November 4 – December 23, 2019
525-531 West 26th Street
New York City, (212) 695-0164

In much the way that a string of matched pearls is worth far more than each singularly perfect specimen, separately evaluated, a fine exhibition can be like the exposition of a jeweller’s craft.  The analogy holds for Loretta Howard’s display of seven large paintings by Poons from the later 1980s.  A near harmony of pale hue–panoplies of mingled blues, grays, purples, pinks, mint greens, olive greens and various shades of cream – forcibly suggests a snowy mountainside, glistening with a million points of lights in the sun, or the opalescence of a tropical underwater vista.

But these paintings are not all alike. Surfaces are all uneven, but in different ways. All have acrylic paint and gel poured or sloshed over accretions, but there are different levels of encrustation. The elements beneath are most prominent in The Cry Room (1990), where one can see segments of small balls (maybe tennis balls) and rows of still smaller balls (maybe matting of some sort) underneath pale greens, whites, and pinks.  Far better integrated is Southern Exposure (1986), where the crumpled bits of paper and sponge-like areas in greens, whites and gold create a cotton candy ambience of a fairy-tale kingdom.  Particularly wonderful is Brahms in Rio (1988), predominantly cream and pale olive green, with areas of mint across the top, and a narrative of underlying elements – crumpled paper on the left, flat narrow tubes of paper in the bottom center, sponge-like elements in the top right center, and so on.

Poons did not arrive immediately at this technique.  In the ‘60s, he was the infant terrible of op, with his brilliantly colored “coin-dots,” but even then, like all great artists, he was not satisfied with success. His coin-dots became larger and larger ovals, ; next, they melted into loose forms made by paint poured onto a horizontal canvas, then pushed around with a broom. This homage to Pollock ended one day, when Clement Greenberg was visiting Poons’s studio, and complimented him on the way that some paint had splashed off the canvas onto an adjoining space. Pondering this insight, Poons began to set his canvases upright, and concentrate on the splash itself, pouring the paint so that it coursed down the entire canvas and formed a variegated display of color like frozen waterfalls or lava. After pursuing this technique throughout the 1970s, he evolved to the style seen in the present show around 1980.

The paintings at Loretta Howard were made in an old barn in upstate New York. They started out as an environment, with a long swathe of canvas wrapped around so as to form an enormous cocoon or grotto, within which the artist worked by electric light.   An intricate series of sketches (some of which are on view ) laid out the general lines of the composition. On top of this composition were then fastened the various accretions, and next, the paint was sloshed on.  Finally, individual pictures were cut out of the cocoon, squares and rectangles which then had to be stretched and framed and exhibited as separate works.

The light in the cocoon was fitful and dim, but Poons liked it that way.  It reminded him of the candlelight by which he believed Rembrandt and Velazquez must sometimes have painted, and enabled him to capture some of their feeling for lights and shadows.  The cocoon was also reminiscent of the carefully-designed interiors in which Mondrian used to work, but, like Mondrian, Poons saw himself as essentially an easel painter, as opposed to an environmentalist. It is curious, but true, that the idiom he developed combined the abstractness and classical poise of Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism with the baroque flair and compositional openness of the seventeenth-century’s Old Masters.

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“Robin Richmond: Sacred Geographies” at Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art until June 5 (86 Walker Street, between Broadway and Lafayette Street, 646-613-1252)

“Eric Holzman: The Sky Is Crying,” at Jason McCoy Gallery until May 31 (41 E. 57th Street, 11th floor, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-319-1996)

There is something about impasto, the expressive layering or encrustation of paint, that is indelibly linked in the critical mind with romanticism, or with its twentieth-century derivative, expressionism. Larry Poons, however, is an artist who overturns any preconceived idea about impasto that aligns the device to emotional investment.

The compact overview of his oeuvre at Jacobson Howard stretches from the mid-1960s to last year and covers a gamut of surfaces from crystalline opticality to visceral tacility, from the transparent to the opaque. In following his career via these pictures, the imagination travels from outer space to the earth’s core.

You don’t think about the medium for a second when you look at “Stewball,” (1967): Paint is a vehicle that carries the eye to color esspressimo.. Chromatically close calibrated balls and ovals bounce around within a field of luxuriant, saturated red. The scale of the painting (it’s over ten feet high) keeps you far back enough from noticing the weave of the canvas, let alone any paint application.
All that seems to change overnight with “Big Purple” (1972), a gushing, dripping, painterly splurge. Paint has been put down with joyous abandon, yet miraculously the color is not muddied. Where Jackson Pollock painted with a stick straight from the bucket, his latter-day disciple dispensed with the stick even.

To achieve such melding and meshing of bright, contrastive color – scalding oranges and yellows in the foreground with succulent striations of lilac higher up – you’d imagine the artist must be in league with the devil. There is none of the murk or gloom that occurs when color is left to its own devices in such volcanic eruptions.

Mr. Poons has always had a penchant for quirky color. His works of the 1960s had an almost Pop brashness, and the 1970s were marked by funkiness. But by the late 1980s, the time of the two paintings that dominate this show, “Merton Eaves” (1988) and “Smith Train” (1991), Mr. Poons had entered what can be described as a jewel-encrusted bog.

The orgasm of “Big Purple” is over, and as Cicero said, every animal is sad after sex. The extreme hapticity makes you feel you are groveling in some kind of cavern. But as soon as the eye adjusts to the new light conditions, melancholy disperses. These are still as much about color as they are about texture or tone; there is still food for the retina.

These 1980s paintings envelope you in their vulgarity. The surfaces, built not just of hubristic heaps of pigment but padded out with found and sculpted objects, are liable to disgust viewers with the ambiguity of their otherness. But they excite just when they repel, in a way that aligns this scion of polite, refined post-painterly abstraction to the brash neo-expressionists upcoming at the time of these works.

But, then, some of his erstwhile 1960s peers went the same way, most noticeably Jules Olitski, whose glutinous glittered impasto of the 1980s was the harbinger of a full-blown neo-romanticism.

The first impression made by Robin Richmond’s paintings at Paul Sharpe’s homey TriBeCa loft gallery is of an improbable collaboration between Mr. Poons, say, and a neolithic cave painter. The rawness of the loft space accentuates this association.

Ms. Richmond is a painter whose meanderings into the twilight zone between color and texture inspire an oxymoronic reaction: glowing gloom. Initially, these seem like strangely murky creations, but – as with a 1980s Poons – the eye needs to adjust. A better way to describe the experience would be that of entering a gloomily lit church to discover a luminous fresco lurking in a corner chapel.

The metaphor is doubly apt in this artist’s case. Ms. Richmond, a London-based American painter, is the author of a series of books on Renaissance painters for young readers. She has been “on the road” for the last two years, traveling in India, Italy, and America, and the show has something of a travelogue quality, with quotes of Piero and Indian miniatures creeping through the collage- and skein-encrusted surfaces.

Sometimes this gives the viewer the magical feel of making a fleeting, momentary discovery. The biggest find from Ms. Richmond’s travels, however, seems to be the sensibility she picked up from her decades in England: Her spatial and chromatic ambiguities are redolent of the St. Ives artists and their romantic fusion of landscape and abstraction.

“All art is at once surface and symbol,” Oscar Wilde warned in the preface to Dorian Gray. In Eric Holzman’s mesmerizing but enigmatic exhibition at Jason McCoy you penetrate either at your peril. The artist has given this show, his third at the gallery, the fey, wistful title, “The Sky Is Crying,” which is also used for several paintings. His favorite motif is the nebulous space between clusters of trees.

Quoting Wilde seems apt in Mr. Holzman’s case, as he seems at first like a symbolist who has accidentally strayed into the wrong century. It is as if he were Gustave Moreau trying his hand at abstract expressionism. The paintings have a scale, decenteredness, and fascination with spatial ambiguity that makes them contemporary, but the tone, touch, and mood are very much “fin d’un autre siècle.” The charcoal grid still visible in his large painting compositions recalls the functionality of Old Master drawings, but also gives his endeavor a 1970s serial edge.

Mr. Holzman’s beautiful painthandling is a kind of fool’s gold. He enjoys the swirling arabesque sensations to be found in van Gogh but replaces that artist’s compelling gestalt and dynamic color with a twee tonality and distended alloverness. Mr. Holzman’s palette, at once earthy and ethereal, has a warmth that puts you in a nostalgic mood. His impasto, in which tumult is depleted of angst, belies a rococo sensibility.

Yet there is much more to these strangely compelling images than retro whimsicality. There is an element of a lament for painting that recalls the more gutsy but similarly elegiac French artist, Gerard Garouste. The big, washed-out landscapes in the back room look like Correggio drawings that have been left out in the rain.

There’s a scene in a Fellini movie where visitors to the Catacombs chance upon long lost Roman murals that disappear the instant they are unveiled. In similar fashion, Mr. Holzman revels in the sensation of chancing upon a long-lost masterpiece at the frustrating yet exquisite moment of dissipation.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 22, 2004

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“Friedel Dzubas: Paintings of the 1950s” at Jacobson Howard Gallery through April 17th 2004,
19 East 76th Street, between Madison and Fifth 212-570-2362

“Angelo Ippolito (1922-2001)” at David Findlay Jr Fine Art through April 24
The Fuller Building, 41 E 57th Street, at Madison Aveunue, 212 486 7660

When Dia:Beacon opened last year, Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times announced that minimalism, not abstract expressionism, provided America’s “greatest generation”. On the evidence of the kind of art favored by museums, where the monumental, serial, standardized and reductive never lose their appeal, he may have had a point, but where painting is concerned, he was dead wrong.

It is staggering, in fact, how much life is left in the revolution that took place in Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 1950s. Without making extravagant claims for “our generation”, there is truly a renaissance of abstract painting underway in New York today, with figures like Thomas Nozkowski, Terry Winters, Melissa Meyer, and Bill Jensen at the helm.

Craig Fisher belongs in this company: his art directly takes up the challenge of the first generation New York School , engaging Adolph Gottlieb, late de Kooning and classic Hans Hofmann in eloquent dialogue. With freshness and verve, however, he is unmistakably grounded in the present. He stands apart from the abstract expressionists in his determinedly decentered and anti-compositional approach, yet the rythms of these masters flow through his own paintings without seeming to miss a historic beat.

No throwback to older styles, it is a form of minimalism that saves him from looking retro – minimalism, however, in a European rather than American incarnation. With his contemporaries, the painters Joe Fyfe and James Hyde, Mr. Fisher constitutes the “French connection” in current New York painting, taking creative impetus from the “support-surface” movement of the 1970s. Each of these younger American painters is obsessed with the semiotics of surface, but without capitulating to dry reductivism. Each, in his way, lubricates an intellectual interrogation of the language of painting with personal quirkiness and individuality.

Mr. Fisher’s is an art of cool, sparse, isolated, yet somehow heartfelt expressivity. The overriding impression made by his canvases is of canvas itself: the support is nonchalently left raw, with merely sporadic painterly incident. You can almost believe they have been hung the wrong way round: nebulous forms and staining make it seem as if a more boisterous, resolved composition, flipped against the wall, is going to waste.

His favored support is the back side of a failed, or abandoned canvas, or better still, as in the case “Crop-Drop Painting,” (1999), the earliest and largest painting on show, the drop cloth he had placed underneath other canvases while being worked on the floor. Unwilled texture is generated by paint seeping through from one canvas to another. Such calculated impersonality might smack of “process art” of the 1970s, which in its turn took its cue from the Dada anti-creativity of Duchamp with his aesthetics of chance.

But Mr. Fisher is not a process artist *per se* because this penchant for the accidental isn’t a programmatic or declared modus operandi that constitutes an element of the work. Despite the disperateness and infrequency of his, marks and gestures, and their obstinately unorchestrated nature, his effects nonetheless behave in each other’s company with unfailing grace. But still, his strategies will strike many as an “arty” way of deconstructing purposiveness in painting. Knowing what future paintings are going to need by way of “chance effects” must make this artist supremely self-conscious as a dropper and spiller of paint.

The recent paintings in this show, from 2003, introduce an element of color absent in his earlier work, suggesting a radical departure. His new preference is for acerbic, acid hues that heat up the canvases. This new color adds a level of intentionality alien to the “readymade” canvas colors and tastefully neutral shades that used to predominate, as in the 1999 painting. But dissonant color actually introduces a new kind of accidentalism to his art, as if so perverse a palette could only have been stumbled upon by chance.

***

Mr. Fisher’s show forms a timely comparison with a raw canvas and stain painter of a previous generation. There is a rare chance to see a group of 1950s paintings by Friedel Dzubas at Jacobson Howard, who recently took on the estate of the German-born artist, who died in 1994. Through his friendship with Clement Greenberg, the formalist guru of second generation abstract expressionism, Dzubas became a studiomate in the early 1950s of Ms. Frankenthaler’s at the time of her breakthrough “Mountains and Sea” series of stained paintings.

On first impression, Dzubas relates closely to these paintings, in palette and mood. But although staining, which is evident in these works, would become a dominant aspect of his more familiar color field painting, these early works have a gutsy impasto which offsets the more ethereal effects of staining, offering a rich earthiness. In a painting like “Cyclop,” (1959) there is a dynamic relationship between autonomous gesture and described forms that really gives the painting depth and punch.

***

Another lesser-known figure of the postwar period who is enjoying some reconsideration lately is Angelo Ippolito. Earlier this year, he was the subject of a generous retrospective at Binghampton University, where he had taught; now a small but illuminating representation of his output can be seen at David Findlay Jr, a gallery who are making a speciality of examining different members of the first of the Greenwich Village cooperative galleries, the Tanager, which was founded in 1952. Other members of this group included Charles Cajori, Lois Dodd, William King, Alex Katz and, slightly later, Philip Pearlstein.

Italian born (and trained) Ippolito picked up scale and directness from “the older guys”, as he referred to de Kooning and Pollock, but insisted on a cheery palette (comparable to Mr. Katz of the early 1950s with its sweet pinks and oranges) and compositional refinement that held his painting back from the roughness and robustness of abstract expressionism. In this respect he is rather like the Spaniard Vicente Esteban, who also retained European painting manners despite enthusiasm for “American type” painting.

In Ippolito’s case, a love of landscape and a diehard traditionalism regarding pictorial organization lead to some extraordinary partial returns to representation, such as in the masterful “Landscape with Red Table,” (1972) which pits a smooth, hard-edged, almost Pop interior against neatly delineated pockets of painterly exuberance.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 15, 2004

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Friedel Dzubas: Paintings of the 1950s
March 18th to April 17th 2004
Jacobson Howard Gallery
19 East 76th Street
New York, NY 10021

Judith Rothschild’s name does not appear in the following books: Barbara Rose’s “Art Since 1900,” Dore Ashton’s “American Art Since 1945,” and Irving Sandler’s “The New York School and The Triumph of American Painting.” A quote about Willem de Kooning’s working methods by Friedel Dzubas appears in one of these books and his name appears alongside better known color field painters in another book. But there are no images or any descriptions of their work.

These painters are known in the art world as second wave artists. They did not develop a signature style, a marketable and easily recognized visual language, such as Rothko’s rectangles, Pollock’s drips, or Kline’s isolated black slashes. They were conservative in the sense that they explored painting styles invented by other artists. The prominence of avant-garde art, which is synonymous with novelty and shock value, guarantees that straightforward practitioners will become irrelevant to historians who write about the “major” developments.

Galleries have an ambiguous relationship to these second tier artists. In one sense, they act as revisionists, reminding us that other painters besides the ones who appear in the art history books made interesting and compelling work. On the other hand, galleries tend to overemphasize the importance of work that is often mediocre, and probably better forgotten. They emphasize the company the second tier artist kept in order to jack up the prices, with the hopes that the magical aura surrounding the canonized artist will rub off. The press release for the Dzubas exhibit reminds us that “Jackson Pollock was his close friend, and he shared a studio with Helen Frankenthaler.” Many of these artists will never have a monograph written about them so the catalog essay is often the only historical or critical document that will survive into the future.

Friedel Dzubas was fortunate enough to live with Clement Greenberg in 1945, and he was helped by the influential critic for years after that. The paintings in the current show at Jacobson Howard Gallery are from the 1950s when the painter was still under the sway of Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists. These were done after the painter had stopped painting for 2 to 3 years. He said that his goal was to “purge the linear emotional garbage.” The tension created by his use of murky mid tones and hack and slash brushwork is more problematic than satisfying. Pollock restricted his use of color in his drip masterpieces and therefore his explosive and expanding linear clouds maintained their energy level. The linear aspects of the compositions were more important and they strengthened the impact of the layering of pigment. In such paintings as Easter Monday, 1956, de Kooning’s colors were opaque, dry, and intense or high pitched. He was much more conscientious and sparing than Dzubas, when using a brush loaded with black paint.

Dzubas’ emphasis would shift after the 1950s, when the purging of line was complete. He took up the cause of the color field painters, Frankenthaler, Noland, and Louis. Eventually he let the colors speak for themselves and the violent slashes of paint receded into the past. There are echoes of Frankenthaler’s palette, staining techniques, and brushwork in a few of these canvases. However, in Frankenthaler’s early work she played transparency off of transparency, and her handling was far more delicate and suggestive. “Cyclops,” (1959) is the best work in this exhibit because of the relationship between the title of the work and the shapes depicted. Swirls of thick encrusted white paint encircle a pupil like black dash. The problem with these paintings is that the violent and thick slashes of paint tend to weaken the impact of the swathes of transparent colors. The stained areas don’t quite gel with the expressionist brushwork. After the 1950s Dzubas began to apply large areas of stained color to his canvases and to allow these areas of uninterrupted transparent color to stand on their own.

According to David Cohen in his catalog essay Judith Rothschild was Hans Hofmann’s star pupil. Clearly Rothschild was influenced by the sage of painterliness and plasticity. The oil paintings in this show are the inspired and technically impressive progeny of such Cubist masterpieces as Picasso’s “The Painter and His Model,” (1928), and “Studio with Plaster Head,” (1925). In the 1940s, before Rothschild produced what critics have called a “milquetoast version of Cubism,” she painted these jigsaw puzzle like pictures. The tightly interlocking asymmetrical vertical and horizontal strips suggest many things, but are open to interpretation.

Whether we are looking at abstractions of figures in specific spaces, or still-lifes on a table, we are not quite sure. But the inventiveness and variety of forms is impressive. Black outline is generously applied and these outlines vary in thickness. Line and color are happily wedded. The colored portions of these paintings are intense and jewel like. They stand on their own even when they are outlined with thick black lines. But the colors don’t punch holes in the flattened out pictorial space. Each facet of these paintings is clearly articulated and they become unified through time. Rothschild creates a poetic echo chamber filled with improvised rectangles, triangles, and ovoids. The separate parts of the composition relate to each other through intuitive repetitions and subtle modifications.

In “Boruba II,” (1948), the thickness of the black outlines varies greatly and enhances the sense of movement. The abstract puzzle pieces have just enough specificity to retain the viewer’s interest. There is no beginning or end to these compositions and they resemble sunlight filled panes of medieval stained glass. Shapes are added or placed next to one another to satisfy the compositional problems the artist set up for herself. They resemble mosaics. Each part of the composition relates to another in obvious or not so obvious ways, but a quiet friction is generated in these shallow spaces. The gouache and collage pieces found in the smaller gallery are reminiscent of Kurt Schwitter’s collages because of Rothschild’s use of ticket stubs. These small pieces are not as tightly knit as the oil paintings but are just as textured and complex. Late in her career Rothschild explored Matisse’s late cut-outs with her relief paintings. She gladly worshipped at the altar of the two greatest painters of the twentieth century, Picasso and Matisse, yet she made powerful and distinctive work in the 1940s and towards the end of her life.

We do not know if the legacy of Rothschild and Dzubas suffered because of their reluctance to cave in to current trends, to stop painting and to start conceptualizing, or because they failed to develop a signature style. Both of them were content just to paint and to explore spatial concepts first introduced by other artists. Although it seems like a worthy task, to revise the history of modern art movements by displaying works by competent artists who have fallen through the cracks and are not mentioned in the narratives of modern art history, galleries are also trying to increase the value of their holdings by reminding us that these artists had connections to a tiny handful of artist all-stars. This also helps lend prestige to the gallery itself. One thing that is clear to me after seeing these exhibits is that the leading figures held sway over many different artists and left just as many possibilities behind them as they did masterpieces. By attempting to resurrect artists who have been marginalized or completely forgotten, galleries are fueling a self perpetuating process. They end up ignoring contemporary artists who do not have the ability to create a buzz, to catch the attention of trendy galleries and the mainstream art magazines

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