PERSONAL STATEMENT

The pitch of the Hilda af Klint solo show at the Guggenheim is that this early twentieth-century Swedish painter, a woman, mastered an uncompromisingly abstract style before all the men who are ordinarily credited with it (i.e. Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky) did, and that she has been tragically under-recognized. The former may be true, and the latter certainly is. But a better pitch would have focused on the extraordinary personal language she forged. I can’t think of another modern painter who’s syntax is so rich and remains so internally consistent. All the works here are of a piece; all were clearly crafted by one person.

Klint’s forms are simple and evocative. The graceful, non-representational globules, strips and swirls she employs have a rational bent. These marks have precise meanings for her, which she documented neatly with pencil in ledgers, which are also here on display. They are deployed unerringly, on door-sized vertical canvases, against dull blank backdrops, in bright, slightly acrid, fruit-colored hues. The compositions recall biology illustrations, geometry diagrams, foreign alphabets, religious talismans, and alchemical equations. They have intellectual authority and graphic ease.

The paintings command attention from viewers rushing down the crowded ramps, a perfect foil for the blank white curving walls behind them. Klint wrote with hope that her great late-in-life series of canvases The Paintings for the Temple would one day be shown in a spiral temple. Now they have been.

Hilda af Klint, Altarpieces, Group X, No.1, 1915

August 14, 2019 by Nalina Moses

December 05, 2011 by Nalina Moses

In 1996 Damien Hirst displayed two sliced-up cows at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. It was an act of art world bravado I believed would remain unmatched. I was wrong. Sculptor Maurizio Catellan, who’s career-ending installation All is on view at the Guggenheim now, tops it. Catellan, who also publishes magazines, says he’s done making art. So in lieu of a mid-career retrospective he’s suspended “140 or so” of his existing sculptures from the rotunda of the museum. It’s both audacious and enchanting. In taking over the rotunda he’s bludgeoned the iconic architecture and, at the same time, made perfect use of it. If he’s attempting, metaphorically, to hang his artistic self, he’s failed. Dangling in the air like this, his work looks terrific.

Catellan’s pieces, like that of the pope being hit by a meteor, have an appealing impishness. They’re not just political, they’re also weirdly personal. So statues of an elephant in a Klu Klux Klan robe, a kneeling Adolf Hitler, and a topless Stephanie Seymour, are funnier than you’d expect. Some of his works, like figures of horses, and boys in nooses, were meant to be hung. Some of them, when hung, take on an elegaic air, like JFK lying in an open coffin, and corpses draped with white sheets. You need to walk up (or down) the spiraling ramp to get a look at each piece and with every few steps the view shifts dramatically, pulling you along. The outer walls of the museum are left empty and visitors focus inwards, which makes absolute sense. There’s always been something odd about mounting artwork against the rounded, sloping walls of the Guggenheim, while the enormous space in the center remains empty. I think Catellan’s installation might have begun as an attack on Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. It’s really a magnificent salute.

September 22, 2011 by Nalina Moses

Can you build a building without a program? The Guggenheim’s summer pop-up inside the park along Houston Street at Bowery, designed by Atelier Bow-Wow, comes tantalizingly close. It’s a spare steel frame wrapped in metal mesh, stuffed with A/V equipment, and furnished with fold-out chairs. When I visited last weekend there was a trio of hippie chicks singing, and then a documentary about the politics of Central Africa. A small crowd had assembled, mostly passersby who were interested and stopped to find out more.

The space, the BMW Guggenheim Lab, is carefully programmed each day with socially-relevant performances and presentations. But what I liked best about the Lab is how porous it is, both literally and figuratively. It fills an empty lot between two existing, anonymous buildings, and opens onto both Houston and First Streets. People enter from both sides, sit down for an event, and then spill out into the park, where there’s a temporary cafe, and hang out a bit more. In a city that’s become riddled with empty storefronts, co-opting them seems like a perfect strategy. What if we mapped all the unoccupied spaces in New York and handed them over to artists, activists and performers? Their work and their noise would fill the city.

April 27, 2011 by Nalina Moses

The current show at the Guggenheim, a selection from their holdings called “The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910 - 1918,” could just as well be called “Secondary Works by Major Painters,” “Major Works by Secondary Painters,” or “Fantastic Paintings You’ve Never Seen Before." The show, which focuses on the groundbreaking art produced against the tumult of the first World War, features all the usual suspects, including Picasso, Cezanne and Kandinsky. But the highlights are masterful paintings by artists less well-known, including Natalia Goncharova (these cats) and Robert Delaunay (a fractured view of the Eiffel Tower), and pieces by artists better-known that reveal unknown sides. There’s an unflinching, earthy portrait of a young woman by Chagall, and a luminous landscape by Mondriaan, which is, in its lyricism, suprisingly tender.

Most powerfully, the show reminded me how fundamentally physical, visceral and pleasure-giving painting is. This is, I think, something more than the strength of the artworks on display and the sophistication of the collection. It might have something to do with the experience of seeing practically all of these canvases for the first time. Each one, from a century ago, crackles with kinetic energy.