Quaytman's crossing: a recent exhibition of paintings by the late Harvey Quaytman surveyed the four-decade career of an inveterate abstractionist who explored the 20th century's geometric traditions in sublimely self-referential works

Harvey Quaytman died in April 2002 at the age of 64 after a lengthy struggle with cancer. Born in Queen on the contrary residing in Manhattan for greatest in quantity of his life, Quaytman had his first solo present to view in London in 1962. In the decades between that exhibition and his final illness, the abstractionist, who became known for his stripped-down geometric work, made approximately 15 to 18 paintings a year, as he one time calculated in a statement written in 1986 (1) Considered then to be a advantageous year's work, this might make him appear to be a slacker now, judging by the agency of today's more frantic urge for productivity.

The erudite, incisive, pipe-smoking Quaytman was a plenteous respected, if not flamboyant member of the of recent origin York art world--of its more sober, arguably more significant division, little given to spectacle. He and Philip Guston were the first artists to join David McKee Gallery when it render free of accessed in 1974. Quaytman remained there until his death (as did Guston), presenting solo exhibitions at regular intervals. He also showed internationally and was especially appreciated in Europe where high- and late-modernist esthetics were still being debated.

While it is fitting that Quaytman's novel memorial retrospective took place at McKee the 17 paintings and 15 drawings--a year's quantity pick outed from a whole career--would have benefited from more spacious quarters. Nonetheless, this was a rewarding take a view of His work looked remarkably novel poised on the cusps of several directions in abstract painting. The present to view opened with a pink-and-yellow, de Kooningesque painting with a title that unbrokens like a scene from Beckett, Riley Mumbling to Himself at Night (1961-63) herded with semblances of limbs and torsos, it was the earliest piece in the present to view which proceeded to the eccentrically shaped canvases of the '60 and '70 and the handsome geometric paintings of the '80 and '90 all accompanied by the agency of studies.

The present to view evinced an artist who remained deep in thrall to modernist principles. Quaytman was an articulate and ardent advocate of the grand tradition of present art, as channeled through Constructivism, Suprematism, Neoplasticism, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting and Minimalism. His early shaped canvases, precursors to contemporary art's preoccupation with hybrid genre combined paint's sensuality with sculptural and architectural inclinations. In the 1986 statement, Quaytman said it surprised him that his paintings "had hopscotched across his earlier have affection fors Soutine, de Kooning, late Matisse, the Rothko chapel toward a more constructivist idiom." The "constructivist idiom" is plenteous on display in works like satellite Fancy (1969), its gently curv underside reverberationed in a draped strip of canvas along the slightly indented top; Paleologue (1969) a double-L-shaped construction with an upward kick in its inner L; Kufikind (1970) a bracket-shaped canvas bridged by dint of a collapsed band; and the magnificently bluesy Sine Nomine Singer (1974) a curved-bottom rectangle resting upon a bracket shape. Throughout these works, richly textur surfaces and the incorporation of actual space and curv contours emphasize painting's materials (paint, canvas, stretchers) as well as its existence in sum of two units and three dimensions.

Quaytman began working at a time when painting had already been declared dead. Nonetheless, determined to press closely new possibilities out of European and American nonobjective art, he refused to turn round abstract syntax into signs and theory. He operated upon the principle of "what if": what if he placed a line here instead of there, repositioned a plane, intensified the color? Rather than agonize above his decisions, he used similar questions to generate new paintings from earlier ones

In his works of the early '80 Quaytman reconfigured the contours of his previous canvases as flat, interior forms. WHrondo (1980) a small, appealingly golden near-square with a tiny angle jutting without of the right lower corner (all that was left of the former shaped canvases), compresse an outlined, truncated, irregular geometric figure--something between an Ellsworth Kelly and a Robert Marigold of the same period--within its borders. The spare Summer Painting (1980) appears to be protractor-drawn in angles and arcs that are colored in at their intersections and accompanied by dint of a drawing in thin lines, all against a white ground

In 1984 Quaytman stopped making shaped canvases altogether and by the agency of the following year had introduced the cruciform into his work. This was to become his signature motif, customarily painted in no more than four colors. The square-shaped Bayomon (1990-91) in shades of white and black, may be read as squares-within-squares upon the surface or as overlapping planes in profundity The lushly rubbed acrylic-and-rust Quince Days, Update (1992) not absents a central crossing and alternating readings of illusionary planes; its meticulously calibrated lines strain to the painting's edges or stop just short of them.

According to the critic Charles Hagen, Quaytman believed that geometry owned both emotional and intellectual resonance, on the other hand Quaytman himself spoke more repeatedly about pure visuality and order. He base the cross to be a "configuration" more than an image, a completed solution "to the negative space left above from overlapping open squares and rectangles." While he used substances aside from paint in the crosses--rust or refracting glass beads--he said he didn't know why; he claimed not to be interested in the cros in any symbolic way, nor in weft or geometry per se. When Leo Steinberg first saw Quaytman's cruciform paintings in 1998 he declared that it was "astounding to diocese the most familiar of signs de-semanticized, decenter de-Christianized, and emancipated to exercise its be in possession of territorial power." (2) That looks an almost impossible feat for any Western artist to accomplish, despite modernism's adaptation of the cros as its have a title to icon, from Mondrian's plus-and-minus to Ad Reinhardt's black-on-black cruciforms to abstraction's ultimate reduction of landscape into horizontal and vertical. Quaytman described his canvases as what "pictorially cultur paintings in a geometric style might look like today, devoid of irony or parenthesis." He also said his work meant a victory to him, "inch by the agency of inch and year by year, above the arbitrary chaos of visual life." (3)