Dear Mr. Gleason,
I was disappointed to read your recent review of Bradford Salamon’s work at the Hilbert Museum (LINK HERE). We rely on people such as yourself for thoughtful criticism of art in southern California galleries and museums. This review, unfortunately, was nothing more than an irresponsible series of cheap shots culminating in your implicit endorsement of that hoary chestnut The Orange Curtain.
I agree with you that Salamon’s paintings are doggedly nostalgic. Why, I don’t know. But, rather than your serial drubbing of select images one after the other, you might have commented on how his warm and muted color palette reinforces his choice of retro
subject matter. Or you might have wondered why his portrait of Don Bachardy was painted with a brighter range of hues. Or better yet, you might have questioned the relationship (or lack thereof) between his oil paintings and the large-scale charcoal portraits he has on display. These pieces, in my opinion, were especially interesting because of their ambitious scale, their performative nature (he works on them in the museum on a regular basis during the exhibition) and the fact that they resembled pages from a sketchbook rather than finished drawings. But then who am I to tell you what to write?
As for your comments on the Hilbert Museum, I must admit that California scene painting is not my cup of tea and that, as former director of Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, I have reservations about the museum’s relationship with university. Nevertheless, living in downtown Orange as I do, I have visited the Hilbert several times and have found some of the exhibitions eye-opening. I remember one particular exhibition a few years ago that featured 20th century California scene painters of all stripes. There were California cubists, surrealists, pointillists and impressionists. It was as if Cezanne, Pizzaro, Dali and Monet had all decamped to the west coast for a summer of sketching and painting.
And speaking of surrealism, what sense was there to your comment about “the Hilbert being a place that pretends surrealism never happened”? So what if Mark Hilbert is not interested in collecting west coast surrealism. Would you criticize California’s Bigfoot Discovery Museum because it was lacking in Jackalopes? The same goes for your mention of the lack of low brow art in the collection. What you failed to comment on, in relation to low brow, is that the work of Chuck Jones and the Disney artists in the Hilbert collection has been an important source of inspiration for contemporary low brow artists.
Lastly, I must take issue with your conflating Orange County’s conservative politics with its art scene. If I were to review an exhibition at the Getty or the Hammer, I would not consider mentioning LA’s Rolex-wearing citizens flaunting their wealth or the discriminatory behavior of the LAPD in my evaluation of the artwork, unless, of course, class, race and economic inequity were themes addressed in the exhibitions.
Most Orange County museums, including Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery which I directed for forty years, have, at the very least, ignored the county’s conservative politics and at best worked to subvert that conservative mindset. Dan Cameron’s Pacific Rim Triennale at OCMA realigned California art with Asia while Pacific Standard Time was still looking back towards Europe. The Laguna Museum’s Art and Nature series has offered a consistent focus on our relationship to our planet. You’re well aware of the history of challenging exhibitions that Grand Central Art Center has staged over the years. Exhibitions at the Guggenheim Gallery curated around topics such as the legacy of the Vietnam war, clowns and caricature, gardens and landscape, outsider art, post-colonialism, etc. regularly questioned the local status quo. Chapman’s burgeoning Escalette Collection has works by a range of diverse artists on public display throughout the university grounds and buildings.
I sincerely appreciate your making the drive down to Orange to review the exhibition at the Hilbert for Coagula. Since the demise of the OC Register and the consolidation of the LA Times, there has been precious little written about the arts in Orange County. But we deserve better than the flippant hatchet job that you delivered.
Best,
Richard Turner