September 7 to October 28, 2017
293 Tenth Avenue at 27th Street,
New York City, paulkasmingallery.com

Assessment of an artist’s early work can be a tricky business. Often this period will have been manipulated to cohere with an overarching narrative associated with the artist, with focus placed on unearthing traces of what would later epitomize the mature style. An entirely different problem, however, plagues the reception of early Robert Motherwell.

Motherwell took a circuitous path to becoming an artist, one peppered with forays into academia and punctuated by multiple decisions to change his course of study to assuage his hankering, though often repressed, desire to envelop himself in modern art. Motherwell’s abandoned doctoral dissertation has had a lasting impact on scholarly treatment of his early work. The enduring credo has it that Motherwell bypassed traditional juvenilia and was instead in possession of a mature style and decided artistic philosophy at the very outset of his career.

When he graduated from Stanford in 1937 with a philosophy degree, Motherwell immediately enrolled in the philosophy graduate program at Harvard. He preferred courses on art theory and aesthetics, and elected to research Eugène Delacroix at the University of Grenoble, France. He soon moved to Paris, however, where he pursued his interest in contemporary art, rubbing shoulders with members of the intelligentsia and studying firsthand the art of modern masters. Returning to the United States, he switched gears and entered the graduate program in art history at Columbia, run by the fabled Meyer Schapiro. Witnessing his student’s primary interest in creating his own work, Schapiro introduced Motherwell to the downtown émigré Surrealist crowd. Despite his youth and unmistakably American characteristics, Motherwell became fast friends with its luminaries. He made a transformative trip to Mexico, for instance, with Roberto Matta, by the end of which he would come to consider himself an artist.

The Mexican paintings are where Kasmin’s Robert Motherwell Early Paintings begins. Remarkably, this is only the second-ever exhibition of the artist’s early paintings.

What’s more, Kasmin tackles a body of work that has been overshadowed by Motherwell’s critically lauded early explorations into collage and automatic drawing. Despite the commercial appeal of paintings and their prominence in Motherwell’s later career, his early paintings have long played second fiddle to artistic production in other media. It is only with the Elegy to the Spanish Republic series beginning in 1957 that Motherwell garnered a reputation as a painter. Kasmin’s exhibition therefore responds to a challenging mandate: to elevate both period and medium against received opinion.

Shining an isolated light on this body of work, with the help of impressive loans from the Dedalus Foundation, the exhibition has a rejuvenating effect. The downside of claiming that Motherwell arrived as an artist fully formed is the corollary assumption that early endeavors suffered from a lack of progress, not bearing the fruits of trial-and-error process that informs most artists. Instead, the 18 works selected for the exhibition, which emphasize serial groupings, attest to the radical development of the artist between the 1940s and ‘50s as we see him grapple with a cadre of influences from Surrealism and psychic automatism to Piet Mondrian and Joan Miró—retaining, rejecting, and remediating as he saw fit.

The most instructive example of his painterly development during this period is the triumvirate of works inspired by Mondrian. While the highlight of the first room of this two-room show might appear to be the first-ever public display of Three Figures, c. 1941 alongside his first complete painting, La Belle Mexicaine (Maria), 1941––a powerful figurative pairing given prominent gallery placement––moments of curatorial inspiration lay in other corners of the gallery. Recuerdo de Coyoacán, 1942, The Sentinel, 1942, and The Spanish Prison (Window), 1943-44 result from his encounter with Mondrian at the Dutchman’s first US solo exhibition at Valentine Dudensing Gallery in 1942. Motherwell was struck by Mondrian’s interrogation of the visual field as a zone to be simultaneously flattened and bisected.

Over time, the works grow progressively distant from the canonical grid paintings as each iteration allowed Motherwell to determine which aspects of Mondrian’s practice were pertinent to his program. The latest work, The Spanish Prison (Window)—its title referencing the Civil War—draws upon De Stijl’s detached, non-objective optical theory while distorting its anti-humanist position by introducing a quasi-figurative, imprisoned form. Blowing open Mondrian’s hermetic grid, this is a body contained and deconstructed by the confines of a vertical field.

More than a grouping of like works, positing these three paintings as a series demonstrates Motherwell’s preoccupation with variegating motifs as his central mode of artistic refinement. Furthermore, this trio challenges its very ontological classification as belonging to a discrete medium by virtue of the way in which the works reify the collagist practice that infiltrated Motherwell’s approach to painting. Linking disparate blocks of color amidst vibrant swaths of paint, Motherwell shows the capacity of paint to behave like torn and rejoined pieces of paper.

Nearing the end of the 1940s and delving into the 1950s, the second room of the exhibition charts another development in early Motherwell, his progressively becoming more abstract. Orange Personage, 1947 is situated against the back wall of the gallery, mirroring the placement of the figurative work La Belle Mexicaine (Maria) in the previous room. This application of parallel structure to the exhibition space clarifies the conceptual distance between the two figurative approaches: in the later work, Motherwell uses the vertical thrust of the canvas and simplistic geometric forms to describe the human form, drastically departing from the figurative, though abstractly obscured, painting of his first wife.

The revelation in Orange Personage, however, is to be had up-close. Covered with sand—likely from the beaches of East Hampton where the artist maintained a home—the work possesses visceral charge and local specificity. Incorporating found objects, natural and manufactured, into his works was a trademark of Motherwell’s collages. Living somewhere between painting, collage, and readymade, Orange Personage dissolves the boundaries of medium specificity.

While an exhibition of early paintings by a famous Abstract Expressionist might not seem anything out of the ordinary, this show is subtly subversive. Instead of simply making an argument for Motherwell’s painterly abilities, the collagist practice, serial pairings, and quotations of different artists at play here challenge notions that this is a show about paintings, a stylistically homogenous period, or Motherwell alone.

The post Not The Readymade Modernist After All: A revisionist take on early Robert Motherwell appeared first on artcritical.

September 24, 2016 to January 2, 2017
Picadilly Circus
London, +44 020 7300 8000

“Abstract Expressionism” at London’s Royal Academy, the first overview of the American movement since one held at the Tate Gallery in 1959, is a landmark event, a sprawling exhibition featuring painting, sculpture and photography from the 1930s to the ‘70s. The curators appear to have entertained two conflicting goals: to present a comprehensive survey of work from this period and to make a lucid case for its artistic achievement. Their solution has been to embed five solo shows and a two-person show amidst a composite display of work by 26 other artists. The singularly showcased painters are Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still with Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt in the two-man room. Other canonical AbEx’ers of the caliber of Philip Guston, Mark Tobey and Robert Motherwell are sparsely represented in the six remaining salons.

These mixed-artist galleries are organized chronologically or, alternatively, by stylistic theme (“Color as Gesture,” “The Violent Mark,” and “Darkness Visible.”) One possible explanation for the exhibition’s muddy curatorial direction is that it reflects the accomplishments of the show’s guest chief curator, David Anfam. The author of a recent textbook on Abstract Expressionism, Anfam is also Senior Consulting Curator at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado and author of the catalogue raisonné of the artist. This left me wondering whether the decision to feature a strong, cohesive selection of Still’s work in the exhibition’s best gallery was intended to show that artist’s superior aesthetic standing among his peers or if it was merely a byproduct of Anfam’s professional interests.

The term “abstract expressionism” was coined in 1946 by Robert Coates, a critic for The New Yorker. The movement’s fiercest critical champion, Clement Greenberg, preferred “American-Type Painting” in a pivotal essay dated ten years later. The artists themselves did not self-identify as part of an organized endeavor. No manifestos were written for the group as a whole and, as this current exhibition attests, the work ranges in style from highly textured gestural handling to flat, hard-edged monochrome compositions. (David Smith’s steel sculpture and a selection of works on paper and photography are also included in the show). However, statements by the various artists suggest a common commitment to unearthing a subjective interiority as part of their reinvestigation of artistic traditions. As Rothko wrote, in 1945, “We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world…If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictorial equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.” The Abstract Expressionists collectively pioneered introspective territory unfamiliar at the time to most other Americans.

The artists in this show worked in the turbulent times preceding, during and after the Second World War. These seismic political and cultural shifts can be read in the experimental searching evident in their output. The passing of UK’s Brexit vote earlier this year harkens back to isolationist tendencies that set the stage for war.

Likewise, the conversations surrounding the current US presidential elections echo England’s social conservatism and increasing signs of lack of tolerance. The Abstract Expressionist’s work quickly led to an explosively creative era in contemporary art in the US that spread around the world. This period of rich innovation is a reminder of the importance of pushing back against limiting fears and hatred. I think the work in the exhibition still captures the imagination, celebrates the individual, and is a reminder of the need for on-going dialogue.

The first room, “Early Works,” is a sure-footed introduction to the artists and their signature orientations. For example, Rothko’s Self-portrait (1936) presents prophetic qualities such as feathered edges and blocky forms. The composition of Pollock’s Male and Female (1942-43) is rooted in the Jungian symbolism that continued to fuel mature work.  I thus expected the last gallery, “Late Works,” to function as as a cohesive conclusion to the AbEx story. Instead it contains one late-stage work each by Hans Hoffmann and William Baziotes whose only other paintings in the show are in the very first gallery. Are we meant to cast these artists as the mascots for this movement? As a second non sequitur these paintings are abruptly placed together with a monumental work, “Salut Tom” (1979) by Joan Mitchell and one of Philip Guston’s late figurative paintings.

Two-thirds of the way through the exhibition, Still’s gallery refreshingly sidesteps any didacticism the show might have been veering towards. A spacious, generously installed room of ten large, stylistically consistent paintings allows for the digestion of his most mature style. Known as a stubborn outsider, Still’s work dodges the queasiness of Surrealism, while keeping its irrational contours. Passages of hot yellow ochre, oranges and deep reds meet patches of white and black alongside fissures of primary colors that open up like scars. His brushwork is alternately efficient and luxurious. Anfam, in the exhibition catalogue, convincingly connects Still’s work to the realm of skin and sensation, whereas it is typically associated with landscape.

Radiating out from this highpoint of the exhibition are two galleries of color field paintings and a gallery of diverse works on paper and photography. Rothko’s flat floating lozenges are presented in a dimly lit, chapel-like room on one side. The two-person gallery of geometric works in reduced color palettes by Reinhardt and Newman are on another side. Rothko’s gallery leads to de Kooning’s solo room of works from 1945 to 1966. De Kooning and Pollock are arguably the artists most often associated with Abstract Expressionism yet, in contrast to Still’s aesthetically powerful gallery, de Kooning has been selected for breadth over depth. Across 13 works de Kooning shifts from the subject of figure — such as in his iconic “Women” series — to landscape, although as the focus passes there is, in fact, a merging of his subjects.

A large gallery devoted to Pollock’s mature drip paintings, while selected in a way that represents the power of his work, was divided by two temporary walls that diminished its impact. Pollock’s largest painting, Mural (1943), commissioned by his patron Peggy Guggenheim, is placed opposite the iconic Blue Poles (1952), contrasting his all-over compositions at two distinct points. The second largest painting in the Pollock gallery is by his widow, Lee Krasner, the stylistically consistent The Eye is The First Circle (1960).

Presenting over 150 works, many of them masterpieces, this exhibition provides an unprecedented opportunity to draw new conclusions regarding the stylistic origins and creative power of the phenomenon widely considered the first true American aesthetic achievement in the visual arts. This only makes more painful, however, the institutional bias against women and minorities found in this exhibition, which includes but four women painters and one person of color (Norman Lewis). Mercifully, one painting that is included is by Janet Sobel, whose allover compositions arguably inspired Pollock: she is usually consigned to a catalogue footnote. Ironically, in view of the apotheosis of Clyfford Still in this exhibition, this summer the Denver Art Museum presented the exhibition “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” curated by Gwen F. Chanzit. Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, and Helen Frankenthaler, who are minimally represented in this exhibition, were featured there extensively with nine other artists. The catalogue for the show in Denver includes biographies for a total of 42 artists whose careers have regrettably been over-looked.

On the plane ride home to New York City, I watched Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind from 1977. As with the artists in the show, select characters in the film are subconsciously driven to express themselves as part of a bonding process with creatures from outer space. Unlike the exhibition, however, I noticed the movie wasn’t burdened with an academic voiceover-like narration. The plot climaxes with a successful exchange between aliens and humans: dialogue in place of destruction. In the 1930s and ‘40s, making a commitment to radicalism in the fine arts was an alien endeavor for most American artists compared to their counterparts in Europe, especially Paris. Furthermore, introspection was considered (and in some circles still is) a sign of weakness and a waste of time. During the war, a motley crew of Americans from both coasts achieved a fertile exchange of aesthetic ideas with recent émigrés from Europe that reached across their cultural differences. To acknowledge and act upon the subconscious required heroic leaps of faith for the characters in the movie and for the Abstract Expressionists.

The post Conflicted Ambitions: Abstract Expressionism at London’s Royal Academy appeared first on artcritical.

Strange how it can happen that an artist whose work you are very familiar with, and have walked past in museums many times with no desire to linger, can suddenly sock you in the gut. Why I suddenly saw Clyfford Still or felt his emotional impact after all these years, when coming upon a painting in the Met on a particular day, I don’t know. Neither do I know why I had been immune to him for so long.

Like the best painting from cave art onwards, Still’s work is as alive and raw as if made today. His characteristic lightning shapes are a bit like the flashes that follow on the heels of Superman. They direct the eye, they activate the composition; actually they are the composition. They suggest a rip or wound in the skin of the paint, something damaged or hurt, while at the same time opening a window of light and color in the otherwise emptiness or murky impasto of the canvas. Still must have gone through countless gallons of black. Either pessimistically or optimistically, the rips and flashes seem to reveal an intimacy and vulnerability, creating a touching counterpoint to the bravado and strong ego that the work communicates — if you are open to being touched by it.

Still’s importance was quickly recognised by his peers when he arrived in New York in the 1940s, a fully formed abstract painter with his own distinctive visual language, of whom Jackson Pollock said, “Still makes the rest of us look academic.” The Metropolitan Museum, in 1979, described him as, “America’s most important, most significant and most daring artist,” as they presented the first big survey of his work. It was, in fact, the first big solo exhibition they had given any artist to date. Clement Greenberg said he was, “One of the most important and original painters of our time — perhaps the most original of all painters under 55, if not the best.” Still responded by saying that the critics were “butchers” and the galleries were “brothels.” Of the artists he said, “You know your brother has a knife, and will use it.” In the early 1950s, he broke all ties with the commercial galleries, and by the mid-1960s was living in Maryland, where he worked in isolation for the rest of his life.

Despite continuing acclaim as a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, he has never had the fame or popularity of Pollock, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston or Willem de Kooning, his close contemporaries whose influence continues to ripple through painting. I was not the only one to walk past those big, jagged, ragged paintings, unmoved.

Since 2011, however, with the establishment of his own private fortress of a museum in Denver Colorado, Still has the edge over everyone. There, in strict conformity with the stipulations of his will, no other artist may be shown, and none of his works loaned, sold, given away or exchanged, but only exhibited and studied in a peaceful, spacious environment — without the distraction of a museum shop or café on the premises. Why Denver? Still was born in North Dakota; the land and the people of the Midwest were the subjects of his early work. Mostly, though, the civic leaders of Denver found themselves able and willing to accommodate his demands.

Only a matter of days after my epiphany at the Met, by coincidence, and without prior knowledge of the existence of the Clyfford Still Museum, I happened to be in Denver. The approach to the museum is through a small grove of trees, isolating it from its midtown surroundings, especially its attention-grabbing next-door neighbor, the exciting but dysfunctional Denver Art Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, where the sloping walls make it almost impossible to hang a painting.

How different the respectful atmosphere created at the Still Museum by Allied Works Architecture, headed by Brad Cloepfil, with his “drive to make, not new things, but excruciatingly specific things.” The study rooms are downstairs and the galleries upstairs in this textured concrete building. The paintings are bathed in natural light that filters through a perforated skylight, showing them at their best. The light invites you upstairs, and makes you feel good when you get there. The ceilings are lower than usual in today’s museums, more like the spaces where Still worked and exhibited in his lifetime, and they contribute to the sense of comfort and contemplation.

The work itself is almost literally electrifying, generating light and movement in the gray galleries. There’s an intense relationship between the paintings, and a conceptual narrative runs through them that would be broken by the inclusion of another artist. This larger-than-life, tough, totally self-assured painter was right to insist on having a museum to himself.

I was reminded of the words of a highly respected London gallerist, who told me (20 years ago) that he had been moved almost to tears by seeing Still’s work. This was so incomprehensible to me at the time that I have never forgotten it. But these monumental paintings do convey equally monumental emotion, which is both grandiose and completely sincere. To quote Still: “These are not paintings in the usual sense. They are life and death merging in fearful union. They kindle a fire; through them I breathe again, hold a golden cord, find my own revelation.”

The words could be Wagnerian. Whether the passion that Still put into his painting reflects his feelings in the aftermath of World War II, or the more direct, personal experience of a lonely, impoverished childhood, the sense of a heroic battle for survival is incorporated in the work. Still believed that art could and must change the world.

In photographs Still looks self-conscious, posing in profile to survey his Maryland property, or before one of his paintings. His long, white-streaked hair and deep-set, angst-ridden eyes give him a rather haunted look. And the house itself could be the creepy creation of Alfred Hitchcock, or Edward Hopper.

Still died in 1980, leaving an incredible 3,182 canvases and works on paper, many of which remain rolled up in the Clyfford Still Museum, having been seen by only a handful of people. Only 500 or so works have so far been shown, but they more than justify the judgement of his contemporaries. The value of the paintings is estimated to be over $1 billion — just as Still always knew. But they can never be sold.

The post Lightning Bolt: A Realization of Clyfford Still appeared first on artcritical.

January 29 to February 28, 2015
958 Madison Avenue (at 75th Street)
New York, 212 628 4000

New York veteran Lisa Bradley’s abstract paintings communicate feeling above all else. Often looking like cloudscapes, and usually occurring in a dark, midnight blue, Bradley’s pictures summon visions of endlessness on a cosmic spiritual level. Her work is open to contemplation and deeply felt experience; the paintings are mystical in nature and suggest the sky, the ocean — places where one finds and retrieves the self in heightened circumstances. Because the paintings are so resolutely abstract, it is hard to pin them down to a particular place; Bradley’s audience must imagine both the emotion and its provenance in processing the inchoate intensity of her art. Championed early in her career by the famous dealer Betty Parsons, Bradley can claim kinship with major New York School artists such as Rothko and Pollock; however, her independence as a painter is notable, in large part because she is so determined to present an undertow of feeling and force through abstraction alone. Interestingly, though, the radical self-containment of Bradley’s paintings often opens up to sweeping vistas that relate to the infinite. So the works have the tendency to switch back and forth between closed and open states. Thus, Bradley’s broad horizons issue forth from a relatively narrow spectrum of expression; the paintings are closely related, and their cumulative effect on the viewer is striking.

How does Bradley’s art compare now, when seen in the light of rising artists? The start of her career belongs to a different time in New York, when painting was of primary importance in the hierarchy of contemporary art. Things have changed — there are many kinds of art vying for our attention — but abstraction has never died out here, where the romance and legacy of major New York nonobjective artists continues to make a pronounced impact. Bradley consequently looks like a painter who has continued in her own fashion as she follows her creativity in subtle ways. Her style, large and voluminous, is found in sequences of related imagery. One moves from work to work and gains appreciation of the dense color and mysterious patches of light, which heighten the sense that something is about to happen. The feeling one has on seeing the paintings is that of silent imminence; it proves hard to explain them with words.

Indeed, intellectual readings fail to explain the meaning of Bradley’s art. In the fine painting Passing (2011), we look at a dark-blue background, against which passages and spots of white contrast in luminous fashion. Although it is not a large painting, Passing presents a spectacle indicative of imminent change — we can ask what it is we are passing through, or if the changing sky or currents of the sea are about to engage in another transformation. The title of the painting, a single word, hints at the occurrence of something reshaping; it is an idea supported by the abrupt contrast between light and dark in the painting itself. As Bradley’s viewers, we are struck by the intense flux of elements caught in a particular moment, just before everything alters. Another painting, Through This (2012), feels like a study of the deep sea. Like Passing, it is painted a dark blue with bits of white color rising from underneath the surface. The title suggests a meaning, but it is hard to say exactly what it is; the image is an intuitive experience.

The oceanic feeling of Bradley’s pictures, both in a literal and figurative context, never goes away. Indeed, the grandness of the pictures is what sustains them. Larger than life, they display a ready familiarity with sublime feeling. Nothing Lost (2012) could nearly be the background sky in one of El Greco’s more melancholic paintings; instead of blue, Bradley’s work brings forth a few blurs of light in a nearly black setting. The implications of the picture’s title are as mystical and incipient as the art we see. At times Bradley’s enterprise can become unclear by her refusal to explain or define her motives. But Bradley is a painter who believes in large philosophies. Because she is working with nearly a boundless sense of form, particulars give way to large insights. So Bradley’s art reminds us of the formless attractions of color alone, and the pleasures of meditating on the infinite. She leaves us room for thought.

The post “Hard to Explain”: Lisa Bradley’s Mysterious Abstractions appeared first on artcritical.

Milton Resnick deserves recognition greater than what he has received until now. This large show of work covering his entire career, presented in immaculate galleries at the epic-sized Mana Contemporary arts complex in Jersey City, goes a considerable distance to recognizing Resnick’s contributions. From the start to the end, he was a painter of high courage and integrity — someone who belonged to the first generation of Abstract Expressionists but who never quite found the validation he is worthy of. At this fine show we have much of his oeuvre in a single place, where his contribution can be assessed from the vista of his entire career for the first time. Photos of his pictures cannot do justice to the rough but exquisite surfaces he came to paint over the decades of his efforts; there exists within the body of Resnick’s art a vision that promises to be seen not as tangential but rather central to the New York School’s early history. In fact, the Mana show makes it clear that we have missed integrating Resnick’s art into the accomplishments of the New York School’s first generation. His gifts, from the early colorful efforts to the final depressive, but marvelously rough paintings accompanied by simple figures, clearly need to be organized within a revised understanding of the art of his time.

It is surprising to see Resnick as a somewhat neglected painter, in large part because he was so much in the thick of things in New York. Born in 1917 in Bratslav, Ukraine, Resnick immigrated to New York in 1922 with his parents, where the family took up residence in Brooklyn. He took art classes at Hebrew Technical Institute, Pratt and the American Artist’s School between 1929 and 1934. Unfortunately, his father disapproved of his studies in art and forced him to leave the family’s home. He began a relationship with Elaine Fried around 1935, but she left him for Willem de Kooning in 1938. During the Depression he worked for the WPA and he served in the US Army during the Second World War. Afterward, he became a founding member of the Artist’s Club and was friendly with Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky and de Kooning himself.

In 1948, Resnick met and later married Pat Passlof, a fellow painter, and traveled to Europe, but he was unable to paint there due to emotional difficulties. He returned to New York and in 1951 he helped organize the noted “Ninth Street Show.” At the beginning of the 1970s, Passlof and Resnick separated, with Resnick living in the upstate New York town Rifton. Max Hutchison Galley began showing his work in 1972, and continued to through the early ‘80s. In 1975, he and Passlof reconciled. In 1984, after decades of abstraction, he started to incorporate figurative imagery in his work. By 2000, Resnick had begun suffering from arthritis, which made it impossible for him to stand and paint, though he continued to work on paper. Then, in March 2004, distressed over his illness and his difficulties working, he took his life at home in New York. Resnick was recognized by the New York art world, but never to the extent to which his contemporaries gained fame.

Resnick’s art realized a considerable amount, both graphically in the overall gestalt of the painting and, as he developed, texturally in the surface of his art. Even early paintings by Resnick display great perspicacity. An untitled oil on board from 1946 nicely demonstrates how sophisticated a painter he was even before turning 30. In this small work, we see some of de Kooning’s influence, his organic forms echoed in Resnick’s work of this time. Biomorphic yellow, purple, black and red forms, along with two small, green squares, embellish an off-white ground, communicating a lyric experience to Resnick’s audience. This poetic tone never entirely leaves; it remains even when he starts to paint according to a darker vision.

Resnick’s art throughout evinces a thorough interest in surface; and this becomes clearer as time goes on. During the 1970s and ‘80s he began making exceptionally rough, striated exteriors, nearly minimal in appearance. In a very large (more than 10 feet long), untitled work of 1975, the application of paint is deliriously thick, building up and off the canvas to the point of low relief. The color of this horizontal painting, an olive green with hints of yellow underneath, shows us that his gifts included experimentation with color in highly original ways. Here Resnick exhibits his talent for understated color, as well as his penchant for an impasto surface. Melancholy in feeling, the painting’s muted hues bear an ongoing, and deeply moving, emotional stance. Straws in the Wind II (1981), another big, horizontal painting, continues the artist’s interest in a heavy build-up in paint; its color, a dark charcoal listing toward black, is dense with excrescences, adds a heightened tangibility to its roughened surface.

One finds these works embracing gloominess in the 1980s, and the emotional register of his work remains substantially the same for the rest of his career, being oriented toward a dark, emotional palette. The show also makes it clear that the figure entered into Resnick’s paintings late in his career. In one 30-by-40-inch canvas from 1989 we see him playing with imagistic art: two dark, blue and flesh-colored figurative forms occupy the middle of the painting. However, they could equally be read as abstractions in the midst of a highly original, sharply idiosyncratic black ground. One seeks, mostly unsuccessfully, an outlet enabling escape from the gravitas of the picture, which offers a relentless surface and small room for egress. The painting’s bleak mood would be repeated again and again in the late paintings Resnick made.

Likely the most pertinent fact about Resnick is his emotional intensity. But even as his pictures communicate his drift into depression, you can see him working hard on a tangible surface that remains a statement about art rather than a personal treatment of his psychology. The paintings, both early and late, are so consistently high in their achievement, they must be seen as representative of a major artist.

One hesitates to ascribe too much of a psychological reading on seeing a body of work by a man whose tragic end is difficult to accept; however, such an interpretation might well describe the general tenor of his output, difficult as it is. One has to weigh the melancholy of these final paintings against the tragedy of Resnick’s suicide. Clearly, they communicate a more and more isolated psychological state; the artist’s viewers are reminded throughout of his death to come as they contemplate his morose art. Resnick lived his artistic life under the shadow of more famous painters, but that fact should not be allowed to diminish his ambition and his reach. Indeed, his accomplishments are not to be denied; his paintings expand the spectrum of the Abstract Expressionists who used paint as a physical entity, artists such as Pollock and de Kooning. In the thicket of his surfaces, we see the AbEx demand that we look at paint simply as paint, so that the surface is neither given to narration nor to intellectual content. It is what it is. At the same time, we do not do justice to Resnick if we walk away from some sense of a personal presence in his pictures. The emotional depth of his abstraction is highly impressive, and must be seen that way. In a way, he survives because his art communicates negative feeling in magisterial ways — a bit of a contradiction, perhaps, but one that asserts the truth of his career.

The post Man Out of Time: Milton Resnick at Mana Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

July 21 to October 27, 2013
279 Montauk Highway
Water Mill, NY, 631-283-2118

(Reviewed at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, February 9 to May 12, 2013)

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Jean Dubuffet (1902-1985) were friends of the privileged collector Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990). Heir to a Philippines sugar fortune, Ossorio lived and worked during his creative life in East Hampton, New York. A gay practicing Catholic, he aspired to synthesize Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Art Brut. This exhibition, presenting the three men as peers, aims to reveal the elective affinities of two famous painters, who themselves never met, and, also, to demonstrate what Ossario, who was friends with both men learned from each of them. It includes one large Pollock masterpiece, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist); some important smaller paintings and art on paper; and a number of works such as Collage and Oil (1951) that reveal him struggling. And, in a marvelous demonstration showing how consistent Jean Dubuffet was in the period 1946 to 1958, it presents both his little drawing Corps de dame (Body of a Lady) (1950) and the majestically large Paysage métapsychique (Metaphysical landscape) (1952). Very different, they both are first-rate pictures.

That Pollock and Dubuffet can happily cohabit as near equals is, of course no surprise. What here is up for grabs is Ossorio’s artistic relationship with these two modernist masters. He tends to place figurative elements or shapes not unlike Dubuffet’s in a Pollockesque all over field. So, for example, Perpetual Sacrifice (1949) floats faces in a field of white lines; Crucifix: Seek & Ye Shall Find (1951) deploys a heavily painted field of lines on a shaped canvas, with a crucifix shape giving form to that field; and Martyrs and Spectators (1951) sets the outlines of a crucifixion scene in a framework of black and white. Advent (1951), the best of Ossorio’s paintings on display runs lines of green, red and yellow around a vertical standing figure. He lacks the single-mindedness of Pollock at his best and, also, the very high level of excellence of Dubuffet in this period. You have the sense, rather, that driven by his awareness of the greatness of his friends’ art, Ossorio was experimenting restlessly without ever achieving real resolution. So, for example, Red Family (1951) uses a figure like some Dubuffets; and Head (1951) employs a drawn field akin to some of Pollock’s weaker pictures. But where Pollock mastered a language of personal abstraction, evidenced in his great little painting on paper Number 22A, 1948; and Dubuffet immersed figures in flatted fields, Ossario, a gifted eclectic always remains uncomfortably suspended between abstraction and the figure.

This Eurasian Catholic must have been a fascinating personality. And it must have been tricky for him to befriend and collect two such different and apparently overwhelming figures. But he isn’t a great artist. In the catalog essay Alicia Longwell says that Clement Greenberg, who admired both Pollock and Dubuffet believed that “an artist had to suppress any hint of representation to achieve a level of distinction in art making.” This statement, which is emphatically not correct, misrepresents Greenberg in an unfortunate, very misleading way. What is the case is that a great artist must be single minded. Connoisseurship is out of fashion—it is commonly said to be politically incorrect. Ossario was a well connected artist; an interesting artist; a skilled artist: but what this misguided exhibition inadvertently shows is that he was minor. Successful curators need to be connoisseurs.

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