Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The weather forecast forced us to cancel a hike, so GH and I went round the Chelsea galleries instead yesterday. We both loved Erin Shirreff's show of  Arm's Length at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.. Relief  consisted of photographs of "handmade sculptural maquettes and assembled composite images." I loved  Drop (no. 12) and Drop (no. 13), "hand-cut paper scraps [that] are translated into large sheets of hot-rolled, cold-rolled or Cor-ten steel, and hang in simple layered arrangements on steel rods. Also absorbing were the four new sculptures titled Catalogue (Object Lesson) . They are composed of "shaped blocks of graphite-pigmented plaster balanced atop one another and along and underneath flat plants." The large-scale cyanotype photograms showed geometric forms and arrangements that echoed other works in the show. Born in BC, Canada, Shirreff now lives and works in NYC. We also liked British painter Chantal Joffe's Night Self-Portraits at Cheim ...

"Hudson River Day Line," Joan Mitchell An informative biography, full of details about Mitchell's family background (Chicago steel heiress), love affairs and artistic struggles. Her competitive desire to be "one of the boys" of the New York School. Her fear of abandonment and death. Her steadfast love of van Gogh. She painted from the memory of a landscape, until she abstracted it in the idiom of Abstract Expressionism. The writing of the biography is in places too breezy and purple for my taste. The biographer clearly admires her subject, but does not hide her flaws.

Discovered Joan Mitchell's art in the Feb issue of Poetry . She was the leading painter of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. Poetry has a bunch of people write about her work and person. The most interesting is the piece by Marjorie Perloff, who saw the figuration in the abstract-looking work Meditations in an Emergency ca. 1967. Les Bluets 1973, in Center Pompidou, is utterly gorgeous.