Anne Margaret Daniel

Bob Dylan, "The Asia Series," at the Gagosian Gallery/​Madison Avenue

The Asia Series: Impressions

The Gagosian Gallery’s branch on Madison Avenue is snugly set into the string of fine art galleries that line the avenue from 70th Street through the 80s, across from the Whitney Museum, and not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim. Gagosian does not, like some of the other galleries, front the avenue with big windows on the street level. To reach the gallery, you must go into what looks like a sleek apartment building, past a big Damien Hirst tondo of butterflies mired in blue paint, and a black-tied and impeccably polite doorman who directs you to the elevators. If you go there before October 22, 2011, you’ll step out four floors above the sidewalk into a comfortable, well-lit hallway with a large sign for “The Asia Series” on the wall. The image for Bob Dylan’s new show is an excerpt from his painting “Shanghai,” a scene of a yellow river crowded with boats and buildings. When I arrived for the show, a happy, talkative pack of college-age folk, most of them Japanese, were convened beneath the sign, sharing with each other their impressions of what they’d just seen.

A lone gallery employee was behind her small credenza, with a stack of one-page exhibition guides with floor plans of the three rooms in which the eighteen paintings hang and the names, dates, and dimensions of the works, and a single copy of “The Asia Series” exhibition catalogue (for display only, and for sale online; no photocopying permitted). She smiled pleasantly, her Daniel Liebiskind glasses doing nothing to mar her beauty, when I asked her if there was a price list, and said that someone could let me know about that if I were interested in buying any of them. Would I like to look at the book? Not before looking at the paintings, I said, and she agreed entirely. “Let me know what you think,” she said, and with plan in hand I went into the first room.

The paintings are all good-sized, several feet in width and height, with the largest, “LaBelle Cascade” and “Cockfight,” around four by six feet. They’re hung comfortably at what’s eye level for most people, without labels or tags on the wall next to them. They are not crowded together, and are nicely grouped in a rhythm that I felt alternated from ancient to modern, and sometimes refused to be confined to a particular century or even place, despite the paintings’ dates and names.

The first painting, “Bull,” features a man and a bull in a landscape with a backdrop of old, mighty green trees, with light patches of water showing along a canal, or ponds, along the way. It’s a scene that still happens in that rural, farming landscape – in any rural, farming landscape – and that happened there centuries ago, too. The vivid greens of the trees, and blue flecks in the otherwise softly-colored water, are powerful, and the brightness of colors in the show builds up steadily as you go along.

I think that the farmer is a man, though I’m making an assumption there. Some of the people in the paintings are hard to pin down in terms of gender. Not so for the bull, of course. His owner is holding the bull, and leading him, by the ring in his nose; Dylan’s bull is a gentle sleek beast, with a peaceful, blocky face, and its white horns laid back almost like a dog's ears. The farmer, despite his dress, doesn't look particularly Asian, as is the case for several, though not all, of the people in these paintings. He isn’t, particularly, an Asian farmer; he’s just a farmer, going about his job in a green place, as farmers do and have done all over this world. His features are finely drawn, and in them, perhaps, an echo of a self-portrait. He’s looking at you, as are many of the people in “The Asia Series.”

“Kitchenette” is one of three paintings on the adjacent wall, and it’s concise and clear and chilly. A contemporary urban couple, in modern dress, are arranging themselves in a gray, small space to face the day: he adjusts his tie, while she seems to be packing a greenish lunchbox. His face is cold, hers solemn, without being patient. The tie itself is the only bright spot in this beginning day: though done in subdued colors, it’s still a wild landscape that’s a relief of sorts.

“Up The Hill” is the opposite of “Kitchenette.” There are two figures, again, at work, but they are outdoors in the sun. One walks far behind, in a hat and green jacket, carrying tools. The person in the foreground, taking up most of the space of the canvas, is radiant: a dazzling smile, and engaging face and eyes, belie the hard task of carrying a big, full basket on one’s back up a mountain road. Again, it’s easy, but not necessary, to assume that this carrier is a man. The basket seems to be full of wheat and straw, soft shades of pinks and greens amidst the yellows, and the basket itself is woven of the same straw: a nice examination of before-and-after, raw material and finished product. To the right, a massive cliff, or great wall (the top is niched regularly, but not regularly enough to let you know it’s a wall, nor irregularly enough to let you know it’s a cliff), rises up to fill the edge of the frame. This painting is a pause on a long way.

“Opium” is another interior painting, of a beautiful dark-haired woman with a pale face and regular features lying amidst strewn and lovely objects you can’t quite make out, apart from her fan, as hard as you might try. Her colors are sunset ones: bright pink (which appears on her matching upper lip), paled reds, rainbow-trout hints, intense without being strident. The room in which she lies is softly gray and green, and there are vases or glasses, lights or pipes or musical instruments, pillows or draped cloths filling the rest of her space. Her eyes are closed, but she isn’t sleeping; she’s lying uncomfortably, in an odd position, and the hand by her jaw is closed in a loose fist, less resting than ready to move.

“Shanghai” recalls so many great world cities with working rivers that run through them. The crowded, colorful buildings on narrow waters might be Venetian, for instance, but the boats themselves are not, and the water itself definitely isn’t: this is a yellow river, for sure. The writing on the walls I could not read, but it brackets the scene on both sides, and in all this welter of boats and buildings there are only two people I could see: a shirtless workman, small in the distance, near the center; and a well-dressed merchant, perhaps, at work in a boat by himself.

The first of three portraits of lone individuals in “The Asia Series,” “The Monk” is arresting – as is its counterpart “Scribe” – for its solitary grace. It’s a large portrait, and surprises you both with its darkness, in the rich browns and dark grays of the background and of the monk’s robes, and its touches of light: the beads he holds, the reds in his stole or collar or hood. Perhaps his head is shaved, but in the shadows one can’t tell; the shadow gives him a tonsure that may or may not be there, and keeps him from being assigned a specific religion or order. He might be a Buddhist monk, but with the heavy browns, he could as easily be Capuchin or Francisan; with the greys, he could be Benedictine: an Everymonk. He holds prayer beads, which are told in many faiths and religious traditions. Again, he does not have particularly Asian features, or coloring. That he is impossible to firmly categorize makes him available to anyone, appealing and comforting at once.

The landscape of “The Bridge” is pleasant enough, except for the bridge itself, with its sawhorsey wooden props in the middle, and the rocks that spill awkwardly from its foundations into the riverbed itself. Women in parasols, faceless, and a man stroll above. More engaging, though, are the figures and scene in the right corner of this painting. A small road winds up and into the trees, and travelers move along it into mystery.

I paused before “Big Brother,” feeling something familiar as I looked at it. George Orwell it wasn’t, though I liked the painting’s name, and both men in the double portrait are surely watching you. The moment that popped into my head was the thought of Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger as Terry and Charlie Malloy, the little brother who coulda been a contender and his doomed big brother, in “On The Waterfront.” This made me smile, as I stood before the painting. The man standing behind his brother, in the putty-colored suit, holds a lighter for the uglier man in the dark suit in the foreground, but there’s nothing servile at all about his jutting chin and the attitude in his eyes. They’re painted in big smooth flat stretches of paint that make them unthreatening, like a movie still, until you look into those eyes.

There is a black-and-white photograph by Bruce Gilden, taken in 1998, that Gilden named “Directing Gangsters.” Gilden recalled for his Magnum blog in 2008 that he’d posed the photograph, asking the man on the left to “please light up the cigarette again, again, again….” The men are Yakuza, Japanese Mafia, who model their own style on that of American gangsters of the 1950s. I’d seen this photograph before, and, evidently, so had Dylan. His two men are in the same pose and posture in “Big Brother.”

In the catalogue for “The Asia Series,” there is a long interview with Dylan by John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture, emeritus, at the Museum of Modern Art. Elderfield asked Dylan directly what he used as models for his paintings, and specifically asked about photographs. Dylan replied that he did indeed use photographs as models for his painting: “Real people, real street scenes, behind-the-curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work. What I’m trying to bring out in complex scenes, landscapes, or personality clashes – I do it in a lot of different ways. I have the cause and effect in mind from the beginning to the end. But it has to start from something tangible.”

That artists in every media use models is no news at all. Roman sculptors spent lifetimes copying Greek sculptures that had been, themselves, carved in memory of lost Etruscan statues. Michaelangelo copied Massacio. Everyone copied Caravaggio. Browning dressed like Byron and tried to write like him. What composer hasn’t done variations on some theme of Mozart’s? Picasso flipped Velazquez on his head and turned him inside out. What is an “original,” particularly in terms of visual art? An original is what an artist sees, in the mind’s eye, and creates with eye and hand – and imagination. Painters paint from life, from models, from photographs and sketches and other paintings, from memories and desires and, most of all, to use Hamlet’s phrase once more, that mind’s eye.

As I stood in the Gagosian, I didn’t know at the time what I’ve just written above, about Bruce Gilden’s photograph – or any other photographs that Dylan might have used as models for any of these works. I didn’t need to know this to look at the paintings there before me, to appreciate them, and to have thoughts and feelings about them – and knowing this information adds, for me, nothing to the reality of standing in a room with paintings and looking at them, as it were, in the flesh. In a favorite poem of mine, William Butler Yeats speaks of “Those images that yet/​Fresh images beget.” The images on show at the Gagosian are paintings painted by an artist named Bob Dylan, and that’s what you’re looking at when you lift your eyes to the walls.
At this point in the show, as I turned from the sinister smiling brothers to a tiny bending figure in a lake, diminished by the waters around her (or him?) and the mountain cliff rising above, I had stopped thinking about the artist – which really surprised me, when I realized, only as I left the show, what I’d done. The reason I went to see the show was because of the artist, but that wasn’t the reason I was now going from painting to painting. There are no labels on the walls at the show, no names of artists or works or any other text, as one finds in museums. I didn’t see a single signature, either, on any of the paintings. Painters usually sign their work – if not when it’s completed, then when it’s sold: I wonder why Dylan signed none of these paintings. Both these things, whatever the reasons, helped me lose my sense of who’d made the art, and focus on the art itself – a consummation devoutly to be wished.

“Hunan Province” is the large landscape of the woman in the lake. The waters are beautifully done, down to the little eddy of reds and purples disconcertingly trailing out from that basin she holds. She is so small against her massive, shadowed backdrop, yet she holds the center of the painting and of your attention. The reflection she's standing in, discolored – or, rather, colored in shades that are not water tones of green and blue – really makes you wonder what was in that bowl she's holding. She looks caught in the act, of bathing or something worse. The cliffs cast their deep shadows into the lake, except for one odd spot near the middle of the painting, where a pale figure surrounded by an orangey glow disturbs the scene.

Puzzling over this work I turned to another unsettler: “Idol.” An idol that looks alive, or comes to life, will always be scary, and this one is already half vital. It sits caged on a porch or veranda, hemmed in by salmon-colored staves that couldn’t hold it for a moment if it wanted to get up and go. The left half of the face is dead and stony, but the right side is blurry and cognizant of something, expressive, an old man’s face, alarming.
“Monkey Ridge” was a nice, calming change, on the opposite wall. To me it was the least of the landscapes, though pleasant. A snow-capped mountain, looking like Mount Fuji, that seems to be melting makes the backdrop for a man and a horse. Like the bull, the horse is a sweet creature, patient and unmoving; Dylan’s farm animals are gently and pleasantly drawn, save the two tortured roosters in the last painting.

A painting of two men doing a deal, “Trade,” rounds out the room. The one on the left, bald-headed and younger and blustery, is instigating the deal with an open speaking mouth and a crooked finger (the faces in Dylan’s portraits are clear and defined, but the hands often unfinished-looking, a Modernist touch I associate with Modigliani). The savvy, silent older man in the center of the canvas, with his wrinkled brow and cloth cap and solemn face, will, I felt, get the better of whatever this deal is that’s going down. A shadowy set of steps in the back left corner of the painting, leading off the street to some unknown interior, are more interesting to me than are the merchants.

The next three paintings are the best in the show. I pulled up short before the four people in a glowing, vibrant landscape, so unlike the rather natural outdoor scenes in the other rooms. The painting hangs alone on its wall, and easily carries the space. “LaBelle Cascade” is a large painting of two women, beautifully dressed, sitting at the edge of what seems to me a stream, with trees sloping up and out to the sides, and a vital focus at the center on a brilliant, electric-blue spill: one of the women’s shawls or drapes? It’s liquid and lovely, and intense even in a painting in love with colors. A partial triangle of whitish pearl, like a white cliff, above and in the background, only serves up the blue more dramatically. The women are still, silent, not having a meal or doing much of anything; one wears a white headdress and is either sucking on a pipe or playing one, while the other, with purple flowers in her hair, frowns at nothing – or at you. The two men, clad only in tied white fundoshi underwear, lean in in a framing way, their longstaffs or fighting sticks to hand if needed.

The Gagosian guide to the show says of “LeBelle Cascade” [sic – certainly it’s “LaBelle,” and not “LeBelle,” unless the gender’s bent on purpose; it’s spelled alternately, in the Gagosian’s publications] that it “looks like a riff on Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe but … is, in fact, a scenographic tourist photo-opportunity in a Tokyo amusement arcade.” The latter part of this tracks what Dylan says about the painting in the catalogue, and I guess it means you could put your face in the spaces currently occupied by the women’s, if you’d like to, at that amusement arcade. As to the Manet, not so much: if it’s a riff on the Manet, Dylan has kindly clothed the women and stripped the men, which is decent and democratic of him, and he’s brightened it up considerably.

Two excellent portraits, side by side, complement each other on the wall adjacent to “LaBelle Cascade.” “Mae Ling” is a beautiful woman with hard, tilting, unavoidable eyes and a wine-dark smile. Her dress and headdress of blacks and greys, with a threaded pale-yellow design of great intricacy on both, are set against a weathered, taupey wall. The twists and turns of yellow seem to crawl against the simple setting and darker colors, and, in Mae Ling’s dark hair, a vermilion strand emerges and submerges where you’d least expect it.

Next to her is the painting in this show I liked best, “Scribe.” There are many paintings of men writing: my favorite will always be Caravaggio's St. Jerome in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. But the upright, formal elegance of Dylan's scribe, from his robe to the way he's holding his pen, are perfect. He is a writer, and artist, of dignity and perpetuity.

Perhaps I wasn’t going to be as receptive to anything after I’d been so struck by three paintings in a row, but the last three paintings in the show brought me down a bit. “The Game” is no game at all; the three men crouched on a sidewalk around a gaming board look like they’re at work, not at play. These people in today’s street are doing what they do for a living, gambling. Their slicked-back hair, cigarettes, and splayed, squatting feet made me feel cheap and dismal, like them. “Emperor” is a finely executed painting, but somehow unfinished. The colors are not unlike the colors used in “Mae Ling,” and like her it’s drawn as historical pageant, but the Emperor and his consort have blank, empty eyes, like statues or sharks. The court women behind them, not all beautiful, are much more alive.

And, finally, “Cockfight” is sad. In America, fighting gamecocks endure as school mascots, and in England as the intrepid little rooster atop a soccer ball as the logo for Tottenham Hotspur, but the sport, if such it is, has long been banned. You can easily find a cockfight to watch in many Asian countries, however. Here, a crowd of men, their faces technically very well done, gathers around the cockpit, wearing their bettors’ or owners’ numbers, with one man whose head is out of the frame clutching a prominent bottle at the left. You wouldn’t want to be watched by this group – I didn’t like standing in front of them, but their focus, the place where a viewer must stand, is on you and the roosters together. You don’t want to be, but you’re in the pit, part of the “entertainment.” The roosters already look dead, even the one halfheartedly claws-up; the red is trickling down from the combs into the heads and necks of the birds. I circled back to look at my scribe once more, as I was leaving, just to rinse my eyes.

“Wow, that’s the first,” said the gallery assistant when I told her I wanted to go home with the scribe. Most people, she said, had liked “Shanghai” and “Mae Ling” best, though school groups had liked “LaBelle Cascade.” “School groups?” I asked. “Groups of students,” she corrected. I had passed a pack of young people on the way in, and this seems to be the biggest audience for the show, so far. As I went through, several college-age couples and groups of friends were taking their time going around the rooms. How good that, in this age of young people raised entirely with – and sometimes by – the Internet, they were coming to see the paintings themselves, instead of settling for images on their laptops and phones and various technologies.

It’s a rare art show, and a good one, that makes you want to look at more art, any sort of art. The next morning, I went to the Museum of Modern Art for the first time, I’m ashamed as a New Yorker and a MoMA member to say, in half a year, in the mood to look at the faces of some old friends because of Dylan’s portraits. “The Asia Series” made me think about the artworks, and not the artist, as I viewed the paintings – and made me want more visual, colorful engagement, indoors, on a pretty late-summer’s day: things for which to be glad.

Copyright Anne Margaret Daniel and ISIS 2011

A gallery visit on a sunny weekday afternoon Up East. Read the review in ISIS.