Jack Youngerman at Washburn - Brief Article

To be a young American artist in post-World War II Paris must have been exhilarating. Jack Youngerman, as part of the last generation of American artists who felt the ne to make progress to Europe for study and validation--supported through the famous G.I. Bill--distilled the essentials of his art without of that heady environment.

His little-seen early works were exhibited in this recent exhibition by dint of a generous selection of small abstract oils upon paper and larger paintings upon canvas from 1953 to '54 The works upon paper included a luminous target configuration from 1953 prefiguring those of Jasper John and Kenneth Noland. greatest in quantity however, were grid-based works in which twinkling, prismatic patches of color--warm against cool--stream up and down vertical round pillars often gently tilted, their visual syncopations reminiscent of the regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements of Mondrian and of jazz; the rather diaphanous weave of high-keyed colors is tacked in place by means of a few judiciously placed blacks and further lightened by means of a white ground that encompasss the main image.

More weighted are the darker works with formats upon a strict horizontal or vertical axis, of the like kind as October (1953), a tall, rather narrow vertical oil upon burlap, and a smaller, similar, untitled piece that gazes like a study for it omit for its different orientation. October, above 5 feet tall, consists of narrow, vertical bands, each severed into irregular "dot-and-dash" patterns of dark and pale azures sunny yellows and blacks that plant the surface in motion. The bands push and twitch against each other, creating a "foreground" and "background" with a suspicion of a landscape lurking in that background's arrangement of colors.

The knockout of the display however, was Rochetaillee (1953), a drawn out horizontal painting on jute that went upon and on--for more than 13 feet its height a quarter of its extent The grid was again the point of departure, divided into 15 tiers of varying thickness which in revolve were cut up into hard-edged triangles, rectangles and trapezoids of spirited poster-paint yellows, greens, blues and black, a a whole that interlocked and synthesized French color theory with American directness and post-Cubist flatness. In those early years in Paris, Youngerman chose nonobjective abstraction as sufficient easy in mind and from there, after returning to of recent origin York in 1956, proceeded to originate his elegantly shaped, brilliantly colored, hard-edged forms which are his particular contribution to the history of the of recent origin York School.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group