[On
Sunday afternoon, 21 April 2019, my friend Diana and I went over to the Whitney
Museum of American Art in the West Village just to see whatever was on show
there. We walked through a small exhibit
of colorist paintings in Spilling Over: Painting Color in the
1960s, an ongoing show that opened on 29 March
2019 and will close sometime in August.
Consisting of only two rooms in the Hurst Family Galleries on the eighth
floor, it took so little time to cover that Diana and I decided to go down to
the Robert W. Wilson Galleries and the Zelda Bloomberg Outdoor Gallery on the
seventh floor to revisit Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s
Collection, 1900–1960.
[We’d
seen this large show last year (see my write-up for
Rick
On Theater on 12 June 2018), so I won’t be writing another report, but
there were over half a dozen Edward Hopper paintings on exhibit so I decided to
post an old report from my archive from a 2007 visit to Edward
Hopper at the East Building of the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
On that trip to the Nation’s Capital, I also saw J. M. W. Turner at the NGA’s West Building, so I’m
including that part of the 11-year-old report as well.
[I’ll
also say a few words about Spilling Over at the Whitney at the end of the archival report on Hopper and Turner.]
EDWARD HOPPER
& J. M. W. TURNER (National
Gallery of Art, 2007/2008)
I
was in Washington, D.C., several times since the fall of 2007. I went
down for Thanksgiving and then I returned for the year-end holidays and stayed
for two weeks. I did my now-usual Kosher Bus ride down on Friday, 21
December 2007, for a stay that would last until 4 January ’08. While I
was in D.C. the previous month, my mother and I had decided to try to see two
art shows that sounded interesting and would still be running through the new
year: Edward Hopper and J. M. W. Turner.
Now,
I’m not really a fan of either Hopper or Turner, but I’ll give a very brief
(well, superficial anyway) run-down of the two exhibits nonetheless. Both
fairly large shows were at the National Gallery of Art on the Mall.
We went down to see the Hopper on Boxing Day, 26 December, and
encountered a very long line snaking around the second floor of the East
Building. The line kept growing even as we stood debating whether we
should switch over to the West Building and give the Turner show a try;
but fortunately, it moved quickly and we spent a pleasant-enough afternoon
walking through the several galleries housing the 94 works of the
show.
Hopper
(1882-1967) doesn’t move me; I find his work cold and emotionless. His
lack of human figures in most of his paintings leaves them bloodless and
vacant. Even in the works with people, they are distant and alone—unengaged.
I know that this is what Hopper’s fans find intriguing in his work, and it’s
surely a fascinating psychological insight into his art, but it makes his
paintings an intellectual curiosity to me, not an artistic experience. He
was captivated by architecture and the way light and shadow played on buildings
and houses and he could paint the same one from different angles and at
different times of the day over and over to try to capture the various ways the
light fell, but this is a study to me, not an aesthetic evocation.
(Oddly, Turner had a similar obsession with light and also repainted
the same scene—his were landscapes—multiple times.)
Hopper painted
at the same time that many other American artists were turning away from
figuration and experimenting with abstraction and expressionism (and, er, Abstract Expressionism), but he
fiercely resisted the shift and became an icon among younger and later artists
of figurative painting. (Not surprisingly, I guess, I am a fan of
abstract art; I know some commentators—not necessarily art critics, however—see
that movement as a fraud on gullible viewers, but I’ve always found the works
exciting and moving, emotional and expressive.)
So
I found the show, called simply Edward Hopper (16 September 2007-21
January 2008), pretty much just a curiosity; there was nothing I wanted to come
back for on a Midnight Shopping Trip. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t
learn anything, however. The earliest works in the exhibit were etchings;
I never knew Hopper did any kind of print work, and the 12 small etchings on
show here, though they all displayed the same focus on empty cityscapes
and lonely figures, were somehow more interesting to me than the later
large oils. (Hopper also painted watercolors in his early days.)
I
will also add that there’s a strange kind of theatricality in Hopper’s
paintings—not action or drama, but his interiors especially look like stage
sets, a kind of set designer’s rendering. There’s an implied plot in some
of them. People sitting, essentially isolated even in a group, in a
diner, viewed from the street through a long expanse of window (Nighthawks, 1942), make
you wonder what might have just happened—or might be about to happen—in that
single lighted room on a dark, empty street.
The
woman, apparently an usher, leaning against a wall in a near-empty movie
theater (New York Movie,
1939)—what’s she
thinking about while the movie’s unreeling on the screen just out of her
vision? (In my report on Where We Are at the Whitney Museum of
American Art, I relate the “stories” of some other Hopper works that are
in that show.)
But
these are intellectual curiosities, not emotionally-engaging ones. A
Hopper play would likely be one in which people sit around speaking in low
tones—but only occasionally, leaving most of the play to silence.
In
the Washington Post, remarking
that NGA “understands what an odd duck it has on its hands,” Glenn Dixon
labeled Hopper the “taciturn Yankee poet of shadow and light” and a “voyeuristic
stage designer of lonely apartments, a frustrated voluptuary.” Dixon observed, “It can’t have helped that
his discomfort with the human form is palpable. He would prove far less awkward handling
architecture”; however, the WaPo writer found, “He was able to employ compositional
stretches, subtle manipulations of reality, as psychological tricks.” Commenting on those lonely scenes, Dixon
called them “implication without incident, a kind of single-frame cinema that
rebuffs drama but revels in mood.” He
asked, “What could be happening?”
Dixon’s interpretation? “Nothing.
Isn’t that enough?”
“You must see it,” proclaimed Robert F. Bruner in
the Post. “His human figures
remain imperfect,” cautioned Bruner. “But
what his brush strokes lack in detail, his paintings make up in mood. Hopper’s special gift was to portray certain
emotions of life in a big city, such as loneliness, detachment and
introspection.” He found that “the
special impact of the exhibition came from a comment by a guide, halfway
through the show: ‘If Hopper had been a better painter, he wouldn’t have been
as good an artist.’ Think about that.” The then-dean of the Darden Graduate School of
Business Administration at the University of Virginia asserted a remarkable
analogy:
Business life is
filled with lots of painters and fewer artists. The “painters” are the
technicians, such as actuaries, time-and-motion efficiency experts, accountants
who get the books to balance down to the last penny, logistics honchos who slim
down your inventory, and derivatives analysts. . . .
However, the
technical mind-set is too often focused on reporting data rather than creating
knowledge (or, better yet, wisdom). . . . Artists in business are visionaries,
inventors, entrepreneurs and general managers, people who create something
larger out of the assembly of resources.
On Artblog, art historian Andrea Kirsh agreed
that Hopper had the “ability to people his works so as to suggest a narrative
and create an emotional tension.” Of
what she called “Hopper’s narrative skill,” Kirsh said, “We sense that we are
seeing a slice of a larger story and we project the rest of it onto the
paintings, filling in past events or anticipating future ones.” The Artblogger lamented, however, “I can’t say I gained an appreciation of Hopper’s paintwork, because for
the most part it’s uninteresting, something that always disappointed me.” Debating whether the artist was a Realist—my
friend Diana says he’s an Abstract painter—Kirsh asserted, “Hopper gave us
paintings that show things as we imagine them, or remember them. Perhaps that counts as realism.”
David Yezzi of the New Criterion observed, “Edward
Hopper’s paintings suffer from the same popular misconception that plagues the
poems of Robert Frost: we feel that we know them.” The New Criterion poetry editor went
on: “The National Gallery’s Hopper retrospective . . . shows the painter as
something more than a genial realist. His
attractive surfaces and inviting use of color notwithstanding, something darker
and considerably lonelier, in a word, something more modern, haunts
the shadows.”
Hopper’s work has
a self-assured continuity, from his lamp-lit nudes in stark bedrooms, to the
sun-streaked lighthouses of Maine, to New York interiors glimpsed from an
elevated train, to couples caught mid-scene in offices and restaurants. All are situated in the (for Hopper) endlessly
rewarding dynamic between vestigial and enigmatic narrative and the formal
pleasures of form, color, and light as they inch toward abstraction.
Yezzi cited Surrealist writer and poet André Breton as saying
Hopper was “one of only a few American artists who could approach the dreamlike
quality of Surrealism.”
On DCist, Kate Mereand wrote, “The
scenes are always striking: women at night, mostly alone, and then buildings,
mostly in daylight. Such is Edward
Hopper’s art, finding voyeuristic fancy in two main types of subjects:
ladies and places.” Mereand found that “many
of the . . . works . . . on display at the National Gallery of Art .
. . portray the intense intimacy with which Hopper approached both flesh and
brick alike.” She characterized the
painter’s work:
The somewhat
photo-realistic quality of Hopper’s work blends more traditional and modern
styles of art. The subjects are recognizable, bold, and at times intimate. Whether it is thus milk-toast or
middle-ground, art-lovers and haters of all kinds should be able to appreciate
something that he offers.
She
summed up by recommending that “you should see if for yourself.”
The
next week, Mother and I traveled down to the Mall again to see J. M. W.
Turner (1 October 2007-6 January
2008), a much easier show to get into, in the West Building. Like Hopper, who was born 30 years after
Turner died, the older painter was “fascinated with light,” noted Victoria
Skelly of the Broad Street Review. “Exploring the effects of light or the lack of
it was a fruitful, lifelong focus for both men.”
The
problem I have with Turner (1775-1851) is that he’s essentially a 19th-century
Romantic, a style for which I don’t have much feeling. (I’m partial to
the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists of the decades following, at the
turn of that century.)
In
addition, Turner’s a landscapist, so his canvases are all wild nature, sea
storms, crumbling ruins, and craggy precipices—all with no inhabitants.
So, from my perspective, he’s invoking a vision of the world which doesn’t
really exist and in which no humans live. This doesn’t grab me, despite
the academic fact that he does it with a focused attention on the way the
light—the sun, fire, lightning, moonlight, whatever—illuminates the
scene.
To
me, this makes Turner a technical master, perhaps, but not an artist that
speaks to me. (His series on The
Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 1835, which he painted
after actually viewing the event on 16 October the previous year, are a
remarkable record of the loss—but they are illustrations of the historical
destruction.)
What
did interest me, though, were the works at the end of the show (whose 146
canvases were arranged chronologically). I never knew that Turner was
apparently a transitional figure at the end of his career between the Romantics
and the Impressionists: his late works, some of which were actually unfinished,
are more intuitive interpretations of the subjects, less faithfully
depicted. It seemed to me, though none of the curatorial material bore me
out on this (Jacqueline Trescott, however, did mentioned in a preview article
in the Washington Post
that Turner was “an important influence” on the Impressionists), that these
late works were proto-Impressionism.
The
Washington
Post’s Blake Gopnik declared, “Turner's greatness lies
in his resisting, more than almost any artist you could name, any single notion
of what great art might be.” He added
that the works in J. M. W. Turner “could almost be by half a dozen different
artists—each busy breaking an entirely different set of rules.” Gopnik then offered this conundrum: “If most
great artists' surveys give something for everyone to like, the strong feeling
in the Turner show is that there's something there for everyone, even his
greatest admirers, to dislike. There are
radically incompatible ways of doing things scattered throughout the show.” The Post art reviewer concluded, “Looking
at Turner's pictures may have rather the same effect that visiting him had: You never know quite where you stand, what
oddness he'll throw at you next or whether to be impressed, appalled or
flattered when he lets you watch him breaking rules.”
[Edward Hopper was organized by the NGA in partnership
with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The curators are Carol Troyen, John Moore
Cabot Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;
Franklin Kelly, senior curator, American and British paintings, National
Gallery of Art; and Judith Barter, the Field-McCormick Chair of American Art at
The Art Institute of Chicago. The
exhibit previously appeared at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 6 May-19
August 2007, and will move on to the Art Institute of Chicago from 16
February–11 May 2008.
[J. M. W. Turner comprises 148 works organized by the NGA;
the Dallas Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in
association with Tate Britain, London.
The curators are Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British
paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Dorothy Kosinski, senior
curator of painting and sculpture and The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of
European Art, Dallas Museum of Art; and Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in
Charge of the Department of 19th-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, in association with Ian Warrell, curator of 18th- and
19th-century British art, Tate Britain.
After Washington, the exhibit will go to the Dallas Museum of Art, from
10 February–18 May 2008, and New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from 24
June–21 September 2008.]
* *
* *
SPILLING
OVER: PAINTING COLOR IN THE 1960s (Whitney Museum of American Art)
Spilling
Over: Painting Color in the 1960s at the Whitney
Museum of American Art in the West Village (for a brief discussion of the
Whitney’s new building, see my report on the “Whitney Biennial 2017,” posted on Rick
On Theater on 22 June 2017) is an exhibition of paintings from the 1960s
and early 1970s “that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory
color to activate perception,” according to the museum’s website. Drawn entirely from the Whitney’s
collection, Spilling Over includes works by Josef Albers (1888-1976),
Emma Amos (b. 1938), Richard Anuszkiewicz (b. 1930), Frank Bowling (b. 1934),
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Sam
Gilliam (b. 1933), Marcia Hafif (1929-2018), Carmen Herrera (b. 1915),
Alex Katz (b. 1927), Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), Morris Louis (1912-62), Alvin
Loving (1935-2005), Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), Robert Reed (1938–2014), Miriam
Schapiro (1923-2015), Frank Stella (b. 1936), Bob Thompson (1937-66), and Kay
WalkingStick (b. 1935), among others.
The exhibit’s title comes from a statement artist
Bob Thompson made in 1966, shortly before his death at 28: “I paint many
paintings that tell me slowly that I have something inside of me that is just
bursting, twisting, sticking, spilling over to get out. Out into souls and mouths and eyes that have
never seen before.” Organized by David
Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection, with Margaret
Kross, curatorial assistant, the show opened in the Hurst Family Galleries on
the museum’s eighth floor on 29 March and will run until August (no specific
closing date is given). On exhibit are 18
paintings, created between 1959 and 1972 that span Color Field works—including several
Washington Color School pieces—to Op Art.
As I’ve confessed before, I find the mid-century period
the most interesting in American art, when our painting and sculpture really
emerged from under the shadow of its European forbears and established itself
as a force of its own. (This was also
the period when I was first introduced to modern art because it was when my
parents became involved with the Gres Gallery in Washington; see my three-part
account of this experience, posted on ROT on 7, 10, and 13 July 2018.) Both this show and Where We Are, also
at the Whitney, center on this era (though Where We Are does go back some
decades further), which delighted me.
After Abstract Expressionism, a movement launched
in the ’40s in which color was especially significant (the work of Mark Rothko,
one of whose pieces, Four Darks in Red, 1958, is downstairs in Where
We Are, is a good example of this), broke the ground for non-figurative and
non-representational painting, artists invented Pop Art, Psychedelia, Op Art,
and many other styles that used bold, bright colors, often in large swaths and
washes of pigment. For the Washington
Color School, color was all painting was about—there was no point to their
work except to create a joyful experience of color.
Among the artists exhibited in Spilling Over
are several on whom I’ve blogged before, including Sam Gilliam (“Picasso,
Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin,” 26 June 2011), Morris Louis (15 February 2010),
Kenneth Noland (passing mention in “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin”); all three are or were
members of the Washington School of Color (about which I blogged on 21
September 2014). Gilliam is the only
artist from this show whose work I own; my parents’ art collection (see “A
Passion for Art,” 21 November 2017) contains three of his pieces. Larry Rivers (1923-2002) is the only artist
in the show who exhibited at Gres (1960, his first solo show outside New York
City).
During
the period covered by Spilling Over,
artists were experimenting with many aspects of art, finding new ways to
communicate through painted canvases and new styles and materials to employ. Paint, usually unmixed and otherwise unmuted,
was dripped (famously by Jackson Pollock, who’s not represented in this
exhibit), poured (Morris Louis’s Gamma
Delta, 1959-60), and spattered. It
was applied with a palette knife instead of a brush (Norman Carton, another mid-century
artist not in Spilling Over). The canvases were unprimed so the pigments
soaked in and stained the fabric (Louis, Sam Gilliam’s Bow Form Construction,
1968) rather than coating the surface, giving the painting a translucent
quality.
Acrylic
paint arrived on the art scene during the ’60s. bringing a vast new array of
colors and hues, and many artists began experimenting with this new pigment and
looking for other media with different properties to work with. Art slipped its bonds and literally and
figuratively spilled off the canvas and outside the frames. The old, established forms and norms no longer
applied. It was no longer your
grandfather’s art.
Of
course, the whole society was experimenting, not just in painting and
sculpture, but the other arts like film, design, literature and drama,
music. All the rules were being
challenged and changed: gender, race, sexuality, language, dress, and politics. Painting was only a visual manifestation of
what was happening all over the culture.
The small selection of paintings in Spilling
Over are a representation of that shift, but only a small corner of
it.
Among
the most significant pieces in the show is Helen Frankenthaler’s Orange Mood
(1966), an acrylic on canvas with large expanses of blue, yellow, mustard, and
orange. Frankenthaler had given an important
boost to color painting when she introduced Louis and Noland, who’d come up to New
York to visit her studio, to her work.
This so impressed the two men that they went back to Washington and
immediately began applying what they’d learned.
Louis destroyed all his work up to that point and began working in this
new way, essentially starting, with Noland and a few others who joined them,
the Washington Color School, a branch of Color Filed painting based in the
Nation’s Capital. (Sam Gilliam, who came
to D.C. from Mississippi in 1962, is a second generation of Washington Color
artists.)
Orange Mood is entirely
non-figurative, an example of what became the mantra of the WCS—making art that
communicates nothing but a delight in
the experience of color—but in the same gallery is Thompson’s Triumph of
Bacchus (1964). A depiction of the
Roman god of wine, it was inspired by Renaissance paintings of similar subjects—except
that Thompson used bolder colors for his palette. His choices of colors are also bold—yellow people.
blue horses, a yellow ram—and the artist’s friend, saxophonist Steve Lacy, called
Thompson “jazz himself,” pointing out that “the way he painted was like
jazz—taking liberties with colors.”
Getting
off the elevator on the eighth floor, visitors to Spilling Over are greeted with three very revealing pieces, considering
the curatorial point of the show. One is
Kenneth Noland’s New Day (1967), a
canvas of acrylic stripes of many vibrant colors. (Stripes were Noland’s signature form.) As an introduction to an exhibit about
paintings in color, New Day couldn’t
be more appropriate. And as the first WSC
canvas a visitor encounters, it’s a perfect example of color as pure visual
stimulus.
A
second painting on the wall across from the elevator is Carmen Herrera’s Blanco
y Verde (1959), an almost blank canvas in white and green, as its title bluntly
tells you. Most of the painting is
white, with only a small triangle of green in the center, as if demonstrating
how “color” can be reduced to a minimum and still stand out. In a display of brightly hued paintings all
in brilliant colors, an almost all-white canvas is noticed.
Not
unlike Robert Reed’s Plum Nellie, Sea
Stone (1972), a purple-and-white painting that Reed considered a
landscape. Across the center of the
canvas is a wide wash of deep purple, swirling and eddying like an abstract
rushing stream. But right in the middle
of the purple field is a white rectangle, a geometrical blank space that draws
the eye even though the dominant color is churning and spinning.
What
are possibly the most seemingly conventional and least conventional entries in
the exhibit are near one another in the gallery. Sam Gilliam’s Bow Form Construction is a huge canvas that’s been stained with blue,
green, blush, and maroon acrylic paint, diluted to the degree that it’s
virtually transparent. The canvas isn’t
really hung, however—it’s frameless and formless, a practice Gilliam has used in
many of his frequently-changing styles—but draped like some multi-colored
bunting. (Stained and draped or
suspended fabric is also something this artist has done often over his
career. See my discussion of Close to
Trees in “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin.”) Thomas Micchelli of Hyperallergic called
Bow Form Construction a “fusion of painting and sculpture.”
Nearby is Alex Katz’s Edwin, Blue Series
(1965), a portrait of the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby (1903-83). The portrait is painted on a bright blue
background and both the background and the figure of Denby are flat and
simplified. Katz has cropped the side of
the subject’s body on the viewer’s left as if some kind of door is blocking it
and Denby is just exiting it. If it
weren’t for the flat, bright color of the background, Edwin, Blue Series
could be a conventional—albeit Modernist, perhaps Expressionist—portrait.
I’d love to describe each of the paintings in Spilling
Over, but even as small as this show is, that’s too much. I’ve merely mentioned Louis’s Gamma Delta
and I haven’t even done that with Emma Amos’s Baby (1966) and Kay
WalkingStick’s April Contemplating May (1972), two artists who were new
to me, and I regret that. For a small
show, Spilling Over was most interesting, but there’s just too much to cover
here.
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