Judith Godwin Early Abstractions
September 3, 2008 – January 4, 2009, Tobin Theatre Arts Gallery, Brown Gallery, www.mcnayart.org

The earliest paintings in the show resemble cell structures, with graphic black lines defining the interlocking forms within a matrix of colors that seem to refer to cubism. Another early work, “Nucleus IV,” contains references to the nude figure. “Male Study” and “Woman” are more complex arrangements that resemble early de Kooning. But more neutral space became a key part of her style when she began to experiment with pours and stains, such as “Ode to Kenzo,” which introduces an element of Asian minimalism.

Gradually, her style becomes looser, more painterly and more dramatic. “Purple Mountain” has a peak punching through the top of the picture plane, with the landscape defined by broad, dark brushstrokes. “Night” and “Blue Storm” use dark blues and blacks with accents of gold and brown to suggest the fierce energy of nature. “Black Cross” features a soaring black cross with a broken arm.

A few of the strongest works deal more with psychological states, such as “Longing.” More horizontal paintings with dramatic dark blotches against a white background such as “Into the Depth” and “Maze” seem to be maps of the artist’s subconscious, with dark, violent emotions pushing and pulling against a curtain of light. In these later paintings, Godwin pared down color and emphasized dramatic brush marks.

However, as Sims explains in his essay, while Godwin’s early work seemed to avoid anything that can be described as feminine, her more recent work has more womanly touches — introducing collage elements, such as black sequins and ribbons set into the pigments, and using rounder, more organic shapes. She also uses lighter colors. {Read More…}

Frank Stella’s “Red River Valley,” one of the works he created in 1958 before embarking on his Black Paintings.
© President and Fellows of Harvard College

Frank Stella / Morro Castle / 1958 / Kunstmuseum Basel

Yesterday I got an email from Brian in North Carolina in which he mentioned the Frank Stella 1958, the touring survey of 20 works made by the celebrated contemporary painter in the year that he graduated from Princeton University, organized by Harry Cooper and Megan R. Luke that began at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum and traveled to the Menil Collection in Houston and the Wexner Center in Columbus back in 2006. While I did not see the show, I remember reading the review in the NY Times and decided to see what I could dig up this morning. Below are some excerpts from three reviews.

Exerpted from Frank Stella 1958 by William Corbett in the Brooklyn Rail
Harvard’s Fogg Museum has long owned “Red River Valley,” the catalogue’s cover image. At 7’ 7” x 6’ 7”, it is the scale of New York abstract painting at that time, and it bears the signature flecks and drips of the period. From a pattern of alternating green and black stripes, a red column appears at the right and tapers toward the painting’s top. You can see the blue and black underpainting, like mud in a river, beneath the column and the uneven stripes. The image has a clumsy, awkward appeal—homely and hand-wrought. It is a painting you can sink into, read and roam around in. Fraught with emotional associations, “Red River Valley” is a painting that says more than, “What you see is what you see.”

It is also a painting, like all the others in this show, that seems to have failed for Stella precisely because it succeeded. We’ve seen paintings like these before and since—the work of Jack Tworkov comes to mind, as well as Sean Scully (although, had he been interested, Stella’s cheap paint would not have allowed for Scully’s lavish handling, a world in itself). You can see this “failed success” most clearly in “Morro Castle,” the direct antecedent of the black paintings selected by Dorothy Miller for MoMA’s “Sixteen Americans” show. Here the stripes drift off-center, like lines in a handwritten letter that the writer had been unconcerned and/or unable to keep straight. As with “Red River Valley,” the stripes form an image and invite an interpretive reading. They could depict boxes within boxes or an architectural plan of a stepped plaza or perhaps an abstracted imagining of the real Morro Castle, a fort at the entrance to Havana’s harbor.

What Stella did nowhere in 1958 was make the sort of annihilating black pictures that brought him instant fame. These objects, elegant as a banker’s (or gangster’s) suit, take painting into the realm of architecture. They have an authoritarian force that Stella seems to acknowledge with titles referring to Nazi Germany, even once labeling the pictures as having “a certain fascist element.” The landscape references found in the work from 1958 have been obliterated, along with the window figures in “West Broadway,” “Grape Island” and “Coney Island.” It may be that the part of Stella that looked out onto the world had been purged by these paintings, freeing him to pursue what he saw inside himself: that which could not be read but would stand still, obdurate and implacable, courting no viewer. [Read more...]

Excerpt from A BEAUTIFUL MIND by Phyllis Tuchman on artnet Magazine
In “Frank Stella 1958,” we can see an artist poised precisely on the threshold between Abstract-Expressionism and Minimalism, a moment when compositions of brushily painted stripes could be replete with meaning. The multifarious Ab-Ex space fills with slimmed-down, gestural stripes. Box-like shapes loom in the center of some canvases, move to the corners and then disappear, unneeded. The work becomes monochromatic, the canvas field filling with horizontal blue stripes or stripes of mustard yellow. The bands turn black, skewing and turning to form geometric patterns. And we are there, at Stella’s epochal “Black Paintings,” a source for much Minimalist sculpture as well as many formalist paintings to follow. [Read more...]

Excerpted from A Vivid Back Story for a Stella Legend by Roberta Smith in the New York Times
“Frank Stella 1958″ suggests, completely inadvertently, that the obscurity of the Black Paintings may be partly their own fault. They and Mr. Stella’s subsequent striped shaped paintings are the most implacable and withholding of his production and, in many ways, the least characteristic of his sensibility. They are handsome works of great historical weight, but they don’t seem to have held the artist’s interest for very long, so why should they hold ours? All the more reason to examine what came before the Black Paintings, to better fathom what followed them. [Read more...]

Music of Silence IV / 24” x 24” / 2007 / silverpoint / acrylic on wood / © Susan Schwalb. All Rights Reserved. www.susanschwalb.com

I have always been attracted to the mystery and luminosity in silverpoint drawings. I have experiemented with silverpoint and find the technique fascinating – from the delicacy of touch to the tarnishing. Schwalb’s work is the first I have seen where it used in abstraction and in combination with color. I find Schwalb’s work and Agnes Martin’s to be some of the best examples of minimalism.

Excerpt from Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Feminist Art Base: Susan Schwalb

Susan Schwalb is one of the foremost figures in the revival of the ancient technique of silverpoint drawing in America. Most of the contemporary artists who draw with a metal stylus continue the tradition of Leonardo and Durer by using the soft, delicate line for figurative imagery. By contrast, Schwalb’s work is resolutely abstract, and her handling of the technique is extremely innovative. Paper is torn and burned to provide an emotionally free and dramatic contrast to the precise linearity of silverpoint. In other works, silverpoint is combined with flat expanses of acrylic paint or gold leaf. Sometimes, subtle shifts of tone and color emerge from the juxtaposition of a wide variety of metals. In recent works, Schwalb abandons the stylus altogether in favor of wide metal bands that achieve a shimmering atmosphere reminiscent of the luminous transparency of watercolor. [Read more...]

www.susanschwalb.com 

Bill Jensen / LUOHAN (PERSONA) / 2005-2006 / Oil on linen / 28 x 23 inches / © Bill Jensen. Courtesy ofthe artist and Cheim & Read Gallery

I read two reviews of the paintings of Bill Jensen, a painter living here in NYC and an instructor at the New York Studio School, over the past month – Bill Jensen Notes from the Loggia by John Yau in the Brooklyn Rail and Art in Review; Bill Jensen By Martha Schwendener in the NYTimes. InJohn Yau’s review in the Brooklyn Rail of Bill Jensen‘s recent painting exhibit at Danese Gallery here in New York City. He discusses the centrality of drawing to Jensen’s practice and his debt to both Chinese calligraphy and Abstract Expressionism, both important sources of inspiration for my own work. Yau also goes on to state that Jensen is, “…exploring a territory that is connected to very divergent aspects of Abstract Expressionism (Ad Reinhardt, James Brooks and Jackson Pollock)—lightless light, the interplay between order and disorder, and gesture as form. In all three areas of this territory, which abut and overlap, larger chaotic forces emerge as the shaping feature.” For Schwendener this means that, “Bill Jensen has never settled down with one style,” a trait usually frustrating to galleryists and historians.

A frequent topic of conversation in the studio is what we refer to as the two schools of abstract painting – on the one side there are the gestural, expressionist painters and on the other side are the geometrical, color-field, lyrical abstactionists, and minimalists. This leads to a lot of useless conversations about left brain vs. right brain, emotion vs. intellect, expression vs. conceptual, etc., that really have nothing to do with painting, and devolve into figuring out which camp you belong to and sticking to it. However, I am more interested in mining the territory between the two poles and Jensen’s paintings are a great example of the many possibilities available. In his work we see both gestural marks, bimorphic or automatistic shapes, as well as brilliant colors and transparencies, shifting planes and moving spacial relationships. Jensen will lay in a gesture in a rich pure color opaque color and then come back and run a transparent right over top. Or lay in a thick opaque colorful gesture and then while the paint is still wet scrape it to create a film with transparent and opaque areas.

Finally, Schwendener indicates that while Jensen paints in oil he makes his own paint, allowing him to regulate its viscosity. I think this is a particularly important point for painters and something I have tried to bring into my own practice (I’ll talk more about this in the future). The ubiquity of artist supplies has lead to a plethora of easily available tube paints and painting mediums, the quality of which varies from brand to brand. While this frees up the artist from having to spend copious amounts of time and energy grinding pigments, cooking mediums, and making paint, it brings a certain uniformity and homogeneity to color and surface of paintings. Making ones one paint not only allows the artist to control the viscosity but to control pigment content, pigment mixtures, fillers, etc., as well as the drying time, finish and whole lot of other qualities that come into play in the process of painting. Jensen’s work shows us how important mastering the craft of painting really enables us to explore the limitless complexities of painting.

I finally got up to Moma to see the Color Charts exhibition. The first thought I had when I walked in was how much our experience of color has been influenced by technology. Pixels. It’s as if artists have been reduced to pixels pushers in our use of color. Then it dawned on me that the rectangle (pixel) has become the primary gestalt in the last 60 years. The subtext of the show is definitely about rectangles, grids, and squares, or in the terms of the curator, charts.

What’s interesting is that the title of the show Color Charts: Reinventing Color 1950 to Today seems to imply that artists have been engaged in a radical project of color exploration or that our knowledge of color and the use of color has been greatly expanded. Actually I found the opposite to be the case. With a few exceptions, the artists in the show use color in a rather homogeneous and limited manner. But, I guess that’s the point standardization, mechanization, commercialization. For the most part color is the stuff for conceptual and perceptual games. The stuff of entertainment or decoration. The spice of consumption. An accent.

As a painter, the show reminded me of the importance of color exercises the need to develop and nurture color sensitivity, but that there is a limit to the exercises and that exercises are just that exercises and not works of art. The methods of Johannes Itten and Joseph Albers for the Bauhaus and that have now become standard fare at art schools are helpful in developing color sensitivity, but they are limited. Color cannot be studied in isolation. It is interdependent with our materials. The color of paper and its use in collage is different than the color of pigment and its use in paint. Or the color of pixels and their use in video. Color is a language, a language that great painters master. The use of color is a craft skill developed simultaneously with the other craft skills of painting. The pieces in the show helped stimulate my awareness of color, and when I left and wandered through the other galleries of Moma I felt blown away by the use of color by painters up until 1950. Matisse, Gorky, Mitchell, Diebenkorn, just to name a few. Much more diverse and much more sophisticated and much more sensitive. In their hands color is not just a concept, a game, or a decorative element, but the stuff painterly expression. They give color life and the color gives life to their paintings. Finally, and more importantly, we see that color comes in many shapes and forms, not just rectangles, squares, and grids. It is the language they speak, not just an accent.

Brice Marden, Cold Mountain Painting, 1989/91 Oil on linen, 108 x 144 inches

Today seems to be a day of heavy hitters in 20th century American abstract painting. Check out this interview with Brice Marden in which he discusses the book Cold Mountain, abstract expressionism, chinese calligraphy, and chinese landscape painting. [Read more...]