Brooks Adams

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  diary March 03, 2009

  Opium for the Masses (Kouroi for the Few)

  Paris

  IT CANNOT HAVE BEEN A COINCIDENCE that the public viewing of the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé Collection was slated for the height of what in Roman Catholic Europe is widely celebrated as Carnival Week, and that the auction itself, which began last Monday evening and continued day and night through Mardi Gras, concluded on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent—which in France is the perfumey-sounding Carême.

  As news reports have proclaimed, this was an extraordinary event in terms of its demographics (more than thirty-three thousand people waited as long as five hours to wind their way

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  passages March 2007

  Robert Rosenblum

  A pioneering critic of the past fifty years and a revisionist scholar of the preceding two hundred, Artforum contributing editor Robert Rosenblum will be remembered for the stunning breadth of his erudition and taste. In the issue, a trio of his colleagues—and, above all, his friends—recall a protean figure whose love of art was matched only by his joie de vivre.

  LINDA NOCHLIN

  IT IS HARD not to be lighthearted when remembering Robert Rosenblum. Bob was himself one of those rare people who, though deeply serious, was never ponderous or solemn. His was a quintessentially blithe spirit. From the very

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  diary June 20, 2006

  Surreal Life

  Paris

  The “Hommage à Julien Levy Part 2” sale at Tajan on June 8 was laid-back yet stately, a schvitzy, slacker minuet. Levy (1906–81) is most famous as the dealer who brought the Surrealists to New York in the ’30s and ’40s. He exhibited Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Frida Kahlo, among others, many for the first time in the US, and “discovered” Joseph Cornell, who was working for him at the time. The transition between Surrealism and AbEx could be said to have occurred in his gallery at 15 East Fifty-Seventh Street.

  Why was this material for sale in Paris? According to Marcel Fleiss, who, along with

• previews January 2006

  Malcolm Morley

  The show, which includes recent paintings, such as those of model-plane kits and current events in Afghanistan (most never before shown in the States), should reveal an oeuvre marked by radical switches but also by a deep inner consistency.

  Malcolm Morley stands among the preeminent living American painters, but the historical scope of his work is too little known in the US, his adopted country since 1958. This survey of forty paintings from the mid-'60s to the present is long overdue; it is, in fact, the artist's first in the US since 1983, when he was recast as a neo-expressionist (having first been pigeonholed as a Superrealist). Now, the grandeur of his work puts it far beyond mere labels: “Only when Morley's work is taken out of the movement of Photorealism do his interests come into focus,” maintains

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  diary November 18, 2005

  Fantastic Voyage

  Paris

  Paris is awash with visions of melancholy and esoteric variants of romanticism this autumn, both of which tend to put me in a very good mood. There's “Mélancolie” and “Vienne 1900” at the Grand Palais; the first retrospective of the neglected Girodet at the Louvre; and now a contemporary group show devoted to new manifestations of Symbolism in the work of young artists (mostly based in London and Paris) at Espace EDF Electra. (The cultural exchange between the two cities is also an amuse-gueule to the roughly twenty exhibitions of French contemporary art to be held simultaneously in London next

• diary February 14, 2005

  Reductio Ad Rirkrit

  Paris

  We hopped in a cab last Wednesday night and headed over to ye olde sixth arrondisement, where Rirkrit Tiravanija's “Une Retrospective (tomorrow is another fine day)” was opening in the venerable Couvent des Cordeliers. The Couvent, a beautifully delapidated thirteenth-century gothic hall (and the site of a French Revolutionary club, where Marat's dead body lay in state), is the interim headquarters of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, whose building on Avenue du Président Wilson is closed for restoration. We've seen some good shows at the Couvent in the last year, including ones

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  diary December 10, 2004

  International Style

  Paris

  On a freezing December evening, we rose from a winter’s nap and, automatonlike, lumbered out to our Twingo and drove up to Le Plateau for the opening of “Ralentir Vite” (Slow Down Fast), the first exhibition curated by the space’s new director, Caroline Bourgeois. A mixture of altruism and curiosity had led us to brave the cold. The two-year-old venue Le Plateau is one of those alternative spaces that one feels obliged to support, and we were hoping that the advent of Bourgeois would lend some spark to what has been, it must be said, a lackluster program. The drive—up the Canal Saint Martin

• diary November 29, 2004

  Family Style

  Paris

  Pavel Pepperstein's opening last night at the Centre du Diamant, a glitzy wholesale jewelry showroom in the rue de la Paix (two steps from the Opera and Place Vendôme), was quite charming: little watercolors of dollars and euro symbols exhibited on the wall and in vitrines alongside the ugliest diamonds you ever saw. The art world conduit to such an unlikely venue was the Galerie Iragui (in the Marais) which deals with Russian artists and, apparently, with French jewelers. And you could try on the jewelry—Lisa, my wife, tried a big, citrine dinner ring. The champagne glass in her other

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  print March 2003

  Francesco Clemente

  BROOKS ADAMS: Why do you think we’re talking about the ’80s now? Was it a heroic age?*

  FRANCESCO CLEMENTE: [Laughs.] New York had an extraordinary texture at the time, when I first came from India in April of 1980. In India I was familiar with the word tantra, which means texture, weave. The city itself was this weave of diverse experiences.

  BA: Who were the first painters you became friends with here?

  FC: David Salle and Julian Schnabel.

  BA: What affinity did you see with Salle?

  FC: I was very fond of the early Salles, where you have just the monochrome canvas with the charcoal drawing and one other

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  previews January 2003

  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

  The most haunting and seductive of the German Expressionists, Kirchner was a founder of the Dresden-based Die Brücke in 1905 and the group’s most ardent apologist. With thirty-five paintings, five sculptures, and eighty-plus works on paper, this retrospective curated by Jill Lloyd, Magdalena Moeller, Andrew Robison, and Norman Rosenthal is the artist’s first in the US since 1968 and the first in Britain ever. Look for naturist bacchanals, primitivist totems, out-there bohemian studio scenes, scarecrow-chic Berlin women, grim self-portraits as a soldier, and eerie Alpine snowscapes. Having lived

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  previews January 2003

  Marc Chagall

  The art of Marc Chagall (1887–1985) isn’t all bright colors and fiddlers on the roof. His pre–1910 Russian works, with their shtetl imagery of women giving birth, look ever more raw and bracing, and his 1920 murals for the State Jewish Chamber Theater in Moscow, first seen ten years ago, reveal him to be a lean, mean designer with a mordant wit. Now the biblical paintings from the late ’30s to the ’60s shed new light on the apocalypse of World War II, not to mention the advent of AbEx. As curated by Jean-Michel Foray, director of the Musée Nationale Message Biblique Marc Chagall in Nice (one of

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  previews September 2002

  Transavanguardia

  In the early ’80s, with a new interest in things non–New York School, the Transavanguardia—critic Achille Bonito Oliva’s catchall word for the return to figurative painting—was a big deal. Francesco Clemente’s portable frescoes, Sandro Chia’s great Palio restaurant murals, and Enzo Cucchi’s weird, elongated anatomical drawings were the ones to beat in the go-get-’em atmosphere of the moment. This show, curated by Ida Gianelli, backed by advisers Pier Giovanni Castagnoli, David Ross, Nicholas Serota, and Rudi H. Fuchs (who heavily promoted the three C’s), looks at the period