July 30, 2021 Brush Strokes On the Faces of Strangers: Michaël Borremans’s Pandemic Portrait By John Vincler John Vincler’s column Brush Strokes examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. 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. Read More
May 27, 2021 Brush Strokes On Returning: Gerhard Richter, New York, and Birds By John Vincler John Vincler’s column Brush Strokes examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. 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. Read More
November 26, 2019 Brush Strokes On Desolation: Vija Celmins’s Gray By John Vincler John Vincler’s column Brush Strokes examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. 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. Read More
September 19, 2019 Brush Strokes On Line: The Pulse of Agnes Martin By John Vincler John Vincler’s column “Brush Strokes” examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. 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. * 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. Read More
July 31, 2019 Brush Strokes On Excavation: The Paintings of Mark Bradford By John Vincler John Vincler’s column “Brush Strokes” examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. 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. Read More
July 3, 2019 Brush Strokes On Wingspan: Joan Mitchell’s Reach By John Vincler John Vincler’s new column “Brush Strokes” examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. 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. Read More