Art I'm Looking At: Stuart Davis at the De Young, San Francisco

Stuart Davis: In Full Swing, installation view

I've been aware of Stuart Davis since I was a teenager. He's always been among the 20th century American artists I've enjoyed most, along with other early American modernists such as Arthur Dove, John Marin, Charles DeMuth, and Charles Sheeler, but, having just seen the Stuart Davis show now on at the De Young Museum, in San Francisco (Stuart Davis: In Full Swing), I realize that I knew little about Davis the man, that I've never seen much of his early work, and that I've never seen large groups of related canvases by him together in one room.

Stuart Davis, Odol (1924)
Museum of Modern Art, New York   

Walking into the exhibition, one thing struck me immediately: the galleries were largely empty. The contrast with the Matisse/Diebenkorn show at SF MoMA was startling (it's been hard to walk in the Matisse/Diebenkorn galleries at times for all the people). Is Davis so obscure? Perhaps the high attendance at the SF MoMA show just reflects the ongoing power of early modern European artists to draw crowds. I imagine the Impressionists, for example, remain the single most popular group of artists among the general population and that most people attending the SF MoMa show go to see Matisse rather than Diebenkorn. There's a certain irony there. Davis was among the important American artists struggling for recognition in the 1920s and 1930s when US collectors and museums were still very much focused on European art, while American art—particularly modern American art—was viewed with some skepticism.

Stuart Davis, Lucky Strike (1921)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Having never seen much of Davis's early work, I was unaware of his heavy quotation of advertising imagery. His well known later work, with its frequent use of text, is certainly suggestive of commercial signage, but early pieces in the De Young show are much more direct in their use of this kind of imagery. Odol (1924), for example, anticipates Pop Art's direct appropriation of product advertising by at least 20 years. In Lucky Strike (1921), Davis has, in effect, painted a collage of scraps of cigarette packaging. At this stage, the painter had already learned a great deal from Cubism, but his wholesale incorporation of advertising imagery into his paintings went well beyond the occasional, fragmentary quotations in the work of Braque, Picasso, and Juan Gris.

Stuart Davis, Place Pasdeloup  (1928)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Davis spent a year in Paris, in 1928–1929. The look of his paintings suddenly changed. Oddly, the influence of Cubism seems less here in the city that gave birth to Cubism than in his earlier work. Davis's Paris scenes are blocked out in flat planes of color overlaid with simple black outlines that depict cafés, storefronts, street lamps, and architectural details—although details, in general, are comparatively few. The work is simple, highly stylized. These paintings suggest travel posters or illustrations in picture books for children. The work of Raoul Dufy comes to mind. The De Young show includes several examples from this period, among them the pictured Place Pasdeloup (1928).

Stuart Davis, New York Mural (1932)
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach

Also of interest among the early pieces are the "Eggbeater" paintings (not shown here), these among works first championed by Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery. Having recently read Lindsay Pollock's biography of Halpert (The Girl with the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market), it was fun to see the actual paintings. There is a striking 1932 mural of New York as well, which, according to the wall label, was made in response to an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art to produce mural designs about life in America after WWI. Davis's design includes many coded political references (Alfred Smith's brown derby and bow tie, a banana referring to the 1928 Smith campaign's use of the song "Yes, We Have no Bananas," and a champagne glass turned on its side (upper left) referring to the candidate's support for the repeal of Prohibition, among others).

Three compositionally related works

The show would have been worth seeing just for these early works, but there is a good selection of later, more familiar pieces, including several "sets" of compositionally related works mounted side by side that illustrate the way Davis repeatedly drew on his own canvases to create variations in the manner of a musician improvising variations on a theme. Davis was a jazz enthusiast and thought of his working process as being akin to jazz performance.

Throughout the show, and particularly in the later sections, I was struck by how strongly Davis's canvases suggest collage; most are very easily imagined as pasted paper cutouts. Some of the busiest pieces, such as The Mellow Pad (1945-1951) are notable also for the way Davis covers the entire canvas with color and form in a way that flattens and de-centralizes. He creates a dynamic overall pattern with almost no part of the image more important than any other. Here Davis would seem to have anticipated Jackson Pollock's drip paintings by at least a couple of years in his use of space if not in technique. Stuart Davis: In Full Swing, through August 6, 2017 at the De Young, offers much to see and much to think about.

Stuart Davis, The Mellow Pad (1945-1951)
The Brooklyn Museum

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Serendipitous Art: A Wall of Invisible Marks

Recently at the De Young Museum in San Francisco I saw a wall covered with marks—marks made by human hands—around the hand railing on a staircase. They are invisible in most lights, but, at one oblique angle and with the light coming down from above, they appear momentarily...until you move slightly and they become invisible again.

For more unintended art, see my blog Serendipitous Art.

Art I'm Looking At: Turner at the De Young

San Francisco's De Young Museum is now presenting a major show of the late work of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). Organized by Tate Britain in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, this is the largest exhibition of Turner's work ever mounted on the US West Coast. The De Young show runs through September 20, 2015. The exhibition is a large one, including more than sixty oil paintings and watercolors, but the museum has devoted a great deal of space to their display. The galleries therefore feel spacious, with the works widely spaced on the walls, making it easy to see them without feeling hemmed in by other viewers.

While this show is likely to attract attention for some of the famous large oil paintings on loan from institutions around the world (such as Peace—Burial at Sea (1842), pictured at the top of this page), it's an excellent opportunity to see a large number of Turner's very fine watercolors together. I've always had mixed feelings about Turner. Some of his work seems sublime. Some moves me not at all--for reasons I can't quite articulate. I don't much care for the allegories, for example, especially those that include figures. I think Turner was at his best when using his eyes to depict what he saw rather than attempting to tell stories. I most enjoy the work that veers off strongly in the direction of abstraction, which is perhaps why I find the often more loosely drawn and quickly executed watercolors especially interesting. The interior scene reproduced immediately above (of one of Turner's hotel rooms in Venice, circa 1840) is a good example. Only the ceiling decoration and the distant view of the Campanile anchor this little painting in reality. Without these, it's mostly a composition dominated by vaguely defined blocks of color.

An 1841 watercolor depicting the Ehrenbreitstein fortress on the East bank of the Rhine, overlooking Koblenz, is similar. Only the fortress on top of the rock is drawn with much precision. The rest of the composition is highly impressionistic, rendered in textured washes. It's easy to see why Turner is often considered to have pointed the way toward Impressionism. There is much in the show that brings Monet to mind. This piece even made me think of Rothko, with its horizontal bands of soft color. Looking at the pieces in the show (the largest group of Turners I've seen at one time), I noticed diffuse bands of color serve as the compositional armature of many of his works--although mostly vertical bands—typically deep colors on the sides of a composition and a swath of bright, pale color in the middle, suggestive of color field painting, a development that lay about 100 years in the future.

I was also struck by a pair of watercolors entitled The Red Rigi and The Blue Rigi from 1841-1842, depicting a mountain close to Lake Lucerne, in Switzerland (the latter shown here). The idea of painting the same subject in a series in different lights and from different angles immediately brings Japanese printmaking to mind. Although it wasn't too long after this time that Hokusai's most famous series of images of Mt. Fuji (originally published in 1831) was becoming known in Europe, 1841-42 was probably too early for Turner to have been influenced. Monet certainly was aware of Hokusai.

Inclusion of unfinished works at the end of the exhibition is a nice touch. Turner was criticized in his own day for, among other things, his dissolution of form—for his distinctive indistinctness that many took to be incompleteness. Being able to see truly unfinished pieces makes it abundantly clear how calculated Turner's apparent incompleteness was.

Art I'm Looking at: San Francisco--Keith Haring: The Political Line at the De Young

Two sharply contrasting exhibits are now featured attractions at the main venues of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco--the De Young Museum and the Legion of Honor. I visited both recently, starting at the De Young to see Keith Haring: The Political Line, a show  highlighting Haring's political activism. I enjoyed seeing the very large sample of work presented but kept wondering what fraction of his production might be called political. A little more context would have been helpful. Given the short period he was active (about twelve years, from 1978 to 1990) and the large number of works on display, my guess is that most of his work was politically motivated, particularly toward the end of his life, when his AIDS diagnosis spurred him and his growing fame had given him an international platform.

Motivation and message aside, what's clear from looking at this art is that Haring lived his short life at a fast pace. The work exudes energy. The zig-zag lines children use to depict lightning or electricity when they draw would not be out of place here. Garish, unmodulated hues; clashing colors set side by side; strong contrasts; angular, heavily outlined shapes; and "lines of motion" borrowed from the vocabulary of comic book artists all contribute. Influences are numerous and diverse. Mayan art, quilts, aboriginal art, graffiti art, the Nazca lines, comic books, advertising art, the chalk corpse outlines of Hollywood movies, writhing Boschian hells, and technological hells where demonic robots reign over electronic gadgets come to mind when looking at Haring's work. Yet, the work is always immediately identifiable as Haring's. This dialectical component is apparent also in the way his images operate on the level of pictographs--simple, symbolic, overtly didactic, and quickly absorbed on the one hand--yet remaining cryptic and baffling at the same time. Haring's is a language encountered in an anxiety dream; we feel we should know the language--and we recognize some of its words--but don't fully understand the meaning. The result is a lingering unease. Although there are political messages embedded in much of the work, Haring rarely gave his work titles--again leaving the viewer somewhat off balance. Without the direction provided by a title, it's often difficult to be entirely sure what Haring intended, despite his use of direct, icon-like pictorial elements (sometimes evocative of pictorial road signs or Olympic event symbols). That said, the work is not entirely without humor. There is joy in some of the dancing figures, a vitality in the glowing babies, and Andy Mouse (which does have a title) simultaneously pokes fun at Walt Disney and Andy Warhol; it made me laugh out loud (1985, private collection; detail above). A panel full of cartoon-like penis drawings from a sketchbook, many accompanied by diary-like entries indicating where the artist was when he made them, was funny too.

Haring's line is deft but un-nuanced. It sometimes leaves me cold, but I was impressed by the consistent confidence of its execution, whether in ink on paper, chalk on expired subway ad space, or in vinyl paint on a tarpaulin. I examined the works very closely. Nowhere is there any evidence of preparatory work--no sketching, no planning. Each piece appears to have been an unrehearsed improvisation, drawing on an ever-evolving vocabulary of signs and symbols, many recurring over and over again--barking dogs, crawling babies, snake-like creatures, robots, angular dancers, angels, crosses, bats, figures with holes in them, flying saucers, penises, electronic gadgets, and figures with Xs instead of brains.

The early subway drawings in the show were intriguing. These are perhaps the quintessential Haring. It was the subway drawings in chalk that earned him his first widespread recognition. They seem the most genuine expression of his gift. They were done quickly, as ephemeral performance pieces, in the platform time between connecting trains. They were done knowing the activity was technically illegal and might result in a fine (drawings on the blank panels were considered graffiti) and, like a graffiti artist, Haring made them knowing they wouldn't last, that they might be quickly covered by a new ad or wiped away. I was not alone in wondering how the examples in the show (presumably quite rare) were preserved, as they appear to be in the original metal frames that surrounded the subway advertising spaces they were made in, the whole in each case apparently lifted off the wall. Done in soft chalk, the subway drawings have an affinity with brush-and-ink calligraphy in that the artist has only one chance to get it right. Every hesitation is preserved. There is no going back to make corrections. Remarkably, there is virtually no evidence of hesitation. Perhaps our view of the subway drawings is a necessarily distorted one, based only on a few well-executed extant examples, but other work in the show suggests Haring didn't often hesitate. While some of the later work seems a little too practiced, a little too obvious in its message, a little complacent, I was generally impressed by the show.

Art I'm Looking At: David Hockney at the De Young--Bigger is Not Always Better

David Hockney is much talked about and praised in the press. With even a passing interest in art it would be hard not to know of him. I think I first became aware of Hockney in the early 1970s, when I was just a teenager, when his swimming pool paintings were gaining attention in the serious art magazines--magazines I would often see at the home of one of my high school girlfriends.

I liked the pool paintings. Later, I saw and found interesting his composite works made from multiple Polaroid photographs--a seemingly cubist approach to viewing reality, although my understanding is that he was aiming not to present multiple simultaneous views of a scene but rather to overcome the distortions of very wide angle lenses. After a long blank, I remember seeing a series of paintings of the artist's dogs that struck me as badly drawn, garishly colored, and embarrassingly self-indulgent--evoking the same feelings as those self-published novels about the exploits of a coddled pet, of interest only to the writer and the publishing company squeezing money from the obsessed owner. Subsequently, I'd not heard much about Hockney until learning the De Young Museum in San Francisco was doing a substantial show of some very recent work--a show entitled David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition. The title is curious, but now that I've seen the show, it makes some sense (more on that subject below).

Having last thought about Hockney in the context of the dog paintings, it was with some skepticism that I visited the De Young this past weekend. Nevertheless, I determined to go with an open mind. I wanted to see what Mr. Hockney had been up to lately. I was hopeful the show would be of interest.

It was interesting and I'm glad I went, but I found it interesting mostly on an academic level. Say what you will about him, he is nothing if not prolific and you have to admire his energy and willingness to experiment and use new media. Still, I have to say the show left me cold, and I find it difficult to understand why Hockney continues to get the attention he does. Seeing David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition left me disappointed. The contrast with my emotional state after seeing the recent Richard Diebenkorn show at the De Young couldn't have been greater. That show left me energized, inspired, joyful, and greedily wanting to see more. The Hockney show left me mostly puzzled.

In the charcoal portraits that open the show, I saw awkward foreshortening, figures constructed using a vocabulary of crude marks on the paper themselves not especially interesting as details, and clumsy smudging that looked impatiently done. The work had an air of self-indulgence again. The drawings seemed to declare themselves worthy of scrutiny solely by virtue of their being by David Hockney and because of their presentation in a place like the De Young Museum, rather than because of deeply felt commitment, because of passion behind their creation. The introductory blurb describes David Hockney as a superb draughtsman. If by "superb draughtsman" we mean someone to an extraordinary degree capable of translating a view of the world or ideas into images using a precise, economical, and confident line; having a deep understanding of foreshortening and perspective; and capable of convincing modeling through use of light and shadow, then much of Hockney's work suggests rather that he is a crude draughtsman. And why pretend otherwise? We no longer require great artists to be great draughtsman. Fine draughtsmanship is not the only wellspring of worthwhile art. Art can and often does happily emerge from a far less disciplined place. Hockney's strengths lie elsewhere, but he seems to have forgotten himself. The pool paintings of the 1970s were so successful because the subject matter was well-suited to a brash approach to color, bold composition, and minimal use of line--traits that virtually define Hockney's artistic instincts. Hockney has a distinctive set of artistic tools, but all tools have strengths and weaknesses. It's for good reason that we don't hammer nails with screwdrivers.

The many landscapes in the show struck me similarly--as having the look of work done by an earnest, untutored amateur. There is a very large room in the show devoted entirely (and tiresomely) to charcoal landscapes depicting a road through Woldgate Woods, in Yorkshire, at different times of the year, excerpts from a chronicling of the seasonal transformation of the place. Recording seasonal effects is an interesting enough idea, but is it sufficient if the drawings themselves are not especially compelling? Hockney captures in these drawings something of the light and mood of the place, but I was struck by the ugliness of the marks he has made on his paper. At close range, the drawings decompose into fields of dark squiggles, hash marks, and areas of smudging. The drawings quickly become incoherent. They are much more effective if you turn 180 degrees to view the examples hanging on the opposite wall, from a distance of about 30 feet. It's not uncommon for a drawing or a painting to look markedly different when seen from different distances, but a truly fine drawing or painting is very often as interesting viewed from a few inches away as it is from many feet away. The image may disintegrate and become increasingly abstract as we move closer and we're forced to focus on details, but the details themselves are virtually always as compelling in their own way as is the whole, and this, I feel, is where Hockney's work is so disappointing. The individual marks on the surfaces seem to have no life. Thinking just of the Western artistic tradition, the feathered wingtip of an angel by Fra Angelico, a single flower at the foot of one of Botticelli's diaphanously draped women, one square inch of a Van Gogh pen and ink drawing, a single bright highlight in the dress of one of Sargeant's sitters, a feverish brushstroke by a De Kooning or a Karel Appel--any of these can hold our attention for a remarkably long time. At a normal viewing distance, I found the charcoal drawings of Woldgate Woods soulless.

Bigger is not always better.  David Hockney, A Bigger Exhibition is somewhat absurd in its fetishizing of scale and number. A section of the show highlights works Hockney has made by mounting four, six, or as many as 20 or more panels in arrays to create bigger pictures, some paintings, some digital images printed out on large inkjet printers and mounted. I found it hard to see anything much gained by this approach except scale. The titles carefully record the number of panels in each piece as if the number itself is an accomplishment. What is the point here? In other instances, one-sheet drawings created on an iPhone or an iPad have been blown up to a very large scale, notably a number of landscapes done at Yosemite National Park, and here the large scale and the use of the electronic device serve mostly to accentuate the lack of inherent interest in Hockney's "brushstrokes" again. Some of these images are so big that you can't step far enough away to allow distance to fudge things. One wall of the show is covered with video screens presenting slide shows of some of the artist's many other iPhone and iPad drawings. Being more in their native habitat--on computer monitors--these have more punch, more luminescence, and they seemed more successful for it. I'm not a luddite. I use the iPhone in my own artistic work. I'm all for experimentation and exploring new avenues of expression. Still, with art--unless it's conceptual art--it's the destination that counts, not so much how you get there. To assume that the work is inherently worthwhile because it was made using new technology is just another type of fetishism.

Somewhat ironically, a set of six large portraits made using a tablet, stylus, and Adobe Photoshop  in 2008 and 2009 were the most interesting pieces in the show, in my view. Each is a matter-of-fact observation of the sitter in a mostly empty space against a plain, brightly colored background. They owe much to Van Gogh.  The backgrounds are often split in two, a favorite Van Gogh device. In looking at A Bigger Matelot Kevin Druez 2 (2009), for example, I was immediately reminded of the Van Gogh portraits of Dr. Gachet or the postman Joseph Roulin. I'm not sure why these pictures seem so much more interesting than many of the others, but a major factor seems to be that they have been rendered in more detail and with more care than many of the landscapes and other portraits in the show. Here the individual strokes on the paper, although created digitally and printed, are of some interest. The compositions, though simple, seem more considered. The use of color seems more effective.

Other work draws heavily on Picasso--in particular, The Massacre and the Problems of Depiction (2003), essentially a re-working of Picasso's Massacre in Korea (1951), which takes as its subject a massacre of Korean civilians by US forces at No Gun Ri, in July, 1950, although many people in the galleries seemed to think it was derived from Picasso's Guernica (1937). Hockney has appended to the image a second, smaller image below, a crudely rendered photographer behind a tripod with his head under a darkcloth. What are we to make of this? Another group of works in the show was inspired by Claude Lorrain's Sermon on the Mount (c. 1656), culminating in a wall-sized rendering of that painting on multiple panels, which seemed most impressive as further evidence of Hockney's apparent obsession with size for its own sake. Hockney's version is called A Bigger Message (2010).

Two spaces in the show are devoted to Hockney's recent video explorations, which he calls "cubist movies." These I rather liked. Here the use of an array of screens makes sense. Hockney presents simultaneous views of a scene but from slightly different viewpoints. In these cubist movies (as well as the multiple Polaroid pictures of the past) the question of draughtsmanship is no longer an issue. The individual images that combine to create the whole are each created by a camera, whether still or moving. It becomes possible to focus on the concept behind the work without the distraction of questions about the quality of the rendering.

The last sections of the show suddenly veer back to portraits--some paintings, some drawings--and then to Hockney's interest in optical aids to drawing. The portraits generally are in much the same vein as the earlier portraits, but a series entitled 12 Portraits After Ingres in a Uniform Style (2000) is different and perplexing. According to the text in the galleries, Hockney was inspired to create these after seeing a show of the work of Ingres that led to an epiphany: Ingres must have used some kind of optical device to achieve the high quality of the work he's known for. However, it's not clear how these particular Hockney watercolors (in pairs, of guards at the National Gallery in London, all in uniform--an upper panel showing a closely cropped face set above a panel showing a hand in close-up) demonstrate anything much about Ingres. The lack of guidance here was especially frustrating.

These are followed by a wall of about 40 small portraits made using the camera lucida. Across from the camera lucida drawings and the Ingres series is a re-creation of Hockney's "The Great Wall," a large arrangement of reproductions of European art from around the 13th century to the 20th century, ordered chronologically on the horizontal axis and from north to south geographically on the vertical axis, originally assembled in Hockney's studio. The Great Wall, the story goes, was a response to Hockney's Ingres epiphany, the result of an early 1999 visit to the National Gallery in London. He became convinced suddenly by the increasing use of precise realism from around 1430 that artists at that time began to rely on devices such as the camera obscura, the camera lucida, and curved mirrors to achieve a high degree of realism. Hockney used the wall as a tool to investigate the trend and also to illustrate it. He presented his thesis in a 2001 book entitled Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Techniques of the Old Masters, co-authored by a physicist, Charles M. Falco. The book was controversial and generally got skeptical reviews. While artists certainly did use a variety of optical tools (Philip Steadman's Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces (Oxford University Press, 2002) is especially interesting in that regard), that was not news in 2001, and Hockney seems to have let enthusiasm far outrun the evidence.


Looking at the camera lucida drawings is instructive, however. Hockney's draughtsmanship greatly improves here. Still, he is no Ingres, even with the aid of the camera lucida. Essentially, the camera lucida is a prism mounted on a stand that allows the user to look simultaneously at a sheet of paper and a reflected image of a scene on that paper, making it possible to trace the exact contours of the projected image onto the paper. The camera lucida is a finicky device, however, that takes quite a lot of practice to use effectively. The artist's hand always obscures part of the projected image. Contrast is often low, making contours difficult to see. If the camera lucida could suddenly make a master of anyone that used it, most of us would have used it by now. Most of us would still be using it. I suspect that Hockney's draughtsmanship improves in the camera lucida drawings more because it forces concentration than because of any true advantage the device gives. A tool is a tool. An artist is an artist. Hockney's thesis is ultimately unconvincing. It's much easier and more persuasive to think that even if Ingres and others did sometimes use drawing aids, they were masters because of their mastery, not because of miraculous and secret devices.

In Summary, I wonder if it's really necessary to take Hockney's recent work as seriously as some seem to be doing. While the show was worth seeing, I'm glad I saw it free, as the guest of a member. Had I paid the $25 entry fee, I suspect I would have felt cheated. The show closed on January 20, 2014.

[Update--December 2, 2014. I recently found this review of Hockney's book Secret Knowledge on line. Well worth a read.]