Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (June 22 – October 3, 2016)

Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris, surveys a far-flung group of over 80 artists, centered on William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who met in 1944 in New York City. It’s a literary group distinctly impatient with the printed text, and even language itself; they favor collective experience, collaboration across media, improvisation, and performance. Ginsberg presented “Howl” in a famous public reading, while Burroughs used texts for random “cut-ups”. Language migrates from one medium to another in the immersive, cave-like space of the show’s central gallery, where curator Philippe-Alain Michaud, assisted by film scholar Rani Singh and artist/curator Jean-Jacques Lebel, have orchestrated a comprehensive installation of original materials that encourage reflection on the interplay of European and American modernism.

Unlike a recent exhibition at the Orangerie dedicated to poet Guillaume Apollinaire, which focused on writers and artists in early 20th- century Paris, this one emphasizes travel across continents, fueled on a mix of Transcendentalism and Surrealism, on Walt Whitman and Arthur Rimbaud. There’s an appealing narrative, with a French inflection, to this voyage of marginalized individuals, alienated from a conformist society, who, as America expanded its world influence, turned to Antonin Artaud and Apollinaire, and insisted on immediate, lived experience. They explored film and audio recording and new methods of composition in the “open field”, and questioned consciousness itself through meditation and drugs. The journey ends, appropriately, in Paris circa 1960, at the seedy “Beat Hotel”, where Ginsberg composed “At the Grave of Apollinaire” and Burroughs’ visionary works took form, in the context of the group’s ongoing struggles with poverty, mental illness and addiction. There’s inspiration to be found in their vision, in these times of renewed threats to the individual, but also enough darkness to recall the warning of poet Charles Olson, who observed that we revere Whitman because he gives us hope, but that Melville is “the truer man”, who gives us “America, all of her space, the malice, the root.”

To paraphrase Olson again, “SPACE” is the “central fact” of the Beat Generation, with Jack Kerouac’s typewritten scroll of On the Road extending like a highway for 120 feet across the main gallery. Typed over three weeks on sheets of tracing paper, taped together so as to obviate changing pages in the machine, it’s a performance as much as a text, configured here as a sculptural installation. Anonymous film clips of the American road are projected on screens suspended overhead, while piped-in recordings of vintage blues and jazz intermingle with the hum of film projectors to create a buzzing, flickering field, a realm of surrealist suggestion, in which visitors are encouraged to wander. Displays of vintage typewriters, microphones, and tape recorders ground it all in the material context of cultural production.

Candid, hand-captioned photos taken by Ginsberg himself punctuate the exhibition, insinuating the poet’s personal magnetism and blurring the line between work and documentation. Photos selected from Robert Frank’s famous cross-country road trip, The Americans, supply a gritty visual context for Kerouac’s text, reinforcing the journalistic intensity of his verbal snapshots of marginalized characters. In a neighboring alcove, Frank’s 1959 film, Pull My Daisy, a whimsical collaboration narrated by Kerouac under the direction of Abstract Expressionist painter Alfred Leslie, features Ginsberg and others in a casual sequence of daily interactions. The improvisatory structure of jazz provides an important model for this informal art, and gestural painting seems a sideline for a number of writers, including Kerouac and Julian Beck, whose Living Theater exemplifies the group’s transgressive, participatory spirit.

If there’s innocent exuberance to Kerouac’s hunger for experience, to the freedom of “having nothing”, the cathartic incantation of Ginsberg’s “Howl”, drawn from Blake and Rimbaud, and from his own experience on the road and in a mental hospital, provides a counterpoint. Here, one can listen to Ginsberg himself reading the poem, examine his original manuscript with handwritten revisions, or interact with the words more directly by reading aloud a phonetic transcription, broken down onto some 200 posters created by contemporary artist Allen Ruppersberg. Neighboring displays of tabloid headlines from the 1950s featuring the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg evoke the era’s hysteria over communism and fears of nuclear war, traumas that can’t help but resonate with current anxieties in Europe.

In an inspired contrast to the dark activity of the opening gallery, the curators have dedicated the north gallery and its panoramic view of Montmartre to a reading room. Among its bookshelves, a lone monitor features Ginsberg being interviewed by Lebel, while the silent presence of the city at large animates the room in a flood of natural light. Combining intimacy and spectacle, it informally celebrates the wonder of everyday life and the possibility of enlightenment, anticipating Michael McClure’s ecstatic “Peyote Poem”, reproduced in a neighboring gallery: “I KNOW EVERYTHING! I PASS INTO THE ROOM.”

In side galleries, we follow the group from New York to California, where they establish affiliations with a rich culture of artists and writers, including McClure and Zen environmentalist Gary Snyder. A film clip shows McClure reading poems to a lion at the zoo, engaging with his animal body, while Bruce Conner’s mural-scale film clips of mushroom clouds from nuclear tests ironically conflate American expansionism and hallucinogenic drugs. There’s much art based on clipping and splicing, including the intricate “paste-ups” of Jess, which integrate science, art and myth. Wallace Berman’s collages using early xerox technology underline connections between collage and montage that emerge dramatically in Stan Brakhage’s Desistfilm (1954), with its opening credits hand scratched onto celluloid and compressed editing that develops tensions in an informal gathering, not unlike the one recorded more digressively in Pull My Daisy. A similar hallucinatory intensity animates the magic lantern effects of Harry Smith’s color animations, noteworthy in an exhibition that’s largely black and white, which extend Apollinaire’s concept of Orphism by coordinating shifts in visual patterns to music.

Of the three central figures, Burroughs took longer to establish his literary career, migrating to Mexico and Latin America in search of hallucinogenic plants, and sojourning with writer and ethnomusicologist Paul Bowles in Tangiers, before rejoining Ginsberg and other poets in Paris. A dilapidated bed evokes the seedy atmosphere of the “Beat Hotel”, where he and British writer Brion Gysin developed the “cut-up” – a technique of slicing up texts and randomly recombining the pieces that helped him complete Naked Lunch. For Burroughs, who regarded language as a virus, it was important to rid the body of its control. The cut-up, which Ginsberg saw as an extension of Cézanne’s process of construction with patches of color, also generated a wealth of visual material, combining photography, painting and calligraphy, that culminated in the “Dream Machine” – a rotating light box informed by primitive cinema and by the orgone theories of Wilhelm Reich, designed to activate the electrical energy of the body and generate a hypnotic state in which light could transcend language altogether.

In Paris, Ginsberg sought out Apollinaire’s grave at Père Lachaise and wrote his tribute to the poet who coined the term “surrealism” and gave verses visual form in “Calligrammes” – bringing an American movement back to its European roots. Curator Lebel, who was a member of the group at that time, even introduced the Americans to Marcel Duchamp, envisioning a fusion of European and American avant-gardes; the writers were drunk, but Duchamp, who welcomed the rawness of America in his assault on high culture, was not put off, even as Ginsberg kissed his knees and Gregory Corso clipped off his tie. Beat Generation responds to American scruffiness and homegrown mysticism with a similar generosity of spirit. World-weary Europeans attuned to Baudelairean irony might respond more to Andy Warhol’s reduction of transcendence to celebrity and commodification than to Ginsberg’s raw hunger for life. But by bringing French ideas back to Paris fully embodied in American space and popular culture, this exhibition inspires visions of a Whitmanesque merger. There’s a bracing freshness to the abrupt word juxtapositions of Ginsberg’s “Apollinaire”, while the harshness of Burroughs’ bodily imagery recalls us to the unkempt power of everyday experience.

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November 4 to December 23, 2010
113 East 90th Street, between Lexington and Park avenues
New York City, 212 987 4997

At Allan Stone Gallery, two artists we know well are caught in a less familiar and surprisingly compatible moment of aesthetic initiation.   In their mature oeuvres, John Chamberlain and Alfred Leslie are artists of markedly different sensibility, both from one another and from these, their own early efforts.  This fascinating and focused show is like a snapshot of smiling infants now famous in utterly different walks of life—a rock star and a politician, say, or a priest and a mobster.  Here are little John and Leslie in their Abstract Expressionist kindergarten, and the toy of choice in the sandbox is collage.

Leslie famously abandoned a budding career as an action painter to achieve renown, via a foray in experimental moviemaking, with precisionist nudes and with an extended, Carravagesque narrative/allegorical series on the death of Frank O’Hara.

John Chamberlain is a sculptural giant of the era of Pop and minimal art whose trademark material of compressed automobile body parts, though expressive and contorted, has formal clarity and chromatic sharpness that contrast with the murky period palette and scruffy, ambiguous layering that permeate these early collages.

Collage, according to Rauschenberg, was the drawing mode of the 20th-century.  Does that make it, to montage one dictum with another, the probity of modernism?  What is beyond dispute is the commonality collage provides to the early experiments of an array of American movements and individuals.  Collage was seminal to formative or transformative moves by artists as disparate as Robert Motherwell, Judith Rothschild, Lee Krasner, Alex Katz, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and – as demonstrated here – Leslie and Chamberlain.

These two men are artists who found themselves in finding.  Their collage is of the manifestly messy variety.  There was actually what could be called, in a nod to Clement Greenberg, an American type collage which is better defined as “cutout” in that it is clean, hard-edged, and reductive, having to do with carving out space and depth rather than modeling in juxtaposed and contrastive forms.

Leslie and Chamberlain, however, are anything but fastidious in their fifties collage.  In fact, somewhat brutalist results are redolent of mess and distress.  These collages can feel like randomly selected patches of an AbExer’s paint-splattered floor in which detritus has been stamped into the floorboards as the painter moves around his workspace.  Tellingly, Chamberlain actually uses acoustic board ceiling panels as his support in a couple of these images.

But in common with many American collagists, and in contrast to classic European experimentation, there is little that is associative about the materials that find their way into these works.  In one Leslie piece from 1953-54 we get a scrap of an ad with GE’s distinctive graphic logo, but this hardly makes him heir to Kurt Schwitters.  Interestingly, Chamberlain, whose future idiom, found and crushed car parts, is shot through to the core with rich and suggestive social meaning, is almost willfully non-objective in his choice of materials.  There are, granted,  a strawberry and a few leaves in a fragment of wallpaper in one piece from 1959-60.

The show includes a number of Chamberlains that are not actually collages at all, but the array of mediums (oil, crayon) and of contrastive washes and impastos brings textures into collision that echo a preoccupation with collage as surely as they prefigure his later infatuation with the car wreck.  His breakthrough into car parts occurred in an act of accidental collage when he grabbed a couple of fenders in Larry Rivers’s back yard that he only realized later belonged to a precious 1929 Model T Ford.

Leslie does, in one or two of his pieces, have something of that carving as opposed to modeling sensibility I’m identifying as “American type” cutout.  Gildo the Moore (Rose) 1951 is quite striking in this respect.  Half a dozen torn, black boulders of paper and two whites partially overlap as they are bolted together against a faintly-colored ground, the rose of the title, that is allowed to peer through the slivers of space between these defiant armor plates of paper.

One strategy the artists have in common is to make potent expressive use out of a functional mode of affix, namely the staple.  This comes across very forcefully in Leslie’s Gildo and an untitled Chamberlain of 1960.  In both images, the arbitrarily directed staples, spare but strategic in Leslie, allover and frenetic in Chamberlain, are like pentimenti that electrify the compositions.  Again, however, the way the staple goes down speaks to differing artistic personalities even as Leslie and Chamberlain tap a common period sensibility.  Leslie uses the staples to find, intuitively rather than geometrically, the corners of his rough-hewn quadrangles, or sometimes to tether the forms to one another.  Chamberlain is altogether more liberal in the way he scatters these boisterous accents across the picture plane.  That said, for all their exuberant abundance, almost every staple pulls its weight as a functional necessity.

That neither artist seems to have stayed with collage is in both their cases a moot point.  The young Chamberlain came of age intellectually at Black Mountain College where the company of poets prompted him to play with language.  When he put together poems on the basis of how the words looked, rather than sounded, he realized, he says, that at heart he is a collagist.  That in a way he remains.  The most recent piece in the show, a mixed media relief of 1961, forcefully signals the direction of his mature sculpture.

For Leslie, the idea that his AbEx career is a different man from the new perceptual realist he became is anathema.  Both bodies of work, he once explained to me, are defined by frontality, confrontation and all-overness.  Differences of look and behavior, so far as he is concerned, are of minor consequence.

The boy is father of the man, as the saying goes, and this is true too of collagists and the sculptors or painter/filmmakers they grow up to be.

The post The Probity of Modernism: Collages by John Chamberlain and Alfred Leslie appeared first on artcritical.

SYLVIA SLEIGH
I-20 until May 10 (557 West 23rd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 645 1100)

PHILIP PEARLSTEIN
Betty Cuningham until April 28 (541 West 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 242 2772)

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 5, 2007 under the title “The Realist World”

The more seemingly straightforward realism is, the more it is prone to complications.

Beyond the artworld — whether in schoolrooms, prisons, amateur art classes, psychiatric wards — depiction of the human form is the primary impulse of people who feel the urge to make art.  But it is a persistent strand, as well, of the artistic vanguard even in a century marked by expressionism, abstraction, and recurring claims that mimesis is obsolete.

While the desire to render people in a way that is immediate, universal and impactful has something primitive about it, revival of historically available styles entails sophistication—technically, if you are going to pull it off without looking anachronistic, and conceptually, if in fact mannerism is part of your intent.  Often, significant contemporary realism is pulled by  these competing forces—a naïve belief that you can capture reality and astute awareness of the relativity of style.

This is a good moment to think about realism because of three significant shows by veterans of a 1960s revivial in New York of perceptual realism, along with many young artists (Philip Akkerman at BravinLee Programs, for instance, or Delia Brown at D’Amelio Terras) exploiting realism as much for the frisson of transgression this involves as for the energy it generates within their work.

The key figures of a 1960s new realism that consciously sought to extend rather than simply challenge or bypass the achievements of Abstract Expressionism were Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein and Alfred Leslie. Mr. Katz is the subject of a museum loan exhibition that examines his early work of the 1950s (at the Park Avenue Bank) and Mr. Pearlstein has a show of new work that extends the line of inquiry he established in the 1960s.  Mr. Leslie, meanwhile, is also the subject of a historical show, spanning the years 1964-90.  Sylvia Sleigh’s exhibition is a reassesment of an artist now in her nineties that focuses on her work of the 1970s.  Ms. Sleigh is the widow of the critic Lawrence Alloway who was a persuasive early advocate of Mr. Katz.

Mr. Leslie had enjoyed early success as an abstract painter, first working gesturally in a robust style akin to Willem de Kooning and then moving into rough, drippy collage-based paintings that while close to Robert Motherwell also had a kinship with Robert Rauschenberg with whom he shared a four-man museum exhibition in Sweden in 1962.  Then in 1964-5 he underwent a radical change of heart with a series of full frontal portraits, including a self portrait, on canvases nine foot tall by six foot wide, rendered with precisionist finesse.

In a catalogue essay, David Elliott argues against reading these works as a rebuttal of modernism.  Firstly, he suggests, the New York School was more than abstract painting—it included poets, musicians and experimenters in other domains with whom Mr. Leslie’s realism was consonant.  Secondly, the artist had personal roots, predating his abstract painting, in Brechtian theater, to which these stark, “in your face,” isolated yet socially specific figures related.  In parallel with his painting career, Mr. Leslie was an experimental film director, working with Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank on a significant underground movie, “Pull My Daisy,” (1959).   And lastly, from a formal perspective, the paintings adopted strategies from Abstract Expressionism, namely materiality, directness and scale.

The show includes Mr. Leslie’s earliest surviving realist figure paintings of the 1960s, dynamic, group figure compositions of the mid-1970s, and large-scale nude drawings of 1989 and 1990.  The early works include his 1966-67 self-portrait, on loan from the Whitney, which shows the artist with bared chest and glum expression dazed and mournful following the sudden death of his friend and film collaborator the poet Frank O’Hara, and the destruction of his work and archives in a studio fire that had claimed the lives of 12 fire fighters.  In the early 1970s Mr. Leslie began the series of modern-day history paintings charting the poet’s death, “The Killing Cycle,” his best known, and arguably most bizarre, realist works—which are not included here.

Not that the works on show lack in oddity.  Mr. Leslie’s style is extraordinarily diverse.  At times he veers towards photographic realism, as in the Whitney piece.  The use of grisaille relates more to black and white cinema and photography than it does to old master technique, although it has that pedigree.  “Linda B. Cross” (1967) employs harsh lighting in which the face is spotlit, the mammoth lower body – closer to the artist’s sightline and rendered in grotesquely literal scale – plunged into an almost drastic chiarascuro.  “Judy Tenebaum Early in Pregnancy” (1966-67) has a contrastively symbolist feel: the head is fully work and in color, while the body is more ethereal and generalized, in a chalky miasma.  “Jane Elford” (1967-68) opts for expressivity, with clenched fists, a hint of twist in the torso, a slightly Northern Renaissance grotesqueness in the leer of drooping facial features.  The later group figure compositions, like “Birthday for Ethel Moore,” bring various baroque masters to mind, including Carravaggio and de la Tour.

This diversity gives conceptual edge to Mr. Leslie’s realism, which would exhaust his interest by the early 1990s when archiving and restoring his early films became his main activity.  In the portraits it is as if he is testing, in each work, the limits of different genres—this gives the work a unique intellectual energy, and with it an alienating severity and stiffness.  Unloveable works, they demand to be noticed.

Despite her marriage to a critic, Ms. Sleigh’s realism is less concerned with its own stylistic implications.  At least on first impression they seem blessed by an unaffected naivite.   Her work mixes a sunny disposition, the kind of awkwardness that arises from avoiding single-point perspective and other “academic” tropes embraced by Mr. Leslie, and the slightly nutty ambition of primitivism to capture each petal, blade, body hair. “Annunciation” (1975) has a handome youth sporting an Afro, open denim shirt and denim shorts of a paler hue that evokes the various personal liberation movements of the day and bathes them in a religious light.   An “outsider” sensibility contrasts charmingly with evidently insider subjects, as in “Lawrence and Betty Parsons at Horton’s Point,” (1963) depicting her husband and the well-known art dealer.

Her bucolic scenes of nudes in the open air recall the self-consciously anachronistic later works of André Derain while Henri Rousseau could be quoted in one of the her figures: “Reclining Nude: Paul Rosano” (1977).  In fact, her penchant for seating nudes in the classic modernist pieces that obviously furnished her home, from Paul Rosano again, in a Jacobson chair from 1971 through to “Max Warsh Seated Nude” (2006), the one contemporary work, in an Eames lounge chair, makes a justified historical case for naïve realism as literally and metaphorically embraced by vintage modernism.

The critical fortunes of Messrs. Pearlstein and Katz have inevitably been intertwined since Irving Sandler jointly identified them with what he termed the new perceptual realism.  If you see their works at the same time you quickly realize, where Mr. Katz uses perception to build a painting, Mr. Pearlstein paints in order to use perception.  He is optically obsessed, with no love to spare for paint itself.  At times it seems that the “paint originals” might be jettisoned once they have been photographed—the only value of the paint was to realize the image.

This is not to say for a moment, however, that Mr. Pearlstein is photorealist.  He revels in distortions that only become apparent to an eye trained obsessively on the highly suggestive shapes of limbs in space and the shadows they create, with patterns and objects chosen to test the gaze and tease the picture surface.

The new body of work includes many old favorites among its motife: toys, furniture, models, and kinds of relationship whose reality is exclusively bound to the studio “set up”.  These include translucent plastics calculated to accentuate the distortion of spread limbs and carpet patterns in “Two Models with Balloon Chair and Neon Mickey Mouse” (2007), and ornate objects like a model sailboat or a giant model butterfly, the choreography of whose details mimic the light and shade intricacy of musculature.  In “Model with HMV Dog and Renaissance Bambino” the plays of flesh against wood, of antique porcelain against modern porcelain, are elaborate texural challenges.

In terms of the opposition of a naïve belief in capturing everything and a mannerist delight in the extremities of style, Mr. Pearlstein has it both ways: He is a mannerist when he arranges his set up and positions his canvas, a primitive thereafter.

The post The Realist World: Alfred Leslie, Sylvia Sleigh, Philip Pearlstein appeared first on artcritical.

“Garth Evans, Watercolors” at Lori Bookstein until January 7 (37 W. 57th Street, 212-750-0949).

“Lisa Hoke: The Gravity of Color” at Elizabeth Harris until December 23 (529 W. 20th Street between 10th & 11th Avenues, 212-463-9666).

“Alfred Leslie 1951-1962: Expressing the Zeitgeist” at Allan Stone until December 22 (113 E 90 th Street between Park and Lexington Avneues, 212 987 4997).

David Reed and Garth Evans are improvisors at the top of their form. Where Mr. Evans is like a laid back pianist tinkering away at a set of variations in a warm, quiet bar, Mr. Reed is the last of the big bandsmen, high in style, decibels, and spirits. Mr. Reed is showing new paintings at Max Protetch, Mr. Evans a set of watercolors in the project room at Lori Bookstein—in their different ways they both have us rethinking one of the most cherished dichotomies of the painting phenomenon: transparency versus opaqueness. Each is fascinated by the spatial depths and related emotional resonances of color and materiality. Each uses technique at a high pitch to play depth against surface, closure against ethereality. But the differences between them come down to more than mere mood or means.

Mr. Evans is the more old-fashioned of the two. You can tell right off that he is primarily a sculptor. It is not just because there is always a figure set against a ground (in his case geometric shapes rather than anything anthropomorphic). There’s also an awareness of the expressive value of roughness; although the page is saturated by watercolor used counter-intuitively with almost chalky, pigment-rich earthiness. There’s little instance of the watercolorist’s traditional love of the naked whiteness of the paper, and yet the support has presence: its physicality is played off against the illusion of receding space, achieved with billowing, brooding, pulsating color. The geometric forms have a complexity that subverts the space around them, tucking themselves back and forth within competing picture planes.

Mr. Evans is consumate in his skillful use of the medium and profound in his play with depth and surface, but there is something strong and honest about the use of material; we see through it to form. Mr. Reed, by contrast, is a wizard, a pyrotechnician with paint. He wows and disconcerts with his layering techniques. Where an Evans is spatial, a Reed is spacey. The former is rough on the edges, but you see what you are getting; the latter is silky smooth and slick, reveling in enigma. One is about form, the other style.

With Mr. Reed, the retina feels like its being seduced by a jelly-fish. His complexities of temperature and speed throw the eye about with a tricksiness of baroque proportions. His squiggles manage to recall at once medieval drapery and Bronx graffiti: Martin Schongauer meets Kenny Sharf. Actually, at his best he recalls Sargent in his painterly panache. Where Mr. Evans carves out strong, solid, albeit spatially ambiguous forms, Mr. Reed’s highly energetic, slippery, ethereal squiggles are much more about sensation as an end in itself, about perception than that the perceived. Observers have often remarked how his paint looks photographic. Like a photograph, we see right through the paint to the image it evokes, and yet his image IS the paint—philosophically he is as slippery as his squiggles, which is just the way we like it.

Lisa Hoke has seemed in the past an amusing decorator whose trademark motif would soon exhaust itself. Her installation at Elizabeth Harris puts paid to that: it is good, true and beautiful. She follows on neatly from Mr. Evans and Mr. Reed, not just because of a shared affection for serpentine forms and rich chroma. She has found a strategy to saturate the gaze without teasing the mind. Building effective, rich patterns from banal yet gorgeous means.

She recalls Antonì Gaudi in this regards: as his walls are encrusted with shards of gaudy, glistening ceramic, hers postmodernize the found object while preserving its jouissance with a vocabulary consisting, primarily, of two elements: found paper coffee or soda cups and plastic beakers quarter filled with paint. These are massed to form blocks of color, the cups protruding sculpturally, the beakers swirling into swathes of pure surface. These elements bring to mind the pioneers of painterly digitalism, Seurat and Klimt. She isn’t just about technique and its semiotic implications, however: there is genuine exploration of color sensations—not just chroma but hue. It is a major work that demands return visits to penetrate its depths, and to revel in its surfaces.

***

Alfred Leslie’s abstraction is the stuff of legend, for it is often told how he turned his back on an accomplished early style to embrace the new perceptual realism of the 1960s, the style for which he is better known. It turns out, as the cache Allan Stone has gathered together at his Upper Eastside Gallery, that he was a highly accomplished if somewhat derivative Abstract Expressionst in the 1950s. The experience of this show is rather like finding a vintage cadillac in a long locked garage: they are as fresh as the day they were painted and roaring to go.

There are undoubtedly strong influences from better known painters like de Kooning and Kline in the way emphatic brushstrokes define structure, chance effects are given full play, and the paint embodies the sensation of flesh, and there is probably some influence from such figures as Al Held and Milton Resnick. But the palette has a panache of its own that belies the existential heaviness of his peers, and the energy is prodigious.

I spoke with him as his show opened about the distance he must feel from his early artistic self. On the contrary, he sees absolute continuity between his charged, loose, gutsy bravura painting and collage of the 1950s and the hermetically tight realism, with its bid to create a contemporary history painting, of the subsequent decades, such as his Caravaggesque series devoted to the death of Frank O’Hara, or the monumental series of full-frontal male and female nudes. He stresses frontality, confrontation and all-overness as the underlying formal continuum.

There is a clue about his impatience with abstraction in the experimental movies he directed, two of which are being screened by Mr. Stone in a special projection room (including “Pull my Daisy” with a script by Jack Kerouac, who narrates). Ms. Leslie’s allegiance was to the avantgarde in its broad manifestation, not towards a specific style or technique.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 16, 2004

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