Finding Real Beauty among the Gimmicks at the Premier Art Fair

It was a joy to discover great young artists and see time-tested work, but there was too much junk.

I always enjoy the Art Dealers Association of America’s annual fair at the Armory in New York. The ADAA is the premier professional group for the top dealers in the country. It’s 60 this year and a force in promoting ethics, connoisseurship, and scholarship among American dealers specializing in art from the Renaissance to today. I’ve been going to its annual art fair for at least 30 years. There’s no one art market. Rather, there are dozens of art markets, but the ADAA is one measure of mainstream taste, with some allowance for adventure.

I go less to shop, poor church mouse that I am, than to see what’s cooking in established kitchens and to learn about new artists such as Joe Fig (b. 1968) and Lucy Williams (b. 1972). Fig’s Faith Ringgold: American People/New Museum from 2022 is part of a series of small, sparkling pictures of people looking at art in a museum. He conveys his figures — usually seen from the back — with dollhouse precision. They’re looking, and he’s looking and recording. I’d never heard of him, which is my failure. His work is at Cristin Tierney Gallery. This picture’s $22,000.

The booth of the great San Francisco dealer John Berggruen starred Williams, who makes intricate mixed-media bas-reliefs of Modernist buildings. Fig’s a New York artist. It’s no surprise that his work thrives on people on the move and looking. Williams, who’s British, is deliberate and calm, complemented in this case by California cool. Williams sees her subjects, mostly mid-century, strong and sleek architecture, as utopian and masculine. It’s the stuff of Howard Roark from The Fountainhead.

Williams’s Palm Springs #3 from 2022 is made from paper, plexiglass, wood, piano wire, cotton thread, and acrylic paint. She uses the traditionally female domain of craft, as well as her sense of lovely color, to make the subject warmer and more human. It’s $95,000. She’s a master of light, reflections, and transparency. I didn’t know her work, either, so this was an educational moment for me. She went to the Glasgow School of Art, the springboard of the Scottish Arts & Craft movement, so she’s had the best training.

I almost never disparage the art that dealers decide to show at a fair. I admire dealers. They’re heroic in advancing talent and the best ones develop taste in individual collectors and in the culture as a whole. They make the story lines we art historians develop. Fairs cost dealers time, money, stamina, and pride. All the dealers put heart and soul into the high-end, prestigious fairs like this one.

This year, though, and in this fair, things went awry. I saw many good things, Fig’s and Williams’s work among them, but the mood of the fair seemed uncertain, grasping, and lost. Cheim & Reid, for instance, has a group of Lynda Benglis wall sculptures from the late ’70s. They’re made from polypropylene, cast paper, acrylic, gold leaf, and sparkles and look like Mardi Gras frippery. Benglis (b. 1941) is an important artist, but this is very weak work indeed. This very fine dealer is hawking a name, not quality.

Sapar Contemporary’s work by Faig Ahmed (b. 1982), an Azerbaijani artist, starts as wall-mounted indigenous carpets that puff into a sheep form or extend to the floor as if they melted. Why? Across from it, Castelli’s booth displays a hanging felt-carpet wall sculpture by Robert Morris (1931-2018), the most theatrical of the Conceptual artists. Heavy and inert, the work seems to weep.

Nearby, at Miles McEnery Gallery, Beverly Fishman’s painted wall reliefs fill the booth. Fishman (b. 1955) draws from the shapes of pills and graphics linked to the pharmaceutical industry. Her psychedelic palette suggests both seduction and addiction, but why devote an entire booth to her? One object’s called “Untitled,” with the helpful-hint subtitle “Abortion, Chronic Pain, Panic Disorder, Narcolepsy.” It’s from 2022. Is she running for Congress? Panic, pain, and abortion? And narcolepsy? She sounds like one of those geriatric Washington lifers, both frantic and asleep at the wheel.

I’m not against art that’s a downer. If I knew nothing about her, I’d see her work as part of the circle of Josef Albers, Frank Stella, or Peter Halley. Fishman says her titles are essential in explaining her work, but the art’s got to exist on its own. And who’d buy a work of art whose themes are abortion, chronic pain, panic disorder, and narcolepsy? We live during plagues of neurasthenia and delusion, I know, but, aesthetically, let’s leave that to the Symbolists and the Surrealists.

We can only speculate on why so many dealers failed this year. Showing a single-artist booth is a mistake. Unless the artist’s really, really good, and has a quiver full of tricks, sameness kills the mood. I think too many dealers chose big names regardless of quality. I saw lots of strictly decorative work, or, more precisely, work aimed at decorators.

I have nothing against art that is decorative or plays to received wisdom. Art that’s cucked and lame is another story altogether.

Lots of booths showed all-women artists. I have no problem with this, either, but women and men are, as artists go, equally prone to mediocrity and equally need a gimlet eye for quality. It seems dealers felt they needed to do this. Does this come from Manhattan bubble-think or from pressure from the ADAA brass?

One booth, and I can’t remember which one, is devoted to Yoko Ono. Please, enough Yoko already. Her expiration date was circa 1970. “During my trip to the Soviet Union in 1987 to attend a peace conference . . .” begins her artist statement, reminding me, in the event I’m too senile to remember, that she’s a card-carrying useful idiot.

Howard Greenberg Gallery showed only women photographers, but what a powerful group, with the best of Diane Arbus, Berenice Abbott, and Barbara Morgan and a wall of tough, austere work by Vivian Maier (1926–2009). These artists have distinctive styles but, in their individual language, are incisive and various. “This is how it’s done,” I thought. It’s a classy, compelling booth. Maier’s photographs were priced at $10,000.

The decorative impulse as well as too much gimmick art made the real thing — real, honest beauty — more striking and more stirring. Mary-Anne Martin’s booth focused on the Mexican masters working from the ’20s into the ’50s. La Patrona from 1939, by David Siqueiros (1896–1974), is electrifying. It’s $2.8 million and has the wall power I’d expect from Siqueiros, who leaves Diego Rivera and the flagrantly overrated Frida Kahlo in the dust.

In La Patrona, a woman pierces our façades with dark, ultra-almond-shaped eyes. Her red shawl draped around her shoulder and head looks like a river of blood. She’s flanked by two partly hidden women. The artist suggests the long art history of Virgin Marys and of peasant women, but he minimizes both religious and folkloric iconography. She’s post-revolutionary, projecting strength and an authority that knows neither hierarchy nor narrative nor charm. Siqueiros is a very good figure painter. That skill aside, he experiments with paint. Here, he used a lacquer for subway cars. I use the word “electrifying” in part because of its metallic look, which seems to light the figure from within.

Thomas Colville and Debra Force are among the best of the old-school American art dealers, and each has a model booth in variety and quality.

Force’s Table I from 1959 is by George Tooker (1920–2011). Tooker said he painted “reality impressed in my mind so hard it returns as a dream.” He painted with egg tempera, a medium that dries immediately and projects a finish that’s glassy and warm. It was used by artists in Italy in the early days of the Renaissance. The viewer can decipher it as he or she wants. Tooker and Paul Cadmus are in the same circle, and both have the look of the Old Masters. Table I has been in the same private collection since it was painted. It’s $395,000.

Colville’s booth is mostly ’40s and ’50s geometric abstraction by Americans, among them the superb Charles Green Shaw, Werner Drewes, and Raymond Jonson. Like Debra Force, Colville focuses on the very best, fresh-to-the-market work from the Hudson River School to the American Modernists. I love Charles Burchfield (1893–1967), whose work, almost always watercolor, is unique in blending whimsy, folksy form, and landscape that’s more dreamscape.

Sunday Morning at 11:00 is from 1917 so, for Burchfield, it’s an early stroke of genius in what would become his signature style. It’s had only two or three owners and hasn’t been on the market since 1980. The church on the right of the picture is a solid old pile, but shrubs, trees, and clouds appear as eyes looking at us, and the climbing vine on the church seems ready to walk toward us. At $250,000, it sold the first night of the fair.

Sikkema Jenkins has a strong selection of work by Louis Fratino (b. 1993), a wonderful young artist whose work is cool and moody, frank and fraught. I liked all of his work, but Pelicans from 2022 appealed as both a figure painting and an unorthodox seascape. Its abstract waves reminded me of Marsden Hartley’s water but are less like rock and more like pillows. At $55,000, a good price, it sold by the end of the evening.

Overall, I think this fair has lots of weak work, which isn’t ideal but, strange to say, allows real quality to resonate from booth to booth. I saw a Tooker nude at Debra Force’s booth an hour after I saw one among Fratino’s work, but the two paintings spoke to each other. Tooker’s is a female nude, Fratino’s a male who’s nearly nude, and both paintings are stylish, adept, and deep. They’ve got visual empathy. They beckon the viewer and question us as much as invite us to question them.

We live in turgid times, I know, and this might have soured dealer judgment. I have nothing against the ADAA, and this ice-capped Yankee has reviewed the fair each year with joy and glee. I found lots of quality in new art and time-tested art, but also too much junk.