Artists, inevitably, are captivated by movies.  Many in this show manifest their infatuations in their work, and in a variety of ways.   French artist Marc Desgrandchamps, for instance, gravitates – in his work in general and in his two lithographs in the present exhibition – towards scenes that embody a cinematic sense of flux while tapping modernist conventions of transparency and montage.   Angela Dufresne, in her two paintings, fixes upon scenes that are simultaneously iconic and perverse.  Dawn Clements, in a giant drawing in ballpoint pen, Jessica Drummond in Bed (My Reputation, 1946), 2012, the largest work in the show, exploits the subliminal sense of a movie playing on TV in a domestic situation, with obsessive notation blurring boundaries between inner and outer projections. Duncan Hannah casts Nova Pilbeam, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s early British movies, in a scene of Hannah’s own devising that pays three-way homage to – and emphasizes connections between – his beloved Nova, Hitchcock, and Edward Hopper.  Seduction and self-absorption are recurring leitmotifs, meanwhile, in images of other actors “starring” in the exhibition, whether Elle Fanning in lithographs by Will Cotton, Nastassja Kinski in a painting on liquid graphite by Ena Swansea, or Jeanne Moreau in a work by Dufresne.

Cotton is joined by a number of printmakers in this exhibition for all of whom variation within repetition is as much an expressive or thematic element as it is a technical or publishing factor.  His own pair of lithographs plays an optical game, when hung together as they are here, that recalls the transitions from black and white to color in The Wizard of Oz.  In prints by abstract sculptor Willard Boepple and painter and sculptor Steve Locke the variation and repetition of screens generate or propel the imagery.  Locke is represented by four from a set of 13 lithographs, Rapture, 2009, which envision sexual encounters in which one party, a believer, is “saved” in flagrante delicto, leaving only his clothing behind—but mid action.  There is further play between iconography and process as the prints repeat stenciled groupings from plate to plate with one pair or group highlighted in each work.  In a comparable way, the stencils used by Willard Boepple in his screenprint monoprints are colored uniquely and sequentially within sets of identical configuration so as radically to alter perspective, depth and even form in otherwise unchanging structures.

Like Boepple’s hard-edge glyphs, the evocative, painterly, ethereal monotypes of Stuart Shils explore possibilities of shadow and trace in phenomenological ways that accent the more literary allusions that abound elsewhere in the show.  He exploits to the utmost the suggestion of ghost image in the palimpsest of the monotype plate.  The ghost within the image is accentuated in the three unique works by Nicole Wittenberg that recall a printmaking sensibility by deploying contrasting painterly approaches to a same appropriated photograph by Paul Outerbridge, which image itself recalls Northern Renaissance paintings of the mother of mankind with all its implications of temptation and generation.

A number of artists share – if without the eschatology – Locke’s collision of realism and abstraction as a means to literalize absent presence.   In works on paper by French artist David Lefebvre, for instance, oil painted hard-edge bars or geometric shapes of color intervene in evenly modulated graphite drawings in which orders of what is real and what is stylized, what is natural and what is schematic, are subverted; blocked-out shapes come to signify lacunae in the field of vision. Matt Bollinger’s fracturing of a boy’s head, recalling the faceting of cubism, evokes the mirroring ghost of split identity. And in cool yet voluptuous graphic images painter Alexi Worth explores the interaction of depicted shadow and the actual mesh screening material of his support with deft pictorial wit.

Also incorporating interplay of depicted shadow or shadowy activity into the conceptual fabric of her work is German painter Kerstin Drechsel.  Her sweaty snapshot-like depictions of lesbian nightclub play constitute a kind of tender voyeurism in their intimate, delectable facture, resonating across the show with a small scene from Rear Window by Dufresne and with the artful misregistrations of a Shils monotype.

And here, by way of conclusion, or perhaps introduction, is the personal, curator’s statement offered with the exhibition.

“As a boy of sixteen I worked as a bank messenger, dashing around London with documents to be signed and contracts to be sealed, mostly using the tube to get from Holborn to the West End or the City.  At that time, I was quite obsessed by Tess of the D’Urbervilles: the novel, the movie, the character.  I played a game with myself on each errand that if I passed the poster for Polanski’s Tess (then on general release) a given number of times in my subterranean peregrinations I would win the hand of Nastassja Kinski.  I became expert in strategically positioning myself in the right carriage so that, say, at Chancery Lane I’d maximize the number of posters along my route.  The rules were quite strict: I was not allowed to retrace steps or deliberately miss an exit.  Gradually and surreptiously, other ads began to supplant my beloved poster as the Tess campaign wore off and the posters would be covered up or torn away.  As if Tess’s fate and Nastassja’s languid gaze were not poignant enough, an insipid sensation of absence crept in, of the vacated spot.  The memory or trace of her visage began to fade in a deepening recession, lost in the shadows of romantic impossibility.”

on view through February 16, 2014 at Zürcher Studio, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery?, New York City, 212 777 0790 

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To see the names Prose and Cotton in this monograph almost seems an incongruous riposte to the poetic license and silken surfaces of the paintings reproduced.  Cotton inhabits a unique niche in contemporary painting with his Bouguereau-meets-Haagen-Dazs sexed-up saccharine pop-fantasty realism.  His paintings see Americanized Alexandre Cabanel-style nudes supine on billowing clouds of candyfloss, beautiful young women in cupcake tiaras, and melting landscapes of icing and toffee.  “Like Giotto’s heaven,” writes Prose, “Will Cotton’s is populated by attractive angels—in this case, nude girls who, as they say, aren’t as dumb as they look.  In fact, these girls are smart enough to function simultaneously as a representation of desire, a joke about desire, and a sly commentary on the commoditization of desire.”  But not necessarily, it seems, a joke about representation: the book is strong on the artist’s drawings, and these hint at an earnest engagement with the language of form that transcends what is otherwise a parade of faux-oldmasterliness in their conventional gestures.  The monograph concludes with an extensive conversation with Toby Kamps (and no, that’s not a pun on “to be camp”: Mr Kamps is the new modern and contemporary curator at the Menil Foundation.)

Werk! The Armitage Gone Variety Show, reaches its final night at the Abrons Arts Center tonight, Saturday May 5, with performances at 7.30 and 10 pm.  The other artists who collaborate with Armitage on Rave, a new work, are Doug Fitch, Kalup Linzy, Richard Phillips, Aïda Ruilova and William Wegman.  Armitage has a long history of collaboration with visual artists dating back to the ex-Merce Cunningham dancer’s first works with David Salle in the 1980s.

Will Cotton: Paintings and Works on Paper. Text by Francine Prose, Interview by Toby Kamps.  New York: Rizzoli, 2011. 172 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8478-3667-3. $60.00

Will Cotton at Mary Boone Gallery, May 3 to June 30, 2012. 745 Fifth Avenue, between 57th and 58th streets, New York City, 212.752.2929

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I’d like to talk about two aspects of your work today: the relationship to landscape and the relationship to photography, digital photography in particular. You consider your paintings to be landscapes, which fascinates me. Could you talk a little more about this?

Sure. In a way, it’s very simple. In a painting, if it feels like a scene you could walk into, it’s a landscape space. If it’s something you could reach into and grab an object, it’s a still life space.

A lot of it also has to do with point of view, in the past I made some paintings of still lifes, which usually means you’re looking a little bit down on something. When I started making these paintings, wanting them to feel like they’re monumental in scale, I moved my viewpoint down, so that you’re actually looking out at or up at the scene. There is a scale shift happening.

Do you think the scale of the paintings is important to you as well?

I do. I’ve experimented with that a lot. I make small paintings from time to time and they don’t have the same impact. I know it sounds simplistic, but a large painting is more effective in making the subject appear large. I know it’s not always the case—there are some Hudson River School paintings that aren’t that big and they feel vast. I think that it’s because the things that I am painting are so much associated with smallness that I have to do everything I possibly can to make them feel monumental.

Do you think your notion of landscape has changed with the addition of figures in your work?

I hope not. My hope is that you’ll look at this picture and think, here’s a landscape painting that happens to have a figure in it, as opposed to reading the image as simply a figure painting. It’s really more about making a picture in which the environment tells the story, a narrative landscape.

Are there any landscape painters that you look at historically or contemporary?

Ah, yeah, there are a lot. I became interested in the Hudson River School: Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole. This arose partly out of a search for my roots as an American painter. This is something that had always troubled me—I’ve always been attracted to the European painting tradition, but on the other hand, I feel so American. I feel like this is the place that I come from and understand. So, I wanted to get a little more familiar with what that means, and I’ve found that I feel a kinship to those painters.

I was reading about Frederick Church and that he had visited the American West and South America– these, which were at the time, very exotic places. And then he made paintings of these places that people had never seen before. And in doing so, introduced this entirely new landscape to the public that people were very excited to see. And I thought, “Wow, that’s exactly what I want to do: to build a table-top landscape in the studio and then make paintings of it. So the paintings become a record of this exotic place that existed temporarily, but something no one will ever see in person.

You had asked about landscape painters. I feel in terms of process, a real relationship to Claude Monet, in that, here’s a painter who actually constructed scenery. You know, you think of all these paintings of the lily pond and the Japanese footbridge—these aren’t things that he was walking out through the landscape and just stumbled upon, these are things that he very deliberately built. And with specific views in mind, with these ideas in mind that this is what I am going to paint, very much like I do in my studio. Church, for that matter did some of the same things, up in Olana, in Hudson, New York. He did a lot of landscaping around a house he built up there, specifically with that idea in mind. That landscaping process, I think, is phenomenal and it points to the earthworks of the 1970s.

Talking about your process: Have you always painted from photographic references?

No, in fact, even now, it’s not all from photographic references and I’ve done enough of both that I think it is fairly seamless. This painting for example is not painted from the photograph, it’s painted from a maquette on the table. There was a lot of mechanical, perspectival stuff that I worked out. The perspective was kind of bothering me in trying to lay out these waffle cookies, on the gingerbread trailer house. I worked out a system with a string on a very long wall in the studio, so that I could grid out the whole perspective of the picture, then find and plot out the waffle pattern. Let me mention that it’s a very different mechanical process than working either from life or a photography, kind of a constructed version.

In this one [“Cotton Candy Sky,” 2006] there were photographs involved — photographs of cotton candy that I shot up on the roof, in daylight. The model posed on this table on a pink bedspread to pick up the source of the pink reflection. That way I could work both from a live model and a photo reference.

Another really exciting element of using photography now is the chance to do some digital manipulation as a sketching tool. That I can shoot these pictures of cotton candy on the roof, for example, and load them into the computer and then start playing with the color, which is something in the past that I would have done in a preparatory painting—trying to work, well, what color the sky is going to be, how the shadow compares to the lights, am I under a gray sky? And those are things I can play around with in Photoshop as well.

How do you feel about that in terms of knowing how they feel and the actual texture of them— for example, in making the chocolate pool?

Because it’s such a new and strange world, I feel it’s something I have to touch, I have to go to this place. Building the maquettes allows me to do that. I guess, if I were a fiction writer, I would be one of those writers that has to go and live the life of the character to be able to write it realistically. I don’t feel at all that I am the sort of person who can just use my imagination and say, “This would be like this and this would be like that.” And mostly because it’s so surprising. You can think, okay, “Gingerbread house, I know what that looks like.” But- there are things you learn in actually building it, how the light looks coming from behind, the opacity of the frosting casting a shadow through the interior, through the gumdrop. These are things that wouldn’t even occur to me.

Right, so you are making active discoveries?

Exactly, yes, discoveries. And likewise, with the tactile element of all the sweets, and the chocolate, and “Oh my God, it has this transparency that drips off your fingers.” These are visual cues that I paint into the pictures. They tell you things that make you know that this is real chocolate. It’s really creating a believable fiction. That’s what I’m after—as believable as possible.

Are there any painters that you’ve looked at for these details?

Yeah, definitely, I think I mentioned in the talk the Dutch 17th century still life painters. You know how you can really see the difference—if you look at a Manet still life, everything in the picture is pretty much made of paint. There are little areas where there’s a transcendence and it turns into a flower petal or something else. In a Dutch still life painting, the glass will be just absolutely fragile and maybe cracked. And on the beer, the foam will be slowly seeping. And the crockery you will feel like you could run your fingernails over it. Every single texture, in other words is described in such a way that it becomes a tactile experience to look at a picture. That’s something that is very important to me in painting these and it’s something that was not really natural to me to come to. So, I had to learn how to really paint a picture and I hope you can see this more in the cotton candy painting, how in different areas I treated the picture differently, depending on the material that’s being depicted.

How has using digital photography affected your process?

It’s made photography more useful to me. I used the words “sketching tool” before and I’ll say the same—it’s exactly what it feels like. I’m not really good enough in Photoshop to do a final collage of the different things, so it’s not like that, but, I used to be very frustrated when I would take an image, send it out to be developed and it would come back all wrong—not at all what I was thinking. So every single time I am referring to the image, I am thinking, “Yes, but—“ Here is this whole scene that has a weird greenish cast to it. I am referring to it because I want to know what it looks like but as I mix the paint I am thinking, but make it less green, which is not very helpful.

Going to digital photography and making my own prints in-house, the color reference started to mean a lot more, less afterthought. It’s by no means a complete image that I am then trying to faithfully trying to reproduce. If I felt like I got it in the photography then I’d probably not feel the need to paint anymore. Though I don’t think that I am in any danger of that because there’s still so much in the image I can improve upon.

It seems like you are reconstructing an experience through a variety of documentation.

Yeah and it’s not for any kind of trickery—it’s always for expediency. If I could have this scene before my eyes twenty-four hours a day, that would be ideal and that’s what I really want. Since that’s not possible (due to melting, model schedules, etc.), I have all these other avenues that make it work for me.

That seems to be a contradictory aspect to the work—that the candy disintegrates after a short period of time but yet there is a certain viewing time built into the work and then a certain period of time that it takes to actually make the painting.

Yeah, you see the same kind of thing when painters are painting clouds of any kind, whether they are made of cotton candy or not. I’ve tried to do that kind of thing myself (painting outdoors), but it’s just so hard. It is this ephemeral thing—it’s a recording of this fleeting experience.

How do you reconcile the interest in traditional technique to contemporary subject matter?

Well, I guess again, I’d stress that tradition for tradition’s sake is completely uninteresting to me. Knowing how to do these things is more for expediency. I have an image in mind that I want to make. If I have all the tools at my disposal to do that, I’m better off. Much of those tools are what I see in traditional painting. Many times when I go into a museum, I see something and say, wow that is the way I want to capture that idea. And that idea may be something I got off the back of cereal box this morning when I was eating breakfast. In my mind there is this absolute leveling—no hierarchy.

So you’re thinking about it in terms of appropriating technique where necessary?

Again, but appropriating a technique not for the sake of appropriation or for conscious reference, but just because this is the best, most expedient way to get the idea across.

Sometimes, though not even the most expedient. When I did these, I wanted to figure out how to depict people in candy land—these women particularly, and there are so many potential ways to do that. In the end I wound up using some very specific references. I know my sources in other words. And I am thinking Bougereau and pin-up painting. These are the icons of femininity that make sense in my mind in this context, in a cotton candy cloud. So I’ll specifically go there. And I don’t want to paint this in a way that you can’t see that. I want you to be able to see that. And that means that I have to have some sense of how to paint a Bougereau picture and how to paint a mid-century pin-up painting and that’s where the desire to know technique comes in.

So you’re going after a sense of clarity to the vision?

Yeah, clarity. And I hope in the process a lot of me comes through. I wouldn’t be happy otherwise and I have thought about this a lot, too. It wouldn’t be at all fulfilling to me to make a collage by sticking a Cabanel “Birth of Venus” in an advertising picture of a cotton candy cloud. That wouldn’t be the end of the story. And I’ve actually tried literally to do that, just to see what it would look like—it looks terrible. So the end result is different than all of the sources and references.

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“Ena Swansea: situation” at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert through October 9 (524 West 19th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 807 9494)

“Lois Dodd: Flashings” at Alexandre Gallery through October 2 (Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue, 13th Floor, 212-755-2828)

Will Cotton’s latest paintings give new meaning to the term “eye candy.” His four canvas show at Mary Boone continues a photorealist preoccupation with the motif for which he is best known, confectionery, but forcibly fuses it, this time, with what had been a second subject, the erotic female nude.

Mr. Cotton’s candyscapes collide the genres of landscape and still life, constructing spatially ambiguous vistas out of perceptual and digestive excess. Usually there is a gaudy overload of sweet things, whether icecreams, chocolates, familiar mass-produced goodies like Oreo cookies and M&Ms, or toffees and caramels in a molten state, rendered in suitably sickly, saccherinne hues. His modus operandi is to photograph complex constructions of such stuff and render a painted image in a deadpan academic hand.

“Cotton Candy Cloud,” (2004) confines itself, with twisted restraint, to a single treat, cotton candy, unless we semantically join his sexist orgy and classify the voluptuous reclining redhead as a sweet thing, too. The puffing pinkness cannot begs to be read as an eponymous stand-in for the artist himself: its folds have the feel of musculature.

Art historically, the image overtly references Cabanel and Bougereau, the nineteenth-century “pompier” classicists, and in so doing recalls Mr. Cotton’s own education, which was completed at the New York Academy, which promotes “technique” in the beaux-arts sense of the word. Mr. Cotton’s nudes, more Vargas than Velazquez, lag behind his confectionery in sexiness.

The problem with them is that they come with baggage: The more he tries to make them voluptuous, the more they recall a grand tradition of which, by painting with giant quote marks around his own expressivity and curiosity, he can but be a testy footnote. They aren’t at all convincingly drawn from life, but nor is there an interesting sense that they derive from a specific kind of artifice, in the way, for instance, Cecily Brown uses hardcore pornography.

This deprives them of the warped frisson of vitality enjoyed by his cookies and chocs, ambiguously poised as they are between reality and artifice, a readymade pun as they are on the synthetic. On their own, the still-life motifs were intriguing, if not enticing, in a Jeff Koons kind of way. With the addition of his lethargic classicism his ice-cream melts away into silliness on a par with Lisa Yuskavage.

His delivery contrasts with the great modern master of the creamcake and spandex nude, Wayne Thiebaud, whose still startling images of pies and cheerleaders found in such proto-Pop imagery an apt metaphor for painterliness. Mr. Cotton’s images have some initial energy thanks to their kitsch overload of slick rendering, but that turns out to be the pictorial equivalent of a sugar boost. A Thiebaud is good enough to eat, but a Cotton gives you very little, aesthetically, to get your teeth into.

Ena Swansea also treads ground between artifice and reality, though with radically different results to Mr.Cotton’s. Her figuration eschews academic formula, and endures the awkwardness that inevitably arrives in its wake.

Her show is consequently uneven: some canvases are belabored by nerdishly rendered inanimate objects like an automobile or an air conditioner that upset the delicate ratio between transparency and opaqueness. And yet, other images are energized and animated by an equally pronounced but expressively more convincing awkwardness. Despite a couple of turkeys, the best paintings make this exhibition one of singular power and importance.

Like Mr. Cotton, Ms. Swansea had, earlier in her career, achieved a slick, contained, fully resolved still-life style before succumbing to the temptation of human subjects. In her case, ambiguous shadows cast by flora and vegetation produced images of compelling beauty. Her turn to figuration seems less a style gambit than an expressive necessity.

Her shadowplay led to experimentation with elaborate set-ups, in her case utilizing the camera oscura. The new imagery extends the photographic metaphor. One picture, of a child’s head, is entitled “color negative,” (2004): like all the works in the show, it is painted on a ground of graphite, a material of sinister ethereality, at once leaden and other-worldly.

Ms. Swansea can paint with exhilerating facility: “devil on the road,” (2004) an ambiguously poised, goggled and spandex-clad red demon casting his shadow on shimmering, near-molten asphalt is a suitably devilish display of convincing, beguiling and deft painterly sleights of hand.

The real show stopper, though, is a 15 foot long dinner party scene that recalls a Tintoretto last supper in its compressions and foreshortenings. This image, at once timeless and a painting of modern life, offers an appropriately enebriated perspective: the distorted still-life arrangements and stilted figure poses have the eye lurching between ease and alienation, speed and arrest. In its fusion of fluency and awkwardness this rich, complex work recalls Manet at his weirdest.

Short mention must be made of a compact display of tiny oil sketches by Lois Dodd at Alexandre, the septugenarian’s third show at that gallery in two years. Actually, the show, propped on ledges in the gallery’s foyer, warrants close attention-critical and appreciative: it is exquisite fun, and surveys 50 works from as far back as 1990.

These plein air paintings are done on roofer’s flashings, thin, aluminum panels of five by seven inches. As such, they are like postcards from the front line of observational painting. The medium, eccentric and yet practical and effective, is true to this artist’s character: Ms. Dodd is one of the true mavericks of American painting, a quietly audacious realist whose quirky, enigmatic, yet empirical and heartfelt observations of the rural scene make her the supreme “artist’s artist” of the New York school.

These lyrical yet hardnosed sketches capture, in completely unaffected simplicity, such phenomena as floral color contrasts, subtle noctornal lighting effects, movements of water, a shimmering breeze. At this size and speed, the artist’s affinities with her better known contemporary, Alex Katz, and their mutual mentor, Milton Avery, are clear, but so too is her utter individuality.

In scale, slickness, and “attitude” Ms. Dodd could not be further removed from either Mr. Cotton or Ms. Swansea, but she does share with the younger artists an intuitive sense that oddity and credibility can make happy bedfellows.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 16, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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