October 30 to December 14, 2019
45 East 78th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, mnuchingallery.com

Each had already developed signature ways of seeing and working prior to their meeting shortly before their 1958 civil union after a brief, intense courtship. Subsequent cohabitation, combined with travels to France, Spain and England, for a time created overlapping sensibilities and a shared language. A comparison of these works reveals color pushed to its limits, a painterly riffing and rhyming off of each other’s’ form and the presence of a new energy, seemingly kicked up a notch by the visual conversation born of their relationship. Both must have felt the challenge presented by the other’s painting, resulting in an explosion of competitive collaboration.

Inspired by Spain, Motherwell produced Diary of a Painter, (1958) a work from the same period as his iconic Elegy to the Spanish Republic that instigated the series of that title. In turn, Frankenthaler painted Courtyard of El Greco’s House (1959). Both employ abstract form that remains distinctly referential to local imagery: the black form in Motherwell is reminiscent of the matador’s hat, while a gateway, trellis and arbor can be recognized in Frankenthaler’s painting. A kind of mirroring also happens in a series of collages on view here in which we can observe the artists telling themselves parallel stories about life together. In places the narrative verges on the autobiographical: Bingo (1962) by Frankenthaler is an exuberant, red-footed actual bingo card, emphatically circled and gleefully declaring its winnings. Motherwell’s Hein, Ma Vie?, (1958) translates as “Huh, My Life?”, indicating existential wonder at existence in general. These “Is this really happening to me?” moments give the viewer a sub-rosa sense of joyful communication between the happy couple. Perhaps the most direct message, sent by Frankenthaler to Motherwell, is Happy New 1966, (1965) an enormous greeting card, jubilantly painted on paper and presided over by a big yellow sun. In later years Frankenthaler, asked what moments of her life she would most like to relive, is said to have answered “those first few years with Bob.” These really were the good old days.

Mnuchin Gallery’s publication, adds DAVID COHEN, is a fitting companion and souvenir of this splendid exhibition. Karen Wilkin has worked extensively on both artists individually, especially, of course, Frankenthaler with whom she was particularly close, which perhaps gives the prose here its unique blend of intimacy and accuracy, an example to her profession for how to write biographically and critically with interdependent grace. Take, for instance, her discussion of their respective palettes:

No one would ever mistake a Frankenthaler made between 1958 and 1971 (or at any other time) for a Motherwell, and vice versa. The two painters had very different color sensibilities. Frankenthaler was fascinated by the expressive possibilities of a full spectrum of often intense hues, while Motherwell, especially on canvas, investigated the emotional stimulus of rich tonal variations, with a fairly limited range of hues that apparently spoke eloquently to him. (Frankenthaler confessed to me that when he claimed the chalky blue of Gauloise cigarette packages as his own and asked her not to use it, she was willing to go along with it. “But when he claimed yellow ochre, it was too much.”)

Despite important differences, Wilkin makes the claim for the flowing commonalities that Kim Uchiyama observes:

[…] that their art sprang from internal imperitives; that the artist’s role was to reveal the unseen, not to report on the visible; that touch and color were potent carriers of emotion; that the art of the present was seamlessly connected to the art of the past; and more.

She describes with particular acuity the common drive towards “simpler, more economical imagery” in their distinct paths through the later 1960s (and years of their formal union) with Frankenthaler’s “large expanses of relatively few colors, strategically placed, with the edges of shapes carrying the burden of drawing” and Motherwell’s “even more (apparently) restrained Open series based on the infinite possibilities of drawn or painted interior rectangles played against the rectangle” of the support.

The late scholar and museum curator E. A. Carmean Jr, who died shortly before the opening of this exhibition, organized shows of both artists, rounds off the catalogue with delightful personal reminiscence of the one moment he saw them together after they had gone their separate ways, when Frankenthaler loaned the first Elegy painting that was part of her divorce settlement to an exhibition Carmean organized at the National Gallery of Art of seven Abstract Expressionists. He describes the look of shared pleasure he witnessed as the two artists looked at their friend David Smith’s sculptures together and its familiarity from photos of the couple in the years of their marriage.

The post Competitive Collaboration: Frankenthaler & Motherwell at Mnuchin appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post “He Was Free and Brave”: A Garland of Tributes for Thomas Nozkowski appeared first on artcritical.

Jason Farago, Seph Rodney and Karen Wilkin joined DAVID COHEN to discuss:

Susan Philipsz: A Single Voice
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21 Street, New York tanyabonakdargallery.com

Aneta Grzeszykowska: Mama
Lyles & King, 106 Forsyth Street, New York lylesandking.com

Sangram Majumdar: Offspring
Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth Street, New York shfap.com

Adam Liam Rose: Threshold
Ortega y Gasset Projects: The Skirt, 363 Third Avenue, Brooklyn oygprojects.com

James Hyde: Western Painting-Magnasco
Cathouse Proper @ 524 Projects, 524 Court Street (enter on Huntington St.) Brooklyn cathouseproper.com

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January 29 to March 4, 2018
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, nyss.org

Let’s blame it on the constant digital barrage. Lately, news about artists has threatened to distract us from actually examining their art. Some of the most captivating stories are about artists tagged as outlier, outsider, or self-taught—stories of, say, an eccentric mystic creating prescient abstract paintings; of a reclusive janitor secretly making comic strips of gender ambiguous children. And then there’s James Castle.

Who can look at his eked out dark little interiors without wanting to learn Castle’s story? Born profoundly deaf, mute and dirt poor in Idaho in 1899, his desire to make art was so urgent that he drew using soot scraped from a wood stove, moistened with saliva and applied with sharpened sticks on discarded scrap paper or unfolded cardboard containers. But let’s put aside the story and look intently at his work. James Castle: People Places & Things, curated by Karen Wilkin at the New York Studio School, gives us a new opportunity to reassess what really makes his work so fascinating.

Although it may seem incredible, when we look closely it becomes apparent that in these drawings we see a mind making a systematic inquiry into the expressive and formal possibilities of representation. Meaning that we see someone, though unschooled, not just dutifully trying to replicate his surroundings in a drawing, but doing it with an awareness of just how he is structurally recreating his world and endowing it with feeling. What he chooses to depict and with how much detail indicates where his attention was fixed. His ubiquitous rectangles, for example, not only serve as building blocks of figuration, but are meaning-filled vessels: Pictures, doorways, windows and the drawing itself exist on an equivalent level with other rectangular objects. Tabletops are rectangles strewn with marks representing objects.

In series of works in this exhibition Castle is seen building his understanding of pictorial structure. Several drawings of the same scene change his point of view: more to the right side, or from a slightly lower vantage point. These shifts affect the representations in the picture. A window seen from the side can go from a dark rectangle in one drawing to open up to the landscape in another. A strange face haunting a little interior turns out to be a doorway containing a sliver of patterned wall hung with eye-like pictures.

From an early age he intently, privately, and with no knowledge of art or how it is made, produced hundreds of small works. A former chicken coop and then a trailer became his studio on his parents’ small subsistence farm in Idaho. After they died, it was willed to his sister and he lived there with her family his entire adult life. But we shouldn’t overly romanticize this vision of a little deaf mute boy spitting into soot, and scratching out drawings on materials he scavenged from the trash. It’s not as if they were so poor they couldn’t afford pencils and paper. In fact he was eventually supplied with oil sticks and watercolors. The way he used materials indicated something much deeper than mere penurious ingenuity.

The use of found materials was a way to own his surroundings. He could barely communicate beyond basic gestures and he refused to do farm chores, but the alchemical transformation of the byproducts of his immediate environment into depictions of it, became a way of understanding and laying possession to surroundings to which he probably felt excluded.

He attended a school for the deaf for five years when he was ten, and what occurred there is a mystery. He left at what must have been the middle of puberty, but sexualized bodies do not make an appearance in his work, and because he was not able to use what he learned to communicate beyond basic signing, the possibilities of human relationships seem to have been limited. Instead, like many artists, he used drawing to understand his relationship to his world. Though interiorized in feeling, his work was not about a rich fantasy life like many outliers, and unlike most mainstream artists, his explorations were of necessity more urgent. Looking closely one can see that through his work he began to study how his physical reality was put together.

Nothing is dated here and any ideas of chronology can only be speculative. Nevertheless it is not hard to sense a progression from detailed drawings of his immediate environment—a kitchen, a bedroom, the side of a house, or a view of a field—to a more sophisticated deconstruction of pictures, where abstract form is understood as meaning. Several drawings are devoted to iconic house forms that register as ambiguous symbols.

One of the great strengths of Wilkin’s exhibit is how the drawings are often augmented with James Castle’s source material, which he had carefully preserved. Castle drew inspiration from sources that at first seem so random that it is only when we look to their transformation that we see what might have attracted him. It is usually a fascination with the way a form conveys feeling.

A panel from the comic strip “Henry“ is transformed from a silly scene of the dopy overgrown boy. He has fallen asleep as he digs a pitchfork into a garden plot, a trail of Z’s rising from his head as his perturbed mother looks out at him through a window. Castle turns this, like much of his work, into a dark existential moment. The Z’s are gone, but the strings connecting the stakes demarcating the garden plot are carefully reproduced, as is the side of the house with the window and a shrub in the background. But his mother is barely limned in the window, and Henry becomes a misshapen homunculus with a pitchfork. The shrub in the background goes from a cheery bush to a harbinger of something gray and ominous. Is Castle’s Henry digging his own grave? While the white picket fence in the background is preserved as merely a white shape, Castle amusingly reproduces an anomaly in the newsprint as a strange ellipse. Castle very diligently constructed the black outline that frames the original panel, thus emphasizing the successive rectangles of garden plot, house, and window.

At what point Castle starts to recreate actual objects from the world is unknown, but it seems to come from a more confident and sophisticated understanding of representation. Pieced together drawings are constructed into simulacra of articles of clothing. Or a drawing of a typographic word like “plays” will become the subject of an entire piece. The font is carefully delineated, but the letters become individual calligraphic personae, each serif endowed with unique expressive qualities. He may have been unable to read, but it seems deliberate to represent that word “plays” so evocatively.

He had also created whole hand-bound volumes of images. Apparently one of the few things he did learn at the school for the deaf was how to bind sheets of paper into books. The books are strange amalgams of pages of little rectangles, sometimes twelve to a page, mostly containing portraits, but some are strange symbols or objects, and the images are surrounded by scribbly lines to indicate print. They resemble high school yearbooks or product catalogues. It is this eerie cataloguing aspect that exemplifies the systematic quality of Castle’s work. Having lived until the late 70s, he must have encountered television, and it is notable that some of the portraits look as if their heads are TV sets with faces appearing on screen.

While Castle’s story is compelling, unlike many outliers he was acknowledged as an artist during his life. When he was fifty, Castle’s nephew attending art school in Portland, Oregon brought a few of his drawings to the attention of a professor and his talent was immediately recognized. For the next 20 years until his death in 1977 he became celebrated in the Pacific Northwest with eight one man shows, only to lapse back into obscurity until 1998, when twenty years after his death, his family finally allowed access to the work. Its appearance at New York’s Outsider Art Fair reignited national interest, followed by a retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2008, museum accessions, and a presence at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Examining the pictorial thinking of “outsiders” often takes a back seat to the thrill of rescuing overlooked objects from the trash bin of history. An excitement that is fueled by a perhaps unconscious nostalgia for artistic sincerity is elicited by work that often bears a coincidental visual relationship to modernism but is untainted by modernism’s worldly ambition. This is not really the case with James Castle. The correspondence to mainstream art in Castle’s work, while unwitting, is not superficial. Though it appeared he was indifferent to his “success,” the diligence and concentration that he brought to his work are qualities of many mainstream artists, and tells us a lot about what it means to be an artist. As an artist, he exists on a twentieth century continuum somewhere between Albert Pinkham Ryder and Agnes Martin. And though isolated, James Castle lived in our time and was certainly touched by it. Art has historically been forged in solitude, and though it is tempting to romanticize it, his solitude, while deeper than that of most artists, fueled a quiet passion that is evident in the mood and intensity of the work.

The post Beyond Soot and Spit: Rethinking James Castle appeared first on artcritical.

May 31 to July 10, 2016
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City (212) 673-6466

Driving on winding country roads one often sees the cautionary yet poetic sounding sign “Bridge Freezes Before the Road”. You know to check your speed, pay attention to the surface and be warned for vehicles to spontaneously spin out of control on black ice or hidden pockets of slush in otherwise apparently normal circumstances. As a show title, “Bridge Freezes Before the Road” alerts us to slippery conditions and challenging possibilities of Cora Cohen’s paper surface.

Cohen is a formidable abstract painter who is known for deploying several different mediums and approaches within a single work. Recent bodies of work strive to make the act of perceiving or making the major preoccupation of the work. There are hints of her historical influences, whether Jean Fautrier, Henri Michaux, Wols, art brut, art informel, New York School painting or Far Eastern art, to name a few, but her subjects, choice of materials and themes come from her own reserves.

This show, which was curated by Karen Wilkin, is a perfect opportunity to glimpse at how the artist might see drawings as they are being made in her studio, as, unframed, they are informally pinned up and hung in groups that may or may not relate to a larger painting or signal a nascent theme. The show comprises 27 works from the last decade made on synthetic and natural papers, in sizes ranging from 9 by 12 to 22 by 30 inches with titles such as “Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series” or named according to dates in action or completion. The titles are unambiguous despite the somewhat generic dating. They underscore, as does the title of the exhibition that the artist works from her experiences of first sight, combined with a very wide range of influences that she draws away from as the works themselves develop. I list the materials: graphite, acrylic gesso, acrylic medium, watercolor, crayon, colored pencil, pastel, Flashe, archival ink-jet, wood-veneer, pigment – not because the amount of them is so extraordinary by today’s standards, but because of how well she knows them and in turn coaxes freshness out of them in drawings of delightfully unexpected combinations and poetic compositions.

In 08-15, (2015) fragmented sinewy crayon lines meander over a richly developed whitish surface. Traces of lines can be found below areas of added colors of minty green, blue, yellow and coral. At a glance an image of a figure in a squatting position with a large right foot at the bottom of the page might be found but as your eye slows and the upper half of the page is explored, now an aerial view of land in which solid forms begin to appear as pattern. Maps, seasons, climate changes and such seem to be collecting on the page. Washes of grey have the effect of toning down clacking yellows, while dry pastel seems to be blanketing the lower portion. Something that is very powerful in this particular work is the way it can make us feel engaged in discovery as we look. The surprise of seeing entire worlds encircled below certain areas with marks and textural shifts keep us searching for more. It is as if the sounds of a full orchestra are made by just a clutch of instruments. And as in a concert hall, the worlds one viewer finds won’t necessarily correspond to the discoveries of another.

In 015-11, (2011) veils of delicately hued liquid cover much of the off-square format. Brushstrokes sink into the creamy paper: successive layers lighten some areas while in other places pigments bleed and pool to make natural edges for new shapes. Drips and splatters become attributes or relationships rather than signifiers of process because in Cohen’s work, everything gets worked into the image. A big swath of a cloudy medium collects and dries in the lower left half of the page forming crystalline shapes like those found on freezing windows. Four or five biomorphic forms, hovering atop it all, are significantly more densely colored than the environment they occupy. Their edges are circumnavigated by colored pencil and graphite in repeated routes that frequently slip away from the forms they describe, to instead create areas that invite the viewer to mentally fill them in. There is a smoldering awareness that as these floating things resolve into one form or object then like a cloud they can becomes another. It is something of this world, with its allusions to atmosphere, lichen, algae, crystalline forms and geological peaks and something of an altogether alien plane, a hybrid existence.

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Witty. Elegant. Playful. Subtle. Comical. Frontal. Multi-faceted. Confrontational. Friendly. Thoughtful. Forthright. Singular. Incremental. Alive. I made this rather erratic list in Don Porcaro’s studio during a prolonged encounter with the works in this exhibition. Inspired by a conversation with Porcaro about his family’s heritage, I jotted down the Italian word prepotente – roughly “self-important” – a response, I suspect, to the insistently animated, “look at me” quality of Porcaro’s vertical assemblages of slices of colored stone. And then there’s our awareness of both the unified form and the physicality of Porcaro’s recent constructions–the dry stoniness of the layered limestone and marble. Each of his exquisitely crafted stacks of delicately varied hues has as much personality and eccentricity as an idiosyncratic individual. Spending time with Porcaro’s upright sculptures we begin to feel as if we’re at a party with a crowd of lively, extravagantly dressed guests. The notably different tops of each of the sculptures can appear as inventive hats and the often hilarious feet on some of the most refined of them suggest that these uprights might just scuttle off if our company doesn’t hold their attention. But soon Porcaro’s ability to invent expressive masses claims our attention—we begin to think about his suavely articulated volumes in relation to Constantin Brancusi’s ravishingly pared-down, eloquent forms and the party chatter quiets down.

This double reading of Porcaro’s sculpture is obviously what triggered the wide-ranging list of words that introduced this essay. It’s also an important aspect of what makes his work so compelling. His earlier polychromed pieces combining stone, metal, concrete and paint were unabashed fusions of the grotesque and the toy-like, conflations, as the artist has said, of “the monster and the child;” confronted by these sculptures, whether “life-size,” knee-high, or scaled to the hand, we began to wonder whether we had stumbled into Hieronymus Bosch’s world of sinister hybrid creatures or a particularly sophisticated aisle in F.A.O. Schwartz. Porcaro’s emphasis on stone in his recent work has expanded his vocabulary of allusions, to some extent because of the character of his chosen materials. The exuberant polychromy of his earlier sculpture not only helped bring his inventions to life, but it unified disparate materials and the variety of textures allowed us to read his complex composites as singular, albeit multi-colored, vivacious objects. Yet we also remained aware of color as an addition. Porcaro began to concentrate on the chromatic and textural possibilities of a palette of stone in 2011 when he was working on a project in Slovenia investigating the range of hues available in Croatian marble. He liked the way the variations of delicately colored stone allowed him to seamlessly integrate chroma, texture, and mass. At the same time he created substantial vertical forms by stacking slices of limestone and marble that permitted him to create volume with an additive, improvisatory approach similar to that of his earlier mixed-media constructions.

While no less animated than his “Boschian” mixed-media creatures, Porcaro’s recent stone sculptures seem, at least initially, to be slightly more solemn in their associations, while retaining the sense of multiple readings that has traditionally been characteristic of his work. We are struck first by the singularity of the forms, by the way these unignorable objects loom up before us, occupying our space and demanding our attention. Yet we are also soon aware of the multivalent character of those singular forms. We note the many layers of stone, each slightly different in hue and surface, that make up the unified masses. We begin to think both about the process of accumulation and about natural stratified rock formations, while, in part because of the generous scale and verticality of these sculptures, we think, as well, about classical architecture. The swelling, upward thrust of Porcaro’s recent works suggests the way the columns on Doric temples are modulated to correct for optical distortion. Yet, at the same time, Porcaro being Porcaro, the undulating profiles of his upright sculptures, tapering to narrow tops, recall nothing so much as personable robots; or for those of us who spent childhood rainy days in the antique libraries of summer houses, we recall the tightly corseted society ladies of a certain age or caricatured butlers in satirical New Yorker magazine cartoons of the 1920s. The contrasting sinuous shapes and textures of the sculptures’ tops, assembled from many different sources, intensify the sense of personality and individuality. Porcaro refers to them as “caps,” “heads,” or even “a hookah.” He courts these varied connections, deliberately intending both to ground and to enliven his works by means of what he calls “a kind of reference.” The combination of tapering forms and the narrow edges of the sliced stone provokes still other associations—the elongated necks of the African tribal women whose traditional dress includes stacks of necklaces, for example. Porcaro says, too, that he wants the sense of compression that image elicits; it’s yet another component in the notable animation of his constructions.

Even when Porcaro ventures into more conceptual territory, as in the engaging Cabinet of Nomads, 2015, an installation of a multiplicity of small, colored forms elevated on legs and arranged on shelves, each individual part is as charged as any of his larger works. This sculpture is a new iteration of an earlier concept that had its origins in Porcaro’s concern with the steadily growing population of the world. Now, the work has been reconfigured both to represent both the troubling rise of displaced people world wide and to celebrate the United Nations. The many components that carry the symbolic weight of the sculpture are intimate in size, suggesting that, like toys, they could be picked up and handled. Yet for all their playful overtones, they are also, like all of Porcaro’s works, thoughtful, self-contained, and self-referential. Cabinet of Nomads is confrontational. We feel held accountable for something, even if we’re not quite sure what it is. This kind of multivalence is why Porcaro’s sculpture not only draws our attention but also holds it. At a moment when art is often over-explained or loaded with irony, his work asserts that serious ideas, both aesthetic and otherwise, can be presented by purely visual means, with wit and humor, without compromising either seriousness or wit. That’s both valuable and important.

Karen Wilkin is a New York based independent curator and critic.

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The Surrealists had a fabulous notion of a secret corridor that could take you right through Paris, from building to building, without encumbering itself with the street. In a way, New York has its own corporate version of that fantasy: the lobbies of trading towers that, whether through altruism or planning obligation, the public is entitled to traverse. One curatorially-inclined causeway is Tower 49 Gallery, comprising the lobby, sky lobby (stunning bird’s eyes of the Rockefeller Center by the way) and exterior spaces of 12 East 49th Street, a recently upgraded 1980s tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the Kato International portfolio. Its exhibition program, directed by Ms. Ai Kato, currently features the stunningly installed “Bennington Legacy: Sculpture by Willard Boepple, Isaac Witkin and James Wolfe”. As guest curator Karen Wilkin explains in an accompanying catalogue, Bennington – both town and gown – formed a nexus of sculptural experimentation for several generations: both Wolfe and Boepple (who was actually born in Bennington) served as assistants to South African native Witkin.  Witkin’s sole work on view is his magnificent Shogun, 1968, a welded steel sculpture placed outside the glass and steel building. The sculpture is as solid and flexible as you’d expect a warrior to be: the squat ziggurat to the right feels like it could fold and store in the half-section of cone to the left in a feat of origami.

The Bennington Legacy remains on view through October 29 at 12 East 49th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenue, open weekdays 9am to 6pm

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In the 1970s and 1980s, when James Wolfe (b. 1944) was still an emerging East Coast artist, his sculpture was exhibited at André Emmerich in New York. Then in 1990, he moved to Los Angeles, and for the next two decades exhibited primarily (though not exclusively) on the West Coast. Now he has moved again—to Northport, Maine—and  New Yorkers are getting a chance to catch up with his development in a most lively, invigorating show, organized at the New York Studio School by Karen Wilkin.

Wolfe has always been known for the linearity of his sculptures, the way that their narrow strips of steel twist and twirl, but this unique capacity has become almost an obsession—and a most stimulating one. To be sure, his language belongs in the constructivist tradition that began with Picasso and Julio González in the 1920s, and continued on down through David Smith and Anthony Caro. And Wolfe was, in fact, one of several young American and Canadian sculptors who worked as Caro’s assistants in the early 1970s. But far more notable than Wolfe’s antecedents is his vigorous present stance, his work’s tremendous vitality.

His ribbons of steel appear to flutter like flags, sway like saplings, or wiggle like underwater plants, making his sculptures full of motion and life. All but two of the fourteen in this show are made of powder-coated steel, with a brightly colored, semi-gloss finish; the other two, the largest and most ambitious, are made of oiled steel, with a modest brown finish.

Not only do colors of works in this show vary, but so do placements.  Some sculptures, like the red, marvelously bird-like Just Right (2013), are screwed to the wall.  Some, like the copper-colored T Time (2014), sit sedately on pedestals that bring them up to chest-level. Spiral Yellow (2013), a congeries of saffron curlicues, “sits on a very low platform, forcing the viewer to stand back to admire its beauties.

While three works here have “wicket” in their titles with shapes suggestive of croquet or cricket wickets, there is no evidence that the artist meant to depict actual wickets.  More likely, in the search for satisfying abstractions, is that he named them upon completion, on the basis of what they reminded him of.

And, in the way of all abstractions, other associations also tie them to the natural world.  In no case is this truer than with Spread Wicket (2013). Resting on the ground and facing into a corner of the gallery, this seven foot high sculpture, one of the two oiled steel pieces, is nearly as wide as it is tall. It resembles not only a cricket wicket, but also a door or window facing into a house or church, a giant mask or helmet—none of these association detracting from its dignity, from its purely visual statement of elegance.

Of the four tall, tree-like sculptures  leaning against wallsfrom the “Quartet” series, two suggest further allusions to the natural world—conveyed through small additions, reminiscent of the poetic symbols that Joan Miró once used (though in other respects, these sculptures look nothing like Miró’s).  Midway from the top of Quartet Purple is a small square boxlike piece of metal enclosing an open hole. In the same position on Quartet Gray is a small ball sticking out at the top of a curly strip.  Female and male are thus impishly implied.

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the review panel march 2012

Bill Berkson, Will Heinrich and Karen Wilkin joined David Cohen to discuss the Whitney Biennial 2012.

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This modest but sparkling exhibition of one largish watercolor and 21 medium-sized gouaches is by Jack Bush (1909-1977), regarded by some (including myself) as Canada’s most outstanding painter. True, those who know his large paintings on canvas, exhibited in New York from the ‘60s to the ‘80s, may find this exhibition only a hint of what he could achieve. Still, we haven’t had a Bush exhibition of any kind in the Big Apple since 1997 (and even that was only of early work), so for the present generation of gallery-goers, this show should serve as a welcome introduction.

Bush (like Morris Louis) was a near-contemporary of Pollock’s, but didn’t begin  to create the paintings upon which his reputation really rests until after Pollock’s death.  A lifelong resident of Toronto, Bush attended traditional art schools there in the ‘20s and ‘30s, supporting himself and his family as a commercial artist while exhibiting representational paintings until the late ‘40s. In the ‘50s, he evolved into abstraction, initially taking his cues from the heavily-brushed, gestural style favored by de Kooning and so popular in New York during that decade.  Then, in 1957, Clement Greenberg visited Toronto, at the invitation of the Painters Eleven, a local artists’ group to which Bush belonged.  Even in those days, Greenberg was controversial: two of the eleven refused to let him in their studios, but Bush was among the nine who did.  Greenberg was unimpressed with Bush’s gestural work, but very impressed with some watercolors that the artist had made and laid aside—so impressed, in fact, that he suggested Bush apply this thinner watercolor technique to his larger work on canvas.  Bush took this advice as a point of departure, and revolutionized his style.  In a sense, then, the present exhibition thus becomes a primer on the foundation of Bush’s later accomplishments, and shows what Greenberg admired about this artist first.

The exhibition, curated by Karen Wilkin, and hung in a blessedly chronological sequence, displays work from the ‘60s in the first, entry gallery, and from the early ‘70s in the second, back gallery.  This is the right way to show them, for viewers meeting Bush for the first time will probably find the ‘60s work most accessible, composed as it is of bright, cheerful colors and simple, almost bouncy figures mostly on grounds of white—in other words, not unlike much other color-field painting of the ‘60s, or all that different from what Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Friedel Dzubas were doing at the time. This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of dynamic, satisfying images here, especially the brilliant trio of “sash” paintings directly across from the entrance, Nice Pink, (1965), Bitter Pink, (1965) andUntitled (1966).  According to Wilkin’s catalogue esssay, this image of a stack of colored blocks was inspired, during a visit to New York, by a Madison Avenue shop window display of a woman’s shirt and voluminous skirt, cinched with a wide belt.  As this is a true abstraction, however, and results count for more than intentions, the image also suggests a necktie, tree, skyscraper, and numerous other associations—as well as packing a punch not to be explained by any associations at all.

The second gallery is the one that may challenge the viewer’s taste, for by the ‘70s, Bush had found his mature style, moving into a realm in which he had no artistic kin. In other words, these images are a lot less familiar, and familiarity is — in art as in human relations — sometimes necessary to breed content (accent on the second syllable).  Instead of a white field, all but one of the gouaches in this gallery present their figures on a colored ground, mostly a matte but sometimes a mottled gray (in one case, a softer brown).  The figures themselves aren’t simple geometric ones, but with subtle touches that I can’t recall having seen elsewhere — smooth, opaque streaks or bars of color with one end blunt and the other ragged, as though a giant brush had swept them with a single stroke. And giant loops or squiggles, also creating the illusion that a giant brush has been at work.  Again, the wall of the gallery directly across from the entry offers the most dramatic display of this idiom, with three beautifully simple yet elegant images on gray grounds: Forsythia (1971) on the left, Falling Blossoms (1971) on the right, and in the center, the pure gray-and-white Apple Blossom Burst (1971), for my money the most perfect picture in the show.  Still, because of those tough gray fields, and because one must first view the pictures from a greater distance, even these three wonderful images may inevitably perhaps appear a little smaller and more distant than the work in the first gallery—more remote in a physical sense and therefore perhaps a figurative one as well.

What most truly characterizes Bush’s mature work is a seriousness, even a gravitas that amounts to a truly Olympian detachment, and, in a culture that often tends to resent high seriousness, this may appear a drawback. It is to be hoped that viewers of this inviting exhibition will be able to scale the heights of Bush’s Olympus without suffering overmuch from the absence of too many companions.

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