Art Review

A Painter’s Cut-and-Paste Prequel

‘Robert Motherwell: Early Collages,’ at the Guggenheim

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

‘Robert Motherwell: Early Collages’: A look at the new show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

By HOLLAND COTTER

Abstract Expressionism is overrated. And it wasn’t initially a movement or style at all. It was a bunch of unalike artists, some great, some not, who shared a city, a war, some ideas and a bar, circa 1940. Pretty much everything else, including a fecund two-decade fad for soulful painting that grew from that moment, was largely a product of marketing and myth spinning.

That, at least, is the way future historians may well see AbEx’s “heroic” origins. And they’ll see that Robert Motherwell (1915-91) — a born explainer, neatener and networker — had a ground-level role in creating the brand, narrowing it to a specific kind of art that purportedly channeled emotion through gesture. But Motherwell also coined a more realistically neutral and accommodating label for the vanguard art of the time: the New York School. That name covered a lot of stylistic ground.

So did he when he began his career. We see him hard at work at it in “Robert Motherwell: Early Collages” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. And it’s a bracing, mettlesome, variegated sight, surprisingly so, given this artist’s reputation for formulaic elegance and AbEx orthodoxy.

In reality, Motherwell always stood slightly apart from other characters, even in standard tellings of the New York School tale. To Pollock’s loutish cowboy and de Kooning’s Olympian swashbuckler, he plays the genteel, brainy West Coast kid, a want-to-be painter, writer and philosophy scholar who arrived in Manhattan in 1940 to study art history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia.

Cultural traffic was heavy in the city just then, as émigré artists, fleeing the war in Europe, poured in, among them Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, and a raft of Parisian Surrealists. Because Motherwell spoke fluent French — he had spent time in Paris — and was literary minded, Schapiro enlisted him to meet and greet the refugees, making him one of the few people in the New York art world with ready and continuing access to them.

Within the Surrealist circle, he encountered the young Chilean-born painter Roberto Matta, and they became, for a while, fast friends. It was through Matta that he met a crucial mentor, the collector and impresaria Peggy Guggenheim, who was about to open a gallery-museum-salon called the Art of This Century. And it was Matta who, on a joint trip to Mexico in 1941, fully initiated Motherwell into Surrealist automatism, an improvisatory technique that radically loosened up his idea of what art could be and how he could make it.

By 1943, he loosened up enough to take a stab at collage making, and Guggenheim provided the occasion. She was planning a big collage survey that would bring together European past masters of the form like Arp, Braque and Picasso with American newcomers. She wanted Motherwell in the mix. She gave him a deadline and said: Get to work. He did. One of the collages that resulted is in the present show.

It’s titled “Joy of Living,” though there isn’t much joy evident in this moody, unkempt concoction of smudged ink, nervy doodles and perspectival geometry, punctuated by a scrap cut from a military map and a sprinkling of curious red stains on a patch of white paper, like blood seeping through a bandage.

The piece was a hit. It attracted critical notice and even found a buyer, not bad for a first time out. And this public success set the seal on Motherwell’s newfound infatuation with what would become his primary medium over the next several years and the locus of some of the most interesting work he would ever do.

His paintings and drawings over a long career ahead would often be repetitive and predictable. Not these early pieces, though. A few settle for easy Gallic élan, and, Lord knows, there are Picassoisms flitting everywhere here. But other collages look bulky and dark, even slightly monstrous. They’re heavily labored but raw, as if he’d slaved over them until he just couldn’t bear to another minute and stopped. This impression of effort is probably partly a result of wrestling with formal demands that were new to him, involving the gestureless, surprisingly complicated physics of cutting, tearing, layering and gluing. Plus he was dealing with unfamiliar materials, most of them ready-made and therefore potentially intractable: papers of different weight, patterned and not; high- and low-grade inks, kindergarten gouaches, adhesives that discolored or bled.

The tone of much of this early work though, alternately brooding and volatile, comes from its expressive content. Motherwell once said that he had been obsessed with the idea of death since he was a child. And that obsession is there in his art from the start.

The much-exhibited 1943 collage-painting “Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive” is based on a very specific image of death, a 1923 photograph of the corpse of Villa, the assassinated Mexican revolutionary. Motherwell shows the body, rendered all but abstract, twice, once daubed with blood-colored paint, and again set against a sheet of busily patterned wrapping paper that here suggests a bullet-strafed wall.

Motherwell’s single best-known work, the huge series of more than 100 paintings titled “Elegy to the Spanish Republic,” is a memorial to an extended episode of modern political violence, the brutal suppression of Loyalists in the 1930s in the Spanish Civil War. Stretched over Motherwell’s entire career, the series began in 1948, and a collage from that year, simply titled “Elegy,“ encapsulates its essential resurrectional components: two testicular ovals and a phallic upright.

Many more pieces, however, are clear responses to an even more immediate and colossal crisis, World War II. A section of the military training map seen in “Joy of Living” turns in up a latter collage, “View from A High Tower,” dated 1944-45. Here, the map sits like a targeted patch of green in a convulsed landscape of folded, wrinkled and ripped paper. Just off the picture’s center floats a form that is hard to interpret. It could be a dead body, headless and shrouded, but the letters inscribed on it, “VIV” and “LA,” read like a broken cry to life, a resistance anthem: Vive la France.

By this point, Motherwell had more than just mastered color. He had made it a central element in his collage work, and he would never use it again or anywhere else with such experimental boldness. It’s what turns the 1946 “Blue With China Ink (Homage to John Cage)” into an infinity of kite-filled sky, and, a year later, makes “The Poet,” painted ember orange, a little furnace radiating heat. Color is also part of what makes the 1949 “Collage in Yellow and White, With Torn Elements” autumnal in every sense, with its goldenrod yellow and wild-aster blues, and paper scraps clinging loose to its surface like golden leaves to an October tree.

In some ways, this is the most radical piece in an extraordinary show, organized by Susan Davidson, a senior curator at the Guggenheim. It comes out of both Surrealism and Expressionism but leaves both behind, and maybe abstraction, too: What , after all, could be more concrete, more illusion free than the visibly fragile material this picture is composed of?

And in this work, more obviously than any other, Motherwell relinquished his role as sole creator, which is Abstract Expressionism’s defining feature. Gravity, chemistry and light deserve equal billing as collaborators in a piece of art that has almost certainly changed color, texture and form since it was new.

Motherwell, the memorialist, surely understood this. Maybe that’s why he did his best — his freest, most vital, least doctrinaire — work in collage, a medium that in the end belongs to one all-encompassing movement, time.

“Robert Motherwell: Early Collages“ runs through Jan. 5 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street; (212) 423-3618; guggenheim.org.

Robert Motherwell exhibit at the Guggenheim: Motherwell and Frank O’Hara

Robert Motherwell, “View from a High Tower” (1944-45)

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM OF ART

September 27, 2013–January 5, 2014

Devoted exclusively to papier collés and related works on paper from the 1940s and early 1950s by Robert Motherwell, this exhibition features nearly sixty artworks and examines the American artist’s origins and his engagement with collage. The exhibition also honors Peggy Guggenheim’s early patronage of the artist. At her urging, and under the tutelage of émigré Surrealist artist Matta, Motherwell first experimented with the papier collé technique. He recalled years later: “I might never have done it otherwise, and it was here that I found . . . my ‘identity.’” By cutting, tearing, and layering pasted papers, Motherwell reflected the tumult and violence of the modern world, establishing him as an essential and original voice in postwar American art. Motherwell initially produced both figural and abstract collages, but by the early 1950s Surrealist influences prevalent in these first works had given way to his distinctive mature style, which was firmly rooted in Abstract Expressionism. Robert Motherwell: Early Collages will be presented at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, May 26–September 8, 2013, before traveling to its second and final venue, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, September 27, 2013–January 5, 2014. This exhibition is organized by Susan Davidson, Senior Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

KANDINSKY AT NEUE GALERIE

 

Art Review

Back in the Blue Saddle, for a Gallop to Abstraction

Neue Galerie Examines 15 Years of Kandinsky

Musée National d'Art Moderne. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

Kandinsky’s sketch of a panel for a 1922 art show in Berlin. The mural has been recreated for the exhibition at the Neue Galerie.

By KAREN ROSENBERG

New Yorkers might be forgiven for greeting “Vasily Kandinsky: From Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus, 1910-1925,” at the Neue Galerie, with a shrug and a distinct feeling of déjà vu. Wasn’t it just three years ago now that the Guggenheim mounted a full retrospective, a delirium-inducing helix of Kandinskys?

This, however, is a different kind of show: a boutique Kandinsky exhibition at a boutique museum. (Surprisingly, it’s the first all-Kandinsky affair in the Neue’s 12-year history). And it centers on a rich period — also the purview of the Museum of Modern Art’s recent “Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925” — that saw Kandinsky moving from the prismatic Expressionism of Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich-based artist group named for the motif of a blue horse and rider, into pure abstraction and from easel paintings into set designs and decorative murals.

The exhibition is further distinguished by a reconstruction of one of those mural projects, first made for the 1922 Juryfreie Kunstschau (Jury-Free Art Show) in Berlin: a total Kandinsky immersion, with brightly colored lines and circles and wobbly little forms glowing against black and dark-brown walls.

Elsewhere the installation is choppy, as is often the case in these galleries. Walls have been color-blocked in shades of lavender, ivory and plum, as if viewers could not be trusted to distinguish between, say, Kandinsky’s woozy Blaue Reiter paintings and the clean-edged geometry of his Bauhaus phase. The inescapable soundtrack of Mussorgsky and Schoenberg does not help to smooth things over.

But over all, the show’s fits and starts feel true to Kandinsky’s growing pains during these formative years for abstract art. They also make clear that his philosophies, codified in his famous book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” did not always mesh with the more pragmatic approaches of his colleagues and collectors.

As an instructor at the Bauhaus, for instance, where he taught from 1922 until it was shuttered by the Nazis in 1933, he chafed at the school’s idea of painting as an applied art. “Many demand that we should serve industry, that we should supply patterns for materials, ties, socks, crockery, parasols, ashtrays, carpets,” he wrote. “Or that we should leave off painting pictures once and for all.”

Organized by the art historian Jill Lloyd, the show stresses networks and associations over chronology. It moves from the Blaue Reiter years of 1911-14 to the Bauhaus, but then backtracks to a gallery of larger paintings made for American collectors around the time of the 1913 Armory Show. From there it skips to the experimental theater and mural work, concluding with the Jury-Free project of 1922.

All of this back-and-forth can make the show feel a bit unmoored. Fortunately, it’s stabilized by some judicious loans, among them Franz Marc’s mystically intense painting “The Large Blue Horses” from the Walker Art Center and such Kandinsky works as “Fugue” from the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Guggenheim’s “Painting with White Border,” and several abstractions from the Yale University Art Gallery’s important “Société Anonyme” collection.

Yale’s “Improvisation 7 (Storm),” from 1910, for instance, hangs next to two early Kandinsky streetscapes (1908 and 1909) from the Neue’s collection; together, these works show him making a transition out of Post-Impressionism, melting down its forms without changing the acidity of the palette.

And in the next gallery, four works from MoMA reveal Kandinsky’s deep ambivalence about the decorative possibilities of abstract painting. Titled “The Seasons,” these brushy, densely patterned panels were painted in 1914 for the foyer of the auto magnate Edwin R. Campbell’s Park Avenue apartment.

The collector Arthur Jerome Eddy, who knew Campbell and helped Kandinsky secure the commission, had suggested that the panels be modeled on an earlier painting in his own collection, one “so brilliant in color that it makes a beautiful wall decoration.” In three of the Campbell panels, Kandinsky complied, but the remaining one is noticeably darker and muddier — signaling, perhaps, a level of discomfort with the appreciation of his paintings as a kind of benign wallpaper.

For him, expanding painting from easels to walls was part of a larger mission to bring the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork, into the 20th century. As the catalog essayist Rose-Carol Washton Long points out, that mission was as political as it was aesthetic; Kandinsky advocated clashes of sound and color, “multiple dissonant stimuli,” the better to disrupt complacency.

With the murals for the Jury-Free show, he had a chance to practice environmental painting on his own terms. The setting, an octagonal entrance hall for a modern art museum, was ideal for a wraparound artwork. Directing a team of students from the Bauhaus mural workshop, Kandinsky had them paint a scattering of geometric and biomorphic shapes on large canvas-covered wood panels. The originals were dismantled at the close of the 1922 Show and subsequently lost, but process photographs and a complete set of sketches survive.

One peculiar problem plagues the Neue’s re-creation, which has been executed by Daedalus Design and Production and is accompanied by recordings of atonal piano pieces by Schoenberg: the paintings have been reproduced exactingly from Kandinsky’s sketches, as if they had been enlarged, so that each wobble of the brush or hastily filled-in area is magnified. Ms. Lloyd said she was trying to distinguish this reconstruction from a tidier, more interpretive one presented at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1976, but it’s nonetheless a distracting curatorial choice.

If you are able to look past it, however, you’ll be rewarded with the rare sensation of floating around inside a Kandinsky — one that merges the rigid geometry of his Bauhaus period with the wavy lines and kaleidoscopic clusters of his earlier abstract canvases. It connects the Gesamtkunstwerk to more contemporary multisensory installation art, and is as good an excuse as any for yet another Kandinsky show.

“Vasily Kandinsky: From Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus, 1910-1925” runs through Feb. 10 at the Neue Galerie New York, 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street; (212)628-6200, neuegalerie.org.

EXQUISITE CORPSE

The Exquisite Corpse

"Exquisite Corpse: Game of folded paper played by several people, who compose a sentence or drawing without anyone seeing the preceding collaboration or collaborations. The now classic example, which gave the game its name, was drawn from the first sentence obtained this way: The-exquisite-corpse-will-drink-new-wine."

--André Breton (Waldberg, 93-94)

Drawing by Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Max Morise, Joan
 Miró, c. 1926.More exquisite corpses. Drawings by Victor Brauner, André Breton, Jacques Hérold and Yves Tanguy, 1935.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dada Manifesto (1918):

The signatories of this manifesto have, under the battle cry

D A D A ! ! !

gathered together to put forward a new art. What, then, is Dadaism? The word "Dada" signifies the most primitive relation to the reality of the environment. . . . Life appears as a simultaneous muddle of noises, colours and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified, with all the sensational screams and fevers of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality. . . . Dada is the international expression of our times, the great rebellion of artistic movements, the artistic reflex of all these offensives, peace congresses, riots in the vegetable market. . . . (Hughes, 71)

 

First Surrealist Manifesto (1924)

By André Breton. (Breton photograph by Man Ray [1938],

SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life.

CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES:

DVC Students from Art 105: 2D Design &  Color

 

Night Cafe

Milton Avery

Claude Monet

George Seurat

COLOR ME BLUE by Delia Ephron

 

By DELIA EPHRON

Published: October 19, 2013

“BLOOMBERG, love him or hate him?” a friend asked.

“Hate,” I said.

Hate is a strong word, and please don’t get sidetracked by it. New York’s a passionate place, I’m passionate about the place, and that’s how the question was posed. I had to pick one. No way was I picking “love.”

It’s this bike program. The other day I stepped off a curb and a bike coming the wrong way down a one-way street passed so close I could feel its breeze on my back. It seems as though, every day, I’m almost hit by a bike. That’s a problem, but it’s not the problem.

As it happens, the bike was going the wrong way and I was crossing against the light.

That’s what New Yorkers do. When we walk, we don’t pay attention to lights. That is practically the definition of a New Yorker: when walking, ignores lights. These bicycles have made walking around the city much scarier. Helmets are recommended gear for bikers. These days pedestrians should be wearing helmets.

What Mr. Bloomberg has created is not necessarily a more livable city, a city with a better-exercised citizenry, but a perfect storm.

That should be the reason I picked hate, but it isn’t.

He’s turned our city blue.

For $41 million — what Citibank paid to sponsor the program for five years — our city bikes became Citi Bikes. To make certain you don’t forget this fact, a Citi Bike sign hangs in front of the handlebars, Citi Bike is printed twice on the frame, and a Citi Bike billboard drapes the rear wheel on both sides. The font is the familiar Citibank font and the Citibank signature decoration floats over the “t.” There is no way to see a Citi Bike without thinking Citibank. The 6,000 bikes so far rolled out, of a possible 10,000, and their signs are a Day-Glo cobalt blue that you see on banks. Nobody wears this color. Nobody paints his or her apartment this color. This blue is bank blue.

Odds are, in your favorite romantic Manhattan movie, you’ll see barely any blue.

Almost all directors and cinematographers know that, in a movie, the color blue pulls focus. If you place a love scene in front of, say, a blue bench, the audience will look at the bench and not the actors. Our city, if you look around, isn’t a blue city, or wasn’t until the bikes arrived. With the exception of Times Square, where loud clashing colors are the point, our city is browns, grays, greens and brick red.

We’re told that this bike program is modeled after the one in Paris. But in Paris, the bikes are a silvery gray and the sponsors have discreet small tattoos on the bike frame. Paris bikes blend. They respect the romance that is Paris.

And what a bargain Citibank got. To put that $41 million in perspective, a co-op at 640 Park Avenue recently sold for $23 million, and Calvin Klein’s Hamptons house reportedly cost around $75 million.

In other words, for chump change to a billionaire, Mr. Bloomberg let Citibank alter the color palette of Manhattan. It has distorted every view.

Speaking of which, it is impossible to discuss this blight on our cityscape without a shout-out to an intersection at Ninth Avenue and 18th Street that I think of as Bloomberg corner.

Where there used to be four lanes for cars traveling down Ninth, there are now two. A long triangular concrete island has been installed to guide drivers making left turns even though drivers have been making left turns since they got licenses.

On the concrete island are 15 filthy distracting newspaper dispensers in red, blue, white and orange. To the left of the left turn lane is the bicycle lane. I hope you can visualize this because it’s nuts. The cars are making left turns into the bicycles.

There are many new signs and lights for cars, bike riders and pedestrians to make sure everyone does the safe thing. Good luck with that. The eye is flying around having no idea where to land. Really, standing at that intersection is a surreal experience. It’s as if one has entered the world of a manic martinet.

It’s fall now. As you stroll in the crisp air through Central Park or down a lovely tree-lined block enchanted by the coppery yellow, burnt orange and flame red of autumn leaves, a bank-blue bike is going to whip by, possibly knocking you down, definitely pulling your focus.

Then it will be winter and we’ll have one of those blizzards that turns the city entirely white and nearly silent. You will leave your apartment to take in this miracle, trekking down your street, making the first boot marks in virgin snow, and as you turn a corner, your head will suddenly spin toward a gigantic inkblot on the landscape: a stand of 27 bank-blue bikes. A total of 135 Citi Bike signs. You will forget the awesomeness of nature.

INSTEAD you will start thinking about your bank — how it is paying you barely any interest. And what an outrageous fee it charges monthly for service. Yes, your whole mood might change. You might get angry. You might even start cursing about how, under Mayor Bloomberg, everything was for sale, even the views.

Then the snow will melt and freeze, and someone on a blue bike will skid right into you. Finally spring. Your broken leg is almost healed. The surgery to insert pins went well. You have completed four weeks of physical therapy, and at last can limp around outside without crutches. As you spy a cherry tree lush with blossoms, a you-know-what will zip by. Suddenly that beautiful day will get so much uglier.

That’s our future. And that makes me blue.

Delia Ephron is the author, most recently, of “Sister Mother Husband Dog (etc.),” a memoir.

A COUPLE INTERESTING LINKS

This interactive exercise allows users to test the way they see different color hues by matching color swatches in various hues of the color spectrum.  http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/how-well-do-you-see-color-173018

Take a listen to Radio Lab to hear more about Newton.

AND, one more:
http://www.poynter.org/uncategorized/224413/why-rainbow-colors-arent-always-the-best-options-for-data-visualizations/

Mantis Shrimp

AMY SILLMAN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

September 26, 2013

 

Blobs and Slashes, Interrupted by Forms

By TED LOOS

Some painters are on a quest for truth and beauty. But not Amy Sillman.

In a conversation in her paint-splattered studio in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn on a scorching summer day, Ms. Sillman used unusual terms of affection in talking about artworks, both her own and by other hands: “dirty,” “backward” “not pleasant” and “amateurish.”

“I don’t care about beauty at all,” said Ms. Sillman, who is forthright and friendly, offering some cool watermelon chunks to a visitor. “Not one tiny bit. In fact, I don’t like it. I’m interested more in ugliness.”

Her goal is not to shock the viewer, in the way of some contemporary art provocateurs. Ms. Sillman’s medium could be said to be comic awkwardness as much as it is oil or ink. “I’ve always been interested in jokes and humor,” she said.

The title of her first big museum retrospective, which opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston on Thursday, is a typically wry one for Ms. Sillman: “Amy Sillman: one lump or two.” It’s possibly a sly reference to the play between figuration and abstraction in her work.

“It’s a nice edge,” the show’s curator, Helen Molesworth, said. “People realize they don’t have to choose.”

In a typical Sillman painting, blobs and slashes of paint are interrupted by a form that could be a hand or a foot, which then beats a hasty retreat back into abstraction. The colors she chooses are formerly pretty hues that have somehow fallen on hard times. The resulting tension in her works has led some critics to credit Ms. Sillman, 57, for giving a boost to the medium of painting, which has often been the subject of premature obituaries in recent years.

“There’s often something off balance about the paintings,” said her friend David Joselit, a Yale professor of modern art and a critic, “It goes back to physical comedy. It’s a sight gag.”

Ms. Sillman said that she thrives on doubt about the whole tradition of painting. “There’s a skepticism embedded in all my work,” she said — and that includes a healthy skepticism about her own ability to contribute something.

“You have to have a doubt sandwich,” she said of her process. “If you have the doubt at the front, you won’t do it, and if you have doubt at the end you’re probably going to kill yourself.”

The Boston show is a prime example of an artist getting her due after being an insider, art world favorite for years, but the variety of styles on display in “one lump or two” don’t necessarily make it easy for newcomers to get a handle on her work.

Alongside more abstract pieces like “S” (2007), with its broad neon strokes, there are several ink and gouache drawings in which Ms. Sillman takes a loosely drawn, cartoonlike approach to figures, including captions and even quote bubbles.

She has lately been experimenting with producing a zine, examples of which are in the exhibition, and her work can often take on what she called a “funky” style.

Asked whether she was a figurative or abstract painter, Ms. Sillman said, “I think of myself as liking two things that are friends and antagonists.”

Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, said Ms. Sillman was “a visible example of someone who’s championed the relevance of painting, as opposed to its being some kind of nostalgic enterprise.”

Ms. Temkin added: “She’s a connector between previous generations and artists who are younger. She has led by example, saying, ‘I can make my own rules.’ ”

Ms. Sillman chooses her own job description carefully.

“I think the core of my practice is completely drawing — I don’t even think I am a painter,” she said. “I’m just pulling one over on everyone, because they’re big and they have color.”

She conceded, “They have one thing that’s like true painting, which is that they’re made in a lot of layers, an extremely slow way of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing a space.”

Ms. Sillman, who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with her dog, Omar, said that she would spend between two days and a year on a work — “and often more toward the year.” But for her, the drawn-out process is not exactly about perfecting a piece in the traditional way.

“I’ll go over something that looks perfectly good — it looks beautiful, there’s nothing wrong with it, and I completely wreck it,” she said, adding that Ms. Molesworth has nicknamed her the Wrecking Ball. “People who have seen the work always say, ‘Why didn’t you stop there?’ ”

“I never think I’m done,” she added. “That’s the huge problem with an abstract painting. When are you done? You’re done when you don’t want to do it anymore.”

Despite a professed lack of techno-savvy, Ms. Sillman recently stumbled on a relatively new method for exploring her interest in avoiding endings.

For this spring’s “Blues for Smoke” show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she created an animated work on an iPhone to pair with her painting “Duel.”

“There’s this big serious painting, and then you see on the iPhone 13 possible futures for it,” she said of “Cartoon for a Painting.” “The work is allowed to go off and do something else. And it does sound a kind of comic register. I wanted these things going haywire.”

The Boston show includes a similar iPad piece called “P.S.” (2013). The roughly animated piece is the electronic equivalent of an old-fashioned flip book, and it is paired with her painting “Shade” (1997-98). “It’s made as a postscript for something done years ago,” Ms. Sillman said. “I’ve done a lot of collaborating in my career, but here I’m sort of collaborating with myself.”

Her friend Mr. Joselit called the approach “the painting of duration,” adding, “It’s almost a new medium. There’s a perpetual revision going on, and the work continues to morph.”

Electronic forays aside, Ms. Sillman’s career has had an old-school arc. Raised in Chicago, she moved to New York in 1975 to study Japanese, and ended up attending the School for Visual Arts. After graduating, she worked for more than a decade without showing her work.

“It’s the older model,” Ms. Molesworth said. “You went to school and then you worked alone, hard, until you got good.”

During the 1980s, Ms. Sillman said, “I had no strategy in a strategic decade,” adding that her work did not fit the dominant artistic modes of the day. “It led to some sort of wisdom of the outlier.” In the 1990s, things picked up after Ms. Sillman got an M.F.A. from Bard College, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001.

Ms. Sillman said that, apart from a recent pang of envy when she encountered some much larger and more deluxe artist studios, she felt like she was in a good work groove in Bushwick.

“I can do stuff here,” she said, gesturing to some paintings in progress. “I’m happy here.”