Dana Schutz's First Show at Zwirner

There is nothing I anticipate more in contemporary art than seeing a new drop of work by artist Dana Schutz. I have followed her career and written about her. But nothing replaces the explosion of delight, intrigue and emotion that seeing the works in person evokes. This painting is so complex and filled with allusions and references that it is something worth studying up close. Alas I could not extend my stay in NY to see the new works at Frieze New York, but I am happy to be able to share this one with you and get your reactions. Entitled The Arts and rife with collectors with pearls and baseball bats scrambling over each other to get at the works of art, critics, dealers ( this is Dana’s first show with her new mega gallery Zwirner) and a general melee, perhaps this is Dana’s wry take on what the scene at the first art fair to emerge during Covid will be.

Dana Schutz, The Arts, 2021 © Dana Schutz. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Corot's Women at the National Gallery: A penny for their thoughts

I am not an ardent fan of landscape, however beautifully wrought, so Camille Corot, one of the great 19th century practitioners has not been much on my radar.

 All this changed when I saw the jpegs of 44 of Corot’s Women in the National Gallery exhibition which has just opened in DC.  I have not seen them in their sumptuous flesh yet but I have seen the catalog and heard the curators talk.  Many of the paintings are on loan from the Met, but as this is the only venue of the exhibition which has also aggregated other important works, it’s worth a special trip.

 To be female in the 19th century was fraught.  In France, Balzac, Zola and Flaubert were zeroing in on the dilemma of those of the fair sex who did not have the resources to maintain a position in society. You were either well-to-do, or poor, a milkmaid, a courtesan or princess. If you were beautiful, it helped but then you had a choice of how to deploy your resources. Sometimes that did not turn out so well. 

The paintings do not reflect the down trodden. And yet being a model in those times was certainly not an upper class occupation. The question about what the models did besides model is ever present. Curator Mary Morton suggests they were not performing for Corot. Are they thinking about how hungry they are and how soon they will be able to eat after posing, or something more elevated?

Corot, like his peers, had also certainly come to depend on photography, the medium that had taken the century by storm, and had fostered the development of collections of erotica.

Yet like Delacroix, after touring Italy or southern regions, Corot portrayed the exotic woman in situ, in costume, fully attired. His portraits are often pensive, his nudes not nearly as confrontational as Manet’s who looked the viewers directly in the eye, daring them to respond. Though he played with the male gaze, my impression is of a certain chastity and remove, even in his splendid odalisques. Picasso was apparently quite taken with them.

Corot was by all accounts religious and devoted to his mother and sister with whom he lived. Possibly asexual. He swore off marriage. His family had the resources to allow him to become an artist and finally with their blessing, after his sister’s death, he did so. His family were bourgeois wigmakers and hat makers and he had worked as a draper. Though he was reportedly very shy and wary of the female clients, he obviously had occasion to observe them in close quarters when they were at ease.  

I have seen the sumptuous and thrilling Delacroix show in Paris now largely arrived at the Met. Delacroix is a favorite and I have to confess that Delacroix’s portraits of women are even more splendid.

 But Corot captures something else. Not patriotism or sensuality, but a haunting interiority, a  penny for their thoughts.  

Magritte’s The Fifth Season, an exhibition of late work at SF MoMA has some surprises

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has injected some new energy into the study of late Magritte and though these outliers in the oeuvre are not nearly as pleasing or inventive as those more familiar to us, some, especially those which refine or riff on earlier motifs (bowler hats, fire, mountains and stones) are lively and witty.

The late gouaches are especially nice-small and elegant and returning to the odd juxtapositions which made him not only a master of paint but also the bon mot. Magritte was in touch with the writers and poets of his time and infused his work with the allegories and allusions which preoccupied the Surrealists throughout his life. He believed "‘secret affinities’ existed between unlikely pairs of objects", reminds a wall label. “We know the bird in the cage,” he wrote, but “it is more interesting to replace the bird with a fish or a shoe.”

(The recent biography of the de Menils sheds some more light on this ‘late’ Magritte who appears to have been someone with a real sense of humor.)

The curators say he had largely left surrealism by this juncture.  But he himself waffled when asked the question point blank. I appreciated their wall texts which split the difference.  “When it comes to matters of the heart”, the curators write referring to image of a rose and sword, “Which is mightier?” They point out the multiplicity of layers in Magritte, his enclosing things in compartments to reveal the mysteries inside. This is the essence of surrealism. 

Less successful are the works that hark back to the late Impressionists, or Fauvists and bad Renoir, and bring color and reality to subjects far from those we commonly associate him with—what is commonly called ‘sunlit surrealism’. It felt bumpy as if he himself had sought, during the Nazi regime, to hide his more daring, darker impulses. I suppose it was very contemporary of him to riff on the earlier artists, after all, it is one of the defining artistic motifs of our contemporary period, but for me they fell flat.  

Magritte remains nevertheless close to my heart as you can see by my website cover image of his fish — a late gouache — wrapped in pearls. Another fish — Merman? Mermaid? — is part of the exhibition. He is a master at conjuring imagery of disparate things and bringing new dimension and meaning to each.

Also check out artist Ali Fitzgerald’s funny takes on some of Magritte’s iconic imagery. 

The exhibition is up until October 26 and will not travel.  A good excuse to visit SF where it is much cooler during the summer than the most of the rest of the US.