On Thursday I visited the Jacob Javits Convention Center for the 2009 edition of the PhotoPlus Expo, an annual photographer’s trade show that I’ve visited every year since 2001.  One good sign for the economy was that the expo hall was completely packed with visitors.  Every aisle was jammed and many booths were stuffed with people.  (Other anecdotal evidence of a rebounding economy:  very crowded shopping centers here in central New Jersey last weekend.)

On the other hand, there were two notable absences from this year’s show.  Adobe, which always has a major presence in the front of the expo hall, was amazingly missing this year.  They are one of the big draws with a booth that includes demonstrations and tutorials about using Adobe software, with a focus on Photoshop techniques for photographers (though in recent years there’s been too much time spent on Lightroom, a piece of software that I regret buying and which I found completely unusable).  In the past, the first thing I would do at Javits is check out the Adobe booth, look at the schedule for interesting seminars, and make sure my butt was planted in a seat ahead of time.  No Adobe, though, in 2009, presumably because they’re saving money and because they have no new products to promote at this time.

The other obvious, and perplexing, absence was Panasonic, whose cameras receive rave reviews but which always seem to be in short supply.  With major presences from Canon and Nikon, it seems curious that Panasonic wouldn’t be here to get their cameras into the hands of the people most likely to spread word of mouth.  I don’t recall if Panasonic had been at past shows, though, so I don’t know if this was a new development or par for the course for Panasonic.

As for the show itself, I didn’t sign up for any seminars this year and stuck to the expo hall, which was the same as usual.  Perhaps less new stuff to drool over than in the past (though perhaps that’s because I’m pretty happy with my current equipment right now); a lot of online photo labs pushing their photobooks and other press products; many of the same software products from past years.  One booth that looked interesting was Metal Mural, a company which prints photographs onto aluminum panels.  I plan to give them a try with some reproductions of my paintings.  Also, if you were willing to wait in a maddeningly slow line (I was), you could get a free sample pack of some of Epson’s newest inkjet paper which looks quite promising for artistic purposes, such as Epson Hot Press Bright Paper (they also have a “natural” paper without optical brightening agents, as well as a cold press paper in bright and natural forms as well).  Can’t wait to give those samples a try!

I picked up a book from one of the several book publishers present, Practical HDR: A complete guide to creating High Dynamic Range images with your Digital SLR.  It’s a great looking book that contains some useful information about HDR photography (and some very nice HDR images), but I will admit that I pretty much read the whole book on the 56 minute train ride home from New York and found that you could probably summarize most of the useful information in a couple of pages (or even a few bullet points).  The most useful part was the explanation of how to obtain the proper range of exposures for best results, though afterward you realize it’s not particularly complicated or mysterious.  But I am now inspired to do some HDR photography and see how it turns out.

I headed into Manhattan again yesterday to check out the Georgia O’Keeffe “Abstraction” show at the Whitney (up through January 17, 2010). Last December I saw an O’Keeffe show down in Washington, DC, which had improved my opinion of her work with some very dynamic, abstracted landscapes.

This Whitney show starts of slowly with a couple of rooms full of early watercolor and charcoal pieces from around 1916-1918. These feel like tentative experiments and don’t have a lot going on formally. Once O’Keeffe moves predominantly into oil paintings at the urging of Alfred Stieglitz, however, around 1918 or 1920, things start to get interesting. The oil paintings make you want to look for a while, both up close and at a distance. They are full of folds and undulations and smooth blending of gradations of color. Most of her abstract pieces are of the “abstracted reality” kind — that is, rather than being completely nonrepresentational, they are abstracted from reality through simplified or exaggerated shapes, close cropping, creative color, etc. Most of the pieces would be instantly recognizable as O’Keeffe, even if they are not of the macro-flower type for which she is well known. However, the final room of the exhibition does have some paintings of a very different sort — large color fields with geometric shapes in one, a grid of cloud-like forms receding into the distance in another. The show includes a few pastels here and there that look almost identical to her oils except that they’re displayed under indirect, reduced lighting. A small room in the middle of the show includes about a dozen intimate, expressive photos of her by Stieglitz.

The members preview day crowd was vocal: I couldn’t help but overhear some opinionated (and rather crotchety) gallery goers. “I can’t wait to go paint,” confided one woman to her companion. “She was very comfortable with Alfred,” another woman noted, slightly embarrassed at the photos. “Why do they stand right in front of the painting talking about dinner plans? That’s so rude!” complained a particularly bitter lady, just loud enough that of course the targets would hear it. Ah, member preview day at the Whitney…  Anyway, it’s a very nice show that’s worthy of your attention if you’re in the neighborhood.

On my way back from the Upper East Side, I stopped in to some of my favorite galleries in the Fifties to see what was going on there. If you like Sol LeWitt (I do!), there’s a very nice show of wall drawings at Pace (32 East 57th). “Forms Derived from a Cube” features large geometric figures that don’t always seem derived from cubes. I love LeWitt ink wash pieces — there’s a certain luminosity to the color that I just enjoy taking in. Several of these pieces are described as being comprised of multiple layers of washes, first gray, then yellow, then red, then blue, with each color overlapping a smaller subset of the previous washes. The resulting figure ends up as gray, orange, and dark brown, though closer examination of the washes yields beautiful details and subtleties of color with hints of blue or red peeking through.

In the Fuller Building, there’s a nice exhibition of Jacque Henri Lartigue photos at Howard Greenberg that creatively capture people and objects in motion and in flight. Around the corner on Fifth Ave, there’s a Milton Avery show at DC Moore that’s worth visiting if you’re an Avery fan. I’ve never really gotten the Avery bug, though it seems that everyone else loves his paintings and he was very influential to many artists of the Abstract Expressionist era. The one painting that really sticks out in this show is the stunning “Orange Nude,” probably the most dimensional work of his that I’ve seen. While you’re in the building, you might as well stop by Babcock Galleries to see a group show from their collection that includes some Marsden Hartleys, a Hopper drawing, and some atypical Stuart Davis landscapes.

It’s been quite some time since I last wrote about a trip to Chelsea.  It’s not that I hadn’t seen some good shows over the spring and summer — the amazing Chuck Close tapestry & painting show at Pace Wildenstein and the Yayoi Kusama show at Gagosian come to mind — but no single trip to the district had me fired up enough to write about it.

Tonight, though, was the big opening night for many galleries and the neighborhood was packed!  It felt to me like the city was ready for Fall, looking for the new art season to push a melancholy summer into the past.  My wife and I made it to perhaps a dozen shows and quite a few were worth noting.  We worked our way down the streets first to hit a few exhibitions during normal gallery hours, then worked our way back northward to some of the official opening receptions.

On 25th Street, at Pace Wildenstein, the James Turrell show of “Large Holograms” was well worth a visit.  The show consists of fifteen “light works”, each approximately five or six feet high and a few feet wide.  Each work is comprised of a holographic panel as well as one or two colored lights illuminating the panel from the ceiling.  Most pieces feature one or two geometric shapes such as triangles or elipses.  Rather than looking like photographic images of more familiar holograms, these look like three dimensional colored shapes of light that move as you change your viewpoint.  The shapes and compositions are for the most part simple, but it doesn’t stop you from wanting to spend time with each piece trying to figure out how it works.

Moving southward, we then visited the other Chelsea incarnation of Pace on 22nd Street for an even more dramatic exhibition.  While Turrell had us moving left and right in front of the holograms, Maya Lin’s “Three Ways of Looking at the Earth” made you want to circle all the way around (and even under and through) the artwork.  The first, and most dramatic piece, consists of approximately 50,000 2×4 blocks of wood laid out in a large rectangle, standing upwards on end.  The planks are cut and arranged so that, taken together, they form a huge wave.  The effect is similar to a Tara Donovan sculpture, where an accumulation of objects turns into something beautiful.  But the hard, solid wood produces a different visual effect than the stacks of every day objects such as plastic cups that you might find in a Donovan piece.  The second Lin work, Blue Lake Pass, is composed of approximately 20 separate components, each of which is made up of a couple dozen boards of wood sandwiched together, with the tops shaved into a sort of pixelated terrain (based upon a region of Southwest Colorado).  It’s a beautiful visual effect that’s hard to describe, but one that has you walking around the piece to take in all of the angles and slopes.  The third piece was less compelling:  it consisted of a large aluminum wire gridded sculpture, suspended from the ceiling, whose shape corresponds to a region of the Atlantic Ocean’s floor.

We eventually reached the southernmost tip of our tour, now in “opening reception” territory, and started heading back uptown.  At Kim Foster gallery, Sherry Karver has an exhibition entitled, “Private Stories / Public Places.” I had first seen and admired Karver’s work last year at the same gallery.  The work here is similar, with a few new twists, and I had a chance to ask the artist about her process.  Each painting depicts a scene from a crowded location such as a train station or a city street, populated with what might have been anonymous passers-by.  But superimposed upon select characters from these scenes are textual elements, mini biographies that reveal in efficient terms a personality, peccadilloes and all.  To make these pieces, Karver begins by printing out (on her own large format Epson printer) black-and-white digitally manipulated scenes that serve as sort of underpainting. The prints are then mounted onto a solid support.  Multiple glazes and layers of oil paint provide all of the color in the images, and if you look close enough you can find traces of brush stroke.  Finally, a glossy, thick resin is poured and spread evenly over the painting to provide a uniform, polished look.  The resin is new to this series, as is the occasional presence of desaturated, ghost-like figures which the artist uses to indicate the passing of time (as if the figure had been there for part of a long exposure, but then had left before the photo was complete).  The typefaces used for the textual elements vary with the particular character and Karver says that matching the font with the figure is an important decision in the painting (hmmm, if you could be a font, which font would you be?)

At Danese, Valerie Giles’s works on paper — her first solo exhibition according to the gallery press release — are fantastic.  The drawings that I liked the best are the more abstract ones, full of curvilinear, biomorphic swirls of the pencil.  There’s a sense of dynamism, confidence, and interplay that makes you want to follow the strokes around the paper.

Finally, Yigal Ozeri’s latest show at Mike Weiss gallery is definitely worth seeing for its virtuosity of paint handling.  Although some of the magic disappears when you learn that Ozeri has a team of assistants helping him to paint, some of whom specialize in areas such as flesh or foliage, the paintings themselves still stand on their own.  In this series, “Desire for Anima”, Ozeri focuses his gaze on youthful women frollicking about in fields.  He begins with a crew of video and still photographers to gather his cinematic source material and then begins the hyper-photorealistic painting process.

It was a very promising start to the 2009 art season!

I hadn’t been to Chelsea since January and so was looking forward to catching up on the scene yesterday on an art-filled day in the city.  I had my list of galleries to visit, planned carefully via ChelseaArtGalleries.com (which, sadly, seems to be missing more and more gallery listings these days) and the latest copy of ArtNews.  The weather was reasonably cooperative — gloves and scarf required but at least it was dry and not too windy.

Yesterday it seemed that a recurring theme in several of the shows I came across was “Big Heads.”  For fans of Alex Katz, you might be particularly interested in the paintings by Ridley Howard at Leo Koenig on 23rd St, up through April 11.  The figures are stylized — features are simplified into geometrical shapes but in a way that is beautifully painted.  The pieces include flat fields of color but also have enough articulation to suggest the third dimension more than most Katz paintings do.  (Particularly compelling was “Mexico City“.)

On 27th Street, another show of Big Heads — portraits of famous world figures — by California artist Lee Waisler is up at Sundaram Tagore gallery.  In this show, Waisler attaches thin strips of carefully shaped wood fastened to the underlying canvas as a drawing framework for his “dimensional portraits”, which are then fleshed out with acrylic paint in a sort of pop-art style.  The wood strips give the paintings a sculptural dimension (almost like Wesselman steel drawings) and I particularly enjoyed the smaller of two Einstein paintings and this colorful portrait of Gandhi.

Continuing the Big Head theme and moving towards Floating Bodies, over at Mike Weiss Gallery Piet van den Boog exhibits a number of large figurative works, including this one called Erwin Olaf (listed as Acrylic and Oil on rusted Steel).  The paintings in this show are worth looking at up close, where you can see the texture of the individual brush strokes with very little smooth blending.  The exhibition is called “Ophelia” (after the character from Hamlet who drowned, possibly by suicide, after being spurned by Hamlet and losing her father), and water and darkness play a role in several of the pieces.  The artist has a video of his studio along with a close-up of one painting posted on YouTube.  (Someone who has often painted big heads in the past, Rudolf Stingel, has a show of very small portraits up at Paula Cooper; these have a similar painterly texture to the van den Boog works but are monochrome and I thought not as interesting as other Stingel paintings I’ve seen).

At Von Lintel, back on 25th Street, Izima Kaoru exhibits large intriguing photographs of famous Japanese models and actresses in fantasy scenes of their own deaths — in this show, the most common image is of a woman in a dark peach-colored outfit “floating” in a room of flowers.  You’re drawn to the blank expressions on the model’s face (with perfectly smooth makeup applications), the selective focus in the images, and the peculiar contradictions of bleak subject matter and well-executed photography.

Fortunately, not everything was big heads and floating bodies in Chelsea yesterday.  At Danese gallery, I caught the Larry Poons show of new paintings (Check out the very cool online catalog of this show, though don’t expect perfect color reproduction).  I was most familiar with Poons’ early dot and ellipse paintings, but these works are pure abstract expressionism, large canvases of colorful, vigorous brush strokes.  There are faint glimpses of things that could be read as figures — perhaps a face here, a body there, an overall sense of landscape — but mostly they read as abstract.  (They reminded me of the Cecily Brown show a few months ago, though the Poons paintings are more lyrical in their brush stroke and more harmonious in their use of color.)  Most of the Poons pieces in the show have a high key color palette, with the exception of one painting in the back room whose overall tone was aquamarine blue with punches of magenta, green, yellow, and orange (Calling You).

Finally, at Betty Cunningham there’s a pretty nifty show of “Diaphans” by Clytie Alexander.  These sculptural/painting objects consist of thin sheets of painted aluminum, perforated by hundreds of “hole punches” (probably drilled), floating four inches away from the wall by small rod fixtures.  As the ceiling light shines through these works (“diaphanous”), they create vague shadows on the wall that intermingle with the aluminum support and at times make the edges of the paintings appear hazy.  The backs of these paintings (which you can’t really see directly) are often painted a different color from the front, so that the reflected light tints the shadows on the wall behind the work.  In the back room, this is particularly interesting as pieces that otherwise look to be similar shades of white end up casting different tints of shadows on the walls behind them.  At the surface, these pieces can remind you of a Yayoi Kusama infinity net with hundreds of densely packed holes, while from far away you’re more likely to think of Robert Ryman, where white sits on top of color and the mounting against the wall is an important part of the piece. (Interestingly, as I signed the guest book, I noticed that Robert Ryman had in fact signed in just a few names before mine.)

On Friday, I headed into Manhattan for The Armory Show, located on piers 92-94 at 12th Avenue and 55th Street.  (Since the show didn’t open until noon, I had some time in the morning to catch up with Bonnard at The Met, but I’ll write about that in a separate post.)  This year I didn’t try and stuff four art fairs into a single day (perhaps art is like ice cream, wonderful stuff but if you try to take in too much too fast you get a headache?).

As with last year’s event (wow, I’ve been blogging for over a year now), there was some confusion at the entry to the show that could have been prevented with better signage.  Even though I had an e-ticket purchased ahead of time (recommended), there was still a wait as people sorted themselves out into proper lines and the staff gated people into the lobby rather ad hoc.

This year, the exhibition is comprised of two separate pavilions, the main “contemporary” show (“International Fair of New Art”) in the same upside-down T-shaped pier as last year and a “Modern” component in the adjacent pier.  Both parts are included with the same $30 (!) entry fee.

Turning the first corner in the show, I noticed a large epoxy resin painting by Peter Zimmerman at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin.  Zimmerman writes that he used Photoshop to abstract an image of a book cover algorithmically and used the resulting design as a starting point for his painting.  This seems similar to a process that I’ve used on some of my own recent paintings, where I’ve used photographic reference material and my own Photoshop algorithms to create the framework for a painting.

I noticed two or three different artists using Venetian blinds prominently in their work — something symbolic of the time or just a coincidence?  Evan Gruzis @ Deitch Projects hangs black blinds in front of a plasma TV displaying a bright orange video loop to create an eerie but intriguing object.  (I don’t normally go for this type of piece, but this year I found several assembled objects or sculptural works to be compelling and worth looking at for more than a few seconds.)

Also at Deitch was something completely different, a huge Kehinde Wiley painting (“oil wash on paper”) depicting an African American man in a pose entitled “Confederate Soldier from Mississippi Memorial” with trademark decorative elements floating in the background.  Having only seen Wiley’s canvases before, I enjoyed examining the different texture and brushstroke application in this oil wash on paper painting.

Another assembled-object piece that was visually enjoyable was Cornelia Parker’s “Composition with Horns” (similar to this one) at Frith Street Gallery.  It’s comprised of two instruments, a cornet and a bugle, hanging from thin threads just an inch or two from a pedestal (think Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible), with the cornet hanging perfectly vertical and a flattened (steamrolled?) bugle hanging horizontally at its side.  I’ll assume, given the title, that we’re to appreciate the object’s formal qualities (which I did) and not try to figure out the meaning of the flattened bugle and upright cornet.

At the same gallery, Anna Barriball’s “Green Glass 2008″ reminded me of a James Sienna drawing, or an Altair Design, or a construction from World of Goo, with thousands of delicately drawn green lines connecting to fill a sheet of paper.

One of my favorite paintings in the show, and one that captured the zeitgeist perfectly, was Carl Hammoud‘s “House by the Rai…” at Magnus Karlsson.  It showed Hopper’s House by the Railroad, but half of the house was falling down, crumbling, in disrepair.  Maybe it’s too literal, but since I love Hopper, this painting “hit home” for me.

Another favorite, and another “object” work, was Ján Mancuška‘s “Tatlin’s Tower (this time in proper direction)” at the Andrew Kreps booth.  I’d prefer to call it “Filmstrip Yoga”:  it’s a strip of film with images of someone doing various shoulder stand yoga poses, with the strip twisted into a spiraling twirl, strung up with dozens of white strings and suspended adjacent to a fluorescent bulb lighting a plane of frosted glass.  My description isn’t doing it justice and I’m sure my memory isn’t completely accurate, but what I liked was that you could enjoy the piece at various scales — either up close by looking at the images on the film or the way it was strung up, or from further away by looking at the overall shape of the piece.

I found two Anish Kapoor pieces (both of which I think were sold), one a straightforward concave highly polished mirror that does typical fun house inversions and one that was much more interesting:  a bright magenta open-ended “semi-sphere” where, as you look into it’s interior, you lose all sense of depth and your eyes can’t focus on the back of the piece.  Mesmerizing and beautiful.

Over in the Modern wing, there was quite a lot to enjoy, though I won’t go into all of the details.  Highlights for me included a high quality Philip Pearlstein 2-figure oil painting, a Vasarely that happens to use almost the same palette as a painting I recently finished (oddly enough at the same gallery as the Pearlstein), some nice little Oscar Bluemner watercolors at O’Hara that are alas way out of my budget now, and a few nice Sol LeWitt wavy ribbon gouaches.

Overall, I found the contemporary part of The Armory Show to be about what it usually is:  enjoyable though a bit overwhelming; full of much that wouldn’t garner a second glance, but also providing enough that I enjoyed looking at to make me glad that I went.  Thankfully, this year the $30 entry fee gives you acces to the Modern part of the show as well, where you can take in and enjoy some familiar museum-quality pieces to help get your money’s worth.

After visiting the show in Newark, I headed into Manhattan to for this year’s first trip to Chelsea.  Although many of the galleries are still closed for the winter break, it was opening night for many shows.  Even with the chilly and windy weather, the receptions still drew good crowds.  In an economy where nobody wants to spend any money, free wine and free art (at least to look at) is a bargain.

I was glad to catch the Al Held show at Paul Kasmin, which I had accidentally missed on my last trip to the neighborhood.  The exhibition consists of approximately half a dozen medium-sized paintings (for Held they’re medium-sized, for me they would be gigantic), each a highly saturated, hard-edged colorscape of perspectival scaffolding and twisting roller-coaster-like beams.  In what I consider a sign of a good show, the other two people in the gallery with me were similarly scrutinizing the paintings carefully, from near and afar, from the front and from the sides, looking for color and composition, working to see how they’re all put together.

There are a couple of interesting shows on 23rd Street, a street that often gets short shrift on my visits to Chelsea.  At Pavel Zoubok Gallery, George Deem has a show entitled, “We Were There”.  It features a series of gouache and oil paintings (I think) whose subject matter is taken from combinations of famous works by the masters, particularly Vermeer.  Of particular note is “Sargent Vermeer”, which places one of the girls from Sargent’s “Daughters of E D Boit” (perhaps my all-time favorite painting) into a Vermeer interior, with the Sargent painting itself hanging on the wall Vermeer-style.

Also on 23rd Street at Leo Koenig (extended beyond its Jan 3 end date) is an exhibition of works on paper by Christian Schumann.  Each of the pieces in this show consist of obsessive, meticulous, paper-filling drawings of a sort of fictional landscape that’s reminiscent of the movie Wall-e.  The imagery is of blobs of… something, perhaps organisms, maybe robotic, mostly organic, not a lot of straight lines.  Although all of the works are fairly similar except for differences in the light washes of color underneath the drawing, there’s a cumulative effect of seeing so many of these works lined up in the gallery one after the other.  Given the nature of my own work, I can appreciate the kind of voluminous mark-making and mindful process that must have gone into each of these pieces.

At Kathryn Markel gallery on 20th Street, there’s a fine exhibition of oil paintings on aluminum panels by California artist Tyrell Collins.  Each of the panels contains a lovingly painted landscape in mostly yellowish hues, a combination of trees and fields.  The aluminum supports make these perceptually very interesting, as the works can glow depending upon the angle of view, an effect that reminded me of Daguerreotype photos.

There’s a very nifty show at Gana Art, a gallery that consistently puts on high quality shows.  Korean artist Lee Jung-Woong shows a dozen paintings in a series called, “Brush”.  Each work presents a very finely depicted paintbrush on top of an ink-splattered piece of paper, and you’re compelled to think about how the work was painted and what it’s a painting of.  The press release says that the artist splatters Chinese ink on the “canvas” (though I think the supports are stretched Korean paper) and then renders the brushes in oil paint.

Finally, there’s a beautiful show of “Railings & Shadows” by Andrew Jones at George Billis Gallery.  Jones (who’s a friend of a friend of mine) captures the light on the stoops and railings that line the streets of the West Village.  The paintings are representational but through cropping and carefully selected points of view have somewhat abstract compositions.  My favorite pieces in this series are the ones where the articulations of the brush are visible even in what would be a flat area of color, giving you something very interesting to look at up close.  Some of the works — the ones with the most contrast, I think — really pop when you stand back, especially “West 15th Street Newels” (already sold!).

I was finally able to make it up to Newark today to see the City Without Walls show which includes six of my paintings.  Here’s a photo of the overall installation — you can click on the image to get a higher res version.

I’m very pleased with the way my paintings look in the lighting of this atrium — a nice, neutral light with very even illumination.  If you’re thinking of going to the show but nervous about going to Newark, it’s incredibly easy to get to by train or car.  I’ve posted directions by train in a separate blog post.  By car, you can follow the Seton Hall law school’s directions, which work very well; today I used the GPS which took me via Turnpike exit 13A through Newark and that was perhaps even easier.  There’s a parking garage right next door at 103 Mulberry St (it’s not cheap, but it’s easy).

In addition to my own paintings, the show includes the work of three other artists.  David French, who happens to also be from Carnegie Mellon (where he graduated from the fine arts school just before I got there as an engineer), exhibits a number of large sort-of-Richter-esque abstractions.  Using mostly subdued tones and a wide-open composition, French perhaps uses large palette knives or squeegies to apply the paint to canvas in ways that pit horizontal versus vertical (I found this image, though I don’t think this one is in the show).  Sonya Chusit, who happens to be from Teaneck — where I lived for 8 years growing up and still consider my “home town” — hints at representation in otherwise large fields of color with expressions of hands, foliage, and streams of “0″ digits running across the canvas.  Finally, Karim Marquez (no serendipidous connection, as far as I can tell) exhibits a variety of works ranging from a bright and bubbly blue meditation on color and depth to a dark, monochromatic mixed media expression.

It was good to be back home after driving through nearly four hours of rain and traffic, returning from several days down in Washington, DC.  During the trip I managed to squeeze in visits to three great museums.

First up, I took a quick stroll through the National Gallery of Art, just off The Mall.  I’ve been there several times in recent years so it has become almost familiar, though it’s still quite a joy to explore.  On this trip, I mostly focused on the east wing of the old (west) building, which houses French Impressionists and American Impressionists and Realists from the late 1800s and early 1900s.  One of the iconic images here is Renoir’s “A Girl with a Watering Can”:

From there I headed over (or rather, under) to the newer (east) building, the home of a very fine, compact collection of modern and contemporary art.  All of the major players are represented, with my favorite pieces probably being two Sol LeWitt works:  one is a wall of ink washes in colored bands that make up four squares; the other is a wall drawing in four colors of not-straight lines intersecting with even density (I’m paraphrasing from LeWitt’s descriptive, generative titles).  Both are exciting to look at up close as well as from a distance, each providing a different kind of optical treat.

From the National Gallery of Art, I headed up 8th Street to the National Portrait Gallery (which shares the building with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and together they are called “The Donald W Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture”).  I had never been to this space (at least not in adulthood) and so wasn’t sure what to expect.  It’s a great museum and if you’re heading to DC I would highly recommend a visit!

On display in the Smithsonian side of the building was a special exhibition comparing the works of Ansel Adams with Georgia O’Keefe.  I’ve never been that big a fan of O’Keefe, but this show has perhaps changed my mind, as it was full of dynamic, abstracted landscapes which to me are more interesting than her more ubiquitous flower paintings.  The Ansel Adams photographs didn’t fare well in the comparison, as the warm gallery lighting and generally small size of the prints made it tough to enjoy his photos fully.

Upstairs, the Smithsonian has on display a very nice collection of modern and contemporary work, and I found one Oscar Bluemner (one of my favorite artists) tucked away in a room of other early American modernists.

But for me, the star of this visit was the Portrait Gallery.  The space exhibits “the nation’s only complete collection of presidential portraits outside the White House”, and it’s really a must-see.  From the familiar George Washington “Lansdowne” portrait by Gilbert Stuart to the rather smarmy and soft-focused Bill Clinton by Nelson Shanks, it’s a real history lesson.  The text panels next to each painting focus more on the presidents than on the artists or the paintings themselves, which I guess makes sense for the general public, but left me wanting to know more about each of the paintings.  It was amazing to see the variety in quality from one painting to the next; from truly magnificent to just short of laughable.

In addition to the Presidents collection, the Portrait Gallery also has many other historical and contemporary portraits in the form of paintings, sculptures, and photographs.  On display now is a show called “The Mask of Lincoln” which includes mostly photographs of honest Abe as well as two “life masks” taken five years apart in 1860 and 1865 (the latter just two months before Lincoln’s assassination).  It’s hard to tire of things Lincoln and I always find seeing those images of him from very early in the history of photography to be quite moving and mesmerizing.  Of the rest of the paintings in the portrait gallery, one that jumped out at me was a Sargent (his paintings always seem to jump out at me), a portrait of Leonard Wood from 1903.  This painting combines perfect color mixing with an absolute minimum of brushstroke to yield a striking rendition in paint.

On Tuesday, I stopped by the Phillips Collection, another gallery/museum that I hadn’t seen before and another one that was well worth the visit.  Reminding me of a more intimate Frick Collection, the space is organized into two buildings, an old mansion with carpeted floors and stuffy decorations and a more modern seeming space with wood floors that feels more like a museum.  Currently, the top floor is showing by-products of a work-in-progress by Jean-Claude and Christo:  “Over The River”.  The exhibition includes photos and drawings of the wrapper duo’s plans to drape massive silvery fabric sheets over a stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado.  It might be fun to visit that when it goes live (I enjoyed “The Gates” in NYC a few years back), but the ephemera in this show (quite a lot of it) is rather a snooze.

The rest of the collection, though, was quite enjoyable.  The Rothko Room holds four Rothko abstracts, with Green and Maroon being the most compelling.  On opposite ends of the floor are a wonderful Matisse and then the incredibly famous Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party.  You always wonder if it’ll be a letdown to see a painting you’ve seen a million times before in reproduction (that’s how I felt about Velazquez’s Las Meninas when I saw it in Spain last year, though that could be due to dreary weather and packed crowds).  Luncheon, however, is a blast to see in person.  Full of color and life, it’s one of those paintings that looks much better in person than it does on paper (where the colors are often way off).

Finally, the Phillips Collection hosts the odd numbered panels in Jacob Lawrence‘s Migration Series, which I had seen in total in New York a number of years ago, but which are always worth a look (and a read, since the panels come with captions explaining in story-book fashion the migration of African Americans from south to north from 1916-1930).

One of these days I’ll get back to DC and spend some time with the history and politics destinations, but for this trip I was happy to stick to art (the “Newseum” was begging people to visit, but with a $20 admission charge it’s a tough sell).

After exploring the Miró and Van Gogh shows at MoMA, meeting a friend for lunch, and doing some business in SoHo, I headed back northwards to Chelsea where there’s an abundance of interesting art to see right now.

Of the several major photography shows up today, my favorite was Richard Avedon at the Pace Wildenstein on 22nd Street.  Although I’ve seen many of these images from the Avedon retrospective at the Met a few years ago, you don’t get tired of seeing them.  Many of the shots are his signature white-background portraits, but the show includes more “snapshot” type images as well.  I love seeing the old, barely recognizable Groucho Marx, the triptych of Igor Stravinski with his puddling eyes, the very young Bob Dylan.

At Gagosian’s 21st Street space, Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibits fourteen “Seascapes” photos.  Sugimoto uses a large-format camera to take shots of the horizon at sea, varying exposure times to produce images that range from abstract and hazy to crisp and clear.  More interesting perhaps than the photos themselves is the installation (though I love Sugimoto’s work, these aren’t his most exciting pictures).  The huge gallery has been divided in half, with the first room lit by natural and fluorescent light and the seascapes are of daylight scenes.  In the back half, the gallery is pitch black except for the spotlights which cause the borders of the dramatic night-time seascapes to glow.

Matthew Marks is exhibiting some neat new photos by Andreas Gursky on 24th Street.  These huge images capture the peculiar architecture and the dancing clientele at a nightclub in Germany.  A few of the shots show the club practically empty, drawing attention to the honeycomb-like walls of the room, while others show hundreds of people in a frozen state of dancing.  (I’m not sure to what extent digital manipulation is going on, but I only noticed one patron whose eyes were blinking…  How does he do that, if I can’t even get a family photo with 6 people to all have their eyes open?

The last big photography show I saw gave me the creeps:  Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures.  Sherman takes shots of her dressed-up, made-up self in front of a green screen and then superimposes them onto background images.  Perhaps it was something I ate, but these images of her, which continue “her investigation into distorted ideas of beauty, self-image and aging”, litereally caused my stomach to turn.  I guess that’s what they’re supposed to do.

Moving on to painting, there’s a nice show of large Joan Mitchell sunflower paintings at Cheim & Read.  If you like Mitchell, this is a great little exhibition worth seeing.

I was looking forward to the Terry Winters show at Matthew Marks (22nd St).  From what I’ve read about him, he shares a number of formal and subject-matter interests with me:  science, technology, mark-making, tessellated patterns, topology, and color theory.  But for some reason these “Knotted Graph” paintings didn’t excite me the way a mini-retrospective of his work that I saw in Texas a few years ago did.

There’s an interesting painting show of works by Sandro Chia at Charles Cowles gallery.  I’d call these “mash-up” paintings, in that they seem to pull stylistically from and mix together a bunch of periods of art history.  Mix in a handful of Picasso, tablespoon of Gauguin, a dollop of Matisse, and a splash of Warhol, and you get these colorful, playful images, whose subjects, however, are cowboys, Indians, and pirates.

At George Billis Gallery, Kenny Harris (who happens to be a friend of my brother’s) exhibits some paintings made while he was traveling cross country for a reality show about whether he could travel across the country by trading artwork for food and shelter.  They’re gorgeous paintings mostly of interiors (e.g., hotel rooms) with a particular sensitivity to light, atmosphere, and floor reflections (which are remarkably interesting to look at).

Finally, there’s a nice, small show of paintings at Jeff Bailey.  Mark Shetabi’s “Arena” paintings of images from a Queen concert (with their immediately recognizable late lead singer) vary from small and intimate to large and abstract.  The paintings are alternately representational and abstract.  The representational works show Freddie Mercury on stage in front of huge stadium audiences or capture the machinery of a concert (e.g., speakers, instruments) in low-chroma style.  The imagery gets more abstract as the artist zooms in on the equipment: an amplifier, a sound absorber.

Whew — a long day of art, but quite a bit of it worth seeing, the kind that makes you ready to go home and paint.

After seeing the Miró show, I headed down to the second floor to take in the blockbuster “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night.”  It’s worth becoming a member of MoMA for this show just so you can avoid the timed-ticket entry and the associated very long lines: just flash your membership card and you can proceed straight into the galleries without any delay.

The show focuses on Van Gogh’s longstanding interest in the night: landscapes at dusk, nighttime interiors, and star-light night skies.  It includes, of course, the museum’s super-famous “Starry Night”:  fortunately, if you’ve been to MoMA often you’ve seen this painting a million times and can skip the huge crowds here.  There are several “Sower” paintings where peasants work the fields as the sun sets in the background.  The Potato Eaters is here and it’s nice to see it in person instead of in your art history books (all of them!).

The Dance Hall in Arles is a Gauguin-like interior full of dancers and is noteworthy for its surprisingly flat forms and lacking the signature broken brushstroke of most of Van Gogh’s other work.  In The Night Cafe, Van Gogh tries “to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green”.

In a show full of knockout paintings, the “star” is the other Starry Night (“…Over the Rhone”), a gorgeous scene of a couple strolling in the foreground, the town of Arles shimmering in the distance, and reflections of the town and the stars in the sky flickering over the water of the Rhone.

My only complaint about this show is that it’s so crowded, even with the timed entry tickets.  Worse, large crowds loiter around the paintings with audio explanations, audioguide glued to the ear, oblivious to the space and people around them.  My suggestion is that you go and just look at the paintings as much as you can and read the text or listen to the audio from MoMA’s excellent online exhibition ahead of time.  But most of all, be sure not to miss this show!

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)
In MoMA’s large atrium, there’s a site-specific installation by artist Pipilotti Rist.  I remember being entranced by Rist’s video / sculpture installations in Chelsea a few years ago.  The video component of the present piece is projected up against the walls of the atrium while the center of the space contains round cushioned benches for viewers to lie back on.  People are encouraged to make themselves comfortable, to get to know others around them, and to take off their shoes before stepping onto the light colored carpet!

The Printed Picture
In another show that I had to hurry through but will have to revisit (it’s up through June 1, 2009), MoMA documents the history of multiple-copy image prints (the exhibition coincides with the publication of the book The Printed Picture).  In a nifty curatorial strategy, examples of dozens of different kinds of prints are exhibited along the walls of the gallery, many of them coupled with 50x magnifications that let you easily see what’s going on at a very low level on the paper (e.g., you can quickly see the difference between halftone screen patterns and stochastic screen patterns).  There’s an awful lot to look at here, so this show might be best enjoyed in detail through the book.