Artist and editor Robert Motherwell proclaimed that of all the painters of his generation, Fritz Bultman was “the one [most] drastically and shockingly underrated.” A survey of his paintings is now on view.
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Three months ago I attended a discussion at Hunter College called towards meaning in a plural painting world. The panel sought to examine today’s multiplicity of painting styles and determine if this is a positive or dilutive development for painting’s meaning as a whole. Last Wednesday, the Pratt Institute took on similar subject matter with a panel titled “Painting Matters Now: a Conversation.”
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It was 2005. I had gone to an opening of works by Sarah Plimpton at the June Kelly Gallery on Mercer Street. Around me on the walls was art I could only address in a frame of mind rare here in the bustle and buzz of NewYork. Around us, on the walls, were great shapes, calling for some response I knew myself unable to make at that moment.
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After a recent trip to Key West, I realized why most contemporary art in naturally beautiful places tends to suck. It’s because the viewer has access to the real thing — a magnificent sunset, a flock of pelicans, a sailboat on turquoise seas. So depictions of what look better out a car window never measure up. There are some exceptions to this rule, of course; see: Georgia O’Keefe.
But in a place like New York, a big and sometimes ugly city with little access to natural beauty, artists must convey the latter via art. Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism to ward off the stress and discomfort often associated with life here.
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Roger Brown (1941–1997) died a decade after his retrospective opened at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (August 13, 1987–October 18, 1987), and traveled to three other museums, none of which were on the East Coast or in a densely populated urban center. More surprising, the show didn’t travel to Chicago, where Brown first gained attention and with which he is associated.
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Susanna Coffey, who was born in New London, Connecticut, studied at Yale, teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago, and lives and works in New York, is best known for her self-portraits. These frontal heads set against backdrops of world locales and events are rigorous, unrelenting penetrations of the meeting-point of humanity and violence.
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Despite cold, rainy weather, a large audience turned out for “… towards meaning in a plural painting world,” a panel discussion moderated by Katy Siegel at Hunter College’s MFA building. The room was filled with young artists and MFA candidates eager to participate, and the place swelled to standing room only. Siegel explained that the modus operandi for the evening was driven by questions from and conversations had with students, and that it was only necessary to cross the hall or walk downstairs to view artwork from the Hunter MFA Thesis Fall 2012 exhibition.
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I visited Mary Heilmann recently in her Bridgehampton studio. At the end of our time together, she took a small painting of a wave, and turned it upside-down. It was the perfect gesture to sum up our conversation and the themes of her work — an offhand reminder of its yin-yang quality. Heilmann’s work plays with big ideas, but it does so playfully.
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BERKELEY, California — Hugh Leeman’s work didn’t immediately impress me. It had a distinct Bay Area style, which is not my personal favorite — his paintings are loose, colorful, street art–influenced, and have some realistic surrealism mixed in — but what caught my attention in Leeman’s practice was the social utility interwoven with the artwork.
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Richard Walker is an observational painter who seems particularly interested in light, a concern that goes back to the Impressionists and the beginnings of modern art. However, if you think you are going to get a sugary rehash of Claude Monet, you are in for a surprise.
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