In the Midst of Much

Journal entry for 07 Jun 2011 | Link

Writing energies have gone into other projects over the last week. What started out its life as a short blurb ended up as a full-on opinion piece at the New York Sun.

A couple of weeks ago your author noted that appreciation of the painter Jules Olitski has largely been conducted as a proxy war against the critic Clement Greenberg. You may have witnessed related hostilities in late April, when Ken Johnson wrote about "Anthony Caro on the Roof" at the Metropolitan Museum for the New York Times. "The authoritarian, arch-formalist critic Clement Greenberg was an admirer, friend and studio consultant," he remarked. "You wonder if the influences of friends like Greenberg and [critic Michael] Fried, who dismissed most new art of the ’60s as merely entertaining novelties, may have helped to suppress Mr. Caro’s more imaginatively innovative side and to inflate a more grandiose ambition." We don't, but we understand that Johnson does.

Shortly thereafter my review of the Leon Kossof exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash appeared at Artcritical.

Leon Kossoff’s paintings at Mitchell-Innes & Nash show the octogenarian British painter continuing to work in portraiture and landscape, with a brush loaded with oils as if they were tar, favoring a palette based on a sooty, British gray. In that, there has hardly been any change in his work for decades. But comparing these works to those in the gallery in 2009, which were from the period 1957 to 1967, one can see a brightening. He has admitted green into the paintings, a verdancy unmixed with ashes as would have been his wont fifty years ago.

I then filed my second piece for Art in America. The first has not yet appeared—typically, the time between submission and publication is three months at the art glossies, as one has to lay them out and print them on something called "paper." Lastly, and only because of much prompting by my studio mate, I'm applying for this cycle of the The Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, at which I am engaged presently. I've lost track of how many times I've applied for this thing in the past and decided that enough was enough last year. But thanks to collegial encouragement ("This is your year!" she says), I'm submitting a project that has been on my mind for a couple of years and might do anyway, and thus lying back and thinking of England, as it were.

A Reading

Clement Greenberg's ~~curatorial~~ juror's statement (thank you Ryan) for the Third Annual Exhibition of Southwest American Art at the Oklahoma Art Center in Oklahoma City, 1961, in its entirety:

Man is fallible.