The Upper East Side gallery scene
NEW YORK – The Upper East Side gallery scene can often seem a bit staid, but it has its mercurial side. For one thing, the art in its contemporary galleries frequently pushes the envelope. For another, its many semiprivate dealers occasionally mount shows en masse, whether by plan or coincidence, that amount to collective mood swings. Sometimes Asian art is ascendant, or 19th- and early-20th-century American art. Right now the neighborhood has broken out in exhibitions of European drawings.
Friday and Saturday are officially – emphasis on officially – the last days of “Master Drawings New York,” an annual weeklong constellation of exhibitions, in its fourth incarnation, that coincides with the old master auctions and the Winter Antiques Show. That event, at the Park Avenue Armory, is open through Sunday, and some of the gallery shows are up well beyond that.
Some semiprivate dealers have staged their only public exhibitions of the year; others have put their spaces at the disposal of out-of-town dealers or space-challenged local ones. The effect is something like an art fair, but more focused in terms of material and more geographically spread out at sites better appointed, more spacious and vastly more architecturally interesting than the average art fair booth. Factor in some other galleries in the area showing drawings (including contemporary ones), and there’s quite a bit to look at, most of it on or just off Madison Avenue between 66th and 81st Streets.
The work is primarily European, from the 16th century almost to the present, with high concentrations of Italian, French, Dutch-Flemish and English drawings from the 17th century to the early 19th. Marquee names are scarce, but there are many extraordinary talents who are all but unknown to those of us outside the specialized world of drawings.
Which is to say that you never know what you’ll see, and that you won’t necessarily know what you’re looking at. The unpredictability provides great exercise for the eye, whether amateur or expert – though in some cases not much exertion is required.
At the Didier Aaron gallery (32 East 67th St.), for example, you’d almost have to be blind not to be intrigued by a drawing of people standing and sitting in a large, colonnaded space centered on an imposing history painting, which is displayed beneath a skylight. The work of Jean-Pierre Norblin de la Gourdaine – a new name to many – it dates from 1805-10, but feels awfully prescient: The set-up is a precise precursor of Thomas Struth’s photographs from the last two decades of people looking at prominent artworks in museums and churches.
Also at Didier Aaron, Addison Fine Arts from San Francisco has set up shop with a range of English and European drawings and watercolors – including works by Pinturricchio and Rembrandt – and at least one instance of illuminating confusion. What I thought was a western landscape of a mountain waterfall by the 20th-century American artist Rockwell Kent was in fact an unusually modern-looking watercolor view of the Swiss-Italian Alps by the Briton Francis Towne , from 1789.
Similar surprises can be had at Jill Newhouse Gallery (4 East 81st St.), where works from the collection of Curtis O. Baer, are on view through Feb. 26. Keep an eye out for an early, uncharacteristically blocky rendering of a man’s back that Odilon Redon made in 1860 when he was but 20, and a late, rather scary ink drawing of birdlike figures by Max Beckmann that you might almost think was by Wifredo Lam.
While the offerings at Newhouse range back to the 17th-century Dutch, those at the Jan Krugier Gallery (980 Madison Ave., near 76th Street) are devoted almost exclusively to the 19th- and 20th-century French and Spanish. One of the stars here is a Picasso charcoal of a large bull’s head from around 1955 that (like Newhouse’s Redon) seems more chiseled than drawn.
Some galleries are fairly strict in their national orientation. The drawings that Jose de la Mano has brought from Madrid are almost all Spanish, ranging from early-17th-century works to two drawings by Luis Feito, a little-known Modernist born in 1927. Visiting his display on the second floor of the Arader Gallery at 1016 Madison Ave., near 78th Street, has an added perk: the generous stairway is lined with wonderful botanical prints – an Arader specialty – of American trees by the 18th-century British naturalist Mark Catesby.
Next door, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, at 1018 Madison, Lowell Libson of London is showing mostly 18th- and 19th-century English drawings, including works by Constable, Gainsborough and John Martin. But there are also English scenes by foreigners, most notably four small, resonant ink studies from the 1660s of lush London parks. They are the work of Michel van Overbeek, possibly a Dutch merchant who drew as he traveled, given the geographical range of his subjects and the apparent lack of paintings by him.
Another London dealer, James Mackinnon, has brought a mostly English selection to Clinton Howell Antiques (150 East 72nd St.), including a radiant watercolor of the Eton College Library by Augustus Charles Pugin (1762-1832) that is one of the few richly reported interiors in the shows. And a third London establishment, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, at Mark Murray Fine Paintings (39 East 72nd St.), has topped off an imposing mix of mostly French and Italian drawings dating as far back as the early 16th century – a Virgin and Child by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, the son of Domenico – with more recent English works, including L.S. Lowry’s first attempt at watercolor. He made it on the spot in 1952, at 65, when the daughter of a friend he was visiting doubted that he was a famous artist.
Attribution questions abound in this field, turning the week into an opportunity for dealers to draw on one another’s expertise. One of the first things to be seen in a show mounted by Mia N. Weiner, a private dealer from Connecticut, at L’Antiquaire & the Connoisseur (36 East 73rd St., through next Friday) is “Study of an Anguished Female Head,” with a typed label reading, “Flemish, 17th-century.” Scrawled over it in pencil are the words “Maybe C. de Crayer” – “a suggestion by someone more knowledgeable than I,” Weiner said. She also said she had dispatched an assistant to the Frick Library to seek out a photograph of a Caspar de Crayer painting that might be based on the drawing.
Monroe Warshaw, a private Manhattan dealer who is having his first public exhibition at the Alexander Gallery (942 Madison Ave., between 74th and 75th Streets, through next Friday) buys almost nothing but unattributed drawings and then sets about consulting with art historians and curators. “Otherwise, it’s no fun,” he said.
The result in this instance is a cluster of fascinating Flemish and German drawings that have been looked into on Warshaw’s behalf by a young doctoral candidate named Edward Wouk, who may be on hand to talk about his research. He is especially forthcoming about a large sheet depicting sculptures of sandaled feet that was drawn in the 1530s from Roman statues and fragments that may all have been in the same private collection in Rome. Wouk and Warshaw have attributed the work to a little-known artist with the pleasing name Hermannus Posthumus.
On another wall, an exquisite drawing shows a Venus-like figure whose tree-branch arms transform her into Daphne, but whose proportions shout Northern Europe. Warshaw is convinced that it is the only known drawing by Georg Aberl, a southern German artist from the early 17th century, though he concedes that not everyone agrees.
Nissman, Abromson Ltd. from Brookline, Mass., has an especially beautiful show at Praxis International Art (25 East 73rd St.). The Italian drawings here include one of a young boy eating that was, then wasn’t and now is again by Veronese, and a deft study for a relief that is almost certainly by Pietro Bernini, father of the genius Gian Lorenzo, that helps to explain the son’s preciosity. A charmingly crisp view of skaters on a frozen canal is by Auguste-Xavier Leprince (1799-1826), who didn’t live long enough to leave much of a mark on history. A quizzical-looking young woman in a small portrait by the German painter Franz Krueger (1797-1857) has a softer charm.
Don’t miss a dark outdoor image from the 1890s by the Italian Post-Impressionist Giovanni Segantini. Heavily worked in conte crayon and ink, like an exceedingly muscular Seurat, it shows a boy breaking bread with two shifty-looking men. It suggests a classic Impressionist picnic gone awry, and may have an autobiographical basis: at an early age, to seek his fortune in art, Segantini stole money and ran away from home, only to conned out of his start-up cash by experienced grifters.
Next door to Praxis, at 23 East 73rd St., are three floors of shows. Trinity Fine Arts is showing mostly British works of the 19th and 20th centuries. At Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Art, 20th-century Mexican works prevail, with Rufino Tamayo and Gunther Gerzso standing out (through next Friday). The private New York dealer Richard A. Berman is ensconced at C.G. Boerner with drawings and watercolors ranging from the 16th century to Picasso and beyond.
At 5 East 73rd St., the Craig F. Starr Gallery, which is not participating in “Master Drawings New York,” has, by coincidence, a display of 20 spare, jewel-like watercolor and pencil works by the American Post-Minimalist Richard Tuttle (through Feb. 13). Their adamant economy suggests that there is more than one way to be a master.
So do the bracingly feminist drawings of Ida Applebroog at Hauser & Wirth at 32 East 69th St. (through March 6). In a large group of small drawings from 1969 the artist concentrates on depicting her genitals; these relatively realistic renderings are contrasted with an installation of recent drawings in which she revisits the theme with more flamboyance.
There’s a conspicuous concentration of quality at 19 East 66th St., where both David Tunick and Simon Dickinson have shows, and Thomas Williams and Andrew Wyld of London are elegantly encamped at Dickinson. Start at the top, where Tunick’s display includes a 15th-century drawing from the circle of Rogier van der Weyden. Depicting the swooning Virgin supported by the two Marys, it feels so solid that it might almost be a drawing of a carved sculpture.
At Dickinson, I had trouble knowing who was showing what, but the works range from Jacques Callot through Boucher and Fragonard to Picasso and a Kees van Dongen gouache of a woman in a hat, from 1908, that provides some early fluorescent color. Wyld has Thomas Lawrence’s 1790 portrait in pencil, charcoal and colored chalk of Lord Thomas Pelham-Clinton, a haughty, sharp-eyed boy looking none too happy in an off-the-shoulder dress.
And uptown at Shepherd & Derom Galleries (58 East 79th St., through Feb. 20), the New York dealer Margot Gordon’s selection of French and Italian drawings includes a striking portrait of a woman in red and black chalk by Federico Zuccaro. Also here is the dealer Crispian Riley-Smith from London, with Dutch and Flemish drawings, among them a rare Crucifixion by Hans Bol from the late 15th century and a crystalline view of the harbor at Delft in gray ink and wash by Joannis Jacobus Bijlaert (1734-1809). It is based on an earlier print, which accounts for its slightly archaic look and caption.
Vwg!of the galleries are a bit farther afield, but worth the extra walk.
To the east, at 252 East 68th St., Stiebel Ltd. has an engaging array of mostly French drawings that veer among big and not-big names (through next Friday). Standouts include a Renoir study for female bathers, so refined that you might almost take it for an Ingres, and a strange, collagelike drawing of a woman surrounded by the heads of 27 male admirers of greatly varying ages. Its attribution has shifted from Louis-Leopold Boilly (1761-1845) to Jean-Baptiste Isabey (1767-1855) and is now leaning toward Boilly’s son, Julien (1796-1874).
North of the action, at Carlton Hobbs (60 East 93rd St/), you can study the beautiful drawings Jean-Luc Baroni has brought from Paris. A stunning pastel portrait of Antonio Canova by the Irish artist Hugh Douglas Hamilton would seem to be the last word in realism. A hurried ink drawing by Guercino from around 1630 is reminiscent of Goya in its portrayal of spectators at a bullfight cringing behind, and peering in unison through, a horizontally slatted barricade.
Baroni’s drawings are part of an exhibition titled, a tad off-puttingly, “In the Grand Manner” (through Tuesday), together with the rare, distinguished and often eccentric European antiques that Hobbs handles. A standout among these is a very large gold and silver-giltwood model of the Temple of Solomon from 1876 that looks something like a cross between the Bank of England and the James A. Farley Post Office on Eighth Avenue.
In the grandest manner of all is the gallery’s building itself: an enormous Louis XV-style mansion designed by John Russell Pope and completed in 1931. Three lots wide, it has few equals in this town in terms of sheer drop-dead majesty. It’s a setting that puts the old back in master.
