End of Year Notes

The Black Swan

 For all the hype about lesbian love scenes and self-mutiliation, The Black Swan is really a  spot-on character study disguised as a classic melodrama/opera/ballet adorned with the occasional Japanese style cgi horror image. Portman gives her best performance since Beautiful Girls perhaps because as in B.G. she is playing closest to herself. Aronofsky, for whatever reason, is able to slide into the head of a ballerina. He really does. I know. Trust me or else I'll tell you about the ballet classes I took in high school. Now there's a disturbing image. 

Abstract Expressionist New York

Moma's exhibit of works all drawn from its own fabulous collection brings forth:

• the  under-represented pleasantly represented: Baziotes and Brooks
• the enduring masters: Pollock, Krasner, DeKooning, Gorky, Rothko [displayed in in stunning range], Reinhardt
• those hanging on for dear life: Kline,Still and Hoffman,
• and those who have fallen off entirely:  Motherwell and Gottlieb - who must have been one charming dude to ever to have ascended as far as he did.

Favorite extended wall caption [it always thrills me that when dumb paint on canvas can rouse people to outrage, Outrage!]:

When Reinhardt’s black paintings were first exhibited at 

MoMA, in 1963, their reductive imagery and stark 

palette shocked visitors, prompting at least one 

Museum membership cancellation, in protest.

I loved the photography, not the obligatory Robert Frank's but the all-over, all out ab-ex silver prints of:

Aaron Siskind

Harry Callahan

Nathan Lyons

Frederick Sommer, and

Minor White [best name ever]

I did not love most of the ab-ex sculpture which, with very few exceptions, could not escape looking like dated dental office art.

Exhibit of the Year


Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield   curated by Robert Gober


June 24 - October 17, 2010

Unlike great athletes who often do not make very good coaches, great artists often do make the best curators. There is precious little I could quibble with in this pristine tour de force of an exhibition. If you don't know Burchfield look him up or buy the catalogue. He was an upstate New Yorker who lived his life as a working, middle class artist. He did things with nature, watercolor and raw energy that had never been done. Most revelatory, later in life he returned to paintings he'd begun decades prior and added to them by tacking on additional pieces of paper. I don't know what the dude was smoking, but like Cezanne and Morandi before him, you can see the air rippling around his world, but unlike either of those gentlemen you can also smell the moisture on the forest floor and hear the flutter of the butterflies.