March 1972
A century ago the momentum which changed the course of that aspect of our awareness through culture called painting, declared itself within the confines of the art movement known as Impressionism. The story of Impressionism is often a dismal tale of fatigue to mind and muscle. The Franco-Prussian war exiled people from France, and all over Europe economic and religious revolutionary turmoil created havoc with human lives. Yet despite exile from France and being driven crazy in Holland, these people painted pictures which continue even now to reflect pure paint possibilities.
Exiled in London, Monet and Pissarro were reduced by indignities, whose effect could prompt Pissarro to write "I shan't stay here and it is only abroad that one feels how beautiful, great and hospitable France is. What a difference here. One gathers only contempt, indifference, even rudeness. Among colleagues there is the most egotistical jealousy and resentment. Here there is no art--everything is a question of business,"
The artist as heroic individual may or may not be a 19 th century European idea, but the artist as star is of our time, and for this reason, among others, here in New York where the energy is now situated, the important business of painting pictures was overshadowed.
The Café Guerbois in mid 19 th century Paris was, evidently, hot with feuding, maybe even fisticuffs, but what we see now are splendid pictures. So it's not that naïve to assume that painting, after all, is not fighting -nor anything else for that matter.
A hundred years after the inception of Impressionism painters still walk around carrying painting like a guilty secret. For a while, to discuss pictures in any terms but their essential barter content was anathema. The situation hasn't changed radically, but there are signs which indicate the exposure of cynicism is upon us. In painting every effort at product should be concerted evidence. Questions are posed and answers are made. An essential difference, one of the aspects or qualities which distinguishes it [painting] from most other kinds of making, is inasmuch as it is being made, paint is culled to the surface, to life, through, by, with color to deliver articulate paint on one's canvas.
An artist like Joan Snyder poses a problem about touch through visual attraction, and her pictures come over to me as rather splendid touch. Snyder seems set on demonstrating the fundamentally simple principle of ordered relationships in space; in her case flat pictorial space, so that virtually anyone can understand by responding to the spaces through color; gaps like breathing or hand-arm span, scribble, dribble, notation; secrets that can't be told, only shown.
The picture by this artist in the present Whitney Annual [ Smashed Strokes Hope, 72"x120"] is one of the more interesting works in the annual within the context of color painting. The way the marks are put on this regular, rectangularly proportioned canvas creates a vague but infuscating triangle which dominates the picture. Beginning about a third of the way down the middle of the surface, a rather muddy patch, though open area, connects to a mauve line, runny and slightly fragmented going diagonally across the surface from the center to the left. Patches which are literally "smashed strokes" of green, red, blue, going right diagonally across the surface, serve as another of [//] visual drifts. These ideas [//] actually reach the bottom perim[/] of the work but visually head there because of the way the surface area commands attention. The open area to the [/] of the work is so stepped up by exquisite color mixtures - blue, red to mauve, yellow to green - the surface is delicately balanced forward. The other side which would again be the plane above the stuttered outer edge of the triangle is visually less clear and not because it is more densely painted. [Cezanne painted his picture of a plate of peaches densely but it doesn't come out this way]. The work all over is done in that thick/thin manner which is a marked contemporary trait. I don't know what adjective, in terms of a verdict, to use about this picture but I'm very attracted indeed by it, at the same time as being aware that it groans with overload.
[PICTURE]
Garry Rich, Big Paint # 1, 96" x 144".
[PICTURE]
Joe Fisher, Thirteenth Hour, [1971-72], 14 1/2" x 7 1/2", a/c.
To attack the Whitney is not my purpose: That old football which one couldn't shy, never mind carry, is worse than indulging all other criticisms of establishment institutions. If the Whitney is to be blamed at all, it is to be blamed for going on trying, which is absurd. But it's a visual obvious fact that most of the marks made on the overtly figurative works are banal, empty and unevocative to an extraordinary degree except for a very distinguished work by Alex Katz, Raymond Saunders' memorable Jack Johnson , and two or three others. From Malcom Morley's New York it looks as though he is going back and trying to refine John Bratby by the way of Oscar Kokoschka. Paint color has more life.
This Whitney Annual is lively in a different sense with Ken Noland showing a Benjamin's Mess which if one has to deal with this kind of concrete quality, Dan Christenson's Yellow Loom is of-the-school-of. Jules Olitski's picture is outstanding because Larry Poons and various fellow travellers feed the mind with opulent confusion; thick paint was never an issue. Robert Melville recently had this to say about Leon Kossoff: " ... there are artists whose handling performs a sort of burial service over the subject whilst proclaming its resurrection ..." Kossoff's work began thicker, and at times continues to be thicker, than Frank Auerbach's, whose exhibition here at the Marlborough galleries we saw the Fall of 1969 and which was less than warmly received. Kossoff had his retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery in London.
Here in New York there is Poons et al. Shivering Night! I ask you ... Shivering Night where? Off Broadway or on the moon? Pictures have more visual substance through paint than this performance. Cy Twombly, whose exhibition at Castelli downtown is the major showing of pictures that building has housed thus far, has a work which in the hodge-podge looks regular, so has Jasper Johns. Both possess a certain quiet distinction which has to be seen. That we must, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "disenthrall ourselves" for big names and a certain life style is the meaning of this visual parable. The Whitney after all, being a strictly American institution, is often brought to near compromise over issues which have little to do with quality in art. It might be a great day when art history is not written from the point of view of wars and revolutionary social upheavals. But it appears, contrary to certain privately aired opinions, that this continues or will continue to be the case. The history of this period's art, if it is ever to be written, will have to include Women's Lib., the Black Panther Party and Gay Liberation. There is irony here, for by popular consensus it must be possible to judge a picture by the color of its skin or what sex it is.
[PICTURE]
Murray Reich, Red Out, [1972] 92" x 130".
A work by Murray Reich is in the Whitney Annual; he and Garry Rich are sharing the space at Max Hutchinson's gallery. At first glance both artists seem to be reworking areas which Piero Dozario and Edward Avedisian have touched on and hastily moved on. Rich rolls his color on either raw duck or a ground as neutral and unmodulated as the duck. That he lets the device have its head is interesting - avoiding the geometry of the supports the rolling takes place the way rolling would, in a multitude of organic stops and starts. That there is very little clarity in these pictures at the moment does not deny an implied quality but there are question marks [the image itself gives up, literally, a set of question marks]. A picture stops and starts not necessarily by cropping at the perimeter of the supports but by pictorial statements about vision.
In reworking some areas Avedisian touched on, Reich recently produced a three panel work which is rhythmed to green, what green can take without collapsing. Where the panels meet the color is red and a shade of red, a kind of maroon; an oval which looks like a long coffin shape rounded at the corners. This dapple or variegation of organic matter is held by a thinner stripe of blue at the outer edge, then green in to paler green. The outside edge is broken evenly both sides by a pink slither ending in the green which, by here, has become a long thin strip halfway up the picture surface. The curving no edge, then edge, then not so much edge as a thin separating line arresting the eye because of the raw canvas like a freely hanging thread, opens up the picture surface like the pages of a book seen flat. The curve goes [/] and up causing the green to billow, just perceptibly, in and out. The effect of these pictures is color almost like breathing.
In speaking about or trying to articulate self evident truth one can miss the point about relative truth. Since no artist as painter is going to make the ultimate statement about paint-color-action-reaction 'one shot' there is a lot to be accepted about cropping. But a picture is a whole picture and as Einstein said on the formulationing of the "Rules of The Game", " The danger ... lies in the fact that in searching for a system one can lose all contact with the world of experience. It seems impossible ... not to waver between the two extremes." A good picture must visually impart the kind of truth implied in what Buckminster Fuller had to say: "It seems that truth is progressive approximation in which the relative fraction of our spontaneously tolerated residual error constantly diminishes."
[PICTURE]
Mark Alsop, Untitled, [1971].
Joe Fisher and Frances Barth are two young artists. Barth is included in the Whitney Annual but Fisher is not. Barth's work in the Whitney is rather large, 73 1/4" x 145 1/2", a green picture called Boudu Saved From Drowning. In a very physical sort of way the literary title of this work hits one after experiencing this rather splendid effort. It is a picture of green with reds, very mysterious and dynamic in a way only color can serve up. This large work consists of two rectangles within the larger rectangles but the right hand one is physically painted out so as to leave a right angled triangle with the hypotenuse, rather jagged and freely painted, forcing the interest back into the picture. Some palimpsestic tension is set up between this triangle and the paler rectangle, that is just off square, with its right hand corner blunted or rounded and which shows traces of the reds which have now become a delicately balanced grey pink.
Fisher and a host of younger artists who have been spotted and encouraged by perceptive teachers at place like Pratt, Cooper and various out of town schools, are often amazed at their transition, through paint color, to Pollock, Rothko - the first generation of New York painters - with a positive pro-life articulation of that paint color. As Fisher himself says "Baronik had the most influence on my work in that he was able to recognize and trace my influences which were at the time Francis Bacon and Gorky ...Magritte".
They are actually tackling pictorial problems of such magnitude that one wonders who it was or how it presumably came to have been that very concerned and respectable people could announce the death of a highly complex activity which is so vigorous. It is true that someone like Fisher, who vacillates between tinting and shading, betrays some of the current indecisions but the evocation of common pictorial ideas challenged is of such potentially high quality from the visible marks made that, as opposed to hope [since the thing exists], one must express total concern at the fact that the people are afraid of well painted pictures, if not of the people who make them, to the extent that they won't look at them.
