by Ben Lima | 18 April 2010 | Modern, Museums
In the March 30th issue of the New Republic, Jed Perl reflects on survey exhibitions of Joaquín Torres-García, Arshile Gorky and Anne Truitt.
On Torres-García (cf. Robert L. Pincus, Douglas Britt):
“His ochres, siennas, and grays–which from time to time achieve a mineral brilliance, approaching Mondrian’s iconographic red, yellow, and blue–are protagonists in the drama of his art, not a means to an end but ends in themselves. His colors are emblematic, symbols of earth, stone, water, fire. His lines, whether drawn in paint or incised in wood, suggest humankind’s first pictographs, the shape of a temple or a god, drawn with a stick on the sand as the water laps at the ancient artist’s feet. At the Menil I felt how strongly this classicism is grounded not in the ideas of some architect or artist, whether Vitruvius or Mondrian, but in the primacy of craft.”
On Gorky (cf. Holland Cotter, Laura Cumming, William Feaver, Richard Dorment):
In the abstracted gardens of his later art–whether they are full of young spring colors, strong summer ones, or charred and bleached winter ones–the equivocations and evasions of the paint handling embody the enigmas of nature, the never entirely predictable patterns of growth and decay, the sudden appearance of new life, the equally quick eviscerations.
On Truitt (cf. Lance Esplund, Tyler Green, Greg Allen, Meaghan Wilson and Talea Miller, James Meyer, Ken Johnson, Blake Gopnik and Anne Byrd):
Nearly every edge is a hard edge, which only underscores the variety she achieves, sometimes carrying a horizontal band of color around the four sides, often giving the top or the bottom of a column a grace note in a different hue. Truitt understands the sensuousness of color, its power to be luxuriant, seductive, hedonistic. Her deep purples and verdant greens and lush oranges, presented on different sides of her columns, or in contrasting blocks and stripes, are so playful, so immediate, as to suggest the formalization of informal feeling. The color on some columns is light and clear, like an early morning optimism. Others are dark nighttime visions. Sometimes she spins a romance of the tropics, sometimes she alludes to the steady light of the Transcendentalists.
