Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock at the Institute of Contemporary Art
April 29 to August 14, 2016
118 South 36th Street (at Sansom Street)
Philadelphia, 215 898 7108

Entering “Louise Fishman: A Retrospective,” at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, NY, feels like balancing on a raft that is inadequate to cross the ocean it is floating on. The exhibition, organized by chief curator Helaine Posner, comprises more than 50 paintings and drawings created between 1968 and the present, and demonstrates the achievement of an artist whose work has invigorated the language of abstract painting. A concurrent exhibition, “Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, offers an instructive companion to this long-overdue survey. That show, curated by Ingrid Shaffner, explores a selection of small sculptures, leporellos (folded artist’s books), and five large paintings that reveal the breadth and scale of Fishman’s oeuvre.

My respect for Fishman’s work did not come automatically, as I initially perceived a bluntness in the work; it resisted entry. Over time, and with experience in the thicket of artmaking, her paintings have worked me over, and the Neuberger retrospective’s tight selection facilitates this effort. Posner’s mindful arrangement within the museum’s galleries gives Fishman’s work plenty of room to breathe, explicating the artist’s conceptual and spiritual concerns and revealing her creative trajectory. Smaller works on paper, arranged on freestanding walls in the center of the main gallery are less effectively supported. In the cavernous space of this gallery, they may have resonated more powerfully if positioned in tighter clusters. Seen in its entirety, however, the retrospective inspires a sense of awe, and finally, situates Louise Fishman within the tradition of American painting rooted in Abstract Expressionism and furthered through her singular vision and endeavor.

The earliest work in the exhibition, In and Out (1968), contains four wing-like shapes, flatly painted in pinks and black that open in an irregular symmetry from an implied vertical line at the canvas’s center. Graphite lines visible through the white ground reveal subtle adjustments to the hard-edged shapes as color creates a strong spatial pulse. To my eye, the painting speaks to the central core imagery that was being developed by feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, though Fishman attributes it more directly a response to Al Held’s black-and-white abstractions of 1967–69.

During the 1970s, in the crucible of New York’s emerging feminist movement, Fishman became acutely aware of gender discrimination and acknowledged her own isolation as a lesbian. As if to destroy the influence of the male-artist power structure, Fishman cut apart her canvases, reworking them into small sculptures oriented along a grid. Confronting her disdain for traditionally feminine work, she employed stitching, dying, and weaving. Untitled (1971), reminiscent of an abacus, is made of rubber, graphite, string, and staples on tracing paper. Transversed by a twisted thread, the amber hue of the rubber resembles skin knitting itself together or the ruled lines of an illuminated manuscript, influenced by Fishman’s childhood exposure to Hebrew texts. Fishman knew Eva Hesse, but her encounter with the 1971 memorial exhibition of Hesse’s work at the School of Visual Arts was the catalyst for her decision to work with that material.

The Angry Paintings of 1973 came out of Fishman’s deepening self-awareness in the consciousness-raising gatherings she attended. Her pain and rage were unleashed in a series of 30 text-based paintings identifying the artist’s contemporaries and predecessors. Ti-Grace Atkinson and Djuna Barnes were among those whose names were inscribed in bold letters obscured by slashes and drips. While they are the least formally interesting of Fishman’s works to me, these protestations are nevertheless unique documents of the living history of feminism, even today, when women who express anger still risk stigma.

Life has been drained from the tempered grays, ashen blacks, and steel blues of Fishman’s Remembrance and Renewal series. Inspired by a 1988 visit to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezín, Fishman made a group of paintings that were given Hebrew titles from Passover. Into her colors, Fishman mixed silt collected from the Pond of Ashes at Auschwitz, creating the granular surface of Haggadah (1988). Dybbuk (1990) comprises a reddish-black grid, like prison bars enclosing a sequence of dimly lit windows — the result of swiping brushstrokes dragged through the oily pigments. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is the earthbound soul of someone who has died, unable to be released. These elegiac works reflect Fishman’s concern with painting’s capacity to reflect psychological and physical states of imprisonment, just as they became a medium for transforming her grief upon witnessing the Holocaust sites.

Seven monochromatic paintings from the early 1990s represent an exponential leap in subject matter, scale, and surging physical gesture. Iron Sharpens Iron (1993) contains three charcoal-black bands on a white ground that stretch 10 feet up the canvas, then diverge. Fishman’s use of drywall knives and trowels yields a textural vocabulary of scraped and crusted surfaces, absorbing and reflecting light like hammered or rusted metal. The title, from a passage in the Book of Proverbs, means that through interaction and conflict we sharpen one another. Her history as a competitive athlete is also embedded within the aesthetic concerns of this work. Fishman relates her command of the boundaries of the canvas, gestural velocity, and physical confidence to pitching hardball and playing basketball as a teenager.

For There She Was is a magnificent, darkly luminous painting of 1998, whose title is appropriated from the last sentence in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The relationship between two characters who metaphorically merge into one comes to mind, as every color is turning into another. With interlocking passages of blue, gray-violet and black shot through with cadmium red-orange and burnt sienna, Fishman has created a vibrating field that reminds me of a Chinese garden at dusk. A collector of Chinese scholar’s rocks, Fishman also acknowledges that the landscape surrounding her old farmhouse upstate, as well as the practice of Buddhism has given her the ability to better understand her work as an artist.

Using paint’s viscosity as a metaphor for the power of water to buoy, submerge, and destroy, Fishman’s arm makes rapid swipes, cuts, and scrapes throughout her Raft of the Medusa (2011) and The Salty-Wavy Tumult (2012). J.M.W. Turner’s gory whaling pictures, with their allover facture, were not far from the artist’s mind as she smeared and twisted her reds around spumes of white in Margate (2015). Kreisleriana, (2015), divides the canvas into vertical bands of fiery yellows, reds, and blues that suggest the emotional contrasts of Robert Schumann’s work for solo piano. Because music is the most abstract art form, paintings in response to it can often be lame (illustrative) equivalents. That doesn’t happen here.

I see Fishman’s paintings in this domain as a reflection of her deep intellect and nuanced understanding of spatial and rhythmic structure. They are influenced by the focus and attention of a deep listener, but they are independent objects. At the top of her game, Louise Fishman translates aural, physical, and visual experiences into radiant and muscular works of art whose tension is maintained by the grid that anchors her fierce gesture. Her hard-won joie de vivre, born of new travels, immersion in music, and a contented relationship, underscore this substantive, if belated retrospective.

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The shows to be considered at the National Academy October 26 at 6.30 PM by David Cohen and his guests Nora Griffin, Phoebe Hoban and Donald B. Kuspit are as follows: Louise Fishman, at Cheim & Read (547 West 25 Street, 212 242 7727); Casey Jex Smith: Fiend In The Void, Based On The Romney Campaign, at Allegra LaViola Gallery (179 East Broadway, 917 463 3901); Michelle Stuart: Palimpsests, at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, 535 West 22 Street, 6th Floor, 212 255 8450 and Tatzu Nishi: Discovering Columbus, a project organized by the Public Art Fund, at Columbus Circle (8th Avenue/Broadway/West 59 Street, 212 980 4575).

To view Discovering Columbus online reservation is required at publicartfund.org.

The National Academy is at 1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street. Admission is $12 ($7 for students and seniors, free for National Academicians and students of the NA Schools.)

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At 70, Louise Fishman continues to gather strength as a painter fueled by headlong passion and sheer nerve. Of the generation  that includes Mary Heilman, Bill Jensen and Brice Marden Fishman has not been as widely celebrated as these abstract peers; perhaps it is this slight underdog position that spurs her on.

In earlier decades, she investigated her identity as a painter in a number of formal, political, personal and historical-cultural directions. A work by her from around 1971, a fairly small, two-part gray canvas, chalk and rope construction—as chic as a pair of clutch purses—was one of the highlights of  the 2007 exhibition “High Times/Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975” and revealed Fishman as a stylist, concerned already at that early date with method over message. Still, how to introduce particular subject matter into painting was her nominal concern into the 1990’s.

In her  “Angry” series of paintings on paper, for example, from around 1973, which literally named names that she blamed for her frustrations as an artist, the text portions of the works were surrounded by a stitching-and-patterning-cum-lyrical-abstraction painted border; the color is all muted blues, reds, greens and grays. There was a degree of taste along with discontent in works that aided her in politicizing her consciousness as a feminist lesbian.

Following this series she returned to using conventional stretched canvas supports and among works of various sizes up to about 2 x 2 feet, she produced a series of small, thickly applied oil-paint-on-canvas works from around 1980 with a palette-knifed spiral motif. Made at The MacDowell Colony, a palpable light of the forest shone within them. Fishman has always been intent on making scale changes, and the power of these diminutive works — some   were only around 6 x 8 inches — led to her ability to maintain an intricately articulated surface, as the paintings grew larger.

Then in 1988, after a trip to Auschwitz and other former concentration camps in Poland with a holocaust survivor couple Fishman executed an extensive series of works—darkly foggy, muffled crucibles—conceived as remembrances that embraced her Jewish inheritance. Fishman mixed in the paint with a small amount of soil from sites she had visited. Fishman had been asking very specific things of her chosen medium: how does one make it relevant to oneself and one’s history? How does one possess it? How do you filter your experiences through it?

It would seem that, for these past twenty years and with these questions answered, Fishman was relieved of any qualms about throwing herself wholeheartedly into gestural expressionism. This most recent exhibition is as much in conversation with other painters of this idiom, past and present, as it is with her own emotional response to her medium.  Two contemporary painters in particular came to mind at various moments, former and current gallery mates Dona Nelson, who generally makes larger paintings than Fishman, and Bill Jensen, who makes smaller ones.

There are number of works in acrylic in this show, a first for Fishman in many years. Arctic Sea (2007,) with its blobby skeins of foreground blacks, is reminiscent of Nelson’s pours. The blacks float before a shimmering illusionistic field largely made up of yellow and gray shiny chisel-like swipes that seem to hollow out an interior space. These had to be rendered with a brush, which is one of the main drawbacks of acrylic for this artist, as she can’t chip off chunks of dried oil paint, one of her signature moves. In a painting such as Cooked and Burnt (2007) small divots created with some small pick-like blade seem to return air to dried humus of built up emerald green pigment. Near it, a fragment of a painted cross, done in runny, wet light blue imposes itself over rust-colored underpainting. There is paint applied with a dry brush toward the middle section and cross wipes from a large trowel that spill from the lower left.

One of the more interesting developments is that Fishman’s paint has become denser and slower. Some of the fast liquidity of American abstract-expressionism is here but no more so than, say, School of London painting, evidenced by the fecal, dagger-like shapes in the large slashing dynamo, Embrace the Tiger (2009) and the tachisme of Nicolas De Stael in the impastoed patches in the diminutive, still-life-like Bottom (2009.)

In Telling (2007,) Fishman produces her version of what has become a Bill Jensen staple, the gestural monochrome. She increases the scale, and creates a dark indigo simulacrum of a freshly patted-down grave. After burying the surface in an endless network of fully loaded brushstrokes, it appears that fishman’s touch became lighter and lighter, so that an invisible scrim seems to bind together its seeping, runny facture.

Fugitive (2008,) my personal favorite in the show, is a very composed picture but seems as improvisational as the rest. It has an Ecole de Paris air of late Fautrier in its black ground and brown, white and grey marks, flirting with trompe l’oeil in the use of a serrated edge similar to Braque’s favorite wood graining tool, disrupting the foreground marks. Like all the works here, it didn’t seem to start within proscribed limits but ended there and reminds us that the primary content of serious painting is not performance but evidence of the means at arriving at an encompassing and complete statement.

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Exhibition curated by Katy Siegel with David Reed

National Academy Museum until April 22
1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, 212 369 4880

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 15, 2007 under the title “Painting when Painting was Dead”

Maybe it is because the word “times” occurs twice in its title that  “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-75” achieves such a feeling for period.  Even for someone who was a toddler when the experimental abstract painting in this lively, intelligent, informative survey got going—in another continent, to boot—dejà vu seems to waft from the National Academy’s fabric walls.  What must this show feel like for people who lived through those years?

This was the era of spray guns and masking tape.  So many of these dishevelled yet sparky paintings and paint-based objects have the trippy, hippy look of the years of the flower power movement, civil rights, ecology, and emerging feminism and gay liberation.  Even brightly colored works have a limp, tie-dye, impoverished quality.  Everything is rough at the edges, made from cheap or recycled materials, informal or provisional in arrangement, sometimes ethnic-looking, other times futuristic, and always at once earnest and nonchalent—in harmony with what one knows (or projects) of the look and feel of bohemia, the city, and youth culture at that time.

The show looks at painting in a truly transitional moment.  The medium was under sustained assault from an avant garde that, empowered by the ascendancy of sculpture, installation, performance and film/video, insisted that painting was dead.  Of course, hundreds of painters worked experimentally and optimistically through such rhetoric, but there were some determined to be part of the revolution who nonetheless wanted to paint.  For them, according to Katy Siegel, the exhibition’s curator (advised by painter David Reed, with whom the idea for this show originated) the radical critique of painting was liberating, “an opportunity, not a pink slip.”

Indeed, the heavy duty insistence on painting’s demise is now seen by defenders of the painters in this show as itself macho, authoritarian, and locked into an earlier aesthetic, which by the late 1960s was an institutionalized revolution.  These artists found a space for themselves between the dogmatics of minimal and conceptual art on the one hand and the formalist abstraction championed by the critic Clement Greenberg, on the other. Having their cake and eating it, they wanted to enjoy playing with shape, form, color, and material and feel that they were structurally questioning the language of art in the process.

In terms of inclusiveness and free flow this new painting was obviously a backlash against the prim, austere negations of minimal art, but it would be simplistic to see it as a pendulum swing back towards the defiant gestures of Abstract Expressionism.  If there is one artist in the show of whom this might be the case it is Joan Synder, whose painting, “The Storm” (1974) has a rich, romantic mythic sensibility.  Generally, however open and loose looking their forms, the artists were interested in upfrontness and process, not in mystery and nebulousness.

The first galleries have the most pictorially conventional canvases of the show.  “Pavo” (1968), a large Dan Christensen of nine-by-eleven feet, has overlapping fuzzy circles spray painted in bright colors, while Kenneth Showell’s “Besped” (1967) is a warped grid of spray-painted little squares bent into trapezoids and parallelepipeds.  The spray in both paintings is at once illusionist and a literal, fact of process. Jo Baer’s “Speculum” (1970) is a precisionist geometric abstraction.  On its front the picture is mostly monochrome, with most of the composition taking place along the deep edges.  Ms. Baer had taken on the anti-painting rhetoric of Artforum magazine, which moved to New York from California in 1967, in an influential letter to its editor.

Once the visitor moves to the large second floor gallery, however, order and precision give way to scatter and flop.  But still, however limp they have become, grids still predominate. “Put a Name on It Please” (1972), by Alan Shields, a diagonal grid looking at first like a badminton net caught in a gale, is made of cotton belting embellished by strings of bead. Its mix of a structural element from high modernism and almost louche use of cheap and unlikely materials sets the tone for a kind of hippy abstraction.  Howardena Pindell’s “Untitled” (1968-70), an open grid of sausage-like rolls of canvas joined by metal grommets, and Louise Fishman’s “Untitled” (1971) of string sewn into strips of canvas, are limpid grids that tease this signifier of order and regularity.  For many feminist artists, a use of craft elements like sewing was a self-consciously political gesture, a critique of masculine authority.

And women dominate this show in terms of the most striking and original forms: There is Lynda Benglis with “Blatt” (1969), a floor piece formed of poured pigment and latex that curdled into a free-standing puddle free of any canvas or support.  Mary Heilmann’s “The Book of Night” (1970) is a deep-stained black canvas, free of stretcher, that also lies horizontally, in this case with a kink in it on a chest-high pedestal.  Dorothea Rockburne’s “Intersection” (1971), a kind of oil sandwich in which thick, viscous black oil is contained within transparent plastic sheeting laid out of the floor.  Imprinted on the plastic is, once again, a grid.  Carolee Schneemann, a pioneer of performance and feminist art, is represented by a video of her 1967 piece, “Body Collage” (1967) in which she dabbed her naked body in glue and rolled around over bits of paper and fabric.  Her inclusion is a provocative statement in a show of painting, an insistence that process, gesture and intention trump product or effect.  It is taken as significant that she described herself, in early group shows, as a painter.

Many of the artists in this show have fallen from attention, while others—like Ms. Heilmann and Ms. Rockburne—returned to conventional formats in their mature careers.  What also happened is that shortly after the time frame of this exhibition New York witnessed a resurgence of abstract painting.  Figures who now dominate that genre such as Bill Jensen, Thomas Nozkowski, Melissa Meyer, Sean Scully,  and Mr. Reed himself, all found their feet in the wake of these years of “way out” experiment.  There is a clear trade off between radicality and quality in such artists who are more conservative in format but nuanced in painterly achievement.  But for sheer permission to play there is a debt to those who scaled the high, hard times.

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Weatherspoon Art Museum
Greensboro, North Carolina

August 6 to October 15, 2006

Recently the art world has been much concerned with its own recent history. “The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984,” organized by the Grey Art Gallery, 2006, told part of that story, displaying Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and a number of other influential figures who turned away from painting. “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967- 1975” tells another part of the history, showing artists who tried to keep painting alive.

Like the art world at large, they rejected Clement Greenberg’s ways of thinking. Most were Americans, but some distinguished visitors, Blinky Palermo and Kayoi Kusama for example, passed through this New York art world. Some of these artists worked with other media. Lynda Benglis and Carolee Schneemann did video while Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburne made installations. Others were using traditional materials in untraditional ways. Alan Shields created painted sculpture constructions; Harmony Hammond did fabric and acrylic constructions on the floor; Howardena Pindell and Louse Fishman constructed hanging grids; and Lynda Benglis poured paint on the floor. Artists tried to keep painting alive by using spray paint (Dan Christensen), by laying the canvas on the floor (Mary Heilmann), or by employing big mounds of paint (Guy Goodwin). Jo Baer and Jane Kaufman were minimalists; Michel Venezia and Lawrence Stafford played with optical effects; and Ron Gorchov, Mary Heilman, Ralph Humphrey, and Elizabeth Murray, who went on to have distinguished careers, were finding their styles. What perhaps unified this community was their desire to distinguish themselves from the clean designs of Greenberg’s color field painters. Their shared ambition, it might be argued, was to return to the era of Abstract Expressionism when, after all, painting was the dominant medium.

This exhibition interested me greatly, because when I started writing art criticism just a few years after this period, I too focused on abstract painting. I got to know some of these artists, and saw their paintings. And then in the 1980s I read (and participated in) the debates about whether painting remained viable. The catalogue gathers a great deal of interesting sociological material. I hadn’t known, for example, that four gifted black artists – Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell and Jack Whitten— were painting abstractly in this period. Nor was I aware of the range of women’s art presented in this exhibit. It was hard then to be an abstract painter, especially if you were female or black.

A great deal of this art is fascinating, at least to me, but in the end this style of abstraction didn’t have carrying power. The most important American who belongs with this group, Thomas Nozkowski, is not in the exhibition. And, to my surprise, David Reed, who advised the curator Katy Siegel and contributed an evocative essay to the catalogue, did not include his own early art. Some of the artists on show went on to have distinguished careers, but in the end, the interests of the art world moved elsewhere. And so now when the terms of debate have shifted so dramatically, it’s hard to recapture the sense of this moment when the attacks on painting were so ferocious.

What did in painting, Robert Pincus-Witten suggests in his catalogue essay, was October. As I see it, the situation is different. There is a lot of fascinating art on show, but nothing I would want to take home. Many of the artists in this show were immensely talented, but in the end none of them are as significant as their immediate precursors, or the Abstract Expressionists. In the end, then, painting survived, but not in the hands of the artists in this exhibition.

The exhibition will be on show at the National Academy Museum, New York, February 15-April 22, 2007

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