THE HUDSON REVIEW
Vol. LXXII, No. 4
WINTER 2020
KAREN WILKIN

At the Galleries
AN IMPRESSIVELY VARIED GROUP OF EXHIBITIONS on view in New Yorklast fall—if you traveled from the Upper East Side to the Lower East
Side, with a small stopover in Tribeca—was proof that painting anddrawing, in many different permutations and in different mediums,
were not only alive and well today, but also had been for some time.
Uptown, at the Met Breuer, “Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory”
offered an illuminating survey of a mysterious artist, spanning five
decades of the 81-year-old Celmins’ labor-intensive, ferociously concentrated work. Seen earlier in 2019 at the San Francisco Museum ofModern Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and organized by
SFMoMA’s Gary Garrels and the Met’s Ian Alteveer, the elegantly
installed retrospective began with the deadpan “portraits” of theinanimate objects in Celmins’ daily life that she painted in the early
1960s: a glowing space heater, a lamp, a television. These early works
announce constants that persist to the present: a palette of silvery grays,a fascination with the ephemeral, and an insistence on stripping
everything down to its essence, coupled with scrupulous observationand fastidious execution.
We followed Celmins as she “redescribed” (her word) existing
images—her own photographs and others clipped from newspapers—of explosions, fires, or equivocal airplanes. The momentary and thevisually elusive are stilled and prolonged by Celmins’ scrutiny and“redescription.” The boundaries between fact and fiction blur. In 1968,
she stopped painting entirely in order to concentrate on drawing,
relishing the limitation of making pencil marks of differing weights anddensities on paper. Some early drawings refer, albeit obliquely, totragedies and disasters, but the same year, Celmins also began drawing
the surface of the sea, based on her own photographs, distilling
expanses of agitated water devoid of shoreline or horizon into
repetitive, subtly varied strokes, exploring an astonishing range of
tonalities, different grays, and delicately inflected marks. She often held
the web of marks back from the edge of the paper, leaving untouchedneutral zones that remind us of the artifice of her obsessively accurate
images. Over the years, Celmins has been similarly preoccupied withisolated chunks of a starry night sky, the irregular, unprepossessing
surface of the desert floor, the pitted landscape of the moon, and spider
webs—all seemingly impossible subjects that she transforms through614

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sheer effort and concentration into disembodied all-over images that
pulse between radical abstractness and terrifying, non-photographic
verisimilitude. Her paintings are astonishingly accomplished, but her
drawings are often more compelling, perhaps because the hand is more
visible, making us think about the physical process of making rather
than about replication of the seen. The most eye-testing works on view
were pairs of rocks, one real, one a carefully executed replica. We could
tell which was which if we studied the pairs as intensely as Celmins did
when making them. The entire show demanded that kind of effort. It
was worth it.
A little further uptown, at Acquavella Galleries, “Wayne Thiebaud:
Mountains 1965–2019” presented a less familiar aspect of this endlessly
inventive painter’s long career. Known best for his seductive, allAmerican, vernacular still lifes of pie slices, deli counters, gumballmachines, and the like, as well as for hieratic, self-contained figures,
Thiebaud has long used his acute responses to place as starting points
for evocative improvisation and invention. His dizzying equivalents ofsteep San Francisco streets, his sweeping reminders of the broad deltalandscape near Sacramento, where he lives, and this exhibition’s
looming, vertiginous forms of his mountain paintings all seem to springfrom the same impulse. Asked whether there were actual mountains inNorthern California that looked like his images, Thiebaud said that heknew places that felt like that.
The most engaging paintings on view kept us off balance, thrusting
sheer cliffs and implacable walls of gorgeously hued pigment at us,
playing fast and loose with our sense of scale by slowly revealing tiny
suggestions of vegetation and human presence at the summits andedges. Just as Thiebaud’s dessert and deli paintings updated the
traditional still life as a celebration of diner and lunch counter offerings,
his mountain paintings translate the sublime into wholly contemporary
painterly terms. Faced with works such as the disquieting Cliff Road, theradiant Rock Island Split, and the eerie Mountain Fire (all 2019), I kept
thinking about Turner’s images of passes through the Alps, with their
towering mountains, impossibly narrow paths, and minuscule figures indanger of plunging into the chasm below. Thiebaud elicits much of thesame awe at the power of nature, as we imagine ourselves teetering on
the edge of his cliffs, then pulls us into the present with the delectablephysicality of his glowing, layered color and lush, varied paint-handling,making the artist intensely present. Thiebaud celebrated his 99th
birthday in November. Talk about “late style”! A great many of thepaintings at Acquavella—and many of the most striking—were madethis year. If Thiebaud were Japanese, he’d have long since be declared aliving national treasure. Don’t we have an equivalent American
designation for this wonderful artist?
A little farther south, “Henry Taylor: Niece Cousin Kin Look How
Long It’s Been” at Blum & Poe offered a generous sampling of mostly
recent paintings (and a couple of oddball three-dimensional pieces) byKAREN WILKIN

this tough-minded, Los Angeles-based African-American artist. Taylor’s
vigorous, take-no-prisoners paintings, dealing with such uncomfortabletopics as police brutality, were among the most potent and memorable
works in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. The paintings in his current
exhibition seemed just as powerful but less angry. Many were namelessportraits, identified as having been made in 2019 in Dakar, Senegal. If
we added that information to the show’s title, it became impossible notto consider that Taylor was thinking not only about persistent racialinequality in the United States, but also about kinship, continuity, and
the African diaspora. The roughly life-size, frontal Senegalese studies,hung salon style, along with a plainspoken self-portrait, were notable for
their intimacy, directness, and personality; so were two larger than life
male and female Senegalese heads installed elsewhere. The tilt of ahead, the splay of braids, a headwrap, or the angle of eyeglasses were all
noted, underscoring the differences between broad and narrow faces,
necks of different lengths, and varied hairstyles. The whites of wide eyes
contrasted dramatically with dark skin.
Elsewhere in the three-level gallery, near-life-size seated figures
dominated, mainly of fellow African Americans, including a 2019
portrait of Taylor’s fellow artist Glenn Ligon in an ochre armchair and amore introspective 2013 image of the blind poet, publisher, and guru of
the Downtown art world, the late Steve Cannon. Ligon confronts us.
He’s relaxed, hands folded in his lap, seen against a wall of paintings.
Cannon, head lowered, is folded in on himself, with brushy zones ofcolor both surrounding and overlapping him. These formal differences
not only make for compelling paintings, but also suggest different
personalities, different ways of engaging the world. Taylor’s social
conscience was evident in the exhibition’s largest work, an ambitious
disquisition on race relations, Asian exploitation of African resources,and other problematic topics. The mural-size frieze of expressively
drawn black and white figures, maps, diagrams, and provocative phrases
filled an entire wall, floor to ceiling, demanding that we immerse
ourselves in its complex, layered images and disjunctive phrases, and try
to tease out its message.
Taylor, like his predecessor, Robert Colescott, is a virtuoso of
expressive paint-handling, of emotion-charged gesture, and of eloquentdistortion. He moves pigment around with energy and shifts the
proportions of his figures to emphasize how particular people sit or
stand and the ways their bodies articulate space. His color is saturated
and rich, with luminous pinks and reds, singing yellows and brushy
greens played against darks and neutrals; all of these hues conspire toenhance a wide range of warm brown flesh tones. Those browns are
strikingly subtle and diverse, both tonally and chromatically, andfurther modulated to suggest bulk and mass. White skin is painted more
schematically. It’s worth comparing Taylor’s nuanced use of color, as
well as his loose, spontaneous touch, with Amy Sherald’s more
restrained, formulaic approach to skin tones, drawing, and surface. In

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her paintings of standing figures, seen at Hauser and Wirth last fall, skintones are always a neatly applied, flat, unvarying graphite gray,surrounded by equally tidy zones of high key color, and corralled byacademically correct drawing. We’re told that the inert skin color waschosen for its neutrality, but unlike the fierce black that Kerry JamesMarshall turns into both a potent metaphor and an important compositional component, Sherald’s flat gray rarely seems to work with thebrilliant hues of the rest of the painting. Her highly accomplished,elegant paintings appear to be the result of a repeatable series of predetermined moves guaranteed to produce a handsome, plausible result.
Taylor’s images, by contrast, are refreshingly unpredictable, a little
awkward, in an invigorating way, and always seem to have been triggeredby uncalculated, deeply felt responses to an immediate, sometimes
ambiguous situation. One of the most arresting of the exhibition’slarger portraits presented an anonymous, three quarter length whitehaired man in white, holding what seemed to be a cane, caught in the
middle of an intersection defined by vivid greens and geometric bars ofwhite. The gray of the roadways framed the oval of the protagonist’s
body like a cross. The picture provoked admiration for the economy
with which a distinct individual was conjured up, as well as for thebravura paint-handling. But at the same time it triggered a host of
ruminations about age, mobility, and even, because of the cane and thefigure’s white clothing, the state of health care in this country. Like allof Taylor’s work, the painting seemed at once artless and inevitable.
“Larry Poons: ‘First Thought, Best Thought’—The Particle Paintings(1996–2002),” at Yares Art, reviewed some of what may be this brilliant,
idiosyncratic painter’s most idiosyncratic works: paintings constructedwith declarative, expansive, almost cartoon-like shapes and dazzlingcolor, animated by aggressive patterns and applied textures thatthreaten to subsume chromatic variation. For all their eccentricity, theseries developed logically from the cascading Throw pictures that Poons
had been making well into the 1980s, seen at Yares in 2018. As theThrow pictures evolved, Poons began to add more and more substantial
substances to the surface of the canvas, everything from crumpled
paper and batting to discrete units, to interrupt and inflect the
downward flow of the liquid paint, prefiguring the unpredictableattached elements that enliven the Particle Paintings. Poons reveals, aswell, that the collaged shapes were the result of his wanting to makesculpture. “I couldn’t figure out a way to do that,” he says, “so I put
everything onto the canvas.” Some of his rarely exhibited drawings
suggest that the bold, jazzy “imagery” of the Particle Paintings may haveits origins, somewhere, somehow, in the artist’s experience—fromthings seen on television to the landscape and streetscape rushing by
him when he rides his motorcycle and, I suspect, a good deal more thatremains unnamed.
I remember seeing Particle Paintings when the series was firstexhibited and being simultaneously fascinated, entranced, and baffled.

KAREN WILKIN

Like the projecting, glitter-encrusted, scrawled-on constructions ofPoons’s friend and coeval Frank Stella, the Particle Paintings initiallyseemed to test the limits of what was possible, threatening to cross over
into some uncharted non-art territory. Today, Poons’s brash, no-holdsbarred canvases read as opulent, playful, and fearless, or, to find an art
historical analogy, they seem like completely contemporary versions ofan extravagant, over-the-top High Baroque aesthetic with a large
admixture of wit. (So do Stella’s complex, projecting paintings.) Like
Stella, Poons has never allowed himself to settle into a comfortable“signature” approach but instead has followed his intuition andexperience, responding to the implications of each work as it evolves
and pursuing them, often into startlingly new regions. We never know
where Poons will go next, nor, I suspect, does he. Unexpectedness,
audacity, and ravishing color are the only constants in his impressive
body of work. It’s time for a full-scale retrospective at a major museum.
In the meantime, we’re fortunate that over the past few years, Yares has
been devoting monographic shows to different aspects of Poons’s work,
past and present.
Another equally irreverent but, at the same time, equally serious
approach was announced by “Gregory Coates: Actual and Implied,” atMonica King Contemporary, in Tribeca. Coates has frequently deployedunexpected found objects and materials in his work. There have been
series made of transformed inner tubes and repurposed pallets that
depended on the artist’s accepting and altering their textures andcolors, disciplining the insistent physicality and wide-ranging associations of his materials with minimalist, pared-down forms. The works in
Coates’s recent show, made between 2016 and 2019, were mainly
constructed with coarse, bristly deck brushes, meant for scrubbing
recalcitrant surfaces, arranged in neat grids, bristles facing out. Somewere coated with saturated color—luminous blues and oranges—asthough the brushes had been dipped briefly in paint or some other,more unlikely substance—including mud—picking up just enough tochange subtly the character of the rough-hewn expanse. Coates refers
to these works as the Cornrow series, an allusion to traditional Africanand African-American hairstyle.
The brushes are almost entirely subsumed by Coates’s foursquarearrangements and judicious addition of color. We follow the rhythmic
interior inflections of the neat stacks and rows and note the variations inthe surface, as if we were contemplating a rockface. We become so
engaged by those surfaces, especially in works such as the dark,brooding, squared-off Here (2019) or its enormous, horizontal, evenmore somber counterpart, My Big Brown Peace (2019), that it is asurprise to encounter an end view and realize the identity of thebuilding blocks of the confrontational expanse. Yet that previous
identity is important. The series was dedicated to Coates’s grandmother,a domestic worker, for whom the scrubbing brush would have had
entirely different connotations. Even if we know nothing of this or fail

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to grasp what the paintings are made of, we can’t avoid feeling acutely
the tension between the cool, pared-down elegance of the Cornrow
series and the visible robustness and brutality, the haunting tactility ofthe paintings’ surfaces. Did the title’s “actual and implied” refer to thiskind of opposition? Maybe.
At Betty Cuningham Gallery, on the Lower East Side, “Graham
Nickson: Eye Level” surprised even those who have been following thework of this British-born, New York painter for decades. Known for hislarge, enigmatic gatherings of agile full-length bathers, evocations of amodern-day Arcadia furnished with lifeguard’s chairs and beach towels,and for superheated skyscapes, Nickson showed a series of about twodozen portrait heads, most of them painted in 2019. A small number
had been made about fifteen years ago, while an intimate canvas about
10 inches square, one of the few where the sitter did not confront theviewer, dated from 1972, when Nickson was juxtaposing rows of small
related paintings with his larger ones, modern versions of the predellapanels of early Renaissance devotional works. Despite the existence of
these precursors, he had never exhibited any of the single heads before.
And, it’s worth noting that unlike the subjects in the recent exhibitionof single heads, the figures in Nickson’s large paintings of bathers
frequently turn away from us or cover their heads in some way. A figure
who faces us is usually an exception. Each of Nickson’s cast of charactersin his beach paintings exists as an identifiable personage—the man
drying his back, the person doing the headstand, the balloon woman—
who often recurs in different paintings, yet their identities are mostclearly established by their poses, and they seem more significant ascomponents of a complex whole than as individuals.
The initial surprise of seeing a group of single heads by Nickson
notwithstanding, the directness and material forthrightness of therecent portraits may have been their most striking quality. As we studied
each one, we were quickly captured by the bold, staccato touches of thebrush, the modulations of color temperature, the intensity with which
the sitter often stared back at us. A male head, titled The Observer (2019),
was among the most compelling works in the series. The silver-haired
sitter eluded our gaze, tilting his head slightly. But what really held ourattention was the way the broad, emphatically placed planes of brow,cheek, and chin responded, spatially, to the assertive vertical division of
the wall behind him, half black, half gray. The memory of Matisse’s
Fauvist heads made itself felt. So did Cézanne’s slow accumulations oftouches. But the painting, like all the others in the show, had its own
distinct character. Nickson describes himself as being struck by thepresence of the single heads, when he looked at them as a group, apresence he terms “awkward and insistent.” It’s an apt characterization.
The best paintings of the series are somewhat uncomfortable, becauseof our awareness of the slow, repetitive process of their making, and also
impossible to ignore.
For initiates, most of Nickson’s sitters were identifiable—fellow
artists, a gallerist, an art historian, all part of his circle—but likeness was

KAREN WILKIN

Graham Nickson (British, b. 1946), The Observer, 2019. Oil on canvas. 20 x 16 inches.
© Betty Cuningham Gallery. Photo credit: Lexi Campbell.

plainly not the issue. His single heads are no more literal than thehieratic, solemn bathers in his beach paintings or the burning metaphorsfor sunrise and sunset in his landscapes. The overall fabric of paint was
clearly of more concern to Nickson than the particularities of individualfeatures. Likeness seemed to have emerged almost inadvertently, an
unwilled result of intense scrutiny and of concentrating on translating
the perception of planar and spatial relationships into mark-making, all
but detached from thinking about what those planes comprise. In someways, it’s the effort to reconcile the insistent presence of the sitter withthe equally insistent presence of the painting as a made, autonomous
object that makes Nickson’s single heads so engaging. It will be interesting to see whether he continues to make portraits and, if so, whether
he will show them.

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