KAREN WILKIN
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and undated - and as innovative as when they were first shown, I suspect.
They looked physically fresh, too, with patinas and paint in mint condi–
tion, which raises the question of how Smith's fragile painted surfaces are
being maintained. While it is good to know that the sculptures are being
lovingly cared for, it is still startling to see a polychrome sculpture of
1962, an expanding flare of narrow steel hoops (described by a perceptive
painter friend, with merciless accuracy, as "the Balenciaga"), looking as
shiny as if the paint hadn't dried yet. An even larger work,
Anchorhead
(1951), with extensive passages of Smith's characteristic scumbled, layered
brushstrokes, looked equally clean, the superimposed dry strokes as clear
as on the day they were painted. Have these works been repainted, and,
if so, who is imitating Smith's wrist?
One of the most talked about shows of the season was the Terry
Winters retrospective, from mid-February through early May, organized
by the Whitney Museum, following its showing at the Museum of Con–
temporary Art in Los Angeles. Why did the Whitney devote an entire
floor to ten years of work by an artist born in 1949? According to the
exhibit's curator, Lisa Phillips, Winters is important because he is unlike
the Neo-Expressionist and Neo-Conceptualist members of his generation.
He is, we are told in the show's catalogue, "one of a small international
group who have continued to make abstract painting a credible enter–
prise for the late twentieth century." That abstraction needed permission
to continue is peculiar enough, but so is the rest of the text, which de–
scribes Winters as using "organic forms to depict an intimate, quietly ec–
static natural world that serves as a metaphor for his own artistic evolu–
tion. With its technical virtuosity and psychologically loaded imagery
tempered by historical self-consciousness and ironic reserve, his work has
helped to carry abstract painting into a new domain." Putting aside the
evident contradiction of an abstraction that depends upon a depicted
natural world, let alone "imagery," psychologically loaded or not, the
question remains: does the work support either the thesis or the hyper–
bole? I think not.
Whatever else one can say about Winters, it's hard to think of him as
an abstract painter, since his imagery is unequivocal. He enlarges, more or
less verbatim, the kind of thing found in natural history texts and
anatomy books - spores, cells, the fruiting bodies of fungi, cross sections
of organs - depicting them with a heavy hand and a possibly deliberate
but noticeable
lack
of the technical virtuosity vaunted in the catalogue.
His drawing is so haphazard that it's sometimes hard to decide whether
we are faced with a spore, a blastula, or a soccer ball. That one wonders
at
all
about identities, rather than accepting an evocative ambiguity,
strikes me as a failure of intention. Winters has a feeling for paint, for
inflections of surface, but painterly nuances often seem to exist indepen-
