"Is The Killer Art Market Killing Art?"

On Saturday morning at 10:00 am, March 28, I was in the Titus One auditorium at the Museum of Modern Art to attend the Art Dealers Association of America’s panel, Is the Killer Art Market Killing Art? The large auditorium was just about full, indicating that this was a crowd with some stake in the answer.

The full house at the ADAA panel, Is The Killer Art Market Killing Art?

Panelists, below, from left: moderator Allan Schwartzman, art adviser and writer; Connie Butler, curator of drawings at MoMA; Gordon VeneKlasen, Michael Werner Gallery; Amanda Sharp, co-director of the Frieze Fair; Gavin Brown, gallerist; Roberta Smith, art critic, The New York Times; Paul Schimmel, chief curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

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The Introduction
Roland Augustine, president of the ADAA introduced the topic saying, "Our train is moving far too fast. The train wreck is bound to affect us sooner or later." Somewhat more philosophically he added, "Never before have gallerists and artists seen such success. We should make every effort to savor it."

[Here let me say that I’m reporting to the best of my scribbled-notes-in-the-dark ability. Quotes define verbatim comments. Brackets fill in the blanks. The rest I’m paraphrasing. Italics are my own editorial comments—hey, it’s my blog.]

The Moderator on The Market
Moderator Allan Schwartzman set the stage for the discussion: "Financial value seems to have become the determining factor of artistic value," he began. Some points:
. The Sixties and Seventies was a small world; "it was artist driven."
. "In the Eighties, the market started to change direction, from non-profits to profits, and from artist- and critic-driven to collector-driven."
. "In the last four or five years there has been an extraordinary explosion of the art market, the coming of age of a generation who grew up with art."
. "The market has risen so dramatically that artists are seeing tenfold increases in one year."
. At the same time, he says, the people who entered "the business" for the love of it—working with art and artists—are finding themselves working more and more with the collectors. "It’s not what I signed up for. I’m not enjoying it anymore," one gallerist reportedly told him.

The Panelists Responding
. Schimmel:"I can’t believe how much the secondary market is driving the primary. I’m anxiously awaiting the scales to tip in the other direction." And when they do, he said, "I think it will happen in one day. I hope it happens tomorrow. I don’t think it will be as devastating to artists as everyone says."
. Klasen took the more circumspect view: "There are all kinds of artists and a number of different markets."
. Butler: "Outside the ‘killer market’ of New York City, there are very different markets—Los Angeles, London, other parts of the world not thinking in quite the same market-driven way. "
I’m compressing the chronology of the conversation here, but Schwartzman asked if a show such as WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, which Butler curated while at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, could have happened had she then been a curator at MoMA. "Institutionally, it couldn’t have,"she acknowledged. "There's more freedom on the West Coast to look at art history [and at what is included as art history]." .". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Out of chronological context, but related to this question was the comment that China offers the largest potential art market in the world. This point did not get pursued, probably because it’s theoretical right now; more Chinese art is coming into the West, but Western art is not yet going the other way. But I wonder if that’s why so much mediocre Chinese art is being shown here—so that once the gates are open, Western art can flow in the other direction? Probably the topic of another panel in a year or two.

Moderator: "Has the number of artists being pursued at the highest level increased? "
. Schimmel: "Art is accelerating with a smaller and smaller of number of artists selling at higher and higher prices."
. Smith: "Auctions are a small drop in the bucket of artists making art." Also: "Collecting is a personal experience. I don’t know why all museums have to have the same things." (The curators got their backs up over that one, but the audience applauded.) She went on to say that [contemporary collecting] "is built on desire, on wanting something, much of it unexamined." This is very different from how people collected in the past, she noted. "Generation after generation of people wanted to have things around. Museums came out of those collections."
. Butler: "One of the things we need to talk about is ‘How do we slow down?'"

Moderator: "Museums tend to do more monographic shows that reinforce the market… "
. Schimmel: "It’s hard to find funding for ‘non-brand’ shows."
. Butler: "Women’s work is very difficult to get funded. The support usually comes from individual gifts from women. " In response, someone on the panel or in the audience acknowledged the support of Elizabeth Sackler’s funding of The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum. Butler added that the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where the show originated, even approached Tampax and SaraLee (!!!) for funding of the WACK show.
. This is out of chronological context, but Gavin Brown made the point that as a dealer he’s now doing the work of the curators. "I’m sticking my neck out [by finding and showing new artists]. "

Moderator: "Has the pressure of the market compromised artists?
. Brown: "You have to be bigger than it." Here, he's speaking not only of artists but of dealers: "I have to live off the market, too."
. Smith: "That’s how artists do it. It’s what happens—a constant process of distortion and correction. In the Fifties, artists has no money and no collectors. Was that better? "

Moderator on The Issue of Age
. Schimmel: "It’s not just in art. It’s in science, too, where breakthroughs are made by a younger generation of creative minds. The Abstract Expressionists resented the emergence of the Pop Artists. "

The Discussion Turns to Art Fairs
. Brown: "The art world is separating itself into continents. Auctions houses are a separate continent. I like art fairs; they’re more balanced—though they’re stuck in a trade fair model."
. Schimmel: "Dealers are forcing themselves to do them. "
. Sharp, on how she went from being an editor of Frieze magazine to the founder of the Frieze Fair: "It didn’t make sense that there was no art fair in London. We waited for five or six years. No one was doing one, so we did."
. Schwartzman: "The Armory Show last year suggests that there is a vast audience for art. There was a long line of people waiting to get in; they were out the door. Collectors couldn’t get in because a much broader public was in line ahead of them."

Moderator: "What effect does the super collector, such as Eli Broad, have on the market?"
. Schimmel: "Frick and Morgan created their own museums. The Rockefellers’ collections formed the base of MoMA, the Havermeyers of the Met."

So is the Killer Art Market Killing Art?
The short answer from Brown: "You can’t kill art."
The longer and somewhat Zen answer from Smith: "This is a mirage in motion. Things will fall away. Things will result. The fact is that the art world is unregulated. I express my opinions with my writing. Collectors, with what they acquire. If you’re an artist, you sign on to be tested. Art is always a commodity. Anything can be sold. Everybody has to establish their integrity."

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ART BLOGGERS @ RED DOT

I'm late with this post. What can I tell you? Life, of the non-blogging variety, intervened. But I do want to put my two cents in about Art Bloggers @ Red Dot.

We were here:

The Red Dot Fair at the Park South Hotel, 128 E. 28th Street

And this was us:

That's you all in the audience. Panelists from left: Ed, Paddy, Carolina, Sharon, Carol and moi. Photo courtesy of Hrag Vartanian, whose blog post contains a link to a few Flickr images

Sharon Butler (in the blue shirt) and I (at far right) came up with the idea of bringing bloggers together in real time and space, typically at an art fair or event. Art Bloggers @ thus came into the world during the Miami art fairs, where a small group convened in the lobby of Flow Fair on Collins Avenue.

We had a bigger group in New York. Last Sunday, March 30, we met at the Red Dot Fair at the Park South Hotel. Some 40 or so bloggers showed up--some bleary-eyed, let it be said--as we started gathering in the lobby at 10:00 am. After an informal round table in one of the small conference rooms, we adjourned to the restaurant, which had been set up for a series of panels. Ours, "The Impact of Bloggers on the Art World," ran from 11:15 to 12:30 and could easily have gone on another hour.

I moderated a panel that consisted of Carol Diehl, painter, critic (Art in America), Artvent blog; C-Monster, aka Carolina Miranda, freelance writer; Edward Winkleman, gallerist, Edward Winkleman Blog; Paddy Johnson, freelance writer and blogger, Art Fag City; Sharon Butler, painter, writer (The Brooklyn Rail) and professor, Two Coats of Paint. I was the moderator. Sharon has posted some of the panel questions on our blog so that we might all continue the discussion online.

I started by offering some blog statistics, which I've updated for this post. According to Blogpulse, the total number of identified blogs is 77,104,143. In the last 24 hours alone, there were 95,529 new blogs. That's 3980 an hour, 66 a minute, and just over one new blog a second. Even if one half of one percent of those blogs is related to art, that's several hundred thousand blogs--offering potentially or actually far more commentary about art than conventional print media could ever produce.

So my first questions to the panel was:
What is our responsibility personally to good writing and journalistic integrity in our own blogs and within the blogosphere in general?

Ed got to answer first, as he would leave early to go to his gallery's booth at Pulse. I don't have notes, since I was focused on moderating, but I do recall this part of his response: "My readers are my editors." If there's one difference between print media and the blogosphere (aside from the lack of salary in the latter) it's the instantaneousness of the medium. You can't pull one over or get away with shoddy reporting when your readers can call you on it. And they do.

The conversation drifted to ethics. Since the panel was composed of ethical people, no one seemed overly concerned about what they were or weren't doing. Carolina, the most journalistically bona fide of the group (she used to work at Newsweek and was part of the team that helped expose inconsistencies in the resume of FEMA's Michael Brown) noted the importance of disclaimers when writing about a potential conflict of interest. (Disclaimer: I often disregard copyright to pull images from the Internet--but they're always in service to the related topic. )

We talked about stats--yes, we're all obsessed with them--and some technical stuff. There was some nice give and take with the audience, many of whom returned home almost immediately to blog about it. Art Bloggers @ has links. The thing that struck me was how nice everyone was. As you know, the blogosphere is often marked by contentiousness (and more). Here, everyone was very friendly.

James Kalm recorded it all. We'll let you know if he posts a video. (This just in, 4.8.08: he did. Click here for Part 1, and here for Part 2. Thanks, James. You distilled a lot of information in two 10-minute segments.)

We didn't get to the big questions-- Are we mainstream yet? Do we want to be? What is the future of art blogging?--but Sharon and I are planning something in New York in the fall, and of course in Miami in December, so the conversation will continue. We'll have the info on our respective blogs and on Art Bloggers @ in September.

Big props to George Billis, gallerist and founder of Red Dot Fair, for generously letting us convene. A partial list of attendees (thanks to Franklin for taking names) includes:

Chris Albert
Steven Alexander
Brent Burket
Franklin Einspruch
KosukeFujikata
Aneta Glinkowska

Stephanie Lee Jackson (aka Pretty Lady)

Chris Jagers
James Kalm
Olympia Lambert
Megan and Murray
Andrew Robinson
Harry and Jennifer Swartz-Turfle
Hrag Vartanian

Next post: A report on the ADAA panel at MoMA, "Is the Killer Art Market Killing Art." Then on to some fair reportage and pics.

Alfresco Geometry

Nothing pedestrian about this diagonal swipe of two-tone color. See the grid lines of the sidewalk?

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Twentieth Street is a particularly great place for alfresco geometry. A while back I showed you painted trucks from the DPW depot on the corner at 10th. This time it's geometry at my feet--in front of the loading docks on the north side of the street, middle of the block.

This an apt image for the week. I'm pounding the pavement as I dash from the West Chelsea galleries to fairs all over town. Having already seen the Armory Show and Scope and peeked at Art Now, I'm still figuring out out to best cover the fairs. (What, you think I'm going to stop everything to give you another 16-part Miami extravaganza?)

I also want to report on the ADAA panel at MoMA on Saturday morning, Is the Killer Art Market Killing Art and the Art Bloggers panel, The Impact of Bloggers on the Art World, at Red Dot on Sunday morning.

Stay tuned..

Still Painting . . .

Clyford was here?

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The blue plywood barrier around the construction site at the corner of 23rd Street and 10th Avenue is usually plastered with poster images of semi-dressed people pushing music, alcohol, underwear and sex. Recently it underwent a makeover--well, a coverup, as all those posters got painted blue. I like this abstract version better. And if I didn't know better, I'd say that Clyford Still had done it.

Deducting the Fair Market Value of Your Art

Please take a moment to send an email in support of The Artist Deduction Bill S. 548 and HR 1524. This Bill would give artists the right to deduct the fair market value of their work when donated to museums and other non-profit organizations.

Click HERE to support this bill. Americans for the Arts has created a user-friendly format for you to contact your representatives. The e-form fills in the appropriate legislators as soon as it knows your zipcode. It will take one minute.

State of Grays

Jasper Johns: Gray

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through May 5

Medium-dark at the top of the stairs. The Jasper Johns banner gets prime placement over the main portal.

(Image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website)

Only in New York, I suppose, could you find running concurrently one big museum show on Color and another on Gray.

I weighed in early on Color Chart at MoMA, but I’m coming late to the party at the Met. The reviews have already been written (see selected links at end of post). Not being a critic, I don’t expect to add anything new in the way of criticism, but I do have observations and a thorough understanding of encaustic, so perhaps I can fill in some of the cracks (literal and figurative) in the reportage.

The concept of this show, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in cooperation with the Met, is splendid: a career retrospective as seen through the thin slice of one color. Who but Johns could have such a show? He has worked grisaille for his entire career, typically side by side with chromatic compositions, a point made right from the first two paintings of the exhibition, False Start and Jubilee.

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Left: False Start, 1959; right: Jubilee, also 1959. Images from The New York Times website; no additional information on medium or size, but I'm pretty sure they were oil on canvas, and at least 60 x 48 inches, maybe larger

From there we leave color behind and enter the shadows. Slipping into this doppenganger oeuvre is strange and kind of wonderful. First of all, like a parallel universe, it's startling that it exists at all. And it's enormous, some 120 works. Here you see richness in ways you might overlook in the chromatic world. There’s the range of materials: graphite, charcoal and ink; Sculpmetal, lead and silver; oil and wax— each holding, releasing, reflecting the light and, more importantly, revealing the effort of the artist’s hand, in its own way. Then there’s the range of texture intrinsic to the materials: the crosshatching of the prints, the velvety lushness of charcoal, the sensuous ooze of dripped wax, the objects embedded and affixed. And, finally, there’s the richness of the repetition. Fifty-plus years of artmaking, fifty-plus years of numbers endlessly traced, of targets limned, of flags painted, incised, cast. Over and over.

To be honest, I find his painted grays leaden, the achromatic version of the Roach Motel—the light goes in but it doesn’t come out. On the other hand, the lead, as rendered in cast flags and numbers, fairly scintillates with light and shadow, warm and cool. That’s one of the surprises of this show. You think you know Johns’s work, and then you get hit with a realization like that.

My favorite grouping is of three small flags, each about 12 x 16 inches, installed in a corner. (I wish I could show you installation shots, but a non-photo policy and hyper-zealous guards put the kibosh on that.) The first is a flag painted in Sculpmetal. (Well, let’s be clear: it’s not actually a flag, of course, and it’s not actually sculptured metal.) Catty corner to it is a relief sculpture in lead sheet, an embossing of that first painting. Next to it is a sterling silver cast of the painting. Three nearly identical objects and each, up close, as different as can be in color, surface and material. And these three are each and all quite different from drawings and prints of the flag, as they, in turn, are different from an ashen version in encaustic. The exhibition could have been called Jasper Johns: Obsessions.

Jasper Johns; The Dutch Wives, 1975, encaustic and collage on canvas (two panels); overall 51 3/4 x 71 inches; collection of the artist. Image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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I mentioned earlier that I thought Johns’s grays are leaden. There are some wonderful exceptions, and without exception they are paintings in which the unpigmented wax medium acts as a window to the newsprint that lies below the paint. Newsprint being newsprint, it has yellowed over time, so there’s an amber hue—almost a honey color—that warms and lightens the grisaille, illuminating it, really, from within the painting itself. The Dutch Wives—the diptych, above, whose panels hold almost identical crosshatch markings—is the very best example of a collaged newsprint painting that has mellowed this way. .(I wonder what it looked like in 1975 when it was painted.)

Johns is not a guy who lets much out unintentionally, so those little windows into the painting are almost erotic. As for the waxen drips here and elsewhere, well they're metaphoric in their ooziness.

I’ve used the Johns’s images sparingly, as the Met site carries dire non-repro warnings. So go see the show for yourself. And—shameless plug alert—if you want to know more about encaustic, take a look at my book, The Art of Encaustic Painting. There’s even little interview with Jasper in which he talks a bit about his process.

An excerpt:

JM: What is working with encaustic like for you? Is it a struggle or does the wax just flow?

JJ: (Laughs) I wouldn't describe it as either extreme. One proceeds. One watches what happens. Things happen unexpectedly, some that I would be happy to live without. But it has been a pleasure to watch what happens.

I feel pretty much the same way about the show.

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Coda: If you're going to visit the show in person or on line, make a detour to the Matthew Marks Gallery on 22nd Street to see Jasper Johns: Drawings 1997-2007. It's up through April 12. There's a greater chromatic range here, since the focus is not on gray but on works on paper. I was allowed to shoot in the gallery, and here's one of my favorite pieces from the back gallery. It's not a drawing at all, but a bronze cast from a number painting. I love how you can see the drips of wax paint. This is the ultimate in wax casting, no? The painting itself is sacrificed to the sculpture.

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Recent reviews:. Jasper Johns: Smog Alert by R.C. Baker in the Village Voice
. Jasper Johns Shows his True Colors by Roberta Smith in the New York Times (with slide show)
. The Gray Areas of Jasper Johns by Carol Vogel in the New York Times (also with slide show)
. Shades of Gray by Lance Esplund in The New York Sun
. Two Coats of Paint rounds up the reviews

On the Geometric Trail: Part Seven

On the Geometric Trail, in Chelsea

On the Geometric Trail, Part Two: SoHo

On the Geometric Trail, Part Three: Isensee

On the Geometric Trail, Part Four: Two of a Kind

On the Geometric Trail, Part Five: McKenzie

On the Geometric Trail, Part Six: Zox and Martin

Harriet Korman at Lennon, Weinberg

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Juan Usle at Cheim & Read

Harriet Korman at Lennon, Weinberg: Installation view looking toward the back of the gallery

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Harriet Korman’s solo show is no longer up at Lennon, Weinberg, but that doesn’t mean I can’t show you a few pictures. Her painting, with its hard edges, shifting planes and saturated hues, is geometric abstraction in a modernist vein. There’s a bit of the cubist composition in her work, with its loopy intersections and Matissean shapes, but her seemingly straight-from-the-tube color and strong graphic quality give the work a signature that is unmistakably her own: joyous but rigorous.

As an artist who works serially, I like to see how other artists explore or attenuate an idea. Here, two paintings with a similar composition-- and even some similar color passages--allow

you to eavesdrop on their conversation

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Is it me, or is there a suggestion of landscape in these paintings?

New for me is the painting, above, in which patches of color are painted with roughly equidistant parallel lines. I like this rectilinear order. I want to say that I’ve seen this composition, or something like it, while flying over the country’s midsection at 30,000 feet, but that’s not quite right, for while I perceive something of a landscape in this work—in both paintings shown above, in fact—I’m not at all sure it was intended. I don't think Korman is making paintings that are about anything but painting.

Despite their almost playful color and composition, these paintings establish boundaries between themselves and the viewer. Maybe it's their mid-range size or relatively uninflected color. Or maybe it's that intellectual rigor. You step back to see these painting, and each painting seems to say, "You stand there." That's fine. I can dig them from a few feet away.

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Juan Usle at Cheim & Read

Juan Usle at Cheim & Read: Installation view taken from the gallery's website

Juan Usle’s paintings, on the other hand seem to whisper, "Come closer, mi amor." Maybe it’s their small size—his show, "Brezales," at Cheim & Read consists of fewer than a dozen small canvases (and two large ones)—but they exude something that just pulls you in. While there’s a new fluid line in some of the paintings, I’m fonder of the rectilinear compositions, patchworks of color and visual texture that are marvels of painterliness. The gallery’s press release describes the work as "organic geometry." That’s a good term, because the grid has been constructed block by block within the composition rather than imposed onto it; moreover, the color is fluid and the mark of the brush very much in evidence. (Usle uses pigment in a vinyl dispersion medium to get the streaked, almost textile-like surfaces of his color, and from the looks of the linearity of the application, I'd say he uses something like a squeegee as well as a brush. )

Juan Usle: La Camara Oculta, 2007, vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas, 18 x 12 inches.

Above: installation view of the small front gallery, from the gallery's website

Below: Miron, 2006-07, vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas, 12 x 18 inches.The gallery press release calls his work "organic geometry," and you can really see that here--the way the artist has dragged and pushed his pigment, creating lines that waver and vibrate

Juan Usle: Installation view of Cada Vez Mas Cerca, 2006-07, 24 x 18 inches, left; and Sone Que Revelabas (Tigris), 2007, 108 x 80 inches; both vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas. Installation shot from the gallery's website

"Brezales" is up through this weekend. If you’re reading this blog before March 15 and you’re in New York, log off and go see it.

On the Geometric Trail: Part Six

On the Geometric Trail, in Chelsea

On the Geometric Trail, Part Two: SoHo

On the Geometric Trail, Part Three: Isensee

On the Geometric Trail, Part Four: Two of a Kind

On the Geometric Trail, Part Five: McKenzie

Larry Zox at the Stephen Haller Gallery

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I promised a post on the geometry behind the wall against which these containers were stacked. Here it is: Larry Zox at the Stephen Haller Gallery. See the painting in the lower left corner of the picture below? We're entering the doorway there.

Geometry on both sides of the wall. We're entering the gallery at the lower left corner of the picture

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Below, as you enter: Esso Lexington, 1968, acrylic, epoxy on canvas, 79 x 64 inches. This is a composition that Zox mined over and over in different combinations of hues

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To be honest, I hadn’t known about Larry Zox until a conversation with Stephen, about a year before he mounted his first show of Zox’s work in 2005 . This was at the end of a relatively long career for Zox, one that had seen his work in numerous museums, even a retrospective at the Whitney. By the time that first show at Haller went up, Zox’s heyday was over. The show was stellar—a combination of his hard-edge geometry from the Sixties and Seventies, along with newer, softer compositions that introduced a looping, nicely lyrical line.

A second show followed in 2006, and then—I’m not sure of the exact chronology—Zox died. Wherever the lyrical color fields might have gone, we won’t know. Both bodies of work are in the current show. I’m partial to the Seventies geometries with tinted color, a nice hard/soft combination in which the edge is mollified by the gentler palette.

Looking into the main gallery: No information on the gallery website for this large horizontal painting, but it ranks among my favorites. The paint is rendered with an almost suede-looking surface that's at odds with the hard-edge shapes. I love that!

In the main gallery: No info on the gallery site for this painting, either, but I can tell you that it's part of the Diagonal series from the Sixties

Looking into the center gallery, far wall: Change of shape--and century. Hayward, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 42 x 57 inches

In the center gallery: No info on this large horizontal, but it resembles other work on the gallery's website from the Seventies

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Chris Martin at Mitchell-Innes and Nash

A few doors down at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, Chris Martin delivers his geometry with eye-searing color and collaged surfaces—glitter, newsprint, sponges (?)— that inform his shapes with a slight depth and dimensionality. While Zox’s painting seems to have come from his brain, Martin’s comes from straight from the gut. It’s raucus. It rocks.

Chris Martin: Untitled, 2007, oil, gel medium, collage on canvas, 64 x 59 inches

Chris Martin installation view at Mitchell-Innes and Nash: Seven Pointed Star, left, and Untitled, both shown below

In conversation with Craig Olson in a recent issue of The Brooklyn Rail, Martin said this about his process:

"These forms come from a long process of unconscious drawing. Then there is this desire to see it in paint—a kind of compulsive curiosity that drives me to choose colors, mix up buckets of paint, and prepare a surface. The actual performing of a painting involves giving oneself over to a series of actions and trusting in the body and what the body knows. And when I step back to look at this thing, I’m still trying to figure it out just like everybody else."

Chris Martin: Seven Pointed Star, 2007, oil and collage on canvas with gel medium, 54 x 45 inches

Below: Untitled, 2007, oil and collage on canvas, 54 x 49 inches

Next posts: Harriet Korman and Juan Usle

Color with a Y Chromosome at MoMA

In the lobby, above, Jim Lambie's wildly striped and angled color.

In the sixth floor atrium, below, a Donald Judd sculpture dominates. My photography ends here, as the no-photos policy kicks into place.

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I was going to make another stop on the Geometric Trail, but we're taking a quick detour up to 53rd Street for Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today at the Museum of Modern Art, organized by Ann Temkin. The exhibition is all about hue, whether right out of the tube, off the chart, or based on color systems devised by the artists or left to chance. There's oil paint and mototcycle enamel, car lacquer and Color Aid, Pantone and the Macintosh palette. In other words, it's a big show with broad parameters.

So, first the good news: This wide-ranging survey covers more than half a century of chromatic work with the usual suspects well represented: Dan Flavin, Damien Hirst, Ellsworth Kelly, Yves Klein, Frank Stella and others. You've probably seen most of this work in museums over the past few decades, but it's thrilling to see it all together.

The exhibition starts dramatically in the lobby with Jim Lambie's striped floor, all sharp lines and acute angles, continues into the sixth-floor lobby where a Donald Judd painted aluminum sculpture dominates, and opens into the special exhibitions gallery, where you are greeted by a horizontal painting, installed up high, by Marcel Duchamp. In the first gallery alone there's work by Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.

Now, the bad news: If you've followed the names I've dropped so far, it should be obvious that this show's color comes with a Y chromosome. Of the 44 artists in the show, 38 are men and six are women. This is the curator's privilege, of course, but I wonder how such broad parameters could be so exclusionary.

You should see Color Chart. It's a visually powerful show, but to my mind it's half a show. Spend some time with the two large Jennifer Bartlett pieces--each an installation of enameled squares in her signature dots and grids (alas, no pictures available from the MoMa website)--and Angela Bulloch's lightbox that flashes the colors of the Macintosh 0S9 operating system (ditto). While those colors are flashing, imagine the reductive color fields of Marcia Hafif, the macro-pointillist compositions of Alma Thomas, the undulating geometries of Bridget Riley, the dyed floor sculptures of Polly Apfelbaum--and make your own list while you're at it.

The show is up through May 12.

Feel free to add names to the Comments, below.

Impromptu Geometry

Rounding the corner from 11th Avenue to 26th Street I came upon this

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splendid composition of containers in colors that paired perfectly with

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the wall of the building next door. Next post we're back on the

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Geometric Trail with visits to a show of vintage Larry Zox at the

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Stephen Haller Gallery (on the other side of that oxide red wall) and

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up-to-the-moment Chris Martin just down the Street at Mitchell Innes

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and Nash.

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Voyage to mars (red and orange) on 26th Street

The Women's Room

Unexpected illumination: Partly it's the color, that deep coral against .

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the lavender .wall, but I've never before seen soap light up a room.

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The women's bathroom on the 6th floor of 511 W. 25th Street

Paintings and Process--Thirty Years Apart

Larry Poons at Jacobson Howard: Festinniog, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 78 x 69.5 inches

If you read this blog regularly, you know that while geometry is a recurring theme, I'm just as interested in material and process. It is those two latter issues we'll consider in this post via a couple of New York shows--one still up, the other now closed--both with references to nature.

Larry Poons at Jacobson Howard Gallery through March 1

"Throw, Pour, Drip, Spill and Splash" offers a fine selection of Poons’s paintings from the Seventies and Eighties. True to the title of the show, these are paintings at their most process intensive. Layers of paint in frozen rivulets and and richly encrusted surfaces still resonate with the energy of their making, an effect heightened by their large size in relation to the two small rooms of the Upper East Side gallery in which they’re shown.

There was nothing in the gallery information that made reference to landscape, yet the paintings themselves recall all manner of nature and of the payssage: mossy earth, flowered fields, waterfalls. Perhaps I'm reading them too literally, but I see what I see. lllglg

Tantrum 2, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 165 inches

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Carolanna Parlato at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, through Feb. 2

Downtown, in "Nature Games," a show that closed on February 2, Carolanna Parlato showed work in the same vein. While her m.o. would seem to cover the same territory as Poons, her process is much more controlled; the enamel-like paint flowed and dripped but only, it seems, until she said, "Stop." The paintings are worked in saturated, uninflected colors, yet the topographical quality of the pentimenti and the substantiveness of the drips show you just how much dimension "flat" can have. (Both painters work in acrylic, by the way.)

Parlato makes a direct reference to landscape in her statement, but I see her elements more as land mass. It's the process here that engages me, and the pleasure of materiality that is just under--and essential to--that glossy surface.

Installation view: Carolanna Parlato at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery, "Nature Games"

Below: The Kiss, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 80 inches; image from the gallery website

What Goes Up, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches; image from the gallery website

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Detail below:

The edge gives you some sense of the push/pull Parlato has managed so well

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I’m not one to ascribe gender to painting, but I feel comfortable saying that the Poons paintings are genuinely beautiful—in part because of the lovely pink and lavender-tinted palette—while Parlato’s are muscular and handsome. Either show would have been satisfying to me on its own, but seeing them in the same period was more than doubly rewarding as the experience challenged ideas of time (they were painted almost 30 years apart), landscape , gender and materiality.

El Anatsui at Jack Shainman

Fading Scroll, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 88 x 472 inches

I have given up trying to cover gallery shows while they’re still up. That’s the job of a paid journalist. My reportage is typically presented after the fact, and until my twin clones are perfected, that’s probably the way it will remain.

So here we are at the Jack Shainman Gallery on 20th Street at the end of January. The show is El Anatsui’s "Zebra Crossing." God, I love this work: large, fluid expanses that hang slightly away from the wall, occasionally bulging or sagging as they yield their great weight to gravity.

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Zebra Crossing III, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 61 x 107 inches

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The work embodies some lovely dualities. There’s an underlying geometry to the structure. Strips of metal—the aluminum wrapping from the neck of liquor bottles—are pierced and held together with twisted wire, row-on-row, but the overall effect is one of fluidity and organic growth. The patterns are textile-like in their structure, like Ghanian kente cloth, but sculptural in their presence. The work is made of junk, but the light shimmers sublimely across the surface. And of course there’s the metaphor of transcendence. It took the labels from a damn lot of devil water to make this celestially beautiful work.

Area B, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 155 x 236 inches

You can call this work sculpture, tapestry or painting, and any description would be correct.

El Anatsui is a professor of sculpture at the University of Nigeria, so perhaps sculpture is the word he would use. But the relative flatness of the surface suggests painting. Think, for instance, of the gilding and drape of Klimt. And the structure does suggest tapestry. Are you familiar with the work of Colombian-born artist Olga de Amaral, whose large scale tapestries are painted and gilded? See both below.

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Above, Klimt: Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, oil on canvas with gold and silver gilding, now at the Neue Gallery, New York City; The Kiss

Below: Olga de Amaral, Cesta Lunar, fiber, gold leaf, acrylic

More El Anatsui: Takari in Black, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 60 x 76 inches. This one is my favorite. I particularly like the coolness of the silvery hue, and the organic geometry of the composition.

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In case you’re interested, the prices ranged from $250,000 for the smaller works, such as the one above, to $500,000 for the big one that opened the post And every single one on the gallery list had a red dot. A sante!