Myth Versus Reality
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Born in Poland in 1930, Magdalena Abakanowicz lived through the hardships and repressions of the German invasion and Soviet occupation. Her personal history has been an instrument of mythmaking, the artist indistinguishable from the art. The catalog for her current exhibition at Marlborough describes her as a “sculptor, shaman, visionary, sage, and increasingly, statesperson” as well as a “global citizen.” It proclaims her “a central figure regulating the pulse of late 20th century art,” echoing Barbara Rose’s assessment of her as a canonical figure who sits at the right hand of Picasso. Add the claim that she is descended from Polish aristocrats who trace their lineage to Genghis Khan, and we are in the mythico-sacral realm of Joseph Beuys.
In the 1960s in Warsaw – where she still lives and works – Ms. Abakanowicz began a series of monumental woven environments called “Abakans,” after her own name. Lacking studio space or money for supplies, she worked in her one-room apartment with salvaged materials. Simply getting things done was an act of ingenuity and endurance that lent a heroic cast to the work itself. Her woven collossi were awarded the Grand Prize at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1965, the start of a fruitful and impressive career that would bring the artist to international prominence.
Her sculpture is most suggestive in series: towering, headless, archaic figures grouped like the 112 cast-iron ones that comprise “Unrecognized” (2001-02) in Poznan, Poland or the 100 to be installed in Chicago’s Grant Park next spring. Congregated in flocks, they evoke modernity’s blind march to the gates of hell and the impersonal forces that drive it. On show at Marlborough are pieces which are not part of any edition: seven distinct figures in bronze plus three winged stainless steel “flyers,” made in collaboration with her longtime welder.
Viewed singly, her cumbrous bronze forms are almost mute. Her eloquence arises from multiplicity; it is not inherent in the individual sculptures. (Compare the anxious figural distortions of Marino Marini or the headless figures of Ewald Matare, produced in Germany in the 1920s,which require no accompaniment.) “Zinaxin” (2005) is a looming hieroglyph with legs. It rises, mid-chest, to a protuberance that carries no conviction as a head and communicates little. “Gutron in Cage” (2005) might have been a powerful image of entrapment if the platform-crowned torso conveyed a fuller sense of human presence. As is, it bears the artificial look of a solid broken from a mold.
One truly compelling figure is “Jasnal” (2005). A lithe, androgynous body sits atop a high stool. The slim neck supports a gracefully abstracted animal head with long ears and a snout that suggest the donkey head worn by Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” But the arms are cut off just above the elbow. The figure is amputated, a brute product of nightmare. This solitary sculpture accomplishes what the others intend: It resounds with lamentation in the wake of unnamed oppressions.
Included in the exhibition are 35 gouaches, the least known of the artist’s repertory. Each is a lumpen, oversized approximation of a human head drawn with her fingers. The drawings cast a different light on Ms. Abakanowicz’s preference for headless forms. It is one thing for an artist to travel freely through the facts of figuration, something else to be ineffectual in stating them.
Critical response to Ms. Abakanowicz’s work is colored by her status as a totem of art under an authoritarian regime. However, this skirts the complicating factor of state sponsorship, which was responsible for her very inclusion in the Sao Paulo Biennial. And far from the lone voice of Eastern European art, she has significant affinities to other prominent Polish artists, chief among them Tadeusz Kantor and several women active in post-war Poland.
This exhibition coincides with Ms. Abakanowicz’s receipt of the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor sufficiently vexed by extra-aesthetic concerns that – like the Nobel Peace Prize – it is hard to know just what it signifies.
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Goodbye to Helen Miranda Wilson’s characteristic small, detailed still lifes, serene landscapes, and cloudscapes. She has gone abstract with surprising panache. Who knew?
Exhibited for the first time at DC Moore are 21 panels with vivacious geometric abstractions on the same intimate scale as her representational painting. Ms. Wilson has the good sense not to sacrifice the appealing modesty of her usual dimensions to beefed-up pictorial rhetoric. Here, too, is the same lovely matte surface, undisturbed by assertive brushwork. And what color! Light and dark contrasts move in concert with variations of intensity that advance and recede. Your eye moves both through the painting and around it, as it does in more complex compositions.
Ms. Wilson calls these “calendar paintings” because the format provides a grid that can be filled in one at a time as the days permit. She disassembles and rearranges her lattice in a patchwork fashion suggestive of quilts. Association with fabric is strengthened by the gossamer effect of threads of paint pulled by a fine fan brush from one color patch to another, softening edges.
“Rembrandt, for Pat Lipsky” (2005) is tonally subdued and pitch perfect. Its variations on a paving-stone pattern recall the canvases of Sean Scully. But where Mr. Scully injects a simple design with steroids and struts it on oversize supports to announce contemporaneity, Ms. Wilson’s refusal of bombast underscores a forgotten reality: Geometric abstraction predates Mondrian’s Neoplasticism by thousands of years. The combined pleasures of geometry and color are as ancient as the structural patterns of weaving. The painterly grid of post-Cubist devotion is the warp and weft of textiles brought up to date.
Abakanowicz until November 19 (40 W. 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-541-9000).
Wilson until November 5 (724 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street, 212-247-2111). Prices: $2,500-$4,500.