Gallery chronicle (October 2009)

 

George Grosz, Nude in Dunes (1948), courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York

THE NEW CRITERION
October 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “George Grosz: The Years in America: 1933–1958” at David Nolan Gallery; “Mel Kendrick: Markers” in Madison Square Park; “Conrad Marca-Relli: The New York Years 1945–1967” at Knoedler & Company; “Leon Polk Smith” at Washburn Gallery; “Carole Feuerman: Swimmers, Bathers & Nudes”at Jim Kempner Fine Art; “Carole Feuerman: Swimmers, Bathers & Nudes” at Jim Kempner Fine Art & “Color-Time-Space” at Lohin Geduld and Janet Kurnatowski Galleries.

Many people have asked me how the art world is doing in the economic downturn. I am sorry to report that the art world died in early August. This tragic event was not unexpected, nor was it unwelcome. The previous several months had been rough. The end came as a blessing.

After the death of the art world comes its afterlife. The silly season that stretched for nearly a decade will give way to more sober reflection. Galleries will continue to close. But we also know that some galleries will survive, thanks to their intelligence and sensitivity to the emerging mood. Several are off to a good start.

One artist whose antennae were always attuned to changing situations was the German Expressionist George Grosz. The artist is now the subject of a museum-quality exhibition at David Nolan. The business of good gallery-making begins with the education of the eye. With twenty-nine Grosz paintings and drawings and a 280-page catalogue, David Nolan is now running his own class in Grosz anatomy.[1]

In the 1920s Grosz lampooned the excesses of the Weimar Republic, corrupt and blind to Germany’s darker forces. He singled out Adolf Hitler for ridicule when the Führer was little more than a failed artist. A one-time member of the Communist Party, Grosz also repudiated his leftist allegiances after a visit to the Soviet Union. Hitler and Stalin came to appear to him as two sides of the same war machine. Rightly so. Yet perhaps most surprisingly, Grosz developed an unalloyed exuberance for the United States. This romanticism emerged first through his reading of popular American literature and developed in dialectical opposition to his pessimism towards the deteriorating European climate.

When an invitation came in 1932 to teach a summer course at the Art Students League, Grosz booked passage the next month on the ocean liner New York. He arrived to the fanfare of the American press. He wrote back to his wife: “I love you, America. I feel like this is my country, I belong here.” He soon decided to emigrate with his family to New York and did so early the next year. Two weeks after his arrival, SA troops stormed his flat and studio in Berlin and declared him an enemy of the regime.

Anti-Hitler, anti-Stalin, pro-America—the trifecta of political astuteness, but a victory that has complicated Grosz’s legacy. Anti-Hitler, good. Anti-Stalin, tolerable. Pro-America, beyond the pale. As Klaus Mann, an exile in Paris, complained in 1936: “He has changed; a very long, very passionate battle has left him tired. He has become apolitical—or is at least trying to be… . He no longer draws: he paints.”

Grosz lived and worked in the United States for twenty-five years. He became one of the earliest high-profile refugees from Hitler. Yet while his audience expected the caustic illustrator to turn his pen against his new homeland, Grosz went about exploring other sides of his artistic vision. The nudes and landscapes that resulted are the revelations of the Nolan show, along with the dense allegorical work he developed in paint.

Grosz could apply his talents for drafting to many styles. The show ranges from black-and-white wartime illustrations to satirical send-ups of Hitler (So Smells Defeat [1937]). He worked his way through the Old Masters, Breugel in particular, by creating pressure-cooked paintings like the infernal Retreat (Rückzug) (1946) with swirling fires, twisted barbed wire, and a shot-up brick wall that has a three-dimensional texture in oil. In Cain or Hitler in Hell (1944), a pile of human skeletons climbs up Hitler’s leg.

That Grosz had a flip side to his dark vision makes him a more complex and interesting artist. His “romantic” American landscapes are as true to their own time and place as are his dystopian images of Europe. Grosz lived on Long Island and vacationed on Cape Cod. He adored the beaches and often painted his wife, Eva, in nude and sometimes erotic scenes in the dunes. The rolling sand and wispy beach grass in Grosz’s landscapes become fecund allegories for a land of milk and honey. As he wrote to his brother-in-law in 1950, “What do you have against the dune paintings and nature studies, they are part of the whole oeuvre—if I hadn’t done them (with passion and love, too), I would not have been able to paint my imaginative pictures, because ‘invention’ is only derived from nature.” He was right. Drawings like Dunes at Wellfleet (c. 1940) and Dunes Cape Cod (1939) are among the best works in the show, and to be blind to them is to be blind to Grosz’s entire vision.

Several shows this month deserve far more attention than space allows, so here are the best of them, however briefly. When I last reviewed the sculptor Mel Kendrick, another David Nolan artist, I objected to the diminutive scale of the work on view. Kendrick is a constructivist who carves an abstract shape from a wood block, then places the result on top of a base made of the leftover pieces. For an artist who likes to show his hand, sometimes the process gets the better of the product. Not so for a set of monumental sculptures now on view in Madison Square Park.[2] Derived from many of the same forms at his last Nolan show, these outdoor giants executed in poured black-and-white concrete are playful exceptions to the cloying piles that normally pass for public sculpture. To appreciate their power, just visit the park with children around. By climbing through every hole and jumping off every shape of Kendrick’s work, they understand the fun of these structures without the need for further explanation.

The New York School artist Conrad Marca-Relli brought collage to Abstract Expressionism. Some of his best work is now on view at Knoedler.[3] In 1967 the critic William Agee noted that Marca-Relli “accepted the potential risks inherent in collage and developed it as a complete pictorial system.” Unlike earlier artists who used collage as fragmentary elements in larger paintings, Marca-Relli created entire collage abstractions. An untitled work at Knoedler from 1952 serves as an example of what he could do. With a white surface covering a black background, Marca-Relli cuts a swirling line across the canvas and pulls the gaps open exposing the black beneath, sometimes turning and re-pasting a white chad back onto the surface. “The limitations of the material acted two ways,” the artist once said. “It confronted me with a problem of solving the shape and reducing it to the simple form that I was looking for. On the other hand, a collage has always been to me a kind of discipline.” It was a discipline that Marca-Relli perfected.

From Malevich to Albers, the square has long been a focus of abstract attention. Sometime in the 1960s, the circle began to receive its due. The simple drawings of Leon Polk Smith from 1968 now on view at Washburn—along with one much larger, shaped canvas—pay homage to the celestial.[4] On a white background Smith collects a handful of colorful circles together in multiple iterations. These dots act as singular objects, but we can also read them as portholes onto larger circles beneath. Smith leaves these forms to be rounded out in our minds, a dynamic that never loses energy.

It is no secret that twentieth-century modernism had a bad body image, as everyone from Picasso to Giacometti beat a psychological reading into the classical form. Look at the healthy bodies of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and realize the beauty that was lost when art turned away from the idealized nude. The sculptor Carole Feuerman has been confronting this development for decades by reevaluating the classical nude in a contemporary way. Her work is now on view at Jim Kempner.[5] Unlike other hyper-realist sculptures, Feuerman is not afraid of idealized form. She specializes in female swimmers. According to the modernist playbook she does everything wrong. Her work indulges in sentimentality. Her materials include hair and plastic resin, which she splashes on her figures like drips of pool water. Not to mention the fact that we haven’t seen bodies this fit since the Fascist summer-carnival sculpture in Zell am See. On the one hand, for all of her technique, I found some of the polychromy, especially in the faces, a little waxen. On the other, a work like Tree (2009), with its swimmer standing on a tree trunk in nothing but a leafy bathing cap, seems like an art nude for the twenty-first century, real and of the moment.

Last June, I mentioned the upcoming exhibition of Tim Bavington’s hard-edged abstraction at Jack Shainman Gallery with some enthusiasm. Having now seen the show, I can say it was a disappointment.[6] Bavington is out to revisit the optical art of the 1960s. Unfortunately, he approaches this task with the gauzy reserve of Gerhard Richter. Bavington’s optical effects are referential rather than internal to his painted form. He reinvestigates the synesthetic link between color and music, but the connections he draws are facile. For one painting, Fell in Love with a Girl (2009), Bavington informs us the work was “named for a White Stripes song” but “inspired by Missoni fabric.” Please, someone send this artist a Scriabin CD.

The abstract painters Joanne Freeman and Kim Uchiyama have organized an excellent group show over two galleries with eye-popping work by Jennifer Riley and Thornton Willis, among others.[7] Allow me to single out my new favorite painting. It is My Beautiful Laundrette (2008) by Stephen Westfall. The colorful work is based on a grid design the artist has been developing for years. What separates Westfall from the old serialists is the way he fits his pieces together, with his square corners coming together slightly out of alignment. One’s darting eyes pick up the differences and animate the frames. Color, texture, and form all come together. It is a mesmerizing spectacle and a vision, I hope, of things to come.

New Yorkers came out by the thousands for the season’s gallery openings, and several galleries mounted strong exhibitions. The death of the art world may be the best thing to happen in years.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “George Grosz: The Years in America: 1933–1958” opened at David Nolan Gallery, New York, on September 16 and remains on view through October 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “Mel Kendrick: Markers” opened in Madison Square Park, New York, on September 17 and remains on view through December 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
3. “Conrad Marca-Relli: The New York Years 1945–1967” opened at Knoedler & Company, New York, on September 12 and remains on view through November 14, 2009. Go back to the text.
4. “Leon Polk Smith” opened at Washburn Gallery, New York, on September 10 and remains on view through October 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
5. “Carole Feuerman: Swimmers, Bathers & Nudes” opened at Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York, on September 17 and remains on view through October 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
6. “Tim Bavington: Up in Suze’s Room” opened at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, on September 11 and remains on view through October 10, 2009. Go back to the text.
7. “Color-Time-Space” opened at Lohin Geduld and Janet Kurnatowski Galleries, New York on September 10 and remains on view through October 11, 2009. Go back to the text.

All My Sons

CITY JOURNAL
September 4, 2009

All My Sons
by James Panero

Two memoirs of William F. Buckley outline his towering shadow.

A review of Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, by Christopher Buckley (Twelve, 272 pp., $24.99) & Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement, by Richard Brookhiser (Basic Books, 272 pp., $27.50)

Since the February 2008 death of his father, William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Buckley has courted his share of controversy. As last fall’s presidential election approached, he publicly backed Barack Obama on Tina Brown’s website The Daily Beast. He withdrew from writing for National Review, the magazine that his father founded in 1955. Then came Losing Mum and Pup, a tell-all memoir of his parents’ painful sickness and death—a book heavily promoted and embargoed until its publication date. An advance excerpt published as a cover article in The New York Times Magazine in late spring seemed particularly harsh, yet Losing Mum and Pup could not be easily dismissed. The book became a bestseller. Instead of being opportunistic or shameless or even a product of personal or political retribution, the book succeeded on its literary merits.

Losing Mum and Pup is the story of a political leader’s death, deliberately stripped of politics. Some might see this as a disservice or even a repudiation of Buckley’s beliefs. But what results is an engrossing, universal story of a son who confronts the death of both parents in less than a year. The lack of politics also distinguishes the book from nearly all other contributions to the growing Buckley memorial shelf. The spirit of the ailing WFB, the private WFB, shines from its pages. So does the figure of Chris’s mother Pat, the Norma Desmond of New York society, on whom WFB was a doting Max von Mayerling.

The particular resonance of Christopher’s story builds on more than the fame or gossip surrounding his subject matter. “There are seventy-seven million of us boomers,” he writes. “Many of us have already lost the ’rents, and the rest of us will be going through the experience later if not sooner.” Buckley’s story addresses generational division, specifically the divide between the Baby Boomers and the Greatest Generation. In the Buckley household, this divide seems to have been particularly pronounced. The neo-Edwardian WFB led the national consensus against much of what his son’s generation came to represent with its counterculture, its doubt, and its self-obsession. Christopher, in turn, took up the position of his father’s antagonist. “Pup and I exchanged, over the course of a lifetime,” he writes, “letters of deep and abundant affection. But we fought, and hard. Of the perhaps—I’m guessing—seven thousand or so letters and e-mails we exchanged, I’d estimate that one-half were contentious.”

Christopher plays the part of the Boomer con brio, and much of the book relates more to the author rather than to his subject matter. A father now in his fifties, Christopher declares himself an “orphan” after the death of his parents. “Today I got a call, and I cried. Grandfather dies, father dies . . . you’re next,” he writes. Many observations come off as similarly self-indulgent: “I suppose one way or the other I’ve spent a good deal of my life, despite my protestations to the contrary, trying to measure up to my father. . . . I felt—for the first time in my life—entirely independent of paternal authority or rebuke. . . . I stroked [my mother’s] hair and said, the words surprising me, coming out of nowhere, ‘I forgive you.’” For all of the faults he finds in his family, in fact, Christopher comes off worse—I would imagine, consciously so. At the outset he writes: “I hope to avoid any hint of self-pity, any sense that I’ve been dealt some unusually cruel hand.” That Losing Mum and Pup fails so dramatically in this regard elevates his story from cautious encomium to an engrossing discussion of family dynamics, one told through a certain reckless honesty.

The Buckleys’ only child, Christopher begins his story with the illness and death of his mother. Pat was going downhill fast after suffering through amputations made necessary by her poor circulation, the result of a lifetime of smoking. (Is it notable that Christopher, author of the satirical novel Thank You for Smoking, lost both of his parents to complications from tobacco?) A towering figure in the New York social scene, Pat could be one part Lenny Bruce and another part Wicked Witch. Christopher may have inherited his father’s literary chops, but his wounded wit comes off as 100 percent Mum. “One morning, during the Nixon administration,” Christopher writes of one of his mother’s more famous episodes, “the phone rang in Stamford at what Mum deemed an inappropriately early hour on a Sunday. ‘The president is calling for Mr. Buckley,’ the voice announced. Mum fired back in her most formidable voice—and trust me when I say formidable: a cross between Noel Coward and a snapping turtle—‘The president of what?’ To which the White House operator calmly replied, ‘Our country, ma’am.’”

William F. Buckley was only one-half of the family drama: Pat commanded her own marquee. Just as WFB “had a paladin code of conduct that the show must go on,” writes Christopher, “she’d once said to me, only half-kidding, ‘I’ve got the best legs in the business.’” Pat both deferred to and dominated WFB. “She took possession of her husband,” writes Christopher. “And he was desolate now that she had gone. It was only now, seeing him so helpless without her, that I saw the extent of his devotion to her. The phrase unconditional love has always been an abstraction to me. Now I understand. I think he even missed her being cross with him.”

Losing Mum and Pup traces the death of Pat to the descent of her husband less than a year later. “Industry is the enemy of melancholy,” Christopher writes of his father’s philosophy on grief, and in his last year WFB labored over his own mortality. He could be difficult in his own way. He confronted a host of failing bodily systems, brought on by emphysema and diabetes and a lifetime of self-medication. “It was as if his mind were a still brightly burning fire deep within the wreckage of his body,” Christopher writes. The son’s efforts as caregiver often put him at odds with his restless father: “Pup’s daily intake of pills would be enough to give Hunter Thompson pause.” Ritalin and sleeping pills were to Buckley the opposite of recreational drugs. They were his work drugs, an extension of his efficiency, impatience, and control. “Pup’s self-medicating was, I venture, a chemical extension of the control he asserted over every other aspect of his life. . . . I did not, as a young bacchante in the sixties and seventies, absent myself from the garden of herbal and pharmacological delights—far from it—so I found myself in an ironic position, lecturing a parent about drugs. The child/parent relationship inevitably reverses, but to this degree I had not anticipated.”

For Christopher, the necessity of these confessions comes in clear view when he discusses his father’s despondency. A pious Catholic with an ailing spirit, in his final months WFB discussed the ethics of suicide with Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times’s Book Review and Week in Review sections as well as WFB’s official biographer (the work remains in progress). Hours after Buckley’s death, Tanenhaus told Christopher about the suicide discussion and said that he wanted to publish an article in the Times about it. Christopher worried that such a story would fuel speculation about the cause of his father’s death (listed on the official death certificate as “cardio-pulmonary arrest”) and told Tanenhaus that his father’s statements were made to him “in your capacity as his biographer. Not as a reporter for the New York Times.” As his father’s literary executor, Christopher then threatened to cut off Tanenhaus’s access to the Buckley archive if the story ran.

It didn’t, so it may seem curious that Christopher chooses to describe the incident in detail. Yet here he reveals what must be the ultimate intention of writing Losing Mum and Pup: divulging the secrets of his father’s final year so that others will not do it first. This is a book about setting the record straight, on Christopher’s terms. His deployment of the narrative is his own. Yet in his desire to control the story, Christopher is his father’s son.

One might say that William F. Buckley was far more organically than politically conservative. In matters of philosophy and spirit he was an ultimate conservative force, but he was more taciturn in conservatism’s application, especially in his later years. In Right Time, Right Place, his own memoir of WFB, Richard Brookhiser writes: “Liberalism prevailed, Buckley said, because it was socially acceptable. He therefore wanted to lift taboos on thought and discussion; once that happened, elections would take care of themselves.” Buckley left the wonkery and political leadership to others. Looking to his columns for political direction could be like consulting the Delphic Oracle. He wrote no defining political treatise. His literary totality, ranging through letters and spy novels and celebrating the joys of life, good friends, and a love of God, formed an anti-manifesto. Too much of Buckley’s universe was unknown. It needed exploration, not explanation.

And the issue of succession is more easily determined in the realm of politics than in this one of philosophy and temperament. Who would succeed Buckley at the helm of National Review? The answer seemed to emerge in the fall of 1969, when Brookhiser, then a mere 14 years old, submitted an essay reacting against anti–Vietnam War sentiment at his upstate New York school. Buckley ran the piece and began to see a reflection of himself in the budding young talent. By 1978, Brookhiser, by then a graduate of Yale (like his mentor), had already become an editor at National Review. Buckley privately tapped him as his heir apparent.

Buckley’s mentorship of young writers was a defining trait, yet his vitality could often outstrip that of his protégés. “The puer eternus,” writes Brookhiser, “the eternal youth. Hermes/Mercury represented this type in classical religion. The puer is quick, clever, verbal, sometimes shifty. Bill was unquestionably a puer eternus. He would always be on the lookout for others. He had found a number of bright young writers already—John Leonard, Garry Wills, Joe Sobran—and there would be more in the years that I knew him. But I was the one he tapped in the spring of 1978.”

In choosing a successor early on, writes Brookhiser, Buckley may have been reacting against the career direction of his natural-born heir: “Bill’s conservatism and his role in the world had not replicated themselves. . . . Chris shared his father’s convictions, but he did not live them in the same way. He was not on the firing line week after week, as Bill was; as we at National Review were; as I was. This necessarily gave his convictions a different quality. Chris was conservative from habit, more in the manner of my parents (if my parents had been raised by wealthy Yalies). Chris must have decided, very early on, not to become his father. Chris’s decision to go his own way may have added a share of urgency to Bill’s efforts to find a successor.”

Then a decade later, just as suddenly as Buckley had conferred the crown, he took it away. “One summer day in 1987,” writes Brookhiser, “I came back to my desk after lunch and found a surprising letter. It was from Bill, and the envelope was marked ‘Confidential.’ ‘It is by now plain to me [it began] that you are not suited to serve as editor-in-chief of NR after my retirement. This sentence will no doubt have for a while a heavy heavy effect on your morale, and therefore I must at once tell you that I have reached this conclusion irrevocably. . . . You do not have executive habits, you do not have an executive turn of mind, and I would do you no service, nor NR, by imposing it on you.” It is unclear from Brookhiser’s book why Buckley had his change of heart. While Brookhiser offers theories (he did not flatter Buckley enough at an editorial dinner; he disliked Buckley’s novels), one senses that the answer remains unclear to Brookhiser himself.

If the WFB of Losing Mum and Pup leaps from the surface of Christopher’s book, the WFB of Brookhiser’s book is embedded in its depths. But Right Time, Right Place compellingly captures the editorial world of Buckley’s National Review. As a book about recent conservative politics and magazine life, it can be fascinating. While National Review often gets credit for starting the Reagan Revolution, for example, Brookhiser reveals the editorial indecision over Reagan’s 1980 candidacy. “Bill assumed Reagan ‘would come to grief early and drop out,’” he writes. WFB first backed George H. W. Bush.

In the 1970s, Garry Wills, one of Buckley’s most prized protégés, took a turn to the left. The break vexed Buckley, and National Review began running a regular “Wills Watch” (Wills writes about their reconciliation in a recent issue of The Atlantic). The Buckley protégé Joe Sobran then made his own break. After Reagan’s disastrous visit to the Nazi cemetery at Bitburg, Sobran blamed Jews for the media fallout. He began to see Zionism as a conspiracy akin to Communism, and WFB pushed him away. “He imagined that Bill was bullied and terrorized by Jews—the ‘Zionist apparat’ of New York, the elders of Gotham,” writes Brookhiser. “But he was acute about aspects of Bill’s personality. Bill, he thought, rejected Jew bashing because it was declasse, and he cared above all for maintaining ‘la bella figura.’”

“Joe’s fall was personal,” Brookhiser continues. “Joe was his discovery, his protege, his failure.” Brookhiser similarly blames Buckley for the shortcomings in their own relationship: “Bill’s failing (apart from cowardice) was to have made the offer he did in 1978, having wrongly decided that I, at age twenty-three, was the second coming of him.” The rate of apostasy within Buckley’s young circle ran high. It produced some interesting (and also alarming) talent, as protégés became adversaries and attempted to engage Buckley on equal if opposite footing. Though he engaged in no ideological break with his mentor, with Right Time, Right Place Brookhiser now enters those ranks as the reluctant apostate.

Buckley created a personal mythology that he was careful to control. His 2004 “literary autobiography,” Miles Gone By, gathered much of this mythology in one place. A shimmering, 1,000-watt reflection of the late conservative icon that remains the single best book about him, Miles Gone By dispensed with the standard work of history and memoir. Instead, Buckley set about collecting essays from 50 years of his books, articles, and columns “in which I figure directly,” he wrote in the book’s introduction, “sometimes actively, sometimes only in a passive way, but always there.” Miles Gone By began with Buckley’s childhood memory of fireflies at Great Elm, the family estate in Sharon, Connecticut. The chapters then ranged through governesses, sailing, music, his son, wine, parents, Yale, skiing, an ill-advised solo airplane flight, dozens of friends and eminences, language, travel, politics, private clubs, and finally “Thoughts on a Final Passage.” “There would be no point in contriving an autobiography from scratch,” Buckley wrote. “Why? I have already written about the events and the people that have shaped my life; any new account would simply paraphrase these.” Miles Gone By presented the Buckley myth with the magnolias let back in. Buckley soaked his prose in his own blend of perfume, and he cared little about changing the formula.

Buckley exercised as much control as he could over his own story because that control was central to his overall mission. Will, word, and action were inseparable for him, and all were lushly conceived. But he needed to be the one crafting the plot. He bristled at incursions on his authorship far more than at political disagreements. When a relationship took an unexpected turn or a friend was written out, it was done decisively, and on Buckley’s terms.

Which is why both Buckley memoirs ultimately seem so controversial. Neither Losing Mum and Pup nor Right Time, Right Place departs from Buckley’s politics in a marked way, but both books provide what we might call “unauthorized” accounts of the Buckley story. They are products of, at times, seething exasperation with their subject, yet each pays tribute to him in its own manner. William F. Buckley cast a long shadow. In their inability to get out from under it, Christopher Buckley and Richard Brookhiser reveal the height of the figure towering above them.

Gallery chronicle (September 2009)

 
Jack Tworkov, Thursday (1960), courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC / Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund

THE NEW CRITERION
September 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

We think of painting as a window, but for Jack Tworkov painting was a home. “My striving is not for the far-off or far-out landscape,” he once wrote, “but for the identification and naturalization of a home ground.” So he became the master contractor of Abstract Expressionism. In color and gesture he rarely dazzled. In the construction of work, however, he could be flawless. Rather than seek affection, he commanded admiration. His paintings do not seduce, they secure. They dig a foundation, erect four square walls, and put a roof over your head that is built to last.

In 1960 Tworkov complained that “I’ve been second-rated by every critic, large or small.” Two first-rate productions now allow us to reconsider this estimation. At no other moment, including 1964’s Whitney survey and 1987’s Pennsylvania retrospective, could this artist be so fully examined. At the UBS Art Gallery in midtown Manhattan, the curator Jason Andrew has assembled a must-see show called “Jack Tworkov: Against Extremes, Five Decades of Paintings.”[1] The exhibition presents numerous Tworkov drawings and twenty-nine major paintings, from Untitled (Still Life with Peaches and Magazine) (1929) to the large Compression and Expansion of the Square, completed just before the artist’s death in 1982. At the same time, Yale University Press has published the definitive collection of Tworkov’s writing in a book called The Extreme of the Middle, edited by Mira Schor.[2] This 480-page volume brings together Tworkov’s artist statements, published reviews, and correspondence, but most notably it unearths extensive selections from Tworkov’s diaries. In their philosophical and artistic introspection, these rigorous notations may just be the New York School’s answer to the journals of Delacroix.

Born in Biala, Poland, in 1900, Yakov Tworkovsky emigrated to the United States in 1913 with his mother and younger sister Janice, joining his father on the Lower East Side. The sister took the name of her Old World hometown to become a famous painter herself, a jet-setting Parisian ex-pat, and the common-law wife of Ford Madox Ford. Jack proved to be much less facile in putting down roots. He wrestled with the despair of alienation. “I have the perverse desire to be completely known as a Jew to non Jews but deny that fact to Jews,” he wrote of his religion in 1954. “My predicament is that I’m essentially a religious man—a religious man without a religion and so abstract art is perhaps the nirvana towards which I reach,” he reflected in the 1970s.

The order one can impose on painting became Tworkov’s support. “Geometrics or any systemic order gives me a space for meditation, adumbrates my alienation,” he wrote in a revealing letter to the painter Andrew Forge in 1981.

Tworkov studied at New York’s Stuyvesant High School and entered Columbia University to major in English Literature. He thought of becoming a poet. Then exposure to Cézanne and Matisse lured him to painting. Upon graduation in 1923, he enrolled in the National Academy of Design to study with Ivan Olinsky and Charles Hawthorne. He followed Janice to Provincetown and met Karl Knaths. At the Art Students League he trained with Guy Pène du Bois and Boardman Robinson.

Like many of the older members of the New York School, Tworkov took up painting with the Public Works Project. His genre work from this period, such as Afternoon Bridge (The Card Players) (c. 1935), is eminently forgettable, a fact he was quick to acknowledge. He became disillusioned with loaded political subject matter and stripped his work down to the bone. Tworkov may be known as the Abstract Expressionist who turned increasingly minimal in the 1960s, but the importance of structure is apparent from his early work. “I turned to still life as a release from subject and spectacular composition,” he wrote in 1947. His Untitled (Still Life with Blue Pitcher and Grapes) (1946) demonstrates an engineering hand, as line twists through space to connect elements into a unified whole. In 1948 he rented a studio next door to his friend Willem de Kooning. As a founding member of the Eighth Street Club, Tworkov then emerged alongside de Kooning during Abstract Expressionism’s rapid ascendency in the 1950s.

Some of Tworkov’s paintings from this period endure as masterpieces of post-war American art. House of the Sun (1952) ranks with de Kooning’s 1948 Painting in the MOMA collection as a supreme demonstration of gesture tied to form, here in primary colors. Watergame from 1955 is another example. Yet while Tworkov’s structure was always strong, often his color choice and brushwork lacked assurance. His painting could be stiff and overbuilt. Nausica (1952) is one instance where pastels produce a cartoonish riff on a de Kooning Woman.

The Dionysian expression that came to define Abstract Expressionism held little interest for Tworkov, and he gradually moved towards a more Apollonian center. “I would not be comfortable with a painting that was too aggressively stated or too sleek or too self-consciously simple, or too beautiful or too interesting,” he noted in 1973. “I am uncomfortable with extreme portrayals. I let reason examine disorder.” He recognized the uplifting quality in mid-century art: “The abstract-expressionist movement, although negative in its rejection of all tradition and especially of the French art of the first half of the century, did reflect this positive element, the postwar euphoria, the sudden feeling of strength both physically and spiritually.” Yet he turned against the violence of de Kooning: “We all dissent from de Kooning’s example of defacing, of painting out the painting, of throwing the defiled scrapings back on to the surface, in a gesture of contempt and hatred… . My attitude was to abandon the angry gesture, to wear in this respect a neutral face.”

Tworkov’s home life reflected his desire for order. He rejected the licentiousness of bohemia. He identified with middle-class America and lived accordingly. “Jack took care of everything—his car, his house, his lawn, his tools, his studio, his brushes, his family, himself,” noted the poet Stanley Kunitz. “Nobody could have led a more admirably moderate, regulated, or disciplined life.”

His diaries reveal a rigorous self-questioning that emerged from a revulsion with both Nazism and Communism. “The left has become the biggest cesspool,” he wrote in 1958. This sentiment matured into his identification with a patriotism that led not towards ideology but to freedom from ideology. “Only bourgeois society as we know it in America today gives me the freedom to join nothing, no organization and protects me from its vengeance,” he wrote in 1959. “We had and still have in this country the chance to take a new turn towards humanity and human society,” he continued, “Not Russia, not India, but America is the hope of the world.” He then proclaimed in 1960: “My Americanism amounts to a total conversion. I know myself to be Jewish, but my desire is for identification with those people and those forces that move towards making this country a reality of the Bill of Rights.” Tworkov saw the direction of his philosophy for what it was: “Rereading some of these notes I am struck by the conservatism of some of my views, how uncongenial they are to the prevailing intellectual point of view. However these notes are a response to the most serious self-questioning… . They represent not what I ought to believe, but what I know I believe.”

As Tworkov found his home in middle-class America, it meant an exit from artistic bohemia and the sacrifice of his own reputation. He despised Dada and its new formulations. (“A Jew is out of his head if he is for Dada,” he wrote in 1959, “like a hare running with the hounds.”) Yet rather than despair at his falling out, Tworkov found an additional spur. Many of his signature works emerged during this period. “I think the time has now arrived for me to do the best work of my life,” he wrote in his journal in 1960. He was right: Thursday (1960) is a standout of the UBS show. A red armature binds together the painting’s green and white forms, which come alive through an ambiguity of figure and ground. Although Tworkov says his dealer Leo Castelli once worried over them, one of Tworkov’s heraldic flag–type paintings, RWB #3, is also a triumph. “They are all in red, white and blue, and perhaps unconsciously an ironic comment on my growing patriotism.”

Tworkov moved to academia. In 1963 he became the chairman of the art department of Yale. He discovered a greater interest in mathematics and geometry. Unfortunately for an artist who once remarked that “all programs represent future sorrows,” much of the work from this period comes off as programmatic. Idling II (1970) might as well be the prototype for stain-concealing wallpaper. Even his writing seems increasingly formulaic. “The painting activity stands in ironic contrast to the measuring activity,” he noted at the time. “The brushing represents a purely random activity.”

The diagnosis of bone cancer around 1980 reawakened his human touch. Conventional wisdom dismisses all of Tworkov’s post-1960s work as bloodless noodling. Yet Compression and Expansion of the Square (1982) may just be the most assured painting in the show. In this three-panel work, structure becomes gesture. Tworkov built the animation of the piece into its form, not its brushstroke.

Tworkov could be a captive of his own intellect. “I had a revulsion against the intellectual in my own nature and in art,” he wrote in 1947. “I am a man condemned—behind bars—a prisoner,” he lamented in 1954. “I need desperately to be alone again—to stop the endless verbalizing of all my thinking, and to paint.” Yet he could also harness his intellectual pressures to build great structures in paint. “Reason chooses the ground where the play of feeling is set free. … It does not so much limit as it contains,” he remarked. While his paintings became marked by a greater sense of order, in fact he always exercised a high level of control, even in his more gestural work. “His paintings have a quality that other American-type non-objective paintings do not have,” Fairfield Porter rightly observed. “Though superficially just as broad and dashing, they are entirely conscious… . Tworkov’s power, which gives his paintings their lasting effectiveness, comes from his never letting go of awareness.” Tworkov believed in an “aesthetic morality,” and it began with the trueness of his line. “Art can become the true square and level of all things,” he wrote. Rather than a mere concern for structure and gesture, for Tworkov “trueness and pleasure add up to the most fundamental quality in a painting.”

Notes
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• “Jack Tworkov: Against Extremes, Five Decades of Paintings” opened at UBS Art Gallery, New York, on August 13 and remains on view through October 27, 2009. Go back to the text.
• The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, edited by Mira Schor; Yale University Press, 480 pages, $45. Go back to the text.