124
PARTISAN REVIEW
space-devouring painted steel pieces, including the spiky, "ground–
flung," golden yellow
Chickasaw,
from 1973, its sawtooth edges and
scooped shapes like an exuberant riff on Giacometti's
Woman with Her
Throat Cut,
were evidence of both Witkin's place in the lineage of Caro,
at the time, and his notable originality. Smaller, more recent, poured
works, mostly in bronze, with some aluminum and stainless steel vari–
ants, brought us up to date.
The poured sculptures demand to be seen close up, if the subtle
inflections of their forms and chromatic nuances of their patinas are to
be discovered. Some, with intricately folded surfaces, suggest that we
explore them like Chinese landscape paintings or scholars' rocks, men–
tally traversing their complex geography. Others, like cascades or scud–
ding clouds magically arrested, bear witness to hot metal's formerly
molten state; a very recent fragile "tower" seemed, paradoxically, at
once to acknowledge and defy gravity, declaring itself to be both a
stilled waterfall of once-molten bronze and a freely composed gathering
of discrete patches of metal.
The surprise of the show was discovering the seamlessness of Witkin's
varied development. The swelling forms of some poured bronzes, like
their inventive patinas, became logical descendants of the soft-edged
volumes and intense colors of his earliest work, while the rapidly
sketched "drawing" of other, more open pieces announced itself as an
intimate, cursive version of the angular, overscaled gestures of his steel
sculptures . All in all, the show was a fascinating overview of a vitally
engaged, mature artist who continues to question his most deeply held
assumptions . It's an exhibition a museum should have done, but that's
another matter.
The New York Studio School, which occupies the site of the original
Whitney Museum, on 8th Street, habitually mounts shows that muse–
ums should have done, in spite of the limited size of its gallery space.
This fall,
Academie Matisse
examined a little known aspect of this assid–
uously studied artist's legacy: the work of the students at the school he
ran between 1908 and 1911. Most were not French. There were a good
many Americans, because of Matisse's connection with the Stein family,
some Germans and Englishmen, and a surprising number of Scandina–
vians, largely because of the Norwegian, Jean Heiberg, and the Swede,
Carl Palme, early recruits to the school who urged their compatriots to
come to Paris and enjoy the benefits of completely original, tough
instruction at modest prices. Earlier this year, the Lillehammer Art
Museum in Norway mounted a pioneering survey of the work of
Matisse's Nordic students, from which the Studio School's exhibition
