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ART/WORLD Latest Museum &Gallery Guide Founded In 1976 Copyright@1988 Arts Review Inc. VOL. 12 NO. 8 1295 madison Avenue, NYC 10128 May 20- June, 1988 Subscription: $20.00 per year. $30.00 Foreign TWO DOLLARS Letter from L.I. Classicism & Modernism - Talk, Talk, Talk! (Illustration) @'88 G. Thorton Andy, in heaven espouses the new classicism. Dear Aunt Susannah, Aren't you thrilled by the New Classicism in painting and sculpture? I am. And I thought Cousin George would be too, after all those years of talk, talk, talk about the Failure of Modernism and the Classical Idea and the Closing of the American Mind and the Crucial Necessity of Returning to Fundamentals (you know George always speaks in capitals.) But when I took him to the Queens Museum to see their wonderful new exhibition, "Classical Myth and Imagery in Contemporary Art," he just walked very quickly through the galleries, with only the briefest of pauses before a little head of Medusa by Carlo Maria Mariani, and then after a reproachful glance at me, went across the hall to another set of galleries where Continued on Page 6 Color, Tahiti, Symbolism: Gauguin Exhibit in D.C. By Johnathan Phillips Spring was a long time coming to the northeast this season. If it waited until May, perhaps it was in deference to the opening of the Paul Gauguin exhibition (at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.) on view until July 31. This is the age of the "really big show" in museum curating, and with a pop history of Hollywood-crafted-myth hulking in the foreground of Gaugin's biographical presence as well as Van Gogh's, it might seem that the long lines wending around the corner of East Wing aren't worth braving—They are! Just be sure to leave time to visit this show two or three times if you really want to take in this vast assemblage of this immortal artist's art. Color was king of the reasons Gauguin painted from the beginning. The surprise to many weaned on the "famous Gauguin" of the synthetist-symbolist Tahitian period will be just how arrived this painter was in his Parisian, Arles and Brittany paintings. Upon entering, you are confronted with the artist's "les pommiers en fleur" (Apple trees in the Hermitage Neighborhood of Pontoise, 1879), an oil painting of dry viridian-green-and-ultramarine-flecked trees with a ground space of litharge, naples yellows and vermilions in sunlight; and caput mortum, english red and ultramarines in shadow areas. All this reverberates softly Continued on Page 6 [[image]] Paul Gauguin, "Aha oe Feii?" 1892, oil on canvas, 68 x 92cm., in the show "The Art of Paul Gauguin" at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. to July 31. Collection of Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (Sponsored by A.T.&T.) Rauschenberg Passes Series At Knoedler By Ray Matthew Restless, unsatisfiable, impatient, inventive Rauschenberg - a one-time student of Vaclav Vyticil- has stormed every depth and dared comparison with every height; has been behaving aesthetically (as Robert Hughes almost said) like the Father of Us All. These "New Drawlings from the Passes Series" are the Old Man (like all fathers he is an adolescent 62) in pensive mood. Quiet, restrained, enigmatic, he knows what he knows. And these conversational, confidential acrylics with their hinting and play, their changing of mood and urgent juxtapositioning challenge us to enquire deeper into that knowledge. Some of them, at a glance, seem conventional. "Late Porch" is a realist, haunted twilight state set mise en scene. "The Painter's all that. Passes that guarantee from Plato. "Chicken Crossing" is an ancient's joke about getting to the other side. But each picture holds a riddle of transformation and unease. "Behold I tell you mystery..." They are linked together as "the Passes Series" What passes? Che passa? and all that. Passes that guarantee limited freedom get one through exams, divide mountains. Passes away, passes by, passes out?-...Passes around like "Chain Letter," which bleeds out of of its in-the-picture frame, passes through the "Onatu Jungle, passes over like "Chicken Crossing," passes off like a fake, passes forever like itself, an art and all? "Stonehedge Cup" is a triptych of stone images, but one wing represents beakers of Continued on Page 4 F. Rouaun At Matisse By Denis Hollier Over the fall of 1971, F.R. and I spent much time walking and talking in the streets of Rome. We had just left Paris. So we would speak of Paris--of politics, of modes of production, and even occasionally of Mao Tse Tung--the Parisian one we had just left behind us. THe fall was very mild, very lush. Against an operatic background we produced a dialogue whose soundtrack was not always up to the level of stage-set. But we toyed with this very gap. Continued on Page 2 M. Spender In London By Bernardo Bertolucci I have always thought that life thrust Matthew Spender towards color, terracotta and wood, in the same way that a child is thrown into water, where he is forced to invent for himself the art of swimming so as, not to drown. Painting and sculpture are in this sense for Matthew a matter of life and death. That density, which is incribed in invisible ink next to Continued on Page 2 Uffizi Painters' Portraits At National Academy [[image]] Angelica Kauffmann, Self-portrait," 1787, oil on canvas, 128 x 93.5cm., in the show "Painters by Painters," an exhibition of more than 30 works from the collection of artists' portraits in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy, at the National Academy of Design, 1083 Fifth, to July 31. (Sponsored by United Technologies Corporation) By Ormonde De Kay In Florence, the Uffizi hoards a store Of hundreds of self-portraits--hordes, in fine, But here, one gallery holds even more: The National Academy of Design. "Why not exchange displays?" suggested one. "Why not?" the other said; and it was done. Continued on Page 3 D. Tanning At Kent By Pontus Hulten It is not horror or nightmare but it induces the sensation you experience when you are trying to remember a dream you have just had just a moment ago. You know it is there, somewhere, anyway it was there, it is a matter of minutes, and now you are reaching into your mind, scanning it, fumbling around trying to find what it was, to gain it back, to grasp it. It was strong, it was important, it is personal, it is you, actually, and now it seems to be avoiding you, escaping into Contined on Page 2 Carrington At Brewster By Whitney Chadwick Animals are almost always present in Carrington's paintings, for she has embraced the Mexican belief that each one of us possesses an animal soul as well as a human one. She has long distrusted Western Society's exclusive reliance on rationality; her animals testify to the presence of alternative forms of intelligence in the universe. In "Desert Dorgys" (1986), the Tibetan ritual instrument signi- Continued on Page 2 Torres at Americas By Barbara Braun From 1973 on, Torres divided his time between Montevideo and his favorite city, Barcelona. Stimulated by the congenial Catalan cosmopolitanism and a favorable setting—a studio with a broad harbor view—he experienced a burst of creative activity during a prolonged Barcelona visit in 1973-79. Many of his paintings of the harbor area, though clearly inspired by the view from his window, are patently nostalgic evocations of Montevideo — as if not being Continued on Page 2 J. Decker At Coe Kerr By William H Gerdts Recognition of Joseph Decker as one of the finest still-life painters in America in the late nineteenth century is a phenomenon of recent growth. During the 1880s, Decker's work appeared regularly in exhibitions in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and even as far distant as Chicago and Buffalo, and he was the recipient of fairly extensive critical notice albeit often of a disparaging nature. Nevertheless, he Continued on Page 4
