Retrospectives of two veteran contemporary artists who make a lot of people happy, including me, have opened, as if on order for hard times. “Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work 1972-2008,” at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and “Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone,” at the New Museum, in New York, merit, besides praise, something like pledges of allegiance. Both artists affirm values beneath and beyond the market anxieties and affiliated buzz in the art world, where they have demonstrated sturdy integrity throughout career ups and downs. West, the Viennese sculptor, collagist, and furniture-maker, is a gentle anarchist whose audience-friendly works anticipated—and considerably outshine—the recent vogue of “relational aesthetics” in international art. (I have in mind the likes of food events by Rikrit Tiravanija and interactive environments by any number of other virtual-camp counsellors.) West’s please-touch-me objects dependably entertain but never seem trivial. At sixty-one, he projects the disconcerting gravitas of a serious man who is constitutionally averse to taking anything seriously. The spunky, songful, subtly disciplined informality of the American abstract painter and ceramist (and also, recently, furniture-maker) Heilmann, sixty-eight, has provided low-profile joys in art since the late nineteen-sixties. Hers is the type of art you may cherish as a touchstone of your own private taste.
Read more at The New Yorker.