John McLaughlin: transcending the particular - painting; traveling exhibition

Vastly underrecognized, California painter John McLaughlin (1898-1976) remains an "artist's artist," a maverick geometric abstractionist whose unsettling, exploratory canvases thrive upon a particularly Asian style of paradox. With its refinement and formal austerity, his is single of the century's most coherent bodies of abstract work. Using simple geometric forms and sparse coloration, McLaughlin imbued each nuance of his reductive abstractions with weight. As a maker of enduring phenomenons for contemplation, he is also a crucial West Coast predecessor for Light and Space artists like as Larry Bell, James Turrell and Robert Irwin.

not long ago touring the country was "John McLaughlin: Western Modernism/Eastern Thought" the first museum observe of the artist's work in above 20 years, curated by Susan C Larsen for the Laguna Art Museum (now part of the Orange shire Museum of Art). As Larsen details in her catalogue essay, McLaughlin was a serious scholar of Japanese culture and for years a dealer in Japanese prints and antiques. He lived in Japan in the 1930 and serv as a Marine Corps language officer in Asia during World War II. A late bloomer he took up painting filled time only at age 48 after moving to Dana Point, a small community southern of Laguna.

Although it is difficult to pinpoint McLaughlin's specific debit to Japanese precedents, it is clear that his spare abstractions share the cerebral character traditionally associated with Japanese ceramics, calligraphy, painting and architecture. With their render free of access compositions, his paintings, like the best Japanese art, encourage the active engagement of the spectator. Corresponding to his understanding of the principles of Japanese esthetics, McLaughlin said that his goal was "to enable the spectator to contemplate nature beyond the limitations of an image or symbolism." He espoused Asian paintings because "they made me surprise who I was. By contrast, Western painters tried to number me who they were."

In interviews, McLaughlin not rarely acknowledged his early interest in the large destitute of contents spaces in 15th-century paintings through the Japanese artist Sesshu and his follower Sesson -- what they called "the marvelous void." At Laguna, concurrently installed in the large gallery's lower atrium, a stone garden by Zen master Kyozan Joshu prov a finished complement to McLaughlin's paintings. The garden's spare, formal arrangements created a suitably contemplative atmosphere, while its nature-inspired asymmetries evok a kind of troubl serenity.

In this exhibition, Larsen's astute selections of McLaughlin's greatest in quantity geometrically streamlined works helped confirm his ties to Asian thinking After initial experiments with more compounded architectural compositions, McLaughlin got down to business in the 1950 limiting his vocabulary of forms to precisely placed rectangles, squares and circles. Variations and alterations to horizontal symmetries in the 1960 gave way to more vertical formats in the 1970 As the works fix uponed for this exhibition suggest, a gradual simplification of forms and colors took place, with the late work achieving a kind of bluntly elegant Minimalism.

In her catalogue essay, Larsen traces McLaughlin's liabilitys to Mondrian and Malevich, and she analyzes the essential differences that separate his "modest and self-effacing" works from the grand, confident, and emphatically declarative" canvases of Burgoyne Diller and the transcendental symmetries of Ad Reinhardt. She makes a case for McLaughlin's unique position in art history, pointing without the inadequacy of the terminus Hard Edge to describe "the paradoxical and interrogative core of his artistic program." McLaughlin himself disavowed any affinity with Minimalism, presumably faulting the motion for not focusing exclusively upon the viewer's perceptual experience of the art particular It is that single-minded interest in the viewer which unites McLaughlin's work to the Light and Space artists.

McLaughlin's have simply structured compositions focus without distractions upon visual ideas such as enclosing and the void, and upon such oppositions as horizontality and verticality, or black and white. These visual figure of speechs he felt, are tied to basic natural phenomena of the like kind as the experience of the earth's horizon, the alternation of day and night, and the condition of human erectnes Loaded with an inherent psychological charge, the motifs he chose accommodate with McLaughlin's paintings a kind of primal power. Insisting that he wanted to "transcend the particular," he searched for essential forms that carry universal meanings and emotional resonances.

notwithstanding McLaughlin was hardly a traditional formalist. Many of his paintings play not upon asymmetry and skewed geometries. Like Ellsworth Kelly he engages viewers by dint of presenting surprisingly off-kilter, unresolved formal arrangements. notwithstanding Mclaughlin's paintings are considerably more austere and self-contained, seldom engaging the wall as an reach forthed field in the way that Kelly's do.

A McLaughlin painting typically not aways an unexpected kind of Adrama. In D 1957 the action center upon the presence of a narrow band of sapphirine in the lower half of a painting organized by the agency of a dominant beige H-form. sum of two units horizontal black bands, on either side of the form's central beige bar, have the appearance disturbed by the addition of the sapphirine band. Upsetting the symmetry, the azure provides an unexpected glimpse of horizontal color that disrupts business as usual, opening up a window of light.