Mass MOCA , Sol Lewitt

Christopher Wool and Willem deKooning

Christopher Wool's show is very elegant in a contemporary way.

He seems to have won the day, though I wondered if de Kooning himself would have liked it. It seemed some time ago that Chris left the arena of painting for itself and entered the critical world of Richter and European uber-thought. Here any painting is as good as another. The system is the thing or idea. It is funny as this complexity actually seems to stop thought and prepare the object for it's way as a commodity.

There is something of the intricate thought of today's Wall Street Market.

The de Kooning show at Gagosian is surprising in the context now of the parodies going on around displayed in the Gagosian gift or book store.

The actual drawing in touch with the mind even at a state of senility is what I look for. The prior history of his life's  drawing unfolds there in front of you still and we reach for it.

The de Koonings still have a poetry of the coming to terms with the fright in the world, of form goobling up form.

Chris's dyspepsia is more of William Burrough's world. So much of that literature is now an adolescent dream which leaves us wondering what we saw.

It is of this contemporary world of ours and it is unfolds in a wonderful way. The latest work are the ones I care and wonder about. 

Brice Marden seems to have a chance to edge back in here?

deKooning at Gagosian.

National Academy Museum

See It Loud

Peter Heinemann died two years ago now. He was my first drawing teacher at SVA. He taught  the importance of drawing. He held very strong opinions which kept him in a time frame or mental state never quite of this contemporary world. He stayed very close to what he learned himself. He went to Black Mountain where he studied with Joseph Albers. The geometric patterns owe to Albers and a want to feel contemporary. 

Peter was very romantic in his drawing. He drew and erased. The rhythm for the sake of rhythm abstractly was what comes to mind. He was formal in this way. He etched a final line somehow which has a very psychological compelling nature. I always felt his emotion was unbound by form. Character is a hard thing. Some bring to the painting, others believe the form delivers it.

I met Paul Georges at the SVA workshops which Peter presided over. Paul believed the drawing was a language that could be used to make a reality "as if". He talked a lot about suspending ones disbelief. Also of being unselfconscious.

At this viewing I saw he seemed to have a conflict between Value and Color. He was intellectually on the side of the Modernist surface but had a foot in the Old Master value camp. Building up a surface from the burt sienna ground, though he started with ink and white canvas on most paintings.

Maybe this back and forth never allowed him to be in a new world.

He later tried to paint on Red grounds which immediately set him in a modernist relation to color but then his drawing whittles back into space once again.

He liked how traditional artists put space into a flat shape.

He knew so much about all this he couldn't help using it all.

This painting below has the set up of a Titian painting which he would talk about for hours.

There is a wonderful complexity here in the drawing. Paul drew all his life and it is probably his legacy  though sadly drawing is distant, it allowed him this poetry and his humanity.

Resika in the old days was more of an uptown painter. His paintings retain that demeanor to this day. He studied with Hofmann as did Georges but stayed within that parameter. Wolf Kahn is not in this show but would be interesting with Resika.

Also a glaring omission is no women painters. I prefer Louisa Matthaisdottir to her husband Leland Bell. Jane Freilecher certainly also should be here.

Grand Junction Art Center, Grand Junction, CO