From her outpost at the foot of Geary Street, gallerist Paule Anglim maintained a magisterial presence in the San Francisco art world. Until her death last week in her 90s, Anglim was an anchor. From her beginnings in North Beach in the 1970s through her 32-year occupancy of 14 Geary Street, Anglim invigorated the Bay Area art world, maintaining contact with its roots in the postwar scene while cultivating new talent and nurturing it with input from New York and Europe. Veteran painter Wayne Thiebaud recalls with admiration the way “she kept that gallery going,” while showing “so many interesting artists,” remembering her as very smart and no-nonsense.

Anglim’s exhibitions reflected her wide-ranging interests and friendships with artists, which led her to follow artistic conversations as they developed. Beginning with those associated with the Beats like Jess (Collins), Joan Brown and Bruce Connor, she followed artists who took their engagement with materials in more conceptual directions like James Melchert and Paul Kos, or developed assemblage into installation like Nayland Blake. Shows of New York artists like Louise Fishman and Milton Resnick emphasized pure painting, but she also represented Robert Bechtle, whose photorealist renderings of suburban streets are quintessentially Californian. Perhaps the best way to characterize her taste is that she relished the rich compost of ideas that sustained Bay Area culture.

But painter John Zurier, who worked with her for nearly 30 years, also recalls Paule as “a direct link to older artists such as Picabia and Max Ernst, and the Parisian painters from the ’40s and ’50s like Fautrier, Jean Riopelle, and Joan Mitchell. She loved the art of conversation and was particularly proud of the interview she did with Picabia’s widow. Paule could be cutthroat in business, but she ran the gallery like an old fashioned salon.” Zurier recalls sitting in Paule’s office when she had to take a call. “I asked if she wanted me to leave so she could talk privately. She said no and then picked up the phone and screamed ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you’ and slammed the phone down. She looked up at me with a little smile and said ‘that was a bit much, don’t you think?’” As ceramic sculptor Annabeth Rosen puts it, “She had exquisite manners and sharp wit, both wielded with precision.”

Rosen also recalls Anglim’s deep commitment “to the artist’s dialogue, which she was relentlessly engaged in,” and Zurier emphasizes her constant reading: “She could talk about the poems of John Montague as easily as the latest mystery novel. Paule loved artists and writers, especially poets, and supported Robert Duncan as much as she did Jess, and Bill Berkson as much as Philip Guston.”

The loss of her presence, and of her institutional memory, cuts deeply, at a time when galleries in San Francisco are being displaced by higher rents, and artists lament the financial changes in the art market along with the money-driven culture of the international scene. Anglim represented not just intelligence and cultural breadth, but a rootedness that seems hard to recover.

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February 13 to April 4, 2015
20 West 57th Street (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York, 212 244 6055

The title of this exhibition, West of the Future, makes me think of a passage from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden: “I always found myself in dread of west and a love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I could not say unless it could be that the morning came over the peaks of the Galbilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias.” This passing of light and time together seems wholly apposite in thinking about Zurier’s paintings, which so successfully evoke a feeling of proximity to other sentient beings through the elusive and transitive world of the senses. Each of the paintings here, varying in size and in a color range from greens, pale blues and varied grays, to intense reds and dark resonant blues, need prolonged viewing, and extensive descriptions. It is more worthwhile, I have found, to describe a single painting at length and a further one more succinctly.

Afternoon (S.H.G.), from 2014, is a 28-by-35-inch horizontally oriented painting, made with distemper on linen, a medium consisting of pigment suspended in a glue, for example a rabbit skin glue The extent of the actual painted surface — another rectangle a half inch or so shy of three edges — reaches around the left vertical edge, again, by a distance of about a half inch. This off setting of the white painted rectangle simply and subtly asserts the objectness of the support, declaring its role to be coexistent in the production of pictorial space rather than incidental or de facto. This not only avers the status of what we see as a constructed and painted object — distemper painted on linen fabric, over a frame of some sort — it also, whilst objectifying the picture plane, proclaims its capacity for spatial illusion. By incorporating a side edge, only seen of course from a viewing position that is not directly in front, a reading is required that involves movement and the realization that to truly see the painting it has to be seen not as an image of some sort alone, but as a surface bearing paint that has actual depth as well as a porous visual depth. The slight perspectival slope of the left top side edge is echoed by a blue diagonal in the top left corner of the composition, itself joined to a partially erased vertical blue line, that is in turn parallel to, two thirds over at the right side of the painting another blue line. Neither vertical line reaches the exposed raw linen band of the bottom edge, though at the top right hand edge, where the rectangle of white breaks and opens in slightly less opaque brush worked paint, the blue vertical reaches the actual edge of the painting. This area of lessened opacity reaches down through the painting from top right to bottom left — together with the vertical lines a slope of tonal variations recall a hill side fronted by leaf bare trees. Michel Foucault in his Manet and the object of Painting (2009), describes the kind of fixed viewing of a simply depicted space in Western painting, that Eduard Manet turned away from, a tradition Zurier continues: “It must also deny that the picture was a piece of space in front of which the viewer could be displaced, around which the viewer could turn, so that consequently he can grasp an angle or eventually grasp the two sides, and that is why painting, since the Quattrocento, has fixed a certain ideal place from which and only from which, one can and must, see the picture.”

A feint white diagonal line adds further complexity to Afternoon (S.H.G.), adding the illusion of a tilted plane receding from the vertical blue lines, which can, if concentrating on this diagonal slant, stand in as a human orientation against the plane’s horizontality. The raw linen half inch bands at the painting’s edge “frame” the “view,” an evocation rather than a description, akin to Charles Baudelaire’s concept of correspondances — an evocation of real world experiences through the invented world of a painting — an alternative to the analytic mind. Existential tensions between life and art are evinced by memory’s capacity to move between what is present and what is absent. As the white distemper is thin it is consequently often absorbed and as it is worked in short roaming strokes it registers each particular woven, creased or knotted idiosyncrasy of the linen itself. This particular movement of paint, and physically proximate material can recall — with no rational relation — the vapors dispersed from New York’s rooftop pipes seen moving sometimes against low, grayish cloud. The linen surface, whilst tactilely there, moves in and out of focus, against the brushstroked whites, hinting at temporality: A paradoxical and perpetual temporality in the paintings, as opposed to a momentary and actual one. The paintings in West of the Future are invested with Zurier’s interest in Iceland — a place he spends time each year — with its landscape and light, but relate also to other lights and places for this viewer.

Pierre Bonnard presented not only a composite facture of multiple brushstrokes, but the psychological displacement caused by passing moments of time, returned as constant passages of time in paint. Zurier’s, Before and After Summer (2014), a vertical 78-by-48-inch painting in oil on linen, is taller than head height and offers therefore two distances to view from when close, the variegated passage of brush strokes and abrasions from short distance together with the sense of looking toward or past something when looking up. Dark greens overlay a pale blue, the blue more revealed in two patches adjacent to the painting’s upper limit. Optically the painting’s light level suggests dusk, of northern, rather than southern light constancy. Two artists that have been important to Zurier are recalled here, Bonnard himself ,and Munch, though at some distance. More recent artists who come to mind, such as Raoul De Keyser or Günter Förg, occupy the borderland between reference and process. Zurier has combined thoroughly any influences on his process to come up with a singular expression for his own thoughts and experiences.

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April 25 to June 22, 2013
20 West 57th St, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212 244 6055

Particularity: some paintings have it, some don’t. In a painting that has it, specific material and visual attributes eclipse whatever genre, medium or aesthetic ideology that work might embody. The viewer’s experience of such a painting is rooted in the minutia of its physical constitution, rather than in its significance as a statement of purpose, an intellectual position, a conception of space, or what have you. Particularity is located somewhere in triangulation with Michael Fried’s “presentness” and John Waters’ definition of beauty as “looks you can never forget.”

And there is sometimes a fine line between particularity and its absence, as John Zurier’s current exhibition at Peter Blum’s new 57th Street space demonstrates. On view are 11 paintings dated 2012 or 2013 and one from 2007. In that earlier oil on linen, , Oblaka (for Mark), a pale bluish film of paint is methodically but imperfectly scraped over viridian green underpainting, leaving green glitches that might remind you of fingerprints on a steamy mirror, or skittering fish beneath the water’s surface. The painting measures 38 by 31 inches.  What is interesting to me is that the six paintings in the exhibition that are smaller than Oblaka (for Mark) are far more memorable than the five that are larger, and the difference, I think, is owing to the smaller paintings’ particularity.

The very smallest canvas, Sorgin (21 by 15 inches), painted in a close range of pungent reds, attests to Zurier’s coloration of touch. A dense, though not particularly thick, cloud of brushstrokes — both fast and slow, fat and lean — gives way to raspy pinkish areas at top and bottom where the brush has barely swept the surface, or missed it entirely. A faint impression of the stretcher bars, which painters generally try to avoid, inflects this quizzical painting’s skin with a reminder of its rudimentary mechanical infrastructure.

Öxnadalur (oil on linen, 72 by 44 inches) is ten times the size of Sorgin, but that size does not translate into a commanding sense of scale. To be sure, it is beautifully painted—in a silvery-purplish gray broadly worked wet-into-wet over a whitish ground—but it lacks the density of Sorgin’s material factuality. The paintings do, however, have in common a faint representational suggestion: a rough trail, angling up from the bottom edge (hence into pictorial space) and into a bosky wood indicated by silhouetted treetops.

This footpath scenario is even more distinct in A spring a thousand years ago, a painting in glue tempera on cotton. Brushily painted in a watery slate blue, the image exhibits just enough variety in mark making to break down spatially into the classic foreground/middle ground/background landscape organization. The inclination to interpret sparse compositional cues as a representation of believable space is more interesting as a study in the psychology of perception than as metaphor for the act of painting as a trek into unfamiliar territory. In any case, what particularity this painting possesses emerges not from the spectral sylvan iconography but from a few slightly discordant, strictly ruled horizontal and vertical brushstrokes that echo the painting’s framing edge.

A less literal order of narrative is embedded in the odd Mosfellsbœr (distemper and oil on linen), where the fabric support itself, puckered along the right side as it meets the stretcher, contributes to the story of the work’s making. A translucent whitish wash, loosely applied, backs a constellation of five tiny black rectangles resembling bits of electrical tape which in turn align in an upward-curving sweep as if caught in a current of wind or water. Nothing about the painting feels arbitrary. The very fact that, when working small, Zurier apparently avoids standard formats supports the impression that their every detail is the more considered.

The two largest paintings, Hellnar (108 by 75 inches) and Härnevi (75 by 108 inches; both distemper on linen) are the most generalized, nearly monochrome, and placid almost to the point of dissipation. While they may well have one foot in the sublime, so to speak, they nevertheless lack the visual crackle of, for example, After Paolo Schiavo. Named for a Quattrocento Florentine painter, this compact work (17 by 21 inches) succeeds in depicting an expansive, mysterious space in a very few variations on blue-black. It is horizontally bifurcated by a surprisingly concrete horizontal stroke of the brush, which, amidst the exhibition’s abundant atmospheric effects, looks solid enough to do chin-ups on. While Zurier’s quite lovely larger paintings may be seen as contemporary examples of lyrical abstraction or color field or neo-monochrome, a painting like After Paolo Schiavo defies categorization.

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