January/February 2024. Art & Antiques

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F O R C O L L E C T O R S O F T H E F I N E A N D D E C O R AT I V E A R T S

M A R K R OT H KO | R A D I C A L C L AY | STA N L E Y W H I T N E Y | A F R I C A A N D BY Z A N T I U M

Perle Fine

january/february 2024

F O R C O L L E C T O R S O F T H E F I N E A N D D E C O R AT I V E A R T S

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Re-framing Perle Fine

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One of the founders of Abstract Expressionism is finally getting the recognition she deserves

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Radical Clay Into the Spotlight: Contemporary Japanese Women Ceramists BY LILLY WEI

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The Power of Paper

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A new exhibition explores Mark Rothko’s works on paper, revaluing an unappreciated medium BY ASHLEY BUSBY

On The Cover: Perle Fine, The Wave, Roaring, Breaking (Gardenpartie), 1959, oil and collage on canvas, 68 x 94 inches. [detail] © A.E. Artworks, Courtesy Berry Campbell, New York

VOLUME XLVII

NUMBER 1

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CAR OL & JE FFR EY HO RVI TZ COL L E CT I ON O F CONTEM POR ARY JAPA NES E CER AM ICS ; N ATIO NAL G A LLERY O F ART, WAS HI NGTON, G I FT O F TH E M ARK ROT HKO FOU NDAT I ON , I NC. COPYRIGHT © 2023 KATE ROTHKO PRIZEL AND CHRISTOPHER ROTHKO CAR O L & J EFF REY HO RV ITZ COLLEC TIO N OF CO N TEMPO R ARY JA PANES E CER AM ICS ; N ATI ON A L GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, GIFT OF THE MARK ROTHKO FOUNDATION, INC. COPYRIGHT © 2023 KATE ROTHKO PRIZEL AND CHRISTOPHER ROTHKO

BY WILLIAM CORWIN

january/february 2024

38 OBJECTS OF DESIRE

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Tiffany & Co. “Night and Day” Carriage Clock; a Holland & Sons cabinet commissioned for E D I TO R

Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.

Lorna Dryden C R E AT I V E D I R E C TO R

IN PERSPECTIVE

Mark Snyder

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C O P Y E D I TO R

More extensive coverage of the best auctions,

Roger Harris

museum exhibitions, and gallery shows from Emma C Dryden SENIOR DESIGNER

Christine Snyder

EXHIBITIONS A long overdue retrospective devoted

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to the work of Stanley Whitney opens on

Randall Cordero Ted Morrison

February 9, 2024, at the Buffalo AKG Art

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Museum in Buffalo, NY. “Stanley Whitney:

Rebecca Allan Ashley Busby James Balestrieri William Corwin Dian Parker Scarlet Cheng Sarah Bochicchio Elizabeth Pandolfi Lilly Wei Dawnya Bartsch Gabriel Almeida Mario Naves Barbara MacAdam Henry Adams D. Dominick Lombardi Jonathan Kandell Sheila Gibson Stoodley Chris Shields Jonathon Keats Jonathan Lopez Dana Micucci Carter Ratcliff

How High the Moon” is the artist’s first retrospective, celebrating his 50-year career.

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“Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village”

at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, through July 28, 2024, presents an incisive reassessment of the relationships between Native American cultures and Anglo-American artists.

“Africa & Byzantium” at the Metropolitan

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Museum of Art through March 3, 2024, is an important rebalance of the myriad cultures of the vast and diverse African continent against the cultures of the “civilizations”

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C O N T R I B U T I N G P H OTO G R A P H E R S

of Rome, Byzantium, and the Islamic empires..

R E P R I N T S / B AC K I S S U E S

Reprint Department Record-Breaker

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Robert Rauschenberg’s Vitamin, 1960/1968

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PR IVATE CO LLE C TI ON. PHOTO: RO BE RT MCKEEVER , COU RTESY OF STANL EY W HITN EY STUDI O. ARTWO R K © STAN LEY WH ITN EY ; COURTESY S OTHEBY ’S NEW YORK

A S S O C I AT E A R T D I R E C TO R

around the country.

ERNESTINE BETSBERG

Ernestine Betsberg, The Big Stand, 1952, oil on canvas, 51 x 40 in. Private Collection.

In conjunction with the release of a book devoted to Ernestine Betsberg’s career, the gallery is proud to announce a retrospective exhibition that will open in February 2024.

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objects of desire

Back in Time The carriage clock came about when famed Swiss-born horologist Abraham-Louis Breguet designed a small portable clock in 1798 for Napoleon Bonaparte, who wanted a way to keep time while his carriage trundled from skirmish to skirmish. Featuring a top handle, the spring-driven clock could be fastened securely to a hook and still maintain accurate time while swaying with the motion of a horse-drawn conveyance. Through its utility, the clock became very popular; even after the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, affluent travelers continued to use the carriage clock model while travelling. Carriage clocks have stood the test of time, so to speak, and have become highly collectible items. Decorated with bats and roosters, representing night and day respectively, the “Night and Day” Carriage Clock by Tiffany & Co. was designed and crafted by Charles Osborne (1847–1920), a master of his craft. Osborne, who at one time was the chief designer at Whiting Manufacturing Company, eventually migrated over to Tiffany’s—a business competitor—to collaborate and learn from the jewelry establishment’s head silver designer, Edward C. Moore. Osborne, who specialized in Japanesque silver, embellished the clock’s background with a

Japanese decorative influence can be seen throughout the clock’s design, such as in the simplification of the bats’ features—the bat being a creature that the Japanese associate with good luck. The top of the clock depicts characteristics of the unmon, a Japanese cloud motif. The rounding of the bats’ eyelids and ears appeals to the Japanese sense of kawaii or cuteness. In ancient Japanese myth, the rooster was said to have tempted the sun goddess, Amaterasu, out of her cavern, bringing light back after a dismal period of darkness. According to the curator’s notes at Macklowe Gallery in New York City, where the 19thcentury clock is on display, these decorative elements are typical of Tiffany & Co. silver in the 1880s, which was primarily inspired by the Japonisme and Art Nouveau movements.

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COU ERTESY MACKLOWE GALLERY IN NEW YORK

Martelé or hammered-like texture.

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objects of desire

A PRINCELY PIECE DESIGNED to impress, no expense was spared when constructing this elaborate and intricate cabinet for English royalty. Crafted by the venerable cabinet makers Holland & Sons, this opulent cabinet was commissioned for Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), and his wife, Princess Alexandra of Denmark. The royal couple, who lived in London at Marlborough House until Prince Albert’s ascension to the throne in 1901, moved into the palatial residence shortly after their marriage in March 1863. In anticipation of their arrival, Marlborough House was extensively remodeled; fashionable new reception rooms were created, making it easier to entertain foreign dignitaries and other luminaries in style. In an effort to greatly enhance the interior, a large quantity of furniture was ordered—and it was very likely at the same time that this elegant cabinet was commissioned. The cabinet’s back is stamped “M H,” placed below a crown and a distressed label, with the maker’s name—Holland & Sons—appearing inside the cabinet and at the top of the door. Made of thuya wood, Circassian walnut, and unusual specimen woods, the cabinet features exquisite marquetry of the finest quality. It is adorned with a porcelain plaque, engraved ivory, and gilt bronze mounts—the surfaces festooned with swags, paterae, turtle doves, lov-

The cabinet’s central doors, which enclose a shelved interior, are elaborately inlaid with engraved ivory and rare woods. A central inlaid ivory female bust holding ribbon-tied plaits supports a bronze-framed elliptical plaque painted in sepia tones; depicted are putti waking Cupid. Interestingly, the central iconography is flanked by portrait heads of two great English poets, John Milton and John Keats. The entire design is held aloft by back-to-back griffins. This extraordinary cabinet can be viewed at Butchoff Antiques, London.

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COUERTESY BUTCHOFF ANTIQUES, LONDON

ers’ bows, garlands, martial trophies, and lambrequins.

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Art-world news and market updates, exhibitions and events.

Fine Art Immersion

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is countered by the artist’s precision, and reflects Plank’s obsession with universal order in chaos. De Sarthe gallery, a leading figure in contemporary art from Asia, will feature work from Beijing-based painter Zhong Wei. Two People in the Blue of the Sky (2023) ruminates on human existence in a new technological era. Creamy beige organic forms suggest

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l i mbs a nd torsos stretched like taffy in a strange sort of digital hyperspace. From the internet to new forms of artificial intelligence, Wei’s beautiful but unsettling compositions warn against a potential future where technology may overtake humanity. Santa Fe a r tist Sarah Bienvenu, represented by Winterowd Fine Art, has painted the landscape of her adopted home for over for t y years. The artist largely wo rk s e n pl e i n air and prefers the immediacy of watercolors to capture her high-desert surrounds. Seeing the Hills Through Trees simplifies and abstracts nature. Gently leaning trees create a pleasant visual cadence among rolling hills and a deep blue sky with cottony white clouds. Her sophisticated explo rations of color, light, and repetition, create a refreshing take on a long-painted subject. Maybau m Galler y will include Victoria Wagner’s remarkable sculptures. The artist

sources damaged redwoods from West Sonoma County and then intuitively carves them into orb-like polyhed ro n s . M a d e Ro ug h a n d Ready by the Wind and Tide is comprised of a towering stack of these forms; selected planes incorporate 22kt gold or brilliant color gradients painted in oil. T he work captures nature’s beauty and resilience. Hyperrealist sculptor Carole Feuerman, represented by Melissa Morgan Fine Art, has seen recent public installations of her work along the Park Avenue medians in Manhat tan and in the Egyptian desert near the Great Pyramids. One of her signature, swimsuitclad women, Ke ndall Island (Life-Size) w/ Bl ack S warovski Crystal Cap (2021), will star tle viewers with its shocking verisimilitude. Neither vain nor objectified, this woman is poised, confident, and powerful.

C O U R T E S Y J O N AT H A N C A R V E R M O O R E ; C O U R T E S Y W I N T E R O W D F I N E A R T; C O U R T E S Y M AY B A U M G A L L E R Y; C O U R T E S Y M E L I S S A M O R G A N F I N E A R T; C O U R T E S Y D E S A R T H E G A L L E R Y

INTERSECT Palm Springs will showcase an exciting slate of international galleries February 8-11, 2024 at the Palm Springs Convention Center. Billed as a four-day fine art immersion, organizers pride themselves on their innovative programming, including special tours, artist talks, and special on-site exhibitions and activations. One special presentation this year, Emerging: A California Collective, will see contributions from five major West Coast dealers. Featured artist Carrie Ann Plank, represented by Jonathan Carver Moore, creates dizzying acrylic and ink work such as Elemental Lattices Orange Red. Plank’s work is rooted in math and science. She carves wood reliefs that are printed using transparent pigments. Here, brassy orange and red-violet create a moiré effect. What at first appears as visual interference,

IN PERSPECTIVE

Bay Area Pioneers

COURTESY JOST FINE ART

AN ONLINE exhibition highlighting two Postwar Bay Area women artists will be live on Artsy this month courtesy of Jost Fine Art. For the Love of Paint, an exhibition feat u ri ng t he works of Rut h Wall and Katherine Barieau, brings together two midcentury painters whose contributions to West Coast Abstract Expressionism are currently being reexamined.

Wall’s vibrant and richly textured paintings reflect the introspective nature of Bay Area abstraction after World War II, particularly when artists Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. Wall studied at the storied art school in the early 1950 s, working with both painting and printmaking while joining a dynamic cohort of students whose short-lived artist-run galleries in the neighboring North Beach district fostered a culture of experimentation and creative autonomy. Barieau’s work

is indicative of the distinct aesthetics that were associated with the UC B erkeley art program which benefitted from the direction of notable faculty like Erle Loran and John Haley. At the time, students were encouraged to move

freely between figuration and abstraction, sometimes within the same composition, relying on automatic approaches to painting to develop imagery. Together, these artists represent the idiosyncratic nature of abstraction in the region, particularly as Bay Area artists adopted psychoanalysis in order to tap into the subconscious underpinnings of painting while describing the experiential aspects of their surroundings.

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PH E NOM E NA PAUL JENKINS (1923-2012) spent his career exploring innovative techniques in color application. His luminous, expressive canvases were created by pouring and manipulating pigment. A new exhibition at Robert Green Fine Arts, looks closely at his work from the the 1960s and 1970s, Paul Jenkins, Paintings from the 1960s and 1970s (January 12-February 25, 2024). After W WII service, the Kansas City native used G.I. Bill funding to move to New York in 1948 and enroll at the

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standout Morris Louis. But, the intensity of color and their varied interactions in work such as Phenomena Conclave of Four (1964), atonce layered and rainbow-hued like an oil slick, sets his work apart. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Jenkins insisted on a primed canvas. T his allowed the paint to pool and eddy rather than soaking into the linen as he twisted, spun, and tilted the support. By playing with the consistency of his pigment, he was also able to create additional effects. H is colors sits atop the brilliant white gessoed ground. His move to acrylics in the 1960s also further amplified the intensity of his colors. In Phenomena Entrance Red (1964), his titular hue begins as a bold body of color at bottom right. But, as it weaves its way across

the canvas, it becomes almost an echo of its original intensity before coalescing in a muddied fusion at top left. Jenkins was deeply influenced by eastern mysticism. He saw painting, both the creation by the artist and the appreciation of a viewer, as a kind of meditative act. Beginning in the 1960s, he prefaced the titles of most of his work with “Phenomena.” In so doing, the artist seems to emphasize a non-objective painting’s ability to act as an experiential portal to transcendence. As we stand agog at the brilliance of his palette, we’re also invited to consider beyond the thing itself.

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Art Students League. He soon fell in with the young Abstract Expressionist artists, counting Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko among his friends. By 1953, Jenkins relocated to Paris. He spent the next several decades travelling widely, eventually returning to New York toward the end of his life. Jenkins’ approach to color and materials varied greatly from his New York School peers. While canvases such as Phenomena Folds of Day (1964) feature drips and skeins of paint, they are not akin to Pollock’s performative action paintings. And, while his innovative approach to color invites a kind of contemplation similar to R o t h ko , h i s w o r k rem a i n s d i s t i n c t ly different. His means of applying paint to the surface via pouring and drizzling feels closer to Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique or the shimmering veils of color in the work of Washington Color School

IN PERSPECTIVE

C O U R T E S Y Q U A N T U M C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T; C O U R T E S Y G A L L E R I U R B A N E ; C O U R T E S Y M O D E R N F I N E A R T; C O U R T E S Y G A L L E R Y C H R I S TO F F E R E G E L U N D

Beachfront Fair of the feminine. Bathsheba (2023) counters a pattern-filled, warm interior with the icy countenances of his models. Also in the figural realm, London’s Quantum Contemporary Art includes Bridget Davies’ ink drawings on gold leaf. The A r r i va l - D a w n a n d D u sk

NOW I N ITS second year, Art Palm Beach returns to the Palm Beach County Convention Center January 24 th to 28th , 2024. Organizers have curated an impressive roster of over 80 international galleries, from well-known stalwarts to those focused on emerging talent. New this year, the fair will see a charity partnership with

the American Heart Association and will feature special events dedicated to the impact of AI (artificial intelligence) on humanity and the art world. Represented by Danish Gallery Christoffer Egelund, Niels Strøbek’s realist figure studies explore the mysteries

( 2 0 2 3) c e n ters on a glamorous figure sheathed in black couture. This vampy siren feels plucked from 1940s Hollywood. Galleri Urbane (Dallas, Tx) brings sculptures from Jessica Drenk, who transforms paper into something unexpected. Wall-piece Aggregate Stone 2 (2023) evokes geologic time and stratigraphy but stresses the role of the artist in its manufacture. Comprised of densely-layered pieces of junk mail, she comments on the tedium of our present age.

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LA Vibes

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fair’s non-commercial platform and provides a collaborative space for dialogue and experimentation on a selected theme. Event curator Marisa Caichiolo’s 2024 programming will focus on the inter-

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sections of memory, humanit y, and A I , and consider the ethical and socio-political implications of these new technologies. Among this year’s exhibitors, New York’s Arcadia Contemporary will show work from Oslobased painter Kesja Tabacz u k. Im pos sibl e to R e si st (2022), an oil on canvas portrait of a young woman holding a large pink peony, is remarkably photo realistic in effect. Tokyo’s Silver Shell Galler y will feature work from Choi Seung-Yoon, i n c lu d i n g wo r k f r o m his series Cross Section of Start, which feature dynamic, yet precisely controlled, strokes and marks in primary hues. I n the booth from London’s Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, visitors will be wowe d by M ad r id - b a s e d pa i nter Ni kole t a S eku lo vic’s large scale portraits that explore the figure as well as pattern. Vita Sackville West (2023) is an imagined portrait of the notable English author, garden designer, and onetime lover to Virginia Woolf. West rests easily in a riotous field of florals and patterning. Sekulovic hopes to show her subject “stripped of external expectations and in a state of authenticity.” For those looking for art that combines

ancient tradition with contemporary techniques, visit Santa Fe’s Blue Rain Gallery and view work from Vivian Wang, including her Mongolian Leopard. The artist’s intricate sculptures incorporate ancient Chinese techniques including stoneware and gold leaf, supplemented with the new in the form of cast glass. A former fashion designer, her work is also inspired by historical textiles. London’s Cynthia Corbett Gallery will feature Andy Burgess’ reimaginings of modernist architecture, including Quiet Courtyard (2021). The artist reinvents and abstracts real places to create dreamlike and seductive spaces. His courtyards and pool scenes are especially fitting at this LA fair.

C O U R T E S Y A R C A D I A C O N T E M P O R A R Y ; C O U R T E S Y S I LV E R S H E L L G A L L E R Y ; C O U R T E S Y B L U E R A I N GALLERY; COURTESY REBECCA HOSSACK ART GALLERY; COURTESY CYNTHIA CORBETT GALLERY

LOS ANGELES’ largest a nd longest-r u nning art fair will again fill the halls of the Los A ngele s C onvent ion Center February 14-18, 2024. This year’s fair features an impressive international lineup. According to producer and director Kassandra Voyagis, “The LA Art Show is committed to creating the most comprehensive international contemporary art experience imaginable. We keep building a bigger and better version every year.” I n add it ion to prem ier offerings in Modern and Contemporary art, this year’s fair will feature The European Pavilion, with special curated exhibitions centered on the latest in the continent’s Contemporary art movements. The fair will also showcase and recognize participating female-owned galleries. Ever concerned with philanthropy and outreach, organizers will donate 15% of this year’s proceeds to the American Heart Association. Ru n n i ng conc u r rent ly, DIVERSEartLA serves as the

IN PERSPECTIVE

COURTESY GUARISCO GALLERY; COURTESY REHS GALLERIES; COURTESY YA FA S I G N E D J E W E L S ; C O U R T E S Y TO U L O U S E A N T I Q U E G A L L E R Y

Palm Beach Splendor LUXURY ABOUNDS at the 21st annual Palm Beach Show, February 15-20, 2024 at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. The area’s most prestigious cultural event of the winter season will boast worldclass dealers with magnificent art, dazzling jewelry, and lavish antiques and design. With locations in New York and Palm Beach, Yafa Signed Jewels will present magnificent museum qualit y jewels, including an Art Deco Diamond and Gem Set Brooch. The French design incorporates a glittering arrangement of diamonds, rubies, sapphire, emerald, and onyx. Guarisco Gallery, Washington, D.C., will feature a superb selection of late

nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury paintings. Femme à la promenade by Renoir protégé A lber t A n d r é (18 69 1954) shows a young woman strolling with a greyhound at her side. The artist’s careful attention to the woman’s chic fashion, especially the adornments on her hat, attest to his early training in silk design. The booth from New York’s Rehs Galleries, Inc. includes paintings from British maritime artist Charles Dixon (1872-1934). Galleons at Sea shows four of the Spanish vessels racing across choppy waves. Toulouse Antique Gallery, Los

Angeles will feature an exquisite gilt-bronze mounted, champlevé enamel clock (c. 1870) from Parisian maker E. Henry. Part of a garniture, the clock is accompanied by two decorative urns. All three are fine examples of the Baroque opulence common to the Second Empire Style.

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Native Perspectives PHILLIPS AUCTION house will featu re a new selling ex hibition of late t wentieth- and twenty-first-century Native American Art at their Park Avenue location (January 5-23, 2024). New Terrains: Contemporary Native American Art centers on the rich and varied work of both Canadian First Nations and Native American artists. In the words of Dine’ artist and curator Tony Abeyta, “Our time of inclusion and our hour of personal storytelling is now.” T he show’s other curators, James Trotta-Bono and Bruce Hartman, emphasize

that this exhibition parallels larger efforts to “expand the canon of American art.” Representing over seven decades of practice, established artists will grace the gallery alongside new and emerging talent. Yanktonai Dakota ar tist Oscar Howe (1915-1983) helped pave t he way for Native artists looking to work in contemporary formats outside the bounds of traditional “Indian” art. Double Woman (Winyan Nupa) (1962) depicts a my t h ic sorceress who prolonged her

life by possessing the body of a young, beautiful woman. Howe’s Winyan Nupa dances in a torrent of energy, ex pressed i n sw i rling reds and blues—a beautiful depiction of an otherwise monstrous creature. Like Howe, Luiseño ar tist Fritz S cholder (1937-2005) spent his

“Real, not Red” subjects like the towering figure in Sitting Indian (1972), who directly counters our gaze. Ojibwe artist George Morrison (1919-2000) showed his work alongside New York School standouts and pointedly rejected the label “Indian painter.” He preferred to be known simply as a painter “who happened to be Indian.” A reflection on the landscape,

c a reer push i ng for a new expanded definition of Native art. His portraits reject stereotypical Eurocentric images of the “noble savage.” According to Scholder, he wanted to depict

Summer Spectrum II (1958) incorporates a loosely painted, stunning palette of oranges, reds, greens and violets. Multiracial artist Gerilyn Montano (b. 1961) can

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trace her lineage to both the Dine’ and Comanche people. The Web of Transformation (2021-2022) blends iconography from both her Dine’ roots and other Native cultures to comment on the tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic. We see echoes of figures in a procession, perhaps a reference

to the funerary, and a spider, which evokes the Dine’ Spider Woman, a deity revered as both creator and destroyer. Lakota First Nations photographer and filmmaker Dana Claxton (b. 1959) calls her lightbox presentations “fireboxes” suggesting the way in which the work sets ablaze

Native A merican stereotypes. Against a stark green backg r o u n d , s h e c ap tures fellow ar tist I i k a a k sk itowa on a low rider bike in E a s y R i d e r N DN (2022). She implies that Native identity is a part of the contemporary world and not simply a thing of the past. Cree First Nations painter Kent Monkman (b. 1965) “Indigenizes” and intervenes in great works from Western art history. These new works reconsider Native identity and decolonize the canon. Death of Adonis (2010) reimagines Albert Bierstadt’s

The Last of the Buffalo (188889). Monkman’s queer alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testicle, kneels at center in red thigh-high boots. She tearfully grasps a dying white cowboy, inverting traditional notions of conquest and the savage.

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Space Time lowed her curator husband to various museum appointments. They finally fou nd a hom e at South Dakota State University in 1971, where she taug ht painting until her retirement in 1994. She now lives and works in Santa Fe. Stuart’s impact on the South Dakota art scene and the university’s students is a lso t racked i n a companion exhibition on view concurrently. Since the early 1960s, Stuar t has explored manipulated suppor ts, engineering and stitching her ow n c a nva s e s . Early work, such as Construction for Line IX (1 9 6 3) , s h o w s t h is approach with its visceral, wire-stitched slices. Stuart also experimented with other media, testing the lim-

itations of pap er, wh ich she ripped, wove, battered, collaged, and otherwise manipulated. A t t h e he a r t of S t uar t’s practice is a fascination with both the beauty found in nature and ideas in quantum physics. She explores the paradox between what we see and what science tells us exists. As she emphasizes, nature may appear static, but physicists understand existence as a kind of constant flux at the subatomic level. Stuart’s work serves as a reflection upon our experiences within space and time. These ideas come full circle in installation projects where the viewer is inserted into and moves throughout the work. InSilence 3 (2023), a restaging of a 2013 project, features intricately cut panels of Tyvek that reference an invisible web that connects all life while also mimicking the play of shadows

in nature. That emphasis on perception—especially color and light—are central in Stuart’s practice. Chasm 2 (2017), with its lush, shifting hues of red and blue, suggests the temporality of vision. The colors are like those seen at sunrise and sunset, there and gone in an instant.

C O U R T E S Y P I E P R O J E C T S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T S A N D T H E A R T I S T; C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T

IN A CAREER spanning over sixty years, Signe Stuart has dedicated her practice to abstraction and materiality. A retrospective exhibition at the South Dakota Art Museum makes the case for the artist’s wider recognition, Signe Stuart: Events in Space and Time (October 14, 2023March 30, 2024). After training at the University of Connecticut and the Yale Norfolk Summer Art School, Stuart completed a masters in 1961 at the University of New Mexico. She recalls that no one pushed her to take up abstraction; she always created in that mode. For a decade, Stuart fol-

Master’s Showcase

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C O U R T E S Y DAV I D N O L A N G A L L E RY AND DONALD ELLIS GALLERY

NOW IN ITS eighteenth year, Master Drawings New York hosts their annual fair in Manhattan (January 27-February 3, 2024). MDNY’s President and Executive Director, Christopher Bishop notes, “All of us who work in drawings…are invested in seeing that the joy of the study of drawings is passed on to new generations.” Twenty-six international galleries will present an impressive array of work. Abbott & Holder will showcase a J.M.W. Turner composition once owned by critic John Ruskin, while Galerie 1900-2000 will feature work from leading twentieth century avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Jean Dubuffet. Also of note, David Nolan Gallery in collaboration with Donald Ellis Gallery will offer ledger drawings from Cheyenne artist Nokkoist (Bear’s Heart) produced while a prisoner of war at Fort Marion.

IN PERSPECTIVE

Spirit of Connection

C O U R T E S Y C E L E B R AT I O N O F F I N E A R T

SCOTTSDALE’S Celebration of Fine Art returns this winter for its 34th year (January 13-March 24, 2024 from 10:00 am-6:00 pm daily). The juried invitational show will feature work from 100 renowned and emerging international artists, working in a range of media, all housed in the “big white

tents” in the heart of the city. Among this year’s featured artists, visitor’s will be wowed by realist painter Tatiana Rajkov. Her R ed Ro yal presents a blownup peony in full blo om , a s t u nning amalgam of seventeenthcentu r y Dutch master precision and the oversized beauty of an

O’Keef fe. Colin Branham creates acrylic abstractions with rich texture by scraping and manipulating pigment. His Sequential Order matches rigorous compositional planning with a playful exploration of p at t e r n . U t a h b a s e d s c u lptor L au ra L ee Stay B rad sh aw pro duces large-scale public ar t and l i m ited- ed it ion bronze castings using live models. The graceful figure in her Spring Dance is at once

decidedly contemporary and evocative of ancient allegory. Celebration of Fine Art remains one of the premier annual art events in the West. Co-owner and show director Susan Morrow Potje prides herself on the “uplifting spirit of connection” experienced by visitors. T he show ’s u n ique set-up allows first-hand access to artists working in their temporary studio spaces, bringing the act of making to the forefront. The weekly, interactive Art Discovery Series provides even more insight into the influences, processes, and stories behind individual artists and featured works of art.

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Desert Color nition, especially in light of continued efforts to expand and revise the canon. Born in Washington D.C. and trained at the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery, Fratt’s early development simmered in the same sphere as the later Washington Color School. The artist moved to Phoenix in 1958 and refused to give up her work in abstraction despite the area’s then conservative art scene. Nonetheless, Fratt championed abstract art’s potential, exposing Southwest residents to new modes of painting through her teaching, exhibition practice, and advocacy. S o m e t i m e s l ab e l e d a n Abstract Expressionist, and other times associated with Color Field painters, Fratt’s work defies easy categorization. Oh My (2000), one of her shaped or “st acked c a nvases,” features an intense orange g rou nd with a gest u ral zig zag

of v iol e t t h at vibrates with expressive intensity. In contrast, other shapes and marks in the composition, arranged around the peripher y, are more carefully delineated in bright shades of

red, blue, green, fuchsia, and yellow-orange. Many works by Fratt celebrate the landscape, sometimes directly referencing the unique features of her adopted home. In the words of co-curator

Lauren O’Connell, “Fratt made abstract paintings inspired by the freedom of space she found in the Arizona desert.” Ah Wilderness (1995) bears no easy connection to a landscape pa i nt i ng but celebrate s nature with its expressive title. Winter Storm (1999) more directly relays nature’s sublime power and also well demonstrates Fratt’s play with color and space. Two shapes, a large red and a smaller bright pink, push to the foreground when seen against the deep olive ground. Angry gestural marks foreshadow a coming storm, with line as a stand-in for intensity.

RUNNING THROUGH June 2024, Fort Lauderdale’s NSU Art Museum stages Glory of the World: Color Field Painting (1950s-1980s), charting the splendid variety and expressive potential in Color Field painting. Curators derived the title from Frank Stella’s response to a painting by Hans Hofmann: “…the straightforward manipulation of pigment can create exalted art...Glory of the world this painting surely is and glory of the world his painting surely was and is.” Stella’s own diptychs with bold concentric stripes— influenced by 15th century religious paintings—express the sacred in the secular. From Robert Motherwell’s monochrome blues to Larry Poons’ pours, the exhibition also documents orig-

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inal techniques. A Fantastic Sunset (1970) by Washington Color School standout Alma Thomas (18911978) features her signature lozenge-shaped marks. She creates a pulsing, prismatic orb. There’s no literal sunset, but, much like the NSU Art Museum exhibition, Thomas prods us to gaze in wonder. There is so much more here than simple color.

C O U R T E S Y A N O N Y M O U S . © 2 0 2 3 E S TAT E O F A L M A T H O M A S ( C O U R T E S Y O F T H E H A R T FA M I LY ) / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIET Y (ARS), NEW YORK .

Glory! Glory!

A L L A R T W O R K S C O P Y R I G H T E S TAT E O F D O R OT H Y F R AT T

THE SCOTTSDALE Museum of Contemporary A rt will debut the first major museum exhibition of Dorothy Fratt (1923-2017), an underrecognized abstractionist. Chronicling over five decades of her career, Dorothy Fratt: Color Mirage (February 3-July 21, 2024) celebrates the artist’s masterful exploration of color and vibrant compositions. A monograph, co-published with Radius Books and previously released in October 2023, accompanies the exhibition. The opening will also coincide with SMoCA’s 25th anniversary celebration. Curators make an argument for Fratt’s wider recog-

IN PERSPECTIVE

THE JOHN WOODMAN HIGGINS ARMORY COLLECTION, IMAGE © 2021 WORCESTER ART MUSEUM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Designed for Warfare BEGINNING mid-February, the San Antonio Museum of Art will showcase objects from the second largest collection of arms and armor in the United States. The Age of Armor: Treasures from the Higgins Ar mor y C ollection at the

Worcester Art Museum (February 16-May 12, 2024) is sure to captivate with a retelling of the global history of armor’s golden age in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Rivetted by chivalric tales, industrialist John Woodman Higgins amassed an impressive trove of weaponry

and armor and founded the Higgins Armory Museum (1931-2013). The collection has been overseen by the WAM since 2014 The exhibition highlights the impressive engineering and elegant design i n a n a r t for m u lt i m at ely designed for protection. A Comb Morion for the Guard of C h r i s t i a n I o r II, Electors of Saxony (c. 1585-1595) features etched and gilded steel and was originally worn by the personal guards of powerful German princes. Helmet in the for m of a S e a Conch Shell (1618) is an example of a

kawari-kabuto or “extraordinary helmet” worn by late sixteenth-century Japanese warlords. The Higgins Collection also includes full suits of armor. Milanese Field Armor from a Garniture (c. 1595) is highly articulated for battlefield use and features rich, etched surface pattern. An example of an imposing German Rennzeug (c. 1590-1600) was designed for jousting with heavy plates to protect the combatant’s unprotected left side.

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Eye of the Beholder RUNNING through late February, Anita Shapolsky Gallery’s Eye of the Beholder provides visitors with a sensorial treat (November 30, 2023-February 24, 2024). With work drawn from the gallery’s accomplished stable of contemporary artists, the exhibi-

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Marc Van Cauwenbergh’s abstract color-field paintings are deceptively complex. His Pink Over Green (2018) includes horizontal swashes of atmospheric color. What

C O U R T E S Y A N I TA S H A P O L S K Y G A L L E R Y

tion presents a “rich artistic tapestry,” and includes everything from gestural abstraction to evocative cosmic landscapes. Artist Amaranth Ehrenhalt began her career in New York

in the early 1950s. By the end of the decade, she relocated to Paris, where she remained for over three decades. Her unique approach to color endeared her to one of her first patrons, Orphist artist Sonia Delaunay. Ehrenhalt returned to New York in 2008. Painted just after her move to Paris, Parcours I (1959-1960) features a riotous explosion of mark-making that bears comparison to the drips and splashes of her New York School peers. However, her exploration of hue and saturation, from intense vermillion to blush pink, royal blue to soft ash gray, is uniquely her own.

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appears as single strokes are actually several translucent washes of oil that sit not only on the surface of the support but are also absorbed into the weave of the linen. While the artist admits that his urban surrounds have served as a

compositional jumping off point, he maintains that the work does not reference the world outside the painting. Ford Crull’s abstract canvases explore the expressive potential of symbol. They provide a sort of visual metaphor for humanity’s attempt to seek out meaning amongst the chaos of existence. Midsummer Night Ruby 2 (2010) incorporates the artist’s signature kaleidoscopic ground, a rich rainbow of shifting colors, densely layered with dark archetypal shapes and marks. Au s t ra l i a n a r t i s t Pe ter Bonner cites a broad range of sources for his work, from Aboriginal artists to modernist

masters such as Paul Klee. The rich reds, pinks, and umbers of his In The Key of F or G, And I’m Not Afraid To Die (2016) suggest the palette of the dessert. From the outback of his homeland to the American southwest, Krull finds in

his favorite spaces a ground for abstract exploration. His deeply layered impasto and added collage elements, beg close-looking and contemplation. C h ic ago -based pa i nter Michiko Itatani creates fantastic temples and built environments that seem to float in a dazzling, blue space scattered with starry constellations. Waiting Game (2018) from the series Celestial Narratives is at once an architectural space we recognize set adrift in the infinite expanse of the universe. With such diverse offerings, the gallery offers a space to connect, to reflect, and to find that next great work of creative inspiration.

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Sagebrush State

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Dixon first travelled to Nevada in 1901. He made his last trip in 1939 just before relocating to Tucson. That trip served as a final farewell to a place with which he had connected over almost four decades. NMA’s exhibition and the accompanying catalog simultaneously track his many trips to the Sagebrush State and his increased engagement with a modernist approach to art-making. Born on ranch land near Fresno, California, Dixon spent much of his career in San Francisco, but maintained a lifelong cowboy aesthetic. Known for favoring boots and Stetsons, Dixon presented himself as rugged, but this may have served to mask his lifelong struggles as an asthmatic. In the Western landscape, Dixon found refuge and felt compelled to document these rapidly shrinking spaces. Dixon’s travels to Nevada took the form of “sketching trips,” which his second wife, photographer Dorothea Lange, noted “recharge(d) his art.” A fourmonth sojourn in 1927 yielded over 50 paintings, including Mountains in Sunset Light. He also made plans for larger studio compositions completed upon his return. In this work, we see Dixon’s adop-

tion of a modified Cubist approach or what scholar Donald J. Hagerty terms his “distillation composition(s)” where he comingles remembered places with a need to reduce and organize the landscape. One of those studio works, Wild Horses of Nevada (1927), pictures horses emerging from a long slice of shadow and thundering across the desert at a diagonal. In the background another diagonal stretches in

B L A N TO N M U S E U M O F A R T, T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F T E X A S AT A U S T I N , G I F T O F C . R . S M I T H , 1 9 7 6 ; C O L L E C T I O N O F T H E W I L L I A M A . K A R G E S FA M I LY T R U S T; R AY A N D K AY H A R V E Y C O L L E C T I O N ; P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N ; C O L L E C T I O N M O N T E R E Y M U S E U M O F A R T. G I F T O F R E N A L D L . K O C H E R A N D J U N E KO C H E R C A R T E R , 1 9 9 5 . 0 2 2 ; B R I G H A M YO U N G U N I V E R S I T Y M U S E U M O F A R T, G I F T O F B . DA R R E L A N D R . R E E D C A L L , 1 97 7

PAINTER MAYNARD Dixon (18751946) spent his career trying to capture “ideals of truthfulness.” His images of cowboys, such as Steers to Market (1936), personify the Western landscape with the spirited farmhands that he depicts. And, scenes of the landscape, such as Shorelines of Lahontan (1935), image the West as a space for reflection with their vast cloudless skies and endless plains punctuated by sentinel-like mountains. While Dixon’s oeuvre has been well-examined in recent years, a new exhibition opening in March at the Nevada Museum of Art, Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada (March 2-July 28, 2024) provides the first comprehensive documentation of the artist’s wanderings through the state.

P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N ; M I C H A E L J . A N D K AT H L E E N A . B O Y C E , B O Y C E FA M I LY T R U S T

the opposite direction, a path leading up to a mesa anchored against the horizon. The NMA exhibition also places emphasis on a 1934 body of work that documented the creation of the Boulder (now Hoover) Dam, commissioned by the New Deal Public Works of Art Program. These paintings comes closest to Dixon’s social realist contemporaries and reveal the plight of laborers. Tired Men captures workers on a transport truck after a long day. Dixon described these men as “robots” used as cogs in a machine intended to tame and rebuild the landscape. Cowboy and Packhorse captures a single rider delivering supplies to an unseen work camp, the cowboy here a last vestige of the Old West in the face of this t ra n sfor m at ion a l undertaking. Hagerty describes Dixon as an “emotional cannonball” who retreated to Nevada not only to paint but to otherwise escape life. We see that desire in work such as Old Homesite (1937) with its placid, pastoral simplicity. Still, Dixon presents us with an illusion of the West, a place free from settler colonialism and harsh frontier life. As curator Ann M. Wolfe warns, we must “beware the silence” and “unearth the true stories of Nevada’s many frontiers.” Standing in front of Dixon’s stunning canvases, we can relish the beauty, but still acknowledge that even in his search for truth he perpetuates an idea of the West that is at least partially invented. J A N U A R Y/ F R B R U A R Y

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Transformative Addition

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handling and sketched quality of Ladies in the Shade: Abriès (1912) is entirely unexpected. Two women, dashed onto the paper in splashes of color, have, in the words of one of Sargent’s closest friends, “an air of happy impromptu.” The artist here seems freed from the conventions of portraiture and explores the potential of color, light, and line. Trained by Robert Henri and recognized as one of the leading painters of the Ash Can school, George Bellows is best

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known for his gritty scenes of Manhatt a n , f rom u nderground boxing clubs to the city’s tenements. Upper Broadway (1907) presents an unvarnished view of the city duri ng a rai n storm. Fog seems to loom just beyond the city block, and bright strokes of color across the pavement suggest a rain-slick surface. A streetcar trundles along as small figures rush across the street, their bodies bent against the inclement weather. Ohio-born Charles Burchfield worked exclusively in watercolor depicting unique, visionary scenes of the landscape comprised of simplified expanses of color. Painted early in his career, while still studying at the Cleveland School of Art, Hot Morning (1915) incorporates bright complementary hues of orange and blue, yellowy green and deep violet. Having been exposed to the work of the Fauves, Burchfield puts his own spin

on European modernism. Natives of Norfolk, Macon and Joan Brock have long been philanthropic champions for the Chrysler Museum. Joan formerly served as the first woman chair of the Board of Trustees, and the couple were instrumental in the institution’s 2014 expansion project. According to museum officials, the Brock collection is “the most transformative addition to the institution’s holdings since Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.’s foundational gift,” one that will help further establish the institution as a top-tier site for the study and exhibition of American Art.

PROMISED GIFT TO THE CHRYSLER MUSEUM OF ART FROM THE MACON AND JOAN BROCK COLLECTION OF AMERICAN ART

CHARTING the rise of modernist techniques in American art, A Shared Vision: The Macon and Joan Brock Collection of American Art spotlights a promised gift of 45 paintings, pastels, watercolors, and prints to the Chrysler Museum of Art. On view until March 4, 2024, the show features established names in American art as well as lesserknown artists. Winslow Homer’s Girl with a Letter (1879) dates to a period when the painter produced genre portraits of women with frank intimacy. In this watercolor, his sitter lazes on a tapestry-back folding chair. Despite her Victorian dress, she feels d e c id e d ly m o d e r n . She stares back at us fixedly and lacks the air of obeisance one might expect from a woman of the era. To t h o s e m o r e fa m i l i a r w it h Joh n Singer Sargent’s commissioned society portraits, the loose paint

exhibitions

How High the Moon A STAN LE Y WHITN E Y RETROSPECTIVE AT TH E BU FFALO AKG ART M USE U M

11 ⁄8 x 13 ⁄4 in. 7

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STANLEY Whitney paints like a jazz musician. Having found a solid structure that he can rely on gives him the freedom to improvise. He riffs with color. He is a color improviser. His compositions are rows and columns of eloquent color in a loosely defined grid. Improvisation is the elongation and exploration of the moment, demanding trust and letting go. Whitney lets himself go in his studio listening to Miles Davis’s

Bitches Brew, a free-wheeling fusion of trumpet blasts, pulsing bass, throbbing drums, and clashing cymbals. Whitney has been painting to this album for 30 years. When he walks into the studio, he immediately puts on the record and the music puts him in the zone. Now he can paint for hours. “I become the music,” he said. Always starting in the upper-left corner, Whitney moves on from the first color he puts down, allowing gravity to take him

P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N . P H OTO : R O B E R T M C K E E V E R , C O U R T E S Y O F S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y S T U D I O . A R T W O R K © S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y.

Untitled, 1997, oil on linen,

B Y D I A N PA R K E R

P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N . P H OTO : R O B E R T M C K E E V E R , C O U R T E S Y O F S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y S T U D I O . A R T W O R K © S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y.

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through the canvas. His paint table is filled with plastic salad bowls of paint. He picks a color and goes, one color leading the next, like the oral language of jazz. In the same way, Whitney uses color. Because stacking color within loose, brushy lines is his go-to format, he doesn’t have to think, allowing the color to lead him. Color is his subject matter. Studied closely, you can see how one color moves into the next. Drips, edges of color revealing bare points of canvas, thick and thinned paint, obvious brush strokes, his fingerprints—the paintings are moving to the music. A call and response to Bitches Brew and to the magic of color. A long overdue retrospective of Stanley Whitney opens on February 9, 2024, at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, NY. “Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon” is the artist’s first retrospective, celebrat-

ing his 50-year career. Paintings from 1972 to 2023 are exhibited, along with drawings and prints. For Whitney, drawing has always been his touchstone, his foundation. Like Brice Marden and Philip Guston, Whitney constantly returns to drawing as a way to keep his painting fresh. Drawing is the key. As a young child he drew constantly, preferring to draw rather than study. When he wasn’t drawing, he said he was looking out the window. Born in 1946 in Bryn Mawr, near Philadelphia, Whitney received a BFA from the Kansas

Above: Untitled, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 70 in. Below: Untitled, 2020, watercolor on Lessebo paper, 19 1⁄2 x 24 5⁄8 in.

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exhibitions

Below: Untitled, 2018, graphite on paper, 22 x 30 1⁄2 in.

City Art Institute and an MFA from Yale. This was the time of the Vietnam War, and going to school made it possible to avoid the draft. As a black artist during this time he was expected to be political, which he resisted. He just wanted to paint. “People went to jail, I went to Yale,” he said. His early years in New York were hard. The freedom of the ‘70s with its Bohemian lifestyle was complicated by racism and the pressure for black artists to be political. The ‘80s replaced the loose lifestyle with snobbery, elitism, and money. He began painting with acrylic and moved on to oils in the early ‘90s, finding the fluidity and depth with color he wanted. He supported himself by teaching full time at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1992, frustrated with a solo gallery 40

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P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N . P H OTO : R O B E R T M C K E E V E R , C O U R T E S Y O F S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y S T U D I O . A R T W O R K © S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y.

Above: Untitled, 1983, monotype on BFK Rives paper, 30 1⁄4 x 44 3⁄4 in.

P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N . P H OTO : L I S S O N G A L L E R Y, C O U R T E S Y O F S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y S T U D I O . A R T W O R K © S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y.

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show in New York where nothing sold, he and his wife, the artist Marina Adams, moved to Rome. During this time, he reveled in the light, scale, and weight of Rome’s ancient architecture. Eventually he and his wife bought a house in Parma, northern Italy, where they lived for 25 years. In Italy, he found he was able to breathe and explore. He visited Morandi’s studio

in Bologna, studied Etruscan stacked sarcophagi, and traveled around Egypt. The big pillars of stone inspired him as a way to organize his paintings—lines separating packed geometrics of color. He had found his voice. Whitney reads a lot while the paint is drying on the canvas. He reads poetry, like Rilke and Neruda, as well as history,

Aretha, 2018, oil on linen, 72 x 72 in.

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Below: James Brown Sacrifices to Apollo, 2008, oil on linen, 72 x 72 in.

politics, and novels to keep his mind sharp. He is inspired by American quilt-making, which is evident in his paintings. His idols are Mondrian, Morandi, Mark Rothko, and jazz musician Charlie Parker. When he saw his first Cézanne, his first thought was Charlie Parker. His paintings evoke moods. In the painting Aretha, here are his evanescent colors, singing out, warm and cool like Aretha Franklin’s voice. He shows us his loose brushstrokes, the paint dripping, the downward cast of horizontal lines. The square gives him 42

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a tight space to work in for the dramatic, dynamic color, and we walk into it. Untitled, 1979, is an example of his early work in acrylics. The work feels tentative, whereas in the paintings from the last ten years you can see the confidence he’s achieved from 50 years of continual painting. In the watercolor Untitled, 2020, Whitney has allowed the water to merge with the color beside and below it, changing the color. The result is sparks of color as if a light is shining where the paint merges. Untitled, 1992, dances in red, blue, orange with white

P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N . P H OTO : L I S S O N G A L L E R Y, C O U R T E S Y O F S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y S T U D I O . A R T W O R K © S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y.

Above: By the Love of Those Unloved, 1994, oil on linen, diptych, 78 3⁄4 x 102 1⁄2 in.

P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N . A R T W O R K © S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y.

lines dividing the groupings. The painting is a syncopation of colors playing off one another. These are step-by-step paintings; paintings that took him years to find the confidence to follow the color and see where it leads. He doesn’t plan ahead of time; simply puts on Miles Davis, goes to his table, picks a color, places the brush in the upper left-hand corner and lets the color, gravity, and the music lead him. Each time he risks everything. When he feels frustrated or stuck, he draws. The titles of his paintings are his life

story: Loveroot, James Brown Sacrifices to Apollo, Stay Song, Undestructible Hymn, Endless Time, NO to Prison Life. In Stanley Whitney’s paintings, color is rhythm, syncopated harmonies. When viewed side by side, the variations of color shift, like a kaleidoscope that sings. He once said that when you look at abstract art you have to be open, willing to admit you don’t know. He said he wasn’t worried about knowing anything. That humility and hunger has kept him painting, glorious color following glorious color.

Undestructable Hymn, 2001, oil on linen, 54 x 60 in.

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exhibitions

Pueblo Perspectives IN DIG E NOUS ARTISTIC RE FLECTIONS ON TH E AM E RICAN SOUTHWE ST ARE FEATU RE D AT TH E COLBY COLLEG E M USE U M OF ART B Y R E B E C C A A L L A N

1907, oil on canvas.

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THE NOTION of an unchanging perspective on life, history, or art is counterintuitive. To have the opportunity to reexamine the stories and events that shape our ideas about cultural legacies encourages us to appreciate how museum exhibitions reveal new truths and benefit humankind. The exhibition “Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village” at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, through July 28, 2024, presents an incisive reassessment of the relationships between

Native American cultures and the AngloAmerican artists for whom New Mexico was both a homeland and cultural wellspring of artistic inspiration. The exhibition encompasses new research that guided a reinstallation of The Lunder Collection— one of the most important private collections of American art in the world. The museum’s curatorial staff members, working with an advisory council made up of Pueblo and Wabanaki cultural leaders, have centered Pueblo perspectives on the social

C O L BY C O L L EG E M U S E U M O F A R T, T H E LU N D E R C O L L EC T I O N , 2 0 1 3 .1 8 8 .

William Robinson Leigh, Zuni Pottery Maker,

C O L BY C O L L EG E M U S E U M O F A R T, G I F T O F J O H N M A R I N , J R . A N D N O R M A B . M A R I N , 1 97 3 . 0 5 0 . ; C O L BY C O L L EG E M U S E U M O F A R T, G I F T O F A D E L A I D E P E A R S O N , 1 9 6 0 .1 4 6 .

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and cultural landscape of Taos from 1915 to 1927, when the Taos Society of Artists (TSA), a group of Anglo-American painters, was active. Juxtaposing historic and contemporary works in painting, textiles, ceramics, sculpture, sound and video, the exhibition examines the varied and rich art histories of the American Southwest; by extension, it also addresses the issues that impact Indigenous communities today. This collection installation is meant to inspire a deeper understanding of “how art produced in the Southwest United States reflects, or diverges from, the lived experiences of Native community members. The featured artworks and their accompanying interpretation emphasize the sovereignty of Pueblo peoples and the land they steward.” Juan Lucero (Isleta Pueblo), a research fellow who collaborated on the exhibition,

explains the significance of personal collections of baskets, pottery, and meaningful objects displayed on shelves within Pueblo homes, such as the earthenware Acoma Water Vessel and a group of Pueblo and Wabanaki objects. In the museum these are displayed high on a wall to represent their place of honor in the home. “These collections are glimpses into private lives. Each work holds stories and fingerprints of relatives— both the living and those who have passed on. The pottery works are storage vessels collecting memories of meals and conversations, loves and heartaches, ceremonies and celebrations. Each earns its spot on the shelf through relationships developed and relationships ended.” Working as an artist’s model as a young person, the painter Albert

Above: John Marin, New Mexico Landscape, 1929, watercolor and charcoal on paper. Below: Artist unknown (Acoma Pueblo), Acoma Water Vessel, n.d., earthenware, 8 in.

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Untitled Basket, 2023; aluminum house siding, found vinyl, enamel spray paint, found plastic, faux leather.; Ernest Blumenschein, Girl in Rose, 1926, oil on canvas, 30 1⁄4 x 25 in.; Cara Romero, Crickett, 2014, archival inlet print, 40 x 27 in.

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(Martinez) Looking Elk (1888-1940) studied with Oscar Berninghaus, a founding member of the TSA. He sold his paintings to tourists, and, although seldom earning more than a few dollars for his works, he received significant recognition, which included having his artwork exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe. Untitled, from the 1920s or 1930s, is characteristic of Looking Elk’s subject matter, a descriptive and personal view of Pueblo life, often conveying the temperature and atmospheric light of his homesite. Here, a single figure cloaked in a blue, hooded garment over a cardinal red skirt, is dwarfed by the sharp, perspectival view of the terraced tiers of adobe houses. The buildings and earth are bathed in golden light, while roiling, cumulus clouds and ultramarine blue shadows suggest a windy, chilly day. Unlike the often-romanticized scenes of Taos by TSA artists, Looking Elk’s works were created by an artist who was embedded in the daily life of the

Pueblo. American modernist John Marin first traveled to Taos at the urging of Rebecca Strand and Georgia O’Keeffe, a departure from his routine of painting in Maine every summer. During the summers of 1929 and 1930, he made approximately 100 watercolors around Santa Fe and Taos, representing the arroyos and canyons of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the Rio Grande. New Mexico Landscape was painted in 1929, five years after the federal government granted Native people citizenship on their own lands. Marin slices the landscape in half along a sweeping diagonal, with deep blue mountains above and red-ochre soil below, populated with silver and olive green hues of junipers, piñon, and sage. Exquisiteness can be found also in the smallest and presumably most modest objects, such as Sarah Sockbeson’s Untitled Basket. An artist from the Penobscot (Wabanaki) Nation, whose people have been present in Maine for some 12,000 years, Sockbeson specializes in handmade ash and sweetgrass basketry. Sockbeson’s practice

C O L BY C O L L EG E M U S E U M O F A R T P U R C H A S E F R O M T H E J E R E A B B OT T AC Q U I S I T I O N S F U N D, 2 0 2 3 . 0 4 6 . ; C O L BY C O L L EG E M U S E U M O F A R T, T H E LU N D E R C O L L E C T I O N , 2 0 1 3 . 0 1 9 P. ; C O L BY C O L L E G E M U S E U M O F A R T P U R C H A S E F R O M T H E J E R E A B B OT T AC Q U I S I T I O N S F U N D .

Clockwise from below: Sarah Sockbeson,

C O L BY C O L L EG E M U S E U M O F A R T, T H E LU N D E R C O L L EC T I O N , 2 0 1 3 . 0 3 9 .

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Gerald Cassidy, Pueblo Priestesses, c. 1930, oil on canvas.

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or 1930s, oil on board. Below: Dan Namingha, August Moon, 2022, acrylic on canvas.

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of basketry is intertwined with her commitment to maintaining her Wabanaki cultural lifeways— guaranteeing that the culture is passed on to future generations. In this work of art, she employs the porcupine weave, made by folding and pinching the strips of her material to create spikey points. Fancy baskets, often made for sale to nonNative people or tourists, have employed this technique for more than a century. Visitors to the exhibition will likely be surprised to encounter Sockbeson’s use of aluminum house siding, found vinyl, enamel spray paint, found plastic, and faux leather, rather than the traditional ash wood (Fraxinus nigra). This is in response to the destruction of these trees by the emerald ash borer. By replacing natural wood with found and discarded materials, Sockbeson presents an alternative to ash and sweetgrass. Like

many artists in the face of climate change, she has found a way forward in the face of the loss of the natural materials that are both sacred and irreplaceable. During the TSA years, Native Americans who worked as artists’ models were subjected to low compensation, demeaning or sentimentalizing poses, and dress that was inauthentic to their tribal identities. In the exhibition’s interpretive materials, the curators address the prevailing societal prejudices, stating: “The repugnant belief that Anglo-Americans were morally and intellectually superior to Native people, widely held in (Joseph) Sharp’s time, was used to justify violence against Native people and continues to cause harm to Native communities to this day.” Two compelling portraits, created 88 years apart, represent the complexity of

G I F T O F B R A D A N D F R A N TAY L O R , C O L L E C T I O N O F T H E M I L L I C E N T R O G E R S M U S E U M , TA O S , N M . ; C O L B Y COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART PURCHASE FROM THE JERE ABBOTT ACQUISITIONS FUND, 2022.064.

Above: Albert Looking Elk, Untitled, 1920s

C O L BY C O L L EG E M U S E U M O F A R T, T H E LU N D E R C O L L EC T I O N , 2 0 1 3 . 2 6 3 . ; C O L BY C O L L EG E M U S E U M O F A R T, T H E LU N D E R C O L L EC T I O N , 0 4 0 . 2 0 0 9 .

interpreting this genre in relation to the treatment of Native American sitters, the absence of their names, and their relationship to the artists who portrayed them. Contemporary photographer Cara Romero’s image Crickett projects a sense of power and self-possession in its close framing of a girl’s face. Romero tells us who she is: “A brief moment marks the passage between girl and young woman. My stepdaughter was at this transition when I photographed her in the dining room. As I have observed her fondly over the years, she strikes me as one of the most remarkable women I have ever met. She has also always been wise beyond her years—an ‘old soul,’ if you will. Her mother has HIV/AIDS and Parkinson’s. She lives each day with grace and strength. She has been her mother’s primary caretaker since about this age. When I photographed her, I said, ‘Look fierce.’” Ernest Blumenschein’s interest in Native

Americans, their art forms and imagery, and the effects of modernization on their culture are congruent with the modernist fascination with tribal art and the recent rise of anthropology as a serious science. During his years in Taos, Blumenschein observed the contrasts between the centuries-old enduring lifeways of Pueblo peo-

Above: Joseph Henry Sharp, The Sunlight of Taos–A Conversation Among Friends, after 1893, oil on canvas. Below: Ernest Blumenschein, Untitled (Mountain Wood Gatherers), c. 1926, oil on canvas.

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canvas.; Below: Jason Garcia, I live off the land…and Sonics, 2023, ceramic.

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ples against the transformations of the 20th century. At a time when the federal government was abolishing tribal land rights, Blumenschein fought for cultural preservation, equality and full citizenship. While the identity of many Native American models is as yet unknown, the sitter in Blumenschein’s Girl in Rose (1926) is, according to co-curator Sheila Hyte, “most likely Maria Mondragon, a Taos Pueblo community member whose husband, Don Mondragon, also modeled for Blumenschein and other TSA artists.” Hyte continues: “Though the title refers to a girl, Maria was already a married young woman by the time she posed for Blumenschein. In general, the TSA painters depicted and hired men to sit for them, though in any case many TSA portrait sitters are still as yet unidentified. It was in part because it was rare for women to pose that we were able to narrow down Mondragon’s identity here. What story might we read in Maria’s expression? She

looks away from the artist and, by extension, the viewer—a gesture historically employed by many painters to communicate a type of feminine docility. We could also read her pose as a personal refusal to meet our gaze, a retaining of privacy that is reinforced by her arms, which encircle her own body in what may be a protective embrace or simply a strategy to stay comfortable during a long modeling session.” The searching inquiry and deep seeing that are evident in the juxtapositions of artwork, interpretive texts, and conversations that form “Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village” catalyze vital questions posed by its creators. For example: What can be learned about self-representation, intertribal exchange, settler colonialism, and environmental justice by foregrounding Pueblo and other Native voices? And likewise: What enduring myths about Native people and westward expansion might be unlearned through this multivocal approach?

C O L BY C O L L EG E M U S E U M O F A R T, T H E LU N D E R C O L L EC T I O N , 2 0 1 3 . 2 1 1 ; C O L BY C O L L EG E M U S E U M O F A R T P U R C H A S E F R O M T H E J E R E A B B OT T AC Q U I S I T I O N S F U N D, 2 0 2 3 . 0 1 0 .

Above: Thomas Moran, Acoma, 1902, oil on

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Ancient Splendor IMAG E S AN D IDEAS LIN K TH E ANCIE NT KING DOMS OF AFRICA AN D BYZANTIU M TH ROUG H AN EXHIBITION OF ARTIFACTS AT TH E M ET B Y J A M E S D . B A L E S T R I E R I

15th century, tempera on wood, 11 ⁄4 x 16 ⁄16 x 1

5

⁄16 in.; Below: Jeweled Bracelet (one of pair),

13

500–700 CE; gold, silver, pearls, amethyst, sapphire, glass, quartz; overall: 1 1/2 x 3 1⁄4 in., strap: 7⁄8 x 7 11⁄16 in., bezel: 1 5⁄16 .

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ON VIEW AT The Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 3, 2024, “Africa & Byzantium” is an important salvo in the drive to rebalance the myriad cultures of the vast and diverse African continent against the scholarship of the West, which has often relegated those cultures to the status of vassal states and suppliers of resources for the “civilizations” of Rome, Byzantium, and the Islamic empires. Comprised of almost 200 objects of delectable beauty, “Africa & Byzantium” is also comprehensive in scope, revealing the influence of Byzantine art and culture in North and East Africa from the 4th through the 15th century and beyond.

The exhibition traces the long and complex histories of Ethiopia and Egypt, the rise of the powerful Axumite Kingdom and Nubian Empire and their early conversion to Christianity, the subsequent expansion of Islam—and it establishes the region as a key crossroads of ideas. As the meticulous essays in the catalogue state and reiterate, the concept behind the exhibition is nothing short of a reorientation of vision—a view from Africa towards Byzantium and the wider world, as opposed to a passing glance at Africa from the north. Byzantium, of course, in what is now Turkey, became the new Roman Empire after the fall of the city of Rome and the final loss of the Western Empire—including the

N AT I O N A L M U S E U M O F A F R I C A N A R T, WA S H I N G TO N , D . C . , G I F T O F J O S E P H A N D PAT R I C I A B R U M I T; C O N S E R VAT I O N O F T H I S A R T W O R K S U P P O R T E D B Y T H E S M I T H S O N I A N I N S T I T U T I O N W O M E N ’ S C O M M I T T E E ( 2 0 07- 4 - 1 ) © N AT I O N A L M U S E U M O F A F R I C A N A R T. P H OTO : F R A N K O K H O U R Y. ; T H E M E T R O P O L I TA N M U S E U M O F A R T, N E W YO R K , G I F T O F J . P I E R P O N T M O R G A N , 1 9 1 7 ( 1 7. 1 9 0 . 1 6 7 1 ) .

Above: Marian Triptych (Ethiopia), mid- to late

M U S É E N AT I O N A L D E C A R T H AG E ( I N V. N P. 0 1 9 E C C 7 ) © M U S É E N AT I O N A L D E C A R T H AG E . ; M U S É E D U LO U V R E , PA R I S , D E PA R T M E N T O F G R E E K , R O M A N , A N D E T R U S C A N A N T I Q U I T I E S ( M N C 1 5 7 7 ; M A1 7 9 6 ) © R M N - G R A N D PA L A I S /A R T R E S O U R C E , N Y. P H OTO : H E R V É L E WA N D O W S K I . ; N AT I O N A L M U S E U M O F A F R I C A N A R T, WA S H I N G TO N , D . C . , G I F T O F J O S E P H A N D PAT R I C I A B R U M I T; C O N S E R VAT I O N O F T H I S W O R K S U P P O R T E D B Y T H E S M I T H S O N I A N I N S T I T U T I O N W O M E N ’ S C O M M I T T E E ( 2 0 0 4 -7-2 -) . P H OTO : F R A N K O K H O U R Y.

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Clockwise from above left: Lady of Carthage (Tunisia), 4th–5th century CE, marble and green glass, 43 5⁄16 x 41 3⁄4 in.; Mosaic Panel of Preparations for a Feast (Tunisia, Carthage), late 2nd century CE; marble, limestone, molten glass; 94 1⁄2 x 88 5⁄8 in.; Diptych with Saint George and the Virgin and Child (Ethiopia), late 15th–early 16th century, paint on wood, 20 1⁄2 x 26 5⁄16 x 13⁄16 in.

city of Carthage in present-day Tunisia—by 476 CE, shifting the balance of power further eastward and causing the new emperors seated in the capital city of Constantinople (known officially as Istanbul only since the first quarter of the 20 th century) to look to Egypt and East Africa for new alliances and trading partners. Greco-Roman artistic practice and iconography is self-evident in a Carthaginian work such as Mosaic Panel of Preparations for a Feast (late 2nd century CE), which prominently features a dark-skinned servant at lower left and, perhaps to offer a sense of contrast and the sweep of the empire, a figure in frontier garb at lower right. Because the Romans’ policy was to assimilate conquered cultures and unify them into a single polity, the conversion of Rome to Christianity in 313 CE spread quickly through the empire, so much so that St. Augustine of Hippo, born in Roman North Africa (now Algeria) in 354, would become one of the most important saints in the early church. Indeed, his writings were instrumental in establishing an understanding of the foundations of the Christian faith; moreover, Augustine’s observations in his book Confessions constitute one of the earliest autobiographical analyses on

record and has remained a seminal text in Western thought. One might say, then, that Western notions of selfhood have North African origins. What we know little about is just how Romans, and Africans themselves, construed and constructed color and their identity as

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with Saints Täklä Haymanot and Ewostatewos (Gondar, Ethiopia), second half of 17th century, paint on canvas remounted on cotton, 5 1⁄8 x 1 x 45 1⁄4 in., 16.3 lb; overall with mounting: 55 11⁄16 x 45 7⁄8 in.; Icon of the Virgin Enthroned (Egypt), 6th century, wool, 70 1⁄16 x 43 5⁄16 in., 65 lb.

Africans. Projecting the long history of othering onto the past is—as it always has been— a minefield of error and prejudice. The two women who adorn the Toilet Box (100 BCE–300 CE), an artifact from the city of Mero­ on the border between Egypt and Nubia, have always been assumed to be Black because of the features of their faces and braided hair. Yet, in fact, they are fashioned of white ivory inlaid into dark wood. But what, if anything, did “Black” mean to the maker(s) or owners of the object? This is a history that is yet to be unearthed. Similar questions arise when looking at the stunning parchment folios of the Egyptian Ashburnham Pentateuch (late 6th–early 7th century CE). In looking at folios replete with a mixture 54

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of Black figures and those not Black, “Some scholars,” as Andrea Myers Achi, Associate Curator of Byzantine Art at The Met, writes in the catalogue entry, have come to “believe that the marked difference in skin colors in the manuscript was used to construct a white, Christian identity,” while closer examination reveals a wide variety of Black figures with skin in many shades, wearing different manners of dress that suggest different roles. Achi’s entry ultimately arrives at a diametrically opposing hypothesis, stating on Page 122 of the exhibition catalogue, “It may be that the artist of the Ashburnham Pentateuch was trying to represent the multiethnic communities of Egypt instead of putting color symbolism on the figures.” In fact, if Achi is correct, one might argue that the manuscript illustrations are

T H E E C L E Y B . C O X E , J R . , E X P E D I T I O N T O N U B I A , K A R A N O G , A N I B A C E M E T E R Y ; D . R A N D A L L- M A C I V E R A N D C . L . W O O L E Y, 1 9 0 8 , U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LV A N I A M U S E U M O F A R C H A E O L O G Y A N D A N T H R O P O L O G Y, P H I L A D E L P H I A ( E 7 5 1 9 ) . P H O T O : P E N N M U S E U M P H O T O S T U D I O . ; M U S É E D U Q U A I B R A N LY– J A C Q U E S C H I R A C , P A R I S ( 7 1 . 1 9 3 1 . 74 . 3 5 8 8 ) © A R T R E S O U R C E , N Y. P H OTO : PAT R I C K G R I E S / B R U N O D E S C O I N G S . ; C L E V E L A N D M U S E U M O F A R T, L E O N A R D C . H A N N A , J R . , F U N D ( 1 9 6 7. 1 4 4) .

Clockwise from below: Toilet Box (Karanog, Egypt), 100 BCE–300 CE, wood and ivory, 11 1⁄16 x 10 9⁄16 x 9 1⁄8 in.; Possibly Wäldä Maryam, Wall Painting

T H E H O LY M O N A S T E R Y O F S A I N T C AT H E R I N E , S I N A I .

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Icon with the Virgin and Child, Saints, Angels, and the Hand of God (probably Constantinople), second half of 6th century CE, encaustic on wood, wood, 26 15⁄16 x 19 9⁄16 in.

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172 lb. Below: Psalter (Tigray, Ethiopia), 15th century, ink and tempera on parchment, 12 3⁄16 x 8 11⁄16 .

Ectius ute si samus di nus nulparc hicabo. Ped quiatia ndenitiae voluptaeptis sed utem explitem rem auda natiur?

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meant to suggest the power and embrace of Judeo-Christian practice and philosophy. In the end, as one views “Africa & Byzantium,” the eyes have it, so to speak. If eyes are mirrors of the souls, if eyes are windows into the soul, then this exhibition is a palace of silvered and transparent glass. It has probably been studied and written many times, but, if not, someone should research and write a survey of the depiction of eyes across the Byzantine Near East, the period of the East African kingdoms, and Gothic Europe, before eyes grew smaller and more realistic during the Renaissance. From the Lady of Carthage (4th–5th century CE), whose gender is hotly debated; through the Byzantine Icon with the Virgin and Child, Saints, Angels, and the Hand of God (second half of 6th century CE); to Wall Painting with Saints Täklä Haymanot and Ewostatewos (second half of 17th century) from Gondar, Ethiopia, what

connects these far-flung places over centuries is the size of the eyes, their soulfulness, and their direct, penetrating gaze. Those whose faith has been proved—these saints and angels that are the subjects of the works—look out at us, asking about the degree to which our faith is strong. Those eyes are meant to make us look, look again, and, perhaps, look away and inward. Art history has long taken these eyes for granted, as if their abstraction and exaggeration were due to a lack of skill on the part of the artists, or some cultural absence or stricture that prevented them from painting eyes “realistically.” But, if nothing else, “Africa & Byzantium” should force us to reevaluate the broad and long-lasting impact of a motif as ostensibly simple as the depiction of the eye in art. We might see it as a metaphor of sorts, with the African past looking out at us, assessing us, asking—perhaps even demanding—that we look and look again.

B R O O K LY N M U S E U M , N E W Y O R K , M U S E U M C O L L E C T I O N F U N D ( 0 5 . 1 8 ) . ; B I B L I O T H È Q U E N AT I O N A L E D E F R A N C E , D É P A R T E M E N T D E S M A N U S C R I T S ( E T H I O P I E N D ’A B B A D I E 1 0 5 ) .

Above: Mosaic with Lion (Hammam-Lif, Tunisia), 6th century CE, stone tesserae, 29 5⁄16 x 42 1⁄4 x 1 5⁄8 in.,

B I B L I OT H È Q U E N AT I O N A L E D E F R A N C E (C OT E : N 5 3 0 1 9 3 9 2 ) .

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Ashburnham Pentateuch, late 6th–early 7th century, ink and colors on parchment, 142 folios, 15 9⁄16 x 13 3⁄16 in.

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Re-framing Perle Fine One of the founders of Abstract Expressionism is finally getting the recognition she deserves Tournament, 1959, oil and collage on canvas, 57 1⁄4 x 135 3⁄8 in.

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© A . E . ART WORKS . COU RTESY BERRY CAMPBELL, NEW YORK .

Imagine the atmosphere of a crowded and murmurous second-floor loft on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village in 1949: smoky and smelling not a little bit of unwashed clothes, Ballantine Ale, and whiskey. It was a raucous, chaotic atmosphere, full of macho posturing and empty threats (since this is art after all). In the early days of The Club, the storied Abstract Expressionist hangout in the East Village, there were only a handful of women in the room: among them the aristocratic Mercedes Matter, the streetwise Elaine de Kooning, and an intense dark-haired painter, Perle Fine. Working class, as were many of the other Abstract Expressionists, Fine put herself through art school and taught to pay the bills. Then, in those first five years following the end of WWII, at the invitation of a peer, the dashing Willem de Kooning, she found herself a found-

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Re-framing Perle Fine

1959, oil and collage on canvas, 68 x 94 in. Below: Perle Fine in her Provincetown Studio, 1952.

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ing member of a group of artists that at that specific moment in art history was determining the direction of Western art in the 20th century. In terms of painting, Fine was many things; historically, she helped define Abstract Expressionism. Her practice flirted with Neo-plasticism, and as a protégée of Mondrian she was enlisted to help keep the Dutch artist’s legacy alive after his sudden death in 1944. Fine also pursued a multi-media approach to painting; mid-career she embraced hardedged pure abstraction—in direct dialog with Rothko, among others—and then in later life she experimented with Minimalism. Like many of the American artists who came to prominence in the postwar period, Perle Fine came from humble beginnings and was energized by a new social acceptance that regular people could become artists, particularly in New York, while bolstered by some of the post-Depression artist-focused programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), though she did not directly benefit from the WPA employment opportunities. These programs were transformative in that they pushed the notion that an art career could be pursued by anyone and was no longer an aristocratic pursuit or family business. Born in Boston in 1905, the daughter of immigrants

© A .E. ART WORKS. COURTESY BERRY CAMPBELL, NEW YORK .; PHOTO: MAURICE BEREZOV © A . E . ART WORKS .

Above: The Wave, Roaring, Breaking (Gardenpartie),

© A . E . ART WORKS . COU RTESY BERRY CAMPBELL, NEW YORK .

Re-framing Perle Fine

from Russia—Sarah and Sholom Hyamovitch—who started a dairy farm in Malden, Massachusetts, Poule Feine (as her name is recorded on her birth certificate) became known as Perle Fine. She trained in illustration and graphic design, first at the School of Practical Art in Boston, but then moved to New York in the late 1920s and continued at the Grand Central School of Art, where she met her husband, Maurice Berezov. She committed to “fine art” painting and studied at The Art Students League in the early 1930s. Immersing herself in the

Painting No. 56, c. 1954, oil on canvas, 60 x 56 in.

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Re-framing Perle Fine

Clockwise from below: Charcoal-Black and Yellows, 1952, oil on canvas, r ca. 1961-1962, oil on 28 ⁄8 x 23 ⁄4 in. ; Cool Series No.7, Square Shooter, 7

3

canvas, 40 x 40 in. ; Untitled (Prescience), 1951, oil on canvas, 44 x 37 in.

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© A . E . ART WORKS . COU RTESY BERRY CAMPBELL, NEW YORK .

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numerous galleries in New York and visiting the recently opened Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to catch up on all the current trends in European painting, she devoted herself to abstraction early on. Tranquil Power: The Art and Life of Perle Fine, a detailed and thoughtful biography of the artist by Kathleen L. Housley, presents an engaging narrative of a New York School artist, resonating with the lives of Nevelson, Rothko, and many others of similar backgrounds. The radical works that defined Fine’s career were produced in the 1950s and early ‘60s. Fine and her husband, also an artist, had jumped at the chance to study with Hans Hofmann upon the opening of his painting school in 1933. Hofmann and Fine had a productive teacher-student relationship; however, Fine was decisive and obsessed. Like her teacher at The Art Students League, Kimon Nicolaïdes, Hofmann after a point felt there was no more he could impart to the intense and driven young woman. While studying with Hofmann in the ‘30s, she embarked on a course of action to create abstract form that transformed painting from a picture of something into the actual thing itself. Fine’s works rejected figuration so completely that she was afraid to show them to Hofmann (and maybe she was also afraid he would steal her ideas). Always determinedly individualistic, Fine needed to retrace the steps of modern painting herself, moving from Cézanne to Cubism, on to Neo-plasticism and Mondrian, and finally, in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, arriving at a dual approach to painting embodying a soft and diaphanous touch versus tortured and cacophonous emotion. In Untitled (Prescience) from 1951, a throbbing all-over background of rose, salmon, and peach is overlaid with scattered, softedged, but solid-colored green and blue forms. While these glyphlike objects are distinct from the surrounding pink, they rest gently on the surface. Painting #67, also from 1951, is very similar

© A . E . ART WORKS . COU RTESY BERRY CAMPBELL, NEW YORK .

Re-framing Perle Fine

Bristling, 1946, oil and sand on canvas, 44 x 38 in.

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Re-framing Perle Fine

Above: A Crossing Thought, 1970, acrylic on linen, 50 x 50 in.; At right: Untitled, d c. 1950, oil on canvas, 71 x 29 in.

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© A . E . ART WORKS . COURTESY BERRY CAMPBELL, NEW YORK .

“Fine’s works rejected figuration so completely that she was afraid to show them to Hofmann (and maybe she was also afraid he would steal her ideas).”

in format. Contrast these to works from Fine’s alternative trajectory: Tournament and The Wave, Roaring, Breaking (Gardenpartie), both from 1959. While the two canvasses are from the late ‘50s, Fine had been painting in this style since at least the very beginning of the decade. In both, the notion of a background is scrapped. Instead, competing forces clash across the volume of the canvas. Shards of color and amorphous blotches, sometimes multi-layered and deceptively volumetric, vie for prominence. In The Wave, script-like jagged lines stagger amongst the patches of color and expand outwards, creating a nexus of activity emanating from the center, whereas in Tournament, lines are less prominent, instead acting as frenetic lightning bolts momentarily emerging and receding. Fine’s credentials were expanded when she joined the American Abstract Artists (AAA) in the early 1940s. The AAA endeavored to introduce to local artists the refugee European artists streaming into New York during the German occupation; it was, in fact, through these introductions that Fine established contact with Piet Mondrian. As a devotee of Mondrian from the first appearance of his works in New York museums and galleries, Fine was now able to watch the Dutch master in action in his New York studio. She was fascinated by his rigorous methodology, as well as the spiritual power that he attached to his use of color and its precise application. We see her deep appreciation of Mondrian in her work in Bristling (1946). A confounding labyrinth floats over a

© A . E . ART WORKS . COURTESY BERRY CAMPBELL, NEW YORK .

Re-framing Perle Fine

Arriving, 1952, oil on canvas, 50 x 49 1⁄2 in.

bulbous beige form on a mottled white background. The precise black lines are occasionally intersected by simple forms: X’s and diamonds, irregular black polygons, and a red dot. Like a Mondrian, it has a definite, even if perhaps difficult to comprehend fully, order and playfulness. It presages both Fine’s more tempestuous assemblages of painted objects of a decade later, and her neater hard-edge Cool and Accordment series. Fine found the drunken, garrulous atmosphere of the Cedar Bar (or Cedar Tavern) distasteful, as did many women on the scene. She was content to work in her studio on Tenth Street and was a

founding member of the Tanager Gallery, an early artists’ collective, where she exhibited after a stint at the Willard Gallery, the Karl Nierendorf Gallery, and after Betty Parsons cut her loose after three shows with few sales. Fine was included in the legendary Ninth Street Show in 1951, one of the nine women along with Mercedes Matter, Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning, Anne Ryan, and Sonia Sekula. Despite her talent and associations, Fine did not find the financial success or notoriety that many of the other Abstract Expressionists experienced. Fine opted for a stable teaching career at JANUARY / FEBRUARY

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Re-framing Perle Fine

Above: The Bather, r 1958, oil on canvas, 44 x 50 in.; Below: Of the Future, 1952, oil on canvas, 37 1⁄2 x 33 1⁄2 in.

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© A . E . ART WORKS . COURTESY BERRY CAMPBELL, NEW YORK .

Hofstra College and relocated to Springs, New York, on Long Island, pursuing a careful experimental methodology in painting very influenced by Mondrian’s practice. She would try different materials such as silver foil in her painting, as well as textured or even three-dimensional appliqués to the surface of her canvasses. Fine was never one to bend to the demands of the market. This also accounts for her widely varying styles—she was pursuing the interests of her practice. While Fine’s experiments with texture, material, and geometry seemed esoteric, they were ahead of their time, influencing a new generation of painters from Frank Stella and Larry Poons, Robert Rauschenberg to Ronnie Landfield. Fine’s process was one of trying and exhausting every possible pathway she could conceive in her painting. This came in part from Hofmann, who encouraged students to constantly re-frame their perspective—ripping up works, re-arranging, and re-composing them. While her process had happily led to an intersection with the painterly freedom of Abstract Expressionism, she was not an action painter and definitely not the kind of painter to cling to a popular style, as she was an artist who felt a powerful need to experiment with other possibilities. She shed unnecessary gesture and form, alighting on a hard-edge abstraction seen in her Cool series. A series of paintings in two colors, Cool paintings show Fine dissecting the figure/ground relationship and questioning perception, a line of discovery that informed her later work. In Cool Series No. 7, Square Shooter, ca. 1961–1962, formalistically, Fine owes a debt to Rothko (with whom she was close), but an even greater

one to Mondrian. Unlike Rothko, who trafficked in emotionally triggering assemblages of color, Fine is instead employing an optical game—first dividing the canvas in deep blue and bright red, and then inscribing a red square on the lower blue half. The implication is volume, even though there is nothing more than the simplest geometries. Her later optical works, which included three-dimensional appliqués, would also pursue this idea of implied space. Simpler and simpler, in her final series, Accordment, Fine was focusing on the all-over-ness of the canvas, creating fields of color and enigmatic mathematical gesture. Her Accordment series, beginning in the late ‘60s and carrying through to the end of the ‘70s, was the last series of paintings she created before succumbing to dementia. Her late practice intersected with the subtle mark-making grids of Agnes Martin. While Fine is channeling Mondrian again, she is not highlighting the grid or geometricity so much as creating a gentle and regular net or pattern of marks as a means of presenting color and further suppressing imagistic proclivities. In A Crossing Thought (1970), a serene chocolate background is divided into narrow channels by alternating pairs of precise red and white vertical line segments. Blue curved segments appear to wriggle across the brown expanse, behind these oppressive lines. Like a Mondrian, the colors flicker, while the space of the painting is simultaneously inscrutable and mesmerizing. Perle Fine, to a degree, was punished for her independence from a recognizable style-based market, as much as she was for being a

© A . E . ART WORKS . COURTESY BERRY CAMPBELL, NEW YORK .

Re-framing Perle Fine

woman. Fine could not join the Irascibles in their letter against the “American Painting Today” exhibition in 1950 at MoMA because she was actually included in the exhibition. This deflates the myth that Abstract Expressionism was purposely excluded from the show—it was merely Abstract Expressionism painted by men that was excluded. Always a known quantity, Fine was represented in several exhibitions at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, was well-reviewed by critics like Clement Greenberg, and saw her work added to important museum collections. But it wasn’t until she was featured in “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” curated by Gwen Chanzit at the Denver Art Museum in 2016, and then in “Inventing Downtown: Artists-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965,” curated by Melissa Rachleff in 2017 at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, that her rightful place as a founder of Abstract Expressionism and an influential voice in mid-century American painting was confirmed.

The Sea’s Throat (from Prescience Series), 1954, oil on canvas, 65 1⁄2 x 71 1⁄2 in.

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esteem in which they are held. As might be expected, however, like many materials formerly relegated to the less until recently, any ceramist considered of serious weight was male. acclaimed echelons of craft, at least in the United “Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan,” on States, has risen in esteem of late, as have other so-called minor view at the Art Institute of Chicago from December 16, 2023 arts. There are more exhibitions dedicated to it, and clay appears until June 3, 2024, persuasively argues the flip side of that story, more often as part of the repertoire of multidisciplinary artists featuring 36 outstanding Japanese ceramists representing several in the wake of increasing aesthetic diversification and hybridizagenerations of women, the works from the collection of Carol tion. Clay has its own storied history and other cultures have and Jeffrey Horvitz. long prized it, particularly in Asia where rare porcelains can comJoe Earle, an expert on contemporary Japanese art, in one of mand upwards of eight figures, as one tangible index of worth. the essays in the catalogue accompanying the In Japan, ceramic works have been designated By Lilly Wei exhibition for which he was the editor, traced National Treasures, another measure of the

Clay,

Above, left to right: Ogawa Machiko, Red Vessel, 2021; glazed stoneware, reduction-fired stoneware; 16 3⁄4 x 14 1⁄2 in.; Tanaka Yu, Fukuromono (Bag Work), 2018, glazed shigaraki stoneware, 24 1⁄2 × 21 1⁄2 × 14 1⁄2 in.

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ALL WO R KS FRO M TH E C ARO L & J EFFR E Y H O RVITZ CO LLEC TIO N O F CO NTEM P O R ARY JAPAN E S E C ER AM IC S .

Into the Spotlight: Contemporary Japanese Women Ceramists

ALL WORKS FROM THE CAROL & JEFFREY HORVITZ COLLECTION OF CONTEMPORARY JAPAN E S E C ER AM IC S .

Kishi Eiko, Compilation of Recollected Images, 2017, stoneware with colored-chamottee inlays, 23 1⁄2 × 26 × 7 1⁄2 in.

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radical clay

Koike Shoko, Shell, l 1995, porcelain with shiny white glaze, 18 × 20 × 22 1⁄2 in.

the trajectory of women ceramists in Japan from the 19th-century Buddhist nun Otagaki Rengetsu to early modernists Suwa Sozan II to Ono Hakuko, to the increasing number of women practitioners entering the field since the 1950s and 1960s. Studio ceramics flourished as they did so, in what seems to be an intertwined development. Japan boasts the greatest number of clay artists in the world whose art, not so incidentally, can sustain them, although women artists still struggle with the same problems that beleaguer women everywhere in balancing the demands of traditional female roles with those of careers, especially in more patriarchal societies, despite ostensible progress. Five decades or so ago, there were very few women in a field they now dominate. Among the reasons that they have been embraced might be their eagerness to innovate, untrammeled by the restrictions of a tradition that had excluded them and spurred by a willingness to play with the medium and push its boundaries, including scaling up to the dimensions of sculpture. And why shouldn’t studio ceramics be viewed—and assessed—as sculpture, as a three-dimensional art form? Many of these ceramists have studied and lived abroad (as Erle 70

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points out, Japanese women artists who are successful still often reside outside of Japan), absorbing new ideas and inventive techniques that have made their practice more current, more appealing to contemporary audiences. These artists are largely unfamiliar to American audiences, a continuing lack of recognition of the medium that, with a few exceptions, is not limited to Japanese ceramists, but that, too, is changing. In “Radical Clay,” the majority of the stoneware and porcelain works are abstract, but they run the gamut from the purely geometric and expressive to forms that imply the botanical as well as the human body, both as intimations and as replications of nature. They also vary in appearance and mood, from the austere to the sumptuous, the highly refined to the playful and comical, the beautiful and the grotesque. One of the great pleasures to be found in contemplating these objects is the sheer range of forms, imagery, and the even more remarkable array of textures; the surfaces in some instances are so alive they all but dance. They might assume the delicacy of plants or the enlaced filagree of pine trees. Some are rivetingly surrealistic, one a mix of fish, florals, butterflies, a human ear, open

ALL WO R KS FRO M TH E C ARO L & J EFFR E Y H O RVITZ CO LLEC TIO N O F CO NTEM P O R ARY JAPAN E S E C ER AM IC S .

Above, left to right: Aoki Katsuyo, Loom II, 2014, white porcelain, 23 1⁄4 × 23 1⁄8 × 16 1⁄2 in.;

ALL WORKS FROM THE CAROL & JEFFREY HORVITZ COLLECTION O F CO NTEM P O R ARY JAPAN E S E C ER AM I C S .

radical clay

Mishima Kimiyo, Untitled, d 2007, stoneware, 9 × 20 × 22 in.

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radical clay

base with crackular glaze and three opaque clear glass vertical insets, 18 × 16 3⁄4 × 17 in.

mouth, and a hand. Other works appear as if made from textiles of all kinds from the slippery to the rough. Still others look as if confected of spun sugar, or billows of mouthwatering meringue. The tactility of many of the works tempts you to touch them (but don’t), mimicking the gnarly bark of wood, the crumple of paper, the grittiness of soil, and much more, some of such astonishing intricacy and fragility that it is surprising that they haven’t splintered in the kiln, the invention and technical prowess of the artists impressive. Mishima Kimiyo (b. 1932), at 91, the oldest contributor in the show, is one of its most widely shown and revered, if also its quirkiest artist. Considered a sculptor and installation artist whose medium is clay, she lived through the traumatic bombings of World War II and its ruins, her artistic talent evident from the time she was 12 years old. A leading advocate of non-traditional ceramics, her work mimics the trash she collects to recycle, slyly calling her presciently environmentally sensitive work “garbage” to underscore her independence. She sometimes enlarges her objects from 72

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their original size, such as the 2007 work that replicates a carton used to carry Asahi beer that is crushed and stuffed with newspapers. Their text, in English and Japanese, is screen-printed onto the clay, the disposability of the objects paired with the accidental and intentional cracks in the ceramic that reinforce the work’s own vulnerability. It’s a trompe l’oeil of image and material, a double feint that fools the viewer into thinking it is an actual discard, and that it is made of paper and cardboard, not clay, Cinderellaed from junk into art. Koike Shoko (b. 1943) frequently depicts nature in her work, the first Japanese female ceramic artist of the post-war period to do so, and the first woman to graduate from the program in ceramics from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1962. She is internationally known for her hand-sculpted, labor-intensive shell vessels, but her ceramics might also recall the roll of ocean waves or the stratification of cliffs near the sea. Each work is created slowly; it can take up to six months to complete a single piece, her shell ribbing made by applying layer after layer of grainy (Shigaraki) clay fol-

ALL WO R KS FRO M TH E C ARO L & J EFFR E Y H O RVITZ CO LLEC TIO N O F CO NTEM P O R ARY JAPAN E S E C ER AM IC S .

Above: left to right: Yamaguchi Mio, Shura, 2020, glazed stoneware, 27 × 15 in.; Tashima Etsuko, Flower #10, 2013, yellow three-prong

ALL WO R KS FRO M TH E C ARO L & J EFFR E Y H O RVITZ CO LLEC TIO N O F CO NTEM P O R ARY JAPAN E S E C ER AM IC S .

radical clay

Tsuboi Asuka, Karaori “MO” ” (Chinese weaving), 2017, stoneware in gold and silver glaze, 25 × 19 × 15 in.

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radical clay

Tomoko, Liberation, 2022, glazed porcelain nerikomi.; Futamura Yoshimi, Big Birth, 2016, stoneware with liquid white slip, 24 3⁄8 × 25 5⁄8 × 24 in.

lowed by coats of milky white and ferrous glazes that she incises to create its complex, textured and creviced surfaces as seen in Kai no katachi (Shell), 1995. Her mother was a prominent fashion designer in the western style, giving her the idea that she could shape clay in a similar manner, creating the ridges for her shells “by making pleats or darts like clothing,” she said. Ogawa Machiko (b. 1946) was raised in Hokkaido in a family of artists; her early training took place in France (Paris) and Burkina Faso. She also claims nature as her source, although from a more panoramic, geologic vantage point. Akai utsuwa (Red Vessel), 2021, is an eye-catching, intense red evoking crusted layers of baked volcanic earth or an excavated artifact that has been cracked, the outer two casings split open to reveal its core. Another work is white, irregularly shaped, wavering between a handmade and found object, the limpid blue glaze that drips down one side like water appears to be still wet and is its most arresting feature. 74

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Shinsho o tsumu (Compilation of Recollected Images), 2017, is by Kishi Eiko (b. 1948), whose signature technique is the use of colored stone inlay (saiseki zogan), a method she pioneered. Kneading together more than a dozen multicolored clays, she overlays her severe geometric forms in a manner that, when cut, reveals their many hues. Here, the surface of its polygonal shape is crossed by slightly raised triangles and thin bands that are aligned like an unfolding fan. Her works can suggest fabric, such as the stiff brocade robes threaded with gold of No drama and are a nod to Kyoto’s famed textile industries. Aoki Katsuyo (b. 1972), who originally studied painting, soon switched to ceramics. Her work is unapologetically decorative, but with an undertow of melancholy, as if all that teeming fecundity, that bursting of life, will disappear, will decay and die—an echo of the pervasive theme of monono-aware (loosely translated as the pathos of transience), as in Loom II, 2014 made of glazed porcelain. It is a tour de force

ALL WO R KS FRO M TH E C ARO L & J EFFR E Y H O RVITZ CO LLEC TIO N O F CO NTEM P O R ARY JAPAN E S E C ER AM IC S .

Clockwise from below: Ogawa Machiko, Hashin Sure Utsuwa (Evocative Vessel), 1995, glazed stoneware with thick pale blue, 11 1⁄2 × 10 × 27 in.; Konno

ALL WO R KS FRO M TH E C ARO L & J EFFR E Y H O RVITZ CO LLEC TIO N O F CO NTEM P O R ARY JAPAN E S E C ER AM IC S .

radical clay

Clockwise from below: Hattori Makiko, Samayou (Wandering), 2012, porcelaineous stoneware.; Katsumata Chieko, Akoda (Pumpkin), 2015, stoneware with black and red matte glazes, 18 × 21 × 19 in.; Fujikasa Satoko, Seraphim, 2016, unglazed stoneware, 27 × 22 × 19 in.

technically, characterized by an ornamental impulse and fragility that are as exquisite as they are extravagant. Who knew that clay could be made to do that? The youngest of the group is Tanaka Yu (b. 1989). She is another artist who playfully, charmingly teases the eye, transforming the brittle, unyielding clay into what appears to be the softness of cloth. Her most sought-after series are her fukuromono (bag pieces), including one from 2018 with its swooping folds and cunning knot, and tsutsumimono (wrapped pieces), referring to the venerable Japanese custom of using furoshiki, cloths used to bundle possessions together for transport (a laudable custom we might emulate to reduce waste). She is also a gifted colorist, her distinctive goldenrod yellow glaze particularly admired. “Radical Clay” is an overdue salute to Japanese women ceramists (and women ceramists in general) whom Janice Katz, the associate curator of Japanese art at the Art Institute of Chicago and the exhibition’s lead organizer, credited with making some of the most innovative contributions to the medium in the past several decades. One reason given for their more imaginative output, both stylistically and technically, is because they were not welcomed in traditional studios, therefore not burdened by retardataire conventions. By working “not through but around the systems,” Katz explained, they have “elevated Japanese ceramics into a contemporary art form of great relevance.” JANUARY / FEBRUARY

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A new exhibition explores Mark Rothko’s works on paper, revaluing an unappreciated medium

By Ashley Busby 76

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N AT I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F A R T, WA S H I N G TO N , G I F T O F T H E M A R K R OT H K O F O U N DAT I O N , I N C . C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 2 3 K AT E R OT H K O P R I Z E L A N D C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O . ; P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N . C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 2 3 K AT E R OT H K O P R I Z E L A N D C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O .

Too often an artist becomes synonymous with that thing that cements their status, leaving a one-sided glimpse into an evolving career. For Mark Rothko (1903– 1970), his expressive color field paintings, towering in presence and moodily centered in pure washes of color, have come to define him. A new show at the National Gallery of Art, “Mark

Rothko: Paintings on Paper” (November 19, 2023– March 31, 2024), relishes his mature work from the last two decades of his career and also presents these as one chapter in a lifetime as a painter. With over 100 works on view, the exhibition showcases the NGA’s decadeslong project to catalogue the artist’s works on paper. An online resource (rothko.nga.gov) and a forthcoming cata-

Opposite: Untitled, c. 1944; watercolor, ink, and graphite on watercolor paper; sheet: 15 x 21 in. Above: Untitled, 1969, acrylic on wove paper; overall: 62 5⁄16 x 48 1⁄16 in.

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the power of paper

1933/1934, watercolor on construction paper; sheet: 11 x 8 133⁄16 in.

logue raisonné document almost 2,600 known works by the artist. Both will provide scholars and enthusiasts alike with unprecedented access to view and better understand the artist’s oeuvre. Museums and collectors often dismiss the value of works on paper. The term signals planning, and precedence is placed on the work that follows, typically on panel. Ephemeral by nature, paper does not have the same perceived value as a work on canvas. Over the course of his career, Rothko sketched and made preparatory studies in media such as graphite and ink. However, the NGA exhibition tracks four key periods when Rothko produced a large number of paintings on paper: the 1930s, 194449, 1958-59 and 1967-69. At such times, 78

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Rothko utilized watercolor, oils, and eventually acrylics to create fully realized works on paper. For Rothko, in the words of NGA curators, “paintings were paintings,” and he made no clear delineation or valuation of the work dependent on his choice of support. Born in present-day Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, Rothko’s family immigrated to the United States in 1913, eventually settling in Portland, Oregon. A voracious reader with a high academic acumen, Rothko showed little interest in art during his early life. In 1921, he attended Yale on full scholarship, sampling courses, from biology to philosophy, with the vague intention of a career in engineering or law. Despite his love of learning, experiences

N AT I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F A R T, WA S H I N G TO N , G I F T O F T H E M A R K R OT H K O F O U N DAT I O N , I N C . C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 2 3 K AT E R OT H K O P R I Z E L A N D C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O .

Above: Untitled, d c. 1946, watercolor and ink on watercolor paper; sheet: 22 3/4 x 31 5/16 in. Below: Untitled (seated woman in striped blouse),

P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N . C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 2 3 K AT E R OT H K O P R I Z E L A N D C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O .

the power of paper

Untitled, d 1958, oil on watercolor paper mounted on hardboard; sheet: 23 133⁄16 x 18 133⁄16 in.

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the power of paper

with antisemitism, financial struggles, and a lack of social cachet left him at the bottom of the university caste system. At the end of his first year, Rothko lost the scholarship that had made enrollment possible. Before the end of his second year, he dropped out and moved to New York with no plan concerning how to proceed. In late 1923, on a whim, Rothko attended a life drawing class with a friend enrolled at the Art Students League of New York. In that moment everything changed, and he dedicated himself to training as an artist. He pored over the city’s museum collections, in addition to taking classes with Arshile Gorky at the New School and Max Weber at the Art Students League. By the early 1930s, Rothko was exhibiting broadly expressionistic landscapes and figure studies in group shows at the city’s Contemporary Arts Gallery and had built friendships with other future Abstract Expressionists, such as Adolph Gottlieb. Notably, Rothko’s first solo exhibition in 1933 at the Museum of Art, Portland, featured mostly works on paper including water80

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color landscapes realized on cheap linen writing paper. While his selection of materials was almost certainly driven by his meager finances, Rothko felt comfortable exhibiting such work despite his lack of fine materials. Other works from this period were executed on low-grade construction paper. From 1929 to 1946, Rothko taught children’s art classes at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center. He often utilized the same craft paper as his students. According to exhibition curators, Rothko’s use of the cheap paper was also encouraged by Milton Avery, with whom Rothko began a long friendship in the 1930s. Rothko’s work from these years shows traces of Avery’s simplification of the figure to flat planes of color. Utilizing watercolors and painting wet on wet, compositions such as Untitled (seated woman in striped blouse), from 1933/1934, document Rothko’s early experiments with abstracted form and the play and manipulation of pigment. You can observe the ways in which the pigment feathers above the neckline of the woman’s

N AT I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F A R T, WA S H I N G TO N , G I F T O F T H E M A R K R OT H K O F O U N DAT I O N , I N C . C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 2 3 K AT E R OT H K O P R I Z E L A N D C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O .

Untitled (seated figure in interior), c. 1938, watercolor on construction paper; sheet: 10 1⁄4 x 12 1⁄8 in.

W H I T N E Y M U S E U M O F A M E R I C A N A R T, N E W YO R K , P U R C H A S E , 4 6 . 1 2 . C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 2 3 K AT E R OT H K O P R I Z E L A N D C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O . D I G I TA L I M A G E W H I T N E Y M U S E U M O F A M E R I C A N A R T/ L I C E N S E D B Y S C A L A /A R T R E S O U R C E , N Y.

the power of paper

Baptismal Scene, 1945; watercolor, ink, and graphite on watercolor paper; sheet: 20 1⁄2 x 14 1⁄2 in.

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the power of paper

watercolor paper mounted on hardboard; overall: 23 7⁄8 x 18 in.

blouse, a sort of controlled accident caused by the interaction of the watercolor medium with the pulpy surface of the paper. Also apparent is Rothko’s burgeoning move toward abstraction. He defines the planes of the woman’s face using muddy brown and mauve to render shadow and yellow to highlight across an otherwise creamy pallor. Stains of intense blue-green and burgundy suggest rather than define her lips and eyes. Even in this figural work, we see echoes of Rothko’s later approach to color and abstraction. During the early 1930s, critics also recognized Rothko’s affinity for paper. A writer for The New York Times noted that the artists’ watercolors were “freest and most successful.” Another critic for The New York Sun commented that his watercolor landscapes “really score” while dismissing his oil on canvas offerings, work that a New York Evening Post critic described as “dry and brittle.” Perhaps taking this as a challenge to find a way to excel with works on canvas, Rothko left behind watercolor and focused his efforts on oils. He also stopped exhibiting the works on paper for almost a decade. The NGA exhibition tracks a second period of intense production and exhibition of watercolor paintings on paper between 1944 82

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and 1949. Such work was widely exhibited and critically praised, including a solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1945. When Rothko submitted Baptismal Scene (1945) for inclusion in the Whitney’s 1946 annual contemporary exhibition, the institution acquired the work, his first to be included in a museum collection. Work from the late 1940s verged ever closer toward total abstraction. Rothko’s compositions, rendered in pale, almost ghostly hues, emulated the style of biomorphic Surrealist painters, such as Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy. He would have likely first encountered their work at Alfred Barr’s 1936 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at the Museum of Modern Art. Tanguy was also among the many Surrealist artists that immigrated to New York during World War II and with whom Rothko and other New York School painters connected during the early 1940s. In Untitled (c. 1944), Rothko maintains a connection to his early preference for landscape. Soft washes of blues and gray greens create the visual impression of a thin strip of ground plane and a vast, mottled sky. Populating the space, at once expansive and exceedingly flat, he includes a new language of form and shape

C O L L E C T I O N O F C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O . C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 2 3 K AT E R OT H K O P R I Z E L A N D C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O . ; N AT I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F A R T, WA S H I N G TO N , G I F T O F T H E M A R K R OT H K O F O U N DAT I O N , I N C . C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 2 3 K AT E R OT H K O P R I Z E L A N D C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O .

Left: Untitled, d c. 1949, oil and watercolor on watercolor paper; sheet: 39 3⁄4 x 26 1⁄8 in. Right: Untitled, d 1968, oil and watercolor on

N AT I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F A R T, WA S H I N G TO N , G I F T O F T H E M A R K R OT H K O F O U N DAT I O N , I N C . C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 2 3 K AT E R OT H K O P R I Z E L A N D C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O .

the power of paper

The Bathers, 1934, watercolor on construction paper; sheet: 12 1⁄4 x 15 in.

rendered in quick painterly strokes of watercolor, ink, and graphite. This new iconography suggests the biological, almost like an abstracted vision of the microscopic or unicellular. Such a tendency would have certainly been drawn from the artist’s natural science coursework during his time at Yale. This move away from identifiable subject matter was also entrenched in the collective terror that pervaded the world during the war. Atrocities on the battlefield, a growing awareness of the horrors of the holocaust, and fears surrounding the potential development of an atomic bomb shattered Rothko’s perception of the world. The artist felt powerless to depict such an appalling reality. Instead, he depicts a kind of primal space of origin, perhaps the envisioned terrain of what might remain in the wake of an atomic event. Drawing both on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious, Rothko believed his abstracted forms and expressive color could

communicate a sense of universal human tragedy. By 1948, Rothko left behind the biomorphic. We see such a shift in Untitled (c. 1948). Gone are the symbolic shapes rendered in ink and graphite. Instead, Rothko returned to watercolor as his sole medium and selected a larger (40 x 27 1/16 inch) paper support. In its play with space, color, and scale, the work echoes contemporary oil on canvas compositions that critics termed his “multiforms,” a sort of stepping stone toward the later color field work. At the end of the decade, Rothko would again turn away from works on paper and focus his output on oil on canvas. Between 1949 and his death in 1970, the artist would only return to paintings on paper in two short bursts of exploration at the end of the 1950s and again at the end of the 1960s. Rothko’s first return to paper coincided with a 1958 commission for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. NGA curators argue that paintings on paper completed durJANUARY / FEBRUARY

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the power of paper

sheet: 40 x 27 1⁄16 in. Right: Omen, 1946, watercolor and ink on watercolor paper; sheet: 39 ⁄8 x 25 ⁄8 in. 1

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ing the commission should not be read as one-to-one preparatory studies but rather as parallel exploration. Subsequent work from 1959 continued to investigate expressive space and color. Rothko often capitalized on his early mastery of watercolor, exploring oil’s potential to bleed into and across the paper, such as the intense blue and red tones in Untitled (1959). In 1968, during Rothko’s recovery from an aortic dissection that vastly compromised his health, doctors forbade the artist from working at large scale. Given his physical limitations, he produced small works on paper, which document his recovery and his insistence on continuing to paint. That same year, Rothko prepared his will, naming the new Mark Rothko Foundation as primary beneficiary of the estate. An inventory of work, created as a part of this process, made no distinction between paintings on paper or canvas, further emphasizing the perceived value of the works on paper. In 1969, one year before his death, Rothko worked almost solely 84

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on paper completing 120 acrylic paintings. By then ignoring his physical limitations, his scale again swelled with some works as large as 84 x 60 inches—comparable to his oil on canvas work from the previous two decades. He continued to produce work on paper until just before his death by suicide in February 1970. While Rothko was often critically panned for producing a body of work that might be read as repetitive, the artist dismissed this notion. His work was never simply a formal exercise. His central goal was to evoke emotion, once arguing that anyone solely interested in his work’s color interactions had “miss(ed) the point.” Over the course of 1969, Rothko explored multiple color palettes. Soft, shimmering pastels exist in a space of emotional tension, at times quietly sad or deeply hopeful. Work featuring black, gray, and brown has too often been misread as a tragic foreshadowing of his death; however, on closer inspection, the work—while somber—is also startlingly frank. The paintings encourage a kind of meditative calm and create space for spiritual reflection. Through it all, whether on paper or canvas, whether figural, abstracted, or somewhere in between, Rothko makes us feel.

N AT I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F A R T, WA S H I N G TO N , G I F T O F T H E M A R K R OT H K O F O U N DAT I O N , I N C . C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 2 3 K AT E R OT H K O P R I Z E L A N D C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O . ; T H E U L L A A N D H E I N E R P I E T Z S C H C O L L E C T I O N , B E R L I N . C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 2 3 K AT E R OT H K O P R I Z E L A N D C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O .

Above: Untitled, d c. 1948, watercolor on watercolor paper;

N AT I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F A R T, WA S H I N G TO N , G I F T O F T H E M A R K R OT H K O F O U N DAT I O N , I N C . C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 2 3 K AT E R OT H K O P R I Z E L A N D C H R I S TO P H E R R OT H K O .

the power of paper

Untitled, d 1969, acrylic and ink on wove paper; sheet: 50 x 42 1⁄8 in.

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record-breaker

Robert Rauschenberg’s Vitamin (1960/1968)

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COU RTESY SOTHEBY ’ S NEW YORK

AMERICAN artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) has long been considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, and his reputation only seems to be growing. Most recently, Rauschenberg’s Vitamin, executed in 1960 and 1968, sold for $3. 5 million, breaking a record for a design on paper by the artist, whose early work is considered a forerunner of the Pop Art movement. The record breaker is a quintessential example of his “combines,” in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg’s combines signaled an art revolution. He worked and combined various mediums, from drawing and painting to photography and sculpture, and thus redefined traditional art boundaries, developing a new means of artistic expression. His three-dimensional works, such as Vitamin, demonstrate how Rauschenberg reinvented the terms by which art was made and considered. “The present work, titled after the nutrient essential to living organisms, exemplifies the artist’s desire to work in the gap between art and life as it juxtaposes vibrant green gestural painting and everyday materials, including a commercially branded cardboard box, to evoke the movement and changeability of life,” writes Paul Schimmel in his essay “Autobiography and Self-Portraiture in Rauschenberg’s Combines.” The late art patron and famed collector Emily Fisher Landau acquired Vitamin from the artist himself in 1982; it was just one of the numerous important works acquired by Landau to hit Sotheby’s auction block in early November. Bringing in a record $424.7 million, her trove of personal artistic treasures became the most valuable collection devoted to a woman collector to make it to auction.

“Emily Fisher Landau’s prescient and unerring eye allowed us to shine a spotlight tonight onto the great artists who now form the bedrock of 20 th-century art history,” said Brooke Lampley, Global Chairman and Head of Global Fine Art at Sotheby’s, at the time of the auction.

Offered by: Sotheby’s New York, November 8, 2023 Sold for: $3.5 million

Landscape Sonata, oil on canas, 1986, 36 x 24in.

David Rubinfeld M.D. Paintings and Drawings (IGIQFIVĀþĀāERH.ERYEV]ĀþĀĂ

The Loft Art Gallery Wharton Public Library 15 South Main St. • Wharton, New Jeresy, 07885 973-366-8022 • [email protected]