Stanley Lewis’s work is the obverse of what one might think of as a downtown aesthetic. His paintings and drawings, now on view at Betty Cuningham’s new Lower East Side home, carry a real one-two punch. Here are deliberately banal subjects — backyards, suburban scenes, calendar views of Lake Chautauqua — transformed by a brilliant but tortured way of realizing a painterly image that can yield work of rare satisfaction and ambition.

The fascination he arouses comes partially from an almost irreconcilable tension between working directly from observation, with exacting attention to small forms, and a very contemporary, almost sculptural painting process that builds a work with obsessively dense materiality. Cloth and paint are built up by cutting and repositioning pieces of worked canvas that will be reconnected, at least partially, with a loaded brush, painting wet into wet, layer upon layer. This often leaves bare staples, gaps, and deep scars that resist integration with the image.

In his larger works, Lewis is often seen trying to correct initial estimates of how much surface is needed to chart the movement of the eye from near to far, so that the space of the picture can make sense as a world. As he focuses on a specific area, it expands to fill his field of vision, fragmenting a sense of the whole. If Lewis wanted to cover the tracks of his labors he easily could, but the point of his work, evidently, is not a view of nature alone, nor is it just a correspondence between built up paint and the presence of things. Instead, we are invited to move back and forth from the world depicted to the traces of his process. Ultimately, Lewis’s sucker punch is to shift our attention from quotidian views to his inner experience of looking and making, to the meditative adventure of what painting can be.

As I was looking back and forth between three terrific works in the gallery’s back space, Lewis’s distinct quality of light on partly cloudy days became evident. In Boat on the Beach, Lake Chautauqua (2013) and even more so in Backyard Jeykll Island, GA (2014), a subtle pink tone suffuses the air, transforming the everyday into a glimpse of reality enchanted. This surprisingly recalled Jess’s magical Translation paintings, which also share with Lewis a charmed light and an irrational play between image and a lapidary surface of thickly applied paint, erupting here and there into incongruous lumps. The third painting, Winslow Park, Westport (2010-2014), and the most recent work at the gallery’s entrance, Matt Farnham’s Farm with Truck (2014), share a cooler blue-green quality no less captivating than the others.

Structural ideas vary from picture to picture: a traditional repoussoir of dark trees frames the central vortex of space in Farm with Truck; in Winslow Park, a tree masked by a telephone pole serves as a pictorial axis using wires above and the gated fence below to extend their reach backward and forward into space. A network of silhouettes and shadows orchestrates Jeykll Island and diagonal paths of thickly worked rivulets of grasses and clouds open the space against the horizon in Boats on a Beach.

Perhaps the most unusual and surprising structure is featured in the show’s largest work, an elaborate paper bas-relief, Hemlock Trees Seen from Upstairs Window in the Snow (2007-2014), made with pencil on layers of cut and carved print paper. This irregularly-shaped snowbound landscape is partially modulated through the physical modeling of the paper, allowing the dominant central tree to float, as if we were watching a slow motion explosion of limbs moving outward in all directions. This is the show’s knockout punch. His master work captures the eerie grey light of a soft snow fall that carries an unmistakable air of fatality.

Thinking about this and other fine drawings on view, it is hard to miss correspondences between Lewis’s work and School of London artists like Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Closer to home and recent innovation are the drawn mappings of Dawn Clements and recent tree photographs of Mike and Doug Starn. All these artists share with Lewis an interest in the reinvention of realism by piecing together literal fragments of paper that re-synthesize the image. Lewis’s crazy-quilt painting process stands for the dignity of his unique experience. This is the source of what is so disconcerting, so irritating and so crucial in his work.

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May 5 to June 18, 2011
534 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 744 7400

Leon Kossoff’s paintings at Mitchell-Innes & Nash show the octogenarian British painter continuing to work in portraiture and landscape, with a brush loaded with oils as if they were tar, favoring a palette based on a sooty, British gray. In that, there has hardly been any change in his work for decades. But comparing these works to those in the gallery in 2009, which were from the period 1957 to 1967, one can see a brightening. He has admitted green into the paintings, a verdancy unmixed with ashes as would have been his wont fifty years ago.

It was perhaps necessary to offset the unavoidable symbolism in the recurring subject of his work over the last decade, a tree propped up on two stakes as if upon primitive crutches. A note from Kossoff dated July 2010 explains, “These paintings are about one tree. A cherry tree in a garden that may have been part of an orchard before the nearby house was built. One large bough was deteriorating and should have been removed. Instead, we decided to support it with stakes. As time passed it seemed as if the stakes had always been there. This subject, so different from other subjects that I had been involved with through the years, became my working life. Time passed, and paintings of the tree emerged together with the [models’] heads…”

The artist gives us no reason to interpret the tree as anything but itself. But there it is, ancient, half-toppled, held up by human interventions, and yet growing upwards and outwards in fine weather hardly ever seen before in Kossoff’s oeuvre. Cherry Tree, Early January (2004), though its surface is no less clotted than is typical of him, is suffused with yellow warmth. In Cherry Tree, with Diesel (2004-5), a train speeds by in the background, brushed out in smears of paint that lend it a Futurist velocity. Life goes by; the tree persists, reclining in the sun, if not leisurely or wholly by choice. It’s as fine a metaphor for a good old age as anything ever painted. When other paintings of the same subject return to the overcast norm, they get a boost of vitality for the artist having proven that they appear as such due to his command, not out of habit.

Christchurch Spitalfields, the Hawksmoor church that Kossof has studied with a sustained intensity that recalls Monet’s serial meditations on the facade of Rouen Cathedral, gets similarly refreshed treatments. The gray outlines and pitched perspective of the architecture is there as before in his work, but in a five-foot panel from 2000 it appears sandwiched between a hesitantly blue sky (cheerful by Kossoff’s standards) and a mighty green canopy, presumably a line of trees of which we see the trunk of the first.

Longtime sitters John and Peggy reappear as well. The artist’s portraits can come off as vicious. This is especially true of the early works – with all the slathering of gray oils, people in Kossoffs sometimes look as though they’ve been portrayed as a pile of octopuses.  But even here the colors have sweetened into pinks and greens, and the Venetian red line that holds them together verges on the calligraphic. A tenderness and humanity has entered into them where there was once a predominance of bombastic, albeit gifted, brushwork. After a series of head-and-shoulder portraits of John, the full-length one from 2006 depicting him in a wheelchair, alongside a dozing Peggy, comes as a shock. But the greenery beyond the window and the glad blue of the floor set him up for consideration akin to the cherry tree, assisted, but still participating in life.

“Everyone has talent at twenty-five,” said Degas. “The trick is to have it at fifty.” So what’s the trick? No one ever willed talent into being. (Skill, yes; talent, no.) One can only sow effort year after year and hope that one’s creative soil is rich enough to produce. Kossoff, who would be in a position to note that the real trick is to have talent at 85, shows the way. The persistent, vigorous exercise of his gifts has resulted in a visual spring at a time when one might expect an artist’s winter.

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There is no getting away from the fact that Leon Kossoff’s early paintings are deeply weird, “deeply” being the operative word. These works are more like some form of sculptural relief than painting per se – they are certainly as far as you can get, physically and theoretically, from Clement Greenberg’s notion (contemporary with these works) of “ineluctable flatness.”  The disturbing, gloomy, alienating mess that first confronts the viewer in these profoundly strange images finds a surprising kinship in the combines of Robert Rauschenberg, sharing with them an intrusive literalness. (Edward Kienholz also comes to mind.) The surprise in this commonality derives from the fact of the British painter’s humanism.  His paintings depict the nude, family members, city streets—hardly the motifs of an art world iconoclast.

The show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash of ten paintings, mostly around five by four feet, made between 1957 and 1967, represents a first opportunity for Americans to see this important, intriguing body of work.  And the ability to stand at the distances afforded by a brightly lit Chelsea gallery would change the way they are thought about for people who would have seen them when they were first exhibited, in London, in the markedly different kind of viewing space of the Beaux-Arts Gallery (Kossoff’s first dealer) in a musty mews off Berkeley Square.

Commensurate with their disconcerting depth, Kossoff’s early paintings are literally and metaphorically heavy. Color keeps up (or down, rather) with the weight of the paint in its somber, tonal, earthy murkiness. John Berger, in one of Kossoff’s earliest reviews, thought that his pictures “look as if they were made of coloured, solidified engine grease as put into a grease gun”.  The defiant sweeps of brush or some cruder instrument through hefty slatherings of churned, predominantly brown, green and red paint resemble nothing so much as tire tracks on a sodden road.

The body language of the people depicted and, as far as they can be discerned, their facial expressions, also register heft.  Father Seated in an Armchair no. 2 (1960) for instance, is an essay in lethargy.  It is as if the sitter is as personally weighed down by the medium used for his portrayal as by the tribulations of post-war angst or austerity that might otherwise explain the leaden mood of the picture.  The thought of the sagging heaps of paint seemingly slowly drying still before our eyes, almost half a century after being painted, adds to the metaphorical burden of the sense of aging and decay this melancholy image stirs.

“An essay in lethargy” – except it is painted with compelling energy, gusto, relish. This balance of observation and freedom from it is the paradox of Kossoff, the essence of his oddity.  He recalls Francis Bacon’s dictum of “exhilarated despair,” which so sums up the School of London milieu of which Kossoff is part, along with such painters as Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud.  Along the lines of “exhilarated despair,” Kossoff excites oxymoronic responses of his own: frenetically slow, mesmerizingly alienating, gracefully heavy.  For despite the initial impression of moroseness imparted by the muddy tones and turgid surfaces, once the eye adjusts to Kossoff’s personal language, these paintings reveal themselves as poignant and somehow capable, despite their initial gloom, of revealing nuance.  Still, these early works stand in contrast to the comparative lyricism, the soft, luxuriant palette (still more tonal than chromatic) and delicate inner illumination that have come to mark Kossoff’s mature work.  Kossoff emerged from these early gropings in the dark as an artist with an extraordinary ability to balance gravity and levity.

He is an artist who has to draw a subject over an extended period before feeling ready to paint it, and yet, according to his own account, “I have never finished a picture without first experiencing a huge emptying of all factual and topographical knowledge.”  His modus operandi  finds a direct correlation in the experience of the viewer.  These early images are laden with intimacy, of feeling and of observation, and yet to read them properly, to make sense of them beyond mere sensation, you have to get well away from them.

Up close and personal and without the benefit of the title, Seated Nude no. 1 (1963), for instance, reads more like an off-kilter landscape from Soutine than a nude.  When you begin to see the figure she seems like an almost brutal caricature.  But with requisite distance, anatomical credibility and a palpable sense of where the painter also stands in relation to the model come into focus. Ironically, it is at a distance that intimacy is possible, whereas in physical proximity the subject is remote.

Actually, to make proper sense of these pictures (assuming mimesis to be “the proper sense” of painting!) you should not only stand at some distance, you should also squint.  For all their impasto and expressivity, you end up adopting a strategy like the one that works for Seurat, even though the latter’s highly finessed pointillism could not be more opposite in terms of sensibility and priorities to Kossoff.

This yoyoing viewing experience has aesthetic implications. It starkly dramatizes a contradiction in Kossoff between optic and haptic sensation, between seeing and touching.  And as you move back and forth between a position that has you wallowing in the sheer, icky yet compelling stuff of the painted surface and a position that lets you read the image, you are forced – literally and spatially – to acknowledge another contradiction in Kossoff, between two competing definitions of realism.

Kossoff is realist in the traditional way of being grounded in closely witnessed – confronted – existential and social realities; but he also hits upon the realness of his paint surface, the obsessive, almost kinky thickness of his congealed mass of swirling, churning, mud-like matter.  Walter Sickert advised artists to deal with “gross material facts,” meaning that they should prefer the scullery to the drawing room.  In Kossoff, gross material fact is the form and the content, the medium and the message.

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on view in the exhibition Leon Kossoff: From the Early Years, 1957-1967opening today, February 17, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash through March 28 at 534 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues

Like Rilke, Leon Kossoff strives “to be a beginner.” “Whether by scraping off or by rubbing down, it is always beginning again, making new images, destroying images that lie, discarding images that are dead,” he has written. In each painting there is an urgency, a sense of improvisation, such that one could believe that he had to learn as he went along how to make this image happen, to excavate or coax it from an oppressive overload of paint. Kossoff paintings are heavy–not just literally, the pigment heaped onto wooden supports, as canvas could never carry his amounts of paint, but emotionally too, the palette lugubrious and autumnal. Because of the sheer, manifest effort they embody, the works weigh heavily on the conscience of the viewer.

This was an artcritical CAPSULE in February 2009.

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Until September 9

Like the artist it celebrates, “The New Landscape/The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art” is bursting with energy and ideas. The show presents Chaim Soutine 1893-1943) as a father figure of different traditions, American Abstract Expressionism and British expressive realism among them.

Of 46 works on display, seventeen are by Chaim Soutine himself, including such show stoppers as “View of Cagnes” (1924-25), on loan from the Metropolitan Museum and “The Carcass of Beef” (c.1925), from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.  These hang cheek by jowl (an apt metaphor for an artist notoriously drawn to dead animals as his favored still-life motif) with a range of modern and contemporary artists, including luminaries of the New York School like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Joan Mitchell; School of London painters Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff; and individualists as diverse as Alice Neel and Joel Shapiro, Avigdor Arikha and Louise Bourgeois.

This line up is both a plea for Soutine’s contemporary relevance and a signal of his perennial outsider status.  The organizers of the show are Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, collaborators (with Klaus Perls) on the 1993 catalogue raisonée of the artist which—very rarely for a scholarly work of this kind—sold out its first hardback edition of 25,000, reflecting a deep interest particularly among painters.  Bizarrely, as the authors observe, the fascination with Soutine doesn’t inspire the Museum of Modern Art to hang any of the artist’s work in their permanent display.  On the contrary, MoMA recently deaccessioned an important later canvas, “Chartres Cathedral” (1934), to their shame.  There is a sense, however, that such official neglect bolsters Soutine’s standing as a supreme “painter’s painter”—a maverick who inspires artists whether by his drivenness and eccentricity or his deep rootedness in craft and tradition.

Soutine satisfies either criteria, which in a way is his paradox.  He has been vaunted as a kind of painterly madman, a latter-day Van Gogh.  Phrases like “hallucination,” “drunkenness,” “Dionysian frenzy” litter the Soutine literature—one critic even spoke of his flinging down ready-made compositions and not particularly caring if they landed on the canvas—and yet in marked contradiction to this is hisfierce rigor, the hidden order that binds together his frenetic marks and energized compositions.

This duality comes across in the masterful and perplexing “Landscape with Figures” (c.1922), from Soutine’s watershed three year period in Ceret, when his work reached its most “abstract expressionist” intensity (he destroyed many of the fruits of this creative outpouring in disgust at its extremity.).  A seated group of women are on a village terrace overlooking a ravine.  There are violent flashes of color—red chairs, the orange tiles of the surrounding houses, the blue of distant hills, and the near black of the steep wall disappearing beneath the figures—which somehow survive a tendency towards chromatic mush.  Similarly, close scrutiny of what could come across as a formless, expressive swirl, reveals moments of careful observation.

The elongated features of a woman with her back to the viewer, the exaggerated hat and almost dislocated, distended arms, appear to be carved out of the negative space around them—an area of intense greens and yellows that pop forwards into the picture plane.  Chairs and benches are at once specific and perfunctory, concrete and shorthand, lumpen and animate.  The whole composition is caught up in a kind of frenzy, submitting to the force of a spiral that moves down along the wall, up through the tree, and down again into the ravine.  There a sense of things coming into focus and melting away.

Some of the artists placed alongside Soutine relate more to his primitivism than to his modernist sophistication.  Jean Dubuffet, for instance, is represented by “Pierre Philosophique (D’Epanouissement)” (1951) and “Paysage Fossile” (1952), whose grinding, dense, existentialist gloom speaks to the expressionist angst in Soutine.

Two sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, a suspended bronze titled “The Quartered One,” (1964-5), that resembles a leg of meat, and a wall piece, “Rabbit” (1970), relate to the totemic, almost ritualistic identification with slaughtered animals found in Soutine’s work. “There is something electric and violent and fragile that touches me deeply in all of Soutine’s works,” Ms. Bourgeois told the curators in 2005.  His carcass motif—inspired by Rembrandt’s “Slaughtered Ox” (1665)–is also picked up by Gandy Brodie in “Meditation on a Kosher Tag” (1963), while the depictions of inert fauna by such painters as Georg Baselitz, Alice Neel, and Susan Rothenberg, keep company with Soutine’s game and fowl.

The viscous veils of swirling reds and blues in Bill Jensen’s “The Five, The Seven VII (Ceret)” (2005) eerily relate to the Buffalo “Carcass of Beef” .  Jensen’s layering of translucent colors offers an abstract equivalent to Soutine’s ability to conjure hidden pockets of space while pushing his marks and colors outwards to heighten the visceral, intrusive presentness of the meat.  In the same room an untitled 2006 construction by Joel Shapiro, who owns a Soutine rabbit, takes on a carcass-like complexion: The wooden pieces hang together with awkward lifelessness; they are stained an almost sinister sanguine purple; and the bent out of shape wire (a device he started using after September 11, 2001) adds poignancy.

The heart of this show, however, is a presentation of Soutine as the father of two traditions—American abstract expressionism and British expressive realism.  The American involvement with Soutine has an historic marker: the 1950 Soutine retrospective at the MoMA, which the New York School artists took in with great admiration only seven years after the artist had died in Paris.

While Pollock is represented by a 1934 canvas whose robust, hefty awkwardness feels Soutine-like, it is his trademark “all over” drip paintings that relate to a defining quality in Soutine, identified by another Abstract Expressionist painter included here, Jack Tworkov: “the way his pictures move towards the edge of the canvas in centrifugal waves filling it to the brim.”  It is this sense of a swirling gestalt, a method in the madness of compulsively accumulated marks, which also justifies the inclusion of the poetically intense Milton Resnick.

De Kooning, on the other hand, relates directly to Soutine’s instinctive rapport with materials, the luscious, succulent, urgent, voluptuous presence of oily pigment that brings both their canvases so rudely to life.  While De Kooning’s “Untitled  XVI” (1976) hangs with the “Carcass of Beef” it has an unmistakably sexual presence in the way slippery pinks, whites and grays ooze into each other.  It is the kind of canvas that exemplifies De Kooning’s legendary remark that flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.

De Kooning is as much an avatar of British painters Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff as Soutine.  Auerbach’s gooey, glistening, sparkling impasto is impossible without the example of the American.  But these men, with Freud, are convincing in their role here as contemporary incarnations of the Soutine spirit.  A glaring omission in this show is the chef d’ecole of the School of London, Francis Bacon (in 2001 the same curators organized an exhibition in Germany that juxtaposed Bacon, Dubuffet, De Kooning and Pollock with Soutine) whose “Painting” (1946) directly quoted the Soutine/Rembrandt carcass.  Freud is represented by “The Painter’s Garden” (2003), a relatively rare outdoor subject that relates more to one of Soutine’s heroes, Courbet, than to Soutine.

Like Soutine, the English painters are romantics yearning to commune with the classical tradition.  Soutine was the victim of enormous prejudice even from critical supporters who mistook his expressive intensity for primitivism rooted in ignorance of painterly traditions.  He was seen as a wild primitive who painted from inner necessity, oblivious to conventions, whereas his style was in fact rooted in sophisticated observation of old masters, who he increasingly revered.  The School of London painters have a similar obsession with the past, which they believe can be reconciled with fresh, authentic, instinctive direct observation.  What is also telling is that just as the artist from the Lithuanian shtetl saw himself as keeper of the flame of French painting (working from Courbet and Chardin), the London painters (refugees from Nazi Germany, or in the case of Kossoff, the son of emigrants from Eastern Europe) as often work from Constable or Hogarth as from Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian or Poussin.

Kossoff is the English painter who comes across as the most Soutine-like.  He is represented by two of his finest works: “Here Comes the Diesel, Spring” and “Christchurch, Winter Evening” (both 1987).  Like Soutine, Kossoff (and Freud and Auerbach as well) prefer to have their subject present, although these Kossoffs are actually painted in the studio after copious drawings sur le motif.  Where Soutine would destroy many of his canvases, an equally doubt-driven Kossoff scrapes down numerous unsuccesful earlier attempts at achieving the desired image, some memory of which lingers under the final effort, the result of a single session.  His motifs, like Soutines, seem to wobble precariously in the expressive effort of landing in the picture.  And his buildings and trains, like Soutine’s French villages, anthropomorphize as if under the weight of their author’s ambition to instill into them a depth of feeling.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 6, 2006.

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