Yve-Alain Bois

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  print February 2000

  SUM AND THE PARTS: SOL LEWITT IN RETROSPECT

  “SOL LEWITT: A RETROSPECTIVE,” THE FIRST FULL-SCALE U.S. SURVEY OF THE ARTIST’S WORK SINCE HIS 1978 MIDCAREER MILESTONE, GOES ON VIEW THIS MONTH AT THE SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. ANTICIPATING THE OPPORTUNITY TO VIEW THE LAST TWO DECADES OF LEWITT’S DIVERSE OUTPUT ALONGSIDE HIS EARLIER PRODUCTION, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR YVE-ALAIN BOIS ASKS HOW THE INCREASINGLY CONTRADICTORY SECOND ACT WILL SQUARE WITH THE FIRST.

  IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE WE’VE BEEN ABLE TO SEE SOL LEWITT WHOLE. His last full retrospective in this country was in 1978, at the Museum of Modern Art. Sure, he’s been around: In my home area of Boston alone, we’ve had an excellent survey of his wall drawings from 1968 on (at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover in 1993), and shortly afterward the touring retrospective of his drawings on paper, beginning with his 1958 student sketches after Piero della Francesca and Velázquez, made a stop at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And in New York, just as one was beginning to wonder if LeWitt

• previews January 2000

  Cy Twombly: The Sculpture

  This first-ever retrospective of Cy Twombly’s sculpture, organized by Katharina Schmidt, comprises about sixty-five works, more than a third of the corpus. From earliest work to latest, there is little stylistic change: Always small and frontal, the sculptures are made of assembled found objects and are generally anchored to a conspicuous pedestal. Those cast in bronze are painted white, imparting a kind of milky patina evoking infancy. It is perhaps this discreet allusion to a time of origins that has led scholars into an iconographic booby trap where they have kept busy uncovering countless

• previews January 2000

  Kasimir Malevich: The Late Work

  The figurative paintings realized by Malevich after his 1927 Berlin retrospective have long puzzled art historians. Many are unconvincingly antedated remakes in the various styles (Impressionism, “primitivism,” Cubism, Futurism, etc.) the artist passed en route to his 1915 breakthrough; others are hybrids, blending the language of Renaissance portraiture with a kind of Art Deco version of Suprematism. The deliberately out-of-sync character is usually explained away by the oppressive political context, but this rationalization is too simple; they are far from comfortable in the Stalinist canon.

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  print December 1999

  BEST OF THE ’90s: BOOKS

  Homi K. Bhabha: The times are out of joint, perhaps never more so than when we are seduced by that decade-end desire to say, One last time, what was the great work of the ’90s? The ’90s began in the late late ’80s with the big bang of The Satanic Verses, and the decade dribbles on with small arms sniping around an elephant-dung madonna. In between times, we realize how powerful is the appeal to religious orthodoxy; how insecure our sense of the secular; how fragile any idea of global cultural understanding; how the politics of art rarely lies in the artifice itself, but all around it, in the

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  print December 1999

  “La peinture apres l’abstraction”

  Sometimes a silly idea can lead to a fascinating exhibition even as the silliness still shows through. When I first heard about “La peinture après l’abstraction,” documenting work done in Paris between 1955 and 1975 by five artists as unlike as Simon Hantaï, Jean Degottex, Martin Barré, Raymond Hains, and Jacques de la Villeglé, I thought the project utterly crackpot. I still think so; Degottex’s inclusion shows how little thought went into the mix. But the beauty is that Degottex’s oeuvre inadvertently serves as a repoussoir: The contrast his work provides helps demonstrate what the four others

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  books October 1999

  on catalogues raisonnés

  I’VE ALWAYS FETISHIZED the “complete works” editions of my favorite writers and daydreamed about the prospect of reading any one of them from A to Z (which of course I’ve never done). I loathe anthologies and the arrogance of the editor who chooses for the reader what is worthy of interest. Nothing fuels my fantasy more than the illusion of having in front of me a lifework whole, with all its moments of grace and oddity there to be unearthed (even if the exhaustiveness can only be temporary, as the appearance of countless “revised and expanded” editions of books warns us, and with the criteria

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  print May 1999

  MISSING IN ACTION: THE ART OF GUTAÏ

  THOUGH THE JAPANESE GROUP Gutaï has received some exposure in the US in recent years, most notably in the 1994 “Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky” exhibition (at the SoHo Guggenheim, New York, and SF MOMA) and 1998’s “Out of Actions” (which opened at MOCA, Los Angeles, before traveling abroad), the extraordinary activities of these artists during the ’50s and early ’60s remains largely unknown in this country. No exhibition devoted solely to the group’s efforts seems to have followed the Martha Jackson Gallery show in 1958. Europe at least has been better served, with a 1990

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  print February 1999

  MATISSE AND PICASSO: A GENTLE RIVALRY

  As final preparations were underway for “Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry,” which opens this month at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, art historian LINDA NOCHLIN met with the exhibition’s curator, YVE-ALAIN BOIS, and talked with him about his revisionist approach to the relationship between these two central modernist figures. By turns parodic, agonistic, even elegiac, the conversation Bois details unfolds as a series of nuanced moves and countermoves within the artworks themselves. Often seen as antipodal forces, the two artists emerge as necessary partners and foils, twin protagonists engaged in a mutually enabling dialogue that helped shape the narrative of modern painting.

  As the end of the twentieth century approaches, those grand old lions Picasso and Matisse, once seen as polar opposites within the narrative of modernist innovation, seem more and more like congenial creative companions. Perhaps it is today’s art-video, object, or installation oriented-that makes the two look sympathetically old-masterish, mythic remnants of a pre-abstract, painting-and-sculpture-centered tradition inherited from the nineteenth century. In short, Picasso and Matisse today seem more similar than either of them is to Robert Gober, or Janine Antoni, or Mona Hatoum, or for that

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  print January 1999

  Lygia Clark

  I know of no other artist whose oeuvre a curator could find more difficult to present than that of Lygia Clark (1920–88). Though the Brazilian artist was acclaimed in her own country, she remained marginal in the art world all her life. Her works after 1965 (which she labeled “propositions”) were never meant to be offered for sale; nor were they made to be “shown.” They consist of nothing else but the use by others, according to certain rules determined by the artist, of various easily replicated props—such as a pebble and a plastic bag filled with one’s own warm breath and tied with a

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  print December 1998

  “Les Années Supports/Surfaces”

  Despite its domination of the French art world in the ’70s (when it quickly replaced Nouveau Réalisme as an official institutional “avant-garde”), the production of Supports/Surfaces has never been able to stir up much interest outside France, and even at home it has largely fallen into oblivion. A reassessment of Supports/ Surfaces today requires a selection of the best work and a clear presentation of the context in which the group emerged, achieved its hegemonic position, and then disintegrated. In “Les années Supports/Surfaces dans les collections du Centre Georges Pompidou,” a selection of

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  print February 1998

  Jackson Pollock

  On April 30, 1961, The New York Times Magazine published five letters to the editor regarding an article by Clement Greenberg that had appeared in its pages two weeks earlier, entitled (against the author’s will) “The Jackson Pollock Market Soars.” Among the illustrations for his piece, Greenberg had used an early Pollock drawing after one of Michelangelo’s Ignudi in the Sistine Chapel, which two of the writers thought was a cheap trick. Indeed, even though this particular drawing was not discussed, the text—an attack against the stereotype of Pollock as an artiste maudit—made its function

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  print January 1998

  Richard Serra

  “Masterpieces come late.” I was stunned to hear this pronouncement, last spring, in the course of a phenomenal lecture by T. J. Clark on de Kooning’s 1958 Suburb in Havana. Let’s bypass my puzzlement at the word “masterpiece” from an art historian whose past work would seem to preclude the use of such an ill-defined notion. The tempo of the lecture was fast, and at the time I could make only one hasty association: that was with Matisse, and with my unlikely preference, in his whole oeuvre, for the 1947–48 interiors, among his last canvases.

  This association helped me grasp what I take to be the