Ex-pat octogenarian Shirley Jaffe’s exhibition is a satisfying delight on many levels.  Presented as a kind of mini-retrospective, complete with a catalogue and short essay by Carolyn Lanchner, the show has seven recent works with six earlier works from the previous four decades.  Forty years ago Jaffe was already forty-five years old and steering into what would prove to be her mature style.

Jaffe moved to Paris in 1949 and spent the next decade exploring Abstract Expressionism before progressing, like many of her peers, to newer investigations of what a contemporary painting could be.  By the mid-60s she had eliminated expressionistic brushwork and began looking at alternate ways of organizing the picture plane.  The Gray Center, (1969) comes near the end of this fertile period of growth.  Simultaneously lush and formal in equal extremes, it presents a large vertical grid made up of six rectangles – three on each side – with each rectangle composed of segmented triangles, squares, and ovals.  Running from top to bottom in the visual center is the purported gray center of the title, although in actuality it is much closer to a putty blue-green than gray.  Always the colorist, Jaffe slices into the upper right corner of the “gray” a section of burnt orange that sets the key for the entire work.  The paint application, too, demonstrates the careful thoughtfulness and restraint that will only grow stronger and more self-assured in the years that follow.  Not yet obvious is the artist’s abundant humor or her eventual ease in manipulating shapes, although one might be able to intuit in the center stripe a sly wink at Barnett Newman.

But if we are to throw about names, Stuart Davis and Matisse (in his late works) are more likely to resonate.  Jaffe shares these painters’ interest in a flat but highly fluid figure/ground relationship, as well as a truly remarkable ability to strip down everyday objects from the real world to their essentials while retaining a sense of their mystery.  Perhaps offering an early hint at the artist’s internal dialogue at this time is Macon, 1979.  Ten years after The Gray Center, Jaffe has completely jettisoned the stiff grid and strict geometric shapes in favor of a loose, undeniably playful series of rectangles with interior forms.  The forms, though abstract, clearly refer to things in the material world: an escutcheon pair float in the upper right next to what appears to be, just maybe, the Marlborough cigarettes logo.  Below these forms and some others, the lower 60 percent of the painting presents a large green and white half oval surrounded by a gray ground (really gray this time) with calligraphic orange lines dancing all around.  This gray ground is as fully realized as any of the prominent grounds in her later works, and one wonders whether Jaffe did not toy, therefore, with adopting this gray as the neutral space that would allow her to range freely through her pictorial ideas.

Instead – for which perhaps we have the light in Paris to thank — Jaffe made off-white her primary ground of choice, creating a seemingly limitless palette of sensuous, creamy variations from the most unassuming of colors to build upon. The simple forms she created and continues to use developed an internal language all their own, playful, vibrant, and familiar in a way that borders on the uncanny.  It is abundantly clear that the artist’s decisions over the last four decades were exceptionally good ones, right up to her most recent creation, the knock-out Labyrinth, 2009-10. This is a show not to miss.

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Timed to open the same week as The Armory Show on the piers, the ADAA’s long-running fair is Blue Chip city, with high-end historical and contemporary offerings. The name confusion between the two fairs is an ongoing source of befuddlement to the general public—and probably part of some larger, intentional strategy.

ROLLING OUT THE GRAY CARPET

POWER PARTNERS

A preview and press conference kicked things off, with remarks from Mayor Bloomberg. Whisked in to the assembled, he responded to a heckler: “Am I here to buy art? Not today.” He went on to cite the economic facts: a projected $44 million in activity for the fairs overall, including some $1.8 in tax revenues. He estimated some 60,000 visitors for the combined events, with 60 percent of those coming from out-of-town.

FEELING VISIONARY

Charles Long, idiosyncratic sculptor of biomorphic follies, was on hand, overseeing the installation of his solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar’s booth. This comprises three wall-mounted Saarinen-inspired tables that have undergone surrealist transformations, their tops facing viewers, hiding strange agglomerations behind. Long says he’s giving us an “alternate reality” of “displaced gravitational force,” playing off of the modernist tables and chairs found ubiquitously in surrounding booths.

EMOTIONAL OVERLOAD

“Optimistic” is how gallery employee Allana Strong categorized the Vivian Horan Fine Art booth, with its mirror-surfaced words by local artist Rob Wynne. I asked Strong if she felt her own “invisible life” or “destiny” in their presence. “My destiny, I hope, is to have my own gallery in a few years,” she mused.

JAFFE JUMPS

Tibor de Nagy’s booth is given over to the remarkably sophisticated and exuberant abstractions of Shirley Jaffe, a true “American in Paris” expatriate working at the top of her form at age 87. The artist was in town for Tuesday evening’s planned festivities, to be followed soon by a proper show at the 57th Street gallery.

SPERO’S LIFE LINE

Another strong solo consisted of Nancy Spero’s 1996 piece, “Sheela-Na-Gig at Home,” a clothesline installation strung with unique prints of a female fertility god and various undergarments, accompanied by a video of the artist (1926-2009), which finishes with her saying, “I have to get the dishes done.” Asked if she could relate to Spero’s wry feminist predicament, Lelong director Sabbatino responded, “I have a dryer.”

MATCHING ENSEMBLES

Greenberg Van Doren mounted a fine 1950s-1960s survey of works from the estate of still-underrated ab-ex master James Brooks. The lush brushstrokes of his earlier canvases are pared down to gorgeous graphic Matissian elements in later cut-paper collages.

HEADS YOU WIN

Gallery Michael Werner, of Cologne and New York, juxtaposed modernist works of Francis Picabia with the neo-expressionism of Georg Baselitz and Eugene Leroix and a contemporary work by Thomas Houseago, an emerging talent from Los Angeles. The results are authoritative and convincing.

GERMAN SPOKEN HERE

GESTURE AND FORM

The survey of Roxy Paine drawings and sculptures at James Cohan’s brings a personal response to our post-industrial landscape. His artificial take on nature is showcased not only in “tree” studies, but also in the products of his sculpture and painting “machines.” Gallery employee Goodson spoke of the “accresive process” of dropping heated “low-density polyethylene” on a conveyer belt to pleasingly accidental results. Here’s hoping that fair attendees will make the natural connections to Brancusi and Arp.

This is Blue Chip, after all.

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