Lester Johnson’s show of “the Milford paintings” at the Martha Jackson Gallery consists of both figure pieces which continue and enlarge upon the big and simple statements of his last exhibition, and a group of still-lifes that essay new but not altogether unrelated painting questions. The figure paintings aim at a classical monumentality that would seem, on the surface of things, to be hopelessly at odds with his marled pigment, splattered and dribbled upon in the course of its manipulation with the knife. However, it is not a classical form which Johnson tries to construct, but rather a classical ambience that he wishes to evoke. Man With Columns places a male nude before two Ionic columns of different sizes meant not to operate as props indicative of a classical locus, but rather as symbolic elements which enhance the pathos of the isolated generalized figure. The effect and apparent intent of this arrangement is like that of early Byzantine consular diptychs, stark and iconic presentations of forms and images burdened with associations of the past, yet intensely expressive of the crisis and anxiety of an irrelevant present. The larger paintings of this type, with more than one figure, such as Figures With Columns, are frieze-like alternations of man and pillar, the figures pressing up very close. Between them the piston-like columns establish a grave and forceful rhythm progressing across the canvas.
Equally peculiar are the figure paintings related to Durer’s ink and wash study in the Morgan Library for the famous Adam and Eve engraving of 1504. Johnson’s interest in these two figures, archetypal both in subject and as visual images, lies both in the bounding contours of their contrapposto poses and the placement of their sharply hatched volumes against the undifferentiated dark ground. Transposed into Johnson’s muralistic scale these considerations easily metamorphose into meaty lines and ecstatic spatters, immediate gestures that heighten the exacerbated confrontation of contemporary sensibility with Durer’s Renaissance formulation. In the three-figure Eve repetition of the curvilinear figures fittingly maintains the surface integrity of a wall-sized picture; the wide brushy contours snake over the painting with the vigorous flexion of the linear elements in Matisse’s Dance.
The still-life paintings in the exhibition bring Johnson to grips with a set of problems that perhaps present greater difficulties than do the figure pieces. Most of the pictures deal with familiar groups of bottles, potted plants, jars, and the like set about on a round table top. The inevitable questions of spatial structure and relative position of forms raised hereby have led Johnson to answer them by adopting the post-Cubist formula of the ecole de Paris, i.e., tipping up the table top to provide an oval field large enough in which to dispose the elements of the setup drawn in thick outline. The difficulty here is that the results totter dangerously on the brink of the bathotic banality of, say, Claude Venard. Large-writ titles loosely scratched or extruded onto the surfaces in this case cause Motherwell’s life line to tangle into a fatal snare. All the directness and force of Johnson’s handling becomes pointless applied to an essentially trite pictorial concept, and the inscribed titles invalidate whatever fragile spatial coherence has been achieved. The still-lifes then, are, in the main, honest failures due to the collapse of an inadequate compositional idea under the artist’s manhandling technique.
—Dennis Adrian
