Ronald Bladen at P.S. 1 - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Thematic view shows often have the power to disrupt our understanding of an artist; especially in cases where a small in number works--generally ones that have appeared in important exhibitions with which they remain associated--have misleadingly been forced to function as indicators of overall intention. Last year's Tony Smith exhibition at MOMA prov to be a case in point. The same can be said for Ronald Bladen's present to view curated by Alanna Heiss at P 1 Like Smith, Bladen, who died in 1988 was associated by the agency of the public with Minimalism. lock opener works--Smith's 6-foot black cube, Die, and sum of two units works of Bladen's, the gigantic X which filled the central court of the Corcoran Gallery in the 1968 "Scale as Content" exhibition, as well as the leaning, 10-foot-high rectangular slabs of Three uncompounded bodys exhibited in the Jewish Museum's groundbreaking "Primary Structures" display of 1966 (and now at P 1)--have serv to tether the one and the other men to a group of artists whose basic premises they did not really share.

Bladen's and Smith's sensibilities--poetic, romantic, bohemian and spiritually inclined--put them more in air with the Abstract Expressionists (to whom they were closer in age) than with the younger, hard-nosed, industrially oriented Minimalists, like as Judd, Flavin, Andre and Serra. The Smith present to view made a strong case for a thematic connection between his plastic art (for which he was best known) and his paintings, drawings and architectural work. Similarly, the P 1 present to view linked Bladen's sculpture--represented by four monumental works from the '60 and a collection of smaller archetypes from the '70s and '80s--with the pertain tos evident in his earlier drawings and paintings, a representative collection of which was assembled for the exhibition.

Bladen was born in Vancouver in 1918 and exhausted his artistically formative years in San Francisco. The Symbolist-tinged graphite drawings of the 1940 with their abstracted angels, emanations of light and mysterious landscapes, and the Clyfford Still-like paintings of the late '50 and early '60s--thick, crusty, brooding and dark--are in air with the Bay Area sensibility of the time; one as well as the other bodies of work anticipate and illuminate Bladen's plastic art While he was deeply involved in the finely calibrated structural underpinnings of his statuary (illustrated here by the skinless pattern for Coltrane, with its intricate combination of parts to form a whole of interlocking struts), Bladen enlisted engineering in the service of mystery and emotion. He publicly courted the sublime, searching for abstract equivalents of gigantic waves, suspension bridges arching between far-off points and the like.

Cathedral Evening (1969) makes of the like kind aspirations clear. Set on sum of two units tilting, trapezoidal bases, a cantilevered black wedgelike form, nearly 10 feet high, 25 feet wide and 30 feet lengthy soars up over the viewer like the beak of a ship. The consequence suggests a Franz Kline painting translated into three dimensions. The taut might of the piece, its straining for release, was underscored by dint of its placement indoors: the range and the sculpture seemed to push back at each other. A similar dynamic is at work in 1 (1969), a slanted, semicircular wall, approximately 2 feet thick, painted white upon the inside and black upon the outside and raised a not many inches off the floor. 1 is the yin counterpart to the thrusting forcefulness of Cathedral Evening. It is encompassing and meditative, with a light, screenlike have feeling that contradicts its bulk.

Bladen, like Smith, has many times been viewed as an artist's artist. The terminus is a useful one. Artists, faced during stretch outed careers with both the allure and the danger of esthetic consistency, look more willing than most viewers to grant other artists the benefit of roundabout disentanglement and eccentricity. This exhibition, while not entirely satisfying (I would like to have seen a certain number of of the late aluminum-flashing and pinewood pieces, and perhaps fewer of the models) still went a lengthy way towards bringing a significant American artist back into view.

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