There remains a circle of modernists working in New York who trace their roots back to postwar abstraction on Tenth Street and consider themselves to be working with its fundamental concerns. Modernism, it turns out, may be inherently revivalist, and thus a form of permaculture. The problem from the beginning was to look back in order to find a way forward. As Walter Darby Bannard noted, “Any art that is truly radical must also be in some way conservative.” [1]

The newly arrived Berry Campbell Gallery has taken an interest in such work, and is currently showing James Walsh and Susan Vecsey. It’s too soon to call Walsh a senior member of the circle with lions like Bannard and Larry Poons still making beautiful paintings, but he’s been involved and productive within it since the 1980s. Vecsey is younger, but no less invested in Color Field abstraction, though she comes to it by way of the Tonalist landscape.

Walsh’s paintings are smallish by the standards of modernism, but the containment showcases a range of application from thin stains to eight-inch-thick crests of acrylics. Over the years his palette has moved from smoky and dour to cheerful, even tart, and his painterly command, judgment and taste have become exceptionally refined. Somehow the paint sloshes over the canvases without looking incidental. They are as orderly and yet unpredictable as the sea.

Case in point is his 2002 Turn of Color, just 18 inches high but seven thick. The berm of paint on it is built from slathered layers of pure yellow, royal purple, and a splat of iridescent copper. But Walsh folds a cream color around so that it dominates the pile, and tops it with a gray dollop, forming an organic symmetry that pulls the canvas together. It is as if a Georgia O’Keefe flower study was given the dimensionality and assertiveness of a John Chamberlain sculpture.

Among the recent works, Greenscape (2014) is especially forceful, with a mighty left-to-right sweep of paint that builds to a wave, leaving behind it a weightless slick of aqua, lime and ocher. A resinous green crackle has formed over the lower half, and with blue and white smears above, it alludes to landscape, but volume and gesture tow it back into the objective physicality of paint.

Susan Vecsey provides a restrained counterpoint. I had wondered why no one had yet picked up on Helen Lundeberg’s sunlit minimalism and run with it — perhaps it had to wait for another landscape painter like Vecsey to become interested in geometric abstraction. In any case we need wait no longer. This new series has her making satisfying pictures out of three or four colors, modulated with the surety of someone who has painted her share of skies. In Untitled (Gray/Blue Vertical) (2014) a sumptuous azure block sits atop a field divided by an S-curve into a lighter and a darker gray. Nothing else is needed.

It may sound strange to say so, and reproductions won’t back me up, but this is virtuoso painting. With the right viscosity of turpentine, oils bleed into one another in a way that leaves little branch-like shapes at the edges, such as those in Untitled (Gray Waves) (2014). The burlap-colored warmth of the sized linen is allowed to show through from behind the application of cool grays, producing a rich atmosphere. This all takes enormous control. If anything, Vecsey’s new paintings feel a little too premeditated, but she’s in an early stage of her abstract oeuvre and more chromatically pumped-up pieces like Untitled (Blue/Red) (2014) indicate that some unruliness is on its way in. Thus the constant revival continues.

1. “Touch and Scale: Cubism, Pollock, Newman and Still” (1971), Artforum, Vol. 10, (June 1971): pp. 58 – 66.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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November 4 – December 23, 2019
525-531 West 26th Street
New York City, (212) 695-0164

In much the way that a string of matched pearls is worth far more than each singularly perfect specimen, separately evaluated, a fine exhibition can be like the exposition of a jeweller’s craft.  The analogy holds for Loretta Howard’s display of seven large paintings by Poons from the later 1980s.  A near harmony of pale hue–panoplies of mingled blues, grays, purples, pinks, mint greens, olive greens and various shades of cream – forcibly suggests a snowy mountainside, glistening with a million points of lights in the sun, or the opalescence of a tropical underwater vista.

But these paintings are not all alike. Surfaces are all uneven, but in different ways. All have acrylic paint and gel poured or sloshed over accretions, but there are different levels of encrustation. The elements beneath are most prominent in The Cry Room (1990), where one can see segments of small balls (maybe tennis balls) and rows of still smaller balls (maybe matting of some sort) underneath pale greens, whites, and pinks.  Far better integrated is Southern Exposure (1986), where the crumpled bits of paper and sponge-like areas in greens, whites and gold create a cotton candy ambience of a fairy-tale kingdom.  Particularly wonderful is Brahms in Rio (1988), predominantly cream and pale olive green, with areas of mint across the top, and a narrative of underlying elements – crumpled paper on the left, flat narrow tubes of paper in the bottom center, sponge-like elements in the top right center, and so on.

Poons did not arrive immediately at this technique.  In the ‘60s, he was the infant terrible of op, with his brilliantly colored “coin-dots,” but even then, like all great artists, he was not satisfied with success. His coin-dots became larger and larger ovals, ; next, they melted into loose forms made by paint poured onto a horizontal canvas, then pushed around with a broom. This homage to Pollock ended one day, when Clement Greenberg was visiting Poons’s studio, and complimented him on the way that some paint had splashed off the canvas onto an adjoining space. Pondering this insight, Poons began to set his canvases upright, and concentrate on the splash itself, pouring the paint so that it coursed down the entire canvas and formed a variegated display of color like frozen waterfalls or lava. After pursuing this technique throughout the 1970s, he evolved to the style seen in the present show around 1980.

The paintings at Loretta Howard were made in an old barn in upstate New York. They started out as an environment, with a long swathe of canvas wrapped around so as to form an enormous cocoon or grotto, within which the artist worked by electric light.   An intricate series of sketches (some of which are on view ) laid out the general lines of the composition. On top of this composition were then fastened the various accretions, and next, the paint was sloshed on.  Finally, individual pictures were cut out of the cocoon, squares and rectangles which then had to be stretched and framed and exhibited as separate works.

The light in the cocoon was fitful and dim, but Poons liked it that way.  It reminded him of the candlelight by which he believed Rembrandt and Velazquez must sometimes have painted, and enabled him to capture some of their feeling for lights and shadows.  The cocoon was also reminiscent of the carefully-designed interiors in which Mondrian used to work, but, like Mondrian, Poons saw himself as essentially an easel painter, as opposed to an environmentalist. It is curious, but true, that the idiom he developed combined the abstractness and classical poise of Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism with the baroque flair and compositional openness of the seventeenth-century’s Old Masters.

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A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 15, 2007

The oeuvre of Larry Poons represents a case of painterly bipolarity.  It is hard to think of an artist who veers towards such extremes of serenity and chaos, prettiness and vulgarity.  As if to dramatize the split, the early work was characterized by flatness and finesse while subsequent developments included such wayout thickness and integration of alien textures that his garish canvases achieved extraterrestrial weirdness.  One possible point of comparison would be with his fellow second generation (post-painterly) Abstract Expressionist Jules Olitski who also oscillated from “ineluctible flatness” to use the phrase of the two artists’ critic-champion Clement Greenberg to loony impasto.

In his new body of work, Mr. Poons seems to enjoy some measure of equilibrium.  There is thickly churned swirls of paint, but there is also a new-found lyricism that recalls the seductive charm of his early flat abstraction.  The title of one of the works, “Could You Love Me One More Time,” (2005) almost seems an appeal to early formalist enthusiasts to forgive the romantic excesses of the intervening years.

The palette and brushstroke are consistent through this exhibition of generally large, busy canvases.  There is an underlying range of organic hues – browns and greens – accentuated by generous dolops of contrastive pink and blue.  These colors inevitably bring the late landscapes of Pierre Bonnard to mind, although the artist whose color range they more closely resemble is fellow American Louis Finkelstein.  While completely abstract, there is a sense of narrative as the eye reads the canvas as if a calligraphy scroll in a way that recalls Jackson Pollock’s “Mural” (1943).  Bizarrely, however, the agitated sexuality of these paintings mostly brings to mind a younger contemporary of Mr. Poons’s with whom one would not instinctively compare him: Cecily Brown.  These paintings look like Browns with the figures and old master references removed.

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“Robin Richmond: Sacred Geographies” at Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art until June 5 (86 Walker Street, between Broadway and Lafayette Street, 646-613-1252)

“Eric Holzman: The Sky Is Crying,” at Jason McCoy Gallery until May 31 (41 E. 57th Street, 11th floor, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-319-1996)

There is something about impasto, the expressive layering or encrustation of paint, that is indelibly linked in the critical mind with romanticism, or with its twentieth-century derivative, expressionism. Larry Poons, however, is an artist who overturns any preconceived idea about impasto that aligns the device to emotional investment.

The compact overview of his oeuvre at Jacobson Howard stretches from the mid-1960s to last year and covers a gamut of surfaces from crystalline opticality to visceral tacility, from the transparent to the opaque. In following his career via these pictures, the imagination travels from outer space to the earth’s core.

You don’t think about the medium for a second when you look at “Stewball,” (1967): Paint is a vehicle that carries the eye to color esspressimo.. Chromatically close calibrated balls and ovals bounce around within a field of luxuriant, saturated red. The scale of the painting (it’s over ten feet high) keeps you far back enough from noticing the weave of the canvas, let alone any paint application.
All that seems to change overnight with “Big Purple” (1972), a gushing, dripping, painterly splurge. Paint has been put down with joyous abandon, yet miraculously the color is not muddied. Where Jackson Pollock painted with a stick straight from the bucket, his latter-day disciple dispensed with the stick even.

To achieve such melding and meshing of bright, contrastive color – scalding oranges and yellows in the foreground with succulent striations of lilac higher up – you’d imagine the artist must be in league with the devil. There is none of the murk or gloom that occurs when color is left to its own devices in such volcanic eruptions.

Mr. Poons has always had a penchant for quirky color. His works of the 1960s had an almost Pop brashness, and the 1970s were marked by funkiness. But by the late 1980s, the time of the two paintings that dominate this show, “Merton Eaves” (1988) and “Smith Train” (1991), Mr. Poons had entered what can be described as a jewel-encrusted bog.

The orgasm of “Big Purple” is over, and as Cicero said, every animal is sad after sex. The extreme hapticity makes you feel you are groveling in some kind of cavern. But as soon as the eye adjusts to the new light conditions, melancholy disperses. These are still as much about color as they are about texture or tone; there is still food for the retina.

These 1980s paintings envelope you in their vulgarity. The surfaces, built not just of hubristic heaps of pigment but padded out with found and sculpted objects, are liable to disgust viewers with the ambiguity of their otherness. But they excite just when they repel, in a way that aligns this scion of polite, refined post-painterly abstraction to the brash neo-expressionists upcoming at the time of these works.

But, then, some of his erstwhile 1960s peers went the same way, most noticeably Jules Olitski, whose glutinous glittered impasto of the 1980s was the harbinger of a full-blown neo-romanticism.

The first impression made by Robin Richmond’s paintings at Paul Sharpe’s homey TriBeCa loft gallery is of an improbable collaboration between Mr. Poons, say, and a neolithic cave painter. The rawness of the loft space accentuates this association.

Ms. Richmond is a painter whose meanderings into the twilight zone between color and texture inspire an oxymoronic reaction: glowing gloom. Initially, these seem like strangely murky creations, but – as with a 1980s Poons – the eye needs to adjust. A better way to describe the experience would be that of entering a gloomily lit church to discover a luminous fresco lurking in a corner chapel.

The metaphor is doubly apt in this artist’s case. Ms. Richmond, a London-based American painter, is the author of a series of books on Renaissance painters for young readers. She has been “on the road” for the last two years, traveling in India, Italy, and America, and the show has something of a travelogue quality, with quotes of Piero and Indian miniatures creeping through the collage- and skein-encrusted surfaces.

Sometimes this gives the viewer the magical feel of making a fleeting, momentary discovery. The biggest find from Ms. Richmond’s travels, however, seems to be the sensibility she picked up from her decades in England: Her spatial and chromatic ambiguities are redolent of the St. Ives artists and their romantic fusion of landscape and abstraction.

“All art is at once surface and symbol,” Oscar Wilde warned in the preface to Dorian Gray. In Eric Holzman’s mesmerizing but enigmatic exhibition at Jason McCoy you penetrate either at your peril. The artist has given this show, his third at the gallery, the fey, wistful title, “The Sky Is Crying,” which is also used for several paintings. His favorite motif is the nebulous space between clusters of trees.

Quoting Wilde seems apt in Mr. Holzman’s case, as he seems at first like a symbolist who has accidentally strayed into the wrong century. It is as if he were Gustave Moreau trying his hand at abstract expressionism. The paintings have a scale, decenteredness, and fascination with spatial ambiguity that makes them contemporary, but the tone, touch, and mood are very much “fin d’un autre siècle.” The charcoal grid still visible in his large painting compositions recalls the functionality of Old Master drawings, but also gives his endeavor a 1970s serial edge.

Mr. Holzman’s beautiful painthandling is a kind of fool’s gold. He enjoys the swirling arabesque sensations to be found in van Gogh but replaces that artist’s compelling gestalt and dynamic color with a twee tonality and distended alloverness. Mr. Holzman’s palette, at once earthy and ethereal, has a warmth that puts you in a nostalgic mood. His impasto, in which tumult is depleted of angst, belies a rococo sensibility.

Yet there is much more to these strangely compelling images than retro whimsicality. There is an element of a lament for painting that recalls the more gutsy but similarly elegiac French artist, Gerard Garouste. The big, washed-out landscapes in the back room look like Correggio drawings that have been left out in the rain.

There’s a scene in a Fellini movie where visitors to the Catacombs chance upon long lost Roman murals that disappear the instant they are unveiled. In similar fashion, Mr. Holzman revels in the sensation of chancing upon a long-lost masterpiece at the frustrating yet exquisite moment of dissipation.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 22, 2004

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