Gallery-Going
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The ghost of Bartleby the Scrivener hovers over Albert York, contemporary painting’s best-known recluse. Born in 1928, the painter came of age with Abstract Expressionism. He staked his place vis-a-vis the modern movement with passive resistance to its defining imperatives, much as Melville’s Bartleby countered demands with “I would prefer not to.”
On view at Davis & Langdale are 25 paintings, all created before 1992, the last year the gallery received a canvas from him. This exhibition also includes nine recent drawings suddenly submitted by the artist earlier this year.
While Ab Ex heralded its own significance on oversized canvases, Mr. York preferred panels under a foot square. He quietly met the pressure to make noise – pump it up, abandon representation – with bias for the visual world: small-scale landscapes, a pot of flowers, sometimes a cow or a memento mori. His subject matter is ordinary, but it is ordinary in extraordinary ways.
Skill with the fabric of paint plus a refined palette shift the artist’s renunciatory simplicity away from the margins inhabited by Sunday painters and eccentrics. His colors mark him as a sophisticate whose modernity knows its own roots. His greens, derived from French landscape tradition, are delectable. Spare compositions divide into light and dark zones, the drama of contrast made more intricate by subtle blending of foreground and background color into the motif. While values remain distinct, admixtures of pigment harmonize the counterpoint.
“Two Pink Carnations in Glass Goblet” is a luscious example of his deceptive realism, as well as the improvisational confidence that binds him to the moderns. A goblet of blooms is set, deadpan, in a meadow, as if it had grown there. The foreground green is worked into the carnations, reducing the tone almost – not quite – to a middle gray. The optical effect is of a warm, dark pink with anything saccharine denied.
Entries for Albert York are scarce in the annals of Modern art, yet every serious painter in New York (and many collectors) knows his work. He raises simple sights to the dignity of painting with an imaginative elan that strikes the viewer as deeply felt. In a 1974 essay, Fairfield Porter wrote that it is his empathy that attracts. That, and modesty. Legions of artists pummel us with the weight of their ideas. Albert York prefers two trees against the sky.
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A more illustrious celebrant of a private world is Giorgio Morandi, lodestar for other painters and a poet of the familiar and unexceptional. Now on view at Lucas Schoormans is a loan exhibition, several years in the making, of six stunning paintings plus two works on paper. It concentrates on work from the last 15 years of Morandi’s life, his most mature and exquisitely nuanced.
Volumes have been written about the formal structure and spatial organization of Morandi’s paintings: the distilled architecture of homely items compressed on a tabletop, each adjustment finely calibrated to break the monastic silence of the whole. The same household objects repeat like mantras throughout his work.
Morandi’s seemingly narrow range is misleading. His distinctions are penetrating but so unassuming you have to work at observing them. They signify a dynamic attentiveness that, were it not for the physicality of paint, comes close to an act of prayer. No middle ground exists for the audience: Either this captivates (as it does me) or bores. Too see the world in a grain of sand or an arrangement of bottles and boxes is an acquired preference.
The word “contemplative” is overused in relation to Morandi. Contemplation of what? And toward what end? Your tolerance for these two questions shapes the nature of your response to the work. It helps to know what motivated Morandi’s mastery: It was more than paint.
Morandi was an ardent reader of Pascal, the French mathematician and physicist. The painter took heart and direction from that passionately religious man (credited with originating the theory of probability) who lived what he proclaimed: “Let a mite be given to him [the reader]. Let him see therein an infinity of universes.” Morandi had no need to leave Bologna. Infinity was there on the Via Fondazza.
Because of the severity of his methods and materials, Morandi is commonly labeled a precursor to Minimalism. But art-historical pigeonholing misses the animating core of his originality. His painting embodied his convictions (for these look to Pascal). The spatial ambiguities and linear evasions of these still lifes emulate Pascal’s refusal to fix the finite. There is nothing minimal in Morandi’s affirmations of material uncertainty.
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Nicholas Evans-Cato paints mainly in the rain. It is an arduous plein air commitment that yields brooding images of Williamsburg and its surrounds. Rectilinear structures and the gridded logic of urban streets play against the muting effects of fog and wet weather. My favorites – and the ones that feel most contemporary – are those in which the scenic remains subordinate to geometry.