Nate Lowman: Parking / At Home: Alice Neel and the Queer World / George Morrison

Nate Lowman, Advantage Perfection (Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness), 2024 © Nate Lowman Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

By PETER FRANK October 23, 2024

Say what you might regarding the globe-spanning mega-galleries that dominate the current art scene, their ambition is to our benefit as they address art history (responsibly), blend it with the present (discreetly), and thus determine an intermediating dialogue between museological and commercial contexts. The trio of one-person shows occupying David Zwirner’s block-long Los Angeles compound exemplifies this crafty and well-crafted strategy that does everybody good: it’s hard to fault efforts to reawaken markets for undeservedly obscured figures, subject not-so-forgotten figures to new curatorial angles, and bring an emerging (okay, emergent) living artist to the attention of a fresh audience.

That living talent is a homey, and his approach to his subject matter, in two dimensions at least, has an LA frisson to it. Nate Lowman grew up in the artsy mountain resort town of Idyllwild, between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, before heading to New York for college, so the title he gives his show, “Parking,” might induce Ruschaesque associations. In fact, the series of paintings given this rubric are of golf courses – an LA Pop “thing,” perhaps, but not as quintessential as parking lots. Lowman represents these, er, sporting fields as neutralized grounds, non-pictures of non-places. The pictures are composed from various angles, compromising any but the most formal reading. The coloration and brushwork feel appropriate, the way embalming fluid tonalizes a mummy. Lowman seeks the neutral moment, the visual experience of perfect non-presence. It’s a strategy descended directly from Gerhard Richter’s, but without the tragic undercurrent that suffuses throughout the German painter’s oeuvre. Lowman exposes the lie of pictorial art – not only with his Parking canvases, but also with an intense scattering of daubed ideas, found/altered objects, and even rough-hewn free-standing sculptures, one of which stands in greeting at the show’s entrance. These tactile devices reinforce the paintings’ deception. Lowman’s golf courses are the knowing figurative equivalent of zombie abstraction, but perhaps more dangerous: they are actually images of aesthetic and even social substance. Painting is undead.

Alice Neel, Henry Geldzahler, 1967, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Anonymous gift, 1981© The Estate of Alice Neel Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
 

Painting was never more alive than in the hands of Alice Neel, a grande dame d’atelier based in New York from the 1920s until her passing in 1984 (at 84). Neel wasn’t simply living and working in the mid-century world art capital, she was documenting its denizens, their affinities and their peccadillos – not by going out to clubs and vernissages, but by posing clubbers and vernissageurs on her own ratty studio furniture and painting straight-on seated portraits like some latter-day Goya. “Straight-on” is a term used advisedly here, as “At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World” focuses curatively on the painter’s penchant for the creatives and demi-mondaines who made the “scene” a scene. Cultural critic Hilton Als has organized “At Home” as not simply a parade of people pictures, but as an excavation of their relationship to Neel and to the city and magical energy the Pennsylvania-born people-lover celebrated. Being “celebrated” by Alice Neel could seem like being lauded in a roast; her expressionist mannerisms amplified her ability to find the awkward and vulnerable souls of politicians no less than polysexuals, which is why New York Ed Koch and Met Museum curator Henry Geldzahler hang next to Warhol Factory folk like Jackie Curtis and Gerard Malanga. In his particular selections, and in the engrossing documentary material presented in several vitrines, Als recalls a time and a place that now seem mythic, even to those (like Als himself) who were there. The thing gripping this funky, glorious past to the gritty, furious present, of course, is AIDS, and that plague seeps around the exhibition’s corners like a bad dream, a victim of the disease staring at you from almost every wall. But the sheer bravado of Neel’s brush, and her ability to render veracity with a clumsy-seeming figurative technique – not to mention the pride and resolution we see in so many of these faces, assure us that we have the A-word all but beat, and the same resistance to prejudice and hate, the same stubborn persistence, will save those who are “different” over and over again. Als’ Neel is a study not only in nostalgia, but in community.

George Morrison, Abstract Forms, 1949 © George Morrison Estate, Courtesy the George Morrison Estate and David Zwirner

George Morrison passed through New York for rather less time than has Lowman or did Neel. But in his stint in the Big Apple (with detours to France and Rhode Island) between 1943 and 1970, the doubly native Minnesotan – he was a member of the Grand Portage of Chippewa (Ojibwe) indigenous nation – produced several series of abstract paintings and works on paper that seem at once very much of their time and entirely fresh and personal. In other words, Morrison is a very welcome rediscovery – or seeming rediscovery, as he became widely recognized as an artist and a teacher after returning home. While clearly in dialogue with the prevailing abstract expressionist aesthetic of his salad days, to judge from this small but powerful show, Morrison was more oriented toward the image, albeit an image hypercharged with color and gesture and, in his best work, composition. He broke up the picture plane and put it back together, here compiling mysterious hieroglyphs à la Paul Klee, there compressing what look like centuries’ worth of stone deposits into handsomely fractured geologic strata (whose resemblance to the cliffs along Lake Superior is doubtless no accident). Morrison’s works on paper are looser and more gestural, but glow with the same fiery-to-earthen palette. Even despite his friendships with art stars like Franz Kline and Louise Nevelson, Morrison never fell under the shadow of any of his peers (as too many other of his peers were wont to do). Especially in his work from the late 1940s, however, the chunky but graceful choreography of Morrison’s loosely geometric abstractions suggests at least an awareness of a proto-ab-ex movement called Indian Space Painting, a derivation on Surrealism that looked at motifs found in the art and artisanship of Northwest and Southwest Native American peoples. As a Plainsman, Morrison was a product of an entirely different culture; but he clearly found at least formal resonance in the work of his distant brethren. In fact, when he returned to Minnesota, Morrison joined the American Indian Movement and helped found the first American Indian Studies department in an American university (the University of Minnesota’s Minneapolis campus). As stated, this show hardly rescues Morrison from obscurity (two years ago, for instance, the US Post Office issued five stamps with Morrison motifs). But a new look at this serious talent helps broaden that much more the rich tapestry of American art history. WM