Seymour Rosofsky was born in Chicago, where he grew up and received most of his art education. Although he went away several times—as a soldier in World War II, on a Fulbright grant to Rome in 1958, and on a Guggenheim Fellowship to Paris from 1962 to 1964—he remained a Chicagoan all his life, and died here in 1981 at the age of 57. Perhaps because he stayed at home this way, his art has an unmistakably domestic and enclosed feeling to it. His is not the imagery of grand ideas that the Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists created. On the contrary, at a time when the dominant esthetic was

In the midst of a seminal essay entitled “Perception and Mind,” Henri Bergson suddenly stopped to point out that nobody could get through day-to-day life by looking at the world as metaphysicians do, because if you did, you would be unable to cross the street without being run over. I’ve always thought that this remark might also apply to primitive painters. It seems tome a mistake to regard the imagination of an artist like William Hawkins as being somehow childlike, for his vision strikes me as speculative, rather than merely intuitive; it is meditation carried to the point of impracticality.

The traffic in irony is heavy today, and the gridlock of “simulationism” threatens to block the way of those artists pursuing strategies of abstraction that are neither ironic nor parodic. Art Kleinman’s complex and colorfully geometric works recall, to a certain degree, the technocratic surrogate abstractions of Ashley Bickerton, Jack Goldstein, or Peter Halley. Yet Kleinman’s interest in the appearance of projective and recessive space, as developed through the schematic interlocking of variously colored modules, distances him from the critique of representation that informs the works of