18 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
Celmins explores recurrent motifs patiently and obsessively, testing the margins between art and reality.
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THEA RTS
SURFACE MATTERS
The timeless work of Vija Celmins.BY CALVIN TOMKINS
MAGNUM
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEC SOTH
A
few days before the opening of Vija
Celmins’s retrospective at the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, last
December, the artist, an auburn-haired
woman in dark slacks and a slate-blue
overshirt, stood in the first gallery and
said, to nobody in particular, “This show
is too large.” Curators are used to com-
ments like this from Celmins, who is
prone to self-deprecation. She once told
a collector that the painting of hers he
had recently bought was “the worst thing
I’ve ever done.” The current exhibition,her largest to date, was scheduled to
move on, after San Francisco, to the Art
Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, and on
September 24th it will open at the Met
Breuer, in New York, where Celmins has
lived since the early nineteen-eighties.
Gary Garrels, SFMoMA’s senior curator
of painting and sculpture, needed about
ten years to put it together, in part be-
cause Celmins, who turns eighty-one
in October, is so quixotic about how,
and when, her work is seen. Both Garrels
and his co-curator, the MetropolitanMuseum’s Ian Alteveer, believe that the
effort was long overdue. “Vija is trea-
sured and admired by other artists, and
by curators, scholars, and art historians,”
Garrels told me, “but beyond the art
world she is almost unknown.”
This has never been a problem for
Celmins. Her art has awed critics and
found buyers since she began showing
it, in the early nineteen-sixties, and her
paintings now bring between three and
five million on the primary market. Still,
she produces relatively little work and
vigorously resists all forms of self-pro-
motion. From the late sixties until quite
recently, her subject matter has been
limited to a few recurrent motifs—
oceans, deserts, night skies, spiderwebs,
antique writing slates—which she ex-
plores, patiently and obsessively, in draw-
ings, oil paintings, prints, and sculptural
objects that are unlike those of any other
artist. She has erased the line between