Experiencing this marvelous show of works by Andrew Forge (1923-2002) at Betty Cuningham Gallery, the second they have organized, something of an epiphany brought composer Morton Feldman to this visitor’s mind. I am not suggesting a co-extensive relationship between music and visual art – even Kandinsky, in his correspondence with Schoenberg, refuted that notion – but there are parallel qualities and ideas explored by Feldman and Forge that sustain this connection.

It is notable that both wrote on their respective fields. A polymath, Forge was also an articulate and insightful writer and teacher. His extensive, as yet uncollected writings include books and essays on a diverse range of significant artists: Paul Klee, Claude Monet and Robert Rauschenberg, to name a few. Feldman also wrote on painters and poets who had influenced his development and those pieces have been collected in Give My Regards to Eighth Street. Central to both were the examples of John Cage and Rauschenberg on how to escape from the binding aspects of their respective traditions.

At the Cunningham Gallery we have been offered a selection of three types of work: watercolors of floating and touching dots and dashes, some coalescing into fields of color; watercolor grids of shifting columns; and oils of densely worked color fields opening into ever changing networks of shimmering atmospheres, telegraphing to our eyes Forge’s sense of mapped sight and motion.

Seen broadly, the watercolors offer a way into Forge’s thinking process. He created them as a release from the dense complications of his oils. In the four works of strictly gridded columns, thin quivering strokes slide laterally across the vertical columns, sometimes partially overlapping others and playing against the rigidness of the interval. This mosaic-like tessellation of color notations carry melodic movements, punctuated by accents of dark or opposing saturated colors. All of these works are in dialogue with Klee’s magic squares, and the North African rugs that inspired him.

Feldman also expressed an interest in Near and Middle Eastern rugs: “Music and the designs or a repeated pattern in a rug have much in common. As a composer, I respond to…a rug’s coloration and its creation of a microchromatic overall hue…for most artists the structural concerns are uppermost and out of it comes content….” (Crippled Symmetry (1981)

For Forge, the objective process of making a painting by following a set of rules for structural development was a means of paralleling nature’s ways of forming. Writing on Klee (1954), Forge quoted from the latter’s essay, On Modern Art (1922): “With the gradual growth of such a structural image before our eyes an association of ideas gradually insinuates itself which may tempt one to a material interpretation.” This quote would become key to his mature process and it is telling that it was used in a discussion of Klee’s Classic Coast (1931), one of the great mock-mosaic works employing only dots and bars of color in an extensive, shifting, asymmetric grid. In his struggle to find a satisfying relationship between looking, making and meaning, Forge ultimately discovered that the notational marks were charged with an expressive quality that ultimately “generates … subject, not the other way around,” as he later wrote in the brochure for an exhibition he curated at the New York Studio School, Observation: Notation (2000).

This relationship with Klee and other artists is what Forge referred to as his “internal audience” where work speaks to work, across time, space and culture. Seen this way, a work of art is part of a greater whole. Each new work may change our sense of the past, even as the past may change the present. This continual restructuring can also manifest within the history of an artist’s work. This kind of thinking is what Forge thought “distinguished an artist.” (891, 1985)

A small vertical landscape of heavy atmosphere is titled Aurélia (1985) in allusion to Gérard De Nerval’s famous Romantic account of his descent into madness. This seems to parallel Forge’s desire to form a method of mapping the world that was objective in process and subjective in affect, all while not being representational. Two works from the same year conjure Roman torso fragments portrayed as spectral emanations appearing or dissolving into simple notation.

Where Forge moves further away from recognizable forms, his landscape titles allow us a way into the work even as it may suppress our access to his inner dialogue. In Willow (1999) Forge synthesizes Monet and Jules Olitski into something unique and radiant. In both versions of the dark Heavy Hemlocks (1999) Forge approaches Morris Louis’ veils with a suggestive energy that has an existential intensity.

As I began to move back and forth between two large and transcendent works by Forge, April (1991-92) and November (1980-81), each painting opened up slowly, illuminated by a synthetic, intellectualized light. April evades prettiness in an airy softness of buzzing pulses, echoing Pierre Bonnard’s more apparitional works, and in November, a shadowy palette yields an ocean of chromatic patterns. Exceedingly dense, both works are lightened by the amount of white ground variously peeking through, creating a Bezold effect. With their flowing networks of shifting hues, these paintings are polyphonic in the way they changed radically from a distance of 3 feet to 6 feet and again from across the room. As one moves back certain configurations appear and then disappear as one’s brain synthesizes the color oppositions. At the furthest remove, the canvases have an atomized geometrical structure.

It was during this immersion that I was suddenly aware of a parallel experience, an extraordinary evening at New York City Opera (2011), listening to Feldman’s monodrama, Neither, for soprano and orchestra based on a short text by Samuel Beckett. As the composer noted in his last interview (1987), with Everett C. Frost, “The subject essentially is: whether you’re in the shadows of understanding or non-understanding. I mean finally you’re in the shadows. You’re not going to arrive at any understanding at all: You’re just left there holding this—the hot potato which is life.”

This stunning music sustained a chromatic atmosphere which had drawn me in, repeating phrase fragments that seemed to have much in common with Forge’s networks of dots and dashes, billowing into varied densities of space and light. In this hour long piece, Feldman achieved a moment held in duration–vertical time–unexpected in music, but central to painting. Every luminous chord changed so gradually that what seemed movement in the moment, was reflected in repeated patterns subtly shifted by tempo and his orchestration of instruments. Here too, segments of listening time resembled my various positions in relation to each canvas. Or as Feldman put it, “I am involved with the contradiction in not having the sum of the parts equal the whole.”

Both Feldman’s and Forge’s works achieve lucid-dream states. In my experience, it was the especially large scale, whether spatial or durational, that produced profoundly transporting totalities. The disquieting mood for Feldman had “to do with instrumental images,” whereas the indistinct inner worlds in Forge rely on the diffusion of color into unnamable but apprehensible feeling. After a number of gallery visits, I haven’t come to the end of these works: all their secrets hide in plain sight.

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Andrew Forge (1923–2002) was the author of shimmering abstract paintings of intense chromatic lyricism. His canvases are constructed from an even layer of closely woven, abutting colored dots, a kind of modernist update of Georges Seurat’s pointillism. His second notational device, a line about the size of a matchstick is an occasional usurper amid the dots, a queen bee among the workers.

Betty Cuningham has assembled 14 of his canvases and a selection of works on paper from the mid-1980s through 2001, shortly before his death from cancer. It is a joy to see the works under natural light. While there is a rigor and consistency to his technique, there is also significant variety in tenor and mood between different works, and varying degrees of elusiveness or legibility. His art has a quiet, intriguing beauty that rewards long, slow looking. But there is no getting away from the fact of hard work — they are (and were) a long haul for painter and viewer alike.

The works are as challenging to write about as they are to read. “Fall (For P.M.)” (2000) assembles green and yellow dots across its 3 foot width. Bands of alternating light and shade, forming an irregular wave pattern, are built up from an ebb and flow between the lighter and darker dots. There are intimations of geometric forms — a triangle, a parallelepiped — and while the boundaries are too vague and elusive for these to assert themselves, they intimate pockets of deeper space and varying qualities of light. Towards the bottom of the composition, blues of varying strength suggest a foreground, encouraging the rest of the painting to recede.

The paintings are arcane alike in what is depicted and the aesthetic intentions behind them, but Forge is hermetic, not systemic. He stands apart from the conceptual and minimal art of the 1970s, when his mature style formed, because however involved he was with his own language, his vision is rooted in perception, a desire to grasp reality. The general feel is of forms trying to emerge than of forms being submerged — as if the artist is genuinely doing his best to reveal structures rather than obtusely to conceal them.

Forge was a charismatic teacher, critic, and scholar. Among many artists about whom he wrote persuasively, Monet and Bonnard are most instructive in relation to his own work. The catalog is especially rewarding in its use of quotes from the artist about his artistic journey: It almost reads like an illustrated novel. The reception for the opening of his show was a gathering of several generations of alumni and faculty from institutions that revere him as a kind of artist-saint: Yale University, where he was a professor and dean from 1975 until his retirement in 1994, plus the New York Studio School, Cooper Union, Dartmouth College and others.

It was only after his retirement from Yale, however, that Forge really hit his stride as a painter. In his early career, in England, he enjoyed success as a figurative realist in the tradition of his teacher, William Coldstream. His embrace of abstraction in the 1960s came as a shock. But it is possible in retrospect to join the dots — no pun intended — between these disparate styles. What his fastidiously observed realism and intuitive abstraction have in common are the painterly virtues of slowness, fidelity, and thought. He was a friend and devotee of Alberto Giacometti and clearly shared his almost masochistic sense that truth is mortgaged to effort. There is a cult of the “hard won image” among School of London realists like Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud — artists, incidentally, for whom Forge curated an important group exhibition at Yale in the 1981 — which he clearly is part of.

Forge was strongly influenced by the art theorist Adrian Stokes, who made much of Michelangelo’s distinction between the carver and the modeler. Cearly, with his slow, deliberate method, Forge himself was a carver. Slowly, and without correction, each mark that went down had to really matter.  Even as vast numbers of dots and sticks accumulated, each mark had to pull its weight. Despite their weird craft, nothing is gratuitous in these highly wrought compositions.

If this all makes Forge sound dry, academic, and anally retentive, the experience of his paintings belies such an impression. However elusive the work is, looking at it is a joy. The colors are organic, mostly sunny or autumnal. The chromatic relationships are the kind observed in nature. Titles often indicate landscape as the motif. But the motif seems subsidiary to subject, which is more about the experience of looking than what is actually being looked at. Without being in any way illustrative of a scientific theory about seeing, the work seems to be about constructing a meaningful, truthful visual reality. The canvases deny the easy privileges of cognition, the imposition of meaning and order upon the mass of visual sensation—awakening us, in their strange, unfamiliar process, to deeper experiences of vision.

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exhibition travels to Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center
Auburn, NY in May-June 2004

Watercolor, once the Cinderella of mediums, has been having a ball recently. Pamela Auchincloss and Melissa Meyer curated a survey of 22 abstract painters who use watercolor in 2001 that has been on virtually continuous national tour since, while last fall the painters Graham Nickson and Susan Shatter were co-curators of a ground-breaking international survey at the New York Studio School of 40 current practicioners that cut across stylistic divisions. Of course, in bastions of traditionalism across the land – arts clubs, community centers, academies – there has never been a let-up in annual shows by enthusiasts, but these two exhibitions challenged stereotypes about the medium, showing great range of expressive possibilities.

A preview of another survey, again of 22 artists, destined for the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, N.Y. next summer, is now at the Kouros Gallery. It has been organized by members of Zeuxis, a group named for the Greek painter celebrated by the Ekphrastic poets for a depiction of grapes so realistic that birds were deceived into pecking them. The Zeuxis group is devoted to still-life, although this show, of members, late members, and an eclectic roster of guests, is divided equally between the genres of landscape and still life, with a couple of abstractionists thrown in for good measure.

Despite the conservatism of this pervasively polite show, there are some truly remarkable painters here whose work rewards optimism about the vitality of this most ancient and elusive of mediums. Several exhibitors paid homage to the patriarch of modern watercolor, Cézanne. Both Robert Jessel and Ruth Miller favor the French artist’s delicate overlap of diaphanous veils. Where Mr. Jessel, who also brings to mind the watercolors of Signac, carpets his composition with repetitive strokes in a way that ultimately belies watercolor’s transparency, Ms. Miller’s explorations yield miraculous depths, a numinous sense of inner space. It is too bad that she is separated from her late husband, Andrew Forge, whose single contribution is hung on another floor: There is an exquisite commonality of vision and touch uniting the perceptions of abstract husband and realist wife.

In his mature paintings, Mr. Forge developed a deeply felt yet hermetic system of notation from colored dots, with the occasional intervention of connecting sticks. His oil paintings have the shimmering mystery of Byzantine mosaic, but to the uninitiated the sense of depictive logic without the reward of pictorial meaning makes hard work of them. In watercolor, where the roles of dot and stick are reversed, his esoteric pointillism lets its hair down, so to speak, in what is, for Forge, an exuberant display of painterly sensualism.

In a typically felicitous phrase, Mr. Forge, who was a dazzling lecturer and critic, once told sculptor and fellow Brit Garth Evans that, when starting a watercolor, the white paper is “money in the bank.” On the evidence of three works in this exhibition, Mr. Evans seems to be keeping his investment intact: no white shows through at all. Indeed, his use of watercolor seems counter-intuitive, for the effect of pigment pushed against page is to bolster the physicality of the support rather than create the ethereal otherness which is the most familiar property of watercolor. But in his masterful handling, the medium reveals itself as the perfect means to reconcile volume to flat shapes.

In contrast to Mr. Evans’ parsimony, Robert De Niro, Sr. (father of the actor) was positively profligate with the whiteness of the paper in the undated work included here. This seemingly dashed-off still-life arrangement of pots and flowers is a wonderful orchestration of wet against dry, color against virgin page – dualisms that recall the famous “push-pull” dictum of De Niro’s teacher, Hans Hoffman.

Other artists of De Niro’s generation shown here include Louisa Matthiasdottir, who makes the medium behave in harmony with her smooth, fluent vision, and Nell Blaine, one of the only artists in this generally rather tame exhibition to let rip, painting wet in wet with the ferocity of a German expressionist.

In a set of small duck watercolors from 1990, Lois Dodd takes the power of the support to an extreme: But for the beaks, all of the birds’ bodies is negative space defined by surrounding grass, sky or their own shadow. (Underlying pencil drawing does add further articulation.) Like the cows from earlier in her career, ducks are a perfect vehicle for the kind of placid, understated animation this quiet modernist values in landscape. Ms. Dodd evidently has an admirer in Phyllis Floyd, a prime mover in Zeuxis. Her economical but keenly observed views of city parks deftly capture specific body types and gestures in a way that is neat and endearing, and she handles watercolor with business-like straightforwardness.

The same compliment cannot be extended to Arthur Kvanstrom, whose bewildering, illegible, and fiddly back-and-forth merely aggrevates the eye, or Joseph Byrne, whose anemic tree trunks aspire to the fey reductiveness of early Joseph Beuys but merely confound the attention their fussiness demands. Victor Pesce saves the day for feyness with a touching, Morandiesque lemon, which is anything but.

The show, it has to be said, is generally let down by lightweights padding out the ranks*. The artists really compromised by their company are those whose understated style or compositions initially seem academic but on closer inspection are quietly inventive. I’m thinking of John Goodrich, for instance: The delicate awkwardness in his handling of the open form of a lattice bowl then left to stand out against a bold diagonal expanse of crimson wall is deliciously subtle.

Someone, meanwhile, should save Carmen Lund from her framer: Her abrasive, cacophonous flower studies, aggressively cropped with almost a collage sensibility to form a dense if irregular grid, were all ready to be taken seriously until shiny, kitsch mouldings disasterously intervened.

* In the printed edition of this review, the sentence continues: “although these are probably core members of Zeuxis, whom the heavy-hitters were enlisted to bolster”. Further research has revealed the opposite: it is the artists singled out for praise in this review who are Zeuxis members, the unnamed “lightweights” who were guests. Apologies to anyone hurt by the misunderstanding. Readers will have an opportunity, incidentally, to judge Zeuxis’ membership in greater depth in an upcoming exhibition, Zeuxis- A Moveable Feast, at the Westbeth Gallery, 155 Bank Street, New York, September 6-28, 2003

A version of this article first appeared in The New York Sun, August 14, 2003.

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