Harold Stevenson
"Death in Key West"
installation at
Mitchell Algus
Robert Mallary Jouster, 1960
Harold Stevenson
installation view of The New Adam, 1962
Leonid Venetian Lagoon
1971
Larry Zox Diagonal Series VI,
1966 and Edwin
Ruda, Metro I, 1966
Wojciech Fangor M 28, 1968
Edward Avedisian Untitled, 1962
Edward Avedisian The Mondey Children
1963
Stanley Twardowicz #8, 1966 and B.G.P.R., 1970
Walter Redinger Untitled, 1969
Don Bonham Maggie-Cycle
1969-70
mitchell algus:
reanimator
by Mary K. Weatherford
My first encounter with Mitchell Algus
and his gallery was in the fall of 1994. The
painter Glenn Goldberg introduced me.
"Do you know this guy Mitchell Algus?
He's pretty interesting." "Never heard of
him," I replied. A half hour later, I was
a convert. Mitchell Algus, high school
science teacher by day, SoHo art dealer by
night. Mitchell Algus Gallery, the place
frequented by the real New York art
cognoscenti. Mitchell is always there, and
he's usually engaged in a conversation or
debate with someone I know, or someone I'd
like to know.
Mary K. Weatherford: You opened the
gallery in November 1992. How did that come
about?
Mitchell Algus: A friend of mine, Leecha
Jimenez, was running a gallery in
Williamsburg. I had shown paintings there
along with works by a friend, Marc
Travanti, and when Leecha said she was
looking for someone to help her run the
gallery, I said, that looks like fun. So we
started doing that around 1989.
MKW: When did you realize that it might be
possible to go back to old art magazines
and use them to track down artists?
MA: I was always looking through this
stuff in terms of my own art. When I was in
graduate school in geology and was supposed
to be doing my science, I'd spend all of my
time in the art library just looking
through the old art magazines. You could
find Art International, for instance, going
way back. And I saw work in the magazines
that I thought seemed really interesting,
but I never saw it in the museums, even
though apparently the museums had at one
time collected work by these artists. So
when I started doing the gallery with
Leecha in Williamsburg, I finally had a
reason to see if I could actually find this
work.
MKW: Who was the first artist that you
tracked down?
MA: Robert Mallary. In the late 1950s and
early '60s he had made assemblages, going
out and finding materials like old
cardboard boxes in the street. He would
arrange them, and epoxy-resin them. They
looked like hunks of garbage, but they were
compositionally very classical--formally
they were very elegant. He was in the "16
Americans" show at the Modern in 1959, and
in the "Art of Assemblage" show there in
1961. The Whitney owns pieces of his, he
was written about extensively in the early
1960s, and he was an important influence on
other artists. I called Allan Stone, the
last person he showed with in 1966, and
found out that he was teaching at the
University of Massachusetts. I called him
and went up there, and it was amazing. He
had moved to Conway, Mass., in 1967, and he
had just put everything in a truck. We
opened up the barn he has, and there were
all the pieces I had seen in the Modern
catalogues. Philip Johnson had commissioned
a piece from him for the 1964 World's Fair,
and there it was sitting in the barn.
He was excited, I guess, that somebody had
sought him out and that his work still
existed in some way out in the world. He's
doing computer art now, which he pioneered
in the late 1960s, he has this whole other
career. So Mallary was the first person I
started to work with. We brought pieces
back and showed them in Brooklyn in 1989.
MKW: What was going on here in New York at
that time?
MA: A lot of process-oriented painting, I
guess, like your work, and that of Carl
Ostendarp, John Zinsser and Gail
Fitzgerald. That work was a reaction
against expressionism, I think. Even five
or six years earlier I had been interested
in Neo-Dada and European stuff that wasn't
being shown here--Manzoni, Fontana, the
French Nouveaux Réalistes--a kind of
"realist" art that was anti-expressionist.
If the "authenticity" of expressionist work
was no longer possible, then the question
for the artist was: how do you continue to
do things which have that same visual
interest yet don't reflect personal
subjectivity. It seemed to me that a lot of
the process-oriented art around 1990 was
also about finding a way to distance
yourself from the work, to make something
that was surprising, that looked different,
that was new.
MKW: Who were some of the artists you
showed following Robert Mallary?
MA: I opened the Thompson Street gallery
with work of Harold Stevenson, who had
shown with Iris Clert in Paris from the
late 1950s on. He was doing huge homoerotic
paintings; his work was associated with Pop
art, but it really had its roots elsewhere.
He showed with Alexandre Iolas and the
Tchelitschew circle. Harold was much more
original than any of those guys, but his
work never found a context. He was supposed
to have been included in a Guggenheim show
in 1963 organized by Lawrence Alloway, but
Alloway wrote to Harold saying that in the
end he just couldn't show The New Adam--a
40-foot-long nude portrait of Sal Mineo--
because it would create an "imbalance" in
the exhibition (laughter). Harold showed
The New Adam at Richard Feigen Gallery in
the early '60s and at Iris Clert in Paris;
then it got rolled up and put away. So
when I got in contact with Harold, he
was thrilled. We showed The New Adam, which
filled the whole gallery. The exhibition
got some attention: Brooks Adams came, and
Lisa Liebmann wrote a review saying that it
looked like Alan Turner's work, that it
looked like all of the body-obsessed work
that was going on in the early 1990s. That
was the real point: to show work dealing
with contemporary issues that looked as
good as, if not better than, it had looked
at the time it was made. Part of the
interest of the work is that when you drag
it out, people are very confused about when
it was done and what it means.
MKW: One of my many jobs in New York was
to move an entire artist's studio in Union
Square into storage. And you know what
happens when you don't pay your storage
bill: the work just gets thrown out.
MA: There's another artist that I've
shown, named Leonid; he was the brother of
Eugene Berman, and he was a Neo-Romantic
painter who did dreamy, romantic seascapes.
He moved to the U.S. after World War II and
died here in 1976. He had shown with
Julien Levy in the 1930s and was collected
by James Thrall Soby at the Modern. Today
he's practically unknown. Leonid is chi-chi
New York painting at its height. His
paintings steer clear of modernism, they're
very elegant. Maybe they're what Modernism
might have been if Picasso had never
painted or Duchamp had never made the
Fountain. Today Leonid's works look almost
like motel paintings, but they're so hyper-
sophisticated they're really interesting.
MKW: When you showed those to me I
imagined them in a Park Avenue living room
in the 1950s, or in a Hitchcock movie, with
a woman in a big dress sitting on a piece
of Knoll furniture in front of them.
MA: After his death, Leonid's estate was
divided between two very wealthy patrons.
Half of the estate now sits in a basement
on Fifth Avenue, and the other half sits in
a storage facility in Pennsylvania.
MKW: Most of the people that you're
showing are artists whose work looks really
fresh today, in terms of the contemporary
context, but at the time it appeared no one
knew quite what to make of it. Do these
artists share any kind of common career
trajectory?
MA: For a lot of the abstract painters,
especially, the early 1970s were
devastating. People like Edward Avedisian,
Larry Zox, Nick Krushenick and Wojciech
Fangor had big careers in the 1960s: Zox
had a retrospective at the Whitney, Fangor
had a retrospective at the Guggenheim. Then
by the early '70s things just hit a brick
wall. Those few artists who had a powerful
gallery and retained their recognized
style--like Robert Ryman and Robert
Mangold--didn't appear to be affected by
the doubt that struck a lot of other
artists. Artists like Avedisian and Zox had
to try to push beyond the kind of art they
had been doing, because they were facing an
end-game: they lost gallery support, and
support for painting in general was
disintegrating in the early '70s.
MKW: When you say end-game, do you mean in
terms of the market or in terms of having
reached the end of what they could do as
artists within a certain style?
MA: Both. At the time that Minimalism
began to be codified in the mid-1960s, many
artists realized that it was an end-game,
that you couldn't push much beyond this.
I'm thinking in particular of a sculptor
like Gary Kuehn, whose work I'm going to
show. In the mid-1960s he did white
Minimalist cubes that seem to disintegrate
into an ooze or blob. Edward Avedisian was
doing paintings that straddled the
territory between Color Field, Pop and
geometric abstraction. They were smart and
totally insouciant, much more playful than
Stella's. Those works look contemporary now
because artists today know that these are
the stylistic limits and art trying to move
beyond them.
My previous show, of sprayed acrylic
"target" paintings done by Stanley
Twardowicz between 1966 and 1970, is a good
example of work that looks as if it had
been made last week. The quality of the
painting--the craft--is incredible. Again,
Twardowicz has work in the Modern's
collection, he was a close friend of Franz
Kline and Kerouac, but now his work is
unknown. As with Avedisian or Zox or
Fangor, younger painters are just amazed
when they see it.
MKW: That's why it was shocking to see
Kuehn doing, say, Judd meets Oldenburg in
the mid-'60s. Today, so many young artists
--like Charles Long, for example--are trying
to work out bizarre hybrids of classic
styles like Pop and Minimalism. And you're
demonstrating that when artists tried to do
the same thing 30 years ago, no one knew
what to do with the work.
MA: It's the same with the show I just
did, featuring work by three Canadian
sculptors--Walter Redlinger, Don Bonham and
Ed Zelnek--who worked in London, Ontario,
in the late 1960s. They were trying to take
beautiful Minimalist form and make it very
sensual and psychological. At the time in
New York, that stuff didn't play. But now
it's exactly what younger artists are
trying to do.
MKW: It also sounds as if you're saying
that many of these artists got to a certain
point and said, "I've done as much as I can
in this style, I've got to do something
else."
MA: Yes, but I think the culture changes,
too. When these artists were working in the
1960s, art was the cutting edge of visual
culture, and they were helping to define
it. And the excitement generated within the
culture supported what they were doing.
Then, I think, the culture changed. By the
mid-1970s, the ideals of formalist
abstraction, or Minimalism, or Conceptual
art, were no longer pertinent to the
culture. This has been a problem for art
ever since. There isn't a collective
cultural desire which is being articulated
by artists in defining the visual look of
the times.
Also, the mid-1970s was the time when
nostalgia began to be a major cultural
force and the current situation of
perpetual stylistic recycling was born. In
a way, I think that what I'm doing with the
gallery is important in terms of freeing
younger artists to do their own work. It's
a way of saying to them, "You don't have to
make that kind of painting--it's already
been done."
MKW: What kind of audience are you finding
for the work you're showing?
MA: The audience from the beginning has
been artists. The gallery is oriented
toward work that looks interesting in terms
of making art now. The audience consists of
people who are doing their own work in the
studio and who find these paintings or
sculptures pertinent to what they're doing.
MKW: Who are your regulars?
MA: You are! And painters like David
Reed, Carl Ostendarp and Philip Taaffe have
come regularly. Critics like Raphael
Rubinstein and Brooks Adams have also been
really supportive, as was Stuart Servetar
when he was at the New York Press.
MKW: Do the collectors who are buying
younger contemporary art show any interest
in buying work of the kind you're showing
here, work that might provide some
historical continuity in their collections?
MA: Collectors, it seems, are interested
either in what's new or in what has already
been certified as blue-chip. With the work
that I show here, which has passed through
a period of being ignored, it's very
difficult to reestablish value for it. In a
market that looks with its ears, or looks
at auction prices rather than at the art
itself, it's very hard to get people to
reassess this work. The people who are
reevaluating it are the ones who are
engaged in making art.
MKW: It seems that one artist who has made
that jump in recent years has been John
Wesley. I think that owed a lot to Donald
Judd's support.
MA: It's also interesting to see what's
happened recently to the work of Yayoi
Kasuma. But when you have powerful
galleries like Ron Feldman or Paula Cooper
or Robert Miller involved, they're able to
present the work in a way that thrusts it
into the mainstream. Without that kind of
machine behind you, it's very hard for an
artist to gain recognition.
MKW: Where, in the best of all possible
worlds, would the work you're showing find
a home today?
MA: There are lots of museums that have
grown up in the last 20 years that could
use this work. It's relatively inexpensive.
For the same amount that it costs to buy an
$80,000 Frank Stella drawing, you could get
eight major paintings by his contemporaries.
It seems to me with all of the Abstract
Expressionist work now raked over, it's
this work from the late 1960s and early
1970s that should be the cutting edge of
historical collecting.
MKW: I read an article on the "mortality
of art" that said that 99.9 percent of all
artworks ever made cease to exist physically
within 100 years of the time they're made.
What will happen to this work if it doesn't
find buyers?
MA: When the artists die, unless their
work is perceived to be of value, estates
won't be set up to take care of it. It will
be divided among relatives . . . or thrown
away.
MKW: How do you go about creating a market
for this work today?
MA: I wish I knew. You'd think there would
be people out there who would be genuinely
interested in work of this quality, people
who buy contemporary art but would also
want to flesh out a historical context for
it. And this is the obvious historical work
to be collecting.
Certainly there's work being sold today,
but it's by a few artists from a few
galleries. I think one thing that makes it
different today is the lack of an
intellectual middle class. Thirty years
ago, many of the people who bought
contemporary art were middle-class people,
and they had a kind of intellectual
involvement with the work that doesn't
really exist anymore. Art has always had a
social function, I suppose, but today it
seems to have only a social function. And,
of course, if you're going out to
conspicuously consume, what you want is a
more expensive version of the same thing
that everyone else has.
The work I'm showing, on the other hand,
falls into a gray area; the history hasn't
really been written yet. And so it takes a
lot of understanding, insight and passion
on the part of the people who buy it. The
few people who have bought work here have
been people who really knew--people who
were involved in the art world, or those
few artists who were successful.
MKW: So it's successful artists who buy
work here?
MA: And ex-critics who now have university
jobs. People who know the work, and know
that it's good, and that it's really cheap.
MARY K. WEATHERFORD is a New York-
based painter who is currently teaching at
Princeton.
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