Jo Baer continues to exploit a strongly analytical and didactic penchant. Her seemingly empty canvases opt for marginal preoccupations similar to those of a wide front of intellectually oriented paintings (and sculptures as well), from the arid work of Miss Baer herself to the liquefactious aerations of Jules Olitski. Most recently Miss Baer presented a square black border fitted against the margins of the canvas itself. This in turn was lined in sequence with a red edge, a blue edge and a yellow edge—three canvases in all. Such didacticism may be equated with similar attachments in the expository primary panels of Ellsworth Kelly.
The present exhibition shows work prior to the lessons described above. Painted in 1962, the black border is presented here as a square element detached from the square circumference. Within this square and touching its inner margin, a thin blue line traces the perpendicular changes except for the upper edge (ledge?). At this height, the blue line is transferred from the inside of the square to its outer edge. This switch, still a clue to a naturalistic memory (indicating up? sky? entablature?), is accompanied by reticent linear punctuations. In one, a parallel sequence of lines, a kind of simple basket-weave configuration with all the hardness and recalcitrance of Bauhaus offsets, or, in another, a kind of blipped vertical stroke at either edge. An awareness of the reluctancy of Miss Baer’s work and its ever intensified attenuations indicate that she must be counted among the most significant present-day Minimalists.
Miss Baer’s paintings, perfect in themselves, are equally superb foils to the accomplished drawings of Al Leslie, finished, amazingly enough, immediately after he was burned out of his studio. These fine representational drawings, portraits, nude studies, some squared off for transfer to larger canvas, have an assurance which leads one into invidious comparisons—they have the verve and confidence which Larry Rivers is said to possess, and which by moments, in terms of firmness and decisiveness, Jim Dine alludes to. The soft graphite drawings with their hard tonal modulations assume a distance and majesty which in the end runs counter-current to the erotic basis, at least in the case of the nudes, which first impelled them into being.
—Robert Pincus-Witten
