Landscapes and Still Lifes of New Territories By ROBERTA SMITH

December 30, 2010
Landscapes and Still Lifes of New Territories By ROBERTA SMITH

FAVORITE paintings in New York museums? You don’t have to be an art critic to have a few, or a few dozen. Winnowing these treasures down to five — the assignment here for three critics for The New York Times — is a pleasant, invigorating yet implicitly arbitrary endeavor. The resulting lists can only be characterized conditionally, as personal, partial or provisional.

All told the city offers one of the world’s great accounts of the medium. The paintings selected here range from Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert,” from 1480, in the Frick Collection to “Do the Dance,” from 2005, by Elizabeth Murray in the Museum of Modern Art. (The choices are on Pages 26 through 28.)

Paintings, like poetry or music, are essential nutrients that help people sustain healthy lives. They’re not recreational pleasures or sidelines. They are tools that help us grasp the diversity of the world and its history, and explore the emotional capacities with which we navigate that world. They illuminate, they humble, they nurture, they inspire. They teach us to use our eyes and to know ourselves by knowing others.

If New York’s legions of irresistible paintings could sing, these hills would be magnificently alive with the sound of their music.

‘GREEN STILL LIFE,’ BY PICASSO, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART One requisite for “favorite painting” status would seem to be an irrational, mood-boosting thrill each time you see it. Even by that standard my soft spot for this popular Synthetic Cubist Picasso is especially spongy.

I looked at it regularly before I had any inking of Picasso, Cubism or the Museum of Modern Art (which received it as a bequest from one of its founders, Lillie P. Bliss, in 1934). Or at least I looked at a handsome, possibly full-size reproduction, stylishly framed in white, that hung in my parents’ house in Lawrence, Kan. The facsimile even hinted at, I think, some of the bumpiness fanning out from the white, darkly shadowed compote dish that is one of its central elements. Its reworked roughness could be signs of an earlier composition painted over. Still, Picasso made the best of it, eventually reinforcing the turbulence with radiating dashes of color that first scale the neck of the wine bottle that is the compote’s consort and then scatter beyond.

Picasso painted “Green Still Life” in the summer of 1914 in Avignon, after ushering the interlocking planes of his Analytic Cubist paintings into robust three dimensions with his various guitar sculptures. Robustness prevails here too, in the solid, flat green field that is about as close as Picasso gets to the modernist monochrome. It can be read as a response to Matisse’s “Red Studio” of 1911, especially as it hangs just a few galleries away at the Modern.

But in the main, “Green Still Life” shows Picasso relaxing into Synthetic Cubism’s flirtier, simpler compositions, brighter colors and Pointillist dots, which in this case intimate table runners and a spider web catching the yellow light. The letters J O U, a Cubist staple, are further away from “Journal” (French for newspaper) and closer to “jouer” (to play) or “jou-jou” (child’s toy) than ever. Fancifully shaped and stippled in black and white, they actually seem carved into a little block.

Other visual witticisms include the outline of a pear that contains a bit of lovingly exact pear flesh, a large bristling orb that might be a pineapple or artichoke, a cut-glass vessel and a hand wrapped around a grenade. It is the summer of 1914; World War I is just getting under way.

‘HEAT,’ BY FLORINE STETTHEIMER, BROOKLYN MUSEUM The Brooklyn Museum has the city’s best painting by the eccentric if thoroughly modern Florine Stettheimer, a greater artist than Georgia O’Keeffe. It is “Heat” (1919), a smoldering flaglike field of wide bands of orange, deep yellow and olive green dotted with the figures of Stettheimer, her sisters Ettie, Carrie and Stella and their revered mother, Rosetta. It was painted in 1919, the year Stettheimer turned 48 and was at the peak of her strange powers as an artist.

These powers revolved around an unwavering faith in saturated color laid on thickly, and a slightly wicked gift for caricature. Perched on the steeply banked color bands, the women are arrayed in a circle. In the foreground is a lighted birthday cake set on a table whose oval top is one of the few concessions to spatial recession, although the foreshortening mainly serves to fuse cake and tabletop into a very large eye that adds to the painting’s mesmerizing power. The Stettheimers are enduring the summer heat in different ways, while also enacting varying states of consciousness: limp collapse, wakening, sitting up and finally conversing with Mama, who wears head-to-toe Victorian black and appears to be fully alert. A kind of life cycle, perhaps, with death at the top.

Private wealth ensured Florine Stettheimer a genteel, uncompromised life. She declined to have solo shows during her lifetime (despite the enthusiasm of artist friends like Marcel Duchamp and Hilla Rebay and the critic Henry McBride). She disliked selling her work. The capsule about “Heat” on the Brooklyn Museum’s Web site begins with her observation that “letting people have your paintings is like letting them wear your clothes.” This statement hints at something of the iron butterfly that you sense in the merciless color and tactility of “Heat,” not to mention the suggestion of an inverted, probably male torso in the black tree visible in the background.

One indication of a painting’s staying power is its ability to function like a two-sided mirror, showing parts of both the past and future of painting side by side. “Heat” looks back to the languid fetes of Watteau (as the art historian Barbara Bloemink has pointed out) and the solid colors of the Italian primitives, and forward to two artists rarely mentioned in the same sentence: Mark Rothko and Tim Burton.

‘MORNING IN THE VILLAGE AFTER SNOWSTORM,’ BY MALEVICH, GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM Like so many works from the 1910s Malevich’s “Morning in the Village After Snowstorm” (1912) hovers deliciously between abstraction and representation, object and image, imagined and perceived.

Within two years of assembling this gleaming, scalloped vortex of snow drifts, peasants, houses and trees, Malevich would bring forth what is generally considered Western painting’s first pure abstraction, the first of his “Black Square” compositions, which he set against a field of white and described as a “full void.” In the Guggenheim painting we sense the fullness of his mystical void as an approaching whiteout, a kind of blazing light that threatens to burn away image. Strictly speaking, this would leave us with something closer to his “Suprematist Composition: White on White” of 1918, the tilting kitelike square of cool white on a slightly warmer white ground in the Museum of Modern Art.

In the meantime “Morning” ravishes the eye with its sparkling facets of red, blue, black and tan, shaded to white. The gaze moves through the scene like an icebreaker. The forms heave to either side, nearly filling the available space but leaving a narrow path to a tiny figure pulling a sled in the distance. One-point perspective and the Renaissance notion of the picture plane as a window are bid fond farewell.

Among the crowning achievements of that marvelous Russian mongrel Cubo-Futurism, “Morning” has Malevich both scaling up and calming down Cézanne’s anxious cylinders, spheres and especially cones to the point of majesty. Malevich then enlists them to render country life as he knew it from his childhood, a return to roots that proved similarly effective for other early modernist painters, including Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Chagall and, as we shall see, Miró.

The smoothness of Malevich’s paint application adds to the forms’ metallic sheen. We are in the world of Dorothy’s Tin Man, a realm in which, if you cast the mind forward a bit, you can imagine both the metal Minimalist boxes of Donald Judd and the fluorescent glow of Dan Flavin’s light installations.

‘VINES AND OLIVE TREES, TARRAGONA,’ BY MIRó, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Before Miró cut loose with his well-known improvisations of balloon forms, raw, washy colors and meandering automatist lines, he was a wonderfully fussy painter. His strength lay in tightening and tweaking reality a little beyond the real, creating a sharp and exacting artifice that brought the decorative, the abstract and the natural into perfect harmony. “Vines and Olive Trees, Tarragona” was painted in 1919, the year before Miró left Barcelona for Paris. Although he was certainly no stranger to the latest modernist styles, it shows him considering them at a remove in a sequence of contrasting landscape treatments that celebrates nature’s bounty.

Miró’s subject is the countryside near Tarragona, Spain, south of Barcelona and not far from his parents’ farm in Montroig, terrain he knew well and clearly loved. The composition proceeds like a succession of stage flats, different yet connected, beginning with the parallel bands of sun-baked furrows running across the bottom of the picture, where young vines are cradled in freshly dug, impossibly consistent holes. Their feathery leaves are attached to twigs of a calligraphic angularity that brings to mind wrought iron.

In the next tier — or field — the furrows pivot toward the horizon, but they don’t get far. Instead they erupt into accordionlike pleats, with locked-together edges that are alternately jagged or curvaceous (and anticipate Matisse’s cutouts) and flat, bright colors of blue-green, dark pink and yellow, a kind of naturalized version of the primary colors.

A series of tilting geometric shapes — studded with the Pointillist dots of Synthetic Cubism — follows, suggesting village roofs. Then, with the dots continuing, and accompanied by spike-leafed plants suggesting yuccas, the olive trees start up. Their cotton-ball shapes blend into a level, oceanlike mass on the left, while on the right, a single tree rises above all else, its sinuous branches and leaves performing a kind of fan dance that causes other trees to follow suit into the distance.

Finally, at the farthest reaches of the painting, a soft, lavender of mountains is visible in the haze, a parting tribute to Impressionism. This gentle fade makes you all the more aware of the carefully orchestrated cacophony that has brought you there. Now nearly 100 years old, this work is a relative newcomer to the ranks of New York’s painting gems, having arrived at the Met as part of the Gelman Collection in 1998. Welcome.

‘DO THE DANCE,’ BY ELIZABETH MURRAY, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Elizabeth Murray’s “Do the Dance” is a late painting, made in 2005 after she had received the diagnosis of the brain cancer that would kill her two years hence, at 66. Made of five separate shaped canvases that create the illusion of scores of individual smaller canvases percolating momentarily into a rectangular cluster, it is obliquely autobiographical, as all convincing art probably must be to some extent. Most of Murray’s paintings can be read as tallies of both the private emotions and events of her life and of the visual sources that fed her art throughout her career. Her vocabulary was built on elements from the work of Braque, Picasso, Miró and Malevich, as well as Jim Nutt and R. Crumb.

Like my other choices here “Do the Dance” operates in the lavishly appointed gap between the actual and the abstract. In its lower-left corner we see a character familiar from earlier Murrays — a rubbery Gumby figure whose limbs stretch into ribbonlike extensions. This figure is now apparently the patient, attached to a light-green IV, lying on white and yellow sheets whose red-flecked patterns discreetly evoke blood. Near its head a small four-pronged shape resembles a rubber glove, yet its cartoony, splatlike silhouette is one that recurs throughout Murray’s art, as spilled coffee, for example. (The hospital, like everywhere else, seems to have brimmed with expressive potential for her.)

Just above the brown figure a series of white round canvases connected by a blue laddered line that might be a spinal column or a sutured incision implies another figure. This one’s head is crisscrossed with red lines and attached to an oxygen tube. On the right half of the painting two baggy, biomorphic shapes — one yellow, one lavender — occupy their own irregular canvases; they form a couple struggling to stay connected while closely resembling examples of Murray’s earlier work. So does an undulant cloud of purple-brown, punctuated by a white dotted line. Other irregular, bulbous lines snake and coil among and around these larger shapes, suggesting tubes, wiring or cords of synaptic nodes.

At the bottom of it all, in the form of a long blue squiggle, lie the waters of Manhattan. “Do the Dance,” Murray tells us, when the end is near. The dance is life. And life, for her, was painting.