Three New York gallery shows

Sublime convergence in three New York galleries

ROBERT ZALLER

Three gallery shows have brought the New York art season to a superb end— insofar as New York’s art season ever ends. Two have received considerable and well-deserved publicity: the Claude Monet show at Pace-Wildenstein— which, with some 60 works spanning Monet’s entire career, is of a scope and quality that few museums could pull off; and “Van Gogh and Expressionism” at the Neue Galerie, an excellently curated exhibit that demonstrates Van Gogh’s galvanic effect on early 20th Century German art.

But a smaller and far more radical show, Richard Feigen’s “Sublime Convergences,” illustrates how much of the most exciting thinking about art these days occurs at the gallery level.

The dynamic Renaissance

“Sublime Convergences” displays 14th-Century North Italian religious painting side by side with American “spiritual” abstractionists, and makes the case for seeing in these two obviously different painterly styles a deeper kinship and a common sensibility. Quattrocento art, whose Gothic formality slowly evolves toward the freer, more dynamic style of the Renaissance, is every bit as conceptually challenging as that of our own (recent) time; and, refreshed by its juxtaposition with the likes of Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Barnet Newman, and others, the work of such masters as Taddeo Gaddi, Bernardo Gaddi, and Lorenzo Monaco reveals both new complexity and ancient vitality.

There isn’t any heavy critical essay making the kind of jargon-ridden critical comparisons you’d expect with a show of this sort— just Richard Feigen himself, remarking that “All art is essentially abstract,” a point that’s obviously true even if it’s really far from obvious. Feigen’s moderns, too, draw sustenance from their Italian forebears, and the whole of this modest but exhilarating display— mostly contained in a single room— shows, like few other exhibits within memory, how works of art can spark off one another when their deep structure is brought out by a discerning eye.

Van Gogh's influence on the Germans

The Neue Galerie both calls itself a gallery and bills itself as a museum, and it’s a bit of both, since it uses a fine permanent collection of early 20th-Century German and Austrian art as the basis of rotating exhibits. In “Van Gogh and Expressionism,” the objective is not to set seemingly disparate works side by side, but to trace straightforwardly and compellingly Van Gogh’s enormous influence on the German and Austrian Expressionists. Some lesser-known German figures, notably Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluf, are forcefully represented, but the principal figure is Egon Schiele, whose The Artist’s Bedroom in Neulengbach (1911), set beside Van Gogh’s 1889 The Bedroom, shows not merely influence but deliberate homage. Van Gogh himself is generously represented with both well- and lesser-known work; most notable among the latter is the Corner of a Garden with Flowers and Butterflies, a close study whose complexity is worthy of Durer.

The excitement of the Monet exhibit was not only that it was the artist’s first substantial New York show in decades— how could that have been?— but that, with so many treasures unearthed from private hands, it was in many ways a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The early Claude was particularly well represented in all his fascinating dialogue with his elder contemporary, Edouard Manet. Here, too, influence was apparent; but as with the Feigen show, something else besides: a genuine reciprocity, the appreciation of one genius for another.

As for me, I can’t wait for the fall.