This week, we present a pair of slightly less brief In Brief reviews of New York gallery shows on view through the start of summer. For his Critics’ Table debut, David Rimanelli reacts with deep feeling in his consideration of a group of top-notch, career-spanning works by Willem de Kooning. And Johanna Fateman lauds an overlooked body of controversial work from the 1970s by the artist and Throbbing Gristle-member Cosey Fanni Tutti at Maxwell Graham.
Willem de Kooning
Gagosian | 555 West 24th Street
Through June 24, 2025
Trying now to write up the de Kooning show at Gagosian, I confront my ironic, perhaps inevitable, dilemma: He’s just so vast and huge and improbable and convincing, how could he not fail in my eyes when even Jesus Christ and Dante did? My “favorite” painter, whom I “blame” for my early fall into contemporary art (for my stupid career, “the art critic”), de Kooning, with his acres of masterpieces, is responsible for just too much beauty altogether. Yet, this show, “Endless Painting,” curated by Cecilia Alemani—even if its title and the unease suggested by endlessness count as interpretive pleasures—is dreary, pointless, almost (ridiculous me) embarrassing. How can this be possible?
The artworks on view are of an astonishingly high caliber for any exhibition, whether at a museum or gallery. The earliest is a neurasthenic pink lady (the small, oil-on-Masonite Figure, 1944), and, like a mini retrospective, this show covers the artist’s career right up to the end, to the very dematerialized ribbons of color that characterize his final phase, when he was suffering from dementia. One period is markedly not included: the black-and-white oil-and-enamel paintings of the later ’40s. But the skeptic or simply the attentive viewer might go gooey with indecision and second-guessing, so paltry is the conceit undergirding this show. The microwaved pu pu platter of press-release folderol is stunning, something about arms and knees and who knows buttocks and bosoms. You know, the Body, or the body parts, rather, chopped up and abstracted, Cubist and Surrealist, etc., etc. These are among the inescapable, real characteristics of de Kooning’s art—the truth that’s nonetheless too obvious, almost tedious.
But is there really something new and surprising to say about de Kooning? Like the Old Masters, de Kooning startles emphatically as we encounter his influence among younger painters. Staring at Montauk II, 1969, I find myself in a hysteron proteron time warp: “That is just Cecily Brown at her dizzy breathless peak!” And the very late work is usually either rejected outright as a market manipulation of the awkward and discreditable effluvia of a once-great artist who had, as they say, lost his stuff; or it’s sentimentally and cynically coddled by critical, art-historical, and indubitably commercial interests: De Kooning mustn’t decline by any measure, because there are rather a lot of the late works, and both mythology and cash register demand they remain “pure genius.”
My negativities shouldn’t dissuade anyone from seeing and indeed loving this show. I have seen it three times, and I’m returning tomorrow. For one to bask in a real (and, to some tastes, quite awful) new sensation among the disputed late works: Untitled X, 1985. Forget evocations of the surf, eddies of flesh and the devil, empty air, white. This painting is just breathtakingly vulgar, like a cataclysm of plastics, toothpastes, Pepsodent, Crest, Colgate. Gaga drunk Bill cruising to the finish, he’s still (Jesus Christ) a bit shocking! Willem de Kooning is it. —David Rimanelli
Cosey Fanni Tutti
Maxwell Graham | 55 Hester Street
Through June 28, 2025
Cosey Fanni Tutti’s series “Magazine Actions,” 1972–80, is a conceptual-feminist checkmate for the ages, and, unsurprisingly, a mostly unsung victory—until now. Or so an understated presentation of this very rarely shown, “shocking” body of work at Maxwell Graham hopes (as do I). For the pieces on view here, the British artist (who is perhaps better known as a founding member of legendary industrial music group Throbbing Gristle) worked as a model for adult magazines. She collected the fruits of her labor from newsstands and sex shops and arranged the excised pages featuring the photo shoots (and their accompanying text) in neat grids—a reimagining of the readymade as a feminist usurpation, with a pornographic and self-reflexive twist.
Fanni Tutti’s orderly formatting of appropriated material establishes the “Magazine Actions” as “conceptual” from across the room, before a viewer can be besieged, at close quarters, by the countervailing associations of the sexually explicit, mass-cultural, meant-to-be-consumed-privately materials that compose them. The 52-page, two-panel Stern Pupil, 1978 (extracted from Miss Sadie Stern’s Monthly No. 6) is a grand rectangle, occupying the gallery’s back wall; Woman Lust, 1975, and Meet Geraldine, 1975–76, made from shorter features, form single horizontal lines; while a vitrine contains intact issues of publications, with only their covers visible, the artist’s signed certificates of authenticity arranged on glass shelves below.
Archival, administrative, aloof in look and tone, the “action” of the show’s title is nevertheless defining in its broad evocation of acts—political and sexual—as well as performance art (as in the Actionism of her then recent Viennese forbears). Fanni Tutti’s process was not (or not merely) focused on the transmutation of borrowed imagery into art via a conceptual sleight of hand: Because she appears in the photos herself, entirely exposed, an “actor,” I can’t help but imagine them as documents of clandestine performances occurring in plain sight, psychic interventions in the apparatus of what was then called the male gaze, as a kind of espionage, an artist-agent masquerading as mute commodity.
Beyond the obvious questions of authorship and ownership she raises vis-à-vis the production of the pictures and her subsequent use and sale of them, lie those concerning the production of sexuality and the sexed body, the social meaning of her spread-legged poses and bedroom eyes, and its relationship to her own self-representation and desire. But the complexity of the work, with its range of antagonisms—to the labor relations of both the sex industry and high art, to hierarchies of class and taste, to the history of the nude and the limits of the moment’s reigning feminism, for example—takes time to absorb, unfolding only after the initial, provocative effect of the artist’s pornographic imagery fades. And art floodlit by controversy is rarely granted that.
The exhibition’s press release recounts the commotion surrounding the 1976 exhibition at the London ICA, “Prostitution” by COUM Transmissions (the collective that was precursor to Throbbing Gristle) in which Fanni Tutti’s “Magazine Actions” debuted. The show was scandalous enough to prompt calls for an end to taxpayer funding, a Conservative MP calling the artists “wreckers of civilization.” The unintentional praise is perhaps hyperbolic, but true enough—though in the case of this particular series, destruction is pursued with formal acuity and long-game restraint. —Johanna Fateman
