Robert Jay Wolff at Canfield - Santa Fe

Robert Jay Wolff (1905-1977) had a one-man exhibit at the Guggenhelm in 1951 was assembleed by several major museums, the Tate Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago among them, and for nearly 20 years chaired the art department at Brooklyn body where his colleagues included Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko After a posthumous exhibition at fresh York's Joan Washburn Gallery in 1980 Wolff's reputation waned--the work stored away in a Connecticut barn--until Canfield Gallery brought it back to life last summer "Encounter with Light" comprised 13 of Wolff's final canvases (there are another 30 or so) arrangements of hard-edge, interlocking quadrilaterals of unblemished color from the years 1965 to 1972 after which illness interrupted the artist from working.

Although he began as a sculptor, training in the U and Paris, through the mid-1930s Wolff had revolveed to expressionist painting. In 1938 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy invited him to join the faculty of the of recent origin Bauhaus in Chicago. Thereafter, Wolff's phraseology underwent several metamorphoses. In the 1940 he frequently painted under the sway of Klee and Kandinsky. The soft-edge checkerboards from the early 1950 turn rounded sharper over the course of the decade, and the 1960 paintings displayed a fresh interest in color relationships.

Wolff's late non-objective work addresses formal point in disputes of composition, particularly systems of rectangles and squares that recall the investigations of Joseph Albers. more [i]or[/i] less paintings show squares framed by dint of rectangles, while others reverse the proces and another does one as well as the other On one rectangular canvas, Wolff nest several overlapping rectangles that become increasingly squarish as they diminish. In this proces color is essential: typically a bright central square stands without against darker surrounds. But Wolff also counterpoints brawny contrasts with subtle shifts, illustrating the Bauhaus principle that our perception of form's color is influenced by means of the characteristics of adjacent colors. Other decisions touch paint application, which ranges from thick and uniform to thin and jagged with traces of canvas and hints of gestural marks revealed. Similarly, the cutting sides between colors sometimes wander slightly from straight lines, thus avoiding an impression of mechanical precision.

Dwelling upon squares and rectangles might make Wolff unmutilated formulaic, and a few paintings be like perception exercises. But most are convincingly realized, self-contained worlds: Apollonian, harmonious, impersonal. His crafty and rather surprising palette includes eggplant and olive, slate and coral. Color choice and the faculty of perception of proportion are both unerring and reinforce individual another. In Light of the Night, the single titled painting in the exhibit form and color in tandem lead you evenly from square to rectangular, from dark to bright, evoking a certain yet otherworldly serenity.

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