February 22 to April 28, 2017
23 East 73rd Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues
New York City, vandorenwaxter.com

Harvey Quaytman (1937-2002) came of age as a painter when abstract painting was beleaguered. The Pop Artists wanted to depict figurative subjects; the minimalists, to work in three dimensions; and the conceptual artists, to abolish the physical art work entirely. In looking rather to traditions of geometric abstraction, Quaytman employed another starting point, one that had been explored by Mondrian and his many followers and, more recently, by such diverse American figures as Ellsworth Kelly, Peter Halley and Kenneth Noland; and, of course, by Carmen Herrera, who recently had a show at the Whitney. Hard-edge abstraction can be very varied. Some of them project utopian models, but they can also model architecture—as in Kelly’s early paintings or social structures, as Halley claims of his art. Quaytman’s paintings were highly distinctive. There wasn’t any political agenda attached to them. Nor were they accompanied by any theorizing—he didn’t write about his painting. And so the critic who wants to place his work in art’s history must look and speculate. In the 1980s when I met him, I got to know a great many abstract painters. Harvey was the happiest artist I had the pleasure of meeting. I think, even if you never met him, you can see that happiness in these paintings— which are consistently exhilarating and visually buoyant. And in our art world, that is a great achievement.

Alternate histories can be revealing. What if Hitler had been assassinated in 1933, if the Japanese had not attacked Pearl Harbor, or if, as Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union proposes, Israel had not survived, leaving many Jews to take refuge in Alaska? A comparable art historical might-have-been concerns the fate of the Russian avant-garde. If the pioneering abstractionists in the USSR had been allowed to develop, our history would be inconceivably different. Malevich’s Suprematism (Blue Triangle and Black Rectangle) (1915) looks disconcertingly similar to Frank Stella’s physically larger abstract works from the late 1960s. And Vladimir Tatlin’s Counter Relief (1914-15) could have been shown seventy years later in a New York gallery devoted to contemporary sculpture. If abstraction had developed early in the twentieth century, then avant-garde art would legitimately be associated with communist politics. But as it is, Abstract Expressionism was the art of the victors. A passionate belief in the compelling power of personal expression made this art possible. Only a culture with enormous self-confidence could create such art. And so then in the next generation, Quaytman could take up the tradition of geometric abstraction, in a self-confident, but less arrogantly assertive manner.

The nine works in this show, which were made between 1983 and 1990, are very varied. One, Union Square, Tantra (1982-83) is a shaped canvas, with irregular top and bottom blue shaped edges, framing a small black-and-orange plaid in the center. Some of them, Jacob’s Coat (1984); Vital Attractions (1990); and also Marienburg (1985), the strongest work in the exhibition, are built around cruciforms. And Hone (1988) is a blue-black and white trapezoid, pressing towards to the left edge. Quaytman’s basic compositional motif involves recognizable deviations from bilateral symmetry. Thus in Untitled (1983) he in effect twists the left bottom corner of an otherwise symmetrical black frame on gray background; in Jacob’s Coat (1984) behind the symmetrical black cruciform are narrow verticals left of center and on the far right edge. And in Vital Attractions (1990) behind the centered blue cruciform is a blue square displaced left of center. The effect of these departures from symmetry is to give energy to the compositions. Genius, so Immanuel Kant wrote in his Critique of the power of Judgment (1790), is “a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given.” To judge art, he explains, requires adducing rules, which cannot be identified in advance “from the product.” And he then adds: “How this is possible is difficult to explain.” This statement perhaps helps suggest why Quaytman’s art is difficult to explain. Some abstract painters of Quaytman’s generation worked in series. And many of his contemporary peers adopted frankly repetitive modes of composition. Refusing to settle down in these ways, he showed that the resources of geometric abstraction are surprisingly rich. Certainly the effect of this group of pictures is visually self-evident—they convey immediate visual pleasure.

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October 7 to November 15, 2015
36 Orchard Street, between Hester and Canal streets
New York City, 212 995 1774

Paul Klee’s 1920 painting Angelus Novus has, for a long time, been the subject of much interpretation. In her present exhibition, Rebecca Quaytman further opens up that process. Two years ago, when visiting the Israel Museum, she discovered that Klee had glued his painting, which is a monoprint, directly on top of an old engraving, identified with a date in the 1520s and the initials LC. Walter Benjamin’s much-discussed essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) uses Angelus Novus to stage discussion of a Marxist vision of historical progress. Benjamin owned that painting, which then after passing through the collection of his friend, Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, entered the museum in Jerusalem. The picture, Benjamin wrote,

[S]hows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. […] This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. […] A storm is blowing in from Paradise. […] This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin says that the angel looks out at past events, which are in front of him. But the engraving found by Quaytman is behind that angel. And so now the analysis must become still more complex. Normally interpretation of a painting is written, but sometimes an artist may be said to interpret prior paintings; think of how Picasso re-interpreted Poussin and other old masters. Responding as an artist, Quaytman offers a series of painted variations on Benjamin’s commentary, which constitute an unexpected interpretation of Angelus Novus in light of her remarkable discovery. She presents here a number of rectangular, painted-wood panels, some containing an inked, rectangular silkscreen, as in Preview of Angelus Novus (2014). These paintings display Klee’s painting along with the underlying print, in perspectival constructions that open up the picture space. And some of her works on display — for example an encaustic titled O Tópico, Chapter 27 (2014) — provide information about the scientific techniques (x-rays, thermography) used in the investigation of the print.

“[Haqaq], Chapter 29” (Haqaq, in Hebrew, means engraved, carved or inscribed) is something of a tease. Suppose that LC are the initials of the 16th-century German painter Lucas Cranach—and perhaps the portrait shows Martin Luther. What would that reveal? The gallery says that a full report on Quaytman’s discovery must await the publication of her catalogue. Perhaps! Meanwhile, however, a reviewer must report on what he sees. Quaytman’s paintings don’t really tell us how to understand Angelus Novus. Rather, it seems that interpretation of Klee’s painting has become an open-ended process. Inspired by her, allow me to take analysis one-step further. She is the daughter of the distinguished late abstract painter, Harvey Quaytman, who loved to paint cruciforms. His 1998 exhibition at David McKee surprised Leo Steinberg, who found it “astounding to see the most familiar of signs de-semanticized, de-centered, de-Christianized, and emancipated to exercise its own territorial power.” Here, then, Rebecca Quaytman extends what has become a familial tradition, playful visual exegesis of Judeo-Christian iconography. The meaning of Klee’s picture remains elusive.

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