Mass Moca

This Kiefer Installation is really elegant. Slow like the Winters, it is a Glacial scraping of time. A frozen wave.



The Sol Lewitt is going to be installed for 25 years! It's good, they have had a big influence over the years, wish they were paintings though. What will they look like in 25 years. What about Frank Stella?

Terry Winters

I have some resistance to these paintings, though it is their superlative quality which draws criticism.

I remember seeing the first drawing and paintings at Sonnabend in say 1984? He seemed to have the drawing, insight, of a man in his 70's they were just that deep.

He went against that for a long time trying to stay at a more contemporary surface. I think he is back to the older self.

I just took some pictures at the Cathedral of St John Divine which reminded me of a book I have of A. Malraux, Voices of Silence. It has great old black and white photos of Gothic art which seem not art but nature itself.

Winters is located there.

Somehow I myself want to make a more contemporary art out of the Winters space bringing it closer. But then it wouldn't be his domain.

Seems everyone of any quality has made some reference to this 'diamond' motif, maybe a way of letting one know one loves art and it's tradition. It derives from Cezanne of course, before that the references were more narrative, in the commedia del arte vein.

Winters paintings are so slow I didn't really see them at first, one has to slow down abit and for that I thank him.

Ron Gorchov, Bob Moskowitz and Joyce Pensato

Still a powerful and physical formal tribal presence.

Joyce, too!




Bob Moskowitz continues this theme with powerful positive negative effect. Maybe why these above paintings still look good.

Roman and Greek Sculpture at the Met

Morandi at the Met

Morandi really is about the making of the modernist surface. This Modern suface is really as old as painting itself.






The color and light of Morandi is related to the color of fresco, say Piero della Francesca.

We often think fresco, especially Piero is modern because of this hard surface.

Massacio seems a bit older because of the use of brown maybe but the figures are set solidly like Morandi, see the figures standing behind, like in Morandi, but all apart of the frontal surface.



This is what is thrilling, how the bottles stand in for the abstract painting surface and are still there as bottles.

This is an existential exercise philosophers in Bologna must have loved .

By the end of the show I thought, how easy then the steps to our contemporary paintings of Agnes Martin and Brice Marden.



It makes me wonder though, as we stand on the other side of this, whether we need to see the bottles again or not.

The mind twisting struggle to equate abstract surface and subject (bottles) gives such satisfaction that we feel Morandi really lived and saw in a powerful way.

The fact that he spent most of his life in that little studio makes it all the more poignant that what he found there was so satisfying and made his reality still beyond our own.

There is a great painting that has three boxes with three bottles in front of them. This painting is similar.



I thought it like the picture plane was blown up with air and was made a theater or exaggeration of the plane, as Guston does.
It made the subject profound in its clumsiness, to describe such awesome being in such seeming simplicity.

When the positive negative aspects are shown so equally one knows the picture plane is being forwarded.

Cezanne, where it begins

I think it is all about the surface.

A critic today has his pleasure in saying how little the picture plane means.

But that is why we have little that resembles the rigor of these paintings.

I understood a lot about this by seeing how the Morandi paintings subject exactly is not the lowly vase he paints but the surface that the vase can camouflage as the real subject.



Here the image was still also of importance and it seems to me the best painting has a strong back and forth between form and content.

Meaning there is a picture surface and a subject.

Johns also is very strongly camouflaging the fact it is all about that surface. The subject having left us for the moment until we are bored of this surface for itself.

This may be what the critic means?

Little Harlequin ceramic at Met

I guess this is what spawned the thoughts below

Harlequin Diamonds

There is a Chia show at Charles Cowles. Haven't seen one in years.




It picks up the idea of Harlequin in art, or Arte I should say, through Cezanne. The idea permeates his work, in I guess what would be called an Imaginative poetic manner. I wish he would slow down a bit, the work seems borderline and so commercial?

Commedia del Arte is what I was reaching for. It figured big in Picasso by way of the Theater and Dance stage decoration.

There are some other posts from Europe about Derain I saw at La Orangerie. ( They seem to have been deleted?)

This all culminates in J. Johns.



I made diamonds, myself, as reference to an Ideal likened to the height of the sun, as figure, in 1990.

There is much more to it, but..



I was refering to Wallace Stevens and his jangling regalia of diamonds in the Notes towards a Supreme Fiction.

"I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
You will have stopped revolving except in crystal."

Funny that I should pick that phrase--

"summer, jangling the savagest diamonds"

from Examination of a Hero in a time of War, by Stevens, was more what I meant.

Here's Johns.

Guston and Cezanne

I saw this sleeve in a Guston up at the Modern. Earlier this week I made this crop from a Cezanne Bather Painting.

Ive seen this similar idea in Hockney and in Johns. Cezanne's surface had some simile as a Harlequin figure, the figure of Harlequin as the surface of painting.

Cezanne used these flat brushstrokes to turn the form of an orange and at the same time make the surface of the canvas non illusionistic and physical.

Museum of Modern Art, August 2008

The black line here in the hands of Manet's Christ seems to have something to do with the accents of the urban 'black' one sees in the tophats and overcoats of the Parisian strollers.



Manet made boat shapes black on a viridian sea. Here Monet does a similar thing. One sees it taken forward in Matisse and Marquet takes it to make the center of his style. Close valued color tempered with figures and lines of black.




Van Gogh in his struggle to draw he almost incises this line and finally uses black to get the full force of effect.



This is where I'm going with all this. A blow up of the Van Gogh gets us mighty close to Picasso and Jasper Johns, if on squints.






This line of Van Gogh also connects to what I'm bringing up later about Guston.





One can see here how this line sets the strenght of Picasso and Matisse.



Mondrian has his own complete evolution which has created a unique Modernism. He begins with a naturalistic illusionistic line and comes along to the more artificially drawn line, now flattened, and more in relation to the reality of the surface of the physical canvas.






Beckman is someone I am interested in lately as he is a link to Marsden Hartley and this line coming to America through German Expressionism through Picasso's influence.






Gorky and de Kooning, and Pollock bring all this forward to a new level once again.











There is a nice grouping of Guston in the Atrium. I was surprised then when I came upon this Claes Oldenburg. I then saw how Elizabeth Murray related to this group.






The insistent black line drawing, in it's variations has been an important way in which reality has been seen as Modern. There have been many subtle innovations in this evolution in the last 40 years. We are missing Frank Stella, Rosenquist, and later Johns.