What a week of great shows! In Kansas City, the Olitski survey at the Kemper Museum stopped me cold. The various periods of Olitski's development were fascinating for their exploration of acrylics, particularly the sprayed ones, which toyed with the illusionistic effects of dispersion, but there was a fussiness about the border of each painting that drove me nuts. They reminded me of the posters from my college job in LA at the "postmodern" furniture and frame store in LA. My enjoyment of the earlier works was primarily historical, a join-the-dots experience. Then, like a crescendo of unexpected force, came four transcendent works from 2002, With Love and Disregard--that demanded at least an hour to absorb their chromatic fullness, their compositional depth and heft. What color, light, surface, abandon! Olitski didn't stop pushing the paint, ever--the results are fissured, planetary realms with complex spatial shifts. Thrilling to see a painter in his 80s hit his stride! Also enthralling to see someone play recklessly with the possibilities of their life's work and come up with something so convincing. It was like watching his brain move through his hand, which is the embodied value of painting. In the final four paintings, there was no false note, regret; they were sure-footed risks. This was not true throughout the show due to the fussiness of earlier work; thus meant the more. Olitski was a whole-hearted explorer! What inspires is that he found this in summary, not early on. And these are GREAT paintings, filled with ideas and images.
The earlier sprayed works, especially the topographies, brought to mind three paintings I saw today by Ben Schumacher in the current show "We Regret To Inform You There Is Currently No Space or Place for Abstract Painting" at Martos (http://www.martosgallery.com). I am noticing more historical shows tracing such relationships, such as Unpainted Paintings uptown and the Painting show on 25th St. Given our eight years in the Middle East, it comes as no surprise that 1970s postwar abstraction, on the heels of 1950s postwar abstraction, seems newly relevant. Also, relationships between expressionism and Color Field seem important now, in a way I would liken to Impressionists and post-Impressionists--aware of the nationalistic implications as well.
Down 29th Street from Martos, Alexander Ross's exhibition at David Nolan revealed the artist's expansion of his bell-pepper-like forms into surreal landscape spaces recalling de Chirico. Ross's palette was startling, as was his paint--licking and encircling form, strokes like fire; becoming protagonists of thick and juicy facture that catches the light, causing a shimmering veil of pattern viewing the paintings from aside. And the color! Ross has always built color in a gradated range of color, not dissimilar from how pastels are made. He's hit new strides in this show--reds disintegrating into plummy rust tones, acid greens like slightly soured candy invading the more usual greens tending toward blue. The show revealed a maximal tendency redefining Ross's previously pared down, architectural forms.
On 26th St. at Mitchell, Inness and Nash, Leon Kossoff's palette concocted strange, umber-y brews, with limpid greens and reds furnishing ballast in the roiling surfaces of paint. The drawing in them was not so great, but the "put" of mark and the palette-- superb, pearly; like winter light describing spring--gave his architectural forms, in particular, heft. And on 26th, David Cohen's Fitting Room (http://www.vogtgallery.com/), featured two favorite painters, Mernet Larsen and David B. Brody, whose work has recently been shown in New York and is mentioned on this blog.
These may be the last shows I see before leaving for Beijing Sunday. I wonder what painting will be like there?
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