April 25 to June 8, 2013
53 East 58th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, (212) 832-0208

James Walsh, Black Bottom, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Collection of Spanierman Modern, New York

James Walsh is an artist in mid-career who is still not as widely known as he deserves to be, despite the fact that he has participated in more than 50 group exhibitions since 1974 (when he was still an undergraduate at Rutgers) and has been the subject of five solo shows since his 1985 debut at Galeria Joan Prats, New York.

His latest show comprises just seven small paintings (24 by 18 to 36 by 26 inches) judiciously selected and installed in Spanierman Gallery’s project space, Spanierman Modern Library.  I find the paintings very handsome, with a clear, vivid palette and sophisticated color combinations.

These paintings also differ from almost any other abstract paintings in town by virtue of the fact that their paint rises above the canvas surface in swoops, blobs and swirls. Practically every other abstract painter who has attracted critical attention this season is painting with thin, flat layers of paint, but Walsh’s paint is mixed with molding paste so that it has to be scooped out of a bucket and spread onto the canvas by hand. Then it is manipulated with blades of wood, steel, or cardboard, and sometimes with a large commercial brush designed for smoothing wall paper. The final effect falls somewhere between thick cake frosting and the foaming waters in the wake of a giant cruise ship.

Clement Greenberg is supposed to have said that flatness should be a characteristic of modernist abstraction. Walsh’s painting challenges this apparent dictum (possibly because he concurs in my belief that Greenberg was merely describing what had been done in the past, not advocating what should be done in the future).  Here is yet another mass of evidence that painting is better done by instinct than by theory.

James Walsh, Colorbook: Paularry, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Collection of Spanierman Modern, New York

I have not always been enthusiastic about Walsh’s exhibitions:  the last time I wrote about his work at length, I felt that he was exhibiting too many paintings that combined too much paste with too many colors, but in the current show, in each painting he either limits his color schemes or the amount of paste he uses, achieving much more satisfying results.

Jolts (2012) is an example of holding back on colors and lavishing on the paste, with the left hand yellow side scraped clean down to the canvas surface, but a giant blob of on the right edge of brown, green and white, and both sides held together by a central, medium-thick area of brown and yellow.  Black Bottom (2012) goes the opposite route, with a fairly thin sea of blacks and blues on the lower side of the canvas, a sky of pink and yellow above, and a cruising inward form on the upper right that could be either a comet or a fish in the Hungarian national colors of red, white and green.

Occasionally, in Colorbook: Paularry (2012) for instance, Walsh seems to depart from his newfound restraint, to ladle on both a hefty quotient of paste and what appears at first a full range of hue (though it isn’t).) The image is built around three fat vertical sweeps of predominantly blue paste on a flatter blue field. The two side sweeps swoop downward. Both have white tops, and the right hand one also has a pink underbelly. The central sweep swoops upward, with blue feet, brown head, and a daub of white in its middle.  This painting forced me to accommodate myself to it. At first, I felt it excessive, but in the end, I found myself thinking that it might be the best painting in the show.

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Installation shot of Sideshow Nation at Sideshow Gallery, Williamsburg, January 5 to March 24, 2013. Richard Timperio is the face behind the iMac. Courtesy of Sideshow Gallery

Richard Timperio lends new meaning to the terms “skying” and “grounding” with the humungous 470-artist group show, Sideshow Nation, at his Williamsburg gallery.  The precedent for such jam-packed art installation that comes to mind is the 19th-century style of exhibition of the great European academies and salons with their paintings hung floor to ceiling to which the public flocked en masse.  Sideshow Nation closes this coming weekend after a two-month run.

“I never liked the idea of a Christmas show,” the artist-turned-gallerist tells me.   “A lot of little trinkets.  Nobody buys them and nobody cares.” In the early days of Sideshow he staged just such an event, with the title “Merry Peace,” but what he has come to prefer is  “an overview – a chance to show what people are doing.”

An estimated crowd of 2,000 attended the opening January 5.  Of coure, if each artist attended with a couple of friends it would get up to that number pretty fast.  People lined up in the cold half way around the block, and Timperio had to stand out on the pavement, in order to let new people in only after previous guests had left.

The official hours were six to nine PM but the galleries were still crowded at eleven. Timperio’s annual salon has become a New York art world fixture: even its premier fun couple, Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz, were spotted in the line in one recent year.

The hanging is a work of art in itself, a complex checkerboard of paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptural objects. But then, Timperio is himself an artist, and one who has evolved through a variety of personae..  (His own show at Art 101 in Williamsburg was reviewed by artcritical in 2011.)

Photograph of Richard Timperio by Peter Reginato

WhenTimperio arrived in New York in 1970,  in his early twenties, from his native Ohio, he designed a pinball machine. This was followed by a sojourn in New Mexico, where he was able to make a living in commercial art (and acquired his trademark cowboy hat). Returning to New York in the later ‘70s he did political caricatures for the New York Times and began to devote more time to his painting.

Starting out in a pop idiom, with special attention to rodeos, Timperio evolved into abstraction when, as he says, “I realized that I was more interested in what the paint was doing than in telling a story.”  This was in the early eighties, when he also started to paint on the floor. Dan Christensen, a good friend, was a big influence on his art.

Sideshow had its beginnings in 1995, when the legendary Williamsburg restaurant, Planet Thailand, invited Timperio to hang some art on its walls. In those days, Williamsburg was still a working-class neighborhood where artists found attractive rents. “We would have an opening and you could actually have a dialogue,” Timperio recalls, nostalgically.

But other galleries and young professionals followed the artists, and they, in turn, were followed by edgy boutiques, restaurants and condos: the usual story. Today, a Sotheby’s real estate office shares the block with the cheerfully graffiti-decorated building into which Sideshow moved in 2000, and, grouses Timperio, “Everything costs a fortune.”

Some of the artists showing in this year’s Sideshow Nation are “celebs” like Paul Resika, Bill Jensen, Forrest (“Frosty”) Myers and Dorothea Rockburne.  Others are at least as well known for their writing: Robert Morgan, Phong Bui, Mario Naves; or their dealing:  Janet Kurnatowski, Pauline Lethen. Some are unknowns and/or friends of artists included in the past, and some are tried and true friends of Timperio’s who have returned year after year.

It’s also a family affair, with brothers Don and Dan Christensen, Ronnie Landfield and son Noah Landfield, husband-and-wife team James Walsh and Ann Walsh,  twins Carol Diamond and Cathy Diamond, and  Timperio’s own artist-childrenWillie Timperio and Cheyenne Timperio.  The younger Timperios both showed abstraction in the past but this year both opted for figuration.

Most of the artists on display are alive, and of all ages, but occasionally room is made for a distinguished deceased.  For instance, a lively self-portrait drawing by the late impresario Willoughby Sharp is in the current show, as is a fine small painting by Dan Christensen.

Being a painter himself, Timperio is not overly enthusiastic about conceptual art.  “It has to have something you can see,“ he says.  He considers the visual “more important than meaning – I’m not big on the word. But I try to keep it as open as possible. I think every generation has something valuable to say.”

Sideshow Nation at Sideshow Gallery through March 24, 319 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 486-8180

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November 8 – December 29, 2012
529 West 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues
New York City, 212-929-1351

Al Loving, Untitled #32, c. 1975. Mixed media, 121 3/4 x 112 inches. Courtesy of Gary Snyder Gallery

Barely a year after moving to New York from Detroit in 1968, Al Loving (1935-2005) became the first African-American artist to be accorded a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. During this period, he was painting large, very simple shaped canvases with brightly-colored geometric abstractions on them, not unlike the contemporary work of Richard Smith and Sven Lukin

The show at Gary Snyder is not of such work, however, nor does it focus upon his final phase, in the 1980s and ‘90s, when he made large and stiff but radiant collages out of rag paper cut into spirals, circles and doughnut shapes, covered with bright colors and stripes, checks, lozenges, or interwoven slats. Rich in symbolism, these late works reflect the achievement of calm maturity.

The show at Snyder presents a period in Loving’s career when he was restless and experimental. Evidently dissatisfied with the initial worldly success he’d attained, he was searching for a new, more distinctively personal form of expression that—while remaining true to the standards he’d established for himself—would offer fresh possibilities.

During the early 1970s, he found this in the creation of wall compositions made of large, loosely hanging but stitched together strips of canvas—canvas collages. This crucial link in his development – between the promise of the early period and the serenity of the late one – turns out to be well worth contemplating for its own sake.

Loving wasn’t the first artist to take canvas off its stretcher. One notable predecessor was Sam Gilliam, the Washington Color Field painter, who since the mid-‘60s had been draping his canvases rather than exhibiting them stretched.  Gilliam was far from Loving’s only source, however; equally influential must have been the “process artists” of that period, including Robert Morris, with his rolls of felt, Eva Hesse, with her latex, fiberglass and plastics, and Alan Saret, with his tangles of wire.

There is, however, a critical difference between Loving and Gilliam or the process artists.  Gilliam’s “drapes” were not only color-field paintings but also critiques of the school, indebted to performance and environmental art. The process artists were even more concerned with destroying the hierarchies of what they viewed as more traditional art.

Loving’s stance toward abstract expressionism was less adversarial, more cordial. He seems to have sought a rapprochement between what today we might call modernism and postmodernism.  This is clear in his current show. Its central gallery is hung with five large fabric wall pieces measuring up to 14 feet high and up to 12 feet wide. All are made from narrow strips and stripes of torn canvas, but these pieces have been stitched into rich-looking, multi-colored and well organized compositions that all have recognizable tops, sides, and bottoms (some of the bottoms rest on the gallery’s floor).

Al Loving, Untitled, 1982. Paper collage, 31 x 19 inches. Courtesy of Gary Snyder Gallery

The colors in the best pieces at Snyder – achieved through dyeing canvas with Tintex – are subtle and elegant, in a more muted palette than the artist had employed in the ’60s, or would employ later. At the University of Michigan, where he took his MFA, Loving was a protégé of Al Mullen, who had studied with Hans Hofmann, arguably the finest colorist among the abstract expressionists.  Loving’s colors don’t resemble those of Hofmann, except in the sense that they are clear, appealing, and harmonize with each other, ratherlike good jazz (like Pollock, Loving was a jazz aficionado).

Two large wall pieces stand out.  One is Untitled #32 (ca. 1975), facing the gallery’s entrance, and shaped like an inverted pyramid with a loop to one side. The other is the untitled piece (ca. 1974-1975) on the right-hand wall. It reminded me of a subway map, though the colors are much warmer: reds, oranges, browns, yellows and pinks, with complimentary touches of olive.

Also at Snyder are smaller paper collages from the 1980s distinguished by their simplicity. Most effective is the small, untitled paper collage (1982) in the entry lobby. On a glowing field, in which yellow, pink and blue blend together, are scattered free-form colored dots and strips: an effervescent carnival.

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September 5 to October 6, 2012
179 East Broadway (between Rutgers and Jefferson Streets)
New York City 917-463-3901

I first saw paintings by Sandi Slone in 1983, when she was living in Boston, and I’d been invited by some Boston artists to visit and critique their work. Slone had recently taken her MFA from the Boston Museum School, and was still teaching there.

Sandi Slone, Vulcan Love, 2012. Oil, acrylic, mica on canvas, 46 x 43 inches. Courtesy of Allegra LaViola Gallery

Her paintings were huge and abstract, with large, soft fields of color; mellow reds and oranges either predominated or simply struck me with especial force. I thought them very beautiful (that being an adjective one could still use on such work in those days).

In 1984, Slone moved to New York. Twice, in the 1990s or maybe in the next decade, I saw more of her work in Manhattan galleries.  On the first occasion, her paintings were hung on three sides of a space, in the center of which, on the floor, sat a pile of sand and/or detritus. The second time, the paintings were only semi-abstract, with little, cartoon-like human figures floating on their edges.

I felt that these embellishments reflected insecurity, that the artist seemed worried that her work might not be “edgy” enough to attract attention by itself. Such embellishments aren’t unique to Slone. In the recent past, I’ve seen one well-reviewed show of abstractions to which lit-up neon tubes had been affixed.  Another artist had semi-abstracts mounted on hanging glass panels, because (according to the label accompanying them) she hoped that this would make them appear “relevant in the environment of today’s art world”.

I believe that today’s “relevant” may well be tomorrow’s redundant, and that any artist is better off trying to inaugurate trends than to follow them. That is why I was so pleased to find that in her latest show, Slone has largely (though not entirely) abandoned embellishments, and determined to tough it out with pure painting. The new paintings are more modest in scale than those I saw in the 1980s; but they’re also more aggressive, even offensive, with a savage voluptuousness that borders upon barbarity.

Colors are louder and shriller: reds, purples and oranges still dominate, though some pictures (especially less successful ones) are mostly blues or greens. Technique involves pouring and swabbing streaks of paint onto horizontal canvases, then manipulating the paint by lifting the canvases one way and then another, so that, besides vehement swirls and sinister puddles, there are long, straight drips, often running toward all four sides of the canvas.

Poured paintings, of course, are nothing new. Pollock worked on the floor, and has had his followers, but in the decades since, many more abstract painters have kept their canvases upright and applied paint entirely or at least partially with a brush – following the alternative example of de Kooning, that other Pole Star of abstract expressionism. It is therefore unusual to find an artist who perseveres on the road less traveled, and rarer still to find one who pursues it as passionately as Slone does in this show.

Some paintings here are overdone, with splashes and puddles dissolving into an inchoate sea of paint.  Other paintings, where coy little figurative elements still peep out around their edges, look underdone, unfinished.

A sizeable handful, though, are real winners.  One is Sex with Strangers (2012), whose pouring creates a wonderful swimming, soaring impression by contrasting thin with thick paint, and reds, whites, and pinks with purples and blues. Also dynamite is Vulcan Love (2012). It is mostly burning, boiling lava-like red, with complementary dark speckles and complementary smears of black at the bottom, blending with the red into brown.

A third, nearly perfect painting is Further Out (2011), which is organized into three horizontally-streaked, drifting areas of color – soft blues and purple at the bottom and a central dreamy cloud of white, above which a blazing red sunset waits.

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May 17 to September 27, 2012
25 East 73rd Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues
New York City, 212-249-2040

Installation shot of the exhibition under review. (c) 2012 Frank Stella/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Ernst Häckel’s famous theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny – the development of an organism, that is to say, mirrors the evolution of the species – applies to Frank Stella in relation to Western art since the Middle Ages.  His severe but elegant  “pinstripe” paintings of the late 1950s and early ‘60s, together with the gentler aluminum and bronze paintings that succeeded them, can be seen as his Quattrocento period (and, not surprisingly, won much praise when a group of all three series was shown at L & M Arts earlier this year).

The brilliantly colored “Protractor” series, though freer in concept and execution than the paintings preceding them, were  — like them — clearly outlined and defined, just as the high Renaissance paintings of Raphael and early Michelangelo had been.  This was where I came in on Stella, writing about them when they were first exhibited at Leo Castelli in 1967 and I was in my first year of writing about art for Time.

Ever since, it has seemed to me, this artist has been in a prolonged Mannerist phase in which the hallmarks of his wild and wooly creations — increasingly three-dimensional, increasingly composed of many small elements, increasingly variegated in color— are agitation, the off-centered and the nitty-gritty of confusion: a modernistic counterpart of late Michelangelo, Bronzino or Parmigianino.

Now, at long last, I feel Stella has arrived at a new synthesis, just as Caravaggio and the Carracci stabilized mannerism to arrive at the baroque. I see a new serenity and stability in Stella (though I confess that until now I haven’t felt strongly enough about any work by him that I’ve seen since the sixties to examine it in detail). While this show is still endowed with the energy and diagonal thrust we associate with both historical mannerism & the historical baroque, at times there are harmonies of composition and color almost worthy of comparison with Velázquez.

Fittingly, this present show features ten works from Stella’s “Scarlatti” series, and recorded baroque music by this composer plays softly in the gallery. Each piece, which in relation to the wall behind it implies a canny combo of painting and sculpture, bears the Kirkpatrick number of a Scarlatti sonata

Frank Stella, k.161b, 2011. Mixed media, 20 x 20 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Freedman Art. © 2012 Frank Stella/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Stella has long been known for his advanced technology. I see technology as a better servant than master. The same applies to the armies of human assistants Stella employs (reputedly as many as Bernini). Merely because such resources enable him to achieve effects that shout “2012” doesn’t guarantee their esthetic excellence. Half of creation is knowing when and how to edit one’s creations.

This time the master abstractionist has curbed his excesses. The show’s curly, straight-out and splayed combinations of tubes and flatter shapes have been constructed with the aid of CAD software, often out of a brightly colored material called ABS (Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), with further color sometimes applied in the studio. Mechanical and personal elements thus come together into new wholes, with widely-varied effects whose range can be indicated by three of the finest pieces.

One of the smallest greets the viewer upon entering the gallery. This is k.161b (2011), a shiny, sparkling all-green composition that sits on a little plinth of its own. It measures only 20 inches in all directions, but is an intricate composition of open and closed star shapes, with stick-like or sometimes leaf-like components harboring a form within that seems to have been inspired by a dog toy left in the artist’s studio.

Next to it, on the right, is k.37 (ABS Blue) (2012) which sprouts from (or hangs off) the wall to a height of almost nine feet and a width of more than five. At its perimeter are open, curly yellow and red tubes, mostly pretty narrow and leaving lots of space between themselves and a central element, like the paths of electrons circling a nucleus. This nucleus is more compact, and made out of slightly larger, curved but broader flat shapes in red, while and blue.  Graceful and expansive, free yet organized, k.37’s use of color is thus restrained and selective: to the red and yellow of the perimeter’s tubes and the tricoleur nucleus are added only subtle accents of aqua and silver.

At the far end of the gallery  is k. 359 (2012), a majestic monster, larger and denser than the others, which both sprouts off the wall and stand free on its own feet.  Projecting more than  six feet out into the gallery, its composition is incredibly complex. To the center left, in front, is a curved open shape with twisting, turning thin slats inside that make that area resemble a giant flower. An upwardly curved bundle of slats to the right looks like a giant sconce and in turn upholds a mass of curvilinear and twisted shapes somehow suggestive ofa giant chandelier. These effects might have been unbearably overdone if tinctured with Stella’s usual riots of color, but instead restraint shows itself through rendering the entirety of the piece in a mellow gray.  An exception are several narrow horizontal bands of a clear, transparent plastic that circle the entire sculpture tight against its body to achieve a marvelous unity out of dissonance.

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March 1, 2012 to April 7, 2012
529 West 20th Street
New York City (646) 486-7004

Some new art astonishes us with its audacity. Other new art assumes a more modest stance, arguing that novelty need not be sensational to convey loveliness and expressiveness.  Toon Kuijpers, a native of Amsterdam, offers a tantalizing but moving blend of the representational and the minimal, in the form of ultra-simple still lifes that can trace their lineage back to 17th-century Holland, yet still manage to look at least as  fresh as any display of contemporary minimalist abstraction.

Toon Kuijpers, Yellow Jug, 2011. Oil on canvas, 20 x 17.5 inches. Courtesy of Howard Scott Gallery.

All these oils on canvas were executed in 2011. All are small, ranging from 31.5 inches square to only 8 by 9 inches. Most focus on a single object, occasionally two, and even more rarely as many as four or five.  All these objects find their most natural habitat on a table top, for most are lovingly-rendered antique tea cups, with the occasional bowl or jug or (once in a long time) ceramic flasks.  The last-named grouping is reminiscent of Morandi, but most of the time, Kuijpers is his own man, because his palette is a lot warmer than Morandi’s, because of the radical simplicity of his single objects, and  because of the contrasts between them and their backdrops.  Sometimes these backdrops suggest tablecloths. Sometimes they don’t. Either way, they are usually divided into differently colored halves or quarters, lending an artificially abstracted setting to what are otherwise naturalistically-rendered subjects.

Clearly, these paintings are meant to summon up memories of Holland’s Golden Age, and artists like Heda and de Heem, but nobody painting still lifes in the wake of 19^th century impressionism can escape the slightly less weighty brushwork of Manet,  so what we have in Kuijpers is a blend of traditions, including echoes of Mondrian or even Sol LeWitt.

Nevertheless, it is amazing how many beguiling changes this painter rings on what may seem at first a single tune. He takes his cues from the vast variety of porcelain, lusterware and other types of pottery created in Europe and Asia through the last four or five centuries. Yellow Jug pairs a good-sized pitcher with a small whitish chinois cup, seen in profile, while Versailles depicts a large, French-looking red, white and gilded tea cup and saucer, seen from above. Royal Albert presents, museum-style, four elaborate Victorian cups and saucers, but no other painting in this show attains the perfection of the smallest, Blue Cloth, with its simple, exquisite (though chipped) little bowl, and its sunlight pouring in from the left.

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January 12, 2012—February 25, 2012
525-531 West 26th Street
New York City, (212) 695-0164

British sculptor Tim Scott, long committed to an uncompromisingly abstract esthetic, has also shown an aptitude over the years for exploring a range of materials.  An exhibition of his work at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, in 2010, combined steel-and-sheet-acrylic work from the ‘60s with what was in 2010 his newest series of smaller ceramic sculptures, “House of Clay”.  In the fall of 2011, a group show at the Poussin Gallery in London featured Scott’s current work, larger pieces made of naturally finished plywood (the “Woodwind” series). Loretta Howard Gallery offers a reminder of what first made him famous in the ebullient ‘60s, when the art world’s expanding ambition and tolerance for experiment led to sculptures not only large but composed of then-novel media; we also see him in the more subdued ‘70s, consolidating achievements of the previous decade.

Tim Scott, Counterpoint XIII, 1973-1974. Aluminum, steel and plexiglass block, 48 x 272.5 x 36 inches. Courtesy of Loretta Howard Gallery

With Philip King, William Tucker and Isaac Witkin, Scott belongs to the group of sculptors featured in New Generation: 1965, a groundbreaking exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.  At the time, Scott (b. 1937) was freshly emerged from the study and practice of architecture, as well as later study and teaching of sculpture at St. Martin’s School of Art, then a hotbed of constructivism as derived ultimately from Picasso and Julio Gonzalez, but carried on through David Smith, and (in England) Anthony Caro.  St. Martin’s, in the 60s, was heavily committed to color in sculpture, and the two pieces in this show from the ‘60s, Bird in Arras III (1968) and Wine (1969) are both appealingly colored, composed as they are of colored sheets of acrylic and tubes of painted steel. However, the four pieces from the ‘70s—the Counterpoint series—furnish quite a contrast, being more compact and bereft of color. Mostly composed of thick sheets and tubes of clear Plexiglas, they are held together by narrow blackish- brown steel bars and sometimes sheets of steel.

In both the work from the ‘60s and the ‘70s, surrounding air plays a role, but in the earlier work, it serves to outline and dramatize the movement of the sculpture, while with the later work, the transparency of the Plexiglas makes most of the sculptures almost appear to disappear. Either way, abundant pleasure is to be derived from this work.  Bird in Arras III, more than nine feet high and nineteen feet long, is a very light and delicate monster: its green metal skeleton rises in an arc to which five rectangular sheets of shiny acrylic have been bolted at right angles. The first three (on the left-hand, rising side of the arc) are a pale cream color, the fourth (on the descending side) a bolder yellow and the fifth (which nearly reaches the ground) a soft brown.  Altogether, it reads like a fluttering bird rising up, then gently descending—sort of an Eadweard Muybridge emblem of flight.  Wine, while more settled and sedate, combines an even more delicate skeleton on four narrow waist-high legs, all colored like a fine Burgundy, with two trapezoidal acrylic sheets, one a fuchsia rosé, the other more Pinot grigio (recalling that grigio is Italian for gray).

With the Plexiglas sculptures, their graceful transparency offers a tantalizing commentary on the chunky solidity of their outlines. In some ways, though, the most satisfying of that series in this show is Counterpoint XIII, (1973-1974) in which Plexiglas plays only a minor role, and muscular slabs and sheets of steel and aluminum dominate the composition. Though it must weigh a lot, nonetheless this piece shares the sleek elegance, lightness and airiness of the rest of the exhibition.

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Frankenthaler at work in her New York studio in 1969 © The Estate of Ernst Haas

Helen Frankenthaler, who died on Tuesday after a long illness at the age of 83, defied categorization.  Although one of few women artists to achieve recognition in the macho art world of New York in the 1950s, she didn’t want to be known as “a great woman artist.” She wanted to be known as a great artist, period (which she was).  Although she was also the founder of the “Color Field” school of painting, having provided Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland with inspiration at a crucial stage in their careers, she was not often written about by critics who shared the tastes of Clement Greenberg, and practically never by Greenberg himself.  She’d gone around with him in the early ‘50s, but they’d split up in ’55, and the breakup had left him with very mixed emotions about her. The result was that for most of her life she had to make her own way,  finding her own admirers and followers. Her reward was that ultimately she became a bigger star than Greenberg (which is the way it should be between artists and critics).

I met her in 1969, at the time of her first major retrospective, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, when I was still writing the Art page for Time. I had seen this show, loved it, and wanted to put her on the cover of Time, but my editors overruled me.  To my surprise, Frankenthaler wasn’t distressed—said she’d thought it over, and didn’t want to be on the cover of Time. I think she was concerned that her story might be vulgarized if dealt with at cover length. She did, however, like the two-page article that I wrote instead, accompanied by four pages of color photography of her paintings, among them The Human Edge (1967) and Interior Landscape (1964). Those beautiful paintings were what told her story. I could have been writing the alphabet and it wouldn’t have made much difference.

Still, some things she said wear well.  Born to wealth and privilege, she’d attended Manhattan private schools, including ultra-traditional Brearley, where she’d discovered that she could paint, and progressive Dalton, where she was able to further her painting studies with Rufino Tamayo, the Mexican modernist.  She’d gone on to progressive Bennington College where she studied with Paul Feeley, and then organized an exhibition in Manhattan of Bennington alumnae in May 1950, the year after she graduated. She invited all the critics in town to the opening, including Greenberg (already an art-world celebrity, thanks to his writings on Pollock and other rising first-generation abstract expressionists). Greenberg didn’t like Frankenthaler’s painting, but he did ask her out for a drink, and for the next five years, the pair underwent what she described to me as “a painting bath.”

They went to every exhibition in town, from Pollock to Sir Alfred Munnings, the  English horse painter (and an enemy of modernism). They’d get the catalogues to each show, and grade the paintings in them.  “One check meant we liked it. Two checks was pretty good. Three was wow!”  And always a lot of talk, about what made one painting more successful than another.  “This seems the opposite of that lofty beautiful experience that art is supposed to be,” she recalled. “Every painting is supposed to be a valid expression and interesting.  But the truth is some work and some don’t. That happens with all painters in every age.”  Greenberg had a great “eye;” he could tell a first-rate painting from a second-rate one, but Frankenthaler wanted to make paintings that worked, so she looked and looked, seeking to develop her own eye.

Helen Frankenthaler, Interior Landscape, 1964. Acrylic on canvas, 104-7/8 x 92-7/8 inches. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. © Helen Frankenthaler/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

When I met her, she’d been married since 1958 to Robert Motherwell, youngest of the first generation abstract expressionists (Greenberg cattily called them  “the Princess Grace and Prince Rainier of the art world”). To me, Motherwell maintained that Frankenthaler had “internalized” Greenberg’s eye.  She’d also painted Mountains and Sea (1952), her first major “stain” painting, and the one that so impressed Noland and Louis. It had two sources of inspiration. One was the Nova Scotia landscape that she and Greenberg had visited that summer, to paint late impressionist pictures sur le motif.  The other was her visits with Greenberg to Pollock’s studio, seeing how Pollock was making the “black stain” paintings that succeeded his “classic period” of 1947-50.  For Mountains and Sea, Frankenthaler used Pollock’s principle of staining a canvas laid on the floor, but thinned her oils with turpentine so that they sank into her unprimed canvas, using her shoulder instead of her wrist, and a sponge in addition to a brush. The image was cloudlike, more gentle than Pollock’s, but with a lively zest all its own.

Dozens of artists have since carried on with that technique; few have achieved the range and vitality that characterize Frankenthaler’s staggeringly large total oeuvre, created over six decades.  In general, I prefer the paintings of the ‘50s and ‘60s, but there have been many top-quality individual paintings since, and many of Frankenthaler’s most exciting works on paper (particularly her woodcuts) date from these later periods. Because the colors of Mountains and Sea are pastoral colors—pinks and light greens and blues—many critics tried to pigeonhole her as a painter of abstract landscapes.  But this is another category she defied. In her old age, she was more willing to speak in interviews of her closeness to landscape painters like Turner, and to paint pictures that could more easily be read as landscapes, but to me, in ’69, she contrasted painting landscapes with painting abstracts, saying that with landscapes, one was stuck within a tradition where pretty much everything had been said, but that with colors and shapes, there was still a lot to be said.

I found her work almost invariably ambiguous, in the best tradition of true abstraction.  Shortly before Christmas, I saw her luminous Paris by Night (1986), a deeply rich brown canvas with two floating white and off-white ovals on it, in the Ernestine and Bradley Wayne Collection, at the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery.  In the catalogue essay, Dorsey Waxter suggested a resemblance to street lamps in the Place de la Concorde. Before reading that, I’d been reminded of the cheery windows of a Paris café, shining through the evening darkness.  Obviously, both of us had been influenced by the title, but the fact that we were reminded of two very different images tells me that the painting still inhabits that refreshingly free (though still invisibly circumscribed) magic world of abstraction, Frankenthaler’s truest home.

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October 15 to November 13,  2011
319 Bedford Avenue, between South Second & Third Streets
Williamsburg,  (718) 486-8180

Louise P. Sloane, Red Red Orange Square, 2010. Acrylic Polymers, Paint and Gouache on Aluminum Panel, 50 x 46 inches. Courtesy of Sideshow

While Louise P. Sloane and Randy Bloom come from different painting backgrounds, both have sure, lively senses of color and color harmony, amply living up to the show’s title. “Hotter than ‘Ell” is the name of a 1934 jazz melody by Fletcher Henderson.

Sloane’s canvases have been compared to tablets, like those upon which the Ten Commandments were supposedly inscribed. This is not only because of to their rigidly rectilinear composition, but also because their many narrow and arrow–straight rows of squiggly lines (created by squeezing paint through the nozzle of a pastry tube) resemble cursive writing. Though too freely formed to be legible, they still convey a sense of linguistic message. The overall configuration of these paintings is so simple as to seem minimalist, except that few minima artists used the eye-popping color that Sloane employs.  Each painting (acrylic upon steel, aluminum or wood) is composed of four squares, one in each corner, with a fifth square in the center.

In most cases, the four squares on the periphery have horizontal rows of squiggled paint, while the square in the center has vertical rows. An undercoat of contrasting (or complimentary) color was laid down before the squiggles were applied, and a third layer of paint covers up most of the original (muted) color of the squiggles.  Some of the layers beneath peep through, however, and, because of the thickness of the paint, the effect is like a tapestry. Typical of the hot colors that Sloane loves is Red Red Orange Square (2010) with crimson and scarlet in the periphery, and a center of even hotter orange. But she can also do cool colors. The smaller Howl into Spring (2007), displayed in the window of the gallery, has two shades of grassy green in its periphery, with a center of electric blue.  Whether warm, cool, or a combination of both, the effect is hypnotic, almost magical.

Bloom creates paintings more like windows, offering the viewer a vista into wide open space. Indeed, the space suggested is so open that it can seem a bit unsettling, like a voyage upon uncharted seas. Upon solid fields of one color, the artist superimposes designs in contrasting colors. The design combines two, three or four long framing lines around the edges, with a small rectangle (usually blue) in the center, and the outlines of four even smaller squares floating in a semi-circle around it (or, alternatively, four raised jewel-like blobs of paint). No two compositions are identical, although the images all clearly belong to the same family, and are mostly made by acrylic brushed onto canvas with a highly traditional brush.

Randy Bloom, Clown Around, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 67 x 65 inches. Courtesy of Sideshow

Bloom also works with warm, cool and combinations of both. On the warm side is Clown Around (2011). The red of its field is quieter than the reds that Sloane employs, but   more transparent, hinting at a darker undercoat beneath.  Three framing lines of bluish green nearly circumscribe this field, emphasizing the resemblance to a window while suggesting a floating feeling.  The small open squares of yellow, blue, pink and orange also seem to float. In the cool category is a smaller, witty painting, So What (2011). Here a field of ice blue clings to the canvas; at its edges, raw canvas shows through. Then the painting is framed all the way around, not once but twice, with navy-blue lines. The tilted square in the middle is framed with navy blue and filled in with slate blue inside. The four little floating ovals (blue, green, yellow, and pink) are each surrounded with their own individual frames of navy blue, while the small square could almost be a person surveying them. It’s like the diagram of a picture gallery, inside a picture.

These artists share a devotion to color, and also to jazz, as there is rhythm and cadence in each set of paintings. But the deeper reason Sloane and Bloom have been paired is that they offer two ways of showing that art doesn’t need to be shrill or sensational in order to command attention, that it can provide emotional release through beauty alone.