(The Lack of) Women Artists at MoMA: Saltz on FB, Reprinted on Winkleman

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The indefatigable New York and New York critic, Jerry Saltz , is leading a spirited discussion of gender inequality at MoMA. Starting point--for this leg of the discussion, at least--is the report on his Face Book page of his meeting with Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the museum. (Not sure if it's kosher to link to FB this way?)

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Comrades in struggle: The Guerrilla Girls, left; Saltz

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A snippet: "Temkin stated that work by women artists has been rotated into the collection over the course of the last two years, and that the FB protestors and I were not taking this into account. I acknowledged this but said that even with these substitutions and changes the percentage of women artists on these floors did not rise, and that these adjustments weren’t enough. (If you count the works of art, rather than artists, the figure drops to four percent women.) "

With Saltz's permission, Edward Winkleman has reprinted the critic's report.

This is a discussion worth following, wherever you follow it. If you're on FB, I think you can jump in to comment.

Sol LeWitt at MoMA

One of three walls of the installation

I haven't yet driven up to the big Sol LeWitt show at Mass MoCA, but there's plenty of time for that. It's on for another 24.5 years. Instead, I popped into the LeWitt installation at MoMA, which continues only until June 1.

Wall Drawing #260 is in an open space on the fourth floor, a big modernist box with wall-to-wall windows overlooking the sculpture garden. The other three walls, all broken by doorways, nevertheless offer high and broad expanses for the work, which is in the museum's collection.

I like this chalk-on-painted-wall piece, all arcs and curvy lines bisected or otherwise divided by angles and staccato lines. There's a logical progression to how the lines intersect, but I'm an artist, not a mathemetician, so I'm less concerned with the precise peregrination of the line, only that it moves and morphs as your eyes travel from wall to wall. The linear geometric composition suggests nothing so much as choreographic notation--a formal expression of the human activity in the enclosed space as people pass into, around and through it.

With your back to the window, you turn to the left wall, which contains a legend for the visual logic of the work

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Below: Turning slightly, you see part of the other two walls

Below that: The full expanse of the wall at right

A full expanse of wall
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Below: a detail of the chalk line


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Homage to the Square . . . .

El Lissitzky, Of Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale in Six Constructions, one page of an illustrated book with seven letterpress illustration, 1922, page 10 15/16 x 8 7/8

Here's one last look at the Geo/Metric show. As you might expect in a show on geometric abstraction, the square was a leitmotif that floated throughout the galleries (the rectilinear version of "follow the bouncing ball"). This is a strictly subjective selection.

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Josef Albers, two from Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers, 1962, each 16 1/2 x 16 1/2.

Above: Full; below: Tenuous

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Ellsworth Kelly, Purple and Orange from the series Line Form Color, 1951, gouache on paper, 7 1/2 x 8 inches

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Mary Heilmann, Davis Sliding Square, 1978, synthetic polymer paint on paper, 29 7/8 x 22 1/2. I love how the two Jo Baer gouaches are reflected in this work

OK, I have really finished with this series now. I'm moving on to Louise Bourgeois in the next post.

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Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 2

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Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 1 

Geo/Metric at MoMa, Part 3  

Geo/Metric at MoMa, Part 4 

The entrance to Gallery 2. A Bridget Riley print is flanked by a grid of nine ink-on-paper works by Tony Smith, and a gouache-on-paper drawing by Jo Baer. Most of the work in this gallery is from the Fifties and Sixties

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If my first post reads more like a travelogue of the gallery than a discussion of the work, it’s because I really don’t know how to talk about that early-in-the-last-century work.  Here in the second gallery, my art history is a bit better. This is more contemporary work—though by “contemporary” we’re talking late Fifties and Sixties. Work in black and white is installed in the four corners. The dialog between and among these works, mediated by everything else in the gallery, is animated. You join in visually, the way you might join a conversation at a cocktail party, a bit here, a bit there. Because the space is small—and because this unsung show is almost deserted—it is easy to maneuver, and there are many such conversations to join.

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Bridget Riley. Untitled (Fragment 1) from a series of seven screenprints on Perspex, 1965

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So let’s enter the gallery. The optically invigorating screenprint on Perspex (that’s plexiglass to you and me) by Bridget Riley is crisp and fresh, though it dates from 1965. Riley has mellowed in recent years but I remain enamored of the painter who muscled her way into the art scene of the Sixties with her retinally explosive Op paintings. This print, all aggressive angles and vigorous energy, is a fitting metaphor for what it must have taken for a young woman to create a place for herself back then. Plus it’s fabulous.

Over your left shoulder is a black and white work by Myron Stout, one of the great albeit not-so-well-known painters of modernist geometry (or is it geometric modernism?). You’ll see it in a bit as we swing around the gallery. Visible to your left is a wall of gouache and ink works by Ellsworth Kelly. I’m lukewarm about Kelly’s mature work, but these early paintings and collages I love. Their small size and wonderful color, and Kelly's exploration of related shapes and hues, and the dialog between the color and the black and white is still snappy after all these years.

Ellsworth Kelly. Line Form Color, 1951, ink on paper (the black and white work) and colored and pasted colored paper on colored paper. Kelly described the works--from a group of 40 that he created--as "an alphabet of plastic pictorial elements."
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Below: Tony Smith, 4/26/61 (a suite of nine drawings), 1961, ink on paper. (Beyond the wall is a peek at one of a series of small works by Martin Creed in the next gallery)

The gridded installation format continues with the ink-on-paper works of Tony Smith. Is it me or do the photographs of Berndt and Hilla Becher come to mind? Certainly it’s the installation, but it’s also the architectural quality of the images, the black and white, and the slight variations, each worthy of close viewing, within the theme.

A doorway to the large third gallery comes next, but we’re going to continue our tour around Gallery 2 and stop at the two gems by Jo Baer, both gouache on paper. You see the small one on the right when you enter the gallery; it and a partial view of the Smiths flank Riley’s print in a pas de trois of angular black and white.

Up close you can appreciate the energy of the lines in Baer's small work, brushed on confidently with a free hand—and that red line, not quite tentative, yet not fully assertive, traverses the length of the inside space just under the defining upper edge. There’s just the tiniest bit of space between the light red line and the bolder black swipe above it. Then you notice its counterpart at the bottom of the frame. It sits atop the black line there. Is it resting or lying in wait? What energy and equipoise contained in such a tiny space! (See Carol Diehl's review in AiA of what Baer has been up to more recently.)

Two by Jo Baer, both untitled, from 1965 and 1963, gouache on paper. ( Peeking into Gallery 3, we see Gabriel Orozco's digital print wallpaper)

Below, the untitled work from 1963, 5.5 x 7 inches sans frame

Continuing around, we see works by the Brazilians Helio Oiticica, most gouache on board, that are beauties of modernist geometry, and Lygia Clark, whose two black-and-white collages are placed in the diagonally opposite corner to the Tony Smiths and opposite the Jo Baers. The balance of content and placement is this exhibition is staggeringly good!

Work in gouache on board from 1958 and 1959 by Helio Oiticica, above
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Below, more by Oiticica and by Lygia Clark in cut and pasted paper on paper. (To orient you: just to the right of the Clarks is the entrance to this gallery)

Now we back ourselves almost into Gallery 3 so that we can take in the foreground and background of this space. On the wall behind the Bridget Riley print is this gouache-on-paper painting by Mary Heilmann, below. Look at the dialog of blues between it and the Oiticica on the left. Pulling back farther, you see the Myron Stout drawing which had not been visible as we entered. The Stout work faces the Tony Smith grid; the exchange of positive and negative planes and spaces between these two installations is so compelling that you might be at a tennis game for the amount of head swinging you do. Through the doorway into Gallery 1 you can see the Hans Arp collage which I showed in the previous post.

Mary Heilmann, above and below, Davis Sliding Square, 1978, synthetic polymer paint on paper, 29 7/8 x 22 1/2
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Above, work by Oiticica is to the left of Heilmann's painting. Below, Myron Stout's choarcoal and pastel drawing is visible to the right, and beyond that, a collage by Hans Arp in Gallery 1

Heilmann is a personal favorite. I find her particular brand of geometry and color both rigorous and sensuous. Neither a minimalist nor a materialist (or perhaps a little of both), she knows exactly how much to put into every painting—or maybe exactly how much to leave out. This work, from 1978, is more recent than most of the other work in the room. Presumably that’s because it leads you into the large Gallery 3, the site of the newest work in the exhibition.

Heilmann's work faces this view of Gallery 3, which is where we’re going in the next post.

Next stop: Gallery 3

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Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 1

Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 2

Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 3

Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 4

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If you’re in New York this week and you have even a passing interest in geometry, get over to the new work-on-paper galleries on the second floor at MoMA to see Geo/Metric, up through the 18th. Travel is not in your plans? Well, get comfortable here in front of the monitor, as I have a lot of images to show you. The work in this show is from the MoMA collection, which means visitors were free to photograph it. I did, from every conceivable angle. The installation is beautifully thought out, so every angle permits visual connections between and among the works.

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A hallway on the second floor at MoMA leading to Geo/Metric. This work is from the untitled Forms Derived From a Cube, by Sol Lewitt, from a portfolio of etchings and aquatint

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The wall text describes the show as “an informal survey of the impulse toward geometric abstraction in visual art over the past century.” It’s a worthy premise represented by a wonderful selection of work. A wide-ranging show in four large galleries, it begins with the Cubists and Suprematists in the early 1900s; continues on to Minimalism, Op and hard-edge abstraction; and ends with new work by younger artists like Mark Grotjahn and Olaf Nicolai.

Starr Figura, the associate curator of prints and illustrated books, and Kathleen Curry, assistant curator for research and collections, are to be commended. Not only is the show beautifully selected, it’s installed in a way that from any vantage point you may see something of the historical range on exhibition. Moreover, they did not exclude the contributions of women artists to this genre. Sophie Taeuber Arp, Hannah Hoch and Lyubov Popova are in the first gallery; Bridget Riley, whose acute-angled print on plexiglass opens the second gallery, is followed with work by Jo Baer, Lygia Clark, Mary Heilmann, Agnes Martin and Dorothea Rockburne.

If you follow this blog, you know that color and abstract geometric work are two elements I seek out, so this exhibition is a little slice of heaven.

To orient you to the space as I take you around, know that the galleries for this exhibition are laid out geometrically. Envision a square divided in thirds horizontally. The bottom third is Gallery 1, where you enter (the two images below). The top third is Gallery 3. The middle third is divided in half vertically into the smaller Galleries 2 and 4. Galleries 1, 2 and 4 are painted light gray; the large gallery 3 is creamy white. Got that?

Here we are in Gallery 1. Above: The entrance to the exhibition is behind us, and we’re looking toward the right. (Pay no attention to the Albers prints; they’re in Gallery 4 and we’ll get to them later.) Arranged around the wall to the right of the Albers prints are works by Kandinsky, Malevich and Alexandr Vesnin

.Below, the view continues on the far wall with work by El Lissitsky and, on the right wall, Moholy-Nagy. I particularly like the drawings by Malevich and the lithos by Moholy Nagy. In the vitrine are small works by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Vasilii Kamenskii

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Two from Kazemir Malevich, above: Suprematist Elements: Squares, 1923, pencil on paper, 19 3/4 x 14 1/4; and Suprematist Element: Circle, 1923, pencil on paper, 18 1/2 by 14 3/8

Below: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Untitled from Konstruktionen, 1923, lithograph, 23 9/16 x 17 5/6 inches. This is one from a portfolio of six lithographs

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Turning to the left side of the room there’s work by Lyubov Popova and Frantisek Kupka. I find the installation of these works jarring. The placement of the sixth Popova on the wall above the line of five seems like an afterthought, and I would have liked a more formal installation of the Kupka works, in keeping with the rest of the show. (Pay no attention to the glimpse of Ellsworth Kelly gouaches in Gallery 2; we’ll get to them in the next post.)

On the wall at left, gouache and ink paintings on paper by Frantisek Kupka from 1912. On the wall at right, linoleum block prints with gouache and watercolor by Lyubov Popova. (I never heard of them either, but it was interesting to see the work in the context of this exhibition.)

Below, a work from Popova's Untitled from Six Prints, 1916-1917,13.5 by 10.25. This image from MoMA's feature on the artist

The wall on which the Kupkas are hung is a divider. (Each of the four galleries has a divider, however those in the other galleries are placed in the geographic center, whereas this one is placed so that it creates a vestibule for the second entrance to the exhibition. We'll get behind the wall in a moment.) To the left of the Kupka wall are small works by Jean (Hans) Arp, Hannah Hoch and Sophie Taeuber Arp.

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Left: Jean (Hans) Arp, Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance), 1916-17, no size given but you can see the scale in the installation above

Right: Sophie Taeuber Arp, Echelonnement Desaxe, 1934, gouache on paper, 13 7/8 x 10 5/8. Both images from the MoMA website

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Mondrian before the boogie woogie: Pier and Ocean 5 (Sea and Starry Sky, 1915, charcoal and watercolor on paper, 34 5/8 x 44 inches

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On the other side of the Kupka wall is the Mondrian. I love the intersecting verticals and horizontals in an oval field, the whole contained with the horizontal rectangle of the frame placed against the larger vertical rectangle of the wall.

Behind your left shoulder as you look at the Mondrian are a collage each by Braque and Picasso, continuing their eternal conversation about Cubism. To the right of the Picasso is the entrance to Gallery 2, which is where we’re going in the next post.

Above: Georges Braque, Guitar, 1913, cut and pasted printed and painted paper, charcoal, pencil and gouache on gessoed canvas, 39 1/4 x 25 5/8 inches. Right, Pablo Picasso, Guitar, cut and pasted paper and printed paper, charcoal, ink and chalk on colored paper on board, 26 1/8 x 19 1/2 inches

Below: The entrance to Gallery 2, with a screenprint on plexiglass by Bridget Riley. This is where we'll begin next time

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(Un)Familiar Territory: Martin Puryear at MoMA

Click here for FAIR FACTOR: Report from Miami

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Atrium view of Martin Puryear at MoMA: Desire, 1981, with Ladder for Booker T. Washington in the background

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Below: view of the sixth-floor installation at MoMA

Years ago, I had a dream in which I took an elevator to the top floor of a tall building. When the elevator opened, it was into a small square room with floor-to-ceiling windows on all four sides looking out to a pitch-black night dotted here and there with lights. Inside the room there were several raised pools of water that flowed into other pools, everything connected and flowing, serene and quiet. Upon waking, I recognized that the dream was a gift from my unconscious, a tranquil vessel in which to immerse myself whenever the waking world presses too crazily or stressfully against me.

I’m telling you this because walking into the sixth floor of MoMA during the Martin Puryear exhibition I experienced something similar. Instead of walking into my own personal dream, however, I felt as if I had just entered the collective unconscious of humanity. The forms were more or less recognizable—nests, wheels, vessels, tools, even animals and humans—and the materials, mostly vines and wood, were natural and familiar, but the formal relationships were unusual, dreamlike, otherworldly. I knew this place, but I didn't. Each seemingly recognizable object yielded something completely new and unknown. And the experience of being among the sculptures was reassuring, even if the work tugged uncomfortably from time to time at odd little strings in the unconscious.

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.Above left and right: Brunhilde, 1998-2000, and Old Mole, 1985

.Below: Deadeye, 2002

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In his blog In it For Life, my buddy Tim McFarlane describes his experience of the exhibition as "tantalizingly close to what we know in our world but just different enough to exist on another plane altogether." Yes, yes. I’m not alone in my perceptions.

I’d like to think that anyone from any culture could walk into that room and have a response similar to the ones Tim and I had. The work, after all, comes from an artist who has lived a fully engaged life on different parts of the planet and who, with academic training and a contemporary sensibility, connects to the preindustrial, even the tribal, with his handmade sculpture. His is craft grafted to art (or vice versa), the hand everywhere present, intuition stitched seamlessly to the idea of use, the unconscious made tangible.

Here are Puryear's own words from 2007 which appeared on a wall text in the atrium:

"I value the referential quality of art, the fact that a work can allude to things or states of being without in any way representing them. The ideas that give rise to a work can be quite diffuse, so I would describe my usual working process as a kind of distillation--trying to make coherence out of things that can seem contradictory. But coherence is not the same as resolution. The most interesting art for me retains a flickering quality, where opposed ideas can be held in tense coexistence."

are from the atrium, where photographhy was pe

Atrium view of Martin Puryear. The big wheel of Desire is in the foreground. And I love the poetry of how a sliver of Matisse's Danse is visible in the window above the work. (I never liked this atrium until now.)

Above and below: Ladder for Booker T. Washington. Specific information about each work is on the MoMa website, link at bottom

When you see this exhibition, certainly in person but even in pictures, it's clear that no recently minted 25-year-old MFA recipient could have created work with as much refined vision and raw power. These sculptures issue not from youth and accademia but from a lifetime of experience, where they were cultivated and constructed. So props to artists at midcareer, whether they're as celebrated as Puryear or appreciated by only a devoted few.

Happy New Year--and success to artists all.

Click onto the MoMA site for more images and excerpts from the catalog essays.

Click here for Jame Kalm's guerrilla video of the Puryear show (via Shark Forum)

Serra on the Surface: Looking at the Sculpture with a Painter’s Eye

Click here for The Artist as Curator, updated with pictures and review

In my previous post, Serra and Stella: Big Boys in Big Spaces, I talked about walking around and through the massive works. You can talk about the sculptures in formal terms: the sinuousness of their line opposed to the muscularity of the material; and of the torques, which define the exterior and interior spaces, sometimes simultaneously, with a different shape at the bottom than at the top.

A painterly surface and....color!

Exterior view of Intersection 2, in the MoMA courtyard. To me, the work is as much painting as sculpture

You can also talk about the achievement of the artist in mathematically wresting the material into shape so that the huge machines used in shipbuilding could roll and forge the metal to deliver the work physically.

Another view of Intersection 2 showing three of the four slabs that make up the work, each with a distinct surface

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I've already talked about my physical experience, which had me pleasantly disoriented, lightheaded and, to be honest, a little fearful. Gravity is anchoring these bent and twisted slabs; couldn't it also pull them down? But there is no experiencing this work if you don't get past that--so, er, que sera, sera; you take a breath, set aside what may or may not be an irrational fear, and enter the work. My emotional experience of the work was that these muscular slabs of metal were almost maternal in the way they enveloped the body.

And how can you not make the connection between iron oxide and blood? Indeed, in some places the iron has bled onto the marble of the courtyard, so that when the sculptures are removed, a physical trace of their presence will remain permanently. (I hope the museum won’t replace the pavement.) So the work is all very First Chakra and earth centered.

Above: A view from inside Intersection 2. This stretch of slab is particularly topographic, so I composed the detail shots (three shown below) to suggest maps of uncharted territory

In this post I want to talk about the surface. I’ve seen several Serra installations at Gagosian and the permanent installation of the big basin-like shapes at Dia Beacon, but indoor lighting—including the glaring overhead illumination at MoMA—does not prepare you for the experience of seeing his work out of doors in full daylight. The mottled and scratched surface texture, always interesting, reveals itself in daylight to be something more like skin: thick here, thin there, pocked, shiny, flaky, smooth. Or skins, plural: human, animal, mammalian, amphibian. Or planetary: a sandy strand, a lunar crust, a Martian landscape. There are red-orange tracks formed by liquid (rain?), and deep gouges, perhaps wrought in installation. Wherever the treated surface of the metal is rent, there is rust—pits, scars, scabs, craters.
Still inside Intersection 2, above, this stretch of metal is pitted, scabbed, scarred. Two details are below
Then there is color. The vibrant spectrum of rust is richly satisfying, from yellow-orange through coral (!) to ocher and brick red. But the surprise--the shock, really--is in the other hues: lavender, pale pink, gray-blue, even blue-green. I’ve used the parable of the blind men and the elephant before in describing the experience of Basel Miami and its satellite fairs, but it’s more apt here. Depending on where you (visually) touch these mammoths, you will perceive a different creature.

This stretch of Intersection 2 is marked by a dramatic counterpoint of granulated rust and a smooth gray-blue surface where the surface treatment had not been broken. Along the bottom curve of the slab you can see where the rust has bled into the marble pavement.What I found surprising was the particularly lovely coloration--note the light blue, below-- and the delicate scrim traced by the path of bleeding metal. Like watercolors, no? The brick hue and matte surface of Torqued Ellipse IV, the second sculpture in the garden, held a different surprise when you passed through the spiral slot. . . . . . an inner surface whose cascading waterfall of color might have come from the brush of Pat Steir. . .

. . . and calligraphic markings as light as anything you might see on rice paper.

What I haven't read anywhere is how much of this stupefylingly beautiful surface patination is the result of planning. Surely there was a decision to rupture the weatherproof coating. So are we seeing unintended consequences or simply the painterly passage of time? What will the work look like a decade from now? A century from now?