David Cohen
Here are two memories of Thomas Nozkowski, picked at random from so many that remain vivid of this larger than life yet eminently down to earth man, epitomizing what exhilarating fun he made it to share for a moment in his aesthetic adventures. In 2003, I curated a retrospective of his drawings at the New York Studio School, the first in New York. I say curated, but as I went off to Europe in the preceding summer, after instigating the project, I returned to find that Tom had, impatiently, made a final selection of his own accord. I was, however, given carte blanche in the installation. Conscious of the age and delicacy of some of these works, I researched just how many lumens we could allow in the gallery. The only direction on the hang, besides a judicious last-minute exclusion, was to turn the lights up full blast. The eager-beaver curator tried to explain what he knew of the science, but Tom insisted the only thing that mattered was that they looked good to those who came to see them. “Let ‘em fry!” he exclaimed.

Years later, when I was selecting a show at a commercial gallery inspired by cinema, Tom enthusiastically – but with a promise of discretion – shared his ongoing catalogue of art in movies. With a reach and perspective that would have impressed any iconologist in its multifacetedness, Tom compiled extensive lists of artists as characters, preexisting artworks by known artists that make screen appearances, artworks made for films, and many other permutations. I begged him to allow me to publish it, but he couldn’t let it go to press so long as the research was ongoing—a lifelong pursuit.

Editing these tributes and reminiscences from a cross-section of artists, scholars and friends – again, a sampling – has the humbling effect of making clear that everyone else privileged to come into his orbit felt uniquely special, a confidant of his avuncular bonhomie and encyclopedic knowledge, and of the candor and curiosity he felt about his own artistic inquiries. His wit was kind and merciless in a single instance. He was democratic in that anyone could be included in the conversation and hierarchical in really caring about what was best, what was dispensable. Indifferent towards established canons of high and low, he was fastidious in the sense of quality.

For me, he was a paramount example of an artist who could go against the grain, but do so without rancor, and indeed be an exemplar of community even with a mainstream he might reject. This is what he was as a person and an artist—a maverick who was also a mensch.

Karen Wilkin
I knew Thomas Nozkowski’s work before I knew Tom. I was fascinated by those mysterious, small but commanding works that seemed to be about something very specific but impossible to pin down. I loved the range of paint applications, the delicacy of the incidents, and the surprising color. I’m still haunted by a work from the first Nozkowski exhibition I saw – at Max Protech Gallery about 1990. A wavy edged white shape, like a saddle made of curly sheepskin, hovered against a pale brushy ground. The image was odd, beautifully constructed, and both exquisitely and roughly painted. It was also ferociously intelligent, funny, and, as it turns out, unforgettable. When I got to know the author of this oddball image, I discovered that he shared many of the painting’s qualities, plus irresistible charm. Like the painting, he could seem deceptively off hand, someone who took his work very seriously indeed but didn’t take himself all that seriously. His comments about art were seasoned with throwaway lines like “Why two, if one will do?” and something about oil paint’s being “the queen” of materials.

It was clear that Tom’s elusive works were simultaneously discoveries that emerged from the act of making and distillations of experience. The sense of discovery made repeated motifs seem fresh and newly invented each time. There were loose family resemblances among groups of paintings – shared memories of the grid, repeated structures or background patterns – but color was always arresting and every configuration seemed unprecedented and indescribable: hors catégorie, like the steepest routes in bicycle races. I discovered that the underlying experience that, at some level, provoked the image could range from things glimpsed to things read, and much, much more. Tom made powerful images “about” arcane books on science and walks through the city. No wonder those enigmatic paintings seemed so specific and at the same time, unnameable. They were specific, just unidentifiable by us ordinary mortals. (I recall Tom’s saying that sometimes he found himself unable to remember exactly what had triggered a particular configuration, but if it still seemed resonant, he could use it.)

A few years ago, I invited Tom and Joyce to be visiting critics at Triangle Artists’ Workshop, an intense program of art making and discussion for international artists, held that summer in upstate New York, within striking distance but still a healthy drive from the Nozkowski-Robins home in High Falls. The pair generously spent the day with 20 or so artists from about half a dozen countries – a high point of the session, the artists said – and joined the gang for a fairly raucous dinner. We had offered Tom and Joyce accommodations after their strenuous day in the studios, but they insisted on returning home that night, as I knew they often did after New York openings. “We like driving,” Tom said. If those long nocturnal trips stimulated paintings, we are all the beneficiaries of his stamina behind the wheel.

Many students have told me how much they admired Tom’s work, but few seem to have responded to it directly. They’re wise not to try. Tom’s astonishing images could only have been made by someone with a mind as well-furnished as his, informed by his particular experience, and open to the possibilities suggested by his apparently limitless ways of putting on paint. Of great mathematics, the mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote: “There is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.” That’s a perfect description of Thomas Nozkowski’s art.

Marjorie Welish
A rare artisanal talent, Thomas Nozkowski developed an image, an image in the true sense of that word. What emerged in canvas after canvas, time after time, was no mere thing but rather entirely more strenuously inventive, as the object became a lapidary form through metamorphosis, in a practice spanning a half century. Very few artists can match that imaginative embodiment.

Robert Storr
Thomas Nozkowski was a wickedly intelligent man and an unrivaled painterly lyricist. The intelligence was natural and unpretentious. He read a lot and developed an astonishingly broad albeit usually understated frame of reference, which made it a delight to match wits with him when everyone else around seemed bent on showing off their readymade erudition. And in a period when many of his peers – though when it came to art itself he had precious few – favored arcane discourses with all their labored jargon he trusted in the American vernacular, a preference doubtless enriched by his consumption of detective stories and films noirs, passions we shared.

As a painter he was the ultimate come-from-behind kid, the day-job-wife-and-family man who paid for all his time in the studio by being his own patron. That job, which consisted of being a layout artist for Mad magazine, made him wary lest the art world ascribe his fanciful caprices for an extension of the house aesthetic. Or so I inferred. Nevertheless, I recall walking across town from MoMA to meet him at his office for lunch and it struck me as entirely natural that those two institutions should exist at the same urban latitude – you know, Low and High – with Tom alert and at home in both. In any event, he need not have feared that the discursive arabesques of his own painting and drawing would be explained away as “mere” cartooning, and worse as a stylistic off-shoot of the perpetually smart-aleck Mad manner: they were nothing of the kind.

Slow, steady maturation of an incrementally improvised, manifestly unprogramatic image was their essence. Working on smallish panels of several standard proportions, and frequently starting with nothing more than an ambiguous ground tone and an amorphous shape, Tom followed the organic growth and mutation of his intricate patterns, eccentric configurations and, by turns, exquisitely subtle and surprisingly bold polychromatic palette. The consistency of his method opened out to stunningly various pictorial vistas contained within irresistibly intimate formats. Looking at his paintings slows the clock and sharpens the eye and mind while massaging, tickling and pinching the haptic synapses. In the old days one might have called Nozkowski a “little master” but his scope was wide, his view long and his faith in his own ultimately immodest gifts was that huge: in short that of a master – period. Of how many contemporary artists can it be said that he or she never bored me or took my engagement for granted? Not many, but Tom was certainly one.

Joseph Masheck
As editor-in-chief of Artforum in the late ‘70s, I was pushing for painting, especially abstract painting, despite the political incorrectness of that. I also hated the art-commerce developing as philistine businessmen discovered art as a new continent for unregulated insider trading, so it was great to discover Tom’s work in shows at the artists’ coop 55 Mercer Street. In the ‘80s I wrote articles in three art magazines on Nozkowski, and curated a show of early drawings at Nature Morte (1983).

The essays were agonizing to write because, I now see, they reflect the kind of freewheeling conversations we had that depended on analogy: how one topic turned by analogy into another. That was all the more exciting because our respective analogies came from different stocks of experience as well as reading. There could be hearty disagreement, too, though Tom was not a dialectical kind of guy. His wide reading is legendary; but politically, his shockingly normal, art-world liberal line might have come out of The Whig Interpretation of History. Once he said that the greatest philosopher was Thomas Paine. Come on, Tom! No wonder why in one of my articles he reminded me of Santayana on Emerson: “There was a great catholicity in his reading . . . But he read transcendentally, not historically, to find what he himself felt, not what others might have felt before him” (Artforum, May 1981).

Now I have to think: maybe being so undialectical—stubborn!—kept the big bear calm and jolly. (Tom, I knew you would like a little roast, like an Irish wake. Oh, Tom . . .)

Jonathan Lasker
I don’t know what brought me to 55 Mercer Street Gallery in the Fall of 1979, but upon entering the gallery I felt that I had stumbled upon a wonderland of everything which I was hoping to see in painting, at that time. I remember increasing delight as I went from one picture to another. Upon leaving the gallery, I muttered to the guy sitting at the front desk that I thought this was a really great show. Of course, I was speaking to none other than Tom himself, who took my compliment for his exhibition with boyish delight. After that Tom and I traded studio visits and a long friendship began. Nonetheless, with each ensuing show by Tom, that feeling of being in a painting wonderland was always there. The feeling of “how did he think this up” and what will the next picture be like. It is very sad that Tom can no longer provide us with this expectation of wonder. Rest well Tom.

Merlin James
I tracked Tom down as soon as I got to New York. He’d stood for something, in my mind, since I was a student in London in the early ‘80s. A British painter, Garth Lewis, had introduced me to the work, via thin catalogues, a few slides and black and white reproductions. Somehow I ‘got it’, perhaps all the more intensely because of the sparseness of information. I got how this apparent modesty – of scale, productivity, pictorial proposition – was a Trojan horse for the greatest possible artistic ambition. I loved visiting Tom and Joyce at the ex-synagogue on Hester Street, eating and talking, listening to music, always aware of Tom’s easel standing a few yards away. Sometimes he’d take me over to look at the current painting. For me, Tom was among a very select band who at any one time keep painting alive.

James Hyde
I first met Tom at the artist cooperative gallery 55 Mercer. It was in the early eighties—the time of big heavy abstract work by the likes of Brice Marden and Richard Serra, as well as the bombast of Neo-Expressionism. While I really enjoyed meeting Tom and Joyce Robins, his paintings merely intrigued. Tom has made a point about the size of his paintings being a political choice. Small paintings, he argued, allowed people to have them in their homes and didn’t require support from big collectors and institutions. There’s an additional, subtle ethical point as well: Since small works don’t force, they at first must interest, then persuade.  Patience and observation are their essential values. Over the subsequent years Tom’s paintings persuaded and rewarded whenever I had the opportunity to see them.  So much so that when a painting from the year of the 55 Mercer show came up at auction, I stretched the budget and now have the pleasure of seeing it daily. Its cryptic shapes provide a Rubik’s Cube of associations, and with the colors alternating between murk and glow, the painting keeps surprising.

Coming out of concrete abstraction I‘ve considered the painting panel to be as evocative as what gets painted of the surface. Some years ago, I was explaining to a group of people that my paintings weren’t sculptural so much as “panel intensive”. Tom, who was there, didn’t miss a beat—“does that mean the paintings are surface-challenged?” It was classic Nozkowski – perfect timing, off kilter and a brilliant turn of phrase. And it was damn funny—funny enough to stick. I took Tom’s offhand remark as an imperative to up my surface game.

I have plenty of company in my enthusiasm for Tom’s paintings. He is legend in art schools and a touchstone for painters. Abstract paintings look different today than in the early eighties. While some are larger, splashier and flashier than Tom’s, it’s hard to find an abstract painting today that doesn’t bear some trace of Thomas Nozkowski’s painting DNA.

Raphael Rubinstein
That a painting is modest in size does not mean that it is modest in ambition—this is one of the many valuable things that Thomas Nozkowski had to tell us. In fact, Tom’s decision at the end of the 1970s to scale down his paintings may count as the most radical and influential aspect of his work, which offered a quiet but firm reproach to ego-driven or market-driven gigantism, and asserted intimacy as a supreme virtue. His downsizing was fundamentally ethical: he wanted to make paintings, as he said, that could never end up in bank lobbies.

The importance of scale in Tom’s work became clear to me in 2013 when I was curating an exhibition for Cheim & Read Gallery (“Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s”). Tom was among the 15 artists I included in the show, each of whom would be represented by a single painting. I was happy to find that Tom’s New York gallery had several great 1980s paintings that could be borrowed for the show. Two in particular interested me. In my discussions with the gallery, the director encouraged me to take both paintings, and for a while that was my plan. After all, I thought, having two paintings instead of one would convey a fuller sense of Tom’s work, and since they were the smallest works in the show—which included a number of very large canvases—it seemed only fair to give the artist a little more wall space.  It was only late in the process, as I was planning out the installation, that it came to me: there must be only one Nozkowski painting in the show! It was crucial that I treat Tom exactly the way I was approaching the other artists; one work per artist, regardless of size. I understood that to include two of his paintings would be a betrayal of his work, an insult to his decades of insistence that a 16-by-20-inch painting could be just as great, just as important, as one measuring 16 by 20 feet.  In an era when the cost of over-consumption is becoming tragically clear, when spectacle continues its prolonged, asphyxiating stranglehold on our culture, we need to listen more than ever Tom Nozkowski’s plea for the beauty and power of small things.

Valerie Jaudon
Thomas Nozkowski was a key artist in the Conceptual Abstraction exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1991, and a prescient figure for today’s abstract painting. Tom’s insistence on working at an easel painting scale created a deliberative arena for his extraordinary art making process. With his uncommonly prolific visual vocabulary and acute historical memory he was able to work freely and consciously, with a sense of contemplative and well-ordered spontaneity. Although his drawing and painting method had much in common with surrealist automatic writing, he was able to direct that spontaneity with considered invention, and to work instinctively and surely without the burden of the abstract expressionists’ often heavy-handed autographic gesture. Tom was a model for contemporary abstraction, but paradoxically one who could not really be imitated.

Catherine Murphy
I’m always puzzled when Thomas Nozskowski is referred to as a modest painter. From my first introduction to his work, his ambition and radical aspirations made me pay the utmost attention. The paintings are intentionally not huge. I’ve always thought that they were brain size, taken directly into the brain. His argument, was, for one thing, that the size was political: They are to be contemplated, put in a house, lived with. Early on, Tom put his neck on the block and when few dared, said paintings should be about the experience of living: Looking, thinking, remembering, learning. plans and games, things we love and things we hate. His work is a joyful complication, a life examined and translated into beautiful painting, food for my aching psyche.

Jennifer Riley
I teach visual studies to graduate students in architecture. Introducing them to abstraction, I guide them through some of the usual suspects of early modernism, up to Ellsworth Kelly, where it’s possible to show one way to arrive at an abstracted reality. Then I expose them to Tom’s work, among others. To my mind, Thomas Nozkowski represents one of the most approachable examples of a contemporary artist working from found forms, shapes or patterns, culled from myriad sources of nature and culture alike, which he morphed and transformed into images with his deft use of color, light, line, and atmosphere. These evocative paintings are at once deliberate and effortless, joyful and serious, specific and open-ended.

In my own practice when I’m chewing on a problem, I look at artworks to tune into a mindset of possibility. I will miss seeing Tom’s new works, as it had become routine to look at Tom’s work that reminds me not to be too serious, but to be deeply serious. To pay attention to the world, but to keep things utterly personal and yet avoid sentimentality. To unquestionably use the richness of any painterly approach or convention and then perhaps when necessary- simply subvert them.

I am not alone in feeling the gravity of this loss to our painting culture. Thankfully, there is John Yau’s very fine, recent monograph from Lund Humphries. With typical generosity, Tom inscribed my copy with words of ‘painterly’ solidarity and optimism along with a witty line drawing. A gesture, I’m sure, to which many fellow painters and friends were treated.

Sally Saul
The first time Peter [Saul] and I visited Tom and Joyce’s home in High Falls, there was a sumptuous Indian meal spread buffet style on the dining table, and a lively grouping of artists and writers clustered around the table and adjoining rooms, as well as art new to us that demanded the viewer’s attention, books and interesting objects. We were so surprised and grateful to realize our life on the other side of the river was not so isolated and remote as we thought. Tom’s openness, generosity, curiosity, and easy sharing of his knowledge and interests always generated conversation, a give and take. He recommended books, and art shows, movies and music. One time he gave Peter a disc of Jim Leonard playing the Super Saw which is still one of his favorites, the whistling sound floats through the studio. We will miss him greatly.\

Suzanne Joelson
Tom counted. His book of daily expenses and conversations was a record James Comey might admire. He knew the names of things, and their histories. One day the artist Mike Metz stopped by after a meeting at Chess records and repeated one of Marshall Chess’ stories about the early days in Chicago. Tom disputed it and found documentation to justify his version.

Tom played favorites. An evening could be spent debating a list of favorite visual artists, or filmmakers, Howard Hawk/John Ford, musicians, architects. He wondered “why Plecnik wasn’t in Moma’s “Toward a Concrete Utopia?” and then showed me favorite details from their four Plecnik monographs. His information seemed endless. What he did not know, Joyce did. And we – that is Gary Stephan and I—would invariably leave their house with a book and a list of new things to buy, research, remember.

When we hiked Tom knew the history, the legal disputes and former uses of the land. He could find the remnants of berry shacks and stone cellars, where discarded vehicles interrupted the reclaimed territory. He went on to map many of the lesser known trails which were published in the “Friends of the Shawangunks” newsletter.

At the end of one of our first day long hikes, Tom stunned me by asking, “What was your favorite part?” I had imagined the experience as a narrative, a layering of sensations and ideas, and had no answer.

Tom devoured information. In his paintings, those ways of knowing rubbed up against each other until the friction ignited an aberration. Maybe his paintings were a respite from counting and naming.  With brush or pencil in hand he could loosen his grip on how he knew the world. In the studio, he suspended judgment. Edges tangled, categories lapped, and a different discernment entered.

Then we gather at a Nozkowski opening. Each rectangle is a different subjective map and instead of my usual ways of considering art, I ask friends, “Which is your favorite?”

Harry Roseman
Thomas Nozkowski was a painter, a wonderful painter. My relationship with Tom spanned decades. It was during the last two and a half years, that, to me, something had shifted. I felt he was letting us all know that he wanted to live his life when possible, as usual, and that he wanted to be as productive as he could. If he referred to how he felt it was mentioned almost as a slight inconvenience. It was somewhere between a stiff upper lip and a particular pleasure in situations and in the people he was sharing this time with. I also know it became difficult for him to work as much as he would have liked. It was a privilege to see such courage as well as heartbreaking to see such a love of living. One thing I wasn’t expecting was seeing some of the paintings he did during this time. They are spectacular. Tom squeezed every last bit of life that was possible to have as it became available in smaller and smaller portions. Shorter, I should say, not smaller.

John Yau
All during the time that I was writing my monograph on him, Tom never complained about what he was going through. A few days before he died, he sent me an email telling me there had been a “glitch in his treatment,” and that he had spent the weekend in the hospital getting blood transfusions, but that there was nothing to worry about, and then thanked me for the DVD of Kaili Blues (2016), directed by Bi Gan, that I had sent to him and Joyce. The rest of the email was about where I could download the films of Mikio Naruse for free, and other related stuff. Tom wore his enthusiasm on his sleeve right up to the end. He spent part of one dinner recounting to John Ashbery, who was no slouch when it came to film, the plots of little-known movies directed by Gregory La Cava and later sent John DVDs of La Cava films that he had not seen. Tom seemed to have seen every film he ever talked about at least twice.  I have piles of books, DVDs, and lists of films he sent me. He was always excitedly pointing me towards something to read or see. I cannot imagine that I will ever go a day without remembering something he said to me.

David Goerk
In 2015, Thomas Nozkowski and I visited Ruth Root’s exhibition of new paintings at Andrew Kreps gallery. Tom was familiar with the artist’s work and obviously intrigued by the new paintings. He signed the guest book as he always did and picked up a catalogue of her artist-in-residence exhibition from the previous year. Tom flipped through the publication, studying each page, and as we were leaving the gallery he mentioned that he liked the new work. After a pause, he asked me if I had ever seen her smoking paintings. I hadn’t. Tom took a certain delight in explaining how Root’s smoking paintings appeared to be taking a much-needed cigarette break, as if being a painting was a difficult job and hanging on a gallery wall all day required some downtime. Tom was truly amused by this notion, he related and really loved the idea.

Whenever Tom visited the city to see exhibitions, he had a checklist in his pocket of exhibitions he wanted to see. He studied the list and proceeded to see as many of the shows as the day allowed. When I had time, I joined him on these gallery outings, appreciating his company and insights – every chance I had to look at art with Tom was special. Sometimes he pointed out a particular moment within an artwork or walked over to see what I was drawn to, other times he slowly circumnavigated the gallery on his own. As we finished up at one gallery and moved on to our next destination, we always discussed a story or observation connected to what we had just seen.

When Tom and I spoke, which was often, he never failed to ask me how I was doing before we discussed the business of the day. The sound of his voice, familiar and reassuring, was that of a teacher. His excitement and enthusiasm inspired, no matter the subject. I had the tremendous pleasure and honor of working with Tom for many years and have never known anyone as generous, genuine or knowledgeable.
[Editor’s Note: Mr. Goerk, a painter, was a director at Pace Gallery assigned to look after Thomas Nozkowski.

Alain Kirili
Tom was a dear friend to me and Ariane, and we were able to see many of his shows, including one of his last, at Art Omi in Gent, NY, last year. Despite his great and encyclopedic love of music, including jazz, Tom was not especially familiar with Free Improvisation, the genre of jazz that for many years my wife and I have featured in presentations in our Tribeca loft. But when I ask him to lend a painting to dialogue with a musical duo, he immediately accepted and had his gallery, Pace, deliver and install the piece. I knew that it would work beautifully. The duo was Michael Attias, saxophone and Mary Halvorson, guitar, and the whole thing was superb! What worked so well was the size of the painting with the two musicians: Tom was such a master at working small and creating dissonances within that restricted size, a combination of skills he shared with the duo. Chamber music, a duo, was a perfect fit with the aesthetic of Thomas Nozkowski! I will never forget that night: He was enchanted and so was our audience. There was a standing ovation. The music and the painting will stay with all of us forever. Merci, Tom.

Peter Saul
I first met Thomas Nozkowski ten years ago when we were both inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a famous artist with a reputation for stubbornly refusing to let any of his pictures be larger than a certain small size. Then, we both served on a jury charged with giving money to young artists and I got to know Tom better. He was so logical and unprejudiced in wanting to reward artists of different styles. Tom stands as an example of how to behave on an art jury: To be fair, give money to the one whose pictures are best, forget the career stuff. I regret very much not getting to know Tom better.

Elizabeth Hazan
For painters who find imagery as we work, Thomas Nozkowski was a master. His forms sing with reminders of pleasure and possibility. Tom had an endless ability to resolve his paintings in new ways. Yet he told me once he had some he put away for as long as ten years until he could figure out how to make them work. At times that’s been an enormous help to keep in mind. Like de Kooning, Nozkowski had a high batting average for words that resonate in artists’ studios.

It might be surprising to know that Tom felt a strong affinity with the late still life paintings of my mother, Jane Freilicher, and he wrote perceptively about her.  Once you see the connections it gives new insight into both artists’ work: her shapes in front of a cityscape evoke how he saw his own figure/ground relationships. Much of what he wrote about her integrity as an artist applies to his own life and work. Tom was asked to give the tribute for her at the American Academy when she died.  He noted that she apparently never wrote an artist’s statement, which he’d been searching for while writing his remarks.  At the dinner afterwards, he leaned over and said, “I think it’s terrific that Jane got as far she did without writing one of those fucking things.”

Peter Schjeldahl
Tom got along more than well with just about everybody, even me. Our tastes differed, as did our politics and, really, whole worldviews. I revered, and still do, his art; but he amiably shrugged off compliments. Our friendship could seem a sort of dance, amazingly pleasurable, through a minefield. Only once that I recall, at the tail end of a tired and emotional summer evening, was there a blowup; and it was over in what, 30 seconds? Less than a minute, capped by one of Tom’s wry little philosophical smiles that as much as said, “The way things are includes wishes that they were otherwise. But hey, we’re alive.” You don’t hear much these days about strength of character, but Tom had that, with kindness backed by confidence. As well, he was free and brave: a dissenting but platonic American. Maybe because I couldn’t make it to the funeral, he isn’t gone for me yet but as if withdrawn for a spell in the studio, actualizing surprises. I won’t say I “loved” him, because I love him still.

Richard Kalina
I, like many others, knew Tom Nozkowski for many years and liked him immensely. How could you not? He was good company, sure of himself but properly modest, low-keyed, generous, kind, smart, hardworking, and of course talented and endlessly inventive. He was also a very droll fellow and, in many ways, that was key to his art. Tom was bemused rather than ironic – intuitively aware of the inherent skew of the world, a master of mining the inherent, subtle, and inevitable discontinuities of form and intent that present themselves to those attuned to them.  As we know, he preferred to work on an intimate scale – the better I believe to inhabit his paintings rather than address them. His drollness enabled him to keep a quizzical distance from the visual pleasures that he was so adept at providing. He worked through a painting rather than at it, on the continual lookout for the animating and sudden loss of traction that sends a work of art skidding to a desired but completely unexpected place. Looking at a Thomas Nozkowski painting elicits an almost neural jolt of surprise and recognition, and I am sure that will be as true 50 years from now as it is today.

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April 9 to May 9, 2015
547 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 242 7727

How can abstract painting develop — and what kind of history can this art form have? Figurative painting proceeds by identifying new subjects, and, also of course, by painting familiar subjects in unfamiliar ways. Obviously non-figurative art cannot develop in an exactly similar way. Kandinsky and Mondrian backed into abstraction by stages, as did Jackson Pollock. And then once abstraction became an ongoing tradition, working in series provided one way of keeping going. Such otherwise diverse figures as Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Mangold develop a composition, rework it until it is exhausted, and then move on. What abstract artists legitimately fear nowadays is falling into a signature style, the repetition of a basic composition in varied colors — Kenneth Noland’s chevrons in various colors would be a good example of that. If abstract art is to transcend mere decoration, it is essential for it to find some deeply imaginative way of developing.

Sometimes an exhibition review must deal with such general questions. The gallery publicity for “Transgressions” cites Bill Jensen’s very numerous inspirations — African tribal art, Chinese poetry and philosophy, Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, and Russian films. And it offers an eloquent description of his surrender to a fascination with process, and his striving to avoid “preconceived outcomes.” The critical question, then, is how these very disparate influences can be synthesized in his paintings. We have the heavy black line drawing of Transgressions (Flesh) (2013), the brilliant colors of the triptych Loom of Origins (2014 – 15), the blood reds of Mountain Tiger-Sky (2013); and the drips and painted hands of Angelico, Angelico (2012-15). And the nearly all black Now I believe it peak (Huangshan Mountain) (2014 – 15). Each of these paintings is splendid — each of them could, I believe, be one work in a strong show. But seeing them together is like seeing a group show of oddly diverse artists.

Jensen is a much admired senior artist. By sticking to his guns at times when abstraction has been beleaguered, he earned our respect — and the right to be boldly experimental. That said, this is the strangest show, by miles, of a famous artist that I have seen in a major gallery. It’s a very daring exhibition, for it’s as if Jensen wants to put everything in his paintings. Up the street from Cheim & Read is Thomas Nozkowski’s show at Pace. Nozkowski is regularly praised (or blamed) for the variety of his compositions, for his refusal ever to adopt a signature style. His pictures are very varied, and yet, a Nozkowski is always identifiable. What, by contrast, I find in Jensen’s show is a boldly promising incoherence. This is why I admire Transformations even as I fail to understand it. But who knows what I’m missing: I have been wrong about ambitious artists before.

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At his opening, I told Thomas Nozkowski that his latest show at Pace Gallery — almost entirely the work of the last year or two despite its amplitude, with densely hung drawings and paintings of different sizes — had the feel less of a commercial gallery show of new work, and more of a kind of scholarly museum exhibition. His jocular response was something along the lines that if institutions aren’t doing it he needed to himself. This seems a good starting point for a discussion about an abstract painter who breathes new life into that most hackneyed and over-used of phrases, the painter’s painter. Why does his phenomenal following among artists barely register with museums, or make much of a dent in the pocketbooks of collectors even? But I’m imposing already with such a leading question. Let me back up and ask my distinguished guests — artists, curators, critics — the same question more circumspectly: what is Nozkowski’s status, and does that status in your opinion do him justice? How do you view this current show: does a close-knit, almost narrative hang serve the work best? What, in your opinion, is the relationship of painting to drawing in his oeuvre? Where does Nozkowski come from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, in terms of influence and impact upon painting culture?

I asked my participants to choose an image from the show they would like reproduced with their submissions. For the record, Marjorie Welish declined to do so, explaining that “I’d truly prefer not to choose one above the rest but instead allow other respondents’ choices to represent the body of works, so that readers are challenged to engage the ideas across the show as a whole.” Alexander Ross chose as his image the installation shot above.  DAVID COHEN

JOSEPH MASHECK: What a beautiful show just to “regard”: it almost seems like self-indulgence to write about it. It was awfully nice of Tom to mention me at his Rob Storr-moderated conversation (with artist James Siena, April 10) because I have to say that it ticks me off when somebody thinks your writing was actually too early for the stage-management of the career. The dealer of the English painter Jeremy Moon [1934-1973] was once doing an exhibit in a vitrine of Moon’s press cuttings but didn’t really want my Studio International article of 1969 because the prematurely dead artist is only now to be rediscovered! Anyway, it’s a matter of disclosure to say that I published on Nozkowski in 1981, 1985, 1988, and 2008, and curated a show at Nature Morte in 1983.

I like the question of this artist’s ambiguity of status: whether we want to elect him a master and kowtow or whether we want him to be like a nice accessible democratic personality in the way John Dewey might have liked, when America aspired to be a leader of democracy (but now that there’s only one game in town …) — which he is. For example: I have a constitutional distaste for “sublimity” as a term of approbation; and confess, by way of illustration, that Serra’s late way of hitting me over the head is distasteful (no wonder “the suits” like it). I think this is a way of saying that, though I would never be prescriptive about scale, the fairly small size of most Nozkowskis is fine with me. In fact, this show — which is better than the last because the drawings don’t seem to be so didactically related to the paintings, as before and after — positively gains by having the drawings be smaller still than the otherwise normal-sized paintings.

As soon as I got acquainted with it, the show made me conscious that I have always had an, I think, interesting problem in my head when it comes to Nozkowski’s sense of “variety,” even though that is also part of a distinct personal style: that is, how like Klee he is in this. I mean, only insofar as we are considering the shape of the overall oeuvre, because Tom isn’t really an expressionist — he is too concerned with what effect the next mark will have on what’s already there. But then again, don’t we all put the Klee slides (if you still have any!) apart until the end of our planned lecture on expressionism, because they have a similar quality? I don’t want to overemphasize this because I don’t want style to be the key thing, but there is a connective strand, I think: (a) a chamber-music scale that is most clearly like one person’s addressing another, or a few (John Russell once said that Schubert would not have understood the idea of a concert in a “hall full of fee-paying strangers”); and (b) a funny way of admitting constructive ideas if they can be sort of “melted” into the DIY orthodox-expressionist mix.

I didn’t mean to use up three paragraphs in generalities, because always I love the “object” of painting, especially when it’s as good as we have here.

DAVID BRODY: I’m going to reach a little here and say, about Tom Nozkowski’s consistently excellent body of work, that there’s something distinctively American about it: the matter-of-factness, the nakedness of the process, the humble sources of ecstatic revelation — I’m thinking of the lineage of Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield and Mitlon Avery, and also more broadly of Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Agnes Martin, Agnes Pelton and Al Held. All these visionary modernists share a quasi-religious drive for simplicity, which seeks the small in the large and the large in the small. What makes them especially American is their skepticism about systems of belief, their rejection of received rules, their yeoman/DIY empiricism, and the courage to entertain naïveté.

Nozkowski embodies this tradition for me in abstract paintings that are far too smart to get caught up in nostalgia about any of that. If he lets “nature” into the work, it’s just another sign along a country road crowded with billboards. Or the billboards might be crumbling relics, their diagrams and ideology overtaken by kudzu. On top of this caricatural grip on semiology, in which all signs are equal, Nozkowski’s practice lays on a second nostalgia-proof coating: an anti-masterpiece stance — beginning in a ‘60s ideological context, as he has explained, of modest paintings suitable for his friends’ tenement apartments and continuing with a scorn for laboriousness, in favor of daily production. Add to that the way he interbreeds motifs and techniques from work to work, and from year to year almost serialistically — painterly abstraction absorbing the spirit, while expunging the letter, of Sol Lewitt.

The sheer profusion of Nozkowski’s enormous output of paintings, drawings, and prints (the prints should ideally be shown alongside!) can even put one in mind of the neutrality of Richard Tuttle or John Baldessari: one thing next to another. The distance between the good, the bad, and the ugly of Nozkowski is a hair’s breadth — ironically, as a result of his nearly perfect pitch and his superb craftsmanship, but also by the design of his disdain for the great, the anxious, the impossible work.

Sometimes this bothers me. Does one ever NOT like a Nozkowski? Is his color ever less than completely digestible? (All painters should have this problem.) Take two of my least favorite paintings in the show, Untitled (9-32) and Untitled (L-38). The first is a little too delightfully Mattissian, and the second feels like bubble gum that Nozkowski could chew in his sleep. They are both still really beautiful and interesting paintings. They might be the best in the show, just for the way they irritate me. The painting I’d pick as my favorite, though, is Untitled (L-37) which seems to combine Turner, Klee and Burchfield — talk about nostalgia. How did we get here?

When I think about Nozkowski’s long employment at Mad Magazine, and the crucial disruption of generations of young minds accomplished by that lonely bastion of unhinged cartooning — it’s as if the universe, out of curiosity, placed a perfectly equipped painter-philosopher at ground zero of a cultural explosion. Did “being a spy in the house of Mad,” as I asked in my artcritical review of Nozkowski’s 2010 show at Pace, allow him to resist the widespread awe of cartoonists, “as cultural magicians rather than versatile deadline professionals?” Did his workaday knowledge inoculate Nozkowski from the cascading effects of Zap Comix and of Philip Guston’s return to his own cartoon sources, after which the dam of imagistic American painterliness had burst? Similarly, perhaps, Burchfield’s day job as a wallpaper designer made him, if anything, cannily resistant to the seductions of pure patterned abstraction, favored by Theosophically inclined modernists since Mondrian.

ALEXANDER ROSS: Here we are once again engaging with words to further grasp something about what an artist has already shown us directly. There are at least two kinds of knowing; the naming, hashing verbal kind, and the picturing way. So, using the former method I will champion the latter! Nozkowski is an excellent example of the visually intuitive, brain-training kind of artist. By that I mean if you do something over and over again for many decades, even if what you do is leaping this way and that with full faith in intuitive moves and a responsive eye to visual inventiveness, you will establish your own beautifully stubborn neuronal pathways that will lead, perforce, to more of the same. In his case, it is often remarked that there seems to be no end of novelty in his works, and yet they somehow always look like Nozkowskis. And here’s why: there is a naturally occurring restraint located at the edge of what Noskowski would never think of doing, but within which Nozkowski has endless freedom of invention. These paintings and drawings are boundary markers of his uniquely habitual brain ruts. The man simply has the healthy habit of trying to break habits that he will in a larger way always be bound to, and we enjoy his tireless attempts, yet unconsciously sense his natural limits. His awesome contribution is to have achieved a distinguished visual persona solely via the trust placed in the brain’s natural tendency to show itself pictorially when given the means. It is that unashamed directness of showing that gives his works such inherent high quality, and it’s the high quality of the works that, like a least-expected miracle, make a sudden parting of the (mostly) dreadful contemporary art waters and allow for the firm establishment of island Nozkowski. Anachronistic work? Yes, perhaps, in the grand sweep of the buzzing “now”, but no less than other great, out-of-synch actors like Bonnard or Balthus. Strong and solid things do tend to last, I’ve noticed.

MARJORIE WELISH: The informality of the display is the perfect rhetorical complement to certain aspects of Nozkowski’s signature style: not scholarly because more intuitively grouped than would be desired in an explanatory retrospective led through an argument of some kind, this hang found a way to make a commercial gallery into a studio with a sense of process fresh on the walls.

Process here, however, enters in the sense of image always uppermost in Tom’s work for as long as I have known it. If anything, the painterliness of his early images is much less here as than in recent shows: much less impasto and pigmental wet-in-wet stuff on the canvas and rather more in evidence is the drawing — that is to say, design, and with design, a willful undermining or exaggerating error or swagger. The concetto puts good design on notice. Meanwhile, the layering of ground and relation of figure to ground is consistently contrastive, however apparently diverse appear the devices and the color. One of Tom’s strengths has always been that he does indeed understand the nature of an image to be, not an object seen in actuality, but a metamorphosis. He understands that only insofar as metamorphosis of the data has occurred does an image come about.

So knowing something of his generation is quite informative since this knowledge supplies something of an answer concerning Nozkowski’s culture and style. Joseph Masheck really should say something about that, given that as Editor-in-Chief he was instrumental in selecting Tom’s art for the pages of Artforum yet also in selecting some others who are still even now quite compatible stylistically.

As against the art constructs of Minimal or even Postminimal kinds, and certainly as a defense against Conceptual procedures, some artists adhered to a vernacular rendering, at times focusing on image driven through a folkloric or outsider stance, primitivist in nature. Decidedly not bijou, Nozkowski’s canvases early on expressed — can one say espoused? — this sensibility. In any event, this characterization provides some sense of orientation to his personal style and culture.

Other narratives of our contemporary moment would persuade us that art is not personal but impersonal, insofar as aesthetic ideology and/or an ahistorical thesis necessitates art’s coming into being. Further discussion could engage this argument.

JENNIFER RILEY: I have a large capacity for viewing and taking in works made by others, but this show was too big in a great way. I often visit shows I like sometimes two, three, four times, but seldom simply to finish seeing the whole show, as was the case here.

The story of Tom being an insider’s artist who slowly became visible is so well known that the notion of his ambiguous status worries me. I believe its a matter of minutes not decades before we will see or learn of major museum retrospectives. Tom simply occupies a sizable plot in the hearts and minds of the city’s artistic cognoscenti. Everyone wins when the good guy wins.

Tom is highly regarded by many artists because his work sits outside of fashion trends but always feels smart and of the moment. He is a studio worker who sustains a practice that clearly engages and activates his own imagination at full tilt.

I love the inclusion of both types of drawings in this exhibit, suggesting a nonhierarchical regard towards the artist’s output. I find it extremely satisfying to see drawings that inform paintings and vice versa. This offers opportunity to consider an image-group and discover the alternate attitudes of the various approaches.

I’d wager that few of us enjoy reading wall texts and looking at inkjet printouts on a wall yet thankfully from time to time we have an intensely rich, delightfully overhung, complicated show of a fierce and independently-minded individual who happens to be a master colorist, humorist and aesthete all in one.

To consider the question of where Nozkowski comes from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, I immediately go to the beginning of Modern art: Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Leger, Braque, Villon, Klee, Mondrian and on over to America to artists still current and working when Tom was coming up, such as Albert Stadler, Walter Darby Bannard, Paul Feeley but also Nicholas Krushenick among many others. I am not sure of those influences- that is to say, whether or not they were his influences — but I make my own connections and nothing would surprise me more than to find out from Tom who he’s looking at or thinking about now. Recently it was Watteau!

He knows painting culture and art history, and he knows how to engage with it fruitfully. And then there are the comic books, cartoons, Mad Magazine, and graphic design. The variety of imagery that Tom presents only seems rarer today because there has been a narrowing influence — either from the academies (the professionalism of art) or from the marketplace (the speculation on art and artists careers) or both — in gallery exhibitions.

My concern is more for young artists entering the field who have not had time to deepen their initial projects and yet are vacuumed up into the machinery of art. I see a return to very handmade things in some groups of younger artists but I also hear and see a disconnect due to recent decades of de-skilling. Several younger artists have turned away from using technology altogether in their practices and have begun to teach themselves how to draw, paint and sculpt. I find this to be a good thing. Those who work with their hands, not machines or who do not rely on the labor of others to make their work, who don’t care to merely illustrate ideas or curator’s objectives may find Nozkowski to be a perfect role model. Tom’s work however is so much his own that I put him in a category with Cézanne: it is a branch few can walk out on.

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN: Yes, Thomas Nozkowski should be getting serious attention from U.S. museums, and should have gotten it long ago, as should many other New York abstract painters of his generation. I suspect that most of them have all but given up on the hope of full-scale retrospectives (at least in their hometown) and probably would echo Nozkowski’s DIY sentiment. Alas, they are probably right. Despite the market’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for painting (especially, of late, for abstract modes), and despite the expansion of museums in number and size, there has been almost no interest in examining the recent history of New York painting. The only two exceptions that come to mind are “High Times Hard Times,” Katy Siegel’s 2006 exhibition at the National Academy, and my own “Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s,” at Cheim and Read in 2013, which included a work by Nozkowski. Significantly, neither of these historically-themed shows happened in the mainstream museum world.

Putting aside for the moment the question of why Nozkowski and others have been subject to official neglect, let’s turn to the show at hand. The quantity, and the quality of this quantity and, perhaps most importantly, its diversity, come across as a major statement, which is rather surprising for this artist who, as our compère rightly notes, seems to fit nicely into the category of the “painter’s painter.” One of the requirements for being a “painter’s painter” is reticence, developing a style that seems, at least superficially, modest, declining all bombast, and any hint of wanting to make a big art-historical statement. It also helps to paint small. Nozkowski has met these superficial requirements, working at a consistently small scale (which has grown in nearly imperceptible increments over the decades), issuing no explicit challenges in technique or content to the legacy of modernist abstraction, exhibiting no hunger for iconoclasm or transgression. Of course, if one looks at the work more closely, there are all kinds of innovations and transgressions in Nozkowski’s work but they are always subtle and never announce themselves as such.

Nozkowski’s avoidance of high drama can lead viewers to discount his work. I have to confess that, for many years, this was my attitude. I never doubted that he was a “good” painter, one whose paint-handling and ability to create spatially complex compositions were impressive, but I mistakenly equated the small scale and the absence of attitude with lack of art-historical ambition; I was also confused by his unprogrammatic diversity, his sheer self-permissiveness. I believed (again, mistakenly) that an important contemporary painter was one who grappled with difficult contemporary themes, set out to demolish some cherished aspect of the medium, engaged in some Oepidal struggle or otherwise emulated historic avant-gardes.

Eventually, I saw the error of my ways and became, like nearly every artist I know in New York, a Nozkowski fan. As for the scale of his ambition—the current show is dizzyingly audacious. Each painting or work on paper in it could plausibly be the foundation of another artist’s entire career. Every few steps one discovers that the artist has yet again shattered the components of his art and reassembled them in an entirely new configuration. A dark ground gridded with pinhole points of jewel-like colors might give way to a neo-Cubist design of pastel hues and black lines while nearby Matisse’s Blue Nudes join a troupe of daredevil acrobats. Every few steps the kaleidoscope shakes and turns and there’s a new tangle of bifurcating rhizomes, Byzantine mosaics rearranged by some mescaline logic, gossamer textiles, baroque doodles, coral reefs, fractal enlay, star maps, fractured puzzles, Suprematist patches, flowering ornaments of every possible variety. If this show can be said to be about any one thing, it’s the necessity of growth. This has been a long winter, but now, the artist is reminding us, it’s the turn of spring.

CONTRIBUTORS

Joseph Masheck, editor in chief of Artforum from 1977-80 and longstanding contributing editor of Art in America, is the author, most recently, of Texts on (Texts on) Art, 2011. David Brody is a painter and filmmaker who exhibits at Pierogi Gallery as well as a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Alexander Ross is an internationally-exhibited painter who shows at David Nolan Gallery, New York. Marjorie Welish, a poet, painter and art critic, is the author of Signifying Art: Essays on Art After 1960 (1999), among other works. Jennifer Riley is a painter and writer and a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein teaches critical studies at the University of Houston. His numerous publications include, recently, The Miraculous (2014) and a monograph on Shirley Jaffe (2015).

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This “Hub” linking artcritical articles on Thomas Nozkowski by five writers in the last twelve years is re-presented on the occasion of the three-decade survey of his legendary 16 x 20 inch tableau by BravinLee programs at VOLTA, the art fair at Pier 90 next door to the Armory Show, on view in New York City through Sunday March 8.

artcritical writers on Thomas Nozkowski:

Nora Griffin, 2013
David Brody, 2010
David Cohen, 2010
David Cohen, 2008
David Cohen, 2006
David Cohen, 2003
Sherman Sam, 2003
Joe Fyfe, 2003

and Thomas Nozkowski on Jane Freilicher, 2014

More information on the artist can be found at Pace

Full index entry for “Nozkowski” at artcritical

“HUBS” presents artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

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My favorite Freilicher paintings–I wrote about them once–were her extraordinary crosses of still-life and landscape.  It is one thing to turn a still-life into a landscape or even vice versa, but to create an image that maintains the integrity of both genres is something else again.  Jane’s beautiful hand makes it look easy but it is very hard to do. Try it.

The protagonists of these great paintings, a nasturtium and a city, say, or a peony and a salt marsh, have complex relationships. They bob and weave with and against each other, moving gently but with more than a touch of contained conflict. They punch as often as they caress.

These are courageous paintings suggesting that a button of color — a flower or a dab of paint – can make the world shake.

Jane Freilicher is my idea of an artist. Her long career, her endless invention, her intelligence, her attention to the job at hand, her integrity – and all her wonderful paintings, which is what we have left now.

Her luminous color–her exemplary life.

From artcritical’s calendar for December 12, 2014:

Presenting Jane: 90th Birthday Celebration for Jane Freilicher

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Of the various names of beauty we have touched, hozho is the most comprehensive, which we might explain by saying the Navajo way of life is aesthetic at its base. But we also should simply say that beauty is not, for the Navajo, an aesthetic concept: it’s not primarily about the way things appear — though it includes the universe as a whole. It is usually translated into English as “beauty,” though also as “health” or “balance,” “harmony,” “goodness.” It means all of these things and more. It refers above all to the world when it is flourishing; it refers to things we make, which flourish and play a role in the flourishing of other things; and it refers to ourselves, flourishing as makers, as people inhabiting a community that inhabits a world. It is a word for the oneness of all things when they are joined together in a wholesome state.
-Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty, 2004.

At her memorial service earlier this month I found myself thinking about Jennifer Wynne Reeves and hozho, with its implicit moral imperative. It struck me that Jennifer lived, made and wrote in a state of hozho.  Minutes after I had this thought the woman with the guitar started to sing a Navajo song about peace all around us which became a singalong to close the beautiful and elegant service to this woman’s singular life and work. The nearest English equivalent would be to say that Reeves lived a life bathed in Grace.

Reeves anthropomorphizes abstraction in an ultimately humane way, abstracting emotion in the way Pina Bausch does in her choreography. The Garden of Gethsemane (2014), with its off-white picket fence, and its multicolored abstract striped figure, reminds me that in the suburbs no one can hear you scream.

Jonah (2012) has a series of lumps of an Autumn palette forming a figure with wire arms in a gesture of either helplessness or praying — the two go together — facing away from the gaping red maw of a giant fish. It is archetypal in its appropriately named biblical theme.

Place (1997) drives home the impasto and materiality of Reeves’ work that does not show up in reproduction on Facebook, where I became one of her followers and a commenter on the long threads accompanying her art and her writing. I didn’t understand her work well on Facebook – it was over my head – but when I went to the opening of her memorial show at BravinLee and saw it for the first time in all its material glory, it went straight to my heart.

Place has a heavily impastoed cake form in black with white frosting accompanied by equally dimensional blobs in sky blue and sea green stacked into a figure. Kym Ghee, my Facebook friend who met me at the show, said all of her paintings were delicious and edible with something uncomfortable taking place underneath. No painting illuminates this principle more than Place.

Klee and Arp were designated the humorous painters of the time by art critics. I would add Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. But their humor is not lacking in gravity. People err when they think of life as pure tragedy, for they will become melancholics, or of life as pure comedy, for they will become clowns. Life is both tragic and comic at the same time. Reeves shares with these artists a sense of the tragicomic.

Among her contemporaries she belongs with Thomas Nozkowski, Stephen Mueller and Jonathan Lasker to the genre of narrative abstraction. Mueller and Lasker the most: Mueller for his spirituality and early Lasker for his symbolism. Lasker was the Forrest Bess of the TV Generation. Reeves’ work shares this spirituality and symbolism.

Come walk in hozho with the work and writing that Jennifer Wynne Reeves has left behind.

BravinLee programs is at 526 West 26th Street #211, New York City, 212 462 4404

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University Galleries, Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida
February 5 to March 23, 2013

The exhibition was shown in two parts at:
Lesley Heller Workspace
54 Orchard Street
New York City, 212-410 6120

Asya Geisberg Gallery
537B West 23rd Street
New York City, 212-675-7525
April 24 to May 24, 2013

We may one day recall 2013 as The Year That Abstract Painting Came Back. Historical exhibitions have appeared at the Museum of Modern Art (Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925) and the Guggenheim (Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960), as well as Loretta Howard Gallery (DNA: Strands of Abstraction) and Cheim & Read (Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s). The year has also been a notable one for contemporary shows: Paul Behnke at Kathryn Markel, Jennifer Riley at Allegra La Viola, Thomas Nozkowski at Pace, to name a few, with Sharon Louden coming to Morgan Lehman in October. And that’s just considering New York.

Add to this list POUR, an exhibition that showed simultaneously at Asya Geisberg Gallery and Lesley Heller Workspace after originating at Florida Atlantic University. Curated by Elisabeth Condon and Carol Prusa, POUR established that the desire for good abstract form, achievable by way of liquid paint, is a perennial concern. In Chaim Potok’s 1972 book My Name is Asher Lev, abstract painter Jacob Kahn says to Asher, “I think people will paint this way for a thousand years.” We’re well on our way. Moreover, we seem to be doing so having settled a debt to Clement Greenberg. Greenberg goes largely unmentioned in the catalogues, criticism, and conversations surrounding the aforementioned exhibitions. Helen Frankenthaler’s name comes up in the POUR catalogue (this is a show about pouring paint after all), but so does Rubens and Chinese scroll painting. Finally, we can have a show of abstract painting in New York without it turning into a referendum on Greenberg. When someone turns it into one anyway, as John Yau did on behalf of Thomas Nozkowski in his March 2013 review in Hyperallergic, it sounds dated and beside the point. Greenberg has taken his rightful place in the cosmos and we can choose to navigate by his light, or not.

It now seems possible to draw a line from Carrie Moyer’s lesbian activism to her formidable shape-making, and think it only natural. Moyer, who was made a Guggenheim fellow this year, co-founded Dyke Action Machine! in the early ’90s and designed the group’s  agitprop. Her painted images have long combined elements from political posters, Tantra drawings, and a vocabulary of abstraction derived from Morris Louis. The last of these influences has come to predominate her work in recent years, as she keeps experimenting with painting techniques. While plenty of splatters remain on her canvases in the state in which they landed there, Moyer seems to have enlarged certain incidents of gravity and viscosity until they form flat, opaque arcs with the graphic fortitude of industrial signage. For added visual heft, she paints in subtle shadows around the edges of some of these shapes. The total effect is both delicate and arresting.

The “pour,” as presented by Condon and Prusa, takes one of two forms. The first is the revealing pour, the one with which we’re familiar from Jackson Pollock – paint as the manifestation of itself, the literal trail of evidence made by the action of colored liquid on a support. There is a distinctive grid, irregular and rounded, that appears when you tilt a canvas with a dripping swath of paint on it along one axis and then across it. This drip-grid appears in work by both Jackie Saccocio and Carolanna Parlato. Saccoccio, working handsomely in a vein first opened by Jules Olitski, is emptying out otherwise busy abstractions with a high-value, neutral color poured generously into the center.  She uses the drip-grid to integrate the figure and the ground, by breaking up this central shape at the edge and allowing the more saturated colors there to show through. Parlato, in contrast, uses  the drip-grid as a design element. In Drizzle (2009), areas of viridian, fuschia, and scarlet have been given the same treatment, one layer after the next, and she tops them off with a lemon-over-green coat that is itself allowed to drip, locking in a diagonal that composes the canvas. Angelina Gualdoni used an analogous technique to create Opening the Gates (2011), but the paint was tilted every which way, and she dosed the broad, black pathways thus formed with chalky violet while they were still wet. The interpenetration of the two colors results in luminosity.

The other form taken is the hiding pour, in which the force of the falling paint removes evidence of the human hand from the application, leaving the viewer to wonder how the shapes got there. David Reed’s No. 611(2010) is painted in oil and alkyd on polyester, using dripping, squeegeeing, and masking of translucent paint on the slick surface, producing an abstract calligraphy of blue across an elongated six-foot rectangle. Carrie Yamaoka’s works on reflective mylar, coated with colored gloss that has been allowed to pool across the supports’ bending surface, are so limpid and so devoid of evidence of their manufacture that they may as well have come from outer space. Roland Flexner’s moody, diminutive landscapes of liquid graphite form from controlled accidents of surface tension on paper. Their appearance is a wondrous collision of an abstract contact print with a Sung Dynasty forest scene. Ingrid Calame’s Pop-bright whirls and scrapes of enamel on aluminum may look improvised, but in fact are the product of meticulous tracing in the urban environment.

Later in My Name is Asher Lev, Asher and Jacob conclude a satisfying day of painting with a walk on the beach. Gazing at the sea, Jacob remarks, “Sometimes I think all water is blood. It is a strange feeling.” No more about it is said. Among painters, no more would need to be said. But I might elaborate this way: liquidity is vitality. The artists of POUR have made this beautifully clear.

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October 22 to December 4, 2010
510 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 255 4044

In Thomas Nozkowski’s studio, a Socratic dialogue continually unfolds between drawing and painting, which his current show at Pace for the first time puts front and center – or rather, to David Cohen’s vigorous displeasure, side by side.  (See Ground Control to Major Tom: Please re-hang your show.)  For a dissenting view – apropos the hang at least –  please read on.

Cohen is eloquent with praise for the drawings and paintings in themselves, and about that all “besotted consumers” of this terrific body of work will agree.  Each Nozkowski, here and always, is a precise, luminous clearing in the vast wilderness surrounding ideology and formula.  Suspicious of systems, defiant in its modesty, Nozkowski’s might be the model abstraction for our times.  In the current show, Cohen is right to argue that he is at the top of his game, setting off color vibrations in painting after painting like musical tones in resonant chambers.

A 2006 exhibition at BravinLee gave a glimpse of Nozkowski’s terms on paper: they might be that much more imaginative, dangerous and thrilling.  Where the canvasses often rely on narcotic textures and warm, concentric afterglow to settle hostilities between figure and ground, the drawings’ dynamics are, in a way, harder won.  On view at Pace are two new species of works on paper.  Premised on the paintings, they are distinct from the fully independent drawings shown in 2006.  (At first, this dictatorship of premises seems un-Nozkowski-like, but the sustaining paradox of his practice might be exactly this: that the proscription of systems is just another system.)  One new way of working is hung on a wall in the back room in a large array with no weak link.  Each of these oils on paper arose from a forked moment; when an incident that Nozkowski liked on canvas had to go, he rebuilt it, bringing it to fruition in an alternate universe.

The second new practice takes off from the paintings’ conclusions (rather than their momentary confusions).  Using ink and colored pencil on canvas-textured paper, Nozkowski retraces, more or less, the salient formal properties put in play in each oil painting.  It is the provocative hanging of these drawings directly beside their prototypes that so irks Cohen.

What the pairings do is tease out a stereo view of the boundaries between Nozkowski’s linguistic building blocks.  Blobs and polygons change outline, color, texture and proportion, but by and large they retain their topological, and thus their psychological, identity.  Nozkowski translates, for example, the light bulb shape against a vivisected red grid of the painting Untitled (8-117) into the drawing Untitled (N-30) as if rendering a French poem into English.  Nouns and verbs must be rearranged, and idioms reimagined, but basic denotation corresponds.

On canvas, the bulb is surrounded by a dry but painterly gray halo, exquisite in its translucence.  Within, you can see how the fracturing red background lattice evolves from the halo’s blinking internal structure.  In the drawing, Nozkowski knows to knit lattice and halo together from the start, structural revelation taking a backseat to the problem of how to render the halo’s shallow depths with loose cross-hatching.  Cohen finds this sort of contained technical challenge distracting, at odds with Nozkowski’s core values of polymorphous mutation.  Indeed, the bulb-halo-lattice shorthand used here would ordinarily be dangerous, since Nozkowski’s resistant images rarely settle for specificity of that kind, certainly not parody or quotation.  But in this insistent pairing, the drawing intensifies a literal reading by transforming the painting’s vertical red zip of a “filament” into a cartoonishly crumpled, “burnt-out” one.

Allowing a bit more of a view into the psychic sources of his forms is an intriguing gambit for Nozkowski, consistent with his contrarian stance.  Real world subject matter, along with the uncanny animation and diagrammatic potency of the cartoon, do lurk in the least suggestive of these works, as a stratagem against formalist rhetoric.  In this regard, Nozkowski’s long employment as a production manager at the legendary birthplace of stylistic chameleonism in comics, Mad Magazine, is sometimes cautiously mentioned.  However, the spatial puns and hazy, gradient backdrops that typically set off foreground activity in Nozkowski’s work, as in Untitled (8-130) or Untitled (8-137), suggest, if anything, more of an engagement with the metaphysical cartooning of Steinberg and Folon, by way of Klee.  Being a spy in the house of Mad might have left its mark, nevertheless, in workaday exposure to the Usual Gang of Idiots.  Might other painters doing battle with, and by means of, the cartoon, from Joyce Pensato to Caroll Dunham, hold cartoonists more in awe – as cultural magicians rather than versatile deadline professionals?

Art sources of all kinds are grist for Nozkowski’s democratizing mill.  Dunham’s cutout, man-in-the-mountain gunslingers haunt certain geometric profiles, and James Siena seems acknowledged in the circuit-board labyrinth of Untitled (8-123).  Paul Klee, above all, infuses Nozkowski’s soft color grids, which are so charged with poetic voltage that they slowly inflate to cosmic, archetypal scale.  And in Untitled (8-134), among the most heartbreakingly beautiful paintings in the show, buoyant speech balloons assemble into a melancholic monster out of an animation by Hayao Miyazaki.

This riled-up underwater spirit abides in a wet, thin membrane of close values in osmotic equilibrium and chromatic pulsation.  The after-drawing, this time, is purposefully different.  Here we have strong light and shadow, and the speech-balloon creature is radial, rather than bilateral – perhaps in its spore phase.  Life, like Nozkowski’s flourishing studio practice, has many generative strategies.

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October 22 to December 4, 2010
510 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 255 4044

First, the good news.  Thomas Nozkowski’s latest show includes some of his best work to date. There is gorgeous play with scale in these assured, richly colored and diversely textured paintings and drawings.  As usual with Nozkowski, the formal elements are neither gratuitous nor an end in themselves.  One doesn’t have to read his eloquent interviews to get the back story on the 66 year old artist’s anti-formalism, his conviction that art can embrace one’s life and interests and that modesty of size has political as well as stylistic implications.  The energy coming off these works imparts a sense that, in speed of execution and intentionality of composition, they are depictive before they are expressive.  Resolutely non-objective in the way they elude analogical description, they nonetheless feel more like pictures than paintings.

Compare him for a moment with Brice Marden, showing a few blocks south at Matthew Marks.  I’m not looking for a Manichean opposition between these contemporary masters of lyrical abstraction. There is composition in Marden and gesture in Nozkowski, but in Nozkowski you sense that composition occasions various gestures; in Marden it is the other way around.  Again, another caveat: it is not that Nozkowski has an a priori image that the picture merely records.  Clearly, the image evolves in the process of execution.  But an “as if” hangs over every local decision, every stroke and shape, every weight and density, as if Nozkowski were a genre painter or portraitist whose subject has been lost in the process of making, like the wax original in traditional bronze casting.

A Nozkowski has an unmistakable look.  There are motifs and procedures that recur across the decades of his tenacious output.  And yet, each picture is absolutely distinct.  And each new body of work has a quirk that betokens a restless spirit.  He told the British painter Garth Lewis in an interview in the journal Turps Banana, reprinted in Pace’s catalog for his present show, “I actually know how to make a Nozkowski now, and that can be a real trap.”  A trap, that is, in his endeavor to avoid a signature style.

A significant departure in his new work is that he appears to have changed the way he goes about making a drawing.  Hitherto, Nozkowski’s drawings were pretty much Nozkowski at his exercise but on paper rather than board-mounted linen, and with graphic rather than painterly mediums.  There is indeed a group of 18 oil paintings on paper in the back gallery, salon hung in a dense grid to sumptuous effect, that are intermediate alike in scale and in medium-to-support relationship between the paintings and drawings that form the bulk of this exhibition’s display.

The shocker in this show is that Nozkowski has taken to making drawings of his own completed paintings. He explains the new modus operandi to his old friend and collaborator John Yau in an insightful interview in the November issue of the Brooklyn Rail.  The new drawing size, just under nine inches by 10, are left over sheets cut down from pages of an artist’s book he had made.  “The paper is called Magnani Pescia and it takes color like a kiss,” he explains.  “I thought doing a little drawing when the painting was finished might give me a little aesthetic distance, help me understand what I had just done. I quickly discovered it was a great way to cool things down and get the painting out of my head.”  He proceeded to do these drawings for every painting in his new show.

Let me state categorically that, as a besotted consumer of his work, I have absolutely no objection to this.  They are as gorgeous as any other Nozkowskis.  They deliciously raise questions in just the way you’d expect from this mercurial, provocative artist about the nature of his practice, the status of mediums, the ontology of image formation.

Making a graphic work after a painted work is by no means unprecedented.  Most prints, traditionally, come after paintings: Alex Katz has called his prints “the final synthesis” of the painted images they are resolved from.  William Tucker draws his own sculptures as a means to get to know their intuited formal structure.

But making is one thing, how you show is another. Adding butter to your sauces is lovely; smearing it all over the silverware, not so much.  Nozkowski has forcefully paired each painting with its “anima,” its after-the-effort drawing.  Even merely as interior décor, the result sucks.  As your gaze circumnavigates the gallery the analogy that springs to mind is of dinner and salad plates, as each after-drawing repeats the motive-structure of its parent painting.  A very unfortunate association for what is, once we turn to the aesthetic implication of presenting the work this way, a dog’s dinner.

What you simply can’t help doing as you work your way through this show is playing “Spot Waldo.”  Ah, he has a stained field in the painting and cross-hatching in the drawing.  That blue shape is a gray shape now.  The checkerboard has been turned into plaid.  The figure is resolute when small, diffuse big.  Etc.  Ad nauseum.

When you get used to the hardly revolutionary fact that the drawings are not preparatory for the paintings but a commentary upon them, you are still left with a relentless paragone debate: which worked best on this occasion, drawing or painting?  It is art exhibition as boxing match, another fixture in the series of which MoMA’s 2003 Picasso-Matisse exhibition will always remain the nail-biting finale where you could not enjoy each artist’s achievements without measuring them up against his rival’s from one turn to the next.

Nozkowski has inadvertently turned himself into a sophomore conceptualist.  What is so fabulous about him as an artist is that he always makes you think by feeling and feel by thinking.  But this hang clobbers us over the head with a one-dimensional premise.  It frustrates the marvel of his output, its diversity, by eliminating the kind of free rhythms that build up in an intuitive rather than programatic installation of the work.  In the fulsome survey organized at the National Gallery of Canada last year by Marc Mayer, sixty-two works dating back to 1987 flowed like a waltz from room to room; you constantly moved back and forth looking for, and discovering, unexpected relationships.  Here, with this constant der-dum, der-dum, we don’t even get a bolero.

This exhibition – inaugurating Pace’s fiftieth birthday gift to itself, the top-lit old Bartolomi space on West 25th Street – has been given a generous six-week run.  Let me therefore make a proposal to the artist: You’ve done your Halloween trick, now give your loyal fans a Thanksgiving treat.  Re-hang over the holidays the good old-fashioned way, with drawings grouped apart from the paintings, so we can really savor these works as the great images that they are.

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Each year, the American Academy of Arts and Letters honors of 50 composers, artists, architects and writers with cash awards ranging from $5000 to $75,000.  This year’s winners are to be announced in a private ceremony that takes place on May 16, 2010.  In addition, four Honorary Members will be inducted into the Academy: the actress Meryl Streep, conductor and pianist James Levine, and architects Fumihiko Maki (Japan) and Alvaro Siza (Portugal).  New members of the Academy are Tania Leon, composer and conductor; Fred Lerdahl, composer; Thom Mayne, architect; authors Thomas McGuane, Richard Powers, Francine Prose and Marilynne Robinson; visual artists Thomas Nozkowski, and Peter Saul.

The Academy is a honor society of 250 members whose purpose is to foster and sustain an interest in Literature, Music, and the Fine Arts by identifying and encouraging individual artists by administering awards and prizes, exhibiting art, funding stage projects, and purchasing works to be donated to museums.  It was modeled after the Académie française, and met for the first time in 1899.  Its initial seven members included Mark Twain, John Hay and Edward McDowell.

Visual artists receiving awards this year are Gabrielle Bakker, William Christenberry, Aaron Gilbert, John Grade, Lothar Osterburg, Julianne Swartz, Tom Uttech, and Stanley Whitney.  In addition, 16 works were chosen for purchase, to be donated to American museums. Committees, whose members are drawn from the Academy’s roster, chose the award recipients.  Candidates for awards are nominated by an Academician (with the exception of the Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater).

The Academy of Arts and Letters is located at 633 West 155 Street in buildings designed by William Mitchell Kendall, Cass Gilbert, Charles Pratt Huntington and James Vincent Czajka.  The Galleries, which exhibit works by members, are located on Audubon Terrace and may be accessed through the gates between 155 and 156 Streets on the west side of Broadway.

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