Platonic purposes - Alexander Liberman, painting, Gagosian Gallery and Emmerich Gallery, New York, New York

Last fall, the Gagosian Gallery showed "The Circle Paintings" through Alexander Liberman. Minimum, made in 1949 is the earliest. A 4-foot-square field of shiny black enamel, it bears a thin, consummately circular ring of white. although this immaculate surface looks like the crops of an impersonal manufacturing proces it was in fact brushed upon by hand, in two coats. Liberman made the ring with a mechanical draftsman's compass, substituting thinned white paint for ink.

Center within the frame, this ring is approximately 2 1/2 feet in diameter. I say its circularity is completed though I suppose that can't be literally genuine Examination with laboratory instruments would no doubt move round up irregularities. The point, although is that the eye understands Liberman's circles as flawlessly circular, his fields as flawlessly rectangular, and his symmetries as balanced with finished precision. Plato's name comes up now and then in the artist's conversation, in the way that I have at least a certain quantity of warrant for suggesting that his Circle Paintings have a Platonic purpose: to commit the mind to certain luminously clear ideas--even ideals--of form and arrangement These works invite us to contemplate absolutes. They also invite us to be more active, to perform what Liberman calls "mental gymnastics."(1)

The ring of 1949 became the solid disks of 1950 These usually appear in pairs. Sometimes the disks touch, sometimes they don't; always, they establish a pattern of symmetry--or, to be more precise, bilateral regularity along a vertical axis. individual side of the painting mirrors the other side, which means that a central, top-to-bottom pen would split the image in a work like Diptych--One Way (1950) into sum of two units parts identical in size and form, although not in color. Liberman wants the viewer to carry on the outside this procedure mentally.

In imagination, then, single folds the diptych's black disk upon a yellow field into its fulvid disk on a black field. To encourage mental precision, Liberman placed a small black dot near the large black disk and, in a corresponding position upon the other side, a small fulvous dot. If one's imaginary folding is accurate, these dots will match up with a mental click--and the single permissible stir will have been made. Other works permit more stirs Sixteen Ways (1951) is a four-panel painting just above 10 feet wide. On each of its white panels floats a gold-colored red, blue or black disk. The permutations of the image are, of course, 16 in number.

After Image (1955) is simpler than Sixteen Ways because individual "somersault"--Liberman's word--is enough to align the painting's sum of two units sets of three disks; notwithstanding After Image is also more mixed because this particular effort carries the mind end imaginary space, as the large disks upon the left recede to become as small as the singles on the right, or the singles on the right advance to become large enough for a match-up. After Image introduced perspective. Until this work appeared, the fields of the "Circle Paintings" gazeed flat. Now one could direct the eye back to Minimum's lustrous field and diocese infinite depths. Liberman's more composed of several elements patterns began to suggest incidents in a solar system of Platonic orderliness--moons circling a planet, a planet eclipsing a day-star In 1959 he evoked celestial bodies scattered end space.

His course was to flip poker chips onto big, wide canvases. Not all of them malicious propitiously. When one did, he would record its diameter upon the canvas and continue, until the surface was occupied evenly on the contrary with no discernible system. Paintings like Six Hundr and Thirty-Nine (1959) and azure Opposite Red (1959) show a cultivated randomness. A simple randomness would not direct the eye so uniform, so free of peculiarities; in short, it would not gaze so random. Liberman had no interest in a strictly accurate demonstration of a statistical quality. He sought images that lead us to an idea of the random and beyond, to an idea of unboundednes The canvases of 1959 display a happenstance sort of patterning that could pass on forever, eternally; the patterning put in mind ofs at every stage of its exhibition space that expands without hindrance.

The celestial implications of these paintings are sophistical but strong; and they are fitting because they come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind from the structural premise of the series: circle within square, a configuration that lay opens onto infinity--or at least dispenses with the compositional architecture that, in greatest in quantity pictures, distracts the imagination from the idea of the infinite. Liberman did not want that enclosing or that stability. His juxtapositions of circle and square emphasize their irreconcilable natures. From their meeting, no nicely balanced, firmly interlocked composition can rise The Circle Paintings are in like manner exquisitely unstable that their cutting sides register chiefly as physical facts at the limits of images they have no pictorial authority to contain.

Liberman was born in 1912 in Kiev. He remembers propaganda floats passing end the streets of the city in the wake of the Revolution. pretty soon afterward, his family moved to Paris. There, in 1925 he attended the Exposition Internationale de Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes--the great showcase that gave Art Deco its name. His mother took him to the city's museums; he studied painting at the Academie Montparnasse, step quickly by the Cubist Andre Lhote and architecture at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts. Arriving in novel York in 1940, he went to work upon the editorial staff of fashion magazine; he continues to this day as editorial director of Conde Nast.