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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Velocity of Vision: Deborah Rosenthal’s Geography appeared first on artcritical.

April 26 – June 30, 2012
531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-630-0722

Just what is it about America’s love-hate relationship with French culture? There was a time when it tipped to love: Americans were among the most significant collectors of 19th- and early 20th-century French art. By the postwar era, however, Clement Greenberg was arguing for the “force” of American painters over the “charm” of the French. Donald Judd was even less enamored. In a 1964 interview, he dismissed the “structures, values, feelings of the whole European tradition,” adding for good measure, “It suits me fine if that’s all down the drain.”

The change of heart, of course, paralleled the waning of the French School and the ascendancy of New York. But it also had something to do with the nature of French art itself: its very stylishness, and its predilection for the fastidious and idiosyncratic. When we were seduced by it, we fell hard; when we weren’t, we wouldn’t go near it.

Art, though, is not fashion, and style not the final measure of an artist. There’s no better reminder of this than Schroeder Romero and Shredder’s remarkable retrospective of nearly thirty drawings and paintings by Jean Hélion (1904-1987), an artist whose work powerfully combined the raw and the elegant, the primal and the complex. Curated by Deborah Rosenthal, the exhibition spans over fifty years of the artist’s work, illuminating the consistency of his aesthetic even as it evolved from pure abstraction to the highly figurative. Coinciding with the exhibition is the reprinting of “They Shall Not Have Me” (Arcade Publishing, $24.95), Hélion’s gripping account of his two-year incarceration and escape from a Nazi prisoner of war camp.

Given his propensity for crafted forms, massaged contours and provocative color, you’ll seldom find a more distinctly French painter than Hélion. But what really matters is that he was a great artist—a forceful draftsman, a superb colorist, as well as a first-rate modernist: a cerebral painter who didn’t conceal strategies inspired by a profound understanding of the masters.

Mondrian was an early influence, and Hélion found original ways of re-creating the Dutch master’s climactic sequences and intervals. In one of the earliest pieces in the show—a small, briskly executed gouache from 1934—rough pairings of shapes sea-saw and clamber up the paper, each uniquely characterized: a heavily incised rectangle balancing a lighter, rounding form; smaller shapes above, echoing and extrapolating on these tensions. Imagine a painting by Mondrian, loosened in motif and technique, but relinquishing not a spark of its rhythmic intensity.

Hélion wrote eloquently about art, and he described his process in a 1937 essay titled “Avowals and Comments”:

By all kinds of successive manipulations, some instinctive and dark, some intellectual and conscious, I reach a structure which, at certain times, becomes strong, dominant, individual.

The nearly four-by-five-foot canvas Équilibre (1936) reveals a far higher degree of finish than this gouache, but its forms are every bit as energetic. The design circulates between four cores of overlapping, shield-like forms, each articulated to a different degree, with angled planes stretching in-between. Some shapes orbit others, or speed towards a stable point, or pace out an extended passage. The pressure of colors—dense, vacant, burning, limpid—charges the measure of each interval with emotion. Or do colors measure the emotions of forms? Like all Hélion’s work, Équilibre seems simultaneously propelled by the rational and the sensual.

Describing one of the Louvre’s great Poussins in his 1938 essay “Poussin, Seurat and Double Rhythm,” Hélion illuminates the animating effect of color:

Thus a current is running though the picture, carrying the spectator to all points, everywhere gaining an acceleration, a new speed, a new quality. By a series of rebounds, the color transforms itself. One red jumps over to a blue to an orange. One brown jumps to red over a black…

In Équilibre no element is more crucial than one of the smallest: a slender, horizontal wedge of blue near the canvas’ lower edge that anchors the circulating masses, and holds them just below our point of view. It serves as a kind of floor line, establishing the support of earth, the departure of verticals, the density of space around them: in other words, the most primal sensations accompanying our own occupations of space.

Stylistically, Hélion’s paintings from the late ‘30s bear some resemblance to Léger’s, but Hélion is drawn more to strange, glancing particulars. Though highly abstracted, his images conjure surprisingly earthy effects. Bobbing at one end of the long horizontal canvas Abstraction (1939), for instance, two faceted forms have all the presence of heads, though lacking any kind of facial features. At the canvas’ opposite extremity, a condensation of arcing and minutely overlapping forms becomes a cloven mound, viewed from slightly above. The intensity of its presence, and of our relationship to it, is uncanny. “In a picture an element is real when it behaves like nature, when it coincides with its currents,” Hélion wrote in his essay on Poussin.

It’s really not that much of a leap, then, to the figurative images he pursued from the late 1930’s on. The small gouache Pegeen (1944) tangibly captures the presence of the artist’s wife—despite her absurdly long neck and highly abstracted hair—in front of the fellow-forms of a sport coat in a store window and a wall’s patch of flaking paint. Again, colors weight all: sidewalk below, storefront held above, figure before, our viewpoint held by punctuating details. We’ve seen this conviction of form before in Courbet and Matisse, but Hélion edits his perceptions in an original way, extracting his subject out of raw events with almost unsettling poise.

Considering its intimate scale, “Jean Hélion: Five Decades” touches on a surprisingly wide range of the artist’s explorations. A crisply angular portrait of a be-hatted man in a 1939 painting seems just a stone’s throw from the earliest abstractions. A 1949 canvas of a seated nude reveals the outlined arabesques and odd, rippling details of work from the late 40s. A number of more realistic drawings and paintings, dating to the 50s and 60s, combine multiple studies of a particular motif on a single sheet or canvas. In each of the ten scenes comprising Page de Musique, (1962) the artist employs a “simple” palette—buoyant off-whites, retiring blue-grays, deeply absorbent earth-reds, insistent green-ochres—to vividly locate the curves of a tuba between an angling skylight and the floor’s diagonal shadows. By some magic, Hélion makes the resilient contours sensuous, and the sunlight concrete.

Though more painterly in technique, canvases from his last active years reflect the same eye for the essential and oddly telling moment. The shadows cast by an umbrella in Mannequinerie en solde (1978) crucially advance one’s eye through a web of color-located spaces, each hue preparing the leap to the next: soldier to manikin, to bucket, to object-laden table. For me, Hélion’s late paintings sometimes have the aspect of flamboyant exercises—cerebral rhymings between objects and their stand-ins, arrangements for the sake of arranging—rather than the spontaneous, portrait-like summations of even his most abstract works. Elements, at times, locomote without gaining momentum. But more often the late work simmers with Hélion’s usual energy, as does the small pastel-and-gouache Suite Pucière (1978), which potently measures out a procession of piled hats and pitchers along a bench top.

Expectations of art have changed a great deal since the Havemeyers bought Monets and Albert Barnes acquired Matisses. We’ve grown more sophisticated about art, and have added auras of appreciation to the art we encounter. Abstract Expressionism showed us how a painting could measure the psychic tremors of an artist’s searchings. Pop Art demonstrated that an artwork might magnify cultural purposes by recontextualizing them. Minimalism showed us how a sculpture could recall the transcendence of life by incarnating the transcendence of art.

None of these auras illuminate the work of Hélion. Rather than presuming a role for art—as transcendent object, or omniscient sign—Hélion simply absorbed, with a remarkably astute eye, great instances of traditional painting, and pursued its possibilities in his own way. While many a postmodernist artist might toss all of tradition down the drain, Hélion found it vibrant and rich enough to re-invent from within.

And yet, a wide, anarchic streak informs Hélion’s process, relying as it did on independent and spontaneous experience. In the same “Poussin” essay, he wrote: “Art is not the praising of eternal values; it is the permanent transformation of those values.”

And though the New York School, a decade later, practically fetishized the idea of being “in” the painting, Hélion affirms that for the best artists of any era, whatever their style, the connection to the work is always consuming, evolving, and regenerating. From “Poussin,” again: “The created form becomes creative. What is built, rebuilds the conception. A continuity between man and his work is started.”

Love or hate his style, you should include Hélion in your personal canon of notable artists. He’s our best recent link to Mondrian, Poussin, Giotto, and beyond.

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Before there was Philip Guston there was Jean Hélion.  Well, of course, there was also Kasimir Malevich, André Derain, not to mention Pablo Picasso, but the sheer élan of Hélion’s 180-degree about turn from abstraction to figuration stands on its own. As the war clouds beckoned in 1939 this sometime pioneer of purism, co-founder with Théo van Doesburg of the Art Concret group in 1930, embraced a new spirit of humanism, seeking to connect his art with “the life around us.” Schroeder Romero & Shredder have brought together two dozen paintings and works on paper to survey five decades of the neglected French master’s works.  It can be predicted, however, that, just as happened with the fine abridged version of the Pompidou survey brought to New York in 2005 by the National Academy Museum, this selection will do more to bolster the unity of this remarkable artist’s oeuvre than enforce the sense of rupture of his stylistic switcheroo.  The exhibition coincides with republication of Hélion’s moving and influential 1943 memoir as an escaped prisoner of war, “They Shall Not Have Me,” with a new introduction by Deborah Rosenthal and an afterword by the artist’s widow, Jacqueline [Arcade Publishing, $24.95]

Schroeder Romero & Shredder, 531 West 26th Street, April 26 until June 30, 2012

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July 14 to October 9, 2005

Jean Hélion Essays by Didier Ottinger, Henry-Claude Cousseau, Matthew Gale and Debra Bricker Balken (English edition) Paul Holberton Publishing, London, 2004 ISBN 1-903470-27-7

a short version of this article first appeared in The Burlington Magazine

One might have wished for the current Hélion retrospective (originating at the Centre Pompidou in Paris) to come to a really ‘mainstream’ venue for its New York showing. MoMA was perhaps never likely. Robert Storr and others were allowed their moment of revisionism (‘Modern Art Despite Modernism’ and so on) before the museum closed its doors for the big rebuild. Now, apparently, it’s back to a grand established meta-narrative. But for the Guggenheim it would have been a nice move. Hélion was famously dropped by Peggy Guggenheim in the 40s for his heretical move away from abstraction back to figuration. Today he can be seen as one of the prophets of a postmodernism that would eventually bring retrospectives to the Guggenheim from the likes of, say, Clemente and Cucchi.

But in fact it is mistake to concentrate on Hélion’s strategic manoeuvring – on where he stands, what he stands for – at the expense of responding to his works themselves. Celebrating his contrariness, his provocative diversity and unpredictable stylistic manners, is paradoxically to risk doing him a similar disservice as did those who once criticised him for stepping out of line with the avant-garde. What counts is not, as such, that he repudiated abstraction (and then skirted around other movements such as surrealism, post-war realism or Pop). He did so only as a consequence of making the works he felt compelled to make. Parading painting’s affective and semantic potential, his pictures cry out to be critically appreciated and interpreted, not just endorsed as some ‘alternative’ to a discredited – or still tacitly accepted – mainstream canon.

In the exhibition catalogue* long-time Hélion scholars Henry-Claude Cousseau and the show’s curator Didier Ottinger each suggest a wilful perversity in the painter. Cousseau writes of ‘the diversity of the paths he took, paths which broke with, distanced themselves from or went à rebours, “the wrong way up”, to dominant trends’ (p.28). Ottinger mentions ‘heretical’ impulses, first to defying abstraction, then to dream a utopian, monumental art in an age that allowed only disillusioned anti-monuments ( e.g. Guston’s figuration). Happily, both writers move on to Hélion’s transcendence, or rather dissolution, of strategy, and finally offer some observations on his mysterious works themselves.

Still, in the face of the exhibition’s embarrassment of riches, one feels individual paintings have scarcely begun to be understood. Each requires close reading to yield its revelations on the relationships of people to each other, to art, and to the world. For example, the human comedy in “The Exhibition of 1934,” (1979-80) slowly emerges from odd, chromatic shadows. Flakey highlights cast figures into a kind of motly. They are each oddly alone, despite their proximity in the elastic envelop of pictorial space. Figures crowd an art gallery. A kneeling youth seems to worship at the altar of an abstract canvas, yet also appears to ‘play’ it like to keyboard of a piano. Its marks appear to flow from his finger. A seated figure also gestures like a pianist. A central ‘everyman’ (or artist?), sits akimbo, vaguely buddha-like, dreaming. From his neck a second head seems to sprout – but it is that of a girl sitting behind him. Another woman sits some way off, a ‘wallflower’ at the party, eyes visored, casting a curiously masculine shadow-companion for herself. Another woman, standing, is alone in actually looking at the art, though she too might be gazing, abstracted, into the distance. Other eyes are closed, blind, averted. The whole group is a bouquet, emanating from a vase of flowers, bottom right.

Early on, admittedly, Hélion seemed a tactician. This show includes orthogonal abstractions of around 1930 when he was tirelessly proselytising and organising for non-objective art. But even as a partisan of abstraction he was never simply concerned with being on the ‘right side’ ideologically or stylistically. His pictures outshine apparently similar neo-plastic exercises (by, say, Vantongerloo or Vordemberge-Gildewart), because his facture, surface, materiality and nuanced tone and hue have a life beyond nuts-and-bolts abstract research. In a catalogue essay about Hélion’s extensive influence on British abstraction, Matthew Gale confirms that he appealed to criteria of artistic excellence beyond superficial stylistic allegiance when vetting artists for group exhibitions, coverage in the magazines and publications, or membership to progressive groups such as Art Concret and Abstraction-Création.

His increasingly curvilinear and spatial compositions towards the mid ‘thirties, with their shards of colour floating in deep space, their swinging, counterbalanced shapes and tromp-loeil convexities, increasingly proclaim that pictorial vitality and character is what matters, not aesthetic theory. Prime examples of these works, from museums all over the world, made a majestic sequence in the Paris version of this show, and hopefully several will be in the (much reduced) New York hang. Seurat and Poussin were among Hélion’s acknowledged masters at the time, and while he wrote of them (in the progressive Axis magazine and elsewhere) in formalist terms, his own pictures announce their affinity with past art in subtle ways hardly done justice to by truisms about shared visual rhythm and structure. An abstract canvas by Hélion is recognisably the same category of object as a David, a Louis Le Nain or a Ucello, not least in making the viewer hyperaware of the a skin of paint on a surface, actively and, as it were, continually (re-)generating and sustaining the image. Such is also true of many Mondrians, but – for example – few Van Doesbergs, and no Kandinskys at this period. At the same time, while Hélion maintains this kinship with painting tradition, he manages to avoid the impression of being a representational painter who is simply depicting an abstract ‘motif’, as happens in all but the most rigourous of Kupka, or in Picabia‘s Orphist period (with which Hélion in the ‘30s has certain similarities).

Unlike many previous Hélion retrospectives (none of which has come to a New York museum), the layout of the present exhibition – and catalogue – is thematic and only loosely chronological. For example, two 1939 paintings of heads, Charles and Édouard, from a series marking the artist’s return to figuration, are actually presented prior to the body of abstractions. Thus they foretell not just the formal affinities across different categories of Hélion’s art (Charles and Édouard, with their hats, collars and ties, are models of composure), but they also signal issues of perception, consciousness and agency running through the oeuvre. Again, it is midway among the abstractions that we find inserted the 1979-80 painting The Exhibition of 1934, the burlesque conversation piece in which figures gather at a show of Hélion’s own earlier abstractions.

Throughout the present exhibition there are – were in Paris at least – juxtapositions of cross-related works. Bright, gestural images of falling figures from the ‘70s and ‘80s are put with the hard, steely “Fallen Figure” of 1939, in which abstract forms assemble into quasi-representation. Late, sloshy nudes hang next to ones rendered in Hélion’s strange, neutral realism of the early ‘50s or in his cartoonish yet chalky handling of the late ‘40s. Haunted allegories of somnambulant city life, evoked in the inky blues and blacks of his feathery 1960s manner, echo gaudy polyptychs of the 80s, mythologising the quotidian. Paired and grouped to great effect are festooned tabletop pictures, and ones of flea-market-style junk jumbles. Cast off clothing, ragged or voluptuous vegetables and loaves, all talk to each other, as do musical instruments and newspapers, folding chairs and other sticks of furniture, twigs and branches, ornings, sewing machines. At critical intervals we are given key pictures that often set the trends for recurrent iconography. “With Cyclist,” (1939) inaugurates the window-and-door dramas, the passing cyclists, the gents with umbrellas, the smokers, the opposition of ‘in’ and ‘out’ – all common in Hélion. “Défence D’,” (1943) announces his creed of semantic continuum, from written word through visual representation to ambiguous or abstract colour and form. The hat brim covering the eyes in this, as in so many paintings, flags notions of inner and outer sight, identity and anonymity. “The Stairs” (1944) introduces blindness, (an increasing concern up to the loss of Hélion’s own sight late in life) and enshrines the key principles of ascent, descent, rotation, pairing. “Wrong Way Up” (1947) with its gallery frontage displaying an abstract picture, begins the symbolic juxtaposition of art and reality and the play between shop window and street life. The ubiquitous newspaper readers are definitively assembled on a park bench in “The Big Daily Read” (1950). (Many of the artist’s pungent titles have been creatively Anglicised for this publication.)

Large as it was is Paris, the show was still selective. Drawings, sketchbooks and pastels were sparingly chosen for their relation to paintings. Many major canvases were absent, such as the plough and ploughed earth images and the Tuillerie Gardens paintings from the ‘50s, the Paris rooftop paintings and May ‘68 pictures from the next decade, or the almost sci-fi city visions of the ‘70s. But it is as well that the show offers focus rather than compendiousness. Long reflection is required to register the formal ‘key’ of each work. A barrier has to be crossed to access the visual-conceptual orchestration and animism that give ‘approfondisment’ to the more evident puns on form and function – the rhyming of poses and gestures, the conflating of figures (sharing heads or limbs). The flagrant vulgarity of the work is also a challenge, rubbing the viewer’s nose in the psychedelic tatters of Hélion’s vision. His is an acquired taselessness.

Indeed, the yet further editing of the exhibition for New York may be an advantage rather than otherwise, demanding, as it should, more focus on single pictures. American audiences may find Hélion hard to ‘get’. Debra Bricker Balken’s catalogue essay covers his active influence in the the USA up to World War II, and a satellite display at the Academy Museum will explore ‘Hélion and American Art’; but Balken’s impression is essentially that he has slipped out of visibility. She is aware that Leland Bell and other ‘Jane Street’ artists faithfully championed Hélion long after the War, and certainly he is well known across a couple of generations of figurative painters that one might associate with galleries such as Tibor de Nagy or Salander O’Reilly (the latter staged a smaller Hélion survey a few years ago). Critic Jed Perl has written about Hélion as part of his promotion of a traditionalist alternative to institutionalised avant-gardism. Hilton Kramer has discussed him too, though tending to approve the overall effort of Hélion’s visionary figuration more than his individual pictorial achievements.

Hopefully, though, some New York viewers will see comparisons with all sorts of other painting that has been visible in the city at different times. Hélion associated with artists such as Saul Steinberg and Richard Lindner, and has affinities with Willaim Copley, Lester Johnson, Bob Thompson and other figures (often ones who are themselves ripe for reassessment). Carroll Dunham will surely come to some viewer’s minds, as will names from younger generations. Look at “The Accident,” (1979) and think of Thomas Scheibitz. Look at “Odalisque.” (1953) and think of Lisa Yuskavage. Look at “The Last Judgment of Things,” (1978-79) and think of Neo Rauch. Hopefully it is the contemporary relevance of Hélion that will be recognised, and in turn the necessity for current painting, in this period of ploymorphous boom, to take account of its own complex recent history.

The post Jean Helion appeared first on artcritical.

June 12-July 25, 2003

Everyone knows the story: after World War II, the newly dominant United States brought to the world’s attention a new kind of art. The new painting was one of wide spaces and practical purposes. It reflected a plain-speaking individualism and a belief in social mobility and self-reliance. It rejected the stagnating tastes and hierarchies of the old order, and it prevailed because of its originality and forcefulness.

Right?

Actually, extraordinary as the New York School was, one ought to be a little wary of any account so flattering to our sense of national destiny. A truer history would also examine the mechanisms by which modern artists move from obscurity into the public’s imagination (noting, for instance, Clement Greenberg’s influential arguments about painting’s necessary evolution). It would also include accounts of other vital, contemporaneous movements.

The Jane Street Gallery: Celebrating New York’s First Artist Cooperative, at Tibor de Nagy through July 23, presents one such movement, and there’s enough compelling painting here to make one wish for more. All twenty of the paintings here were at one point exhibited in the Jane Street Gallery, a cooperative gallery whose membership varied slightly over the years but seems to have hovered at around eight to ten members, each of whom paid $5 monthly dues. (Ah, 1940s rents!) The gallery operated only from 1943 to 1949, the same years that Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were finding their mature styles. Most of the Jane Street artists were then only in their twenties-a fact all the more startling when one considers how fully-formed their work seems to be. Overall the selection at Tibor is strikingly confident in its philosophy of attack. Instead of the cathartic, autobiographical approach of their elder colleagues-the demonstrative process, the explicit brushwork-the Jane Street artists looked for discoveries within existing idioms. Many had studied with Hans Hofmann, and they sought to extend rather than overthrow the School of Paris. Not surprisingly, more often than the Abstract Expressionists the Jane Street artists show the virtues of the French School-and these lay not just in style and charm, but in a discipline of internal rhythms that bespoke its own kind of energy and courage.

After its first couple of years, changes in the gallery membership led to the dominance by artists pursuing pure geometric abstraction. Leland Bell (1922-1991), Nell Blaine (1922-96), and Albert Kresch (b. 1922) were particularly enamored of Arp and Mondrian, and the influence is apparent in all their work at Tibor. In every case, however, the impulses of forms and colors have the energy of personal discovery. In Bell’s small gouache Abstraction (II), 1942-45, a core of angling forms throws up two masses of concentric loops whose curves kink and chase each other in terse play; inside, succinct patches of pure cobalt, pale yellow, and a mild sienna pin down locations in a kind of expectant disequilibrium. The jostling, overlapping planes of Blaine’s oil painting Abstraction, 1948, suggest a tilted landscape, or perhaps a river pushing along resistant boulders; their colors-sturdy whites, a charged orange, a reserved blue, a static raw sienna-pile and slip against the flow. Kresch, the only artist here represented by both abstract and overtly representational work, employs unnaturally intense hues of cadmium red, yellow, and deep bluish blacks to boldly describe the natural plunges in space in Rockport Sea Wall, (1948).

No less geometric in style, three abstract paintings by Judith Rothschild (1921-93) are somewhat less intractable in their tensions; along with its more rounding rhythms, the Cubistic planes of Mechanical Personnages, 1945, recall a better-behaved Picasso. Rough depictions of figures in interiors in two oil paintings by Louisa Matthiasdottir (1917-2001) suggest at first an innocence of attack, but the keenness of light-with intense colors somehow communicating exact degrees of shadow-and the vigorous spatial placement of forms reveal a forceful temperament, balanced calmly at the crux between abstraction and representation.

The four paintings here by Larry Rivers (1923-2002) will surprise gallery-goers familiar with only his proto-Pop works. All these skillful works have a fluency (if sometimes a glibness) of style; three suggest rusticated Bonnard, while the last, an interior with still life, has the looping arabesque that might remind one a little of Braque were its coloration a little less equivocal. Rounding out the exhibition are single, lyrical paintings by Hyde Solomon (1911-82) and Ida Fischer (1883-1956).

Installed in Tibor’s smaller exhibition space are ten paintings, watercolors and drawings of the painter Jean Hélion, a leader of Abstraction-Création whose work particularly influenced Bell, Blaine, and Kresch. These works dating from 1937 to 1951 record the French artist’s gradual move in the 40s from crisp abstraction to a robustly modeled realism. To my eye, Hélion’s early abstractions are among the very few to rival the sensuous rigor of interval of a Mondrian or Arp, and here, in an untitled oil painting from 1943, Hélion neatly applies this energy to a portrait; in this stylized world of calibrated color planes, a necktie struggles to emerge from overlapping gray and white garments with unstoppable plastic force, while the subtle weights of hues capture, palpably, the space under a projecting hat brim. (Trifling stuff, with much of Europe then in flames? Hélion found different venues for recording his personal experiences: his paintings express the life of everyday objects, his published memoir recounts his service in the French army and escape from a Nazi prison camp.)

Hélion’s work forms a fitting afterword for The Jane Street Gallery, because his example inspired the gradual but permanent shift of Bell, Blaine, and Kresch toward representational painting in the gallery’s last years. Like Hélion, all carried the formal vitality of their abstractions into their more realistic work, but the shift may well have made the new paintings less interesting to critics. Clement Greenberg had previously singled out Blaine’s abstract paintings in group shows elsewhere, and in 1947 he described the Jane Street artists as “ambitious and serious” and “uncompromisingly determined to prolong and widen the path marked out by Matisse, the cubists, Arp, and Mondrian.” But to my knowledge, his only mention of the figurative work of any the artists here was a rave review of River’s 1949 exhibition (quoted in the excellent exhibition catalogue essay by curator Jennifer Samet). Other Jane Street artists found themselves in an ironic position: having wholeheartedly embraced abstraction before many of the Abstract Expressionists, they had turned away from it just as it was gaining critical favor.

History records that the sole Jane Street artist to gain celebrity status was Rivers, an artist best remembered today, ironically enough, as a progenitor of Pop art-the very movement whose genericizing detachment was scorned by Greenberg (and welcomed by others as an antidote to Abstract-Expressionism’s autobiographical angst.) Pop art was to bring figuration back into the limelight, but in an entirely new guise. One need only compare Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, 1962, to Hélion’s untitled portrait at Tibor to appreciate how fully the tradition of formal composition had slipped from critical attention.

Most of the Jane Street artists remained lifelong friends. The catalogue records the words of the lone surviving member, Albert Kresch, who aptly sums up their youthful venture and their view of the Abstract Expressionists:

“They felt they had invented something new, that easel painting had changed with New York artists…And in a way, we felt that what we were doing was more difficult, because we were trying to interrogate reality, and what we saw, and the visual. They were in the first ecstasies of success and triumph and we just didn’t agree.”

Much credit is due to Ms. Samet and Tibor de Nagy for illuminating an intriguing and too-little known episode of our own history. It’s a vivid reminder that good painting, whatever its incarnation, is always a matter of independent perception and spirit.

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