On Art

...Still, Evening Star No...

...the second for his architectural quality...

...Although Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are the Executioners of High Art, no brush- or chalk-stroke ever showed a more painterly flourish than theirs...

...Predictably, this leads her into a bog of definitions and she has to reach back to Vasari and deep into literature for support...

...And he answered his own call in a very private space—the passageway to the exhibition rooms at the Modern: Dipping his hands and, I believe, knees, into graphite mixed with plate oil, he applied the affected parts to the wall, paralleling the ensuing lines of smudges with a row of footprints on white cards laid along the floor...

...Whether by luck, canniness or courage, Georgia O'Keeffe survived the doctrines of her time to become one of the country's most original artists...

...Doubters need only watch life-class students expressing what they feel instead of what they see...

...Dada-Sur-realism is epitomized by Duchamp, an honorary American for the occasion, and by Man Ray and Joseph Cornell...

...There are, inevitably, some gaps: The early Social Realists, who were in their own way an avant-garde, are ignored...

...In this setting, then, the responsibility for the neo-Dada backlash is carried primarily by Claes Oldenburg's Proposals for Monuments (a series of works bearing such subtitles as Butter in a Baked Potato) and Andy Warhol's pencil studies of soup cans and dollar bills...

...Moreover, despite its impromptu revelations, the optimist could almost see in it a revival of interest in drawing...

...Generally with postmodernism, the less you see, the more thinking has taken place...

...By contrast, despite—or maybe because of—his acknowledged importance as a teacher, Hans Hof-mann's awful color and bravura brushwork do little more than harangue the spectator...

...The most familiar of these was well exemplified in the show, where chic, ever latent in such work, was brought out so splendidly by means of impeccable presentation...

...The quality was present in abundance, however, at the Museum of Modern Art's just concluded Drawing Now...

...They might also take note of what is admired by those who should know better: Neatness tends to be confused with genius...

...VI is a gorgeous little 1917 watercolor comprised of three horizontal washes in bright reds, blue and green, with the top one embracing a fat crescent shape...

...One is at times reminded of the comedian Dudley Moore's rendition of a pianist enmired in a piece of music that will not be resolved...

...the notes of color bright and pastel—all met the interior decorator more than half way...

...But for me, the pleasures of residual art lie in seeing the tricks it plays on its exponents...

...Starting with his cluttered yet always coherent collages of the '40s, this synopsis shows him methodically refining and paring until, by the '60s, he achieves completeness with no more than three or four perfect shapes...

...One must concede that the respective contributions of these two in mixed media abstractions, dense drawings of flags, etc., really look more like late, late Greek than Barbarian...

...Curator of Exhibitions Diane Waldman remarks in her catalogue introduction on the "extraordinary, if conventional" draftsmanship of the artist...

...Each has eyes enlarged to Keane-like proportions, and in neither is there any evidence of bodies under the scrupulously shaded clothing...

...In this setting, the comparatively burly mathematical notations of Donald Judd began to look decorative, too...

...early portrait studies by de Kooning are likened to the work of Ingres...

...He may have invented the drip technique, but there is ample evidence at the show of who has used it most tellingly: The 1951 Pollock of wet-looking black ink shapes interspersed with smaller orange and yellow blots is a beauty...

...Rothko and de Kooning moving from uncertain compositions of small, detailed shapes, abstract and otherwise, to their individual grand slams of release...

...In her accompanying book bearing the same title, Rose, like her Guggenheim colleague Waldman, maintains that although drawing isn't what it used to be, it has "relinquished none of its traditional functions, and has kept its traditional resources as constant points of reference...

...Viewing selections like this one, I often feel the effect of Cubism on American artists was less benign than it is generally held to have been...

...The innovations made by the Matisse-Picasso generation, whose members invariably had some kind of Beaux-Arts training, were seen not as the apotheosis of the practice that they actually were, but as an invitation to skip it altogether...

...possibly its success depended as much on the sheer physical impact of exaggeration—either by scale or through repetition—as on the ideas...

...But where Waldman wisely confined herself to noting the paradox and then moved on to a useful account of modernism as manifested by the artists she selected, Rose plunges into the impossible task of constructing history out of what would be better left to set a while longer...

...Ranging from Stella (Joseph) to Stella (Frank), the show is a fair enough survey of the major developments, in the period beginning with Cubism and going through Abstract Expressionism to Pop...

...But this should not deter anyone from visiting the museum...

...Bowing submissively to the performer, earthworker, sculptor, film-maker, and critic (I hope I haven't left anything out) Robert Morris, Rose describes him as "calling for an art of a more private nature, more intimate in relation to the body, noninformational and contemplative of a private space...

...Mounted by Curator of Drawings Bernice Rose, that exhibition focused on American (and some European) art of the last 20-odd years...

...Similarly, Charles Demuth's fragile watercolors of machinery and landscape might as well be stylizations of butterfly wings...

...Regrettably, there is not much at the Guggenheim to prove it...

...Based on the analysis of form, the discipline sat uneasily on a national sensibility that, when confronted by physical reality, seemed to turn away from it as if repelled...

...Thus, the charcoal abstractions of Arthur Dove, all but bursting out of their formats, are patterns built on landscape rather than recreations of it...

...Motherwell's art...

...Kline and Motherwell stand apart from their peers: the first for being the calligrapher and changing very little...

...As for Carl Andre's collages of cutout words, arranged like brick walls, no 19th-century lady whiling away the New England winter could have produced more charming compositions...

...and, while "drawing" is extended to include watercolors, oil sketches and collages, no mention is made of the Color Field school...

...The temperaments of Marsden Hartley and Stuart Davis were possibly better suited to the mode, though even the military symbols of Hartley have a strong decorative appeal...

...Nevertheless, I wouldn't for the world have missed knowing Lawrence Alloway's expression for a quick sketch, "graphological disclosure...

...Two such overpraised de Kooning efforts can be seen at the current Guggenheim show, Twentieth-Century American Drawing: Three Avant-Garde Generations (through March 21...

...The starkness of the totally black objects, and the chasteness of the completely white...

...Incidentally, the exhibition shows Pollock...

...Indeed, what could make more delectable furnishings than a roomful of the daintily tinted hatchings and transfers of Rauschenberg's Dante's Inferno series, or a wall of Oldenburg's jokes, immaculately executed in crayon and pencil...

...In fact, the entire Guggenheim show—and I'm not sure whether this is a plus or a minus—lacks the trendiness integral to both the production and appreciation of avant-gardism...

...A believer in progress, she seems to view drawing as a separate business that was late in retooling and therefore has only recently aligned itself with the rest of the art industry...

...the aggressive simplicity of geometry...

...On Art THE EROSION OF DRAWING BY VIVIEN RAYNOR The principle that drawing is the premise on which all the visual arts rest has been badly eroded, in a process accelerated by the invention of modernism...

...more than anyone else's, derives from a sense of form in space...

...the repetitions of simple marks...

...Both the book and the show demonstrate the unending sadomasochistic affair between artists and the Establishment...

...In terms of reportage, I found the Modern's exhibition more interesting than the Guggenheim's...

...Strange to say, none of the Pop items recreate the thrill of the original putsch...

...In addition to resulting in the disintegration of academic discipline, this has served to dim the collective understanding of what good drawing is...

...It is the search for those thoughts that makes Concep-tualism and Minimalism intellectual treasure hunts...