Turning Points: The Wheel in Art and Material Culture

Vivienne Kessler ◹

The Aperture Review · Formalist critic

The first thing that hits you walking into this show is how rarely anyone looks at a wheel head-on. We pass them constantly. They hold our weight, move our goods, mark time. And artists, it turns out, have been staring at them for five hundred years. What they have actually made of that staring is the point.

Titian's Cupid with the Wheel of Time stops you cold. A small painting, really, but the modeling of that infant flesh against the wheel's geometric hardness creates a visual tension that the title tries to explain but the paint does the actual work. The oil builds the cherub's musculature with soft insistence while the wheel behind remains almost abstract in its formal precision. You see the problem the wheel presents: how do you paint motion? How do you paint something that is by definition not still? Titian solves it by not quite painting the wheel at all. It hovers. It is almost ornamental.

Callot's The Wheel takes the opposite approach. Every mark on that plate is there to create a surface so dense with incident that the wheel itself becomes almost lost in the crush of it. But that is the point. The wheel in Callot is not the subject. The spectacle is. The public nature of the apparatus. The etching's hatching is so thick in places it nearly obliterates the image, and yet the wheel reads clear. That is control. That is craft.

Where the show moves into the twentieth century, the problem shifts. The wheel stops being something that needs to be represented as object and becomes something you can just use. Johnson's Breakdown with Flat Tire contains an actual bicycle, or the painting of one, rendered in forms so hard-edged and simplified that it reads as almost purely formal. The flatness of the tire is the flatness of the picture plane. The mechanics are not being depicted so much as stated. It is a cleaner solution than Ibbetson's Watershot Wheel, which still wants to make the thing beautiful, to nest it in landscape and light. Ibbetson's painting is accomplished but it is also sentimental. The wheel is functional but also part of a dream of rural labor. The light says so. The foliage says so.

Piranesi's Giant Wheel is where the show really earns its space. That etching is not about the wheel as mechanism. It is about the wheel as form. The interior in which it sits is rendered in his typical cascading hatching, his favorite technique for suggesting scale and weight and time. The wheel becomes almost architectural. Almost monumental. You could spend an hour looking at how he has made those spokes read against the shadows around them, the way the crosshatching suggests not just darkness but volume, space, the actual thickness of an interior.

The real weakness here is that most of these pieces are old. The show moves through five hundred years of representation and then hits the twentieth century and largely stops. Schillinger's abstract wheel and Renouf's Time Wheel suggest that the form could still generate formal problems, but they are late additions to what is otherwise a historical survey. And a survey, no matter how well-made, is a survey. The curatorial argument, that the wheel has been a continuous preoccupation across periods, is true but also obvious. That artists have found different formal solutions to depicting it is also true. But obvious truths, however beautifully made, are still obvious. The show assembles evidence. It does not quite make a case that needed making.