out other nothing more consoling than the of the ink bottles –– and at times even the camaraderie of a shared bewilderment, is Anowar Hossain, Noho M55, 530 W. 25th St. cups of strong black coffee –– on his writing seen in a mixed media work incorporating July 16 - August 3, 2013 desk, which moved the great romantic a photo collage image of President Obama Reception: Thursday, July 18, 6- 9 pm

JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 27 Minimalism Becomes a Vehicle of Emotion in Malka Inbal’s Stately Series “Pathology of Rust” n encountering Malka Inbal’s darkly studio, then patiently contemplated from the post-menopausal years. Having entered Omysterious new photographs, their various angles and photographed over time, her fifth decade, the artist courageously chose secrets shrouded, as in the paintings of Mark casts its associative spell, delineating the to explore the issue of loss of femininity that Rothko, in veils of near monochromatic journey all of us must eventually face, from so many woman fear at that turning point in restraint, one thinks first of Emily Dickinson’s gradual deterioration to final transcendence. their lives. And in the process, she achieved cryptic lines: (Or, in relation to that final word, so we like the freedom from fear that came with the “After great pain, a formal feeling comes to hope.) realization that she could “enjoy the infinite – / The Nerves sit ceremonious, process of learning and the like Tombs – / The stiff Heart different developments in my life.” questions, ‘was it he, that bore,’ In her present series, Inbal ‘And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries anticipates an even more profound before’? / The feet, mechanical, change with equal existential go round – / A wooden way / courage, in pictures that are Of ground, or Air, or Ought – / contrastingly minimalistic. In Regardless grown, / A Quartz the past, she has stated that the contentment, like a stone – / “lead actor” in her work was This is the Hour of Lead –/ light. Now, however, light plays a Remembered, if outlived, / supporting role to what the poet As freezing persons, recollect Gilbert Sorrentino once called the Snow / First – Chill – then “the darkness that surrounds Stupor - then the letting go –” us.” But the dark sublimity of “When my parents passed Inbal’s new pictures calls to mind away I was quite young,” not Sorrentino’s dire poetic Inbal has stated, attempting to warning, but the Japanese novelist explicate the series of pictures Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s great essay she calls, “Pathology of Rust,” “In Praise of Shadows,” of which “I felt mourning, sorrow and I the late Charles Moore then chair missed them terribly. Yet because of the department of Architecture of my age at the time I had no at UCLA, wrote: “It comes fear. At present, though I feel with the thrill of a slap for us . . very content with my life, I am . to hear praise of shadows and suddenly aware that the clock darkness; so it is when there comes never stops ...” to us the excitement of learning For Inbal, it would appear, the that musicians everywhere make series marks the final “letting their sounds to capture silence or go” phase of the grieving process that architects develop complex that Dickinson describes, stated shapes just to envelope empty in purely visual terms as cryptic space.” as those of the poem itself. Only, In purely formal terms, Malka here the memory, now that it Inbal’s new pictures are exquisite, has been acknowledged and with their traces of golden light assimilated into her art, shakes dancing on the edge of the abyss, the complacent foundations of alternately suggesting every the artist’s former illusion of disparate dream any shadow contentment with her life. show or magic lantern can evoke Those of us –– which is to say: in the human imagination. Yet, all of us –– who have reached From the “Pathology of Rust” series it also seems clear that it is not adulthood, can read many the artist’s primary intention to diverse allusions into this artist’s auras of gold What makes these new photographic have us view these evocative images as if they weaving through blackness with the spare yet works by Malka Inbal so surprising, however, were psychological signifiers on the order decisive grace of a Zen master’s brushstrokes: is that at least on a superficial level they of Rorschach tests; or as the ancient Greeks the glint of bronze statues in a dim room; appear to present such a radical departure once did when they sought apparitions of the the aforementioned paintings of Rothko from her previous New York exhibition two spirit realm in those mirror-gazing booths shedding their internal light on his stately years ago. For that solo show in the same known as psychomanteums. Rather, as all Chapel; the play of light and shadow over Chelsea venue as the present one featured sophisticated artists do when they bare their flesh and bones evoked in line and ink-wash, images of the mature nude female body innermost visions to us, Malka Inbal presents in Rico Lebrun’s darkly forbidding “Study photographed in a manner that made it the pictures in her “Pathology of Rust” for Buchenwald Cart” drawings for a mural appear at times to be involved in a process of series as priceless objects of mutual trust and in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. melting into a silvery backdrop and becoming aesthetic delectation. From ethereal auras to the most sensuous, liquidly distorted, as by a funhouse mirror. –– Ed McCormack physically palpable aspects of the material But, in fact, that series of pictures also alluded world, Malka Inbal’s singular chiaroscuro, to transcendence, albeit of another kind: culled from the subtle patterns of light and the transcendence of youth’s physical vanity Malka Inbal, Pathology of Rust, shadow cast on three precisely illuminated by “women of a certain age,” to use the Noho Gallery M55 Art, 530 W. 25th St., sheets of slowly rusting metal set up in her patronizing euphemism so often applied to through June 22, 2013. 28 GALLERYSTUDIO JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 IAA9F0H 0;CF55@@9FM :ƵŶĞϰͲ:ƵŶĞϮϱ͕ϮϬϭϯ KƉĞŶŝŶŐZĞĐĞƉƚŝŽŶ͗dŚƵƌƐĚĂLJ͕:ƵŶĞϲ͕ϲͲϴƉŵ WƵůƐĞŽĨďƐƚƌĂĐƚŝŽŶŝǀŝǀŝƌĂnj͕ƌŵŝŶĂǀƌĂŵŝĚŽƵ͕DĂƌŝƐĂĞƌŶŽƚƚŝ͕ ^ŚĂƌŽŶƌŝůů͕W'>/h͕ZŝǀŬĂ&ƵĐŚƐ͕>ĞĞŶŶ'ŽƌŵĂŶ͕:ĞƐƐŝĐĂ:<͕dĂŵĞƌĂ>ĞĞ͕ ^ĂƚŽƐŚŝDŝŵĂ͕'ĞƌĚZĂƵƚĞƌƚ͕ŽŶŶĂ^ŚĂĨĨĞƌ͕zĂŶĂzĂŵŝ dŚĞDĂŶŝĨĞƐƚĂƚŝŽŶŽĨDŝůŝĞƵ,Z^d͕:ŝŵŽďď͕ĂƌŽůŝŶĂ&ĞƌƌĂƌĂ͕ 'ǁĞŶ&ƌĞĞŵĂŶ͕^ƚĞǀĞŶZ͘,ŝůů͕'ĂƌLJ͘<ŽĞƉƉĞů͕ĂǀŝĚZŽůĂŶĚĞĂƵ͕ ĚƵĂƌĚŽ͘ZƵďŝŶ͕/ǀĂŶ͘dŽŵŝĐŝĐ͕/ƌLJŶĂdŽƌƐŬĂLJĂ tŝƚŶĞƐƐ͕Ă^ƚĂƚĞŽĨĞŝŶŐ͗<ĂŶĞŬŽ:ŽŚŬŽŚͬĂ^ŽůŽdžŚŝďŝƚŝŽŶ :ƵŶĞϮϴͲ:ƵůLJϭϵ͕ϮϬϭϯ KƉĞŶŝŶŐZĞĐĞƉƚŝŽŶ͗dŚƵƌƐĚĂLJ͕:ƵůLJϭϭ͕ϲͲϴƉŵ ^ĞŶƐŽƌŝĂůZĞĂůŵƐEĂƚĞŽŽƚŚ͕ŽƵŐĞWŝĐĞ͕dĞĚĞdŽLJ͕:ĂĐŬ'ƌĂǀĞƐ///͕ ZĂĐŚĞů,ĂŵďƵƌŐĞƌ͕ŚĂƌůĞƐ,ŽǁĂƌĚ͕ĞůĞŶ:ĂƵƌĞŐƵŝ͕ZŽLJĂŚ>ŽŝĞ͕WĞƌELJůĞŶ͕ sŝƚĂůŝLJKƐŽǀƐŬLJLJ͕ŶĚƌĞĂ^ƚĞŽƌƚƐ WĂƚŚǁĂLJƚŽďƐƚƌĂĐƚŝŽŶdŝƌŝů͕>ŝĂĂůĂŵŝĂ͕DĞůŽĚLJ,ĂǁƚŝŶ͕ŝĚĚLJ  ,ŽĚŐŬŝŶƐŽŶ͕ŶŐĞůĂ^͘:ĂĞŐĞƌ͕dĞƌƌLJ<ŝŶĚůĞLJ͕<ŽŬŝDŽƌŝŵŽƚŽ͕:ĂŶĞƚƚĞEĞǁŵĂŶ͕ :ƵůŝĂŶŶĞZĂLJŵŽŶĚ͕ůŝƐĂďĞƚŚ^ĐŚĂĞů͕ĂŝƐŚŝ^ƵnjƵŬŝ͕>ŽƌĞƚĂdĞŽĚŽƌŽǀĂ͕'ĂďĞdŽŶŐ

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JUN/JUL/AUG 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO ALEXANDER KANEVSKY

"Aeneas", 2012, Oil on wood, 8 x 4 feet (244 x 122 cm) "Zenobia", 2012, Oil on wood, 8 x 4 feet (244 x 122 cm) GIANTS, POWERS, ENIGMAS 2013 European Exhibition Tour Milano Monza Venezia Spoleto Paris Berlin WWW.ALEXANDERKANEVSKY.COM