Contributed by David Carrier / What is the present state of painting? For as long as I have been writing art criticism, that question has been much discussed. Some critics have said painting was dead, perhaps to be replaced by Minimalist or conceptual art. Others have argued that because painting is an inherently bourgeois art form, it can continue only as long as it is politically tinged. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s show “50 Paintings” takes an essentially empirical approach to the question. Co-curators Margaret Andera and Michelle Grabner gathered mostly mid-sized recent paintings by artists well-known in the New York art world and demonstrated how varied and how good painting is today. There are abstractions by Peter Halley and Mary Heilmann, a landscape by April Gornik, and figurative paintings by Cecily Brown and Nicole Eisenman. It’s natural for a visiting critic to pick favorites. Mindful of the unhappy fate of Paris, whose judgment about which goddess was most beautiful triggered the Trojan War, I dare to name mine.
Yun-Fei Ji’s The Red Truck is Waiting (2022) presents a marvelously wacky narrative, almost as strange as some of Philip Guston’s. I see the truck, which seems to lack wheels, clearly enough, while the significance of the bric-a-brac assembled in the foreground – a chair, other furniture, and vegetation – is more obscure. Yet the very curiosity they evoke, with such visual panache, justifies a marvelous painting. I admire Lisa Yuskavage’s Night Classes (2020), another novel tableau in which one almost nude female model sits in front of a canvas on an easel, while a hirsute man with a pipe paints the other’s body. Amy Sherald’s, Sometimes the king is a woman (2019) is a more straightforward but no less remarkable figurative work, depicting a poised Black model in a black and white dress against a pink background – a distinctly original array of colors that powerfully and efficiently conveys unabashed confidence.
I also appreciate Pat Steir’s Untitled XXII, 2019 (Taipei) (2019), which is a small version of her well-known wall-filling abstraction showing that scale, not sheer size, is what matters to her. Also impressive is David Diao’s Bietveld’s Berlin Chair Parts on Horizontal 3 Color Ground (2021), which uses a De Stijl craftsman’s deconstruction of that chair to conjure hard-edge abstraction. Amy Sillman’s Untitled (blue, black) (2023) is a pleasantly arresting concoction of broad black lines and dark and light blue shapes, forming a box whose contents spill out to fill the canvas – a virtuosic exercise in pure painting. Perhaps the most striking piece I saw, though, is over a century old and hangs nearby in the museum’s distinguished permanent collection: Gabriele Münter’s Boating (1910). The dark blue hat of the rower is juxtaposed with the light blue coat of the man facing us, behind whom jagged blue mountains loom. It is a tour de force of spatial construction, transporting the viewer from the foreground into the distance in an exhilarating rush.
All six of the recent works I’ve mentioned could easily join the museum’s permanent collection. I would also argue, however, that they confirm that there are no general rules about what constitutes a good painting. The reasons Diao’s work is convincing do not explain why Steir’s is a success. My praise of Sillman’s work doesn’t follow from my affection for that of Mütter, Yun-Fei Ji, and Yuskavage. It is unduly difficult – possibly just misguided – to try to generate hard-and-fast criteria for aesthetic judgments. From this perspective, “50 Paintings” could afford viewers a provocative exercise in comparing their judgment with mine or that of the curators. The six artists I picked, or the fifty selected by Andera and Grabner, might not be those they would choose. And that’s one of art’s essential pleasures.
“50 Paintings,” co-curated by Margaret Andera, senior curator of contemporary art, and Michelle Grabner, artist, curator, and Crown Family Professor of Art and Chair of Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, WI. Through June 23, 2024.
About the author: David Carrier is a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University; Getty Scholar; and Clark Fellow. He has published art criticism for Apollo, artcritical, Artforum, Artus, and Burlington Magazine, and has been a guest editor for The Brooklyn Rail. He is a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
Lovely review! Best wishes! e
I’m glad the work in the show is getting reviewed. When I read Debra Bremer’s earlier review in Hyperallergic I was pleased by her focus on the show’s lack of an overriding thesis. So much so that I thought her unusually brief comments on the work itself did not detract from the significance of her review. I have not seen the show and I am unlikely to do so. But I hope it serves as a corrective, an example of humble curating. Grabner and Andera deserve applause for putting artists first. (THE artists, not their artists). I walked into a show last month in Chelsea (I don’t remember the gallery name) that had the title “Eye Candy”. I asked the gallerist on hand if they found the title pejorative. They were puzzled by the question.
I took the train to Milwaukee to see the Fifty Paintings show the day after I saw the Chicago Expo show. Both exhibitions left me with a slightly empty feeling. Sure, like David, I had a few favorites (IMHO it’s next to impossible to see an art show and not come away with some favorites), but call me old-fashioned, I missed experiencing the high that accompanies a carefully curated show based on visual ideas. Furthermore, in the Milwaukee show, the curators required everything be “easel-size.” I found this to be a disservice to those artists in the show whose scale is generally large.
All this said, the Milwaukee show was installed beautifully,, whereas Chicago Expo suffered the fate of all art fairs, which is to make art seem beside the point.