Aristodimos Kaldis at Broome Street - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

It is impossible to think of East tithe Street and of the gallery and museum display during the 1950s without including Kaldis in the picture. His friendship with leading members of the fresh York School dated from the '30 During the '40 he sometimes supported himself by means of giving lectures on art and archeology in a expanse at Carnegie Hall - with Willem de Kooning at the slide projector. These discourses were attended by large numbers of novel York artists.

However, Kaldis was a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more than a somewhat eccentric public personality. He was also a painter, and a advantageous one. Since 1979, the year of his death, there have been several exhibitions of his work, including single in 1985 at the Artists' Choice Museum. The catalogue, containing memoirs and reproductions of a certain quantity of of his best paintings, is marred sole by a caption below a photograph of Kaldis and Philip Pavia, the sculptor, that identifies Pavia as Franz Kline. (Both artists were shut up friends of Kaldis.)

This latest exhibit titled "Magic Mountains, Sporades, Cyclades and Cote d'Azur," took place at the invitation of the novel York chapter of Artists Equity, and was a preliminary to a nationwide tour. All paintings in the display were fairly small landscapes, and of these a not many were of motifs suggested by dint of the south of France.

In a Kaldis painting the make submissive is always broadly recognizable, especially in of that kind minor details as trees, ladders, piers and porticoed fanes But Kaldis was really more of an abstractionist at heart, notably in the placement of colors and the colors themselves. He might begin a painting with a certain number of drawn outlines, but while painting he would ignore these outlines and place the colors quite freely At first the distribution of his colors and the shapes they take appear to be somewhat haphazard, but careful scrutiny reveals invisible compositional lines leading to and from these patches to make an overall schema. At the same time, the colors reaffirm the flatness of the surface, uniting celestial expanse with ground. Kaldis's colors are like bugle-horn calls - echoing, responding, now clear, now distant. In themselves they are not especially bright, and at the same time the paintings have brightness because of the large areas of white-painted canvas left untouched.

While considering these beautiful paintings I meditation of some lines from a piece of poetry by Tennyson, "The Eagle": The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls / He watches from the mountain walls / And like a lightning-flash he falls."

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