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Art, Music & Feminism in the 1950s

Following our unorthodox cover last week, the January 13, 2023 cover of Dan’s Papers features a piece by late East End painter James Brooks (1906–1992).

The Missouri-born, Texas-raised and New York-settled painter is best remembered for his 1940 mural in the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, for his status as one of the Irascible 18 abstract expressionists who protested a 1950 modern art show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and for his home/studio in Springs, once shared with his artist wife Charlotte Park, that’s now considered one of America’s 11 most endangered historic places.

The art on this week’s cover, a 1982 painting titled “Eastern,” was provided to us by the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, long ahead of the painting’s inclusion in the upcoming exhibition James Brooks: A Painting Is a Real Thing, scheduled to debut at the museum on August 6.

Guest curated by Dr. Klaus Ottmann, the exhibition will be a “comprehensive survey of significant scope comprised of some 50 paintings drawn from public and private U.S. collections,” according to the museum’s website.

The show offers an overdue retrospective of the artist’s fascinating four-decade career and diverse range of art styles, as well as an insightful 125-page catalogue featuring a chronology, bibliography and interpretive essays by Ottmann and other experts.

We spoke to Ottmann about the cover art, Brooks’ career and the August exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum.

Lilian Thomas Burwell
Photo: Lexey Swall

The Tom Brady of Other Jobs
Meet the people as old in their jobs as Tom Brady is in his: the oldest 1 percent of the work force, across a range of professions.
By Francesca Paris
Dec. 24, 2022

In the National Football League, Tom Brady is a very old man. When he takes the field Sunday night — with his Tampa Bay Buccaneers still hoping to make the postseason — he will be 45.4 years old, six years older than the next-oldest starter in the N.F.L. and the oldest starting quarterback in the league for the seventh season in a row.

In a league where most quarterbacks last about four seasons, Mr. Brady is in his 23rd. It is safe to call him the top 1 percent in terms of age for starting quarterbacks, or even the top 0.1 percent. He is, himself, the end of the distribution.

There are many ways to contemplate Mr. Brady’s age, but the best one may be to look outside the sports arena, comparing him with aging workers still going strong in other professions.

Starting at quarterback at 45 is akin to being a family doctor well into his ninth decade. It’s like being an emergency medical technician — a job that requires running up stairs and lifting bodies on stretchers — at age 70. Or an artist in her 90s, a logger in his 80s or a biologist in her 70s.

We know this because the Census Bureau publishes detailed data about the composition of the American workforce, including age and occupation. Using this information, we set out to find a group of American workers who occupy the same part of the age distribution in their professions as Mr. Brady does in his.

We found nine such people from around the United States, and we asked them why, like Mr. Brady, they can’t seem to quit.

Of course, there is no such thing as a Super Bowl of baking, or an All-Pro team of the country’s logging foremen. There is no Most Valuable Bean Biologist award, though perhaps there should be. We do not claim that these workers are the greatest of all time at what they do. On the other hand, having talked extensively with them, we cannot rule it out.

Meet them, and decide for yourself:

Lilian Burwell recently had an exhibition in New York that drew so much attention that, as she puts it, she’s been making “real money.”

“I can’t keep up with myself anymore!” she said.

At 95, that’s how so many things in her life feel, including her art: still new, after all this time.

“It’s like it comes through me,” she said. “Not from me.”

She knew as a child in New York City during the Great Depression that she had to follow her instinct to create art.

Her parents thought she had lost her mind.

“They said, ‘You can’t make a living like that!’ Especially because of the racial prejudice,” she recalled.

“And I said, ‘But that hasn’t anything to do with it.’”

They compromised. She became an art teacher, then a teacher of art teachers. Each day, she hurried home from work to make her own art, which has since been exhibited from Baltimore to Italy. If creating was magical, teaching might’ve been even more delightful: It was like “throwing a pebble in the water,” with the result — her students’ lives — out of her control.

Mary Dill Henry: The Gardens (Paintings from the 1980s)
Artforum Must See

Overlooked Bauhaus painter Mary Dill Henry gets her due

Mary Dill Henry’s legacy is a rich one, spanning paintings influenced by the Geometric Abstraction movement and joyful murals that continue to grace Hewlett-Packard’s Silicon Valley headquarters. And yet, the late Pacific Northwest artist’s name is widely unknown. Henry’s multifaceted oeuvre, represented by the Berry Campbell Gallery in New York, is finding the much-deserved spotlight now that the Hauser & Wirth Institute has processed and digitized the archive pieced together by her family. Located in the Paul V. Galvin Library at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the New Bauhaus school where Henry studied under László Moholy-Nagy in the 1940s, the archive’s sketchbooks, photographs, letters, and magazine clippings provide intriguing insight into an under-the-radar talent. 

Lynne Drexler: The First Decade

By William Corwin

In Lynne Drexler: The First Decade, simultaneously at both Berry Campbell and Mnuchin Galleries, we come across a voracious and novel form of late Abstract Expressionism. It’s a path that runs parallel to color-field painting, and in playing with discreet nodes of color owes as much to Klimt, van Gogh, and Seurat, as it does to Drexler’s mentor and teacher, Hans Hofmann. The paintings in these two exhibitions test out how best to manipulate the viewer’s response to associations of almost-pixelated color units, singular forms which attain a mosaic-like quality: working together but retaining their independence. This causes almost as much visual agita as it creates harmonic compositions. But Drexler enjoys this game, pushing us into musical associations, as with the fiery and seething Gotterdammerung (1959), which displays her obsession with Wagner; or reminding us of the luminaries of late nineteenth/early twentieth century painting. The paintings are slyly referential, and at times almost charts or repositories of leitmotifs, gorgeous but slightly too practiced. It is at the moments when the gestures themselves begin to get out of hand that we begin to really enjoy Drexler’s chaotic energy.

The selection of paintings at Mnuchin Gallery range from 1959 to 1964, and very literally trace the path of an artist growing out of the influence of Hofmann, with whom she had studied in 1956 in New York and Provincetown. In Erratic Water (1963), Untitled (1962-64), and Leaning Trees (1964), impassive squares and rectangles stand guard over miasmatic flows of smaller quadrilaterals. Drexler plays constantly with how to orient her precise strokes: in Erratic Water, long blue, gray, and lilac striations branch and intersect like geologic formations, while in Rosewell (1959-62), the artist gives her lively little forms some breathing room, and they float in an erratic but discernable formation, like a chemistry textbook illustration of the process of diffusion. The thick stratigraphies of color, as well as pointillist pods of flickering dots recall Klimt’s The Park (1910) or Bauerngarten (1907), but Drexler seems to be seeking a controlled chaos, much like Wagner’s swirling string passages connoting the movement of the Rhine or dancing magic fire in his “Ring” Cycle. This she achieves in the pale Untitled (1960), given pride of place in Mnuchin’s rotunda, a breeze of mint green, orange, and burgundy brushstrokes which ebb and flow like a cloud of particles constantly changing size and orientation. In Untitled, Drexler conducts a visual musical passage solely through brushstroke, perhaps thinking, and certainly reminiscent, of Monet’s Les Nymphéas.

Drexler’s innovation in terms of presenting color was quickly recognized by both Hofmann and her other mentor Robert Motherwell: she was steering in a direction that contained the raw emotional energy of action painting but was not following the path of watery skeins of color of her contemporaries like Helen Frankenthaler or bold juxtapositions of form and texture, such as Perle Fine or Willem de Kooning. At Berry Campbell, whose selection of works dates from 1965-1969, Drexler’s fastidious arrangements of strokes or units become much tighter and thicker, and the earlier open fields of color and brushstrokes yield to denser accumulations. These canvasses offer more textural variety; works such as Flecked Sun (1966), Grass Fugue (1966), and Harmonic Sphere (1966), map-like, have distinct zones of more square strokes painted in clear distinction to longer curvy marks. The artist clearly recognizes that certain motifs dominate, but she works hard to balance their presence against that of the other motifs: the feather-like curvy marks do coalesce into wing-like forms (which also look like van Gogh’s cypresses and wheat fields), and these she tries in different colors. Drexler allows these wings to take over the canvas in Harmonic Sphere, the curling wing is pink, in Grass Fugue it is green. In South Water (1965) and Plumed Bloom (1967), and it is in these paintings, and the paintings of 1967-69, that she allows this powerful gesture to grow and destabilize the visual equation of her paintings. In Burst Blue (1969), Towards Twilight (1968), Egg Plume (1967), and Untitled (1968-69), Drexler becomes enchanted by her writhing plumes of diaphanous color. These formations are far from benign or sedate; they expand and weave their way across the canvas: it’s as if Vincent’s cypresses have decided to barrel diagonally upwards across the canvas in Egg Plume, checked only by a resolute red dot in the upper left corner. Towards Twilight is the most unsettling and intriguing of Drexler’s paintings in both exhibitions: a vibrating, revolving mass of beiges, pinks, and blues—overall, fleshy in color—expands outwards, swallowing masses of ellipses and circles, and pushing flattened yellow rectangles to the borders of the picture plane. The brooding AbEx postwar angst has been concentrated into this scintillating mass, and it is both devouring and shoving aside the artist’s selection of considered Modernist signifiers. It is exciting to see a relatively short period in an artist’s life covered so thoroughly at both galleries, and to watch her tweak and experiment up to a point of jarring and poignant originality.

Art Basel’s 2022 edition in Miami Beach closed on Saturday, December 3, 2022, following a week of solid sales across all market sectors and throughout the show. 

The Fair celebrated its landmark 20th-anniversary edition in Miami Beach, signalling two decades of growth and impact by Art Basel as a cultural cornerstone in South Florida, across the Americas, and beyond. The 2022 edition – Art Basel’s largest to date in Miami Beach – brought together 282 premier galleries from 38 countries and territories, including 25 galleries participating in the Fair for the first time and multiple international exhibitors returning to the show after a brief hiatus.

Photo Clayton Calvert © Artlyst 2022

Art Basel continued to draw an attendance of unparalleled global breadth and calibre. Leading private collectors from 88 countries across North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East visited the Fair, as well as museum directors, curators, and high-level patrons from over 150 cultural organizations, including: Art Gallery of Ontario; Aspen Art Museum; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Denver Art Museum; Detroit Institute of Arts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba); Museum of Fine Arts Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The New Museum, New York; Oklahoma Contemporary; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Serpentine Galleries, London; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, reinforcing the Fair’s commitment to showcasing exceptional art from the region, nearly two-thirds of this year’s participating galleries had locations in North and South America, with a powerful presence of galleries from the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. The show also featured standout presentations by galleries from Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay, including newcomers Herlitzka + Faria from Barrio Norte, Paulo Kuczynski from São Paulo, and Rolf Art from Buenos Aires.

In celebration of its 20th anniversary, Art Basel launched a Gift-Giving Campaign with a lead donation to the STEAM + program, whose mission is to bring active artists into the seven public schools of the city of Miami Beach. Founded in 2018, the program engages 5,000 children and teenagers every year. It is administered by The Bass Museum of Art, working with many other local institutions, including Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami City Ballet, New World Symphony, The Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU, Young Musicians Unite, and The Wolfsonian-FIU. In addition, UBS, Ruinart, La Prairie, Chateau D’Esclans, Valentino, Knight Foundation, and DRIFT generously support this philanthropic campaign. The fundraiser will run until the end of 2022 when the total sum collected will be announced. 

Where would Miami be, when it comes to art and culture, had Art Basel never planted the seed in 2002? Would The Magic City still be living under the shadow of its Miami Vice/Cocaine Cowboy past? Over two decades ago, auto mogul, art collector, and philanthropist Norman Braman and his wife Irma had a bigger vision for both Miami Beach and the art world. Although there’s been challenges and victories along the way, Art Basel Miami Beach’s 2022 edition is bigger, better, and stronger.

"We found our life partner and 20 years ago we met our significant other in Art Basel," said Dan Gelber, Mayor of Miami Beach.  "It would not have happened without Norman and Irma Braman."

New Beginnings

It was recently announced that Marc Spiegler would step down as Global Director after 15 years at the helm. Noah Horowitz, after leaving Art Basel as Director Americas to work at Sotheby’s, fittingly returns to step into Spiegler’s shoes. The transition should be seamless, and Horowitz will bring new energy and vision to the show. 

"It is incredibly exciting to step into this role, not only the fairs but try to open a new chapter of what we can do as far as broader innovation in the art ecosystem and market," comments Horowitz.  "I think there is extraordinary untapped potential in Basel and that is what I’m most excited about."

He continues, "I love Art Basel because of its mission and supporting galleries and arguably more so coming out of Covid. That power of coming together is transformative."

Largest Show to Date

Following a pandemic hiatus in 2020 and a challenging 2021, Art Basel Miami Beach returned full throttle boasting its largest edition to date. There are 282 premier galleries from 38 countries and territories. 25 are first-time participants.

Success from the Start

While gallery sales have yet to be released, it was an exciting first time exhibiting at Art Basel Miami Beach for Berry Campbell Gallery (Survey). The New York gallery presented Lynne Drexler: Nature Sparked, a focused exhibition featuring Drexler’s groundbreaking works created between 1959 and 1967. 

"It is an honor for Berry Campbell to participate as a new gallery in the 20th anniversary Art Basel Miami Beach fair. We are grateful to Art Basel for their inclusivity and for their willingness to include galleries with new ideas and unique perspectives," commented Christine Berry and Martha Campbell. The gallery had a hugely successful fair selling out the booth. The largest canvas, titled Mutinous Water from 1964, sold for $1.2 million. Continue Reading

Lynne Drexler: Nature Sparked
Art Basel Miami Beach
December 1 - 3, 2022

Purchase Tickets
Online Catalogue

Berry Campbell is pleased to present Lynne Drexler: Nature Sparked, a focused exhibition featuring Drexler’s groundbreaking works created between 1959 and 1967. On October 23, 2022, an article by Ted Loos appeared in the New York Times with the heading, “Out of Obscurity Lynne Drexler’s Abstract Paintings Fetch Millions.” The article was published on the occasion of the opening of a joint show of the work of Drexler’s first career phase (1959–1969) at the Mnuchin Gallery on the Upper East Side and Berry Campbell in Chelsea, which represents Drexler’s estate. An Abstract Expressionist painter and student of both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, Drexler established a distinctive stylistic idiom through vibrantly contrasting hues, applied in swatch-like patches with a Pointillist dynamism. Never offered before, these paintings reveal the significant contributions she made to post-war abstraction and reveal works alive with an intense physical vibrancy and an incomparable and innovative style.