Tomoko Sawada, Mirrors @Zabriskie

JTF (just the facts): A total of 30 small scale color works, framed in brown wood and matted, and hung in the main gallery space and back viewing room. All of the photographs are digital c-prints, made in 2009, sized roughly 4x7, and printed in editions of 8. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Japanese photographer Tomoko Sawada has already made a sizeable photographic career out of the simple idea of changing her outward appearance. From arrays of photobooth self-portraits to school girl class pictures and arranged marriage shots, she has used nuances in clothing, makeup, hairstyle, and facial gesture to generate literally hundreds of variations on herself, quietly commenting on cultural traditions, societal roles and norms, and the creation of personal identity along the way.

Her newest body of work continues in this same vein, this time using paired portraits of herself which are identical except for small changes in superficial details (hence the title of the show, Mirrors). In what might be pictures of twins, sisters, or futuristic (and creepy) clones, all is exactly the same except for the manipulation of one mundane, everyday variable: the color of a blouse, the style of the hair, or the tilt of a head. What is altogether surprising is how much these small external characteristics seem to imply about age, class, and personality, as well as the subtleties of mood and emotion.
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I think it's overly easy to connect Sawada's work to that of Cindy Sherman or Nikki Lee, and there certainly are obvious parallels in terms of mimicking of appearances and the chameleon-like approach to outward transformation. What I think is slightly different here (especially in her new work) is that Sawada doesn't recede into "character" or the staged environment quite so much; while there is an element of play-acting, the spoofing and satire is a little less overt in these pictures, the approach a bit cooler and more deadpan conceptual. Perhaps another way to put this is that while Sherman and Lee often "become" their characters, I never seem to lose sight of Sawada the artist, even when she has modified her appearance significantly.

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Collector's POV: Each of the works in this show is priced at $1300. While Sawada is on her way to becoming increasingly well known here in the US, her work has not yet reached the secondary markets for photography in any significant volume, so no detailed auction price history is readily available. As such, gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Interviews: Artkrush (here), Pingmag (here)
• Heavy Light, 2008 @ICP (here)
• Review: NY Times, 2003 (here)
• Book review: School Days, Japan Exposures (here)

Tomoko Sawada, Mirrors

Through July 9th
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Zabriskie Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Ralston Crawford, Drawings & Photographs @Zabriskie

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 works, alternately framed in brown and black wood and matted, and hung in the main gallery and the back viewing room. The 10 photographs are all vintage gelatin silver prints, made between 1940 and 1965. The 1940s prints range in size from 4x5 to 7x9; the 1960s prints are somewhat larger, ranging from 11x11 to 14x17. The 14 drawings are mostly ink on paper, and were made between 1940 and 1964. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Ralston Crawford's drawings and photographs of American architecture and industry are elegant exercises in the simplicity of carfeully constructed found abstraction. We've written about Crawford before (here, from 2008), so we'll dispense with the usual broad historical background and photographic context in this review, and head straight to a closer look at the works on view in this particular show.

Crawford's photographs are rooted in realism, with fragments of bridges, grain elevators, buildings, ships and trains providing the raw material for his explorations into geometric patterning. New York Door, 1961, depicts the thick black and white panels of a high contrast painted wooden door, bisected by a slashing black shadow. Box Car, 1949, juxtaposes undulating corrugated steel with the strict lines of bubbly seams and the rungs of a ladder, creating a composition with layers of interrelated textures. Grain Elevators, 1949, starts with a cluster of tubular white silos, and adds long diagonals, horizontal braces, and vertical vents striped like shutters. All of these works begin with something familiar, and transform it into a pared down visual experiment with spare, building block forms.

Crawford's drawings and sketches seem to explore many of these same ideas in a slightly looser, more expressive way. Given his choice of medium, these works are very line heavy, with intersections and cross hatching used to create darkness and light. The remnants of a girder or a door frame are still evident if you look closely, but the lines have been boiled down to such an extent that very little representation is left behind. Reality has been reduced to flat, elemental shapes and planes, which have then become the starting point for further (and more radical) explorations in abstraction.

I suppose what I most would most like to see is a deep, scholarly retrospective of Crawford's photographic work. But until that mythical show happens, exhibits like this one, which intermittently bring out a handful of unseen images from the storage boxes in the back room, will likely have to be the substitute.

Collector's POV: The photographs in this show are priced between $7500 and $16000, with the 1960s images all priced below $10000. The drawings range in price between $6500 and $16500. Crawford's photographs are scarce at auction, so it's quite difficult to develop any reliable price pattern from so few lots. Overall, his photographic work remains on the short list of artists we would like to add to the city/industrial genre of our collection.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times, 1985 (here), NY Times, 1991 (here)

Ralston Crawford, Drawings & Photographs
Through May 15th

Zabriskie Gallery

41 East 57th Street

New York, NY 10022

Ralston Crawford @Zabriskie

JTF (just the facts): A total of 25 works of art: 4 paintings, 4 drawings/watercolors, and 17 photographs, shown through the main gallery and back room. Crawford died in 1978 and most of the work in this show is from his later life (i.e the 1960s and 1970s) although there are a handful of earlier pieces mixed in as well. (Installation image at right.)

Comments/Context: Ralston Crawford is best known as a 1930s/1940s painter of pared down and often abstracted views of American vernacular architecture: industrial buildings, docks, factories and the like. He is often lumped in with Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth as a Precisionist, or more loosely associated with artists like Stuart Davis or movements with titles like Geometric Abstraction or Synthetic Cubism. He made crisp, flat, simplified images of recognizable objects, where detail was eliminated and the relationships between form, line, color, and space were carefully selected and balanced. With the arrival of the wild, emotional excesses of Abstract Expressionism in the early 1950s, he was largely marginalized and forgotten.
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What is less known about Crawford is that he was also a photographer. Starting in the late 1930s, he used a 35mm camera as a kind of sketch pad, where he would capture images he found out in the world, to later be reworked and synthesized down for his paintings. As the years passed, he began to see the some of the photographs not as intermediate steps but as works of art in and of themselves, and in his later life, his activity as a photographer was much more pronounced.
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One of the neat things about this show is that Crawford's photographs, drawings and oils of the same subject have been hung together, so you can really see how his mind was working through the problems of picture making. The installation shot above (not easy to see I realize) shows 4 different iterations of the same anchor, and how he carefully chose his elements and then amplified and distorted them to get the effects he wanted.

I think Crawford is under appreciated in terms of his place in the history of photography. Prior to the late-1930s, abstraction in photography was still in its infant stages. Many artists both in America and Europe were experimenting with pared down industrial forms and Modernist simplification, but most of the objects are still clearly recognizable. Crawford's early photographs provide an interesting bridge to Callahan and particularly Siskind, who both came along in the late 1940s and 1950s and really started to break things down further. Crawford's later photographs continue along the same path, exploring forms and shapes, light and dark, while still adhering to his consistent and original point of view.

Collector's POV: In the past five years, there have been a total of two (2) Ralston Crawford photographs available in the auction market (one sold for just under $5000 and the other was bought in), so his work is scarce. (There is also one nice, albeit small Crawford available in the upcoming sale at Rago, preview here.) The photographs in this show are priced between $7500 and $15000, and are generally 8x10, 11x14 or slightly larger. The oil paintings are priced between $140000 and $200000, although a few are NFS (not for sale). As collectors of city and industrial imagery, we are absolutely on the look out for a Crawford photograph to add to our collection. Even if you're not in the market for a Crawford, the show is worth seeing, especially to consider the interplay of photography and painting in the history of American Art.
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By the way, there was a nice retrospective catalog on Crawford put out by the Whitney in 1986, if you are looking for some background on Crawford for your library.

Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system defined here)

Ralston Crawford
Through November 29th

Zabriskie Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Lisette Model @Zabriskie

JTF (just the facts): 18 total images, 2 of which are duplicates. 12 of the images are from a 1976 Lunn portfolio of Model's work; the other 4 are portraits of jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong. The images were taken between 1933 and 1949, and measure approximately 19x15 or the reverse. (Installation shot of the gallery, at right.)

Comments/Context: Given the explosion in the Arbus market in recent years, I am glad to see some of that light being reflected back on Model who (as her predecessor and teacher) is deserving of more attention and respect. I think it is hard for us today to understand just how revolutionary Model's portraits were for her times. Back in the late 1930s/early 1940s, the dominant portraiture was cool, detached, even distant, and sometimes heroic (think of the FSA photographers of this time). Her images are of imperfect, ordinary, and sometimes extraordinary people, with whom she has connected in a way to reveal their humanity, their dignity, and their humor (without mocking). I think that it was this willingness to "get involved" with her subjects, to meet them on their own terms without looking down on them, which was her true innovation, one which she happily passed on to a generation of photographers after her (especially Arbus, nearly 30 years later).

This small show does a good job of giving a viewer a feel for her approach to portraiture. (It closes tomorrow, so make haste in getting to see it.) While there is really only one semi-vintage piece in the exhibit, there are still many great pictures to see and be reminded of. I particularly like the only non-portrait in the show, Window Reflections, Fifth Avenue, New York City.

By the way, Model's work can also be seen at Arbus/Avedon/Model, currently on at the ICP (see here). There are only 5 of her portraits in this small show (all of which are in the Zabriskie show I believe), but they are placed in the context of the work of the other two, which helps to clarify her influence on the photographers who came after her.

Collector's POV: For collectors, there is a big gap between Model's vintage and non-vintage work. Due to the relatively large number of later portfolios made (edition of 75 plus 15 APs), many have been broken up and sold off as individual images, depressing the prices a bit I imagine. At auction, later prints have gone in a range of $1000-5000 in recent years. The vintage work is another story: there has been very little that has come to market and those that have appeared have sold in a range between $25000-60000. Zabriskie is selling the entire 12 print 1976 portfolio for $65000. Other pictures in the show range from $7000-8500 for the more unknown jazz musicians up to $38000 for the 1950s print of Singer at the Cafe Metropole. These are, of course, Fuller Building retail kinds of prices.

Some questions to ponder about portfolios: when does a collector get large enough in his/her activities to be interested in buying entire portfolios of work? What is the right edition size for a portfolio, so that it is large enough to serve the audience of museums and large collectors, without flooding the market? And how many collectors get so big that they begin to support/subsidize the creation of specific portfolios of new work by their favorite photographers?

Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system defined here)

Lisette Model
Through August 29th

Zabriskie Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022