24 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
or important collectors. McKee had
raised her prices, against strenuous ob-
jections from Celmins. “Every time I’d
suggest a price, Vija would say, ‘Too
much!’” he recalled. “But the reviews
were good, and she had been embraced
by the New York art world.”
“
B
arrier,” dated 1985-86, is the first
major oil painting by Celmins
since 1968—the first one she kept, at any
rate. It’s large by her standards, six feet
wide and just under six feet high, and it
ushered in a long and magisterial series
of night-sky paintings. Like her oceans,
the night skies are without centers or
boundaries, each one an unbroken field
of white dots of various sizes, against a
black background. Celmins is rarely
satisfied with her work—a 2006 note in
her diary reads “I have not yet made
something that TOTALLY pleases me”—
and she wasn’t sure that she wanted “Bar-
rier” in the San Francisco retrospective.
“She felt it was too large and too square,”
according to Ian Alteveer, the co-cura-
tor. “Barrier” made the cut in San Fran-
cisco, but it will not be included when
the show comes to New York. It lacks
the complexity and the ravishing beauty
of the night-sky paintings that Celmins
did later. When I told her that some of
these give me a feeling of deep, infinite
space, she said, rather kindly, “I think
the reality of the paintings does not em-
phasize that. I like big spaces, and I wres-
tle them into a small area and say, ‘Lie
down and stay there, like a good dog.’”
But Celmins has also said that her early
work projects out toward the viewer,
and the night skies draw you in, so what
does she know?
Celmins also made paintings of her
earlier subjects—the oceans, deserts, and
galaxies that she had done in graphite—
but from the early nineties until quite
recently night skies have been her main
focus. Her layered painting process has
become increasingly complex. After
getting the initial image on canvas, she
covers each star with a tiny drop of liq-
uid cement, and when that hardens she
paints the image again. She may repeat
this process twenty times or more, sand-
ing the entire surface, before she lays
down the next layer of ivory black mixed
with burnt umber, ultramarine blue, and
sometimes a touch of white. When she
decides that the background is sufficiently
developed, she scrapes out the cement
and, using the smallest sable brush, fills
the little holes with white paint mixed
with cerulean blue, or sometimes raw
umber or yellow ochre. “I ruined a lot
of paintings by sanding,” she told me.
“It scared me. But it’s like building a re-
lationship. You do it again and again,
and you sense that the thing is begin-
ning to have a form that looks strong.
And all the time you’re thinking, and
making decisions. The making, the de-
votion to making, is what gives it an
emotional quality.”
Since 1996, a number of museum
shows in Europe have made Celmins’s
work better known there, perhaps, than
it is in this country. Although her exhi-
bitions have always been well received—
when I asked if she had ever had a neg-
ative review, she thought for a bit, but
couldn’t come up with one—the work
may be too reticent to attract a wide pub-
lic. One show that pleased her a great
deal was a 2014 retrospective at the Lat-
vian National Museum of Art, in Riga.
She had been back to Latvia before, with
her sister, Inta, but this was a gala home-
coming, attended by dozens of proud
relatives she had never met. Several of
her Latvian cousins travelled to San Fran-
cisco last December for her opening there.
“I feel closer to them now,” she said. “I
write to them and send pictures.”
L
ast fall, Celmins told me that she
was “getting sick of black paintings
that you can’t get into, and have that
closed-off look.” She added, “I’m trying
to switch to something lighter.” What
that might be is not clear. She has done
reverse night skies—dark stars on off-
white backgrounds—and she has made
paintings of the covers of two old books,
the sixth edition of Charles Darwin’s
“On the Origin of Species” and a much
older Japanese volume that she bought
on her only trip to Japan, in 2003. For
the past eleven years, starting in 2007,
she has also been working on a series
of three-dimensional slate writing tab-
lets. She found the first one, a nine-
teenth-century schoolchild’s slate with
a wooden frame, in a secondhand store
in Sag Harbor. Since then, she has
tracked down several others, or received
them as gifts from friends, and her dear
friend Edward Finnegan, a sculptor,
who died while she was installing the
San Francisco show, made a number of
replicas for her, some of them quite large.
“I think I remember having a tablet as
a child,” she said. “I had to redo the first
one, because I fucked up the surface,
but I thought, Gosh, this is such a hand-
some, complicated, beautiful thing.”
As Celmins enters her eighties, she
feels that her attitudes may be chang-
ing. “I’ve been opening up a little, let-
ting my hand show more,” she told me.
“My hand isn’t quite as steady, my mind
is not as steady, my eyes are not as steady.
I’m allowing things to happen, hope-
fully.” A few years ago, she bought a
house in Mérida, Yucatán, thinking that
she “could sort of be Gauguin and go
there in the winter.” She hasn’t spent
much time in the house, but Mérida is
a popular haven for Mexican artists, and
she talks about selling the house and
buying a smaller one that’s closer to
friends. Celmins, like many artists, cov-
ets real estate. She still owns some land
in New Mexico, near Taos, which she
bought in 1977 but never built on.
David and Renee McKee retired and
closed their gallery in 2015. Celmins is
now represented by the Matthew Marks
Gallery, whose roster includes Jasper
Johns, Robert Gober, and Charles Ray.
Her first show there was in 2017, and, as
usual, everything was sold. “Painting in
Six Parts,” six images of the same stretch
of ocean, the first one done in 1986 and
the five others between 2012 and 2016,
went to the Glenstone Museum, in Mary-
land, whose founders, Mitchell and Emily
Rales, also bought several other works
in the show. “I had a lot of trouble paint-
ing oceans, and I thought I could never
do it again, because they were so tedious,”
Celmins told me. “Then I thought, Can
I do it again? And I went on a roll. It
was sort of like living your life over.”
Her work is still priced well below
that of Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter,
and other market superstars, but she
has more money than she needs. Celmins
is looking into buying a new car, maybe
an electric Toyota or a Tesla, because
it’s supposed to be less harmful to the
environment. I like to think of her and
Raymond on the Long Island Express-
way, sparring over behavioral issues
while the Tesla drives itself. “I’m lucky
to be alive, and to still make work,” she
said to me the other day. “And I have
a lot of energy.”
