Installation view: “Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades at Knoedler & Company,” 2008
In finding commonalities between two recently deceased artists whose work couldn’t have been more different—Helen Frankenthaler and John Chamberlain—Roberta Smith in today’s NY Times appraisal, demonstrates her knack for synergistic thinking.
Roberta writes:
They occupy such similar positions within the history of American art.
Both emerged in the 1950s and provided crucial links between art styles,
specifically helping to forge the transition from Abstract
Expressionism to what lay beyond.Both brought a new, unfettered approach to materials that pushed their
respective mediums toward greater expressive freedom, unabashed
physicality and a rough-edged, aggressively color-based beauty.
And in today’s Wall Street Journal, Eric Gibson reminds us how sorely we miss his intellectually and stylistically satisfying art criticism (sharply curtailed, due to his time-consuming responsibilities as editor of the paper’s “Leisure & Arts” page). In the concluding paragraph of his informed, insightful postmortem appraisal of Frankenthaler’s work, Eric writes:
Her legacy already seems in peril. There hasn’t been a full-dress
retrospective in more than 20 years, and her gallery, Knoedler &
Co., suddenly closed last month, leaving no forum for the regular
exposure of her work. She deserves better. Greatness abhors a vacuum.
Chamberlain, as chance would have it, is getting a memorial retrospective: The next big exhibition to open at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, is the long-planned John Chamberlain: Choices, consisting of “nearly 100 works, from his earliest monochromatic
welded iron-rod sculptures to the large-scale foil creations of recent years. This presentation encompasses Chamberlain’s
shifts in scale, materials, and methods, informed by the assemblage aesthetic that has been central to his artistic practice,” according to the museum’s description.
What’s particularly sad about Knoedler’s demise is that the rich information on its website has died along with it, including webpages for the important exhibitions it had mounted over the years.
Clicking the links to Frankenthaler’s Knoedler shows that appear in various online reviews (such as those for her 2008 “Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades at Knoedler & Company” and her 2011 “East and Beyond”) redirects you to the gallery’s current homepage, which tersely announces its “closing, effective Nov. 30, 2011.” There should be some way to preserve and make publicly available online the important record of the gallery’s exhibitions and archival material.
One of the collateral stories connected with Knoedler’s closure concerns the future representation of its artists. Lisbeth Mark of Jeanne Collins & Associates, which yesterday issued the press release announcing Frankenthaler’s passing, today told me this, in response to my query:
Helen Frankenthaler’s gallery was Knoedler until the gallery closed on Nov. 30, 2011. The family and studio are not commenting on anything related to representation or her estate at this time, but will at an appropriate time in the future.
[NOTE: Another worthy tribute to Frankenthaler, to which I linked in an update to yesterday’s post, was Jerry Saltz‘s, appearing late yesterday on New York Magazine‘s website.]