Graham Nickson: Cumulus, Monumental Trees and Transient Skies at the New York Studio School

September 4 to October 21, 2018
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, nyss.org

Although Graham Nickson has been Dean of the New York Studio School since 1988, it has taken this long for the institution to persuade this beloved teacher and leader to agree to allow an exhibition of his own work to grace the walls of this historic institution. Karen Wilkin and Rachel Rickert, the curators of the exhibition, have drawn works exclusively from the indepth collection of Nickson formed by the late William Louis-Drefus, with watercolors and one related oil painting spanning the period 1999 to 2013. Nickson is perhaps better known, or is at least equally known, for monumental figurative compositions of bathers by the sea, as seen recently in exhibitions at Betty Cuningham Gallery as well on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. But sunrises and sunsets have been an important interest from the outset of his career.

I vividly recall, from a talk he gave at the school about his work almost two decades ago, him discussing the formative experience of painting the skies morning and evening, each day for weeks on end, at the British Academy in Rome where he had won a scholarship from the Royal College of Art in London where he studied. This discipline fed his passion for light, color and nature. The discipline and the passion go hand in hand with Nickson. As he explained in his Beer with a Painter interview with Jennifer Samet in July 2014:

I’m interested in things that are opposites — dichotomies. Obsession, and what you do with it, is part of that double thing: it is obsessive, but it is good for you. How can you paint bathers for thirty years? How can you paint sunsets for such a long time? Well, you can if you feel that they are still as thrilling and challenging as they were from the first.

Another dichotomy is trying to make something monumental out of something transient, trying to make something transient out of the monumental.

From Tuscany to Cape Cod, Australia to Hawaii, the force of Nickson’s look into nature, the rapid yet meticulously built up rush of light, water and paint, is deliciously bracing. Sensual, wild, almost outlandish combinations of color and bold contrasts are balanced by a deep dark internal sense of structure.

Particularly powerful in this exhibition is the way the dual themes in the show’s title – trees and skies – are arranged in two large wall installations comprised of individually framed watercolor paintings: . Eighteen dramatic skyscapes dominate the first room, while in the second, each composition depicts a single “monumental” tree in different seasons exalting in shifts of growth, light and color. For me, these installations bring to mind associations and contexts likely very far from the artist’s intentions that nonetheless serve, through contrast, to bring out what I think is the true spirit of these works.

For example, in viewing the Skies wall it hit me—after beholding the beauty and intensity of hue and texture, light and clouds folding about one another in rich, almost dizzying color–how our iPhone world has us living in snapshots, scrolling through image walls and timelines on social media: Our clichéd desire for the sentimental landscape, the romantic sunset- shot over and over, used endlessly to express a sense of nostalgia, what Karen Wilkin, in her catalogue essay, refers to as “forbidden subjects…for contemporary artists”. But Nickson’s paintings could not be further from the snaphot. Sensation here for the viewer is immediate and yet wonderfully slow: The images demand real looking, as the artist so passionately yet with full control of his paintbrush, looks, using hue, value, opacity and fluidity to full effect. The accumulation of form and movement, from image to image, resonates as musical interludes, riffing off one another with saturated color and subtle harmonies, while each painting remains an entirety. In Black Hush: Dawn, Luciano d”Asso, (2005) purples and grays layer atop one another as darkness presses down into land, leaving the gold of light like a razor’s edge across the earth. Red Stream Sky (2005) unfolds upward from reds through deep oranges, slashed with violets and rising toward a soft yellow patch in the painting’s upper left corner. One is reminded that while experiencing nature, we soak it in all around us, looking left, right, up, and down – often the beauty is so strong it is hard to bear. Nature, through paint, occupies us wholly.

The second wall installation presents 15 watercolor images in which a single monumental tree motif is central to each composition. At first impact there is strong sensation of repetition. One, another, then another tree, painted through seasons, growth, change and stability. Each image contains a principal color contrast, or opposition, such as the pale yellow sky against green black tree in Serena’s Tree: Yellow Sky, (2000) or the orange-green clash of light to shadow in Serena’s Tree (2000).

Thanks to the massed installation, I could not help thinking about Andy Warhol, though it is hard to think of two artists who have as little in common conceptually or aesthetically. Why does the artist choose to come back again and again to a subject? In the Pop aesthetic, Warhol’s subjects lost a sense of individual meaning through multiple repetitions, photographic mediation and screen printing process. Irony prevailed, and the artistic temperament and hand were of little value. For Nickson, repetition serves to see more deeply into the subject, to create metaphors between nature and art, to question vision itself in the seeing and re-seeing of a single subject as a vehicle for color expression. His concept of repetition says that vision is endlessly changing, not static. Personal sensibility prevails, even though there is a determined detachment capable of maintaining close observation while painting en plein air. While in substance and intent Nickson’s work reveals quite opposite or contrasting meanings to that of Warhol, I believe these meanings stand out all the more because of the veil of similarity.

This show is a tour de force for Nickson, after decades of dedication to building a history through his powerful body of work. We stand before this devotion, rich in feeling, memory and sensation.

The post Saturated Color and Subtle Harmonies: Graham Nickson’s Watercolors appeared first on artcritical.

November 4 to December 22, 2017
15 Rivington Street, between Chrystie Street and Bowery
New York City, bettycuninghamgallery.com

Because our visual culture is supersaturated with representations of all kinds, contemporary figurative artists need to be resourceful to survive. Some do this by appropriating imagery from advertising, while others borrow from old master or modernist art. The paintings and works on paper in this mini-retrospective present a now familiar modernist theme, beach scenes. And so, merely identifying Graham Nickson’s theme may suggest that he is a very traditional artist. As a teacher, I should add, he loves to talk about the importance of drawing; and in this exhibition’s catalogue he discusses the importance of working from direct observation – both, of course, traditional concerns. But look at Bather with Reflector (1982-83), with its dramatic horizontal division, the intensely artificial sky above the sand and reclining bather. Here you see how much Nickson owes to Brice Marden’s monochromes and to the blank colored backgrounds in Alex Katz’s portraits. Observe, too, how Departure (1977-1994), another enormous painting, plays an intensely lit sky against the darkness of the foreground, where the fisherman and beach goers stand. This, too, is a most untraditional composition. Or consider Tracks (1982-91), an enormous near-monochrome in which the tracks in the sands run out to the horizon in a daring perspectival construction. Originally this much-reworked picture was done in full color. A nineteenth-century painter might show this motif from a distance. By taking us close up and eliminating local color, Nickson reveals the strange visual qualities of his tracks. And I love the daring way that the delicious Maine Grey: Yellow Jacket (2017) places the back-turned standing figure in the immediate foreground, presenting another untraditional motif.

Nickson is a very varied painter – and this exhibition provides an effective introduction to the range of his artistic interests. What then links together all of these works is a highly personal, most effective vision of the artist’s goals. He has said: “The entire process of creating art is abstract, but the finished work is a metaphor for the artist’s experience and direct observation of nature.” If I understand him correctly, this statement helps identify the difference between the five paintings in this show and the various smaller watercolors and charcoal drawings. These works on paper are relatively immediate responses to his chosen motifs, while the paintings are more considered developments in which reworking of these products of direct observation is mediated by prolonged reflection. ‘Abstract’ here thus is a shorthand way of identifying his active concern to develop these motifs, in response to his governing aesthetic. This, I think, is why Nickson is not interested in the psychology of the people he depicts – they are just his subjects. And it is what makes the beach such an ideal site for him, because of its location between the urban world of culture and nature. We may enjoy beaches because we think of them as timeless, unspoiled places, but of course they too, as much as the city, are, in part, modernist urban creations – they too thus are artificial. I believe that only a contemporary artist would understand figurative images in these terms. What then seems to me distinctive (and highly original) in Nickson’s art is his passionate pursuit of immediate visual experience. You don’t imagine that he searches the Internet for motifs. In that way, allowing for the qualifications that I have offered, he can be identified as a very belated modernist.

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The Space Between at the New York Studio School
February 13 to March 22, 2015
8 West 8th Street (between Macdougal and 5th Avenue)
New York, 212 673 6466

Some finished works of art efface evidence of the process of their own making. A painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or Philip Pearlstein doesn’t reveal how it was made — in that way, it is like a photograph. There is, by contrast, a special fascination in art which, by revealing the activity of its own making, makes that process part of its meaning. Such art, it might be said, is the most aesthetic visual art — it is doubly art because we both identify its abstract or figurative subject and enjoy seeing how that subject was rendered. We find this happening with Abstract Expressionism, as represented at FreedmanArt’s “Art in the Making,” by marvelous signature style works by Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, among others, and by artworks from artists of succeeding generations who extended that tradition. And the juxtaposition of a little two-sided painting Woodland Stream, Martha’s Vineyard/Chilmark Landscape (1922) by Thomas Hart Benton with a glorious drawing from his pupil, Jackson Pollock Untitled (folded greeting card) (1946-47) is a marvelous demonstration of how varied art whose making is part of its meaning can be. So too are the 23 drawings by Kit White, as illustrated in his book 101 Things to Learn in Art School (MIT Press, 2011), which present details from works by such varied painters as Michelangelo Caravaggio, Giorgio Morandi and Andy Warhol.

The press announcement for “The Space Between” identifies a key theme in Studio School teaching. Between-ness, this text suggests, may allude to the space between forms in the picture plane, between abstraction and representation, and, also, between pictorial symbols and the three-dimensional space they symbolize. Here, then, we find a variation on FreedmanArt’s theme, for speaking in these varied ways about betweenness is to allude to awareness of the process of art making. No wonder, then, that Bill Jensen and Graham Nickson are in both shows, for Jensen’s abstractions and Nickson’s figurative images provide pleasure thanks to both their subjects and our awareness of the painting process used to present those subjects. The same is true, comparing two other works on display at the Studio School: contrast, I would suggest, Margrit Lewczuk’s magnificent large Untitled (2009) with Stanley Lewis’ View from Studio Window (2003-4). Sometimes the most revealing survey displays are found not in our museums but in the galleries — here in small galleries. You could teach a whole history of Modernism using just the art on display in these two richly suggestive shows. That is a great, generous achievement.

The post Making Art, and Making It Well: Two Recent Group Shows appeared first on artcritical.

September 15 to October 21, 2011
19 East 70th Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues,
New York City, (212) 794-0550

On Cape Cod there is a bay that faces directly into the setting sun during the summer months. When the tide is low one can count up to seventeen sandbars before seeing the water’s edge more than half of a mile off shore. It’s a mind-bogglingly seductive scene. As the sun sets, the water trapped in between the long thin bars begin to shimmer, glow and turn hot orange, red and magenta, ringed with opalescent greens and blues. The sand bars go from reddish dirty blond to deep eggplant. The shore is lined with a cast of locals and tourists, many sitting on the dunes or posing for snapshots. When the last bit of the sun dips below the horizon, a din of clapping and whoo-hooing is heard followed shortly by the irregular hum of engines starting up to take the spectators home.

But for Graham Nickson, this is the time when the colors are the most intense. He knows to stay and look. He knows also the challenge of such a moment and of such a theme.

In the aptly titled exhibition, Paths of the Sun, Nickson demonstrates his capture of the transitory in a forty-year sampling of over 40 bedazzling paintings and watercolors of sunrise and sunset.

There are examples of the small paintings in hand painted frames from 1972-74 made during time spent in Rome, when he initially adopted this time-worn theme and aimed at making a fresh interpretation of it.  These small format works articulate a certain conception of light and a synthesis of abstraction and figuration that resulted in images that Nickson to this day continues to explore. The gemlike quality of these small-format works is emphasized by the wide, flat, profiled frames, which also underscore the individuality of each image. They link, in my mind, to the experience of finding small treasures in dimly lit churches.

A group of watercolors, installed in a grid, conveys Nickson’s idea of painting the same tree as a foil to sunrises and sunsets. These are characterized by large, interlocking areas of brightly colored wash with hatched lines that become, bush, tree, branch and so on. They represent some of Nickson’s most extra sensory visions of the forces of nature upon his subject.  Each is an animated world of its own, recalling the watercolors of Charles Burchfield and the newest large-scale paintings of Per Kirkeby, to be seen a few blocks away at Michael Werner Gallery. A second group of figureless watercolor landscapes of sunrise or sunset mesmerize with pulsating orbs and bands of rich color.

But three monumental paintings anchor and at the same time steal the show.  They make me want for more, not because they are deficient in any way, but becuase they are so full of so much that is absent in a great deal of painting today.  A deep pleasure in viewing Nickson’s work is being able to discern the direct, straightforward use of the medium. To see the hand at work, to feel the effect of the choice of the oversized canvas, to be brought along as a viewer as if participating in the spectacle of this work: these are seldom achieved by anyone in today’s climate of immersive, overwhelming spectacle.

The theatricality of sharp contrasting colors of red, orange, pink, deep blue, gray and violet in Traveler; Red Sky (2002), as well as in Red Lightening (2008-10) creates powerful epic images.  Although these paintings produced a lingering emotional reaction, the most recent of the three, Tree of Birds (2009-11), is the most challenging for its seemingly effortless combination and arrangement of both representational and abstract elements.

The scene, a tree of birds before a massive volcano within a mountain chain, is painted in shades of blue, grey, and violet, off-set by areas of light yellows and greens. A patchwork of interlocking clouds fill the sky, drop in front of mountains and cast shadow shapes upon fields below. There is a funky-chunkiness to these slightly comic, awkward forms as well as a remarkable compression between the foreground, middle ground and background. Shapes belonging to the background are pulled to the front of the picture plane and vice versa. Clusters of pale color are geometrically deployed in subtle triangulation that interestingly brings emphasis to the volcano peak. Here, we find a small, white shape, just like the pale lavender one to its right, which, surprisingly, is a bird in flight and not a cloud. One can imagine being in this scene and yet the painting conveys the immensity and mystery that we know of and experience but can never fully capture.

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Giorgio Cavallon: Paintings
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries

Both shows through April 30

What, for a painter, surpasses the nobility of the human figure? Why, several human figures—or so we might gather, thumbing through any history book of western art. So many of the “mega-hits,” from Leonardo’s “Last Supper” to “Night Watch” to “ Guernica ,” consist of groups of strategically interacting people. No wonder ambitious painters continue to be drawn to such heroic feats of composition.

The trouble is if you’re not Leonardo, those half-dozen figures disporting across a landscape or interior are liable to look less like individuals with inner lives than marionettes jerking on strings. With dismaying speed, epic poetry can turn into traffic engineering.

Graham Nickson is one painter who rises to these challenges and prevails on his own terms–though with such bristling intensity that visitors to his ninth exhibition at Salander may at times feel they’re getting the same workout as his straining figures. The paintings, some of them huge and the product of over two decades of work, mostly depict a favorite theme, bathers at the shore. All reveal the familiar, formidable attack with strident colors and tightly knit dramas of pose and counterpose.

Although performing natural tasks in fairly ordinary settings, his figures gesture with the deliberateness of Neoclassical history paintings. Picture that magisterially raised arm in David’s “Death of Socrates.” (It’s no coincidence that Mr. Nickson, now in his late 50s, is Dean of the New York Studio School and originator of its grueling Drawing Marathon.)

Despite his turgid color, the artist’s drawing dominates in these paintings. But in many areas, his hues vibrantly support the energy of his contours, lending a remarkable presence to gestures and light. In the lower left section of the immense “Edge Bathers” (1983-2005), a kneeling figure leans forward, placing her forearms on the towel spread before her. (She doesn’t look exactly comfortable, but then “comfort” here is an alien concept.) The artist energizes this inspired construction—taut angles of elbows springing from the great arc of a foreshortened back—with a few perfectly calibrated hues: a deep, dusky scarlet for the shadowed towel, rich purple on shaded flesh, vivid lights for their illuminated counterparts. Above, with a rare touch of mischief, the artist has placed a single lick of lightning against the implacable horizon.

In “Theoria” (1989-2005), contours and hues combine again to lend part of the image a wonderfully specific vitality. A standing woman stares upward at a clutch of balloons, her tipped head holding powerfully at our exact eye level. Her vertical form stretches below with monumental sureness, its length measured out by opposing notations of bathing suit, ribs, and knees. The sand at her feet seems ponderously far from the head, in large part because of subtle pressures of color: though both are varieties of orange, the sand quietly throbs as if absorbent of sunlight, while the skintones alongside radiate light, and it’s a marvel how this subtle difference urges the figure’s vertical rise out of flatness.

Both of these paintings are made up of smaller panels that might be almost complete works on their own. In fact, this process of accretion appears to form the basis of Mr. Nickson’s working method; the main elements seem to grow, crystal-like, from inner cores, a technique especially effective for the dense modeling of figures.

Be sure not to overlook two of the artist’s more modest efforts. One of two landscapes above the desk, the spacious “Dark Island Dawn, Jade Sea,” (2004) features dark blue/violet ripples of clouds climbing into space above a luminous blue-green sea. The smallish image reminds us of the looser direction Mr. Nickson has pursued for many years in the medium of watercolor.

One side effect of the highly deliberated drawing in his figure paintings is that the hues, while occupying aggressive points on a color wheel, are often surprisingly passive when it comes to a composition’s largest rhythms. Intensity of color and pictorial presence are not necessarily the same thing. In “Reflection,” (1989-2005) light pours through a window into a darkened interior, leaving a sequence of lights on a woman’s hair and the wall behind. Unlike that striking passage of sand-to-sunlit-flesh in “Theoria,” these patches, though varying in hue, have exactly the same pictorial weight. Rhythmically the hair has just as much of a rapport with the wall as with the rest of the figure.

A colorist like Matisse or Veronese hierarchizes his color, particularizing with weights of hue each step of the movement from the largest ground/sky divisions down to the subject’s details. Mr. Nickson’s potent drawing, though, tends to be the sole determinant of scale and focus, leaving certain passages of color in a kind of compositional purgatory. To the left of that powerful vertical figure in “Theoria” is another individual clutching an inflatable whale. Here the same electric pinks and stolid purples describe elements of both man and whale, flattening and completely deflating their presence in the surrounding color sequences. The result is so complete as to seem deliberate—and one wants to cry out: Enough drawing! Let color speak!

“Sandbar Bathers” (1999-2005), too, at once rewards and tries the viewer. Here, the artist beautifully renders the dynamic pose of a woman stretching a towel behind her back. Her arms angle vigorously through the turgid orange of fabric, opposing the subtle tilt of hips. Concise drawing and vibrant hue reinforce each other with a kind of classical muscularity. But move to the figures on either side, and color practically disappears as a compositional factor; the drawing explains complex overlappings of forms, but the colors mumble and dither. In fact, one has to look twice at this thirteen–foot wide canvas to register its overarching concept of space–figures planted in foreground, sandbar arcing behind–because it’s captured only in its drawing.

This should all be viewed, of course, in the light of the age-old debate about the primacy of color or drawing. Do you aspire to Ingres’ probity of line, or Delacroix’s eloquence of color? Mr. Nickson seems quite unapologetic about his choice.

But before resigning yourself to this fact, take a peek at the two rather casually painted figures airing a green towel on that distant sandbar. Their hues hold their places with the limpid authority one finds in the “Jade Sea” landscape, and it’s a bit of painting all the more striking because it seems an afterthought.

The artist’s intentions for drawing are evident in every square inch of his canvases, but his color—in-your-face, but elusive; vital here, disconnected there—remains an enigma. It’s all part of these uningratiating, forceful paintings—and explains, perhaps, why they’re so intriguing.

*****

In the first-floor gallery at Salander, the paintings of Giorgio Cavallon (1904-1989) are considerably lower-keyed. More joyful in execution and milder in ambition, these painterly abstractions have an immediate, comparatively innocent appeal. But they reward prolonged looking.

The artist uses a lively range of color to animate compositions of slightly rough rectangles with occasionally rounded forms. His technique is unaffected, as if the business-like brushstrokes were simply what the artist found adequate for his purposes. His goal, on the visual evidence, was focused and consistent: the uncovering of innate qualities of color and form and the movements between them. This the paintings achieve with aplomb.

There’s no doubt about the artist’s influences. A native of Italy , he immigrated to the United States in 1920, and shortly began studying under Charles Hawthorne. But it’s the impact of Hans Hofmann, with whom he studied for almost a decade in the 30s and 40s, that rings through every painting here. Countless artists may have passed through Hofmann’s schools, but Mr. Cavallon’s paintings, with their uneven blocks of color, are especially close to his teacher’s stylistically.

Mr. Cavallon has a gentler touch, and seems more inclined to layer colors in subtle veils, but one finds the same sense of exploring, of proceeding from hunches and seeing where they lead. The eleven paintings here amount to a survey of the last four decades of work, and one can trace his steady development within the lyrical confines he set for himself.

A work from 1948 (untitled, like almost every painting in the exhibition) neatly shows off the pulsating energy of the gridded patterns he favored in the 40s. There may well be a hundred different colors in this painting, each confined to its own cell but reacting in a distinct way to its neighbors: eclipsing it, shouldering against it, or wedging or slipping behind. An even-handed simmer of color-forms on the left third of the canvas evolves into a more unsettled rhythm at the center, with some forms lengthening and dominating in size. At far right, the match-ups have become more uneven still: a sizeable blandly off-white rectangle tussles with a fuchsia-hued ribbon bracketing it on two sides, neither willing to yield.

Several canvases from the 50s show how the artist began placing his colored forms against white fields. The pale backgrounds, quietly throbbing from many underlying tints, lend a slightly otherworldly aspect. Looser and broader shapes appear in later decades. A large painting from 1988, the year before his death, shows him still composing at full speed.

Mr. Cavallon exhibited extensively during his lifetime and his work is in the collection of several major museums, but he didn’t enjoy the level of fame of some of his colleagues. The temperament behind these paintings is one of unassuming earnestness, and this alone—never mind the parade of attention-hogging “isms” in the last half-century—would be enough to relegate a painter to the “under-appreciated” category. Judging from these plain-spoken but articulate paintings, he deserves better.

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February 17 to May 7, 2005

The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture is housed in a nationally land marked building on 8th Street – a maze-like architectural wonder that combines four Victorian townhouses, mews carriage houses, and Art Deco frontage – which has always been a dynamic center for intellectual adventure. It began as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s studio, then became the original home of the Whitney Museum. In the late 1960s, artists and philosophers (including Buckminster Fuller, Meyer Schapiro, and Morton Feldman) gathered there around the Studio School’s founder, Mercedes Matter. And these days, current Dean Graham Nickson leads an Evening Lecture series, which has brought hundreds of leading art critics, thinkers, and artists to the school.

On the occasion of the school’s 40th anniversary, I was asked to curate an exhibition about its history. As an art historian, my research centers around a generation of New York-based, painterly figurative artists, many of whom taught at or were even founding faculty members of the school. The exhibition, “The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School,” whose first part opens today, will examine the institution’s history, via the work of approximately 100 faculty members and alumni.

The school was founded in 1964, after Mercedes Matter published a harsh critique in Art News of the state of current art education. She criticized art schools for their fragmented, busy curriculum, and for teaching students about “what is going on” in the art world but never actually “how to draw.” Matter taught at Pratt at the time, and a group of her students prevailed upon her to start a new school based on the ideas she outlined in print. The students then took an active role in locating a space – originally a loft at Bleecker and Broadway – constructing worktables and modeling platforms, and even paying the rent. The school moved to its current home in 1967 (a move made possible through a student who died young and left her inheritance to the school).

Although the school has always emphasized working from life, and many teachers avoided discussions of content, the divide between abstraction and representation was indeed fluid and dynamic. A teacher like Nicolas Carone (who taught for nearly 25 years and has been hugely influential within the school) claims an ideal art to be “abstraction with content.” Charles Cajori’s “Seated Figure”(exhibited in part one) hovers at the edge of abstraction and sets the tone for the conversation around these issues. Esteban Vicente, the noted abstractionist, was also a founding faculty member.

Drop by the school this week, and you will note in the galleries work by these artists, as well as Leland Bell, Alex Katz, George McNeil, and Matter – all dating from the period – a quick course in early faculty aesthetics. In those days, Studio School students learned “plastic values”: the creation of form on a two-dimensional space. The object, whether the still life or the figure, was basically an armature – an excuse – for organizing forms in space. This teaching was based on that of Hans Hofmann, who had his own school on 8th Street in the 1940s and 1950s, and with whom many Studio School teachers, such as Matter, Carone, and McNeil, had themselves studied.

In the 1970s, a generation of influential abstract artists began to emerge from the school, including Andrea Belag, Emily Cheng, and Christopher Wool. Faculty included rigorous abstractionists Milton Resnick and Jack Tworkov. Philip Guston – another founding faculty member – was a particularly powerful influence at the school (he was making his own transition from abstraction into more personal imagery at this time). He encouraged his students to develop their own personal vision. Steven Sloman, a student of Guston’s in the 1960s, became a teacher in the 1970s.

The 1980s were a time of transition. Sculptor Bruce Gagnier became dean for several years and was followed briefly by painter and future MoMA curator Robert Storr. Mr. Gagnier brought in a new group of teachers. Ophrah Shemesh embodied the cultural mix of the 1980s: Her paintings take on sexuality and the body and have a European, neo-Expressionist feel. Ross Bleckner taught at the school and curated an important exhibition there, “From Organism to Architecture.” The mystically inclined monochromist Frederic Matys Thursz, a faculty member who did not believe in drawing, provided a very different kind of guidance than the founding teachers. This period seemed to open up the school to influences that were swirling around at the time outside its doors.

In 1989, Graham Nickson became dean. Mr. Nickson, who is British, brought to the Studio School the influence of his own training at the Camberwell School of Art, where he had studied with Euan Uglow, who in turn worked under William Coldstream at the Slade. The tradition developed by Coldstream is based on intense observation, working from life, and employing an exacting system of measurement to scale down what the artist sees be fore him onto the page. The influence of Coldstream, Uglow, and the Slade – brought via Mr. Nickson and other British teachers he has employed – is a new element in the mix of teaching ideologies at the school.

Mr. Nickson pioneered the Drawing Marathon, an extraordinarily intense two-week, full-day course of study, which he has taken around the world. British emigre students have included such figures as Matthew Ritchie and Cecily Brown. The latter purportedly once complained that the charcoal smudged Studio School students didn’t understand her dressing up to attend parties, yet her work displays an undeniable Studio School painterly panache.

Although Mr. Nickson’s own style of large-scale, complex, psychologically suggestive figural painting has certainly made its mark at the school, there still is no single “Studio School” vision. More recently, teachers have included Rosemarie Beck, Paul Resika, and British artists Carole Robb and Garth Evans; works in the final show of this series will include these artists as well as John Walker’s muscular abstraction, a seemingly alchemical abstraction by Bill Jensen, and densely painted, evocative works by Jake Berthot, Eric Holzman, and John Lees.

Teaching and painting are the two principal legacies of the school – and in most cases, the artists selected for this exhibition are actively practicing, exhibiting, and often teaching, not only at the Studio School but also around New York City, nationally, and internationally. The common denominator, in the face of diverse artistic output, is an extended tradition of seriousness and innovation; a willingness to utilize the timeless languages of painting, drawing, and sculpture; an engagement with art of the past; an appetite for intellectual adventure, and a devotion to sustained studio practice.

This is what distinguishes and marks the New York Studio School.

The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School, Part 1 (1964-1971)

“The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School,” will be held in four separate parts, between today and May 7. The installations move chronologically through the decades of the school’s history, combining the work of faculty and students and presenting a glimpse into four periods of the School’s history. Many of the selected works date from the periods represented, but others are more recent. Grounds for these decisions were aesthetic as well as historical: to convey both a sense of the educational system at the time, as well as communicate the possibilities for what an artist who trained there might become.

Part one (1964-71), opening today, includes the work of founding and early faculty members, as well as founding and early students. Themes presented in this show include a group of works about the body, in the entrance halls to the school, such as George Spaventa’s “Walking Woman” bronze; cutout figures by Mark Zimetbaum; Carl Plansky’s self-portrait, naked in work boots; feminist works by Marjorie Kramer and Irene Peslikis; Judy Rifka’s post-September 11 skeleton meditation, and Chuck O’Connor’s 1968 classic Studio School style nude.

In the galleries, works by Charles Cajori, Gretna Campbell, Louis Finkelstein, Sidney Geist, and Alex Katz set the tone for discussions around abstraction and figuration, planar form, and active drawing; while heads by Earl Kerkam and Nicolas Carone examine the soulful possibilities of Studio School aesthetics.

Selecting the works for this exhibition was fascinating: it very much contradicted the idea of a unified “Studio School style.” It was my own “marathon,” a la Mr. Nickson, of research, interviews, studio and gallery visits. But this is only the beginning of the story.

this article originally appeared in the New York Sun, February 17, 2005

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