New York has been the art capital of the world for so long. California artists are always getting the short end of the stick. Hockney may have been the most famous but he is English. Diebenkorn is probably the best painter. Robert Irwin is probably the best artist. Ed Ruscha is mostly engaging. The “Pacific Standard Time” show at the Getty in 2011 opened my eyes to the left coast sensibility. And lately I have held some fascination for John Baldessari.
He has been creeping up on me. When we were in New York a few months back we ran into him at the front desk of the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea. There were two shows there, Donald Judd downstairs and Georgio Morandi upstairs. Downstairs left me cold and I remember praying Baldessari was there for Morandi. We found this recent portrait of him at the Hammer Museum last week and then in San Francisco I found a NYT article about Baldessari’s upcoming show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. Second paragraph in discusses his purchase of one of the paintings from that Morandi show. At 84 he claims it is the first painting he ever bought! So he was at the the David Zwirner desk negotiating a deal for a Morandi when we spotted him. Up another notch. I ordered “More Than You Wanted To Know About John Baldesaari” from Angel‘s couch and it arrived the day we got back.
I have funny connections to artists. I used to like Alex Katz and we were at a Whitney Biennial years ago where someone had a drum set inside a small enclosure in a big room of the museum. Visitors were welcome to play. I sat down for a minute or two and came out face to face with a smiling Alex Katz. He was wearing brown bucks. I was struggling to see an Alice Neel painting at the Modern and some guy in a wheel chair with an assistant behind the chair was planted in front of the painting for ten minutes or so. The assistant spun him around and it was Chuck Close. Years later we were wandering around Chelsea as it was getting dark. A gallery there had just installed a new Chuck Close show, a room full of his daguerreotypes and a room full of his big paintings. Two people in the gallery and one was Chuck. I took his photo and talked for a bit. He wheeled his chair to the door, propped it open a crack and lit a cigarette. We drove down to my brother’s place in New Jersey in 2009 and spent the night. We left for Manhattan the next morning and checked out his paper before getting on the train. David McKee Gallery had reunited Philip Guston’s small panels from 1969, the breakthrough series that was shown at the Marlborough Gallery that year. We went directly there. Some things are meant to be.
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