Bookstein
April 19 to May 26, 2018
60 East 66th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, booksteinprojects.com

Harvey
April 18 to May 20, 2018
208 Forsyth Street, between Houston and Rivington streets
New York City, shfap.com

Might a bookish analysis provide the best way to understand the art of a marvelously intuitive painter? Perhaps! In his great treatise on figurative art, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960) Ernst Gombrich offers a far-reaching thesis about the history of European painting. In a process of what he calls ‘making and matching,’ an artist starts with some simplified pattern, which Gombrich calls a schema, and then adapts it to match the particular visual features of what is represented. In cubism, which marks the beginning of the end of this tradition, so Art and Illusion claims, “the scrambling of clues” baffles perception. And then Jackson Pollock, going one step further, prevents “us from interpreting his marks on the canvas as representations of any kind . . .” Then visual deadlock is what results when there’s no way to consistently match the pictorial content to some depicted site in physical reality.

Often Paul Resika’s paintings from the 1980s show seascapes from Cape Cod, where he maintains a studio. These works, it might seem, are far from the modernist tradition of abstraction. But now, as if working in a highly personal way through a Gombrichian history of figuration, he juxtaposes backgrounds of clear skies, with yellow suns, with jagged pyramids in the foreground. And this show falls into two, distinctly different parts. Bookstein Projects shows a roomful of these enigmatic works, Resika’s more conventional paintings, variations on this theme. And at Steven Harvey’s gallery, in addition to the beach scenes, you also see several works, which are harder to place — A Quiet Romance (2017), showing a conch shell on a similar background, and, in the back room, the magnificent Self-Portrait with Rag (2017). Resika, you sense, keeps his options open. For this reason, my schematic history hardly does justice to the bold originality of all of these paintings. Look at Triangle- Sun (2017) are Harvey, or Rose Dawn, also 2017 at Bookstein. These prickly images set against the sky, which have no sources that I can identify, are a law onto themselves.

In some of these recent paintings, The White Sky (2017) for example, (on view at Bookstein) you see the edge of the sea on the horizon. The sea and sky backgrounds of these landscapes could be painted from nature, but what are we to make of these geometric structures – which, and here I contradict one statement by the artist in the gallery press releases, do not look remotely like any sand dunes that that I have seen at the beach, neither in Cape Cod nor elsewhere? Rather, I would argue, it is as if Resika self-consciously chooses to juxtapose a seemingly non-figurative form against these natural settings, in pictures that are half abstract, and half figurative. What a strange juxtaposition of figurative and abstract-looking elements – and what an original way, certainly never envisaged by Gombrich, to deal with the traditional issues of pictorial representation. As far as I know, this is a remarkable, seemingly unprecedented development in Resika’s long evolution. MoMA’s display “the long run,” which runs through November 4, chronicles the development of artists after their breakthrough moment. This exhibition includes an enigmatic recent work by Lee Bontecou, a late painting of Elizabeth Murray and one picture from the seemingly endless ongoing development of Frank Stella. These two shows of Resika’s very recent paintings nicely supplement that presentation, for at ninety his art, too, has undergone a dramatic transformation. In old age now, he prepares to leap into abstraction, as if returning to the concerns of the art world of Hans Hofmann, with whom he studied in the mid-twentieth century. How surprising and how absolutely admirable is his determined ability to remain essentially unpredictable!

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on view at Booth B9 as part of ArtHamptons the international art fair at Bridgehampton Historical Society, 2368 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton NY this coming weekend, Friday July 10 through Sunday, July 12. Opening hours are noon to 7pm, Friday and Saturday, and noon to 6pm, Sunday. Opening Gala/Collectors’ Preview is Thursday Jul 9, 6-9 pm

This was an artcritical PIC in July 2009.

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Lovers: The Drawings of Rosemarie Beck and Paul Resika, 1968-69
Lori Bookstein Frine Art

Andrea Morganstern: Nature’s Pulse
Kimberly Venardos & Co.
1014 Madison Avenue at 78 Street, New York. Tel: 212.879.5858

A version of this review appeared in The New York Sun, February 26, 2004

Wendy Mark, an accomplished print maker, finesses several themes. But it is her near-miniature landscape variations, dominating this exhibition, that best fulfill her stated ambition to express a body of inherited forms in contemporary terms. With contemporaneity a swollen currency, Mark’s conversation with past masters broadens her emotional range and achieves a certain eloquence.

Mark bypasses the disorder of nature to seek motifs in the formal vocabulary of the great names in landscape painting. With a cheerful kleptomania, she excerpts motifs from the history of landscape-a veil of atmosphere, the color and movement of clouds, the weight of skies or volume of a tree-making imaginative reconstructions from the models provided by the masters. She also nods to Wayne Thiebaud, who holds a patent on the candy-puff clouds that Mark adopts on occasion.

Out of Mark’s paraphrases from tradition emerges a beau ideal of the natural world presented with a modern directness and simplicity. Self-conscious titles (e.g. A Place to Take Off From, Where He Was in August) signal that these are products of the studio, not natural vistas. In their seeming specificity, they achieve in litho ink what poet Marianne Moore sought with words: the creation of “imaginary gardens with real frogs in them.”

Look carefully at Halfway Over, 2000. In a print under 6 inches square, Mark suggests a convincing bank of considerable expanse, all its varied vegetation and the sky above. An animated, improvised surface, stippled and wiped, yields an optical charm that is all the more appealing for its informality. Reminiscent of the textures and tonalities of Degas’ late monoprints, this is Mark’s technique at its loveliest. All else on view can be judged against this singular gem. And with one solitary exception, every thing succeeds in holding its own.

That exception is the display of 3 sets of cubes, similar to children’s box puzzles. Each side is covered with an image clipped from discarded prints and set under Plexiglas. These are playful but slight, substituting cuteness for pictorial interest. Mark serves herself best with work that makes no apology for a refined sensibility.

In 1968, Rosemarie Beck and Paul Resika drew from the figure together, sharing models in a Washington Square studio. Thirty five years later, the result of those sessions is on the wall in an instructive pairing.

In Resika we see an ebullient, sensuous colorist contending with the austerities of line and the discipline of anatomy. His sketches leave an impression of things glimpsed over the artist’s shoulder, rehearsals that at the time of their making were not intended for an audience.

Beck’s drawings, the anchor of this ensemble, are beautiful. Bearing the stamp of Cezanne in their hatchings and broken contours, their communicative value is wholly personal. They convey the volumes and expressive rhythm of the human body with distinctive grace and tenderness.

Beck was a deft draughtsman, unintimidated by the heightened challenge of figures in pairs. She made effective use of shadows to unify separate masses and create spatial veracity. With a gift for abstracting from bodily facts, she handled the demands of male musculature with the same transforming ease she brought to the arabesques of the female body. In an era of dreary eroticism, her drawings make creditable John Donne’s sweet cry: “Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee.”

Andrea Morganstern is a painter in search of a subject. She creates delicate surfaces that appear to exist for their own sake regardless of the motif. Love of surface drives the picture, instead of the other way around. Her images are distilled from nature-bamboo shoots, birds or, most recently, a tracery of jagged, lightening-like forms-but with little of the natural left in them.

Tender oil glazes, applied one over the other, appear to have been breathed onto the canvas. The mark of a brush is barely visible. Desert Pulse, 2003, is indicative of her approach. Here, an undulating rhythm of pale cadmium and yellow ochres combine to suggest the heat and movement of sand on a desert floor. It is evocative, not realistic. Any illusion of reality is shattered by the web of pale viridian cracklings that migrate across the picture plane unlike anything in nature. These are patterns decorating a surface still waiting for a purpose to support.

Artic Cascade, 2003, is the most successful of the series. Red-black veining is perfectly pitched in width, extra-fine so that the drawing of it does not call attention to itself as something applied on top. It appears, instead, as if the dappled canvas had been splintered by some inner force. The illusion of fissure lends needed strength to the gentle play of blues and violets of the ground.

Morganstern possesses a sensibility more at home in a monastic scriptorum than on the modernist battlefield. Like several artists in Kimberly Vernardos’ stable, she seems a manuscript illuminator deprived of a text. Artists with a sense of humor can turn that deprivation on its head and pull whimsy from it. But Morganstern turns inward to make a sacred text out of some vague spirituality culled from Eastern philosophy.

Less concentration on Vedantic practices and a deeper love for the visual world-and its great interpreters-would give this artist the focus on which all possibility of emotional depth depends.

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1968. Year of the “Events”. The Summer of Love and all that. In a studio in New York’s Washington Square, two young artists stage an event of their own: a pair of lovers sit for them, warding off winter with poses of passion.

“Erotic Resika” is a tautology, for whatever he depicts- it can be a boat in harbor- is X-rated. In his pastels of the loving couple, drawing is as frenzied as any amorous act. Hot contrasts of orange andpink sweat it out in conté. These drawings were apparently saved from a studio fire: sfumage casts appropriately smouldering looks.

Beck brings a contrastedly classical equilibrium to the life room. She is apollonian to his dionysian. Her couples could equally be resting after love or on the flight into Egypt. She views the lovers through seven veils, one each for Shakespeare, Ovid, Titian, Michelangelo, Correggio, Tiepolo, and lastly, her own “Oh”: a secret pleasure in unexpected shapes, the flirtatious possibilities of a smudge, a spatial abbreviation, a coy rhyming of buttock and member. Less overtly visceral, she nonetheless taps a whole erotics of negative space, a hermetic language of love.

Where Resika’s gaze joins the lovers to make it a threesome, Beck brings a post-coital langour to the same poses. But her classical serenity is a timely reminder: love wasn’t invented in 1968 after all.

this text is reproduced with permission from the exhibition announcement card

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“Louis Finkelstein: The Late Pastels, 1990-1999” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art until July 25 (50 East 78th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-439-9605).

Every picture by Paul Resika is a manifesto for pleasure. Color, gesture, impasto, motif: All betray the hand of a voluptuary. The Baudelaire-inspired title of Matisse’s great masterpiece, “Luxe, Calme et Volupté,” could be appropriated by Mr. Resika for almost any of his own bucolic, lyrical, sensual canvases.

Vered Gallery in East Hampton offers a rich selection of his work from the last decade . There is almost a symbolic resonance in seeing Resikas displayed on the ritzy Long Island Riviera: Recreation and indulgence are their thinly disguised subplot. But pleasure is no synonym for lightness or inconsequence. Gauguin did aesthetics a disservice when he pronounced that nothing pretty can be beautiful. An underlying suspicion of pleasure, a sense that art needs to be difficult, dangerous, or disconcerting to warrant any kind of serious attention, has become a tiresome orthodoxy in contemporary thinking.

Of course, art does need at some level to engender complexity, ambiguity, a hint of its own opposite, to be satisfying and intriguing. Matisse’s work always frustrates a full capitulation to the kind of sensual delight he claimed for his art. Likewise, there is usually just sufficient awkwardness in Mr. Resika, a toughness of form, to prevent his smooth, generous compositions from slipping too serenely through the retina.

Mr. Resika belongs to a strand of American painting – Milton Avery is a significant forebear – characterized by warmth, delicacy, and sweetness. He, perhaps not coincidentally, shares a place in this tradition with other sometime pupils of the Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann – among them Wolf Kahn and Robert De Niro, Sr.

Usually, an exhibition of Mr. Resika’s works offers variations on a single motif. The broad cross-section of subjects on display in East Hampton, with canvases sometimes hanging cheek by jowl, avoids the problem of formula that can beset a mono diet of his motifs. It thus proves a less precious way to get introduced to Mr. Resika’s oeuvre.

His recent show at Salander-O’Reilly, for instance, focused on the solitary nude seated or reclining in a hybrid landscape-interior space. “Dark Lady” (2001-02) is arguably as fine an example of this subject as any of the canvases in that show, and is shown at Vered for the first time.

There is a hard-won density to both tone and texture here that sets this canvas apart from the more hard-edged color and clarity of line typical of Mr. Resika’s paintings. The background is animated by a fleshy, writhing calligraphy that brings to mind De Kooning. The figure, seen from the back, is a vague mass of earthy terracotta, given precise definition by an overlaid linear arabesque of Matissean-Oriental economy.

The earliest work in the show, “Blue Mountain, Provence” (1987-92) is the most closely related to Hofmann, although it is also among the more naturalistic works on offer. The bold, simple subjects – houses, a tree, a blaze of blue sky – become veils of color, pushing and pulling the eye back and forth.

The most abstract work in the show, “Blue Creation” (2001), floats a three-sided geometric form and two overlapping orbs (one of them, a yellow disk wobbling off-center on a large white one, inevitably recalls a fried egg) with three fish swimming around. Even when approaching Miró or Kandinsky in terms of disengaged symbolism,the epicurean Mr. Resika takes the viewer to the dinner table.

“Divine Geometry” (2002) has a nude contemplating a triangle in the sky. The work, whose title could refer equally to the contemplator or the contemplated form, recalls Dürer’s famous print, “Melancholia,” but Mr. Resika is an artist temperamentally incapable of the blues. A night scene of two boats under the moon has an audacious black sky that constitutes fully two-thirds of the picture surface. Black has rarely looked brighter or fresher than it does in this painting.

* * *

The late Louis Finkelstein is an artist who demanded more from color than Paul Resika and got less. His muse was also Mediterranean: Cézanne, Bonnard, and Matisse were his portal to the old masters. Some landscapes were made in Provence, others with Provençal memories in Vermont and New York. But his sensualism is tinged with an angst that would be alien to Mr. Resika. Finkelstein was more the intellectual – a beloved teacher, a formidable if idiosyncratic theorist and scholar – yet seems not to have been blessed with the degree of pictorial intelligence that comes effortlessly to a natural like Mr. Resika.

Nonetheless, a show of late pastels at Lori Bookstein, which closes this weekend, offers a persuasive case for greatness. There are sublime moments in works whose rushed awkwardness has an aura of aesthetic desperation. Images are energized by impatience. The way he uses collage in many of these drawings has a similar effect: Taking the knife to these works lends them a sense of cut-throat bravura. The unfinish makes these drawings especially likeable, forcing a contrast to the oppressive density and exhausting all-overness that often mar Finkelstein’s canvases.

Finkelstein’s late color is genuinely intriguing. It could equally be regarded as instinctive or schematic. Are the works following a hermetic logic, working different chromatic temperatures upon the viewer’s perception to intimate with alchemical ingenuity depths and shallownesses of space? Or are they blazing a trail, singing a mad Dionysian song of their own?

This article first appeared in The Sun, July 24, 2003

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