“A Case for the Obvious” @wsj

 

Every once in a while a major museum mounts what might be called a “Well, duh” exhibition, lavishly demonstrating something everybody pretty much already knows. That Rembrandt was a genius or that the Impressionists were inspired by sunlight fall into this category. So does Andy Warhol being a pervasive influence—probably the pervasive influence—on contemporary art. The most shrewd and sophisticated faux-naïf the world has ever known, Warhol may or may not have had his tongue planted in one of his sallow cheeks with each and every item in his massive oeuvre, but practically every artist who worked in his wake during the past half-century succumbed to at least a mild bout of irony influenza.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, choosing about 100 works by artists influenced by Warhol, along with about half that number made by the doyen of detachment himself, endeavors to illustrate this obvious fact in “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years.”

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Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through Dec. 31

The show is a breeze. Walking leisurely through a gentle maze of galleries with your head on a swivel, you can take in the whole thing in about half an hour, with a little extra time allowed for the crowds—it’s a popular show—and possibly pausing in front of a video or two. (The grainy black-and-white head-shot “screen tests” of Lou Reed and Nico are strangely fascinating, while the truly awful 1968 Warhol feature “Lonesome Cowboys” is only slightly less odious on a small screen than it was in theaters.) A quick pan of the final gallery, wallpapered with Warhol’s famously garish cow heads and garnished with those floating silver pillows (which constituted his second solo at Leo Castelli, in 1966), and you’re ready, as the British street artist Banksy would have it, to exit through the gift shop. The exhibition contains little, if anything, you need to see close up or to linger over. The audio guide doesn’t whisper, “Andy would have wanted it this way,” but it should.

“Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” really didn’t need much organization in the galleries. Random copses of parent-and-sibling work would have done the didactic trick: Andy did a portrait of Marilyn Monroe this way, while Luc Tuymans paints Condoleezza Rice that way and Julian Schnabel painted Barbara Walters still another way. But see how they’re all kind of similar because they’re anything but honorific? The Met groups the exhibition into five convenient categories which, with their subtitles (and like Warhol’s collection of flea-market kitsch), embrace just about everything under the sun: “Daily News: From Banality to Disaster”; “Portraiture: Celebrity and Power”; “Queer Studies: Camouflage and Shifting Identities”; “Consuming Images: Appropriation, Abstraction and Seriality”; and “No Boundaries: Collaboration, and Spectacle.” The wall texts aren’t awful, but they’re a far cry from “Eureka!” For example, this from the portraiture section: “Power and fame in their countless manifestations have held a strong appeal for many artists beyond Warhol. The artists in this section, nearly all of whom depend on the photograph in some way, build on the Warholian model and replenish the art of portraiture in their own unique fashion.” It’s hard to image anybody who sees “Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” not knowing this beforehand, or not being able to see the point just from the pictures on the walls.

What’s good about the show? A lot. This is the Met, after all, and it either owns or can borrow excellent and salient works by Ed Ruscha, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vija Celmins, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and the rest of the no-surprises supporting cast. The installation is first rate. (It’s not the designer’s fault that nothing beckons you to stop for a moment of contemplation.) The catalog—an ample but concise bit of one-stop shopping for Everything Andy—boasts a long, cohesive, and nicely written essay by the show’s co-curator Mark Rosenthal. It also includes a superb chronology of “moments” in Warhol’s career, from his initial rejection by Castelli in 1961 to his cameo in the movie “Tootsie” and hilarious Braniff Airlines ad campaign with Sonny Liston, to his near-murder in 1968, to highlights from Warhol’s even more influential posthumous quarter-century (for example, Rob Pruitt’s “The Andy Monument” statue recently on view on a street corner in New York’s Union Square.)

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Still, there’s something dishearteningly lightweight about “Sixty Years, Fifty Artists.” It may be that the august Met, straining against type as it does to hold little contemporary art circuses (e.g., Koons, the Starn Twins) on its roof, isn’t really comfortable with an artist as nearly omniscient, yet will-o’-the-wisp, as Warhol. In one of the catalog’s interviews with several artists influenced by Warhol, co-curator Marla Prather blunders. She says to California artist John Baldessari, “As you no doubt know, Warhol’s first solo show was at the Ferus Gallery [in Los Angeles], in 1962.” If she isn’t somehow referring to his first show in California, that isn’t the case. In 1952, Warhol had a one-person exhibition, “Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote” in New York. He also enjoyed at least a couple more solo outings prior to showing his Campbell’s soup can paintings at Irving Blum’s emporium.

It’s not usually a critic’s place to tell a great museum what it should have done, but the disappointing superficiality of “Sixty Years, Fifty Artists” bids me step over the line. We all know the breadth of Warhol’s influence; a peek into the first 10 Chelsea galleries you happen across will tell you that. What the Met should have plumbed is the depth of Warhol’s influence, by taking, say, 10 artists (I’ll nominate Ms. Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton, Messrs. Koons and Baldessari, and Robert Gober to get the squeegee moving), first noting the affinity between an early work and a relevant Warhol, and then documenting how, and to where, those artists ran with it. The Met could have escorted the viewer beyond Pop’s chic ennui and into Warhol’s profundity as an artist, as evidenced in the “Disaster” paintings, the Jackies and early films like “Empire.”

That, however, would have required the influencees to admit the extent of their debt to Warhol, and big-time contemporary artists are often too career-savvy for such modesty. Pushing them out of their necessary professional conceit is the task, nevertheless, of a premier museum if it wants to get beyond an E-ZPass version of Warhol’s legacy.

By PETER PLAGENS

"Don't Stop, Just Paint | Malcolm Morley" By Peter Plagens in @wsj #art #contemporaryart

By PETER PLAGENS

New Haven, Conn.

'The Theory of Catastrophe" (2004)—a big overhead view of a freeway pileup painted by Malcolm Morley in a deliberately offhand, close-enough-for-government-work version of Photo Realism—could well be painting's riposte to the reason the photographer Garry Winogrand gave for photographing something: to see what it would look like photographed. Mr. Morley wanted to see what such a chaotic scene would look like painted. Of course, the obvious objection to this comparison is photography's supposed machine-made "objectivity"—even in this digital age of Photoshop. Mr. Morley, though, is himself something of a painting machine. That's a compliment, meant in the same way you might call Rafael Nadal or Roger Federer tennis "machines."

[MORLEY]Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

'The Theory of Catastrophe' (2004).

Mr. Morley was born in 1931 in London. His family's house was blown up by a German bomb during the Blitz; homeless for a time, he led a rough-and-tumble youth. Serving a three-year sentence in the Dickensian-sounding Wormwood Scrubs prison for breaking and entering, the young Mr. Morley read "Lust for Life," the novel about Vincent van Gogh and, he later told a critic, he figured that being an artist was something he could do. After attending art school in London, he moved to New York in the late 1950s. There he met Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and was set on a course combining Warhol's wan acceptance of practically any subject that passed in front of his face as suitable for painting with Lichtenstein's surgical irony toward the paradox of the painted image—is it just a bunch of borrowed colored shapes, or is anything meaningful fully there?

For more than half a century, Mr. Morley has attacked that paradox by painting and painting and painting. He's taken his brushes and palette on a wild ride from dreary English postwar realism ("Richmond Hill Below the Wick," 1954) to hard-core Photo Realism (the ocean liner "Cristoforo Colombo," 1965), varieties of neo-expressionism ("Camels and Goats," 1980), cliché-embracing pulp-illustration pictures of World War II fighter planes ("Beautiful Explosion," 2010) and, most recently, veritable installation art (an exterior segment of a pub called "The Spitfire," 2012). All of this and more is engagingly crammed into the modestly proportioned art gallery of the Yale School of Art, a little minimalist building that's usually used for graduate-thesis exhibitions. "Malcolm Morley in a Nutshell" was curated by Robert Storr, the school's director, and it's an art education all by itself.

An awful lot of expertly improvisational painting moves—oddball compositions, deft brush strokes, snappy colors, risky gimmicks such as miniature 3-D barrels hanging by wires in "Depth Mine with Sharks" (2011)—are in action at a breakneck pace. While a few artists might be better at paint-handling than Mr. Morley, he does keep his colors separate and crisp, and he can make you shiver at the dark, cold wetness of Atlantic Ocean water. A certain visual garrulousness is part of his charm.

Malcolm Morley In a Nutshell: The Fine Art of Painting 1954-2012

Edgewood Avenue Gallery, Yale University School of Art

Through March 31

But he isn't perfect—and he probably wouldn't want to be. A couple of titles ("Aero-naughty-cal Manuever" from 2009, for instance) are too cute. A painting called "Split Level" (2011) is an expedient top-and-bottom reprise of two previous paintings, and one of the pub installations, "Biggles" (2011), is too sentimental for real translation into a work of art, yet too garish to convey genuine affection. "Rat Tat Tat" (2001), a 17-foot-wide triptych depicting cardboard punch-out models of World War I aircraft—and the least successful work in the show—is installed directly above the gallery entrance, as if to encourage you to miss it.

In the end, though, Mr. Morley is great at representation, not just verisimilitude. He paints whatever wows him at the moment, and manages most times to find the superficial essence (a deliberate oxymoron here) of his enthusiastically varied subjects. Mr. Morley's emphasis on finding his artistic inspiration outside of himself is what keeps his art from succumbing—as so much contemporary work does these days—to overintellectualizing and bottomless self-reference. "The idea," Mr. Morley has said, "is to have no idea. Get lost. Get lost in the landscape." By landscape, he means the hurly-burly of the world at large—ships, airplanes, naval battles, exotic animals, pubs and the occasional catastrophe. The exhibition is a kind of tribute to the good, old-fashioned, lusty painter's life, and—although Mr. Morley is in his ninth decade—an artistic spirit that's still as young as they come.

Mr. Plagens is a New York-based painter and writer.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 8, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Don't Stop, Just Paint.

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Ken Price | Words Need Not Apply | By Peter Plagens in @wsj

By PETER PLAGENS

Significant modern sculpture has been generally assumed to be pretty big, made out of metal or some kind of assemblage, uncolored or at least muted, rough-hewn or "tough," and certainly without utilitarian allusions. Ken Price, who died Feb. 24 in Taos, N.M., at age 77, made relatively small objects out of clay, many of them brightly painted, very smooth and, if not exactly useful around the house, at least wittily referential of that possibility. Price was a ceramist—he studied with the celebrated Peter Voulkos at the Otis Art Institute kilns near downtown Los Angeles, and got a master's degree from Alfred University's renowned two-year ceramics program in just one year—who became a sculptor, who became a great, sui generis artist on the order of Francis Bacon or Sidney Nolan.

price
Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Matthew Marks/Ken Price/Fredrik Nilsen

'Zizi' (2011)

Part of Price's uniqueness—especially in today's logorrheic, theory-besotted art world—was his straightforwardness. At a talk he gave seven years ago at Don Judd's Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, Price said: "I can't prove my art's any good or that it means what I say it means. And nothing I say can improve the way it looks." The first of his works to be noticed were the circa-1960 football-size "eggs," intensely painted in color schemes of eye-boggling pinks, greens, oranges and yellows, and augmented with openings inside of which lurk dark, glossy, larvae-looking stuff. Then he went to cups—hilariously impractical vessels with bodies of snail forms or Constructivist geometry (imagine a Gerrit Rietveld chair for your morning coffee)—that are like nobody else's, before or since.

Price was born on the west side of Los Angeles on Feb. 16, 1935, and raised in comfortable circumstances. (He was privileged enough to take some trumpet lessons from Chet Baker.) His parents designed and built a home close to the beach, so their boy was ready, willing and able to surf practically every day. The sport was a big deal to him (the announcement for one of his shows at the groundbreaking Ferus Gallery contains a photograph of Price standing straight up on a board in a wave, arms triumphantly outstretched), and surfing trips to Baja California, brought him into contact with one of the major influences on his aesthetic, Mexican curio shops. He spent six years in the 1970s, in fact, on a never-completed (but exhibited in parts) project called "Happy's Curios," named after his wife. It consists of cabinets of hand-made homages to Mexican commercial pottery, Day of the Dead imagery, satiny cloth and flowers.

[price2]San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Ken Price/Fredrik Nilsen

'L. Red' (1963)

A quietly affable fellow, Price could break out of his beloved studio labor (which he thought was the greatest blessing of being an artist) to create the occasional album cover (for his friend Ry Cooder), illustrations for poetry books (by Harvey Mudd and Charles Bukowski) and liquor labels (for a favorite brand of mezcal). He also taught for 10 years (1993-2003) where he first went to college, the University of Southern California, before finally decamping to Taos.

Although it's almost contrary to the joyful, just-look-at-it spirit of Price's art, his art-historical importance must be mentioned. When Price, Voulkos, John Mason, Billy Al Bengston and a few others got together at the Otis kiln, the Los Angeles modern-art world was, if it palpably existed at all, provincial and behind the times. The Otis ethos was "Let's make whatever the hell we feel like making as fast as we can while being so technically proficient it's scary." Coupled with Los Angeles's lack of a brooding avant-garde such as New York's, and with Los Angeles's cars-and-plastic visual environment, it formed the basis of the great Southern California art revolution currently being celebrated in the Getty-sponsored plethora of "Pacific Standard Time" exhibitions. (Mr. Price had three sculptures in the Getty's own lead PST show—now closed—and is one of the featured players, along with Voulkos and Mr. Mason, in Scripps College's current PST exhibition, "Clay's Tectonic Shift.") At the time of his death, Price was working with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a 50-year retrospective, a show that will turn up in 2013 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—where, if it isn't a gobsmacking revelation of the first water, something's wrong with New York.

In more academic terms, the art of Ken Price is a lively link between the austerity of Minimalism (he never wasted a curve or a color) and the inclusiveness of postmodernism (his work can remind you of everything from Constantin Brancusi to American Indians to Japanese woodblocks), proving that in art there are no real ruptures, only intriguingly disguised continuities. But in the end with Price it's the object—not history, not theory, not jockeying for position among cities—that counts. Somebody asked him why there were as many as 70 coats of reworked and pitted acrylic paint on his late, obsessively crafted, bloblike sculptures. "That's so it looks good rather than bad," Price replied. Nothing anyone can say about his work can improve upon that.

Mr. Plagens is a New York-based painter and writer. He writes the bi-weekly gallery-review column for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 6, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Words Need Not Apply.

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