Tribute to Robin Greenwood and friends

 

Robin Greenwood’s "Thuvia , Maid of Mars,"  210 x 120,  1990

A funky, dramatic interplay of solid colors for the sheer fun of it,

So appropriate for the absurd pulp fiction for which it was named.

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Robin Greenwood (1950 -- 2023)

To be ‘new’ a painting doesn’t have to have been painted in 2018, or even by a living painter. What this survey and the comments show is that time, discernment and taste has not yet caught up with many of the paintings on display. A painting is ‘new’ if it opens up untapped resources for others that have been lying fallow or unnoticed, or if it reasserts the fundamental eloquence of the means, the simple elements of colour, line, plane, area-shape, facture, in a surprising way — (confined surprise, as Greenberg called it, not literal theatrical surprise -Seminar 8).”   Comment by Alan Gouk on Key Paintings of the 20th Century, a ‘Musée Imaginaire’, Part 2, 11.3.18.

“For something to be “new” in this sense, not only does it not have to be painted in 2018 or by a living painter, but it doesn’t have to be either modernist or abstract. Just saying.”   Comment by RG in reply, 12.3.18.

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Above is a brief exchange between Robin Greenwood and one of the artist/writers who posted text on Abcrit,  an online forum he created to talk about art.  He also created the Branchester Chronicles to document and discuss the exhibitions he invited into the gallery he started.

As you may note, Greenwood does not connect judgment to a narrative of art history.  But his approach to art is so theoretical, I’d hesitate to call him an aesthete.  He wants sculpture that has no frontality  - so all figurative and much non-figurative is off the table.  His own work looks like fluff balls of tangled metal - and I doubt they would engage me in person. 

He wants painting that is free from all associations, striking out as its own new thing. energizing space with a swirling gyre of mark making.  He offers the abstract expressionism of Pollock and Krasner as examples:

Lee Krasner

Meanwhile, he despairs the. “drift” of the work by Frankenthaler and Olitski, two of Abstract Expressionism’s most dubious and indulgent painters …..in clear detriment to the “all-over energy” of Pollock; or, for that matter, the best of 

A work of art is the unavoidable result of countless feelings, memories, ideas, experiences etc.  But still, the greater prominence given to theory, the worse it’s going to look.  Analytical Cubism is a classic example.

Nevertheless - I really like almost all the painters in Greenwood’s circle.   Mostly, they’re old folks who picked up ABX at art school, loved it,  and never moved on.  That is not how to build a career - and like Greenwood, most of them needed another source of income.  Many don’t  have galleries or even websites. 

If I had a house in London, this is what I’d fill it with.

(No wall space left in Chicago)

Here’s a shot of Greenwood’s  last show.

His sculptures desperately curl away from surrounding space  as if it were toxic.

John Pollard,  Brutal World

These Brits are certainly not sentimental,

but still this is a world I’d like to live in. 

I feel joy, love, passion

whether intended or not.

Anne Smart, Broiderie Landings, 2013

Greenwood had this above his bed.

Less aggressive, still probably quite thrilling in person

where you can feel the surface.

John Bunker, detail

John Bunker. B. 1968

Fred Pollock, Clyde Magic,  2018, 30 x 39

The over stimulation of 

a hip urban scene 

Patrick Jones, Picking up Sticks, 2022,   24 x 36

Cirque du Soleil ?

Want to see more.

Beautiful and thrilling

Nick Moore, Cryptic, 2017, 48 x 48

A classical feeing here.

The Fall of Troy?

Emyr Williams, Times Refresh,  50 x 30

Richard Ward, August 19,   27 x 27

Nice on-line discussion of  the “slap dash” used  in the above.

Richard Ward, 120 x 100”

Man  walking?

Noela James Berry

Henry Hay,  Word Go,  28 x 24”,   2019

Younger than most (b. 1990), now does figurative

#EC_ismyname

EC

This artist is coy about her name and every other detail of  her life.

But she is my favorite 

and still quite prolific on Instagram.

Always seems to be looking for whatever will surprise.

Alexandra Harley

The only sculpture shown that I liked.

 Definitely quite frontal, however.

Sadly, with Robin’s passing,

his gallery and both forum websites have passed away as well

Sic transit Gloria Mundi

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 “To be ‘new’ a painting doesn’t have to have been painted in 2018, or even by a living painter. “…a number of the Tintorettos were new to us, and what’s more, were exciting and up-to the-minute. The experience of such art is often not only a ‘new’ thing, but also a ‘now’ thing, a revelation of the moment, even if we have seen it before. With art as good as this it is never just a matter for art history. And there is more originality and immediacy in a few Tintorettos than in a dozen FIACs.” [FIAC is a Parisian Contemporary Art Fair]. From a Poussin Gallery catalogue essay, “New to Sight”, by RG, January 2010.

Portraits of the Tao

 

This is an ongoing post - a place where abstract paintings of a certain kind will be posted as I stumble across them and discussed - or discussed again - as the spirit moves me.

Readers are invited to add their own comments.

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Kandinsky, Campbell Panel #2, 1914

I have a much better idea of how this kind of painting looks than what I might call it. 

It’s a subset of Abstract Expressionism that is notably less personal and more spiritual.  Though marks may always suggest a language and shapes may always resemble something— all possible associations are irrelevant, even counter-productive, to what this kind of painting is doing.  It’s not about things, places, ideas, moods, memories, fears, desires, or even visions.  The apparent subject is “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” - whether intended  as such or not - and it lives entirely in the painted surface,  not in whatever associations may be made by the viewer.

Might we call them portraits of the Tao at both the macro and micro level ? 

The Tao is the  incomprehensible way things are - always changing, expanding in unexpected ways,  infinite in complexity, interconnected throughout every scale from quark to galaxy.  No familiarity with actual  Taoist literature or practice is implied. An exhibition of "Taoism and the Arts of China" came through the Art Institute of Chicago twenty five years ago - and believe me, nothing like this could be found. It was much more tame.

It’s not just the spirit of life - it’s the spirit of being.  No common phrase in European thinking comes to mind - though Federico Faggin’s quantum information panpsychism is a compatible  idea.

Bradley Walker Tomlin (1899-1953)

Each mark is added, not to clarify a feeling, but to amplify  power and strangeness.

A pioneer of ABX who died way too young, I sure enjoy him more than Pollock and DeKooning.

The above is my favorite piece, but dammit, can’t find a title or date.

Joan Mitchell, Evenings on 73rd st. (Detail), 1957

Funky, neurotic , and exciting

Richard Poisette-Dart, Meditation on Drifting Stars, 1962

As gentle as a bloom of bacteria in a petri dish.

which does not mean that it cannot be terribly destructive.

Scott Wolniak, Current, 2014

Acrylic, ink, and watercolor on carved plaster, burlap , and plywood., 24 x 21

John Grillo, untitled,  1960

the shapes are larger so there's an evident sense of graphic design.

But still - each area seems to be erupting into its own direction.

Winnie Weiyun Szu

Monique Van Genderin

Alma Thomas untitled, 1962,  22 x 30, acrylic on paper

Esther Stocker

Alfonso Ossorio, Beachcombers (detail) 1953, 84 x 124

Alexander Rodchenko, Dance, 1915

Pavel Filonov, Victory over Eternity, 1920-21

Pavel Filonov, Composition, 1928

Mikhail Matiushkin,   Extended Space, 1922-23, 27 x 38"

Bill Jensen, Locus, 39 x 32, 2001-3, 

Mark Tobey, Written Over the Plains, 30 x 40, 1950

Samia Halaby, Prancing in the Vineyard, 1982, media on paper

Bruce Thorn,  Night Song (detail)

Arshile Gorky, One Year the Milkweed, 38 x 48, 1944

Arshile Gorky, Waterfall, 1943, 60 x 44

the pulsation of nature as it throbs'…. Gorky

American Modernists at the Art Institute of Chicago

 

There is a floor of 20th Century art in the American Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago -  and gallery signage indicates that several kinds of Modernism are on display.

They’re not saying that every artist born after 1880 was Modern - but it’s starting to look that way.  

Walter Ufer’s painting of Navajo has been carried up from the first floor to the second.

What’s next ? Will Andrew Wyeth be shown in the Modern Wing? Currently he’s not on display at all.

Eventually the museum will have to find a place for the non-confrontational art made after 1950.

Max Weber, (1881-1861) Construction,1915

Terra collection

Sure feels like the gritty kind of cityscape

This is the most doctrinaire European piece

in this room of American Modernists.

Life is a fierce, grim, desperate struggle.

“Be strong” it says.

Arthur Dove (1880-1946), Swing Music (Louis Armstrong), 1938

Stieglitz Collection

American born,  Dove spent two years in Paris,

but I can’t  imagine anything further from either cubism

or naturalism.

The painting says “My world is wonderful and full of surprises”

Marsden Hartley American, 1877-1943 , Provincetown 1916 

Oil on composition board , Stieglitz  Collection

Sense of place?

More like a sense of quietly being in that place

Cheerful, rollicking, whimsical, ordinary

Balanced. Modest earth tones

At the beach

Rough hewn casual

Pulling inward 

Figure - ground

Things coming together 

Punctual (the clock face)

This is an episode in the painter’s life.

Escaping from war torn Europe,

he moved to an artsy resort town on the coast and loved it.

Marsden Hartley American, 1877-1943 Movements 1913 Oil on canvas 

Unlike many other American artists, Marsden Hartley was more drawn to German Expressionism than to Frenchi modernism, and executed this painting in Berlin. Made on the eve of World War I, Movements possesses a turbulent energy that sparks associations with both the vibrancy of modern Berlin and movements of music. Like the Russian Expressionist painter Vasily Kandinsky, Hartley sought to make his work more like music, which he admired for its nonnarrative nature and its potential to be purely spiritual or separate from material reality. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.544

Another expression as personal as a journal - this time the excitement of a fast, sensual, urban life.

No grand ideas seem to be involved - just having a good time.

This is my favorite piece in this post - but there are several other Hartleys on display that are just as vibrant.  

Google tells us that the Whitney has the best collection of American modernists - but Chicago is better for both Hartley and O’Keefe.

Ilya Bolotowsky (American, born Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, 1907–1981)

Study for 1939 New York World’s Fair Mural, Hall of Medical Science Date: 1938–39

A pleasant, orderly collection of shapes with a modernist flavor 

is not necessarily a painting

Manierre Dawson American, 1887–1969 Figure in Pink and Yellow Date: 1914

Casual, self satisfied, mildly whimsical

Like a portrait of Mr Greenjeans (Captain Kangaroo)

A sense of urgency may not be 

good for healthy living

but who wants art without it?

Did not enter the artworld until the widow conducted an estate sale.

Patrick Henry Bruce. (1881-1936),  Peinture, 1917-18

Terra Collection

Working hard to be cool and sophisticated.

This piece predates the Bauhaus but seems aligned with it.

Love the crispness

and slow, steady rhythm

Patrick Henry Bruce. Composition 3, 1916

(Found online - not at the museum)

I like this wilder one more.

It’s  closer to my own life.

Charles Demuth. (1883-1935),Spring, 1921

The play of patterns is a contemporary concern

So is the reference to merchandising.

The arrangement of flat objects on a wall, however,

seems connected to American trompe-l’oeil

of the previous century.

Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986),  It was Yellow and Pink III,  1960

Stieglitz Collection

An early modernist forty years later 

still exploring her own way of painting and observing.

An aerial view of a traditional subject for landscape painting

I haven’t done a complete survey - but it does seem that the museum has more pieces by Georgia O’Keefe on display than any artist other  than Claude Monet.

Each of her pieces feels like an experiment.

We may also note that Uber-masculine Cubism 

was replaced by the more personal and anarchic ABX,

 while the soft, uber-feminine qualities of this painting

has lived on famously with Helen Frankenthaler and locally by Leslie Baum.

 

Preston Dickenson (1889-1930), 1922

Not quite a love of painted space (Cezanne)

Not quite a love of how things of the world appear (Vermeer)

Not quite a compelling personal vision (Van Gogh)

Call it a mishmash.

Almost makes me feel queezy (DeKooning)

Ben Shahn (1898-1969)  Contemporary American Sculpture, 1940, 

tempera on paper

In this work, Ben Shahn blended fact and fiction to offer a pointed commentary on the inclusions and exclusions of the art world. This enigmatic composition features eight known sculptures by leading artists of the day that were all displayed at a 1940 exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Three large, unframed painted images on the back walls of the gallery appear to be part of the show, but they were not actual paintings. Instead, they derive from Shahn’s photographs of working-class people around the United States, which he had taken while employed by the federal government as part of the New Deal, an economic program intended to revitalize the economy during the Great Depression. The invented works serve as portals to different worlds. The figures portrayed in them are positioned to see into the gallery but they are excluded from the “real” space of the museum and the modern art on view because of race, class, and geography.

Acquired in 2023, possibly in response to the Artworld’s recent turn toward social justice, this is more like a political cartoon than a painting - even if its subject would only relate to a miniscule cultural elite.

It takes aim at the New York heavy figure school of modern classical sculpture which is exactly the tradition into which I was born and wish to continue.  So you might say it’s a slap in my face. Why doesn’t my kind of art pay more attention to the real world out there of tenements, struggling farmers and unemployed workers ?

To which I would reply “because imagining a positive, vibrant, beautiful human spirit makes one enthusiastic about humanity, not just our own little lives”

But then my response is based on experience with the best examples of actual sculpture - not the misshapen white lumps in his cartoon.

William Zorach, Mother and Child,  1930

Probably similar to what Shahn saw

Morris Kantor (1896 -1974) Haunted House, 1930

Non-Chicago Imagism?

As weird as Gertrude Abercrombie.

As threatening as a funhouse.

This is entertainment well done.

BTW .  this piece won a purchase award 

at the museum’s annual exhibition of living American artists.

Which may have been the only way it could have entered the collection.

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It’s hard to image this gallery without the Stieglitz or Terra contributions.

I was looking to compare this generation ( born at the end of the 19th century) with the ABX painters who followed.

Mostly less personal and more positive.

No one feels alienated and confused.

They seem to assume that viewers want pleasure and wonder and joy,

not a profound experience of the void.

Jackson Pollock, The Flame, 1934-38