New York, Time and Again
GELERNTER, DAVID
Art New York, Time and Again By David Gelernter The six "Ashcan" artists painted New York City with headlong ardor and limited subtlety starting around the turn of the century; George Bellows,...
...what about now...
...Her work at its best has a mesmerizing come-hither intensity, engaging color, and rare decorative richness...
...The Jay Gorney gallery is showing bad paintings by David Deutsch and a bad sculpture by Haim Steinbach...
...Good or bad...
...Of this year's SoHo exhibits, the one that has attracted the most attention by far is the work of an English individual who doesn't deserve to have his name in the papers...
...The unsuccessful ones are dominated by her text, which runs to platitudes...
...The Ashcan artists were parochial and SoHo's are cosmopolitan...
...The crowd is a dynamo, throwing off sparks...
...if only the good people at the Ferzt gallery (I chatted with an exceptionally knowledgeable and charming staffer) would train their discerning eyes on the art and not the artist, we would be in fine shape...
...Danae and Computer" raises the interesting question of why computers appear so rarely in modern paintings-after all they are ubiquitous, and artists of an earlier day loved high-tech objects...
...Yes...
...if only someone would notify Carnwath that she gets full credit for being a right proper Democrat even if her paintings don't constantly remind us of the fact...
...versus "woman, her, missus, female...
...Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York," at the New-York Historical Society through August 4, underlines a strange fact: The conviction that you are an important painter doesn't make you one, but it helps...
...in today's art, the individual stands bedraggled and alone, whining...
...It is a line so radically different from what most artists say today, so obviously germane to the ongoing political and cultural debate, you might have expected the press to descend like flies on "Metropolitan Lives...
...The same thing is aching to happen in the art world...
...Car-toonish elements intrude here too: The perspective is unconvincing...
...While I am a Socialist," John Sloan wrote, "I never allowed social propaganda to get into my paintings...
...Sloan could have settled for dramatic but insisted on histrionic...
...Often an installation will try to be evocative and only succeed (as this one does) in being inanely literal...
...After all, today's art bosses are enthralled with the Geraldo School, which passes itself off as the latest thing but in fact merely confirms (in the grand tradition of Barnum, Liberace, and Phil Donahue) that, just as there is no "world's biggest number," there is no "world's biggest twit...
...The piece is so threadbare that the thoughts it induces aren't about violence or menace or poignancy at all...
...Of the four, Iltnere is an engaging painter whose pictures don't quite work but are intriguing anyway...
...The boys have comic-strip faces...
...the rest of the painting is burlapy-gold...
...But the Ashcanners spoke with authority...
...They petered out gradually in the wake of the 1913 Armory show, which introduced Americans to the Fauves and Cubists and turned the six erstwhile American avant-gardists into fuddy-duddies overnight-one of the meanest tricks in modern art history...
...Splinter Beach" has the vibrant, packed-together feeling of a scene through a long telephoto lens, as if the river were two feet wide and you could reach across, and the tight composition keeps the chaos in hand...
...Our capacity for vulgarity is unlimited...
...George Bellows, Robert Henri, and John Sloan are the big names...
...But Oppenheim turns these weaknesses to advantage...
...Metropolitan Lives" is intriguing for another reason too...
...when you look at it, it feels as though you are peering into a window right through the painting, through the wall behind to a magic color-world beyond...
...Given the necessary minimum of dexterity, vision, and heart, authority is the magic ingredient that separates Art from Noodling Around...
...The square-of-nine-colors draws you from across the room...
...That was New York art then...
...New York is so different from here," Henri wrote from Philadelphia in 1897...
...one feels alive there...
...Another boffo attention-getter on the English scene (eagerly awaited at the Whitney Museum, no doubt) is a partnership whose art is dedicated to human excrement...
...This image has the dream quality of being neither happy nor sad but ambiguously troubling...
...These 1912 New Yorkers are too preoccupied to pay you any attention, but they are alert and engaging, many of them smile, and the power of the electric train and the brilliant lights and the big, vibrant, roaring city is reflected in their faces, and you envy them...
...Do they sell this sort of thing...
...A girl was still a girl...
...The strange thing is, Oppenheim is an artist of real talent...
...The red shapes on white paper in plain black frames are the sort of vision that comes whole in a flash, and they are lovely...
...That I don't know...
...it's just that I have never seen an example that's any good...
...Carnwath's whimsical drawing and the childlike scrawl in which she adds words to her designs make her paintings seem, at times, like a cross between Dubuffet and New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast...
...A landscape that is dominated by objects no one wants to paint is unprecedented in modern times, and sad...
...I for one would want to make sure all White House lamps were battened down tight...
...Press hard or press soft, nothing changes...
...Still, Carn-wath is the real thing, and if you visit the Beitzel gallery and buy some of her paintings (go for the smaller ones), you won't regret it...
...Americans at large inspired tolerant amusement among the Ashcanners...
...It's intriguing, but would work better if the drawing were less lackadaisical...
...It's just bad...
...it comes to ground amid the Manhattan clutter...
...It is notable, however, that this work isn't bad because it is tasteless or political...
...One way to suggest "prison courtyard" is with an actual concrete floor and actual searchlights and a soundtrack about guns, but it's neither an evocative nor an interesting way...
...Warning: The New York Historical Society installation is among the worst I have ever seen...
...it is merely a thin gray scrim, like the dust on your computer screen: You wish you could grab a rag and wipe it off...
...Still it is a fine, memorable, vitamin-packed picture of a brilliant blue-and-golden moment...
...Every Ashcanner but Henri worked at some point as a newspaper or magazine illustrator, and so cartooning is a natural influence on their art, and it's not bad in itself...
...With this issue, David Gelernter assumes the duties of art critic of The Weekly Standard...
...But at the galleries I visited, you see the raw material for a vibrant art scene...
...One painting centers on a list of male-words on blue versus female-words on pink ("man, him, master, male...
...in SoHo you can smell the slackness and drift the instant you step out of the cab...
...I visited some fashionable SoHo galleries to find out...
...Love," "Sunlight," "Friendship," etc...
...Markers are no good for art, ordinarily: The color sags (it is saturated at the stroke's edges, weak in the middle) and offers no dynamic range...
...George Bellows lays out the Ashcanners' wares-good and bad, fine and cheesy-in a 1911 drawing called "Splinter Beach...
...on top, Manhattan looms...
...She uses the watery center-strokes to create a liquid, rippling effect, and the monotonous color makes the drawn objects seem (just enough to interest, not to deceive you) like real cloth under glass...
...Who says today's art scene is balkanized into idiot categories having everything to do with politics and nothing with art...
...But when it flares up as it does in "Splinter Beach" amid restrained-and-seri-ous realism, like Ronald McDonald strolling onstage during A?da, you don't know what to make of it...
...I've never felt the least urge to draw one myself...
...Is she parodying Serious Statements about gender stereotypes, or making a Serious Statement about gender stereotypes...
...The best Ashcan paintings give you (as "Splinter Beach" does) a feeling of swept-upness...
...you can buy the whole shmear for $7,500...
...They are good...
...Squeak Carnwath at the David Beitzel gallery, on the other hand, is a fine painter...
...the Ashcan painters took it...
...The Ashcanners never sentimentalized, but these crowds are as cheerfully resolute as ripping flags...
...William Glackens shows the dynamo crowd skating in Central Park, George Luks shows it crammed into the heart of the Lower East Side, John Sloan paints the crowd whooping and boisterous outside a newspaper office on election eve, or dining at a busy restaurant-in a painting ("Renganeschi's Saturday Night," 1912) you might have mistaken for a loose-limbed proto-Hopper, except that the diners are having fun...
...Another painting gives a list of "Worries," prominently featuring "bad air," "ozone hole," "linear science...
...Although Ashcan paintings rarely have good colors, in "Six O'Clock, Winter" the dusk sky is transparent deep blue going to purple and the lit-up storefronts are glowing, beckoning gold...
...SoHo (which is not far from the once-Jewish Lower East Side that intrigued the Ashcanners) is the center of New York's gallery scene and, therefore, of the world's...
...One small square painting, for example, shows a second square made up of nine smaller squares each in a different color (peaches and oranges, reds and yellows, greens and blues), superimposed on a richly textured blue ground with a line drawing of a drinking glass in front...
...Over her head is a flock of white 0's floating in a speech-balloon on a black ground...
...about to fly off and rescue a damsel...
...You step off the elevator into a bare high-ceilinged room where two searchlights (warm white and cold white) roam the floor...
...I only wish they were better...
...Leftist politics is no big issue here...
...Yet the story isn't all bad...
...for the tracks to veer off so radically upwards, you ought to be standing much closer than you are, and the train itself has the pumped-up look of a superhero (LocoMan...
...The problem is, I suppose, that the mere box reveals so little about the machine's capacities...
...You won't find many higher-energy paintings than Sloan's "Six O'Clock, Winter" (1912...
...Three horizontal stripes: Along the bottom, bantering boys strip to their shorts and dive into the East River...
...in the middle, a huge tug noses south...
...In "Danae and Computer," a girl lies on a chaise holding a keyboard and contemplating the monitor...
...Whatever the ultimate cause, the inclination not to depict computers is strong...
...Off in a back room are two modest but memorable drawings of slips or nightgowns (no one in 'em) in lipstick-red felt marker...
...In the schools, by the way, felt markers have all but displaced cheaper-and-better wax crayons because they are easier to use and showier...
...The droning soundtrack issues from small corner speakers: a sweet, fruity woman's voice chanting a song by Jimi Hendrix ("Hey Joe") about a man with a gun...
...But somehow most journalists missed this story...
...If only Oppenheim didn't feel she had to make installations to get attention...
...These artists were rock-ribbed leftists, but steadfastly refused to mix art and politics...
...I could go on...
...Break out the champagne...
...Reasons to get up in the morning...
...More likely the latter, unfortunately...
...today's artists tend to look on their fellow citizens with undisguised contempt...
...It concludes (by way of illustration) with a series of out-of-focus black-and-white slides projected onto a mustard wall, the bleary images over-running a molding strip towards the ceiling, as if the curators were eagerly pursuing the 1996 World's Deadliest Anticlimax award...
...SoHo, in sum, could have been a lot worse...
...How can people work in this gallery without the endless singsong driving them insane...
...The best Ashcan paintings give you that swept-up feeling...
...The only way to get it is to take it...
...True, the Mimi Ferzt gallery is showing "Women painting women," consisting of pictures of girls and ladies by four female artists who are aged around 40 and come from Latvia...
...his specialty is animal corpses preserved in formaldehyde...
...Installation Art is a major factor today, so I went first to Gallery 303 to admire Kristin Oppenheim's "Hey Joe...
...they are more like "what an odd way to fill a room...
...Picture Hillary Clinton awakening one morning to discover that the entire country had moved left and she was now a Republican, utterly devoid of compassion ex hypothesi...
...In recent years conservative political thinkers have turned the intellectual world upside down by drawing readers in droves to their books and magazines...
...they are made up of self-possessed people who know they are part of the mass and like it...
...have felt positive repulsion on the few occasions when I tried to make myself do it...
...At street level the rush-hour crowd boils and surges round the station...
...The Ashcanners had little originality and merely adequate technique, but their passion and swagger make them interesting...
...When I was a girl," writes mournful-but-perspicacious Squeak Carnwath, one of the artists whose shows I visited, "being good brought no entitlement, no privilege...
...That trivial fact speaks volumes about modern America...
...Brooklyn Bridge slices into the picture like a bolt from heaven...
...Presiding in the heavens is an elevated train paused at the platform (you feel it throbbing), ready to barrel forward out of the picture...
...Yet it has a typical Ashcan weakness also: an unwelcome cartoonishness...
...Any day now, some venturesome New York gallery will run a standard up the pole-the standard of Aesthetic Absolutism, not pallid "conservative" realism but bold, confident, technically sound-and you will be amazed at the talent that rallies round...
...You will even make money in the long term...
...Where do things stand as we prepare for the next turn-of-the-century...
...I have nothing against the idea of installation art...
Vol. 1 • July 1996 • No. 41
