David Cohen
Here are two memories of Thomas Nozkowski, picked at random from so many that remain vivid of this larger than life yet eminently down to earth man, epitomizing what exhilarating fun he made it to share for a moment in his aesthetic adventures. In 2003, I curated a retrospective of his drawings at the New York Studio School, the first in New York. I say curated, but as I went off to Europe in the preceding summer, after instigating the project, I returned to find that Tom had, impatiently, made a final selection of his own accord. I was, however, given carte blanche in the installation. Conscious of the age and delicacy of some of these works, I researched just how many lumens we could allow in the gallery. The only direction on the hang, besides a judicious last-minute exclusion, was to turn the lights up full blast. The eager-beaver curator tried to explain what he knew of the science, but Tom insisted the only thing that mattered was that they looked good to those who came to see them. “Let ‘em fry!” he exclaimed.

Years later, when I was selecting a show at a commercial gallery inspired by cinema, Tom enthusiastically – but with a promise of discretion – shared his ongoing catalogue of art in movies. With a reach and perspective that would have impressed any iconologist in its multifacetedness, Tom compiled extensive lists of artists as characters, preexisting artworks by known artists that make screen appearances, artworks made for films, and many other permutations. I begged him to allow me to publish it, but he couldn’t let it go to press so long as the research was ongoing—a lifelong pursuit.

Editing these tributes and reminiscences from a cross-section of artists, scholars and friends – again, a sampling – has the humbling effect of making clear that everyone else privileged to come into his orbit felt uniquely special, a confidant of his avuncular bonhomie and encyclopedic knowledge, and of the candor and curiosity he felt about his own artistic inquiries. His wit was kind and merciless in a single instance. He was democratic in that anyone could be included in the conversation and hierarchical in really caring about what was best, what was dispensable. Indifferent towards established canons of high and low, he was fastidious in the sense of quality.

For me, he was a paramount example of an artist who could go against the grain, but do so without rancor, and indeed be an exemplar of community even with a mainstream he might reject. This is what he was as a person and an artist—a maverick who was also a mensch.

Karen Wilkin
I knew Thomas Nozkowski’s work before I knew Tom. I was fascinated by those mysterious, small but commanding works that seemed to be about something very specific but impossible to pin down. I loved the range of paint applications, the delicacy of the incidents, and the surprising color. I’m still haunted by a work from the first Nozkowski exhibition I saw – at Max Protech Gallery about 1990. A wavy edged white shape, like a saddle made of curly sheepskin, hovered against a pale brushy ground. The image was odd, beautifully constructed, and both exquisitely and roughly painted. It was also ferociously intelligent, funny, and, as it turns out, unforgettable. When I got to know the author of this oddball image, I discovered that he shared many of the painting’s qualities, plus irresistible charm. Like the painting, he could seem deceptively off hand, someone who took his work very seriously indeed but didn’t take himself all that seriously. His comments about art were seasoned with throwaway lines like “Why two, if one will do?” and something about oil paint’s being “the queen” of materials.

It was clear that Tom’s elusive works were simultaneously discoveries that emerged from the act of making and distillations of experience. The sense of discovery made repeated motifs seem fresh and newly invented each time. There were loose family resemblances among groups of paintings – shared memories of the grid, repeated structures or background patterns – but color was always arresting and every configuration seemed unprecedented and indescribable: hors catégorie, like the steepest routes in bicycle races. I discovered that the underlying experience that, at some level, provoked the image could range from things glimpsed to things read, and much, much more. Tom made powerful images “about” arcane books on science and walks through the city. No wonder those enigmatic paintings seemed so specific and at the same time, unnameable. They were specific, just unidentifiable by us ordinary mortals. (I recall Tom’s saying that sometimes he found himself unable to remember exactly what had triggered a particular configuration, but if it still seemed resonant, he could use it.)

A few years ago, I invited Tom and Joyce to be visiting critics at Triangle Artists’ Workshop, an intense program of art making and discussion for international artists, held that summer in upstate New York, within striking distance but still a healthy drive from the Nozkowski-Robins home in High Falls. The pair generously spent the day with 20 or so artists from about half a dozen countries – a high point of the session, the artists said – and joined the gang for a fairly raucous dinner. We had offered Tom and Joyce accommodations after their strenuous day in the studios, but they insisted on returning home that night, as I knew they often did after New York openings. “We like driving,” Tom said. If those long nocturnal trips stimulated paintings, we are all the beneficiaries of his stamina behind the wheel.

Many students have told me how much they admired Tom’s work, but few seem to have responded to it directly. They’re wise not to try. Tom’s astonishing images could only have been made by someone with a mind as well-furnished as his, informed by his particular experience, and open to the possibilities suggested by his apparently limitless ways of putting on paint. Of great mathematics, the mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote: “There is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.” That’s a perfect description of Thomas Nozkowski’s art.

Marjorie Welish
A rare artisanal talent, Thomas Nozkowski developed an image, an image in the true sense of that word. What emerged in canvas after canvas, time after time, was no mere thing but rather entirely more strenuously inventive, as the object became a lapidary form through metamorphosis, in a practice spanning a half century. Very few artists can match that imaginative embodiment.

Robert Storr
Thomas Nozkowski was a wickedly intelligent man and an unrivaled painterly lyricist. The intelligence was natural and unpretentious. He read a lot and developed an astonishingly broad albeit usually understated frame of reference, which made it a delight to match wits with him when everyone else around seemed bent on showing off their readymade erudition. And in a period when many of his peers – though when it came to art itself he had precious few – favored arcane discourses with all their labored jargon he trusted in the American vernacular, a preference doubtless enriched by his consumption of detective stories and films noirs, passions we shared.

As a painter he was the ultimate come-from-behind kid, the day-job-wife-and-family man who paid for all his time in the studio by being his own patron. That job, which consisted of being a layout artist for Mad magazine, made him wary lest the art world ascribe his fanciful caprices for an extension of the house aesthetic. Or so I inferred. Nevertheless, I recall walking across town from MoMA to meet him at his office for lunch and it struck me as entirely natural that those two institutions should exist at the same urban latitude – you know, Low and High – with Tom alert and at home in both. In any event, he need not have feared that the discursive arabesques of his own painting and drawing would be explained away as “mere” cartooning, and worse as a stylistic off-shoot of the perpetually smart-aleck Mad manner: they were nothing of the kind.

Slow, steady maturation of an incrementally improvised, manifestly unprogramatic image was their essence. Working on smallish panels of several standard proportions, and frequently starting with nothing more than an ambiguous ground tone and an amorphous shape, Tom followed the organic growth and mutation of his intricate patterns, eccentric configurations and, by turns, exquisitely subtle and surprisingly bold polychromatic palette. The consistency of his method opened out to stunningly various pictorial vistas contained within irresistibly intimate formats. Looking at his paintings slows the clock and sharpens the eye and mind while massaging, tickling and pinching the haptic synapses. In the old days one might have called Nozkowski a “little master” but his scope was wide, his view long and his faith in his own ultimately immodest gifts was that huge: in short that of a master – period. Of how many contemporary artists can it be said that he or she never bored me or took my engagement for granted? Not many, but Tom was certainly one.

Joseph Masheck
As editor-in-chief of Artforum in the late ‘70s, I was pushing for painting, especially abstract painting, despite the political incorrectness of that. I also hated the art-commerce developing as philistine businessmen discovered art as a new continent for unregulated insider trading, so it was great to discover Tom’s work in shows at the artists’ coop 55 Mercer Street. In the ‘80s I wrote articles in three art magazines on Nozkowski, and curated a show of early drawings at Nature Morte (1983).

The essays were agonizing to write because, I now see, they reflect the kind of freewheeling conversations we had that depended on analogy: how one topic turned by analogy into another. That was all the more exciting because our respective analogies came from different stocks of experience as well as reading. There could be hearty disagreement, too, though Tom was not a dialectical kind of guy. His wide reading is legendary; but politically, his shockingly normal, art-world liberal line might have come out of The Whig Interpretation of History. Once he said that the greatest philosopher was Thomas Paine. Come on, Tom! No wonder why in one of my articles he reminded me of Santayana on Emerson: “There was a great catholicity in his reading . . . But he read transcendentally, not historically, to find what he himself felt, not what others might have felt before him” (Artforum, May 1981).

Now I have to think: maybe being so undialectical—stubborn!—kept the big bear calm and jolly. (Tom, I knew you would like a little roast, like an Irish wake. Oh, Tom . . .)

Jonathan Lasker
I don’t know what brought me to 55 Mercer Street Gallery in the Fall of 1979, but upon entering the gallery I felt that I had stumbled upon a wonderland of everything which I was hoping to see in painting, at that time. I remember increasing delight as I went from one picture to another. Upon leaving the gallery, I muttered to the guy sitting at the front desk that I thought this was a really great show. Of course, I was speaking to none other than Tom himself, who took my compliment for his exhibition with boyish delight. After that Tom and I traded studio visits and a long friendship began. Nonetheless, with each ensuing show by Tom, that feeling of being in a painting wonderland was always there. The feeling of “how did he think this up” and what will the next picture be like. It is very sad that Tom can no longer provide us with this expectation of wonder. Rest well Tom.

Merlin James
I tracked Tom down as soon as I got to New York. He’d stood for something, in my mind, since I was a student in London in the early ‘80s. A British painter, Garth Lewis, had introduced me to the work, via thin catalogues, a few slides and black and white reproductions. Somehow I ‘got it’, perhaps all the more intensely because of the sparseness of information. I got how this apparent modesty – of scale, productivity, pictorial proposition – was a Trojan horse for the greatest possible artistic ambition. I loved visiting Tom and Joyce at the ex-synagogue on Hester Street, eating and talking, listening to music, always aware of Tom’s easel standing a few yards away. Sometimes he’d take me over to look at the current painting. For me, Tom was among a very select band who at any one time keep painting alive.

James Hyde
I first met Tom at the artist cooperative gallery 55 Mercer. It was in the early eighties—the time of big heavy abstract work by the likes of Brice Marden and Richard Serra, as well as the bombast of Neo-Expressionism. While I really enjoyed meeting Tom and Joyce Robins, his paintings merely intrigued. Tom has made a point about the size of his paintings being a political choice. Small paintings, he argued, allowed people to have them in their homes and didn’t require support from big collectors and institutions. There’s an additional, subtle ethical point as well: Since small works don’t force, they at first must interest, then persuade.  Patience and observation are their essential values. Over the subsequent years Tom’s paintings persuaded and rewarded whenever I had the opportunity to see them.  So much so that when a painting from the year of the 55 Mercer show came up at auction, I stretched the budget and now have the pleasure of seeing it daily. Its cryptic shapes provide a Rubik’s Cube of associations, and with the colors alternating between murk and glow, the painting keeps surprising.

Coming out of concrete abstraction I‘ve considered the painting panel to be as evocative as what gets painted of the surface. Some years ago, I was explaining to a group of people that my paintings weren’t sculptural so much as “panel intensive”. Tom, who was there, didn’t miss a beat—“does that mean the paintings are surface-challenged?” It was classic Nozkowski – perfect timing, off kilter and a brilliant turn of phrase. And it was damn funny—funny enough to stick. I took Tom’s offhand remark as an imperative to up my surface game.

I have plenty of company in my enthusiasm for Tom’s paintings. He is legend in art schools and a touchstone for painters. Abstract paintings look different today than in the early eighties. While some are larger, splashier and flashier than Tom’s, it’s hard to find an abstract painting today that doesn’t bear some trace of Thomas Nozkowski’s painting DNA.

Raphael Rubinstein
That a painting is modest in size does not mean that it is modest in ambition—this is one of the many valuable things that Thomas Nozkowski had to tell us. In fact, Tom’s decision at the end of the 1970s to scale down his paintings may count as the most radical and influential aspect of his work, which offered a quiet but firm reproach to ego-driven or market-driven gigantism, and asserted intimacy as a supreme virtue. His downsizing was fundamentally ethical: he wanted to make paintings, as he said, that could never end up in bank lobbies.

The importance of scale in Tom’s work became clear to me in 2013 when I was curating an exhibition for Cheim & Read Gallery (“Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s”). Tom was among the 15 artists I included in the show, each of whom would be represented by a single painting. I was happy to find that Tom’s New York gallery had several great 1980s paintings that could be borrowed for the show. Two in particular interested me. In my discussions with the gallery, the director encouraged me to take both paintings, and for a while that was my plan. After all, I thought, having two paintings instead of one would convey a fuller sense of Tom’s work, and since they were the smallest works in the show—which included a number of very large canvases—it seemed only fair to give the artist a little more wall space.  It was only late in the process, as I was planning out the installation, that it came to me: there must be only one Nozkowski painting in the show! It was crucial that I treat Tom exactly the way I was approaching the other artists; one work per artist, regardless of size. I understood that to include two of his paintings would be a betrayal of his work, an insult to his decades of insistence that a 16-by-20-inch painting could be just as great, just as important, as one measuring 16 by 20 feet.  In an era when the cost of over-consumption is becoming tragically clear, when spectacle continues its prolonged, asphyxiating stranglehold on our culture, we need to listen more than ever Tom Nozkowski’s plea for the beauty and power of small things.

Valerie Jaudon
Thomas Nozkowski was a key artist in the Conceptual Abstraction exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1991, and a prescient figure for today’s abstract painting. Tom’s insistence on working at an easel painting scale created a deliberative arena for his extraordinary art making process. With his uncommonly prolific visual vocabulary and acute historical memory he was able to work freely and consciously, with a sense of contemplative and well-ordered spontaneity. Although his drawing and painting method had much in common with surrealist automatic writing, he was able to direct that spontaneity with considered invention, and to work instinctively and surely without the burden of the abstract expressionists’ often heavy-handed autographic gesture. Tom was a model for contemporary abstraction, but paradoxically one who could not really be imitated.

Catherine Murphy
I’m always puzzled when Thomas Nozskowski is referred to as a modest painter. From my first introduction to his work, his ambition and radical aspirations made me pay the utmost attention. The paintings are intentionally not huge. I’ve always thought that they were brain size, taken directly into the brain. His argument, was, for one thing, that the size was political: They are to be contemplated, put in a house, lived with. Early on, Tom put his neck on the block and when few dared, said paintings should be about the experience of living: Looking, thinking, remembering, learning. plans and games, things we love and things we hate. His work is a joyful complication, a life examined and translated into beautiful painting, food for my aching psyche.

Jennifer Riley
I teach visual studies to graduate students in architecture. Introducing them to abstraction, I guide them through some of the usual suspects of early modernism, up to Ellsworth Kelly, where it’s possible to show one way to arrive at an abstracted reality. Then I expose them to Tom’s work, among others. To my mind, Thomas Nozkowski represents one of the most approachable examples of a contemporary artist working from found forms, shapes or patterns, culled from myriad sources of nature and culture alike, which he morphed and transformed into images with his deft use of color, light, line, and atmosphere. These evocative paintings are at once deliberate and effortless, joyful and serious, specific and open-ended.

In my own practice when I’m chewing on a problem, I look at artworks to tune into a mindset of possibility. I will miss seeing Tom’s new works, as it had become routine to look at Tom’s work that reminds me not to be too serious, but to be deeply serious. To pay attention to the world, but to keep things utterly personal and yet avoid sentimentality. To unquestionably use the richness of any painterly approach or convention and then perhaps when necessary- simply subvert them.

I am not alone in feeling the gravity of this loss to our painting culture. Thankfully, there is John Yau’s very fine, recent monograph from Lund Humphries. With typical generosity, Tom inscribed my copy with words of ‘painterly’ solidarity and optimism along with a witty line drawing. A gesture, I’m sure, to which many fellow painters and friends were treated.

Sally Saul
The first time Peter [Saul] and I visited Tom and Joyce’s home in High Falls, there was a sumptuous Indian meal spread buffet style on the dining table, and a lively grouping of artists and writers clustered around the table and adjoining rooms, as well as art new to us that demanded the viewer’s attention, books and interesting objects. We were so surprised and grateful to realize our life on the other side of the river was not so isolated and remote as we thought. Tom’s openness, generosity, curiosity, and easy sharing of his knowledge and interests always generated conversation, a give and take. He recommended books, and art shows, movies and music. One time he gave Peter a disc of Jim Leonard playing the Super Saw which is still one of his favorites, the whistling sound floats through the studio. We will miss him greatly.\

Suzanne Joelson
Tom counted. His book of daily expenses and conversations was a record James Comey might admire. He knew the names of things, and their histories. One day the artist Mike Metz stopped by after a meeting at Chess records and repeated one of Marshall Chess’ stories about the early days in Chicago. Tom disputed it and found documentation to justify his version.

Tom played favorites. An evening could be spent debating a list of favorite visual artists, or filmmakers, Howard Hawk/John Ford, musicians, architects. He wondered “why Plecnik wasn’t in Moma’s “Toward a Concrete Utopia?” and then showed me favorite details from their four Plecnik monographs. His information seemed endless. What he did not know, Joyce did. And we – that is Gary Stephan and I—would invariably leave their house with a book and a list of new things to buy, research, remember.

When we hiked Tom knew the history, the legal disputes and former uses of the land. He could find the remnants of berry shacks and stone cellars, where discarded vehicles interrupted the reclaimed territory. He went on to map many of the lesser known trails which were published in the “Friends of the Shawangunks” newsletter.

At the end of one of our first day long hikes, Tom stunned me by asking, “What was your favorite part?” I had imagined the experience as a narrative, a layering of sensations and ideas, and had no answer.

Tom devoured information. In his paintings, those ways of knowing rubbed up against each other until the friction ignited an aberration. Maybe his paintings were a respite from counting and naming.  With brush or pencil in hand he could loosen his grip on how he knew the world. In the studio, he suspended judgment. Edges tangled, categories lapped, and a different discernment entered.

Then we gather at a Nozkowski opening. Each rectangle is a different subjective map and instead of my usual ways of considering art, I ask friends, “Which is your favorite?”

Harry Roseman
Thomas Nozkowski was a painter, a wonderful painter. My relationship with Tom spanned decades. It was during the last two and a half years, that, to me, something had shifted. I felt he was letting us all know that he wanted to live his life when possible, as usual, and that he wanted to be as productive as he could. If he referred to how he felt it was mentioned almost as a slight inconvenience. It was somewhere between a stiff upper lip and a particular pleasure in situations and in the people he was sharing this time with. I also know it became difficult for him to work as much as he would have liked. It was a privilege to see such courage as well as heartbreaking to see such a love of living. One thing I wasn’t expecting was seeing some of the paintings he did during this time. They are spectacular. Tom squeezed every last bit of life that was possible to have as it became available in smaller and smaller portions. Shorter, I should say, not smaller.

John Yau
All during the time that I was writing my monograph on him, Tom never complained about what he was going through. A few days before he died, he sent me an email telling me there had been a “glitch in his treatment,” and that he had spent the weekend in the hospital getting blood transfusions, but that there was nothing to worry about, and then thanked me for the DVD of Kaili Blues (2016), directed by Bi Gan, that I had sent to him and Joyce. The rest of the email was about where I could download the films of Mikio Naruse for free, and other related stuff. Tom wore his enthusiasm on his sleeve right up to the end. He spent part of one dinner recounting to John Ashbery, who was no slouch when it came to film, the plots of little-known movies directed by Gregory La Cava and later sent John DVDs of La Cava films that he had not seen. Tom seemed to have seen every film he ever talked about at least twice.  I have piles of books, DVDs, and lists of films he sent me. He was always excitedly pointing me towards something to read or see. I cannot imagine that I will ever go a day without remembering something he said to me.

David Goerk
In 2015, Thomas Nozkowski and I visited Ruth Root’s exhibition of new paintings at Andrew Kreps gallery. Tom was familiar with the artist’s work and obviously intrigued by the new paintings. He signed the guest book as he always did and picked up a catalogue of her artist-in-residence exhibition from the previous year. Tom flipped through the publication, studying each page, and as we were leaving the gallery he mentioned that he liked the new work. After a pause, he asked me if I had ever seen her smoking paintings. I hadn’t. Tom took a certain delight in explaining how Root’s smoking paintings appeared to be taking a much-needed cigarette break, as if being a painting was a difficult job and hanging on a gallery wall all day required some downtime. Tom was truly amused by this notion, he related and really loved the idea.

Whenever Tom visited the city to see exhibitions, he had a checklist in his pocket of exhibitions he wanted to see. He studied the list and proceeded to see as many of the shows as the day allowed. When I had time, I joined him on these gallery outings, appreciating his company and insights – every chance I had to look at art with Tom was special. Sometimes he pointed out a particular moment within an artwork or walked over to see what I was drawn to, other times he slowly circumnavigated the gallery on his own. As we finished up at one gallery and moved on to our next destination, we always discussed a story or observation connected to what we had just seen.

When Tom and I spoke, which was often, he never failed to ask me how I was doing before we discussed the business of the day. The sound of his voice, familiar and reassuring, was that of a teacher. His excitement and enthusiasm inspired, no matter the subject. I had the tremendous pleasure and honor of working with Tom for many years and have never known anyone as generous, genuine or knowledgeable.
[Editor’s Note: Mr. Goerk, a painter, was a director at Pace Gallery assigned to look after Thomas Nozkowski.

Alain Kirili
Tom was a dear friend to me and Ariane, and we were able to see many of his shows, including one of his last, at Art Omi in Gent, NY, last year. Despite his great and encyclopedic love of music, including jazz, Tom was not especially familiar with Free Improvisation, the genre of jazz that for many years my wife and I have featured in presentations in our Tribeca loft. But when I ask him to lend a painting to dialogue with a musical duo, he immediately accepted and had his gallery, Pace, deliver and install the piece. I knew that it would work beautifully. The duo was Michael Attias, saxophone and Mary Halvorson, guitar, and the whole thing was superb! What worked so well was the size of the painting with the two musicians: Tom was such a master at working small and creating dissonances within that restricted size, a combination of skills he shared with the duo. Chamber music, a duo, was a perfect fit with the aesthetic of Thomas Nozkowski! I will never forget that night: He was enchanted and so was our audience. There was a standing ovation. The music and the painting will stay with all of us forever. Merci, Tom.

Peter Saul
I first met Thomas Nozkowski ten years ago when we were both inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a famous artist with a reputation for stubbornly refusing to let any of his pictures be larger than a certain small size. Then, we both served on a jury charged with giving money to young artists and I got to know Tom better. He was so logical and unprejudiced in wanting to reward artists of different styles. Tom stands as an example of how to behave on an art jury: To be fair, give money to the one whose pictures are best, forget the career stuff. I regret very much not getting to know Tom better.

Elizabeth Hazan
For painters who find imagery as we work, Thomas Nozkowski was a master. His forms sing with reminders of pleasure and possibility. Tom had an endless ability to resolve his paintings in new ways. Yet he told me once he had some he put away for as long as ten years until he could figure out how to make them work. At times that’s been an enormous help to keep in mind. Like de Kooning, Nozkowski had a high batting average for words that resonate in artists’ studios.

It might be surprising to know that Tom felt a strong affinity with the late still life paintings of my mother, Jane Freilicher, and he wrote perceptively about her.  Once you see the connections it gives new insight into both artists’ work: her shapes in front of a cityscape evoke how he saw his own figure/ground relationships. Much of what he wrote about her integrity as an artist applies to his own life and work. Tom was asked to give the tribute for her at the American Academy when she died.  He noted that she apparently never wrote an artist’s statement, which he’d been searching for while writing his remarks.  At the dinner afterwards, he leaned over and said, “I think it’s terrific that Jane got as far she did without writing one of those fucking things.”

Peter Schjeldahl
Tom got along more than well with just about everybody, even me. Our tastes differed, as did our politics and, really, whole worldviews. I revered, and still do, his art; but he amiably shrugged off compliments. Our friendship could seem a sort of dance, amazingly pleasurable, through a minefield. Only once that I recall, at the tail end of a tired and emotional summer evening, was there a blowup; and it was over in what, 30 seconds? Less than a minute, capped by one of Tom’s wry little philosophical smiles that as much as said, “The way things are includes wishes that they were otherwise. But hey, we’re alive.” You don’t hear much these days about strength of character, but Tom had that, with kindness backed by confidence. As well, he was free and brave: a dissenting but platonic American. Maybe because I couldn’t make it to the funeral, he isn’t gone for me yet but as if withdrawn for a spell in the studio, actualizing surprises. I won’t say I “loved” him, because I love him still.

Richard Kalina
I, like many others, knew Tom Nozkowski for many years and liked him immensely. How could you not? He was good company, sure of himself but properly modest, low-keyed, generous, kind, smart, hardworking, and of course talented and endlessly inventive. He was also a very droll fellow and, in many ways, that was key to his art. Tom was bemused rather than ironic – intuitively aware of the inherent skew of the world, a master of mining the inherent, subtle, and inevitable discontinuities of form and intent that present themselves to those attuned to them.  As we know, he preferred to work on an intimate scale – the better I believe to inhabit his paintings rather than address them. His drollness enabled him to keep a quizzical distance from the visual pleasures that he was so adept at providing. He worked through a painting rather than at it, on the continual lookout for the animating and sudden loss of traction that sends a work of art skidding to a desired but completely unexpected place. Looking at a Thomas Nozkowski painting elicits an almost neural jolt of surprise and recognition, and I am sure that will be as true 50 years from now as it is today.

The post “He Was Free and Brave”: A Garland of Tributes for Thomas Nozkowski appeared first on artcritical.

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Video One: Anthony McCall, Byron Kim

Video Two: Catherine Murphy, Jamian Juliano-Villani

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Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Floors and Rulers, 1967-76 at Craig F. Starr Gallery
February 5 to March 26, 2016
5 East 73rd Street (between Madison and Fifth avenues)
New York, 212 570 1739

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end. […] We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.
-Brian Doyle

In so many words, this poetic excerpt gets at the heart of Catherine Murphy’s work, which is fortuitously on view at Sargent’s Daughters, and is featured in a new Peter Freeman, Inc. publication with a foreword by Svetlana Alpers and an essay by John Yau. The book offers the best possible surrogate to experiencing Murphy’s paintings and drawings in person, further providing a comprehensive, chronological exposition of her life’s work. Yau has clearly dedicated as much rigor and fidelity to Murphy as she herself has invested in her paintings and drawings. The reader is provided with an intimate, formal, conceptual, and even spiritual survey that touches on her personal life and artistic career. Living reclusively with her husband outside New York, Murphy submitted herself entirely to painting and drawing, frequently using the view from her apartment window as the vehicle for her expression. Yau writes, “Often, we find ourselves scrutinizing Murphy’s paintings and drawings in search of a clue to explain why she chose this particular moment and not some other one. The feeling of awe and bewilderment embodied in such concentrated looking is akin to what I experience when I again turn to her views from an apartment window, done nearly forty-five years ago.”

Murphy’s work hangs somewhere between an exacting and invented space. In the book she explains that while measured, it is necessary to avoid the pigeonhole of photorealism. Such a formulaic precision is too easy; rather, her observation must simultaneously bump up against and work with her own invention. As another rule, her invention never relies on overt markmaking and gesture. Despite the personal content, she never cares to assert her ego through those means, but rather aims toward a higher end: to deliver an experience of being in a particular moment.

We see her direct, emotionally reserved hand in the preparatory drawings on view at Sargent’s Daughters. Working Drawing (Getting Set Up) (ca. 1998), for example, depicts a note the artist wrote to herself about the anxiety of getting set up for a painting. Anxiety is literally expressed with words, and even felt in the painstaking accuracy of the picture. But true to the artist’s paradoxical insistence, one also experiences great pleasure in Murphy’s careful rendering of the moment this crumpled note rested on her desk or floor. She is incredibly serious, but always remains open to life in a lighthearted manner. In Working Drawing (Cathy) (ca. 1999), we see her name, apparently traced with a finger on the outer side of a foggy window. Cued by the painted version of this composition done a year later (featured in the book) we know that this was a very sensitive, factual study of a moment in time. But the drawing gives something the painting doesn’t: a cheeky red smudge in the top right corner. An element of chance is revealed in a number of colorful, incidental smudges found on the drawings. This body of work also demonstrates how experimental Murphy is in composing the scenes from her life. Working Drawing (Hand Mirror) (ca. 2006) is comprised of two pieces of paper unabashedly taped together in order to expand the originally conceived composition.

Murphy appears to be preoccupied with a number of relationships. Clarity and ambiguity meet in Working Drawing (Lampshade Reflected on a Painted Wall) (ca. 2000), where a fuzzy atmospheric thumbnail compares to a more linear study. In Working Drawing (n.d.) an economic contour drawing of a chair sits starkly in front of obsessively detailed wallpaper.

One cannot help but think of Murphy’s contemporary, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who also has a show up at Craig F. Starr Gallery. In the same vein, Mangold insists on acute observation while walking the fine line between naturalistic exactitude and invention, resulting in a variety of mysterious, peculiar pictures. Floor with Laundry No. 3 (1971) brings the viewer into the painting by plopping three white, yellow, and brown pieces of fabric onto wooden floorboards. Because we cannot affirm a particular perspective, it being something between hovering above and sitting on the floor, it is clear that Mangold, like Murphy, paints, with a deeply felt love of perspective and perception, for her experiences’ sake and not necessarily for the viewer’s benefit. Four Coats (1976) is simultaneously intense and simple. Two rulers rest on the right and left edges of the painting to create an immense pressure squeezed between them. But that space between is but a plain, white field — possibly the floor or a sheet of paper.

Murphy and Mangold share a miraculous ability to reveal the extraordinary nature of everyday happenings, the ordinary. Perhaps in this present time, in dealing with the immediacy technological advances impose, we can find their work especially vital. We can look towards these artists who have clearly shown us how to slow down and wake up to life.

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“The second year looks good,” commented Washburn, the type of dealer who makes returning to The Armory Fair Modern a pleasure. Her long-term dedication to a core group of New York School artists has paid off: she has material that no one else even has access to—rarities from estates and other connoisseur gems. Seen here: a 1960 Ray Parker and 1957 Nicolas Carone, with a 2006 Gwynn Murrill feline in the foreground.

SITTING PRETTY

It just wouldn’t be an art fair proper, without Botero and Francis. And those two works provide a provenance for the future: the recent Damien Hirst spin painting directly beside.

THE HAVE KNOTS

A sidelong glance from Knoedler’s Anastasia Ehrich says it all—everyone loves Catherine Murphy’s paintings.

This solo show features the first works Murphy has ever made as a series. She became “obsessed with seeing repetitive things in her house,” I was told. In each, she depicts the ring stains that wood knots make through common house paint, leaving ghost-like circles. Murphy, a master of visual double entendre, locates these within larger plays of geometry and perception.

PAPERWORKS POWERHOUSE

Reinvigorated by their recent move to 11th Avenue, and their launching of the new Senior & Shopmaker space with a show of paper pieces by New York hometown hero, Thomas Nozkowski, these paired dealers are taking their act on the road in search of greater visibility.

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Suggesting fractured reality, this piece was originally made by the French stripe master for a show at the Hirshhorn Museum, according to the New York dealers offering it.

FISTS OF FURY

Schultz is a globalist, with branch galleries in Seoul and Beijing and a pan-international neo-pop stable of artists. The work he stands before was sold at the outset of the fair for 130,000 euros, he told me. “Tonight, we eat good meat,” he crowed, with Teutonic glee, shaking his fists.

ECCENTRIC ABSTRACT

One hardly expects to see such outré sophistication coming out of a gallery from the rural heartland. Here, geometry is played against personal idiosyncratic vision by three extremists of post-war non-objectivism.

HAIL TO THE CHEF

Art writer Lilly Wei strikes a supplicating pose in the presence of Julian Schnabel’s massive 2007 self-portrait at Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki.

PHOTO BOOTH

From 20th Century photography masters to odd ephemera from newspaper vaults and police mug shot files, here’s a trove of American Studies-worthy artifacts. “The hippest buyers are museums, like the Metropolitan and the Modern,” Winter told me. “They’re willing to buy something more edgy than collectors.” He expanded, “in painting and sculpture, you don’t have the museums leading.” The reason?  “Maybe it’s because they don’t have to re-sell the stuff,” he added, wryly.

MARRIAGE COUNCIL

East End of Long Island veteran dealer Borghi mounted a series of Elaine de Kooning ink nudes, Portrait of Bill—An Intimate View, unflinching and direct. A show of comparative small works by the abstract expressionist couple rounded things out.

A DEALER’S SECRET

Parsons helped launch Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko, among others. Her own contribution as an artist is overshadowed. In this rangy survey, viewers were left to connect the many dots: with evocations of Forrest Bess, Milton Avery and Robert Motherwell.

TONGUE AND GROOVE

New York’s Gary Snyder/Project Space Gallery takes a curatorial approach, working the gap between pop and abstraction. Both artists pictured here were represented by Pace Gallery in the 1960s and then fell between the cracks. Maybe the time is right to take another look.

And that’s the art of art dealing at The Armory Show Modern—instinct and timing.

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This was a PIC OF THE FAIRS in March 2010

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Catherine Murphy’s first show with Knoedler & Company finds the veteran realist at her most compelling, though — as ever — her work is compellingly odd rather than compellingly beautiful.

She is a tough painter to enjoy but her unflinching, emotionally neutral realism is extraordinary for the level of its attentiveness. She has a fascinated gaze whose focus is both micro- and macroscopic, dealing with both minute details and broad philosophical issues about perception and aesthetic value in ways that are inexhaustable.

A sense of compulsion trumping pleasure in the response to Ms. Murphy seems to correlate with what you sense must have been the experience of the making. She is an utterly fastidious, acute, and astute realist who never looses track of the essential artifice of her project in rendering complex visual data with deceptively simple pictorial verisimilitude.

The motifs of her seven paintings and four drawings are diverse to the point of perversity, suggesting the kind of mind drawn less to things than problems. What is consistent across these images is the sense of a fanatical empiricist picking quarrels with the perceived world.

Her subjects include a striped comforter with a sleeper, his or her head just glimpsed at the top of the composition and rumpling the fabric’s closeknit stripes; Christmas lights oozing their glow into a night sky; a squirrel keeping watch over winter branches; blankets hanging on the line to dry, with snippets of picnickers again barely spied between them; a mirror held up to a bird in a tree; corners of fashion plate illustrations pinned to a girl’s bedroom wall; a crucifix suspended within a woman’s ample cleavage; a pie in the oven; a split log; shelled pistachio nuts and their shells in separate piles on an unfolded napkin.

Each subject is a challenge to maker and viewer alike, to see how deeply into the perceived they are willing to go, to think of the implications of this texture, that perspective, this duration, that light.

Sometimes, Ms. Murphy seems intent on setting up conditions for abstraction precisely in order, however, not [end italic] to capitulate to it. “Comforter” (2007) and “Blankets” (2006) tease out schematic possibilities — the stripes of the first, the color field, or (literally) floating lozenges of saturated color in the second. There is a game being played here with art history, with nods to Frank Stella or Kenneth Noland in “Comforter” and Mark Rothko in “Blankets.” But to keep up her end of this stylistic duel of observation versus decoration, attention to the perceived world outweighs absorption in painterly activity. It is in these two images that the glimpses of human presence are discreetly intimated beneath or behind. The stripes are a mind-boggling feat of close reading as they acknowledge various creases and follow the sleeper’s curves. The dappled surfaces of the blankets have what seem at first like arbitrary patches of texture but then register as either the reflections of foliage, or foliage penetrating the blankets as they catch the sun.

The artist’s paint handling is possibly the weirdest aspect of her work because it belligerently steers a resolute course between painterly exuberance and mechanical observation. She is not a photorealist, imitating the exactitude of a camera or rendering the coldness of a photographic print. But equally, she is unconcerned with the life of paint, in creating tactile equivalencies for the sensations of sight.

The real enigma of her treatment of the perceived world, however, is that for all that she is neither hyperrealistic nor impressionistic, nor is she so remote from her own facture as to achieve — or seem to want to achieve — total verisimilitude. The Greeks had a concept of ekphrasis, of such extreme realism that, in a famous example, cherries were so perfectly rendered that birds were fooled into pecking at them. With Ms. Murphy, you always know that it is paint- you are not lured into a trompe l’oeil state of suspended belief. Her realism is deadpan but handmade.

“Pendant” (2005) could almost be read as a manifesto of this middle road — all the more so for being so provocatively symmetrical a composition, and for teasing out theological implications — the “word made flesh.” The wearer’s breasts are viewed head-on (so to speak) while the cruficix is balanced between them, its nave casting a shadow between those of the breasts themselves. The arms of the cross ever so gently dent the smooth, tanned flesh that hold it in place. Christ’s arms then cast a wishbone shadow that follows the contours of the cleavage behind. The crucifix floats abstractly, yet from a pictorial perspective, quite credibly, popping out to the viewer’s necessarily voyeuristic gaze. The gold of the Christ figure’s artifice contrasts with the fleshliness of the woman’s body, her veins intimating palpable volume. The white dress caught in the corners of the composition adds a third texture to this trinity of metal, flesh, fabric.

The drawings take Ms. Murphy and her viewers into an even deeper level of sheer depictive obsession. Her graphite has such minute yet specific marks (pin pricks of highly sharpened pencils) that it achieves an otherwordly surface in which you feel the material has been breathed onto the page rather than applied with any intentional force. There is something of the exalted monomania of an old banknote engraver about these images, also recalling the fastidious touch of Vija Celmins.

The drawings have an incredible totality of coverage combined with restraint of markmaking. They are intimidating tours de force. She chooses subjects for herself like a split tree trunk whose innards are exposed, while deep foliage is spied in the narrow gap between these two halves. The level of detail requiring attention in this choice of motif makes you fear for the artist’s sanity. In fact, they recall a level of detail rarely seen since the Victorian fairy painter Richard Dadd, who ended his life in an asylum.

But this astoundingly skillful, perplexing exhibition raises enough questions about representation and perception to leave little doubt about the wisdom and togetherness of this remarkable artist.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 5, 2008 under the heading “Catherine Murphy, Sneaking Glimpses of the Perceived World”

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September 22- November 3, 2001

A hand blocks the landscape view in Catherine Murphy’s painting “Backlit,” recalling a gesture familiar from celebrity sightings and crime scenes:’no pictures!’ The image of the hand, oversized and cropped at the frame, compels our interest. Backlit, the ridged flesh between thumb and forefinger is almost translucent, while the tilted columns of the fingers appear wittily massive and vibrant against the wisps of summer foliage behind them. The gold of the wedding ring is flecked with blue sky, the vertical lines of the stretched palm rhyme visually with the verticals of the grass and trees. Landscape and artisanal hand merge and separate, in a finely nuanced play on the Modernist dialectic of object and expectation-this is not a hand, yet it is.

Similarly, traces of a landscape show through the letters of “Cathy” (seen backwards) written on a fogged window, a beautifully immediate rendering of the frustration of peering through subjectivity to that which is being represented. Painting, in these works, seems haunted by an anticipatory nostalgia for the actual, the subject that constantly slips into change as the process-Murphy is known for taking months and years on her work-goes on. The crumbs scattered across a stained tablecloth in “The Windsor” suggest that if the artist at work must inevitably come late to the feast of sensual experience, this must suffice. And it does; the painting is at once intimate and forlorn, cerebral and keenly felt. Even paintings with a largely formal interest reveal an underlying tension.

The images of a hunting scene in”Wallpapered Corner” reverse and repeat on the vertical, playing abstractly on the geometric configurations of walls, trim and carpet, at the same time drawing us figuratively into a painted corner. But it is a lovely corner; why not stay there The puzzles of Murphy’s work are nearly as seductive as the sensuality of their color, yet in her drawings one sees that something else is at work that transcends both. “Swept up,” completed in 1999, gathers endless debates over representational art where they belong, in a carbon swirl of beautifully rendered dust. A drawing that nearly cost Murphy her eyesight asserts the exactitude and rigor of her vision.

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