Looking Backward

John Haber
in New York City

The 2006 National Academy Annual and Bo Bartlett

Alina Grasmann and Victor Burgin

Not every artist has to break new ground. Even when artists tell old stories, they can take risks. And even when they play it safe, they can do it with a certain style.

Every so often, exhibitions find some remaining mileage in rather conservative vehicles. The National Academy Museum Annual holds onto the assurance that painting by the rules still rules, well after the revival of painting should have put that to rest. And Bo Bartlett keeps nudging academic art past nineteenth-century rules Together, they ask what kind of conservatism makes sense in art that struggles to find new challenges. What defines conservative—an academy of fine art or a sober realist at home in one? I may have mixed feelings about all of them, but often so do they.

Bartlett points to a new relevance for tradition—not just in his skill, which others have matched or surpassed, but in his Surrealism. Edward Hopper painted an actual house in 1925, a railroad cutting against its luxuriance and across its base. I am not so sure about Alina Grasmann and Victor Burgin today. Is the goal of a railroad to connect people? They and Hopper alike invoke solitude, in real and imagined worlds. And that blend of reality and the imagination is what makes some who value older art anything but conservative.

This year's model

Sick of the gift shops and calendars? Exhausted by yet another art fair or shopping weekend for the rich in Chelsea? Hate the thought of another survey of emerging artists at MoMA PS1 or Harlem, open studios and "Open House" to all of Brooklyn, Biennales and Biennials, and more? The National Academy Museum goes the Whitney one better—with its 181st Annual. Yes, that means every year now for 181 years. Its well over one hundred works might bill themselves as the anti-Biennial.

The contrast begins with the method of selection. The Annual represents a committee decision, packed closely into its narrow, four-story Fifth Avenue mansion. (I want a winding stairwell like theirs.) Make that three committees, counting one for award winners. Where the Whitney pays its dues to America and now even Europe, the Academy's artists generally have ties to the New York area. And then the Academy takes just one work apiece.

It becomes a profile not of two pairs of critical eyes and art now, but an institution. Where the Whitney biennial often shuns established artists apart from their influence on emerging stars, the Annual has few youngsters and one eighty-year-old. Work dates back years. It draws on a wide range of galleries, but largely established ones. And where the Whitney might scorn two-dimensional media, the Annual includes little sculpture and just one short video. Nothing spills far enough into a room to pass for installation. Perish the thought.

An Academy Annual still believes in traditional genres, including abstraction, kept safely apart. It values art unshaken by crisis. That makes sense, given its divided mission. It has a school dominated by academicians, a distinguished roster of invited "members," and a museum that is definitely finding its identity. A show of F. E. Church fit the dilemma perfectly. It saw him at his most quirky, but also as a great American painter.

A residual conservatism pays off. Donald Baechler downplays his pop-culture references in favor of subdued colors and a skull that makes frightening eye contact. Thomas Noskowski's dashes build toward color, almost like Morse code without a message. Jonathan Lasker gives oil squiggles the informality and visceral color of crayon, and white acrylic from Rochelle Feinstein almost fades into canvas before one's eyes. In Phong Bui's hands, a Sol LeWitt wall drawing appears to suffer a nervous breakdown. I had fewer surprises with the representational art, but views of the 2004 MoMA garden extension by Donald Richardson could pass for landscape painting.

The rare forays into three dimensions hint at what else is left out. In Kiki Smith's white porcelain, Alice in Wonderland's extended arms and open palms seem to fend off her dreams. Cordy Ryman extends the corner of a room into an alternative architecture, and Lynda Benglis perverts her lava-like bronze into a laugh-out-loud freestanding fountain. In the sole video, Maren Hassinger dares one to discern blackness from blackface. I do not dare to ask a show like this for more direct reflections of artistic and social realities. At least, however, I could enjoy pretending that art had stood still, back when I thought I understood it.

The American way

I reviewed Bo Bartlett a week too soon. I had given a talk at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on "What Was Realism?" Because Bartlett was about to open nearby, I took my final examples from him. I had little by which to judge, beyond a sneak peak into his New York gallery. Did I get it right, assuming such a question makes sense when it comes to art? Not exactly, but Bartlett keeps evolving anyhow, toward a dark undercurrent of the American tradition.

All critics should review a show that they have not seen. It breeds humility. Besides, it offers practice in playing the glib art-world referee, just like critics for the weekend papers. When it comes to Bartlett, though, a quick take is out of the question. He may seem like a throwback, but what does it mean after Modernism and Postmodernism even to talk of conservative? Bartlett could easily pass for a student at the National Academy, but he could well appear among earlier American artists as the real thing.

My talk explored how realism came to serve as a criterion for painting, especially at academic institutions like that one, and the varied aims that such a criterion has encompassed over the centuries. I did not promise a social history of art so much as how a social history of how art became possible. I ended with a cliché—the rootlessness of contemporary life, including how people have abandoned the cities and rural communities that long supplied the subject matter for realism. Think of great American art from Hudson River landscapes to the urban scene. While postwar abstraction aspired to new definitions of realism, traditional forms felt the pressure to represent something new, too—a world of neither natural light nor street lamps in the fog of night, but rather a uniformity that sees them all in the light of a TV screen. In late work by Edward Hopper and Pop artists like James Rosenquist, Americans are bowling alone, eating alone, and having sex alone, but representation, too, is changing.

Bartlett occupies a place between the American scene and Surrealism. It is a place, too, between academic art and rebellion, nostalgia and irony. His even sunlight, subdued color, and tendency toward "face painting" recall many an old-fashioned art class. Yet he uses those features to assert a distance between painting and immediate vision. Seeing a man and his son after reeling in the big one, I asked to consider them a happy family portrait—or maybe American Gothic, but with the wife replaced by a dead fish. His latest show brings his Surrealism closer than ever to the surface.

In the years since, Bartlett's light has grown dim. People dress in darker clothing, like men in topcoats and hats escorting a woman toward an unseen fate. They prefer the cover of evening, like a group enacting a lynching or a man posing in his bathrobe like a sleepwalker. When they do not stare rigidly forward, they often turn entirely away. They move slowly, if at all, as in a ritual or a dream. The men in trench coats lean at an odd angle, and one hardly knows whether their strict parallel belongs to a police state or a dance.

Their clothes make me think of René Magritte. Like Magritte's suits and bowler hats, they situate the threat amid not just fears of terrorism and warrantless searches, but the banality of everyday life. Most often still, when Bartlett reaches for prewar Modernism, he has something grander in mind. He claims that the composition of his lynching derives from Guernica. Maybe, but then the lynching leaves entirely behind serious considerations of race. Still, he does what my listeners in Philadelphia worried, rightly, that I had not—reflecting on the import and variety of realism as much as its subject matter.

Specific locations

Not that Alina Grasmann would want me to be certain of her realism, although she says that she bases all her oils on "specific locations." One interior has House by the Railroad right over the bed. Its Victorian grandeur seems all the stranger for the tower rising above its chimneys, gables, and attic windows. The bedroom feels lived-in by comparison, from the fine headboard and throw pillows to the open laptop on a newly made bed, but without a trace of whoever left it behind. Nothing, it seems, could disturb the cool shadows, perfect housekeeping, and pristine emptiness, not even near replicas of Hopper's house on the computer screen and out the window. They could belong to Edward Hopper, Google maps, or a hyperactive imagination.

"Based on" can cover all sorts of imaginings, and Grasmann chooses her remote locations for their associations with lies and fictions. The bedroom belongs to her Montauk Project, and Montauk, she notes, has spawned a novel by Max Frisch after actual events—and all sorts of conspiracy theories about secret government experiments. A second series, Sculpting in Time, took her to a planned community in the Arizona desert. It was to be not science fiction, but a utopia all the same. She researched both, meticulously, before her journey and detailed observations. Realism and Surrealism alike, she knows depend on that specificity. No wonder she brought a laptop.

There was always something surreal about Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island, even before it became a long-term escape from the pandemic in New York. Hopper aside, Grasmann's strangeness does not turn on art-historical mind games. It takes only sunlight, artificial lights, clean angles, and emptiness to carry her photorealism into another dimension. If people have left their eats, drinks, and clothing behind, it could have taken centuries to eliminate them or just another conspiracy. The Arizona series quotes Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel, like relief from the Arizona heat, but Bruegel has nothing on the view out a window. One cannot help seeing an echo of the circular window in a circular coffee table—or the circular lens that it would take to produce so great a panorama.

A black cat finds its way along the edge of a swimming pool and a raccoon down Main Street, near a shop for Italian ices. Another distant landscape has a house on fire, and it, too, seems less an immediate threat than a dark fiction. It recurs in a series of small paintings, not quite four inches on a side. (See, she really does have to get the details right before she can proceed.) A formal European garden on TV has to compete with outdoor views to either side, one as green as the other is dry. The flat screen also has to compete with good old-fashioned books, one of them open to another Bruegel.

Victor Burgin has his empty house, too, with the same combination of dated architecture, postmodern clarity, and photorealism. And he, too, is telling multiple stories over time. He speaks of his fascination with a Danish painter after a visit to London's Royal Academy, that bastion of conservatism in British art. He also confesses to a weakness for science fiction. (Got all that straight?) Oh, and the show opens with a text painting after an African American, Richard Wright.

The text speaks of a woman alone, and the remaining six works show an interior with little on the walls but their elegant molding. The title, Young Oaks, sounds like a quaint British name for an old mansion, and yet actual trees appear out of a window, in all their young greenery. Little changes from painting to painting beyond an item of two of furniture, such as unmatched desks. They could be the bare start of a future alternative reality. Burgin speaks further of a project, "Afterlife," that plants memories into human beings—much as the museum planted memories in him. The hazy light cannot erase the mansion's clarity, but just wait for this artist, too, to escape from New York.

jhaber@haberarts.com

The 181st Annual of the National Academy Museum through June 18, 2006, and Bo Bartlett at P.P.O.W. through May 27. Alina Grasmann ran at Fridman through January 5, 2021, and Victor Burgin at Cristin Tierney through December 19, 2020.