1960s Painting Revisited at David Richard

Publication: Journal Santa Fe Section; Date: Oct 22, 2010; Section: Gallery Guide; Page: S8

SPACE AND TIME Exhibit re-examines underrecognized ’60s work Art Issues

MALIN WILSON-POWELL

For the Journal

Artists know about historical neglect. It’s a condition that might more accurately be called “spaceneglect.” Artworks take up space and if they don’t occupy space on public walls and in the discourse, theydon’t exist for future generations. After the reign of Abstract Expressionist painting in the 1950s, paintingswere an idiom that had been declared dead — a declaration that has popped up repeatedly, contrary to allevidence. Of course, painters went on painting. By the end of the 1960s, Pop Art and Minimalism filled allthe space, and, ever since, there has been the perpetual hyping of one thing after another. In this excitingexhibition of 32 abstract painters, the full landscape of abstract painting trajectories is filled in with livingcolor. It is a complex, interesting tale and — 50 years later — it is just about time.

A 2006 international traveling exhibition, “High Times, Hard Time: New York Painting, 1967-1975,” iscredited with initiating an overdue institutional re-examination of the zeitgeist of this robust era. Thisexhibition’s curator, Gary Snyder, is known as a “revisionist” New York dealer who championsunderrecognized art from this period. “High Times, Hard Times” undoubtedly opened space for the“reaffiliation” of “torqued and hybridized” paintings by 38 featured artists and their peers. The biggest andsurely most predictable confirmation of the vitality of painting in downtown Manhattan was the feisty,bold, important work of female painters of the period, including well-known New Mexico resident artist,writer and activist Harmony Hammond (who just this summer relinquished authoring this column aftertwo years).

“1960s Revisited” includes two eye-dazzling paintings by British-born Roy Colmer (b. 1935), whoseTV-inspired canvasses were in “High Times, Hard Times.” The catalyst for his big, fresh, airbrushedcompositions, he says, was “experimenting with video feedback, I became excited working with theconstantly changing form ... the liquid properties of the image suggested many possibilities.” Usingcommon tools of the era — an industrialmodel spray gun and masking tape — he “was seeking out andtesting opposite values: soft/hard, rigid/flowing, color/noncolor, control/lack, horizontal/vertical ... I wasseeking to free form from edges and boundaries, where color would dissolve opticality.” Like most of theartists in the show at David Richard Gallery, Colmer actively exhibited studio canvases throughout the1960s. He quit painting in the mid-1970s to concentrate on documentary film and photography.

During the 1960s, if you made Saturday rounds to the dozen or so contemporary Manhattan galleries,there was a great diversity of painters. This exhibition is installed to loosely highlight four of thethen-different preoccupations — gestural abstraction, Op Art, Color Field and Washington Color School,with a strong showing by Japanese abstract artists who came to study in America. It fills in the emptyspaces in the shift from 1950s action painting to the formal 2-D compositions espoused by ClementGreenberg in the 1960s. A catalogue essay by Peter Frank observes that when it comes to the ’60s, “wedon’t really know the half of it.” Significantly, he observes that it was no longer necessary to work in NewYork, only necessary to exhibit there. He posits a growing audience for post-World War II American art

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that “rode off in every direction.” Art schools burgeoned with the influx of GIs, faculty was neededthroughout the land, and after such a popular magazine as LIFE published two photo essays on artists likeJackson Pollock, artists felt they could flourish and keep in touch wherever they lived. Artists migrated tomore commodious regions like New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, upper New England, and to other urbancenters like Los Angeles and Chicago. Paintings by New Mexico-based artists Lawrence Calcagno,Raymond Jonson and Beatrice Mandelman confidently hold their own and enrich the discourse in thismostly East Coast company.

There are many distinguished and authoritative successful color field and optical paintings on view inaddition to the two Colmer canvases. Among them are the Washington Color School masters Gene Davis’s“#156,” 1971; Thomas Downing’s “Red, Blue and Gold,” 1960; and Leon Polk Smith’s “Constellation K,”1969.

One of the most compelling objects in the show is Hisao Hanafusa’s “Yellow I,” 1966, an insistent 3-D,constructed wall piece that bows out in the middle with horizontal metal tubing, a early Popinflected,painting-as-cartoon-appliance, ala Donald Judd.

All three black-and-white paintings are excellent, including Ward Jackson’s “Reversal, Interchange VII,”1964, a constructivist diamond-shaped canvas; an elegant, quiet, black-and-white composition titled“Homage to the Immaculates,” 1965, by Hilton Brown; and, Rakuko Naito’s dizzying “Untitled (Black andWhite),” 1964.

The inclusion of seven Asian-American artists hints at the large gap of knowledge and the immensity ofneglected space occupied by these accomplished painters. In recent years there have been exhibitions onboth coasts, but little of this excellent work has reached New Mexico. There was a large influx of Japaneseartists, trained in their gestural traditions of calligraphy, who wanted to explore this process in individualways. They came to study in the U.S. after their defeat in World War II and stayed. At long last, we get tosee their paintings. Looking through the artists’ biographies, they exhibited actively and then were “losthistory” until very recent scholarship has begun to reclaim their place with recent exhibitions like “UnderEach Other’s Spell” about the Gutai movement and New York. It seems important to see more of MatsumiKanemitsu’s velvety inks on paper; more overpainted visual events like Minoru Kawabata’s “Yellow Slow;”and more of Sumiye Eugenia Okoshi’s melting, drippy wobbly “Untitled” targets.

At a 1998 Chinati Foundation symposium, artist Robert Irwin asserted that postmodernism waspremature, wishful thinking and modernism had many unexplored avenues to traverse. He estimated thatmodernism had another 200 years of contributions to make to the visual arts. With this exhibition, itseems he’s right.

If you go

WHAT: “1960s Revisited” WHERE: David Richard Contemporary, 130 Lincoln Ave., Suite D WHEN:Through Nov. 13. Open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday CONTACT: 505-983-9555 orwww.davidrichardcontemporary.com


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“Constellation K” is a 1969 acrylic on canvas by Leon Polk-Smith.

“Yellow I” is a 1966 canvas and tubing construction by Hisao Hanafusa.


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COURTESY DAVID RICHARD CONTEMPORARY

“No. 43” is a 1973 acrylic on canvas by Roy Colmer.


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1960s Painting Revisited at David Richard

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