September 6 to October 20, 2018
521 West 26 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, lorettahoward.com

Much of David Row’s earlier abstraction was predicated on dark, often curved bands that meandered over textured monochromatic fields. Curves have also appeared with frequency in his subsequent development, though with each iteration they are put to surprisingly different use. Like many abstract painters, Row works in series. And this latest, of relatively small paintings, continues with the irregularly shaped canvases he has contended with for several years now, but with a few notable changes typical of his restive approach

Unlike the chromatically rich selection shown at the Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, in 2017, Row limits his palette here to a mid-range cobalt blue combined with black and white. From this narrow medley he manages to coax compelling variations by applying two interdependent rubrics: the first is the commonplace method of controlling a color’s intensity by adjusting the amount of surface each occupies; the other involves cropping painted forms—reclining Os and Xs—with multiple diagonal edges. The Os in particular, when interrupted diagonally suggest a larger shape that amplifies each painting’s scale and pictorial depth. Illusions of deep space thwart emphasis on surface, but never entirely. Between barely contained expanse and concentrated interlocking geometry these images exude a complexity one would not expect from such small panels.

Most of the nine pieces in the main gallery are less than two feet in any direction. Their compression induces a viewer to seek answers that may explicate their elaborate construction. Axis 2 (2018), for instance, teeters between resolution and near chaos depending on which spatial illusion catches a momentary optical bias.

Searching for patterns within the series, one discovers that five of the nine paintings, including Axis 2, are made of components consisting of shapes formed of three, four and five sides respectively. It’s not a hard and fast rule but occurs often enough to hook the viewer into a heightened awareness of how the shapes fit together. Such casual consistency is typical of Row’s approach to composition, as he seems willing to follow a formula so long as it produces a desired visual effect. Though his canvas shapes seem to revisit issues tackled in the 1970s by Kenneth Noland, the analytical depth to which they are subjected, particularly in this series, indicates a willingness to investigate many aspects of abstraction simultaneously. He avoids ideological traps. Pitting one abstract element against another suggests a permanent restlessness. The search itself seems to be the point.

Selectively distressed surfaces are introduced into otherwise largely hard-edged compositions without looking arbitrary or directed toward novelty. Whites are slightly dulled with embedded gray newspaper text, too small to read and often reversed or upside-down, but visible enough as body text to suggest a faint gray tone. Though unreadable, they add a temporal aspect. The speed one brings to scanning the lines produces a braking effect on one’s sensitivity to the scraping, which is gestural and thus implies quick, assertive movement. A dynamic counterpoint develops. The crater-like gouges left by granules of sand embedded in the wet paint act against the text, while the text acts against the sweep of the painted curves.

Xs and Os are not just cropped but overlapped and occasionally split. Counterclockwise, (2018) the one large piece in the show and the source of the show’s enigmatic title, imposes a black ellipse on a blue background with a large keystone-like section severed and pulled slightly out of alignment. This partial amputation forces a change in scale that might be more discovered than planned. Either way, it remains impossible to decipher which section was pulled from the other—which was the fixed element, and which has been moved. There is no way to resolve it but to recognize that Row is not after gestalt. The dynamic born of his intuitive method becomes the primary element with which a viewer engages the work. One is drawn visually into his thought processes.

Considering much of current abstract painting’s focus on spontaneity and one-off effects, Row’s tendency to revisit abstract elements embraced by earlier painters—not just Noland but Ellsworth Kelly, Dorothea Rockburne and Al Held, with whom Row shared a close friendship—may seem retrograde. But Row evidently depends on viewers willing to look beyond the superficial recognition of a style’s elements. He’s interested in how the elements function in a single painting. His aesthetic hangs off slender threads tying abstract painting to both feeling and intellect.

David Row is accessible in the best sense of the word. The way each painting in this show begs for engagement, first with itself and then with the whole series, recalls the provocative hang quotes in a magazine article that begs a full reading.

The post Noughts and Crosses: David Row at Loretta Howard appeared first on artcritical.

September 8 to October 8, 2016
521 W 26 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 695 0164

At Loretta Howard Gallery this month, six sculptures by Joel Perlman make the best argument I’ve found recently for reassessing a growing tendency to consider an artist’s dedication to working with a specific material as something that has passed into history. I don’t mean to imply that the assemblage techniques currently dominating, for instance, the Turner Prize competition are not adding to a welcome broadening of the sculptural genre. I’m wary of allowing technical mastery to lapse into a misguided notion of obsolescence. Intimate knowledge of a material gained through hands-on experience and nurtured along with an artist’s talent, judgement and intuition, has been a property of sculpture shared by nearly all cultures and in nearly all historical contexts. It is not a style. It is the recognition that sculpture has a formal essence.

As Perlman’s work shows, to develop an intimate and tactile knowledge of a specific material is not to unduly confine one’s experience, but to foster a level of focus that frees intuition and helps an artist develop an instinct for spatial language. His passion for industrial metal, specifically steel came early in his education. Leaving his native New York to spend a portion of his undergraduate years studying with welded sculpture pioneer Brian Wall at the Central School of Art in London, he returned to the states to complete a degree at Cornell, then went on to Berkeley. Though Wall has been a definite influence on his work, the sculptures at Loretta Howard are very much in the tradition of David Smith, particularly in regard to Smith’s innovative drawing mode as exemplified in the Whitney’s Hudson River Landscape (1951).

Like Perlman’s 2014 exhibition at Loretta Howard, the current work concentrates on a motif of open circular frames, with perimeters punctuated by half round and triangular shards dispersed intuitively along their curved edges. These marks function like swells and blots along a line of ink. One might consider them distant cousins to Pollock’s flung sinews, but the level of compositional control Perlman displays belies that tempting parallel. More than signs of mere spontaneity, these smaller elements read as stops or accents on a line of thought. When enlarged they intrude into the open space within each circle, redefine that space and accentuate the work’s abstraction. When smaller, they enliven pieces like Double Trouble (2015) by provoking a calligraphic interpretation that can lend itself to a range of implied references. Triangles suggest saw teeth; strings of half-rounds suggest worn gears.

Yet in either case, Perlman favors the abstract side of the spectrum and keeps the viewer’s eye trained on how the open spaces are defined by interruptions along the overlapping curves that define each piece. In Masterpiece (2015), a lower and upper emphasis on perpendicular circles cluster in a way that gives the space created in the center an illusion of expansion, which subsequently de-emphasizes the implied references to machinery. It is a delicate balance that changes with one’s concentration. The control Perlman demonstrates attests to his comfort with thinking in formal terms. Foremost here is a non-verbal and intuitive methodology apparently developed over decades of practice.

Perlman’s confidence allows him to occasionally leave the tactile security of steel, which informs his process through a feeling for weight, resistance and flexibility, and move to a near weightless material like Styrofoam in order to construct sculptures designed to be cast in bronze by means of a process similar to lost wax. Four of the pieces in the exhibition, including Double Trouble are fabricated this way. Casting in this manner is not all that different from the usual welding procedures, considering that it is based on assembled elements. Moreover, the production of multiples to which casting is often associated, is not possible in a loss system. Thus the motivation for its use is more like an exploration of visual ideas—sketching so to speak, not creating a line of multiples.

Each of the four cast pieces received a unique patina. Though subtle in range, color is important to Perlman, who prefers color that seems to deviate modestly from the look of the material beneath. And as he works intuitively, so experimentation with painting techniques follow. The two larger pieces in the gallery, Broadway (2016) and Wonder Wheel (2015–16) have been painted using a technique called powder painting or e-coating, which employs an electric current running through the sculpture that encourages an ionic bond between pigment and surface.

The formal vocabulary established in the smaller bronze pieces takes on an entirely different feel in the considerably larger Wonder Wheel. Here the triangular and half-round elements are scaled up, releasing them from their accentuating role and putting them to work merging and equalizing their relationship to the circular elements. A sense of solidity now joins the shards to the curve, leaving a more unified mass, the effect of which is to draw the eye to the irregular spaces between the solid elements—spaces that resemble the simplified edges of Matisse’s cutouts. They also — perhaps accidentally — create a pun on the idea of a cut-out.

It is this complexity, arising from nuance set upon nuance that makes contemplating these six sculptures a rich and open-ended experience. The variety of uses to which a few elements can be employed is limited only by the artist’s ability to see beyond the material fact of each shape toward a unified sculptural essence. And that ability, that sensitivity to variation and adaptation that Perlman’s work clearly demonstrates, ought to be a larger part of sculpture’s continued progress.

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February 18 to April 2, 2016
525 West 26th Street
New York City, (212) 695-0164

The work of New York painter David Row has been labeled “conceptual abstraction” but the unabashed physicality of his work—of which 15 choice examples are on view at Loretta Howard Gallery—suggests “calisthenic abstraction” as an equally apt designation. This exhibition’s checklist spans the promised 40 years, from 1976 to the present, and every painting is as much a material presence as it is a pictorial conundrum.

Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Column” is recognizably the source for the vertical, zigzagging motif in Koloph I (1986), implying that it might imaginatively extend beyond the top and bottom edges of the canvas. A pictorial field that seems too small to accommodate the figure—that is, in which the boundaries of the canvas or panel appear to crop the image—has long been crucial to Row’s compositional strategy. Variously reiterated, it yields all manner of spatial displacement and disjunctions. But this instability is carefully controlled, meticulously planned—another paradox that only deepens the pleasure this stunning show affords.

If the truncated figure/cropped ground is the exhibition’s through-line, the clearest evolution from Row’s early years to the 1990s is coloristic. Whereas Koloph I makes its point with just three hues—a brooding blue; a dense, cold gray; and black—the surface of Split Infinitive (1993) is scraped and repainted and scraped again, producing complex optical blending. Roughly approximating mustard yellow and blue-black from a distance (and in images), the surface is streaked and flecked with pale cadmium green, teal blue and a tamped-down alizarin crimson. The painting features concentric ellipses, a signature device that emerged in Row’s work of the early 1990s. The artist’s take on the ellipse—a foreshortened circle—is described by band of unvarying width, and thus both does and does not occupy illusionistic space.

At 7½ by 12 feet, Wind Cools Itself (1996) is still more chromatically complex, resonating in both major and minor keys. The wind in question is no balmy zephyr, but a gale that howls through the painting, rattling its shutters. Across a black ground smeared with white and green a great coiling band unspools through a scraped and squeegeed zone of underlying Popsicle orange, candy pink and lime green; qualifying its dominance is a vertical panel (more oranges and greens!) in which screened grids of tiny dots buzz. It is the most unhinged painting in the show, teetering on the edge of chaos. Row admires Indian painting; this work’s title might refer to a well-known Basohli gouache-on-paper work from 1730 in which a parti-colored cleft in the rocky Himalayas encloses a swarm of serpents, and trees with dot-filled green blobs for foliage. The deep space beyond—the heavens?

A grid of rather larger screen-printed dots is way up front in Here and There (2003), laid over an interlacing of flat brushstrokes that resembles a nightmare freeway interchange seen from high above. The grid reads as a pixelated scrim, with orange on the left half, green on the right. As in other works, bifurcation suggests two sides of the same coin; “Here” might be the picture plane, “There” the middle ground into which the brushy figure recedes.

The gallery’s walls feel crowded, but it is pointless to quibble over any specific inclusion; Row’s trajectory has been rich and varied, and the gallery is not enormous. Among the surprises is Omega (1991), in which concentric ellipses in charcoal and ink are distributed across the top sheets of three intact, contiguous watercolor blocks—an unconventional use of a traditional material. It echoes the three-canvas structure of the closely related Split Infinitive, which hangs nearby. Row’s work in fresco merits mention also, particularly Dean Street Special (1990), a somber study in brick red and olive green. The eccentrically rectilinear support’s chunky thickness almost—almost—eliminates the window-like illusionism of the picture’s face.

In recent years, the artist has worked on irregular polygons with (usually) six or seven sides, of which none is perpendicular or parallel to the edges of the framing wall. This family of shapes relates to the silhouettes of the artist’s smallish, cast-glass “Lighttraps” sculptures. But an understated horizontal/vertical axis, keyed to the painting’s center, anchors the work’s equilibrium—in Elektor (2013), it provides a spectral, yellow-orange ellipse another compositional structure to confront.

The familiar claustrophobic tension of ellipses expanding outward to press against a polygonal boundary is present also in Joule (2016), but its surface (it is oil on wood panel) feels significantly less worked-over; it is fresh, even lively. A smoldering red-orange peeks out from between the inner, blackish ellipse and its whitish surround; stirred up here and there, turning pink, are traces of this underpainting, which also resides in a diagonal incision slicing across the panel from top to bottom. The humming visual energy of Joule is quite unlike that of the strenuous Wind Cools Itself, or the workmanlike problem solving of Split Infinitive, or the radiance of Elektor. Each is unmistakably Row’s, and each reveals a different side of this artist’s restless intelligence.

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October 18 to November 15, 2014 (Zoubok) and to December 20 (Howard)
531 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, Zoubok: 212 675 7490; Howard: 212 695 0164

Billed as a collaborative exhibition, this Judy Pfaff double-whammy at 531 West 26 Street reveals an understated bifurcation in Pfaff’s studio production: extroverted and introverted. It also leaves the viewer convinced that, given the opportunity, the artist could have hung new work on every wall in the entire building, and the neighboring addresses as well. She is unstoppable, having devised a working method that is capable of absorbing an enormous range of materials, processes and moods.

At Loretta Howard, Pfaff delivers her familiar but always engaging blend of elegance and ebullience in 14 works of widely varying size, all dated 2014. In smallish works dedicated to Larry Poons, Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley and Jules Olitski, Pfaff tips her hat to movers in mid-20^th-century abstraction. In these pieces, shards of colored plastic, deformed by being melted, tangle with acrylic, resin, and pigmented expanded foam, and evoke the formal means of each honoree. The biggest of the tributes is Blue Note (for Al), in which Pfaff’s former teacher, Al Held, is celebrated — a 9-by-14-foot wall work featuring concentric circles of blue and orange Plexiglas, fluorescent lights and a meandering, steel-rod musical staff.

Even more convincing is the gallery’s second space, in which the visitor encounters the two largest works in the show. Pfaff’s use of foam in the (mostly) free-standing, three-part There is a Field, I Will Meet You There (Rumi) recalls Lynda Benglis’s innovative use of similar materials, but whereas Benglis’s roiling mounds of polyurethane feel volcanic, Pfaff’s oozing pools are more like quicksand — once you start to get sucked in, it’s difficult to extricate yourself.

In Alberta, another dimensions-variable work, there are echoes of Frank Stella’s late-1980s and early-90s wall works — those with the relatively restrained palette and the rippling, swirling, organic shapes between which you can see through to the wall. In this company, an untitled work dominated by green plastic is both compact and explosive. To achieve such balance of intimacy and theatricality requires that Pfaff nail the scale of the works relative to the room — and that she does.

The mood is darker at Pavel Zoubok, the work there less immediately ingratiating. Their materials feel clotted rather than clustered — not just layered, but laminated. The checklist runs to 73 items (nearly all from 2014 or 2013), of which many are small, individually framed works, many riffing on botanical and decorative motifs, in encaustic and collage on repurposed ledger paper from India and antique bills of lading from a New York paint company. Across tiled expanses of snapshots and postcards of flora, fauna and her own studio activity, these framed works are arrayed, underscoring the idea of inventory or archive. Wrapping around three walls in the gallery’s back space is one such environment, which includes 21 paper works and an untitled, tendrilly sculpture; the viewer might feel a bit lost in the underbrush. Even more than usual for Pfaff, this installation device risks inelegance for the sake of sheer abundance, as if to assert that the irreducible essence of her practice is proliferation itself.

Among the many sculptural works at Pavel Zoubok, of particular interest is Hydroza, nearly eight feet high and dated 1994-2014. A rough bundle of tar, resin and steel wire, enclosing a big bulb of greenish blown glass, dangles by steel-rod vines from a sort of boom mounted at a perpendicular to the wall. It looks like a nest. The gallery’s overgrown, jungly feeling owes much to the preponderance of materials that have been scavenged from the natural world: Hanging Judge, a walk-through sculpture just inside the entrance, makes effective use of several charred chunks of driftwood; in other works one finds tree branches, dried leaves, deer antlers and sections of honeycomb.

These are combined with repurposed manufactured objects such as paper Chinese lanterns, welded steel furniture, plastic flowers and (naturally) more expanded foam. Twenty-four feet long, Let Sixteen Cowboys Sing Me a Song is anchored by a stringy, undulating frieze of what appears to be seaweed encased in clear resin, an element that plays nicely against the other flotsam washed up in this piece: photographs of giant crustaceans; a translucent pool of pigmented resin, mounted to the wall at looking-glass height; roots, branches, leaves; pinwheeling globs of some unidentified polymer product; photographs of old color engravings of deep-sea fish. A rigid, right-angled, polished steel armature lends visual as much as structural cohesion to this sprawling work.

In the best sense of the term, Pfaff is an artist of the old school. She puts the stamp of her personality on whatever theme she takes up. She thoroughly reinvigorates a tired trope — the natural vs. the man-made — and in the process suggests that just about anything is open to being revisited, reinvented, rediscovered. Embracing a familiar idea and completely recasting it in her own idiom, she demonstrates an awe-inspiring tenacity. To rework an old joke: How do you get to have a two-gallery show in Chelsea? Practice, practice, practice.

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While there are only eight objects on display in “Irving Sandler: Out of Tenth Street and Into the 1960s” at Loretta Howard Gallery, the spare installation amplifies the presence and power of each of them. Together they form a sacra conversazione of high modernism. A large-scale Ronald Bladen and a small, two-part George Sugarman share a visual sensibility but differ wholly in attitude. Phillip Pearlstein and Al Held meet along two adjacent walls and trade ideas about how to use large shapes to divide the rectangle. Paintings by Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, and Alice Neel discuss their commonalities in figuration, while a faintly figurative Mark di Suvero sculpture holds itself aloof.

At the center of this conversation is Irving Sandler, who witnessed the labors of these artists as they set down their individual paths in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. With figures such as de Kooning and Pollock having established themselves as giants, there was enormous interest in – and heated arguments about – what younger artists were to do in their wake. On the eve of the show I spoke with Sandler in his Greenwich Village apartment not far from where it all happened a half-century ago.

Franklin Einspruch: The exhibition at Loretta Howard Gallery represents a fascinating time, in which some of the most important developments in modern art are taking place around a tiny cluster of cooperative galleries on Tenth Street. Ambitious artists with big personalities are lending their elbow grease to make it all work.

Irving Sandler: Tanager Gallery started in 1952 and moved up to Tenth Street in ‘54. I worked there from ‘56 until around ‘59. The artists in Tanager, I grew up with them — Philip Pearlstein, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd. Mostly Phillip and Alex. Across the street you had Brata Gallery, which had George Sugarman, Ronald Bladen, and Al Held. They became very close friends, all three. They were my closest friends on Tenth Street except for Mark di Suvero, who was next door from Brata, at the March Gallery. So these were my guys, this show I put together. I thought I chose pretty terrific artists to be best friends with.

Of course, Alice Neel was older and pretty mean. She constantly needled me for not writing about her. But I wanted her in the show to indicate that Tenth Street was not one thing. Clement Greenberg identified something called the Tenth Street Touch, which he meant as the School of de Kooning, or action or gesture painting, but it wasn’t all like that. There were 200 artists showing there. Art was very much all over the place. Although there was a dominant style and that was gestural painting.

By the time Greenberg was referring to the Tenth Street Touch, he meant it as a pejorative.

Definitely. We all considered it a pejorative. People began to regard gestural painting as having run its course by ‘58. Greenberg of course was promoting — I use that word “promoting” deliberately — color field abstraction. Here in the apartment we have one artist who probably did it first in ‘52, Ben Isquith, now all but forgotten.

But by 1958, certain artists, particularly the guys in the Loretta Howard show, felt that gestural abstraction was used up. Katz and Pearlstein thought that figuration was in crisis, and that they had to move it towards literalism, fact, and specificity. For Ronnie Bladen and George Sugarman, welded construction didn’t offer any new possibilities and they began to do other things. There was no consensus, but they felt for personal reasons that they wanted to do something new.

Of course there was Robert Chamberlain working in kind of an action or abstract-expressionist mode. There was also di Suvero. But they were thinking of people like David Hare and Ibram Lassaw. These were leading sculptors of the ‘50s, now forgotten. Theodore Roszack and Seymour Lipton have had major shows of their work. Hare not yet, Lassaw not yet.

You’ve seen contemporary art history operating for long enough to have witnessed some artists getting taken into the institutions and preserved, while other artists are forgotten. Is that process historical and thus in some way fair, or is it more political and arbitrary?

It’s hard to say. My next book will be about that, why styles change. There’s an audience that wants for reasons of its own to see new pictures. It’s these reasons I’m trying at this point to figure out. Of the group who became the so-called New Realists, Katz has become the most prominent. Do I think it was justified? Absolutely. Phillip too in an entirely different way.

How about the people who have been forgotten?

I don’t think that’s at all justified, it just happens. Some of these people are very fine artists. There are older abstract expressionists, artists like Bradley Walker Tomlin, who’s wonderful, or James Brooks, or William Baziotes, who in their time were considered major figures. But it seems that art history has a way of constantly narrowing the field, and wonderful artists end up languishing in doctoral dissertations. But they can be rehabilitated.

Does that winnowing process happen in the same way as it used to?

I don’t know. We are in a time of such total pluralism, it’s hard to know why lightning strikes where it does. In my day, in the days of high modernism, things developed rather more regularly and we could see a kind of progression. That didn’t mean that we liked it, and that didn’t mean that we didn’t go out and really hammer it, because it was competition. I think of my response to Frank Stella, for example, which was: if that’s art, then anything I stand for is something else, and vice versa. But we very quickly saw why it was happening, and the necessity for it.

But after 1970 it becomes very difficult to understand. The modernist era splays open. I wrote that at one point it looked like a mainstream, and now it looks like a delta. It’s all over the place. There’s nothing wrong with that, it makes artists freer than ever before. The problem is, how do you get attention? My students put that up as the major problem of their careers, to get somebody to look at their work.

It’s hard to comprehend how much larger the art world is now than it was in 1958.

In 1959, when I counted, the entire New York school consisted of, at tops, 250 artists, probably closer to 200. You could know everybody. I knew everybody. There were twenty galleries worth seeing, and you could visit them all in an afternoon. There are what, 600 galleries now? In Bushwick, upwards of fifty! We didn’t have to look past Manhattan. And we had a community, a real community. These 200 people had The Club, which I ran from 1956 to 1962. We had our bar, the Cedar Tavern. There were the openings, and there were constant studio visits. We were geographically concentrated in a very small neighborhood.

Today it’s all over the place. That’s why I said that past the 1970s, I followed developments closely, but I can’t think of it in the same way as I did before. It’s very difficult for artists to come up with anything new in the modern sense. They can make wonderful art, and there’s a great deal of wonderful art around. But you go to Chelsea today and you have to move fast, there’s so much to see. Your whole way of looking has changed. You can’t stop too long.

If you visit twenty galleries, you’ll see nineteen shows that are okay, maybe. A lot of them are bad, and the rest are nothing to change your life. From this you can conclude that American art is in the pits, that nineteen out of twenty shows didn’t move you, or you can say, “Hey, wow, that one show!” Take your choice, it’s the donut or the hole.

Which way do you lean, the donut or the hole?

Oh, I definitely lean to the donut. I cannot believe, many of my former best friends notwithstanding, that art suddenly stopped short. There’s more of it, and much of it is really very good.

How important is community to the advancement of art? You could look at the show at Loretta Howard and theorize that you need the likes of Dodd and Katz and Pearlstein together, that caliber of character and intensity of connection, in order to make art go forward.

You see, you’re talking about a modernist idea. I’m not sure whether art goes forward. At one time we thought it should go forward, and there was an avant-garde, and we were embattled, and among ourselves we fought bitterly. But I don’t think art goes forward. It’s either interesting or not, moving or not.

Is it possible that art was moving forward in 1959, but after 1970 it stopped?

I think so, or it moved in different directions, and you could see a kind of progression, but only in retrospect.

If you were an advocate of abstract expressionism as I was, and then in 1959 you were suddenly confronted with the black paintings of Frank Stella, that was another world. If you were committed to art, you were shaken up. The same thing with Warhol and Lichtenstein and Rosenquist, particularly Warhol in 1962. Even artists who weren’t quite that radical but in their own way using common objects like Oldenberg and Dine, that stuff looked unprecedented. Our idea was that high art and low art just didn’t meet. Read early Greenberg and early Rosenberg on that — they called it kitsch.

Doesn’t Alex Katz’s work touch on that overlap? It must have been a bit of a shock at first to see him doing those aluminum constructions like the one at Loretta Howard.

Katz is an artist who is absolutely attuned to what he sees around him. He notices billboards and widescreen movies. He understands fashion, and how fashion changes. He is aware of being contemporary, Baudelaire’s idea of the dandy. Not that he’s a dandy, but he has the attitude of the flâneur.

Whereas Phillip Pearlstein is looking backward.

I see what you mean. Phillip looked back to the history of the nude and tried to figure out what had to be done. That turned out to be of interest to Pop artists and the hard-edge people, in that he had taken the painterly image like those of Elaine de Kooning and he made it specific.

There were all these arguments going on among the artists and the critics, and of course that’s part of the fun. But my suspicion is that people find that they have more and more in common as time goes on.

I don’t think they think so, but I think so. Al Held and Phillip Pearlstein, who were close friends, were aesthetic enemies. Pearlstein stood for realism, Al stood for hard edge abstraction, and they were at one another’s throats. They wouldn’t show together, but I showed them together at Cunningham Gallery because I was interested in the affinities.

Both you and Phillip Pearlstein were in the military. How long did you serve?

Three and a half years, in the Second World War. I enlisted in ‘43 and got out in ‘46. I was supposed to do the invasion of Japan, and was supposed to be killed, which had we landed would have happened in fifteen seconds. But Phillip was in Italy. I don’t think he saw combat, I certainly didn’t. After sixty or seventy years I still carry this.

For the record, I’m looking at Irving Sandler’s United States Marine Corps Certificate of Satisfactory Service. He is ranked as a lieutenant and identified by his thumbprint.

It’s called a Good Conduct Discharge. It happened so long ago they hadn’t even invented photography. Being a Marine changed my life, but that’s another world, and my memoir doesn’t go into any of it.

Was your going into the art world a reaction against your military experience?

Absolutely not. I enlisted when I was 17. When I was commissioned I was probably the youngest officer in the Marine Corps. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I loved the Marine Corps. Because they brainwash you, a lot of that love remains. I remember during the Gulf War, General Schwarzkopf punched the First and Second Marines through the Iraqi lines. The Second Marines was my marines. What an upsurge of pride! So those feelings are still there.

And yet the intellectual atmosphere around your artistic milieu was communist. There was a burgeoning interest in Marxism.

Well, that would have been earlier on, in the ‘30s and ‘40s into the ‘50s. In the ‘60s everything changed, and it became political, in a countercultural way.

But we could do something back on Tenth Street that you can’t do anymore. We could live on nothing, and have the so-called Bohemian life. My rent was $17 a month. You could get a good studio for $30 a month. At a dollar an hour you could pay your rent in seventeen hours. You were free! We could just look, do what we wanted, and try to find what it was that we wanted to do. And I found art.

Is the art world more political than it used to be?

Oh yeah. As a matter of fact, because of the hangover of social realism, the art world as I knew it tended to be relatively apolitical. Politics were not discussed at The Club. There was a kind of indifference to it. We talked about art, not politics.

What were the circumstances of your coming into Tanager?

I decided to enter the art world after an epiphany in front of Franz Klein’s “Chief” at the Museum of Modern Art. I didn’t know quite how to do it, but I knew I wanted to know more about it, and as I said I was free to figure it out.

After that a lot of accidents happened. I went up to Provincetown with a girlfriend. We were supposed to camp out on the dunes. One night of that and we got a place in town, and I got a job as a dishwasher at Moors, a very fine Portuguese restaurant. One of the waiters was Angelo Ippolito, who a member at Tanager Gallery. We became friends. When we came down to New York he got me a job at the Tanager. They needed a sitter. So I worked there, and was really well paid — $20 a week. This was when my rent was $17 a month.

I went to the Cedar Street Tavern every night, and nursed one 15-cent beer the whole evening. Even after I got married in ‘58 I still went. I got to know artists and listened to them, and got invited to galleries. But working at the Tanager was my real entry.

Anything that had to be done in the art world that nobody wanted to do, I did. So when The Club was on its last legs in 1955, there was a meeting to disband it. Elaine de Kooning said, “This has been going on since 1949. It would be wonderful if we could keep it going, if only someone would volunteer.” Silence. Then I said, “I’ll do it.” So not only was I running Tanager, I was running The Club, and soon after I was writing for Art News.

What was the attitude about criticism at the time?

We critics were sort of mildly inferior people. However, people like Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg were major intellectuals, and public intellectuals. They would be treated differently than someone like myself who was a kid on the scene. But the artists also liked admirers, and they liked whipping boys, and we fulfilled both functions quite well. Though Tom Hess, him you didn’t mess with because he was very smart and very fast and he ran Art News.

There was an interesting mixture of condescension and awe.

More condescension than awe. If you wrote a bad review, you made an enemy for life. If you wrote a good review, it was just assumed the artist deserved it. You couldn’t win either way. But that was okay because at one point I decided to write a history of abstract expressionism, The Triumph of American Painting, and for that I needed these guys. The information had to come directly from the artists. If I got condescended to, okay. Luckily I’m the kind of person who never knew when he was being condescended to, a quality which infuriates my wife. It never bothered me.

In contrast with other writers we associate with that era, you have a communitarian spirit. It’s almost as if you regard artists as family.

Yes. Criticism can be a lot of things. At Art News I could assume that the audience was sophisticated, and I only had to write reviews of a hundred to 300 words. But when I became the critic for the New York Post, my function as I saw it was to educate. I really didn’t care about what was good and what was bad. I wanted to know what the art was and present it to the public. The judgment came in when I chose what to write about. If I didn’t like an artist’s work I just didn’t write about it. Unless he was a big gun, and then I’d run after him. If I thought the reputation was unmerited he was fair game.

That’s the situation we’re in now in criticism, with so many artists working. The decision to write about one of them is the first and main act of judgment.

Art critics have been sidelined by the market. In the 1950s, when there was really no audience outside of our own group, taste was made by artists. De Kooning was considered one of the great artists because artists thought he was a great artist. In the ‘60s, art critics, particularly the younger art critics in debt to Greenberg and writing for Artforum, became arbiters of taste. And then in the late ‘60s the collectors and the dealers became the tastemakers. Now a handful of billionaires are determining taste by commanding attention.

Did you feel at some point that you had to deliberately cultivate a voice? Did you look at other writers to emulate or not emulate?

I personally didn’t. I think the critic-poets in the ‘50s like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara probably did. Frank became a model for younger critics like Bill Berkson. No, I had another process. I had no sense of style. I still don’t. I figured the only thing I could do was make my writing as clear as I could, and that’s what I did. No jargon, no bullshit, just make it clear. It was a terrible struggle to put down what I wanted to say in words that other people would understand.

The simple process of turning a visual experience into a verbal experience is difficult. Jargon can sneak in. Bullshit can sneak in. You get to talking about spirituality or God or all sorts of other nonsense. Although that’s what you’re really trying to say!

Did that put you at odds with what the artists wanted you to write about them? Bladen, I know, had a spiritual streak.

In Bladen’s case he did all sorts of specific things I could point to and say, “Hey, that looks spiritual.” You could know what I meant. Hans Hofmann said that when you put two colors together they create a sense of the third. That third color isn’t there, so it has to be spiritual, right? So you can do that.

What are the takeaway lessons for the contemporary art world in the exhibition up at Loretta Howard Gallery?

That’s a very interesting question. One of the things I was interested in was how fresh and terrific the work looked. In terms of the contemporary experience, I really don’t know. This is my history, and it’s the artists’ history. A few of the artists in the show no longer have the kinds of reputations they had in the past, and I like the idea of rehabilitating them. Even Bladen. Sugarman, possibly more. Of course neither Katz nor di Suvero need it, they remain very much in the public’s eye. Lois, who’s got a slowly building reputation, I would like to see more of her work. She is really very good. As a person she is about as modest as they come. She doesn’t say much, but she paints beautiful paintings.

It’s much harder today than it was back then because there were relatively so few artists. But I think that would be my main idea, to bring these guys up and say, “Hey, take another look.”

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November 7 to December 14, 2013 at Loretta Howard Gallery, 525-531 West 26th Street?, New York City, (212) 695-0164
January 10 to February 8, 2014 at Danese/Corey, 511 West 22nd Street,  New York City, (212) 223-2227

If these shows of early and recent Larry Poons were the opening and closing rooms of a full-on career retrospective, they make a convincing case for organizing one, argues painter JILL NATHANSON

While each of these shows is a visual powerhouse, taken together, Loretta Howard’s December showing of Larry Poons’s early geometric and dot paintings and Danese/Corey’s exhibition of the veteran master’s latest works allow us to experience Poons’ devotion to radical experimentation with color in its unique, mercurial nature

Superficially, the two shows looked so different, the grid-based, controlled, flatly painted shapes on equally flatly painted overall fields of the works from the 1950s and ‘60s contrasting with large recent works made entirely of small painterly finger-and-brush marks, touching, scumbling, sparking, glowing in myriad random-seeming ways.  But Poons’s long painting life makes sense of this, going ever deeper into the pure craziness that is working with color.

The Dot Paintings at Loretta Howard looked fuller and more complex than I remembered after having seen them reproduced for decades as ‘60s icons.   The show also included many Geometric Paintings that had never been shown before, a selection of preparatory pencil on graph-paper drawings and a 1964 video interview with Poons.  In the video, and in conversations with me over the phone, Poons spoke of those days when he was seeking his way out of the prevalent Abstract Expressionist idiom.  He had spent a couple of years at New England Conservatory studying music composition before transferring to The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In his early days in New York City, encounters with two other artists would help him to find his direction.   A show of Barnett Newman at French and Company in 1959 “blew me away…they were like Beethoven”.  Poons says of these paintings that “they weren’t static, even though there were very few elements.  You’re not looking at a stationary object.”   They set a new standard: a pure painting space that would look vast and non-static, that would change–as Poons says all great painting does each time you look at it.  Another powerful experience, in the same year, was seeing Frank Stella’s paintings in Sixteen Americans at MoMA.  From Stella he received the sense of necessity, of how little is necessary to make a space unique to painting. Stella and Newman became his friends, helping him to secure his commitment to disciplined non-illusion.

Poons’s last geometric painting, Florentine, (1958) allows one to follow his path as an experimenter.  It has a jagged  “lightning bolt” lay out.  In this flat two-color painting shapes connect points from sixty-four small grids.  His planning was apparent in the nearby pencil drawings.  After Florentine, however, he eschewed big shapes.  The painting that followed used only points on the construction grids, without connecting them.  The geometric shapes gave way to unconnected points set as if moving either clockwise or counter-clockwise.  These points, painted on a 56” canvas in close value on a high-keyed solid ground, set up a pulsing color structure:  the first ‘Dot’. “The pulsing was a door prize; it was not the point, but it didn’t bother me so I left it”.  An early ‘Dot’ at this size was in the exhibition.  Subsequent paintings got very big, fast.

Large Dot paintings from the mid ‘60’s at Loretta Howard had a good deal more coloristic variation among the dots.  One can see how colors were repeatedly changed, like orchestration transformed, during the painting process.

Looking at The Dots from a few feet back, and given a minute or two of focus, dots hum, fields fluctuate due to simultaneous contrast and after images, ellipses zip around – their direction determined by clockwise or counter-clockwise orientation.  The buzz and movement is a matter of specific color and value relationships.  With all the zipping, the wholeness doesn’t give way to internal sub-plots but  just keeps integrating anew.

Over the years, I’ve thought of these paintings as embodiments (not illustrations) of quantum uncertainty: paintings in which the energy of color gets to look and act (on us) as energy, getting as close to the underlying nature of matter (us included) as painting can get.  On talking with Poons, I found that modern physics was not on his mind, but I maintain its significance, which bears on the importance of these paintings as works about color and the strangeness of painting.  They’re certainly not like other works of Op or Color Field paintings.

Poons moved on from the “Dots.  In subsequent work, pigment — material color in tension with color as light — became the way to generate movement and unity.  From the 1970s to the ‘90s Poons threw paint onto walls of vertical canvas and let it cascade, color building on color, the compositions “found” afterwards through a cropping process done over weeks.   The cropping rigorously avoided familiar compositional devices in favor of color’s leading role.  In the 2000s, Poons left off throwing and began constructing with small marks, building the painting through color-on-color accretions.

These new works integrate Poons’s mastery of counterpoint construction, developed through the Dots and subsequent decades of painting.  I would suggest that no other painter is able to mentally/visually construct color relationships across a huge canvas and through the duration of the working process like Poons.  Without relying on underlying pattern, system, design, composition or narrative, he keeps the eye’s responses to hue, scale and saturation in play using value to amplify intensity.  Shape never overshadows the starring role of color as broken light.

Prior to the current show I had sometimes felt Poons’s new work to be less radical than what came before.  The brush and finger marks seemed more familiar than the cascades or Dots.  So many colors are used, including many outside the bounds of my own retro-tastefulness.

Perhaps I looked harder at this exhibition, but the works in this show all hit me as intensely pleasurable experiences of a place quite new.  Each small area of color interaction seems visually crisper and more specific, while the softer modulations of color/light have become more insistent. This especially comes across in the way small marks interface against larger areas of modulating, glowing light, wrangling with randomness while integrating weight-defying, interactional dynamics. The openness to using all colors results in amazing mixtures and events.

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January 12, 2012—February 25, 2012
525-531 West 26th Street
New York City, (212) 695-0164

British sculptor Tim Scott, long committed to an uncompromisingly abstract esthetic, has also shown an aptitude over the years for exploring a range of materials.  An exhibition of his work at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, in 2010, combined steel-and-sheet-acrylic work from the ‘60s with what was in 2010 his newest series of smaller ceramic sculptures, “House of Clay”.  In the fall of 2011, a group show at the Poussin Gallery in London featured Scott’s current work, larger pieces made of naturally finished plywood (the “Woodwind” series). Loretta Howard Gallery offers a reminder of what first made him famous in the ebullient ‘60s, when the art world’s expanding ambition and tolerance for experiment led to sculptures not only large but composed of then-novel media; we also see him in the more subdued ‘70s, consolidating achievements of the previous decade.

With Philip King, William Tucker and Isaac Witkin, Scott belongs to the group of sculptors featured in New Generation: 1965, a groundbreaking exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.  At the time, Scott (b. 1937) was freshly emerged from the study and practice of architecture, as well as later study and teaching of sculpture at St. Martin’s School of Art, then a hotbed of constructivism as derived ultimately from Picasso and Julio Gonzalez, but carried on through David Smith, and (in England) Anthony Caro.  St. Martin’s, in the 60s, was heavily committed to color in sculpture, and the two pieces in this show from the ‘60s, Bird in Arras III (1968) and Wine (1969) are both appealingly colored, composed as they are of colored sheets of acrylic and tubes of painted steel. However, the four pieces from the ‘70s—the Counterpoint series—furnish quite a contrast, being more compact and bereft of color. Mostly composed of thick sheets and tubes of clear Plexiglas, they are held together by narrow blackish- brown steel bars and sometimes sheets of steel.

In both the work from the ‘60s and the ‘70s, surrounding air plays a role, but in the earlier work, it serves to outline and dramatize the movement of the sculpture, while with the later work, the transparency of the Plexiglas makes most of the sculptures almost appear to disappear. Either way, abundant pleasure is to be derived from this work.  Bird in Arras III, more than nine feet high and nineteen feet long, is a very light and delicate monster: its green metal skeleton rises in an arc to which five rectangular sheets of shiny acrylic have been bolted at right angles. The first three (on the left-hand, rising side of the arc) are a pale cream color, the fourth (on the descending side) a bolder yellow and the fifth (which nearly reaches the ground) a soft brown.  Altogether, it reads like a fluttering bird rising up, then gently descending—sort of an Eadweard Muybridge emblem of flight.  Wine, while more settled and sedate, combines an even more delicate skeleton on four narrow waist-high legs, all colored like a fine Burgundy, with two trapezoidal acrylic sheets, one a fuchsia rosé, the other more Pinot grigio (recalling that grigio is Italian for gray).

With the Plexiglas sculptures, their graceful transparency offers a tantalizing commentary on the chunky solidity of their outlines. In some ways, though, the most satisfying of that series in this show is Counterpoint XIII, (1973-1974) in which Plexiglas plays only a minor role, and muscular slabs and sheets of steel and aluminum dominate the composition. Though it must weigh a lot, nonetheless this piece shares the sleek elegance, lightness and airiness of the rest of the exhibition.

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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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