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Big, Bold, and What Else?
John Haberin New York City
Sonia Gechtoff and Naotaka Hiro
Sensory Poetics: Collecting Abstraction
Once, they say, painting had to be colorful, big, and bold. Most of all, it had to be painting and nothing else.
Abstract art of the 1950s has taken its share of hits, almost from its inception. Even then, Sonia Gechtoff wanted less and more. She found waves of color in paint itself, but also in waves, and it has cost her recognition that she is finding only now. Naotaka Hiro is so drawn to big gestures that they take him personally into the canvas, before bidding a none too hasty retreat. 
Is that too much, too little, or just right? Hiro gives it his best, but Gechtoff shows how it is done.
For all the criticism of Modernism over the years, the Guggenheim Museum is still collecting abstraction. No surprise there, not for an institution that began as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Even now, a show along the ramp returns to Wassily Kandinsky—stressing his last years, when he had freed himself from anything else. More recent acquisitions in a tower gallery lack, thankfully, his busy, eccentric late compositions. Yet they are all, the museum insists, "a response to the constraint of Minimalism." Solomon R. Guggenheim could well have embraced them all.
To the sea again
When Sonia Gechtoff looked at abstraction, she saw the sea—unless, of course, it was the other way around. Born in 1926, she admired the postwar art of Clyfford Still. She took up his jagged colors and jet black, pushing to the very edge of a canvas only to break off before they arrive. Daylight blues come up against a rectangular border within a painting's larger rectangle, only to start again. Dark matter emerges from fiery red. And yet, like Arthur Dove before her, Gechtoff keeps returning to the sea.
"Water Memories" at the Met opens with a twist—not the Native American art of the show's title, in all its traditions and contemporary vitality, but Dove's Reaching Waves from 1929. He was among the first Americans to embrace abstract painting, along with Patrick Henry Bruce. Yet he got there through the Connecticut seacoast that he called home. This is not a textbook view of American Modernism. It took Gechtoff, though, to bring the epic scale and perpetual motion of Abstract Expressionism. Where Dove might well have called his blue-gray patterns Standing Waves, art for her refuses to sit still.
I had come from Hiro, with similar colors and gestures to hers. Does he put himself at the center of everything, as his way of keeping abstract art alive? Could there be a better way? Just up the street in Tribeca, his gallery shares a space with two other galleries, and all three sponsor Gechtoff. Her show runs from 1958 almost to her death in 2018, lending a renewed vitality to landscape and formalism alike. But then Clyfford Still, appropriately enough, always has me thinking of cliffs.
With that kind of endurance, why is she not better known? Most obviously, she was a woman in macho times and a Bay Area artist when history itself seemed to run through New York, where in due course she settled. She still prefers Still's irregular edges to such signs of all-over painting as detail in Jackson Pollock and painting as an expanse of color in Mark Rothko. Besides, "pure painting" could aspire to the Romantic sublime of the Hudson River School, but never to landscape itself. Gechtoff may seem caught between realism and abstraction, long after the first had fallen from grace. And she kept at it, when painting itself was declared dead.
Dove deserves a pass, for he painted back when and knew at first hand the winter tides. And his mix of oil and aluminum is forward looking as well, to copper and aluminum paint for Frank Stella. Gechtoff had her imagery, too, and it took her through more than one breakthrough. At first, impasto in oil articulates the painting's surface while scattering points of white akin to Dove's sea foam. And then the paint thins, in acrylic and graphite, to accommodate the broader motion and transparency of waves and art itself. Paint is always in motion, even as the painted image is forever still.
If that recalls Hiroshige (cited in a work's title) and Japanese painting, painting as calligraphy inspires Pollock, too. Just as important, it brings out her dedication to abstraction. One sees the colors before the waves, and one leaves with those colors firmly in mind. One also leaves with a firmer sense of celestial fire and ocean darkness. Her nested forms bring out a painting's structure and surface as well. They take her closer to the eclectic realism of abstraction today.
Everything he has
Abstract Expressionism has a thrilling but questionable legacy, the belief that one must throw everything one has at a canvas. Naotaka Hiro outdoes Jackson Pollock himself—not just leaning over a canvas to leave his handprints and his drips, but entering a painting in order to make it. 
He comes close enough on video, adding mark after mark as if drawing were an endurance contest, with explosive sounds. His paintings, too, are performance art, only there he directs the violence at himself. He lay beneath a work, as if constrained by its weight even as he reached upward to complete it. The cords threading through and dangling on the floor might have bound him to its fabric.
Those circular holes in life-size plywood panels? They come in pairs for a reason: he had to reach through them, and he alludes to that when, every so often, his strong colors give way to flesh tones. It cannot have been easy, and he wants you to know how far he had to lean and how many media he applied. His patterns suggest loose clothing as well, further smeared with paint. If anything goes these days, it does not go without a struggle.
If this sounds maudlin, he throws in a sculpture cast from his naked body, and he wants you to know how long and uncomfortably he had to hold the pose. I hate to think that he is as gaunt in person, and I am almost certain that he has not lost his right arm. But such, I suppose, are the risks. Still, Hiro is not on one long ego trip. He is not visible in his paintings—or, beyond his right hand, in video. The play between presence and absence enlivens Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and their peers, too.
This could be a parody of arte povera, the movement in Italy, from the artist's poor soul to the cuts through a painting. It has, though, broader fields of pale color anchored in red, yellow, and black. The holes enforce a symmetry that the surfaces only approach. They end up big, bold, and almost restrained, without the impulse to throw in obvious brushwork or imagery. Graphite and crayon give shape to the acrylic and fabric dye. Now if only he could keep out of the painting long enough to eat.
The revival of painting keeps raising discomforting questions, about what is original and whether that matters one bit. I see more abstract art, often appealing, than I could ever describe. It can push toward the self-referential, but not as postmodern critique. Zander Blom, say, overlays black and white in the shape of brushstrokes, with thick curves for bristles. As with David Reed, they give the illusion of what they are, while appearing to dart in and out of the surface. They also provide a cover for black drips on white.
Say what you will, Blom is having fun—which one cannot always say about an older generation. Yet they, too, could use art to catalogue and to codify its making. Think of de Kooning between women and abstraction. Think of Louise Bourgeois between painting and sculpture. It is not that anything goes, although nothing is excluded. It is that a painting has a time scale apart from the clock, with time for growth and change.
Collecting constraints
Did Wassily Kandinsky, Mr. Guggenheim's most treasured artist, make geometry float freely in a space all its own? Zilia Sánchez, in "Collecting Abstraction" at the Guggenheim, fabricates an off-white shape with a smooth dark peak, like a canoe that has lost its oars and direction. It looks both more and less like a painting as it hangs on the wall. And then on video it bobs on the surface of actual waters. Sánchez keeps casting it into the deep, but it keeps returning home, much like the museum. But then she herself, in the work's title, can say that I Am an Island.
The Guggenheim has acquired all ten works by ten artists in the last ten years. All date since 1970, when Senga Nengudi had her own Water Composition—pointed plastic bags of colored water, suspended from the twin peaks of a rope and spreading apart on the floor. Most date from just the last few years, but no matter. Nothing, the show reassures one, need ever change. Did Nengudi make her mark with rope compositions that respond to their own weight? The very next year, Jorge Eielson finished knotting bright yellow fabric to yellow canvas, and in 2009 Sonia Gomes was still salvaging textiles for colored rope bobbing or spiraling its way across the wall.
One might pay the show the highest compliment by saying that it looks more like a themed show, but with what theme? It reflects a resurgence of painting as an interdisciplinary art, where sculpture and video fit right in. Yet it excludes hints of representation—because the Guggenheim still believes in abstraction with all its heart. Seven of ten are women and half from the Caribbean and South America, even as Cecilia Vicuña probes diversity and identity in a show down the ramp. Politics, though, is out of the question. The museum hits instead on a vague but sensitive main title, "Sensory Poetics."
Sensation is, without question, the order of the day, as art pushes out and back from the wall, like white limestone by Jessica Dickinson. Virginia Jaramillo sticks to stained canvas, but she insists on its presence by turning it in the process, so that stains spread in every direction. It is also about her presence, as Birth of Venus. Still, poetry is in the eye of the beholder, and text painting is conspicuous by its absence. The Guggenheim cites jazz as an influence, but just try to hear it. Better let sound art fall to Vicuña's predecessor on the ramp, Jennie C. Jones.
When it comes down to it, the museum is just holding steady. Let others rehang their collection, like MoMA with its "fall reveal" or the Brooklyn Museum its American art. Let the Met add a room for Afrofuturism and the Morgan Library a greener garden. The Guggenheim is happy just to bridge late Modernism and today's revival of Minimalism. (Another tower gallery brings back the most provocative of Post-Minimalists, Eva Hesse.) In company like this, any one constraint opens onto another.
Vivian Suter exhibits staining, like Jaramillo, but on four unstretched paintings with memories of the sun and rain of the Americas. (She titles it Three Artworks, but never mind.) Carlito Carvalhosa molds her shapes like Sánchez, but in a series of red geometry right out of Minimalism. Her rows also have a counterpart in handmade squares by Stanley Whitney. After the textile paintings, one can almost mistake them for iron-on patches—and an echo of Gee's Bend quilting. They, in turn, resemble riffs on cutouts in paint by Caroline Kent. This is not just Kandinsky's abstraction.
Sonia Gechtoff ran at Bortolami, Andrew Kreps, and Kaufmann Repetto through August 26, 2022, Naotaka Hiro at Bortolami through August 26, Zander Blom at Signs and Symbols through July 30, and "Sensory Poetics: Collecting Abstraction" at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through October 17.