Sabine Moritz, Deeply Unaware @ Marian Goodman

Sabine Moritz, Night I, 2019

As I perused Sabine Moritz’s abstract paintings on the ground floor of Marian Goodman, I was strangely unaffected. I was surprised that these colourful, highly abstract paintings didn’t appeal to me, but I was not convinced they were doing anything I needed to see or to know about. I have to admit, I was disappointed to the extent that I wondered if Moritz had established her name thanks to her famous husband—Gerhard Richter. I know I am meant to look at her work as independent, but it was difficult not to compare it with the complexity and ambiguity that draws me to Richter’s. Her big abstract paintings are vivid, rich in colour and paint, moving different shades of the same colour in different ways around the canvases. However, I didn’t get the sense that they were doing much more.

Sabine Moritz, Ice, 2019

In some of them, we see flowers exploding, and apparently, they have been realized through a unique mode of paint application. I was reminded of Berthe Morissot, another painter who was known because of the men in her life, and indeed, there were moments where I thought Moritz’s paintings resembled blown up details of Morissot’s. Eruptions of colour with large (as opposed to short) expressive brushstrokes were resonant of Morissot’s impressionist creations. However, Moritz’s paintings are flat, superficial, not capturing a complexity of perspective, depth and creating intimacy with their spectator. Indeed, the absence of tension was my problem with Moritz’s paintings.

Sabine Moritz, Sea King 82, 2017

I found the figurative works in the downstairs gallery to be more interesting. The four walls were covered in helicopters. The helicopter drawings and paintings on paper are also colourful, but more subtley so. The helicopters dive and float, swooping through skies, hovering above the sea and the city, on unidentifiable paths. At the level of the image, the helicopter series is engaging for its ideas of repetition, exploration of the relationship between history and representation, as well as a resulting reflection on the changing connotation of the helicopter as machine over the years.

Sabine Moritz, Sea King 70, 2016

Most obviously, we recall the choppers of the Vietnam war, think of the use of helicopters to deliver first aid, transport the police and the army, the helicopter as a carrier of weapons and parachuters, as well as weapons. In spite of the longevity of the intellectual and technical history of the helicopter as vehicle and machine, Moritz’s drawings and paintings are spontaneous, sometimes intimate and filled with emotion. The resulting multicoloured helicopters hang in the air, fly through the sky, explode like bombs, are sometimes in the process of being effaced from the image, at others heading straight for us. Some of them are just a few lines, others, a frenzy of expressive gestures, flying through moody skies, ostensibly evoking their potential surroundings, their mission. All these qualities meant that the helicopter images were engaging and, for me, redeemed the exhibition.

copyright all images Marian Goodman Gallery

Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao

Martin de Vos, The Rape of Europa, 1570-75

On my final day in Bilbao, deterred by all the rules and regulations to be followed at the Guggenheim, I visited the Museum of Fine Arts. I should have known that this museum would be all but empty and the guards relaxed, rather than rushing to berate the visitors for coming too close to or taking photographs of the art works. All round, my visit to the Museo de Bellas Artes was a much more comfortable experience than the Guggenheim and I would really recommend it to anyone interested in escaping the tourists.

Paul Gauguin, Washerwoman in Arles, 1888

The pleasure of visiting this museum begins with the organization of its permanent collection into twenty-six rooms, one for each letter of the alphabet. It sounds hokey, but this innovative way of displaying works, many of which will be little known to visitors unfamiliar with Spanish and Basque art, was delightful and informative. The theme of each room is determined by the letter of the alphabet: Art, Bilbao, Citoyen (Citizen), Desira (Desire), Espejo (Mirror) and so on. The result being that the museum’s prize artwork—Gauguin’s Washerwoman in Arles (1888) hangs in the same room as four Joseph Beuys lithographs, and archaeological finds from the Basque region. Thus, there is no privilege given to, for example, the reputation of the artist, the century in which the work was created, or the artistic material/medium of execution. The hanging encourages visitors to look at everything, to discover previously unknown art works and also to contemplate the connections between artists that, instinctively, we would have thought had nothing in common. I found this dialogue over centuries to be enlightening as well as a great way to examine aspects of the works that we might otherwise ignore.

Antoni Tàpies, Large Oval or Painting, 1955

Of course, there are problems with this kind of exhibition. First and most obviously, there is so much left out of the hanging because it draws attention to thematic elements perceived by the curators while ignoring the historical, cultural and aesthetic particularity of certain pieces. To give one example, in the room called Terre (Earth), Antoni Tàpies, Large Oval or Painting (1955) focuses solely on the role of the earth as material, and overlooks the coming together of paint and the natural environment for expressive purposes in the artwork. In another example, the works in the room entitled War share their space with Goya’s exquisite portraits of the Adán de Yarza Family, and therefore, it was impossible to look at anything else in the room.

Francis Bacon, Lying Figure in a Mirror, 1971

In addition, some of the rooms are more convincing than others. The room themed Desire is wonderful, with images ranging from depictions of prostitution, through Martin de Vos’s magnificent The Rape of Europa, 1570-75, Jose de Ribera’s San Sebastian Cured by the Holy Women, and ending up with an example of Francis Bacon’s delight for pieces of flesh in mirrors. Together, the works in this room raise questions of submission and power, ways of seeing the body, and how both themes change across centuries. Other rooms, however, are less convincing. The rooms devoted to Friendship and Otherness being cases in point. Paintings such as Goya’s portrait of Martin Zapater or sculptures like Jorge Otieza’s of his wife didn’t convince me that they were about friendship. I couldn’t help thinking that any number of art works could have been put in this room and the notion of friendship twisted around the depictions to fit the theme. In a more academic critique, the room labelled “Quiet” shows a number of still life paintings, thus assuming that still and quiet are the same thing. To think of the converse, which is also implied by the organization in this room, I couldn’t help imagining how misleading it would be to think of all those Cezanne paintings as quiet. This history of turmoil, change and confrontation that artists such as Cezanne depict through apples and oranges falling off tables would be completely erased if the still life was indeed quiet.

Wright Morris, L'Essence du Visible @ Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Wright Morris, Dresser Drawer, Ed's Place, Norfolk Nebraska, 1947

The Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson has recently moved its galleries to a wonderful new space on rue des Archives. I missed the inaugural Martine Frank exhibition earlier in the year, so the Wright Morris was my first venture to the new space.

Wright Morris was born and presumably grew up in Norfolk, Nebraska in the prewar decades at the beginning of the twentieth century. And that is the world that not only informed his photography, but became its subject matter over the course of a lifetime. Morris oscillated between writing and photography it seems for much of his life, but the works in this exhibition indicate his skill with the camera. While some of the photographs reveal his concentrated focus on the effects of light, to me these images are about framing, and about composition.

Wright Morris, The Home Place, Norfolk Nebraska, 1947

For me, the photographs are interesting because they are about a midwest America that no longer exists. It is a hot, lonely and desolate world that was left behind following the depression and the postwar move to the cities. This sense of a lost world permeates the photographs. Windows are transparent and made opaque by the no longer used objects piles up behind them. They are simultaneously reflective of the activities on the street in front. It is important to note that Wright Morris's mid-West is a world that is well-lived in, rather than being desperately poor like that shown in Walker Evans famous photos. And unlike Walker Evans there are no people. Rather, Wright is interested in capturing the presence of people through their absence from a chair, a tin can left on the verandah, a comb missing teeth on an old vanity chest.

Wright Morris, "Gano" Grain Elevator, Kinsley, Kansas, 1940

I was struck - as I often am by the interior living spaces pictured in Walker Evans's photographs - by the immaculate tidiness of the interiors in Wright Morris's photographs. The people may not have fur coats and diamonds - more like frayed jackets and a pair of scissors on the table - but everything is in its place. The well-lived in spaces also have everything they need. It might be poor, but poverty is not the focus of the image. The markedly geometrical framing saves the images from evoking both pity and nostalgia. We see cupboards with doors that don't fit, we see old carpets and chairs, but there's no yearning for that past, there's no feeling sorry for their owners. Rather, we see in the images the rush to document worlds before they are lost.

Wright Morris, Farmhouse in Winter, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1941

As I wandered this exhibition, I was often overcome by thoughts of these places in Nebraska and Ohio today. This is middle America. These are the plains that saw the productivity of the land prior to the Depression, and I imagine that since then, things have gone downhill. This is the country of belief in a set of values and a way of life that no longer exists, a world that continues to be exploited by capitalism and the greed of those with power and money. It might look very different today, but it remains a world left behind.



All Photographs copyright Wright Morris Estate