There are few buildings in New York as closely tied to the history of 20th-century art as The Breuer. Opened in 1966 as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Marcel Breuer’s landmark on Madison Avenue later housed the Met Breuer and Frick Madison before becoming Sotheby’s new headquarters. This year, for the first time, the Independent 20th Century art fair takes over the building — an especially fitting move as it marks its 60th anniversary.
That history runs through the fair in ways that are sometimes surprisingly literal. At Forum Gallery, a solo presentation of Raphael Soyer returns the artist to the same building where the Whitney Museum opened his retrospective in 1967. Elsewhere, familiar figures are approached from less familiar angles: Lévy Gorvy Dayan looks beyond Yves Klein’s monochromes to his preoccupation with nature, weather, and trace, bringing together his Cosmogonies alongside the suspended blue rods of Pluie bleue.
At Michael Hoppen Gallery, Out of Chaos turns attention away from the finished work altogether. Photographs, contact sheets, and pieces of paper collected from the floor of Francis Bacon’s notoriously cluttered studio reveal the visual material that surrounded him, including photographs by John Deakin and Peter Beard and sheets bearing Bacon’s own markings. The presentation offers something closer to an excavation of an artist’s working process than a conventional survey.
Reassessment is one of the fair’s most persistent themes. Berry Campbell revisits the women of the influential Stable Gallery, bringing Joan Mitchell, Janice Biala, Elaine de Kooning, Perle Fine and others back into a history of Abstract Expressionism still too often told through its male protagonists. Nearby, Olney Gleason devotes its presentation entirely to de Kooning. Alison Jacques turns to the rediscovered Surrealist Bona de Mandiargues, while Richard Saltoun traces the dreamlike, symbolic world of Manina—two artists whose positions within Surrealism have only recently begun to receive renewed attention.
The view of the century widens considerably from there. Salon 94 and Ryan Lee’s Black SoHo brings David Hammons together with Emma Amos, Ed Clark, Norman Lewis, Camille Billops and others who helped shape downtown New York’s cultural life outside the art world’s dominant institutions. At Gomide&Co, the work of Sachiko Koshikoku appears within a presentation examining the influence of East Asian migration on Latin American modernism, while Galatea’s Ubi Bava brings geometric and optical experimentation into particularly sharp relief against The Breuer’s own architecture. Meanwhile, Thaddaeus Ropac places both Lee Ufan and Lee Kang So among a group of postwar artists that pushes abstraction well beyond its familiar American and European histories – centering and towards the parallel developments that were unfolding across Asia.
Ultimately, the Independent 20th Century fair is compelling simply not because of the presence of major names, but the way the chosen artists, movements, and bodies of work complicate the version of the century we already know. Inside the Breuer Building that has spent six decades exhibiting, collecting and continually reframing the history of art, that process of looking again feels particularly at home.
by Victoria Sutrisno
Images by V. Sutrisno