Walton Ford
Nicole Klagsbrun
If his own outraged historical innocence is what reopens the vista of early American painting for Walton Ford, it neither quite compensates for the glum maladroitness of that genre, nor for the tendency of lost innocence to avenge itself with caricatures of corruption. A comparable logic haunts Komar & Melamid’s revision of Soviet Realism. Ford, in this sense, is their American counterpart, even as, through his struggle to dissolve the limits of this approach in his recent work, he reveals a relatively precocious awareness of them.
In Martha, 1993, a mural-sized, oil-on-wood triptych, crowds of