November 22, 2011 to January 21, 2012
525 W 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 445 0051

Dating from a period in which Abstract Expressionism was being eclipsed by new kinds of art, George McNeil’s paintings of  the 1960s show no let up in expressionistic intensity or compositional rigor. Rather, McNeil seems to hunker down for the long haul, trying to forge something solid and enduring out of Action Painting, as Cézanne did out of Impressionism. Confronted by a climate increasingly hostile to painting, he insists on the basic principles of vivid color, solid construction and compressed space upheld by his teacher, Hans Hofmann; he tightens up his compositions until, as though in response to some neglected principle of physics, gestural shapes become massive, and primitive figures emerge.

A founding member of the American Abstract Artists in the 1930s, a group identified with cleanly defined Cubist structure, McNeil found his way into more psychologically charged painting via Hofmann’s combination of expressionistic gestures with constructive discipline. McNeil aspired to be “completely sensate”, a process that, while aiming for spontaneity, involved long periods of revision, during which he sometimes resorted to a blowtorch to remove unwanted layers of dried pigment. As a student, I visited his studio in the mid-seventies: McNeil liked to start from a pile of random objects, using them to establish reference points on canvas, suggestive of movements through space. He showed us a canvas in progress on the floor, stretched on a panel – “so you can jump on it.” Pouring and scraping, he scanned ambiguous forms suspended in liquid pigments for signs of emerging life.

The eight small panels exhibited here are especially dense. Applied with gestural abandon, McNeil’s swaths of paint are charged with inchoate feelings that defy confinement by drawing. Yet out of the same passion comes an urge to organize. Even in a small painting like Des Moines Landscape 7/12/69 (1969), measured fields of deep red and blue are weighed against a yellow shape, and poignant touches of light emerge from the general flux. As with others in this series, gestural shapes suggest ragged trees and glimpses of sky, traces of more recognizable forms. Massive composition is tempered by a seductive lightness of touch, in delicate lines and traces of color suspended in translucent washes.

These improvisations find fuller resolution in the five larger paintings, all from 1960-1969. The open gestures of Lenox (1960) mass together, and the more self-contained shapes in Asphodel (1962) and Game II (1969) assume the weight and contours of bodies – one hesitates to say “figures”, since they emerge in a less intentional way than do de Kooning’s Women or Guston’s Klansmen. McNeil encloses and squeezes his shapes, trying to endow every area with substance. There’s something wildly eccentric about Game II, in which an elongated “leg” connects to a torso with its head downturned along the side of the canvas, contorted like one of Picasso’s Dionysian dancers. The ochre shape compressed between leg and arm exemplifies the surface tension McNeil cultivates, by lending background shapes a positive character; even the acid-green fields of poured paint around the body assume an enameled hardness, like cloisonné.

Of many artists who studied with Hofmann, McNeil may have worked out most thoroughly his teacher’s fusion of analytical rigor and raw expression. He also exploits Jackson Pollock’s practice of working on the floor, approaching his canvas from all sides, to generate images that could only arise from that process of painting. More than Hofmann, in fact, whose “push-pull” tends to rely on colored rectangles suspended against vertical curtains of paint, McNeil’s acrobats take on a total, more personal, identification with the spaces of his works; they test the limits of the frame with a full range of mobility.

References to figures and landscapes, with place names as titles, call to mind works like de Kooning’s Merritt Parkway (1959), which also cultivates breadth and simplicity. But de Kooning’s mark making is more open, and his figures tend to dissolve into their environments.  McNeil’s assume mass and solidity, even as they develop in more unexpected ways. His weighty shapes have more in common with Philip Guston’s emergent, ambiguous forms of the mid-sixties, which prefigure the outlined objects of his cartoon images.

McNeil worked on through the 1970s, increasingly isolated in New York in his devotion to Abstract Expressionism. His improvised figures – angels, mythological characters – are sometimes humorous but also heroic. In the 1980s, he emerged again on the gallery scene, superficially linked to the youth-dominated culture of Neo-expressionism. But that association, and the exuberant productivity of that period in his work, has tended to obscure the depth and rigor of his accomplishments.  This exhibition helps restore the balance; McNeil’s struggle to define imagery in abstraction argues strongly for his historical significance, both in relation to other Abstract Expressionists and to the overall trajectory of painting after modernism.

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“Nobu Fukui” at Stephen Haller Gallery through May 18 (542 W26 Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 741 7777)

“Alexander Liberman: No Regrets” at Ameringer Yohe, through April 24 (20 W 57th Street, bewteen fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212 445 0051)

“Fred Sandback” through end May at Lawrence Markey Gallery 42 East 76th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212 517 9892, and at Zwirner and Wirth, through May 1, 32 E 69 Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-517-86

Minimalism was so strenously and self-consciously iconoclastic, with its prim reductions, its insistently banal primary structures, and its chromophobia, that there is an almost equally iconoclastic pleasure to be had in work that takes up some aspect of this movement but recklessly adds whimsy or gaiety.

Several shows up right now that fit this bill. None of the artists set out to debunk minimalism: one historically precedes it, others dutifully pay homage to the movement. But it doesn’t require a radical misreading of these artists to see an implicit critique of puritanism in their catholic displays of gesture or color.

The small painted boxes of Stuart Arends know how to behave in polite company: They have been collected assidiously by the Panza di Buomo Collection in Italy, which specializes in minimal and monochromatic art. But they are touched by a delicacy and personal, even poetic quality that belies any sense of severity.

The artist has insisted on their status as paintings rather than sculptures, suggesting in a statement that accompanies the show that he arrived at the box as his preferred support out of a desire to deal with a painting as an object “rather than just a format for illusions”. The box isn’t suggestive of a receptical; rather it is just a canvas whose wrap around edges happen to have equal weight to its frontage.

The painting is made up of neatly delineated, irregularly overlapping rectangles. There is a specificness to his touch, which is restrained but personal, sealed-in (with much use of wax) and at the same time differentiated, with a different kind of brushstroke for each rectangle. As if to emphasize the personality of these charmingly particular objects, Mr. Arends has called his show “Friends,” giving each piece a person’s name. His show is a party where you want to linger and meet everyone.

In 1965 Nobu Fukui elicited a cryptic description from Donald Judd, the high priest of minimalism, in a brief notice in Arts Magazine: “The paintings are well done; there isn’t anything wrong with them-they aren’t elegant, bland or affected-but they are like other paintings.” While Mr. Fukui’s work has changed radically in the intervening decades-his aesthetic is now exuberant and layered to the point of being baroque-Judd’s enigmatic categorizations hold true with remarkable alacrity.

Mr. Fukui is an artist who, literally, juggles many balls: a typical work lays upon a ground of richly detailed, dense gestural and/or collaged texture a rigid grid structure populated at the intersections of its ruled lines with irregular clusters of colored uniformly sized dots and, less frequently, actual balls (they could be beads or marbles) dipped in paints of the same primary and nursery colors.

The viewer soon gets used to these grids and balls so that they shimmer on the retina like a layer of pointillism. There is, however, an insistent democracy between the layers, and within each layer, despite the irregularity, an all-overness that achieves order without symmetry or ubiquity. The collage materials, where he uses them, hover ingeniously between interestingness and gratuity. In fact, his whole project seems to be a bravura balancing act of meaning and decoration, as if these aesthetic categories themselves are willed equivalents of order and chaos.

Dots and balls of a sparer nature but no less whimsy and charm filled the works of Alexander Liberman between 1950-1960, an elegant selection of which, installed in direct emulation of a show staged by the artist at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1960, closes at Ameringer Yohe this weekend. Reviewing the Parsons show in Arts magazine, Judd noted that “the economy is admirable.”

These works are, indeed, about economy for the sake of vigor and dynamism rather than reduction for its own, cerebral or theoretical sake. They look to Russian Constructivism, (the “Yellow Continuum” series directly recalling Rodchenko and El Lissitsky) but despite their precionism and hard-edged clarity they equally bring to mind the pulsating, wobbly disks of Miró or the child-like joie de vivre of Calder, especially Liberman’s last disk painting in this show, an untitled work from 1960 that pits a hand-drawn larger yellow and smaller red ball against a dazzle of ultramarine.

Liberman was the legendary art editor at Condé Nast who managed to maintain a serious practice as a fine artist despite the pressures of his job and the snobbish distance, before the era of Andy Warhol, between the worlds of art and fashion. He was a great collector and patron of artists, but there is plenty of positive evidence in these joyful, bracing works to overcome any suspicion of the depth of admiration felt for this artist by such peers as de Kooning, Newman, and later, of course, Judd.

On the face of it, the late Fred Sandback-the subject of a two-part exhibition at Lawrence Markey and the uptown premises of David Zwirner-was as minimal as they come.
His trademark material was store-purchased brightly colored acrylic yarn, stretched taut between floor and ceiling, or forming right angles to a wall. These lines of string inevitably force awareness of their environment in a way that displaces attention from the object itself to its impact, a classic hallmark of minimalism.

And yet, severe, pristine, reductive as Sandback first appears, the effect of his string pieces is strangely sculptural. You become aware not so much of the room itself, although that is a factor, as of planes defined in space. And the sense of implied continuation, the thought that the lines must continue through to other rooms and spaces, adds a poetic element alien to hard core minimal art. Despite his drastic means, Sandback was ultimately more of a connector to artistic traditions than a disruptor of them. His professed preference for the expressive figuration of Giacometti over the presumed affinity between his own work and the Russian contructivists is richly suggestive and rings true.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 22, 2004

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“Markus Linnenbrink: The Beauty You Are”
Margaret Thatcher Projects until November 29
511 W. 25th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-675-0222

“The Sentimental Favorite: abstract painting”
Elsbeth Deser, Iva Gueorguieva, Frederick Hayes, Mark Takamichi Miller, Jennifer Riley
Triple Candie until November 23
461 W. 126th Street, between Amsterdam and Convent Avenues, 212-865-0783

Although, as Cézanne observed, there are no straight lines in nature, art and design more than make up for it. Still, it is surprising how late and inauspicious an entry stripes made into Western consciousness. As the French scholar Michel Pastoureau noted in “The Devil’s Cloth” (2001), when the Carmelites brought the pattern back from the Holy Land, stripes bewildered and infuriated people: The medieval eye was conditioned perceptually by figure-ground relationships. Stripes came to be viewed as diabolical.

In our own times, however, the stripe appeals to artists of a reductive bent precisely because of its ubiquity and standardization, the unostentatious way it sits upon the eye. (No room for the devil if there aren’t any details.) Three painters currently showing revisit stripes: Two – the German Markus Linnenbrink and the Bostonian Jennifer Riley – are relative youngsters, but Kenneth Noland is a grand master of the motif.

As ever with Mr. Noland, his exhibition at Ameringer Yohe of nine new canvases is in equal measure elegant and enigmatic. In his last show at the gallery, the artist revisited his trademark “target” format, first seen in the late 1950s. Now it is the turn of stripes, which became his idiom ten years later: emphatically horizontal bands of solid color, posited in radical chromatic relationships with one another.

Mr. Noland’s own rhetoric, and that of his formalist champions, speaks about optical hedonism. His style and achievement were pitted, historically, against the hard, cold, logic of the minimalists. But while this new show deploys sumptuous colors, ranging from the pumped-up synthetic to the shamelessly pretty and pastel, it is hard to get these paintings to work in the way one assumes they are supposed to. How is one to resist the banal conclusion that they are delightful graphic designs?

Scale helps. In their bid to envelop the gaze, these canvases are heroically horizontal. At least double-square, they sometimes stretch in width to more than three times their height. But getting the eye horizontal doesn’t mean these paintings have their wicked way with it. Bands of color are hardly more prone to blend on the retina than Seurat’s dots; they insist on their autonomy. At best, if stared at long enough, there’s a bit of optical buzz, but – to pursue the bedroom analogy – it is hardly as if the earth moves.

Mr. Noland’s paintings are “about” color relationships rather than actually embodying them: They are beautifully printed scores, not symphonies. This artist, who has suffered for his formalism, is actually not formalist enough. Revisiting his own high-modernist halcyon days at a time when *de rigeur* ironists are doing the same, Mr. Noland has become an inadvertent postmodernist.

***

I first became aware of Markus Linnenbrink at the Hammer in Los Angeles last spring, where a floor-to-ceiling mural filled the UCLA museum’s entrance. This stunningly audacious décor, “Myself Outside,” fused the yin and yang of painterly abstraction: the stripe and the drip. It was droll, canny, and felicitous in its balance of semiotics and sweetness.

Mr. Linnenbrink’s third solo show at Margaret Thatcher Projects, however, disappointed me. If only he could heed the classic modernist dictum that less is more; instead, the artist seems to be hedging his bets with a variety of strategies and confections. It is not that there aren’t winners on hand. In “Ladylove” (2003) strips of bright, colored, epoxy resin form a beaded surface, each strip artfully seeming to drip its way to a point. In “Zimmer in the Dead Sea” (2003), horizontal lines of epoxy, tentatively zigzagging and densely clustered (at places almost sandwiching), shimmer or dribble over faintly legible collage materials to intriguing effect.

It is the array of that ideas is unbecoming. Whether the artist means to show off, is unsure where to go, or is placing his disparate efforts in clever-clever (Richterian) quote marks is unclear. This market-stall act is decidedly gauche from an artist of such proven poise.

***

Jennifer Riley’s contribution to the stripe renaissance is to be found in an eclectic and bizarrely titled group exhibition at Triple Candie. “The Sentimental Favorite: abstract painting,” is like the Harlem industrial space that hosts it: sprawling, rough at the edges, and quite a trip.

Ms. Riley, who is represented by three large canvases in this five person show, appears to be the only artist who can plausibly be described as abstract. It is also difficult to believe that abstraction is, or ever has been, “the” sentimental favorite. But so what? The true selection principle is that these are emerging artists with some reputation in their hometowns: New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle, and, in Ms. Riley’s case, Boston.

It’s worth the detour, incidentally, for another painter in the show, the emphatically figural Mark Takamichi Miller, whose fast, thick, gooey action paintings read like family snapshots caught in atomic meltdown. In contrast to these gushing fountains of virtuosity, Ms. Riley’s sparse, introverted compositions reveal their quirky individualism as if by micro-irrigation. They pay a kind of warped homage to the earnest mystical abstraction of Agnes Martin, the Zen nun of stripes. Ms. Riley, however, is devoted to what are more like heraldic bars.

She is often symmetrical, but more in the breach than the observance. In “Multiflex” (2003), color schemes seem suspended between the random and the sensical. Typically of the artist, the eye is beckoned towards an ever-elusive logic. Ms. Riley’s subtle touch creates fluid, almost sinewy lines. Strangely flesh-toned, these can almost misread as stretched stockings (connecting with the funky Mr Takamichi Miller after all). It is as if by stealth this gentle subversive is claiming back – for nature, for the body – the hardest edge of abstraction.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 13, 2003.

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September 9 – October 9, 2004

Ellen Phelan has taken a great many chances in her current show of paintings and watercolors at Ameringer & Yohe. First of all a she has chosen to work from photographs. Secondly they are family photographs. This is something that many inexperienced art students choose to do. They will often bring in a picture of Aunt Gussie (or someone) and proceed to make a perfectly awful painting attempting to copy the photo. As an experienced teacher Phelan knows this, and as an even more experienced painter ( thirty plus years) she has the finesse and temerity to “go there” and come out none the worse for the endeavor.

This is only the beginning of the chances she takes. The paintings literally involve smoke and mirrors. However, her intent is not to conceal or deceive, but to see more clearly things, which have been veiled by time. There is smoke in that she uses the Italian renaissance device known as sfumatto (smoke) enveloping the subject in a kind of haze of light and dark, and even darker tones. This results in a “through a glass darkly” sort of examination of memory and identity and perception. Artistically the venture calls to mind Whistler, Corot and even Eakins. For this viewer the results can be quite moving and always expertly executed.

Phelan’s techniques are her own and a mystery even to other painters. There is an elegant surety about placement and color. Perhaps the most beautiful painting here is a self-portrait, called Self-Portrait”, showing the artist taking her own picture in a mirror. This sounds corny (another risk) but the painting is astonishing. The works are all beautifully scaled. Whether or not Phelan wins the gamble, playing with narcissism and sentimentality as she does, is debatable. I found the show masterful and all the more so for taking the risks that she does.

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Patricia Tobacco Forrester: New Paintings
A.V.C. Contemporary Arts Gallery until October 11 (41 E. 57th Street, fifth floor, at Madison Avenue, 212-888-1122).

“Mario Naves, Collages,”
Elizabeth Harris until October 4 (529 W. 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-463-9666)

That installation art had its origins in a set of values which were essentially anti-aesthetic makes Judy Pfaff a doubly remarkable figure. Not only was she one of the pioneers of the new medium; as a consumate aesthete, she also represents, a dissenting strand within it. Whereas the impulse behind installation for her countercultural, iconoclastic contemporaries was militantly antagonistic towards the object, in Pfaff’s hands, as Clausewitz might have put it, installation is painting and sculpture pursued by other means.

This is not to portray her as a counter-revolutionary or to deny her personal connection with the avant-garde of the 1970s. That she brings formal concerns to installation doesn’t make her a formalist. But, at the same time, she takes an abstract delight in readymade materials (she is the crucial forerunner to Jessica Stockholder and Sarah Sze in this respect.) In Ms. Pfaff’s work, there is an ambiguous back and forth between indulgence in the sheer shape, color, and texture of her appropriated bric-à-brac and poetic awareness of actual, redolent things in the world.

Her latest installation, at Ameringer Yohe, is her first exhibition in New York City since 1997, when she showed at Andre Emmerich, which has since closed. It is also the first opportunity for New Yorkers to see a significant change in direction, first signaled at the 1998 São Paolo Bienal, where she represented the United States. If her work in the 1990s had tended towards sculptural unity, her new approach revives the radical informality of her earlier forays into environment.

“Neither Here Nor There” falls roughly into four interconnected zones. , though the installation is far from visually unified. From scaffold, architectural ornaments, and found objects, Ms. Pfaff and her assistants have created structures that are at once dense and sprawling, and they have painted, stenciled, and collaged the walls with a panoply of decorative detail. While one room is dominated by grids built out of tape on the floor and a floating frame of plywood, the style in another room is determined by circuitry, with vaguely Islamic motifs zig-zagging around the room in welded metal strips and plaster vase-forms. But despite a density of spatial and referential layers, despite a cornucopia of materials and a corresponding abundance of style and touch, from delicate intricacy to studied nonchalance, , there isn’t the overwhelming sensuousness one might imagine.

In fact, the work shows remarkable expressive restraint. Forms are built up or broken down with disarming poise. Even where architectural trimming is deconstructed to expose its underlayers, this incident forms an isolated phrase on the wall. If a room is an installation artist’s blank canvas, Ms. Pfaff leaves much of the canvas bare, despite the seeming alloverness of her approach. This is where the new work contrasts with her 1990s sculptures, with their Frank Stella-like exuberance and deliberate over-stimulation. Environment has become her support again, but without a corresponding ambition to envelop the gaze. Instead, the eye is left to roam around on its own, to find scattered effects rather than lose itself in the visual forest.

It is bizarre that such a “material girl” as Judy Pfaff should remain so cerebral in this way. The sense of deliberation, of isolated phrases and interventions, brings to mind Katharine Hepburn’s reported criticism of Glenn Close and Meryl Streep: you can hear them thinking. But in Ms. Pfaff’s case, that may not be a criticism. At Yale her mentor was the problematizing abstractionist, Al Held.If her subsequent tastes and preoccupations took her into the company of the “pattern and decoration” artists of the late 1970s, and if her use of materials is poetic as much as it is formal, at the end of the day her vision still remains heady and hard-won.

***

Down 57th Street at AVC Gallery in the Fuller Building, Patricia Tobacco Forrester does equally remarkable and inventive things within a chosen medium at the opposite end of the trendiness spectrum, watercolor. Ms. Forrester was a few years ahead of Ms. Pfaff at Yale, where classmates included Richard Serra, Rackstraw Downes, and Janet Fish. She has not only made watercolor her exclusive medium, but made the exotic landscape her chosen motif. In a way, it was as brave to join a genre that attracts so many illustrators and amateurs as it would have been to pioneer a new medium such as installation.

What makes Ms. Forrester’s work so compelling is its unpredictability. Technically speaking, these paintings achieve their intensity through outsize scale, strong inner light, formal complexity, dramatic cropping, and high-octane color – abetted by the artist’s fearless decision to expose her paper unglazed. But what makes them so demanding and satisfying has to do with obsessive attention. And it’s attention not so much to detail as to nuance.

“Beech/Birch” (2003), a 10-foot-wide triptych, has both alloverness and depth. The painting depicts a violent competition between the tree species, in which growth entails strangulation in a way that mirrors the precarious vitality of watercolor itself. A painting like this bathes the retina in chromatic luxuriance, but Ms. Forrester holds back from a sentimental view of nature. She collides passages of precision and ambiguity managing at once to summon the immediate presence of wood and to evoke the ethereal movements of water. In her paintings, such strange bedfellows as vibrancy and mystery are encouraged to cohabit.

***

Artist Mario Naves is a critic for the New York Observer, so perhaps it’s fitting that his chosen expressive medium, papier collé, should entail a degree of cutting and tearing. Joking aside, he is a collagist of great charm and sophistication, whose fresh, intriguing works at Elizabeth Harris are at once delicate and pack a punch. Although he prepares his own stock of painted and impressed papers rather than finding materials out in the world, the fiddly intricacy of his touch recalls Kurt Schwitters, the Dadaist who appropriated bus tickets, matchboxes, commercial labels and the like in his quirky constructions.

The more obvious source of inspiration, of course, are the late cutouts of Matisse. Other modernist strategies come to mind, particularly those pioneered by the Surrealists, such as frottage (rubbing) and decalcomania (a form mirror imaging itself through folding and impressing.) While Mr. Naves remains an abstractionist, his affinity with Surrealist collage encourages a sense of narrative in his lively compositions. Anything but polite essays in spatial dynamics, these teasing, voluptuous objects of desire might just be subjects of it, too.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 25, 2003

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Jules Olitski: Spray Paintings of the 1960s, at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, 20 W 57, 2nd fl, between Fifth and Sixth, New York, NY 10019, phone: 212-445-0051, mon-fri 10-6, sat 10-5, thru Aug 1

Art Production Fund, brainchild of curator/improsario Yvonne Force, administers a scheme to place upcoming American artists in studios at the Fondation Claude Monet in Giverny. Protected from the tourist hordes, residents enjoy privileged access to the Impressionist master’s legendary gardens. Key fixtures like the Japanese bridge and the lily pad pop up frequently in this sprightly celebration of the program at Salon 94.

For the most part, Ms. Force has sent Giverny way 15 hot button emerging artists, including painters Augusto Arbizo, Ann Craven, Steve DiBennedetto and Rochelle Feinstein. Rumor has it that the Fondation has vetoed future photographers, which on the evidence of the alumni on view here is a shame: Miranda Lichtenstein and Susan Jennings both responded to Monet’s horticultural inspirations in ways that pay homage to his vision across the divide of medium.

Ms. Jennings, with her high-chroma, zestfully cropped, chirpy photographs of the inner workings of flowers exploits the the painterliness of photography in a masterful, one might say impressionistic fashion. Like Monet, she fuses visual intensity with high style in a way that defies any hint of their incompatability. Her photographs are artfully sealed behind extra thick plexi adding a layer of sculptural otherness to their presence. They hang nicely besides dinky plastic waist-high flowers by Rachel Urkowitz; these nursery-colored fleurs du mal are the only sculptural work in the show.

It is particularly instructive to see Alexander Ross’s not especially Monet-influenced painting in the company of the almost mocking homage to the master by Will Cotton. These two painters, though respectively abstract and realist, have close affinities with one another in terms of modus operandi (apparently there are complex arrangements involving set-ups and photography) and heightened awareness of artifice.

Mr. Cotton makes big still lifes of melting ice-creams and soft-focus puddings. His 2003 piece here is entitled “Giverny Flan Pond”. He creates abstract fields (shimmering haystacks indeed) from absurdly hyperreal observation. Mr. Ross travels in the opposite mimetic direction, but the rich dialogue between these two painters only goes to prove that the journey not the destination is what counts in art. His ambiguous forms defy pictorial interpretation, but the brushstrokes are organized with tight depictive purposiveness. In Mr. Ross, abstraction achieves the condition of representation, whereas in Mr. Cotton it is the opposite that seems attempted.

From the paradise where they were made to the Upper East Side the pictures in this exhibition continue to enjoy a pampered setting. The exquisite Salon 94 is actually the ground floor of the home of financier Nicholas Rohatyn and his wife, the dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn of Artemis Greenberg van Doren. The gallery space looks out onto a garden through a magnificent floor to ceiling bay window that directly recalls in shape and scale if not content the late murals of Monet.

Yeardley Leonard offers a painterly bridge between the cool minimalism of this classy interior and the sumptuous naturalism of Giverny. The touchstones of her dense but serene constructivism are Bridget Riley, Jesus Rafael Soto, and Theo van Doesburg, but in her painting “When the Sun Shines Through” (2003) a compositionally-centered burst of light softens her usually rigorously determined flatness almost, within her own strictly geometric terms, impressionistically.

***

Apropos Monet, there is a timely chance to view classic 1960s spray paintings by Jules Olitski at Ameringer Yohe. Like late Monet, these breakthrough works by the leading color field painter are at once solid and ethereal: color is embodied by paint and yet seemingly seen through it, as if – contrary to the formalist rhetoric that accompanied these pictures into the world – color constitutes an image autonomous of the means of its conveyance.

Mr. Olitski is hard to see. It is not that he isn’t visible – there are fairly frequent shows of his work, though more in commercial than public forums – so much as that he comes with baggage. Mention his name and the critic Clement Greenberg comes to mind as surely as Baudelaire’s does with that of his protégé Constantin Guys’. But the experience to be had at Ameringer Yohe may prove a revelation to a generation better acquainted with the theory and hype surrounding Mr. Olitski than the work itself.

The artist has recounted elsewhere how, in the mid 1960s, these paintings came to be. The British sculptor Anthony Caro was talking about how he used color to emphasize the density of steel. “Without thinking I said I want the opposite for my painting. If I could just have a spray of paint in the air that would just stay there, not lose its shape.” The next day he drove into town and bought a spray gun. Olitski and his peers had been striving for a “post painterly”, that’s to say anti-gestural color presence. Hitherto staining and pouring had been a preferred mean to take the hand out of painting. Spraying upped the ante; paint moved beyond saturation to become a breathy, whispering presence.

Later, in complete and studied contrast, Olitski would re-embrace impasto with aplomb, experimenting with gels and mediums to create bizzare bas reliefs out of paint (anticipated by “17th Hope” [1969], from the end of the period represented in this show). In either extreme – flatness or thickness – Mr. Olitski is a master of unexpected color, risking saccherine sweetness in his pursuit of feeling. Despite their radically reduced means, these works are miles away from the minimalism and conceptualism beginning to take hold of the artworld of the day. They are romantic and naturalistic, almost to the point of embarrassing the viewer with illusions of cloud formations or morning mist. If abstraction is implicit in the atmospheric impressionism of Monet, the opposite holds for Mr. Olitski.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 17, 2003

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