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 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, , 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 , 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 . 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.

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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. (These days, we are of color as well as of surface. more accustomed to seeing such halations in abstract than Rose will often raise or lower the "volume" of local colors, in figurative painting.) Cast shadows in Rose's paintings as his picture of Central Park with the back of the Metro• do not fling themselves, but spread osmotically across a politan Museum and midtown skyscrapers shows. The brick- street or wall, comporting themselves more as hue-changes red of the nearby Met is considerably diluted and the distant than as tonal distinctions. These close-valued works have a skyscrapers correspondingly sharpened in clarity and color diffused and dappled radiance which is, though here more for the sake of a muted atmospheric constancy instead of and there less intense, still essentially even in its emanation dramatized oppositions of color or space. Further, Rose

The Old Port, Le Havre RAOUL DUFY

HIRSCHL ABLER Oil on canvas 24 x 29 inches ON EXHIBITION DURING JUNE AT PHILHARMONIC HALL 21 E.67thSt. • NY 21 • LE5-BSI0

Open Mon. through Fri.

SUMMER 1967 69 only broadly establishes the time of day or kind of weather— and young trees in Central Park. The point of view is un• an odd and telling fact about such a devoted open-air painter. usual for Rose: looking up from the bottom of a massive A particular compositional habit of Rose's is also syn- rock-hill, you see delicate tree-tops, but not their trunks, optically undramatic—his "parade." He often marshals silhouetted against the sky; there is nothing else in the things in a horizontal sequence across the canvas, creating painting. The explicitness of the opposition of rocks and a kind of palindrome. This structural theme is obviously vegetation, as well as the exaggerated upward tilt of the suited to views like that of New Jersey's factories strung vantage-point, gives the picture a directness and suggestive- out along the Hudson's shore (though which came first?) ness not at all "generalized." When there is apparent un• and is perhaps natural, too, in still-life, but the horizontal conscious meaning, we can, without treating it condescend• concatenation recurs as well in compositions that do not ingly as "psychological projection," nevertheless recognize automatically suggest it. In The Actor, Leslie Barrett (color- vivid subjective states which increase or are increased by plate, p. 36), the parade appears, somewhat altered, in the the esthetic means. Such a picture is one of Cape Cod with arc of objects that encircles the figure (from the containers a small boat on the water protectively framed by two on the floor at left, the still-life elements strewn across the rounded clumps of shrubs on the shore, and, in the fore• table and shelf, down to the paper and phone at lower right). ground and to one side, a dead tree whose broken branch And in Rose's cityscapes, the pull of receding planes is often twists and yearns toward the distant craft. For Rose, this mitigated by the arrangement of buildings at the horizon is a very precisely designed work. Its axial tensions, the in a lateral continuum, without the "beginning, middle, and tug between the tree and boat, the symmetrical placement end"—that is, the formal rise, climax and fall—of dramat• of the shrubs, the isolation of all of them, convey a secret ically valued structure. pathos unrelated to the actual subject matter. It would be merely sentimental if deliberate, but is, in its latency, a However if Rose usually suppresses visual and psycho• dramatic discharge of feeling. logical excitement in his work in favor of a reticent even• ness, there are enough exceptions to suggest that the im• Often the little nick of street at the bottom of an aerial pulse toward more charged expression is strong. Several cityscape will have the same effect, not only giving scale of the recent paintings present very directly intense states to the overview, but making the realm of human activity of feeling, accompanied by pictorial heightening. They are seem unattainably remote. hardly Expressionist explosions (better, Impressionist im• An expressly evocative painting is The Actor, Leslie plosions), and at first contact, you get but a whiff of the Barrett. The theme of a man alone in a room is a recurrent new energy that has broken through. Yet within Rose's one for Rose, and in this, the latest of the series, isolation fine range, the difference is marked. Sometimes the dramatic and melancholy are palpable. The emotional significance image seems unconsciously symbolic, sometimes expressly is not disguised or muffled. Yet the conscious intellectual evocative, and sometimes it gains its import purely as a control of pictorial means is, paradoxically, at its strongest. response to an arresting configuration in the outside world. The way that complicated areas are balanced against simpler For the latter, an indelible example is the picture of rocks ones, the way the left-hand part of the room is tilted up

KNOEDLER Established 1846

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70 and in to keep it unified with the rest, the organization on Lubbock's terms, "panorama" and "scene." In the former, a few major verticals and diagonals, these and other care• the author intervenes between his characters and the reader, fully worked out elements are there as if in compensation summarizing events and compressing time; he tells what for the unusually "loaded" content. Picasso said that during happens. In the "scene," however, he shows events directly, iM War he thought that poets would probably be writing letting the characters speak for themselves in something sonnets. In Rose's case, certainly, the more intense or dis• more like real time. Herman Rose seems to me to alternate ruptive the emotion, the greater is the formal clarity and between these two poles. He usually tells, and the pictures control. of this kind are beautiful, if remote; but sometimes he In the Jamesian esthetic of the novel, much is made of the shows, and when he does, the point-blank confrontation with distinction between "telling" and "showing," or in Percy his revelations lingers in the consciousness.

Auctions Continued from page 47 Madonna and Child, a Bernard van Orley triptych of Adora• Sisley, Pissarro and Picasso. This sale will be immediately tion of the Magi, Colin de Coter's Christ Crowned with followed by more modern works from various sources, among Thorns, Supported by an Angel. which is listed a large early Monet, Winter at Argenteuil, A sale of English paintings, some from the Walney Col• 1874. On July 5. there will be old master paintings from various sources including the Prince zu Wied, the Earl of lection, at Christie's on July 7, includes: a fine portrait of Southesk, Sir John McLeod. Listed among a number of Handel by Thomas Herring; a portrait of William Hogarth 18th-century Italian works are four Canalettos, including by Thomas Herring; Two Beggar Boys by Gainsborough; Regatta on the Grand Canal, Venice, from the collection of a full-length English Copley, Portrait of Hugh Montgomerie. the Dukes of Buccleugh. There is also a very fine Maurice 12th Earl of Eglington, signed and dated 1780; canvases Quentin de la Tour pastel Self-Portrait, a Botticelli Portrait by Mytens, Hans Eworth, Constable, Devis, Allan. Ramsay. of Simonetta Vespucci, and a number of paintings from the Pollard, Sartorius, Robert Nightingale and others. Christie's Prince zu Wied. is also having Impressionist and modern paintings on June A sale of the 18th- and 19th-century English paintings and 30th. watercolors, at Sotheby's on July 12, includes a celebrated Report from Sotheby's Rowlandson watercolor, An Evening at the Vauxhall Gar• Sotheby's, who in April had a record-breaking sale of dens, in which are depicted many well-known personalities Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, is holding promise of of the day, including Boswell, Dr. Johnson. Mrs. Thrale, a repeat performance with 19th-century and modern paint• Oliver Goldsmith, the dandy and gossip writer Captain ings on June 28, for which there will be two catalogues. The Topham. the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Duncannon first will comprise ten paintings from the Chester Beatty (two famous contemporary beauties) and the Prince of Collection, including works by Corot, Jongkind, Monet, Wales flirting with Perdita Robinson. The was

OCTOBER 1966 '70' DWAN NEW YORK

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