Albert York: Paintings;
A Loan Exhibition
Davis and Langdale Company
231 East 60th Street
New York
212 838 0333
October 9 - November 13, 2004
Giorgio Morandi:
Paintings, 1950-1964"
at
Lucas Schoormans Gallery
508 West 26th Street, Suite 11B
212 243 3159
December 4, 2004
A version of these
reviews was first published in The New York Sun, October 14, 2004.
By MAUREEN
MULLARKEY
 |
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Albert York
Landscape with Two Tropical Trees 1986
oil on masonite, 13 x 11 inches
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Albert York Head
with Parrot 2004
graphite pencil on paper, 8 3/16 x 5 1/8 inches
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The ghost of Bartleby the
Scrivener hovers over Albert York, contemporary painting's best known
recluse. On view at Davis & Langdale are 25 paintings, all created
before 1992, the last year the gallery received a canvas from him. This
exhibition also includes 9 recent drawings abruptly submitted by the
artist earlier this year.
Born in 1928, the painter
came of age with Abstract Expressionism. He staked his place vis-a-vis
the modern movement with passive resistance to its defining imperatives,
much as Melville's Bartleby countered demands with "I would prefer
not to."
While Ab Ex heralded its
own significance on over-sized canvases, Mr. York preferred panels under
a foot square. Pressure to make noise-pump it up, abandon representation-was
quietly met by Mr. York's bias for the visual world: small-scale landscapes,
a pot of flowers, sometimes a cow or a memento mori. His subject matter
is so ordinary as to be almost inadmissible. But it is ordinary in extraordinary
ways.
Skill with the fabric of
paint plus a refined palette combine to shift his renunciatory simplicity
away from the margins inhabited by Sunday painters and eccentrics. The
quality of his color marks him as a sophisticate whose modernity knows
its own roots.
His greens, derived from French landscape tradition, are delectable.
Spare compositions divide into light and dark zones, the drama of contrast
made more intricate by subtle blending of foreground and background
color into the motif. While values remain distinct, admixtures of pigment
harmonize the counterpoint.
"Two Pink Carnations
in Glass Goblet" is a luscious example of his deceptive realism
and the improvisational confidence that binds him to the moderns. A
goblet of blooms is set, deadpan, in a meadow as if it had grown there.
The foreground green is worked into the carnations, reducing the tone
almost-not quite-to a middle gray. The optical effect is of a warm,
dark pink with anything saccharine denied.
Entries for Albert York are
scarce in the annals of modern art; yet every serious painter in New
York knows his work (so do collectors). For good reason. He raises simple
sights to the dignity of painting with an imaginative el n that strikes
the viewer as something deeply felt. In a 1974 essay, Fairfield Porter
wrote that it is his empathy that attracts. That, and modesty. Legions
of artists pummel us with the weight of their ideas. Albert York would
prefer two trees against the sky.
Giorgio Morandi Still Life 1955
oil on canvas
A more illustrious celebrant
of a private world is Giorgio Morandi, lodestar for other painters and
a poet of the familiar and unexceptional. Now on view at Lucas Schoormans
are 6 stunning paintings plus two works on paper in a loan exhibition
that was several years in the making. It concentrates on work from the
last fifteen years of Morandi's life, his most mature and exquisitely
nuanced.
Volumes have already been
written about the formal structure and spatial organization of Morandi's
painting: the distilled architecture of homely items compressed on a
tabletop, each adjustment finely calibrated to break the monastic silence
of the whole. The same household objects repeat like mantras throughout
his work.
No middle ground exists for
the audience. One is either captivated (as I am) or bored by his seemingly
narrow range: penetrating distinctions so unassuming that you have to
work at observing them. Too see the world in a grain of sand or an arrangement
of bottles and boxes is an acquired taste. A decision. Everything depends
on one's attraction-or none-to Morandi's subtlety, a dynamic attentiveness
that, were it not for the physicality of paint, comes close to an act
of prayer.
The word "contemplative"
is overused in relation to art in general and to Morandi in particular.
Contemplation of what? and for what end? Your tolerance for these two
questions shapes the nature of your response to the work. It helps to
know what motivated Morandi's mastery; it was more than paint.
Morandi was an ardent reader
of Pascal, a 17th century mathematician, physicist and passionately
religious man. The painter took heart and direction from a man (credited
with originating the theory of probability) who lived what he proclaimed:
"Let a mite be given to him [the reader]. Let him see therein an
infinity of universes." Morandi had no need to leave Bologna. Infinity
was there on the Via Fondazza.
It is commonplace to label
Morandi a precursor to Minimalism because of the severity of his methods
and materials. But art-historical pigeonholing misses the animating
core of his originality. Morandi's painting embodied his convictions.
For these, look to Pascal, not academic categories. The spatial ambiguities
and linear evasions of these still lifes emulate Pascal's refusal to
fix the finite: "Let us not look for certainty and stability."
There is nothing minimal in Morandi's affirmations of material uncertainty.
