Michaël Borremans, Study for Bird, 2020, oil on linen, 14 1/4 x 11 3/4″. © Michaël Borremans. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

I didn’t understand how much I needed to look at the faces of others until I drove into Manhattan this past December to stare into a stranger’s unmasked face on my birthday. The sole reason for this trip was the stranger’s face—a portrait by Michaël Borremans, an artist I had taken to describing for nearly a decade as my favorite painter whose work I had never seen in person.

I knew Borremans’s work mostly from the giant monographs and exhibition catalogs on his work I’d check out from the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library several years ago while I was working as a rare-book librarian a few blocks south at the Morgan Library & Museum. I’d lug these giant books from one library to another and then home in my backpack on the train from Midtown back to Brooklyn, renewing them over and over until they could be renewed no longer, sometimes requesting them again immediately, repeating the cycle. These paintings, or at least their reproductions, had a special resonance for me then. In the Morgan’s reading room, I routinely looked at the miniatures painted in the medieval manuscripts requested mostly by visiting academics. And when I would reshelve the printed books housed in J. P. Morgan’s former study in the old library, I’d always take a moment to look upon Hans Memling’s panel painting Portrait of a Man with a Pink.

J. P. Morgan’s Study (West Room) showing Hans Memling’s Man with a Pink, May 2016. © The Morgan Library & Museum. Photo: Graham S. Haber.

This day job rhythm fueled an almost ambient thinking about the relationship between medieval manuscript illumination and what I still think of as “early Netherlandish” panel painting, to use the art historian Erwin Panofsky’s now-antiquated phrase for this work created during the transition from the late medieval to early modern periods. In Borremans’s paintings, I saw a contemporary inheritance of this dawning moment. Borremans lives and works in Ghent, home to the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. Begun in the 1420s and completed in 1432 (probably primarily by Jan after Hubert’s death and following his initial design), this landmark historical artwork was one of the first paintings to use oil paint and a series of transparent glazes to create radical effects with light. Ghent is some twenty-five miles from Bruges, where Memling was the leading painter in the second half of the fifteenth century. In Memling’s work, the uncanny renderings of skin tones alive with light and paired with lushly textural treatments of often brocaded and jeweled clothing captivated me with their detail. Skin and clothing, faces and postures are also essential elements of Borremans’s work. As I pored over the reproductions of his paintings in those giant library books, I sensed a genealogical connection across generations to his geographically proximate forebears. This is not to say that his paintings are antiquarian-seeming curios; rather, he takes on figuration as if in a sort of dare, rendering his subjects with a freighted ambiguity. In Borremans’s work, it is as if the Catholicism of the early Netherlandish painters’ cathedral setting has fallen into ruin and been replaced with a desolate absurdist stage set. The people in his portraits often seem as if they are playing a role in some mysterious production, adding a layered tension to an existential question they ask of both themselves and the viewer: What am I doing here?

Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece (or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb), 1432, twelve interior panels, open view, 11 × 15′. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

On that blustery Saturday in December, I put on my mask, left the shelter of my car parked on the mostly empty streets, and ran across the pavement through the freezing rain to the David Zwirner Gallery, where my partner, Kate, had booked me a timed socially distanced appointment for my birthday. The trip to Manhattan to see the single Borremans was my second attempt to reengage with looking at paintings after the onset of the pandemic. I appeared to be the only visitor in the gallery that morning. In the large skylighted room farthest from the entrance, I was able to gaze upon the smallish canvas I had come to see. Measuring less than twelve by fifteen inches tall, Study for Bird is an intimate work painted by Borremans during the pandemic. In scale it echoes that Memling I spent years looking at in the Morgan. Returning to the Zwirner gallery was entering a familiar but seemingly altered space, not abandoned but haunted by the too-real fullness of the year’s history. It was a rare gift of solitude. Kate stayed with our baby still asleep in the car, as my eldest finished drawing on a birthday card. I had the gallery to myself, except for two attendants, one at the front desk and another in the gallery itself. They had pointed me in the right direction to see my first Borremans in the flesh.

What did I see? A human face, a stranger’s, unmasked. Settled, contemplative, resolute, yet melancholic. An inward look. Softly femme. Slight makeup, most noticeably blush high on the cheeks. Or perhaps they were pink with exertion. A touch of gloss on the lip, which caught the light, but so did the bridge of the nose and the peak of the left brow. A ballet dancer, a player onstage? Or maybe, as the hooded costume suggests, a pilot or a fencer. The collar floating, otherworldly, tracing a circle below the neck.

The problem here seeking a solution by the painter is the face the hood encloses, part transcribed realism and part affective invention. The figure is set before a dark ground; the darkness is drafted, filled as an afterthought. There’s something cursory, vague about this darkness, which serves to hold the figure in a field of contrasting tone and then get out of the way, to be the shadow uninvolved in the otherwise complex play of light across the face and its surrounding costume. The bit of darkness in the space behind the neck creates an area where the image peels away or falls apart, but just for a flash, a blip, just for a moment. (Maybe this is where long hair is secreting out the back of the hood.) This ambiguous bit of fabric or hair behind the head flares slightly up from the body and creates an area of just enough strangeness to reveal the plasticity and thus the inventiveness of the painting itself, as if the painting were paused just before the stroke of completion.

The attendant, maybe curious that I seemed principally interested in the Borremans painting, mentioned that it related closely to another by Borremans, titled The Pilot, that was concurrently being shown at the Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp. I had seen The Pilot online along with paintings of rockets and people dressed in rocket-like costumes. Of Study for Bird, she said the figure looks to be playing a pilot, “like Amelia Earhart.” It felt awkward and exhilarating having a conversation with a stranger about painting, attempting to remember how to do that, keeping our distance, wearing our masks.

View of “Coloured Cones,” 2020, Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. From left: The Pilot, 2020; and Large Rocket, 2019. Photo: We Document Art. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp.

Thinking back on that moment before the painting in the gallery, I now realize I would usually have taken the subway. I have only just started taking the train again, which has reminded me that the experience of New York usually is an experience of a sea of innumerable faces. Taking the subway means daily having at least one person’s face across the aisle and many faces in your line of sight. You can’t help but study the concentrated face of a reader, the elsewhereness of a daydreamer, the sadness here, the exhaustion there, the twitchy concentration of a game player, the open face of the tourist, and even the practiced but not quite impervious shell of the city dweller, lightly armored in sunglasses or headphones. In staring at the face in Borremans’s portrait, I wasn’t left thinking about the history of early Netherlandish panel painting. I was instead reminded of the experience of moving through a city, the mix of intimacy and alienation that comes from incessant, packed proximity with strangers. It was okay to stare there in the gallery, to contemplate the dignity and complexity of this subject, with the strange costume, the visage part mask and part portal, suggesting something as awesome and truly unknowable as an individual person. Isn’t this a paradox, to be made to remember the faces of strangers?

John Vincler is a writer and visual artist who has worked for a decade as a rare-book librarian. He is editor for visual culture at Music & Literature and is at work on a book-length project about cloth as subject and medium in art.

El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), The Vision of Saint John, ca. 1608–14, oil on canvas, 87 1/2 x 76″. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.

I will remember 2020 not as a year of looking but as a year of listening. For months as the pandemic overtook New York, ambulance sirens sounded at all hours in strange choruses. When the sound of the sirens would break occasionally or fade into the distance after dawn, it was replaced not by eerie silence but by birdsong: the shrieks of the blue jays, the playful cheeps of the sparrows in the bushes, the eeks, chirps, and oddly varied sounds of the grackles everywhere. I wondered then, Were these sounds always here, and it was we who were made quiet? I rarely left my neighborhood of Ditmas Park, in Brooklyn, except to take my partner, Kate, pregnant with our second child, to appointments at the Manhattan hospital complex that was itself a hive of sirens that grew louder each time we approached. In my memory the sirens and birdsong were followed by police helicopters seemingly always overhead, as the city erupted in Black Lives Matter protests and the violent police response that only ensured they should continue. The helicopters loomed in the skies above as I ran circles over the same patch of weeds in the small plot of our shared backyard, playing a game my four-year-old daughter, Leo, calls “dinosaur chase” (she is the dinosaur, I am her lunch). Half the year was marked by interrupted sleep—first the constant fireworks at all hours of the night and then, by the end of the summer, the squawking and cooing of the baby, unaware of the distinction between day and night. As I write this, collecting a year, it is spring again. The neighborhood seems to be returning to some approximation of the old sounds from before. That is, if we can recall the way it used to sound. Even the old sounds are heard differently now. With my daughter in her mud boots, bird book and binoculars in hand, as the baby sleeps at home on Kate, we begin each day our circuit. Leo collects sticks, rocks, and seed pods, stomps in puddles, and pauses to track blue jays in a tree, following their noisy stutter.

This past October, I had my temperature taken outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After seeing the line that snaked out for what seemed like a mile, I immediately wanted to leave. There were a number of reasons I felt so jittery. I was concerned about the ethics of visiting at all, of the labor of the museum worker, a role I had once played, having to now be exposed regularly as they held the thermometer to our foreheads, even the baby’s. Also, I was worried that maybe Leo had gone feral for the better part of the year, no longer spending her days on the college campuses where her parents taught or in the museums and galleries we frequented. I tried to keep her standing on her yellow dot, as she agitated to dart off and play in the fountain. The idea was to make a pilgrimage to experience a shard of the abruptly abbreviated Gerhard Richter show that had closed nearly as soon as it opened in March 2020. My distrust of the press-preview experience of art had left me waiting to see the exhibition among a crowd, and by then it was becoming clear that it was unwise to gather in crowds at all. In the months afterward Manhattan became a place over the river, its galleries and museums suddenly impossibly far away.

As I waited in line that October, I carried the experience of the previous months with me. I was hopeful, I think, that this set of works—in which an artist many would claim as the greatest living painter addresses the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century—was just what I needed to jolt me back to attention, to help me rediscover the possibility of painting as a means of speaking to moments of crisis. I had previously caught Richter’s 2012 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, a show that displayed his inimitable virtuosity across a range of styles and mediums, from painting to sculpture, even if to me his work often seemed cool, lacking in humanism or—what I recorded then in my notebook—soul, but for a few exceptions found mostly in portraits of his family or intimates. Completed by Richter in 2014, the four canvases at the Met that make up “the Birkenau series” were created in response to photographs secreted out of Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944. After studying the paintings, I turned to look at reproductions of the much more affecting source images. The pictures, which document the process of mass murder in the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps, were taken by a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of mainly Jewish prisoners forced to help carry out the atrocities, as the caption explained. The high-contrast black-and-white photos are themselves almost abstractions, with the black of a window frame bracketing much of the images and a forest at the center, the figures barely perceptible before and below the immensity of the trees. In the gallery, the photographs were situated so they remained out of view when one looked at the paintings, and vice versa. As I turned from the photos to the four large canvases in black, white, gray, green, silver, and red, I noted that the paintings themselves revealed essentially nothing of the source images within their smeared and scored surfaces of chaotic, vaguely grid-like constructions. I scanned the paintings, and then I backed away to take them in again at a distance, as a totality. I struggled to find a generous reading of this accrual of marks and pigments. I felt an unsettling empty feeling alone there in the gallery. Standing before these paintings, I felt no sense of awe or stirring of emotion beyond the thinking I had brought into the gallery in anticipation. I thought to myself, or perhaps I even said it out loud: So he paints over atrocity—is that what I’m looking at here? These paintings added nothing by way of insight and seemed only to undercut the power and witness of the original photos. Why was I even here? Why was I looking for solace in paintings? We were still in the midst of a plague. It felt foolish to be standing amid the opulence of the Met.

Maybe the problem was mine. Could I even look at art again? Or rather, would it ever be the same for me after the events of the past year? But with attention, art never is the same. Art occupies a tenuous middle distance between one’s present state (and accrued personal history) and the current cultural moment (as a point in time within history). Each artwork must present itself between these ever-shifting poles. These Richter paintings seemed like a failed attempt to extend his squeegee technique, used in his grand late abstractions, into the space of profound meaning through historical association. Maybe the failure of the Richter paintings is the point. Could any attempt to paint the events glimpsed in the source photographs succeed, and if so, what would that mean? Wouldn’t any such attempt result essentially in painting over atrocity? But these oversize canvases were neither a monument memorializing the victims nor an attempt at reckoning with the nationalist violence behind the atrocity. Perhaps what drew me to the Met wasn’t that I was seeking an experience of art. Maybe it was that I had been missing the city, of which the Met is an essential part. But what I had never previously considered, at least so viscerally, was how much the Met as an institution obliterates the lived reality of New York. While in other times this rendered the Met as a haven or an escape for New Yorkers, in this moment I found it alienating.

Having seen the set of pictures that served as the ostensible reason for my trip, I wandered unintentionally to the relocated and rehung El Greco paintings, with their familiar melancholic faces and elongated hands, and the unparalleled expressive monochromes of the sinuous fabrics enfolding light into clothing. Here I saw them in their new location for the first time.

El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Saint Jerome as Scholar, ca. 1610, oil on canvas, 42 1/2 x 35 1/8″. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.

His portrait of Saint Jerome “as scholar” met my gaze, the subject in red robes with a cloak-like mantle from which luminous, wrinkled white sleeves emerge, his hands in a book, his right thumb signaling some illegible passage. Saint Jerome is an icon of the solitary work of the scholar, writer, or translator, and the possibility of this work being contemplative, meditative, and meticulous. I contrasted this to El Greco’s View of Toledo, in which the city emerges from the landscape underneath a sky threatening to storm, the clouds unable to suppress the light filtering through their diaphanous layers, illuminating everything. What generations of humankind had built in the depicted city remains dwarfed by nature’s mercurial powers. These paintings reassured me like an old friend who could understand and tolerate me in a sour mood through the camaraderie of shared silence.

El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), View of Toledo, ca. 1599–1600, oil on canvas, 47 3/4 x 42 3/4″. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.

As I met up with the rest of my family, left the museum, and headed into Central Park, the sounds of traffic quickly gave way to the sounds of birds. I thought of Louise Lawler’s audio work “Birdcalls” (1972/1981), which plays in the garden space of the Dia Beacon museum a few hours north by train along the Hudson. The piece plays amid the chatter of the real birds in the garden, performing a sort of audio camouflage as Lawler renders the names of famous male artists into bird calls. “Rick TUHR, rick TUHR,” she cries—one of about thirty names she cycles through in the seven-minute audio loop. I called this out to myself in my head, immediately easing my mood, there behind the Met, listening in a crowded park quiet but for the birds. Even if Lawler’s work existed there only in my memory, it was as if I were hearing and comprehending it for the first time, understanding with greater depth how she both sent up the limits and undercut the myth of the great painter.

As I walked through the park, I realized that the room of rehung El Greco paintings didn’t include The Vision of Saint John, a painting perhaps best known for being a model and inspiration for Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon some three hundred years later. I always see in its orgiastic scene the dawning of a mode of abstract painting, a freedom emerging like revelation as the cloth on the blue figure at left is undone in red, yellow, green, and white, naked figures rejoicing before these dynamic blocks of color. I thought of when the pandemic would be over, when we could take off our masks and be with one another. And I thought of how museums and paintings can and cannot help us to consider what this collective freedom might look like. I listened to the birds.

John Vincler is a writer and visual artist who has worked for a decade as a rare-book librarian. He is editor for visual culture at Music & Literature and is at work on a book-length project about cloth as subject and medium in art.

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), 1973. Collection of Aaron I. Fleischman © Vija Celmins, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

Open sea water seen from above. Star-filled skies. Stones. Gray after gray: from the graphite of pencils, charcoal on paper and its erasure, oil paint in layer after layer of deep, smooth near-black. Forays into ochre and midnight blues, the earthen tones of sand and stone, then returning seemingly always to gray. Before seeing the objects, works on paper, and paintings gathered together at the Met Breuer for the immense Vija Celmins’s retrospective, “To Fix the Image in Memory,” I had previously witnessed the gnostic perfection of the later paintings of ocean waves and night skies. The Breuer exhibition was the first time I was able to trace in person the artist’s development from the early paintings of objects and appliances in her studio (a hot plate, a fan, a lamp) to her distinctive late work. What I didn’t anticipate from this exhibition was the suggestion of utter desolation.

I should say that Vija Celmins paintings are not about this sense of foreboding. The artist has said, “I am not interested in telling stories.” And yet art exhibitions, career retrospectives in particular, do engage in storytelling. What is an exhibition but an essay written with objects in three dimensional space? Celmins’s biography and the sequence and development of her work proceed in an ordered and coherent fashion across two floors of the Breuer. Vija Celmins was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938, two years before the Soviet occupation. A decade after her birth, her family moved to the United States where they settled in Indiana. Clemens drew animals in her notebook in the back of the classroom while the teacher spoke in a still-unfamiliar foreign language, English. After earning her B.F.A. in Indiana, she headed to California as an art student in the M.F.A. program at University of California, Los Angeles, where she would find a studio near the beach outside of downtown Venice. Here the studio interior itself became her object of study, particularly the functional objects within it. The resulting paintings read more like portraits of inanimate objects than still lives. A lamp stares back at the viewer with its two bulbs, the orange coils of the heater and hot plate in two separate paintings glow with an almost palpable animal heat from their gray perches on the floor and a shelf respectively.

Vija Celmins, (American, b. 1938, Riga, Latvia) Lamp #1, 1964. Collection of the artist, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery © Vija Celmins, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery Photo: Sarah Wells

Celmins was an LA artist before that was fashionable and once it was fashionable her work never read as very LA (again, all that gray). She is either detached from the New York art world, or in dialogue with it from what seems like a vast distance away, with the message changed beyond recognition along the way. In the sixties, she moved away from painting into making sculptures of oversize objects—a hyper-realistic pencil, scaled to the length of a person; oversize erasers—which relate conceptually to pop art but are of a strikingly different character. Celmins’s sculptures remain inward-looking, a new avenue for obsessively documenting the tools and objects found in the studio and used by the artist. They also foreshadow a move, gradual at first, toward meticulous drawings made with pencil on paper prepared with an acrylic ground. For a time, magazine clippings provided her subjects: warplanes, an explosion at sea, a floating zeppelin, and, in 1968, her first moonscape. An early drawing of the open sea, sourced from her own photograph, was also completed in 1968. (There are striking affinities between Celmins and Gerhard Richter’s work from this period, although they were not aware of one another.) By the seventies, she had all but abandoned painting for works made with pencil (without the use of an eraser). The narrative, as it is spun, both in the exhibition itself and in the many reviews, leads us to the arrival of Celmins’s almost transcendental subjects: mostly the open seas and starry skies, but also spider webs, desert floors, clouds, and, again, the surface of the moon. Instead of objects, in this late work she paints or draws expanses.

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Double Desert), 1974. Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson © Vija Celmins, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

Vija Celmins paintings and drawings feel at once mystical and philosophical. Through all of their insistent gray, they hum with an inherent melancholy, that somehow doesn’t deaden their sense of life and activity. Her works are wondrous and vibrant while also paradoxically stilled (the undulating surface of the sea stopped in a moment) and delimited (the expanse of space contained in a small rectangle)—alive, yet rarely enlivened by anything as distracting as color. Mystical because they often conjure the unknown. Her great subject might be the abyss, depicted through the known and recognizable: the sea, outer space. Philosophical because Celmins returns to first principles. A return to painting as representation, or more than this, art that reassembles truth. The title of the exhibition, “To Fix the Image in Memory,” takes its name from a sort of artistic-philosophical game she played, a game that brought her back to painting by the end of the seventies, before her move to New York in the eighties. Celmins collected stones from the beach or desert, took them home, and then made bronze casts of them. Each individual cast was then painted as a twin facsimile of an original, both were then set before a viewer to see if any difference could be discerned between, in her words, one “found” and one “invented.” Celmins’s work is not simply about obtaining a likeness. It is about seeing and process and working the materials so as to render something that is not only an object of artistic labor, but the result of great and, ultimately, mysterious contemplation.

Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory I–XI, 1977–82. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Edward R. Broida in honor of David and Renee McKee © Vija Celmins, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

In an interview, she describes her process of composing the star-field paintings. Of painting and then sanding the surface smooth again and then repainting, repeating this process as many as a dozen times. Is this layered yet anonymous quality (there are no discernible brush strokes), what gives the images their depth and presence? In an almost offhand comment she describes these as “a lame attempt to make something that can remain … like the end of art history, and this my answer to it.” “Lame” perhaps because she recognizes that the work is doomed, as every made thing is doomed. Whatever their fate, while they remain, these works should be treasured, shown, seen, and contemplated.

*

We of course bring our own stories to the art we see. In the weeks before seeing the Celmins show at the Met Breuer it seemed every conversation I had included quips about climate change, the discomfort bubbling to the surface for everyone.  “If there is a future, when we’re old,” someone I met for the first time said, as I was holding my child. “Sailing will be a useful skill, after farming, in the decades ahead,” said a friend about to head to Iceland to write about climate change, uncertain if she’d return to New York. I read that the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, where I just spent a few weeks, may be one of the best-suited geographic sites for surviving a climate crisis in the contiguous United States. This relates to the futurity I sensed in Celmins’s work, which I failed to see when I saw her recent paintings at Matthew Marks Gallery in 2017. It occurred to me that Vija Celmins could be described as a painter of geological time. That much of her later subject matter consists of what will remain when and if human beings are no longer: the sea, the solar system, rock and sand, stones and sky. Will clouds remain? Spider webs?  These are the questions her work has left me asking as I encounter it in 2019.

Vija Celmins, Falling Star, 2016. Private collection © Vija Celmins, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery Photo: Ron Amstutz courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Celmins’s paintings and drawings made me think anew about of one of my favorite novels, David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. The central and sole character, Kate, appears to be the last living person on earth after some unnamed cataclysmic event. She occupies a house on the beach, or rather a series of them, when she is not spending her winters living in the world’s great museums (the Metropolitan Museum and the Louvre, among others), where “she burned artifacts and certain other objects” for warmth. Once, after leaving her cooking to urinate on the beach, she turned back to see that the house was burning. So, after watching her house become consumed by fire, she simply moved on to another. But she would still see the other house sometimes on her walks down the beach. “One is still prone to think of a house as a house, however, even if there is not remarkably much left of it.” After leaving Celmins’s exhibition, I thought to myself that in one of those otherwise emptied out museums, Celmins’s work would seem almost singularly prescient. Yes, like an answer to the end of art history. Painting for the Anthropocene. Nature painting wholly divorced from romance. But maybe this is too much. I look at the news. Multiple wild fires are burning across California with names like Kincadefire, Tickfire, Skyfire, and Gettyfire. Hundreds of thousands evacuated from their homes. Nearly a million people without power. Prisoners conscripted as firefighters. The Getty Museum campus, with its store of invaluable art objects, is in its namesake fire’s path, protected only by fire retardant dropped from airplanes and its own fire-resistant design. What might we discern of our future in Vija Celmins’s ashen yet beatific grays? What will remain after everything burns?

To Fix The Image in Memory will be on view at the Met Breuer in New York City until January 12.

Read earlier installments of Brush Strokes here

John Vincler is a writer, visual artist, and has worked for a decade as a rare book librarian. He is editor for visual culture at Music & Literature and is at work on a book-length project on cloth as subject and medium in art.

Agnes Martin, Innocent Love, 1999. Dia Art Foundation; Partial gift, Lannan Foundation 2013. © 2019 Agnes Martin Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York.

I went into the woods for a while in order to think about the paintings of Agnes Martin. For most of the last fifteen years I’ve spent at least a week of the summer in a cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that has been in my partner’s family since the Depression. The cabin is a three-day drive from Brooklyn, with a dog and our two-year-old daughter all packed uncomfortably in our old Honda. Closing in on the cabin for the last mile or two, as our car bumped along the unmarked, sandy two-track passage better suited for a truck or Jeep, I looked at the two lines ahead of me, more path than road, and at the stand of tall and slender soft pines, like the ones the logging trucks carried up here to be pulped into paper products. The road and the trees made a sort of grid, I thought, as the forest, cleaved by the road, engulfed the car. Finally, with the evening sun low in the sky shimmering off the lake, the cabin came into view—the vertical lines of pines on the other side of the lake formed a horizontal band between the water below and the sky above.

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The paintings that burrow their way in are most often the ones I didn’t expect to impress me. Seven years ago, shortly after having moved to New York, I found myself in a room of Agnes Martin paintings at Dia:Beacon, the Dia Foundation’s museum of mostly minimalist late-twentieth century artworks in Beacon, New York. The museum is full of artists regularly found in modern art museums: the fluorescent light works of Dan Flavin, Donald Judd’s right-angled sculptural constructions, Richard Serra’s immense and weighty weathered metal forms. While I may nod to those with expectation and recognition, they mostly leave me cold. At Dia:Beacon, however, even the expected work of these artists wrested my attention differently. Their cold physicality seemed more matter-of-fact: constructions to be contemplated (or not) within an environment of quiet and light and openness. There is a hangar-like space with a row of enormous Serra sculptures you can walk within, rendering them poetic, elegant, and inviting when I expected them to be audaciously brooding. Strange that my favorite museum holds few of the works of my favorite artists. On my first visit, I would have counted among those only Louise Bourgeois. But after that visit, I would also include the work of the Canadian-born painter Agnes Martin.

I had only a vague idea of Martin’s art, gleaned from reproductions in magazines and monographs, which amounted to little more than “a painter of lines and grids.” I may have rightly understood her to be an outlier and predecessor of minimalism. Like the work of Flavin and Judd, I expected mostly a cold recognition: so this is what an Agnes Martin painting looks like in person. Does anyone go looking at a painting of lines and grids expecting excitement or insight or anything remotely surprising? Not me. Not then. During that first visit, the works of Flavin and Judd seemed less austere, more humane. I hadn’t gone there thinking about paintings (sculpture and installation dominate) but I wandered in to the room of Martin’s canvases and works on paper. So here were the paintings of lines and grids.

There is something about the light in this museum. Martin’s paintings are composed with gentle washes of color, mostly represented in bands of blue, yellow, red, or orange, and white in various permutations, especially in her later period. The paintings have a distinctive diaphanous quality, matched and heightened by the space where they are hung. (I believe, this quality is also why her paintings are impossible to adequately reproduce.) Previously a box-printing factory for a cookie company, Dia:Beacon’s skylights filter natural light in from above. A drifting cloud or an overcast day can change the character of light in the room, connecting you to the natural world even while standing in a white cube of space with the quality of an unadorned cathedral. The simple bands of color drew me in, so that I found myself looking closely at the shifting tones. Light moves through her faint washes of paint, like the ghost of a color floating above the white ground. As I drew closer, until I was inches away from the canvas, I noticed the thin penciled lines demarking each band.

Her lines surprised me and would later—gently, quietly—obsess me. They should be completely unremarkable. They are not made with anything like masterful virtuosity—I’m thinking of the tale of the fourteenth-century painter Giotto’s genius evidenced by a perfect circle drawn freehand (an act of protominimalism: he submitted only this red circle, while all his contemporaries submitted detailed drawings to win a commission from the Pope). Martin’s lines are likely made with the aid of a straightedge. They are not the singular autographic lines rooted in some primal mark-making impulse, like the penciled or crayoned lines in a Cy Twombly canvas. Martin’s lines are workmanlike. They are there to delineate where one color goes beside the next. From a distance, the bands of color perform their task of holding and reflecting light, imbuing it with color. Soft but seemingly perfect, they are ordered after some realized plan. But up close the lines quaver and wobble. Maybe the pencil lead broke here and the line was then started again thereafter. Martin’s lines breath, they document a moment of action done with purpose and—to purposely use an unadorned phrase—not a lot of fuss. They have humility. Hers is a minimalism with some blood in it—minimalism with a pulse. This is to say nothing of what an Agnes Martin painting is a painting of.

Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1959. Dia Art Foundation; Gift of Milly and Arne Glimcher. © 2019 Agnes Martin Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York.

*

I saved writing about Agnes Martin until I would be here in the woods, almost an hour’s drive to the nearest store. In the cabin by the water, I spent a week remembering first seeing her paintings and writing these memories in my notebook, in the moments of quiet while my child napped in the other room. I spent the second week similarly, while rereading Nancy Princenthal’s biography of Martin. There again I found the spartan details of Martin’s life; when she stopped and then, eventually, returned to painting. Following her days in New York, Martin wandered up to the Pacific Northwest and down into the desert mesas of New Mexico where she would settle. First she lived in her camper, then she built the simple adobe structure she would use as a home, with a well for water but no working electricity. The simple ascetic diet: at one point she was said to be eating only “preserved walnuts, hard cheese, and homegrown tomatoes” and later, only “Knorr gelatin mixed with orange juice and bananas.” Beyond a shared impulse toward reduction, these facts and the rest of her fascinating biography do not illuminate her paintings. In fact, they risk crowding in on the ample quiet and light and openness.

To think about Agnes Martin, I wanted to get off-line, to unplug. To think about how my brain has been baited and trained by apps urging me to keep scrolling. My instinct—more feeling than thesis—was that Martin’s paintings were the antithesis of digital addiction. They were counter to it as an experience of nature was counter to it. Forest bathing some call the documented, calming neurological effects of the experience of nature (related to the decades-old Japanese process of shinrin-yoku—literally “taking in the forest”). Beyond a plan to think, recollect, and write about Agnes Martin, I also took with me two books: Silence: In the Age of Noise, by the Norwegian publisher and explorer Erling Kagge, and How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, which I read in that order. I was surprised to find an epigraph by Agnes Martin at the start of Odell’s second chapter, which argues for the need for retreat to nature, to isolation, but then also return, back to the daily rhythms of one’s neighborhood and life, for only then is real activism and attention possible.

A lot of people withdraw from society as an experiment, so I thought I would withdraw and see how enlightening it would be. But I found out that it’s not enlightening. I think that what you’re supposed to do is stay in the midst of life.

I went to the woods, where I thought about Agnes Martin, and as I finish writing this, I have returned. This process began earlier, when I thought with clarity that an Agnes Martin painting cannot be reproduced, at least not on screen or in a monograph or magazine. You might have some luck making your own facsimile—that is, painting your own Agnes Martin. Or, I thought, as I walked my dog along the usual rectangular blocks of my Brooklyn neighborhood, that walking in the grid of streets was closer to reproducing a Martin drawing than photographing it and putting it online. Near the cabin, I saw the branch of a tree that fell in such a way that it was held horizontally by others, creating a stark but organic geometric pattern. Here, too, this may more accurately reproduce the experience of looking at an Agnes Martin painting.

Photograph by Kate Zambreno

In the three-day drive back to the city, I felt the quiet and isolation of the woods recede. I wanted stillness instead of the constant scroll, but I didn’t need to remain in the woods for that. In Agnes Martin’s paintings I can see how being in the woods feels. Hers are paintings of a state of mind—most often one of quiet and light and openness. In an interview, Martin was asked how long a viewer should look at one of her paintings. She responded, “about one minute.” Noting the interviewer’s surprise, she offered, “but a minute’s quite a while.”

John Vincler is a writer, visual artist, and has worked for a decade as a rare book librarian. He is editor for visual culture at Music & Literature and is at work on a book-length project on cloth as subject and medium in art.

Mark Bradford, Black Venus, 2005. © Mark Bradford (courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth) Photo: Bruce White

Writing about art is often linked to the timely—the current exhibition, the just-released catalogue. The need for an immediate response makes fast what should be slow, and focusing on the continuously new can distort the experience of art. I want to attempt a subversion of this by thinking about the first time I saw the paintings of the Los Angeles–based artist Mark Bradford, now almost a decade ago. I want to revisit a moment before I thought I could write about art, to locate the moment when the looking deepened. There is a risk inherent in what I want to attempt here, primarily memory’s frailty: what have I forgotten and what have I embellished? My goal is to recollect not just the work of an artist but the moment when the way I thought about art changed.

In 2010, I was living in Akron, Ohio, working in a library housed in the windowless basement of a converted department store, organizing a neglected rare books collection. My partner Kate and I had met in Chicago, eloped to London where I attended a one-year graduate program that would result in a decade’s worth of student loan debt, returned for a quick stint in Chicago, and then moved to Ohio. In London, I had gone to the free art museums regularly, especially the Tate. Once in Ohio, I often visited Akron’s excellent small art museum, which was housed in a strangely radical contemporary building (a cantilevered postmodern glass-and-steel form embracing the central brick structure of Akron’s former central post office). The surprises in the permanent collection included Lee Bontecou, Yayoi Kusama, and Doris Salcedo. I began to travel regularly to continue my habit—to Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, to museum and gallery shows. When I learned of a debut museum show of a young painter previously unknown to me at the Wexner Center for the Arts, two hours away in Columbus, Ohio, I made a plan to see it soon after the opening.

I can still remember entering the space of the Mark Bradford exhibition and making my way to the long sliver of a gallery. The gently sloped floor moved me slowly upward into the expanse of the Wexner’s exhibition space. And I remember being surprised by the scale of Bradford’s work (both the size of the canvases and the number of them). I remember that most of the works seemed oddly and immediately familiar, uncannily legible from the corner of my eye, or from across the room, but then vast and perplexing upon closer examination. The show consisted primarily of paintings … but were they? They seemed to be works of collage, but the surfaces were more unified than what I thought collage usually suggested. They were composed of paper, string, and … what? Paint, glue, or both, all congealed, dried, then sanded smooth? The most immediate visual association was to a common enough urban spectacle: layers of wheat-pasted posters or billboards with their surfaces torn so as to reveal the strata of layers, creating happenstance compositions. In Bradford’s work, wear and neglect were rendered as a technique, striking an alchemical balance between chance and design. The apparent method of composition suggested removal as much as addition: the surfaces seemed scored and sanded away. I remember looking at a painting in profile, examining the edges of the canvas to get a sense of the layers and thickness beneath the surface. Bradford’s paintings seemed excavated from within some earlier incarnation of themselves.

Mark Bradford, Mississippi Gottdam, 2007

Why did Bradford’s paintings feel so familiar to me? I had never seen them reproduced before, and while various lineages could be traced (Jean Dubuffet’s scored and scratched surfaces, Glenn Ligon’s use of text as well as his sources, even Warhol’s serialized images and pop iconography), at that time I was unable to adequately trace them. His work was unlike anything I’d seen before. Wasn’t painting dead, anyway? Or so I had assumed before this show. But Bradford’s compositions seemed new, exciting even. The familiarity hit me partly because of the resemblance to torn posters but also because of his broadly legible forms. Take for example the near monochrome of Mississippi Gottdam (the title is a reference to Nina Simone’s civil rights anthem). I still remember the first time I saw its surface of churning water, the marks seemingly incised in the live, roiling surface. The canvas is predominated by silver interrupted by staccato flows of mostly black and white, and small spackled flashes of various colors that are almost imperceptible at a distance. There was a sly play with scale, as the huge canvas evoked smaller forms: water as depicted in an early European woodcut or perhaps a Japanese ukiyo-e print. In the catalogue reproduction I am looking at now, I cannot make out the bits of color. But in person, on close inspection, I was able to see that the color came from comic book pages embedded in subdermal layers. There seemed to be such gravitas to the canvas and I found it disarming, almost funny, that the bits of green were from the Incredible Hulk.

Several paintings in the show were immediately recognizable as maps. These were my favorite of Bradford’s works, both that first day and still. Patterned lines read as streets, rectangles suggest buildings, each spreading semiorganically and semiarchitecturally—partly grown and partly built—across the surface of the paintings. An early painting in the show, Black Venus, from 2005, seems to render a bird’s-eye view of a cityscape, the sort of view we are now accustomed to seeing displayed dynamically on our phones and screens in navigation apps. I may have been spending too much time in research libraries, but when I first saw these paintings that suggested cartography, I immediately thought of fire insurance maps from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These maps, called Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, are contained in giant atlases and document the footprints of individual buildings in major cities. Updates to the atlases were issued in sheets, which were intended to be cut out and pasted over the existing maps to bring them up to date. Over the years, the layers in the atlases would accrue, charting the buildup, alteration, and destruction of structures within a city. There seemed to be a link here between the pasted-over billboard ads and the buildup and destruction of a city itself: the teeming activity, the churn of the new, the quick fade of consumerist gloss, the gentrification, and the persistent poverty, ebbing and flowing.

Sanborn Map Company; Insurance maps of Chicago, Illinois, Volume 7, 1916. Courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago

*

After I had spent time with the paintings, I circled back to read the texts. There I learned that Mark Bradford’s work was informed by place, by the community of South Los Angeles where he grew up and still maintains his studio. He came to art making through working in his mother’s beauty shop (followed by an M.F.A. at California Institute of the Arts). Looking back now I wonder if I misread (or even noticed) “end papers” as a material used in Bradford’s early work. These were not the decorative pages at the beginning or end of a bound book, as I would have thought from my day-job myopia, but instead the “permanent-wave end papers,” used for protecting hair in his mother’s shop. Bradford repurposed them in his work—sometimes singeing the edges with flame—incorporating them alongside advertisements he pulled down from walls and fences in his neighborhood. The allusion to maps was intentional, and the incorporation of place more literal than I had at first imagined.

At the end of the exhibit space, I encountered Bradford’s 2008 painting The Corner of Desire and Piety (named after two parallel streets in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans). The sign “Propane delivered to FEMA trailers,” is followed by a phone number, in a repeated grid, in various stages of legibility. The signs are rendered as if they were relics unearthed from an archeological site, documenting the parasitism of capitalism upon catastrophe . After Hurricane Katrina, Bradford relocated temporarily to New Orleans, to listen, witness, and assist, but also to make work. I thought about the artist Paul Chan’s kindred project of restaging Waiting for Godot in the Lower Ninth Ward at about the same time. Chan and Bradford were marking a historic moment so that it wouldn’t be forgotten, paying witness through work that was engaged not just with an event, but a place and a community. I’m not sure if this later work made me think back to Mississippi Gottdam then, but it should have made me reconsider my initial cursory reading. Mississippi Gottdam was an icon of destruction, closer to documenting the present than memorializing the past.

Mark Bradford, Corner of Desire and Piety, 2008

I didn’t think of any of the paintings as abstractions on that first visit—though I now know that Bradford situates his work as emerging from the abstract tradition, a tradition he took up in part because he felt it was closed off to him as a queer black artist. In an interview with the curator Hamza Walker, Bradford described some of his working methods: “I do draw, but then I go over the lines with another medium, or I go over the lines with string. That tracing removes the emotion from the gesture.” He describes his method of transformation, which is also a layering, “like drawing a place based on memory. And now we’re twice, three times removed. Like looking at a Google map based on a satellite image.” Perhaps in our looking we attempt the inverse, an excavation of the distance between the artist, their work, and what we bring to it. Spending time with the paintings was like being let inside of something vast and previously unknown, not a space exactly, but a body of knowledge.

I would like to think that it was then, during that museum visit, that I began to think self-critically about the experience of seeing art. I realized if we can pause to consider works of art, a subtle excavation occurs: we sift through all of the associations and memories the work conjures, including the detritus and scraps of visual culture we carry within us. Maybe we begin to situate the work within the scope of art history as we understand it. And then we begin to more critically sort through it, looking for clues for how our associations may or may not sync with the artist’s intentions as far as they can be discerned (through titles, text, interviews, by comparing and contrasting the features and character of work brought together in an exhibition). We participate in what I now refer to as visual thinking: by attentive looking we consider how the artist has used material to embody thought or feeling and we attempt to move from our own experience more fully into the space of the artwork. For a time, we give ourselves over to it so that we may experience something new—an insight, a sensation, an experience—so that at least in some small way it may change us. What if another way of asking the question “Is it art?” is ultimately personal and private: “Well, did it change you?”

Mark Bradford’s diptych “Duck Walk” (2016), is currently on view as part of the Met at Fifth Avenue’s exhibition Epic Abstraction.

John Vincler is a writer, visual artist, and has worked for a decade as a rare book librarian. He is editor for visual culture at Music & Literature and is at work on a book-length project on cloth as subject and medium in art.

Joan Mitchell, Sunflowers, 1990-1991 ©Estate of Joan Mitchell, Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York, Courtesy David Zwirner

Standing before a Joan Mitchell painting, as I tried to bring language to her colors and gestures, the first word that came to me was wingspan. As I walked past the nine paintings spread across two rooms at her recent exhibition, “I carry my landscapes around with me” at David Zwirner, I looked for the grand, arching strokes that regularly mark the oversize scale of her work. The term wingspan suggests a great bird or angel, but it occurs to me simply as shorthand for reach, like that of a star athlete: a tennis player’s serve, a baseball player’s windup, a basketball center’s blocking ability. (Almost every consideration of her work mentions the seemingly requisite detail that she was an accomplished figure skater in her youth.) Joan Mitchell was not unusually proportioned or exceptionally tall (a patient archivist from the foundation points me to a mid-60’s driver’s license that places her at 5’6”), but she brought an enormity to her painting, whether in individual gestures—juxtaposing the large and sweeping, with the small and delicate—or in the size of the canvases themselves. Most works in the Zwirner show measure between eight and ten feet in height. In my mind, the paintings are always linked to a series of images included with Linda Nochlin’s essay in the 2003 Whitney Museum Joan Mitchell catalog, which were meant to illustrate the woman artist as subject, not object: the famous 1950 Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock painting Autumn Rhythm in his East Hampton studio, with Pollock like a dancer leaning forward, brush in one hand, paint can in the other, arcing drips across his unstretched canvas on the floor; Cecil Beaton’s photograph for Vogue from the following year titled blankly Model in front of Jackson Pollock painting, showing a model in a strapless couture dress holding a pair of black gloves standing stiffly with a Pollock painting serving as the backdrop; and finally Rudy Burckhardt’s 1957 photograph of Joan Mitchell, feet planted firmly, facing her canvas Bridge, back to the viewer, her right arm stretched to its limit as she slashes horizontally at a height almost certainly exceeding six feet tall. This photograph of Mitchell documents a body’s limit from rootedness to extension. Standing there in a room surrounded by her work, I see clearly that through her painting, Mitchell made herself a giant.

I’ve been struggling with a question: why are Joan Mitchell’s paintings important now? Is it ahistorical to look at paintings from the last century with landscape as their subject and wonder if they portend something ominous? To closely examine a visual artist’s recorded view of a landscape from a half century, or even a few decades, ago is to begin looking for signs of change, degradation, hints of potential impending collapse. Joan Mitchell’s paintings are primarily documents of expression, capturing a memory or a feeling of a place, rather than depicting a specific landscape itself. Her method of painting channels the dynamic and fraught relationship between human making and the natural world, maintaining an element of struggle, even violence, underneath. Here in the paintings, a persistent force struggles against a threat of impending collapse, often culminating in an ecstatic result.

Joan Mitchell, La Seine, 1967© Estate of Joan Mitchell, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, New York State, Office of General Services, Courtesy David Zwirner

In the paintings we find immensity but not monumentality (a word Mitchell distrusted), something great yet still seemingly fluid, organic, akin to nature, like the trees she frequently referenced in connection to her art. Joan Mitchell’s paintings grow up from the bottom of her canvases like trees. Or they settle downward with gravity. They manifest a tension between these two ideas: the growing upward and pulling downward. This is a feature of her work refined over the decades, from the early fifties to her final works in the nineties, and it is what distinguishes her from the “allover” tact of her abstract expressionist peers like Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, or Willem de Kooning. Her paintings also build outward from the surface in layers of paint that are at once methodical and intuitive. Often featuring a ground that begins from white and then builds into creams, beiges, occasionally merging into gray or brown, and sometimes flesh tones. In her middle-period paintings, blocks of color rough out the composition, which are then overlaid with finer details. The earliest work in the Zwirner show, the four-part La Seine, is a masterful demonstration of this. By the seventies, the blocks recede and are often supplanted by flows and tangles of color: yellows, greens, or her perfect deep blues. The Zwirner show focuses on her multipart paintings, with the parts arranged horizontally, allowing her to complicate the vertical tension in her work as she moves horizontally across her canvases, as in the sun-drenched Minnesota, in four parts a study in the possibility and depth of yellow (like the lemon yellow that peaks with a brightness, light and luminescent, without becoming pale). The beauty of Minnesota distracts (or does it?) from what I want to think about, which is why Joan Mitchell feels relevant to me now, and to this column generally, about how paintings and painters can speak to our contemporary moment, even in abstraction.

Joan Mitchell, Minnesota, 1980, © Estate of Joan Mitchell, Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York, Courtesy David Zwirner

As I spent time in the gallery on my first visit, I observed couples, groups, and even strangers turn to one another to puzzle through her compositions together, frequently miming her strokes: making slashes or arcs in the air, attempting to intuit the motions Mitchell made while painting. When I went to find my partner, Kate, in the next room, whose dress was the exact cobalt shade of a Joan Mitchell blue, I found her kneeling down beside our daughter as she, too, mimicked Mitchell’s imagined gestures. I also encountered the procession of people taking their own photo or having their photo taken in front of Mitchell’s grand paintings. When looking at a painting, do we envision the process, mood, or feeling of the painter in the act of creation? Or do we see the painting just as an object? We place ourselves as an object for visual consumption alongside the art object. Do we do this to mark for others our consumption of beauty? To record the moment to suggest that we live a beautiful life? Paintings prove themselves, I believe, in how they can hold you in their present, if you allow them. Maybe this is why paintings are worth looking at today, their specific aspects that defy reproduction, or at least why I find myself seeking them out now more than ever. I want to know what I might see or understand if I can meet a painting in the moment and attempt to read meaning or sensation in all of its tactility and recorded action—a rare moment of silent meditation and focused contemplation.

While procrastinating from this knot of thinking about Instagram culture and painting, I check the news, then Twitter, where I read in my feed the writer Wendy S. Walters tweeting, “Oh my friends keep making beautiful things despite occasional terror and frequent horror.” This recalled for me one of my favorite exchanges, between the artists Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz, after Leonard worried to Wojanarowicz that her photographs of clouds would be read as simply beautiful and, because of this, be seen as a turn in her work toward the apolitical. This was at the height of the AIDS crisis that would eventually take Wojanarowicz’s life and the lives of countless other artists and lovers of art. Wojnarowicz responded, “We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.” Why in the midst of all of this horror, the latest outrage of the news, am I thinking about painting?

Joan Mitchell, Edrita Fried, 1981, © Estate of Joan Mitchell, Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York, Courtesy David Zwirner

It was on my second visit to the gallery that I jotted down one note, inspired by Nochlin’s essay on Mitchell: “from rage to beauty.” I have been wondering how to get beneath the beauty of Mitchell’s paintings, especially in the late paintings, to the complication underneath. Only when you look beyond the beauty of a Joan Mitchell will you see that the paintings are a struggle. On my second visit, I spent much of my time looking at Edrita Fried, from 1981, a painting in four parts and the only painting in the show named after a person (although visually it still suggests a landscape). Fried, Mitchell’s therapist, died the year of the painting’s completion. It’s tempting to read across the painting from darkness to light—tempting to read across Mitchell’s work as a whole, from the grayer, urban tones of the fifties to the pastoral, sun-drenched quality that takes over her work with her move in 1968 to a country studio in the Vétheuil region, northwest of Paris on the Seine. (All but the earliest painting in the Zwirner show are from this Vétheuil period.) But to read Edrita Fried in such a simplified way is a mistake. Mitchell told an interviewer that by 1964 she was “trying to get out a violent phase and into something else.” But it’s what she says next that really resonates, this consideration of rage and its relationship to art and beauty: “I have lots of real reasons to hate [but] I can’t ever get to hatred unless someone is kicking my dog … or destroying [a friend], then I’ll bite … I can’t get to killing—my ‘dead’ shrink kept trying to get me there—I have never made it—my how I loved her.” I see here, through Mitchell’s serrated humor, the recognition of truly being seen, of having someone in her life who understood that she needed to channel rage into art all while still managing to pursue beauty. Perhaps Mitchell is a model for us now, for channeling rage outward into something beautiful all while maintaining a steady gaze at reality, and resisting the urge to turn the rage inward against ourselves.

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1992, © Estate of Joan Mitchell, Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York, Courtesy David Zwirner

I thought of all of this when looking at Untitled, painted when Mitchell was very ill, in the year she would die from cancer. Much of its surface remains as white ground, seemingly to emphasize her now-limited reach, documenting the struggles of the body against frailty. But her gestures remain large and bold, lyrical and confident, creating a stark yet riotously colorful composition that suggests calligraphic graffiti (with a fluorescent lime-yellow I had never seen before in her work—still experimenting, even at the end). Despite a few drips descending, the painting renders an otherworldly landscape. The painting conveys such an immensity of spirit and scale—the persistence of her wingspan—suspended.

“Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me” is on view at the Zwirner Gallery until July 12.

John Vincler is a writer, visual artist, and has worked for a decade as a rare book librarian. He is editor for visual culture at Music & Literature and is at work on a book-length project on cloth as subject and medium in art.