Alexander Kaletski, Soviet Movie Star Turned Artist, Leads the Way in Great Gallery Shows

New York’s dealers are showing better art than most museums.

I was in New York last week mostly for gallery visits and an interview for a book I’m writing on the dealer Allan Stone. Allan (1932–2006) was a dealer extraordinaire who discovered Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Estes, John Chamberlain, and many other struggling, striving young artists. He also represented Willem de Kooning and Joseph Cornell. His impact as a tastemaker was big, too, since he worked with so many collectors.

Allan was a visionary and a connoisseur with an eye for quality and innovation like no other. Art dealers are the unrecognized drivers of the art world. They stand with art historians, critics, curators, collectors, and the auction houses in molding visual culture. I plan to do my bit to give them their place in the sun.

I did see the incontinent, snoozy Jasper Johns retrospective at the Whitney. More on that after I’ve read the catalogue. I also saw a sublime show at the Asia Society on living Iranian artists. Mostly I visited gallery shows.

I went to the Anna Zorina Gallery on West 24th Street after the Johns show, where I’d looked at 500 works by Johns, most a rehash of the same motif and some with dangling strings so they double as cat toys. I read all the labels, too. I consider this a profile in endurance and devotion. I needed a palate cleanser, and Zorina, I remembered, had an exceptionally nice booth at the Armory Show. The exhibition on view, Ricochet, displays paintings from the ’80s by Alexander Kaletski (b. 1946). I’d read Kaletski’s autobiographical novel Metro and knew I was in for a treat, and a much deserved one.

Kaletski is a talented painter working in what I call an avant-garde realist style focusing on the human figure. Viewers don’t need to know anything about Kaletski to see quickly his take is both fresh and bracing. The Gangster, from 1989, fills the big 72-by-52-inch picture. His suit’s lapels are broad like a jet’s wings, but they menace rather than soar. His face isn’t really a face but a blank passage with a beak for a nose and one beady eye. I don’t think I’d ever seen a living artist tackle the subject.

Or One, Two, Three, You’re Out, from 1986, a standing, gaunt prisoner, handcuffed but holding two balloons. Or The Guitar Player, from 1987, a seated, anxious-looking woman wearing a nun’s cornette, Cubist style, but this lady’s no nun. Kaletski likes his paint dense and mixed with different colors, so each stroke is chromatically intense, determined, and meaningful. Sometimes he paints over dense burlap applied to the linen canvas. This adds more than texture. This is art with grit.

None of the paintings on view has an obvious storyline. I’m all for art that’s cryptic. Most art today isn’t. It’s the billboard approach: big, with one message, almost always a boring one, and the poor viewer’s clobbered by it.

Kaletski’s work is more handsome than beautiful. He does nudes, but Broken Window, from 1988, isn’t the stuff of Renoir or Rubens. Buxom she is, but her face is fragmented like the shattered window that frames her.

This is art that’s serious and cryptic. Knowing something about Kaletski helps.

He was born in what was then the Soviet Union, though he’s an American now, having lived here since the mid ’70s. His father was one of the country’s leading construction moguls so also a Communist Party member from Stalin’s time. Kaletski grew up in a big, fancy Moscow house begun by one of his father’s colleagues in the construction business but left unfinished. “He was executed,” Kaletski says, deadpan, since “he was executed” isn’t that unusual as ends-of-stories go in the USSR pre-Khrushchev.

Kaletski’s unusual, too, in that he was a movie, TV, and cabaret star by the time he was in his mid 20s. He was also a defector. In 1975, he went to Vienna for a week, then Rome for a month, and then, penniless, to New York. He puts it very simply: “I wanted to be free.” He made a living performing on college campuses. His songs, most of which he wrote, are romantic and high-spirited but laced with irony. He came from the lunatic world that was Communism, a world filled with informers and alcoholics but also hope and humor. How else could a sensate person survive?

Like all the best art, Kaletski’s offers no easy answers. I loved the show.

Stance, Rhythm, and Tilt is the John Chamberlain show at Gagosian on 21st Street. It opened at the end of September and is the first New York exhibition of Chamberlain’s work since his retrospective at the Whitney in 2012. Chamberlain (1927–2011) is an Abstract Expressionist artist but, unlike Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline, worked with metal, originally from junked cars. The show spans his career from the early ’60s to 2010. It’s nicely presented in a big, sleek space that’s suitable for a Jaguar dealership, even more so since a few blocks away is Manhattan’s car dealer’s row.

Chamberlain is a very American artist. Cars are the ultimate totem for 1960s America. We’ve always been a people on the move, and we’ve always been in hot pursuit of whatever’s sparkling new, which means objects formerly seen as sparkling new get junked faster than anywhere else on earth. Chamberlain said his interest in metal art started when he served in the Navy on an aircraft carrier. Gagosian’s press release says this “influenced his understanding of scale and perspective,” to which I say “scrapola.”

In the late ’50s, Chamberlain was both entrepreneurial and not broke but not flush, either. Junkyards might not have been as ubiquitous as white picket fences and American flags, but suffice it to say they existed in abundance on the fringes and had ample supply of bits of colored metal with characterful dents.

Chamberlain had the soul of a collagist, so a most unusual artist was born.

As patriotic and macho as the aircraft-carrier story is, in the 1950s Chamberlain was a hairdresser. I think if anything gave him an “understanding of scale and perspective,” it was a bouffant, poodle cut, pompadour, and soft bob.

I liked the show. Chamberlain is an original. Early in his career, he used found objects. While he manipulated them, the junkyard aesthetic is there, and it’s a glorious one. Diamond Lee, from 1969, and White Thumb Four, from 1978, are wild and in your face. Later works like TAMBOURINEFRAPPE, from 2010, seem dainty, insofar as a hunk of twisted metal can be dainty. I couldn’t get Gagosian to cough up its asking prices. Looking at auction results, I think they range from low to mid six figures.

Allan Stone discovered Chamberlain and represented him for years. Allan took on artists whose work he loved. His tastes were catholic, but I’d use the word “visceral” to describe the quality that attracted him the most.

I walked over to the DC Moore, one of my favorite galleries, on West 22nd Street.

I hadn’t been there since the COVID mass hysteria started. DC Moore always shows good art. It represents Yvonne Jacquette, Alexi Worth, Barbara Takenaga, Duane Michals, Eric Aho, Joyce Kozloff, Janet Fish, and many other solid, consistently high-quality artists, sticking with them for many years. I wasn’t worried about DC Moore surviving the storm of an unprecedented, pointless lockdown and self-induced economic collapse. Quality will always survive, even under extraordinary assault.

I’d heard good things about the Katia Santibañez show there, and I wasn’t disappointed. She’s American but was born in Paris and grew up there. She lives now in a very rural part of Berkshire County in Massachusetts. Lumens Anima is a show of her newest landscapes. I think they’re very beautiful. She’s inspired by the stained glass in Sainte-Chapelle, the small royal chapel in Paris finished in 1248 and, in my opinion, the most exquisite complex of stained glass anywhere. Santibañez’s trees are things I know since her home is not far from mine in Vermont. They provide the grid. Her real subject is the light in the forest as it is filtered by trees, leaves, and humidity.

Having seen three good shows, I felt recovered from my Jasper Johns version of the Bataan Death March. I also confirmed what I feel about art dealers, as if it even needed affirmation. Often the best exhibitions in New York happen not in museums but in galleries, and often those with the best taste and vision aren’t curators but dealers.