Countless individuals, institutions, and causes lost a remarkable and irreplaceable friend earlier this fall with the passing of collector and philanthropist William Louis-Dreyfus. He literally transformed the lives of artists whose works he amassed. A stalwart campaigner for social justice, he pioneered ways of fusing his twin passions for art and for serving the underprivileged in the novel plans he laid for the dispersal of his collection. And, it can now be revealed, he was a significant and gracious supporter of artcritical magazine and its programs, a generous enabler who made no editorial demands and chose to keep a low profile.

I first got to know William in his capacity as a collector. He was a benefactor of the New York Studio School where I spent a decade as gallery director. The solo show of new sculpture by John Newman that I organized could fairly be judged a success on all fronts, starting with the quality of the work and its spectacular, architect-directed installation. Although John had enjoyed major attention at the outset of his career, attested to by the star-studded school lobby on opening night, his fortunes had taken a dip since the halcyon days of the 1980s. That changed with a steady flow of visitors and a review in the New York Times. But what totally galvanized the situation was a visit one evening to the galleries from Louis-Dreyfus. He evidently flipped on seeing Newman’s whimsical, fearless inventions. Quirky almost to a point of willful vulgarity, yet intense in their miniaturist energy, and heartfelt in pushing sculptural boundaries and chromatic possibilities alike, these intimately sized hybrids struck such a chord in the collector that he all but bought out the show. He would go on eventually to acquire three-dozen of Newman’s pieces and a number of drawings, and helped secure gallery representation for the artist. John is unabashed in declaring that William’s patronage turned his career around.

Alerted to William’s largesse – not to mention his appetite – I began to take proper note of him as a collector, especially when Christina Kee, who had been my work-study assistant at the School and later began to write for artcritical, joined William’s curatorial team. Nothing could quite prepare one for a first visit to his warehouse-cum-museum in Mount Kisco, NY where one could see room after room of efficiently stacked but artfully displayed works, often with one artist per room, although not a few artists needed more space than that. He had a penchant for outsider artists, amassing unparalleled holdings of James Castle, Bill Traylor and Thornton Dial (over 200 works by Castle and over a hundred each both Traylor and Dial). Tellingly, he preferred to avoid the term “outsider,” perhaps intuiting that all the artists he collected, well known or marginalized, academically trained or self taught, were equally charged by independence of vision and authenticity of touch.

His catalogue was a liberating and shameless mix of “big ticket” and oddball reputations, of conservative realists and outlandish mavericks, of modernist giants and student unknowns, it being very clear that the collector had his own criteria of worthiness. He had dozens of drawings by Giacometti; a massive early stain painting by Helen Frankenthaler among several other pieces from the same hand—an outlier in his tastes, this was a work whose quality he swore by; and literally hundreds of works each in different media by the social realist polychromatic sculptor Raymond Mason; the painter of hieratic and mysterious figures on beaches and blazing sunsets, Graham Nickson; the ethereal miniaturist Eleanor Ray; and others. He had more than 200 artists in his Mount Kisco Pithom and nearby estate. His collecting in such depth almost had an outsider, OCD aspect to it, as he would only half jokingly aver.

Eclectic as his holdings were, there were most definitely consistent qualities. He made no bones about the fact that he appreciated skill, hard work, individuality, authenticity, traditional mediums and a visceral sense of connection with the human story. Some of these were traits, it could be argued, that others were blessed to value in him, as a patron.

I realized that William was especially generous to take the interest that he did in artcritical. Although he was a literary man (for a decade he had been chairman of the Poetry Society and was a published poet himself) he was not in natural sympathy with art criticism. He was conscious of his alienation from prevailing art discourse. Although he obviously devoted enormous resources to collecting and supporting his collection, he knew that much of what he valued in art was out of fashion. That he was as maverick and “outsider” as many of the people he collected.

He knew about The Review Panel, having come to hear Christina Kee when she appeared in the series, but he wanted to know if we ever discussed more general issues or problems in art, rather than always focusing on shows. I argued that “meta” subjects often come up, but that to my mind it is better to have critics engage with specific bodies of work, and allow broader issues to emerge organically. Later, Christina shared her interpretation of this exchange, confiding with characteristic humor her sense that William’s dream was of one definitive, landmark debate, with someone arguing with the passion he felt on the subject, which would somehow dissipate all the misunderstandings that had arisen around art. He told me that he particularly liked the criticism of Jed Perl.

In “Generosity of Eye,” a film about William co-produced by his daughter, actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, William outlined his audacious plan for the dispersal of his collection. Rather than leave it all to a museum, perhaps a new-built institution or a wing bearing his name, he would be donating it, for the purpose of sale, to a favored philanthropic project, the Harlem Children’s Zone. The creation of Geoffrey Canada, this is a cradle-to-college educational support system for an impoverished, at-risk community. Obviously, many of the artists William collected have or had little market beyond his own patronage, making the liquidation of his holdings problematic for artist and beneficiary alike, but the venture is a long-term one and will hopefully be handled with sensitivity and skill by trusted parties. Modest and self-effacing though he was, William didn’t shy away from the egotism underlying the altruism and risk in his gesture. The poet-philanthropist-collector-humanist was also—after all—a venture capitalist. He wanted the market to vindicate his taste.

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

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

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

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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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There’s a paradox at the heart of how we experience art. While we may take pride in being art-literate, we absorb much of our knowledge of art (as for life itself) in unconscious fashion. Scrupulous study and debate may guide our understanding, but these are no substitute for the education we continuously and unknowingly receive through our eyes.

This is a very particular kind of education. Eyesight may be no more than the recording of countless ricocheting electromagnetic vectors, but it permits a startlingly rich connection with, say, a tree; the act of looking is a miraculous mapping of another miracle in the natural world. It’s an experience unknown to a person born unsighted, who may otherwise acquire every bit of knowledge about history, science, and human nature.

It’s no wonder that over a quarter of our brains are involved in processing visual stimuli, and that it takes new-born babies months to fully see. And no wonder so many great artists said they wished they could see like a child. Seeing truly, without habit or bias, was crucial. Many an artist could muster a sense of style and technique, but the masters surpassed at something more intuitive and unique to painting: the ability of giving pictorial momentousness to a figure’s gesture, or an apple’s location. Thank your eyes, then, and that quarter-part of your mind, if some mysterious power in a Titian, seen in the flesh, moves your sensibility in ways that defy your intellect.

This is an aesthetic not well suited to our time, when communications too often resemble talking points: fast, smart, exchanges that are instantly transmittable and promise quick mastery of a subject. We settle for very imperfect substitute-images in print and computer screens. Rather than asking ourselves if we are really seeing, we tend to seek new analyses of what we habitually see.

All of which highlights the indispensability of exhibitions like “Nature is the Teacher” at The Painting Center. “Nature lies in the faithfully observed motif and equally in the analytically invented form,” reads a sentence from the unsigned essay accompanying the show, and indeed the work of the four participating painters—Simon Carr, Stanley Lewis, Thaddeus Radell, and Deborah Rosenthal—argues cogently for the interdependence of visual awareness and artistic tradition. Connecting this diverse group of artists—and having become acquainted with each of them over the years, I can attest they are thoroughly different spirits—is the common urge to re-create nature in the language of paint. But their styles vary tremendously, and their diverse pursuits of narrative, symbolism, or process make for an exceptionally handsome installation.

Carr’s scenes of subways come the closest here to traditional realism. His heightened colors, however, lend remarkable robustness to figures, locating not just their physicality but their character. In one lushly scumbled canvas, the dramatic depths of a subway car interior, viewed from one end, encompass a nuzzling couple, kinetic drummers, and a distant LED sign, with colors somehow imparting independent life to each. In another, commuters bustle across a subway platform, but the scene centers about the yawn of a single child. In Carr’s canvases, all means of description and technique ultimately serve humanist ends.

Though his landscapes also depict real scenes, Lewis’ narratives concern the processes of observation and painting. Pictorially, the artist risks the most of any painter in the show, working with a kind of steady ferocity to rebuild appearances in fragmenting marks and planes. Weighted color and line yield poignant truths: a tree, thickly encompassing space among its branches, presides above a yard with a toy cart; totem-like structures punctuate the unfolding panorama of a public garden.

Radell’s surfaces, too, have the quality of weathered layering, but in more luxuriant, affirmative fashion. The artist constructs figures in arabesques of looping black outlines, with interior pinks set off by luminous blues and green-grays. The matte depth of his wax medium and his feathering colors conjure an idyllic atmosphere, with actual volumes mattering less than sensations of movement, light, and depth. Though identities are unclear—the figures might be warriors or shepherds—the paintings hum with the impulse to leaven modernist idioms of painting with echoes of tradition.

Although the most abstracted work here, Rosenthal’s compositions of organic, geometric forms and calligraphic marks abound with intimations of lyrical events. Peaked shapes, lofting across the upper portions of “Uphill and Down” (2011), might be distant mountains or sheltering tents. Exact significations are less clear, and less crucial, than the sense of a poetic journey and its attendant tribulations. The canvas is one of the artist’s two largest in the show, which both use color especially effectively, their varied, deep reds sounding against subdued violets and jolts of vivid green.

Time was, painters learned through their eyes, just as musicians did through their ears and dancers through their bodies. Due to the sheer complexity of nature, and the infinite possibilities of paint, it was a lifetime education. “Nature is the Teacher” reflects these four artists’ shared commitment to this learning, and reminds us how the one faculty of sight can lead to very different truths.

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Stanley Lewis is a powerful painter.  His vision is independent, original, raw.His latest work is to be seen at the Bowery Gallery, an artist- run cooperative dedicated to painters working in the tradition of French modernist figuration.  This setting allowshim to work without commercial constraints but also without the resources to promote him and his work effectively. Nevertheless he has built an impressive reputation among artists and his prices have risen quite a bit just lately, due to a committed group of patrons.

Lewis emerged from the circle surrounding the painter, teacher and charismatic outsider, Leland Bell with whom he studied at Yale. Bell saw the influence of French modernism as way of deepening figurative painting through greater consciousness of form, and was a great admirer of Giacometti, Balthus and the later work of Andre Derain. Lewis also admires the English painters Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff with their perceptual approach and aggressively activated paint surfaces.

Like them, his gloppy paint surfaces are aggressive and sensual though he differs in that he is much more involved with a direct naturalistic transcription of the casual, disheveled, white bread American subjects.  These he paints directly and laboriously on the spot, including everything in his  field of vision, weeds, trash, cars, power lines, etc.

The supports are roplex- soaked corrugated cardboard, old splintering plywood, cotton duck and/or crinkled paper glued or mounted and stapled on masonite – he’s an alchemist who can turn trash to gold.

Lewis is a master colorist. His unfailingly authoritative skill for painting real, rich and crystalline light, joined to his muscular composition, is the key to his power and success. An occasional pitfall for Lewis in his early work (as for Bell himself) was an uncomfortable stylization resulting from an effort to force formalism onto perception. Recently, he has resolved the problem in the direction of a more direct long- form rendering of nature. For example in his “12th St. and 4th Ave” 2006, painted in Brooklyn, he continues exploration of direct optical perspective in a fisheye view of a rather carefully characterized parked car (a Saab), tenements behind, street signs, tree in the foreground, all tense as a bent knife blade. Objects suggesting human presence such as the Saab in the foreground, seem to function as subject focus, replacing the role of the figure in the landscapes of Poussin and Corot.

The “View of the West Side of House” 2003- 07, is a loving rendering of the artist’s own porch with its gently curving trees, the sky punching through. A w-shaped jacknife torsion is seen in the triangular compressions of  in the “View from the Porch- East Side of House” 2003- 06.   “Mayville Court House” 2006 is a studiedly casual presentation of a small town scene with a characteristic wildly tilted horizon line.  An even wilder tilt can be observed in the “Monroe Marina” 2007, where it is as if a photographer dropped the camera while framing the scene.

The drawings, well represented here, are often made with such physical intensity that there are holes in the paper. The large snow scene “Winter View from West side of Houses” 2004- 07, for instance, entails a process of drawing and correcting by pasting paper repeatedly producing a scarred, heavily textured surface resembling impasto.  The drawing is so sharply observed  and intensely abstract that Lewis is able to demonstrate that the most powerful formal solutions can be found, at least sometimes, by giving oneself over to the direct study of nature, and the best way of finding high style can be found by turning one’s back on the direct pursuit of it.

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September 8 to Octobrt 2, 2004

We have a convenient shorthand phrase for the making of meaningful marks on canvas: “the Painting Process.” But it isn’t really a single process, nor even a finite one. For representational painters the challenge has always been two-fold, at least; they must first come to grips with their own visual experience, and then find a way of rendering an equivalent in paint. (Cézanne showed just how compelling this restless dichotomy of observation and reconstitution could be, but in fact this struggle is as old as painting itself.) The “process” actually continues even after brushes are laid down, because the reconstituting, in circular fashion, shows the eye how to see.

Of course this isn’t the kind of process every artist has in mind today. Many pursue a conceptual engagement with symbols and statements, rather than the sheer variety of impetus of color and line. This wouldn’t necessarily be a loss, except that fewer painters, abstract and representational alike, seem inclined to extract from visual experience its full potential.

But there still are painters who look long and deep. An exhibition at Salander-O’Reilly features the landscape paintings of two such artists, Stanley Lewis and Gregory Botts. The pairing is intriguing. Both show how even the tradition-laden genre of landscape can be renewed through the process of seeing, but they do this through entirely different means.

Now in his early 60s, Lewis has had for many years a following of admirers among colleagues and students. His four medium-sized and two tiny paintings here have the standard subjects and rectangular format of landscape, but they are anything but tame. His canvases are so matted with strokes of thick paint that they seem almost to swell from their supports. Deep, irregular troughs cut through his surfaces, the result of repeated cutting off and repositioning of entire sections of paintings. The images themselves are crisscrossed by careening impulses; streaming horizon lines–always angled or curved–divide these worlds into forms surging above and below, with big foreground wedges sectioned off by thrusting fences and paths.

What is so remarkable about the images is their final tautness of design. Despite the agitated attack, each element seems minutely considered, its visual weight and location measured against the accumulating whole. The drawing of forms sometimes gives them an almost hallucinogenic speed, but oddly enough this only seems to confirm the fidelity to optical experience. One feels almost as if one’s eyeball were planted at the center of his canvases: as the tree in “Matt Farnum’s Farm, Chautauqua, NY” soars from the horizon, it spreads above and over our viewpoint as it makes its ragged way to the edge of the canvas-here, identical with the limits of our perceptions.
Lewis’ muted colors, too, seem designed not to charm but to do pictorial justice. When his tilting, predominantly khaki-green planes set up the punctuations of more intense notes of red and yellow, the relationships have the ring of observed truth. An up-close pickup truck hogs the entire front corner of “Farnum’s Farm,” but the unexpected delicacy of its coloration, faithful to the weather and hour of a particular day, turns it into a subdued, hulking bulwark against the tide of streaming grass. By contrast a house perched distantly on the horizon, silhouetted by hard contrasts of sky, stares starkly back at us from far behind those same layered greens. The effect is of intensely cohesive impressions-of snapshots finding their gravity, if you will.

At points the paintings suggest an artist on the brink of perceptual saturation-Lewis’ eye seems unable to pass up any event, including the truck’s Chevy insignia–but they arrive finally at a kind of quivering, temporary equilibrium through sheer focus of intent. It’s as if Lewis “wanted to make Expressionism into something as permanent as the art in museums”, to paraphrase Cézanne’s self-proclaimed goal for Impressionism. Despite this (or perhaps, because of it), one suspects that Lewis would happily pull any of these canvases off the wall and start hacking again. His goal appears to be not a fixed perfection but an unboundable synthesis of seeing and making. It’s hard to think of another painter who so completely shuns preconceptions about traditional painting while reaffirming its most interesting possibilities. These days it’s a rare virtuosity: one caring nothing for itself.

The paintings of fifty-two year-old Gregory Botts, with their agile surfaces and crisply fragmented designs, draw upon perceptions in an entirely different way. Where Lewis’ obsessively rehashes, Botts’ finesses, encompassing both sweeping forms and discursive details with a supple bravura. Appropriating the elegant paradoxes of Cubism, his images flirt with stylistic adventurism, but more than most of his contemporaries he’s saved by a sure grip on formal tensions–in his case, too, arising out of keen observation. Botts gets loads of mileage out of economical tactics. In a section of “Western Sky #2,” the largest of his three paintings here, patches of luminous ochre, evanescent blue, and a spacious, warm off-white are all it takes to produce tangible fact: the weight of a cloud in a late afternoon sky. Silhouetting stylized sunflowers, the sky is in turn framed by a surround of grayed, more loosely brushed shapes that turn out on closer inspection to be a panoramic version of the same sky and flowers: a playful gambit of simultaneous/alternate views.
Where Botts’ color animates the sequences, references to Cubism or Pop seem irrelevant-who cares what an artist borrows if he makes it authentically his own? Botts’ constructions generally convince, although two heavy ultramarine bars running vertically across “Western Sky,” don’t help; they mechanistically repeat other blue elements rather than urging rhythms to the next degree, and one can’t help wondering wistfully what Juan Gris might have done.

But “Spring Vanishes Scraps of Winter” has no such shortcomings; here, the surround of neutral-colored, abstracted forms becomes the tense, measured foil for another glimpsed landscape-this one, too, made varied, rich, and spacious by a few well-chosen hues and shapes. Within, the ease of the movement from huge hovering petals to a tiny bit of distant shoreline is striking. Neatly punctuating the frame of grays are cryptic details-an odd rectangular scrap marked with a squiggle (perhaps the artist’s initial), a small white diamond shining from behind several curving, overlapping planes–that expand and intensify the scale of the rhythms. One sees a lot of cartoony images and splashy, doily-like abstractions in cutting-edge galleries, but they rarely achieve this weight of composition. This makes Botts’ contributions especially welcome; he shows that a free-wheeling, self-conscious exploitation of sources-now nature, now history, now his own in-progress facsimile of nature-can indeed result in meaningful painting.

Facing each other across the walls at Salander, the paintings of Lewis and Botts almost suggest Earnestness regarding Facility. Neither quality by itself, though, would make for memorable painting. The catalyst is the intensity of perception and reformulation in the language of paint, and it’s this reformulation that ultimately makes an image ‘real,’ whether it’s representational, abstract, or somewhere in-between. These two painters at Salander show that painting is indeed still something of a hallowed calling–that is, it’s a major art form, its learning curve is steep, and dedication to it leads to intense, idiosyncratic results.

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