The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Everyday Abstract — Abstract Everyday Shinique Smith’s “Bale Variant No. 0022,” in this show at the James Cohan gallery, one of five Chelsea shows of contemporary painting. More Photos »

June 28, 2012

By ROBERTA SMITH

Painting is a lot of things: resilient, vampiric, perverse, increasingly elastic, infinitely absorptive and, in one form or another, nearly as old as humankind. One thing it is not, it still seems necessary to say, is dead.

Maybe it appears that way if you spend much time in New York City’s major museums, where large group shows of contemporary painting are breathtakingly rare, given how many curators are besotted with Conceptual Art and its many often-vibrant derivatives. These form a hegemony as dominant and one-sided as formalist abstraction ever was.

But that’s another reason we have art galleries. Not just to sell art, but also to give alternate, less rigid and blinkered, less institutionally sanctioned views of what’s going on.

Evidence of painting’s lively persistence is on view in Chelsea in five ambitious group exhibitions organized by a range of people: art dealers, independent curators and art historians. Together these shows feature the work of more than 120 artists and indicate some of what is going on in and around the medium. Some are more coherent than others, and what they collectively reveal is hardly the whole story, not even close. (For one thing there’s little attention to figuration; the prevailing tilt is toward abstraction of one sort or another.) A few of the shows take a diffuse approach, examining the ways painting can merge with sculpture or Conceptual Art and yield pictorial hybrids that may not even involve paint; others are more focused on the medium’s traditional forms.

All told, these efforts release a lot of raw information into the Chelsea air, creating a messy conversation, a succession of curatorial arguments whose proximity makes it easy to move back and forth among them, sizing up the contributions of individual artists as well as the larger ethos.

Everyday Abstract — Abstract Everyday

A good place to start thinking about the expansive possibilities of painting is this show at the James Cohan Gallery, one that is not explicitly about painting but that nonetheless includes a lot of works of a definite pictorial nature. Organized by Matthew Higgs, director of the alternative space White Columns, it charts a literal-minded kind of abstraction that uses common materials and, often, painting as a jumping-off point.

Representing 37 artists, the show reaches into the past for Hannah Wilke’s small, delicate chewing-gum reliefs from 1975 that are evocative of female genitalia, and for an Andy Warhol 1978 “Oxidation Painting,” its gaudy green-gold splatters achieved by having his assistants urinate on canvasses covered with copper paint.

Recent efforts include paintinglike wall pieces like Alexander Bircken’s striped rectangles of crocheted yarn (a skeletal homage to Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bed”?) and Bill Jenkins’s wire bed frame threaded through with short snakes of rope (Jackson Pollock?). There are works that suggest three-dimensional paintings, including a thick pylon of bright bundled fabric by Shinique Smith and a free-standing sheaf of painted fabric and paper by Nancy Shaver.

Other standouts include Udomsak Krisanamis’s 1996 “Acid Rain,” a swirling painting-collage of black and white; Gedi Sibony’s “The Two Simple Green Threes,” whose stenciled motif suggests a rehearsal for a quilt; and a painting on paper by David Hammons in which splashes of pink Kool-Aid evoke the nearby Warhol. There are lots of illuminating connections to be drawn among the works here.

Context Message

The robust, even wholesome physicality of Mr. Higgs’s show finds its complement in “Context Message,” at Zach Feuer, a rather more barbed presentation of what I would call painting, quasi-painting and anti-painting. With works by about 40 artists (including some collectives and collaborations), the show has been organized by Tyler Dobson and Ben Morgan-Cleveland, two young artists who run the small, forward-looking gallery Real Fine Arts in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

It starts off winningly. At its center hang two beautiful quilts, one by Lola Pettway, the other by Mary Lee Bendolph and Ruth P. Mosely, all from the acclaimed quilters’ collective of Gee’s Bend, Ala. The works surrounding these two amazing pictorial objects oscillate erratically among the ironic, the sincere, the subversive and the snarky.

R. H. Quaytman, known for cool photo-based works, contributes a small, sweet but rather generic oil portrait of her husband. The great blues guitarist and self-taught painter John Fahey (1939-2001) is represented by a lively gestural abstraction.

The canvasses of Merlin Carpenter, Bjarne Melgaard and Michael Krebber all add fairly obvious twists to ironic art-world self-reference with images and texts copied from the Internet. In between, paintings by Alistair Frost, Margaret Lee and Michele Abeles, David Diao and Martin Kippenberger all reward attention.

This show never quite comes together, but that may be its point. Its scrappy waywardness gives a vivid picture of the general unruliness in and around painting right now.

Painting in Space

A similar lack of focus afflicts this show at Luhring Augustine, but not quite so fruitfully. Packed with well-known names, it is a benefit exhibition for the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and has been organized by Tom Eccles, the center’s executive director, and Johanna Burton, director of its graduate program. Among the 26 artists here the three who explore the show’s titular theme most actively are Martin Creed, represented by a big latticelike red wall painting; Rachel Harrison, whose bright, patchily painted plastic-foam sculpture comes with a length of searing orange carpet; and Liam Gillick, the subject of a show that opened at Bard last weekend, whose spare painted metal sculptures suggest geometric paintings extruded into space.

Otherwise, videos and sculptures by Tony Oursler, Pipilotti Rist, Haim Steinbach, Mark di Suvero, John Handforth and others mainly squander an interesting concept: Just about anything seems to qualify as “painting in space.” Paintings of a more wall-bound, canvas-based sort, by artists like Josh Smith, Amy Sillman, Glenn Ligon and Sarah Morris, range through current abstraction, but that’s not the same.

Stretching Painting

The 10 artists in “Stretching Painting” at Galerie Lelong don’t so much push the medium into space as meddle with its physical properties at close quarters, on the wall.

Sometimes the exercise is disarmingly simple, as with the magnified brushwork and pale colors (diluted with plaster) of Alex Kwartler’s two large paintings on plywood. Sometimes it is startlingly obsessive, as with the work of Gabriel Pionkowski, a young artist who unravels canvas, colors the individual threads and partly reweaves then into stripes or jacquardlike patterns; or Donald Moffett’s wildly suggestive combinations of furlike paint surfaces on emphatically perforated wood.

Kate Shepherd and Jim Lee indicate new possibilities for the modernist monochrome. Assembled by Veronica Roberts, a New York-based curator and scholar, the works here can sometimes feel a bit small-bore. This is relieved by Patrick Brennan’s “Boomtown (A long road home),” a big, bristling collage festooned with small paintings, and Lauren Luloff’s “Flame Violent and Golden,” which seems pieced together from textile remnants that are actually hand-painted on different scraps of cloth, using bleach. It has some of the scenery-chewing exuberance of Julian Schnabel, which is quite refreshing.

The Big Picture

A penchant for small, modestly-scaled works that is often evident in these shows is at its most extreme at Sikkema Jenkins in “The Big Picture,” a slyly titled show of works by eight artists whose efforts rarely exceed 20 inches on a side.

An implication here is that small is not only beautiful but also might actually be radical, or at least anti-establishment, in a time of immense, often spectacular artworks. Another suggestion is that there remains plenty to be done with paint applied to small, flat rectangular surfaces.

These arguments are made effectively and repeatedly, whether by Jeronimo Elespe’s “Segundo T,” whose scratched patterns suggest a text or a textile as much as a painting; Merlin James’s resplendent “Yellow,” which simply pulses with small, well-placed blooms of color; or Ann Pibal’s latest, more forthright collusions of brushy and hard-edged abstraction. Through quietly inspired brushwork alone, David Schutter breathes his own kind of life into landscape-suggestive monochromes, while John Dilg brings the canvas weave to bear, almost pixelatedly, on his cartoon-visionary landscapes.

Robert Bordo, Josephine Halvorson and Ryan McLaughlin all make the case that art exists foremost for close looking and internalized experience and nothing does this better than painting. Other mediums can do it just as well, if we’re lucky, but not better.

For the moment three solo exhibitions supplement the conversation among these group shows in nearly mutually exclusive ways. In Cheyney Thompson’s installation (through Saturday) at Andrew Kreps (525 West 22nd Street) postwar gestural abstraction and Conceptual Art collide to bracing effect in a series of gaudy but weirdly methodical canvasses of identical height whose widths are proportioned to the walls on which they are displayed; never has Mr. Thompson’s sardonic skepticism about painting and its processes looked so fierce or decorative.

At Derek Eller (615 West 27th Street) André Ethier’s small canvasses (also through Saturday) mine the overlap between modernist and folk painting with a vibrant insouciance and could easily have been included in the Sikkema Jenkins show. And in her Manhattan gallery debut at Thomas Erben (526 West 26th Street) Whitney Claflin presents, through July 28, busily painted, also small canvasses enhanced by collage-poems, jewelry, sewn patches and feathers; they announce painting’s ability to absorb all comers in a whisper that is also a joyful shout.

Canvas Is Optional

THE BIG PICTURE Through July 27. Sikkema Jenkins, 530 West 22nd Street, Chelsea; (212) 929-2262.

CONTEXT MESSAGE Through Aug. 3. Zach Feuer, 548 West 22nd Street, Chelsea; (212) 989-7700.

EVERYDAY ABSTRACT — ABSTRACT EVERYDAY Through July 27. James Cohan, 533 West 26th Street, Chelsea; (212) 714-9500.

PAINTING IN SPACE Through Aug. 17. Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street, Chelsea; (212) 206-9100.

STRETCHING PAINTING Through Aug. 3. Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, Chelsea; (212) 315-0470.

 

The Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, designed by Foster + Partners, at the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.

 

Keeping up with the Joneses.

It happens in many settings, from the classroom to the country club, and, perhaps not surprisingly, among cultural organizations, according to a new study that finds that many institutions recently expanded their buildings in part because everyone else had.

Other reasons that organizations will build too much are overambitious trustees, self-interested architects and unrealistic financial projections, according to the study by the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago that is to be released Thursday.

The study, “Set in Stone,” examined the cultural building boom between 1994 and 2008, when museums, performing arts centers and theaters in the United States got swept up in new construction or major renovations.

More than $16 billion was spent by cultural organizations on building projects during that period, some inspired by the hope that construction initiatives could do what a Frank Gehry-designed museum building did for Bilbao, Spain: transform a small city into a major cultural destination.

“This issue between confusing a want with a need is enormous in the sector,” said Carroll Joynes, a founder and senior fellow at the policy center. “There are clear ways to avoid this. You can learn from what other people went through.”

A number of the lessons, the study suggests, could be drawn from its case studies of expansions like that of the Art Institute of Chicago over the past decade.

At first glance the project seemed daunting: a $300 million venture that would boost yearly operating costs by an estimated $4 million and would necessitate another $87 million in fund-raising to expand the endowment.

But with the Italian architect Renzo Piano engaged and several key trustees and the museum’s director gung ho, the expansion gained a kind of inexorable momentum.

Attendance did spike initially when the new wing opened in March 2009, but then it dropped back to normal levels. A precipitous decline in endowment income led to pay cuts, furloughs, a salary freeze and two rounds of layoffs.

“Instead of expanding its budget as expected, the Art Institute was forced to contract instead,” the study said.

The study examines not only what arts organizations got wrong but also what they got right and offers guidance for arts executives, civic leaders, donors and government officials about how to avoid pitfalls and how to grow intelligently and responsibly — or maybe not at all.

“It’s lessons from the front lines,” said Adrian Ellis, an arts consultant who helped conceptualize the study. “The stories aren’t told that often.”

The study was based on interviews with people in more than 500 arts organizations and drew data from more than 700 construction projects that ranged in cost from $4 million to $335 million. The New York region led the country in cultural building ($1.6 billion) after Los Angeles ($950 million) and the Chicago area ($870 million).

In many cases the researchers found that organizations failed to realistically assess the demand for their projects and their capacities to complete them: Do we really need this? Can we afford to build it? Can we support a larger operation going forward?

“All of the work fundamentally says, ‘Don’t build what you can’t sustain,’ ” said Duncan M. Webb, an arts management consultant, who was an adviser on the study.

Architects can also run away with a project, the study reports. “They say the building is for you, but the building is for them,” Mr. Joynes said. “It’s for the pictures and for their careers. From their point of view it’s a real success if it gets built.”

The study found that the most successful projects were driven by a clear artistic mission and demonstrable need; had authoritative and consistent leadership throughout the process; controlled expenses during construction; and generated income after completion.

The report’s other case studies were the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Va.; the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.; and the Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, Tex. — all of which encountered financial hurdles after expansion.

“The Modern Wing was not an impulsive project,” Douglas Druick, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, said. “It was 10 years in the making, and it puts the Art Institute on a solid footing for the future. We expect it to be here for decades, just as we still open the doors of our original 1893 building every morning.”

Additional examples outside the study abound, Mr. Joynes said, like the recent travails of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, which had to close its new flagship building in Midtown and move to its smaller Upper West Side location after almost going out of business. “The Folk Art Museum should not have happened,” Mr. Joynes said. “It was a wonderful museum and they self-destructed. Our whole purpose in this is to say, ‘There are ways to do this that can protect your organization and help you fulfill your mission that won’t cripple you or take you down.’”

The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, Mr. Ellis said, is an example of an organization that failed to build the necessary consensus among public officials and others before embarking on its $265 million complex, which opened in 2001.

“They thought, ‘If we can just get this thing up, everything will fall into place,’ and that simply isn’t the case,” Mr. Ellis said of the Kimmel. “If you haven’t thought about how to operate it, it will come back and bite you.”

Anne C. Ewers, Kimmel’s president and chief executive, acknowledged that she inherited a $30 million building deficit when she came on board in 2007 but said that she retired it the following year and that the institution was in the process of correcting “architectural mistakes” like the acoustics. “The biggest challenge was not having established an endowment dedicated to the maintenance of the facility,” she said.

In part because of these experiences and the economic downturn, the researchers say, the cultural building boom is decidedly over. The trend now is toward adaptive reuse of existing buildings and cultural districts that link various smaller organizations.

“We’re less interested in the idea of palaces of the arts,” Mr. Webb said. “A lot of these communities got in over their heads. I think we’ve learned our lessons.”

Gustav Klimt: 150 Anniversary Celebration
Neue Galerie
Through Aug. 27

New York

Few artists evoke the troubled opulence of Vienna before World War I as vividly as Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). To mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, the Neue Galerie has mounted an exhibition of paintings and drawings from its own and private collections.

"Gustav Klimt: 150th Anniversary Celebration" is not the exhausting blockbuster you might expect. Instead, having staged a larger Klimt show in 2007, the Neue Galerie has now zeroed in on some of his top works, offering a succinct and cogent presentation of Klimt's fairly rapid artistic evolution from polished academic realism toward his distinct, increasingly abstract style vividly linked to Art Nouveau.

Klimt absorbed old and recent influences as he needed them, from ancient Egypt and Byzantium through 19th-century Orientalism, Impressionism and Symbolism. Among the show's landscapes, "The Park of Schloss Kammer" (c. 1910) presents a shimmering blend of French influences—the massive trees and dappled background light rendered with Pointillist textures, the opalescent lake suggesting one of Monet's water-lily views. "Forester House in Weissenbach on the Attersee" (1914) is another wonderfully decorative composition, its textures of slate roof, flower-strewn lawn and vine-covered wall punctuated by the open casement windows whose slightly wavy delineation conjures up the flamelike intensity of Van Gogh.

Beyond the visual impact of Klimt's portraits and figure studies, their allure rides upon their libidinous candor. In the era when the essentially conservative Viennese were disquieted by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical probing into the unconscious, Klimt's increasingly rebellious imagery disturbed the establishment. He loved women, and his posing, floating and reclining female subjects seem sexually aware—and willing. Even when they aren't nude, he implies they ought to be.

View Slideshow

Neue Galerie New York/Estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer

"Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907).

 

Thus Klimt, who in 1897 co-founded the anticonservative artists group Vienna Secession, was at the artistic center of an imperial capital increasingly divided between the traditions of the Habsburg empire and the revolutionary ideas of a rising generation. Apart from their sexuality, Klimt's oil portraits and allegorical groups reflect this through persistent tension between naturalism and stylization.

"The Dancer" (1916) is a prime example. Her face, bare bosom and legs, painted in morbid blue-gray tones, are engulfed in a polychrome welter of stylized floral patterns. The riotous Japanesque background seems to flow from the dancer's flower-patterned chemise—provocatively unbuttoned. And so busy is that background and enigmatic the perspective, that you can easily miss the yellow daffodils in her left hand. Another naturalistic touch is the meticulous rendering of the dancer's shoes—Klimt pays conspicuous attention to their wide ribbon ties and gracefully curved "Louis" heels, then at the height of fashion. He was, after all, a close companion of the fashion designer Emilie Flöge, with whom he is depicted in several rare photographs hung in the adjoining room.

The stark sensuality of "Pale Face" (1903), suggests 17th-century Dutch portraiture seen through an Art Nouveau lens. The pale pinks and delicate modeling of the subject's calm, sculptural profile are set against softly defined, sinuous black-and-white passages of her hat, hair and coat. And the smokelike quality of these passages is sharply offset by a typical Klimtian touch—a silver-gray checkerboard pattern in the upper right corner further accented with the portrait's only stroke of red.

Not surprisingly, the place of honor is accorded the Neue Galierie's prized possession, the 1907 portrait of Klimt's possible lover, Adele Bloch-Bauer. In all its gleaming allure of gold and silver leaf, this portrait stands as a more modernist riposte to John Singer Sargent's once-notorious portraits of Madame X (1884) and of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1888). Like many of Klimt's mature portraits, it is iconic not just because it is so familiar, but because it actually evokes the style of Byzantine and Russian icons, the latter with their characteristic gilt metal coverings. Bloch-Bauer's head, shoulders and arms seem to peer out from behind a carapace of gold, its surface a dazzling swirl of burnished and stippled textures.

It is hard to separate precisely Bloch-Bauer's gown from the elaborately patterned background, or to determine whether she is seated or standing. But in the adjoining gallery a series of eight preparatory drawings for the portrait reveal how painstakingly Klimt worked out the pose and composition that today seem so spontaneous. The drawings also reveal the various ways Klimt arranged her hands to conceal her deformed finger.

Klimt was associated with the Wiener Werkstatte, which was dedicated to raising the quality of design of domestic objects. Placing Klimt's paintings in the context of Viennese decoration are three important Modernist-style clocks, designed by architects Adolf Loos, Otto Prutscher and Josef Urban. And to provide a telling reflection of the jewel-like patterns of the Bloch-Bauer and "Dancer" portraits, the gallery also features a group of brooches and related jewelry whose burnished silver and gilt mounts glow with the seductive radiance of polished cabochon emeralds, opals, carnelians and other precious stones.

When Klimt died in 1918 at age 55, painting and music were at a crossroads, and his late imagery prompts us to speculate which path he'd have taken had he lived into the 1920s and '30s. Would he have reflected Arnold Schoenberg's atonality and become more abstract? Or would he have continued to vent his erotic nature by maintaining his increasingly stylized representational idiom, echoing the late-Romanticism of Richard Strauss? It's tantalizing to ponder.

Mr. Scherer writes about classical music and the fine arts for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared June 26, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Forever Between Two Worlds.

via online.wsj.com

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: June 22, 2012

When I was in graduate school in the mid-’70s, trying to learn how to paint, a useful, shorthand criticism for a certain kind of creation was, “It looks like a LeRoy Neiman.” A reasonably sophisticated art student knew what that meant, and it was not a compliment. It referred to the splashy, garish, instantly recognizable style of illustration, a formulaic mix of impressionism, expressionism and realism, that Mr. Neiman used to make himself one of the most famous artists in America. To compare a student’s work to Mr. Neiman’s meant, “You are trying to distract the viewer from noticing your wooden draftsmanship and your ineptitude with matters of form and structure by larding your canvas with loud color and patchy accretions of paint.” Or, “What you are making is all frosting, no cake.”

 
LeRoy Neiman Inc.
A portrait of Joe Namath by LeRoy Neiman, whose bread and butter was sports subjects.

Mr. Neiman, who died this week at 91, was not an artist whom anyone in what I will here call the serious art world ever cared about. The world that I identified with, and aspired to be a part of, was the one whose orbit included New York Times critics, Artforum and Art in America magazines, institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art and galleries like those lining the streets of Chelsea.

From that exclusive vantage point, Mr. Neiman was the archetypal hack, his immense popularity explicable only by his ambitiously opportunistic personality and his position as Hugh Hefner’s court artist, which gave him monthly visibility to millions in the pages of Playboy. With his ever-present cigar and enormous mustache, he was a cliché of the bon vivant and a bad artist in every way.

I suppose that what Mr. Neiman’s fans found in his painting was a sense of engagement with the kind of subjects regularly proffered by network television: professional sports and its heroes, like Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath. He was, after all, a modern artist, as concerned as any with synergies of form and content. He made infectiously frothy paintings about exciting subjects. But there was nothing in his work to upset the couch potato’s televisual worldview.

It is one of the big lies of the serious art world that anything goes. That may be the case in regard to form, material and techniques, but when it comes to cultural politics, my art world leans decidedly leftward. In Chelsea galleries you are not going to find art made in the service of family values, patriotism or orthodox religion. Republican presidents may be satirically skewered, those who are Democrats hardly ever. You are unlikely ever to see anything condemning abortion or advocating looser gun control laws in a Whitney Biennial.

The serious art world expects, ostensibly at least, that Modern and contemporary art should be in some way critical of mainstream culture, as the avant-garde, from Manet to Pollock, is supposed to have been. Pop Art of the 1960s seemed to view the circus of American mass entertainment and consumerism with a mordantly amused eye. Warhol cranked out portraits of celebrities, but in a way that left you uncertain what he really thought of them. Mr. Neiman’s shamelessly fawning portraiture and uncritical view of big-time athletics left no room for doubt.

But his enthusiastic embrace of the wide world of sports points up by comparison a troubling insularity and crabbed vision in the serious art world. Unlike, say, movies and books that expansively meditate on topics of urgent interest to lots of people and at the same time  earn the respect of smart critics — the novels of Richard Ford and the films of Wes Anderson, for example — the contemporary art scene tends to favor either navel-gazing or promotion of certain agendas. The movement known as Institutional Critique, which obsessively parses the system by which art is circulated and consumed and has been, paradoxically, much favored by museum curators, is only the most conspicuous instance of this blinkered view of real, multidimensional life in the world at large.

Mr. Neiman started out in the late 1950s and early ’60s near the cutting edge of cultural change in his association with the swinging yet literate, unapologetically hedonistic lifestyle promoted by Playboy. His single, most memorable creation was the Playboy Femlin, his deft cartoon figure of a curvy sprite in thigh-high stockings and big hair. She was an extraordinarily economical condensation of mid-20th-century heterosexual male desire and a muse for the sexual revolution in the new era of the Pill.

But Mr. Neiman did not evolve in ensuing decades, and his public profile faded, like that of the magazine he worked for. I suspect that few artists now under 30 have any idea who he was or what he represented.

Mr. Neiman  is not the only celebrated artist to be marginalized by the cognoscenti. Walt Disney, Salvador Dalí, Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth all incurred suspicion for the taint of kitsch attached to their work. But it is hard to deny the aesthetic and moral interest of what they did, so they have their high-minded apologists.

Is the serious art world wrong to exclude and disdain Mr. Neiman and his art? I don’t think so. But the artist who could galvanize both popular imagination and mandarin intellect and in so doing expand the serious art world’s spiritual horizons and tell us something true about real life in the real world — that is something to wish for.

 

Christian Marclay/Paula Cooper Gallery
Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film montage, “The Clock,” is coming to the David Rubenstein Atrium in Lincoln Center.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: June 21, 2012

This summer the city that never sleeps will have another glimpse of an artwork that doesn’t relent much either: “The Clock,” a spellbinding, time-telling 24-hour wonder of film and sound montage by Christian Marclay, the polymath composer, collagist, video artist and pioneer turntablist.

An assemblage of time-related movie moments that had its debut in London in autumn 2010, Mr. Marclay’s “Clock” is already a popular classic. It is also a functioning timepiece; a highly compressed, peripatetic history of film and film styles; an elaborate, rhythmic musical composition; and a relentlessly enthralling meditation on time as an inescapable fact of both cinematic artifice and everyday life. Perhaps the ultimate validation of appropriation art, it thoroughly demonstrates how existing works of art — in this case films — become raw material for new ones.

“The Clock” counts off the minutes of a 24-hour day using tiny segments from thousands of films. Bits of “High Noon,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Laura,” “On the Waterfront,” “The Godfather” and “A Clockwork Orange” speed past, mixed with early silent films and less familiar foreign ones.

As the action, music, sound effects and dialogue of one film bleed into those of another, each segment specifies a time, sometimes through spoken words, but mostly through shots of wristwatches, clocks, time clocks and the like. All are synced to real time. When it is 11:30 a.m. in “The Clock,” it will be 11:30 a.m. in the world outside. Exactly.

The first New York showing of “The Clock,” at the Paula Cooper Gallery in January 2011, had people lining up around the block in a relatively deserted west Chelsea in the dead of winter. Now, for 20 days starting on July 13, Lincoln Center will present the piece in a specially built theater in the David Rubenstein Atrium on Broadway between 62nd and 63rd Streets. Admission will be first come first served in a setting — lined with movie-palace velvet curtains and outfitted with enormous couches that blur boundaries between living room and screening room — that accommodates only about 90 people at a time.

It may be a challenge to get in, even in the wee hours, which is when I want to go, but I intend to make every effort, and recommend that you do too. The piece will run Tuesday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and then settle in for three 38-hour weekend marathons beginning at 8 a.m. Fridays and running to 10 p.m. Sundays. It will be closed Mondays and ends on Aug. 1.

 

 

Published: June 20, 2012

 

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

LeRoy Neiman in his Manhattan studio in 1996.

LeRoy Neiman, whose brilliantly colored, impressionistic sketches of sporting events and the international high life made him one of the most popular artists in the United States, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 91.

Mr. Neiman’s kinetic, quickly executed paintings and drawings, many of them published in Playboy, offered his fans gaudily colored visual reports on heavyweight boxing matches, Super Bowl games and Olympic contests, as well as social panoramas like the horse races at Deauville, France, and the Cannes Film Festival.

Quite consciously, he cast himself in the mold of French Impressionists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Degas, chroniclers of public life who found rich social material at racetracks, dance halls and cafes.

Mr. Neiman often painted or sketched on live television. With the camera recording his progress at the sketchpad or easel, he interpreted the drama of Olympic Games and Super Bowls for an audience of millions.

When Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky faced off in Reykjavik, Iceland, to decide the world chess championship, Mr. Neiman was there, sketching. He was on hand to capture Federico Fellini directing “8 ½” and the Kirov Ballet performing in the Soviet Union.

In popularity, Mr. Neiman rivaled American favorites like Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Andrew Wyeth. A prolific one-man industry, he generated hundreds of paintings, drawings, watercolors, limited-edition serigraph prints and coffee-table books yearly, earning gross annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars.

Although he exhibited constantly and his work was included in the collections of dozens of museums around the world, critical respect eluded him. Mainstream art critics either ignored him completely or, if forced to consider his work, dismissed it with contempt as garish and superficial — magazine illustration with pretensions. Mr. Neiman professed not to care.

“Maybe the critics are right,” he told American Artist magazine in 1995. “But what am I supposed to do about it — stop painting, change my work completely? I go back into the studio, and there I am at the easel again. I enjoy what I’m doing and feel good working. Other thoughts are just crowded out.”

His image suggested an artist well beyond the reach of criticism. A dandy and bon vivant, he cut an arresting figure with his luxuriant ear-to-ear mustache, white suits, flashy hats and Cuban cigars. “He quite intentionally invented himself as a flamboyant artist not unlike Salvador Dalí, in much the same way that I became Mr. Playboy in the late ’50s,” Hugh Hefner told Cigar Aficionado magazine in 1995.

 LeRoy Runquist was born on June 8, 1921, in St. Paul. His father, a railroad worker, deserted the family when LeRoy was quite young, and the boy took the surname of his stepfather.

He showed a flair for art at an early age. While attending a local Roman Catholic school, he impressed schoolmates by drawing ink tattoos on their arms during recess.

As a teenager, he earned money doing illustrations for local grocery stores. “I’d sketch a turkey, a cow, a fish, with the prices,” he told Cigar Aficionado. “And then I had the good sense to draw the guy who owned the store. This gave me tremendous power as a kid.”

After being drafted into the Army in 1942, he served as a cook in the European theater but in his spare time painted risqué murals on the walls of kitchens and mess halls. The Army’s Special Services Division, recognizing his talent, put him to work painting stage sets for Red Cross shows when he was stationed in Germany after the war.

On leaving the military, he studied briefly at the St. Paul School of Art (now the Minnesota Museum of American Art) before enrolling in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where, after four years of study, he taught figure drawing and fashion illustration throughout the 1950s.

When the janitor of the apartment building next door to his threw out half-empty cans of enamel house paint, Mr. Neiman found his métier. Experimenting with the new medium, he embraced a rapid style of applying paint to canvas imposed by the free-flowing quality of the house paint.

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Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting.