|
|
|
|
|
Laying It on Thick
John Haberin New York City
Leon Kossoff, Brenda Goodman, and Maja Lisa Engelhardt
In the course of a long career, Leon Kossoff could sure lay it on thick. So could Brenda Goodman in the course of hers, but they could not have been more different—unless, that is, paint has a life of its own. In both their hands, it sure does. Oh, and speaking of thickness and life, Maja Lisa Engelhardt finds a model for abstraction in a fertile ground of clay. Yet paint for all three could serve equally as figure and ground, and it brings their fragility to life.
Kossoff was quintessentially British, and his subjects were close to home. Like the artist, his family and his London already belong to history. Much younger and American, Goodman gets more intimate still and a great deal more in your face. Paint for her conveys the body, her body, at its most vulnerable and demanding. It brings her closer to the urgency of women artists today than to Kossoff's academicism, modesty, and modernity. Engelhardt in Denmark has both a sentimental and a clinical side, and they keep each other's excess in check. 
Out of the fog
Not three years past his death, a Chelsea gallery boils Leon Kossoff down to essentials—one unrelenting field of gray. How better to keep the focus on the people and city he knew best, and how better to let his brushstrokes speak for themselves? Predictable as it is, gray has its surprises at that. Kossoff's people are not in agony, for all their discomfort, and London is more than fog and gloom. And the thick brushwork is more luxuriant than clotted, even when one might mistake them for rags. It also conforms more closely to his subject than one might think.
To be sure, a portrait of his wife comes in bright colors, to the extent that anything in his art is exactly bright. Then, too, his most familiar paintings are anything but monochrome, much as I may remember them as gray. They have a dense variety of colors, from people in a crowded city, although mostly darker and frumpier shades than his wife's red chair and acid-yellow flesh. These highlights stem from their clothing, not sensuality and sunlight. This is postwar British art and not Post-Impressionism. It is Monday on the way to work, not Sunday in the park with George.
Still, the show welcomes its limits. Kossoff's death in 2019 prompted a healthy selection this past year of fifty-eight works at a London gallery (from an artist who had received a Tate retrospective long before), and most have gone instead to LA Louver in California. That leaves a revealing alternative in New York, in a space more than large enough to show it off. American portraits since Alice Neel are suitably economical but proud and assertive. He shares instead the literalism of Frank Auerbach, an old friend and one-time fellow student, and the expressionism of Francis Bacon, R. B. Kitaj, and Lucian Freud. In the words of the curator, Andrea Rose, they turn on "the interplay between external reality and internal perception."
Still, he seems far more down to earth than his compatriots, although a nude scene borrows its myth from Nicolas Poussin in the Baroque. His portraits stick almost entirely to family and friends and his urban scenes to the neighborhoods in which he lived. They are modest neighborhoods at that for so successful an artist. (Hey, I slept on the floor on my last trip to England in Bethnal Green, where he lived in the 1960s, well before the East End showed much in the way of promise.) They are also neighborhoods in transition, from not just gentrification, but perpetual motion. He lingers on the domes and brickwork of early modern London but also the tracks and traffic, and one dome caps a Y being torn down.
The people seem ordinary enough, too—and not just passers-by and commuters. Born in 1926, Kossoff must have already felt the perils of age. His father is not crying out, but nodding off. His streets are not all that wide and deep, but welcoming, from an artist who knew them well, too. His thick brush simply follows a train track and invites one to linger over its crossing. It also comes in ever so many shades of gray.
Still, this is the unreal city of T. S. Eliot under the brown fog of a winter's day, not an everyday metropolis. There is no getting around that generation of British art in all its literalism and exaggeration. Kossoff is never far from what you know. Up close, though, one can only feel at home with and challenged by his people and his streets. They will not sit still, even half asleep, and his sight lines diverge and collide. Yet that, too, helps relieve the pressure to think larger or smaller than life.
The prison house of paint
If I were Brenda Goodman, I would have feared at the very least for the studio floor. As it is, I feared for both myself and her. In a painting from 2004, she stands facing the viewer, arms to her sides, in what fans of a comic-book superhero would call a woman's power pose—and there is no doubt where her power lay. In place of Wonder Woman's ropes and shield, she holds three or four brushes in each hand, more than enough for each and every primary color. These brushes are loaded, and so is the image. But then her naked body, her chest itself thick with paint, is a provocation, too.
For all that, there are limits to a painter's power. Her arms hang down, relaxed but by no means ready for action, and the multiple brushes stand for her craft, but not with a halfway practical way of wielding it. Then, too, she has barely done so. Some red, yellow, and brown have gone into her crotch and wrists, like bad bruises. Some more stains the walls and traces the lines between walls and floor, although not at all completely, in a perspective that makes their bare presence all the more real. If this is a studio, it lacks for art, paint, other tools, a worktable, or a drop cloth. I really did worry for the floor.
If anything, it resembles a prison cell, at once too large and too small for comfort. Goodman is in isolation, maybe abused, long past a hero's toned body if she ever had one. Painting, it suggests, could be her empowerment or her prison. The sole other departure from bare off-white, covering her face, could be a hood or a mask. She could be keeping her identity to herself or awaiting execution. But then she will be her own judge, jury, and executioner.
Goodman is entitled by now to determine her fate. She began her career in her birthplace, Detroit, before moving east in 1976, two years after her first self-portrait. A small show has room for it—and for all those years of refusing undue anxiety or special powers. She has the back room, past Maria Nepomuceno from Rio. For her "Roda das Encantadas," or wheel of enchantment, Nepomuceno assembles tubes, fabric, and glistening spheres like ripe fruit into colorful installations. They might be stage sets for sock puppets made from actual striped socks.
Just what is the script, and what is the next act? Are the fruits temptations, with Nepomuceno on the way to your fall from paradise and her own? Where are the wheels, and where are they turning? I have my doubts, but the temptations are real. Goodman, though, refuses enchantment. Her nudity claims neither innocence nor a fig leaf. She has one subject—a refusal of painterly tradition when it comes to a woman's body, from Titian or Peter Paul Rubens to today, an embrace of paint, and a place between a woman's interior life and her exterior form.
It is particularly thick in work from the 1990s. In one, she holds another body in her arms in white, perhaps a child. Paint her also sticks out like shelves for still more clotted paint, like that of Kossoff and other Brits without all that tempting and ugly self-expression. More recently, as in the cell, Goodman foregoes the drips and shards of paint in favor of a more independent, decipherable image. She can also turn aside or turn her back on the viewer—in one case surrounded by paintings. She was up to something in her studio after all, all along.
Much fruit
Maja Lisa Engelhardt feels an affinity with the earth. That need not mean a lecture on politics and personal habits, much as I fear for climate change. Nor need it mean spiritualism, much as her past work held out mysteries. Its colorful brushwork staked out a place between pure abstraction and something larger than life. No, for her, the ground is a rich, musty soil that preceded her and will outlast her. It is simply clay. 
Engelhardt puts the affinity down to life in Denmark, where the earth is rich in clay. Put it down, too, to her growing sense of herself as an artist. Soil is little more than dirt, and thinking about it seems to have disciplined her imagery. New work on paper has a stronger focus around a broad vertical, with an equal emphasis on its color, shape, and texture. Some is close to black and white, and color, when it appears, may come as a surprise. It has a greater depth than first appears, and it seems almost to arise from within.
It takes time, too, to decide what one has seen. Clay, after all, can be dark and near monochromatic while full of color. Clay is also tactile, and the works on paper are monoprints, or the direct impression of an object, but what? One could mistake it for a human spine and marvel at its strength and vulnerability. Soil, though, is a place for growth, and this is grain. It becomes obvious in a painting, more than eleven feet across, where its seeds take shape and the golden yellow comes to life.
Clay, though, owes its productivity to its role as a repository, as things grow, die, and return from whence they came. Death, too, is implicit in taking grain from the soil, as material for art, and it may account for the temptation to see human anatomy. A monoprint often reverses figure and ground, bringing it close to an x-ray, with a clinical chill. The painting is itself close to monochrome. Its background reds and yellows, which take up much of it, are muter variants on the central colors. They hint at an entire landscape.
Weighty associations aside, clay is also an artist's material. Ceramics are hot these days, like fabrics, blurring the distinction between painting and the decorative arts. Sure enough, one last body of work treats fired clay very much as painting. It hangs on the wall, in low relief, with near parallel horizontal curves like rising seas. Engelhardt works it hard, too, just like paint and the printed object. She fires and refires it more than once before she is done.
The bright glazes and gentle curves seem straightforward, even garish, compared to the paintings and prints. While less successful, they contribute most by rounding out three distinct media—in the back room, where one may not expect them. Since her last show was "The Seventh Day," this one is "The Eighth Day," when, no doubt, she is no longer resting. The painting may come as a surprise, too, in its scale and by standing on its own after so many prints. All just smaller than an ordinary sheet of paper, they come off as a single series, evolving across the gallery walls from dark to light. But then if a grain die, returning to clay, it bringeth forth much fruit.
Leon Kossoff ran at Mitchell-Innes & Nash through March 5, 2022, Brenda Goodman and Maria Nepomuceno at Sikkema Jenkins through February 19, and Maja Lisa Engelhardt at Elizabeth Harris through April 9.