Gallery Listings

Alexandre Gallery, New York City

“Recent paintings by Tom Uttech, a veteran landscapist who focuses on the wilderness of upper Wisconsin and Canada. These large-scale paintings of woods and wetlands are inhabited by numinous animals and bring a New World sensibility to Romantic themes. He takes his titles from local tribal names for lakes. September 24–November 14, 2009.

 

Arden Gallery, Boston

Paul Béliveau, new paintings in the artist’s series of close-cropped book spines, playing colorful glossy jackets against worn cloth and paperbacks. The mix of words and images in the groupings, often predominantly art books, adds cultural commentary. September 1–29, 2009.

 

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

“Sargent and the Sea,” an exhibition of eighty paintings, watercolors and drawings. Best known for his splendid society portraits, Sargent frequently spent his summers painting the sea and sky in Brittany, Normandy and Capri. The results are loose, spirited paint-handling and an atmosphere filled with light. September 12, 2009–January 2, 2010.

 

Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, New York City

“Gus Heinze: Means of Entry,” photorealist paintings with a strong sense of color and formal shape. Avoiding the wide-perspective street scenes of many photorealists, with the attendant visual clutter, Heinze likes tight close-ups, of train engine wheels, for example. The influence of Mondrian and the Precisionists makes for strong compositions. September 3–26, 2009.

 

Fischbach Gallery, New York City

Recent watercolors and acrylics by Nancy Hagin, who depicts found objects in crisp sunlight. She is sensitive to the shapes of old jugs and coffee pots and the texture of appliqué fabrics. Showing concurrently is “The Heart of Center Meditation: Energy Follows Awareness,” a group of oil-on-masonite paintings by John Falato. Falato takes as his subjects the woods and covered bridges of Connecticut, capturing the texture of fallen leaves and rippling water. September 10–October 10, 2009.

 

George Adams Gallery, New York City

Large-scale paintings by Andrew Lenaghan, who depicts middle-class yards and interiors. While the details may be mundane (a car in a carport, a kid in a pool), the artist plays intriguing perspective games, subtly mimicking a fish-eye lens or offering an aerial view that resolves white houses into lively triangular shapes. A schoolroom with bare wood floors and a snowscape at the window suggest Caillebotte. September 9–October 3, 2009.

 

Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York City

New paintings by Harold Reddicliff, who likes to “explore the transformation that occurs when ordinary objects are subjected to extraordinary scrutiny.” Interestingly cropped portraits of cameras, staplers and scales, meticulously rendered. September 24–October 24, 2009.

 

John Pence Gallery, New York City

New paintings by Tony Curanaj, a former graffiti artist who mastered the contemporary realist aesthetic at the Water Street Atelier. While Curanaj works in several genres, including figure and landscape, his forte is the still life. His subjects are often edgy: a trompe l’oeil gasmask against flowered wallpaper, a mix of fine and pop culture items, as in Red (2008–09), which includes Baroque swags and gold frames alongside a gumball machine. September 11–October 10, 2009. A group of Dean Larsen’s atmospheric interiors and cityscapes is on view during the same period.

 

Kent Gallery, New York City

“All in This Together: Dorothea Tanning and Friends,” a celebration of the grande dame of Surrealism, with a selection of her haunting paintings and works by Joseph Cornell, Leonor Fini, Giacometti and Magritte, as well as photographers Irving Penn and Henri Cartier-Bresson. In the twentieth-century race to abstraction, such artists insisted on both mimesis and imagination. September 10–November 28, 2009.

 

Klaudia Marr Gallery, Sante Fe

“Excellence on Paper,” a group show featuring Aristides Ruiz’s densely worked portraits and urban street scenes (in graphite and ballpoint pen), Myra Schuetter’s busy-patterned toy corners in soft colors and Rose Simpson’s sharp black-and-white, picturesque illustrations. August 21–September 30, 2009.

 

Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, California

Patti Olean exhibition, entitled “Phantom Spaces.” Olean describes these oil-on-panel paintings as “fabricated environments” and favors ballrooms and museum interiors, unpeopled, lit by mysterious light sources and subtly distorted by effects more usually associated with photography, such as double exposures. September 12–October 10, 2009.

 

Principle Gallery, Alexandria, Virgina

Thomas S. Buechner, a retrospective covering six decades of work by this realist painter, who served as director of the Brooklyn Museum and the Corning Museum of Glass. His Profile in Red and Purple (1949), with its flattened space and vibrant color, suggests a friendly exchange with modernism. Alley Door (2008) combines illusionistic space with painterly color. September 25–October 25, 2009.

 

Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco

“Inside Out,” a solo exhibition of paintings by Jeff Bellerose, who describes his work as “an attempt to capture the stillness deep in the city shadows.” The unpeopled urban architecture evokes some strong compositions, especially when viewed from under bridges and down concrete canyons. Through September 12, 2009.

 

William Baczek Fine Arts, Northampton, Massachusetts

Black & White,” a group show of eight artists working without color. Particularly noteworthy are Skip Steinworth’s graphite still lifes, with an amazing display of tonal gradation, and Steven Graber’s dramatic landscapes. September 9–October 10, 2009.

 

William Campbell Contemporary Art, Forth Worth, Texas

Recent paintings by J.T. Grant: classically inspired still lifes with a strong dose of tenebrism, expansive skyscapes and figure paintings with disturbing subjects in an edgy surrealist manner. September 5–October 10, 2010.

 

William Vareika Fine Arts, Newport, Rhode Island

John La Farge was a good painter, but he is best known for the splendid stained-glass windows he created from the 1870s to 1910. This exhibition, with about 150 objects, includes nine windows, along with watercolor sketches for windows and some South Sea landscapes. September 4–November 30, 2009.

 

Museums

Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio

“Familiar Faces: Chuck Close in Ohio Collections,” a gathering of Close’s very human close-up portraits, from his black-and-white, Pop-inflected period to his recent painterly mosaic-style work. September 5, 2009–January 3, 2010.

 

Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York

“America’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City,” in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of William Vance’s two-volume study America’s Rome, tracing the influence of Roman art and ideas. Organized around the Forum, the Colosseum and the Campagna, the show features eighty paintings by, among others, Thomas Cole and George Inness. May 23–December 31, 2009.

 

Getty Museum, Los Angeles

“Capturing Nature’s Beauty: Three Centuries of French Landscapes,” a drawing exhibition featuring works by Poussin, Claude, Fragonard, Seurat and van Gogh. July 29–November 1, 2009.

 

Getty Villa, Los Angeles

“The Golden Graves of Ancient Vanni,” archaeological treasures from the site of Cochis, destination of Jason and the Argonauts, now in Georgia. July 16–October 5, 2009.
 
“The Chimera of Arezzo,” the three-headed beast slain by Bellerophon through five centuries of classical art. The star attraction is an Etruscan bronze presented in partnership with the National Archaeological Museum, Florence. July 16, 2009–February 8, 2010.

 

Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles

“Capturing Nature’s Beauty: Three Centuries of French Landscapes,” a drawing exhibition featuring works by Poussin, Claude, Fragonard, Seurat and van Gogh. July 29–November 1, 2009.
 
“Out-of-Bounds: Images in the Margins of Medieval Manuscripts.” The medieval imagination was elastic enough to encompass fantastic and hybrid creatures and a wealth of natural detail. These playful addenda to the theologically defined universe are the principle delight of manuscript marginalia. September 1–November 8, 2009.

 

Heckscher Museum of Art, New York City

“A retrospective of works by Wassily Kandinsky, one of the museum’s star attractions. The most spiritual of the great twentieth-century modernists, Kandinsky began with magical illustrations of Russian folktales and drew on icons and hermetic mandalas for his later cosmic compositions. September 18, 2009–January 13, 2010.

 

Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

“Body in Fragments,” a theme exhibition drawn from the museum’s diverse collections. Examples range from Egyptian and African sculpture to a medieval finger reliquary, to paintings by Picasso and Magritte. August 21, 2009–February 28, 2010.

 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

““The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry,” a rare chance to see all the illuminated pages of this masterpiece (1405–09), gorgeous in color and encyclopedic in thematic motifs, a sort of luxury visual summa of the late Gothic. September 22, 2009–January 3, 2010.
 
“Watteau, Music and Theater,” exploring the artist’s refined and evocative scenes connecting the pleasures of love and music, as practiced in the opera, ballet and theater of the early eighteenth century. A number of major loans supplement the Met’s holdings. Watteau’s red-chalk drawings, which seem to breathe with life, are sure to be a highlight. September 22–November 29, 2009.

 

James A. Michener Museum, Bucks County, Pennsylvania

“Painting the People: Images of American Life from the Maimon Collection,” American Scene, social realist and regionalist images by artists including the Soyer brothers. July 11–October 18, 2009.

 

Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, Vermont

“The Art of Devotion: Panel Painting in Early Renaissance Italy,” a scholarly examination of the collaborative process of painters, woodworkers, gilders and patrons. September 18–December 13, 2009.

 

Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey

“Cézanne and American Modernism,” eighteen paintings by Cézanne and over a hundred by admirers including Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, Maurice Prendergast and John Marin. The wide range of styles suggests a liberating influence rather than dogmatic devotion. September 13, 2009–January 3, 2010. Travels to the Baltimore Museum of Art February 14–May 23, 2010, and the Phoenix Art Museum June 26–September 26, 2010

 

Morgan Library & Museum, New York City

“Pages of Gold: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan,” approximately fifty single leaves “orphaned” from their original manuscripts, a common practice among nineteenth-century collectors. Italian, French and Flemish examples, along with Mr. Morgan’s last personal acquisition, a magnificent leaf from the twelfth-century Winchester Bible. Through September 13, 2009.
 
“New at the Morgan: Acquisitions since 2004,” a hundred items reflecting a wide range of interests. Highlights include a tiny, lavish sixteenth-century prayer book, a Watteau study for his Cythera paintings, an illustrated letter by van Gogh and visionary landscapist Samuel Palmer’s majestic Oak Tree and Beech, Lullingstone Park (1828). Letters and musical scores (accompanied by recordings at listening kiosks) offer insights into the creative process of writers and composers. Through October 18, 2009.
 
“William Blake’s World: ‘A New Heaven Is Begun,’” drawn from the Morgan’s own holdings of works—drawings, poems, designed books—by the polymath prophet and foremost exemplar of Romantic imagination. September 11, 2009–January 3, 2010.

 

Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

“Glackens as Illustrator.” One of the Eight, a group of artists associated with the Ashcan School, Glackens combines social observation with graphic energy. September 5, 2009–May 3, 2010.

 

Museum of Biblical Art, New York City

“Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in Netherlandish Prints of the Sixteenth Century,” eighty works—woodcuts, engravings and books—from an important era of visual storytelling. Variations on contemporary dress and local landscape brought the Biblical stories home to a wide audience. Works by Lucas van Leyden, Henrick Goltzius, Jan Swart and others. June 5–September 27, 2009.

 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice,” fifty-seven paintings by the great sixteenth-century masters, focusing on their career rivalries and their development of the craft of oil painting. Standouts include Titian’s Flora and Danäe, and Tintoretto’s Susannah and the Elders. March 15–August 16, 2009. Travels to the Musée du Louvre, Paris (September 16, 2009–January 4, 2010).

 

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

“Painting the Cosmos: Science and the Art of Frederic Edwin Church,” a small show built around Church’s depiction of a volcano, Cotopaxi (1855), with books and other materials providing a scientific and literary context. Through September 27, 2009.

 

National Academy Museum, New York City.

“Reconfiguring the Body in American Art, 1820–2009,” a wide-ranging exhibition featuring portraits, including Eakins’s 1902 Self-Portrait, nudes in paintings, drawings and sculpture (Kenyon Cox, Elihu Vedder, Thomas Dewing and Harriet Frismuth), genre scenes and a selection of contemporary works. Not a masterpiece show but an interesting survey of the vicissitudes of figurative art practice in the United States. July 11–October 18, 2009.

 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

“Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life,” thirty paintings—eight on loan from the Prado—by the eighteenth-century artist. Meléndez began with a royal commission to interpret the four seasons and went on to find compositional gold in arrangements of humble foodstuffs. The National Gallery’s acquisition, in 2000, of a Meléndez study of bread and figs was a revelation, sparking this exhibition. May 17–August 23, 2009. Travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (September 23, 2009–January 3, 2010) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (January 31–May 9, 2010).

“An Antiquity of Imagination: Tullio Lombardo and Venetian High Renaissance Sculpture.” July 4–October 31, 2009.

“Judith Leyster, 16098–1660,” ten works by this exuberant woman painter of the Dutch Golden Age, along with paintings by her probable mentor, Frans Hals. Through November 29, 2009.

Newark Art Museum, Newark, New Jersey

“Small but Sublime: Intimate Views by Durand, Bierstadt and Inness,” from a fine collection of Hudson River School paintings. These artists, known for their attention to natural detail, didn’t need epic scale to find remarkable landscapes. Through February 28, 2010.

 

New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, Connecticut

“Hudson River Paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” While the Met’s American galleries are being refurbished, many masterworks are on loan. This selection features paintings by Church, Durand, Inness and Kensett. Through September 2010.

 

Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York

“American Landscapes: Treasures from the Parrish Art Museum.” The light and water of Long Island have attracted artists for well over a century. Works by Samuel Coleman, William Merritt Chase, John Marin, Fairfield Porter and April Gornik are featured in this exhibition. September 27–November 29, 2009.

 

Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine

“Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England,” with seventy-four works by Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri and George Bellows, among others, who painted in Old Lyme, Cos Cob and Monhegon. June 25–October 12, 2009.

 

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

“Public Treasures/Private Visions: Hudson River School Masterworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Private Collections,” paintings by Cole, Durand, Bierstadt, Church and Kensett, on loan while the Met renovates its American Wing. June 15–September 30, 2009.

 

The Hyde Collection, Glen Falls, New York

“Degas and Music,” twenty-five works by the most classical of the Impressionists, focusing on his response to musical subjects. Curated by Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendal, who mounted the well-received “Degas and the Dance” exhibition a few years ago. July 12–October 18, 2009.

 

Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont

“Louis Comfort Tiffany: Nature by Design,” seventy-five works, including a complete furniture suite, the music room in the New York City home of the Havemeyers’s, important art patrons of the Gilded Age. A daughter of the family founded the Shelburne Museum, which also has a fine collection of lamps, vessels and jewelry. Through October 25, 2009.

 

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland

“Shrunken Treasures: Miniaturization in Books and Art,” thirty small-scale objects designed for private meditation, including Korans, tiny ancient gold scrolls inscribed with spells and Books of Hours, from medieval feats of artistry to a prayer book for Marie de Medici with hand-cut, lace-patterned borders. Through November 8, 2009.

 

Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas

“Fantasies and Fairy Tales: Maxfield Parrish and the Art of the Print.” One of America’s best-known illustrators, with a droll sense of humor and a flair for crepuscular light. July 30–October 11, 2009.

 

Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts

“Prendergast in Italy,” seventy works—oils, watercolors, and monotypes—of Venice, Rome, Siena and Capri, based on Prendergast’s Italian tours of 1898–99 and 1911. Bright scenes of sunny sites and amiable crowds, supplemented by contemporary photographs and guidebooks. July 18–September 20, 2009. Travels to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (October 9, 2009–January 3, 2010) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 14–May 9, 2010).

 

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

“Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction.” The line between abstraction and representation is often more fluid that some partisans suggests, and O’Keeffe’s organic forms, even at their most stylized, remain rooted in nature. September 17, 2009–January 17, 2010.

 

Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut

“Mrs. Delaney and Her Circle,” an exhibition organized by the British Museum. Mrs. Delaney’s (1700–88) paper-mosaic botanical illustrations, on striking black grounds, are aesthetically compelling; her collages are shown in the context of contemporary natural history artifacts. September 24, 2009–January 3, 2010.

 

For many artists and critics in the modern world, realism continues to pose old problems of meaning—of how to connect lowly surface description to higher planes of being. Some of the disconnections they wrestle with come from abstractionist apologists’ efforts to reduce representation to the status of mere replica. The disconnects take a variety of forms, but prime among them are those between space and time, the inner and the outer and between art and reality themselves. Again, none of these dichotomies is especially new, but the questions they raise often seem more intractable in their modernist guise than was generally the case in times past.
 
All three sets of questions play into the paintings of Kate Doyle, recently on exhibit at the Tredwell Foundation in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It is an accomplished and highly cogitated body of work, most of all for the way it shows her testing the limits of what the word realism connotes. Her pictures reach beyond descriptive fact and the present moment to conjure up other, more abstract or metaphysical levels of art and reality. Together, they make up what she calls her “Transformation Project.” It doesn’t take long to catch the links to The Metamorphoses, Ovid’s retelling of the Greek myths in light of the theme of change as such.

Over the last few decades, Steven Assael has built up a body of work combining painterly craftsmanship and bold iconography. A new series of works by the artist, exhibited recently at the Forum Gallery in New York City, provided a thoughtful follow-up to his electrifying portraits of underground urban culture. In a beautifully crafted small Self-Portrait (2007), reminiscent of introspective Dutch portraits of the sixteenth century, the artist stares out from the canvas, holding a brush in his right hand. His beard and long hair, his simple cap and open shirt could belong to any century or country. The soft olive, gray and brown tones suffuse any details that might compromise the directness of his painted statement: I am an artist.
 
Figure Holding Eyeglasses (2008) is equally understated and objective, again revealing the artist’s professionalism and master craftsmanship. It is a half-length portrait of a young woman in the nude holding a pair of wire-framed eyeglasses. As in his self-portrait, there is little in the painting to identify the sitter, time or place. Both paintings are about the pleasure of painting and the pride the artist rightly takes in his craft. Phlegmatic brushwork gives Figure Holding Eyeglasses its strong painterly quality, with palpable layers of pigment traced across the young woman’s brow, cheekbones, jaw and skull. Flecks of warm flesh tones flare subtly into the cool bluish tint of the background, producing a mist of color and tone that visually integrates the portrait with the background. Conversely, the faint bluish hues of the background blush back across the contour of the figure. This subtle give and take between figure and background begins at the top of the painting, descending into the dark blue and umber shadows at the bottom. The subtle chemistry of form, color, tone and shadow keeps the viewer’s eye moving and interested. It is a painting with a simple subject; at the same time, it focuses on what is important to art.

In recent art auctions, at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, for example, it seems that the “modern masters” have been losing large fractions of their value, as owners try to liquidate their assets to cover their losses in the financial marketplace. Larry Gagosian’s fashionable art empire (which includes such luminaries as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst) is apparently teetering on the brink of collapse. However, what Carol Vogel, the New York Times art critic, calls “pretty” paintings (the Impressionists, for instance) are selling well. Several victims of Bernard Madoff’s monster Ponzi scheme are reputedly trying to sell their Picassos.
 
In the previous issue of American Arts Quarterly, I pointed out how the recent crisis in credit (from the Latin word for “faith”) may be related to larger cultural issues. These included especially the postmodern overextension of artistic meanings—critical and aesthetic “derivatives”—to the point where their connection with the “fundamentals” of human life has snapped. As the value of a coin or a currency requires some kind of intrinsically valuable backing, whether the value of the coin’s metal or the productive capacity of the nation, so art requires connections with nature and our own bodies. The act of sacrifice—of whatever kind, as long as intangible meaning is cashed in terms of real content—establishes those connections. And the ancient crafts of the arts—melody, meter and rhyme, true pictorial representation, storytelling, etc.—are the shape of that sacrifice.

Stephen Scott Young’s spring exhibition at Adelson Galleries in New York City demonstrated a quiet mastery of technique. Young works primarily in silverpoint and drybrush watercolor, and achieves some remarkably refined effects, especially in his portraits of children. One of his favorite models is Cindy, a five-year-old from Gregory Town, Eleuthera, the Bahamas, where he has a studio. He has a special sensitivity to the luminosity of dark skin, nicely handled in Shy Look (2008), a watercolor portrait of Cindy in a simple white dress. Sunlight caresses her cheek, highlights enliven her eyes, and the shadow of an earring provides a grace note. Attention is focused on the face; the arms and dress are more loosely painted, and the backdrop is a nearly abstract passage of peach and brown. Young is equally adept in monochrome, as in Study of Little Cindy in a Flowered Lace Dress (2008) in silverpoint, a medium, the artist notes, that “allows for no erasing, no mistakes.” The detail in the lace and hair-braiding is exquisite, patiently built up from almost-invisible crosshatching, and the eyes have extraordinary presence. The children depicted are attractive and demurely posed, but far too individualistic and self-possessed to evoke sentimentality. Study of Little Cindy isolates the face and shoulders in a field of light, taking advantage of the warmth of the cream handmade paper.
 
Other works place the full-length figure in architecturally defined interiors. A recent series depicts adolescent dancers in repose, a theme most familiar from the off-kilter studio observations Degas used for his daringly cropped compositions. There is nothing avant-garde about Young’s scenes, but he knows how to deploy the old-fashioned virtues of craftsmanship and empathy, and the results are often rewarding. Young notes he spent ten days on the transparent pink skirt in Ballerina (2008), a drybrush watercolor on handmade tinted paper. The young black model is posed sitting on a stool covered with a checkerboard drape; we see the pattern through the tissue-thin skirt. A black-and-white-checked floor and the edge of a window on the right, the source of the light, help shape the space, although the plain brown backdrop wall seems formally inert. The composition is stronger in the less formal Stagelight (2009). Two young dancers sit on the floor, stretching, one in simple black, the other in a feathery tutu. They are caught in a trapezoidal swatch of intense light, with the rest of the room, which includes a double ballet barre, in shadow. The counterpoint between the two figures—one bending forward, the other sitting up and looking over her shoulder—is graceful. You can also get a good idea of Young’s drybrush watercolor technique here, ranging from the smooth finish of the cool skin tones to the visible brushstrokes of the feathered costume and the floor: the reflection of a pink satin toe shoe on polished wood is handsomely done. His silverpoints of dancers, on handmade paper or gessoed panel, are so finely wrought that the figure seems to materialize out of bright air. The diaphanous tulle in The Long Stretch, the feathers and eyelashes in Rebekah, the ruffled sk

In May, John Pence Gallery in San Francisco presented recent work by Jacob Collins, a major figure in the contemporary realism revival and founder of three influential teaching institutions: the Water Street Atelier, the Grand Central Academy of Art and the Hudson River School for Landscape. As an artist, Collins functions at a very high level of technical proficiency, and the results are on display in a variety of genres, including portraits, plein air landscapes and drawings. The drawings are particularly good examples of elegant, incisive draftsmanship, enlivened by nuanced textures. Collins’s textural flair comes into its own in his oils, where he wields the brush with an ease built on rock-solid discipline. The challenge for artists who have reached this level of mastery is finding subject matter that galvanizes their imagination. Right now, the energy, for Collins, seems concentrated in two genres: the still life and the nude.
 
There are many ways to approach the still life, some—like the vanitas trope—freighted with symbolism, but the genre’s principal appeal may be the chance to work out visual problems within a restricted set of circumstances. Objects help us concentrate on getting the objective truth. The formal approach can lead to a focus on shape, proportion and the play of positive/negative space: Giorgio Morandi, among the modernists, and the contemporary realist William Bailey work in this classically cool mode. Other artists, attracted by the effects of light on three-dimensional forms, try to capture that quality with brushstrokes: Velàzquez and Chardin are the old master exemplars, and William Merritt Chase (before he succumbed to the bright colors of Impressionism) was a wizard at conjuring a silver teapot from tenebrous shadows. Collins’s Roses in a Silver Cup II (2009) is a superb example of this kind of still life. The simple composition provides a showcase for bravura brushwork. The cylindrical vase dimly reflects the surrounding room, with the brightness of the silver glimmering in a few deftly placed highlights. The translucent white blooms have pink and yellow undertones; like human flesh, they have a complexion. Crisp brushstrokes capture the light at the furled edges of the petals and blur into the brown background, in a just-visible halo of pollen yellow. The productive tension between verisimilitude and painterly surface is also impressive with a less glamorous subject. In Beets (2009), Collins performs his alchemy on a bunch of unprepossessing root vegetables, draped lankly over a plain brown table. The beets are still dirty, as if they had come from a farmers market; only the magenta streaks of the leaves’ stems and veins hint at the vibrant color under the matte surface. The background is mottled gray. Collins has made an honest and appealing painting out of humble subject matter. The avant-garde musician John Cage once advised that, if a thing seemed boring after ten minutes, think about it for half an hour. It’s hard to imagine reconciling the creative intelligence of Cage and Collins, but they both understand the principle behind this mantra: pay attention, to your craft and the world around you.

For over half a century, Richard Mayhew has been painting vibrantly colored landscapes that gracefully negotiate the border region between representation and abstraction. This summer, Zone: Contemporary Art in New York City presented “Monuments,” a solo exhibition of highlights from his career. In the fall, three San Francisco Bay Area institutions—the De Saisset Museum, the Museum of the African Diaspora and the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz—are running concurrent shows, each focusing on a different phase of the artist’s oeuvre (October 9, 2009–January 10, 2010).
 
For Mayhew, nature is the portal to “a universal space with the illusion of time.” Born in Amityville, New York, and descended from African-American, Cherokee and Shinnecock Indian stock, he has a strong sense of place, although he is not a close observer of specific topographical details. He grew up drinking in the interplay of water, sky and earth around Long Island Sound and watched the New York City painters who came for the summer to work. He studied with Ruben Tam and Hans Hofmann at the Brooklyn Museum, went to Pratt and the Art Students League and earned an art history degree from Columbia University. Mayhew feels a special affinity for two defining movements in American art history: the Hudson River School, with their celebration of nature’s spiritual illuminations, and the Abstract Expressionists, who approached painting as a shamanistic practice. Primarily a colorist, Mayhew found his own lyrical, pantheistic aesthetic, distinct from the culturally freighted realism of Thomas Cole and his followers, on the one hand, and the muscular drama of Jackson Pollock and associates, on the other. At his best, Mayhew combines ecstatic color fields with a convincing vestige of spatial recession. In Fortissimo (2002), he positions a middle-distance cluster of trees between the varied greens of a field and a sky of hot pink and orchid. The trees are blue and cast a complementary orange reflection in a foreground stream. Colors are heightened, yet so well balanced that they do not seem arbitrary, and the composition holds together as a landscape.

The seven beautifully expressive, bearded bronze heads in this exhibition at Nohra Haime Gallery (May 20–June 20, 2009), by the Mexican artist Javier Marín, each stand almost five feet tall, flowing beards included. They are mounted on narrow steel pillars with circular bases, and above these severe geometries their beards proliferate, snake, braid and intertwine. Their heads are bald, and their faces are solemn, with sensual features, richly textured surfaces and vigorous, confident modeling. One can see that the original plasticene clay was masterfully and also tenderly handled. Yet each head is deeply inscribed—gouged—with a letter, front and back. They are arranged to spell out “MATARAS” on their foreheads and “VIVIRAS” across their pates: “You Will Kill” and “You Will Live,” according to the artist.
 
These heads, for all their sensuality and the terribilità of their modeling, have an ascetic quality. They seem poised to listen. There is an undulation along the row of them as they tilt, raise and duck their faces. These slight gestures convey extraordinary ceremony and lifelikeness. The central head is symmetrical and frontal and, with its closed eyes, softened mouth and serene inwardness, almost Buddhist. The one who looks down on us as if from the Cross seems to suppress a groan. Others have mouths with the pout of Michelangelo’s Moses or a downturned Olmec sneer. All are ageless and slightly androgynous. Some have partly detached beards. If, instead, they wore the exuberant bronze wigs that are exhibited along with them (in a larger size—the wigs here are sculpted on a smaller scale), they might approximate the feminine hauteur of courtiers or ladies-in-waiting to an Infanta. There is a fervor to them that is unusual in contemporary figurative sculpture. The Three Wigs evoke both menace and camp, which links this show to Marín’s earlier work, which has sometimes verged on the grotesque.
 

During his long career, painter and printmaker Robert Kipniss (b. 1931) has moved from semi-abstract landscapes in saturated colors to figural images in black, white and grays. He achieves subtle tonal variations, at times augmented by pale reds, blues or greens arising out of velvety black.¹ He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of American Graphic Artists, and his works appear in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
 
AA: A phrase you use in a recent Beadleston Gallery catalogue introduction intrigues me: “a casually sublime murmuring.”
RK: Vision is more than just seeing; it involves your whole being. If you look with a view to understanding and slow down, you feel emotions when you look. My phrase captures what is casual yet so evocative.