Volume 46, Number 20 · December 16, 1999
Giving Offense
By James Fenton
Clemente 1999-January 9, 2000.
an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 8,, Catalog of the exhibition by Lisa Dennison
Guggenheim/Abrams, 502 pp., $45.00 (paper)
Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection 9, 2000.
an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, October 2, 1999-January, Catalog of the exhibition by Norman Rosenthal, by Richard Shone, by Martin Maloney, by Brooks Adams, by Lisa Jardine
Thames and Hudson, 222 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Saul Steinberg: Drawing into Being 1-October 30, 1999.
an exhibition at the PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, October, Catalog of the exhibition by Bernice Rose, by Arne Glimcher
PaceWildenstein, 79 pp., $25.00 (paper)
Shown on the spiral ramp of the New York Guggenheim, the paintings of Francesco Clemente come across as the work of a prolific artist with a fruitfully unstable temperament. Surprisingly Austrian, for a Neapolitan, he seems to alternate between his Klimt days and his Schiele days. On his Klimt days, an erotic obsession is channeled into the production of gorgeous effects with attractive materials: a double panel executed in gold leaf and oil on linen and called in the catalog Usary [presumably Usury] of Love (cat. no. 43) has a shower of coins falling on the prostrate lovers, or falling past them perhaps, if the lovers are conceived as floating in space. This is pure Vienna Secession.
Review, 3706 words
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