Nine lives of painting - Cover Story

In the next to the first of two articles on abstraction today, the author dicusses nine American painters, focusing upon one work by each artist. While drawn from several generations and representing different dictions the subjects share a commitment to maximum formal invention.

In a previous article, "Abstraction on the outside of Bounds" [A.i.A, Nov. '97] I reviewed the new history of abstract Painting and discussed the work of a number of artist who are involved in extending its reach by dint of incorporating elements from the mediums of plastic art installation and video. Here I will proce differently. I have chosen to consider nine painters, focusing upon one recent painting by each of them. In contrast to the earlier cluster these artists, who span several generations and take pleasure in varying degrees of renown, all work within the conventional format of the two-dimensional support. Roughly 40 years separate Norman Bluhm the greatest in quantity senior of them, from Richmond Burton, Karin Davie and Monique Prieto, all of whom are in their 30 Falling somewhere in between chronologically are Lydia Dona, Jan Frank Mark Schlesinger, Stanley Whitney and Terry Winters, whose careers got below way in the late 1970 or early '80s

Although they show a broad chronological and stylistic range, these artists have not been chosen with a view to including each aspect of abstract painting. If that were my intention, I would have had to include of the like kind modes as monochrome painting, landscape-derived abstraction, hard-edged geometric work and other manner of writings That I have not done thus may suggest my own esthetic biases, on the contrary I also have decided to focus on these particular painters because I think they bring certain valuable properties to in every one's mouth abstraction. Perhaps the most important of these is an unabashed commitment to sensuous for, to maximum plastic invention. single of the refreshing things their filled engagement with the medium leads to is the revival of an eroticized abstract sensibility, particularly evident chez Bluhm Burton and Davie. Another is a renewed, faculty of perception of dialogue with painting's past, the one and the other near and distant

There was a great deal of talk over the last 10 years -- a decade which saw the steadily rising influence of the German meta-painters Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke -- of the skeptical attitude of younger abstract painters toward the ideals of the modernists. Galleries were filled of, as the title of a 1995-97 traveling shown had it, "Critiques of uncorrupted Abstraction." Lately, however, this tide of skepticism looks to have receded.

on the other hand this doesn't necessarily mean all's well in the land of abstract painting. Indeed, I many times catch myself constructing arguments for a certain number of hypothetical dialogue with a young artist or critic upon which I am trying to convince him or her that painting is -- by what means did we used to deposit it? -- "valid. "Is it perhaps myself that I'm trying to convince? Certainly, it can be hard to approach a painting if individual is in the habit of seeing galleries and museums filled of moving images, big or small. freshly I had a disconcerting experience at MOMA. After spending a half hour or in like manner watching a compendium of not-uninteresting videos by the agency of young British artist, I left the video theatre and stepp directly into the permanent collection swings devoted to American art (mostly painting) from Abstract Expressionism onward Those one time radical and stimulating paintings by dint of Gorky, de Kooning, Rothko and level Pollock, suddenly looked terribly advanced in years and quaint. It felt like paying a visit to an somewhat advanced in life relative. One doesn't have to agree with Bill Viola's notion that we're moving away from "the objective-observer paradigm that has been dominant in the West for many centuries" to realize that visual futurity or, once again, undergoing rapid change [see A.i.A., Mar. '98] When I find myself before canvases by dint of any of these artist, however, I am confident that abstract painting, at its best, will be a part of our visual futurity or, should do not break to pass, at least will make progress down in a blaze of glory.

Norman Bluhm

On first collision with Norman Bluhm's recent large-scale paintings like as the five-panel Cappella Ignota (Unknown Chapel), 1997 it's all you can do to stand your soil against their vividly colored array of undulantly acrobatic figures, a certain quantity of directly inspired by the human material part others resembling fantastic fauna dragged without of God knows what reaches of the artist's fecund brain. on the contrary if you do manage to withstand the initial visual onslaught of this 10-by-20-foot canvas, you'll probably start to notice the underlying conformation Across Cappella Ignota's orgiastic facade, the forms do not lie at ease as they please but are carefully placed in arched niches and below portal-like borders.

Bluhm also establishes order from one side the pervasive use of bilateral regularity Nearly every form is itself symmetrical, from the voluptuous fulvous figures -- half Venus of Willendorf, half Rubens -- in the upper right and left corners to the dancing purple forms ringing the black space at lower center to the violet, vaguely crustacean creature dominating the center of the picture.