print November 1996

John McLaughlin

John McLaughlin started painting in his forties. The son of a Massachusetts Superior Court judge, he served in both world wars and when not in uniform was in business. A Japan specialist for American military intelligence during wartime, a part-time dealer in Japanese prints afterward, he was sufficiently drawn to Japan to move there in 1935. Perhaps it was inevitable that he would come to be seen as an artist who brought Japanese thought to bear on Euro-American painting, and this is the view that curator Susan C. Larsen promotes in her catalogue essay for this retrospective in part by way of

books November 1988

Peter Halley: Collected Essays 1981–87

Peter Halley: Collected Essays 1981–87, Zurich: Bruno Bischofberger Gallery, 1988, 205 pp., 19 black and white photographs.

THE ABILITY TO INFURIATE two factions that believe themselves to be mutually exclusive is always of value, indicating as it does the presence of limits of which we were hitherto unaware, of complementariness where we had dreamed of opposition. Apparently sickened by endless talk about how nonrepresentational paintings have to be involved with the idea of the transcendental, Peter Halley has made a career out of paintings that are not concerned with transcending anything.

books March 1988

Fashion and Surrealism

Fashion and Surrealism, by Richard Martin. New York: Rizzoli, 1987, 240 pp., 15 color and 285 black-and-white illustrations.

RICHARD MARTIN HAS PUT together a very useful book documenting Surrealism’s contribution to 20th-century fashion—not fashion in general, but fashion with a capital F, the industry centered around the design of women’s clothes. The book, which is exhaustively illustrated, traces the relationship between the two at the level both of direct effect—fashion designs etc. by Surrealist artists—and of the indirect, the distant, or possibly even the merely coincidental, as in

print September 1979

Clinton Hill

WRITING ABOUT CLINTON HILL'S WORK in 1956, Leo Steinberg said of one of his drawings that “his every line aims at its destination; each patch of tone vibrates with its neighbor; the open spaces work with energy. The drawing is done with such dash and decision that it is hard to believe the resulting pattern to be pure invention.”

It is of course—as I think Steinberg would be the first to admit—hard to know just how pure invention would be recognizable as such. But one knows what is meant, and the description offered in those two sentences continues to apply to Hill’s more recent work.

Directionality,

print December 1978

Matisse the Representational Artist

“I shall be guided by a sentence on the first page of your letter. You write: ‘Panorama and traces, flâneur
and arcades, modernism and the unchanging, without a theoretical interpretation—is that a material which
can patiently await decipherment?’ The understandable impatience with which you searched the manuscript
for a definite signalement [characterization] has, in my opinion, led you astray from it in some important respects . . . ”

—Letter from Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno¹

WATTEAU, DELACROIX, CÉZANNE, MATISSE: four names which stand for—along with much that does not unite them—the

print September 1978

Capital Follies

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE ISN’T VERY beautiful, which is why the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation has been created. The P.A.D.C. is a federal agency with a total budget of $130,000,000 (with congressional approval to raise this figure to $225,000,000 through borrowing), of which it proposes to spend $14,000,000 on the first part of the overall task, the improvement of an area at the avenue’s western end.

The P.A.D.C.’s original plan called for the collaboration of two teams of architects, an artist, and a group of engineers. These, following a selection process described below, turned out

print Summer 1978

Joshua Neustein: Static, Fragile, Massive, Gray, Torn, Impermanent

JOSHUA NEUSTEIN WORKS IN terms which, having been with us for approximately a decade, now seem deceptively familiar. Theirs is a deceptive familiarity because, as I shall come to say, these terms no longer address quite the same issues as before.

They lead us toward this encounter: the work engages and retains our attention through manipulating the—mutually exclusive—perceptual categories of “real” and “pictorial” space. In the course of alternating between mutually exclusive experiences, one is made increasingly aware of the internal structure’s saturation by this general idea, so that one

books November 1977

Progress in Art

Suzi Gablik, Progress in Art, (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1977), 192 pages, 162 illustrations.

Progress in Art is subtitled “Is There Progress in Art?” Gablik wants to suggest that there might be, and her book’s dust-jacket goes on to describe the volume it enfolds as “a radical and challenging view of art based on the ideas of Jean Piaget, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Thomas Kuhn.” One feels as though this sentence might be there to allay the anxiety brought on by the capricious interaction of title and subtitle. Accordingly, it’s printed in red, a brightly marked reassurance whose

print January 1975

Patrick Hogan

Patrick Hogan’s work engages one’s attention in a way that, in some respects, seems to have affinities with a use of materials like Eva Hesse’s. The hairiness of Hogan’s paintings at their edges, combined with the irregularity of the perimeter’s line, hints at a kind of choice I associate with Hesse: the selection of materials which are in themselves implicitly indefinite, or incompletely controllable.

Hesse seemed to use fiberglass because that material guarantees unpredictable nuance and vicissitude. Its ragged edge and uneven surface matched her intuitive—but not unprogrammatic—way of working.

print January 1975

Sanford Wurmfeld

Sanford Wurmfeld’s paintings, made over the last couple of years, present one with a very different attitude to the pictorial object from Hogan’s. If you want to talk about conventionalized impersonality, this is definitely it. And there is one sense, too, in which Wurmfeld’s attitude and Hogan’s can be seen as simply, but diametrically, opposed. In actuality, the relationship between the two kinds of work can only be thought of as indirect and convoluted—and not unaffected, perhaps, by the distance between the East Coast and West Coast. But it might be worth observing that, while in Hogan’s

print January 1975

Frank Lobdell

Frank Lobdell, born in 1921 in Kansas City, Missouri, has spent most of his artistic life on the West Coast. This shows only in the slight influence of California light in his sense of color. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the development of his painting, but the works I’m reviewing here seemed academic in the fullest sense, which is to say that the references they make to Matisse are at least accompanied by a high degree of technical control. Otherwise, these pieces of work reveal a tendency to articulate a cliché and then persistently lapse into it—the same curved line seems to control a

print January 1975

Patrick Caulfield

I refer to the following quote from Christopher Finch’s book about English Pop art Image as Language (London, 1969), to get at the critical ambiance which has typically surrounded Patrick Caulfrield’s art:

Of the painters discussed in this book, Patrick Caulfield is the most specifically European. He has learned from the Americans but remains firmly within the European tradition. It is true—though not the whole truth—to say that the subject of his paintings is the European tradition. For him the greatest benefit of contact with the new American painting has been that it has given him a more

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe