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American Drawings in New York
Robert Zaller
The tiger, the zebra and the free spirit
ROBERT ZALLER
It’s been a good season for drawings so far in New York, with a major show of Philip Guston yet to come. Meanwhile, there was an hors d’oeuvre in the form of a pairing of him with Jasper Johns, as well as a nearby show of Stuart Davis sketchbooks at the Hollis Taggart Galleries.
Stuart Davis (1894-1964) is now best remembered as a WPA muralist of the 1930s (a young Guston worked in the same program as well). As we can now ruefully appreciate, the Great Depression was the best thing that ever happened to America’s infrastructure, what with the roads, bridges and dams that paved the way for the country’s great westward expansion after World War II. It was also a good thing for the arts, as government, for the first time, subsidized popular theater and public works. Davis, always an urban artist, thrived in this environment, and the jazzy American variant of Cubism he’d developed in the 1920s, with its bright colors and energetic movement, served him well. No one covered a wall better.
The candor of a first sketch
Davis started as a late disciple of the Ashcan School, and, like Guston, he was attracted from the beginning to comic strips and other manifestations of popular art, not to mention the detritus of everyday life. A fine 1922 ink portrait of James Joyce (the year of Joyce’s Ulysses) is the last “realist” work in the present show, but, as his art became more abstract, it also became more interestingly democratic. Freed from the tyranny of the observed scene, Davis could juxtapose objects as his fancy dictated, bringing their formal properties into happy and frequently overlapping relation to one another.
Even in apparently abstract compositions such as Configuration (1932), the presence of the object (again, as in Guston) was never far from the surface. The sketchbooks show Davis at his freshest and most direct, winningly candid as only first thoughts can be (but no less shrewd and sophisticated for that). Davis’s line grew freer and looser as the years progressed, and late Matisse was a presence, too.
There’s a difference, though, between working in a tradition and being derivative. American Cubism at its best exudes a breezy energy, an ease of association that differs immediately from its French model; and some of its best is in Stuart Davis.
A mismatch between a tiger and a zebra
Leo Castelli’s modest show of Philip Guston, Jasper Johns is an example of the faddish pairing of different artists, of which the joint exhibit of Turner and Hopper in Washington is the prime current specimen. I can think of many interesting ways to juxtapose Guston and Johns, but the rationale of the present show defeats me. Apart from depicting some of the same objects— wide-open eyes, detached arms and footsoles, dangling wristwatches— there is nothing these eight Gustons from 1969-1980 have to tell me about the eight by Johns from 1982-1996, since they represent not only two private systems of iconography but two entirely different levels of quality.
To put it bluntly, the Gustons knock Johns right off the walls. Their Klan heads, clashing shields, and ominous clocks exude menace, energy, and authority in equal and interchangeable measure, a roiling dreamscape that wells up from some of the darkest springs of the American psyche. Beside them, Johns’s modest, slightly decadent ruminations (a touch of Kubin in some of them) seem bland and fey. There’s something unfair about it, like a mismatch between a tiger and a zebra. Johns is certainly a master, and can show to advantage in most any company. Caged with these Gustons, though, he can only be mauled.
ROBERT ZALLER
It’s been a good season for drawings so far in New York, with a major show of Philip Guston yet to come. Meanwhile, there was an hors d’oeuvre in the form of a pairing of him with Jasper Johns, as well as a nearby show of Stuart Davis sketchbooks at the Hollis Taggart Galleries.
Stuart Davis (1894-1964) is now best remembered as a WPA muralist of the 1930s (a young Guston worked in the same program as well). As we can now ruefully appreciate, the Great Depression was the best thing that ever happened to America’s infrastructure, what with the roads, bridges and dams that paved the way for the country’s great westward expansion after World War II. It was also a good thing for the arts, as government, for the first time, subsidized popular theater and public works. Davis, always an urban artist, thrived in this environment, and the jazzy American variant of Cubism he’d developed in the 1920s, with its bright colors and energetic movement, served him well. No one covered a wall better.
The candor of a first sketch
Davis started as a late disciple of the Ashcan School, and, like Guston, he was attracted from the beginning to comic strips and other manifestations of popular art, not to mention the detritus of everyday life. A fine 1922 ink portrait of James Joyce (the year of Joyce’s Ulysses) is the last “realist” work in the present show, but, as his art became more abstract, it also became more interestingly democratic. Freed from the tyranny of the observed scene, Davis could juxtapose objects as his fancy dictated, bringing their formal properties into happy and frequently overlapping relation to one another.
Even in apparently abstract compositions such as Configuration (1932), the presence of the object (again, as in Guston) was never far from the surface. The sketchbooks show Davis at his freshest and most direct, winningly candid as only first thoughts can be (but no less shrewd and sophisticated for that). Davis’s line grew freer and looser as the years progressed, and late Matisse was a presence, too.
There’s a difference, though, between working in a tradition and being derivative. American Cubism at its best exudes a breezy energy, an ease of association that differs immediately from its French model; and some of its best is in Stuart Davis.
A mismatch between a tiger and a zebra
Leo Castelli’s modest show of Philip Guston, Jasper Johns is an example of the faddish pairing of different artists, of which the joint exhibit of Turner and Hopper in Washington is the prime current specimen. I can think of many interesting ways to juxtapose Guston and Johns, but the rationale of the present show defeats me. Apart from depicting some of the same objects— wide-open eyes, detached arms and footsoles, dangling wristwatches— there is nothing these eight Gustons from 1969-1980 have to tell me about the eight by Johns from 1982-1996, since they represent not only two private systems of iconography but two entirely different levels of quality.
To put it bluntly, the Gustons knock Johns right off the walls. Their Klan heads, clashing shields, and ominous clocks exude menace, energy, and authority in equal and interchangeable measure, a roiling dreamscape that wells up from some of the darkest springs of the American psyche. Beside them, Johns’s modest, slightly decadent ruminations (a touch of Kubin in some of them) seem bland and fey. There’s something unfair about it, like a mismatch between a tiger and a zebra. Johns is certainly a master, and can show to advantage in most any company. Caged with these Gustons, though, he can only be mauled.
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