Paper: Pressed, Stained, Slashed, Folded at MoMA, Part 1

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The works-on-paper gallery on the second floor of the Museum of Modern Art is one of the museum's best-kept secrets. Not that it's hidden or that people don't go into it, but compared to the hordes that visit the higher-profile spaces, this is a quiet oasis in which to contemplate work that is typically quieter and smaller than elsewhere in the building.

Above: Entrance to the exhibition

The exhibitions, often organized by Starr Figura, a curator in the Prints and Drawings department, are always good. (A while back I did a four-part report on Geo/Metric, another impressive exhibition curated by Figura, with Kathleen Curry, and which included the Dorothea Rockburne folded prints that are in this show. ) Because all the work is in the museum's collection, photography is allowed.

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This time the exhibition looks at the materiality of paper. The title spells out the curatorial parameters: Paper: Pressed, Stained, Slashed, Folded. Well, that's not exactly true; it's also ripped, pinned, crumpled, punched, printed, stitched, embedded and handmade. But you get the picture. There are papier mache cylinders by Eva Hesse, a mid-size graphite assemblage by Nancy Rubins that's pushpinned to the wall, the surprise of a crumpled sheet of ink-stained paper by Claes Oldenburg, and a whole lot more. Much of the work is from the 1960s and 70s, so I suppose it officially qualifies as "art history."

The exhibition is up until June 22, so you have time to see it if you're so inclined. If you can't, an interactive flash site shows you more work than I can show you here, often with closeups but without the installation shots. (By the way, am I the only person who hates MoMA's new website? I find it to have entirely too much Flash--too many bells, whistles, graphics, and boxes, changing images, drop-downs and pop-ups.)

Let's start in the anteroom with Robert Rauschenberg, then peek into the large first gallery. After we've made a tour of the room, we'll return to the anteroom to see wortk by Tapies and LeWitt.

In the anteroom: Robert Rauschenberg, Cardbird Series, 1971, photolithograph and screenprint on corrugated cardboard with tape additions, app. 26 x 27 inches
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Far wall, from left: Richard Smith, image and info below; Dorothea Rockburne, Locus, 1972, series of six relief etching and aquatints on folded paper, each app. 40 x 30 inches.

On platform, above: Eva Hesse, Repetition Nineteen 1, 1967, paint and papier-mache on aluminum screening, each app. 9 to 10.5 high and 6 to 9 inches diameter

Below: Richard Smith, Diary, 1975, screenprint on seven sheets with punched-hole additions and string, each app. 20 x 21 inches

Another view of Rockburne's Locus and Hesse's Repetition Nineteen 1 . . .


. . . and details of each

Moving around the gallery, to the right of the Rockburnes is Giuseppe Penone, Fingernail Scratches (Unghiate), 1986, plaster on four sheets of torn paper, 55 x 79 inches total, with the work isolated below

As you face this work by Penone, on the wall past your right shoulder is the work below:

Sol LeWitt, Untitled, 1974, folded paper with pencil, 14 x 14 inches plus frame

Back in the anteroom just to the right of the Rauschenberg, is Anular, an illustrated book with 23 etchings, by the Catalan painter Antoni Tapies

Details are below and below that

In Part 2, which I'll post soon, we'll look into the smaller galleries. I have a lot more to show you, including my favorite work in the show--by Howardena Pindell. .

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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Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 4

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Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 1
Geo/Metric at MoMa, Part 2
Geo/Metric at MoMa, Part 3

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Buren to McLaughlin: view from Gallery 3 to Gallery 4

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We are in Gallery 4, where the walls have again become gray. The glimpse of Daniel Buren’s work in the previous gallery should orient you somewhat. As I noted earlier, this space is the mirror image to Gallery 2; so where the dividing wall held Mary Heilmann’s work in Gallery 2, here it holds four prints by Blinky Palermo, which you will see shortly.

Above, and below, with our back to the Palermos, we’re looking at two lithographs by John McLaughlin. Being a lifelong East Coaster, Northeaster specifically, and New Yorker most specifically, I am not familiar with the oeuvre of this California-based painter. Minimalism is certainly his focus, though color does not seem to be a strong point.

John McLaughin, two untitled lithographs, 1963; at left, 18 x 21 7/16 inches; at right, 18 x 21 1/2 inches

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Now we turn around to face the Palermos, which face Gallery 3. My own camera didn’t get the vertical shot I wanted, so I have pulled the four images from MoMA’s website and arranged them as they were installed. These four, oriented vertically, are not so much narrative as declarative The shapes are what they are. I don’t know the artist’s intent, but I find these works almost playful and related to the Ellsworth Kellys in Gallery 1.

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Installation view of Blinky Palermo screenprints in foreground; Josef Albers screenprints on the far wall

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Four prints by Blinky Palermo, 4 Prototypen, 1970, each 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches. Images from the MoMA exhibition website

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With the Palermos still in our view, we look to the left to see 10 Josef Albers screenprints. These works are in a mirror-image installation to the Kelly drawings and collages on the mirror-image wall in Gallery 2. The symmetry of the spaces and of the Albers and Kelly installations underscore the geometry of the exhibition in a fundamental and deeply satisfying way.

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers, 1962, a portfolio of 10 screenprints, 16 1/2 x 16 1/2 inches

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This series, Homage to the Square, is classic Albers. How do I love it? Let me count the ways: the color, the order, the variation, the simplicity, their systematic and intellectual study of something as sensuous and subjective as color. Whether or not you’re interested in the physics and relativity of color—and if you’re a painter, how can you not be?—or in the empirical studies that resulted, you can simply bask in the refulgence of the hues, or thrill to the formality of the installation: a grid of square-framed work of squares within squares.

Squares to more squares: Albers to Stella

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To maintain that thrill a little longer, we move around to the Frank Stella screenprint, Double Gray Scramble, which alternates and and opposes tonalities of color and gray. The maze-like, but in fact concentric, progression pulls you deeply into its depths. This work, to me, is the abstract version of those Russian nesting dolls set into a hall of mirrors. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer this early work of Stella’s, before it exploded into dimensional frenzy. (I don’t dislike the new work, which I wrote about last year, I just like these flat geometries better.)

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Frank Stella, Double Gray Scramble, 1973, screenprint, 29 x 50 3/4 inches

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The Stella print is to the left of the doorway that takes you back into Gallery 1. To the right of the doorway is this celestial Sol Lewitt, below. The artist’s title is the dry Lines from Corners, Sides & The Center, To Points on a Grid, but it suggests to me nothing so much as a star map for a cubic universe. (I know, bad minimalist, reading poetry into the work.)

Sol Lewitt, Lines from Corners, Sides and the Center, to Points on a Grid, 1977, etching and aquatint, 34 5/8 x 34 13/16 inches

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Sol Lewitt at left. Francois Morrellet, 8 Wefts 0 Degrees 90 Degrees, 1974, eight screenprints, each 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches

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To the right of the Lewitt is a series of eight screenprints by Francois Morellett. The proportional order of the works seems a minimalist cliche to my eyes in 2008; still, there’s no denying the graphic power of these eight works as they move from white to black, maintaining the simplest geometric expression into a compressed infinity of blackness. Its placement after the Lewitt is graphically brilliant.

An enormous Richard Serra punctuates the dividing wall, and the gallery, with a muscular sweep of black oil stick and graphite. This work predates by about three decades the mighty steel sculptures shown at MoMA last year, but in this work you can certainly see where he was headed. And let me express awe for the framing job as well. How many of us have either the financial werewithall or the museum support to get a frame like this?

Richard Serra, Heir, 1973, paint stick and graphite on paper, 114 5/8 x 42 1/4 inches

These last three images are meant to give you an overview of the exhibition:

Here we're standing with our backs to the Stella print so that we see Gallery 4 as it flows from Gallery 3

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Here we're in Gallery 1 by the vitrine looking into Gallery 4, with a view of Serra and the Morrellets

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Below, we're back at the entrance, peeking at the Albers in Gallery 4

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It has taken us four posts, but we have traveled a circle within a square, so our geometric journey has in fact been geometric itself.

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Sol Lewitt at Mass Moca via The New Modernist

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I just found out about the Sol Lewitt Retrospective coming to Mass Moca. I read about it on Edward Lifson's blog, The New Modernist, via CultureGrrl, aka Lee Rosenbaum. On Lifson's June 25 post he shows many, many fabulous pics of the installation-in-progress, Sol Lewitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at Mass Moca.

Here's one.

At Mass Moca: A Sol Lewitt in progress. Photograph from Edward Lifson's blog, The New Modernist

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According to an online press release from the museum, the retrospective will consist of 100 works . . . covering nearly an acre of wall surface, that LeWitt created from 1968 to 2007.

If you have any concerns that a Sol Lewitt won't be a real Sol Lewitt now that he's gone, the documentation will put your fears to rest. Personally, I'd find the job of translating the drawings to be hell on a scaffold, but I'm glad others are up for the task.

They'll be at it for a while. The show doesn't open until November 18, and the installation will be up for 25 years. But you know how these things this go: Put it off and before you know it, it's 2033 and you've missed it.

Update 7.9.09: Chris Ashley has a great image of the Lewitt floor plan

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On the Geometric Trail: Part Four

On the Geometric Trail, Part One: Chelsea

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On the Geometric Trail, Part Two: SoHo

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On the Geometric Trail, Part Three: Warren Isensee

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Two of a Kind

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Sol LeWitt in "Deconstructed Geometry" at Vivian Horan Fine Art

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Ted Larsen, "Constructed Objects," at OK Harris

Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawing #604A-Cubic Rectangle with Color Ink Washes Superimposed, 1989

This work was the centerpiece of "Deconstructed Geometry," which ran officially until January 17 but was still up when I stopped in at the end of the month.

Ted Larsen: Chicklets, 2007, 6 x 6 x 6 inches

This solo show is at OK Harris through February 9th

OK, so I'm stating the obvious, but here's what I love about this pairing of Sol LeWitt and Ted Larsen: big versus little, flat versus dimensional, concept versus object, saturated versus pale, light versus shadow, uptown versus downtown. These kinds of connections sometimes occur as I'm viewing work, other times as I'm viewing the images after the fact. In this instance, geometry was the thread connecting a number of shows I've seen and posted about this winter, but it was not until I sat down to edit these particular images did this pairing fall into place. I'd call it the conceptual version of the kids' toy that requires you to fit a shaped block into the correspondingly shaped hole--even though none of the shapes is quite exactly the same.