Louise Fishman, the preeminent American painter, died on July 26th at the age of 82 with Ingrid Nyeboe, her spouse, at her side.

Born in 1939 in Philadelphia, Fishman translated her life experiences into radiant, muscular works of art. The highly personal abstract style that she evolved was born of her physical power, intellect, and engagement with art history.

In her youth she had been a competitive athlete, which helped shape her gestural idiom. She was both the daughter and niece of practicing artists, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman (1916-2013) and Razel Kapustin (1908-1968) respectively, both of whom studied at The Barnes Foundation, then in Merion, Pennsylvania. Fishman was steeped in the works of such European modernists as Matisse, Cézanne, and Soutine through catalogues from the Barnes in her mother’s library.

Fishman loved music of all genres and could often be seen in a rapt state, sitting beside Ingrid, her beloved, at performances. She became a part of my life several years ago through our mutual friend, pianist Idith Meshulam, who performed music by my spouse, Laura Kaminsky at a concert at Tenri Cultural Institute in 2013.  Louise was deeply moved, and this became the catalyst for a few special gatherings and conversations that we treasure. Her absence is going to have a profound impact on those who treasured her alto speaking voice, radiant smile, and the depth of expression in her eyes that made everyone feel that they were clearly seen and heard.

Though in her mature paintings she employed tools such as drywall knives and trowels, Fishman’s command of the traditional materials and techniques of oil painting came through her academic training at the Philadelphia College of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Tyler School of Fine Arts, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where in 1965 she completed her MFA before heading to New York City in her Nash Rambler.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, she confronted gender discrimination in the art world, and further isolation as a lesbian. Working as a proofreader and editor, she painted at night and on the weekends and became involved in the feminist and queer activist movements. As if to destroy the influence of the male-dominated art power structure, she cut her canvases apart, reworking them into small sculptures that incorporated stitching, dying and weaving. She experimented with liquid rubber, inspired by Eva Hesse’s 1971 memorial exhibition in work at the School of Visual Arts.

In 1973, curator Marcia Tucker included Fishman’s work in the Whitney Biennial.  Exhilarated by this professional recognition, she was nevertheless ambivalent about this inclusion, when it was not extended to  other women artists in her life. Her Angry Women Paintings of that year were an expression of self-awareness, unleashed in a series of 30 text-based works, inscribed with the names of her heroines and friends in bold letters obscured by drips and slashes.

A 1988 visit to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezín had a profound impact on Fishman who transformed her grief into a series titled Remembrance and Renewal. Fishman mixed silt collected from the Pond of Ashes at Auschwitz into her paint in elegiac works that embodied her belief in painting’s capacity to reflect psychological and physical states of being.

For There She Was (1998), one of my favorite works, is a darkly shimmering painting whose title is taken from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. The relationship between two characters who metaphorically merge into one comes to mind, as every color becomes another. With interlocking passages of blue, gray-violet, and black shot through with cadmium red and burnt sienna, Fishman painted a vibrating field that evokes a Chinese garden at dusk. The artist was a collector of Chinese scholar’s rocks, and farm stools. She was sustained by her Buddhist practice as well as the years that she spent walking the landscape surrounding her old farmhouse in upstate New York.

In the last few years, Fishman enjoyed long-overdue recognition, including publications and solo exhibitions at Vielmetter, Los Angeles; Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, and Karma, New York, and retrospective exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College. We can expect more exhibitions and research to examine her unique contribution to the language of gestural abstraction, one that fuses, in her unique way, elements of tenderness, fury, and joy.

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The loudest, most boisterous among us often garner the attention. But sometimes it is the quiet, unseen, yet powerful, undercurrent that most profoundly shapes us.

Much of Marc Zimetbaum’s life was under the radar. But his impact on others, whether they realize it or not, was enormous. Some may remember him for his major role in the foundation of the New York Studio School, which for more than half a century has impacted the lives of so many. Others experienced his love for sculpture during the summers he taught at Chautauqua. Or perhaps you knew him and didn’t realize it, simply through the many years he worked as the third floor manager of that mecca for artists, Pearl Paint on Canal Street.

On December 20th, 2020, Marc Zimetbaum passed away peacefully in Eger Nursing Home from Covid-19. Fifty-seven years earlier Marc, then a junior at Pratt Institute, read a 1963 ArtNews article written by Mercedes Matter entitled “What’s Wrong with U.S. Art Schools”.  Years later he wrote, in an unpublished manuscript:

We didn’t want a degree. We didn’t want grades. We only wanted to study with artists we respected, to spend eight to twelve hours a day in the studio, to have time to grow individually and stylistically without an instructor hovering over us, to be in a place where there was art talk, intelligent visiting faculty and lectures. We wanted to look long and hard at ourselves and our relationship with the history of art and the art world of today.

Along with his friend Chuck O’Connor, Marc met with Matter. Leading a group of disgruntled students, they decided to start an alternative kind of art school with no grades or distractions, only a powerful ambition for their work as artists. There were several meetings in the Chelsea apartment of Louis Finkelstein and Gretna Campbell. After talking with Mercedes they named it “The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture”. The Dean at Pratt said their new school wouldn’t last six months. In the Fall of 1964 the school opened. The original faculty included Matter, Charles Cajori, Sydney Geist, George Spaventa, and Meyer Schapiro. Their visiting faculty included Edwin Dickinson, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Earl Kerkam, and John Heliker. Many of us who know and love the Studio School may not know this, but without the faith and Herculean efforts of Marc and Chuck at the beginning, that article written by Mercedes would have remained no more than a critique in an art magazine.

Mercedes told me many times that she adored Marc, that he was a critical backbone keeping the school alive in its early years. Marc had been a straight A student in high school, third in his class of 500 at Weequahic High School (then ranked the top high school in New Jersey). He was elected Senior Class President and became Editor in Chief of their literary publication, Ergo. Marc’s mother wanted him to go to an Ivy League School. Instead he chose the struggles implicit in the life of an artist. He would have remained closely involved with the Studio School, but life had other plans. In his twenties he suffered the first of what were then called “nervous breakdowns”. These would periodically haunt him for the remainder of his life, interrupting his long stretches of stability. Despite that enormous obstacle, Marc always remained passionately optimistic, and repeatedly pulled himself back in unexpected ways. There is a lump in my throat as I write that there is a lesson in that for all of us. He never gave up.

Recovering from one of these episodes he became well known as the third floor manager at Pearl Paint for many years. Later he managed the Studio School’s art store, Manet On Eighth. For eighteen years, Marc worked as a sculpture instructor at The Art Lab School at Snug Harbor and at Wagner College he was most proud of a group he created for sculptors who shared the cost of a live model. They met on Saturday mornings and he always looked forward to working and talking about art with his friends there.

In the early years of the new millennium, I invited Marc to teach figure sculpture in the renowned Chautauqua Institution summer program. He taught there until 2014. He collaborated with other faculty and students, exhibited his work, and made work in his studio. He was proud to be a part of the 100th Anniversary Chautauqua School of Art exhibition at Denise Bibro Gallery in 2010. A mutual friend, the potter Polly Ann Martin, summarized the shared experience that many of us had with Marc in this latter phase of his life by saying In distant memory, it was a divine summer shared in collaboration with my throwing vessels and his endless passion for drawing on them with many a raku firing. Polly shared the image of a piece on which he drew and gave to her, going on to say simply I have never found myself tired of looking at this work as it has…become part of our home.

Zimetbaum was the recipient of a grant from the Rothko Foundation in 1974, and the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2001. In 2005, at the suggestion of his dear friend Harriet Vicente, he applied and received a grant from The Harriet & Esteban Vicente Trust in order to write a book about his experience during the early years of The New York Studio School. Although left in manuscript form there are plans in place for its completion.

A biographical film entitled Marc Zimetbaum: Journey of An American Artist,  by Mark Ozz and Erick Emerick (available at Amazon)  offers a lesson to all of us who have faced what we may think are impassable obstacles. He was a living example revealing that it isn’t what happens to us that defines us. Instead, it is how we respond to what happens to us that defines who we become. A few years ago Marc wrote “I’ve been involved, all my artistic life, with the figure, with trying to create an image that grows out of perception, in an attempt to capture a particular model in a particular pose, without slavish preconceptions or reliance on anatomy that tends to dehumanize, rather than bring a figure to life.” Marc didn’t just bring a figure to life. For many of us he made our own lives richer through what he gave of himself.

Marc is survived by his sister, Lisa Max Zimetbaum and her husband Philip Popkin, his former wives Nancy Lewis, Eve LeBer and Janet Rispoli, his daughter Erica Zimetbaum and her husband Guy Johnson, his daughter Ruby Zimetbaum Oyola, his son Red LeBer, his niece Rebecca Royen, and granddaughters Sylvia Johnson and Sienna Oyola.

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When “ABC Art,” published in 1965 in Art in America, went the equivalent of viral, it launched the remarkable, decades-long, international career of art critic and art historian Barbara Rose. Rose, who was also a curator and filmmaker, died on December 25, 2020 after a long struggle with breast cancer. She was 84 and was active to the end. In that seminal article, she outlined clearly and forcefully the significance of the pared-down work by a coterie of little-known, lower Manhattan artists who would soon become Minimalist icons. Among them were Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. Since that debut, Rose helped shape the discourse of some of the major art movements of the late 20th Century through a constant stream of exhibitions, publications and documentaries. While she concentrated on modern and contemporary art, she also explored European art history in The Golden Age of Dutch Painting (1969). Fast forward to 2011, she became the first Morgan-Menil fellow at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York, resuming research on a project that linked the medieval illuminated manuscripts of the Apocalypse with commentaries of Beatus of Liébana with the drawings of Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

Her first book, American Art since 1900: A Critical History (1967), highlighted artists who were not fully canonical: John Marin; Joseph Stella; Stanton Macdonald Wright; and she included Irene Rice Pereira among them, at a time when female artists were seldom—if ever—acknowledged in such surveys. Pivoting, Rose began to champion painters and painting in the 1970s, in defiance of Greenbergian formalism and the nearly universal declaration of the medium’s demise, transformed into an impassioned advocate. She curated American Painting: The Eighties, an exhibition of 41 artists at the Grey Art Gallery in 1979, in advance of the decade, the bravura a characteristic trait. It was both applauded and derided, also characteristic. But whatever criticism was lobbed at it, the essential premise, that painting was alive and kicking, was absolutely right. It was followed by a sequel, Abstract Paintings: The 90s at the Andre Emmerich gallery in 1992 as she reprised her commitment to painting many times over.

Other books by Rose included Pavilion: Experiments in Art and Technology (1972); Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present (2006); and, more recently, Painting after Postmodernism: Belgium-USA-Italy (2016.) The latter accompanied the exhibition of the same name that she curated in Brussels, an exchange between artists from those three countries. In it, Rose laments our extremely unstable and changing times and our “increasingly inhuman, technologically driven, globally-networked world.” She defines the spaces of its reproduced imagery as postmodernist, borrowed from “photography, film and video.” To counter that, she said, we need a “rebirth of a pictorial space” which is “ambiguous and amorphous” created by a “visionary consciousness.”

Born in Washington, D.C., Rose attended Smith College, but completed her undergraduate degree at Barnard College in 1957. She studied art history at Columbia University, which was one of the top-ranked departments in the nation, with an illustrious faculty that included Julius Held, Meyer Shapiro, and Rudolf Wittkower. Among the friends she made then were filmmaker Michael Chapman, artists Carl Andre, Larry Rivers, and Stella—whom she married in London in 1961, when in Europe on a Fulbright fellowship to Spain. Her Spanish sojourn was the beginning of a long, requited affair with a country that became a second home to her, awarding her the Order of Isabella the Catholic in 2010. Other awards include the College Art Association’s Distinguished Art Criticism Award in 1966 and 1969, as well as a Front Page Award in 1972. She did not complete her doctorate (contemporary art beckoned) but Columbia awarded her a Ph.D. in art history in 1984, in recognition of her many contributions to the discipline.

Rose wrote regularly for Studio International, Art in America, Artforum, Vogue, New York magazine, Partisan Review, and others over the years, and was editor-in-chief at the Journal of Art, which she co-founded, covering a range of subjects that dealt with art, culture, and politics. As well, she wrote monographs on many, if not most, of the artists of the 1960s and 70s, a dazzling line-up that included Claes Oldenburg, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, and Barnett Newman.

She taught at Sarah Lawrence and Hunter College, among other institutions and was director of the art gallery at the University of California, Irvine and the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, DC. She was curator of exhibitions and collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—not without controversy—where she curated Miró in America (1982); Fernand Léger and the Modern Spirit (1982); and a retrospective presciently, cannily dedicated to Lee Krasner (1983), too long eclipsed by her famous spouse. Rose’s films include the documentaries The New York School and American Art in the 1960s (1972). She collaborated with François de Menil and Philip Glass to make North Star: Mark di Suvero (1977).  Lee Krasner: The Long View (1978) was a solo effort, as was the film about the master printmaker, Tanya Grosman: A life with painters and poets (1979).

Rose was married four times to three husbands: art and music stars Stella and Jerry Leiber, and bookending them, economist Richard Du Boff, her first and last, who survives her, as do her children Rachel and Michael Stella and four grandchildren.

Rose was an art world fixture and provocateur. Criticism did not cramp her style or self-assurance.  She was a character, a force, a diva, quirky or brilliant or both, depending upon your perspective. She had panache, spirit, curiosity, and ambition, and disdained the increasing monetization and corporatization of the art world. She said, with typical pungency, in Nathaniel Kahn’s 2018 film, The Price of Everything, that she’d only been to one auction, and it was distressing to see “art on the auction block, like a piece of meat.”  Trenchant, outspoken, confounding, she could be formidable but also amiable. She could also be hilariously irreverent—and often salty. Let’s not rehabilitate her. She was bracingly, admirably who she was, and that was much more than enough.

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This morning a red fox crossed my path for the second time in two days, its rufous coat glowing in the pre-dawn light. Clocking its surroundings, the vixen swiftly disappeared into nearby woods. It felt like a visitation from Margaret Grimes: sensitive-eyed, brave, smart, unceasingly searching and like this fox, of abundant titian-colored hair.

A painter of the landscape, Grimes found her motifs in densely overgrown and ungroomed places. In all seasons she would take her paints and huge canvasses to carefully chosen, hard to access sites. Each completed painting was the result of many trips to the place where it was first begun. She needed to revisit the foliage, lighting and weather conditions with which she had started. Of course, she struggled with the inevitable changes she found, for that is what she loved about painting landscape. Inspired by the intricacy and linearity of briary thickets, choking vines, entwined scrub or clumps of broken sticks and bare branches, she painted attentively, as if deciphering an ancient vegetal code. She not an artist who favored the picturesque.

Landscape was a genre that Margaret never stopped thinking about. In one of her lectures, she touched on what she was after. “In art school, we were taught to look at nature as if we were seeing it for the first time. Now we look at it as if we were seeing it for the last time, hence the need to meticulously observe.” Like her mentor Neil Welliver, she understood that we humans are devouring our world, especially the overgrown, undomesticated places that support the rebirth of both flora and fauna.

Margaret Whitehurst Grimes was born in New Bern, North Carolina on June 5, 1943 and died in the Bronx, October 9, 2020. Growing up in central Michigan, her parents, Margaret W. Grimes and Alan P. Grimes, were both writers and professors at Michigan State University. As a child, her commitment to art was already apparent, and she would often go without school lunch in order to save money for art supplies. In 1964, she married painter and professor John Wallace who predeceased her in 2011. Margaret graduated in 1975 from Governors State University in Illinois earning BA and MA degrees. Most importantly, in 1976 she met Alice Neel at Notre Dame’s Women Artists-in-Residence Program. Neel’s fierce commitment to both art and politics were to prove a decisive inspiration for her. She then received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980 where she studied with Rudy Burkhardt, Paul Georges and Welliver.

Soon after graduating, Grimes began her long association with the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City which featured her well-received one-person exhibition of 2017, The Secret Life of Trees. Other recent exhibitions include a 2018 solo show at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York. In 2019 several of her works were included in the Invitational Exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters earning her the Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Award. A painting from that show is now in the collection of the Lyman Allen Museum in New London, Connecticut. In 2013 Margaret Grimes: A Retrospective was held at the Gallery of Western Connecticut State University. In an artcritical review entitled The Connective Sublime: A Retrospective for Margaret Grimes, Jennifer Samet wrote:

Margaret Grimes’ paintings are about vastness, not just the all-encompassing kind, but also vastness at the molecular or cellular level. She paints the individual leaf and the entire screen of the forest. And although Grimes depicts trees, her work also suggests technology. She paints the hard drive, the motherboard of nature.

A beloved, inspiring teacher and lecturer, Grimes initiated WestConn’s Masters of Fine Art program with her husband. It was Margaret’s desire to create a serious, challenging graduate school for students who were not able to enter more well-known MFA programs. As Program Coordinator there, she was unceasing in her efforts to give both grads and undergrads the very best art education. A driving force, she fought to get better studio spaces and enough funding to bring in well-known artists and lecturers. In 1990 she was awarded the Henry Barnard Foundation’s Distinguished Lectureship, and in 1992 she received lifetime status as a Connecticut State University Professor and the title of Distinguished Professor. A tireless teacher and mentor, her legacy continues through the achievements of those many young artists she so believed in.

In 2013 Grimes retired from WestConn as Distinguished Professor Emerita. After years of intense juggling of academic and art careers, she could, at last, give her studio the focus she felt it deserved, and her art subsequently soared in both scale and achievement. The paintings and drawings of the last seven years were, arguably, among her finest. These large-scale landscapes fulfilled her ambition to reveal an untamed world; dark, forested, richly textured, ornate, uncultivated and secretive. Dedicated to both the history and practice of landscape painting, Grimes understood that not everyone shared her interest. She often said that the genre of landscape, which depicts a world beyond our reach and scope, can be hard for some to embrace.

Margaret Grimes loved the wild places. She walked amongst them, painted there, and like her subject, lived fully and strongly. She has passed leaving loving friends, a daughter and a son, the musician Carolyn Wallace and retired software engineer Bernard Hulce, among other family members. Those who knew her will miss her stimulating company and reflect on our never dull nor ordinary times with her. While we can no longer raise another glass of Pinot Grigio with Margaret, we can still revel in her beautiful, mysterious, vibrant artworks, gifts for us now and for all those who will follow.

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Like Scheherazade, Matt Freedman kept death at bay for a thousand and one nights, with one story after another. Slowly weakened by illness, he soldiered on with his rambling, brilliant Endless Broken Time performances with percussionist Tim Spelios, the most lasting of his innumerable collaborations, until a few months ago. In the final week of his life he continued to draw a seat-of-the-pants existential comic strip with daily installments on Instagram. In the last few panels, a bear-fish realizes he’s all alone in a watery void, floats on his back and contemplates the constellations in the night sky, then closes his eyes and sinks into the abyss. Yet the protagonist, now underwater, finds that he sees new constellations in the form of his old friends (and to be sure, Matt had as many friends as there are stars). A beautiful ending, except keep in mind that Matt would have had no trouble inventing his way out of that predicament–– while waggishly puncturing any sentiment–– had he been able to draw the next endlessly broken panel. DAVID BRODY

Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal

Artist Matt Freedman’s written and drawn memoir, Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal, is not your typical chronicle of illness and rehabilitation. Neither recovery drama nor tear-jerking tragedy, it’s instead nearer to comedy. Both the tone and the format are semi-comic, with fluid illustrations, diagrams, and panel-like sequences floating on waves of hand-written text. Sometimes Freedman’s drawings take the foreground, with words functioning as captions, but mostly text and image create a hybrid that is surprisingly seamless — and absolutely compelling, since his wit is always to the point, even in extremities of hellish pain, anxiety, or drugged oblivion. Equally sharp is his draftsmanship, honed by the self-imposed mission to fill four notebook pages a day during the two months in 2012 when he underwent intensifying radiation and chemotherapy for cancer of the tongue, neck, and lungs.

If traditional illness narratives tend, understandably, to be lacking in humor, Freedman’s over-analytic mind cannot but go there, even with death looming. (The current health of the author, a beloved friend of this writer and many others, is thankfully vigorous, though still endangered.) At his first radiation treatment, with proton guns firing at his diseased throat, he smells the back of his tongue burning. “I’m cooking,” he realizes. The sting of the observation is eased by the cartoonish rendering of his prone head’s cross-section, a Dristan^® ad gone rogue. Similar images get more anatomically precise yet more gruesomely hilarious as the treatment progresses: razor blades, scissors, and swords through the tongue; a burn pattern on the skin resembling a map of Russia; stripes of loose flesh in his neck, “like from a hot pizza cheese burn.” Color appears rarely but to strong effect, primarily when felt-tip red is used as bitter punctuation to locate this widening gyre of pain. But when associative portals open onto vistas of memory Freedman can wield the same color like a fireballer’s change-up –– as when the number five (a parking stall at the hospital) recalls Joe DiMaggio’s uniform number, and thus a lush image of the Yankee Clipper kissing Marilyn Monroe’s flaming red lips.

“It’s remarkable what a trivial little person is revealed when everything is stripped away by drugs and pain and fear,” Freedman remarks. Sports trivia, at any rate, assert a weird priority in the book, with other hospital parking slots calling forth Ted Williams’s .406 batting average in ’41 or –– more borderline autistic –– Lyman Bostock’s .388 or Rob Deer’s 230 lifetime homeruns, each such jog of memory occasioning a fluent sketch of the player’s trading card apotheosis. Power hitters loom with similar iconic weight above Raymond Pettibon’s punk-erudite obsessions, although where Pettibon is occult, Freedman is communicative, leading us by the hand through the educational zig-zag of his thoughts.

Freedman has often played with academic mannerisms in his performances and collaborative instigations. They are absurd events, such as a recent conflation of the French Revolution and the U.S. Open tennis finals, re-enacted shot-by-shot in real time, with losers guillotined; or live lectures with an easel and Sharpie^®, covering obscure historical subjects, accompanied by a jazz drummer. Even in his primary medium, sculpture/installation, Freedman never loses touch with caricatural literalness, nor with a sense of pedagogical mission. His 2012 solo show at Valentine Gallery in Queens, “The Golem of Ridgewood,”included numerous papier-mâché props, some humble and some lavish. The bluntly beautiful, chromatically rich sculptures helped tell the true story of Jewish resistance to the Nazification of Ridgewood’s German immigrants during the early 1940s, a forgotten local history that Freedman utterly entangled with tall tales, myth, and farce.

Relatively Indolent is full of similar entanglements, side-trips from his daily accounts of inscrutable doctors and protocols. We travel backwards in time to harsh assessments of Freedman’s childhood self; and to the day he met his future wife after accidently cutting off his finger in a sculpture studio. (She drove him to the hospital.) We witness Hurricane Sandy through the lens of Freedman’s exile at a Boston hospital, sharing his frustration and guilt at having to focus narrowly on his own pain.

Still, the unprecedented ravages of Sandy call forth affectingly drawn montages, distilled from CNN videos and news photographs. Not only does Freedman’s utilitarian, seat-of-the-pants draftsmanship manage punchline humor and informational razzmatazz (as with the anatomical cut-aways), but it efficiently captures each of the five stages of grief. Crucially, the publisher’s preservation of the hand-written notebook text –– sometimes scrawled on a bus ride or under the effects of strong painkillers, but always legible –– slows the eye, just enough, from reading to looking. That allows Freedman’s resolutely unstylish drawings to sail past an initial repellency, while we learn to read his distinctive, sketchy line. Even as we become addicted, Freedman bears down, expanding his inky range and power, gaining confidence as the work progresses.

Throughout, Freedman records unsentimental self-evaluations, of his work, his thoughts, and his life. The book’s title refers to the slow but steady growth of his rare form of cancer, but “relatively indolent” also serves as a thematic self-assessment, especially as regards his career. Even as he wonders about his lack of focus and killer instinct, the title’s sardonic pun typifies Freedman’s relentless approach: to milk doubt, failure, and anxiety so as to transcend the pretensions of artistic ego and careerism. In all his activities, Freedman remains a truth teller and a joke teller, a principled dreamer in cynic’s clothing –– never more so than in this brilliantly honest and defiantly funny book.

Matt Freedman, Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014). 240 pages, illustrations, ISBN 978-1609805166. $24

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“It’s strange, we never changed ourselves….we are still doing exactly what we always were.” Claude Lalanne played her own bafflement with pitch perfect innocence; for how had this bohemian Surrealist, an artisanal craftswoman in her Chinese peasant jacket, horny-handed everyday metalworker, gardener and cook become a fabulously wealthy fashion icon?

For at her death aged 93 Lalanne was suspiciously close to being a celebrity, certainly a point-of-reference for anyone who wanted to prove their own status within that modish zone where fine art, design and haute couture mingle. “Claude”, her first name alone was a code word to a certain world, like using just ‘Jacob’ rather than Rothschild, proof of membership.

But even with all their recent retrospectives and books Les Lalanne, Claude and her husband the late François-Xavier, still remained a shared cult, clandestine secret. Famous yes, but only amongst the right people, their furniture, sculpture and jewelry traded and treasured amongst an international élite, the last exhausted fumes of the jet set, final crust of le gratin.

The paradox was that for decades nobody had been willing to take Les Lalanne seriously within the contemporary art circuit and yet their credentials were nonpareil; as young and poor artists at the fabled Impasse Ronsin they were friends of not only Brancusi but also such Surrealists as Ernst, William Copley and Dalí, with whom Claude collaborated. as well as an entire generation of emerging avant gardists from Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle to Jimmy Metcalf and Larry Rivers, even cooking steaks on their studio stove for Yves Klein.

If the Impasse Ronsin was the founding myth of the Lalanne cult their compound at Ury, outside Fontainebleau was where we devout disciples had flocked for decades, a simple farmhouse in the simplest of villages where behind a long stone wall Claude and François-Xavier maintained separate studios and an enviable communal existence. Having moved here at the prompting of Tinguely there was no shortage of local artist friends – Marcel and Teeny Duchamp and Jackie Matisse – nor adjacent grandeur whether de Ganay or Noailles, and the house soon became famous for its parties, a veritable flotilla of limos heading south from Paris in the night.

Les Lalanne were the ultimate exemplars of Picasso’s dictum to live as a poor man with lots of money, the modesty of their world being a lesson in the taste that wealth alone can never purchase, whitewashed walls, wonderful art, warm worn furniture and an entirely personal goût impossible to replicate. An anonymous wooden door opened up to this enchanted private domain, an alligator acrawling, a baboon standing guard in the courtyard, a little gate leading to an enfilade of gardens, each wilder than the last and inhabited by a menagerie of sculpted beasts and benches, cast flora and patinated fauna.

Since the death of François-Xavier in 2008 Claude had enjoyed a full decade in which to really blossom and come into her own, increasingly recognized as just as creative, inventive and industrious as her late husband and indeed perhaps the more ambitious and worldlier of the two, her energy and acumen seemingly redoubled as she hit her eighties.

This ferocious work ethic, heading into her atelier no sooner than she had risen to spend the day solving the practical problems of her latest chair, necklace, chandelier or staircase, was the core of her personality. But it was mitigated by a most honest and open hospitality, this perfect hostess with her home-grown fruit and vegetables and suitably good bottle of Bordeaux, her posy of garden flowers, every meal culminating with her own justifiably famous tarte tatin.

Some could find her altogether ‘formidable’ for she suffered fools badly and was easily wearied by the devious demands of photographers and hagiographers, capable of turning frosty at the slightest perceived slight, her full froideur being a winter unto itself and impossible to thaw by mere flattery alone. It was also probably true that she preferred male company, often homosexual and of deliciously old-fashioned bitchiness and took the slightest sadistic delight in teasing and tweaking, promoting and demoting, those within her private court.

Despite her petite presence Claude was a genuinely strong woman, physically, emotionally and practically and her beauty, still notable even in old age, was of another era. Likewise, her manner of speaking should really have been preserved like a rare threatened species, a mellifluous, high-pitched sing-song with an echo of vanished aristocratic diction, a voice designed for the telling of naughty stories and juiciest gossip, irresistible in its intimacy, “et alors, mes chéris…”

A highly attractive woman it was hardly surprising Claude had gathered a considerable fan club around the world for whom any invitation to Ury was achievement in itself. And her uniquely confident style, cowboy boots and Mao tunics, men’s white shirts with paint brushes in the hair, had always proved irresistible to her many friends in high fashion from Christian Dior lui-même to young ‘Karl’, her lifelong soulmate St Laurent and an entire subsequent generation of designers, from Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs to Maria Grazia Chiuri.

After lunch Claude would retire to her white sofa where with Texan heels crossed high, cigarette at a jaunty angle and devoted dog she would trawl for the latest tittle-tattle, speed dialing one of her infinitely indiscrete friends whilst toying with a precious broach or cuff link, lifting it towards one with a teasing twinkle, “do you think you might like…?”

One of my last memories of Claude was of her digging wild cyclamen from her garden to give me, she herself wielding the spade with a determination that belied her ninety something years, a clod of black sod with the prettiest white and purple flowers, costing nothing yet meaning everything. For surely it was a central metaphor of her personality that she took the natural, the soft and yielding, leaves, branches, flowers, and by a process of galvanization made them hard, strong and inflexible, her own admixture of the gracious and indomitable.

“Why not have this?” she might say and the generosity was not in the market value of the piece pressed upon one but in the initial generosity with which Claude had made it, the inherent act of ‘offering’ which is the essence of all art making, each artist’s ‘gift’ in every sense and one here accepted and acknowledged with suitable gratitude and admiration, and now, grief.

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David Cohen
Here are two memories of Thomas Nozkowski, picked at random from so many that remain vivid of this larger than life yet eminently down to earth man, epitomizing what exhilarating fun he made it to share for a moment in his aesthetic adventures. In 2003, I curated a retrospective of his drawings at the New York Studio School, the first in New York. I say curated, but as I went off to Europe in the preceding summer, after instigating the project, I returned to find that Tom had, impatiently, made a final selection of his own accord. I was, however, given carte blanche in the installation. Conscious of the age and delicacy of some of these works, I researched just how many lumens we could allow in the gallery. The only direction on the hang, besides a judicious last-minute exclusion, was to turn the lights up full blast. The eager-beaver curator tried to explain what he knew of the science, but Tom insisted the only thing that mattered was that they looked good to those who came to see them. “Let ‘em fry!” he exclaimed.

Years later, when I was selecting a show at a commercial gallery inspired by cinema, Tom enthusiastically – but with a promise of discretion – shared his ongoing catalogue of art in movies. With a reach and perspective that would have impressed any iconologist in its multifacetedness, Tom compiled extensive lists of artists as characters, preexisting artworks by known artists that make screen appearances, artworks made for films, and many other permutations. I begged him to allow me to publish it, but he couldn’t let it go to press so long as the research was ongoing—a lifelong pursuit.

Editing these tributes and reminiscences from a cross-section of artists, scholars and friends – again, a sampling – has the humbling effect of making clear that everyone else privileged to come into his orbit felt uniquely special, a confidant of his avuncular bonhomie and encyclopedic knowledge, and of the candor and curiosity he felt about his own artistic inquiries. His wit was kind and merciless in a single instance. He was democratic in that anyone could be included in the conversation and hierarchical in really caring about what was best, what was dispensable. Indifferent towards established canons of high and low, he was fastidious in the sense of quality.

For me, he was a paramount example of an artist who could go against the grain, but do so without rancor, and indeed be an exemplar of community even with a mainstream he might reject. This is what he was as a person and an artist—a maverick who was also a mensch.

Karen Wilkin
I knew Thomas Nozkowski’s work before I knew Tom. I was fascinated by those mysterious, small but commanding works that seemed to be about something very specific but impossible to pin down. I loved the range of paint applications, the delicacy of the incidents, and the surprising color. I’m still haunted by a work from the first Nozkowski exhibition I saw – at Max Protech Gallery about 1990. A wavy edged white shape, like a saddle made of curly sheepskin, hovered against a pale brushy ground. The image was odd, beautifully constructed, and both exquisitely and roughly painted. It was also ferociously intelligent, funny, and, as it turns out, unforgettable. When I got to know the author of this oddball image, I discovered that he shared many of the painting’s qualities, plus irresistible charm. Like the painting, he could seem deceptively off hand, someone who took his work very seriously indeed but didn’t take himself all that seriously. His comments about art were seasoned with throwaway lines like “Why two, if one will do?” and something about oil paint’s being “the queen” of materials.

It was clear that Tom’s elusive works were simultaneously discoveries that emerged from the act of making and distillations of experience. The sense of discovery made repeated motifs seem fresh and newly invented each time. There were loose family resemblances among groups of paintings – shared memories of the grid, repeated structures or background patterns – but color was always arresting and every configuration seemed unprecedented and indescribable: hors catégorie, like the steepest routes in bicycle races. I discovered that the underlying experience that, at some level, provoked the image could range from things glimpsed to things read, and much, much more. Tom made powerful images “about” arcane books on science and walks through the city. No wonder those enigmatic paintings seemed so specific and at the same time, unnameable. They were specific, just unidentifiable by us ordinary mortals. (I recall Tom’s saying that sometimes he found himself unable to remember exactly what had triggered a particular configuration, but if it still seemed resonant, he could use it.)

A few years ago, I invited Tom and Joyce to be visiting critics at Triangle Artists’ Workshop, an intense program of art making and discussion for international artists, held that summer in upstate New York, within striking distance but still a healthy drive from the Nozkowski-Robins home in High Falls. The pair generously spent the day with 20 or so artists from about half a dozen countries – a high point of the session, the artists said – and joined the gang for a fairly raucous dinner. We had offered Tom and Joyce accommodations after their strenuous day in the studios, but they insisted on returning home that night, as I knew they often did after New York openings. “We like driving,” Tom said. If those long nocturnal trips stimulated paintings, we are all the beneficiaries of his stamina behind the wheel.

Many students have told me how much they admired Tom’s work, but few seem to have responded to it directly. They’re wise not to try. Tom’s astonishing images could only have been made by someone with a mind as well-furnished as his, informed by his particular experience, and open to the possibilities suggested by his apparently limitless ways of putting on paint. Of great mathematics, the mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote: “There is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.” That’s a perfect description of Thomas Nozkowski’s art.

Marjorie Welish
A rare artisanal talent, Thomas Nozkowski developed an image, an image in the true sense of that word. What emerged in canvas after canvas, time after time, was no mere thing but rather entirely more strenuously inventive, as the object became a lapidary form through metamorphosis, in a practice spanning a half century. Very few artists can match that imaginative embodiment.

Robert Storr
Thomas Nozkowski was a wickedly intelligent man and an unrivaled painterly lyricist. The intelligence was natural and unpretentious. He read a lot and developed an astonishingly broad albeit usually understated frame of reference, which made it a delight to match wits with him when everyone else around seemed bent on showing off their readymade erudition. And in a period when many of his peers – though when it came to art itself he had precious few – favored arcane discourses with all their labored jargon he trusted in the American vernacular, a preference doubtless enriched by his consumption of detective stories and films noirs, passions we shared.

As a painter he was the ultimate come-from-behind kid, the day-job-wife-and-family man who paid for all his time in the studio by being his own patron. That job, which consisted of being a layout artist for Mad magazine, made him wary lest the art world ascribe his fanciful caprices for an extension of the house aesthetic. Or so I inferred. Nevertheless, I recall walking across town from MoMA to meet him at his office for lunch and it struck me as entirely natural that those two institutions should exist at the same urban latitude – you know, Low and High – with Tom alert and at home in both. In any event, he need not have feared that the discursive arabesques of his own painting and drawing would be explained away as “mere” cartooning, and worse as a stylistic off-shoot of the perpetually smart-aleck Mad manner: they were nothing of the kind.

Slow, steady maturation of an incrementally improvised, manifestly unprogramatic image was their essence. Working on smallish panels of several standard proportions, and frequently starting with nothing more than an ambiguous ground tone and an amorphous shape, Tom followed the organic growth and mutation of his intricate patterns, eccentric configurations and, by turns, exquisitely subtle and surprisingly bold polychromatic palette. The consistency of his method opened out to stunningly various pictorial vistas contained within irresistibly intimate formats. Looking at his paintings slows the clock and sharpens the eye and mind while massaging, tickling and pinching the haptic synapses. In the old days one might have called Nozkowski a “little master” but his scope was wide, his view long and his faith in his own ultimately immodest gifts was that huge: in short that of a master – period. Of how many contemporary artists can it be said that he or she never bored me or took my engagement for granted? Not many, but Tom was certainly one.

Joseph Masheck
As editor-in-chief of Artforum in the late ‘70s, I was pushing for painting, especially abstract painting, despite the political incorrectness of that. I also hated the art-commerce developing as philistine businessmen discovered art as a new continent for unregulated insider trading, so it was great to discover Tom’s work in shows at the artists’ coop 55 Mercer Street. In the ‘80s I wrote articles in three art magazines on Nozkowski, and curated a show of early drawings at Nature Morte (1983).

The essays were agonizing to write because, I now see, they reflect the kind of freewheeling conversations we had that depended on analogy: how one topic turned by analogy into another. That was all the more exciting because our respective analogies came from different stocks of experience as well as reading. There could be hearty disagreement, too, though Tom was not a dialectical kind of guy. His wide reading is legendary; but politically, his shockingly normal, art-world liberal line might have come out of The Whig Interpretation of History. Once he said that the greatest philosopher was Thomas Paine. Come on, Tom! No wonder why in one of my articles he reminded me of Santayana on Emerson: “There was a great catholicity in his reading . . . But he read transcendentally, not historically, to find what he himself felt, not what others might have felt before him” (Artforum, May 1981).

Now I have to think: maybe being so undialectical—stubborn!—kept the big bear calm and jolly. (Tom, I knew you would like a little roast, like an Irish wake. Oh, Tom . . .)

Jonathan Lasker
I don’t know what brought me to 55 Mercer Street Gallery in the Fall of 1979, but upon entering the gallery I felt that I had stumbled upon a wonderland of everything which I was hoping to see in painting, at that time. I remember increasing delight as I went from one picture to another. Upon leaving the gallery, I muttered to the guy sitting at the front desk that I thought this was a really great show. Of course, I was speaking to none other than Tom himself, who took my compliment for his exhibition with boyish delight. After that Tom and I traded studio visits and a long friendship began. Nonetheless, with each ensuing show by Tom, that feeling of being in a painting wonderland was always there. The feeling of “how did he think this up” and what will the next picture be like. It is very sad that Tom can no longer provide us with this expectation of wonder. Rest well Tom.

Merlin James
I tracked Tom down as soon as I got to New York. He’d stood for something, in my mind, since I was a student in London in the early ‘80s. A British painter, Garth Lewis, had introduced me to the work, via thin catalogues, a few slides and black and white reproductions. Somehow I ‘got it’, perhaps all the more intensely because of the sparseness of information. I got how this apparent modesty – of scale, productivity, pictorial proposition – was a Trojan horse for the greatest possible artistic ambition. I loved visiting Tom and Joyce at the ex-synagogue on Hester Street, eating and talking, listening to music, always aware of Tom’s easel standing a few yards away. Sometimes he’d take me over to look at the current painting. For me, Tom was among a very select band who at any one time keep painting alive.

James Hyde
I first met Tom at the artist cooperative gallery 55 Mercer. It was in the early eighties—the time of big heavy abstract work by the likes of Brice Marden and Richard Serra, as well as the bombast of Neo-Expressionism. While I really enjoyed meeting Tom and Joyce Robins, his paintings merely intrigued. Tom has made a point about the size of his paintings being a political choice. Small paintings, he argued, allowed people to have them in their homes and didn’t require support from big collectors and institutions. There’s an additional, subtle ethical point as well: Since small works don’t force, they at first must interest, then persuade.  Patience and observation are their essential values. Over the subsequent years Tom’s paintings persuaded and rewarded whenever I had the opportunity to see them.  So much so that when a painting from the year of the 55 Mercer show came up at auction, I stretched the budget and now have the pleasure of seeing it daily. Its cryptic shapes provide a Rubik’s Cube of associations, and with the colors alternating between murk and glow, the painting keeps surprising.

Coming out of concrete abstraction I‘ve considered the painting panel to be as evocative as what gets painted of the surface. Some years ago, I was explaining to a group of people that my paintings weren’t sculptural so much as “panel intensive”. Tom, who was there, didn’t miss a beat—“does that mean the paintings are surface-challenged?” It was classic Nozkowski – perfect timing, off kilter and a brilliant turn of phrase. And it was damn funny—funny enough to stick. I took Tom’s offhand remark as an imperative to up my surface game.

I have plenty of company in my enthusiasm for Tom’s paintings. He is legend in art schools and a touchstone for painters. Abstract paintings look different today than in the early eighties. While some are larger, splashier and flashier than Tom’s, it’s hard to find an abstract painting today that doesn’t bear some trace of Thomas Nozkowski’s painting DNA.

Raphael Rubinstein
That a painting is modest in size does not mean that it is modest in ambition—this is one of the many valuable things that Thomas Nozkowski had to tell us. In fact, Tom’s decision at the end of the 1970s to scale down his paintings may count as the most radical and influential aspect of his work, which offered a quiet but firm reproach to ego-driven or market-driven gigantism, and asserted intimacy as a supreme virtue. His downsizing was fundamentally ethical: he wanted to make paintings, as he said, that could never end up in bank lobbies.

The importance of scale in Tom’s work became clear to me in 2013 when I was curating an exhibition for Cheim & Read Gallery (“Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s”). Tom was among the 15 artists I included in the show, each of whom would be represented by a single painting. I was happy to find that Tom’s New York gallery had several great 1980s paintings that could be borrowed for the show. Two in particular interested me. In my discussions with the gallery, the director encouraged me to take both paintings, and for a while that was my plan. After all, I thought, having two paintings instead of one would convey a fuller sense of Tom’s work, and since they were the smallest works in the show—which included a number of very large canvases—it seemed only fair to give the artist a little more wall space.  It was only late in the process, as I was planning out the installation, that it came to me: there must be only one Nozkowski painting in the show! It was crucial that I treat Tom exactly the way I was approaching the other artists; one work per artist, regardless of size. I understood that to include two of his paintings would be a betrayal of his work, an insult to his decades of insistence that a 16-by-20-inch painting could be just as great, just as important, as one measuring 16 by 20 feet.  In an era when the cost of over-consumption is becoming tragically clear, when spectacle continues its prolonged, asphyxiating stranglehold on our culture, we need to listen more than ever Tom Nozkowski’s plea for the beauty and power of small things.

Valerie Jaudon
Thomas Nozkowski was a key artist in the Conceptual Abstraction exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1991, and a prescient figure for today’s abstract painting. Tom’s insistence on working at an easel painting scale created a deliberative arena for his extraordinary art making process. With his uncommonly prolific visual vocabulary and acute historical memory he was able to work freely and consciously, with a sense of contemplative and well-ordered spontaneity. Although his drawing and painting method had much in common with surrealist automatic writing, he was able to direct that spontaneity with considered invention, and to work instinctively and surely without the burden of the abstract expressionists’ often heavy-handed autographic gesture. Tom was a model for contemporary abstraction, but paradoxically one who could not really be imitated.

Catherine Murphy
I’m always puzzled when Thomas Nozskowski is referred to as a modest painter. From my first introduction to his work, his ambition and radical aspirations made me pay the utmost attention. The paintings are intentionally not huge. I’ve always thought that they were brain size, taken directly into the brain. His argument, was, for one thing, that the size was political: They are to be contemplated, put in a house, lived with. Early on, Tom put his neck on the block and when few dared, said paintings should be about the experience of living: Looking, thinking, remembering, learning. plans and games, things we love and things we hate. His work is a joyful complication, a life examined and translated into beautiful painting, food for my aching psyche.

Jennifer Riley
I teach visual studies to graduate students in architecture. Introducing them to abstraction, I guide them through some of the usual suspects of early modernism, up to Ellsworth Kelly, where it’s possible to show one way to arrive at an abstracted reality. Then I expose them to Tom’s work, among others. To my mind, Thomas Nozkowski represents one of the most approachable examples of a contemporary artist working from found forms, shapes or patterns, culled from myriad sources of nature and culture alike, which he morphed and transformed into images with his deft use of color, light, line, and atmosphere. These evocative paintings are at once deliberate and effortless, joyful and serious, specific and open-ended.

In my own practice when I’m chewing on a problem, I look at artworks to tune into a mindset of possibility. I will miss seeing Tom’s new works, as it had become routine to look at Tom’s work that reminds me not to be too serious, but to be deeply serious. To pay attention to the world, but to keep things utterly personal and yet avoid sentimentality. To unquestionably use the richness of any painterly approach or convention and then perhaps when necessary- simply subvert them.

I am not alone in feeling the gravity of this loss to our painting culture. Thankfully, there is John Yau’s very fine, recent monograph from Lund Humphries. With typical generosity, Tom inscribed my copy with words of ‘painterly’ solidarity and optimism along with a witty line drawing. A gesture, I’m sure, to which many fellow painters and friends were treated.

Sally Saul
The first time Peter [Saul] and I visited Tom and Joyce’s home in High Falls, there was a sumptuous Indian meal spread buffet style on the dining table, and a lively grouping of artists and writers clustered around the table and adjoining rooms, as well as art new to us that demanded the viewer’s attention, books and interesting objects. We were so surprised and grateful to realize our life on the other side of the river was not so isolated and remote as we thought. Tom’s openness, generosity, curiosity, and easy sharing of his knowledge and interests always generated conversation, a give and take. He recommended books, and art shows, movies and music. One time he gave Peter a disc of Jim Leonard playing the Super Saw which is still one of his favorites, the whistling sound floats through the studio. We will miss him greatly.\

Suzanne Joelson
Tom counted. His book of daily expenses and conversations was a record James Comey might admire. He knew the names of things, and their histories. One day the artist Mike Metz stopped by after a meeting at Chess records and repeated one of Marshall Chess’ stories about the early days in Chicago. Tom disputed it and found documentation to justify his version.

Tom played favorites. An evening could be spent debating a list of favorite visual artists, or filmmakers, Howard Hawk/John Ford, musicians, architects. He wondered “why Plecnik wasn’t in Moma’s “Toward a Concrete Utopia?” and then showed me favorite details from their four Plecnik monographs. His information seemed endless. What he did not know, Joyce did. And we – that is Gary Stephan and I—would invariably leave their house with a book and a list of new things to buy, research, remember.

When we hiked Tom knew the history, the legal disputes and former uses of the land. He could find the remnants of berry shacks and stone cellars, where discarded vehicles interrupted the reclaimed territory. He went on to map many of the lesser known trails which were published in the “Friends of the Shawangunks” newsletter.

At the end of one of our first day long hikes, Tom stunned me by asking, “What was your favorite part?” I had imagined the experience as a narrative, a layering of sensations and ideas, and had no answer.

Tom devoured information. In his paintings, those ways of knowing rubbed up against each other until the friction ignited an aberration. Maybe his paintings were a respite from counting and naming.  With brush or pencil in hand he could loosen his grip on how he knew the world. In the studio, he suspended judgment. Edges tangled, categories lapped, and a different discernment entered.

Then we gather at a Nozkowski opening. Each rectangle is a different subjective map and instead of my usual ways of considering art, I ask friends, “Which is your favorite?”

Harry Roseman
Thomas Nozkowski was a painter, a wonderful painter. My relationship with Tom spanned decades. It was during the last two and a half years, that, to me, something had shifted. I felt he was letting us all know that he wanted to live his life when possible, as usual, and that he wanted to be as productive as he could. If he referred to how he felt it was mentioned almost as a slight inconvenience. It was somewhere between a stiff upper lip and a particular pleasure in situations and in the people he was sharing this time with. I also know it became difficult for him to work as much as he would have liked. It was a privilege to see such courage as well as heartbreaking to see such a love of living. One thing I wasn’t expecting was seeing some of the paintings he did during this time. They are spectacular. Tom squeezed every last bit of life that was possible to have as it became available in smaller and smaller portions. Shorter, I should say, not smaller.

John Yau
All during the time that I was writing my monograph on him, Tom never complained about what he was going through. A few days before he died, he sent me an email telling me there had been a “glitch in his treatment,” and that he had spent the weekend in the hospital getting blood transfusions, but that there was nothing to worry about, and then thanked me for the DVD of Kaili Blues (2016), directed by Bi Gan, that I had sent to him and Joyce. The rest of the email was about where I could download the films of Mikio Naruse for free, and other related stuff. Tom wore his enthusiasm on his sleeve right up to the end. He spent part of one dinner recounting to John Ashbery, who was no slouch when it came to film, the plots of little-known movies directed by Gregory La Cava and later sent John DVDs of La Cava films that he had not seen. Tom seemed to have seen every film he ever talked about at least twice.  I have piles of books, DVDs, and lists of films he sent me. He was always excitedly pointing me towards something to read or see. I cannot imagine that I will ever go a day without remembering something he said to me.

David Goerk
In 2015, Thomas Nozkowski and I visited Ruth Root’s exhibition of new paintings at Andrew Kreps gallery. Tom was familiar with the artist’s work and obviously intrigued by the new paintings. He signed the guest book as he always did and picked up a catalogue of her artist-in-residence exhibition from the previous year. Tom flipped through the publication, studying each page, and as we were leaving the gallery he mentioned that he liked the new work. After a pause, he asked me if I had ever seen her smoking paintings. I hadn’t. Tom took a certain delight in explaining how Root’s smoking paintings appeared to be taking a much-needed cigarette break, as if being a painting was a difficult job and hanging on a gallery wall all day required some downtime. Tom was truly amused by this notion, he related and really loved the idea.

Whenever Tom visited the city to see exhibitions, he had a checklist in his pocket of exhibitions he wanted to see. He studied the list and proceeded to see as many of the shows as the day allowed. When I had time, I joined him on these gallery outings, appreciating his company and insights – every chance I had to look at art with Tom was special. Sometimes he pointed out a particular moment within an artwork or walked over to see what I was drawn to, other times he slowly circumnavigated the gallery on his own. As we finished up at one gallery and moved on to our next destination, we always discussed a story or observation connected to what we had just seen.

When Tom and I spoke, which was often, he never failed to ask me how I was doing before we discussed the business of the day. The sound of his voice, familiar and reassuring, was that of a teacher. His excitement and enthusiasm inspired, no matter the subject. I had the tremendous pleasure and honor of working with Tom for many years and have never known anyone as generous, genuine or knowledgeable.
[Editor’s Note: Mr. Goerk, a painter, was a director at Pace Gallery assigned to look after Thomas Nozkowski.

Alain Kirili
Tom was a dear friend to me and Ariane, and we were able to see many of his shows, including one of his last, at Art Omi in Gent, NY, last year. Despite his great and encyclopedic love of music, including jazz, Tom was not especially familiar with Free Improvisation, the genre of jazz that for many years my wife and I have featured in presentations in our Tribeca loft. But when I ask him to lend a painting to dialogue with a musical duo, he immediately accepted and had his gallery, Pace, deliver and install the piece. I knew that it would work beautifully. The duo was Michael Attias, saxophone and Mary Halvorson, guitar, and the whole thing was superb! What worked so well was the size of the painting with the two musicians: Tom was such a master at working small and creating dissonances within that restricted size, a combination of skills he shared with the duo. Chamber music, a duo, was a perfect fit with the aesthetic of Thomas Nozkowski! I will never forget that night: He was enchanted and so was our audience. There was a standing ovation. The music and the painting will stay with all of us forever. Merci, Tom.

Peter Saul
I first met Thomas Nozkowski ten years ago when we were both inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a famous artist with a reputation for stubbornly refusing to let any of his pictures be larger than a certain small size. Then, we both served on a jury charged with giving money to young artists and I got to know Tom better. He was so logical and unprejudiced in wanting to reward artists of different styles. Tom stands as an example of how to behave on an art jury: To be fair, give money to the one whose pictures are best, forget the career stuff. I regret very much not getting to know Tom better.

Elizabeth Hazan
For painters who find imagery as we work, Thomas Nozkowski was a master. His forms sing with reminders of pleasure and possibility. Tom had an endless ability to resolve his paintings in new ways. Yet he told me once he had some he put away for as long as ten years until he could figure out how to make them work. At times that’s been an enormous help to keep in mind. Like de Kooning, Nozkowski had a high batting average for words that resonate in artists’ studios.

It might be surprising to know that Tom felt a strong affinity with the late still life paintings of my mother, Jane Freilicher, and he wrote perceptively about her.  Once you see the connections it gives new insight into both artists’ work: her shapes in front of a cityscape evoke how he saw his own figure/ground relationships. Much of what he wrote about her integrity as an artist applies to his own life and work. Tom was asked to give the tribute for her at the American Academy when she died.  He noted that she apparently never wrote an artist’s statement, which he’d been searching for while writing his remarks.  At the dinner afterwards, he leaned over and said, “I think it’s terrific that Jane got as far she did without writing one of those fucking things.”

Peter Schjeldahl
Tom got along more than well with just about everybody, even me. Our tastes differed, as did our politics and, really, whole worldviews. I revered, and still do, his art; but he amiably shrugged off compliments. Our friendship could seem a sort of dance, amazingly pleasurable, through a minefield. Only once that I recall, at the tail end of a tired and emotional summer evening, was there a blowup; and it was over in what, 30 seconds? Less than a minute, capped by one of Tom’s wry little philosophical smiles that as much as said, “The way things are includes wishes that they were otherwise. But hey, we’re alive.” You don’t hear much these days about strength of character, but Tom had that, with kindness backed by confidence. As well, he was free and brave: a dissenting but platonic American. Maybe because I couldn’t make it to the funeral, he isn’t gone for me yet but as if withdrawn for a spell in the studio, actualizing surprises. I won’t say I “loved” him, because I love him still.

Richard Kalina
I, like many others, knew Tom Nozkowski for many years and liked him immensely. How could you not? He was good company, sure of himself but properly modest, low-keyed, generous, kind, smart, hardworking, and of course talented and endlessly inventive. He was also a very droll fellow and, in many ways, that was key to his art. Tom was bemused rather than ironic – intuitively aware of the inherent skew of the world, a master of mining the inherent, subtle, and inevitable discontinuities of form and intent that present themselves to those attuned to them.  As we know, he preferred to work on an intimate scale – the better I believe to inhabit his paintings rather than address them. His drollness enabled him to keep a quizzical distance from the visual pleasures that he was so adept at providing. He worked through a painting rather than at it, on the continual lookout for the animating and sudden loss of traction that sends a work of art skidding to a desired but completely unexpected place. Looking at a Thomas Nozkowski painting elicits an almost neural jolt of surprise and recognition, and I am sure that will be as true 50 years from now as it is today.

The post “He Was Free and Brave”: A Garland of Tributes for Thomas Nozkowski appeared first on artcritical.

Carolee Schneemann’s innovative and controversial artistic practice flowed for over fifty years, until her death in March. The performative elements of her big, bold oeuvre—kinetic theater—usually garner the lion’s share of critical attention: Meat Joy (1964) utilized minimally garbed women and men, red paint, and chicken carcasses.  Interior Scroll (1974) adhered to the title’s literal meaning, in which Schneemann—in front of an audience–retrieved a piece of paper from her vagina and then read it out loud. It was certainly easy to distort Carolee Schneemann’s intent. The public and critics both did their share of distorting. Doing so glosses over—perhaps intentionally–an intense, lifelong political commitment that inflected most of her art. There is also—not insubstantially–her insightful, articulate writing.

So much of her work was prophetic, in terms of gender issues, female sexuality, power imbalances, the brutality of the American political structure (“deformed hyper-masculinity”).  Viet-Flakes, her film that focused on American brutality in Vietnam, was undertaken in 1965, at the very dawn of the antiwar movement. That is extraordinary. Being prophetic, though, is a decidedly mixed blessing.

Her emergence as an art student in the 1960s coincided with the zeitgeist of protest and social change, undergirded by the “huge surround” of racial injustice. “de Beauvoir was a huge influence. And then reading Wilhelm Reich. And then all the radical, forbidden literature that was beginning to emerge around the Vietnam War—which we don’t have anymore; alternative journals, critics…”

Her work encompassed a broad spectrum of media: performance, film, photography, but Schneemann was—first, foremost, and always—a painter. “When I was really little—four and five years old—kids are always drawing, but I was drawing obsessively with the sense that this is what life meant. I had to make these images.” Her understanding of kinetic theater was that it was “an extension of Abstract Expressionism. It relates to painters going into real time and actual space, preceded by Oldenburg and Robert Whitman and Jim Dine and Red Grooms; those were the influences ahead of me, confirmed and solidified by Pollock.” For Schneemann, it was “extending the physicality into my own body of the painting.  Kinetic theater is this intensification of visual dynamics.”

This interview with Carolee Schneemann was undertaken at her home in New Paltz, New York in 2010. My collaborator, painter and photographer Lily Prince, was on hand to take photos. There were some moments of levity: Carolee’s confession, for example, that Everyone Loves Raymond was a secret vice. Her cat—as cats tend to do–constantly interrupted the proceedings.

She was born in 1939 into a thoroughly non-artistic household. The options for women in the 1950s were, to say the least, constrained. “I was supposed to conform to the conventions. I could go to typing school, get married, and have children. From early on, I was completely against that.” Virginia Woolf was one of the first hints that there existed an alternative universe of nonconformity. “Woolf was so important to me because I found her book in the back of a library van when I was at Putney [school]; I was probably fourteen. And I don’t know why I picked that book. I liked the cover and the double-O and Woolf looked interesting. And it was The Waves and I took it into the barn, started to read it, and I just wept for the next bunch of hours. Because I recognized this was a kind of fragmentation and reconnection and associative, metaphoric richness. And I knew I wanted this. I didn’t know how I could possibly do it. But as a painter I wanted it.”

The testosterone-driven art world, to say the least, did not offer much support either. “I identified the absence of what we call ‘models’ or ‘precedent’ as something that I had to vigorously try to counter.”

Her photographic Eye Body (1963) was the first time she inserted her body into her work, leading to a lifetime of critical distortion. “They mistook my body for the body of work,” effectively erasing the political import of her art. “I’m always astonished when the message is blurred or reaches a level of ambiguity that’s inappropriate. Or when the work is censored. The censorship is often implicit. Eye Body was censored because no one in the art world knew what to make of it. They thought it was narcissistic. Exhibitionism. And I thought it was a transformation of the traditional nude into a collage configuration in which I was both the image and the image-maker. I felt that that should have a political power that would deflect particularly the…mechanization of the female nude all through the sixties, where the body is turned into a form of machinery…. It’s kind of dead, it’s mechanical and it’s perfect as a surface would be for an automobile or a coffee maker. It’s so divested of a lived viscerality. I was very conscious of that and I was very conscious of the painterly traditions in which the nude was completely absorbed and contextualized into the history of male viewing.”

Fuses, a short film also made during the same period as Viet-Flakes, upped the ante.  Utilizing the techniques of collage and painting, the film chronicles Schneemann and then-partner Jim Tenney’s lovemaking. “There was no example or precedent for heterosexual pleasure that I had ever seen, and I wondered if I could discover aspects of it by filming my partner and myself. There was only pornography and woman as a kind of anomalous sexual problem. The transformation’s so incredible. You couldn’t say lubricity, orgasm, vagina, come, suck, cock unless you were doing pornography. So all the lived experience was deflected. And Fuses entered a contrary cultural moment where people weren’t sure whether it was pornography or transformative, ecstatic depiction and it was the men critics and the men historians who most valued it. Women were scared. They didn’t write about it. Still.

“Initially, in the sixties, [my work] was considered proto-pornography. Then it was essentialism. Then it did not conform to feminist principles… it evaded semiotics. It was not Marxist. Every couple years there was something new that was problematic.”

And the state of the union, 2010? “It’s complicated. Politically it feels as sinister as it could possibly be”—and with the advent of Donald Trump six years later, these words were sadly prescient–“with powers and structures embedded that are maintaining invisibility. It’s a masquerade. But in the meantime, feminist principles and sexual explicitness has so changed popular culture that it’s thrilling, it’s amazing. Gay culture, issues of the body—they’re really in discussion. And to some extent they’ve been vitiated by younger people, because they don’t feel that there is any resistance or still a battle surrounding their own aspects of self-definition and freedom.

“The degree of control and systemization… it’s quite terrifying. And it’s also because culture is mass—everything is mass. There’s no sense of a sustainable community. As soon as there is one, it’s invaded by investors or real estate… so some self-determination is endangered.”

The interview ended on—if not an overtly optimistic note—at least a hopeful one. She displayed a level of personal equanimity that belied her decades-long struggle to overcome the cascade of opprobrium that seemed to emanate from every faction. “Art definitely changes the world. Absolutely. You just consider John Lennon and the song ‘Imagine’ and the power that that has.

“And in the way aesthetics can influence or bewilder or provoke.” And there was no greater example of this than the legacy of Carolee Schneemann. She no doubt bewildered. She certainly provoked. And—to say the least—she influenced.

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Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 at the Haus der Kunst, Munich

October 14, 2016 to March 26, 2017

It has been clear for some time now that received accounts of art in the decades following World War II are deeply unsatisfying. It is no longer plausible to speak of “the triumph of American painting”. Equally unwilling to accept October magazine’s ultimately conservative retelling of that story, however, we need a radical revisionist history of this period. Entering the first gallery of Haus der Kunst, which is also the first of eight “chapters” telling this story, titled “Aftermath: Zero Hour and the Atomic Age,” you face the mammoth Joseph Beuys installation, Monuments to the Stag (1958/82). Other works you see include two of Morris Louis’s early political paintings, of which Charred Journal, Firewritten II (1951),is one; Frank Stella’s black-striped Arbeit Macht Frei (1958); Barnett Newman’s The Beginning (1946); Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous Vibration (1951), by Norman Lewis; and Gerhard Richter’s Coffin Bearers (1962). Form Matters,” the next chapter, includes major pieces by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and a large Lee Krasner picture along with a gargantuan abstract painting by Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid, a Turkish artist who worked in Jordan; John Latham’s Untitled (Roller Painting) (1964), which uses a spray painted cloth, hung horizontally to mark the passage of time; and three black, densely gridded paintings by Rasheed Araeen, the Pakistani painter who lives in London. The fourteen high-walled galleries all mix art by well-known figures with strong works by lesser-known artists. Thus “New Images of Man,” for example, included Picasso’s Massacre in Korea (1951), and sculptures by Giacometti alongside artists who will be discoveries for many westerners, —such as Maqbool Fida Husain, who uses layers of paint to surround his figure in Man (1951) and Alina Szapocznikow, whose Head VII (1961) is a heavily slashed cast lead sculpture. And “Realisms,” which takes you upstairs, includes Vasiliy Jakovlev’s over the top Portrait of Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union (1946) as well as Chinese and Egyptian social realist paintings; an Alice Neal portrait; and Andrew Wyeth’s Young America (1950).

Curated by Okwui Enwezor (director of the Kunsthalle), Katy Siegel and Ulrich Wilmes, “Postwar” shows artists responding, whether in figurative or abstract works, to subjects as diverse as the beginning of the end of European colonization, the postwar reconstruction of ruined Western Europe, the Holocaust and the American atomic bombings of Japan, the coming to power of communism in China, the birth of a consumer economy in Western Europe, the American Civil Rights demonstrations and the start of US intervention in Vietnam, the cold war rivalry of the USSR and the USA, the history of South America, and the development of cybernetics and novel information processing technologies. All this in a building so fraught with history: formerly The House of German Art, it was opened by Hitler in 1937 as a showcase of Nazi culture. The catalogue states, incidentally, that the exhibition is coming to the Brooklyn Museum, but alas that is not to be.

Sometimes the artists respond simply by virtue of the sheer scale of their art. This would be the case for Lee Ufan’s Pushed-Up Ink (1964), Lygia Clark’s Obra mole (1964) and Alfonso Ossorio’s mixed-media panel Rescue (1951). At other times, however, they present these subjects through the iconographical content of their pictures: Ibrahim El Salahi’s Self-Portrait of Suffering (1961), a harrowing portrait of stress, Ben Enwonwu’s Anyanwu (1954-55), an elegant elongated figure based upon traditional Nigerian sculpture, John Biggers’ The History of Negro Education in Morris County, Texas (1955) and Boris Taslitzky’s astonishing Riposte (1951), which depicts the violent breakup by the French police of a 1949 dockworkers’ strike against arms shipments for the colonial war in Indochina. But sometimes, the artists employ a synthesis of subject and its form. In a section titled “Concrete Visions” Gyula Kosice’s Variation in Blue (1945), a shaped canvas meant to inspire utopian reflection, or Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961) are good examples. And there are examples of a synthesis of formal and inconographical approach in works such as Jasper Johns’ Flags (1965), Yosef Zaritsky’s Yehiam (Life on the Kibbutz) (1951), a painting honoring that agricultural utopia, and Ben Enwonwu’s narrative painting, Going (1961) which shows Nigerians celebrating national independence.

Displaying well-known artists alongside lesser-known figures could easily become a pious exercise in political correctness. And dealing with so many, very varied subjects, using artworks, most of them large, by 208 artists, could generate visual cacophony. The show might easily have been a disaster. In fact, however, this oddly harmonious visual feast was, in the three days I visited it and looked closely, entirely visually convincing.In part, this was because you saw how artists from visual cultures everywhere responded to the traumatic events. But it is also because the skillful installation frequently identifies suggestive visual correspondences. Sometimes the catalogue drives a group show of this nature. But although a massive catalogue, with essays by thirty-seven scholars, accompanies “Postwar,” it is the visual evidence that inspires conviction. This powerful exhibition changes permanently your sense of the history of postwar art. It demonstrates that it is now possible to present a world art history in which the American Abstract Expressionists and their immediate successors are legitimately set alongside their peers from not only Europe, but also Africa, Asia and South America. And it shows the power of a social history of art. If “the truth is the whole”, as Hegel famously proposed, then what follows is that in a world where artists from everywhere are in contact, as was the case between 1945 and 1965, no merely partial presentation of art can be entirely satisfying. And sometimes, as “Postwar” shows, more is more.

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Dawn Clements, who died on December 4th at the age of 60 after a two-year battle with cancer, left behind a magnificent body of work, and alas, ambitious plans that will never be realized. She was as single-minded about drawing as any artist has ever been, and as open minded. A small sumi ink rendering of a wingback chair begun during a residency at Middlebury College grew, by added sheets of paper, into an immense panorama thirty-seven feet long, the size needed to portray her entire surroundings at the same intimate level of detail. In one way or another, she was always drawing her world, from the optical scatter of diamonds to the blunt signage of paper laundry tickets. (Clements liked to point out that jewels and scraps of printed matter had equal value as drawings.) She came to embrace a self-sufficient tautology which all artists understand in their own way, but few with such clarity of purpose. As she put it in a 2007 interview with her gallerist Susan Swenson: “Where I live is my studio and the subject of my work is where I live.”

One day she took a small black and white television into the studio in order not to miss a Douglas Sirk melodrama. She was struck by bits of dialogue and jotted them down on a convenient surface. “All of a sudden,” as she said in the same interview, “the still life seemed to become animated.” It was the beginning of marking her drawings with the wordage of passing time –– thoughts, lists, things overheard, things read. It was also the opening of a window in her studio, a small black and white one, onto fictional dimensions, perpendicular axes awaiting exploration. Soon she was not only writing down dialogue but drawing directly from her television.

Clements studied the semiotics of film as an undergraduate, and she had a sophisticated critical appreciation of the medium, but it was soap operas and weepy “women’s films” that came to occupy her as an artist, culminating in major works such as Travels with Myra Hudson (2004; Saatchi Collection), and Mrs. Jessica Drummond’s (‘My Reputation,’ 1946) (2010). The first is a meditation on a Joan Crawford vehicle with noir overtones, and the second derives from a Barbara Stanwyck society drama as polished as a toaster. Both feature strong, independent women looking for love but trapped in their blandly tasteful décor, their gilded cages. It was these Hollywood studio interiors that intrigued Clements more than the narratives, per se, or the films’ inscrutable, photogenic stars. In her own “studio” she forensically reverse-engineered the sets with as much clarity as she could, via flickering low-resolution video frames, and having to guess at background details that might be in shadow or out of focus. Pausing the playback, Clements found frames where ashtrays and bedspreads, wallpaper and perfume bottles emerged from behind the actors, or were revealed by a new camera angle (often noting the video timecode and dialogue on the drawings). The erasure, for the most part, of the actors as the space they left behind was liquidly unfolded and deciphered, induced a psychologically potent side effect. Their absence allows the viewer to enter archetypal precincts, where scenarios of love, loss and heroic sacrifice are enacted forever.

In Myra Hudson, Clements made her most explicit mapping of film, by representing  — right to left — a fateful train journey from New York to San Francisco. A view out one compartment window shows the plains in daylight, while the next window jumps ahead to a reflection of the train interior at night. The panorama passes  through ambiguous outlines in dreamy blank spaces to lead us smoothly into Myra’s San Francisco mansion, up an ominous staircase, and into the heroine’s study, where cruelly ironic scenes will unfold. This is as close to storyboarding the spacetime of film as Clements got. On the whole, she expanded her film panoramas purely by spatial contiguity –– Jessica Drummond’s bedroom being attached to her bathroom, and so on –– just as she did with drawings of her immediate surroundings, one piece of paper folding under, a new one gluing on until the drawing came to rest. When it would be fully opened for the first time, the joints and folds in the paper would remain prominent.

The TV in Clements’s studio was her portal from domestic still life into ancient mythopoeic saga, which is fair enough, since such stories are a part of life, and always have been –– as real as a turnip on a kitchen table. One comes to realize that reality and fiction flip everywhere in Clements work. Her drawings of film spaces are also, of course, analytic renderings of actual sets and props. As for the artist’s encyclopedic drawings of her immediate surroundings, they trade on the traditional fictions of still life in the way that disjunctive local spaces and times are fused under a continuous skin of illusion. Kitchen and Bathroom, for example (2004; collection Whitney Museum of American Art), is a monumental chronicle in sumi ink of her Brooklyn railroad apartment at gritty, Ivan-Albright resolution. It is a flash-lit snapshot that surely took months. The drawing’s fantastic continuum of cramp and clutter serves as a kind of doppelganger to the palatial bedrooms of Jessica Drummond or Myra Hudson. And from a certain point of view, Kitchen and Bathroom is no less cinematic –– one can easily imagine the drawing as a panning background for cel animation, with characters jumping from chair to stove to bathtub as the camera tracks along.

Clements’s panoramic formats, often wrapping around the walls of exhibitions, would have been enough to merit video-chronicler James Kalm’s description of her work as “expanded drawing.” Kalm, however, was also calling attention to the great variety of formats that Clements embarked on a without missing a beat, from vertical “tiltoramas” (as she called them), which travel from her foot to the ceiling and down the other wall; to a Dürer-like study of a single patch of weedy lawn, drawn every day for a month; to a multi-year collaboration with sculptor Marc Leuthold in which she drew a grouping of his sculptures that had been closely modeled, in turn, on her drawings. In every case, she was just drawing what she saw.

Yet it was still life drawings–– very much in the tradition of that genre, for all their irregularly-shaped, rumpled, and annotated eccentricities–– that increasingly came to occupy Clements in the last years of her life. These watercolor masterpieces feature over-life-size fruit, vegetables, and bunches of flowers, maximal challenges for the artists’ ever-sharpening ability to see and describe. With the introduction of color around 2005 –– returning to her roots in painting, though not without misgivings –– Clements had expanded again. Using careful layers of translucent watercolor, she could now capture the waxy glistening of apples, melons and plums. She could enumerate the chromatic foldings of tulips, peonies, hyacinths and chrysanthemums, and solve the crinklings of their green leaves, the knobby fibers of their intertwining stalks, and their reflections and refractions through curved glass vases full of water.

As with Van Gogh’s sunflowers and irises, Clements’s floral still lifes are demonstrations of an ardent kind of mastery that conventional skill can’t touch. Leo Steinberg, in his 1953 essay The Eye is a part of the Mind, was reminding an avant-garde that had little use for representation about the ways in which fresh looking could fire neurons. Taking the exuberant early Renaissance anatomies of Pollaiolo as an example, Steinberg wrote: “Like all works connected with discoveries of representation, his pictures lack the sweet ease of accomplishment. His images are ever aborning, swelling into space and taking life, like frozen fingers tingling as they warm. It is not facts they purvey; it is the thrill and wonder of cognition.” If both Clements’s and Van Gogh’s flower paintings rise miles above easy sentiments normally attaching to the subject, it’s because one thrills and wonders along with the artists in their rapture of discovery.

Many of Clements’s last works, with and without flowers, also depict the colorful packaging of cancer medications. Just another laundry ticket, as it were. And just another vanitas –– one warning among many about the bittersweetness of passing time. Vanitas, indeed, was in her method. In Peonies (2014), a supremely gorgeous work, Clements replaced, as she often did, an area of the drawing with a fresh piece of paper. In the process, she sliced off the side of a lush red blossom (probably what had displeased her). When she resumed the drawing, apparently the blossom had wilted, falling forward a bit, and there she drew it, leaving the hard edge of the blossom’s previous incarnation behind, embedded in the daily fabric of her practice. This memento mori is echoed in the lower right by the ripe young face of thirties star Sylvia Sidney –– a drawing of a drawing, it seems, which was pinned to the studio wall behind the flowers. Clements told Eve Aschheim in a 2007 interview in the Brooklyn Rail that she was planning to bring figures back into the work, and in Peonies she left us with a transfixing hint about where things might have gone.

In writing this tribute to Dawn’s work, I watched a few of the melodramas lyrically transfigured in her drawings. One thing that struck me in the films was the consummate tact of dialogue and behavior, even during emotional eruptions. Perhaps social relations really were more formal, more beautiful then. John Yau, with exactitude, described the works in Dawn’s final show at Pierogi as “love letters to the world.” (The full review on Hyperallergic is mandatory reading.) Yes, love letters, and –– I hope I may add –– disciplined and gracious ones, as if written by the radiant heroines in the films she loved.

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