Smithsonian.com

One rainy Friday afternoon in 1964, a 24-year-old Richard Serra, then wrapping up his studies at Yale, hopped a train from New Haven to New York City. Upon arriving, he headed uptown, to an East 77th Street townhouse, where he first encountered the work of Cy Twombly. “They gnawed at me,” Serra has said of the paintings he saw that day at Leo Castelli’s gallery. “I couldn’t forget them.”

Forty-three years later, Twombly, now 79, remains a master of the unforgettable, creating ever larger and more exuberant paintings that gnaw at you even after you’ve scrutinized them from every angle and tried to memorize their colors. And so it is fitting that an exhibition of recent paintings by Twombly now on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York blooms with that most enduring, enigmatic, and temperamental of flowers: the peony.

Any gardener will tell you that the most important thing about planting peonies is selecting a site, ideally one that gets at least a half day of sun. Long-lived but initially slow to grow, peonies sulk if disturbed. Try to move them and they’ll punish you by not flowering for several years. Leave them alone and they’ll bloom forever.

The cultivation of artists can be just as tricky. In the history of art, there’s no easy place to put Twombly. Today he is typically lumped with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in a catch-all category of second wave Abstract Expressionism, but the label is an awkward fit. Site selection was critical for Twombly. A Virginia native who studied in Boston and New York before matriculating at Black Mountain College, he escaped the go-go New York art world in 1957 for a place in the sun — Rome — where he still lives for most of the year. There he managed to meld abstraction and antiquity, painting and drawing, lament and reverie.

Gagosian’s 21st Street gallery — sprawling, high-ceilinged, and impeccably finished — is an excellent venue to show off the ten paintings and single sculpture (all untitled and executed in 2007) that comprise “A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things.” The main room is ringed with the six large horizontal paintings on wooden panels, each measuring about eighteen feet wide by eight feet tall. Entering the rectangular space, the viewer is stunned by epic constellations of peony blooms that appear to bob, weave, and punch triumphantly through fields of pencil and wax crayon scribbles, handprints, and haikus scrawled in Twombly’s shaky cursive. Where stems should be flow layered trails of thin acrylic paint, downward drips that wash the panels in verticals as if attempting to tether the buoyant flowers to the foreground. (more…)

Image courtesy Hackett-Freedman Gallery

Recently, I met Marc Trujillo, a Los Angeles-based painter who exuberantly contradicts most narrative art with its emphasis on drama and desire. An “urban landscape” and figurative painter, he depicts neither striking vistas nor compelling characters. Instead, he focuses on gas stations, super markets, and shopping malls—those urban and suburban shelters for transitory souls. The paintings appear photo-realistic. But Trujillo mediates them by changing spaces, lighting, surfaces, characters, and gestures, all in service to his vision and the mood he wishes to convey. In these banal places, he notes, most people are thinking of where they’re going, not where they are in the present. “I like to paint purgatories,” he says, “rather than destination points like the Grand Canyon. I draw from the middle ground of experience. Extremes play into sentimentality.”

Trujillo also remains remarkably interested in narrative—or at least the inversion of our traditional notions of drama. He cites Peter Brueghel’s “Fall of Icarus” (c.1558) as a visualization of his storytelling philosophy. In the Greek myth, Icarus crashes into the sea after the sun melts his homemade wax wings. But in the bustling scene Brueghel painted, Icarus is just a small, incidental splash. With gentle wit, Brueghel seems to say that the story doesn’t really matter.

However Trujillo does play with the idea of storytelling in much of his work, and he has had a gallery show called “Seeing & Reading” with Chris Ware, his good friend and a prodigious comic-book artist and writer. Notably, Ware makes a cameo in one of Trujillo’s Wendy’s fast food restaurant paintings—a witty homage to Ware’s high school employer.

But where Ware simplifies his forms almost into hieroglyphics to keep the flow of the story moving, Trujillo deliberately muffles that flow by his intense rendering of details except in the signage. In his paintings, most of the text is obscured. We wile away in Trujillo’s eerily beautiful, familiar spaces—the mercury vapor lights of gas stations, the cement floors of mass shopping centers, and passing buses, presumably going nowhere.

In an age of abstraction and synthetic pop art, RB Kitaj re-vitalized narrative, figurative painting. He died last week at age 74.

Like many great artists, Kitaj endured public acclaim and charged disdain. His 1994 retrospective at London’s Tate Modern was panned in a stormy critical concert. Kitaj, an ardent reader and writer, included explanatory texts with each of his paintings—presumably circumventing the critics, much to their understandable yet misguided ire.

Working primarily during an age of abstraction, Kitaj and his paintings defy easy categorization. Though known as a British pop artist, Kitaj was in truth an American; a British expatriate, he was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. No matter his nationality, later in life Kitaj keenly allied himself with his Jewish faith, even embracing the stereotype of the “wandering Jew” from Anti-Semitic folklore.

Ever restless, Kitaj made for an unlikely modern art hero. He willfully ignored “art for art’s sake,” the reigning Abstract Expressionist doctrine; in thought and act, he referenced a realm far richer than glib pop, often alluding to existential literature and philosophy in his lyrical, figurative compositions. Using line even in his painterly works, critics claimed he could at once draw with the facility of Edgar Degas, and paint with the shimmering, multi-faceted style of Paul Cezanne.

His compositions seem almost cubist, with their figures and landscapes unmoored from ordinary constraints, geographic and temporal—a fitting feeling for an artist who, however embraced, viewed the world through the fragmented lens of an exile. This kaleidoscopic approach seems akin to collage; the collaged effect and Kitaj’s fresh, expressive use of color perhaps led to the unfortunate “pop artist” misnomer.

Critics may also want to re-consider Kitaj’s experimental technique of including texts with his paintings. Such texts may dampen the wordless mystery of art, but they also complement the paintings well, expressing the vividness of the artist’s vision in a distinctive voice. At his 1994 Tate retrospective, Kitaj gives the last word on his art, composed amidst the tumult of our times: “It is, perhaps, an original concept, to treat one’s art as something which not only replaces the inertia of despair, which may be common enough, but to press art into a fiction which sustains an undying love.”

(The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin) courtesy of the collection of Mrs. Susan Lloyd, New York)

Check out Tuesday’s NY Times for the amazing story of a woman who found a stolen Rufino Tamayo in an Upper West Side trash pile. I enjoyed Gawker.com’s take on her story.

Like other (alleged) finders of priceless artwork, Elizabeth Gibson could be termed a tad … eccentric.

I recently attended a lecture by Denyse Thomasos, a young and highly regarded painter based in New York City. The lecture reminded me how fine art greatly benefits from context. Too often we see the work of an artist out of context, scattered like puzzle pieces across vast distances. No wonder so many of us find contemporary art
mystifying.

Unlike novelists, most artists present their ideas to large audiences in excerpt. There’s simply not enough room on a gallery’s white walls. Often, gallery-goers remain in the dark regarding an artist’s studio practices. They can’t decipher a simplified yet precise visual language, honed through so many drawings and paintings, countless and unseen.

In her lecture, Thomasos masterfully explained how she developed her abstract paintings, cage-like grids in earth colors. Painted deftly on monumental canvases, her compositions suggest places of habitation.

While most abstract artists willfully cut tethers from the mundane world, Thomasos seeks to find home again through her art. Born in Trinidad to a family of African and Asian descent, Thomasos told a very moving story about her early childhood in the West Indies, how her father sought only the best for his children. An esteemed high school principal, he wanted his children educated within the British system. He found the right educational model in Canada, and he moved his family to Toronto.

Yet Thomasos’s father struggled to find his footing in cold Canadian terrain. Like many immigrants, he sacrificed the privileges of his more settled life in Trinidad for the lasting benefit of his children.

Though abstract, much of Thomasos’s art is deeply personal, honoring her father while at the same time attempting to define home in a culture of displacement. Deliberately, she wanders, taking pictures of buildings and homes in China, Vietnam, India and West Africa.

The cage-like forms that suggest buildings also suggest slavery and the middle passage; the roots of Thomasos’s art run deeper than one or two generations. She composes entire paintings out of lines, and she suggests that the slash of the line memorializes the labor of the sugar-cane cutter. Studio assistants mix her paint colors, and she asks them to mix the paint into the color of mud and dirt: the raw stuff of home on a canvas, hanging on a white wall.

(Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art)