These works are particular in their details and insistent on the profusion they convey. Concurrent with the drive toward monumentality is a striving for the contracted and claustrophobic, a sort of qualitative smallness. In these pages, John Yau recently alluded to the “density” and “compactness” of Charles Seliger’s work, noting that “our eyes cannot take them in with one glance.” It is an observation one makes again and again with many of the works in Suitcase Paintings. You do not look at them but rather peer into their interiors, picking your way across their fictive and textural forms.

These denser, tighter works invite a focused and expansive gaze, penetrating and loose. If the monumental works assert their presence in our space (making an impact from across the room, or disturbing one’s sense of bodily orientation), these smaller ones pull us eyes first into their space. Of course, the dichotomy is not absolute. Like the Cubist grid that insidiously asserts itself in all-over gesture painting, density has an alarming way of precipitating the monumental, and vice versa. {Read More…}

Any challenge to canonical thinking is worthy of consideration and, in many cases, useful. It can help us see things fresh as well as rescue them from the dusty halls of history. In that regard, Anfam recognizes that the period he focuses on is still contested territory, and he weighs in on it by including work by Sam Francis, Charles Seliger, and Mark Tobey, as well as photographs. I have quibbles with the exhibition, but that is to be expected. Mostly they have to do with who is not included, particularly since Joan Mitchell and Hans Namuth had work in the exhibition, but Norman Bluhm and Rudy Burckhardt did not. But this was Anfam’s exhibition, not mine. And saying that I would have done it differently is hardly surprising.  {Read More…}