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May, 2019

Carla Chammas
Lonti Ebers
Marty and Rebecca Eisenberg
Kathy Fuld
Eric Green
Hilary Hatch
Tina Kim
Michele Gerber Klein
Jill Kraus
Michael Ringier
Jerry Speyer
Alice Tisch
Dian Woodner
Laurie Wolfert

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WELCOME TO THE MAY ISSUE OF THE DIRECTOR'S CIRCLE NEWSLETTER

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WELCOME TO THE MAY ISSUE OF THE DIRECTOR'S CIRCLE NEWSLETTER

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Welcome to new member Michele Gerber Klein! Most of you already know her, but have you read her recent biography of Charles James, entitled Charles James: Portrait of an Unreasonable Man? I have, and it's fascinating! I highly recommend it!
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/charles-james

Did you know that you can comment, opine, or share information simply by typing in a comment in the grey comment area below each jpeg illustration of this newsletter?
TO COMMENT: Just type in a comment in the grey area under each jpeg. There should be the words "Add comment" in that area.
DID YOU KNOW that you can enlarge the jpegs in this newsletter simply by clicking on them?
IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCING A PROBLEM accessing the electronic version, please let me know!
Yet again, I include Experimental Jetset's brilliant 2011 poster that combines Filippo Tomasso Marinetti's "Parole in Liberta" collage with John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "War is Over (If You Want It)." I think it is becoming our logo!

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CLAIRE GILMAN'S favorite drawing (this month)

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CLAIRE GILMAN'S favorite drawing (this month)

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Our Chief Curator, is rounding out her 11th year at TDC, over which time she has curated many memorable exhibitions from the retrospective of the illustrator Tomi Ungerer, to the epic match-up between Emily Dickenson's manuscripts and Edmund de Waal's drawings.
She is currently hard at work on The Pencil is a Key, our group-curated exhibition of drawings by incarcerated artists, while simultaneously working on a project with Curtis Talwar Santiago and a retrospective of the work of Beirut born, Huguette Caland.
Her favorite drawing this month, is a work she saw at the  I-54 Contemporary African Art Fair by Dominique Zinkpè. Here's Claire with more information:
Born in 1969 in Cotonou, Benin, where he continues to live and work, Dominique Zinkpè creates drawings, paintings, sculpture and video rooted in Fon cosmogony. Zinkpè invokes hybrid characters and enigmatic scenes evocative of collective animistic beliefs of the Fon people, as well as the transformations that humans, animals and organic forms undergo through interaction with their environment. Zinkpè is one of the most celebrated contemporary artists to emerge from his country. He was awarded the Prix Jeune Talent Africa in 1993 and the Prix Umeoa at the 2002 Dakar Biennale.

Dominique Zinkpè,
Auto Satisfaction (2016)
Multiple mediums
20 1/5 x 24 9/10"

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New York
Soto: Vibrations, 1950-1961, Hauser and Wirth, 32 E. 69th St.  (through July 26)

Dangerous Liaisons: New Work by Chris Ofili, David Zwirner, 34 E. 69th St. (through June 15)

Jonas Wood, Gagosian Gallery, 555 W. 24th St.  (through July 19)

Josh Klein, 47 Canal, 291 Grand St. (through June 9)

Joe Brainard: 100 Works, Tibor de Nagy, 15 Rivington St. (through June 2) LOTS OF DRAWINGS!

Yuji Agematsu: 1995 & 2003, Miguel Abreu Gallery, 88 Eldridge (until June 21) LOTS of DRAWINGS!

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Metropolitan Museum of Art (through September 8)

Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints: Rembrandt, Metropolitan Museum of Art (through September 29)

Whitney Biennial! (May 17 - September 22)
https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2019-Biennial

Europe
The 2019 Venice Biennale
(through November 29)
https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2019

And at TDC....
Neo Rauch: From the Floor and As If: Alternate Realities from Then to Now (Through June). Our Spring Shows! Please visit, and if you do, please ask for me so that I can come and greet you.

Yuji Agematsu
Untitled (1995)
Collage, 8.5 x 11"

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This month, in museum-quality drawings...

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This month, in museum-quality drawings...

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Without question (sorry, Jonas Wood fans!) the most significant gallery exhibition in New York this month is Tiboy de Nagy's Joe Brainard: 100 Works, the largest display of this poet/artist's work since his retrospective at MoMAPS1 in 2001. This venerable old gallery, founded in 1950, and home to the first exhibitions of Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, Helen Frankenthaler and others, has a history of fostering collaborations between poets and artists. The gallery, now located at 15 Rivington Street around the corner from the New Museum, was the first publisher of the poems of John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Frank O'Hara. Brainard, (1941-1994) an artist who Peter Schjedahl (who began his career as a poet) thought was "touched by genius" is best-known for his delicate drawings, cut paper compositions and collages. Among his most important and most prized works are collages from his poppy series, most of which are very small. This exhibition begins with a beautiful- and enormous one. It is a museum-quality work, hiding in plain sight and so appropriate for this month of flowers.

Pansies (1968)
Ink and graphite
watercolor and collage
23 x 22"

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Conservative Form, Radical Subject Matter

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Conservative Form, Radical Subject Matter

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Bijan Saffari (1933-2019)  was an Iranian artist and cultural figure who was active in the visual arts and theater and at the center of the gay community in Tehran until the Iranian Revolution forced him to immigrate to Paris. He eventually returned to Tehran as an elderly man, and died this year. He left behind a cache of portraits on paper that document his friends and lovers with an academic precision. Saffari was a competent, even talented draftsman. Many of his portraits recall those of David Hockney or Jamie Wyeth both of whom he knew. What is notable about them though, is that they record the likenesses of a community of Iranian gay artists, actors, directors and literati who were closeted but active before the fall of the Shah, and wiped out afterwards. Knowing this history gives Saffari's work new relevance and a tremendous poignancy, and it was one of the reasons that when they were displayed at Frieze, New York in early May, that they were one of the hits of the Fair.

http://www.artnews.com/2019/05/01/frieze-new-york-opening/

Bijan Saffari
Self Portrait. (1981)
Gouache, 9 x 12"

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WHAT'S THE DIFF? Jonas Wood's Drawings, Jonas Wood's Paintings

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WHAT'S THE DIFF? Jonas Wood's Drawings, Jonas Wood's Paintings

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In his current exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York, the Los Angeles painter Jonas Wood (b. 1977) has set aside a room adjacent to two other enormous galleries hung with paintings to display a series of goauches whose subject matter and compositions correspond exactly to those paintings.
In interviews over the years, Wood repeated emphasizes the importance of drawing to his  painting practice.  "I look to drawing first," he said a few years ago while explaining how he makes a painting. "I’ll take a picture of the painting and print it out on drawing paper, get the colored pencils and try to figure some shit out..." Drawing, and the collages that he makes from pieces of them, are integral to his process of composition. As he stated bluntly in 2010:
"I make paintings from drawings. I make collages and make paintings and drawings from them."
Wood does not usually exhibit those works on paper where the composition of his paintings are figured out but works on paper- of a decidedly different sort are a regular features of his exhibitions. At Gagosian, the motifs, colors and composition of Woods' highly finished drawings are exactly the same as his paintings. They are clearly end products, really copies of those paintings, albeit in a different medium, and at a smaller scale.
"For me most of my work is based on trying to make a painting." Wood said recently. "Drawings exist as drawings and collages as collages by themselves, and they can be shown outside of painting, but I have a painting practice." Lovers of his paintings will find their hallmark quirky compositions and smooth manufacture in these recent works on paper now on view in Chelsea. Lovers of drawing, might search Wood's oeuvre for those unseen works on paper, where, according to the artist himself, his paintings are born.

Jonas Wood. Gagosian Gallery, 555 W. 24th St. (through July 19)

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While not exactly a roman a clef, Andrew Durbin's new novel, MacArthur Park (2018) is clearly based on this millennial art critic's experience in the New York and Los Angeles art worlds in the past 5 years. Opening with a quote from Klaus Biesenbach about Hurricane Sandy, the author describes in detail alcohol-fueled Fire Island weekends, Bushwick morning hangovers, and several visits to Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett's artists' project/cult, "Mildred's Lane," in upstate New York.
Durbin is currently Senior Editor for Frieze America and his first- person narrative swings wildly from the wearied voice of a young, privileged literary sybarite to the even more wearied voice of a critic who knows (in all senses of the word) way, way too much about too many curators and artists.
MacArthur Park is not really about the art world. Rather, the art world serves a kind container for the loosely strung together narrative that follows a peripatetic narrator from nightclubs to museums to poetry readings. In one of his most telling passages, Durbin writes: "The art world is an unregulated economy that borrows from other economics — theory, poetry, and scientific research, in this case — to continually update its relationship to the world and, in acting as conduit for other (and all) disciplines, strives to become the clearest image of the world in which we may better see ourselves."  Interesting, but I don't buy it. I still think that the artists and art lovers, and above all, the art, define the world around us and not the other way around.

Much less enervating, is Randy Kennedy's Presidio, (2018) a Larry McMurtry-esque novel set in West Texas.  As many of you already know, until last year, Kennedy, now the editor of Ursula Magazine, a publication of Hauser & Wirth Gallery, was the much admired art feature writer at The New York Times.  Presidio is mercifully free of art world references; the only connection to contemporary art that I could detect was Kennedy's limpid descriptions of color and atmosphere, that, honed by his years writing about art, painted a word picture of his flat, dry, home town with beauty and precision. The novel revived my faith in ability of art critics to transition to fiction, and I recommend it.

Coming in the Fall: Mr. B, a novel by the curator and former director of the Moderna Museet, Daniel Birnbaum. According to Birnbaum, it is the story of his grandfather's travails and triumphs as a German Jew who immigrated to Sweden during WWII. I can't wait to read it!
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/stormy-weather-on-andrew-durbins-macarthur-park/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/books/review/randy-kennedy-presidio.html

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BELLWETHERS: The Culture of Controversy A New Series of Provocative Public Programs at TDC

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BELLWETHERS: The Culture of Controversy A New Series of Provocative Public Programs at TDC

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Beginning on May 21 and continuing every Tuesday evening at 6:30 p.m. through June 4, TDC will host a series of debates between our most important young thought leaders and critics on issues of vital importance to culture at the moment. Curated by Alison Gingeras, the three programs will examine hot button issues like the notion of "cancellation," of individuals and ideas, the pervasiveness of intellectual panic, and the phenomenon of the manifesto, now attached to everything from art exhibitions to podcasts.
These are ticketed events, but as Drawing Circle members, you and a guest will be happily comped. If you are interested, please contact me.

May 21, 6:30 p.m.
MANIFESTO: featuring Chiara Bottici, Sam McKinniss, Adrian Matejka and Audrey Wollen
May 28, 6:30 p.m.
PANIC: featuring Andrea Long Chu and Jamieson Webster
June 4, 6:30 p.m.
CANCELLATION: featuring Anna Khachiyan and Natasha Stagg

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What I mean is, WHEN are you going to go to Chinatown? If you are even mildly fed up with big art in big galleries, and if you wonder if any artists, designers, etc.,  are doing anything experimental, then walk the extra three blocks or so to East Broadway. At 75 East Broadway, a shopping mall located directly under the elevated subway tracks, several galleries, a couple of boutiques and the home office of Downtown for Democracy have rented storefront spaces among stalls and storefronts selling cheap clothes, household goods, cigarettes, toys, lighters, and even fruit. On the second floor, you can find TRAMPS, a gallery sponsored by Michael Werner Gallery and run by Parinaz Mogadassi, a director at Michael Werner in London and the companion of the painter Peter Doig. In a series of small, empty glass-walled booths, Mogadassi places works by enormously well known artists; last Fall she featured paintings by Kai Althoff; now, color photos by Philip Lorca di Corcia are displayed, one to a room, over half a dozen spaces. Joining Tramps, is another gallery, OCD Chinatown and the creatively titled Philosophical Investigation Agency, a storefront "consulting" business opened by artworld-adjacent philosopher Todd Altschuler, which offers "idea therapy." If art and philosophy isn't enough, the ultra hip design brand Eckhaus Latta has a pop up shop, as does the vintage clothing store Templo.
Wander West on East Broadway and down the basement stairs at number 32 you can visit Doyers, the smallest (I reckon it can't be more than 50 square feet) and most secret and most brilliant experimental artspace in New York. It is the brainchild of curator Olivia Shao who has been doing the project- albeit in a couple of different Chinatown spaces- for more than a decade. Her shows aren't advertised except by word of mouth, and the space is only open on Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 6 p.m. In the hope that visitors come to experience the objects and not the novelty of a show in a Chinatown basement, no photography is allowed. A new group show, curated by Nicole Klagsbrun opens next Sunday, May 19. I can't wait.
https://www.trampsltd.com

https://www.philosophicalinvestigationagency.com

https://eckhauslatta.com

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What I Found at Frieze  and Why I Could Not Take it Home

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What I Found at Frieze  and Why I Could Not Take it Home

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In exchange for a corporate sponsorship for The Drawing Center, I am curated the Spotlight sections of Frieze, New York that recently closed, and will curate Frieze Masters, London, that will open on October 3. Spotlight is a series of monographic displays of the work of lesser known artists from the 20th century, or lesser known bodies of work by well known 20th century artists. Spotlight in New York featured several booths which displayed the work of 20th century women painters, including Joan Brown, at George Adams Gallery. George Adams has represented Brown and her estate for almost 50 years, and at Spotlight, they chose to feature a series of four heretofore unexhibited self-portraits from 1983, all of which included the motif of the monkey in one way or another (and all of which were sold at the Fair's preview). In a corner of the booth, there was a small drawing entitled "Self Portrait with Monkey Mind." If I were to choose what to take home from Frieze, NY, 2019, this would be it. Unfortunately, it is part of the family's collection, and it was not for sale.

Joan Brown
Self Portrait with Monkey Mind (1983)

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DEPARTMENT OF LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY

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DEPARTMENT OF LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY

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Any of us who have a passing knowledge of 20th century American art history are familiar with the American Precisionist painter Joseph Stella (1887-1946) whose quasi Futurist depictions of Brooklyn Bridge (1920) with its cables shooting out like lines of force, are emblems of the Italian movement's American version. Stella began his painting career as a realist, but an extended sojourn in Italy and Paris from
1911 - 1913 exposed him to Cubism and Futurism and helped him forge his own, industrial version of these thoroughly Modern languages that he deployed to glorify the engineering feats of 20th century New York. It is not uncommon for art history to focus on a specific period of an artist's career, casting aside earlier or later work because it doesn't fit into the historical narrative. But what happens if an artist is doing something very different at the very same time they were making their signature works? We have exactly this case with Stella. Attracted to, and puzzled by what seemed to be a minimalist collage made from soot coated paper at Peter Freeman's booth at TEFAF, I was stunned discover that it was a work from 1920 by none other than Joseph Stella. Turns out, that Stella met Picasso and Boccioni in his Paris sojourn, but he also met Marcel Duchamp, who continued to be a friend when the latter moved to New York in 1915. There is little doubt that as Stella was imbibing Cubo- Futurism, he was also learning about Dada and Kurt Schwitters which is the context for this collage series. These delicate, stripped down collages made from found pieces of soot-stained paper are little-known evidence that this artist was so much more that American art history has heretofore allowed him to be.

Joseph Stella
Untitled (1920)
Soiled paper, collage, mounted on colored paper
12 3/4 x 9 3/4"

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MEET EMILY KING  design historian, and guest curator  

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MEET EMILY KING  design historian, and guest curator  

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In Spring, 2021, The Drawing Center will present "A New Grammar of Ornament," an exhibition that traces the history of ornament in all forms of design including fashion, graphic design, and even patisserie (!)  from the 19th century to the present day. Our guest curator is Dr. Emily King, a design scholar from London with a deep knowledge of design history and a great love of art. Emily has curated exhibitions in New York before, most recently at Artist's Space, and has published many articles, and several monographs on modern design and designers.

Here's Emily, pictured on the left with the great painter TOMMA ABTS at lunch after a visit to TDC during the first week in May.