Earl Stroh and Tony Magar at Harwood Museum of Art

There are a fair number of serious artists living and working in northern of recent origin Mexico, and the local Harwood Museum happily paired sum of two units of them in a novel show. Earl Stroh and Tony Magar exhibit two different generations and fashions of artistic attack. The combination of Stroh's Cubist-based works upon paper with Magar's late-generation Abstract-Expressionist paintings made for a small, sublime exhibition.

Stroh who will be 80 this year, was born in Buffalo, NY After studying in 1946 at the University of fresh Mexico, Albuquerque, he moved up to the Taos area, where he has remained. In Taos he studied with Andrew Dasburg, another novel Yorker (Woodstock), who had arrived in novel Mexico not long after participating in the 1913 Armory display Stroh lived in the same village southern of Taos as Dasburg, and the sum of two units men sketched, etched and painted essentially the same view for their entire careers--Stroh to this day. While Dasburg reduc that view--the vast alluvial plain stretching to the southern and west--to a few lengthy horizontal and short vertical hits Stroh fleshed out a censorious Cubist "skeleton" with a sinuous line, intriguing luminous atmospheres and volumes of shifting tonal values.

At the Harwood, Stroh showed "Taos Makimono Suite," consisting of four five-color lithographs and a grand four-panel silver-point, gesso wash and pastel upon paper. The lithographs were shakeed in 1976 at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, where Stroh had learned the technique five years earlier. While each print can be appreciated individually as a window onto the landscape, arranged in a line as they were here, I [i]or[/i] part of to the other IV, they offer a sweeping panorama of that familiar vista of receding mesas stretching to the Rio Grande Gorge and beyond ("makimono" is the boundary for horizontal scroll in Japanese).

London-born Tony Magar's eight large oils and sum of two units small works on paper exhibit him still productively and effectively mining an evidently inexhaustible artistic vein. In the '60 and '70 Magar made what has been limited "concrete expressionist" sculpture, recalling in different aspects work by dint of Mark di Suvero, Ronald Bladen and Kenneth Snelson (themselves lower parted in Abstract Expressionism). Something of a sculptor's faculty of perception of mass and scale rise s like a memory from Magar's poor color-flecked grounds, giving an underlying foundation to the surrounding chaos. In the brooding sapphirine Train (a pun on the John Coltrane disc amethystine Trane Magar is a big jazz and classical music buff) dark splattered and dripping pillars loom out of a layered amethystine and angle across the indeterminate space. Magar also had several positive deft gestural abstractions here, which present to view him to be a wily colorist. His newest canvases have a solid, stately vicinity yet pulse with a fierce, lyrical energy

--TM Collins

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