Installation view of Salotto – Villa Panza Museum, Varese, Italy
(l to r) Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Untitled 130, 1987-1988
Multilayered oil on Oyster linen, 60 x 60 inches
Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Untitled 121, 1984-1985
Multilayered oil on Oyster linen, 66 x 60 inches
The Panza Collection (Photo: David Sotnik)

Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, 1923-2010

“Most people who have any interest in Post-War American art, whether Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Environmental Art, Conceptualism or Monochromism have heard of the great Italian art collector, Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. In many ways a modern day Medici, Count Panza passed away at age 87 in Milan on April 24, 2010.

Together with his wife, Giovanna, and with enormous love, courage, forsight and brilliance, the Panzas amassed three distinct collections totaling 2500 works from the mid -1950′s to the present, mostly of American art. They mostly liked to acquire in depth from mature artists who were as yet not well known but would later be recognized as the major artists of their era. These included such figures as Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Irwin, Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Cy Twombly, Richard Long, Lawrence Weiner, James Turrell, Roni Horn, Martin Puryear, Lawrence Carroll and many many others. The Panzas were, in fact, the first major collectors of these artists and signaled to others that these artists were important. Their vast acquisitions influenced American and world art history and art markets profoundly, as well as enhancing the collections of several American museums such as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshorn…”

Peter Forakis, Atlanta Gateway, 1967

From The New York Times, December 17, 2009

Peter Forakis, a sculptor who helped found Park Place, a prominent New York artists’ cooperative gallery of the 1960s, died on Nov. 26 in Petaluma, Calif. He was 82 and lived in Petaluma.

His death was announced by the Togonon Gallery in San Francisco, which has represented him since 2007.

Mr. Forakis was one of many young artists in the late ’50s and early ’60s who took up geometry and moved into three-dimensional space as a way to avoid the omnipresence of Abstract Expressionism.

Born in Hanna, Wyoming, to Greek immigrants, he grew up in California, in Oakland and Modesto, and served in the merchant marine from 1949 to 1950 and in the military in Korea from 1951 to 1953. He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1957 and moved to New York in 1958. Over the next few years he went from concentrating on painting to making sculptures, just as geometry was becoming a force in both mediums, but especially in sculpture, Minimalist and not.

In 1963, a group that included Mr. Forakis, Mark di Suvero, Robert Grosvenor and Forrest Myers started exhibiting their work, playing free jazz and discussing the future of public sculpture in a floor at the top of a loft building in Lower Manhattan near Park Place, where several of them lived. The first director was John Gibson, who would later have a gallery of his own.

However geometrically inclined, these artists avoided the simple, stable shapes of Minimalism. Their best-known member, Mr. di Suvero, favored dynamic, open structures of tilted and balanced beams, objects and forms. His Park Place colleagues worked with and against his influence, usually with more streamlined forms or brighter colors.

Often consisting of repeating, flattened volumes tilted on a corner, Mr. Forakis’s work had a mathematical demeanor; sometimes it evoked the black, chunky forms of the Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith.

In 1965 Park Place relocated to 542 West Broadway (now La Guardia Place) and became known for ecumenical invitationals that included artists as varied as Ronald Bladen, Al Held, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Sylvia Stone, Ronnie Landfield, Carl Andre and Joan Jonas. Park Place closed in 1967. A year later its second director, Paula Cooper, opened her own gallery on Prince Street in SoHo, and for a time represented a few Park Place artists.

In addition to Park Place, Mr. Forakis had New York solo shows in the 1960s at the Brata Gallery, the David Anderson Gallery and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In 1966 his work appeared in “Primary Structures,” an important exhibition of geometric sculpture at the Jewish Museum.

Mr. Forakis returned to Northern California in 1979. His last New York show was at the Max Hutchinson Gallery in 1982.

He is represented in several public collections and numerous commissions in Atlanta, Denver, Oakland, Nyack, N.Y., and elsewhere. In 2008 his work was included in “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York” at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin.

Mr. Forakis’s marriage to the artist Phyllis Yampolsky ended in divorce. He is survived by a daughter, Christina Forakis of Sacramento, who is the child of an earlier relationship; and by two children from his marriage to Ms. Yampolsky, Gia Forakis of New York City and Jozeph Forakis of Milan.

Installation view

September 1-26, 2009

The Paula Cooper Gallery presents an exhibition of work by David Novros. Six paintings dating from 1965 to 1969 will be shown, some of which have not been seen in public for over forty years.

An original member of Park Place, the historic New York artist collective, Novros is well known for his large, abstract paintings on irregularly shaped, multipaneled canvases. With their sensuous and reflective surfaces created with multiple layers of sprayed-on acrylic pigment and glazed with Murano (a powdered pigment which is suspended in clear lacquer), Novros’ paintings provide the viewer with new types of perceptual and emotional experiences. He not only seeks to communicate content through monochromatic color, geometric form and complex spatial issues, but he also encourages a kinesthetic viewing experience through the surface’s response to changing light.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Novros often painted murals on his parents’ garage. Thus began the artist’s commitment to “painting as wall and on wall.” Influenced by a variety of art historical sources, including Native American pottery, Byzantine mosaics, Italian frescoes and the mural-scale paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Novros likens his work from this period to portable murals and aims to communicate the emotional power of geometric abstraction.

These breakthrough paintings from the initial stage in Novros’ career in turn influenced other artists as well, most notably Brice Marden and his panel paintings from the 70s. However, unlike other artists who utilize shaped canvases, Novros’ work emphasizes the critical meeting point of the canvas and wall, as if his paintings are extensions of the walls themselves.

David Novros was born in 1941 in Los Angeles and lives and works in New York City. Most recently, his work was included in a group exhibition entitled “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York” at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Novros was also the subject of “Contemporary Conversations: David Novros and The Menil Collection,” a one-person show that was part of a series of exhibitions that celebrate living artists whose work is in the Menil’s permanent collection.

Novros has exhibited in several prominent venues, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art in Dallas, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Bremen Museum of Modern Art in Bremen, Germany.

Max Gimblett, Orpheus, 2004
Gesso, polyurethane, pencil, epoxy, pigment,
moon gold leaf on wood panel
70 x 70 inches

June 19 – August 1, 2009

Hamish Morrison Gallery presents, for the first time in Germany, New Zealand artist Max Gimblett (* 1935). His work enjoys special recognition in his home country with which he has retained many links, but especially in the United States where he has lived since the 1970s. This year his works have been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum New York as part of the exhibition The Third Mind.

The work of Max Gimblett is characterized by paintings and drawings of great virtuosity and finesse as a bridge between different cultures. The contact with artists like Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock has had significant influence on his painting in the context of abstract expressionism. However, since the 1980s his cultural curiosity which had first been aroused by Maori art has been reflected by the influence of Asian culture on his work and his life.

By using the Greek word Téménos which refers to the space dedicated to a sacred shrine or sanctuary, to describe the exhibition, Gimblett does not evoke the religious aspect of art, but its spiritual dimension. The technological and aesthetic delicacy of his paintings consisting of rare and precious materials such as sheets of silver, gold and palladium imported from all over the world and combined with traditional materials and contemporary polymers results in masterful and fascinating works. The unique forms of his paintings break the convention, which automatically identifies a rectangle suspended from a wall as a work of art or at least as a decorative image. The viewer becomes aware of this quasi-votive character of the work, allowing him access to a dimension beyond time and space, opening a space of meditation.

In the act of painting, his gestures reflect an energy, a rhythm and a dance in which the viewer can participate. This participation is made possible by the perception of time by observation; time, which according Gimblett is concentric. The spectator, by following the traces of the paint brush, witnesses the beginning, accelerations, decelerations and the culmination of the gesture. For Gimblett the process of painting is not a cold cerebral act expressing the Cartesian “I” of the proud and egocentric modern man, but the Buddhist principle of non-self eclipsing one’s judgment. His painting expresses intuitive, pure energy.

The titles of his works and their shapes reflect the wealth of inspiration and syncretism of the artist as well as his interest in different cultures and his reflections on the Jungian collective unconscious. He appears to look beyond the Jungian self which is the unknown centre of personality where antinomies and the collective unconscious expressed by myths of different cultures and embodied by certain signs, such as quatrefoil (Apricot Garden, Celestial) are reconciled. By using the quatrefoil with its association to the four elements, windows, flowers in general or lotus in particular, Gimblett convokes the vital forces and archetypal transcendence of the human psyche.

This motif explains the most recurring references such as the influence of Japanese painter Senga Gibon (1750-1837), for whom the circle, triangle and square – bases for many of Gimblett’s works – alone represent the universe. (The Gaze – For Jackson Pollock 2008, Guggenheim Enso Series, 2008). According to the philosopher of Buddhism Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, the circle corresponds with the infinite without beginning and without end, while the triangle is the beginning of all forms, and the square, a double triangle, stands for the process of duplication. The approximation of the series Guggenheim Enso with “Ten Ox Herding Pictures”, which reflect the path to enlightenment in Zen, is particularly interesting, especially the 8th picture above entitled: “Self and Ox Forgotten”

Gimblett’s work is a synthesis not only of the many questions and answers posed by the history of art, but also between cultures by bringing together opposing values and principles, such as calligraphy and geometry, abstraction and figuratism, as well as aesthetic and philosophical propositions of east and west. In bringing together these spiritual considerations and coming to terms with the seductive power of images, and the intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment, Gimblett achieves in his work the reconciliation of the Apollonian and Dionysian.

 

Installation view

March 19 – May 3, 2009

Kjell Varvin (born 1939) creates both drawings and paintings, but is best known for his sculptures and installations. This exhibition focuses on a large selection of sculptures made of welded steel and produced over the last fifteen years. Together with the sculptures, a number of drawings on veneer will be on show and the exhibition thereby comprises the largest presentation of Varvin’s work so far.

Kjell Varvin’s oeuvre has its roots in Minimalism and the artist himself emphasises how much artists such as Donald Judd, Brice Marden and Sol LeWitt have influenced him (Varvin also later worked as Lewitt’s assistant). However, Varvin uses a method that has more in common with improvisation and playfulness than with stringent planning and perfection. He allows random chance, spontaneous ideas and accidents to be a part of his works, which he prefers to call “proposals” rather than “statements”. This process results in drawings and sculptures that have retained elements of imperfection and therefore also their human quality.

At first sight, the sculptures may resemble classical, modernist works, but since their titles and other components refer to observations of everyday objects (as, for example, fire escapes in New York, a pinball machine or a dining table), they appear on closer examination as up-to-date works with a referential diversity that reminds us first and foremost of far younger, postmodernist artists. The exhibition has a fresh and topical quality, though consisting of works by an artist who made his debut in 1964.

Throughout his career, Kjell Varvin has exhibited extensively both in Norway and abroad. In recent years, he has participated at major exhibitions such as the Sculpture Biennial at the Vigeland Museum and the Drawing Biennial at the Artists’ House in Oslo and also at joint exhibitions such as “Geometry as Image” at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York and “Go back to Start” and 0047 (all held in 2008). Varvin’s last solo exhibition in Oslo was held at The Drawing Center of Norway in 2007.

 

Purchase on Amazon.com

Since it was founded in 1976, Art Monthly magazine has consistently published interviews with leading contemporary artists. The interviews collected in this book offer unique insights into the thought processes and working practices of artists. From Russian Constructivists of the 1920s to Turner Prize winners, this collection of interviews constitutes an entertaining and alternative history of 20th-century art written in the first person.

Contributors include: Naum Gabo, Clement Greenberg, Victor Pasmore, Robert Motherwell, Agnes Martin, Anthony Caro, Brice Marden, Alan Charlton, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, John Baldessari, Hanne Darboven, Hans Haacke, Richard Serra, Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Michael Snow, Gilbert & George, David Tremlett, Jasper Johns, George Segal, Claes Oldenburg, Mark Boyle, Gustav Metzger, Ed Ruscha, Patrick Caulfield, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, RB Kitaj, Ilya Kabakov, Leon Golub, Joseph Beuys, Stephen Willats, Barbara Kruger, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Jeff Wall, Liam Gillick, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Bill Woodrow, Sophie Calle, Gary Hill, Jimmie Durham, Thomas Struth, Willie Doherty, Mark Wallinger, Anya Gallaccio, Steve McQueen, Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, Simon Patterson, Angela Bulloch, & Mike Nelson.

Edited by Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson
Essay by Iwona Blazwick
Introduction by Patricia Bickers
Publisher: Ram Distribution, 2008

In his series of lectures, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, Kirk Varnedoe asks tough questions.  Why abstract art?  What is abstract art good for?  These questions, the topic of his six lectures, are familiar.  It seems to me that they are asked, and in a sense answered, every time an artist makes an abstract work.  They are the questions that artists ask as we wrestle with the history of abstraction and as we work to move abstraction forward.  And for artists making abstract work now, Pictures of Nothing is necessary reading.

The 2006 publication of these lectures, given as the National Gallery of Art’s Mellon Lectures in 2003, offers the many of us who could not attend the talks access to his clear, concise, deeply informed and often funny examination of the art of the last fifty years.  The discussion of abstraction begins, after a very brief summary of the early 20th Century, with the 1950s – the Cold War and Abstract Expressionism.  While it progresses to 2003 in a fairly linear chronology, Varnedoe also moves sideways, describing the significance of multiple and seemingly contradictory things happening at once. 

James Turrell, A Frontal Passage, 1994
Light, 12′ 10″ x 22′ 6″ x 34′

Pop Art and Minimalism emerging from the same moment.  Frank Stella making paintings that are equal parts Pollock and Johns.  Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman make quiet, subtle works that appear similar but are worlds apart.  Although Varnedoe is forced, in the interest of time, to omit many artists and works that could have been included, he’s not working in art historical generalities.  He’s looking at specific ideas, moments and relationships.  With regard to this he says, “Epochs do not have essences, history does not work by all-governing unities, and works of art in their quirkiness tend to resist generalities.” 

Frank Stella, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II, 1959
Enamel on canvas, 7′ 6 3/4″ x 11′ 3/4″

As he leads us through de Kooning, Johns, Judd, Kelly, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Hesse, De Maria, Turrell, Halley, Richter, Marden and Serra (and many others), Varnedoe keeps an emphasis on experience and our responses to the very particular details of a piece.  Small differences, he says, make all the difference.  Whether it’s how we experience the work directly or how the work relates to our experiences in the world, he ties the art to our personal encounters.  Through this he builds his argument that abstraction isn’t grounded in something universal.  Rather it’s based on responses that are our own.  Subjective.  Individual. 

It’s this, a culture that coheres because it values independence, that abstraction offers us.  In Varnedoe’s words, “This is why abstract art, and modern art in general, being based on subjective experience and open-ended interpretation, is not universal or the culmination of anything in history but the contingent phenomena of a modern, secular, liberal society.” 

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968
Brass, 22″ x 48 1/4″ x 36″

Varnedoe concludes with a reference to the faith that abstract art requires.  As he describes it, “Not a faith in absolutes, not a religious kind of faith.  A faith in possibility, a faith not that we will know something finally, but a faith in not knowing…”  His faith, his unwavering belief in abstract art is present in every word of these lectures and it’s what makes his insights and arguments so extraordinary.

A modern, secular, liberal society.  That’s something to have faith in.

 

Lynne Harlow is a New York City-based artist.  She will present a project at MINUS SPACE project space in December 2007.

Kirk Varnedoe. Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock. Foreword by Earl A. Powell III, preface by Adam Gopnik. Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2006.

 

 

Ward Jackson at Kay-Mar Gallery, NY, 1964
Transit & Garden 1 (left to right)

 

Quite simply, you have to know about Ward Jackson and his work — he was an innovative abstract painter, a maverick editor and arts administrator, and a key member of New York City’s artist community.  I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Ward’s nephew, artist Julian Jackson, about his uncle’s life and work.  Our discussion that follows is published on the occasion of Ward Jackson’s first retrospective exhibition, taking place at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY, from April 27 – June 2, 2007.

 

Matthew Deleget: The first time I learned of Ward Jackson’s work was just a few years ago.  I was walking down the ramp at the Guggenheim Museum taking in the Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) exhibition, seeing all the usual work by all the usual suspects, when I was stopped in my tracks by an incredible lozenge-shaped painting, a small one, installed on a short wall near the elevator bank.  It was a work by Ward Jackson and it was slipped into the exhibition by one of the Guggenheim’s curators on account of the fact that Jackson had recently died, age 75.  As I poured over his painting, I wondered to myself, who is Ward Jackson?  So, Julian, maybe you can help me answer that question, who was he?

 

Julian Jackson: That’s really a big, if short, question. He was a painter, a writer, an editor, an archivist, an opinionated observer, a passionate viewer, and was deeply engaged, his whole life, with art. Most of all, Ward Jackson was a real New Yorker, the kind who outgrows a small town, and follows his dreams to the big city.

His early interest in art and his restless intellectual curiosity led him, via art magazines, to a precocious interest in abstraction that had to have been pretty rare in his rural hometown of Petersburg, VA, in the 1930s and 40s. While studying painting at the Richmond Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University), he began a pivotal correspondence with Hilla Rebay, the curator for the Guggenheim family who had recently launched the Museum of Non-Objective Art, which, of course, later became the Guggenheim Museum. She encouraged him to send sketches, which she would review offering comment. I can imagine him eagerly waiting for the return mail! Her interest in his work, which meant so much to him, fostered both his life-long interest in the complexities of the figure/ground relationship in abstract painting and his scholarly interest in the early development of abstraction.  When he neared graduation, she offered him a job at the Guggenheim.   After a period of study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, MA, Ward finally settled in New York and took her up on it.

He started in the mailroom where he worked with Dan Flavin (who later dedicated a light piece that curled down the ramp to him ) before the Frank Lloyd Wright building was completed, and worked through various positions until becoming the archivist in the early 70s. In that position he remained an active part of that institution until his retirement in 1996, though even then he was called upon for projects and maintained desk space in a series of ever smaller nooks of Leiderkranz Hall, the rambling building on 86th Street that housed the archives at that time. For instance, when the cafe was remodeled in the late 90s, Ward curated the photographs that still hang there as a visual history of the museum.

The last time he and I went to the Guggenheim together was in the summer of 2003. Matthew Barney’s vast project was in the rotunda then, but we had come to see the exhibition of Malevich’s brilliant early work that was installed in an upstairs gallery. Ward knew well the intricacies of the building, and led me through a bewildering series of back offices and staircases so as to avoid the Barney. Everyone knew him and he had the run of the place. Before reaching the gallery, we passed an open door, which briefly revealed the rotunda. Ward held his hand beside his face to block out the view and hurried forward to view unsullied the distant idealism of the early Malevich. As a true believer in abstraction, he felt that the Guggenheim had gradually lost its moorings, sense of mission, and drifted far from its founding ethos under Baroness Rebay. This sense of traditionalism set him apart from many of his contemporaries, but was a deep part of him and deeply informed his work. We left the Malevich via another circuitous back way heading to the basement so that Ward could empty his bulging mailbox into his own equally and always bulging shoulder bag. It was the last time that he would visit place he knew and loved so well.

He passed away early in 2004, and Lisa Dennison, who curated Singular Forms, and who had known him at the museum since the 70s, generously included that painting that you saw in the exhibition. At the opening a large group of friends and colleagues gathered there sharing wine and memories. That corner of the ramp that night felt like a crowded opening in a small gallery. I know Ward must have felt right at home.

Well, that’s a long answer to your short question, and it really only touches on one side of him. Ward was certainly passionate about his job, but most of all, thought of himself as a painter and his work will be the focus of the exhibition at Metaphor.

 

Ward Jackson
Composition, 1948
Oil on masonite, 24 x 18 inches

MD: That was an inspired answer.  Ward is clearly someone that continues to inspire you and inform your work – both as an artist and director of a gallery.  Maybe you can tell me about your experience coming of age as an artist.  How and when did you realize your uncle was an artist?  How did he impact your world-view and development?

 

JJ:  Well, art must be in the genes because I was drawn to it. I was always drawing from an early age. We had a good small museum in Richmond where I grew up and my parents often took us there after church on Sunday. Maybe that’s why I still think of art as possessing a sort of spiritual component. Anyway, my grandmother lived nearby the museum so we would sometimes swing by her house afterwards for lunch. Her dark old Victorian townhouse house was chock full of Ward’s early work from the late 40s and early 50s.  She stored it for him all over her walls. To me, my grandmother’s house felt like an extension of the museum and I loved roaming through the cluttered hallways looking for his paintings.

Among his student works were the paintings he had made while studying with Hans Hofmann, and in them, there is a free, gestural energy added to his interest in figure / ground. I loved those paintings, and to this day, keep my favorite one on a wall in my studio. Of course, I had met Ward at family holiday gatherings, but he was an adult, quiet, and didn’t have much to do with the kids. Still, I loved the idea that we had an artist in the family and felt a real kinship with him just from looking at his paintings.

As I grew older and more serious about art, the idea that art could actually be a career was made more tangible by his example. I was kind of in awe of the fact that he worked at a great museum, painted seriously, and lived in New York. In the early 70s, as I was finishing high school, Ward had a one-man show at the Virginia Museum.  It was the first opening I ever went to and it was great. He was showing the bright, reduced abstractions of his Virginia Rivers series, squares of pure color bisected by contrasting colors on active diagonals. These paintings blended tough abstraction with pop color and were very challenging. By this time I felt confident enough to talk to Ward about his paintings and, in a sense, that conversation put me on the road I’m still on as a painter and curator myself.

During that period Ward had also been regularly sending me copies of the publication that he and two partners had started called Art Now New York. It was a three-fold folio containing 8 1/2 x 11 inch reproductions of work recently exhibited in New York, accompanied by statements from the artists. In the four-year run of Art Now (which later morphed into the Gallery Guide), they published everyone from DeKooning and Jasper Johns to Brice Marden and Robert Smithson. It was a window into the art world for me as a young student and a great introduction to a bunch of interesting artists and their thought processes. I would love to see Art Now compiled into a book project because, looking back, the four years of its run (1968–72) were a moment of extraordinary ferment in American art with Pop, Color Field, Minimalist, and Earthwork artists all sharing the stage with an older generation of sculptors and painters. These folios reflect the energy in that mix. In many cases the statements that Ward solicited and edited are absolutely seminal primary statements by some of the really significant artists of that period.

When I began traveling to New York as an art student, Ward would let me stay in his wonderfully cluttered studio on Union Square. He would set me up with a Gallery Guide underlined with his choice of shows that he thought I should see and would usually take me through whatever was showing at the Guggenheim. He was a great source of information and inspiration.

 

Ward Jackson
Rite of Spring, 1952
Oil on canvas

MD: I would like to talk a bit more in-depth about Ward’s early years, in particular his time spent with Hans Hofmann.  As you know, Hofmann had a reputation for being enormously generous as a teacher and had profound impact on modern art in America.  What do you think Ward took away from his studies with Hofmann?

 

JJ: In order to fully answer that question, I should back up a little bit to Ward’s student years. I mentioned the correspondence with curator and painter Hilla Rebay, which sharpened his interest in figure / ground relationships of the sort found in late Kandinsky. This connection led in 1948 to an invitation by George L.K. Morris to exhibit with the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group in their 11th annual exhibition in New York. This opportunity, coming when Ward was just twenty, led to a lifelong, close, and collegial friendship between the two men.  Morris was himself a painter and writer.  He was the first art critic for the Partisan Review, a founding member of the AAA, and an outspoken supporter for the development of abstract art in America. Twenty-three years older than my uncle, Morris became something of a mentor to him, encouraging him in his studies and earliest professional opportunities.

Though tempered with his own restless approach to mark-making, this period of Ward’s development clearly shows the influence of his contact with these two powerful advocates for a type of homegrown abstraction employing a shallow cubist division of space and floating isolated shapes that was very much a part of the critical stance of the AAA at that time. In this period he also toyed with Surrealist automatism in a series of small-scaled works in egg tempera on panel.

This tight and cerebral approach to artmaking was given a good shake in the sunshine when he earned the chance to study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown during the summer of 1952. Hofmann’s insistence on an art based in the study of nature and grounded in exhaustive experience with drawing and composition brought to Ward’s work a looser, organic energy and heightened ambiguity of space. The experience of working outside, close to the sea and the primal landscape of the seashore with its omnipresent horizon obviously touched a nerve with Ward.  It was something he returned to again and again, and it informed his work in various ways for years to come. For the rest of the 1950s, Ward turned his back on the earlier Neo-Plastic styles that preoccupied him as an undergraduate student and plunged into the orbits forming around the key gestural painters of the time, particularly Kline and DeKooning. In this way his contact with Hans Hofmann was critical because through his summer of work with him, he was pulled from the one camp, with its foot firmly planted in styles linked to the 1930s and thrust into confrontation with the dominant aesthetics of his own moment.

 

Ward Jackson
Red Vertical, c. 1956-57
Oil on canvas, 57 x 49 inches

MD:  As a young artist, Ward had a number of ongoing “mentor” relationships with established individuals, such as Rebay, Morris, and Hofmann, and he participated in an exhibition with the members of AAA, most of whom I assume were older and more well-known in the artist community. You did say, however, that it was Hoffman who pushed Ward into the “aesthetics of his own moment.”  I would like to know a more about this.  Who were some of the younger artists, with whom Ward developed friendships at this time, the artists of his generation?

 

JJ: To tell you the truth, I know less about this period of his life partly because I was barely walking at the time and partly because Ward talked about that time in his life less than others. At this point I’m very sorry that I didn’t sit down with him sometime specifically to learn more about that important juncture in his life. Like most artists, Ward was more interested in the present than the past and, by the time the two of us were starting to become close, more than twenty years had passed since he had studied with Hofmann.

What I do know is that he moved to New York in 1952, and began his life as an artist in earnest. Over the next ten years, he explored and expanded upon the gestural style of land / cityscape based abstraction that he had first dug into with Hofmann. He was part of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists and, like so many other of his peers, he began his exhibiting career in New York as part of the 10th Street scene of cooperative galleries that grew up around Irving Sandler’s pioneering Tanager Gallery. The tenth street co-ops provided important alternative exhibition opportunities for the flock of younger artists who, like Ward, were drawn to New York in the post-WWII period.

Most of these artists were working in some variation of the abstract and semi-abstract styles one associates with that period. The big players of that moment like Pollock, Kline, Newman, Rothko, and DeKooning were dominating both the scene and the uptown galleries so the downtown co-ops, many of which were artist-run, played an important role in nurturing younger artists. Artists as diverse as Allan Kaprow and Philip Pearlstein, Mark di Suvero and Alice Neel, Al Held and Yayoi Kusama, and hundreds of others all benefited from the support and early exposure provided by these rough and tumble, do-it-yourself spaces.

New York in the 50s must have been a great place to be a young painter with its heated air of intense debate and discussion and Ward was there. He had his first solo exhibitions in the mid 50s at the Fleischman Gallery, just around the corner on 9th Street. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find out much about that gallery. If anyone reading this could give me more information about it, I’d be grateful. I have no doubt that Ward was a keen observer of the scene, as well as participant, and made many acquaintances there that followed him through his long tenure in the art world. One friend from those years that he often mentioned was Judith Rothschild.

 

MD: Judith Rothschild was an abstract painter and active in the artist community.  She was also a member and later President of American Abstract Artists.  Tell me more about his relationship with her.

 

JJ: Well, this brings us to some of the interesting contradictions of Ward’s life. Judith Rothschild was indeed a serious artist, a good one, and was very involved as a supporter in the 10th Street scene and, as you said, the American Abstract Artists. She was also a wealthy heiress, well able to support her art life. Ward, whose salary at the Guggenheim was modest at best, and whose lifestyle was always marked by utter frugality, was, throughout his life, fascinated by and drawn to the wealthy. George L.K. Morris, his wife artist Suzy Frelinghuysen, and Judith Rothschild were longtime friends and colleagues with whom Ward spent a great deal of time through the years in mutual critique and discussion of both their own works and larger movements in the artworld.

 

Ward Jackson
Bridge, 1963
Oil on canvas, 34 x 34 inches

MD: This background information, particularly about an artist’s formative years, is always so critical in terms of understanding where an artist is coming from, his/her point of view, and overall value system.  It is a great segue into the work he was making in the 1960s, the work that first brought him to the broader attention of his peers and the greater art world.  How did Ward arrive at making hard-edge geometric abstraction in the early 1960s and what territory did he specifically stake out for himself?

 

JJ:  Like many members of his generation, Ward was also struggling to find his own voice. The fevered energies of Abstract Expressionism were beginning to sputter by the late 50s. Rauschenberg and John’s were already, by the mid-50s, pushing back against the overheated dominance of gestural painting by infusing its tropes with ironic detachment. Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers were looking for new ways to bring imagery back into painting. Ellsworth Kelly had recently returned from Paris charged with a freshened approach to pure color abstraction and Al Held had embarked on his series of huge paintings based on simplified letter forms. Ad Reinhardt was deeply engaged in the process of clearing his work of the marking and emotionalism that colored so much work of the later 1950s, and the ground-clearing work of Barnett Newman was also becoming better understood. These streams of activity were clearly informed by a heightened criticality in pointing the way toward the developments of the 60s and the cooler sensibilities that came into play in that period.

Ward responded to this crux moment with a body of work, the black and white diamonds, that marked the arrival of his mature style and laid out certain themes and approaches that would engage him for the rest of his life. Beginning in 1959 or so, his notebook drawings show him experimenting with the diamond as a framing device for calligraphic linear abstractions. Over the next couple of years in dozens of drawings, he begins to respond more directly to the tough formal and symmetrical imperatives of the diamond format itself, gradually developing a set of tightly balanced compositions that utilize its radial stability and echo its prominent diagonals. Transit, the painting that you mentioned at the very beginning of our talk and that was included in the Singular Forms show at the Guggenheim, is a good example of his breakthrough work. The diamond-shaped, ‘square on end’ canvas is first divided by a broad central white vertical band that overlaps, or cuts through, two centrally-stacked black diamonds. At the left and right hand corners of this shaped canvas, smaller diamonds in black are separated from the core by white outlines the same thickness as the ‘spine’. The result, though starkly graphic, is a subtle and ambiguous play of overlapping planes in a relatively small and tightly compacted space.

Ward first showed these pieces in an exhibition at the Kay-Mar Gallery in 1964, in which he shared the walls with a remarkable group of artists — Dan Flavin, Jo Baer, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt.  The hierarchic and emblematic inner geometries contained in this and the other paintings of this series set Ward’s work slightly at odds with the heightened material concerns of many of his peers in the exhibition. In a sense he was looking back to earlier, more pictoral iterations of abstraction while his fellows were busily staking out the more reductive strategies of Minimalism. Ward’s sense of scholarship and painterly lineage ran deep, and throughout his subsequent career, he honored them with his own personal, sometimes idiosyncratic approach to pictorial space and the problems posed by figure / ground relationships. He would often tell me in later years, “Mondrian only painted 13 diamonds.” Clearly he felt that the great master of Neo-Plastic painting had only scratched the surface of the possibilities contained within the prismatic confines of that difficult format.

Ward was devoted to the ideals of Mondrian, though his own work for the most part eschewed rigorous Neo-Plastic conventions. And like Mondrian, whose early works in particular showed the influence of his spiritual engagement with Theosophy, Ward’s work was to some extent colored by his own spiritual studies. Ward practiced Kriya yoga, a meditation technique focused on the transformation of physical energy to spiritual energy by visualizing its movement up the spine and outward. From the earliest black and white diamonds, Ward was interested in the primary vertical structure of the form, and its reinforced cruciform symmetry lent itself to the punchy diagrammatic nature of some of his more mandala-like paintings, especially in later diamond works from the 80s and 90s.

 

Ward Jackson
Virginia Rivers Series: Winona, 1972
Acrylic on canvas

MD: To continue that train of thought, how did Ward’s work change and develop into the 80s and 90s?  For instance, I’ve heard he was constantly making drawings on index cards, a couple of which I’ve seen recently in American Abstract Artist exhibitions.  How would you characterize his late work?

 

JJ: Beginning in the 50s, Ward established the practice of his ‘drawing books’ as he called them, small 4 x 6 inch pads that he always carried in his jacket pockets. On each page he would line off six squares or diamonds and, in these little spaces barely more than a square inch or two in size, work out in serial fashion the ideas that would later become paintings. In this way he could work whenever he wanted and wherever he was. These sketchbooks were an important part of his process and it has been fascinating for me to go through them as I have become more familiar with his linear development. I’ve been able to see how he would gnaw on an idea sometimes over a span of years, before committing it to canvas. This helps explain the fully resolved constructions of the paintings, as well as sheds some light on the sometimes-hermetic nature of his imagery.

As I described earlier, Ward’s work throughout his life swung on a pendulum from inner concerns to outward observation resolved in formal terms and back again. There was always a tension between the seen and the imagined, but as he moved into the 80s and 90s, the free play of ideas, as evidenced in the pages of the drawing books, became more personal and less programmatic. He developed various series simultaneously and within the self-imposed confines of his chosen format was able to engage a wide range of thematic material. One key theme that I have touched on are the group of mandala-like diamonds. Ward was plagued with various health problems during those years and his inherently spiritual approach to artmaking found a deepened release in these paintings, which often featured a rising central axis that, widening as it rose, emulated his positive meditations. This impulse was also at the core of his ‘ladder’ series, which actually began with a group of studies of his view of the World Trade Towers. Those iconic towers, which he could see from the window of his studio, fascinated him with their soaring verticals framing a clear center shaft of sky. At night he was interested in the rung–like arrangements of lit and unlit floors against the darkened night sky. The metaphor of ascendance was an important one in his work, the yearning to transcend the physical. The ‘ladder’ pieces sort of reconciled his key interests as they were based on his close observation and experience of the city, and yet, were also expressive of his personal brand of spirituality.

In his last works, the ‘opening space’ group, Ward returned to more strictly formal concerns exploring once again the unique particularities of space within the diamond format. These are among the most rigorous and successful of his works in this form, I think, reflective of his years of wrangling with it. On their face these final drawings, and the one painting that was their result (Homage to Mondrian, 2001 – 2003), are composed of just two broad bars of color, one an elongate rectangle hugging the lower left edge of the canvas, the other swung upward as if hinged to form a raised horizontal axis bisecting the canvas left to right slightly above center. These bars carve the space and seem to push it to the right creating tension within the diamond while dividing it into four separate and discrete areas of color, each with a different shape and volume. The result has a tough, elegant pictoral logic that pays a final debt to his brilliant precursor.

 

Ward Jackson
Homage to Mondrian, 2001-03
Acrylic on canvas, 34 x 34 inches

MD: During Ward’s last twenty years, you clearly shared an increasingly close relationship with him, which was precisely the same time you came of age as an abstract painter.  You were undoubtedly well-versed in his ideas, process, and practice.  So, on a more personal note Julian, what was Ward’s influence on your own work as a emerging painter?  I think it is also worth mentioning here that you are currently the Secretary of American Abstract Artists, a position long occupied by your uncle.

 

JJ: Growing up in the suburbs of Richmond, VA, where all adults seemed to be either moms or insurance men, it was tremendously liberating to know that such a thing as ‘artist living in New York’ was actually a career option. I learned a great deal from him and have been inspired through the years by the toughness of his conviction and the purity of his persistence. Ward never achieved fame or great fortune, but his work as a painter and participant in the artworld was a source of intense search, discovery, and joy for him. It framed his life and filled it with meaning. What more can any artist ask?

I am also an abstract painter and inherited his interest in the lineage, development, and potential of abstraction as a mode of discourse. My own work and sensibility, though, has always had a softer focus. As a painter I’ve been more interested in atmosphere than edge. Ward never quite approved of what he considered my romantic tendencies and frequently accused me of being “too Turneresque”. He was a tough critic with a tightly-focused perspective, still, as Pollock said, having a strong point of view to push against is tonic for an artist. Gradually though, Ward accepted the seriousness of my own work as a painter, and later sponsored me for membership in the AAA. I think in the back of his mind he was always hoping to protect his legacy in the group, and sure enough, he put me right to work as his typist for the minutes. Deciphering his handwritten notes was always an interesting perceptual challenge.

 

Julian Jackson
Cloudlight, 2006
Oil on panel, 36 x 32 inches

MD: And finally, let’s talk for a moment about the exhibition of Ward’s work you are currently organizing.  You are mounting the first retrospective of Ward’s work at your gallery — Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY — which you founded in 2001 with your wife, artist Rene Lynch.  This must be a labor of love for you.  How are you approaching his exhibition and what would you like the audience to walk away with?

 

JJ: Running Metaphor is itself a labor of love, but this show is special for me. I’m seeing it as the culmination of my long and fascinating relationship with Ward. We’ll be exhibiting a small group of key pieces from each decade of his active working life from the late 40s until he stopped working due to health problems in 2003. Southerners like Ward and myself are made keenly aware of heritage and ancestry and, with this exhibition, I’m paying homage both to my uncle and to a member of the family of artists. I’m very pleased to be able to present a small selection of his life’s work, to frame a sense of the scope of that life, to honor it, and to bring it back into the light. Obviously, I’m very close to the subject of this show, which makes it impossible to be as objective and critical about the work as I might normally be when presenting an exhibition, but I do think the work speaks for itself. I’ll be very interested to learn how a contemporary audience sees and responds to his work.

Those of us involved in the artworld and artmaking to whatever degree are always most alert to the smoke of today’s fire, burning in the moment. Retrospectives are a chance to step out of time and take a longer view. Artists are made up of many things and context is one of them. Each artists’ contribution helps define and frame his or her moment. With hindsight we can see who was in the middle of the frame and who was out at the edges, but in a very real sense, the edges themselves play a constant and critical role in the definition of the center. I would like the audience to walk away from this show with a heightened appreciation of the flow of time that we’re all a part of, a renewed appreciation of the interesting contributions of my uncle, Ward Jackson, and a greater appreciation of the many fires that burn with heat at the edges.

 

Julian Jackson is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder of Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY.

Matthew Deleget is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder of MINUS SPACE.

Links
> American Abstract Artists
> Hans Hofmann Estate
> Judith Rothschild Foundation

Although he has shown extensively in Europe for many years, it’s only in the past decade, when he began showing with Peter Blum, that his stature in America has grown large in a more public way. This, despite the fact that Marioni exhibited his work at Bykert Gallery in the 70’s, was tapped by Brice Marden for a show at Artists Space, and was included in a recent Whitney Biennial. However, it took the New York art scene a long time to take notice—until it was unavoidable really. As soon as it appeared that the renowned critic Michael Fried had apparently stepped out of retirement (at least from contemporary art) in order to give Marioni the nod, how could the art world no longer take notice? 

That said, who would expect anyone involved in a trend conscious commercial art scene to get excited about monochrome painting? The works’ beauty was too basic, non-critical even. In truth, the monochrome tag doesn’t even really fit Marioni so well. The term implies a kind of one-dimensionality, whereas his works are polychromatic, having been made from multiple transparent glazes of color. Marioni was once a part of the Radical Painting Group, which included nearly all of today’s leading monochromists. I find the “Radical” title suspect too, however, because it seems to overcompensate for what is an inherently conservative art movement. I have many more issues with the orthodoxy of the Radical Painting than with the art itself. What’s most interesting about much of Marioni’s painting doesn’t always jibe with the official party line anyway.

Marioni’s current exhibition inaugurates Blum’s new Chelsea gallery space. Although only five paintings occupy this spacious ground floor gallery, it feels quite full, as the works are both large and commanding, though still humanly scaled. Most of the paintings are about ten by eleven feet, and just off square. The color is complex, with a bias towards green. What often appears black at first glance is often two or more distinct color glazes that produce the effect of black in their overlay. Marioni’s ambition is immediately apparent in these new, larger paintings. They seem much more closely aligned with Abstract Expressionism, and the broader stretch of “American Type” painting in general, than with the late-minimal practice of Radical Painting. In many ways, by broadening the scope of his project, and making a play for greatness, Marioni has now left his fellow monochromists in his wake. 

With its dark and fulsome surface, Painting, 2006, which is the show’s centerpiece, recalls Clyfford Still’s grandiose untitled, 1952, (Art Institute of Chicago). Marioni has tested the limits of his program with these new paintings, pushing his tools and materials to their absolute limit. Though, as with Still, one often wonders about the necessity of extreme size. Would the paintings be any better or worse plus or minus a few square yards? It’s hard to say.

At roughly seven by seven feet, the smallest but still sizable painting in the exhibition, also titled Painting, 2006, is also one of the show’s most radiant. Its off-white and pale yellow combination catches raking light from the North as it filters through the gallery’s frosted glass door to the left. The experience is purposefully Vermeer-like, and the painting’s soft golden glow recalls the plaster wall and drawn drapery in the Dutch master’s intimate Woman Putting on Pearls. To his credit, Marioni manages to achieve more nuance with acrylic paint, than most painters are even capable of realizing with oil. He is one of the very few painters whose acrylic surfaces never feel plasticky. In fact, they often look rich, juicy even, in their carefully manipulated downward flow.

Despite the glow, I do, however, have a few issues with Marioni’s work. If these paintings are principally about a color experience, it seems to me that they are fundamentally flawed in that they have highly-reflective, glossy surfaces. How can the viewer become enveloped in the color, or experience the “body-transfer” that the artist himself desires, if one’s own image is constantly reflected within the paint? The paintings operate as colored mirrors most times, blocking one’s gaze. This deleterious effect was slightly diminished in this instance in that the gallery is relying on natural light, so the space is darker, and the light more ambient than one might expect.

Secondly, I feel that Marioni’s constant use of a paint-roller runs counter to the emotional effect he now seems interested in putting across. The roller texture itself is generic, impersonal by nature, and most often recalls the skim-coated surfaces of sheetrock walls. I understand the idea of distancing or removing the hand, and the formalist rigor that such a strategy implies—I don’t necessarily want to be taken to the brink of the sublime in the same bombastic manner as with Still—but the reliance on the roller strikes me as a kind of hedge or dodge. It seems like Marioni might be holding back, or playing it safe, hiding his hand behind the roller, at the most crucial moment in his career, especially now that he has many people’s attention. 

One problem that I have with monochrome painting in general is that all of the action seems to be relegated to the margins. The most interesting activity in the paint is always happening at the edges where the paint tends to unfurl. I understand and acknowledge the critical function of servicing the edge and the role it plays in formal painting. I’ve just grown weary of scanning the sides and bottoms of paintings looking for painterly incident and excitement. Certainly a Pollock painting is as interesting at its core as it is at the edge. Frank Stella once famously remarked that the Abstract-Expressionist always “got into trouble at the corners,” whereas the monochromists are only too happy to stay there and face them.

Also, I don’t buy the implication that monochrome painting is somehow the most superior type of color painting. Duochrome and trichrome painting are also modernist and reductive but often more complex in their color interaction—think of Albers, Louis, or Rothko for starters. Color becomes activated in the presence of other colors, so the whole idea of having a single, dominant hue seems wrongheaded somehow. Often the white wall of the gallery is the strongest counterpoint to a monochromatic field, which is why they’re often reproduced as installations in catalogues rather than in isolation. Wouldn’t more internalized counterpoints, besides marginalia, be advantageous to the advancement of color painting? Even atonal music, such as Terry Riley’s infamous composition In C, contains many structural counterpoints. Even Ad Reinhardt, a common influence among the Radical painters engaged composition to some degree.

I’m not so much questioning the quality of Marioni’s paintings here, as much as I’m debating the dogma of Radical Painting. Clearly, he understands a great deal about color. He’s devoted most of his life, successfully, to the pursuit. I once saw a medium sized yellow painting of Marioni that had the absolute density of dwarf star. The yellow was advancing so strongly that I felt as if I were being shoved around the room. I also appreciate the fact that his work is unabashedly heroic. Some critics might read this as a historicist strategy, an attempt to regain paintings lost authority, but to me it seems more germane to these grim times than much of whimsical work that is supposedly much more relevant. This is easily one of the most ambitious painting exhibitions of the year. I find Marioni’s painting exemplary, rather than temporary, among contemporary art.

 

Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art. 

Harvey Quaytman kept a secret. He had a display case in his studio, which was often obscured from plain view that contained handcrafted models of vintage aircraft. The late Quaytman was no Bluebeard, but he did prefer to keep his hobby to himself—perhaps because he was afraid that it might lead to a literal reading of his abstract paintings.

Clearly Quaytman’s work is not all about airplanes but, in fact, both his art and his pastime had much in common. Quaytman was principally a latter-day Constructivist, and he was drawn to the early aircraft that were the rage during the original Constructivist era. Even Tatlin’s sculpture was once influenced by the skeletal/structural integrity of the first airplanes. Quaytman personally favored the early European monoplanes, such as the Bleriot or the Nieuport, which also captured the imagination of the French photographer Lartigue when he was just a boy on the airstrip with his box camera.

It should be noted that these early planes were constructed much like paintings. They were assembled by hand, by enthusiasts, and were made primarily of canvas and wood. Their colorfully painted insignia utilized color in a modern and utilitarian manner. The planes were constructed in an efficient ultralight manner that I believe must’ve appealed to and informed Quaytman’s own structural sense of design. Most of Quaytman’s abstract painting, either early or late, has been defined by some kind of familiar geometric form (a square, a cross, a rectangle) that’s usually attached to some sort of peculiar structural outrigging which often recalls ailerons or stabilizers. And again, although not literal, Quaytman’s signature use of the cruciform probably has much more in common with a simple Constructivist response to a propeller as a discrete design element rather than to the familiar iconic use of the Christian cross—which may have been the case with some of the early Russian Constructivists.

Quaytman’s current show at David McKee, entitled “Flying the Colors”, is a celebration of the artist’s bold color work and features twelve outstanding paintings drawn from the past 25 years. The apparent reference to flight in the title is entirely unintentional on the part of the gallery, but the color here is indeed strong, deep and soaring.

For Sonia Delaunay is a fine example of the work included at McKee, baring one of Quaytman’s trademark cruciforms painted here in flared scarlet, which in turn is underpinned and shadowed by a black rectangle that causes a slight asymmetrical shift off of its central axis. Two peek-a-boo violet squares suggest the corners of a larger central square at the core of the painting, while the background field is lit up in dense and brilliant yellow. A twin pair of small white stripes, which read as ailerons to my eye, cause interesting spatial reversals within the larger canvas square and allow the yellow to visually expand—whereas the black framing rectangle causes the yellow to contract. Although geometric, Quaytman’s paintings are never static and are supremely sophisticated in their subtle mechanics. Antipodes and Angel, also included, are essentially darker variations on the same approach found in For Sonia Delaunay. For the record, airplanes were often subjects in the early modern work of both Robert and Sonia Delaunay.

The largest painting in the show, the commanding Redwing, is a cutaway cruciform executed in a striking combination of black and carmine. Right to Light contains another one familiar Quaytman move. Here the artist has blocked out the four corners of a square with subdominant sets of smaller squares that shift the visual weight of the painting and destabilize the square.

Many of the paintings in this exhibition, such as Giotto’s Grotto, betray a level of finesse in their design that for better or worse is not always apparent in their execution. Quaytman had a fondness for off-textured surfaces, and reflective surfaces embedded with glass that has the same appearance as the roadside stripes lining pedestrian zone. He sometimes employed volatile elements, such as actual rust. More often than not, the real world wear and tear evident on Quaytman’s acrylic surfaces is what separates his art for mere well-mannered craft. Quaytman was never fastidious in a way typical of most minimal painters—it was probably too small a concern for him. None of these abrasions truly serves any image here, but rather reflects an attitude.

Overall, visual allusions to avionics are rife throughout the entirety of “Flying the Colors”, and this more than anything betrays the artist’s unique model builder sensibility. I say this without judgment and I think this is a more accurate way of accounting Quaytman’s eccentric approach to formal abstraction. In any case, it is much more generous than calling him “academic” as some have done in the past. Quaytman’s work is really too inventive for that label to stick and, within the ideal scope of geometry, he was an artist of tremendous and penetrating insight. His knowledge of materials is well known too—Quaytman was the Bowery sage who once advised Brice Marden to try adding beeswax to his paint. Quaytman was quite capable of painting anything. Bella’s, a coffee shop in Little Italy, was his favorite lunchtime hangout and the place was adorned with convincing Zurbaran still life’s that Quaytman himself had knocked-off in his spare time in order to embellish an otherwise ordinary environment.

Bella’s is now closed, Little Italy has become Nolita, and the painter Harvey Quaytman is dead—the neighborhood will never be the same. His work, however, still radiates an attractive optimism, and accounts for exactly this kind of change. Quaytman’s modernist use of oppositional geometry lies closer to the dynamic worldview of Heraclitus rather than a Pythagorean or Euclidean order. In Heraclitean verse “From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony”.

 

Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art.

How do two planes meet? Forget Henny Youngman for a second, this is the kind of question that painters often worry over. Granted it’s an issue that most people today are oblivious to, especially masons, judging from the snaggletooth brick face one sees on any new building. This subject of planes-the transition of form within painting-has been given great and careful consideration by the painter Joanna Pousette-Dart.

This was Pousette-Dart’s first solo show in nearly a decade and it included about a dozen, mostly large and untitled works, painted on canvas covered shaped panels. Typically two cleaver shaped, curved edged forms, were conjoined horizontally at midsection. This immediately established an unconventional major/minor relationship that had the natural organic fusion one finds in a porterhouse steak, where T-bone and tenderloin are inextricably linked. A few of the pairings recalled the art of the Northwest Coast Indians-Chilkat blankets specifically. Quite often the edges of the two main planes ended sharply at pointed tips, which aided the illusion that some of the paintings were physically expanding across the wall. I don’t know Pousette-Dart’s exact rationale for using shaped canvases, but it has nothing to do with the more familiar modernist strategies as explored by artists like Neil Williams or Frank Stella in the mid-60’s. Her approach seems much more intuitive, eccentric, and anti-programmatic.

The dynamic complexity of the two interlocking planes, which were sometimes concave and at other times convex, was further heightened by Pousette-Dart’s gestural overlay. Her most visually interesting paintings were rife with all manner of spatial inversions and strange reversals caused by the deft interweaving of the artist’s taut, lyrical line which often accounted for both volume and contour, as well as open and closed form simultaneously. Pousette-Dart handled the alternately conjunctive/disjunctive clash of oppositional elements in an exact and graceful manner. Although, in some instances, the plow shaped planes overpowered the finer lines.

The guitarist Eric Clapton earned the nickname “Slowhand” because someone once made a contracted pun of “Eric slow-clapping hand”, but it stuck because it aptly described his deliberate playing style, which was a studious reworking of bluesman Freddie King’s bends. I heard a young artist call Brice Marden “Slowhand” once, at a time when his gestural lines looked a little flat-footed and lock-stepped at the edges-arch as opposed to airy. In certain passages some of Pousette-Dart’s lines also suffer from a similar “Slowhand” syndrome, perhaps because a difficult stiffness sometimes accompanies such strenuous elegance. I don’t think, like some, they’re necessarily derivative of Marden but rather late DeKooning, with whom she probably shares a generalized generational interest.

Strangely enough, it’s the sometimes feeble latter-day DeKoonings with their crack ribbon calligraphy and glassy surfaces that may well prove more influential in the long run than his canonical postwar work. On one occasion I once heard Marden publicly declare that “When someone wanted to learn how to paint, they went and looked at DeKooning”. I’m almost positive that he was referring to the later, Xavier Fourcade era DeKooning. Who has had a greater influence on today’s few remaining gestural abstract painters, Pollock or DeKooning? If you’re concerned at all with painting, it’s not necessarily a dead debate. Anyone who attended DeKooning’s centennial show at either Gagosian Gallery or Mitchell-Innes & Nash this summer might have given that question some thought even at this late date.

Another striking characteristic of Pousette-Dart’s painting is revealed in her use of color, which achieves a quality of light that’s surprisingly not local. New York City light is often described as diffuse and silvery. Pousette-Dart’s paintings emanate a hard light, a relentless, arid light that one might associate with another environment altogether; someplace Western, Iberian, or pseudo-Mediterranean like Fresno. This might stem from the artist’s frequent use of clean, mostly unmodulated, color or the silicate dryness of the acrylic medium itself, but all of the paintings consistently radiate a stark luminosity that is both forceful and unique.

Once again though, it’s the interior transitions that are most compelling. Although he’s an altogether different kind of artist, the literary critic Gregory Stephenson stated the following in an article on the darkly apocalyptic and conspiratorial Robert Stone novel Damascus Gate. I think it somehow applies to Pousette-Dart too:

The overarching, underlying, interweaving theme is that of vision and division: the universal struggle between the forces of disunity and discord, opposition and conflict, and those promoting attraction and combination, harmony and unity. This struggle takes place at every level: the metaphysical, the historical, the material and the mental, and within each human heart.

Stone’s aesthetic has been categorized as “vitalist”, which unfortunately makes me think of survivalist compounds, camouflage, canned tuna, and the Turner Diaries, but I get a strong sense of something direct and vital in Pousette-Dart’s art too. She’s actively engaged in a regenerative, recombinant approach to abstract painting. She’s clearly reconsidering what painting is all about, from the support up, but she’s hasn’t surrendered the pleasurable part of the experience like so many of her contemporaries who began working under a similar premise. Maybe iconoclasm is an inheritable family trait after all?

 

Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art.

Let’s begin by dropping some stock material. Abandoning, for a moment, dystopia, information theory, or recalling Piranesi’s prison etchings for the umpteenth time, along with metastasizing mutatis mutandis and all of the Popular Science pseudo-scientific (scientistic really) rhetoric that sticks so easily to the toothy surfaces of Terry Winters’ work. Winters is an important artist. His paintings have proven relevant because they reveal the often invisible operations of the wilder, real and artless avant-gardes informing every aspect of our culture now. Clearly, few artists, let alone an abstract painter, can ever honestly make such a sweeping claim.

The painter’s last grand painting show, entitled Graphic Primitives from 1999—another era altogether—looms large in memory. Graphic Primitives successfully explored the complex intersection between biology (once considered a “lower” science subordinate to the more calculable charms of chemistry and physics) and woefully omnipresent digital technology. Graphic Primitives presented Winters in mature phase pushing past his personal limits at full force. This show was a huge achievement by all accounts. The paintings were enormous in size, ambitious in scope, and absolutely overloaded with all manner of distressed, overlaid marks. Every component was raging flame-on. Each painting was like an individual breeder reactor bristling with febrile energy—supersaturated in both color and content. Like a beetle or one of Philip Guston’s best paintings, they were wondrously beautiful and horrifying to behold. The Graphic Primitives marked the zenith of an explosive period of creative growth that began shortly after Winters’ mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum in 1992. I wish I were as excited about Winters’ current show at Matthew Marks 22nd St. garage/showroom, but this body of work feels lank and recessionary in comparison—perhaps a predictable and necessary retrenchment.

However, this 2003 show should only reinforce, rather than diminish, the painter’s esteemed reputation. A traveling exhibition covering the last decade of Winters’ painting is slated for three institutions next year, and it’s difficult to imagine that this work will do much more than provide a strong supporting role for the previous series. The new paintings have the signature, but neither the punch nor physical integrity of the last batch. Film strips with notched edges float freely through some, while others are adorned with oceanic novelties—some graphic patterns resembling the underbelly of a whale or the dingle-dangle drift of some jellyfish’s stinging tentacles.

One recurring problem with many of the painting exhibitions that plagues this particular space is the tired dominant hue-based hanging of works on the gallery’s eastern wall. The left wall is repeatedly reserved for the predictable display of a red painting, placed next to a green one, next to a blue one, yellow one, purple one, etc., that only serves to reinforce the atmosphere of a boutique and cheapens the character of the individual works. Is this the genuine exploration of color or merely the filling out of some purchase order? I thought the whole point of luxury trade retail was to extinguish any whiff of merchandising whatsoever. Like so many paintings one sees in Chelsea, this row is colorful but it’s not really about color.

The current show also includes several works on paper. Winters is a master draftsman who uses an intentionally crude and quick line to render otherwise elegant drawings that are typically extrapolated from technical charts and diagrams. Although, I’m not entirely convinced that high-minded resources necessarily make for meaningful drawings, Winters suite of 42 drawings called Turbulence Skins makes a compelling and seductive argument. Winters is truly a graphic sophisticate, and his works on paper often easily allude to such ungraspable topics as velocity or hemispherical neural networks. Everything this artist renders becomes structurally organic and acquires the almost universal appeal of something not unlike a Karl Blossfeldt photograph.

Winters owns this approach to drawing and it should never be confused with the style often adopted by younger artists after having just come across a copy of Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Winters still weighs considerable influence upon art students everywhere, in part because his work illuminates a path between and past the influential modernist extremes of Cy Twombly and Brice Marden. His former practice of using botanical forms lifted from textbooks and hyper-magnified cross-sections is continuously rediscovered by younger artists seeking a vehicle to unite subject with image, form, and surface. It’s still a potent and viable mode that attracts a certain sensibility. Also, Winters’ main themes are constantly trafficked in innumerable group shows centered on morphology or digitization, just to name a few. Perhaps only surveillance has been a more popular topic in recent years.

The most consistent feature of Winters’ painting is its typically rough and fulsome surface. More than anything else, I think that it’s his tactile handling and purposeful pushing of paint that lends his work the aura of authenticity. He also always successfully avoids ever settling for any kind of easy beauty. His pictures remain beautiful in a distinctly earthy way, but they’re seldom pretty and often contemptuous of cleaner “good taste”. There is a sense of discovery that manifests itself in Winters search through the paint that’s endlessly appealing, and there’s a level of confidence on hand in the works on paper that’s beginning to rival the great and titanic modern masters of the past century. The new show at Matthew Marks is fine, but, having already ventured towards his outer limits, I’m resolved to wait for the regathering of Winters’ storm.

 

Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art.

I like looking at Bill Jensen’s paintings the same way I like watching little league baseball players. In both cases, all of their emotions are right on the surface. Emotional investment is an increasingly uncommon quality in the world today, but it was visibly evident in Jensen’s latest exhibition of paintings at Mary Boone’s gallery uptown. This show, which closed just recently, was the latest in a series that has defined the painter’s newfound and forcefully reinvigorated style. I think the shift first emerged in 2000 with an exhibition of works on paper at Danese that was an absolute tour-de-force—a rare event that many artists are still discussing. This was followed the next year by a spirited show of paintings at Boone’s newer and cavernous Chelsea space. A second stunning run of works on paper returned to Danese last year, and this most recent show with Boone uptown was no less striking, and, in fact, quite theatrical given the gallery’s dark ambience that was enhanced by slatey skim-coated walls and directional spot lighting.

Jensen’s work has long been of interest, especially among painters, with whom he has had a near cultish following and an enviable reputation since the late ‘70’s. The artist’s dogmatic preference for American visionary painters such as Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Albert Blakelock, and Arthur Dove is well known. I couldn’t help but draw my own comparisons between Jensen’s impulsive abstractions and the melancholy premier-coups of Edwin Dickinson, whose peculiar brand of Yankee expressionism was concurrently on view in a major retrospective at the National Academy of Design this spring. Jensen and Dickinson are two very different kinds of painters, but I felt a kindred restlessness and intemperance with paint and painting knives at both exhibitions.

It should be noted that Jensen’s direct influences are less obvious now than when he was Captain Crusty of the Joan Washburn Gallery, and his paintings had more in common with the proto-abstract vernacular of Gregory Amenoff and the odd hermeticism of Gary Stephan, both of whom are his contemporaries. Jensen was admired for his encrusted surfaces and labor-intensive processes at that time—a brand of painting ethics. His new work still retains the deep focus of the old, but without so much clinging matter, in every sense of that word. The paintings are lighter, and burn more efficiently.

Like so many abstract painters of today, including the omnipresent Brice Marden and monastic Jake Berthot, Jensen seems to have a deep fascination with Eastern culture where at least a philosophical stance and an approach towards the handling of paint—the tension between freedom and control—are still seamlessly unified. Six of the paintings in this recent show were from the artist’s ongoing “Images of the Floating World” series, itself a nod to the printed masterworks of Japanese Ukiyo-e which have been inspiring Western painters since the Post-Impressionist period. Their influence here was mostly felt through Jensen’s use of color at full bleed and his intentional choice of super-acidic pinks, greens and biting blues. This series, however, which dominated one wall of the gallery, had a distinct airiness one might not necessarily associate with woodblock prints.

This show should be considered a personal triumph for the artist and a true pleasure for anyone with a heart, mind, and eyes. It’s just too damn unusual to see anything anymore that’s painted so sensuously. Touch is a vanishing quality in terms of contemporary art. From top to bottom, all of the paintings were seething with light/color/energy. “Locus” and “Howl” were as intensely irradiated as a bunch of Chilean grapes. Jensen’s penchant for mixing hard bright color with swampy earth tones leads to such rich and sulfurous combinations. Even though they were listed as merely “oil on canvas”, many of the painting had tell-tale matte surfaces that indicated some kind of adulteration—the addition of tempera or dry pigments perhaps as was the case with the works on paper. Rembrandt sometimes mixed in similar materials in order to achieve polytonality. “Summa” was another excellent painting that included some of Jensen’s stock gestural flares and scraped out, negative brushwork that appeared almost like Old Master X-rays from the technical section of some Met monograph. The paintings that were located in the adjacent small gallery looked like old dances, recognizably individual but defined by moves made famous in another era.

It has been said by some that Jensen’s current work rests too comfortably in reworking the conventions of Abstract Expressionism. I think that the current Michael Goldberg show at Lennon Weinberg might be a better example of something this. There are many paintings by Franz Kline presently on view at C&M Arts that are about the same size as Jensen’s, but the scale and the thrust of the work is altogether different. Jensen’s work is earthier; dense and bottom heavy like a terrarium. Jensen’s paintings are probing, and perhaps even scrappier than Kline’s, which in comparison now seem flighty. This is no small distinction, Kline is a painter of the highest order, and like Jensen, immensely gifted and somewhat underappreciated.

One really gets the sense from this show that Jensen is reaping the rewards from his lifelong investigation in paint and his unwavering belief in the power of its renewable properties. How else could anyone possibly reach such a state? A great painter has arrived without leaving.

 

Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art.