AMERICAN PAINTING

April 1952: M. Jones — The tower and city paintings are mostly of white lines in swift relief, as if the paint were shot from a waterpistol, over darks mixed from red, brown dn blue, which though smooth and shiny have the fault peculiar to American painting - insufficient light. The darks are close in value and uninteresting.

January 1953: Reginald Pollack — His art has an elegance that is almost un-American.

January 1954: 18th -20th century American artists —…the exhibition is interesting in that it clearly illustrates the American attitude toward landscape as sad and lonely, an uneasy place to find yourself in, and toward the nude as something not to be too closely looked at, at least without the artist’ first making several adjustments to conform it to an ideal of beauty.

FRENCH PAINTING

November 1955 Lester Johnson — In his work there is an enormous tension between the expression of feeling and the form. His earliest work was exquisitely French: every color and are and edge counted to its utmost and there was nothing extra.

December 1956 Milton Avery — The reminiscence of Matisse in Avery’s work is comparable to the reminiscence of Cezanne in the work of Prendergast a generation earlier: each American artist admired the simplicity in his French model, and failed to achieve a French subtlety in the distinctions of the parts.

PROFESSIONALISM

November 1951: McNulty — In Europe, where art has an assured market, there is a professional tradition for “pure” art, but here, outside of the discipline of journalism, there is no commonly accepted standard of workmanship. McNulty belongs to our native tradition of professionalism. Like Sloan and Glackens, he learned to draw working for newspapers and magazines, and he learned to paint almost by himself.

March 1955: Farber — The drawings have a sophistication refreshing because rare in this country, that could only come from a very old academic tradition. 

May 1955: French landscapes — Even old fashioned “modernism” has to be discovered by an American, while for a Frenchman to whom breadth and handling come with less effort, “modernism” is ready at hand and a smaller talent can do better work than it can in this country. In France where the challenge from barbarity is weak, professionalism is to be expected; in American where the challenge from past expertness is weak, one expects new ideas. The American’s unsureness of his discoveries leads to tightness from gripping too hard what he overvalues and is afraid of losing, and the Frenchman’s facility can fall into superficiality.

PAINTING MEDIUM

October 1951: (Joe Jones) solves a problem that has bedeviled painters since the end of the guild system—the question of the mastery of the oil medium—in a characteristically Anglo-Saxon way: he avoids it.

December 1951: Gasser — It looks as though he considered the medium as something to be subdued, and is satisfied with nothing short of unconditional surrender.

October 1953: (Hultberg) seems to have started his career painting in that style of Prussian-blue dark painting that is taught in American schools. He achieved a certain brightness of color, and then, what very seldom happens, he broke through this second-rate ceiling that holds down almost everyone else by seemingly discovering for himself the beauty of paint and the beauty of color. He discovered his medium.

May 1953: (Blanc) submits to the medium and gains freedom by doing this.

THINGS

Jan.’53:  Vasilieff — exhibits still-lifes, landscapes and nudes in his even-natured, juicy manner.  Life pervades the painting evenly, the baseboard in the background has as much juice in it as the pink grapefruit, the plaster wall has as much warmth as the pink skin of the nude on the yellow velvet couch, the wooden floor is as kind to your feet as the humorously stiff curtains to your hands.  Each part of the picture is positive, like a friend who opposes you enough, without resentment and without offense.  If the drawing is odd and distorted, if the dishes are edgewise on a table seen from above, if the woman’s anatomy is strangely twisted, this does not express, as at first sight you might be inclined to think, a disrespect for the true nature of things, but something almost the opposite.  The friendly feeling derives from one’s intuition that Vasilieff looks at things without judgment, and with acceptance of peculiarity, and therefore everything goes harmoniously together.  His paintings could illustrate the attitude that the more laws, the more crime, and the more things are allowed to be themselves, the more happily everything fits.  Vasilieff, who was born in Russia, seems to believe that the only valid laws are internal ones.

May’54:  Rolick — She experiences form sensuously.  The color may be beautiful, but chiefly it is as though her world were a series of actual or imagined tactile or motor sensations.  A hall is something that she has travelled through many times, in winter and summer, and the light in a landscape shows the feel of leaves, flowers and sticks.  Or a rug has a pattern, which in reality a blind person could not experience, but to her it is so vivid that she must be aware of it in the dark.

DETAILS & REALISM

May ’53:  Biala — …the furniture and dishes and French coffee pots are very specific, not through detail but in the subtle beauty of the outline.  She recalls people in the chin and hairline, and the plywood seat of a common chair in the quality of the curve of the edge.

Dec. ’58:  Andrew Wyeth — His detailed realism reduces objects to non-objects…His painting expresses conscience rather than sensibility…His conscience produces fanatically detailed study of something which has no largeness greater than the smallest part, which is only a small part, not a world.

COLOR

Nov. ’53:  Forst — She paints like a colorist, not like a draftsman: what counts is the inside of her pebble-shaped areas, not the edges.  The color has weight and luminosity.

Dec. ’54:  Serra — He exhibited landscapes of Connecticut and still-lives.  All his work has a tender fresh touch, and the color expresses a gentle delight in fruit, flowers, leaves and snow.  He conveys light without using shadows.  There is an innocence to his paintings which is not the same thing as naivete, but is probably the happiness of maturity.

Nov. ’58:  Reva — American painting in general is weak in color, but every once in a while a painter seems about to break this color barrier in American sensibility.  Reva does: partly because of the shape of the colors that her brush determines.  Her color is freshest when drawing is a kind of painting, just as in some “action” painters composition is a kind of drawing.

THE INFLUENCE OF ART HISTORY

April 1952: James Fosburgh  [Durlacher; to April 19], lecturer at the Frick Museum, has been painting since just before the last war.  This is his first exhibition.  As a scholar, he knows what painting has been, and he shows that he can do it , too.  The advantage of scholarship is that it prevents a painter being taken in by popular current vulgarities:  the disadvantage may be that it gets in his way.