The True Colors of David Salle

An artist who starts at the top usually doesn’t stay there. Not David Salle. His grip on the art world has had little slippage since the early 1980s, when his cacophonic, multipaneled paintings caused quite a bit of rubbernecking in the galleries of Mary Boone and Leo Castelli. At the time, they were, respectively, the hottest art dealer in SoHo and the most influential in the world. Museums and private collectors came calling. Magazines profiled him. Every exhibition sold out.

Salle (pronounced Sally) did not buy into the pyrotechnics of fame, nor did he rest on his laurels. Indeed, if his creative output explains anything, Salle doesn’t rest at all. When he does take a break from making art, it’s mainly to write about art. In 2016, he anthologized his conversational exhibition reviews for Town & Country, The New York Review of Books, and other publications in the book How To See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art. People who do all of those things sang its praises.

In every way Salle is a thinking person’s artist, and a restless one at that. He has been prolific, at times adding to his portfolio by designing sets and costumes for the choreographer Karole Armitage and her company Armitage Gone! Dance. He has made films. He also has taken the role of a curator, most recently for the Hill Art Foundation.

At this point, his exhilarating, sometimes troubling, paintings are so widely exhibited and collected that the 71-year-old New Yorker can have his pick of galleries. Yet, for his upcoming show, his first in Palm Beach since 1994, he chose a 300-square-foot start-up on the second floor of a nondescript commercial building, the sort where one might expect to find a dentist. Not world-class art.

“You’d have to know it exists,” agrees Bonnie Clearwater, the director and chief curator of the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale. She describes the gallery as less a commercial enterprise than a salon, and a tiny one at that. “If 20 people were in there,” she notes, “it would be a mob scene.” Add to that a seasonal operation and near invisibility from the street, and you may have the most exclusive venue on the island: Dylan Brant Fine Art.

What attracted Salle was his friendship with the gallery’s 34-year-old proprietor. “I’ve known Dylan since he was a kid,” Salle says. “Working with him is a pleasure. He’s an exceptional young man whose enthusiasm and sincerity are quite inspiring, actually. And he has great style and taste, like everyone in his family.”

Dylan’s stepfather is Peter M. Brant, the horse-breeding, polo-playing art collector and businessman who married Dylan’s mother, the supermodel Stephanie Seymour, when the boy was four. By then, Salle already had a congenial relationship with the senior Brant. It dates to Brant’s purchase of Autopsy, a 1981 canvas that couples a broad swath of repeating vertical bars painted in the inoffensive colors of midcentury textile design with a grisaille rendering of a naked woman who is seated, cross-legged, on the edge of an unmade bed, a dunce cap on her head and two more over her breasts. Viewers hardly knew whether to laugh, blush, drop their jaws, or throw stones.

Salle’s subsequent works doubled down on their provocations: contorted female nudes in compromised positions, disembodied heads, expired animals, retro product advertisements, and banal images of foodstuffs jostled for position on painted, screen-printed, cinematically sectioned canvases that were overlaid with figure drawings and, on occasion, punctuated by actual objects, say, an umbrella, or a legless, molded plywood Eames Chair. Or two.

Brant bought another painting, and then another, and then more. In late 2021, when the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, organized Salle’s first career survey since 1999, eight of the 50 works on view came from the collector’s personal holdings.

The exhibition brought to mind the competing labels that critics have applied to Salle over the years: postmodernist, neo-conceptualist, appropriationist, neo-expressionist, Pop-surrealist.

Salle dismisses all of them, though their continuing use may demonstrate that any work of art by Salle remains uniquely his. There is no single categorization for it.

“I paint what I want to see,” he says, when I catch him at the studio in East Hampton where he spends most of his time. His sleeves are rolled up as he prepares for his upcoming show in Palm Beach. If he slumps a bit, it’s due to jet lag after a flight home from an exhibition in Korea.

The incongruent images that Salle corrals into mystifyingly coherent pictures are instinctive to his process. “My fundamental impulse is one of combining things,” he reflects. “Whether it’s modern or postmodern is irrelevant to me, but I do think it was a fundamental change to say that a painting could be several paintings at once.” Salle compares this structure to counterpoint in a musical composition.

“Instead of one note, a painting could be one chord, a cluster of notes. That’s how I think about my work: as a chord with three or four notes at specific intervals that, when played together, have an emotional response. Simultaneity has an aesthetic value on its own.”

He recalls, with amusement, one assessment of his work that came from Richard Serra during a panel discussion convened by Artforum early in the younger artist’s career.

“Richard said something like, ‘I know what you’re up to, Salle. All you guys are just trying to combine Warhol with Pollock.’ And I said, ‘Shut up, Richard. Stop being a bully.’ Years later, I thought, well, that was a really perceptive description. There was some truth to it. If you can combine the focal point of a Warhol with the all-over dynamism of a Pollock, you’d really have something. Maybe it’s impossible to reconcile those two things, but I’m still trying.”

All careers have peaks and valleys. Times change. So do economies of taste. Few artists can sustain the level of excitement and visibility of early acclaim, especially when viewers identify them with a particular decade and go looking for the next big thing. Or they discover the work a generation later, when the artist is sowing other seeds.

Salle acknowledges as much.

“For sure,” he says, “to maintain a creative career over the long haul, as opposed to making some sort of splash at the beginning, are two different things. I was very lucky to meet older artists who also had enormous success and had been through it. They were living examples of people who were so curious in their work that there was always something else they wanted to explore, something else they wanted to find out, something else they wanted to say, and they did not take all that other stuff too seriously.”

He cites John Baldessari as an example of a celebrated figure who was well into maturity before the art world caught up to him. In 1970, the revered conceptualist was teaching at the fledgling California Institute of the Arts, where Salle won the scholarship that brought him into the hotbed of avant-garde theory. He joined a class of artists, later dubbed the Pictures Generation, who were encouraged to work in several disciplines. After earning an MFA in 1975, he moved to New York. In 1979, at the urging of the dealer Annina Nosei, he made a semi-private solo debut in the loft where a new arrival, Larry Gagosian, was living. It led to Salle’s breakout show with Boone, and a trajectory that quickly outpaced that of his teacher.

“It wasn’t that John was a late bloomer,” Salle observes. “It was that the world came around later in his life. But he had a very, very long career and was always working. ‘David,’ he would say. ‘You have to be able to do this for 50 years, or don’t start.'”

Salle believes he got off on the right foot when his nine-year-old self met Betty and William Dickerson, a married couple who taught art to kids at a school they founded in Wichita, Kansas, where Salle grew up.

“I worked with them until I was 17,” he recalls. “They were my first models of people who dedicated every aspect of their lives to the arts, and they did it with almost no money.”

In New York, he became close to Roy Lichtenstein. “Roy died prematurely, when he was 73, but he had an incredible work ethic and determination to keep moving. There was always a new idea that he wanted to explore, and he never missed a day in the studio.” Salle also puts Jasper Johns, at age 93, in his pantheon of longevity, along with the 96-year-old painter Alex Katz, a confidante of 40 years who only seems to gain energy with age.

“There’s very little that is improved by getting older,” Salle notes. “Except painting. One works more efficiently, more directly, more confidently. You give up things and you get things. The work becomes less cluttered, less complex, and more direct. The immediacy and the competence of youth, which has its own kind of value, gives way to something else, call it wisdom. When Manet was at the end of his life, too ill to move anything but his hand, he made those flower paintings, the most ravishing paintings ever made. You adapt. I’m a better painter today than I was 30 years ago. Now, when I see some of my early work, it makes me cringe. Which is fine. I mean, we’re different people. I wouldn’t want to be the same person I was at 27.”

Since the Boone-Castelli years, Salle has taken his lumps, particularly from feminists upset by his nudes, but he’s always been represented by prominent galleries. In addition to Gladstone Gallery, which he joined in 2022, he has exhibited with Thaddaeus Ropac in Europe for over 20 years and, at different times, with Per Skarstedt (New York and London), Maureen Paley (London), Bruno Bischofberger (Zurich), and Gagosian (New York and Beverly Hills), among several others. Lehmann Maupin represents him in Asia.

Along the way, Salle’s art has gone through shifts of style and substance without losing its power to dazzle or confound, partly because his pursuit of it has been as unrelenting as that of his artist heroes. The controlled chaos in his work of the ’80s, he compares it to free-form jazz, became more complex and layered without relinquishing its sense of space or intimations of corners too dark to brave.

After a while, white space came into formerly umbral pictures, but they still deployed multiple panels, multiple images, and multiple points of view. No material or technique was safe from the artist’s hand. As of late, Salle has been working with AI. He’s been using it as a tool in his work, but says, “we just haven’t seen the results.”

Mysteriously, Salle’s maximal, allover paintings don’t so much confuse the eye as lead it on a deliriously meandering path through centuries of visual plunder, only to wind up back in modern day, lost in thought. Several paths cross and diverge in a recent series collectively titled Tree of Life. They are buoyant paintings of a half-dreamed, absurdist Eden where the urbane characters of New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno, dressed for the office, the cocktail hour, or the beach, float beside a struggling tree and an attendant, googly-eyed caterpillar. Leaves fall from branches as if they are shedding tears of laughter, while roots visible in “below-ground” panels grope a miasma of painterly abstraction.

The paintings were just taking shape in 2020, when Dylan Brant went to Salle’s other studio, in Brooklyn, and was “blown away.” Soon after, COVID shut down New York, and Brant joined the migrating gallerists and art aficionados who moved to Palm Beach as full-time residents. With a partner, Stéphane Timonier, he rented the space on Worth Avenue that was supposed to be an office for their New York-based artist management agency and private advisory. Soon, however, Brant began orchestrating pocket-size, thematic exhibitions that contextualized the work of young artists with established ones he admired.

He invited friends, and some became clients. Others spread the word through a community of committed collectors that grew exponentially larger during the pandemic. Art was no longer a distraction for wintering socialites who stopped into galleries while shopping for shoes. It was serious business.

Newcomers joined such stewards of vanguard art as Beth Rudin DeWoody, Andy and Christine Hall, and Jane Holzer on soil they had long been cultivating with the newly expanded Norton Museum of Art and, in no small part, the dealer Sarah Gavlak. Her eponymous gallery in Royal Poinciana Plaza has been opening doors, wallets, and minds to weathervane art for nearly 20 years.

“To bring the work of women artists, LGBTQ artists, and artists of color to a place that really needs it is important to me,” Gavlak says. “There’s all this noise about the conservatism of Florida, but I’ve found that people are receptive and have stepped up to support the program.”

Brant’s program, Gavlak emphasizes, is cool, and very different. He gained prominence in 2021, when he dressed mannequins in vintage couture from his mother’s collection and paired them with small, romantic paintings by Karen Kilimnick, the ’90s artist whose portraits of rock stars, supermodels, ballerinas, and horses made her a favorite of the fashion crowd. The quality of Brant’s presentation, and its commentary on femininity, inspired Clearwater to expand it into The Swans, an incisive show at her museum that she named for the wealthy women in Truman Capote’s life who were famous for what they wore.

This fall, because Brant is collaborating with Mary Boone’s son, Max Werner, on an exhibition of ’80s art in a SoHo building owned by his father, he has yet to counter the impression that he’s just another Nepo Baby hoping to make a quick killing in the resale market. But there appears to be more to Brant than that. Though he has been working in the art world for 12 years, by his own admission he has a better feel for curating than commerce. As a result, Timonier recently left the partnership to start a new gallery in Tribeca.

“I’m not trying to attract attention to myself by making some grandiose move,” Brant insists. “I just want to show great art.”

Of his upcoming show with Salle, he adds, “David is one of the best artists in the world. You can trace the work of a lot of younger artists to David.”

 

Brant also collects emerging artists like Enoc Perez, whose career he was managing when Gavlak added him to her roster. What’s more, the works in his Salle show, opening on December 2, will arrive on consignment from Gladstone, who did not add a pandemic pop-up on Worth Avenue to her existing galleries in New York, Seoul, Brussels, and Los Angeles.

Brant, who grew up partly in Palm Beach and loves it, is confident that he can bring a new audience to Salle and perhaps a tighter focus as well. His father, a Palm Beach homeowner for 50 years, knows the score.

“Dylan doesn’t move to fads,” he says. “He looks at current but also mid-career artists who are in the art history books but may not be so much in fashion. Vogue-ness is a passing thing, but the beauty that you create remains.”

The dozen collage-like paintings on paper that Salle plans to show feature three-way views of strapping male and bodacious female figures, or their body parts, in neon-bright, even lurid colors. To gaze at them is to imagine Francis Picabia, Marsden Hartley, and John Baldessari having a debauched night on the town.

“I have more ideas for paintings than I have time to paint,” Salle claims, and there’s no reason to doubt him. He’s not the ironic type. “I never worry about running out of ideas. I worry about running out of time.”

This story and more appears in PALMER Volume 4, available here.