Art’s a Salve in Parlous Times

And there’s plenty to please the eye at the Art Dealers Association of America fair.

T his is high season in New York for art fairs and Christie’s and Sotheby’s auctions so lots of moolah’s changing hands. Buyers are cautious, even resistant, but things of high quality and flashy brands — rarely overlapping — do well. Last week, I wrote about the International Fine Print Dealers Association’s annual fair, its 35th iteration, and earlier this week I visited the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) fair as this fair celebrates its 60th birthday.

ADAA is the professional organization of the art-dealing business. Art dealing in America was a tiny, insular affair until the 1950s. As America prospered and the desire for nice things evolved, buying and selling art became a business. The ADAA has a foundation, too. Money from the fair goes to the Henry Street Settlement, an old charity focusing on the Lower East Side.

These two fairs are always festive, though sadder and uneasy this season because of the Hamas massacre and new war. You don’t have to be Jewish to be appalled by the brutal civilian deaths, among them 32 Americans, the kidnappings, and the hate from college students here. Many collectors and dealers are Jews. Some have to wonder “Am I speaking to a bigot?” at every encounter. This makes for an ever-so-queasy mood.

This year, 78 dealers are exhibiting. It’s a very nice fair. Things are selling, though what exactly and for what are anecdotal, though asking prices themselves have to be disclosed. Art displayed Wednesday night, dealers told me, disappeared from the walls by Thursday, presumably heading to happy homes. Red dots on labels, the old sign of a sale, don’t seem to be used anymore. Dealers say too many shoppers interpret red dots to mean undotted works are second-rate or overpriced or both. I think shoppers understand that the marketplace works in mysterious, moody ways.

Art’s a salve in parlous times, as is durability. Kraushaar Galleries opened in 1885 and was one of the ADAA’s founders. Its booth looks at art from the ’60s, which started out Eisenhower-happy and ended in the Slough of Despond, though our Vile ’20s gives it a run for its debased money. Kraushaar accentuates the positive with a painting by Paul Feeley (1910–1966). Feeley liked upright baluster shapes, arches, wavy squares that look like abstract teeth, and bowling pin shapes.

Untitled from 1961 is green and orange, two of his favorite colors, and it’s got lots of zip. Unlike Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers, and other Color Field painters, his handling of paint isn’t dry or sharp-edged. His contours are a touch fuzzy. His shapes suggest parody. He considered his work Abstract Expressionism without the fits.

Feeley died young after a career that lasted only about ten years. He’s part of the Bennington Modernist crowd, a group of artists who taught at Vermont’s Bennington College and included Pat Adams, who’s still painting, Ken Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jules Olitski. I live a scant ten miles from the college and smile when I think of them as our local artists along with the counterfactual Norman Rockwell, Luigi Lucioni, and Grandma Moses. Kraushaar’s asking $175,000 for this Feeley. It also has a sublime little abstract painting, also from 1961, by Alfred Leslie, who just died and was among the wild men of the era.

I’ve never written about Jill Newhouse Gallery, and shame on me. She focuses mostly on French art, though I remember an elegant Dorothea Rockburne show and scholarly catalogue at her gallery about ten years ago. At the ADAA fair, Newhouse’s The Watercolors of George Sand (she, her, hers) 1804–1876 was eye-opening, eye-catching, and eye candy. I knew Sand (1804–1876) as a novelist, political pundit, occasional cross-dresser, and Chopin’s friend with benefits. She was, in her era, the Woman of the Year, many years over, a networker and intellectual heavyweight extraordinaire. I saw at the fair that she was a very good watercolorist.

This is well known among European connoisseurs, but here in America we never got the memo. The paintings are small and exquisite, many of them abstract landscapes she called “stains” since she painted them and then pressed them when wet on another sheet. They’re dreamy, and we like dreamy. The Walled City, an ink-wash painting on paper, isn’t among them but fascinated all the same. It’s tiny, a bit larger than 2 by 3 inches, and octagonal. How often do I see octagonal art? Rarely, and that gives this painting an Old Master look on top of its dark, Old Master feel. And what a sky.

It was sold when I saw it so I didn’t get a price, but the range for the booth was $3,000 to $30,000. I suspect this dark little gem was at the low end simply because it’s a connoisseur’s thing as well as ethereal and spooky. I believe Newhouse’s booth is now sold out.

I always enjoy Michael Rosenfeld’s booths at fairs and the exhibitions at his gallery on Eleventh Avenue and 19th Street. In quality and variety, they’re mini-museums, and I mean good museums, no schlock allowed. He might survey a single artist, as he does in his booth dedicated to Charmion von Wiegand (1896–1983), or, as he once did at the Armory Show, a chunk of American Modernism through small things. Small but both precious and powerful. His taste is idiosyncratic, which comes from both knowing quality and understanding that it can live in a painting, a box construction, or a collage.

I loved his selection of von Wiegand’s work, in part because she’s an unsung heroine of her epoch in the art world. Since she was a woman, she was unjustly tagged as part of the circle of Mondrian, period, but she’s much more. When I wrote that Rosenfeld’s booths often evoke museum shows in quality and depth, I wasn’t puffing. His look at von Wiegand is an abridged version of the retrospective of her best years that just closed at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Rosenfeld represents her estate.

There are swirling, colorful biomorphic abstractions like Untitled from 1945. Later, von Wiegand became a Buddhist, with her swirls evolving into forms looking like stupas, mandalas, hexagrams, and grids. The Adamantine Way from 1964–65 is a perfect example. It’s 11 by 9 1/2 inches, but it’s got punch and juice. Its title suggests something unbreakable but a gem, too, with prismatic colors each of which correspond to a specific element of the body’s and mind’s natural energy. The black background of this little picture projects its palette at us so it seems like an altarpiece. Both pictures are in the mid to high five figures.

Schoelkopf Gallery, another tried-and-true presence at the fair, displays new work by Richard Estes (b. 1932), the pioneer Photorealist. Estes’s Escalator at Penn Station, painted this year, shows he still has plenty of magic in him and tagging him with the realism of a photograph has never been quite right. Photographs, first of all, aren’t the final word on truth and accuracy since there’s so much artifice in the medium. And “realist” doesn’t fit Estes, either.

“Telescopist” describes Estes, who treats the everyday with the technique of a prober and the impulse of science fiction. He treats the escalator at Penn Station’s new Moynihan Train Hall as a shiny, new, sleek passage to a bustling but faraway world. The gleam of metal and clarity of mechanical lines contrast, too, with construction outside and a world that’s never finished.

Estes has been painting escalators off and on since the early ’70s, when the art dealer Allan Stone cannily discovered him. He’s 91 now but seems very modern. The picture’s not big, at 18 by 24 inches, but the scale’s very satisfying. It’s $325,000.

I’d never heard of Summer Wheat (b. 1977), and I didn’t know her dealer, Shulamit Nazarian, based in Los Angeles and a first-time exhibitor at the ADAA fair. “Fresh meat,” I thought, both artist and dealer. Wheat does something novel, and in the world of art that’s, well, novel, and in her case fascinating. She paints on aluminum mesh, using acrylic paint, gouache, and, in the case of Luncheon on the Haystack from this year, over-the-top acidic colors. It’s a mashup of Luncheon of the Boating Party and Monet’s haystack paintings, with Millet’s Gleaners and Wheat’s very name tossed in the mix. French peasant women did lots of the harvesting work, but, Wheat feels, got no extra time for luncheons.

Wheat paints not only with brushes but with her fingers, scrapers, and cake-decorating equipment. It looks like pixilation so feels very contemporary but also like tapestries so they feel medieval. I thought they were embroidered when I first looked at them. Each year, she picks a different palette and will work with that palette for that period. This year, it’s teal, purple, and orange, and the settings are nocturnal, which makes her Luncheon even stranger. At 69 by 97 inches, it’s cinematic, and wacky cinema at that. Mostly, she paints women, and no Twiggys for her. They’re built like football players and seem to come from the world of myth. Luncheon on the Haystack is $60,000.

I learned today that Wheat is designing a chapel at the Kansas City Museum, which isn’t a history museum but more of a Kunsthalle dealing with the city’s political, social, and economic heritage and how those old stories resonate today. The nondenominational chapel’s anchor theme is the water bearer, or Aquarius, the mystical and zodiac figure who cleanses and rejuvenates. It’ll feature paintings and stained glass. I’m a Methodist from Vermont but think this will be very moving.

I’d never heard of Kurt Kauper (b. 1966), either. He, like Estes, is an unreal realist, offering clear and precise forms not merely leavened with ambiguity but drenched in it, with a dash of wickedness added. His dealer, Marc Selwyn, is Los Angeles–based so I wasn’t exactly floored to see Kauper’s full-length, life-size imaginary nude of Cary Grant, painted in 2002. Grant died in 1986. A sex symbol and devilishly comic actor, he would have been startled but pleased.

Kauper’s Men in the Park, from 2021, is a riff on Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe from 1863. I wrote about Picasso’s linocut take on the picture on Thursday when I reviewed the International Fine Art Print Dealers fair. Next week, I’ll write about Manet’s 1862 version of Déjeuner when I review the Met’s Manet/Degas exhibition. Suffice to say Manet’s a gift that keeps on giving.

Food is served in Men in the Park, but S&M’s on the menu, too, in the form of a nude man, backside up, with his hands tied. Another man, dressed in office wear, lies next to him, signaling to him á la Manet. A third man, also nude, swings a baseball bat at a full moon in a black sky, or at a flying bird. Every day’s a full moon for this trio, it seems.

Kauper’s a contemporary Surrealist. I’m not surprised. Visions are back in vogue, and not of dancing sugarplums. He’s a very good painter. The picture sold on opening night so I don’t know the price.

The ADAA’s call for entries requires member dealers to submit well-developed proposals. Some of the proposals are picked through a vote of the entire membership and some by a selection committee. This, strange to say, sounds fair and balanced. Everyone gets a shot, fads play a role, the big enchiladas do not dominate, there’s no plague of sameness, and dealers have to have a plan. There’s no tossing things on the wall at the last second.

What’s an art fair without gossip? Not one I’ve ever attended. Two weeks ago, I wrote about a purely awful open letter signed by 2,000 people who claim to be in the arts, suspect Hamas isn’t the bee’s knees but aren’t sure, and believe Israel is a war criminal masquerading as a country. Artforum, a mainline, distinguished art journal published the letter. A few days later, David Velasco, Artforum’s longtime editor in chief, was fired. His masters said he “didn’t meet editorial standards” in publishing the letter.

A few dealers and fair goers asked me what I thought. I asked them what they thought. I don’t know Velasco but read whatever interests me in Artforum. Publishing the letter was informative in telling me who signed it. That’s half of the story and in the public’s interest.

Should he have been canned? It’s true that Velasco clearly said in Artforum that the letter didn’t reflect the journal’s editorial opinion. He was disingenuous, though, in writing this given that he signed the letter himself. I think he was involved in writing it, too, which, putting aside its content, is more disingenuous still. His hasty exit — he’s still listed on Artforum’s website as its editor in chief — points to a cataclysmic discovery and not, as he put it after he’d been canned, “outside pressure.”

Velasco isn’t a free agent. He represents the journal and is its public face. Whether he only signed it, or managed its rollout, or, as might be true, worked with his buddy Nan Goldin in writing it, his gross failure is a want of circumspection. The letter circulated when news of awful civilian atrocities was front-page. Hamas, which governs Gaza, doesn’t want a cease-fire. It wants Israel, America’s ally, to disappear into oblivion, and violently so. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is what the letter he signed endorses.

Velasco’s entitled to his own opinion, but he seems to have hijacked Artforum to promote it. Spurred by art dealers, a new, different open letter circulated that condemns Hamas for barbarity. There are so many letters now, and the news is so bad, that this one disappeared into the muck.

The ADAA fair runs through Sunday. It’s well worth a visit.