September 16 – October 8, 2020
87 South Euclid Avenue
Montauk, New York
bckfineartsgallery.com

In Montauk, NY, BCK Fine Arts is no longer the only commercial gallery in town: Chase Contemporary and South Etna, new COVID-era ouposts of Manhattan dealers, , opened their doors in July. . Out on the tip of Long Island, masks and outdoor receptions are the new norm, but at least the art is on view, in the flesh.

BCK’s recent offering, “Fathers and Daughters”, presents an especially appealing picture of the close relationships and shared enthusiasms of four painters. As recounted by one of the daughters, Elizabeth Kresch, the connections originated one fateful day in the early 1940s, when  a stranger – Leland Bell — stopped her father, Al Kresch, as he carried a canvas along a Greenwich Village street. The two men struck up conversation, and from ensuing shared passions for painting and jazz sprang a lifelong comraderie. Over the years, friendship swelled to include wives and daughters that were (or were to become) accomplished artists in their own right.

The wives, as the exhibition title suggests, are not included in the exhibition.  But this still leaves many paintings to savor by fathers Albert Kresch (b.  1922) and Leland Bell (1922 -1911), and daughters Elizabeth Kresch (b. 1971) and Temma Bell (b. 1945).

Each is represented in BCK’s light-filled space by several works ranging in subject matter from figure studies to landscape and still life. An aesthetic of painterly modernism prevails, with energized colors pacing abstracted compositions. One can detect the influences of Hans Hofmann (with whom Albert Kresch and Temma Bell’s mother Louisa Matthiasdottir studied) and Jean Hélion (a much-admired friend of the two fathers).

What does the selection tell us about paternal influences or generational differences? Arguably, the fathers, especially in their most abstracted work, show signs of being driven to define the historic moment: What does our time demand? What’s the most cogent use of tradition?. How to honor what nature presents to the eye? But the overall tenor of the show is of intergenerational fervor, fueled by independent encounters with forms and colors. Considering the shifting terrain of the art world during the decades these paintings were produced, they reveal a poignant faith in a particular kind of observation-based modernism.

At a glance, differences between the four painters stand out. Temma Bell’s brushy naturalism differs strikingly from her father’s outlined, planar attack; Elizabeth Kresch’s earthy renderings of light contrast with the feathery, atmospheric depth of her father’s more recent work.

But variations within each artist’s work are also evident. Except for the youngest painter, Elizabeth Kresch, the work on view of each artist spans decades – a full 65 years in the case of her father – and this allows intriguing glimpses of personal evolutions of thought. Several luminous Al Kresch landscapes from the last two decades suggest, with their layered darks and lights, the moody radiance of Georges Rouault. By contrast, a crisply geometric still life from 1998 recalls Hélion – a connection more than superficial, thanks to its animated journey through color, from a plate’s deep ultramarine rim, to a pitcher’s mild cobalt blue, to the jewel-like cerulean glow of shadowed fabric.

The thick, robust paint strokes of Temma Bell’s 1970 self-portrait become thinner in her more recent works, yet the impulse of color remain just as strong – and indeed, achieve a kind of austere grandness in an Icelandic landscape from 1981, in which a mountain range, carved by light into delicate gray-purples and deep blues, separates pulses of clouds and shimmers of sea.

Leland Bell’s predilection for black outlines, which are liable to dominate any first impression of his work, are barely evident in a small landscape from 1975, in which colors alone prove capable of locating, feelingly, every element.

And while Elizabeth Kresch’s work spans fewer years, it too reflects shifts of perception. Her small shoreline scene from 2016, with clouds rolling brightly above a wharf’s dark horizontal, contrasts strikingly with a five-foot-tall painting from 2020 of a young woman, clad in a radiant red dress, stretching lithely before a brilliant white wall.

Exiting the gallery, and absorbing once more the ocean air and low skyline of Montauk bungalows, one is reminded of life’s continuity, even in these strange times.  With a last glimpse, through the gallery window, of Leland Bell’s “Family Group with Teapot” (1980) – its figures rising with startling gravity, their hands resolving the movements of arms in wondrous, articulated dances – one may believe that life is not simply continuous, it’s unstoppable.

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April 22-May 17, 2003

Matisse/Picasso and Manet/Velazquez may have been the most remarkable exhibitions of figurative paintings this spring, but there were also many others of work by such contemporary artists as Lois Dodd, Eric Fischl, Paul Georges, and Wayne Thiebaud, to name but a few. All received media attention, even though not every gallery presented the painter’s very strongest work. Such is the nature of the art scene that a familiar artist’s lesser efforts will be reviewed while equally deserving but less-known work goes unnoticed. One especially noteworthy exhibition this spring is in fact Temma Bell’s at Bowery Gallery, her eleventh there and possibly most impressive to date. (And by way of disclosure I should note my own association with the gallery as an artist).

For some four decades Bell has produced vividly hued, rapidly brushed landscapes, still lifes, and figure paintings, all painted from observation at her upstate sheep farm or in Iceland, her mother’s native home. Bell’s freeform application of paint combines lush strokes, thin washes, and partial scrapings-away of pigment. Gallery-goers steeped in current art theory (which tends to be long on conception and short on sensibility about color and form) may find here just attractive craftsmanship and imagery. But those attuned to the expressiveness of traditional composition-what Roger Fry liked to call “plastic continuity”-will find considerably more; for them, Bells’ paintings will reflect a personal, elemental language that speaks not of taste or ideas but of individual energy, initiative, and insight.

A first glance at the twenty-two landscapes at Bowery suggests the interest in geometry-in the way, say, that the diagonal of the foreshortened roof of From Hverfisgata II opposes the stacked horizontals of a landscape beyond. It neatly demonstrates the peculiar cohabitation of surface pattern and spatial illusion in painting. Bell’s concern, however, is less in demonstrating principles than in mining their poetic possibilities. A longer look reveals extraordinarily complex nuances of colors and shapes. Foreground buildings, molded out of shadowy, absorbent hues among intense, sunlit notes, occupy a thick and variegated space in the painting’s lower third. Atop, extending the canvas’ width, lies an impenetrable, silvery band of water. Directly above a range of dark mountains cantilevers abruptly across, its dark warm greens and purplish-blues stiffened by an internal rhythm of and arcs and angles. Brilliant whites, pure cerulean blues and muted gray-blues race above as streaks of cloud and sky. Odd, poignant moments appear: a single dark point (a bush? fire hydrant?) arresting a horizontal stream of green; closer at hand, a dark pot-shape marking the culmination of a chimney’s rise.

Mere picturesque description? Hardly-every color and shape has been weighed to convey how each object occupies its space, and its import for the whole image. As if by a somehow continuous process of anticipation, these impulses all connect to become the phenomenon of a bright, barely hazy afternoon at a northern seaport, complete with (or, better, completed by) its visual contradictions.

Compare this painting to the Dark Sky over Esja hanging alongside. The same scene has been completely transformed: the foreground is now a gently shadowed foil for penetrating spaces in a darkening sky; the sea has become a luxurious, inviting blue/green carpet dotted with highlights, the mountain’s velvety shadows newly absorbent of light. The totality captures the pungent and contrasting atmosphere of a storm just passed. And here again is the paradox of a painting as an artifice of forms, cohered solely by a comprehending eye-and becoming, in the process, more real than the most detailed illustration.

Other scenes demand other inventions, and two paintings of a snow covered field seen from different viewpoints require varying formats, horizontal and off-square. All elements change according to the situation: trees have the aspect of gathering or streaming away in tendrils according to the needs of pale fields, fields that are themselves animate in the way they pool or slice into the depths of the paintings. Subtle movements resonate everywhere, and it takes several moments for the eye to pick up the barest changes of temperature of whites that hastens their rolling movement into the distance.

For me, the most startling paintings of the show were the largest. Many painters stiffen as they scale up their gestures, but Bell positively thrives on wide expanses. (Coincidentally or not, the least compelling works in this strong show are among the smallest.) In the bold, 38″ x 72″ Blue Sky, Yellow Fields Delhi, Bell recounts the specific dramas of a panoramic valley with fast strokes and broad but exacting rhythms. Below distant tilting tiers of fields, a great swelling plain of yellow, girded about by shrubs of a murkily insistent purple, dominates so it seems to almost fill our vision. Details stake out their necessary positions, so that the tiny, densely blue tower of a silo at one side feels miles from the quick verticals of trees at the other edge. Rarely in contemporary painting is gesture so freely but continuously allied to a unified lyrical vision.

The wonder of truly good painting is that a human eye can convey so comprehensive a grasp. Viewed together, Bell’s paintings suggest that it’s ultimately her affection for the subject (it can’t be simply calculation or preconception) that coheres the impulses of form-aided, of course, by her considerable abilities and abiding awareness of a formal language of paint.

Bell may well have inherited her indifference to passing trends from her parents Leland Bell and Louisa Matthiasdottir, both artists who also found inspiration in a renewal of painting traditions. Temma’s paintings, however, are more atmospheric and varied texturally than her mothers’, and they completely sublimate the unforgiving outlines of her fathers’. These latest paintings confirm that her work is entirely her own, and her directness-of purpose, perception, and means-vitalizes this show.

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