Art, arguably, is the perpetual rediscovering of one’s environment. It periodically circles back to earlier concerns and subjects, continually extending previous discoveries, and adding new viewpoints and layers of context.

Or does it? These days, some of the hottest artists in the resurgent genre of figurative painting – artists such as Elizabeth Peyton and Luc Tuymans – bring to it a multi-disciplinary approach that combines aspects of “high” art and illustration. These artists tend to address the semantics of representation – the parsings of the implications of style and narrative – more than with the purely formal language of painting. For viewers attuned to traditions ranging from Mantegna to Matisse, the loss may well outweigh the gain.

Such traditionalists will be amply rewarded (and reassured) by the paintings by Louisa Matthiasdottir (1917-2000) currently at Tibor de Nagy. Matthiasdottir, a native Icelander who studied with Marcel Gromaire in Paris and Hans Hofmann in New York City (her home since the early 40s), devoted her long career to painting vividly hued, somewhat abstracted paintings of the subjects around her. Roughly spanning the artist’s last 25 years, the nearly two dozen paintings at Tibor present a handsome sampling of familiar themes: her hieratic still lifes and self-portraits, views of Reykjavik streets and Maine forests, sheep-dotted mountains of Iceland. (Disclosure: I personally knew the artist and have been friends of her family since the mid 1970s.)

At a glance, these images charm with their vivacious brushwork, their frequently exotic scenery, and a brusque, reductive modeling reminiscent of folk art. A longer look, however, uncovers far more. The exhibition catalog’s essay recalls her statement from the early 80s: “The reason I paint is because I want to paint what I see. But to paint what I see, I must build with color.” And indeed, in these paintings, so strangely mute in terms of narrative and style, her colors speak volumes. They record not one-to-one correspondences of hue, but an overall impression of sunlight that weights and animates individual objects. How to convey thousands of leaves overhead, infinite skies, and countless blades of grass below? In “Maine Landscape with Figure” (1976), colors weight forms, and forms direct the pressure of colors. Racing diagonals of grass-greens, buoyant in sunlight, stream around a reclining figure, whose skintones – half-illuminated, in a zone of open shadow – are perfectly captured by thin washes of burnt sienna. On either side tree trunks dart upward, some adamantly straight, others kinking and summing up one another as they clamber above our point of view. Facing us at the canvas’ center, a spiraling tuft of denser greens – a lone bush – hugs the ground just before the earth slips suddenly away to a distant sea. In terms of technique, the fleet brushstrokes and vivid hues are quite beautiful; but formally they are absolutely gripping in their continuous measuring of intervals – the fast recessions, adamant swellings, and anchoring details –that characterize each element.

Contradictions abound in her paintings, just as in life, so that the greens surrounding sheep and horses acquire at some points the vacancy of air and at others the earthiness of the ground plane. These are moments in the cohering perceptions of the artist, who proceeds not as an illustrator (a compiler, in believable but stylistically evocative fashion, of details we already know) but as an adventurer in form (a synthesizer of nature’s innate paradoxes.)

Throughout Tibor’s selection of paintings, one senses a luminous reserve – a private temperament joyfully submitting to an exacting task. We’re rewarded with extraordinary evocations of the observed: the pert attitude of a horse, its tilting head framed as if in a snapshot in the coursing diagonals of foreground and distant hills in “Young Brown Horse with White Feet.” (The exuberant rigor of this small, undated canvas makes it a highlight of the show.) Or, the orchestration of the forms of man, trees, and dog – sweeping, holding, then sweeping again – through a taut composition of “Man and Mishka, Skowhegan” (1976).

Viewers of a literalistic bent may be disappointed by Matthiasdottir’s disinterest in detailed, sculptural modeling. But detailed description in itself was never a determinant of great art. What distinguishes Titian or Rembrandt is a gravity and economy of depiction that makes detail count; one arrives at the extended hand or tightened lip as the denouement of larger, scale-setting gestures. Matthiasdottir may not achieve the rhythmic intensity of detail of these masters – but then, who has in the last century of art? As with Matisse’s work, one finds in Matthiasdottir’s an acute intelligence about painting, as well as humility in its pursuit. I experience it as the drive to live the language of painting, rather than to comment on its processes and cultural implications.

The medium of words, as always, is inadequate to this language, but consider the remarkable coalescence of inventions that is “Two Horses in a Landscape” (undated). This medium-sized canvas unfolds as a meditation on paired objects. Two sturdy horses occupy a field of humming greens, whose contour firmly reserves them to the foreground; twin cabins nestle among hills beyond; way above, a pair of clouds, at once distant and immediate, hover in the ultramarine vacuum of sky. Within this luminous journey, the sheen on the horses’ flanks, and the stretching of their necks to graze, become wondrously necessary moments – arresting insights within the expanding movements of a complete world. There’s no better testimony today to the unique, fluid intersection of observation and re-creation that is painting.

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June 12-July 25, 2003

Everyone knows the story: after World War II, the newly dominant United States brought to the world’s attention a new kind of art. The new painting was one of wide spaces and practical purposes. It reflected a plain-speaking individualism and a belief in social mobility and self-reliance. It rejected the stagnating tastes and hierarchies of the old order, and it prevailed because of its originality and forcefulness.

Right?

Actually, extraordinary as the New York School was, one ought to be a little wary of any account so flattering to our sense of national destiny. A truer history would also examine the mechanisms by which modern artists move from obscurity into the public’s imagination (noting, for instance, Clement Greenberg’s influential arguments about painting’s necessary evolution). It would also include accounts of other vital, contemporaneous movements.

The Jane Street Gallery: Celebrating New York’s First Artist Cooperative, at Tibor de Nagy through July 23, presents one such movement, and there’s enough compelling painting here to make one wish for more. All twenty of the paintings here were at one point exhibited in the Jane Street Gallery, a cooperative gallery whose membership varied slightly over the years but seems to have hovered at around eight to ten members, each of whom paid $5 monthly dues. (Ah, 1940s rents!) The gallery operated only from 1943 to 1949, the same years that Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were finding their mature styles. Most of the Jane Street artists were then only in their twenties-a fact all the more startling when one considers how fully-formed their work seems to be. Overall the selection at Tibor is strikingly confident in its philosophy of attack. Instead of the cathartic, autobiographical approach of their elder colleagues-the demonstrative process, the explicit brushwork-the Jane Street artists looked for discoveries within existing idioms. Many had studied with Hans Hofmann, and they sought to extend rather than overthrow the School of Paris. Not surprisingly, more often than the Abstract Expressionists the Jane Street artists show the virtues of the French School-and these lay not just in style and charm, but in a discipline of internal rhythms that bespoke its own kind of energy and courage.

After its first couple of years, changes in the gallery membership led to the dominance by artists pursuing pure geometric abstraction. Leland Bell (1922-1991), Nell Blaine (1922-96), and Albert Kresch (b. 1922) were particularly enamored of Arp and Mondrian, and the influence is apparent in all their work at Tibor. In every case, however, the impulses of forms and colors have the energy of personal discovery. In Bell’s small gouache Abstraction (II), 1942-45, a core of angling forms throws up two masses of concentric loops whose curves kink and chase each other in terse play; inside, succinct patches of pure cobalt, pale yellow, and a mild sienna pin down locations in a kind of expectant disequilibrium. The jostling, overlapping planes of Blaine’s oil painting Abstraction, 1948, suggest a tilted landscape, or perhaps a river pushing along resistant boulders; their colors-sturdy whites, a charged orange, a reserved blue, a static raw sienna-pile and slip against the flow. Kresch, the only artist here represented by both abstract and overtly representational work, employs unnaturally intense hues of cadmium red, yellow, and deep bluish blacks to boldly describe the natural plunges in space in Rockport Sea Wall, (1948).

No less geometric in style, three abstract paintings by Judith Rothschild (1921-93) are somewhat less intractable in their tensions; along with its more rounding rhythms, the Cubistic planes of Mechanical Personnages, 1945, recall a better-behaved Picasso. Rough depictions of figures in interiors in two oil paintings by Louisa Matthiasdottir (1917-2001) suggest at first an innocence of attack, but the keenness of light-with intense colors somehow communicating exact degrees of shadow-and the vigorous spatial placement of forms reveal a forceful temperament, balanced calmly at the crux between abstraction and representation.

The four paintings here by Larry Rivers (1923-2002) will surprise gallery-goers familiar with only his proto-Pop works. All these skillful works have a fluency (if sometimes a glibness) of style; three suggest rusticated Bonnard, while the last, an interior with still life, has the looping arabesque that might remind one a little of Braque were its coloration a little less equivocal. Rounding out the exhibition are single, lyrical paintings by Hyde Solomon (1911-82) and Ida Fischer (1883-1956).

Installed in Tibor’s smaller exhibition space are ten paintings, watercolors and drawings of the painter Jean Hélion, a leader of Abstraction-Création whose work particularly influenced Bell, Blaine, and Kresch. These works dating from 1937 to 1951 record the French artist’s gradual move in the 40s from crisp abstraction to a robustly modeled realism. To my eye, Hélion’s early abstractions are among the very few to rival the sensuous rigor of interval of a Mondrian or Arp, and here, in an untitled oil painting from 1943, Hélion neatly applies this energy to a portrait; in this stylized world of calibrated color planes, a necktie struggles to emerge from overlapping gray and white garments with unstoppable plastic force, while the subtle weights of hues capture, palpably, the space under a projecting hat brim. (Trifling stuff, with much of Europe then in flames? Hélion found different venues for recording his personal experiences: his paintings express the life of everyday objects, his published memoir recounts his service in the French army and escape from a Nazi prison camp.)

Hélion’s work forms a fitting afterword for The Jane Street Gallery, because his example inspired the gradual but permanent shift of Bell, Blaine, and Kresch toward representational painting in the gallery’s last years. Like Hélion, all carried the formal vitality of their abstractions into their more realistic work, but the shift may well have made the new paintings less interesting to critics. Clement Greenberg had previously singled out Blaine’s abstract paintings in group shows elsewhere, and in 1947 he described the Jane Street artists as “ambitious and serious” and “uncompromisingly determined to prolong and widen the path marked out by Matisse, the cubists, Arp, and Mondrian.” But to my knowledge, his only mention of the figurative work of any the artists here was a rave review of River’s 1949 exhibition (quoted in the excellent exhibition catalogue essay by curator Jennifer Samet). Other Jane Street artists found themselves in an ironic position: having wholeheartedly embraced abstraction before many of the Abstract Expressionists, they had turned away from it just as it was gaining critical favor.

History records that the sole Jane Street artist to gain celebrity status was Rivers, an artist best remembered today, ironically enough, as a progenitor of Pop art-the very movement whose genericizing detachment was scorned by Greenberg (and welcomed by others as an antidote to Abstract-Expressionism’s autobiographical angst.) Pop art was to bring figuration back into the limelight, but in an entirely new guise. One need only compare Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, 1962, to Hélion’s untitled portrait at Tibor to appreciate how fully the tradition of formal composition had slipped from critical attention.

Most of the Jane Street artists remained lifelong friends. The catalogue records the words of the lone surviving member, Albert Kresch, who aptly sums up their youthful venture and their view of the Abstract Expressionists:

“They felt they had invented something new, that easel painting had changed with New York artists…And in a way, we felt that what we were doing was more difficult, because we were trying to interrogate reality, and what we saw, and the visual. They were in the first ecstasies of success and triumph and we just didn’t agree.”

Much credit is due to Ms. Samet and Tibor de Nagy for illuminating an intriguing and too-little known episode of our own history. It’s a vivid reminder that good painting, whatever its incarnation, is always a matter of independent perception and spirit.

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