Artwews, SUMMER I%1 Herman Rose: Telling and Showing
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ARTwews, SUMMER i%1 By Scott Burton Herman Rose: Telling and Showing His concentration on nature yields hallucinatory images of reality, seen after a long absence in New York this month, at Zabriskie Herman Rose in his studio (photo by Braral. Herman Rose paints very small, quiet but vibrant cityscapes. mission to go out on a non-public dock, and once there, landscapes and still-Iifes, and sometimes portraits. His latest he never seems to leave out anything he sees. Instead, he show [Zabriskie: to June 10] covers five years of work and summarizes certain elements of the scene. For instance, in includes watercolors and etchings. Most of his urban pic• a view of a Greenwich Village street, there is a diagonal tures are of New York and environs—Yonkers, Brooklyn, row of parked automobiles in the foreground. They look New Jersey—but there are others of Rome and Barcelona, jammed together, the way a telephoto lens would see them, which he visited in 1962. Many of the landscapes are of and hump-backed. But rather than omitting them or coming Central Park but some were done in Charlottesville, Va., back another time, Rose kept them in and dealt with them where Rose was artist-in-residence last year at the Univer• by generalizing them. In the finished painting, the cars are sity of Virginia, and a few are of Cape Cod. His still-lifes are a little vague and in a looser focus than the rest of the of small objects: plums, shells, gourds, matchbooks, sta• things in the picture. But they are still there, revealing a tuettes, vases, candlesticks. They crown the shelves and basic loyalty to the actuality of the scene. (Rose always tabletops of his studio, and an impression of his ambiance works directly before his model, returning to it again and is built up from the flotilla of small things much as the again, which can stretch the actual painting time into myriad of little touches coalesces to create the image in months or even years.) The intrinsic demands of the pic• one of his paintings. ture appear to take second place to the outside dictates. Though one senses in Rose a miniaturist impulse, there Of course, this is not true, or rather, is an over-simplified is nothing quaint or precious about his light-shredded dis• antithesis, first of all because in the very choice of what tillation of the visible world, partly, I think, because they to paint the picture is already begun before brush is ever never look arranged or "stylized." Rose will go to some touched to canvas. Further, because it is not just in "diffi• trouble to get to the place he wants to paint from, like cult" passages but throughout the whole picture that Rose renting a hotel room in Brooklyn or getting the City's per• generalizes or summarizes. In fact, such mediation is one Continued on page 68 Street in Greenwich Village, 1964, 9% inches high. Provincetown, 1964, 10% inches high. This piece avoiJs intimacy with an even greater rigor than artist's diagram or maquette (Judd, Kipp, Morris, Smith- some of the large structures. The simple geometric units son, among others). •Item like a deliberate depersonalization of plastic form. Scale in American art is not a phenomenon peculiar to Rigid structuring through a modular unit may have a the '60s; it was previously investigated by painters, par• sterilizing effect. (The weakness in Smithson's structure ticularly the Abstract-Expressionists. American sculpture is its self-enclosure.) In contrast, Hamrol's parts are set of the '60s, however, is concerned with scale itself in new off in precarious relation to each other, in relation to sur• ways. There seem to be two sources for this tendency. One rounding space, and in relation to the spectator who can is the America of science, engineering, industry, with its walk around them. LeWitt's untitled 50-inch enamelon- exploration of new materials and sign-making on a grand aluminum cage of uniform open rectangles is in a sense scale. The other is the ever keener awareness of the vast made up of repeated images, but is not involved with serial reaches of this country. It is noteworthy that more than half form, for we are presented with the totality. of the sculptors exhibited were born in the Midwest or West, where a sense of vastness is still untrammeled. This Historically, large forms were made in conjunction with decade has witnessed the widespread emergence of an Amer• architecture, often with religious intent. Because of tech• ican sculpture of large physical presence arrived at by a nical and engineering problems involved, this alliance was creative application of a chosen scale. natural. Today the sculptor moves into engineering to balance large suspended structures (Grosvenor, Snelson) "American Sculpture of the '60s" organized for the Los Angeles County Museum by Maurice Tuchman, curator of modern art, or to tilt massive forms at precarious angles (Bladen). And will be on exhibit to June 25. A book-catalogue has been produced often sculptures are made by industrial means after the for the exhibition. Rose Continued from page 37 of his strongest impulses, affecting his composition, color, eye is located, contributes importantly to the distancing. It light, handling, his very "tone of voice." Though a counter- is not so much that you are looking from far away—the impulse toward more dramatic arrangement and overt feel• still-lifes are in close-up—but rather that the angle of vision ing sometimes breaks through, the drive to distance and is indeterminate, not precisely placed. No table-edge 01 compress what is pictured deeply informs Rose's style. The street in perspecitve is firmly fixed in relation to the sides size itself of his format demonstrates this reticence, and of the canvas. Just how far away is that warehouse or that since he leans to complex, panoramic subjects, the smallness shell? All we can say is that it is "at a remove," discon• is even more telling. It forces him to "synopsize." tinuous with the viewer's world. The subject matter is not in itself arresting—views we Rose's way of handling paint, his touch, is also a powerful all know or things anyone might have around the house, equalizer of what is seen. His mottled surface controls to a nothing novel. And the point of view, where the observing large degree one's perception of the images "behind" it. OSCAR AND PETER JOHNSON LIMITED LOWNDES LODGE GALLERY, 27 LOWNDES STREET CADOGAN PLACE, LONDON S.W. 1. Telephone: BELgravia 6464 Cables: ARTCOS, LONDON, S.W. 1. On view at the ANTIQUE DEALERS FAIR Grosvenor House Stand 44 June r4th-2Qth Oil Painting A Country Lane by PATRICK NASMYTH Signed and dated 1829 On panel 8 x 10 inches 68 ART NEWS Spatial illusion is, of course, checked by the tactility of the from the rear of the painting, as if from the white ground pigment, in a manner long orthodox, but Rose's almost itself. subliminally low relief has the further effect of leveling In keeping with this gentle, intermittent effulgence, Rose's hierarchies in the relations between the various things pic• color is also pied or atomized. Not only are unbrqken areas tured. Thus a sky is not a blank or smooth expanse acting of single colors avoided, but in each picture, every color has as a foil for a complex of more heavily encrusted or more something of every other color in it. The kettle in one of detailed buildings, but, as surface, is continuous with the the still-lifes is broken down not just into the stippled buildings, equally tangible, equally activated—more so at browns and oranges which the color of copper might be times. expected to yield, but also into violets and mauves—more Rose's touch distributes itself without major discrimina• of these than could be explained by the reflection of proxi• tions over the entire surface; though his strokes are looser mate hues. Not restricted to denoting the objects that orig• and more varied than they used to be (the influence of inally suggested their introduction, colors are "let out of doing watercolors), they still provide a kind of filter through their cages," to fly and alight anywhere—a never-stilled which the subjects are passed, to come out equally able chromatic aviary, but one without a "pecking order," for to arouse our scrutiny. Rose summarily eliminates sharp though an azure invades a yellow, it is in turn subordinate contrasts between more and less intricate forms. In his to a green. The method is one of homogeneity through cityscapes, for example, as many or as few windows are variegation. visible in the nearest buildings as in the farthest. Articula• Too, the same colors reappear frequently from painting to tion of parts tends to be constant throughout; the back- painting. Rose's palette is fairly stable; "delicious," char• cloth of a still-life snags the eye as readily as does the acteristically pastel, its rose, peach, turquoise, pistachio, conch shell in front of it. mint and plum tones wander freely, though rarely straying Just as important to this tendency to generalize are Rose's into acidity, between polarities of crimson and blue-green. color and light. There is no single-source illumination of The hues are vivid, if delicately so, usually getting "paled either the striking "proscenium" or the scrupulously imi• out" with large admixtures of white. The high proportion tative kind. The light seems to come from nowhere—• or of medium to pigment asks the eye to close in on the often everywhere, from the whole picture out to the viewer rather transparent, glazed-looking paint to seize its many inflections than from a set internal direction.