Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper

Josef Albers (1888-1976) embodied the principles of the Bauhaus, the influential German art school founded in 1919. Though he attended other institutions, Albers’ studies at the Bauhaus and, in particular, with color theorist Johannes Itten, proved decisive. Albers began teaching at the Bauhaus in 1923 and became a full professor at the school’s Dessau outpost two years later. The Bauhaus closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime—the school’s teachings were not sufficiently Aryan.

Albers and his wife, Anni, subsequently left for the United States, both of them accepting teaching posts at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. (“Germans to Teach Art Near Here” read a December 1933 article from the Asheville Citizen.) But it was Albers’ appointment as dean of Yale’s design department in 1950 and the publication of his seminal text Interaction of Color that codified his historical standing. Albers’s signature suite of paintings, collectively titled “Homage to the Square,” put into practice the goal of “maximum effect with a minimum of means.”

Truth to tell, a little of “Homage to the Square” goes a long way—-sometimes minimum means result in minimum ends. Seen en masse, Albers’ chromatic and compositional structures-—always effective, invariably inflexible—-lend themselves more to finger tapping and clock-watching than aesthetic contemplation. Still, among the surprises at the Morgan is the first of the series, a rarely exhibited panel rendered in, of all things, black and white. For aficionados of modernism’s more austere outposts, this inclusion has to count as something of an event.

The majority of Josef Albers in America is dedicated to informal studies on paper. Covered with scrawled notations, flurried applications of color and grease stains, they reveal Albers’ rigorous methodology at its most approachable. No Platonic exegeses here, thank you; instead we have the remnants of workaday life in the studio. The Morgan show allows us to experience Albers as a man given to curiosity and play—-and it prompts double-takes.

Did you know that this most stringent of pedagogues relied largely on colors used straight from the tube or that his insistence on “hands-off” surfaces didn’t preclude experiments with varnishes? Contemporary sensibilities will relish the diaristic nature of Albers’ works on paper and, in the case of the lush tangencies of “Variant/Adobe, Study for Four Central Warm Colors Surrounded by Two Blues” (ca. 1948), swoon to them. Elsewhere, Albers daubs to charming effect, toys with perspective and posits Mexico as “the promised land of abstract art”—-all the while exemplifying one man’s “craziness about color.”

Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper
Through Oct. 14, The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Ave., 212-685-0008, themorgan.org.

Francesca Woodman, “Polka Dots,” 1976, Gelatin silver print.

A nagging question surrounding the paintings of Odd Nerdrum, on display at Forum Gallery, is: Can you still paint like that?

“Like that,” as if the past 400 years of Western art hadn’t transpired; to put brush to canvas, without irony or affectation, in the style of Rembrandt and Caravaggio. To create images without a hint of pop culture, mass media, Cézanne, Picasso and Pollock.

Intimations of a post-industrial apocalypse betray some cognizance of contemporary life. Otherwise, Nerdrum’s paintings are suffused in golden light, soupy washes of umber and mythological portent. They’re Old Masterish.

For those skeptical of modernism and the excesses it set in motion, Nerdrum’s quixotic achievement would seem to answer a need for a return to principles. It’s hard not to be impressed with the operatic scope of his ambition and the dexterity of his touch. Nerdrum’s consistency as an imagist, with those barren landscapes, ritualistic narratives, theatrical flourishes and supple passages of skin and bone, betokens a sense that sheer force of will can right a culture overtaken by trivial diversions.

But Nerdrum’s nightmarish scenarios are redolent of Frank Frazetta, the fantasy artist who specialized in pulpy depictions of otherworldly vistas, towering monsters, nubile maidens and Conan the Barbarian. Nerdrum is a more serious figure—more reactionary, too. At least Frazetta wasn’t pretentious.

In the end, Nerdrum’s peculiar kind of hokum isn’t all that different, better suited as cover illustrations for heavy metal CDs than for inclusion in The Grand Manner.

For 30-some years, Cindy Sherman has played dress-up in front of the camera in pursuit of “mortification of the self” and “the exploration of identity.” The photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), who died by her own hand at the age of 22, took a lot of self-portraits as well, and for related reasons: “female subjectivity” and “photography’s relationship to both literature and performance.” That the Guggenheim overview of Woodman’s oeuvre is running concurrently with MoMA’s Sherman retrospective is a fortuitous opportunity to compare and contrast.

To Sherman’s detriment, you can’t help but conclude. True, Woodman was no less prone to theatricality and adolescent notions of self-expression. Depending on one’s taste for melodrama, her weakness for the picturesque—dilapidated buildings served as backdrop for many of the photos—and pat religious allusions are likely to strike one as precocious rather than earned.

But Woodman knew how to take photographs—photographs that are rich with texture, isolated blurs of movement, ghostly sweeps of light and rare moments of washed-out period color. Sherman? She doesn’t know a photograph from a deconstructionist hole in the ground.

An early, tragic death is an all but insurmountable hurdle for aesthetic contemplation. Anyone who has seen  The Woodmans, C. Scott Willis’ devastating documentary of a family rendered dysfunctional by art, knows how inextricably Woodman’s vision is tied to biographical particulars. We do the artist no favors by overinflating a flawed but diverting achievement.

The Guggenheim, to its credit, does right by Woodman in setting out the work with jewel-like sobriety. Any serious artist would welcome such an approach. Viewers should welcome it, too.

Odd Nerdrum

Through May 5, Forum Gallery, 730 Fifth Ave., 212-3554545, www.forumgallery.com.
Francesca Woodman

Through June 13, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Ave., 212-423-3500,
www.guggenheim.org/new-york. 

This article first appeared in the April 18 issue of CityArts. For more from New York’s Review of Culture, visit www.cityartsnyc.com.

The advent and subsequent triumph of modernism did much to diminish the role of narrative in the visual arts, insisting, as it did, that the exigencies of craft should take precedence over anything smacking of literature. But modernism is an historical blip—a significant blip, mind you, but a blip all the same. Narratives have dominated world art. To ignore (or downplay) as much is to mistake The Annunciation for a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.

Thoughts about narrative—about temporal flow, cultural myths and the human imagination’s range, influence and probity—came to mind while viewing Storytelling in Japanese Art, an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Which isn’t to suggest that the colors and flat surfaces assembled by the painters and sculptors featured in Storytelling don’t merit attention. A story is captivating to the extent to which it is told well, and the artisans responsible for this panel painting, that devotional carving or emaki, a form of illuminated handscroll, tell them well indeed.

In the work, elaborate stylization coexists with acute observation, generalization with specificity, charm with gravity. Hell is rendered in burnt copper tonalities and whiplash rhythms; the seasons with lucid economy. Shibata Zeshin’s “The Ibaraki Demon” (ca. 1839–40), the closest Storytelling comes to a showstopper, is a miraculous confluence of line, gesture, character and motion.

The more Sarah Sze accumulates and organizes detritus—the more impressive her meticulous arrangements of this, that and the other thing become—the more you have to wonder what it is she’s concealing or, for that matter, running from.

Sarah Sze: Infinite Line, a mid-career exhibition at Asia Society, does everything and goes nowhere simultaneously. Give the artist this much: She imagines what might have happened if Robert Rauschenberg had been a neatnik beholden to Alexander Calder and not the New York School—and if he had been a victim of information overload rather than its messenger.

Immaculate confusion is the result, painfully choreographed and scrupulously inert, though the work hints at pictorial invention. The trouble is, Sze is a sculptor—or an installation artist, whatever. Where to begin detailing her materials? Among them are a Rolodex, a tape measure, pocket change, rocks, an upturned driver’s license, rolled-up photographs of natural phenomena, a desk fan plugged in and working, exquisitely ordered confetti, a take-out coffee cup from “Bread Corrado Pastry” and string, lots of string. What Sze gleans from Calder is his gift for rendering line as a three-dimensional entity and the theatrical contingencies of his “Circus.”

In the end, all those finicky agglomerations of stuff don’t coalesce into anything with much vitality, personality or staying power. An ambitious blur of expertise—we should ask more from our artists.

Sarah Sze: Infinite Line
Through March 25, Asia Society, 725 Park Ave., 212-288-6400, www.asiasociety.org.

Storytelling in Japanese Art
Through May 6, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., 212-535-7710,
www.metmuseum.org.