John Vincler’s column Brush Strokes examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. 

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), 1973. Collection of Aaron I. Fleischman © Vija Celmins, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

Open sea water seen from above. Star-filled skies. Stones. Gray after gray: from the graphite of pencils, charcoal on paper and its erasure, oil paint in layer after layer of deep, smooth near-black. Forays into ochre and midnight blues, the earthen tones of sand and stone, then returning seemingly always to gray. Before seeing the objects, works on paper, and paintings gathered together at the Met Breuer for the immense Vija Celmins’s retrospective, “To Fix the Image in Memory,” I had previously witnessed the gnostic perfection of the later paintings of ocean waves and night skies. The Breuer exhibition was the first time I was able to trace in person the artist’s development from the early paintings of objects and appliances in her studio (a hot plate, a fan, a lamp) to her distinctive late work. What I didn’t anticipate from this exhibition was the suggestion of utter desolation.

I should say that Vija Celmins paintings are not about this sense of foreboding. The artist has said, “I am not interested in telling stories.” And yet art exhibitions, career retrospectives in particular, do engage in storytelling. What is an exhibition but an essay written with objects in three dimensional space? Celmins’s biography and the sequence and development of her work proceed in an ordered and coherent fashion across two floors of the Breuer. Vija Celmins was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938, two years before the Soviet occupation. A decade after her birth, her family moved to the United States where they settled in Indiana. Clemens drew animals in her notebook in the back of the classroom while the teacher spoke in a still-unfamiliar foreign language, English. After earning her B.F.A. in Indiana, she headed to California as an art student in the M.F.A. program at University of California, Los Angeles, where she would find a studio near the beach outside of downtown Venice. Here the studio interior itself became her object of study, particularly the functional objects within it. The resulting paintings read more like portraits of inanimate objects than still lives. A lamp stares back at the viewer with its two bulbs, the orange coils of the heater and hot plate in two separate paintings glow with an almost palpable animal heat from their gray perches on the floor and a shelf respectively.

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John Vincler’s column “Brush Strokes” examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. 

Agnes Martin, Innocent Love, 1999. Dia Art Foundation; Partial gift, Lannan Foundation 2013. © 2019 Agnes Martin Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York.

I went into the woods for a while in order to think about the paintings of Agnes Martin. For most of the last fifteen years I’ve spent at least a week of the summer in a cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that has been in my partner’s family since the Depression. The cabin is a three-day drive from Brooklyn, with a dog and our two-year-old daughter all packed uncomfortably in our old Honda. Closing in on the cabin for the last mile or two, as our car bumped along the unmarked, sandy two-track passage better suited for a truck or Jeep, I looked at the two lines ahead of me, more path than road, and at the stand of tall and slender soft pines, like the ones the logging trucks carried up here to be pulped into paper products. The road and the trees made a sort of grid, I thought, as the forest, cleaved by the road, engulfed the car. Finally, with the evening sun low in the sky shimmering off the lake, the cabin came into view—the vertical lines of pines on the other side of the lake formed a horizontal band between the water below and the sky above.

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The paintings that burrow their way in are most often the ones I didn’t expect to impress me. Seven years ago, shortly after having moved to New York, I found myself in a room of Agnes Martin paintings at Dia:Beacon, the Dia Foundation’s museum of mostly minimalist late-twentieth century artworks in Beacon, New York. The museum is full of artists regularly found in modern art museums: the fluorescent light works of Dan Flavin, Donald Judd’s right-angled sculptural constructions, Richard Serra’s immense and weighty weathered metal forms. While I may nod to those with expectation and recognition, they mostly leave me cold. At Dia:Beacon, however, even the expected work of these artists wrested my attention differently. Their cold physicality seemed more matter-of-fact: constructions to be contemplated (or not) within an environment of quiet and light and openness. There is a hangar-like space with a row of enormous Serra sculptures you can walk within, rendering them poetic, elegant, and inviting when I expected them to be audaciously brooding. Strange that my favorite museum holds few of the works of my favorite artists. On my first visit, I would have counted among those only Louise Bourgeois. But after that visit, I would also include the work of the Canadian-born painter Agnes Martin.

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John Vincler’s column “Brush Strokes” examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. 

Mark Bradford, Black Venus, 2005. © Mark Bradford (courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth) Photo: Bruce White

Writing about art is often linked to the timely—the current exhibition, the just-released catalogue. The need for an immediate response makes fast what should be slow, and focusing on the continuously new can distort the experience of art. I want to attempt a subversion of this by thinking about the first time I saw the paintings of the Los Angeles–based artist Mark Bradford, now almost a decade ago. I want to revisit a moment before I thought I could write about art, to locate the moment when the looking deepened. There is a risk inherent in what I want to attempt here, primarily memory’s frailty: what have I forgotten and what have I embellished? My goal is to recollect not just the work of an artist but the moment when the way I thought about art changed.

In 2010, I was living in Akron, Ohio, working in a library housed in the windowless basement of a converted department store, organizing a neglected rare books collection. My partner Kate and I had met in Chicago, eloped to London where I attended a one-year graduate program that would result in a decade’s worth of student loan debt, returned for a quick stint in Chicago, and then moved to Ohio. In London, I had gone to the free art museums regularly, especially the Tate. Once in Ohio, I often visited Akron’s excellent small art museum, which was housed in a strangely radical contemporary building (a cantilevered postmodern glass-and-steel form embracing the central brick structure of Akron’s former central post office). The surprises in the permanent collection included Lee Bontecou, Yayoi Kusama, and Doris Salcedo. I began to travel regularly to continue my habit—to Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, to museum and gallery shows. When I learned of a debut museum show of a young painter previously unknown to me at the Wexner Center for the Arts, two hours away in Columbus, Ohio, I made a plan to see it soon after the opening.

I can still remember entering the space of the Mark Bradford exhibition and making my way to the long sliver of a gallery. The gently sloped floor moved me slowly upward into the expanse of the Wexner’s exhibition space. And I remember being surprised by the scale of Bradford’s work (both the size of the canvases and the number of them). I remember that most of the works seemed oddly and immediately familiar, uncannily legible from the corner of my eye, or from across the room, but then vast and perplexing upon closer examination. The show consisted primarily of paintings … but were they? They seemed to be works of collage, but the surfaces were more unified than what I thought collage usually suggested. They were composed of paper, string, and … what? Paint, glue, or both, all congealed, dried, then sanded smooth? The most immediate visual association was to a common enough urban spectacle: layers of wheat-pasted posters or billboards with their surfaces torn so as to reveal the strata of layers, creating happenstance compositions. In Bradford’s work, wear and neglect were rendered as a technique, striking an alchemical balance between chance and design. The apparent method of composition suggested removal as much as addition: the surfaces seemed scored and sanded away. I remember looking at a painting in profile, examining the edges of the canvas to get a sense of the layers and thickness beneath the surface. Bradford’s paintings seemed excavated from within some earlier incarnation of themselves.

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John Vincler’s new column “Brush Strokes” examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. 

Joan Mitchell, Sunflowers, 1990-1991 ©Estate of Joan Mitchell, Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York, Courtesy David Zwirner

Standing before a Joan Mitchell painting, as I tried to bring language to her colors and gestures, the first word that came to me was wingspan. As I walked past the nine paintings spread across two rooms at her recent exhibition, “I carry my landscapes around with me” at David Zwirner, I looked for the grand, arching strokes that regularly mark the oversize scale of her work. The term wingspan suggests a great bird or angel, but it occurs to me simply as shorthand for reach, like that of a star athlete: a tennis player’s serve, a baseball player’s windup, a basketball center’s blocking ability. (Almost every consideration of her work mentions the seemingly requisite detail that she was an accomplished figure skater in her youth.) Joan Mitchell was not unusually proportioned or exceptionally tall (a patient archivist from the foundation points me to a mid-60’s driver’s license that places her at 5’6”), but she brought an enormity to her painting, whether in individual gestures—juxtaposing the large and sweeping, with the small and delicate—or in the size of the canvases themselves. Most works in the Zwirner show measure between eight and ten feet in height. In my mind, the paintings are always linked to a series of images included with Linda Nochlin’s essay in the 2003 Whitney Museum Joan Mitchell catalog, which were meant to illustrate the woman artist as subject, not object: the famous 1950 Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock painting Autumn Rhythm in his East Hampton studio, with Pollock like a dancer leaning forward, brush in one hand, paint can in the other, arcing drips across his unstretched canvas on the floor; Cecil Beaton’s photograph for Vogue from the following year titled blankly Model in front of Jackson Pollock painting, showing a model in a strapless couture dress holding a pair of black gloves standing stiffly with a Pollock painting serving as the backdrop; and finally Rudy Burckhardt’s 1957 photograph of Joan Mitchell, feet planted firmly, facing her canvas Bridge, back to the viewer, her right arm stretched to its limit as she slashes horizontally at a height almost certainly exceeding six feet tall. This photograph of Mitchell documents a body’s limit from rootedness to extension. Standing there in a room surrounded by her work, I see clearly that through her painting, Mitchell made herself a giant.

I’ve been struggling with a question: why are Joan Mitchell’s paintings important now? Is it ahistorical to look at paintings from the last century with landscape as their subject and wonder if they portend something ominous? To closely examine a visual artist’s recorded view of a landscape from a half century, or even a few decades, ago is to begin looking for signs of change, degradation, hints of potential impending collapse. Joan Mitchell’s paintings are primarily documents of expression, capturing a memory or a feeling of a place, rather than depicting a specific landscape itself. Her method of painting channels the dynamic and fraught relationship between human making and the natural world, maintaining an element of struggle, even violence, underneath. Here in the paintings, a persistent force struggles against a threat of impending collapse, often culminating in an ecstatic result.

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