Tag Archives: galerie st. etienne

REBUILDING DEMOCRACY: A POSTELECTION CONVERSATION BETWEEN SUE COE AND STEPHEN F. EISENMAN

Sue Coe, It Can Happen Here, linocut on thin white Rives paper, 2016 (photo courtesy Galerie St. Etienne)

Who: Sue Coe, Stephen F. Eisenman
What: Live conversation and Q&A
Where: Galerie St. Etienne Zoom
When: Wednesday, December 2, free with RSVP, 6:00
Why: On November 7, English-born American artist Sue Coe said, “I am beside myself with joy, but it’s not exactly a revolution. The reality is that four to five million more Americans voted for Biden/Harris than for Trump. Although capitalist democracy beat fascism by a razor thin margin, our electoral system still benefits cruel bullying overlords. The struggle continues. . . .” The vote differential is now more than six million, but the struggle continues, especially with an incumbent president who refuses to concede and keeps tweeting about voter fraud with zero evidence. On December 2 at 6:00, Coe, who lives in Upstate New York, will have more to say about the state of the country in a live Zoom discussion with art historian, activist, Anthropocene Alliance cofounder, and Northwestern University professor Stephen F. Eisenman, author of The Temptation of Saint Redon, Gauguin’s Skirt, and The Abu Ghraib Effect and who has collaborated with Coe on her book The Ghosts of Our Meat and the new pamphlet American Fascism Now.

The talk, “Rebuilding Democracy,” is being hosted by Galerie St. Etienne, the midtown gallery that is showing “Sue Coe: It Can Happen Here” through December 30. The exhibition consists of more than eighty paintings, drawings, lithographs, linocuts, and woodcuts that deal with such issues as anti-Semitism, AIDS, animal abuse, the pandemic, police brutality, greed, torture, government corruption, and the Trump administration, the president being a favorite target of vitriol. Be sure to read the exhibition essay, which begins, “People often ask Sue Coe, ‘Did you think it was going to be this bad?’ A proverbial canary in the coal mine, the artist has been ‘tweeting’ out warnings since the 1980s. In her view, the problems that plague us — zoonotic diseases, systemic racism, inadequate healthcare, rising income inequality, global warming, and countless other related ills — are the result of an undiluted form of capitalism that puts profits above individual lives. Forty years of such skewed priorities conditioned America’s grotesque bungling of the Covid crisis and have brought us to the brink of fascism. On the other hand, the Black Lives Matter protests — which are broadly supported by people of all colors — offer hope that it is not too late to take back our democracy. ‘The tectonic plates are shifting and colliding,’ Coe says, ‘allowing us to see the primordial depths below. The question is whether we can rise to the occasion.’”

EGON SCHIELE: IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT LINE

Egon Schiele Reclining Male Nude. 1910. Watercolor and black crayon on paper. Signed and dated, lower left. 12 3/8" x 16 3/4" (31.4 x 42.5 cm). Kallir D. 663. Private collection.

Egon Schiele, Reclining Male Nude, watercolor and black crayon on paper, 1910 (private collection)

Galerie St. Etienne
24 West 57th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through March 9, free
212-245-6734
www.gseart.com

The centennial remembrance of the death of Austrian artist Egon Schiele at the age of twenty-eight in 1918 has featured special exhibitions around the world. One of the most stirring is “Egon Schiele: In Search of the Perfect Line,” which has been extended at Galerie St. Etienne through March 9. The Midtown gallery has been the longtime home of Schiele’s work, having hosted his first American one-man show in 1941. The current exhibit focuses on his extraordinary drawing skill, featuring portraits, nudes, landscapes, and nature scenes. “Egon Schiele ranks among the greatest draughtsmen of all times,” gallery owner Jane Kallir writes in her extensive exhibition essay. “Schiele’s works on paper stand on their own as complete artistic statements. Drawing almost daily, he used the medium to record his fluctuating responses to the basic problems of human existence: sexual desire, personal identity, the tenuousness of life, and the inevitability of death. Over the course of his brief career, Schiele’s drawing style changed frequently — sometimes several times in a single year. He was constantly searching for the perfect line: that split-second of transcendent clarity, when inner emotions and outward appearances become one.” Even the most ardent Schiele fans are likely to be surprised by the range of the drawings. While the 1912 Self-Portrait with Brown Background is classic Schiele, the artist looking strangely at the viewer, a 1906 self-portrait depicts Schiele as a well-dressed schoolboy deep in thought, facing off to the side, his left hand against his chin, a pencil in his right hand.

Egon Schiele Houses in Krumau. 1917. Charcoal on paper. Inscription, dated February 19, 1921, by Karl Grünwald, verso. 11 1/2" x 17 3/4" (29.2 x 45.1 cm). Kallir D. 2136. Private collection.

Egon Schiele, Houses in Krumau, charcoal on paper, 1917 (private collection)

In On the Beach, a well-to-do couple stand happily on a boardwalk, the work bathed in blue and orange. The watercolor and pencil Newborn Baby almost floats off the tan wove paper, a startling contrast to Baby, where you can follow Schiele’s exquisite line. In Seated Girl with Bent Head, the subject is hunched over in the center, packed with emotion even though her face is not visible. Be sure to linger over City Houses (Krumau Ringplatz), Little Tree (Chestnut Tree at Lake Constance), Work Shed in Hilly Terrain, and Two Houses (Suburb of Vienna), which offer unexpected pleasures. And then follow the chaos of the line in Woman with Blonde Hair and Blue Garment. “Schiele’s premature death leaves hanging the tantalizing question: What would have happened next?” Kallir writes. “His oeuvre, comprising roughly 3,000 works on paper and over 300 paintings, may be interpreted as a visual coming-of-age story. Marked by the indelible stamp of youth, his work follows the path toward maturity and records faithfully the growing wisdom of adulthood. . . . In the best of his last works, Schiele had finally found the perfect line.”

ALL GOOD ART IS POLITICAL: GALLERY TALK WITH SUE COE

Käthe Kollwitz, “Seed-Corn Must Not Be Ground,” lithograph on smooth ivory wove paper, 1941 (Very rare proof; no edition was published. Knesebeck 274. Private collection.)

Galerie St. Etienne
24 West 57th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, February 1, free (advance RSVP recommended), 6:30
Exhibition continues Tuesday – Saturday through March 10, free
212-245-6734
www.gseart.com

Galerie St. Etienne brings together two of its most popular artists in “All Good Art Is Political: Käthe Kollwitz and Sue Coe,” revealing compelling similarities in their work, from their style and themes to their socialist, feminist, and activist beliefs. On February 1, the British-born Coe, who has claimed the Prussian-born German artist as a major influence (along with Goya, Soutine, and others), will be at the Fifty-Seventh St. gallery for a talk about her career. The exhibition, which has been extended through March 10, creates a dialogue between their works, consisting primarily of black-and-white drawings, etchings, woodcuts, linocuts, lithographs, and collages that focus on powerful scenes of prisoners, riots, torture, war, and violence along with emotional depictions of women trying to protect children from seen and unseen horrors in a brutal society. “My art serves a purpose. I want to exert an influence in my own time, in which human beings are so helpless and destitute,” Kollwitz (Revolt of the Weavers, Peasant War), who was born in 1867 and died in 1945, said. Coe (Dead Meat, Sheep of Fools), who was born in 1951, has taken up Kollwitz’s mantle, following her journalistic approach. “People think they can be indifferent, and the filter of art is a useful veil to present the reality,” Coe says. “It opens up a chance to have a useful dialogue where the viewer asks questions and is more open to the challenge of change.” Coe’s angry “How to Commit Suicide in South Africa” and “Vigilante” share much in common with Kollwitz’s “Never Again War” and “Free Our Prisoners,” bearing witness and demanding societal overhaul. Coe’s rallying cry “Stop Violence” is a kind of combination of Kollwitz’s “The Volunteers” and “Outbreak/Charge.”

Sue Coe Safe at Last (Rescued) 2016. Linocut on thin white wove paper. Signed and dated, lower right; numbered and with red bird stamp, lower left. 7 3/8" x 6" (18.7 x 15.2 cm). From an estimated edition of 100 impressions. Reproduced in The Animals' Vegan Manifesto, p. 113.

Sue Coe, “Safe at Last (Rescued),” linocut on thin white wove paper, 2016 (From an estimated edition of 100 impressions. Reproduced in The Animals’ Vegan Manifesto, p. 113.)

Coe also extends those themes from humans to animals, which also relates to Kollwitz, who compared “survivors” to “women huddled together in a black lump, protecting their children just as animals do with their own brood,” as explained in the gallery’s outstanding expansive essay about the show. In “Safe at Last (Rescued),” from Coe’s The Animals’ Vegan Manifesto, a woman holds a calf like a child, echoing Kollwitz’s “Seed-Corn Must Not Be Ground,” where a woman uses her broad arms to protect three young kids. Coe’s “Veal Skinner,” a graphite drawing of a sad man standing next to a large, skinned animal carcass hanging upside down, evokes Kollwitz’s “Hunger,” in which a skeletal woman puts her hands over her eyes so she cannot see the dead child on her lap. Hands play a major role in both artists’ oeuvre, clutching at prison bars, reaching up in defiance, holding a weapon, cradling an infant, scrubbing ham, pounding drums, emerging from a small sculpture of a group of women, held up to a face in desperation, and tied behind a black man’s back. Both artists also do not shy away from a boldness that eschews subtlety, although Coe takes it to another level with such recent work as “Unpresidented,” a linocut of Donald Trump grabbing the Statue of Liberty from behind, covering her mouth with one hand and grabbing her genitals with the other. So get ready for Coe, the natural successor to Kollwitz, to hold nothing back at her Thursday gallery talk about art’s role in a changing society.

THE ART OF DRAWING: A CONVERSATION WITH ERIC FISCHL

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “Street Life in Dresden,” lithograph on heavy cream Japan paper, 1908

Who: Eric Fischl and Jane Kallir
What: Discussion about the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the evolution of drawing over the last century
Where: Galerie St. Etienne, 24 West 57th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves., 212-245-6734
When: Wednesday, May 18, free, 6:30
Why: “Ecstatic drawing is the foundation of the new art,” German Expressionist painter and Die Brücke cofounder Ernst Ludwig Kirchner said in 1919. On May 18, New York City native and painter and sculptor Eric Fischl will be at Galerie St. Etienne in Midtown to discuss “The Art of Drawing” with gallery owner Jane Kallir, held in conjunction with the exhibition “Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Featuring Watercolors and Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection,” which continues through July 1. The exhibition comprises more than fifty pen-and-ink drawings, woodcuts, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs by Kirchner, who committed suicide in 1938 at the age of fifty-eight, shortly after the Nazis detained or destroyed more than six hundred of his works. “Just as he preferred moving models, Kirchner himself moved as he drew, changing position or walking through town with a sketchbook in hand. He drew every day and nearly everywhere he went, filling at least 180 sketchbooks, over 12,000 sheets,” Kallir writes in her extensive exhibition essay. “Drawing is the key to Kirchner’s art, and his sketches are the key to his drawings. But the sketches should not be viewed as studies per se. Rather, the sketches birthed new forms, conceived in the throes of ‘ecstatic’ experience, that ‘crystallized and hardened’ in subsequent pictures.” Fischl, whose work includes such series as “Art Fair,” “Corrida in Ronda,” “The Travel of Romance,” “Ten Breaths,” and “The Bed, the Chair . . .” in addition to the MTA mosaic “The Garden of Circus Delights” in Penn Station, will lend insight into his own creative process as well. Free advance reservations are not required but recommended and can be made here.

OUTSIDER ART FAIR 2013

The Outsider Art Fair will include a special exhibition dedicated to Renaldo Kuhler’s fantastical Rocaterrania

Center 548
548 West 22nd St, between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
January 31 – February 3, Thursday preview (6:00 – 9:00) $50, Friday – Sunday $20 per day, $30 run-of-show
www.outsiderartfair.com

For its twentieth anniversary, the Outsider Art Fair promises to be significantly different. Since 1993, the fair, dedicated to the work of emerging and well-known self-taught folk artists, was run by show master Sanford Smith, but art dealer Andrew Edlin, who runs his eponymously named gallery in Chelsea and whose uncle Paul Edlin was an outsider artist himself, has bought the fair with his new company, Under Wide Open Arts, and moved it from such previous locations as the Puck Building and 7 W 34th St. to the Dia Center of the Arts on West 22nd St., where NADA New York and the Independent now take place. More than three dozen galleries from around the world will be participating, including Haiti’s Galerie Bourbon-Lally, London’s Henry Boxer Gallery and Rob Tufnell, Tokyo’s Yukiko Koide Presents, Switzerland’s Galerie du Marché, Baton Rouge’s Gilley’s Gallery, Chicago’s Carl Hammer Gallery, Virginia’s Grey Carter-Objects of Art, Berkeley’s Ames Gallery, Dallas’s Chris Byrne, Miami’s Pan American Art Projects, and Iowa City’s Pardee Collection, along with such local mainstays as Ricco Maresca, Fountain Gallery, American Primitive, Feature Inc., Gary Snyder, Vito Schnabel, Galerie St. Etienne, and, of course, Andrew Edlin. Among this year’s special programs are a series of talks and panel discussions, including “Voyages” with Geneviève Roulin Tribute recipient Mario Del Curto on Friday at 4:00, “Rewriting the History of Art Brut: The Case of Gaston Chaissac” with Dr. Kent Minturn on Friday at 4:45, a Saturday-morning “Uncommon Artists” symposium at the American Folk Art Museum, “Women’s Mad Art” with Dr. Thomas Röske and “Agnes Richter’s Jacket: Enigma, Talisman, Narrative” with Dr. Gail A. Hornstein on Saturday at 4:00, and “A Bridge Between Art Worlds” with Daniel Baumann, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ralph Rugoff on Sunday at 4:00. In addition, the Geneviève Roulin Tribute to Mario Del Curto will take place Thursday at 6:00 as part of the early preview; an exhibition of twelve of Del Curto’s photographs will be on view on the second floor during the fair, along with the special exhibition “Renaldo Kuhler & Rocaterrania.”

EGON SCHIELE’S WOMEN

Galerie St. Etienne
24 West 57th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday, October 23, free, 6:00 – 8:00
Exhibition runs October 23 – December 28 (Tuesday-Saturday), free
212-245-6734
www.gseart.com
www.randomhouse.de

Over the last several years, there has been a heightened interest in the always-popular and well-regarded Austrian artist Egon Schiele. In 2010, John Kelly gave the final performance of his award-winning theater piece Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, which dealt with Schiele’s female muses, and one of the highlights of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival was Andrew Shea’s Portrait of Wally, a gripping documentary about the ownership of Schiele’s portrait of mistress Walburga “Wally” Neuzil. Now Schiele expert Jane Kallir, the codirector of Midtown’s Galerie St. Etienne, which boasts one of the largest collections of works by the artist, has written Egon Schiele’s Women, (Prestel, October 25, 2012, $80), a gorgeous examination of the women in Schiele’s life and on his canvases, placing his work in context of the history of Austrian art and evolving views on women’s freedom and sexuality. Kallir, who appears in Portrait of Wally, looks at Schiele’s relationship with his mother, his sister, various models, and his wife and sister-in-law. The book boasts more than 250 images, including dozens and dozens of splendid reproductions of paintings and drawings by Schiele (not limited to female subjects but also including glorious self-portraits and male figures) as well as works by Oskar Kokoschka, Gustave Klimt, Alfred Kubin, and Edvard Munch, archival photographs, a timeline, a bibliography, and an extensive index. In conjunction with the publication of the book, Galerie St. Etienne is opening the companion exhibit “Egon Schiele’s Women,” consisting of more than four dozen works by Schiele. “While Schiele, in his personal life, was hardly a feminist, in his art he freed women from the controlling male narrative that had heretofore shaped the interpretive discourse,” the exhibition essay explains. “His nudes, in particular, not only challenged the taboos of his time, but presaged the more fluid, open-ended approach to gender and sexuality that prevails today.” Kallir will be at the opening-night celebration of the exhibit, giving a gallery talk and signing copies of the book at 7:00. In addition, she will be at the American Jewish Historical Society on October 22 at 6:30 ($15), participating in the “Culture Brokers: Jews as Art Dealers and Collectors” panel discussion with Emily Bilski and Charles Dellheim.

PORTRAIT OF WALLY

Egon Schiele masterpiece is at the heart of new documentary

PORTRAIT OF WALLY (Andrew Shea, 2012)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
Opens Friday, May 11
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
portraitofwally.com

An exciting, fast-paced documentary set in the high-stakes art world, Andrew Shea’s Portrait of Wally is a gripping real-life legal thriller, complete with international intrigue, love and death, class warfare, lies and deception, and Nazis. In 1912, Austrian artist Egon Schiele painted a small portrait of his mistress, Walburga (“Wally”) Neuzil, in addition to a companion self-portrait. In 1939, the painting of Wally was stolen from art dealer Lea Bondi’s personal collection by Friedrich Welz, a Nazi who had also taken over Bondi’s gallery because she was Jewish. When the painting suddenly showed up in New York City in 1997 as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection” exhibition, a furious, angry thirteen-year battle ensued over ownership of the work, involving Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau; MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry; Sharon Cohen Levin, chief of the Asset Forfeiture Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office; investigator Willi Korte of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project; Schiele-obsessed art collector Rudolf Leopold; and the Bondi family. Other major museums sided with MoMA in a concerted effort to prevent the government from returning the painting to the Bondis, claiming that it would seriously damage the ability of art institutions to bring works on loan for exhibition in the United States; interestingly, Lowry and MoMA chairman Ronald S. Lauder, who is also the head of the Commission for Art Recovery and displays many of Schiele’s paintings and drawings at his Neue Galerie in New York City, opted not to speak with Shea, but the filmmaker did meet with Morgenthau, Levin, André Bondi, New York Times reporter Judith Dobrzynski, 60 Minutes journalist Morley Safer, Galerie St. Etienne owner and Schiele expert Jane Kallir, and others who share fascinating details about the personal and professional history of Schiele and the painting as well as the inner workings of the art world. Mixing archival footage with new interviews, Shea and his wife, editor Melissa Shea, tell a compelling tale of global importance filled with powerful emotion that, in many ways, evokes the feeling one gets when looking closely at a master work of art. But Portrait of Wally is about a lot more than just art; it is also about memory, about family, about responsibility, and about justice.