Realism, Minimalism & the Duke
By Piri Halasz
The cliche is that all Chinese look alike-to a Caucasian, so all Caucasians must look alike to a Chinese. Likewise, since most postmodernist conceptualism, videos and installations have a certain sameness to a modernist like myself, I assume that most modernist painting looks pretty much alike to a postmodernist-and so I am here offering a range of modernist paintings to try and demonstrate differences I see.
First of all, modernist painting doesn’t have to be abstract. More
importantly, it needs to have a certain urgent sincerity, and a desire to pleasure the eye rather than offend or disconcert it. Hence at one end of the modernist spectrum we have representational painting. One could call it "realism," though it’s not realism as the term was understood in the Renaissance, when it merely meant verisimilitude, and was a kind of painting that Leonardo excelled at. Nor is it realism as the term was understood in the nineteenth century, when it meant the portrayal of workers and provincial petit bourgeois to Courbet-grim reality, or social truth if you like.
At parties, I sometimes run into a person who says she is an artist, and when I ask what kind of an artist, she says "a realist" in an angry voice which implies that she considers herself a lonely warrior, passionately defending Art against the ravages of abstraction. But when it comes to her actual work, it is usually only representation as opposed to abstraction, and with landscapes or cityscapes or portraits or still lifes or figure studies as subjects, traditional studio subjects in other words. Nor do I have problems with this approach. Last year, I really went for the snowy landscapes of Temma Bell that I saw at the Bowery Gallery, and this year I was very taken with "Tabletop Arenas," an exhibition at Lori Bookstein by Zeuxis, an association of still life painters named for the ancient Greek painter who could paint grapes so realistically that birds pecked at them. This show ran the gamut from William Bailey, whose jugs and other vessels were so finely-brushed that they looked shiny, to Ying Li, whose Elegy to a Skull and Lilies was executed with such loose gestural sweeps of paint that unless I stood back, clear across the gallery, I couldn’t make out the skull, and even then I couldn’t see the lilies.
At the other end of the spectrum from "realism" we have minimalism, which may be defined as the furthest away from a recognizable subject that a painter can get, and still be putting paint on canvas. Most minimalism is postmodernist in spirit, based on coldly logical premises rather than felt application, but John Griefen has lately become a modernist minimalist. This could be seen in the show at Salander-O’Reilly that he shared with Kikuo
Saito and Willard Boepple. Griefen considers his works so abstract that he won’t even title them "Untitled." They simply have no names except (in conversation) "the red one" or "the lavender one." His softly-colored, monochromatic panels appeared breathlessly empty at first, but when I looked closer, I could see the fine lines that his push broom had left when he stroked on his broad, thick waves of acrylic from the top to the bottom of the canvas. Here and there, I could also see patches of underpainting showing through. It was this layer of underpainting, in a contrasting color, that I think gave these luminous canvases their inner glow.
Finally, modernist abstraction, modernist representation and all the shades of difference in between can live very peacefully together. This became clear when Michael Rosenfeld staged "Mood Indigo: The Legacy of Duke Ellington-A Look at Jazz & Improvisation in American Art." The gallery has two areas of concentration, landmark African American painters and American abstract modernists, especially from the 1930s. This show combined both. On the one hand were representational scenes such as On Tour by Eldzier Cortor, showing a musician in her dressing room, and Nightclub, by Archibald Motley. On the other hand were pure abstractions that either bore musical titles or could fairly be described as "improvisations," by Burgoyne Diller, Norman Lewis, Lee Krasner and many more. In between came Cubist semi-abstracts of jazz bands by Romare Bearden and Jan Matulka, and photographs of Duke Ellington in jam sessions from the 40s by Gjon Mili, and of the Duke in recording sessions and concert by Gordon Parks from the 60s. The centerpiece of the whole show was the million-dollar white baby grand piano on which Ellington composed dozens of his jazz classics, including "Mood
