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PARTISAN REVIEW
literal a translation from the Italian, but it provided an insightful overview
of Morandi's career.
The Hofmann exhibition, ranging over several decades and through
this protean artist's multiple conceptions of what a picture could be, simi–
larly demonstrated the advantages of long life and perseverance. A sturdy,
freely-drawn studio interior and a classi c (and beautiful) "block" picture,
glowing blue and gold rectangles against a murky ground, competed for
attention with a group of explosive little "spot and splash" paintings,
while an oddball picture of staccato red and green dabs slowly declared
itself. The only constant in Hofmann's work is the youthful energy and
exuberance, the sense of discovery and improvisation that characterize ev–
erything he touched, cutting across years, scale, medium, and even con–
siderations of quality. He is almost always a challenging artist, often a great
one, and without fail, an interesting one. Emmerich's annual January
show of Hofmann's work has kept us informed of the breadth of this late–
blooming master's achievement, offering opportunities
to
sec familiar and
unfamiliar works in new combinations and contexts. There are always
surprises. It's a show that consistently sets a high standard - a marvelous
way to start the new year.
The show perhaps most unlike the Basquiat exhibition was to be
found at the Whitney itself - the long-promised Agnes Martin retrospec–
tive.
If
Basquiat's self-indulgent scrawls are paradigms of the excessive
1980s, Martin's pictures are emblems of the 1990s: meticulous, bleached,
held-back, un-sexy - the paintings of self-denial. Martin enjoys near–
sanctified status these days . She's a sort of Georgia O'Keeffe of minimal–
ism. Her age, her reticence, her withdrawal from New York to the
Southwest elicit as much awe from her admirers as her austere pictures
do . I should say that while I take Martin seriously, I've never subscribed
to
the belief that her work possesses any special transcendental quality: the
retrospective did nothing to change my mind. What did become evident
is how much her work is about process - the slow repetition of predeter–
mined lines, the building up and washing away of all-but-invisible grids
on supports of uniform size or proportion. At best, it's something like
Zen meditation, mind-numbing disciplines akin to chanting or gravel–
raking that take the participant out of the realm of time. At worst, the
repetitions seem obsessive, the result of compulsion or an unyielding de–
sire to control.
Martin's pictures are sometimes beautiful, always restrained, often to
the point of deadness. Yet for all their cool anonymity, handmadeness
prevails, dominating the early work and revealing itself even in the most
held-back late works, if they are seen from close enough. They are un–
deniably elegant, but do these subtle, uniformly inflected , uniformly sized
expanses have an effect any different from, for example, a sheet of ravish-
