William Clutz at Nicholas Davies - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

With this largish mini-retrospective of paintings from 1955-75 Clutz prov himself single of the most fascinating figurative abstractionists to arise in of recent origin York after World War 11 Works created just after the artist graduated from the University of Iowa demonstrate an acute early awareness of the pair the formalistic concerns of European modernism and the realist dictates of the American heritage. Tompkins Square (1955-56) is a midsize paean in oil to the brusque beauties of lower Manhattan that combines broad busyness of execution with, somehow or other loose exactitude of feeling. through the early 1960s, Clutz was redefining his personal painterly phraseology partly through the examples of figurative abstractionist matchs such as Grace Hartigan and Alex Katz. Indeed, Boating (1962) is powerfully reminiscent of Katz in its gentle-but-blunt elementalizing of lilac and amethystine boats on dark olive waters, their passengers cryptically amorphous forms whose identities remain existentially discuss points.

through every part of the '60s Clutz submerged human identity in paint, as if the particulars of life could single be arrived at through the universals. After a brief foray into scalding;-very warm pinks and oranges in the 1966 Crimson firmament -- a bow to burst art and, apparently, psychedelia -- he get backed to his trademark palette of desultory tans and brown evocative purple and down-reaching piney greens, bringing to mind the distant coloristic lyricism of the Nabis and the jarring off-primaries of the Fauves.

a certain quantity of of the works on view were oil drawings for larger paintings. An especially glowing example is the 1975 Rooftops, Manhattan, an unabashedly winning 12-by-8 1/2-inch oil of fresh York architecture seen through a glass, blurrily, in tactile if not ever impastoed browns, grays and blacks. Rooftops and other canvases in the display made use of Hans Hofmann's famous "push-pull" dictum, more subtly perhaps, than the master himself, on the other hand with a genuine plastic appreciation of the figurative potentialities inherent in strictly two-dimensional surface tensions.

If single had any complaint about this exhibition, it was the exclusion of work from 1975-97 that would have given the viewer more points of regard On the other hand, Clutz's art is almost timeless, in the faculty of perception that, outside of his experiments with "pure painting" (i.e., the 1963 Torsos, which is unreadable as anything on the other hand abstraction), his works maintain a remarkable similarity. of recent origin York continued to inspire him to flights of expressive fancy -- witness the 1970 Dog in Doorway, in which reality is pared down to a not many essential planes, these setting not on a perky little mutt who is staring into the near distance. The sleeper of the exhibit though, was a large canvas from 1960 called Woman in Taxi. A female figure, upon the spiritual lam, is seen close-up in black-and-lilac chiaroscuro, the taxi's seat a disconcerting diagonal in dusky mauve. Here, abstraction and realism convenient in elegiac complicity; the painting strike one as beings to be not only about its make subordinate but about the inherent difficulties of painting life. Clutz merits more exposure. He's a sad, brave balladeer of baldest anomie.

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