The inevitables

Death, taxes and the Whitney Biennial. This year it runneth over into the Park Avenue Armory. Skip the video, etc. and concentrate on the building -- the "Veteran's Room" is the showstopper, all Louis Comfort Tiffany run amok. What a visual intoxicant: the faux Moorish, crazy, silver-on-maroon ceiling, the gigantic columns, wrapped halfway up in rusted chain. The radiator grilles are chain mail. The fireplace is tiled in swirly aqua glass. There's enough fanciful wrought iron for it to acquire fetish status. Elsewhere, the lofty spaces are time capsules -- the heavily carved wood, the stained glass, the crumbling walls covered with plastic. The Moose Room is poorly used, but climb up to the balcony for a howler of a view. And for a bit I thought the banging of the steam pipes was a sound piece. Oh, and public access is ONLY through Mar. 23.
Now the museum -- Jedediah Caesar, on the second floor, owns the show. He invented his own medium: the artist filled boxes with studio detritus (paint, bottles, socks, cups), poured in resin, had the hardened stew sawn into slabs, then polished...From afar, it resembles travertine. Up close, identifable things surface -- the serpentine of corrugated cardboard, an artichoke, a walnut shell. Nutso, and bravo. What's Latin for Caesar Fossil? (Looking at the wall of this new material, I felt like an archeologist.) This isn't just transformation, it's alchemy. I love this work.
Need more? "Helium Brick" justifiably hogs the room, a giddily, triumphantly fucked-up, hulking confecton of rainbow colored polystyrene. As pitted as a politician's conscience, it's the star attraction of the second floor. The resin (that stuff, again) reacts with the foam, the result is a Ken Kesey Grand Canyon. Everybody wants to touch it...(Backstory: It was inspired by the filthy, days-old snow of New York City. Evidently, they don't have this substance in the artist's native LA.) This is change you can believe in.
Back on the ground, a few other things I liked: the lush, allusive photograms of James Welling, Phoebe Washburn's daffodils growing in Gatorade (hey, this is NY), Charles Long's albumen prints of abstractish drips on asphalt, in reality great heron excrement (hey, who knew?); his papier mâché, sorrowful, Giacometti-like bird sculptures. Worth contem- plation: Carol Bove's "The Night Sky Over New York, October 21, 2007, 9pm", bronze rods in sync with the sky on that night. Okay; stunning, suspended, etherial bronze rods. Also in sync with the piece over the bar at the Four Seasons -- I knew it looked familiar...

Conclusion: don't sweat the onions.


Whitney Biennial at the Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67 st.
212-616-3930
through March 23

Whitney Museum
945 Madison
1-800-WHITNEY
through June 1
www.whitney.org

images, from top:

Jedediah Caesar, "Dry Stock"
Urethane resin, polyester resin, pigment, aluminum, titanium, wood, and mixed media
Collection of the artist
courtesy D'Amelio Terras

James Welling, "Torso 3"
Chromogenic print , 45 x 34 in. (114.3 x 86.4 cm)
Collection of the artist
courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

Carol Bove, "The Night Sky over New York, October 21, 2007, 9 p.m."
Bronze rods, wire, expanded metal , 146 x 192 x 96 in. (370.8 x 741.7 x 243.9 cm)
Collection of the artist
courtesy Maccarone, Inc., New York

Reign in blood...

Blood as medium, blood as metaphor. Blood of a poet, encased in resin: splashed, pooled, spun out like a sunburst, and layered, layered, layered. With a base of clear plexi for support. The gallery's white walls act as a reflector; the panapoly of reds glow. (Deep space, indeed.) Metaphysical and profoundly beautiful, there's nothing else like this. As scarlet tapers into tangerine, ruby trails puddle and crack. "UR 4" is a big bang of color, a pomegranate and persimmon iris. Eagles calls these "energy pieces", they're suffused with a whole lot more than cow blood. "UR" stands for Ultimate Rebirth, which would be nirvana; the hues are the saffron and claret worn by Buddhist monks. As the world turns...another work, "Conduit 1", comprises a peephole of sumptuous crimson, a planetary construct, a primal form pimpled with "sealed-in protein air bubbles". As lit, the translucent disc gains a crescent-moon shadow, cast by the black--actually, preserved blood--surround. I kept on staring and staring; attraction infused with awe. Reproduction doesn't do these paintings justice, they must be seen in person.
Medium as metaphor...


Jordan Eagles, "New Blood", at Merge
205 W. 20 st.
212-929-7505
through May 3
www.mergegallery.com

images, from top:

UR4, 2007
36 x 36 x 3 inches
blood preserved with resin on Plexiglas

Conduit 1, 2007
36 x 36 x 3 inches
blood preserved with resin on Plexiglas

An influential thorn

Ah, Courbet. The bad boy of 19 c. French painting, a divo, and, crowed the cock, "the most arrogant man in France." So far, so good. This show is huge, comprehensive, and revelatory. The early self-portraits show him as a fine-featured, long-haired romantic, assuredly gazing at the viewer. He's good-looking and he knows it: an alterna-Johhny Depp. The delicacy of his face contrasts with the roughness of the background landscape-- the paint is actually textured. A few years later, "The Desperate Man" makes him the poster child for struggling artists everywhere--AAARGH! the trials and tribulations of creating! Tellingly, he never parted with this painting.
Attitude, don't give me no platitude...Courbet courted controversy: splashing decidedly non-stately peasants across large canvases threatened the establishment. Mon Dieu! Le paysannerie! C'est un scandale! Les grandes peintures sont seulement pour les sujets historiques! (To 21 c. eyes, the fuss seems quaint.) By 1850, when his mammoth "The Artist's Studio" was rejected by the Salon (en culé!), he set up his own exhibit* and issued the Realist Manifesto, vowing "to represent the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my own era according to my own understanding of them." Call this the precurser of photojournalism (Koudelka, Salgado) and later, Impressionism. But his realism was still bucolic (think Dutch) compared to Hogarth's urban grit and just about anything by Goya (sniff sniff).
Courbet handled the psycho-sexual deliciously. With a few sly titles, he veered into not-yet-named conceptualism. Take a look at the life-size "Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine" (click on image to enlarge), which has its own wall: these gals are obviously not "demoiselles". The one lolling on her stomach appears louche --relaxed?-- in every sense of the word. From revealed ankle to post-coital expression, she's different. No allegory here, nothing mythological, and certainly nothing to do with the church. She's sexual, period. The title is an illusion, an allusion to the contrary. And Courbet was nothing if not contrary. But this canvas is only foreplay compared to the next room, a chamber of nudes.
Luscious, racky, ready and ripe, bursting with carnality: a modern sensibility. Oozing sensuality is "Bacchante", a take on a classic but distinctly a voluptuary of any age. She revels in her en plein air nakedness. (This painting is stirring in more ways than one.) "The Sleepers" is something Bertolucci might appreciate, gauzy and soft, inviting yet innocuous. Lesbians, not dykes. Tucked in a side gallery is "The Origin of the World", realism's apo- theosis.† Erotica elevated, not by a pillow but by the title. So, is Courbet playing scientist or Soul Man? The artist kept mum. This oil was for private delectation, comissioned by a Paris-based Turk. The most forthright work of its age, it still has the power to amaze.
The show detumesces with a group of (albeit splendid) landscapes, seascapes, and work he did in self-exile in Switzerland. Only an old, sad man paints pictures of bruised fruit.
"When I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important."


Gustave Courbet, at the Met
212-535-7710
through May 18
www.metmuseum.org

*a digression: Funny, why does this sound familiar? Why is innovation so often thwarted by those who set the status quo? Are they afraid of the new? Or unable, or afraid their inabilty might become known, to discern between the new and powerful and the new and mediocre? As we all know, progress necessitates change, but not all change is progress.

†(Can it get more real? mmm, it could...glisten.)

p.s.--The Met is really missing out on revenue. Why no Courbet condoms?

images, from top:

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)
The Desperate Man, 1844-45
Oil on canvas
17-3/4 x 21-5/8 in. (45 x 55 cm)
Private Collection, courtesy of BNP Paribas Art Advisory
Photo: © Michel Nguyen

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)
Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine, 1856-57
Oil on canvas
68-1/2 x 81-1/8 in. (174 x 206 cm)
Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)
The Origin of the World, 1866
Oil on canvas
18-1/8 x 22 in. (46 x 55 cm)
Paris, Musée d'Orsay

Nobody does it better

Sixteenth century Florentine bliss, as personified by several score of drawings. Under the patronage of the Medici, Michelangelo and cohorts (and followers and acolytes) executed sketches for the decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio. (Modern-day plutocrats please take note.) There's Pontormo's study of two men: one figure is in motion as if caught by a strobe, position after position loosly rendered over the previous. The effect is strikingly modern, the line quick and free-flowing. Sig. Buonarroti has only two drawings here--one of a man's leg (but what a leg! the depiction of the thigh muscles is extraordinary--aah, but you knew that) and the other, the bust of a woman. The lady is classical, with a fantastic hairdo, and her demeanor is calm. Forgive the way-off left nipple and focus on her face. What was he thinking??? Bronzino was thinking of a magnificent nude man seen from the back. Supple, natural, fluid, graceful. Tactile, like a Bruce Weber model. This figure was meant to be life-size, as part of the private chapel of Cosimo's wife. Just the form to stare at while she's on her knees, praying. (Consider it a marital aid: she gave him ten children.) And women? Pivot for his lady that owns the show. This "Gentlewoman" (I cannot glibly call her a dame) whispers serenity and aloofness. A beguiling beauty, too, in that clear Mannerist way. I found this portrait mesmerizing; one could build an entire novel around it.
And so it goes. Andrea del Sarto, Baccio Bandinelli, and that diligent biographer/artist Vasari.

This exhibit isn't travelling, so you will.

I'm kind-of stingy with the appellation "masterpiece", but here you've got enough of them to last the evening. The pleasure is sensual.


"Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries: Drawings from the Uffizi", at the Morgan Library
225 Madison Ave at 36 st.
212-685-0800
through April 20
www.morganlibrary.org

p.s. In exchange for waiving admission on Friday evenings, the Morgan subjects its visitors to the sawing of a live string quartet. You are warned.

images, from top:
Pontormo (1494-1556)
Two Studies of Male Figures, 1521
Black chalk and red chalk, red wash, heightened with white chalk (v.)-Red chalk (r.)
11 1/4 x 16 1/16 in. (285 x 408 mm)
Gabinetto Designi e Stampe degli Uffizi; 6740 F

Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo) (1503-1572)
Male Nude Seen from Behind, 1540-46
Black chalk, grey wash on paper tinted with yellow ochre
16 5/8 x 6 1/2 in. (422 x 165 mm)
Gabinetto Designi e Stampe degli Uffizi; 6704 F