ALAN MAGEE: TIME PIECES
Forum Gallery

What is it that makes this singular body of work so moving? The pleasures of trompe l’oeil are ingrained and enduring. When it is good — and Alan Magee is magical — it packs a particular frisson. There is something disquieting, almost voyeuristic, in witnessing such intense, obsessive love of illusionistic detail.

But the success of trompe l’oeil derives only partially from depiction. Equally important, perhaps more, are the objects chosen for scrutiny. We delight in the painted image when it transports us into the presence of things we have already touched. Mr. Magee returns to us discarded artifacts of our own past that remind us of personal and cultural progress toward obsolescence.

“Ode” (2004) is an exquisite portrait of a pipe wrench, stamped with the name of a manufacturer long gone and a patent number that no longer applies. As in each of these panel pieces, the surface is gorgeous. The infinite irregularities of the underlying gesso hold glazes in accidental ways that facilitate the creation of distressed, aged surfaces.

“Back Story” (2006) is typical of the quality of wit, a punning sense, that fulfills Duchamp’s intention to put painting “at the service of the mind.” Two exhausted, bespattered tubes of paint — one long, the other rolled short — lean sweetly against each other. A mother and child, perhaps? Mentor and protégé?

Mr. Magee is a true colorist, one who makes neutrals sing so that only the whisper of a primary is needed to satisfy the demands of the spectrum.

The single disappointment is “Bridge” (2006), the only painting on canvas rather than wood panel. At 6 feet long, it loses the intimacy of the smaller works. As size increases, the spatial atmosphere becomes less convincing. The image inflates into a tour de force that betrays the means of its making — or seems to. It looks like a scanned image magnified and projected onto canvas.

In all, there is much more here than illusion. The work, in its entirety, is a meditation on our subjection to time. And in both subject matter and execution, it is a testament to the work of human hands.

— Maureen Mullarkey

Until December 9 (745 Fifth Ave., between 57th and 58th streets, 212-355-4545).

ELY JACQUES KAHN, ARCHITECT: FROM BEAUX-ARTS TO MODERNISM IN NEW YORK
Columbia University, Wallach Gallery

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Ely Jacques Kahn was the man who invented Midtown. In a career that spanned 60 years, Kahn (1884–1972) designed dozens of buildings in that and other parts of Manhattan. In the process, he bridged the gap between the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he had studied, and the modern movement, thus creating a multitude of structures (like his masterpiece, the Squibb Building on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue) that make up so much of Midtown to this day.

And yet, the Midtown everyone knows is the postwar agglomeration of glass and steel. We need to be reminded that there is a second tier of Midtown, constructed in the building boom of the late 1920s through to the onset of World War II, that was defined by its pared down ornamentalism, its robust proportions, and its Art Deco details. Though this was the style in which Kahn excelled, it has become largely invisible amid the more striking towers of the International style. It is the part of Midtown that we see out of the corner of our eye, whose accumulations of brick and masonry seem to have little or no relevance to the history of architecture. The great strength of “Ely Jacques Kahn, Architect: From Beaux Arts to Modernism in New York,” a new exhibition at Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery, is that it insistently returns our gaze to the treasures this architect created in our midst. Through dozens of drawings, documents, and photographs, it directs our attention to the details of those buildings upon which Kahn once lavished such loving care: the terracotta of his exteriors as well as the Art Deco and Art Moderne mail boxes, elevators, and radiator grates that are the signature elements of his style. In one sense you could say that this exhibition revives the memory of a largely forgotten mid-century master. More likely, it compels us to recognize a first-rate architect who, like all but the rarest practitioners of his art, was never given his due in the first place. Strange to say, many of us need to be reminded that no building is to be taken for granted, that behind it is an artist who conceived it, fought for it, and brought it into being.

— James Gardner

Until December 9 (Schermerhorn Hall, 1190 Amsterdam Ave., between 118th and 119th streets, eighth floor, 212-854-7288).

THE PAINTED SCULPTURE OF BETTY PARSONS
CUNY Graduate Center Art Gallery

The “midwife” of the New York school, as she was often called by the critics, Betty Parsons is mostly remembered as dealer and promoter of the Abstract Expressionists of her day. She is less known as an artist in her own right. “The Painted Sculpture of Betty Parsons,” on view at the CUNY Graduate Center, tries to correct that. The 35 wood-based constructions Parsons made late in her career — between 1966 and her death in 1982 — demonstrate her sculptor’s feel for form, her eye for vibrant color, and her restlessly evocative imagination. Adding loose stripes of fresh color to weathered wood of disparate shapes, dimensions and textures — from amuletsize, rusty-metal-covered door handle and banister chips to massive, faded beam-and-log blocks — Parsons subsequently used nails to join the wooden parts, enlisting both her crude finish and her disarmingly inelegant carpentry to produce works of visual and symbolic coherence.

The sculptures began with an odd assortment of man-made objects Parsons picked around her beachfront home and studio in Southold, Long Island. “They were pieces of houses or docks or boats or signs. … And something happened and they were lost,” the artist once said. “Then they wash ashore, broken and changed, and I find them.” To Parsons, “finding” was a catalytic event, an apprehension of forms lying dormant within those weathered wrecks like giants inside Michelangelo’s chunks of marble. Although her method of assemblage involved accretion rather than carving out of material, her sculpture still retains the raw stamp of the sea showing through the controlled geometry and chromatic modulation of her design. Every bit a modern artist, she understood the aesthetic of found objects as well as Duchamp or Rauschenberg. But, less driven to push concepts to their cerebral, minimalist extremes, she proved subtler in her balanced orchestration of the organic and the artificial.

That is not to say Parsons lacked influences, or hid them. Yet it is precisely her particular fusion of the sophisticated modernist peinture and the innocent folk art that enabled her — as if in reverse to her “midwife” role — to give birth to a mythology of her own. Whimsical, delightfully awkward, and intense, pieces like “One-Eyed Lighthouse,” “Winged Frog,” and “Totem” strike the defiant note of the artist’s Dionysian progeny.

— Albert Fayngold

Until December 9 (365 Fifth Ave., between 34th and 35th streets, 212-817-7394).