"Richard Artschwager, Painter and Sculptor, Dies at 89" @nytimes - George Lindemann

Richard Artschwager/Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photograph by Ben Blackwell

Richard Artschwager with his “Door },” from 1983-84.

 

By KEN JOHNSON

 

Published: February 10, 2013

Richard Artschwager, a painter and sculptor whose witty, contradictory mixing of artistic genres made him one of the most critically admired artists to emerge in the 1960s, died early Saturday in Albany. He was 89.

His death, at a hospital, followed a recent stroke, his wife, Ann, said.

The death also followed by less than a week the closing of a career retrospective of Mr. Artschwager’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, his second to be mounted there. He lived in Hudson, N.Y., in Columbia County.

At a time when most artists worked in clearly determined styles, Mr. Artschwager slyly confounded the usual categories. His most famous sculpture, “Table With Pink Tablecloth,” from 1964, is something of a cross between Pop Art and a Minimalist cube by Donald Judd: a box neatly veneered with pieces of colored Formica to create the image of a wooden table with a square pink tablecloth draped on it.

Mr. Artschwager went on to produce variations on the forms of chairs, tables, doors and other domestic objects in styles ranging from severely geometric to surrealistically distorted.

In the late 1960s, he invented an abstract form he called a “blp,” a small, black, oblong shape that he would recreate in various materials and install in unexpected places to punctuate, mysteriously, gallery and museum spaces. He also placed dozens of “blps,” in the form of reliefs, stencils or decals, outside museums for viewers to go hunting for or stumble upon. Some are to be found on the elevated High Line park in Lower Manhattan near the site of the Whitney’s future home.

Mr. Artschwager’s paintings were often paradoxical. He painted black and white copies of found photographs — group portraits, pictures of buildings and other anonymous images — on textured Celotex panels, a common building material. Ostentatious frames made of painted wood, Formica or polished metal were usually part of the total piece.

He once said: “Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting for the touch.”

Richard Ernst Artschwager was born on Dec. 26, 1923, in Washington. His father, a German immigrant, was a botanist, trained at Cornell University; his mother, a Ukrainian immigrant, was an artist who studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington and at the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1935, the family moved to Las Cruces, N.M., a better climate for the artist’s father, who had tuberculosis.

Like his father, Mr. Artschwager studied at Cornell, concentrating on mathematics and sciences, though he was deeply interested in art. Before completing his degree he was drafted into the Army in 1944 and saw combat in Europe, suffering a slight wound at the Battle of the Bulge. Afterward he was assigned to counterintelligence in Vienna, where he met and, in 1946, married his first wife, Elfriede Wejmelka.

Back in the United States after the war, Mr. Artschwager completed his bachelor’s degree at Cornell but soon, with his wife’s strong encouragement, decided to become an artist. He moved to New York and began attending the Studio School of the painter Amédée Ozenfant, who, along with Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, had founded a form of late Cubism called Purism.

By then the couple had a child, and Mr. Artschwager supported his family as a bank clerk and then a furniture maker.

In the early ’50s he stopped making art and went into business building furniture until a fire destroyed his workshop in 1958. Resuming art making, he had his first exhibition — of paintings and watercolors of Southwestern landscapes — at the Art Directions Gallery in New York.

In 1960, an exhibition of assemblages by the sculptor Mark di Suvero inspired Mr. Artschwager to begin using his woodworking skills to make his own sculpture. A year later, a photograph picked up on the street prompted him to start making paintings based on black and white photographs.

A big break came when he sent, unsolicited, a note and slides to the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York’s leading showcase for new art. The gallery quickly took him on for a group show that included Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. He remained with Castelli for 30 years.

It was at the Castelli gallery, in 1965, that Mr. Artschwager had the first show of work that was recognizably his own. During the ensuing decades he participated in many important international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and Documenta, in Kassel, Germany.

The Whitney produced its first Artschwager retrospective in 1988-89. It later traveled to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris and Düsseldorf. His last solo exhibition with Gagosian Gallery was last fall at its branch in Rome featuring sculptures of pianos.

“Early and late, his work stood out for its blunt, mute weirdness,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in reviewing the recent Artschwager retrospective at the Whitney. A 1963 sculpture, “Portrait II,” for example, resembles a bedroom dresser with no drawers and a sheet of Formica where a mirror might be. The table in “Table Prepared in the Presence of Enemies” (1993) “looks like a low-rise guillotine,” Mr. Cotter wrote.

He added: “Violence is implicit in a lot of Mr. Artschwager’s art, which may be the most intriguing thing about it, the element that gives bite to what would otherwise pass for Magrittean whimsy.”

Mr. Artschwager’s political views were less apparent. In 2003, he painted three identically framed portraits, of a blank President George W. Bush, a smiling Osama bin Laden and a grim-looking one of himself. “Each painting looks cracked, creviced and soiled, as if just dug up from rubble,” Mr. Cotter observed.

Mr. Artschwager was married four times, the first three marriages ending in divorce. In addition to his wife, the former Ann Sebring, he is survived by his daughters Eva Artschwager and Clara Persis Artschwager; a son, Augustus Theodore Artschwager; a sister, Margarita Kay, and a grandson.

David Nolan, whose Manhattan gallery has shown drawings by Mr. Artschwager, said the artist had recently exhibited new paintings and works on paper that he created on a return to New Mexico, inspired in part by the colors of the landscape there he had known so well as a boy.

 

William McDonald contributed reporting.

 

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 10, 2013

 

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the date of Mr. Artschwager’s last solo exhibition with the Gagosian Gallery. It was held last fall, at its gallery in Rome, not in 2008.

“Dots, Stripes, Scans” @nytimes

The Whitney Museum has a hit on its hands: a beautiful show organized by a young curator that makes a cogent case for the work of a young artist. In a season when many New York museums are devoting a lot of energy to the past, the Whitney’s survey of work by Wade Guyton stands out as a cause for optimism. Yes, interesting art is being made here and now. And yes, there are serious ways that museums can present this art that are beyond the scope of even the richest commercial galleries.

Like many artists Mr. Guyton, who is 40, is both a radical and a traditionalist who breaks the mold but pieces it back together in a different configuration. He is best known for austere, glamorous paintings that have about them a quiet poetry even though devised using a computer, scanner and printer. The show is titled “Wade Guyton: OS,” referring to computer operating systems.

Uninterested in drawing by hand, much less in wielding a paintbrush, he describes himself as someone who makes paintings but does not consider himself a painter. His vocabulary of dots, stripes, bands and blocks, as well as much enlarged X’s and U’s and occasional scanned images, combines the abstract motifs of generic Modernism and the recycling strategies of Andy Warhol and Pictures Generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine.

One of his principal themes, which he endlessly cites and parodies yet reveres, is Modernism as an epochal style of art, design and architecture that permeates our culture from the artist’s loft to the corporate boardroom. Another is modernity as an inescapable current condition, personified in his case by his adaptation, as just another kind of paintbrush, of the digital technology that pervades our everyday lives.

While clearly not made by hand, his works are noticeably imperfect. The paintings in particular clearly tax the equipment that generates them; they emerge with glitches and irregularities — skids, skips, smears or stutters — that record the process of their own making, stress the almost human fallibility of machines and provide a semblance of pictorial incident and life.

The line between what the artist has chosen and what technology has willed is constantly blurred. For one thing, to achieve paintings of substantial width, Mr. Guyton must fold his canvas and run it through the printer twice; this gives nearly every image halves that are rarely in sync. You will notice this right off the elevator, where the exhibition’s first wall features five paintings of oddly off-register images of flames, each punctuated by large, often fragmented U’s. Even more emphatic discrepancies are apparent in an extended eight-panel work in which thick black horizontal bands alternating with white ones skittishly slant every which way but level; their jangling patterns form a rhythmic, slow-motion Op Art.

The Guyton show has been organized by Scott Rothkopf, a 36-year-old Whitney curator who has also written a convincing if overlong catalog essay illuminating this artist’s development, and he plotted, in collaboration with Mr. Guyton, a brilliant installation. More than 80 works are on view, mostly paintings but also computer drawings and a few sculptures. Dating primarily from the last decade, they are displayed on and among a series of parallel walls, some quite narrow. As you move around, works seem to slide in and out of view, like images in different windows on a computer screen. The changing vistas reveal the artist’s motifs migrating restlessly from one scale or medium to another. The U’s from the fire images are extruded into three dimensions in a group of 17 sculptures of mirrored stainless steel in 10 different sizes. Placed in a tight row they form the show’s one instance of physical perfection and suggest an irregular sculpture by Donald Judd but are in fact individual works, temporarily brought together.

Born in Hammond, Ind., Mr. Guyton absorbed the critical theory of the 1970s and ’80s as an art major at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville before seeing much art. And according to Mr. Rothkopf’s essay Mr. Guyton still enjoys looking at paintings in books as much as at the real thing, intrigued by the ways photographs alter and distort them. He came to New York in 1996 to attend graduate school at Hunter College, and his first exhibited works here were sculptures that evoked an ersatz Modernism, most effectively in pieces casually executed in smoked and mirrored plexiglass.

In 2002 he began appropriating images by a method more direct than his Pictures Generation elders. Instead of rephotographing photographs, he simply tore illustrations from books or auction catalogs and ran them through his printer, superimposing lines, X’s, thick bands or grids on their images. In one drawing here two dark yellow X’s printed on an image of a modern kitchen perfectly match a cabinet, suggesting that color-coordinated abstract art is essential to a stylish home. In another, a series of thick horizontal bars partly obscure an old half-timbered building whose geometric patterns are structurally necessary, not decorative.

By 2004 Mr. Guyton was enlarging these motifs and printing them on canvas, making paintings that are rife with ghosts. His black monochromes evoke Ad Reinhardt and the Black paintings of Frank Stella (especially when the printer goes slightly awry and starts imposing white pinstripes). His more diaphanous gray ones can summon Mark Rothko’s veils of color, while paintings featuring the blunt, fragmented X’s can summon more Stella Minimalist sculpture or eroding corporate logos.

A field of red and green stripes scanned from the end papers of a book conjures the work of Color Field abstractionists like Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis as well as Christmas wrapping paper. They first appear in two vertical paintings exhibited side by side, where they are printed in similar scales but with quite different results in tone and texture. In both paintings two large black dots in the wide white margin above the stripes lend a clownish air.

The same stripes appear again, in something close to their original scale, in several computer drawings that are sandwiched between plexiglass in a big four-square frame that mimics both a window and a canvas stretcher. (They mask images of a Stella aluminum stripe painting and sculptures by Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner.) And the stripes culminate in one of the show’s grander moments, running horizontally and much enlarged across two immense paintings — one 50 feet long, the other nearly 30 — that cover most of the north wall of the gallery. Here they seem extravagant and bold, yet they also resemble large bolts of fabric, unrolled, with the starts and stops of the printer creating trompe l’oeil folds. Up close you encounter another digital mystery. The extreme magnification creates an illusion of two kinds of textile: the green as a twill pattern, the red as tweed fuzzy with little orange dots.

In what seems to be a typical Guyton touch the big-statement grandeur of these works is played down. They seem to be deliberately crowded by “Drawings for a Large Picture,” which consists of 85 unframed computer drawings displayed in nine vitrines lined with eye-popping blue linoleum. The drawings are casually arranged — laid out in rows, piled in corners — suggesting the constant flux that is the natural condition of images in our time.

-By Roberta Smith

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