May 19 to June 13, 2015
530 West 25th Streets, Fourth Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 646-230-6655

Deborah Rosenthal is a painter deeply engaged in dialogues between past and present, between the world within and the domain beyond the studio. “Geography: Recent Paintings,” her current exhibition at the Bowery Gallery, encompasses familiar motifs from the past decade of her work, and introduces new lines of investigation spurred by her ongoing exploration of the nature of time, landscape, family bonds, and metaphors of sight and sensation. This expansive exhibition coheres readily on the walls while lending itself to unhurried contemplation of individual works. The body of work on view is unified by many of the influences that have shaped Rosenthal’s thinking: the spatial and temporal investigations of early modernists such as Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, and Paul Klee, as well as an interest in Romanesque sculpture and 17th-century French landscape painting.

Rosenthal often emphasizes the metaphorical power of framing. Doubled Landscape (Familiar Sights) (2011) and Paired Scenes (2013) are each structured by meandering, scalloped, and angular lines that activate the borders of each canvas/world, and further enclose interior scenes that contain figures, houses, and landscape elements. This compositional device evokes the flags and fabrics of vintage French circus tents, whose billowy stripes entice spectators to approach and peek at what’s inside. Landscape in the Studio (2014) gives us Rosenthal’s signature M-shaped mountains, and then pops the ground plane forward (note the grisaille cast shadows) with a riot of spectral-colored forms that merge Robert Delaunay’s Simultaneous Windows of 1912 with Jean Hélion’s Mannequinerie en solde (1978). Rosenthal, incidentally, is one of the most learned writers on the work of Hélion, having curated an exhibition of his paintings in New York in 2012 and edited Double Rhythm, a collection of his writings on art, published in 2014 by Arcade.

Rosenthal is perpetually concerned with the “what-ifs” of the painting process. She considers the velocity with which our vision moves across a painted surface as well as the relationship of the center of vision to the periphery. Her attention to facture is evident in paint surfaces that are texturally rich and varied. I have always appreciated how Rosenthal arrives at the colors that we perceive. Look closely and you will see, as in Pierre Bonnard, that what appear to be shapes of solid color are actually shifting strokes, daubs, and veils of various hues that coalesce in the upper layers. This is particularly evident in Country Matters, where passages of scumbled black are actually mixtures of dark blue-violets, red-oranges, and greens that read as freshly-tilled soil — a possible reference to the artist’s familiarity with the rural landscape, and changing seasons of New York’s Sullivan County.

The Three of Them ties together a couple in classical profile looking in on an infant, in a triple-pendant of chartreuse greens, greyed pinks, and citron yellows. This boisterous baby inhabits her own bubble — a vortex that exerts a centrifugal force — as she stretches arms and legs against the boundaries of her enclosure. June, or What I Thought I Knew contains a figure whose regal, Roman head is clearly delineated and whose body — a loose arrangement of pale grey lines — dissolves within a milky white form that could be water, sky, or glacial crevasse. Another figure (a twin, or foil?) emerges from a cleft in the landscape, moving beyond this place with a more deliberate gesture.

Just as books open upon multiple narratives and surprising conclusions, and maps unfold to reveal enticing destinations, Deborah Rosenthal’s paintings, it seems to me, offer many points of departure from which to view our surroundings and our lives.

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Most Chelsea galleries are closed Mondays but expect crowds on West 25th Street this coming Monday, October 11.  The reason?  The Bowery Gallery is reviewing prospective members.

One of the longest-running artist cooperatives in New York, the Bowery was founded in October 1969 and has been in continuous operation since, in various locations.  As its name implies, life began on the Bowery.  Today it occupies premises at 530 West 25th Street, sharing the fourth floor – and a somewhat lethargic elevator! – with other coops of similar vintage, the Blue Mountain and Prince Street galleries.

The Bowery is a prestigious venue.  Its annual national competition has been juried over the years by the likes of Louis Finkelstein, Lois Dodd, Jane Frelicher, Gabriel Laderman, Joan Snyder, Bill Jensen and Paul Resika, with Rackstraw Downes as juror this last summer.  Styles include representational and abstract painting and sculpture.  Current members and associates, of which there are around three dozen, include Temma Bell, John Goodrich, Barbara Goodstein, Barbara Grossman, Deborah Kahn, Lynette Lombard, Gael Mooney, Hearne Pardee, Deborah Rosenthal and Evelyn Twitchell, who recently concluded a show titled “Drawn from Nature” whose penetrating explorations of growth and form included exquisite sculptural reliefs in painted plaster, as illustrated.

The Bowery is entirely artist-run: there is no such thing as a Bowery bum anymore.  In exchange for dues of $140 per month, an initiation fee of $500, and active participation in the running of the gallery, members are guaranteed a solo spot every three years and take part in group shows along the way.

Prospective members must bring three-to-five original art works, supporting materials etc, to the gallery between 4 and 6 pm.  Just like artcritical, it turns out the reviewers work fast, as submissions are to be picked up that evening, at 8 pm.  Warning: the Empire Diner is no more, so bring sandwiches.

More information

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Stanley Lewis is a powerful painter.  His vision is independent, original, raw.His latest work is to be seen at the Bowery Gallery, an artist- run cooperative dedicated to painters working in the tradition of French modernist figuration.  This setting allowshim to work without commercial constraints but also without the resources to promote him and his work effectively. Nevertheless he has built an impressive reputation among artists and his prices have risen quite a bit just lately, due to a committed group of patrons.

Lewis emerged from the circle surrounding the painter, teacher and charismatic outsider, Leland Bell with whom he studied at Yale. Bell saw the influence of French modernism as way of deepening figurative painting through greater consciousness of form, and was a great admirer of Giacometti, Balthus and the later work of Andre Derain. Lewis also admires the English painters Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff with their perceptual approach and aggressively activated paint surfaces.

Like them, his gloppy paint surfaces are aggressive and sensual though he differs in that he is much more involved with a direct naturalistic transcription of the casual, disheveled, white bread American subjects.  These he paints directly and laboriously on the spot, including everything in his  field of vision, weeds, trash, cars, power lines, etc.

The supports are roplex- soaked corrugated cardboard, old splintering plywood, cotton duck and/or crinkled paper glued or mounted and stapled on masonite – he’s an alchemist who can turn trash to gold.

Lewis is a master colorist. His unfailingly authoritative skill for painting real, rich and crystalline light, joined to his muscular composition, is the key to his power and success. An occasional pitfall for Lewis in his early work (as for Bell himself) was an uncomfortable stylization resulting from an effort to force formalism onto perception. Recently, he has resolved the problem in the direction of a more direct long- form rendering of nature. For example in his “12th St. and 4th Ave” 2006, painted in Brooklyn, he continues exploration of direct optical perspective in a fisheye view of a rather carefully characterized parked car (a Saab), tenements behind, street signs, tree in the foreground, all tense as a bent knife blade. Objects suggesting human presence such as the Saab in the foreground, seem to function as subject focus, replacing the role of the figure in the landscapes of Poussin and Corot.

The “View of the West Side of House” 2003- 07, is a loving rendering of the artist’s own porch with its gently curving trees, the sky punching through. A w-shaped jacknife torsion is seen in the triangular compressions of  in the “View from the Porch- East Side of House” 2003- 06.   “Mayville Court House” 2006 is a studiedly casual presentation of a small town scene with a characteristic wildly tilted horizon line.  An even wilder tilt can be observed in the “Monroe Marina” 2007, where it is as if a photographer dropped the camera while framing the scene.

The drawings, well represented here, are often made with such physical intensity that there are holes in the paper. The large snow scene “Winter View from West side of Houses” 2004- 07, for instance, entails a process of drawing and correcting by pasting paper repeatedly producing a scarred, heavily textured surface resembling impasto.  The drawing is so sharply observed  and intensely abstract that Lewis is able to demonstrate that the most powerful formal solutions can be found, at least sometimes, by giving oneself over to the direct study of nature, and the best way of finding high style can be found by turning one’s back on the direct pursuit of it.

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February 27 to March 24, 2007

“About Borromini,” an exhibition of prints and drawings by Deborah Rosenthal and text by Jed Perl, had an almost curative feel to it. To look at these pieces and to read the accompanying prose was like sipping some clarifying tonic. Anyone who’s seen Rosenthal’s’ work in the past will know that feeling, that fusion of free-ranging immediacy and hard-won durability. Her shapes have a playfulness to them. Yet they also feel inevitable, as if they’ve been cut into the world.

The show, which one suspects will find eventual incarnation as a book, is about the making of metaphors, about the way an artist absorbs the forms she sees around her and transforms them in her own imagination, x-rays them down to their essences. As the title suggests, Rosenthal and Perl took the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini (1599-1667) as their inspiration. The artist and writer (who are married) followed their fascination with Borromini during their walks around Rome one springtime not too long ago. As Perl writes in one of his passages, “The dream of a high modern Borromini—that’s what D and I are pursuing.” What is it about Borromini in particular that draws the two of them?

It seems to be his blend of classical firmness and idiosyncratic extravagance. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Borromini’s famous rival, once called the younger Milanese “an ignorant Goth who has corrupted architecture.” The Gothic influence which so appalled Bernini, the penchant for flights of exaggeration, is precisely what interests Rosenthal and Perl. Here’s Perl again: “Borromini is the master of a somber rococo, a luxuriant asceticism. He can be witty but marmoreal, and of what other artist can that be said?”

One answer to that question might be Deborah Rosenthal. Looking at her drawings and prints, you see both the sculptural immovability of the forms and the quicksilver playfulness of the artist’s mind in motion. For example, an ink drawing called “Standing Angles/Study” (2006) shows a series of  anthropomorphic forms, much like dancers bending at the hip. The formal fascination here seems to be with angles, with those vortices at which energies shift and then recoup their force. Rosenthal’s shapes recall the severe turns in Borromini’s bannisters, for example those that run along the balcony at San Carlino. But you don’t need to know Roman architecture to appreciate this work. Rosenthal has so fully absorbed these forms in her own, high modern imagination that the allusions appear as traces of inspiration, and not influence. Whatever  strands she’s taken up from Borromini, they’ve been threaded into the specifics of her own facture. There’s real pleasure, for example, in observing the subtle alternation between dry point and rouletting in “Twisted Column” (2006), or the playful tangles and swerves of the linocut, “Graffiti” (2006.)

One of the most impressive pieces in the show is “Diana of Ephesus” (2006.) Here there’s a central oval, intersected by a series of cone-like shapes. This could bring to mind the ovals that Borromini favored for his windows and domes, as well as for the escutcheons that bedeck his facades. The title points us in a different direction, toward the many-breasted Diana, an incarnation of the Greco-Roman goddess that recalls Indo-European fertility myths. But you don’t have to be an erudite classicist to appreciate “Diana of Ephesus.” These forms of Rosenthal’s are not limited to their subject matter, just as a current is not the water that flows through it at any given moment. Rosenthal’s achievement lies in her ability to create metaphors, to envision structures in which various forces fuse. She’s a literary artist, and yet her work never falls to illustration or to mere essayistic cleverness.

Her work doesn’t need explication, yet it’s a pleasure to have Perl’s accompanying text. Even if he gives some helpful background, he too has embarked here upon his own, artful investigation of his form. Perl’s prose itself ranges between an almost casual pliancy and an acute attunement. Take the first two sentences of his text. Here’s how he begins: “Stars, zig-zags, angles, ovals, edges, curls, curves, flames, flowers, shells, breaks, bursts, echoes, accents, repetitions, reversals, reunions—these are the sights and sensations, each sharply etched in the imagination, that I recall from our Borromini walks, in the streets of Rome, one spring not too long ago.” After that exuberant rush, Perl gives us this simple statement: “Borommini is the master of a somber rococo, a luxuriant asceticism.” You might say that Perl, like Borromini himself, can do both extravagance and starkness. If and when this book comes out, we’ll be treated not only to superb art but also to one of the finer prose styles of our day.

A New York poet who saw this show was heard to remark, while looking at some of Rosenthal’s lino prints, “Linoleum never had it so good!”  There’s something genuinely relevant to that humorous quip. The workaday, domestic sound of “linoleum” may seem hemispheres away form the baroque world of Borromini. And yet the ordinary and the otherworldly come together in Rosenthal’s facture, and in Perl’s sentences. The combination of skeletal simplicity and dreamworld departure is appropriate to Borromini, yet in the end it remains Rosenthal’s own imaginative intelligence that cuts into the lino blocks. The poet was right: linoleum never had it so good.

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Until October 1, 2005

It’s no cliché—painting really is, and always has been, an act of inquiry. But art in New York City has become a competitive vocation, so driven by eye-catching effects and rib-nudging ideas, that it can be difficult to separate novelty from discovery. Often the gesture of exploration seems to count for more than any conviction about the process.

Given our trendy times, Christine Hartman’s first show at Bowery Gallery intrigues for the independence and directness of her investigations. (Disclosure: I’ve been a member of this gallery for a number of years.) Her nine medium-to-large paintings and twenty drawings of still lifes and interiors have ordinary enough subjects: cats, fruit, books, pitchers, and occasionally, figures. Though depicted fairly naturalistically, all are animated by a strong sense of imposed order–or better yet, by a willful appraisal: they seem to have been put though a wringer of steady, intense scrutiny.

How many clichéd ways are there of painting a pitcher in 2005? There are the traditionally academic ways, that is, evocative descriptions of what is already known: a pitcher has volume, particular surface qualities, and fits spatially in a bigger scheme. Then there are the talking points of what might be called the new academy—the sociological analyses that generally apply equally well to strong and weak paintings: the pitcher is an indicator of a social role (its own, or the painting’s, or possibly the artist’s or audience’s.)

It’s safe to say that Hartman isn’t going after socio-political issues. But neither is she merely depicting a pitcher. In a painting like The Red Cloth, she’s characterizing its presence, that is, conveying the full breadth and weight of its visual impression in a language of forms. Here, patches of neutral teal, warm gray, and other colors–non-descript in hue but specific in their pictorial weight–coalesce as a compact, light-reflecting tower asserting itself against gravity. On its side, a thin massing of lights—brighter, in response to a different degree of illumination–projects into the space behind. (Yes, it’s the spout). Critical to the pitcher’s character are the surroundings: the keenly measured intervals that locate a tabletop, a dark mug, and a ceramic box. Hartman’s responses are elemental, but they eloquently size up the complicated, contradictory sensations of a pitcher on a table. What makes this painting all the more moving is its understated style, and what this in turn says about the artist’s intentions–while many contemporary artists would center-stage their own personalities, Hartman seems mostly concerned with her motif’s.

Every painting here is accompanied by one to four graphite studies on paper. These drawings are incisive summations of the paintings’ compositions, their tones vividly re-creating the subtleties of illumination; the half-tones on the slightly shadowed faces in the four studies for Kirsten and Lily are especially poignant.

One also senses in these drawings another, simultaneous searching. With a certain relentlessness, Hartman examines the rhythms of forms as they move across the surface. In some of the Kirsten and Lily studies, a girl’s hand, bending at the wrist, absorbs the downward-curve of her arm, punctuating its encounter with the tabletop. The pertly angled hand also becomes the launching point for the diamond-shape sheet of paper spreading across the table. The wonder is that such muscular rhythms feel so empathetic; the gestures of forms seem perfectly natural in their guise as a young girl’s movements.

In the same drawings, the artist works out the possible poses for a woman seated next to the child. In one version, her lifted arm terminates in a fan of fingers, their tips brushing and measuring the turn of her head. In another, the hand lowers to the table surface, becoming a compact wedge that anchors the looming torso behind. In both cases these events trigger a host of subsequent shifts—in the attitude of the shoulders, the tip of the head or the inclination of a book on the table—that filter throughout the image.

Every drawing here is covered with working notes (“lighter here,” “move head right”), while the margins are often filled with casual but beautifully rendered details: a cat’s head, a child’s face, sometimes a tiny recapitulation of the whole scene. Another conspicuous feature is an overlaying of irregularly placed diagonal lines that sometimes conform to the compositions, but more often don’t appear to. Faintly reappearing in passages of the paintings, they seem to be another means of thinking through these compositions.

The thinking works. Consider a painting like Jackie, in which the pale vertical of a file holder presides over a scene of discreet but complex events. In one of the exhibition’s most remarkable moments, a large, buff-colored cat, its form the very embodiment of intense, self-absorbed curiosity, emerges from behind a shutter. The broad arc of its side and foreleg terminate in the note of a delicately planted paw. Behind, its tail climbs the shutter’s chimney-like shadow with extravagant slowness. The accumulated movements of the composition—the dramatically slanting diagonals about the paw, subtle angles of books and fabric a few feet away—lend a singular poignancy to the gesture.

Cats populate the spaces of two other paintings with similar energy. They squirm from human arms, or turn and fix the viewer’s stare, with wonderfully compact gestures—physical gestures made vital not by the speed of the brush but by the gathered impulses of colors and shapes. (The rather hieratic humans in these paintings tend to be better behaved.)

Not every passage is quite so moving; in a painting like the large Still Life with Pumpkin, a complicated array of vegetables and vessels are depicted with impressive care and a lush sense of illumination, but without the momentum and economy of pressures that so animates the most striking work here.

Throughout the exhibition one will find small untruths, in, say, a jug’s lopsided contours or an angle’s exaggerated perspective. On closer inspection they turn out to the “lies that tell the truth,” to recycle Picasso’s famous phrase. They’re symptoms of the conscious ordering that, rather than confining the objects, gives voice to their pictorial character. One can surmise they’re all part of the priorities of these single-minded, unaffected investigations.

If you find context helpful in appreciating art like this, you could do a lot worse than Chardin. Chardin, whom Matisse once said he studied more than any other painter at the Louvre, was unsurpassed at building powerful hierarchies of elements, each indispensable to a varied, charged whole. This great master serves as a reference point, not just as a setter of stylistic and thematic precedents, but more importantly as an artist who, too, liked to share the possibilities of painting’s distinct language.

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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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