A s art fairs go, the Armory Show is the colossus of the contemporary art world.
Around 235 galleries from all over the world gather this weekend at the Javits Center in New York, each with a booth starring their best. I like it — and encourage people to visit — for its abundance and the snapshot it provides of the good, the bad, and the ugly. On the whole, the dealers are very good, so it’s a serious enterprise. It runs through September 8. It’s the fair’s 30th anniversary. I’ve been to most of them.
Frieze, the London art fair, bought the Armory Show franchise in July, sad to say. Frieze wants to insinuate itself into the American market, but the iterations I’ve seen aim at the lowest common denominator among the oligarchs and the fad-focused. I hope Frieze, which is also very corporate, doesn’t wreck the Armory Show.
Galleries are at the fair to sell, so the Armory Show tells us what dealers divine as the taste of art buyers and collectors. There’s no accounting for taste, of course, and the world won’t end from a blast of grotesque décor. It’s not grotesque, but I’ve never seen so much art with sparkly surfaces. None of it’s good, so I presume that, in the absence of craftsmanship, poetry, and layers of meaning, heavy glitter was deployed to fill the void. It never works.
That said, I like to accentuate the positive wherever possible. Cob, a very good London dealer, devotes its booth to Tomo Campbell (b. 1988), a British artist I didn’t know who is in the vanguard of what I detect, putting my Poirot cap on, is a Rococo Revival, and that makes me happy. Peak Rococo is French from, say, the 1730s to the deluge during which the guillotine grew dull from overuse. It’s Watteau, Fragonard, and Boucher, but lovely, distinctive British, German, American, Italian, and Spanish versions thrived, too. Every style and era produces art that’s mostly bad, but Rococo’s 18th century might be the exception to the rule.
Campbell’s Promise, from 2024, is delightful and gracious. It keeps the eye moving via asymmetrical, dreamy shapes and keeps the eye pleased with light, pastel colors, and a subtle tonal range. Promise reminds me of a fête galante — a courtship party — by Watteau or a romantic chase scene from Greek mythology. It’s warm and cool. Figures are elusive and coy. This is Rococo, not World Wrestling Entertainment.
The look is indulgent and enchanting. Campbell says he’s inspired by the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters, not Rococo since they’re from the 1490s, but their pastel palette, silk and metallic thread, and ultrarefined nobles and hunters make us yearn for chivalry. The walls in Cob’s booth are lined with acid-green Moiré silk, a nice touch and perfect for Campbell’s work. Promise is big — 63 by 98 inches — but it doesn’t suffer from gigantism. It’s immersive and, at $40,000, a great buy. Flora Yukhnovich and Michaela Yearwood-Dan are two more artists reviving Rococo. What’s wrong with loving color and fantasy?
Rococo’s old and new, but artists from the past, and dead ones at that, make comebacks, too. Mary Abbott (1921–2019) was regarded as a very good second-generation Abstract Expressionist whose career evaporated in the 1960s. She had as much promise as Robert Motherwell, Joan Mitchell, Alfred Leslie, and Helen Frankenthaler for her big, bold collage paintings such as Red Water, from 1957. It’s big, at 64 by 106 inches, with horizontal passages of cherry, burgundy, cinnabar, and candy-apple red. Schoelkopf Gallery, which always has good things, now represents her estate and dedicated its booth to her work. It’s $295,000, which is a fair price. All the work at Schoelkopf’s booth has never been on the market before.
Abbott was a Manhattan debutante, made the cover of Vogue as a young, high-society model, summered in the Hamptons, wintered in the Caribbean, and descended from Founding Father John Adams. A rich dilettante? Rich, yes, but a woman artist in the 1950s and ’60s didn’t succeed as she did without grit, talent, and sharp elbows. Art-wise, what happened to her after, say, 1970? In the ’70s, she taught art at the University of Minnesota but dropped out of the art market. Strange to say, the ’70s are known as a time when painting went out of style and, in the ’80s, well, the stars were Basquiat, Haring, Koons, Cindy Sherman, Mapplethorpe, graffiti art, and need I say more?
Her era, interests, and talent came and went along with Abstract Expressionism — not as result of her personal failure. Today, women artists are piping hot, but there’s nothing about her work that sings “I Am Woman, Head Me Roar.” She’s very, very good, period, which is the best reason to be in the galleries and in the public eye again.
I know next to nothing about living artists from India, but the one artist I definitely know is Natvar Bhavsar, the Rothko of India, only better. DAG, with spaces in Delhi, Mumbai, and New York, devoted its booth to his work, which is both sublime and infinite.
Bhavsar is 90, still painting, and was casually sitting on a sofa in DAG’s booth when I visited. He has been working mostly in the U.S. since the late 1960s, got his American art education from Penn, and has been an American citizen for years. Rothko, Clifford Still, Barnett Newman, and Robert Motherwell inspired him for a time. In India he’s among the art gods, and in America he’s viewed, correctly, as having a very Indian aesthetic.
I asked him what makes his work Indian as opposed to American. As an Americanist, I can itemize the half dozen or so core characteristic of American art from, say, Copley in the 1760s through the Pictures Generation in the 1980s, but we’re a new country. India’s huge, ancient, and disputatiously disparate. It’s not a melting-pot kinda place. He immediately said, “Color,” making a national and personal claim. His mother’s family owned a factory that printed on textiles. He described his childhood memories of the place as “a sea of color” and India as filled with color as a concert hall is filled with music.
When I wrote earlier this year about the Rothko retrospective at the Vuitton Foundation, I suggested that Rothko’s classic style, for all its puffy beauty and color juxtapositions, is formulaic as well as bounded at the margins, so the effect is controlled and decorative. Bhavsar’s work is infinite, sometimes explosive, and doesn’t so much absorb us but sweeps us up. If there’s a subject, it might be a cosmic blast or the distant, allover look of the Milky Way. Among Abstract Expressionists, the big classification where we often find Bhavsar, he’s a peer of Mark Tobey, who came from Seattle and was totally tuned to the art of China and Japan.
We talked about his technique. He doesn’t use brushes or a palette knife and doesn’t pour or drip. He’s gestural in a far subtler way that’s Old World. He sifts powder pigment on a flat canvas treated with a wet binder, one color at a time, often applying dozens of colors. His paintings look layered and grainy because they are, and the many colors blend, overlap, and range so subtly that even what I call the cosmic-blast pictures unfold in slow motion.
DAG’s booth is a mini retrospective of Bhavsar’s work from the 1970s to today. For him, they’re small and midsize, with a six-footer here and there. Some of his work is 30 feet wide and suggests views of the night sky during aurora season. Prices for his works range from $40,000 to $400,000. Ketak, from 2013, is likely on the high end.
It may or may not have been a coincidence, but two artists, one from Belgium and the other from the Netherlands, both new to me, lured and snared me. Galerie Ron Mandos from Amsterdam is highlighting Katinka Lampe (b. 1963), a painter from Rotterdam. She’s a figurative painter with a soft, quiet style who starts with photographing models or motifs and painting uncanny, otherworldly abstractions.
2115245 is from 2024. At 82 by 59 inches, it depicts long dresses hanging in what seems to be a closet. It’s aggressively vertical and an eye-catcher. She’s got a pastel palette, which soothes the shape, and a view that I have to say is very odd. I imagined I was looking into Vermeer’s costume closet. The painting was already sold, but the price — middling five figures — seems reasonable. The title is an ID number. Lampe doesn’t want to impose a meaning, leaving that to the viewer.
Lampe’s paint surfaces are precise, flat, and unobtrusive, or what I consider Old Master Dutch. She’s a virtuosa in subject, color, and drama, though, but all are on the quiet side.
Tim Van Laere Gallery is in Antwerp but has space in Rome as well. Rubens, van Dyke, Bruegel, and Gossaert were from Antwerp, which makes for stellar art history. The city was once one of Europe’s richest, and a stormy, piquant little place, with Catholics and Protestants, the Spanish and the Jesuits, mixing it up. Port cities, and Antwerp is one of Europe’s most storied, are always hothouses since so many people, come, make whoopee, and go. Girls looking for new best friends in the diamond department have headed to Antwerp for 500 years. And wee Belgium has been so troublesome, from Waterloo to Flanders Fields to the Bulge to the bloated, parasitical EU.
And popping from this stew is Bram Demunter (b. 1997). Hmm-Hmm Munning Mountain, painted this year, descends from the Ghent Altarpiece and Bruegel, Harry Potter, Ensor, old Indian royal-court paintings, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and how someone with a fertile imagination visualizes Eden or everyday life on Noah’s Ark. Demunter’s motto is “everything exists side by side and can be shown as such,” which is nonsensical, profound, and very Flemish. He paints amalgamations of people, animals, and bizarre landscapes, and parts thereof. No one has an identity we can nail, though I’m happy to say one figure in Munning Mountain, sinister and holding a blood-soaked sword, looks like both Marx and Al Sharpton. His work’s medieval but modern, apocalyptic but fun, juxtapositions that seem to suit our psychotic age. Is the whole world turning into Belgium?
Demunter tells me the title refers to imaginary sounds — hums and mumbles — that mountains make, given all the myths surrounding them. It underscores the antiquity and fantasy his art projects.
He’s a wonderful, very young painter. When I saw his work, I’d just written about Daniel Giordano, the idiosyncratic sculptor from Newburgh, so wild and crazy were both on my mind. Munning Mountain is $42,000 and well worth it. Demunter’s work is among the very best art at the Armory Show.