November 16, 2007 – February 24, 2008

There are two stories in this Albright-Knox exhibit.  The first is Giuseppe Panza’s inspiring quest to use collecting to realize Keats’ ideal world where “truth is beauty, beauty truth”.  The second is the magnificent installation of these 70 works by 16 artists orchestrated by Dr. Panza (over three years of planning) and expertly implemented by a wide range of people at the Albright-Knox, including most prominently, the director Louis Grachos and the senior curator, Douglas Dreishpoon.  The result is that they have created a series of rooms—each a kind of Rothko Chapel containing the work of only one artist.  Indeed, the result is an overall impression of light, color and joy whose only potential downside is that whole threatens to upstage the parts; the individual artists become role players in the Albright-Knox/Panza production.

In an age of cynicism and appropriation, how can one sustain our “truth and beauty”
framing of the Panza exhibition?   By truth we refer to the relentless use of painting as a form of experimentation, the outstanding modernist example being Cézanne.  Truth-seeking here becomes a way of constantly posing problems to oneself regarding the act of seeing.  With regard to beauty, our model is Monet’s exploration of light and color which eventually teetered on the edge of abstraction.   Using this framework, we first focus on the monochrome painters in this exhibition.  We suggest three visually striking examples in the Monet tradition.  Anne Appleby’s sensitive abstract oil and wax paintings of greens, rusts and creams evoke both the majesty and mystery of Nature’s march across the seasons.  Alfonso Fratteggiani Bianchi’s intense pure pigment paintings on porous Italian limestone create a riveting visual experience that is both timeless and contemporary.  David Simpson’s metallic interference paint creates romantic symphonies of lustrous color that constantly change with the movements of the viewer.  The result is sublime eye candy.

In the Cézanne tradition are the artists who achieve their visual seduction by building up an underlying structure that supports a layering of color.  These include Phil Sims with his Cézanne-like organization of brush strokes and Ruth Ann Fredenthal with her all-but-invisible, yet strong, underlying organization of regions of different colors that function as a foundation for building subsequent layerings of color mixtures that somehow create the illusion of a single overall color.  Fredenthal’s serene paintings are sensuous and contemplative; they give us chamber music for the eye.  Sims uses scale to make an architectural statement—his paintings capture color and light, functioning like stained glass windows that, depending on their color, texture and scale, are either introverted or extroverted.   If Sims and Fredenthal achieve their effects “bottom up, Winston Roeth and Timothy Litzmann work “top down”.   Roeth, in the tradition of Albers, plays with often unlikely combinations of color involving both a framing edge and an interior space.  His tempera paint on fiberglass and other materials creates surfaces that are both immaculate and sensuous, alternately cool and warm.   Litzmann, using either unnamable or delicious colors, paints on the back of very thin translucent cast acrylic structures.  By painting the side edges with a contrasting color, he literally traps the light inside these stunning paintings, thereby extending the American Luminist tradition.

Other artists in the exhibition literally created objects of color as opposed to colored objects.  Examples of this strategy are the tiny wall-mounted painted wood and steel cubes of Stuart Arends and the just larger than human scale standing columns of color constructed by Ann Truitt, both of which operate between painting and sculpture.  Arends oil and wax painted cubes have a rubbed surface that speaks to the effects of time and memory.  Truitt’s painted wooden columns with their thin contrasting edges on the bottom or sides can be seen as relating to the explorations of color framing effects by Roeth and Litzmann.

The simply complex character of much of this exhibition is well personified by Max Cole, who uses a rigorous interplay of dense small vertical strokes and complementary horizontal chords to create abstract paintings that hover between musical notation and elaborate weavings.   Cole’s restless visual exploration has a kind of austere beauty that is reminiscent of Agnes Martin’s grid paintings of the early 1980s.  Cole’s largely black, grey and beige paintings, like Seurat’s drawings, manage to derive the kind of color that exists when the first rays of light appear at dawn and the last ray of light disappears at dusk.  Her horizontal bands, reminiscent of the endless horizons of the great plains, are composed of hundreds of vertical lines that silently pulsate giving some of them an almost optical effect.  We also suggest that although Cole, Roeth, and Fredenthal differ in many ways, their paintings share in common the ability to slow the viewer down and reveal themselves quietly over time, requiring an observer who is almost as dedicated and obsessive as their creators.

If it appears from this description that Cole doesn’t fit the monochrome theme, it should be noted that she is not the only exception.  As if to remind us that Dr. Panza can never be pigeon-holed, we find other non-monochromatic art that plays with light and color.  These include Kosuths’ enigmatic phrases as embodied in neon light of red, yellow, and green and Bruce Nauman’s two rooms of bright yellow fluorescent lights that perform a kind of architectural Albers.  In one room, both the bright red wall and the viewer’s skin color becomes greenish brown when bathed in intense yellow light.  There is also a classic white cast and coated acrylic disc by Robert Irwin projecting from the wall with a thin rectangular band across its center.  Four lamps strategically placed on the ceiling and floor create overlapping mysterious shadows that cohabit with the white disc to induce a Zen-like meditative mood.  Dan Flavin casts a misty, almost sexy, red light with four groups of red and white fluorescent bulbs placed low on the long wall of a large dark room.  Near the exhibition’s egress, we pass a wonderfully subtle penciled wall drawing by Sol Lewitt, so ineffable that we walked by it several times before noticing it.  Robert Therrein’s four whimsical bronze sculptures of a hat, a pitcher, and snowmen are sometimes oversized and sometimes undersized.  Despite their beautiful surfaces, they seem out of place, a bit too playful for this exhibition—more entertaining than contemplative.

In sum, this celebration of light and color could not have come at a better time.  As the skies become grey, the sunlight becomes scarce, and the air becomes frigid, we find in snowy Buffalo at the Albright-Knox, a respite for all of this, an oasis of color and light that nourishes the soul, soothes the eye, and stimulates the mind.  We are transported into a special place where Keats’ world of Beauty and Truth comes to life.

Finally, while there is really little substitute for seeing this show first hand, there is for those who can’t visit the Albright Knox or make a trip to Dr. Panza’s villa in Varese, Italy, a beautiful catalogue with images of every work.  It also includes a sensitive historical essay by David Bonetti and excerpts from the videotaped interview with Dr. Panza that plays continuously at the show’s entrance under a majestic orange Phil Sims.

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The Albright-Knox Art Gallery
1285 Elmwood Ave.
Buffalo, NY 14222
716-882-8700

May 6 – July 3, 2005

Carter Ratcliff , in his introductory essay to Michael Wall’s 1979 pioneering exhibition “In the Realm of the Monochrome”, characterized the act of painting a monochrome as an act of defiance. Equally defiant is Natalie and Irving Forman’s decision to largely limit their collection for over a decade to this realm. Although motivated first and foremost by their joint passion for such reductive works, we would argue that this collecting strategy, which flies in the face of Post-Modernism is both courageous and canny. The term canny, in this context, refers to their ability to see in monochromatic painting what some so-called expert critics often miss—a tutorial on learning how to see, where seeing is freed from the constraints of premature labeling and categorical thinking.

These works encourage, as perhaps no other type of abstract painting does, both a fine-tuning of the perceptual apparatus and a deeper penetration into the self as we learn how to be still. What these diverse works share in common is an opportunity for appreciating the complexity in the simplest of experiences. Indeed, this complexity begins with the fact that monochrome is a misnomer. Most of the paintings here are virtual monochromes. That is, despite offering the aura of a single color, as a perceptual gestalt, most of the paintings are built up of many layers of different colored paints. Such works may also evoke a kind of visual hunger that drives us to explore the potential complexity of a painting’s shape, surface, and materials, as well as making us more sensitive to the surrounding environment such as the walls or other paintings in close proximity. But all of this would be largely academic if it were not for one overriding impression—the Formans have given the Albright Knox Museum a high quality collection of reductive works of art.

Unlike collectors who buy with their ears, the Formans bought with their educated eyes and cultivated taste. In many cases, the works selected from an artist were among his or her strongest works. Another admirable and unusual feature of their collection is that it has no geographic bias, possibly because the Formans started their collecting in Chicago and therefore looked to both coasts. But, for whatever reason, it is refreshing to see a collection of reductive painting and sculpture that draws as heavily from California as it does from New York, and as heavily from Europe as from New Mexico where they live.

The collection is far more than geographically diverse. The styles of painting represented also demonstrate the complexity within the realm of the monochrome. Rudolph de Crignis’smooth and impenetrable surface invites the viewer to strain to see the underpainting of yellow or green beneath. Joseph Marioni creates a dominant curtain of paint and pulls the curtain apart just enough for us to see the play of underlying colors that engage in a kind of dialogue with the dominant color. Marcia Hafif’s sensual brushstrokes combine to create blends of color that approximate the subtlety of skin color, evoking the fleshy eroticism of Fragonard. Phil Sims produces a dry, clay-like surface, like an Indian pueblo or a baked roof in an Italian countryside. Dieter Villinger and Peter Tollens offer us expressive surfaces that have an organic feeling — Villinger’s horizontal strokes are like the flow of lava; Tollens mottled surface is like raku pottery.

These paintings also mediate different relationships with the viewer—some paintings, like those of Joe Barnes, invite the viewer into the void while others offer surfaces as hard as the baked-on coating of an automobile. Roy Thurston, for example, often works within the light and space tradition of Los Angeles art, but offers a personal sensitivity often missing in this art. Thurston’s work appears cold at first, but ends up evoking a strong emotional response because his evocative surfaces interact with color and light. Although from Santa Fe, Florence Pierce’s radiant resin paintings have the feel of the “light and space” work circa 1965-1975 in California but are more contemplative (Untitled #346, 1999, resin on mirrored Plexiglas, 24” x 24”). Other examples, despite their seeming simplicity, have an aura of mystery. These include Alan Wayne’s brooding black painting, Alan Ebnother’s gestural, yet subtle variations on the theme of green, and John Meyer’s rich and exquisitely crafted egg tempera diptychs. And if this all seems very serious there is also a funky side to this collection. John Beech, for example, gives us sculptural objects made from wheels and bumpers, some paintings that rotate and others made with glue, Robert Tiemann creates a criss-crossed surface made of cotton twine, and Rachel Lachowicz paints a dazzling red monochrome with lipstick.

It is always tempting to suggest that a collection has left out artists who deserved to be included. It would not be difficult to list several artists who deserve to be included in a major survey of reductive monochromatic painting. However, this strikes us as somewhat unfair. This is a personal collection, not an attempt to be all-inclusive. Indeed, the Formans should be congratulated for their lack of predictability. This exhibition offered many surprises such as the catalogue’s cover image by Rodney Carswell, an early black painting by Doug Ohlson, and Mark Cole’s blue-black symphony of color. And so, the collection should be accepted for what it is, not what it might have been with a different set of collectors.

Kudos to the Albright Knox at two levels.  First, it was an act of defiance for the museum to accept the gift of this currently unfashionable collection.  Second, the museum made some very good choices in the installation of the show.  Where possible, they showed several works by an artist so that one could appreciate the range of that artist’s work.  They also used a “less is more” philosophy, hanging only some of the works available.   So much of reductive art is intended to slow the viewer down and this has been made possible by the generous amount of space and light afforded to each work.  The grey suites of James Howell, for example,  greatly profit from this installation.    Indeed, the environment is such that an open-minded and patient viewer can appreciate both the complexity and beauty of these reductive works.  But be warned that this is not art for those seeking cheap visual thrills.

One beneficiary of the Formans’ persistent dedication to reductive painting and sculpture is theAlbright Knox Museum which arguably, thanks to this generous gift and promised gift of more than 160 paintings and sculptures and more than 200 works on paper, may have the most comprehensive collection of such art in this country.  But, the real beneficiaries are the viewers who have had a unique opportunity to see these works displayed together.  And for those unable to see the show, the comprehensive catalogue with an informative essay by Lilly Wei, will provide a useful map of this little traveled realm.

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