Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Swiss-American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank is now 94, which means he has been in the midst what he calls a natural disaster old age for at least fifteen years. Yet when he was 80, as Gerald Fox trailed him for Foxs 2005 documentary Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank, which recently screened at the Film Forum after he had belatedly approved its theatrical release, Frank seemed an artist whose age and experience only made him a more formidable personality. Rich as it is lean at 85 minutes, the movie foregoes any systematic critical appraisal of Franks oeuvre. But it elicits a full measure of his unchecked candor and salty existential wisdom, suffused with a dourness that sometimes seems to border on misanthropy but in the end ramifies as powerfully human. Chronicling the same qualities in an older Frank, if not quite as sharply, is Laura Israels documentary Dont Blink Robert Frank (2015).
The book is still available.
As Jasper Johns had scraped the putative majesty off the Stars-and-Stripes in his painting Flag (195455), Frank, in his equally influential black-and-white photo collection The Americans (195859), presented its subjects unvarnished, suggesting disillusionment, obduracy, pessimism, and racism. Initially derided as condescending and anti-American, in time this work came to be seen as grimly oracular. Now, in the Trump epoch, it may have acquired even greater profundity. At the time, the collection reified the beats uneasy affinity for the downtrodden. In 1959, Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to the first American edition of the book reproducing the pictures. The same year, Frank and Alfred Leslie co-directed the short experimental film Pull My Daisy, a sardonic dollop of social disruption that Kerouac adapted from his play Beat Generation and loosely narrated, featuring Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso as well as Alice Neel and Larry Rivers.
Natalie Merchant, in her luminously nuanced 1987 song Hey Jack Kerouac, elegiacally asked him when you were the brightest star, who were the shadows? Frank was surely among the longer ones. His social and artistic kindredness with the beat crowd was natural and unforced. Clellon Holmes the so-called quiet beat wrote that what distinguished them was the will to believe even in the face of an inability to do so in conventional terms. Frank seems to credit this basic idea in a deadpan reflection: Im not happy about anything, but Im not afraid of anything. Although his immediate purpose is to advance the notion that imperfection and its possibilities are key to his work, the sentiment also captures his and many artists restive quest for some kind of independent truth.
The circumstances of Franks life havent made that quarry any less elusive. He lost his daughter to a plane crash when she was 20 years old, and his troubled son died at age 43. Regret and sorrow are etched on his face, and the film includes a remarkable mea culpa about his performance as a parent. But in his cantankerous equanimity, he seeks no pity, decries bitterness, and declines to mitigate his pain with the customary salves of faith, material comfort, and celebrity. Over the years, he and his wife, the artist June Leaf, have spent more and more of their time in an austere cabin on Nova Scotias forbidding Cape Breton Island in lieu of their Bowery loft in part because the neighborhood has simply become too nice and complacent. The Yuppies, they have a right to live, too, he says. I just dont want to live amongst them. Cocksucker Blues, the film the Rolling Stones commissioned him to make about them, saw no contemporaneous release in theaters; Jagger found it unflattering, to say the least.
Robert Frank and June Leaf on Cape Breton Island
Leaf is the constant in Franks life, yet she herself acknowledges, with frankness on a par with his, that we do everything together and apart. Frank remains alone and relentless. Perhaps that makes him the quintessential artist.
NOTE: TheTwo Coats of Paint 2023 Year-End Fundraising campaign has begun. If you enjoy our art coverage, particularly our focus on painting exhibitions, the lives of painters, and the New York art community, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to help keep the conversation going in 2024. Thank you, readers. Click here to contribute.
Two Coats of Paint has recently learned of the death of Gordon Fraser, a talented artist and art blogger who penned The Blind Swimmer, of a heart attack after undergoing a series of treatments for colon cancer.
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Today is the day! Thanks @labspace_art for all you do 🎁Posted @withregram • @labspace_art HOLIDAY OPENS TODAY 1-5PM! 🎉
2-Day Opening Celebration begins in 30 minutes! 🏃🏻♀️
Saturday November 25 + Sunday November 26th, 1-5pm both days❣️
We have pumpkin chocolate chip cookies from @cookandlarder 🍪 and we can’t wait to celebrate this incredible show with you
HUGE THANK YOU TO ALL 365 ARTISTS FOR YOUR BEAUTIFUL WORK ❤️
Latest post, link in profile / Hannah Antalek’s crystal ball: Magical and disconcerting / Contributed by Heather Drayzen / “Superseed,” Hannah Antalek’s debut NYC solo exhibition at 5-50 gallery in Long Island City, draws on our species’ overall apathy about the environment. A surreal, dream-like sensibility informs a bio-luminescent vision of nature, cumulatively derived from dioramas she constructs from recyclable materials. She pulls us into a magical but also disconcerting world. Link in profile
Image: Hannah Antalek, Perpetual Aurora, 2023, oil on canvas, 32 x 24 inches
Latest post, link in profile / Nancy Davidson’s wandering carnival / Contributed by Fintan Boyle / A sense of serious satire has pervaded Nancy Davidson’s work for years, and it is on prominent display in her show “Braids Eggs and Legs: A Wandering,” installed in two large galleries at Catskill Art Space alongside Matt Nolen’s work. Davidson has long been a fan of morselized language and sundered bodies, which in theory would make her work fertile ground for the psychoanalytically inclined. Yet here she elides the sexual menace and violence that, say, Melanie Klein offers. Instead, she wanders, as her title announces. Link in profile
OPEN CALL! Apply today for NYC Crit Club`s Plum Lime Residency / Winter 2024 ❄️⏰ / Guest Juror: Paddy Johnson Founder of VVrkshop
The Plum Lime Residency will grant one artist a free 550 sq. ft. private studio space for 5 weeks (January 15 - February 17, 2024) this winter in Bushwick (Brooklyn)!
Latest post, link in profile / Interview: Holly Miller’s transatlantic sensibility / Contributed by Leslie Wayne / If you meet Holly Miller on the street, you will encounter a warm, exuberant, emotionally expressive, and funny person who immediately pulls you into her space. You would not expect her art to be highly controlled, minimal, and geometric. Yet she has built her career on paintings that are just that – slightly irregular geometric shapes, flatly painted and intersected by lines sewn with thread. But Miller is now at a crossroads and her work is suddenly exploding outward, making room for new materials, chance encounters, and unpredictable forms. Perhaps, as with many artists, COVID has had something to do with this shift. Life seems a little more precious these days, and taking new aesthetic chances is a small way of asserting courage in the face of the unknown. Link in profile
Latest post, link in profile / The evolution of Justine Hill / Contributed by Riad Miah / It is a pleasure to watch an artist evolve and see surprising changes, as in the case of Justine Hill with her current exhibition “Omphalos” at Dimin Gallery. Over the course of four solos, elements of her work have remained consistent. These include the cut-out shapes that jostle to fit together, and the color that complements (or contradicts) abutting forms. Hill’s earlier work has been likened to the masterful Elizabeth Murray’s. The comparison was apt enough insofar as she, like Murray, worked on irregularly shaped canvases, but it didn’t seem to go much deeper than that until now. Link in profile
Image: Justine Hill, Bend 2, 2023, acrylic, pastel, oil stick, and paper on canvas, 67 x 69 inches
Latest post, link in profile / Katherine Bradford: Heaven on Earth / Contributed by Rick Briggs / To one growing up Catholic, heaven and hell were in no way, shape, or form mere metaphors for possible destinations in the afterlife. They were very real places to spend all eternity, either heavenly salvation or eternal damnation. Forty years ago, Katherine Bradford proposed an exhibition to Chris Martin and me titled “3 Catholics.” While it never took place, the idea was to gather three lapsed Catholics who shared that particular cultural grounding and also similar painting values, and who were all now earnestly in pursuit of our new religion – Painting. This memory came wafting back to me the morning after viewing “Arms and the Sea,” Bradford’s solo show of remarkable new paintings at Canada. Link in profile
Image: Katherine Bradford, Swimmers Under Pink Sky, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 68 inches
Latest post, link in profile / Contributed by Kasper Nihlmark / During a two-week trip to New York City from my native Sweden, I had the chance to catch a glimpse of the city’s art scene firsthand. Link in profile
images: At the Faurschou Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, solo exhibitions of the work of Donna Huanca and Tracey Emin (images are tagged)
Latest post, link in profile / Ann Craven’s wistful nighttime tales / Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / As children, we learn that nighttime is for hushed voices, unlit rooms, and the chance to briefly disappear into our dreams. In her latest show “Night” at Karma, Ann Craven fully embraces the enchantment of the wee hours. Her paintings, swathed in darkness, capture quiet moments, and the imagery could easily have been conjured from bedtime stories. Yet they’re not all warm and fuzzy. Link in profile
Art that caught my eye in the neighborhood on my lunch break this afternoon: @jennylynnmcnutt and @kathygoodellart in #anthroshift curated by @anitatrombetta and @charborg @ny_studioschool project space / @jennifer.mccandless @airgallery “Soggy Pile of Silver Linings” 2023, ceramics / saw Michael Brennan’s shimmering “Floating weeds” paintings @minus_space , too, but we posted that yesterday :)
Latest post, link in profile / Michael Brennan’s moving images / Two Coats of Paint invited painter Kim Uchiyama to sit down with Michael Brennan to discuss “Floating Weeds,” Brennan’s fourth solo show at Minus Space. In their wide-ranging conversation, they discuss Japanese film, Russell Lee’s photographs, Charles Olson’s poetry, Venetian lagoons, architect Carlo Scarpa, Homer, and more. Link in profile
Latest post, link in profile / An Italian American colloquy with Joanne Mattera and John Avelluto / On the occasion of “A Legacy of Making: 21 Contemporary Italian American Artists,” a sprawling group show on view at the Calandra Institute through January 12, 2024, Two Coats of Paint invited John Avelluto, one of the artists in the show, and Joanne Mattera, the mastermind behind the whole project, which began as an online exhibition called “Italianità,” to talk about growing up in Italian families, and how the experience shaped their lives and their work. Link in profile
Latest post, link in profile / The uppercrust on display in “Wave Pattern” / Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / The lofts of downtown New York occupy a special place in American art history. They functioned most importantly as incubators for Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, eventually giving way to the galleries of the 1980s and 1990s. Today, the spaces once occupied by Barbara Gladstone, Pat Hearn, and Willem de Kooning have been replaced with Uniqlo, Nike, and expansive apartments for the super wealthy. In “Wave Pattern,” a downtown apartment show on the sixth floor of an unassuming Broadway building, art world scions Dylan Brant and Max Werner provide some relief from this cluttered, big-box nightmare.
Walk: Start uptown, walk down Madison Avenue. When you get near Madison Square Park, stop at @project.artspace (99 Madison), and @tenberke_architects (41 Madison). Both have interesting shows, although you have to take the elevator to get there, but, as the leaves fall, you’ll get to see @pepestudionyc installation in @madsqparknyc from the floors above. Cut through the park to 23rd Street to catch the F train, and study the @williamwegman mosaics while you wait for your ride. Unless it’s Monday, you can stop at the @themorganlibrary, too (225 Madison) and see “Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality” (opens NOV 10)…which reminds me that the Two Coats of Paint Year-end Fundraising Campaign is underway — a link to contribute is in the profile!
TenBerke Artist Project: Emily Berger, “Chorus,” essay by @karenwilkin3 @eberger90 (send a message to @jennifer_lucia to let them know you will be stopping by)
Project Artspace: Fundamental, new works by artists Anne Carnein, Chris Duncan and Felicia Glidden. @annecarneinstudio @_chrisduncanart @frglidden
@madsqparknyc Sheila Pepe installation peeks the rough the leaves from @tenberke_architects (on the 17th floor)
William Wegman mosaic detail at 23rd street F stop.