[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: November 21, 2011]
If you have some time free over the next few days, here are brief notes on some gallery shows which might beguile you.
Howard Hodgkin, an eminence of British abstraction, is an artist I've followed over the years. There are artists one enjoys or is intrigued by, and artists whose shows one tries not to miss. Hodgkin is in the latter category for me. I went out of my way to see his 2006 Tate retrospective.
Is it just business as usual? The thick strokes or showers of blobs, rich in color, bearing improbably narrative titles? For the most part, yes, but there are some surprises too. Hodgkin tends towards the miniature. Hodgkin is also known for incorporating the frame in the painting, making strokes to its very edge. I was surprised, then, that the first work which confronted me on entering the gallery was a large format work - "Blood" (2005-10) - with no frame at all. Was I in the wrong place?
But no, mostly it's the familiar Hodgkin, with the wry titles. Two adjacent pictures: "Where never is heard" and "And the skies". Sing-a-long now.
Rauschenberg
I went for the Hodgkin, but spent quite some time with a show drawn from Robert Rauschenberg's private collection, also through December 23. If this is a sub-set of that collection, the full panoply of Rauschenberg's acquisitions must be both large and valuable. In a sense, it's not an especially revealing exhibition. Rauschenberg seems to have owned a number of works by all the artists you'd expect, from his friends like Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, through Black Mountain collaborators like John Cage and Merce Cunningham, to a range of contemporary avant gardists: Andy Warhol, Brice Marden, Robert Mapplethorpe. A handful of older artists too - Magritte, Duchamp - for good measure.
It would be startling f Rauschenberg's private tastes ran to academicians and pre-Raphaelites. But no, this is the art you'd expect him to like. But there's plenty of it here that's worth seeing. Indeed, you could compile a small but exciting collection of Twombly's drawings from what's on show here.
Not just painting and sculpture: there are wildly improbable musical scores too, by Cage and Stockhausen, and a startling photograph of Gertrude Stein by Carl Van Vechten. Altogether, a very nice anthology of the modern.
Ashbery
Emerging from essentially the same period of American modernism as Rauschenberg, but still very much with us, John Ashbery is no more than an occasional artist. He is, of course, perhaps America's leading living poet, but many years ago - evidently and avowedly inspired by the work of his friend Joe Brainard - Ashbery began to dabble in collage.
He must still while away an hour here and there cutting out postcards and cartoons, because there's another small set of works hanging at Tibor de Nagy (through December 3). As a poet, Ashbery manages to be both major and serious without being monumental or humorless. Quite an achievement. His art is, if anything, even funnier than some of his poems. I defy anyone to keep a straight face at "Napoleon." Cartoon figures - famously Daffy Duck, but also characters from Popeye - appear in his poems; they're all over the place here.
One could write portentously about collage as a poetical technique in Ashbery; but this show is too relaxed for that. One to enjoy.
Bracque
If you'd prefer to furrow your brow in scholarly contemplation, you have only a few days left to digest the substantial and reverent Georges Braque retrospective at Acquavella, one of those galleries housed in an imposing, neo-classical UES mansion. It closes November 30.
Although it's diverting to see some pre-Cubist Braque for once - all fauvist and Kandinsky-like - the exhibit leans heavily toward Braque's unmistakeable house style: Cubism with a dismal brown palette. I thought at first that some of the paintings must be fading heavily, but honestly, some early works are brighter than later pieces.
Braque, let's face it, is not fun.
An appreciation of modern art can hardly avoid engagement with the rethinking of pictorial space by Picasso and Braque during their Cubist periods, but the engagement is largely intellectual - for me, anyway. The light relief comes from detecting figures concealed in the paintings. "Guitar? Where? Oh look, there it is, wrapped around the chair."
If you want some Cubist-related kicks, check out 1920s Stuart Davis.
P.S. I will get to DeKooning soon, I promise.
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