Morandi at Lucas Schoormans Gallery

ART REVIEW | GIORGIO MORANDI
Looking Long and Hard at Morandi

In honor of this weekend's Morandi show at the Paul Thiebaud Gallery, Art Notes features Michael Kimmelman's review of the 2004 Morandi show at the Lucas Schoormans Gallery.


October 14, 2004

For the Record: Not another day should pass without noting that the most wonderful little show in memory has landed in town. It consists of just six paintings and two drawings by the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi. And if the world were a perfect place, it would be on view forever at the Lucas Schoormans Gallery at 508 West 26th Street in Chelsea, so that we might remind ourselves at any time what heaven looks like. The world not being perfect, the show is around only through Dec. 4. Consider yourself forewarned.

Lucas Schoormans is clearly a patient man, with a perseverance befitting the object of his devotion. He spent 12 years struggling to assemble this Morandi exhibition, the first in New York in a long while. He cajoled loans from museums and collectors who were understandably reluctant to part with their art even for a few weeks. Fortunately, they did.

Morandi, who died at 73 in 1964 in the modest house on Via Fondazza in Bologna where he had lived his whole life with his mother (until her death in 1950) and with three unmarried sisters, devoted his career to painting pretty much the same dusty bunch of bottles, bowls and biscuit tins. He worked in a studio that doubled as his bedroom. "One can travel the world and see nothing,'' he said, "To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.''

That is the message of his pictures: there is a universe in life's little things. And even when just shuffling a few humble objects around a table, unending variety and humor can be achieved through the subtlest distinctions of color and brushstroke. Look closely, Morandi instructs us. The moral implications are clear.

The show consists only of mature examples, works from 1950 to 1963. As always with Morandi, forms are stripped to their essence, and the art dwells on the precipice of abstraction. The same row of bottles may summon images of ducklings following their mother, or throngs of people in a sunny city square, or the skyline of a town spilling down the side of hill. See a row of brown boxes huddled behind two preening long-necked bottles - one white, one blue - while an oval box gently nudges another swanning bottle to the side.

Suitors at a dance, perhaps.

Pure heaven.

For the Record: Oct. 20, 2004, Wednesday

Morandi

at The Paul Thiebaud Gallery

Italian painter of landscape and still life. Born in Bologna in 1890, the reclusive Morandi spent his entire life there working from his studio.

He is most famous for his subtle and contemplative groupings of domestic objects, painted in muted tones. He pursued this representation of form almost obsessively for many years, and only late in his career he began experimenting with abstraction.





Painting and drawing focused on the everyday.
Thru 10/28/06 Tue-Sat, 10am-6pm
42 E. 76th St., New York, NY 10021
at Madison Ave.
212-737-9759

excerpted from essay; "Vincent Pepi by Harry Rand",1996 "

" Vincent Pepi graduated from the H.S.of Music & Art.In 1944 he volunteered to serve in the Navy, which allowed him to paint in North Africa. After this, he lived for a time in Mexico City. Further studies include enrollment in Cooper Union and Pratt Institute. In 1949 he left for Rome, Italy where he remained until 1951. During this time he painted some of his most important work."

"Pepi has never lost his grounding in manual virtuosity and as in other "first generation" Abstract Expressionists his surety of line and form elevates his art. As a painter who shared his time and environs with such as de Kooning and Kline, Pepi is very much an individual, with a consistency which courses through all of his work, which is both thoughtful and fervent. Long overlooked, partly by his own choices, Pepi is returned, a player in history. The past will care for the future."

Kimmelman does it again.....

Here Michael Kimmelman is right on. His review of the recent show at the Whitney reveals a nice sense of the slow turn that is occuring in the methods of viewing American art. "Everybody loves Pablo" argues a point that, independent of its central indictment of the Whitney, aims to bring everyone back down to earth, so to speak. As per usual with Kimmelman, the abbreviator's comments do not do him justice.

Notwithstanding the glamorous pictures in it, “Picasso and American Art” at the Whitney Museum is one of those dull affairs incubated in the world of academe: a walk-through textbook that goes to extraordinary lengths to state the obvious. It has the numbing feel of a compare-and-contrast slide lecture, the scholastic consequence of art forced to service information. Picasso’s “Woman in White,” a picture of heavenly arrogance, hangs between Arshile Gorky’s “Artist and His Mother” and de Kooning’s “Standing Man,” terrific paintings too. We are meant to register the plain insinuation of Picasso’s Neoclassicism, then move on. Next slide, please.

Fittingly, the show ends not with the lively question of Picasso’s impact on young artists today but with a virtual retrospective of the later, Picasso-inspired works by Jasper Johns, that most hermetic and constipated of American masters. In picture after picture Johns buries allusions to the great Spaniard, aspiring presumably to Picasso’s own late meditations on Velázquez. Except that even when he was old and running out of steam, Picasso still had joie de vivre. Johns doesn’t so much enthrone Picasso as repeatedly entomb him. The exhibition tracks the impact of Picasso on American artists from Max Weber on. (Who outside Scholar World cares about Max Weber in the first place is a mystery.) Pictures by Picasso that influenced pictures by Americans have been rounded up and brought together. The scholarship, the result of years of serious work by Michael FitzGerald, a Picasso expert, seems unimpeachable and fills a fat book, where, ultimately, it belongs. Mr. FitzGerald documents a legacy of Picasso displays: one in New York in 1911, in the Armory Show in 1913, another show in 1915, a survey in Brooklyn in 1921, yet another Picasso exhibition in 1923, at the Whitney Studio Club. That one is partly recreated here, a nice touch, with paintings by Stuart Davis in an adjacent gallery, from a year or so later, which jazz up Picasso’s Cubism by giving it various American twists (painted comics, the image of a Lucky Strike pack).

Davis holds his own in this show, likewise de Kooning, Pollock and a few others, who make a hardy case for burgeoning American independence. By the mid-1930’s, about halfway through the exhibition, the home team has almost shed its obsequiousness. At that point Picasso’s “Studio,” from 1927-28, is still the colorful Tinker Toy centerpiece in a congress of David Smiths, de Koonings, Lee Krasners and Gorkys that collectively play Charlie McCarthy to its Edgar Bergen. But gradually de Kooning and Gorky deconstruct Picasso’s linear style; they explode the tight Cubist grid, remaking their own beholden, puzzlelike images into maelstroms of fleshy pigment.

Into the 1940’s and 50’s Americans respond as much to one another as to Picasso, whose “Demoiselles d’Avignon” nevertheless remains the ghost in the machine of works like de Kooning’s blowsy “Woman” series. Pollock, literally covering up Picassolike shapes with drips and splashes, finally invents himself by this act. Louise Bourgeois fills a cameo role with a pair of pictures that eccentrically riff on Picasso’s Janus-headed motifs.

Picasso has by then become a living monument, his “Guernica” (not here of course, but at the time at the Museum of Modern Art) imitating the look of a black and white cartoon, with a newspaper illustration’s implicit delivery of second-hand emotion, felicitously helping pave the way for Pop years later.

Accordingly, the show rustles up an early Roy Lichtenstein, a delicate little nothing, from 1953, which wrestles with bits of the architecture of Picasso’s “Three Musicians.” A decade later, a mature Lichtenstein swallows whole Picassos, mixes and regurgitates them as coldly rapturous meditations on the great man’s resourceful palette, Cubist patterning and celebrity. Lichtenstein’s laconic absorption of Picasso hawks American industry. His art looks immaculate and, like Johns’s and Warhol’s, chilly as such. Picasso, by contrast, remains dashingly, fiercely handcrafted. His pictures never try to look fresh. They just are. All of which reiterates what we knew already. The unanswerable question is what role Picasso might play next. Historical precedents are hard to come by, Picasso being so modern, his art linked to 20th-century ideas of required novelty and constant reinvention, his fame accelerated by the mass media.

There is Rubens, the dominant figure of his day, who laid out a map for Baroque art, and like Picasso was universally admired, sought after by every patron, emulated by Rembrandt and van Dyck. But now, history having been reconfigured, it’s Velázquez, an artist few people outside Spain had heard of at the time, who looms largest from an era that also produced Bernini and Poussin.

On the other hand there is Michelangelo, as Picasso would be, a stultifying presence for generations, casting a shadow over the equivalent of countless anxious sheep, until Caravaggio came along and turned obeisance into a dialectic. Michelangelo fell out of fashion, but he remained a persona, the heroic ideal of the artist. We could use a few more heroes in art today, don’t you think? Their absence partly accounts for Picasso’s enduring aura. At the end of his “Discourses,” delivered as lectures at the Royal Academy in London, the 18th-century painter Joshua Reynolds, whose style couldn’t have been farther from Michelangelo’s, said what plenty of artists might now think about Picasso. “I have taken another course, one more suited to my abilities, and to the taste of the times in which I live,” Reynolds wrote. “Yet however unequal I feel myself to that attempt, were I now to begin the world again, I would tread in the steps of that great master.” He ended, in 18th-century fashion: “I should desire that the last words which I should pronounce in this Academy, and from this place, might be the name of — MICHAEL ANGELO.”

De Kooning said something oddly similar, out of frustration, when Picasso died in 1973. An interviewer asked him about Picasso’s influence. “There are certain things I like to keep to myself,” de Kooning barked. “He’s always with me — certain artists are always with me. And surely Picasso is one of them.”

He added: “I’m not going to answer your questions because to me the answers are self-evident.” Which ought to have given the Whitney pause.

-Michael Kimmelman, "Everybody Loves Pablo" Sept 29th

I am pleased to invite all those interested in art as a dynamic force, to view my portfolio. It is no coincidence that in the study and history of man, ART has always played the dominant roll. To study man, we study History. Written history is plagued with lies and distortions causing us to read between the lines, to get to the truth. The language of art on the other hand is sublime in its intention. It (art) always seeks to reveal the truth. Thus we feel safe in the study of Art as "The Study of Man". Man is what we want to know about. Not "History”, since history by itself is nothing but a series of anecdotes. ART, instead, is in fact its own measuring stick. When art is false it smells sour. Sometimes it stinks. It reveals itself as Kitsch. When this happens we must resign to the realization that we are in that sorry state of decadence, sometimes referred to as narcissism. The pendulum swings up and then down, and so it is.

From “Notes about art: April, 2006, Vincent Pepi”

"Space & Gesture: The Paintings of Vincent Pepi" exhibit at Deutsch Gallery, New York City, 1992

"Amid the large number of American participants in the development and spread of Abstract Expressionism in the late 40's and early 50's, Vincent Pepi produced a body of work representing a serious, distinctive vision worthy of individual consideration." After having studied at both Pratt Institute and Cooper Union in New York, Pepi spent 2 years painting in Rome, before returning to America. His art continues in the exploration of semi-illusionistic abstract phenomena, at times evoking a nearly palpable though fluctuant sense of space, that comprises an intriguing personal deviation from the American Abstract Expessionist norm, so often given to the pursuit of flatness of form and color. As on going research enriches the already remarkable story of mid-20th- Century painterly abstraction in America, Vincent Pepi's vital, vibrant oeuvre of small scale gestures and spatial inventivness offers timely reminder that much remains in this field to be appreciated anew."

Partially excerpted from catalogue essay "Space & Gesture:The Paintings of Vincent Pepi" exhibit at Duetsch Gallery, New York City,1992