print September 1993

Yours Faithfully,

IT WAS 16 YEARS AGO, and already there had been too much harping on the “end” of painting, of abstract art, of art as we know it, of the world, etc. Some of us sought to move beyond both trademark American formalist “Modernism” and Minimalist inertness. In the late ’70s, with the stock market bobbing around 600, not many dollars were being bet on art, and we were not quite yet overrun by mercantile investors, not yet stuck in a Hollywood of art stars. Obviously I wish we could have held out longer, but I think we did quite a bit in three short years.

There is formalism and there is formalism. I

print November 1982

CONSTRUCTIVE ISSUES IN RELIEF

RELIEF HAS OFTEN SEEMED to waste away in ambivalence between painting, at least painting “proper,” and any “true” sculpture. Minimalism, however, called the question on the contrived dominance of conventional freestanding sculpture—something that Charles Baudelaire and Alberto Giacometti, not just Robert Morris and other contemporaries, had already criticized. By default, relief has generally been left close—if never quite close enough—to the condition of painting, and thus compromised or “impure”; at best. it could submit to architectural subordination. Besides, in and of itself, relief seemed

print May 1981

Pressing On: Thomas Nozkowski’s Paintings

The whole visible universe is just a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value, a sort of fodder which the imagination must digest and transform.
—Charles Baudelaire¹

TO BE “PAINTING AGAIN,” in the Talking Heads’ song “Artists Only,” involves “cleaning” your “brain.” That is not equally apparent in all current manifestations. “Pattern and Decoration” offers the anesthetizing “easy list’nin’” of the music piped into dentists’ offices. So-called “New Image” painting, misappropriating a term once applied to Abstract Expressionism,² conveys the

books February 1981

Italian Drawings 1780-1890, August Sander, Twentieth-Century European Painting, Jackson Pollock, African Furniture

Italian Drawings 1780-1890, by Roberta J.M. Olson, New York: The American Federation of Arts, and Bloomington, Ind., and London: Indiana University Press, 1980, 247 pages, 107 illustrations, including 4 in color.

In format this is an old-masterish catalogue comprising a lot of good full-page, black-and-white illustrations with an introductory essay. Frankly, I was hoping for the kind of drawing problem that I really like, where the conservative and the radical in the 19th century may not be as distinct as is assumed (and which I took up in The Burlington Magazine (April 1977) with a letter from

books January 1981

Joseph Masheck

Moholy-Nagy: Photographs and Photograms, essay by Andreas Haus, translated by Frederic Samson (Munich: Schirmer-Mosel, GmbH., 1978; New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).

The very artiness of this great Hungarian modernist’s photographs can put me off, even though it all takes place on a very high level, and even though the photographs seem to be reproduced with an almost reverent fineness, which must not have been easy to achieve. (Moholy himself had an extraordinary devotion to the most delicate and minute physical properties of the photographic object.) The essay by Haus, who teaches art history at

print December 1980

The Horror of Bearing Arms: Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier, the Military Mystique and the Crisis of World War I (with a Slip-of-the-Pen by Freud)

EXPRESSION IN GERMANIC ART shows itself not in limpid beauty but in the truth that hurts. Anxiety itself becomes a sign of life. By that reckoning Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s 1915 Self-Portrait as a Soldier, at Oberlin College, is definitive. In 1915 Kirchner was already a painter of exquisite fluency, and the Self-Portrait as a Soldier offers a head-on look into his most immobilizing anxieties.¹

Antithetical notions of expression, Mediterranean or classical versus Germanic, can apply to different times, and to different personality types, as well as to different phases in a single lifetime—as when

print December 1979

Brain Food: Some Books of 1979

THE PAST YEAR MAY not have seen an abundant harvest of significant books on modern painting and sculpture, but certain other books do have modern interest. Of course, a book of more direct importance may already have been discussed in a review essay during the year, like Nancy Holt’s edition of The Writings of Robert Smithson, reviewed by Kate Linker in October, or it may require more time for a considered response, as with William A. Camfield’s Francis Picabia: his Art, Life and Times or Meyer Schapiro’s magisterial Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, the second volume of his Selected Papers

print November 1979

Nothing/Not Nothing/Something

missing text

actually cross (not unlike lengths of molding) inside the depiction.

Van Gogh’s combination in a single work of just-touching border bands, an entirely nonobjective square in the very corner, and narrower bands that do cross within the representation, points toward the active neutralization that Mondrian described, since even what is represented conforms to his flat topology. In several of Mondrian’s own canvases, painted from about 1927 onward, a comparable construct can be found. In some of these, from around 1929, the L-shape, consisting of two side bands and their adjacent squares,

print September 1979

Neo-Neo

For D.N.

ART HISTORY BEGAN IN the same period to which we often trace the origins of modern art. When Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art appeared, in 1764, European art was undergoing Enlightenment transformation, changing from an art that flattered aristocracies whose Baroque glory had faded into Rococo delight, to an advanced middle-class art with intellectual concerns, a new art expressing itself by recourse to the timeless lucidity and moral perfection of revived classical forms. This was a great period for the critical mind, and a constructive one for the historical mind.

print May 1979

Pictures of Art

For J.H.W.

IF THE CONVICTION of abstract painting can be said to have revived during the last few years, that revival has not been easily accomplished. In excavating down to its foundations, however, it would appear that abstraction has rediscovered certain principles, about the relations between contained rectangular forms and their containing rectangle, that were first stated in the preabstract painting of the later 19th century, and that trace back further to fundamental organizing procedures in Western art. Even revolutionaries like Malevich and Mondrian, when they concentrated on such specific

books December 1978

The Decorated Letter, Manuscript Painting at the Court of France: The Fourteenth Century (1310–1380), and The Icon

HIGH HONORS GO TO an ongoing series of picture books dealing with medieval manuscript painting that Braziller has been publishing since last year. The project involves, in each case, the selection of some 48 full-page color plates, each with identification and commentary on the facing page, and a substantial introduction by some recognized scholar in the field, with the introduction itself fitted out with many black-and-white comparative illustrations. Each volume comes in both cloth and paper formats, the paperbacks costing in the neighborhood of $10 to $12.

It happens that I have not seen

books December 1978

Beyond Time and Place, and Modern Art 1890–1918

OF THE MANY, MANY new books dealing with general modern art history, three seem particularly worthy of note, although I still do not pretend to have covered the entire field. Beyond Time and Place, by Philippe Roberts-Jones (Oxford), treats the 19th century as the Symbolist century in painting and graphics. Written by a Belgian poet, and thematic in approach, it is packed with engaging visual parallels between, especially, Romantic-period material and high Symbolisme. Such an approach is not in itself new, but here it is searchingly and convincingly applied. Roberts-Jones’ subtitle is Non-Realist