After that it took us 45 minutes to travel three blocks, with Nick marveling at each new encounter. That is how it was with Nick. He possessed a complete alert attentiveness to the world around him, had a great passion for art, and his enthusiasm for life was all-encompassing.  He was completely immersed in the world of art precisely because, for him, art was life, art was experience and every moment contained the very present possibility of new ideas and new inspiration.

Nick was born in 1917 and grew up in Hoboken, NJ.  He began his studies in art at the age of 11 with the Leonardo DaVinci school in downtown Manhattan, and later he studied at the National Academy and served as Leon Kroll’s apprentice and model.  His classical training allowed him to develop a sure and elegant drawing hand.  He could carve out form beautifully.

But it was during the War years, when he was traveling at night from his post out on Long Island to 8th Street to study with Hans Hoffman that he developed his understanding of plastic space. And that understanding not only opened up a whole new world for him, but also launched him on a singularly creative career as an artist.

When the War was over Nick was honored with the Prix de Rome and a Fulbright Fellowship, and those prizes enabled him to work in Italy for several years.  He met a wide range of artists, including Matta, who introduced him to the surrealists and, as a result, became a major influence on his work and life.

Back in New York Nick reconnected with friends from his time in Italy, including Conrad Marcarelli, Philip Pavia and Philip Guston, and took part in the famous 9th Street Show, helping to usher in a new era of painting in New York. He began to work with Eleanor Ward as a director of the Stable Gallery, and created the hugely successful Stable Annual Show, which was modeled on the 9th Street Show, and he brought new young artists into the Stable giving Cy Twombly, Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg their first one-man shows.  He also brought John Graham into the fold.  Nick himself had two solo shows at the Stable, and then moved to Staempfli Gallery.

He was a sought after educator, teaching at Cooper Union, Yale, Brandeis, Cornell, Columbia, S.V.A.  and the New York Studio School, where he was a founding faculty member and taught for 20 years.  Later, he founded his own art School in Umbria, Italy, the International School of Art.

And while the hundreds of students he taught through the years would easily testify that he was a dynamo in the class room, it was after he retired from teaching that his work gained an astonishing new energy and momentum.  Several recent shows at Lohin Geduld Gallery and Chelsea, and at Washburn Gallery on 57th Street, showed an artist at the absolute peak of his powers.

In 2007 Lohin Geduld Gallery showed monumental head sculptures that Nick carved from field stones that he found on the ground around his house in Umbria. The heads are haunting, shocking, emotive, and with their hypnotic gaze they demand a connection with the viewer on a real human level.  Nick claimed that the heads were already present in the stone, and that he simply liberated them into the light of  the present day. Perhaps that’s why they have all the enigmatic appeal of the ancient and archaic, while remaining, in the end, entirely modern.

When it comes to Nick’s work, it’s exciting to know that there is a lot more to explore: three small wax figures featured in that same show give just a hint at a branch of his oeuvre which hasn’t yet been shown to its best advantage.  These fragile, subtle wax sculptures are torsos – some with limbs some without – which are some of his most intimate and sensual works.  They beg to be held in the hand and turned.  I was lucky enough to visit him in the studio while he was working on these sculptures, and my small glimpse into his process is now etched on my brain.  He laid the sculptures out on his work table, some individually, some seemingly in a pile, next to a Bunsen burner, some pots of wax, and a series of strange bottles and jars filled with odd mixtures. The forms that he touched into being were tightly crafted, and they were almost translucent, literally shining in the light. I’d like to see them cast and exhibited.

New large-scale abstract paintings shown at Washburn Gallery in 2009 were bold, lyrical, and mesmerizing in black and white and muted tones.  John Yau wrote of them in the Brooklyn Rail: “Every move is purposeful, while all of it feels improvised; this is the magic that Carone has achieved in the syntax of Abstract Expressionism, particularly because he has made that language specific to his concerns. His lines are simultaneously elegant, unhurried, understated, and child-like.”

Nick’s painted “Psychic” portraits – that is portraits of men and women who never existed – that have been included in group shows, but have not yet been given a solo showcase.  And that’s a pity. Nick spent 50 years making these paintings, starting with his early years in Italy and continuing on to the end of his life.  You could say they are strange – because they are – and you’d have to admit that they are more than a little bit interesting. Some of them are clowns, and others are temptresses, ogres, aristocrats, sages, androgines, and modernized renaissance men. They fall somewhere between figments of the imagination and flights of fancy. Like the very best portraits, they seem to encapsulate a lifetime of experience, which is fascinating since their subjects never drew a breath outside of Nick’s imagination. They also have the strong undercurrrent of Eros that permeated all of Nick’s work – something akin to the tension and longing that occupies the moment before a first kiss – and all of those factors demand that they be treated to a truly ambitious show in the near term.

But through his career, the figure was enormously important to Nick. It was his fuel, his inspiration, his tool. The figure is the building block that shapes and drives the abstract painting: the figure is the process and the figure is the form.

Just last June Nick said to me “Don’t forget.  With the figure, anything is possible.”  I saw this idea come to life in that visit when Claude and Chris Carone, Nick’s sons, showed me his last psychic portraits, which were filled with the physical intensity, turmoil and anxiety of an artist struggling to continue his work at the end of his life, and even then, unafraid to go into the metaphysical realm.

Nick was a living legend, and that he was not out in the forefront of the art world was always hard for me to understand. But I believe that his low profile freed him enormously, and there is no question that when he re-emerged with the shows at Lohin Geduld and Washburn his work was triumphant. No question – here was an artist who was at the very height of his career, whose work was, and is – thoroughly contemporary, multidimensional and unapologetic.

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on view as part of the exhibition, Leon Polk Smith: A Constellation with Works on Paper at Washburn Gallery through October 31, 20 West 57 Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212 397 6780

This was an artcritical PIC in November 2009

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A visitor to Nicolas Carone’s show  may feel momentary confusion over whether this is a typical Washburn Gallery exhibition featuring some master of Abstract Expressionism as in previous shows like the prints of Jackson Pollock or the work of Leon Polk Smith. A quick glance at the labels, however, reveals that these big paintings date from 2006- 08.

But actually, the visitor’s first impression was not so wrong.  These works, by a skilled and energetic 90 year old, recall that Carone was a fully-fledged participant in the 1950s scene, was a friend and neighbor of Jackson Pollock’s and exhibited successfully (notably at the legendary Stable Gallery), if intermittently, during that time.

Though Carone has always enjoyed professional respect among his peers, his work has long been difficult to see. He had long been a popular teacher of drawing at the New York Studio School where he was also a bit of an enigma.

An enigma, because though the classroom corrections and thumbnails were obviously practiced and masterful, and his knowledge and passion for painting and drawing were undeniable, curious students (full disclosure- I was one! ) saw only small but intriguing tidbits of his work.

Things have changed recently, as Carone has been very productive and showing frequently, notably at Lohin Geduld and David Findlay Jr. In fact, due to his vigorous rate of production, the show is overhung, the huge paintings triumphantly covering into every available wallspace, an evident surplus of work.

The paintings resemble the sort of automatic abstractions Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning practiced in the 1940s, such as the latter’s “Attic” (1949), in which the beautiful shapes suggest fragmentary glimpses of the figure. In Carone, too, an underlying classicism combines with a freewheeling painterly cubism.

In fact, this show approaches orthodox Abstract Expressionism more than is normal for Carone and perhaps the splattery free use of acrylic, the black mixed to resemble glossy household enamels, is intended as an hommage to de Kooning’s work of the mid 1940s.  In the austere paintings “In Orbit” (2007) and “Psychic Blackout” (2007-08) the forms are closely cropped within the rectangle, the looping muscular lines standing out as white on a black field.

Even closer to de Kooning are “Over the Threshhold” (2007) and “Not to Be Touched” (2006), with black lines on white, the largeness of the cropped forms reading more abstractly, with negative and positive shapes trading priority, and erasures and drippings emphasizing process and physicality.This “automatic writing” approach also resembles the methods of bebop jazz:, Gershwin’s “I Got Rythm,” for instance, is stripped of the cues that make the tune recognizable to point up the pure abstract musicality.

The large “Lost Tribe” and “Shadow Dance” both from 2007 seem to resemble groups of dancing figures in the classical style of Ingres, the ‘legs’ lost in the cascades of black drips against the white background. On extended viewing, surprisingly precise glimpses figure parts appear, jostling negative shapes in the elegantly free calligraphies derived from his lifelong practice of life drawing in the context of the classical tradition.In other recent shows by Carone, there were a number of works on paper incorporating subtle pencil and red chalk notations that make this connection even more personal and explicit.

This classicism seems to be particularly natural baseline for Nicholas Carone, encouraged as it was by the cultured Italian American family he was born into.  Local artists, writers and musicians were constant visitors to his childhood home, encouraged by his extraordinary mother, who also enrolled him at the Da Vinci art school on Eighth Street in the village and allowed him to quit school at 14 to pursue an artistic career.  During World War II he studied at the Hans Hoffman School, a seminal experience, and after the end of the war lived in Italy (where he still maintains a residence) where in the postwar period he astonished the Italians with their first glimpse of the American Abstract- Expressionist style.

This American treasure, born June 4, 1917, continues to astonish us today.

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June 3 – July 23, 2004

The extraordinary thing about Andrew Masullo’s current show at Washburn is its variety. In a period in which painters are constantly categorized as abstract or representational, geometric or organic, hard edge or painterly, Andrew Masullo exhibits a group of recent paintings which refuse to be categorically any of these. His paintings are correspondingly uneven, yet compensate the viewer with their audacity, exuberance and inventiveness.

There are patterns to this inventiveness. Masullo’s color choices remain pretty constant often relying on bold reds and straight whites as ground. Against these he works in a regular set of yellows, blues, greens and hues. The paintings’ surfaces are heavily textured. This is one of the mysteries of the work, for the texture almost never corresponds to the image, the form of which resides in the thin skein of paint that is the paintings uppermost layer. There, strange blobs that call to mind bowling pins and baby rattles share space with a more classical geometry. The forms often flirt with figuration. In two cases, the artist goes so far as to add tiny arms and legs to his geometry, a distressing decision the only merit of which is perhaps its flagrant willingness to attempt something different. Otherwise, these tiny appendages distract.

The strongest paintings in the show are both direct and poetic. “4099” and “4085” are two. Their number titles, like all those in the show, are another of Masullo’s mysteries. In “4099,” colored diamonds and squares hang in red space anchored by a dark diamond in the upper right. In “4085,” spindly globular forms in pink, yellow, orange, black and blue echo one another diagonally across the painting’s surface. These forms look like balloon animals, a fitting association given the carnival mood of all Masullo’s coloring. In both paintings, the artist exhibits a gift for easy and adept placement of forms.

Packed end to end in one small room of Washburn’s three, the strong paintings share cramped wall space with the weak such as “4100,” in which multicolored cloud forms feel not adeptly placed but thoughtlessly crammed together. There is no relationship of form to ground in this painting as no ground is visible. Neither is there a change in scale. There is just the one form, repeated to fill the picture plane. Across the way hangs “4073.” It is quite clearly a big black Christmas tree ornament with little red arms and legs. It is set on a diagonal against its white ground and its presence in the show is a nuisance.

For all its unevenness, and in part because of it, Masullo’s recent paintings are aggressively engaging. This is a seductive quality for the viewer and an effective one for the artist. Whatever he might lose due to a poor decision, Masullo regains in his willingness to take a risk. Such carelessness as the artist shows seems requisite to the inventiveness that is his strength.

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January 8-February 28, 2004

What if, with a glance, a solid could be made weightless? What if all our ideas about matter were an illusion stemming from a state of mind, which once changed, changed the physical world with it. Then we could live unconstrained by walls and distances, unencumbered by physics. Our own bodies could be light as air or quick as running water.

These were my thoughts at Washburn Gallery before the sculpture of George Sugarman, a photograph of whom adorns the wall to the left as you enter. It reveals a face as expressive and warm as Sugarman’s art. He works in cut, welded and bent aluminum never more that a quarter inch in width. To compose his work, he seems to choose a shape and repeat it, Minimalist style. But Sugarman’s sculpture lacks any sense of the modularity associated with the work of his contemporaries, Andre of Judd. Instead, form flows. Each successive aluminum part, fastened to its predecessor with rivets, seems the next moment in a continuous motion that threads a sculpture together.

In some pieces, he abandons the rivets altogether and simply bends and cuts a single piece of aluminum into a wave like form, two of which fit snugly together to make “Waltz.” One is black, the other blue. When I first saw it, I thought of the ocean crashing on rocks. I felt the movement of one thing into another. Such is the evocative potential of Sugarman’s abstraction.

My own love of landscape and natural form found easy purchase in all his work. What are you meant to see in “Orange Around” with its spiraling mass of interlocking wedges varying in shape and color? Although the piece’s internal scale is perfect, each part relating evenly to the whole, its size, waist high off the ground, seems arbitrary. Again, unlike Minimalist sculpture, Sugarman’s work does not depend on its size relative to that of the viewer for its impact. It does not bother about relationships with the gallery space but refers to some other content.

“Orange Around” seems like the moment just before or after an event. Are those yellow birds at the upper most lip of the piece’s goblet shape? Sun drenched gulls startled outward? I see the sea again. The blue and white interlocking wave wedges around the upper bowl of the form spiral downward whirlpool like toward the depths of the sculpture’s base. But what are those jagged oranges and blacks moving upward? And perhaps those are not birds at all, but the sun breaking on the clouds after a sea squall.
Physics tells us that energy is mass’ equivalent in another form, that the qualities of an object’s physical existence come down to a measure of its potential to transmit energy. It is Sugarman’s gift with material, in manipulating it, to set the mind free in pursuit of physics’ more mystical associations. In his hands, painted aluminum is not painted aluminum. It is anything but and it reveals motion, as light as air and as fluid as water.

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