Sharmistha Ray, Barry Schwabsky and Marjorie Welish discuss Dorothea Rockburne: Giotto’s Angels & Knots at David Nolan Gallery, 24 East 81st Street, Fourth Floor (on view through December 23)

David Brody, Lilly Wei and Alexi Worth discuss Intersections: Ron Baron and Sarah Walker at John Molloy Gallery, 49 East 78th Street, Suite 2B (on view through December 18)

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179 Grand Street, (ground floor) between Bedford and Driggs, Brooklyn. Appointments: Jane Fine at 646-250-4908 or janemfine@gmail.com

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179 Grand Street, (ground floor) between Bedford and Driggs, Brooklyn. Appointments: Jane Fine at 646-250-4908 or janemfine@gmail.com

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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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Justen Ladda, an artist who has lived and worked on the Lower East Side since the late 1970s, has spent endless hours for ten years maintaining a remarkable public garden he helped create (with several New York City agencies) on the Allen Street Mall just south of Delancey Street. Every day Ladda picks up bags of trash and cigarette butts from around a magnificent collection of scholar’s rocks he chose and imported from China, each a world unto itself. He plants bulbs, seedlings and rescued bushes; he waters, weeds and trims; he gently admonishes dog owners and converses with whoever wishes to do so; and he notes with meticulous triumph each new blossom and twig. Ladda designed the park deliberately without fences. Nothing shields the delicate plantings and fresh earth from lanes of heavy traffic and whirring bikes on either side, or from predictable desecrations along the pedestrian path – more of a cul-de-sac – that bisects it. Without Ladda’s unpaid, unrecognized efforts, the place would revert to a wasteland. For now, gentrification in these parts coexists with the homeless population it displaces (gentrification complete with ghetto-chic, a cynic might say), so it is often the down and out that frequent the park’s benches. But Ladda’s labor of love includes his own forms of outreach, pragmatism, and forbearance. Together with his gardening it is enough to nurture a zone of calm and contemplation despite civic neglect, smack in an emblematically dense zone of urban stress.

I spoke with Ladda in early May at the park, as leaves and flowers were emerging, and later in his top-floor loft on Stanton Street –– which until recently was without insulation and unheated (Ladda was once featured in a New York Times article about hardy souls who thrive heatless in winter). I asked him about the relationship between the park and his art practice, which includes exquisitely refined sculpture and painting as well as a series of dazzling, tromp-l’œil installations which, viewed at certain angles, create precisely calibrated sculptural hallucinations (notably Art, Fashion & Religion, his 1986 tour-de-force in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art).

As with an installation, Ladda reminds me, “a garden is a curated space. It creates a certain impression; it does something to people.” But different sculptural modes require different kinds of mastery. “In the studio I’m a total control freak. With an artwork you have a vision, but a garden is ongoing. It’s never done. I am always looking for texture and color, just as with painting. I try to achieve a color balance in different seasons. These nasturtiums, I started them as seedlings and determined where to plant them, but then you just let them go where they want. It will make its own image.”

Ladda’s current studio work involves the painstaking application of more than a hundred layers of photosensitive pigment onto prominently grained wood supports, resulting in patterns of mysterious color that can suggest, as Ken Johnson remarked in a review of an 2010 exhibition in Bushwick, “mountains in Chinese landscapes or leaping flames.” Ladda also creates photo-negatives of uncanny personages –– amalgams of human and animal, portraiture and computer morphing –– which he contact prints in layers of silvery sfumato onto wood grain that the artist describes as “serene.” These almost pure horizontal patterns make the images all the more spectral, like old television transmissions from a spirit world. The time element of this studio work is substantial.

That of gardening, however, is on another scale. “Gardening is an old man’s game,” Ladda says wryly. “Time goes by so much faster now –– it feels like it’s Thanksgiving every three months. If you’re young and you plant something you get very impatient. When time goes faster you can literally watch the grass grow.” Being in touch with larger cycles of time explains, in part, Ladda’s obsession with clearing the ground of every scrap. “I like to be in the soil, in the earth. I know I’m going to go there one day.” Visitors to the park, cheek by jowl with rank exhaust fumes, may not think about the improbable luxury of the loamy freshness at their feet, but the sensation is ineffable –– equally life-affirming and a gentle reminder of mortality.

In contrast with the evolving, seasonal plantings, the scholar’s rocks stand as unchanging sentinels fixed in geological time. “I look on them as an early form of abstraction,” says Ladda. Scholar’s rocks resonated with the artist on first encounter in 1995, in an exhibition of the collection assembled by the brilliant contrarian Robert Rosenblum at the China Institute. “My art education in Germany was basically Bauhaus and Mid-20th century abstraction. I think ‘50s sculpture is the same way of seeing as the scholar’s rocks, that’s why I’m so fascinated by them. The Chinese started looking at abstraction around the year 1000, long before artists in the West. They called scholar’s rocks the bones of the earth, and they used them as inspiration for landscape paintings as early as the Southern Song Dynasty.”

Southern Song “academy” painting had reached an apex of poetic realism equal to anything in the European Renaissance –– but centuries earlier –– after which it was largely superseded by “literati” or scholar-amateur painting, in which the brushstroke itself came to be valued above the artful decipherment of natural phenomena. Scholar’s rocks were consulted by both the realists –– i.e., as bones of the earth –– and by the literati, as calligraphic abstractions. Interest in rocks reached a peak in the Ming Dynasty, exemplified in the 1610 scroll, Ten Views of a Lingbi Stone by the eccentric Wu Bin (currently on exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) that maps a famous specimen from multiple angles with a fanatical, jutting plasticity that is neither realistic nor abstract. There is, evidently, a great deal to unpack in those rocks.

The placement of scholar’s rocks at this site, with their ancient premonition of New York School abstraction, can be seen in dialogue with the upcoming opening of the Pat Passlof and Milton Resnick Foundation in the reclaimed synagogue that Resnick painted in for decades on Eldridge Street. Passlof, who had her own synagogue nearby, practiced tai chi daily alongside Chinese residents in local parks into her eighties –– and of course it is the longstanding Chinese community in the area that the scholar’s rocks primarily address. “I think of the rocks as immigrants, because they come from China,” explains Ladda (himself an immigrant, from Germany). “There was a wonderful Chinese antique shop on Allen Street run by Mr. Wong. He had a hundred or so photographs of rocks sent from China from which I chose these. Each stone has its own character –– it has a habit and a posture.” One low, twisting rock resembles a dragon. A mountainous standing rock with scalloped fins and eroded perforations transforms into a flickering flame as you walk past, with the somewhat dreary cityscape providing a perfect foil.

Ladda is under no quixotic illusions about the civic effects of his unpaid artistic labors. “You learn a lot about people when you are here every day: how little people see, how few people really appreciate this park for what it is. I would say maybe 5%, 3%. Most people are on their cellphone. It doesn’t matter to me. But the people who appreciate parks will find delight in it. It’s a gift, yes, but also a gift to myself. Because how else can I have a garden in the city?”

He gleefully recounts how he finds rose bushes in the excess piles of other parks to plant along the bike paths, which were added after the park was built and which radically altered its situation. His eyes light up as he explains that—someday—bike riders will be engulfed in twin tunnels of roses. A tunnel of roses on the Lower East Side? If that miracle comes to pass, it will be due entirely to Ladda’s unceasing custody. “It’s a labor of love,” he explains. “But, you see, a labor of love is not really a labor at all.”

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At his opening, I told Thomas Nozkowski that his latest show at Pace Gallery — almost entirely the work of the last year or two despite its amplitude, with densely hung drawings and paintings of different sizes — had the feel less of a commercial gallery show of new work, and more of a kind of scholarly museum exhibition. His jocular response was something along the lines that if institutions aren’t doing it he needed to himself. This seems a good starting point for a discussion about an abstract painter who breathes new life into that most hackneyed and over-used of phrases, the painter’s painter. Why does his phenomenal following among artists barely register with museums, or make much of a dent in the pocketbooks of collectors even? But I’m imposing already with such a leading question. Let me back up and ask my distinguished guests — artists, curators, critics — the same question more circumspectly: what is Nozkowski’s status, and does that status in your opinion do him justice? How do you view this current show: does a close-knit, almost narrative hang serve the work best? What, in your opinion, is the relationship of painting to drawing in his oeuvre? Where does Nozkowski come from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, in terms of influence and impact upon painting culture?

I asked my participants to choose an image from the show they would like reproduced with their submissions. For the record, Marjorie Welish declined to do so, explaining that “I’d truly prefer not to choose one above the rest but instead allow other respondents’ choices to represent the body of works, so that readers are challenged to engage the ideas across the show as a whole.” Alexander Ross chose as his image the installation shot above.  DAVID COHEN

JOSEPH MASHECK: What a beautiful show just to “regard”: it almost seems like self-indulgence to write about it. It was awfully nice of Tom to mention me at his Rob Storr-moderated conversation (with artist James Siena, April 10) because I have to say that it ticks me off when somebody thinks your writing was actually too early for the stage-management of the career. The dealer of the English painter Jeremy Moon [1934-1973] was once doing an exhibit in a vitrine of Moon’s press cuttings but didn’t really want my Studio International article of 1969 because the prematurely dead artist is only now to be rediscovered! Anyway, it’s a matter of disclosure to say that I published on Nozkowski in 1981, 1985, 1988, and 2008, and curated a show at Nature Morte in 1983.

I like the question of this artist’s ambiguity of status: whether we want to elect him a master and kowtow or whether we want him to be like a nice accessible democratic personality in the way John Dewey might have liked, when America aspired to be a leader of democracy (but now that there’s only one game in town …) — which he is. For example: I have a constitutional distaste for “sublimity” as a term of approbation; and confess, by way of illustration, that Serra’s late way of hitting me over the head is distasteful (no wonder “the suits” like it). I think this is a way of saying that, though I would never be prescriptive about scale, the fairly small size of most Nozkowskis is fine with me. In fact, this show — which is better than the last because the drawings don’t seem to be so didactically related to the paintings, as before and after — positively gains by having the drawings be smaller still than the otherwise normal-sized paintings.

As soon as I got acquainted with it, the show made me conscious that I have always had an, I think, interesting problem in my head when it comes to Nozkowski’s sense of “variety,” even though that is also part of a distinct personal style: that is, how like Klee he is in this. I mean, only insofar as we are considering the shape of the overall oeuvre, because Tom isn’t really an expressionist — he is too concerned with what effect the next mark will have on what’s already there. But then again, don’t we all put the Klee slides (if you still have any!) apart until the end of our planned lecture on expressionism, because they have a similar quality? I don’t want to overemphasize this because I don’t want style to be the key thing, but there is a connective strand, I think: (a) a chamber-music scale that is most clearly like one person’s addressing another, or a few (John Russell once said that Schubert would not have understood the idea of a concert in a “hall full of fee-paying strangers”); and (b) a funny way of admitting constructive ideas if they can be sort of “melted” into the DIY orthodox-expressionist mix.

I didn’t mean to use up three paragraphs in generalities, because always I love the “object” of painting, especially when it’s as good as we have here.

DAVID BRODY: I’m going to reach a little here and say, about Tom Nozkowski’s consistently excellent body of work, that there’s something distinctively American about it: the matter-of-factness, the nakedness of the process, the humble sources of ecstatic revelation — I’m thinking of the lineage of Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield and Mitlon Avery, and also more broadly of Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Agnes Martin, Agnes Pelton and Al Held. All these visionary modernists share a quasi-religious drive for simplicity, which seeks the small in the large and the large in the small. What makes them especially American is their skepticism about systems of belief, their rejection of received rules, their yeoman/DIY empiricism, and the courage to entertain naïveté.

Nozkowski embodies this tradition for me in abstract paintings that are far too smart to get caught up in nostalgia about any of that. If he lets “nature” into the work, it’s just another sign along a country road crowded with billboards. Or the billboards might be crumbling relics, their diagrams and ideology overtaken by kudzu. On top of this caricatural grip on semiology, in which all signs are equal, Nozkowski’s practice lays on a second nostalgia-proof coating: an anti-masterpiece stance — beginning in a ‘60s ideological context, as he has explained, of modest paintings suitable for his friends’ tenement apartments and continuing with a scorn for laboriousness, in favor of daily production. Add to that the way he interbreeds motifs and techniques from work to work, and from year to year almost serialistically — painterly abstraction absorbing the spirit, while expunging the letter, of Sol Lewitt.

The sheer profusion of Nozkowski’s enormous output of paintings, drawings, and prints (the prints should ideally be shown alongside!) can even put one in mind of the neutrality of Richard Tuttle or John Baldessari: one thing next to another. The distance between the good, the bad, and the ugly of Nozkowski is a hair’s breadth — ironically, as a result of his nearly perfect pitch and his superb craftsmanship, but also by the design of his disdain for the great, the anxious, the impossible work.

Sometimes this bothers me. Does one ever NOT like a Nozkowski? Is his color ever less than completely digestible? (All painters should have this problem.) Take two of my least favorite paintings in the show, Untitled (9-32) and Untitled (L-38). The first is a little too delightfully Mattissian, and the second feels like bubble gum that Nozkowski could chew in his sleep. They are both still really beautiful and interesting paintings. They might be the best in the show, just for the way they irritate me. The painting I’d pick as my favorite, though, is Untitled (L-37) which seems to combine Turner, Klee and Burchfield — talk about nostalgia. How did we get here?

When I think about Nozkowski’s long employment at Mad Magazine, and the crucial disruption of generations of young minds accomplished by that lonely bastion of unhinged cartooning — it’s as if the universe, out of curiosity, placed a perfectly equipped painter-philosopher at ground zero of a cultural explosion. Did “being a spy in the house of Mad,” as I asked in my artcritical review of Nozkowski’s 2010 show at Pace, allow him to resist the widespread awe of cartoonists, “as cultural magicians rather than versatile deadline professionals?” Did his workaday knowledge inoculate Nozkowski from the cascading effects of Zap Comix and of Philip Guston’s return to his own cartoon sources, after which the dam of imagistic American painterliness had burst? Similarly, perhaps, Burchfield’s day job as a wallpaper designer made him, if anything, cannily resistant to the seductions of pure patterned abstraction, favored by Theosophically inclined modernists since Mondrian.

ALEXANDER ROSS: Here we are once again engaging with words to further grasp something about what an artist has already shown us directly. There are at least two kinds of knowing; the naming, hashing verbal kind, and the picturing way. So, using the former method I will champion the latter! Nozkowski is an excellent example of the visually intuitive, brain-training kind of artist. By that I mean if you do something over and over again for many decades, even if what you do is leaping this way and that with full faith in intuitive moves and a responsive eye to visual inventiveness, you will establish your own beautifully stubborn neuronal pathways that will lead, perforce, to more of the same. In his case, it is often remarked that there seems to be no end of novelty in his works, and yet they somehow always look like Nozkowskis. And here’s why: there is a naturally occurring restraint located at the edge of what Noskowski would never think of doing, but within which Nozkowski has endless freedom of invention. These paintings and drawings are boundary markers of his uniquely habitual brain ruts. The man simply has the healthy habit of trying to break habits that he will in a larger way always be bound to, and we enjoy his tireless attempts, yet unconsciously sense his natural limits. His awesome contribution is to have achieved a distinguished visual persona solely via the trust placed in the brain’s natural tendency to show itself pictorially when given the means. It is that unashamed directness of showing that gives his works such inherent high quality, and it’s the high quality of the works that, like a least-expected miracle, make a sudden parting of the (mostly) dreadful contemporary art waters and allow for the firm establishment of island Nozkowski. Anachronistic work? Yes, perhaps, in the grand sweep of the buzzing “now”, but no less than other great, out-of-synch actors like Bonnard or Balthus. Strong and solid things do tend to last, I’ve noticed.

MARJORIE WELISH: The informality of the display is the perfect rhetorical complement to certain aspects of Nozkowski’s signature style: not scholarly because more intuitively grouped than would be desired in an explanatory retrospective led through an argument of some kind, this hang found a way to make a commercial gallery into a studio with a sense of process fresh on the walls.

Process here, however, enters in the sense of image always uppermost in Tom’s work for as long as I have known it. If anything, the painterliness of his early images is much less here as than in recent shows: much less impasto and pigmental wet-in-wet stuff on the canvas and rather more in evidence is the drawing — that is to say, design, and with design, a willful undermining or exaggerating error or swagger. The concetto puts good design on notice. Meanwhile, the layering of ground and relation of figure to ground is consistently contrastive, however apparently diverse appear the devices and the color. One of Tom’s strengths has always been that he does indeed understand the nature of an image to be, not an object seen in actuality, but a metamorphosis. He understands that only insofar as metamorphosis of the data has occurred does an image come about.

So knowing something of his generation is quite informative since this knowledge supplies something of an answer concerning Nozkowski’s culture and style. Joseph Masheck really should say something about that, given that as Editor-in-Chief he was instrumental in selecting Tom’s art for the pages of Artforum yet also in selecting some others who are still even now quite compatible stylistically.

As against the art constructs of Minimal or even Postminimal kinds, and certainly as a defense against Conceptual procedures, some artists adhered to a vernacular rendering, at times focusing on image driven through a folkloric or outsider stance, primitivist in nature. Decidedly not bijou, Nozkowski’s canvases early on expressed — can one say espoused? — this sensibility. In any event, this characterization provides some sense of orientation to his personal style and culture.

Other narratives of our contemporary moment would persuade us that art is not personal but impersonal, insofar as aesthetic ideology and/or an ahistorical thesis necessitates art’s coming into being. Further discussion could engage this argument.

JENNIFER RILEY: I have a large capacity for viewing and taking in works made by others, but this show was too big in a great way. I often visit shows I like sometimes two, three, four times, but seldom simply to finish seeing the whole show, as was the case here.

The story of Tom being an insider’s artist who slowly became visible is so well known that the notion of his ambiguous status worries me. I believe its a matter of minutes not decades before we will see or learn of major museum retrospectives. Tom simply occupies a sizable plot in the hearts and minds of the city’s artistic cognoscenti. Everyone wins when the good guy wins.

Tom is highly regarded by many artists because his work sits outside of fashion trends but always feels smart and of the moment. He is a studio worker who sustains a practice that clearly engages and activates his own imagination at full tilt.

I love the inclusion of both types of drawings in this exhibit, suggesting a nonhierarchical regard towards the artist’s output. I find it extremely satisfying to see drawings that inform paintings and vice versa. This offers opportunity to consider an image-group and discover the alternate attitudes of the various approaches.

I’d wager that few of us enjoy reading wall texts and looking at inkjet printouts on a wall yet thankfully from time to time we have an intensely rich, delightfully overhung, complicated show of a fierce and independently-minded individual who happens to be a master colorist, humorist and aesthete all in one.

To consider the question of where Nozkowski comes from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, I immediately go to the beginning of Modern art: Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Leger, Braque, Villon, Klee, Mondrian and on over to America to artists still current and working when Tom was coming up, such as Albert Stadler, Walter Darby Bannard, Paul Feeley but also Nicholas Krushenick among many others. I am not sure of those influences- that is to say, whether or not they were his influences — but I make my own connections and nothing would surprise me more than to find out from Tom who he’s looking at or thinking about now. Recently it was Watteau!

He knows painting culture and art history, and he knows how to engage with it fruitfully. And then there are the comic books, cartoons, Mad Magazine, and graphic design. The variety of imagery that Tom presents only seems rarer today because there has been a narrowing influence — either from the academies (the professionalism of art) or from the marketplace (the speculation on art and artists careers) or both — in gallery exhibitions.

My concern is more for young artists entering the field who have not had time to deepen their initial projects and yet are vacuumed up into the machinery of art. I see a return to very handmade things in some groups of younger artists but I also hear and see a disconnect due to recent decades of de-skilling. Several younger artists have turned away from using technology altogether in their practices and have begun to teach themselves how to draw, paint and sculpt. I find this to be a good thing. Those who work with their hands, not machines or who do not rely on the labor of others to make their work, who don’t care to merely illustrate ideas or curator’s objectives may find Nozkowski to be a perfect role model. Tom’s work however is so much his own that I put him in a category with Cézanne: it is a branch few can walk out on.

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN: Yes, Thomas Nozkowski should be getting serious attention from U.S. museums, and should have gotten it long ago, as should many other New York abstract painters of his generation. I suspect that most of them have all but given up on the hope of full-scale retrospectives (at least in their hometown) and probably would echo Nozkowski’s DIY sentiment. Alas, they are probably right. Despite the market’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for painting (especially, of late, for abstract modes), and despite the expansion of museums in number and size, there has been almost no interest in examining the recent history of New York painting. The only two exceptions that come to mind are “High Times Hard Times,” Katy Siegel’s 2006 exhibition at the National Academy, and my own “Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s,” at Cheim and Read in 2013, which included a work by Nozkowski. Significantly, neither of these historically-themed shows happened in the mainstream museum world.

Putting aside for the moment the question of why Nozkowski and others have been subject to official neglect, let’s turn to the show at hand. The quantity, and the quality of this quantity and, perhaps most importantly, its diversity, come across as a major statement, which is rather surprising for this artist who, as our compère rightly notes, seems to fit nicely into the category of the “painter’s painter.” One of the requirements for being a “painter’s painter” is reticence, developing a style that seems, at least superficially, modest, declining all bombast, and any hint of wanting to make a big art-historical statement. It also helps to paint small. Nozkowski has met these superficial requirements, working at a consistently small scale (which has grown in nearly imperceptible increments over the decades), issuing no explicit challenges in technique or content to the legacy of modernist abstraction, exhibiting no hunger for iconoclasm or transgression. Of course, if one looks at the work more closely, there are all kinds of innovations and transgressions in Nozkowski’s work but they are always subtle and never announce themselves as such.

Nozkowski’s avoidance of high drama can lead viewers to discount his work. I have to confess that, for many years, this was my attitude. I never doubted that he was a “good” painter, one whose paint-handling and ability to create spatially complex compositions were impressive, but I mistakenly equated the small scale and the absence of attitude with lack of art-historical ambition; I was also confused by his unprogrammatic diversity, his sheer self-permissiveness. I believed (again, mistakenly) that an important contemporary painter was one who grappled with difficult contemporary themes, set out to demolish some cherished aspect of the medium, engaged in some Oepidal struggle or otherwise emulated historic avant-gardes.

Eventually, I saw the error of my ways and became, like nearly every artist I know in New York, a Nozkowski fan. As for the scale of his ambition—the current show is dizzyingly audacious. Each painting or work on paper in it could plausibly be the foundation of another artist’s entire career. Every few steps one discovers that the artist has yet again shattered the components of his art and reassembled them in an entirely new configuration. A dark ground gridded with pinhole points of jewel-like colors might give way to a neo-Cubist design of pastel hues and black lines while nearby Matisse’s Blue Nudes join a troupe of daredevil acrobats. Every few steps the kaleidoscope shakes and turns and there’s a new tangle of bifurcating rhizomes, Byzantine mosaics rearranged by some mescaline logic, gossamer textiles, baroque doodles, coral reefs, fractal enlay, star maps, fractured puzzles, Suprematist patches, flowering ornaments of every possible variety. If this show can be said to be about any one thing, it’s the necessity of growth. This has been a long winter, but now, the artist is reminding us, it’s the turn of spring.

cover image, 2018: Thomas Nozkowski, “Untitled (7-10),” 1992. Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Pace Gallery

CONTRIBUTORS

Joseph Masheck, editor in chief of Artforum from 1977-80 and longstanding contributing editor of Art in America, is the author, most recently, of Texts on (Texts on) Art, 2011. David Brody is a painter and filmmaker who exhibits at Pierogi Gallery as well as a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Alexander Ross is an internationally-exhibited painter who shows at David Nolan Gallery, New York. Marjorie Welish, a poet, painter and art critic, is the author of Signifying Art: Essays on Art After 1960 (1999), among other works. Jennifer Riley is a painter and writer and a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein teaches critical studies at the University of Houston. His numerous publications include, recently, The Miraculous (2014) and a monograph on Shirley Jaffe (2015).

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Pictured here: James Hyde, The Spot, 2015. Acrylic on archival inkjet print on board, 6.5 x 7 inches. $1,200

David Brody, Noor Bseiso, David Cohen, William Corwin, Kara Cox, Ana Delgado, Noah Dillon, Deshawn Dumas, Laurie Fendrich, Laurie Frick, Joe Fyfe, Deborah Garwood, Andrew Ginzel, Claire Haik, James Hyde, Mary Jones, Roman Kalinovski, Dennis Kardon, Christina Kee, Elisabeth Kley, Greg Lindquist, Drew Lowenstein, Stephen Maine, John Mendelsohn, Jeffrey Morabito, Peter Plagens, David Rhodes, Jennifer Riley, Sean Scully, Anna Shukeylo, Elena Sisto, Suzy Spence, Justin Sterling, Wen Tao, William Tucker, Joan Waltemath, Leslie Wayne, Marjorie Welish, Stephen Westfall, Alexi Worth, Brenda Zlamany

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Thomas Nozkowski by John Yau

In the late 1970s, when Thomas Nozkowski entered the New York art world, painting (especially abstract painting) was in a difficult position. Many critics thought that art’s history had ended. There seemed to be no place for Nozkowski’s modest sized abstractions. And in the 1980s, when Neo-Expressionist painting became fashionable, the situation was no better: postmodern theorizing had nothing whatsoever to do with his art. What we can see, now, is that he has proved to be a great artist because he creates very varied, never clichéd paintings. With totally admirable persistence he has produced a consistently first-rate body of works, which are unlike those of any other artist. Nozkowski’s career thus shows the importance of going your own way, without paying attention to fashions. John Yau is the ideal writer for Nozkowski: Visually sensitive, lyrical, not given to hyperbole, he offers closely detailed, nicely sympathetic commentary. I especially admired the account of how early on Nozkowski learned to compose by repeating “a pre-existing, eccentric shape until it established the edge” (23). Presenting excellent close accounts of several pictures, Yau rightly concludes that Nozkowski’s great strength is his refusal to settle into a signature style. The discussion of what Nozkowski learnt from film is revelatory.

Since Nozkowski is accessible, it’s regrettable at some points that Yau didn’t press him harder. I would love to know why Nozkowski thinks that Rudolf Schindler is the greatest modern architect. Because Yau’s account of Nozkowski’s admiration for Pisanello’s The Vision of St Eustace (1438-42) is fascinating, indeed the book comes back to it five times, discussion of other art historical sources would be welcome. And it would be good to know if the artist’s long-time employment at Mad magazine had some effect on his art. Sometimes, also, it is not entirely clear whether Yau is presenting his own thoughts or Nozkowski’s. After narrating Nozkowski’s entry point into the art world by contrasting the hostile reception, in 1970, of Philip Guston’s figurative works with the euphoria that greeted Frank Stella’s first MoMA retrospective, Yau allows: “instead of being directly influenced by Guston, the more likely case is that Nozkowski based his decisions on his own experience” (15). Fair enough, but what then was the purpose of describing Guston’s situation? Similarly, when Yau suggests that Nozkowski’s ways of working owes something to William Wordsworth, it’s not clear how that can help explain the artist’s announced desire to “make anything and everything into a painting” (36), if only because the activities of 19th-century poets and contemporary painters are so obviously different. And, finally, the politics of Nozkowski’s art deserve more critical discussion. He was originally inspired to make small pictures, Yau reports, because he saw “large-scale work…as an extension of imperialism…it occupied whatever space it wanted to without regard for others” (16). But as Nozkowski’s paintings now appear in the same grand galleries and public collections as the large works of his contemporaries, surely this attachment to small-scale has become something of a (productive) myth.

These are minor quibbles about a first rate book. Nozkowski, an accessible painter, is oddly difficult to write about. Very well read, widely traveled, he does not make it easy to understand how his varied visual experiences are the sources for his art. That he almost always refuses to title his works reinforces this elusiveness. Although Yau identifies a few exceptions, Nozkowski generally doesn’t work in the manner familiar from early abstractionists like Kandinsky and Mondrian, of gradually abstracting from nature As Yau rightly says: “The point was to get to the bottom of the experience without representing it in some received or familiar way” (53). But in what way then, exactly, is experience of art, nature and the city the starting point for Nozkowski’s abstractions? That question is hard to answer except perhaps in a negative way: his paintings refuse figurative allusion.

John Yau, Thomas Nozkowski (London: Lund Humphries, 2017). $44.99. 113 color illustrations. 152 pages. Hardback. ISBN 978-1-84822-238-0

Read other artcritical writers on Thomas Nozkowski:

Roundtable: Joseph Masheck, David Brody, Alexander Ross, Marjorie Welish, Jennifer Riley and Raphael Rubinstein, 2015
Nora Griffin, 2013
David Brody, 2010
David Cohen, 2010
David Cohen, 2008
David Cohen, 2006
David Cohen, 2003
Sherman Sam, 2003
Joe Fyfe, 2003

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