“Going to an art fair is like a kid walking in on their parents having sex,” the artist John Baldessari said of the exposed unseemliness of art hawked as trade-show commodities. “You know it happens, you just never want to see it.”
Independent is more discreet than its competitors. Since 2010 it has aimed to present a less daunting, more curatorially inclined fair, keeping its exhibitor list (comparatively) tight.
Its installation this season of its 20th-century model in the Breuer building is a coup, clothing its naked ambitions in design legacy. (The Armory Show, by contrast, is at the Javits Convention Center, home of Comic Con and the Greater New York Dental Meeting.)
Elizabeth Dee, Independent’s founder and director, says its new home at the Breuer will be “permanent,” which, given the building’s revolving door of tenants over the last 12 years, may seem optimistic. Each life of the building is odder than the next: Designed by Marcel Breuer for the Whitney Museum and opened in 1966, the Breuer has since been rented to the Met and the Frick, and was sold to Sotheby’s in 2013.
Superficially, Independent’s presence here would seem to restore some of the Breuer’s sanctity as a modernist temple to art viewing. It turns Sotheby’s sales floors into less obvious sales floors. More than three dozen of its 57 booths are solo or focused presentations, many offering museum shows in miniature. This doesn’t totally diminish the overstimulation spurred by seeing the work of more than 130 artists densely packed into booths, which can feel like a high-pressure science fair, but the Breuer’s coffered ceilings and bluestone floors soften the abrasiveness.
There are rediscoveries, under-known artists and lesser-known bodies of work. Some of this is an art fair in want of a theme. Still, themes emerge.
Shadows of the Past
Independent calls a grouping of eight galleries “re-enacting the Breuer,” an acknowledgment that you can never go home again. For James Fuentes, which is showing two of Al Held’s monumental Alphabet paintings, that re-enactment is literal; both the “I” (1965) and “Upside Down Triangle” (1966), which transmutate fragments of letters into hulking geometries, were installed here for Held’s Whitney retrospective in 1974.
It’s also true of Diane Rosenstein Gallery’s engaging survey of Eleanor Antin’s conceptual, performance-based work. Before Cindy Sherman, Antin photographed herself in personas of different genders, races, professions. She performed as “The Ballerina” in 1978 at the Whitney, and was in the 1989 Whitney Biennial.
The homage is more spiritual in presentations of work by Lucio Fontana and Andy Warhol, whose Met and Whitney retrospectives were held here. Warhol plastered the Breuer’s concrete walls in his purple and yellow cow-print wallpaper in 1971; at Independent his foundation has brought his earlier and more sedate line drawings. (Warhol, who attended the Breuer building’s opening in 1966, offers another through-line; earlier this year, Sotheby’s sold his Brigitte Bardot portrait here for $24.8 million.)
The Museum of Non-Objective Painting
Across several booths, the fair strings together a retrospective of early nonobjective art, the style pioneered by Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract experiments into the spiritual, unseen world.
Weinstein Gallery has an astounding selection of work related to Hilla Rebay, the first director of the Guggenheim Museum, placing Rebay’s own oracular work in dialogue with the prewar artists she championed, like Kandinsky — a teacher of Marcel Breuer — Rudolf Bauer, and Ilya Bolotowsky. The presentation represents work accumulated over the last decade, much of it deaccessioned from the Guggenheim.
It’s complemented by presentations that plumb abstraction’s reach from Europe to the United States: Alice Trumbull Mason’s staccato, plink-plonking compositions, at Galerie Lelong; Sue Fuller’s numinous, Constructivist-informed textile works, at Luxembourg + Co; Emil Bissttram’s transcendental nebulae, at Addison Rowe Gallery; and Esphyr Slobodkina’s planar arrangements, rhythmic and free, at Rosenberg & Co.
Sidelines
There is still blue-chip work on hand (some early Picassos, seemingly out of step with Independent’s curatorial thrust, are wedged into a back corner). But there is also an admirable attempt of dealers to surface work by lesser-known artists. There’s the self-taught New Yorker Frank Diaz Escalet’s flat, impressionistic work that incorporates inlaid leather, at Hollis Taggart.
Leon Tovar Gallery has a survey of work by Édgar Negret and Omar Rayo, Colombian artists who landed in New York and developed complementary approaches to geometric abstraction. For Negret, an industrial sculptural language informed by the city’s vertiginous infrastructure; folded painted metal planes with visible joints and bolts that appear both solid and weightless. For Rayo, paintings of interlocking bands appear as if folding into the canvas, making flat space open up.
And Niru Ratnam has brought works by Rita Keegan, a key artist of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and a pioneer of what came to be known as CopyArt, a practice using photocopiers. For Keegan, the machine was an accessible artistic tool that obviated the problem of permanent studio space. But it also was radical, a precursor to digital manipulation.
Independent 20th Century
Sept. 24 to 27. Sotheby’s New York, the Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue; independenthq.com. Opens to the public by ticket on Friday.
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