Arshile Gorky, Agony, c. 1947

October 21, 2009 – January 10, 2010

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a major traveling retrospective celebrating the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (American, born Armenia, c.1904-1948), a seminal figure in the movement towards gestural abstraction that would transform American art in the years after World War II. The first comprehensive survey of the work of this artist in nearly three decades, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective will premier at the Museum and present 180 paintings, sculptures and works on paper reflecting the full scope of Gorky’s prolific career. Drawn from public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe, this retrospective will reveal the evolution of Gorky’s unique visual vocabulary and mature style. It is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and will be accompanied by a major publication, published in association with Yale University Press. The exhibition will travel to Tate Modern, London (Spring 2010) and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Summer 2010) following its debut in Philadelphia.

“Gorky built upon the achievements of the early modern artists he greatly admired and broke new ground during a remarkable moment to become an inspiration to a new generation of American painters,” said Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director-elect and CEO of the Museum. “The exhibition and catalogue will offer a deeply moving reassessment of the artist’s entire career, including his struggles and his triumphs—personal as well as artistic—and the powerful legacy of his work.”

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is the first major exhibition of its type since 1981 and the first to benefit from the publication of three biographies of the artist: Nouritza Matossian’s “Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky” (1998), Matthew Spender’s “From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky” (1999), and Hayden Herrera’s “Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work” (2003), all of which shed new light on the artist’s Armenian background and his central role in the American avant-garde. This will be the first major museum exhibition to highlight the artist’s Armenian heritage and examine the impact of Gorky’s experience of the Armenian Genocide on his life and work. The retrospective and its accompanying catalogue have also benefited from in-depth interviews with the artist’s widow, Agnes “Mougouch” Gorky Fielding, who has generously supported the project from the start, through key loans and first-hand accounts of Gorky’s artistic practice as well as his cultural milieu. Among the works to be included are such renowned paintings as the two versions of The Artist and his Mother, 1926-36 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) and about 1929-42 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); The Liver is the Cock’s Comb, 1944 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery), the artist’s largest easel painting; Water of the Flowery Mill, 1944 (Metropolitan Museum of Art), which demonstrates his deep absorption in nature-based abstraction; The Plow and the Song series,1944-47, which reflects Gorky’s continuing engagement with memories of his rural Armenian childhood; Agony, 1947 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Gorky’s haunting late painting, a product of his increasingly tormented imagination in the late 1940s; and The Black Monk (“Last Painting”) (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), which was left unfinished on Gorky’s easel at the time of his death in 1948. Some of the works included in the exhibition have not been on public view before, among them the wood sculptures, Haikakan Gutan I, II, and III (Armenian Plow I, II and III), of 1944, 1945, and 1947 (collection of the Diocese of the Armenian Church of America (Eastern), on deposit at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon), as well as the Museum’s recently acquired Woman with a Palette (1927).

Michael Taylor, the Museum’s Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art and curator of the retrospective, stated: “Gorky was a pivotal figure in modern American Art who has since come to be known as the quintessential artist’s artist. It is our sincere belief that this landmark retrospective will secure Gorky’s place alongside Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as one of the most daring, innovative, and influential American artists of the 20th century.”

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective will be presented in a generally chronological sequence. Thematic groupings will represent each phase of Gorky’s career, which underwent an astonishing metamorphosis as he assimilated the lessons of earlier masters and movements and utilized them in the service of his own artistic development. Beginning in the mid-1920s with Gorky’s earliest experiments with Impressionism and the structural rigor of the paintings of Paul Cézanne, and continuing through his prolonged engagement with Cubism in the 1930s, the exhibition ends with the Surrealist-inspired burst of creativity that dominated the final decade of Gorky’s life and left us with so many breathtakingly beautiful paintings and drawings. In the 1940s, Gorky’s contact with Surrealism informed his breakthrough landscapes in Virginia and the visionary works made in his spacious, light-filled studio on Union Square, which he called his “Creation Chamber.” Several galleries in the exhibition will serve as “creation chambers” in their own right, highlighting the artist’s working process by presenting Gorky’s most significant paintings alongside the numerous painstaking studies that informed their making.

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

June 5 – July 12, 2009

Janet Kurnatowski Gallery presents Inside Abstraction, an exhibition that brings together ten exciting artists for the first time: Srule Brachman, Brice Brown, David Cummings, Scooter Flaherty, Sam Fryer, Chris Martin, Gelah Penn, Michal Shapiro, Evelyn Twitchell and Kim Uchiyama.

Curated by Vered Lieb; some of the visual artists showcased have shown extensively while others are new and emergent artists. All of the artists in this show are united in certain visual concerns that they express primarily through abstract means. Each of the artists uses Nature as a point of departure.

The art critic, Joseph Masheck suggests in his essay, “The Carpet Paradigm” that all abstract painting might be viewed as either a portrait or a landscape. Viewed with this in mind, one could debate the issue whether Kim Uchiyama’s or Scooter Flaherty’s painting of broad bands of color describe a landscape, or if David Cummings work derives particular meaning as a series of portraits, while Srule Brachman actually entitles his rough hewn geometric compositions, “Dancing with Ronnie”. However, the intention of the curator was to present a variety of ways of approach to making painting.

“In the 1950’s four highly different approaches to painting might be said to have surfaced represented by Jackson Pollock, Rothko, Kline and Clifford Still. As watershed painters their work naturally led others who came after them to take their basic approach and ideas and run with them. Schools of painting emerged that stained and dripped on canvas, or folded and pleated them. Both Minimalism and Process Art, engendered profound experimentation with the material means of making sculpture and the spacial context it shares with painting. In all cases, whether gestured or minimal, the painting was acknowledged as a unified surface plane and the painting presented as a special object.” VL

Far from exhausting the subject matter of “Inside Abstraction”, the gallery and curator hope that this exhibition will lead to others in the near future. The Brooklyn and Greater New York art communities abound in impressive talent, and this exhibition captures but a small “slice” of the explosive creative energy and intellectual ferment that is going on there.

 

Pearl Fine, Unequivocably Blue, 1967

April 7 – June 26, 2009

Perle Fine (1905-1988) was one of the few women artists in the inner circle of the Abstract Expressionism movement. She moved from Boston to New York in the late 1920s to study art. Kimon Nicolaides was her mentor at The Art Students League. By the late 1930s, she attended Hans Hofmann’s studio sessions. Fine soon became an active member of the New York School. Championed by Baroness Hilla Rebay and the S.R. Guggenheim Foundation, Fine also interacted with the American Abstract Artists group, where she met Piet Mondrian. As her work developed into a more forceful and expressive abstraction, she was honored with solo exhibits at the galleries of Karl Nierendorf, Marian Willard and Betty Parsons. In 1950, Willem de Kooning sponsored her membership in the Artist’s Club. She participated in the seminal 9th Street Show of 1951, and was included in all five New York Annuals of the 1950s. In the mid-1950s, Fine built a studio in Springs, Long Island, near friends and colleagues Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, becoming a member of a sparse but ultimately enduring artistic community.

As the organizing venue for this traveling exhibition, Hofstra University Museum is proud to showcase the work of Perle Fine. A prolific artist intent on exploring her own personal abstract language in a variety of media, Fine moved her studio to the East End of Long Island when she was in her artistic prime. She was an influential faculty member in the Fine Arts Department at Hofstra University from 1962 to 1973.

Also on view: Perle Fine and Friends: An Intimate Portrait by Maurice Berezov.

 

 

Meredith Monk performing her piece “Juice”
at the Guggenheim Museum in 1969,
Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA,
Courtesy of the Paula Cooper Gallery

“…It’s day-job time again in America, and that’s O.K. Artists have always had them — van Gogh the preacher, Pollock the busboy, Henry Darger the janitor — and will again. The trick is to try to make them an energy source, not a chore.

At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again…”

 

Photo by Kay Bell Reynal

Several works by legendary American abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), never shown in a U.S. museum before, will debut this winter at The Rose Art Museum. An extraordinary body of work created by Hans Hofmann for the architect Josep Sert’s 1950 city plan called the Chimbote Project is the genesis for this exhibition.  The nine painting studies Hofmann produced for a series of murals in this Peruvian city form a concise and inspired example of the depth of Hofmann’s strengths as an abstract painter and modernist visionary. Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950 is curated by Michael Rush, the Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose, and New York-based guest curator Catherine Morris.

According to Rush, in the Chimbote paintings vibrant colors mix with a variety of forms (circular, angular and cruciform) and are so full of energy that the canvasses “virtually vibrate with a palpable physicality.” The year 1950 was an important one for Hofmann.  Not only does this period mark Hofmann’s full maturity as a painter, as he produced more than 50 paintings in 1950, but it also delineates one of his most productive periods as a writer.  In the post war years, the artist wrote a significant amount, revealing the formal and conceptual intricacies of his intellectual concerns and his creative processes.  Writings identified by the first line of the “typescripts,” as they are called include revelatory pieces such as “When I start to paint…,” dated April 1, 1950 and “In this moment…,” dated Nov. 25, 1950.

Hofmann also delivered an important talk at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum that year.  Entitled Post-Abstract Painting, 1950 France and America, Hofmann’s lecture was presented in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name that Rush says was characterized as the “most radical artist organized show of contemporary art in America since the 1913 Armory Show.” Artists in the exhibition included Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, William Baziotes, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Theodoros Stamos, among others.  A reciprocal show, Réalités Nouvelles, took place simultaneously in Paris at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

According to the curators, Hofmann, while clearly recognized as an important painter, has often been heralded more for his influence as a teacher than as an artist.  It is the intention of Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950 to situate Hofmann where he belongs: firmly at the center of the historically significant generation of abstract American artists.  While recognizing his broad influence as a teacher, Rush said, “it is our wish to place the work itself center stage, allowing it to be valued, indeed savored, as the product of an under recognized genius.”

The exhibition will consist of the full suite of Chimbote paintings in the context of two dozen other important works from 1950, including “Push Pull,” “Spiral Nebulous,” “Magenta and Blue,” “Image in Green,” “Image in Blue,” “Image in Red,” and several works on paper. Lenders include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kemper Museum and numerous private collectors.

Accompanying the exhibition is a full color catalogue with essays by Rush, Morris, and invited scholar, Irving Sandler.

 

Max Gimblett, Figure of Eight, 1999
15 inch quatrefoil

January 8 – February 28, 2009

Max Gimblett’s ninth solo exhibition, The Midnight Sun, at Haines Gallery includes recent paintings of the visual and intellectual cross-cultural complexity that has been the hallmark of his work for decades. In the new double squares and quatrefoils, Gimblett uses patinas of epoxy and polyurethane, layers of gesso, acrylic and vinyl polymers, and surfaces of black and white and iridescent silver and gold, united by bold strokes of calligraphy. Born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1935, Gimblett has lived and worked in New York since 1972, where he continues to pursue his unique synthesis of influences from Zen master and painter Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1769), Chinese painter Shih T’ao (1641–1670), Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), and Willem de Kooning (1904–1997). Gimblett’s own Zen practice includes koan study and ink brush calligraphy.

 

 

Paul Feeley: Corfu (February 22), 1962 
Oil-based enamel on canvas, 60 x 48 inches 

September 13 — October 25, 2008

The exhibition includes nine enamel on canvas paintings made between 1961 and 1964. Feeley’s abstract works with their bright colors, simple repetitive forms and symmetrical compositions occupy an important place in the history of twentieth-century American art. Feeley, alongside Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, worked against the grain of the prevailing Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s and his work is most often associated with the Color Field painters. Feeley’s distinct body of work, however, reflects a wide range of influences, including ancient Greek and Cycladic sculptures, Moorish decorative tiles and contemporary American subjects, like his motif derived from the children’s game of jacks. 

Although his work is not as well known today, during his lifetime Feeley was at the center of the New York art world. His first one-person exhibition was at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1955. Starting in 1960, and continuing until his untimely death in 1966, he had yearly one-person exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery. In 1968, he was given a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Feeley was fundamental in establishing the celebrated art department at Bennington College, where he taught for over twenty years. At Bennington, he organized many historic exhibitions including the first retrospectives of his friends Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and Hans Hoffmann, exposing his students—Helen Frankenthaler among them—to many of the most significant artists of the time.

 

August 1 — October 31, 2008

Lee Krasner with an early version of Stop and Go, c.1949

 

May 4 — September 21, 2008

In Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, the first major U.S. exhibition in 20 years to rethink Abstract Expressionism and the movements that followed, over fifty key works by 32 artists – among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko – will be viewed from the perspectives of influential, rival art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, the artists, and popular culture.

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.