John Elderfield

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  passages September 2017

  Howard Hodgkin

  THE ENGLISH PAINTER Howard Hodgkin, who died on March 9 of this year at the age of eighty-four, came from a privileged background, went to the best schools, and became widely popular in his native land, which showered him with accolades that included a knighthood. Yet Hodgkin claimed to have come from humble circumstances, thought of himself as an outsider, and once said that England was “enemy territory” for painters. His own sense of himself was not what people made of him, and when he spoke, as he often did, of the painted frames that were integral to his compositions, it was to stress how

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  books September 2014

  The Letters of Paul Cézanne

  CÉZANNE WOULD HAVE HATED THIS BOOK—and Artforum, and me, for reporting its existence.

  Writing in April 1896, angry at “scoundrels who, for a fifty-franc article, have drawn the attention of the public to me,” Cézanne complained, “All my life, I have worked to be able to earn my living, but I thought that one could paint well without attracting attention to one’s private life. Certainly an artist wishes to improve himself intellectually as much as possible, but the man should remain obscure.”

  Cézanne was then fifty-seven, and the reverberations of his first solo exhibition were continuing

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  music October 2012

  Bob Dylan’s Tempest

  IN 1962, the year this magazine was first published, Columbia Records released Bob Dylan, the debut album of an all-but-unknown twenty-year-old. Now, fifty years later, Dylan gives us Tempest, his thirty-fifth studio release, unlike anything he has done before. By 1964, the artist was self-aware enough of his shifts of identity to title his fourth album Another Side of Bob Dylan; every subsequent release could have been named the same. In his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles, he wrote that he had wanted to be like Picasso, the greatest changer of persona of all—an ambition that would seem

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  print Summer 2011

  DEPTH CHARGE

  DESPITE THE UNDIMINISHED reputation of Willem de Kooning as one of America’s preeminent gestural abstractionists, more than a quarter century has passed since his work was last afforded a comprehensive museum survey in the US. This fall, the Museum of Modern Art in New York brings that interregnum to a close with “De Kooning: A Retrospective,” organized by the institution’s curator emeritus, John Elderfield. In anticipation of the exhibition’s opening in September, artist Terry Winters spoke with Elderfield about de Kooning and the important lessons of abstraction still to be gleaned from the painter’s transformative work.

  TERRY WINTERS: How do you begin putting together an exhibition like this—what’s the strategy? Do you start with a certain set of questions or concerns?

  JOHN ELDERFIELD: Yes, but the questions also come along as you’re working. In fact, at a certain point, they just start rolling down the hill at you. And certainly some of the motivation is simply feeling that it’s an exhibition I’d like to see myself.

  The past twenty years have brought us major retrospectives of the work of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, but the last de Kooning retrospective was back in 1983, at the Whitney.

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  books January 2011

  Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus

  Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968–2010, by Greil Marcus. New York: PublicAffairs. 512 pages. $30.

  COLUMBIA RECORDS has just reissued Bob Dylan’s first eight albums, of 1962–68, in their original mono format. These are the canonical recordings—at their center is the great trilogy of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde—that changed popular music forever. With what seems to have been either terrible luck or an extraordinary critical opportunity, Greil Marcus began writing about Dylan right as this period ended.

  We know what the response was when

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  print January 1998

  JASPER JOHNS: DIVER, 1963

  1. THE ARTIST HAS SAID the work shows the idea of a swan dive: legs straight together, back arched, arms stretched out from the sides during the descent. In this interpretation, the parallel bands marked at top center with footprints are not to be thought of as a diving board (a common reading) but, rather, as the body itself gliding down, displaying the soles of the feet. The arms point down, ready to be stretched sideways in the directions marked by the broad arrows at the bottom of the image. So the dive has just been launched. The diver is not entering the water, ready to deliver a breaststroke

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  print February 1974

  “Dada”: a Code for Saints?

  A word was born, no one knows how.
  —Tristan Tzara
  

  I

  THERE IS NO STRONGER LINK between the respectable world of professional scholarship and the far more glamorous world of fictional intrigue than in the case of disputed inventions. What follows is concerned with the word “Dada,” with the conditions of its discovery, and with the kinds of meaning that were attached to it.

  A disputed invention in Dada is unlikely to produce a definite solution. It is as well to say this from the start. Much of the evidence is either hearsay or circumstantial; the. witnesses change their stories; and all of the suspects

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  print September 1973

  Private Objects: The Sculpture of Kurt Schwitters

  I

  SCHWITTERS’ OUTPUT AS AN ARTIST was prodigious, but of all the arts he worked in, the one most objectlike in character—sculpture—seems somewhat peripheral to his main achievement. The eccentric Dadaist sculptures of the early years appear to be mere offshoots from the far more seriously motivated assemblages that spawned them. The small organic-looking works of wood or plaster and wire dating from the mid-’20s are largely monolithic in effect, and further from the principle of assemblage than any other aspect of his oeuvre. He did, we know, refer to the Hanover Merzbau—the labyrinthlike

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  print December 1972

  American Geometric Abstraction in the Late Thirties

  A specifically American problem, they are unbeatable in thinking things out in series and in numbers. Starting with figures to create a comfortable unity . . . New World!
  —Fernand Léger, “New York Seen,” 1931.
  

  “AMERICAN GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION OF the 1930s,” an exhibition at the Zabriskie Gallery, New York, June 1–July 14, 1972, is being circulated by the American Federation of the Arts. “Geometric Abstraction: 1926–1942,” an exhibition organized by Robert M. Murdock at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, October 7–November 19, 1972 included a broad representation of American as well as European work.

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  print September 1972

  Matisse Drawings and Sculpture

  . . . when the issue is one of knowing something, the other senses, by a certain resemblance, take to themselves the function of seeing—a function in which the eyes have priority.
  —Confessions of St. Augustine
  

  I

  MATISSE’S OFTEN QUOTED REMARK that he wanted his art to be “like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue”¹ is really the least appropriate characterization of one’s reaction to his work. Few artists have done more to discredit the idea o f esthetic perception as something passive and compliant than Matisse—for all his hedonism and easily

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  print May 1972

  Grids

  GRIDS, WITH MODULES AND SERIES, have become important modes of organization for recent art. One is tempted to talk here of grid structures; but if the word “structures” is to have any precise definition we must distinguish it from things that are more properly frameworks. Grids can constitute structures or can, more often, be simply frameworks. To assume that a linear surface organization when visible in a work of art is its structure is to follow in part the Florentine precept that aspects other than drawing are somehow accessory to the work’s substance. Of course, much 20th-century art demands

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  print April 1972

  Epic Cubism and the Manufactured Object

  LÉGER WAS AN AMBITIOUS PAINTER. Within a year of joining the Cubist orbit he had created his own highly original style. He was also an optimistic painter. Having innovated once, he hoped to do so indefinitely, and his career became one of willful and continuous change. From the start he was a painter in search of a grand manner. In consequence, the intricately modulated small-scale Cubism of Picasso and Braque was alien to Léger’s blunter nature. He sought instead a style both simpler in its mechanics and potentially more commanding in its effects: a purposefully dramatic and dynamic “epic”