Exhibitions of the Week: Pace Gallery on Painting with David Hockney and Richard Pousette-Dart

David Hockney: Some New Painting (and Photography) at Pace Gallery (until January 10)

When did painting decide to stop being funny? Probably at some point in the 1940s, when "funny painting" became synonymous with "Grant Wood," "Norman Rockwell," and "selling your soul to the bourgeoisie." Funny, because David Hockney never seemed to get the memo--and still doesn't look like a sellout. Among the high points of David Hockney: Some New Painting (and Photography) at Pace Gallery are canvases depicting everyday folk loafing around. The gestures and attitudes of these subjects don't exactly add up, their clothes don't make any fashion sense, and yet these figures offer miscellaneous and quietly amusing human comedy, as though Hockney has unleashed his inner Hogarth.

However, the style and especially the colors of the works in Some New Painting (and Photography) are Hockney through and through. The paintings on display specialize in shades of blue and teal, which are punctured by figures in white and black, while white, taupe, and various reds and browns are the dominant colors for the photos. Many of the new compositions are self-reflexive on multiple levels, but never become cloying: both the photographs and the paintings deal with gallery-like settings and place Hockney's human subjects under odd perspectives. (Photographs such as The Potted Palm, 4 Blue Stools, and The Chairs at once recede steeply and bear down the viewer.) Hockney uses a different deep-space, shallow-space back-and-forth in his recent paintings of dancers: blue mountains create a looming distance, but Hockney's figures--hands linked, bodies dancing in a circle--are so pushed to the front that they become awkward, blocky, massy.

Although such motifs harken back to Henri Matisse's famous groups of dancers and somewhat less famous renderings of artist studios, Hockney's recent work is more obviously grounded in ordinary life. No serpentine nudes or mural-like compositions here: the interiors all have meticulously-captured tiles and curtains, and the dancers all wear practice-style leotards. Don't, however, equate "ordinary" with "dull." In Hockney's painting The Group VI, a heavyset man in socks and sandals leans over a middle-aged woman, showing her something on his iPhone; another man, donning a blazer and a magenta shirt, stares out of the picture with a disgruntled expression. Disgruntled why? The scene doesn't really add up and probably isn't meant to; it's the kind of episode that is glimpsed over and over in restaurants and at parties and within art galleries, and that Hockney presents with both a dash of humor and a strong dose of ambiguity.

Richard Pousette-Dart at Pace Gallery (until January 10)

Primal forms, subjected to painstaking craft, are what you will find in this retrospective of American abstractionist Richard Pousette-Dart. Among the canvases and works on paper that Pace Gallery has culled from Pousette-Dart's long career are renderings of squares, circles, rectangles, executed in the wall-stretching proportions common from the 1950s on. (The paintings here were completed between the late 1960s and the mid 1980s.) The individual images are often built up of stippled dots in different colors, so that what appears to be a white circle or a black square from a distance is really a collection of colored dabs, some blue, some yellow, some the overriding color. And even regrarded from a distance, the paintings carry a certain allure. Unlike the zips and color fields of Barnett Newman, which lose so much of their power when massed up, the phantom geometries of Richard Pousette-Dart contrast and resonate when gathered. As self-contained as these paintings can seem, they also seem to belong together.

Nor was Pousette-Dart a self-contained artist, despite his reclusive tendencies. As Alex Bacon explains this show's catalog essay, Pousette-Dart both "sequestered himself away from the mainstream of the art world" and kept up with it "in his own highly individual and intuitive way." Without taking on the proportions of a full retrospective, Richard Pousette-Dart demonstrates that its subject can be situated within the art of his time, and of times past; Adolph Gottlieb, Frank Stella, and Robert Irwin are among the midcentury reference points that Bacon locates, while Van Gogh and Malevich were among Pousette-Dart's art historical precedents. Then there is the art historical way forward--Pace Gallery stalwart Sol LeWitt with his own geometries, taking the language of circle and square beyond the canvas and giving these forms a very different kind of otherworldliness. Though not the most striking selections that Pace could have chosen--certainly not as baroque and startling as Pousette-Dart's Illumination Gothic or Blood Wedding--the canvases in Richard Pousette-Dart show that lonely and easy mysticism had little place among the modernists. Pousette-Dart was too good an aesthetician, and too good a colleague, for that.