IT’S WHAT IT IS
The Vija Celmins show
at The Met Breuer is an exemplary retrospective, guiding one logically through this artist’s rich career, which seems to shift, at each stage, more deeply into abstraction. She began in the 1960′s painting everyday objects and found media images, and then turned in following decades to subjects that could be understood more simply as fields: spiderwebs, moonscapes and seascapes.
Celmins’ iconic wave drawings from the 1970′s and 80′s fill the surface with an exquisitely
rendered texture, like a tissue. They reproduce beautifully and, in print and on screen, capture majestic natural rhythms. When seen in person they are less obviously
charismatic. They call one close to examine their marks and, the moment one takes that step, fall straight into abstraction. One finds only graphite on paper.
Perhaps it’s naive to to make a distinction, and certainly a judgment,
between figuration and abstraction in painting. But I found something uniquely magnificent and dramatic in the small figural canvases
Celmins completed in the early 1960′s, when she first arrived in Los
Angeles after art school. She painted household objects against blank backdrops on small notebook-sized canvases, in black and white with faints patches of color. There are, in the show, in this genre, portraits of an
electric skillet, a fan, a two-headed desk lamp, a pencil, and an airmail
envelope. In
addition to the exquisite craftsmanship that brightens all of Celmin’s work, these canvases offer the blunt pleasure of representation. This is an electric skillet with eggs, and this is a pair of shoes.
There’s one painting, larger and more complex, that caps this period. It’s the
view of a freeway, painted from a snapshot Celmins
took from the front seat one morning when driving to Irvine to teach. The view, somewhat off-center, of the straight, wide, open road ahead, framed by the car’s hood and wipers, blighted with billboards and blocked by an overpass, doesn’t romanticize the
landscape. But the seamless brushwork – it basically disappears – and just-as-it-is rendering of powdery white Pacific light, give the scene a sweet illustionistic cast. One could look at this
painting, and stay in this place, forever.
Vija Celmins, Freeway, 1966.