This is a month of reevaluations in the art world. The auction season has broken records. In May, at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips de Pury, over 120 modern and contemporary artists saw their prices reach new highs. The auction houses realized $837 million in sales. A single Andy Warhol silkscreen, the gruesome Green Car Crash (1963), sold for over $71 million, going to an Asian buyer. That was four times the previous Warhol record, set last November. Meanwhile, Mark Rothko’s White Center (1950) went for a similar amount to a Middle Eastern interest. As the price tag of art floats free on a rising tide of global wealth, quality has little effect on the evaluation.
Long before the auction houses turned art into a speculator sport, entering and encouraging a price war in the contemporary and post-war markets, the galleries oversaw a very different scene. Galleries managed and, at their best, nurtured careers. They not only found buyers, they also found the right buyers. They saw to the education of the buying public, a task for which they receive too little credit.
Far from the front pages of auction headlines, the galleries still operate in much the same way they did fifty years ago. This season, once again, the best galleries feature art in the best light. It may be ironic, but in these old emporiums, the din of the marketplace can seem a long way off.
Wolf Kahn, who turns eighty this October, has become our most direct living connection to the “push-pull” dynamics of Hans Hofmann, the legendary painter and teacher of the New York School. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Kahn came to the United States and crossed paths with the greatest artists and intellects of the American century: Hofmann, Allan Kaprow, Stuart Davis, Larry Rivers, Elaine de Kooning, Clement Greenberg, and Meyer Schapiro among them.
Much as Pierre Bonnard luxuriated in the after-effects of impressionism, Kahn revels in the color-based legacy of modernist painting. His effects are celebratory. Leafing through the catalogue of his show at Ameringer Yohe, I came to wonder if his confections might even be over-sweetened.[1] In reproduction, Kahn’s landscapes of pinks and purples can seem like too much frosting on the cake—landscapes of corn syrup and Yellow Dye Number 5 and little of real sustenance. It didn’t help that I found the cover of the catalogue, of mulled lavender and rose with a shock of grass green, allergy-producing.
But this latest exhibition has led to my own reevaluation of Kahn’s power. Seaweed Fingers (1999), the same painting that caused such unpleasant irritation reproduced on the catalogue cover, is, in person, one of the finest paintings I have had the pleasure to see this year. Spread out across the gallery wall, over seven feet wide, the work becomes a view of the modernist sublime—a warm, lazy bay disappearing into a painterly haze. Go on. Blow out the candles and cut me a slice. I’m in for more cake.
Georg Baselitz came on strong in the 1960s with his own form of German painting, part Weimar and part Gustave Moreau. Now at David Nolan, Baselitz has taken his iconic works and stripped them down to their symbolic core.[2] In his “remixes,” as he calls them, Baselitz spins his old work like a yo-yo, whipping out the weight of age. Down goes Die Große Nacht im Eimer, the heavily impastoed work of a boy in green knickers that caused a sensation in the 1960s. Up spins an emptied-out figure of hatch marks and ink stains, a living skeleton. Each “remix” begins life as “feather pen on paper.” Often Baselitz overlays this with watercolor, india ink, and wash. At times the results come back a tangled mess. But sometimes the remix returns just right, as in 1962 (Hommage à Wrubel—Remix) (2006), of a collapsed figure. Here, every line is urgent and new, as though this were the first time around.
Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) was “remixing” his watercolors long before it was a trendy thing to do. Through most of his career, Burchfield found success producing watercolors in the style of the American Scene. Late in life, however, he began reevaluating this earlier work, radically recasting it. His late work is now on view at DC Moore.[3] Through a dogged quest for the distilled elements of landscape and light, Burchfield became another one of those great early modernists, like Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, and later Milton Avery—an American artist with a driven, even naive, individual style. In his approach to landscape, Burchfield wanted “to be a strong courageous healthy spirit—delighting in the natural world, seeing it with the innocence of a child to whom each commonplace stone, blade of grass & sapling is a miracle.” In his late work, he expanded his compositions by joining paper to the edge of earlier landscapes. He daubed in streaks of yellow, creating domes of light. The result, as in Blue Dome of June (1955–1963), is an ecstatic eruption, wonderfully mad, experimental. If you didn’t know any better, you might take it for the “edgy,” calculated work of the latest Chelsea art star. But Burchfield was the real thing. He was a remix of nobody but himself.
It’s hard not to think that, unlike Charles Burchfield, Milton Avery (1885–1965) always got it just right the first time. Actually, like Burchfield, Avery revisited earlier compositions, too—the subject of an exhibition at Riva Yares Gallery in Arizona and New Mexico a few years ago. Nevertheless, Avery must have painted with one of the surest hands of the twentieth century. This fact well suited him for the medium of watercolor, work that is now on view at Knoedler.[4] Comparing him to Burchfield, Clement Greenberg found Avery to be “more delicate and elegant.” Avery was also supremely economical. During the Depression, he became famous among artists for the thinness of his pigments. He could make his paint last longer than anyone. In transparent watercolor, Avery incorporated the unmarked white of his paper to maximum effect. He used both sides of the paper. In Very Old Orchard (1953), Avery’s lines are so spare, he says everything he needed to say with just the tap of a brush. That was the master at his best—a modest, quiet family man who asked and answered the question, “Why talk when you can paint?” New Yorkers are fortunate that Knoedler, which represents the Avery estate and featured an exhibition of Avery seascapes in early 2005, chooses to display his wonderful work as often as they do.
In 2002, at the time of the Whitney Museum’s Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) exhibition, there was an outburst of appreciation for this New York School artist. The reason was simple. With her rebarbative personality, Mitchell terrorized the world in life. Her reputation has greatly benefited from ten years of distance. Mitchell was a superb abstractionist. Her personality … not so superb. She could dig up nasty metaphors to describe anyone. She had a particular problem with Helen Frankenthaler’s relationship with Clement Greenberg. But fifteen years on, Mitchell now speaks solely through her art. A substantial survey of Mitchell’s work on paper at Cheim & Reid takes us from the wide, gestural marks of the 1950s, to the piled-up boxes of the 1960s, the color fields of the 1970s, the carbo-load noodles of the 1980s, to a compression of an entire career in the early 1990s.[5] This late work constitutes the best of the exhibition. Mitchell’s pastels of cobalt blue are works of great authority. Finally, we hear it loud and clear.
James Graham & Sons has been going strong through five generations. At 150 years old, this gallery is one of the oldest in the country, and the longest running gallery in New York to remain under single-family ownership. This season, James Graham celebrates its achievement with an anniversary show and the publication of a well-researched history written by Betsy Fahlman.[6]
The story of James Graham provides a mirror on the evolution of American taste. An early photograph of the gallery from the nineteenth century advertises “rugs,” “curios,” and “draperies.” Antiques of all sorts flow out onto the street. Graham’s identity as a gallery of fine art, rather than a dealer of antiques, did not take shape until the arrival of James A. Graham, the third-generation owner, around 1900, and later James R. Graham and Robert C. Graham Sr., brothers who became fourth-generation owners in the 1930s. In the early part of the century, the gallery became a dealer in paintings and sculpture of the American West: Ernest L. Blumenschein, N. C. Wyeth, Charles Russell, and Frederic Remington. This is where the current show, featuring loans that once passed through gallery hands, starts off.
In 1954, the gallery moved uptown to its present location at 1014 Madison Avenue. While branching into more contemporary work, Robert Graham also took on a number of artists’ estates, which has had lasting effects on their places in history. In 1956, Oscar Bluemner, the self-described “vermillionaire” who died penniless in 1938, had not been seen in a solo show for over twenty years. In that year, Graham entered a twelve-year relationship with the artist’s son to restore his father’s reputation. The gallery hosted five Bluemner exhibitions back to back, and seeded his work in museum collections. In 1961, the gallery entered a similar arrangement with the estate of Guy Pène du Bois, who had died in 1958. The relationship continues today, and accounts for the gallery’s museum-quality, two-part exhibition of his work in 2002 and 2004.
The gallery now thrives under the leadership of Robert C. Graham Jr. and his colleagues Cameron Shay (sculpture), Priscilla Vail Caldwell (painting), and Jay Grimm (contemporary art). But just so you know, this summer, James Graham will be moving addresses. Some things do change, even as Graham’s values remain rooted in a century and a half of history in New York. Here is a gallery at its finest and most enduring.
Notes
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- “Wolf Kahn: Sizing Up. Part 1: Paintings” opened at Ameringer Yohe Fine Arts, New York, on April 26 and remains on view through June 1. “Part 2: Pastels” will be on view from June 7 through July 27, 2007. Go back to the text.
- “Georg Baselitz: Watercolors, from the Remix Series” opened at David Nolan Gallery, New York, on May 3 and remains on view through June 9, 2007. Go back to the text.
- “Charles Burchfield: Ecstatic Light” opened at DC Moore Gallery, New York, on April 25 and remains on view through June 22, 2007. Go back to the text.
- “Magical Means: Milton Avery and Watercolor” opened at Knoedler & Company, New York, on May 3 and remains on view through August 10, 2007. Go back to the text.
- “Joan Mitchell: A Survey of Works on Paper 1956–1992” opened at Cheim & Read Gallery, New York, on May 10 and remains on view through June 16, 2007. Go back to the text.
- “James Graham & Sons: A Century and a Half in the Art Business” opened at James Graham & Sons, New York, on May 10 and remains on view through June 29, 2007. Go back to the text.