Best art exhibitions of 2014-Part 1. More to follow.

Italian Futurism. 1909-1944. Reconstructing The Universe The Guggenheim Museum

I saw this extraordinary exhibition today, and I doubt if you will see a more beautiful show this year. It fills the whole museum and although I knew many of the artists there were a few new discoveries for me, notably Fortunato Depero who not only did paintings but also toys, stage sets, costumes, ads and much more.
All the famous artists are here also including Balla, Marinetti and Severini but I was very impressed by the lesser known artists. These guys were full of contradictions and some of their beliefs were and still are difficult to deal with including misogyny,(yet they included women in their group) a love of war and their attraction to Italian fascism which is also covered in the exhibition. They also loved machines, speed, movement, the city and the future and boy what art. There are magnificent paintings, drawings, books, furniture, sculptures and more, in fact I could not find one work that I didn't like. Its wonderfully installed and will be at the Gugg until Sept 1, so there is lots of time to see it.

Gauguin: Metamorphoses. The Museum Of Modern Art
When I was a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, my first encounters with art were through movies. I like to think that I took to art when I was very young in part because I saw “Moulin Rouge” and “Lust For Life” and even at this very early age (I was only 6 when I saw Moulin Rouge) I knew I wanted to be an artist even though these guys ended up in very bad ways.
They were strange and appealing to me, and there was all that color. As a kid I thought the actors portraying these artists were perfect. Kirk Douglas was Van Gogh Jose Ferrer was Lautrec and Anthony Quinn was Gauguin. Later as a teen I expanded my art loves. My first art book was a cheap edition on Modigliani which I still have and for an art class in high school I made books on him and Braque which I also still have. So it was with special interest and excitement that I went to see a show of one of my favorite childhood aritsts, a member’s preview of “Gauguin: Metamorphoses” at the Moma yesterday.
To say that I was overwhelmed would be the understatement of the year. This show is ravishing and deeply moving, and is one of the most beautiful exhibitions of an artist’s work that I have ever seen. The exhibition is made up of mostly his prints many from editions including the famous Noa Noa series and includes many different variations, which show how he worked (thus the title of the show) along with some of the actual woodblocks which really was fascinating for me to see.
There are also paintings, books, some amazing sculptures and several large wall woodcarvings that are simply breathtaking. Actually the entire show is breathtaking and is the sort of show, historical and thorough that the Moma sometimes does so well that I can forgive them for all the mistakes, slights and errors that they make. I sometimes get lightheaded and dizzy when I see great art, and yesterday I was very lightheaded and dizzy. A warning. If you are a member of the museum you should try to see this show during the member’s previews, even though it was somewhat crowded I found it bearable and I was able to take my time wandering back and forth through the galleries. This is going to be a blockbuster ball breaking show with huge amounts of people waiting on lines to get in for a glimpse of this extraordinary exhibition. It’s on through June.

Sigmar Polke The Museum Of Modern Art
The large show of works by the late artist Sigmar Polke now filling the Atrium and the large spacious galleries that the Moma usually uses to show off its latest mediocre acquisitions seems to me to be a show worthy of the attention paid and the spaces used.
Polke is pretty much a stranger to me, so I was looking forward to seeing this show, and by and large I wasn't disappointed. I especially liked his imaginative use of materials and how well he used his large canvases, these are the best pieces and no doubt these works done on fabrics and other odd surfaces were a big influence on some well placed and over saturated artists of the 80's.
His work with photographs and smaller collages are pleasant enough but really didn't do the trick for me and I couldn't concentrate on his films and videos that were placed on monitors here and there. The exhibition guide that you pick up is 32pgs and as usual I hate these fucking things in which you have to match the tiny diagrams with the numbered captions, small descriptive labels would have worked fine instead of me having to try to decipher this poorly conceived and designed road map.

Nancy Grossman. The Edge Of Always. Constructions From The 1960s. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.
For my 30th birthday the artist Nancy Grossman gave me a nice 9-¼” x12 ¼” sketchbook of good thick paper that I used to make nine paintings which I sometimes refer to as my “Nancy Paintings.” I mention this because I thought of them the other day as I viewed her fierce and beautiful show of some forty large assemblages and constructions from the 1960’s.
These are superb pieces, large, abstract, dense & aggressive (but not hostile) that are intricate and intimate but large in their scope and vision. Made from all sorts of discarded materials including scrap metal, saddles and harnesses (a fitting gift from David Smith) leather and other parts of clothing that Grossman then put together to make these amazing textured works that look like remnants of an industrial age plowed under.
Collaged, sewed, hammered and glued, bulging off their supports and sometimes extending out into real space. They also bring to mind the earth, death, sci-fi and destruction and are definitely of their Art World time and period, but are still relevant, brilliant and inspiring. The colors of the pieces are mostly dark browns with some reds, tans and an occasional touch of color (a bright blue might appear) and one can even see figurative shadows lurking in these ruins. They also prefigure her most famous works of sexually charged heads and bodies made of wood and wrapped in leather that she would do in the late 60’s and 70’s and for which she is most known for, but its these early mysterious works that interest me the most. This terrific show will be up until July 3rd.

Chaim Soutine. Paul Kasmin Gallery
Of course the great exhibition now on view in Chelsea is the Chaim Soutine show at the Paul Kasmin Gallery. Comprised of only 16 paintings (but oh what paintings) it’s still a museum quality show and includes his twisted distorted and gnarled landscapes, a few portraits and his famous paintings of carcasses of fowl and rabbits, all beautiful, vibrant and haunting.
I grew up looking at his work along with the work of his pal Modigliani both of whom led sad poor lives, both dying young and both of them Jews. Maybe I was attracted to them because they were Jewish, and showed me that Jews could be artists and there was more to art than just Picasso. Yes I know there was an other Jewish painter, Chagall and I knew his work but he was too nice and pretty for me, I didn’t want fiddlers on roofs, I wanted rough and out of control because that’s how my own childhood was, and these two Jews gave this very lapsed Jew (I wasn’t even bar mitzfaed) what I needed in my early teens.
I also think my love and sadness for them had to do with their unique visions and the pictures that they made. Soutine’s work is the more difficult of the two not only for his subject matter but also for his fierce and violent use of the paint and how he applied, slapped and punched it on to the canvas. I know this can appear ugly and disturbing to some but not to me, to me this is great, haunting and beautiful work. His power and influence on art and artists especially the abstract expressionists is well known and is also felt for many young and not so young contemporary painters.

Garry Winogrand The Metropolitan Museum Of Art.
For me this might be the show of the summer. Winogrand who died young at age 56 is one of my favorite picture takers, and one of the great photographers of mid 20th Century. This show gives us the chance to view 175 of his wonderful photographs of people in the streets, at play, walking, dancing, stunning images of ordinary life made extraordinary by his eye with a big chunk of his images taken in New York City in the late 50's and 60's.
There is also documentation and nostalgia of and for this city of mine in these moments in time that no longer exists, that goes hand in hand with the beauty of his pictures. He also worked out west, in L.A. Texas and Las Vegas, but for me he'll always be a New York City street artist. Do you not know his work? Well then you should take the Lexington Ave line to 86th street and walk on over to the Met and check out his lasting and moving work, and try to ignore the ladies who park themselves in front of his images, just standing there, blocking my view, not looking at the photographs because they're , too busy talking about their grandkids and where to go for lunch in way too loud voices as if they were on their cell phones, intruding on my silent conversation with the art. Why do they even bother coming. Stay home yentas and watch your soaps. This stunning exhibition of this great photographer's work will be on view until Sept.

Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection. The Metropolitan Museum Of Art
I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Met lately, rushing up to view the many shows of interest to me. The other day I took the long trip to the Upper East Side to view the very beautiful Cubism show from the collection of Leonard Lauder who has promised this great trove of 81 masterpieces to the Met. Lucky Met. Lucky us. This is a show to savor, to casually walk slowly through the seven galleries and not to be rushed or inconvenienced by the ladies who lunch, the tourists or the people who have those annoying listening devices attached to their heads
The collection focuses on only four giants of modern art Picasso, Braque, Gris and Leger all long time favorites of mine who pretty much changed the history of art with their experiments in painting that took on abstraction, collage, drawing and assemblage with twists and turns that are still being felt today, more than a century later. Its hard to grasp that these amazing works date back to 1907 and extend only to 1918, these are for me toe curling works that still give me pause, that can still thrill and inspire.
The big surprise for me were the vibrant paintings by Gris who is probably the least known (and certainly the least seen) of the group. Reason for this might be that he was only 40 when he died, which probably explains why he is not as well known as the other three who lived to creative old age with Picasso passing when he was 92.
I thought he would live forever, and I guess he does still live on, it seems that there are major shows of his work every year. One of my favorite sculptures of his is in the show “Glass of Absinthe” of 1914, which I grew up seeing at the Moma, and here is presented in a later casting. This was a piece that played with me, and no doubt threw its influence all of me along with the great Max Ernst’s small combine painting “Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale”.
In 1962 when I was 15 my high school art teacher gave us the assignment to do a book report on an artist we liked and I choose for some reason Braque. When I was a kid I would buy these small cheap paper books with color repros on various artists, and one that I had was on Braque. My report took the form of a little book that I made and still have along with the one I did on Modigliani. I typed out excerpts from the text, and pasted in the small reproductions from the book. I made a big hit with my art teacher who even though she knew that the text was not mine gave me a grade of 100. That’s the grade I would give to this wonderful exhibition.

“Judith Scott-Bound and Unbound” The Brooklyn Museum
Marvelous and moving and I was pretty much the only viewer in the gallery where these large wrapped sculptures are now residing until March. I knew about Ms. Scott for some time and had glimpses of her art and life, which was sad and daunting.
Born with Down syndrome, deaf and mute and considered at the time to be profoundly “retarded” and without much hope. She was separated from her beloved “normal” twin sister and placed in an institution for the “mentally retarded” in 1950. All hope for her was gone and she fell into nearly complete despair, unreachable and unteachable.
The story was terrible until her twin sister took control of her and moved them to California in 1985 and in 1987 enrolled her in the Creative Art Center where after a few months her life changed when she became intrigued and attracted to fiber art, and started to make these remarkable sculptures out of discarded materials especially colored yarns.
No one knows what she was thinking when she was making these pieces, but happily for 17 years she produced this amazing and beautiful body of work before passing in 2005 at the age of 61. I spent quite a bit of time with these pieces marveling at the richness and beauty of them, at once odd and obsessive but also very sophisticated and refined. These are pieces that any artist can and should relish and embrace. I loved this show and it more than made up for any disappointments I had at the museum.

Judy Pfaff. Loretta Howard and Pavel Zoubok Galleries
So I’m sitting here at my computer looking at the many photos I took the other day at the two-gallery exhibition of Judy Pfaff’s art and coming to the conclusion that this show, this work by this artist is extraordinary. It sprawls, hangs, and climbs in vivid colors incorporating lots of great materials like wax, paper, neon, wire, twigs and other stuff. These are for the most part big abstract sculptures that talk about nature and landscapes, the beauty and mystery of the thing.
And like nature it’s always showing us new things that maybe at first you didn’t see, like when you take a walk in the woods with someone who is a nature lover, and they point out things to you just beneath the surfaces of the ground, a rotting log when turned over shows maybe large green patches of moss, or the tracks of a wee animal.
Primordial. The works just ooze and heave, and although not actually moving there is a sense of animation, of life before life, and yes while these works draw you in and cast a magical spell, there is also a feeling of discomfort (certainly on my part) in these installations of unnatural nature which of course appeals to my own feelings and work about nature. Many of the pieces also have a sci-fi look to them, pods looking like they are about to explode and turn me into something that I don’t want to be. Color, texture and the use of theatricality.
Installation art has the intrinsic characteristic of theatricality and Pfaff has an amazing sense of this along with her strong and lovely use of color and her ability to mix and usually not match many different textures that are smooth, crinkly, waxy and rough. These are extravagant and generous pieces.
There are also walls covered in photographic images. What are these murals I thought, are they memory reminisces, bulletin boards from her heart? There are lots of photographs of peaceful images and parts of her works with framed drawings and collages placed on top of them here and there that engulf the viewer like a movie, while sculptures hang down in front of them, and a large tree like sculpture stands guard so watch your back. This big black gnarly thing is the most intrusive and threatening piece in the show. This superb gorgeous joint exhibition will be up until November 15.

"Henri Matisse: the Cut-Outs," The Museum Of Modern Art
I went to the member's viewing today of this extraordinary exhibition by one of the great artists of the 20th century. The show was crowded which I was expecting, but it was nowhere a crazy as it will be once it opens. Filled and brimming over with about 100 of his cut-outs large and small that he did during the last decade of his life including the rarely seen swimming pool that has been painstakingly restored. I thought it would be larger than it is, but the pleasure of seeing this and his other pieces never let up. What was also wonderful was being able to see his "touch" up close, as I've usually only seen his cut-outs in print especially his memorable book "Jazz" which is well represented here both in the actual works and the book itself. I still have the small edition of it that I brought as a late teenager. This is a joyful and hopeful show of what an artist can do even in old age. Easily one of best exhibitions of the year.