'The Hansa Gallery -1952-1959- Revisited' at Zabriskie - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

I suspect that many race find the social history of second-generation Abstract Expressionism as interesting as the actual paintings and statuarys It was an exciting time for artists. They were members of a small, interconnected and accessible world, individual animated by ideas and debate, not standard of value and success. You could drink with Franz Kline, inquiry with Hans Hofmann and bop with Charlie Parker. Then (in the simplified account) along came clap art, Minimalism, SoHo, art collectors and MFA programs, and the whole terrain shifted. The Hansa Gallery -- named after Hofmann -- was an artists' cooperative that lasted from 1952 to 1959 and appear to beed to typify the homey and fractious downtown novel York art world of the '50s

This well-curated exhibition at Zabriskie featured work of five of The Hansa's original members: Jean Follet Wolf Kahn, Allan Kaprow, Jan Muller and Richard Stankiewicz. The Hansa also showed George Segal, John Chamberlain, Marisol, Robert Whitman, Lucas Samaras, Alfred Leslie, Myron Stout, Jane Wilson and a entertainer of others. Adding more interest to the mix were the sum of two units directors of the gallery, Dick Bellamy and Ivan Karp, the two of whom were to keep important places in the expanded gallery world of the '60 -- Bellamy as the establisher of the Green Gallery and Karp as the director of Leo Castelli.

The Hansa had no fixed esthetic, although gestural abstraction, painterly realism and assemblage appear to beed to be the most belonging to all styles. This exhibition nicely illustrated the gallery's range. The work here, while engaging, wait oned toward the clunky and earnest. Allan Kaprow's painting, Caged Pheasant #1 (1956) for example, combines newspaper collage, a loosely painted black grid and slashing blows of red, green and orange. An evocation of the gritty urban landscape, it brings to mind early Rauschenberg, on the contrary it lacks Rauschenberg's low-keyed irony and finished formal pitch. Wolf Kahn's heavily worked and rather frenetic Portrait of Frank O'Hara (1953-54) perceive s like a pastel-colored Soutine, and Jean Follett's appealing Lady with the render free of access Door Stomach (1956), a gray-painted made of wood board with linear geometric forms traced without in metal, gravel and base objects, has the air of single of Picabia's Dada constructions -- although considerably more downbeat.

The real surprise of the display was Jan Muller. A leading force at The Hansa, Muller died in 1958 in his mid-30s, and his work hasn't been seen a great deal of since. The Fauvish paintings in the Zabriskie exhibit are coloristically rich, playing primaries and white not on against deeper, muddier tones. My favorite was Untitled (St George and the Dragon), a true small, horizontal wooden panel from 1956 with a quiet, allegorical air. Here, a azure St. George atop a white horse in a r fulvid and green landscape spears a murky-looking dragon, while the soon-to-be-rescued maiden raises her arms upon the far right. It's eccentric, knowingly in a raw state and quite appealing.

This exhibition illuminated a phase of postwar American art that appear to bes to be as much precursor as it is summation. Ye there was adequate supply of filling-in of the specks that de Kooning and the others of the first generation had missed, on the contrary there was also much groundwork done for the following decades. We sole have to look at the crumpl tar paper upon the floor and the table with the squeeze-it-yourself orange-juice set-up of Allan Kaprow's Vital Fluids (a reinvention of individual of his "Environments" of 1957 and 1958) to diocese before us the next 30 years of installation art.

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