Best art exhibitions of 2014 the final ten.

Richard Nonas. Fergus McCaffrey

This is a large and expansive display of Richard Nonas’s sculptures that I pretty much stumbled on by accident, having no idea that he had a show on. This is a compelling exhibition of simple yet complex minimal sculptures from the 70’s to the present that are made from wood, granite and steel and are placed on the floor and against and on walls. Many of the pieces surprise with their intimate scale and their interruption of the gallery spaces. Even though they are made from impersonal materials they have a hint and feeling of touch. A rich and beautiful show done by an artist now in his late 70’s with more vigor and inventiveness than most artists half

  

Ursula Von Rydingsvard. Galerie Lelong

I should mention how much I liked the Ursula Von Rydingsvard show of large cedar wood and bronze sculptures now on view until Dec. 13. She does amazing things to the large pieces of wood cutting into them like they were sticks of butter and creating intricate and powerful surfaces and details. There is also a large sculpture that incorporates bronze in a lace like pattern to a large piece of carved wood that is really spectacular. You don't often see this kind of work anymore, some might say it was old fashioned and not of the moment,(what no videos?) but I found her marvelous sculptures to be refreshing, bold and exciting. Also the smell of wood when you get close to the pieces is quite intoxicating.

Altoon Sultan. McKenzie Gallery

When one exits the D train at Grand Street on the lower east side, one is transported to another place. It’s like being drawn into a whirlwind of color, smells and busy human activity involving a lot of food and shopping and is mostly Asian. I feel like I am being carried away, lifted in the air and carried off to some giant Mosh pit. This is not a neighborhood that one leisurely strolls.
               I come here very infrequently usually to take in a gallery exhibition so I always find this part of my city always new, vivid and exciting, and a dreamscape for my camera. This is no longer the neighborhood of my Jewish ancestors, although some of this long gone history can still be found here. No now it’s a mixture of the large Chinese community spreading out from Chinatown and fast moving gentrified blocks of here today gone tomorrow galleries, trendy bars and restaurants.
                      I have to say that I found it a relief from all the movement and collaged city streets to enter the serene and beautiful exhibition of Altoon Sultan that is now on view at the McKenzie Gallery on Orchard Street. Comprised of three intimate groupings of drawings, paintings and works in wool each group works beautifully on their own, but also work as a conversation piece.
               A complete set of amazing small strong works. The first group I came to were her framed drawings using egg tempera on paper that are made up of patterns circles, diamonds, triangles and spheres. All are rich in colors and line and according to the press release were influenced by a visit to the new Islamic wing at the Met. Actually all of the work shown was influenced and inspired by various art going experiences, but I would think that the artist’s life on her Vermont farm has also played an important role in her creative life.
                    On the opposite walls are these very small paintings using egg tempera on parchment paper that are stretched on wood panels with most of them measuring a mere 6 x 8 inches. The paintings are of segments of machinery up close and tightly edited and cropped that Sultan based on photographs. One thinks of the Precisionist painters of the early 20th century especially Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth as a starting point but Sultan adds to this starting point by paring these “industrial images ”down to tight areas of abstraction with rich and beautiful colors.
                        The final group of works are comprised of abstractions made from hand tied wool on linen and again are small in size but large in the attention that they command. These works will no doubt bring to mind for some the arts and crafts of women in their solitude making hooked rugs for their families to keep warm on those long cold winter nights. We know better because they transcend their folksy origins and sources and hang on the walls in strong tactile textures of hand dyed wool that are like kisses on the cheek. I should add that Altoon is a cherished Facebook friend of mine, along with many others who also writes about nature and cooking on her blog along with notes about her day to day life living in Vermont and the making of her wonderful works of art. This exhibitions is one of the treasures of the Fall art season and will be up until November 16th.

Thomas Hart Benton America Today. The Metropolitan Museum

Exciting and vivid and well worth a visit is Thomas Hart Benton’s tremendous 10 panel mural “America Today” that was originally done for the boardroom of the New School For Social Research. That was some boardroom. Its here now beautifully hung and restored in a wrap around gallery that recreates the original room and is epic in its strength and painting skill. Featuring ten panels made of different views and segments of American life from the 1920’s the mural features crowded scenes of different parts of the country along with day to day views of hard living and working with an acknowledgment of the coming of the great depression, along with more lighter moments in time and place. It was originally done for the New School in 1930 where it stayed for about 50 years before being sold to AXA Equitable, formerly known as Equitable Life, in 1984. The exhibition also features many of his preliminary drawings along with works by artists, who were active at the time, and not all were always friendly or sweet on him, check out the Stuart Davis painting who pretty much despised Benton. Also hanging is an early Jackson Pollock painting who was a student of Benton’s and posed for some of the figures in the mural. This is a wonderful thing to see and I know full well that some might find it old fashioned and conservative, and might have problems with Benton’s politics (I sure do) but there’s no denying the scope and magnificence of this work. 


Kimono A Modern History. The Metropolitan Museum

This is a dazzling display of fashion and pattern that traces the history of the kimono in Japanese history and culture from the late 18th Century up to today. There are some fifty of these robes basking in a lovely display in the Asian wing along with supplement material of  prints, books, ceramics and postcards. These postcards are small color delights showing women shopping at Takashimaya’s that was the first shop to sell kimonos and opened in Kyoto in 1831 . But it’s the kimono’s that are the stars of this show, so rich and beautiful with elaborate patterns and designs all superbly made in beautiful color and fabrics.  There are also strange and odd examples here like the children’s kimono festooned with images of Mickey Mouse and one from the war years with fighter planes. This exhibition is also a nice companion piece to the eye popping Matisee extravaganza of paper cutouts now at the Moma. Both shows offer powerful images both as art and fashion.

Picasso & Jacqueline: The Evolution of Style. Pace Gallery. Chelsea

 his is a thrilling and beautiful large exhibition of mostly paintings (there are also some prints and drawings) by this great artist from the last two decades of his life. There is a pull, a rope around our necks with regards to the title of the show, which I don’t like that pushes the idea that the much younger Jacqueline Roque who was his lover and later his wife somehow was his muse. Maybe so but I was not really thinking of this coupling when I was looking mesmerized at his wonderful works. And besides Picasso lived with and loved many women who may have been inspiring to him and served as his models, and did this great artist really need a muse? More than any other artist I can think of, exhibitions of Picasso can be served by many themes and they would all make for fine viewing. How about Picasso and food, Picasso and the theatre, Picasso and children or Picasso and the bullfight not to mention shows of paintings inspired by those many other young women he lived and loved with. For me it’s the paintings that count. What was also terrific was that there were maybe 4 other people in the gallery, (probably this had to do with the freezing cold on the day I visited) in fact the guards outnumbered use viewers so I was able to meander slowly back and forth between the galleries and take my time without the usual crowds which is a given these days at museums and on Saturdays in the some of galleries in Chelsea. This is a museum quality show and I was taken with the fact that I could get up close to the works and really look at his markings, the areas of colors and the texture of his paint. See this one.

Albert York. Matthew Marks Gallery

If you've never seen any paintings by Albert York or if you’ve never heard of him, now is your chance to see a beautiful array of 37 of his small and intimate landscapes, flowers and animals that cover his career from the early sixties to the mid 90's. At first you might think that these are the works of a 19th century itinerant painter traveling the countryside doing small paintings on bits of wood of farmer’s cows and soft spring night landscapes. York who was seldom seen or heard from spent most of his life in quiet reclusive time on Long Island painting when he had the chance and doing odd jobs to support himself and his family.
These paintings are small bullets to the heart, measuring mere inches but are so alluring and tender that the size of them become a moot point. There’s a lot to admire in these marvelous paintings including his patches and areas of color both subtle and sometimes bright and his use of figures in his landscapes, sometimes creepy and perhaps allegorical as in the painting of a nude young woman on her knees in a pastoral landscape as death or old age in the form of a skeleton looks on. Another one of my favorites (actually all of the paintings are my favorites) is of two young women at rest on a nice green patch of ground; one appears to be napping while the other woman watches over her. This show is a blessing and easily one of the best exhibitions of 2014.

Willem Van Genk at The American Folk Art Museum

The Willem Van Genk show is quite remarkable. Consisting of dense quite large works of "paintings" made up of cut clippings,notebook drawings, ads and more that show Genk's love for transportation and urban centers. They pretty much defy description, one simply has to see these complex works in person. Although Genk was diagnosed with behavioral problems as a child in the 1960's he traveled far and wide recording his impressions in these works and notebooks and drawings. In the 1980's he also made wonderful models of buses and trolleys from discarded stuff that look like they were in some pretty bad accidents and some of these are also on display. What I could have done without is his raincoat collection (very nice Willem) that take up a large wall that could have been better used by showing more of his terrific works.

Jean Dubuffet. Soul Of The Underground. Moma

This is a small but meaty show of this great artist's works on paper with the spotlight on his wonderful imaginative prints. There are also a few paintings bulky and beautiful with unlikely materials, a couple of sculptures, drawings and books. I love this artist. He was for me when a kid, and a teen a lighthouse and a voice giving me the permission to do anything I wanted, and don't give a shit what anyone thinks. There's very little color in the show, but his materials of sand, gravel, dirt and whatnot have a muted color scheme like the earth and mushed up garbage that most pass by without giving what they are seeing a second thought. He saw and thought and invented. It took him a long time to find his passion, it was start and stop, off and on until the early and mid 40’s when his love for the untrained, the self taught, the art brut became a big influence on his art. Take this show in, slowly. It’s in the drawing and print galleries until April so there is plenty of time to see it.

Robert Gober. The Museum Of Modern Art

The Robert Gober retrospective that has been getting lots of good press, but I wasn’t all that familiar with his work, hell I didn’t even know that he is gay, but this fact although not necessary in liking loving or hating his work can bring some insight to his oeuvre, if one needs this kind of compass. I was taken with a lot of his stuff, his macabre sense of humor and his nice approach to the surreal along with his tactile approach to making things and his strong compassion. 

            I also thought there were some references to cinema, notably David Lynch and a bit of Hitchcock and yes Kubrick also, but the sure shot ghost in the closet is Uncle Duchamp who hovers over some of the work especially Gober’s voyeuristic piece which consists of two partially opened doors at either side of a gallery that when we peek into them we see a clean bathroom where we can make out the partial body of a woman soaking in a tub, the woman is fake but the water is real, and of course this intriguing and spooky piece made me think of the final great Duchamp piece “Etant donnes  permanently installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and also of Hitchcock’s “Psycho” with its permanent horrific black and white bathroom that is embedded in many horror and film lover’s memory.

                 There is a lot of water in this show, some of it actually running through faucets that form part of a large installation of a forest scene that wraps around one of the large gallery spaces with barred prison like windows that line the top of the gallery and piles of old newspapers that are actually hand made sculptures piled about here and there.  The noise from the faucets imitates the sound of a far off waterfall or a babbling brook.

           There is also horror and sadness in much of his work, those cut off limbs and body parts, male waxed legs cut off and attached (slammed) to the walls can bring unease and shock. Several of the large installations have walls covered in painted wallpaper (Gober seems to have a big fondness for wallpaper, for the fine Charles Burchfield retrospective that he curated for the Whiney a few years back, he covered one wall with wallpaper that Burchfield designed) that are vast and engulfing.

          My favorite I think is the genitalia room with repeated scribble like white loose drawings of cocks and cunts against a black background that took me a second to realize what they were.  Sex is mixed up with violence and religion and tragedy takes on comedic proportions. Gober is most known for his sinks, without plumbing and constructed from various materials that are attached to the walls of many of the installations and provoked a sense of unease in me, bringing up images of morgues, death chambers and insane asylums.

             These are sinks never to be used for washing with the holes where the drains would be casting nice circular shadows beneath them on to the floor.  Another one of my favorite pieces is a fake suitcase (another possible homage to Duchamp) that has a sewer grating placed in the bottom which opens into a deep hole that when we look inside presents us with a complex and detailed diorama of a scene of a fake corral reed with real water and a partial creepy view of a man with hairy legs holding a baby. At this point some might be tempted to run for the exit.

            Not everything in the show was to my liking; the big dollhouse sitting in the middle of a gallery although lovely in detail did nothing for me. The same goes for the over the top headless crucifix with a bird resting on part of the cross in a symbolic chapel like setting that had water streaming out of it’s nipples. This installation forces on us Gober’s Catholic upbringing one of several images and sculptures with religious themes. I also thought the disconcerting and unsuccessful attempt at a memory piece duplicating an exhibition that he curated of several women artists’ causes a tear in the flow of the exhibition no matter how generous the gesture.

           His small pencil drawings were average and meager looking like the work of art school students, but maybe that was his intention, and why open the exhibit with a poor small painting of his childhood home, memory and autobiography is fine, but bad painting is not appealing especially when its hung in one of the major art museums in the world. Again this may have been his point, this is a bad painting I did when I was young and so what do I care if you don’t like it; I have bigger fish to fry.