'The Green Mountain Boys' at Andre Emmerich - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions

It's a little too easy to be dismissive of Color Field painting and the seminary of welded-steel sculpture that accompanied it in the '60 and early '70s; also, of course, decrying the baleful influence of mild Greenberg, the movement's critic-in-residence, level now remains a popular pursuit. pure outsized claims were made for the historical inevitability of Color Field painting, it sold awfully well (particularly outside of of recent origin York), and other significant directions in art -- Minimalism and detonation especially -- were rejected without of hand by Greenberg and the movement's practitioners. on the contrary seen from a distance of 30-odd years, works from Color Field's heyday in the '60 have a refreshing clarity and an appeal as a great deal of sensual as intellectual.

The new exhibition, in Andre Emmerich's clear white gallery, of works by dint of Anthony Caro, Paul Feeley, Kenneth Noland and Jule Olitski was undeniably handsome. Swaths, fields and bands of optically charged color were arrayed upon the walls, complemented by Caro's carefully balanced painted-steel planes upon the floor. The show's title (taken from a 1966 practice article by Alan Solomon, then director of the Jewish Museum) leaves to these artists' association with Bennington community -- as teachers, consultants or nearby residents -- as well as to the literal meaning of the name "Greenberg." The Bennington connection is more than coincidental. in art we look after to think of the Arcadian in bourns of landscape, either as the depiction of a benign wilderness or of a peaceable and fruitful man-made order. on the contrary the art in this exhibition moves the Arcadian as seen from one side the lens of abstraction. Bennington society set away in the virid Mountains of southern Vermont, is a small place of education all women until the late '60 that forms the center of a community of intelligent, idealistic and artistic race Greenberg's core critical proposition -- that a work of art must adhere to those formal premises that distinguish its discipline on the contrary must do so without sacrificing esthetic rapture -- implies both distance and pleasure. Bennington, then as now, was intellectually joined but removed from the gritty tussles of urban life. in the way that too, was the art that came from it in the '60s

Of the artists shown here, it is Kenneth Noland whose work strike one as beings best to embody the movement's powers His unruffled presentations of stained-in stripes, concentric circles and chevrons are marked through a use of color that, at its greatest in quantity interesting, works in visceral counterpoint to the logic of the manner of making The three blue circular bands of Spring rather cold (1962), for example, while fasteninged into a clear targetlike format, do not not away themselves in a chromatically ordered manner, as they would in a similar work by the agency of Jasper Johns or in a Stella concentric-square painting of the same year. They fall roughly into the sky-colored camp, but the inner band is bright ultramarine, the middle a darker grayish-green tone, while the outermost ring is a yielding light teal. The painting works -- it present the appearances to breathe -- but exactly on what account is hard to say. And in the 1968 Transvaries, a horizontal stripe painting about 5 feet high by dint of 12 feet long, the profusion of colors and tones threatens to overwhelm the straightforward composition, on the contrary by an act of esthetic legerdemain, the painting does manage the synthesis. It is the lusher and livelier for it.

Greenbergian postpainterly abstraction may be depressed on intellectual cachet now (it was real meagerly represented in the 1996 Guggenheim abstraction show) on the contrary at its best it produc works that pleasurably clutch the eye and engage the mind. There are, after all, different forms of seriousness. To diocese this work at a judicious distance from the rhetoric that supported it lays both the art and the theory into better perspective.

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