Donald Sultan Huxley-Parlour Sam Jackson Charlie Smith London 2X Reviews – Edward Lucie-Smith by Edward Lucie-Smith, Sam Jackson June 25, 2019

This is the time of year when London’s grandee galleries – official and commercial – are so busy presenting us with blockbuster shows that lesser lights tend to get squeezed out, at least where publicity is concerned. Here are a couple of exhibitions on a somewhat lesser scale that it would be a pity to miss. One, at Huxley-Parlour in Swallow Street, offers the work of the American artist Donald Sultan, one of the stars of the return to (as opposed to other forms of artistic expression) that took place in American art in the 1980s. , who had his first New York solo at in 1979, is another member of the same generation. Schnabel, to declining acclaim, still exhibits as a painter but has swerved off track and is now perhaps better known as a film-maker. Sultan has continued to paint.

His show here in London offers just seventeen works but spans the whole of his career. The earliest work on view dates from 1977, and the most recent from April of this year. As the excellent catalogue for the show points out, some of his earlier , which rejected the fashionable at the time, resonate with the feeling of gloom that followed the failure of America’s catastrophic military intervention in Vietnam. The paintings that greet you as you come into the gallery reflect this mood. They are dark works, made in the mid-1980s. One features the devastation caused by a forest fire. Another is an image of railway lines, going nowhere.

The mood lightens considerably when you go downstairs. There you are greeted by a large, very decorative painting called Fifteen Oranges, which shows you exactly that: fifteen simplified bright orange fruit, dangling on a white background amid equally simplified leaves. The oranges have no stems. They float, decoratively detached. In this sense, they are not materially present.

It is, of course, easy to say that, without the example of Matisse, this composition would never have come into existence. Yet, while it is obviously a child of Matisse, it isn’t an imitation. It shows that it is still possible to make a shamelessly decorative painting and get away with it. This decorative flair asserts itself even when Sultan eschews colour, as he does in a couple of of gigantic Black Lemons, in charcoal on paper. Their energetic forms, lacking interior detail, jostle against the edges of the surface on which they have been placed, and impatiently overlap its boundaries. They proclaim an old artistic truth – ‘less is more’ – but do so in a thoroughly contemporary way. Interview | Donald Sultan

June 5, 2019

Donald Sultan, Archive Studio Portrait, © the artist, Courtesy Huxley-Parlour Gallery The acclaimed American figurative painter Donald Sultan currently has his first U.K retrospective at Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London. Sultan is 68 now, and this show entitled, Dark Objects: Works 1977–2019, will be his first in London in 10 years and follows a major presentation in the Smithsonian in 2017.

Sultan rose to prominence in the electrified atmosphere of New York’s downtown art renaissance in the late 1970s and 1980s. Before the use of graffiti and post-modern -fig uration appeared in the galleries and art magazines, Sultan’s simple iconography and complex technique of gouged, spackled, and painted tar-encrusted grids of linoleum tiles attached to Masonite captured immediate and enthusiastic attention.

Sultan was one of the first to employ industrial materials to describe the iconic landscape. His use of such materials, particularly tar, was influenced by his father’s tyre business, and his interest in the industrial world came from is formative years in Chicago at the School of the Art Institute. The result of mixing unusual materials with industrial subjects, as in his early paintings of factories, is both familiar and disquiet- ing. Lines Down, 11 November, 1985, Latex and tar on tile, 96 x 96 inches © the artist, Courtesy Huxley-Parlour Gallery.jpg Arranged over two floors, Dark Objects is comprised of 17 works produced between 1977 and 2019. It features three canvasses from his seminal Disaster Paintings series, early smaller-scale experiments from the 1970s, as well as works in charcoal from the artist’s Black Lemons series (exhibited at the , New York, in 1988) and more recent investigations into the reduction of form.

We had the chance to speak with Sultan in more depth about the exhibition and his career so far.

When did you first decide you wanted to be an artist, as I read you initially en- rolled to major in Dramatic Arts before transferring to Fine Arts?

I had spent most of my childhood and teen years in the performing arts working amateur at the Fessional theatre in both acting and stage craft and university I realize the drama score was not challenging enough and that I could never take direction I moved to radio television and motion pictures and formed a cooperative with the students to make films I realized that filmmaking required too much money and collaboration I decided that to be a real auteur the only avenue was to make my own art and painting was the logical move . You also worked in set design; do you think your early experience working in the- atre imbued within your paintings a taste for theatrics?

Painting is the ultimate theatre work inside design helped me think about scale.

Dark Objects features three of your ‘Disaster paintings’; in the past you have referred to this body of work as ‘Industrial Landscapes’ and ‘Catastrophic event’ paintings, which terminology do you prefer, or feel is most suitable?

Catastrophic event paintings is really preferable but disaster paintings start with my dealers.

It seems now that these disaster paintings from the ‘80s almost anticipate some of the awful things that have happened in the world we find ourselves living in today, were you aware of any political relevance whilst painting these?

I wasn’t making political statements with these pictures (catastrophes) my concerns were A. abstraction, B. a new way to paint the landscape and C. to at once engage chaos and order. Right now, chaos is winning.

I read that you said the scale of a painting has no effect whatsoever on the impact of a painting. Do you still feel like that?

The scale of a painting is contained within the work itself; a small painting can pack a powerful punch, but a large painting is required for certain genres. A small industrial landscape would not convey the same sense of drama. The scale changes the meaning of the work.

I wanted to talk about Arte Povera, what spoke to you about their philosophy of only using every day materials?

I only wanted to use what I called industrial materials. Mainly those engage in archi- tecture and building it. They were cheap and could marry the image to the architecture. By the way, today oil paint in tubes is a manufactured material. I wanted to force the paradox between architecture and impermanence.

The exhibition also includes a number of your more recent works, can you say more about these and your interest in the reduction of form?

The more one makes a definitive statement the more abstract it becomes I try to pare down the images to their essence and capture the fleeting aspect of reality pitting the gesture against the geometric, the gesture being the fluidity of the human against the geometry of the object.

Fifteen Oranges, 17 September, 1992, Tar, oil, spackle on tile over ma- sonite, 96 x 96 inches © the artist, Courtesy Huxley-Parlour Gallery Reevaluating the Art of Donald Sultan at Huxley-Parlour by Balasz Takac June 3, 2019 The New York art scene in the early 1980s was saturated with various tendencies – from the do-it-yourself practices happening on the margins, to the high-end solo exhibitions happening within the institutions. However, the prevailing trend was the return to painting and the majority of artists which had just emerged became stars more or less overnight. While some vanished in the coming few years, others left quite a mark, and one of those artists was Donald Sultan.

In brief, this skillful painter managed to establish an authentic style which made him recognizable. Throughout the years, he has been exploring various formal and conceptual aspects of the painterly surface, which he does still with the same sharpness and devotion.

In order to re-evaluate his oeuvre accordingly, Huxley-Parlour decided to organize Sultan’s first retrospective on the British soil by gathering his seminal works in one specific exhibition space.

Left: Donald Sultan – Building Canyon, 19 April, 1977, Tar and masonite on wood, 12 x 12 inches Gallery / Right: Donald Sultan – Black Lemons, 21 March, 1985, Charcoal on paper, 38 x 50 inches. © the artist, Courtesy Huxley-Parlour Gallery The Exhibition Context

Donald Sultan is undoubtedly one of the best-known proponents of New Image movement, which dominated the New York art scene during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The abstract landscapes constructed of various industrial tools and materials made him almost instantly recognizable. The painter was focused on producing powerful and multilayered artworks by focusing specifically on the boundary between the abstract and the everyday.

This exhibition tends to show the full extent of his painterly experiments and will include seventeen works made between 1977 and 2019 will be arranged over two floors, and the highlight will be the three canvasses from his famous Disaster Paintings series.

Left: Donald Sultan – Lemon, 19 January, 1989, Tar, spackle and tile over wood, 12 x 12 inches / Right: Donald Sultan – Seven Black Flowers, 7 June, 1999, Charcoal on paper, 60 x 40 inches. © the artist, Courtesy Huxley-Parlour Gallery The Installment

On display will be Sultan’s smaller-scale experiments in tar, tile, and Masonite from the 1970s, along with charcoal works from his Black Lemons series; all of those works were shown in 1988 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and they can be considered as a start of the reduction of form.

A later series titled Disaster Paintings were created by the artist throughout the 1980s, and each is inspired by disastrous industrial or urban events (train derailments, warehouse fires or freight, etc.) Left: Donald Sultan – Domino, 10 November, 1990, Tar, latex, spackle on tile over wood, 12.5 x 12.5 inches / Right: Donald Sultan – Golden Flower, 23 October, 1998, Yellow latex and gold leaf on paper, 60 x 48 inches. © the artist, Courtesy Huxley-Parlour Gallery Donald Sultan at Huxley-Parlour

The upcoming exhibition will definitely underline the significance of Sultan’s practice and his role in 1980s return to painting phenomenon. The gallery director Giles Hux- ley-Parlour explained the decision to showcase his works:

The New York art scene of the 1980s gave rise to many great talents, and the paintings in this exhibition reveal Donald Sultan to be one of the key figures of that period. The fea- tured works reveal a painter of vital, unerring energy and unique talent. It is an honor to be able to bring his work together for this timely retrospective.

Donald Sultan: Dark Objects, Works 1977-2019 will be on display at Huxley-Parlour in London from 5 June until 29 June 2019. Donald Sultan: Mimosa, Paintings and Drawings at Ryan Lee by GUEST WRITER April 23, 2019

Donald Sultan: Mimosa, Paintings and Drawings at Ryan Lee. Installation view courtesy of Ryan Lee. Donald Sultan’s new series of images at Ryan Lee is the first exhibition of his Mimosas, inspired by a presentation of the blossoms he received from a friend in the South of France. He began using the structure of the ornamental plant that grows in warm temperate regions of the world to continue his five-decade investigation of the space between abstraction and representation, exploring boundaries between the organic and the industrial, the invented and the natural, thinking and feeling. Mimosas are fast-growing yellow and green evergreens that originated in the southeast corner of the continent of Australia. There are now two varieties. At relatively low altitudes mimosas grow into tall trees, one hundred feet tall, with long leaves. At higher altitudes, among snowy mountain peaks, they are more like shrubs, growing half as tall with the leaves about a third as long. Sultan’s stylized paintings and drawings, as always, give a surprisingly realistic impression from afar, looking remarkably the way actual mimosas look in their natural habitat. But upon investigation, one sees liberties taken with color and form with Sultan elevating the pictorial elements to pure abstraction. Donald Sultan: Mimosa, Paintings and Drawings at Ryan Lee. Installation view courtesy of Ryan Lee.

Sultan was one of the first of the “New Image” painters in the 1970s to paint flowers, a popular subject now. He is known for his tulips, and poppies and for fruits like lemons and pomegranates. In a previous series of morning glories, Sultan used little geometric circles the way he does here, but as the center of a flower. He has also previously employed them in series of dominoes or buttons, with the discs appearing as button holes in the 1990s. In the case of the Mimosas, each flattened circle represents an entire puffy, three-dimensional blossom that pops off the background in sensuous enamel. The monumental paintings, using vinyl and tar as well as enamel on masonite, and drawings in conte crayon, charcoal, oil stick, graphite and yes, enamel, on paper, were created simultaneously and thus inform each other, becoming the latest in Sultan’s series depicting ideas as substitutes for physical events.Gotlands KonstMuseum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in the collections of the ; British Museum, London; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at , Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Sultan lives and works in New York City. Donald Sultan, Mimosa Feb 5 2019, 2019 Charcoal, enamel and oil stick on masonite 96 x 96 inches (243.8 x 243.8 cm). The colors of the backgrounds are sensible enough, occasionally robin’s egg blue, reminiscent of skies in the south of France, elsewhere white or pink or in one of the more elegant drawings, my favorite, Mimosa Feb 5 2019, 2019 an earthy ecru. In only one work are the mimosa leaves green, realistically rendered the shade they might be in bright light. In most of the others, they are black or black and brown, as if in silhouette or at twilight. In a couple of the drawings, they take the form of blue and orange or blue and dark yellow marks woven surrounding wispy black lines to indicate vertical motion, or if not motion, a vertical presence, like hanging bananas or a weeping willow. In two of the drawings, this presence is less of a field but instead a terse visual statement, a dark clump of the leaves simply announcing they are there. In one, a single clump, and in another, three and a half clumps, provide the information in Sultan’s visual shorthand, “leaves go here.”

Donald Sultan, Mimosa with Orange and Green Oct 3 2018, 2018 Oil, tar and enamel on masonite 36 x 72 inches (91.4 x 182.9 cm). The dominant element in all of these works, without exception, are the blossoms themselves, circular discs, seeming to rain down across the surface, creating divine interference between the layers of dark backgrounds and leaves and our eye, becoming the active subjects. They hover, demanding attention, reminiscent of Alexander Calder, John Baldessari or Damien Hirst circles, forcing us to consider negative space, usually in white, occasionally other colors. In one, Mimosa with Orange and Green Oct 3 2018, 2018 the only one with green leaves, the flans are orange and shades of a solid dark green enamel. These arrays of discs elevate the still life tradition by deconstructing Sultan’s subjects into basic forms.

Donald Sultan: Mimosa, Paintings and Drawings at Ryan Lee. Installation view courtesy of Ryan Lee. His use of industrial materials, as always, is striking. The masonite surfaces he has built for the paintings are beautiful when seen from the side, revealing secrets of their structure. The blacks in the paintings are done with his signature element, tar. Sultan was born in Asheville, in 1951 near Black Mountain College but his interest in the industrial world devel- oped during his formative years at the Art Institute of Chicago. His father was a tire company owner and he has attributed his frequent use of the material, sometimes gorgeously thick, other times applied thinly like paint, as the influence of his father’s tire business. He has called his father “a physical person” and noted his grandfather was on the assembly lines of Detroit during the Depression. So physicality has always played an important part in his work. Donald Sultan, Mimosa with Anomaly Oct 14 2018, 2018 Tar and enamel on masonite 48 x 96 inches (121.9 x 243.8 cm). Sultan has worked with spackle and latex and on grounds of vinyl tiles. He is known for scrap- ing into the depth of the material to create lines and for gouging, sanding, and buffing to create various degrees of flatness, depth, gloss, and texture. Here, the delicate mimosa blossoms seem to float on the surfaces of these pieces, carefully placed there on subtle sheets or membranes. Even the thick tar of the eight foot long Mimosa with Anomaly Oct 14 2018, 2018 seems to delicately cradle the anomaly of the title, a single orange dot toward the left of the image. This cradling effect hurls us back and forth between the 3-dimensional world of real mimosas into Donald Sultan’s domain of flat, formalized, schematized shapes, textures and hues.

Donald Sultan: Mimosa, Paintings and Drawings at Ryan Lee

April 4 – May 11, 2019

515 WEST 26TH STREET, NY 10001 Donald Sultan 4 Apr — 11 May 2019 at the Ryan Lee in New York, United States

15 APRIL 2019

Donald Sultan. Courtesy of RYAN LEE RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Donald Sultan: Mimosa, PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS, an exhibition of new work by the acclaimed artist. Inspired by a gift of mimosa blossoms he received from a friend in the South of France, Sultan began using the structure of the mimosa plant to continue his interrogation of the space between abstraction and representation, the organic and the industrial, as well as the history of modern art. The exhibition includes largescale drawings and monumental paintings, ranging from four to eight feet wide, respectively. This is the first exhibition of Sultan’s Mimosa paintings and the show will be accompanied by a catalogue.

Sultan executed the paintings and drawings simultaneously, and as a result they inform each other. Working out the density of charcoal and conte in the drawings first led Sultan to the paintings in which he uses roofing tar and enamel to create a richly textured surface. He continues his use of industrial materials, such as Masonite and vinyl along with the tar and enamel, to construct his paintings, which in their scale, heft, and dimensionality, are sculptural as well as architectural. Their exposed sides and edges reveal the process of their creation. Unlike prior series in which Sultan carved directly into the surface of the painting to generate his imagery, in the Mimosas he builds up the surface through a series of layering techniques applied directly to the Masonite. In Mimosa Jan 16 2019, a cascade of black and brown leaves washes across the eight-by- eightfoot Masonite surface. The range in depth and luminosity of the dark palette is the result of washing the tar with turpentine after its application—a technique Sultan borrowed from his groundbreaking Disaster paintings of the 1980s. Combining fluid gestural brushwork with the precision of stencils and decals, Sultan creates a composition that is at once explosive and contained.

Color plays an especially prominent role in these new works as exemplified by the lush green foliage in Mimosa With Orange and Green Oct 3 2018. In other paintings, passages of light blue suggest the sundrenched skies of Southern France, and Sultan’s mimosa blossoms range in color from dark blue, to orange, deep green, and indigo. The circular forms that Sultan makes use of visualize the interconnectedness across the organic and artificial realms, and link this new body of work to prior series, such as the Morning Glories, Buttons, and Dominoes of the 1990s. The flattened discs have served as the center of a flower, the holes in a button, or in the case of the Mimosas, an entire blossom. Sultan has said, “the closer you work from reality the more abstract things can get.” In distilling the mimosa plant into the fundamental geometry of its leaves and blossoms, it becomes something conceptual. It functions as a vehicle for the exploration of visual ideas— the “armature,” as Sultan has called it, for a “gestural thought of leaves in general.”

Donald Sultan (b. 1951 Asheville, NC) is an internationally recognized artist best known for elevating the still life tradition through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms as well as his use of industrial materials. He studied at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and later received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Sultan rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement, and his first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at in New York. He has since exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, including the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gotlands KonstMuseum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum, London; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Sultan lives and works in New York City. Disaster was his message, but then catastrophes became commonplace By Philip Kennicott July 13, 2017

Donald Sultan, “Early Morning May 20 1986,” 1986, latex and tar on tile over masonite. (Donald Sultan/ Private Collection, New York)

In the 1970s, disaster was repackaged as mass entertainment. Movies dealt with towering infernos, cataclysmic earthquakes, chaos at the airport, hijackings, crashes and the Hindenburg, and television settled into its still ardent affair with the lives of cops, firefighters and other first responders. Donald Sultan began making his large, brooding, wall-commanding “Disaster” paintings about a decade later, in the early Reagan years, which to many seemed just as bleak and anxious, though with a thin veneer of buoyant patriotism and nostalgia papering over things like the AIDS crisis and the growing confrontation with the Soviet east. Reagan is remembered, today, as a genial figure who ended the Cold War; but visit Sultan’s paintings, on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and you will reexperience all the gritty terror of those years, when the leader of the Free World indulged a flippant bellicosity that unnerved allies and enemies alike (“We begin bombing in five minutes,” Reagan joked on an open microphone in 1984). Sultan’s paintings aren’t explicitly political, and he took his subjects mainly from newspaper photographs of accidents, fires, chemical spills and other urban distress. By the time he had built up these paintings, using carved linoleum tiles, tar and smears of lurid color over the surface, they were doing something very different than what disaster as entertainment does. The source of the original images was detectable mainly through a few telltale silhouettes (a fireman’s helmet, a row of streetlights, the metal architecture of an industrial plant or railroad), while the larger image seemed to bubble and ooze and bleed into abstraction. A particular shade of yellow in many works recalls the ugly glare of sodium vapor lights, as noxious a mnemonic as is the smell of naphthalene or the cling of cheap polyester on a hot day.

Disaster entertainment promises proximity, a safe vantage from which to scrutinize terror and suffering. Sultan’s paintings capture the horror, but little of the animating detail. You feel that you have glimpsed the disaster as if waking quickly from sleep, or passing by it at night on the highway. It is a snapshot that quickly dissolves into a visually indistinct but emotionally charged remembrance of having seen something horrible. Even ’s silk-screened multiple images of car crashes made in the 1960s — also based on newspaper photographs — allow the viewer more into the scene, and play more on the ghoulish appetites that make disaster imagery a rich source of public entertainment.

Remove the word “disaster” from this series, however, and you might be hard-pressed to find any distinct sense of danger or destruction in them. “Dead Plant November 1 1988” looks like one of Whistler’s smoky views of the Thames; “Yellowstone Aug 15 1990,” which shows dark tree trunks against Sultan’s familiar industrial yellow, could be one of van Gogh’s olive groves; several of the industrial scenes have echoes of Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and George Bellows. The ambiguity of Sultan’s titles, which often reference the date and sometime the place of a disaster without any specifics of what happened (“Early Morning May 20 1986” and “South End Feb 24 1986”), recall a famous conceptual project, On Kawara’s date paintings (begun in 1966), that include only the date of the day they were made rendered in white against a solid background.

Kawara was painting his age, in a literal sense, recording the passage of time, as if the painting is merely the label one might find on a box that contained the news and events and personal dramas of that particular day (they were, in fact, packaged with newspaper clippings). For Sultan, disasters aren’t specific, they are rather a mode of understanding the world. If Kawara’s work says, “every day there is another day,” Sultan’s says, “every day there is another disaster.” Like reading the horoscope and scanning the obituaries, both of these extended visual explorations belong to a world that feels artificially constructed by media, by the fire hose of newsiness that never turns off and can only be escaped by detaching oneself from the source.

It’s gratifying, reading through an interview with Sultan published in the exhibition catalogue, that he avoids the cant and sentimentality that would probably be essential to this work if it were being created today. He doesn’t talk about memorializing the victims or the tragic fate of the innocent; when asked about first responders, he spoke in broad, systematic terms: “These figures, if you are lucky, are always between you and the catastrophe. They are there to deal with it. So all human systems have a system to deal with that chaos, eventually.” Sultan stopped his series in 1990. Asked why, he acknowledged the toll taken by the implicit subject of his series — that everything is ephemeral — on him: “Now every day there’s a new catastrophe. So, they don’t need me. I’ve got nothing to say about that.”

Of course, the news medium that inspired the disaster series was also beginning to change. Cable news was making disaster more intimate, and seemingly more frequent; in 1986, images of the space shuttle Challenger exploding in flight became part of the ever-expanding global archive of horrifying tape loops. In 1991, the bombing of Baghdad rendered images that feel as if they were painted by Sultan, and animated in a computer. Social media hasn’t just glutted the market with disaster imagery, it has made us all painfully familiar with the everyday disasters of each other, the personal traumas and griefs that make my pain your pain and your pain my pain. Or, at least, elevate our anxiety about pain to an almost unbearable degree.

The other reason he stopped, perhaps, is sought out in the paintings themselves. By 1990, his disaster paintings were becoming too beautiful. The Yellowstone painting, and another of Venice (drained of its water) also made in 1990, begin to live independently of the project as landscapes and cityscapes. References to the history of painting take more prominence, and you realize the lodestar of this work was never disaster, it was always painting itself. At the point that the artist runs the risk of merely using disaster for his own ends, of perhaps even trivializing it in service to his art, he pulls back.

Now the series is safely contained within the decade that inspired it. Taken together, these works feel like a monumental series of history paintings, minus the particulars of history. If they are too dark and clotted to allow us to figure out what it is that menaces the world, that’s no matter. For taken together, they assert an age-old idea that we forget almost as soon as we fold up the newspaper or turn off Facebook: that the world is always menaced, and nothing lasts forever.

An artist’s visions of disaster are relevant again BY JORDAN LEVIN ARTINFO [email protected]

For a guy who paints so many flowers, artist Donald Sultan has an awfully dark vision of the world. Firemen silhouetted against walls of flame, lonely guardians about to be consumed. Skeletal bridges to nowhere in a bleak grey landscape. Tunnels funneling towards a menacing clump of black tar that seems to leak from the surface like a toxic cloud.

“We always think our world is completely unassailable and will last forever,” says Sultan, looking at the ominous series of his works looming from a gallery at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami. “But then you see that’s not necessarily the case. So many great civilizations have disappeared. It’s usually hubris and human beings who bring about the downfall of their own structures.” Shiver. No wonder these are called the Disaster Paintings. Sultan, 65, created between 60 and 70 of them in the ‘80s, as he became one of the most successful artists of his generation in New York. But they are very different from the graphic, bright-colored still lifes, often of flowers and fruit, for which he has become known. Instead, the Disaster Paintings were inspired by news stories on chemical spills, industrial decay, fires and environmental disasters. In our own era, inundated by a flow of media depicting grinding wars and new environmental threats, this relatively little known body of Sultan’s work seems startlingly relevant.

“Everything is cyclical, but this feels like a dark moment,” says Jill Deupi, director and chief curator of the Lowe, who conceived the show. “[The Disaster Paintings] tap into some of the turmoil surrounding us. They’re addressing universal themes of life and death, creation and destruction, darkness and light — all these things that are part of our existence and make us m or t a l .”

And yet, Deupi believes Sultan’s end time visions can be uplifting.

“There’s something extremely cathartic about them,” she says. “You can have these overwhelming experiences, and at the same time you are safe. You can release your angst and walk away feeling a little better.”

The show, which opened at the Lowe last week and runs through Dec. 23, is the first time that anyone has exhibited these works, which have been scattered in museums and private collections, together. The exhibit was organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which will present the show after Miami; it will also travel to the Smithsonian Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The exhibit will be on display during the global hubbub of Art Basel Miami Beach, when Sultan will speak at an annual brunch hosted by the Lowe.

In many ways, the paintings are inspired by Sultan’s life and the era in which he made them. He grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, where he spent time at his father’s tire retread factory, often with a guy who ground rubber, leaving mountains of black powder. “I thought it was just the coolest thing,” Sultan remembers.

He moved to New York in 1975, living in a former factory in during a grim period of urban blight, when arson left black gaps in the city. The steady stream of stories about pollution, disasters and the decay of American industrial cities directly inspired the paintings, each of which is modeled on a news photograph.

“What you’re seeing is a fleeting moment where something is being destroyed or injured,” he says. “At the beginning I called them events, because the terror of what was going on was in most cases un-seeable. They were gas leaks or poison smog or acid rain or the industrial heartland disintegrating, things going away that had once been the pillar of your country.”

And so each painting is a glimpse of a chilling story. In “Early Morning May 20 1986,” a fireman is silhouetted against a raging inferno. “Poison Island” depicts the aftermath of a chemical spill in New Jersey that sickened people on Staten Island. “Dead Plant November 1 1988” shows hulking bridges in an abandoned steel plant. In “Venice Without Water June 12 1990,” tangled pillars rise from the muck left when the Italian city was unexpectedly drained. “Polish Landscape II Jan 5 1990 (Auschwitz)” shows the abandoned Nazi concentration camp and the tracks prisoners walked towards the gas chambers.

“It’s really about emotion and how far did I want to go,” says Sultan. “These were all in the newspaper. They were always about order and chaos at the same time.”

And yet, these depictions of burned out emptiness are almost as physically solid as the structures they show. Sultan worked building and renovating lofts when he first got to New York, and as a teenager he built sets for a theater company in Asheville. He was drawn to the way site-specific and environmental artists like Gordon Matta-Clark and Alan Saret used construction materials, or made art by digging into buildings and walls.

Sultan made the disaster paintings on masonite tile laid over low platforms of plywood and pipe, as if he was building a piece of floor and putting it up on the wall. Not only were the materials cheap and easily available, but Sultan was drawn to their solidity. He wasn’t making an image with paint on canvas, but constructing “boxcars that haul meaning.”

“I felt more comfortable with an actual thing than with an illustration,” he says. “It was more important to have the actual feel of a physical situation. It’s like having an actual person with you, instead of an image.”

But after he constructed them, he deconstructed them, digging shapes out of the linoleum that he filled in with liquid tar, wiping them with solvents that left grit and residue. In some ways, his methods mirrored the industrial processes or destructive forces he was depicting.

Sultan sometimes slipped 19th century references into these pieces; a fire escape is like a balcony in an Edouard Manet painting, Francisco Goya’s violent war paintings, as if Western culture was also being consumed. But you don’t need to get those references to be affected by the Disaster Paintings.

“The longer you look and the more knowledge you have about art and art history, the more it should be rewarded,” he says. “But you don’t have to know anything for it to have some meaning.”

Two pieces show firemen silhouetted against swirling yellow flames. But in those years before 9/11, Sultan didn’t intend them as heroic figures but as anonymous symbols of order and civilization. As guardians they seem vulnerable; they could also be stand-ins for the viewer, staring, like us, at a daunting conflagration. But there are no sentinels at all in “Yellowstone Aug 15 1990,” which depicts a huge fire in the famous national park, just black slashes in a yellow field representing the incinerated trees.

“One of those was enough,” Sultan says.

By the start of the ‘90s, Sultan was done with devastation.

“Events like this began to take over the world,” he says. “What would I make that you hadn’t seen? We’re constantly barraged by destruction and horror. There was so much of that I went the other way and did flowers.”

A quarter century later, as terrorism, war and environmental threats have added new atrocities to the list of horrors, and social media and online news have turned the stream of stories into a virtual flood, Sultan is grateful that his Disaster Paintings have re-emerged.

“I consider this work important, culturally and spiritually,” Sultan says. “People don’t know them. And I didn’t want them to disappear.” Iconic Painter Donald Sultan Shows Seminal 1980s Works, The Disaster Paintings, On National Tour ARTINFO

Iconic North Carolina-born, New York- based painter Donald Sultan, who achieved international fame and success through his still-life paintings made from industrial materials such as tar, linoleum, and plaster, has decided to re-visit an im- portant but oft-forgotten body of work from his early career. Starting on Septem- ber 29 at the Lowe Art Museum in Coral Gables, Florida (and continuing through tours at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, The Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Sheldon Muse- um), Sultan will be presenting his seminal “disaster paintings,” from the 1980s. It is the first time these paintings will be pre- sented together as a group.

Donald Sultan, All photos courtesy of the artist.

Between 1984 and 1990, Sultan started painting catastrophic events that he saw in the newspapers. Particularly those types of events that are of an unseen nature, wreaking havoc with a whimper and not a bang. Sultan says, “The destruction depicted in them was mostly caused by unknowable or unseeable things. You don’t see the actual execu-

http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamlehrer/2016/08/31/iconic-painter-donald-sultan-shows-seminal- 1980s-works-the-disaster-paintings-on-national-tour/ tioner; like shelling from artilleries 100 miles away. The destruction of the earth by oil rigs and refineries. And the poisoning of the waters. So you don’t see the direct result of the event but the fall out from the carrying of the wind.”

Sultan’s disaster paintings thematically differ quite a bit from the still-life paintings of flowers and fruit that he would later become known for. The disaster paintings are dark, foreboding, and almost apoca- lyptic, while his still-lives are exercises in beauty and an abstracted serenity. That being said, the disaster paintings still highlight an important development in Sultan’s uncommon technique. They were the paintings that saw him introduce industrial materi- als to his art making, such as spreading tar over 12-

Donald Sultan, Veracruz Nov 18, 1986. inch floor tile-covered masonite. The paintings that result from his technique are textured, heavy, and dense. The disaster paintings are also abstractions, and Sultan has maintained his inter- est in abstraction in his work today. “I don’t want [my paintings’ subject matter] to be seen as a just a button,” says Sultan. “So they have to be read as not a button or a flower but something abstracted from which you can derive meaning.”

Sultan, now in his mid-60s, is as vital now as he was during the 1980s when he found himself named amongst the other “art stars” of the time: Basquiat, Haring, Schnabel, Fischl, Salle, and others. Unlike some of his 1980s contemporaries, Sultan doesn’t fall into any of the trappings of the “difficult artist” cliché. Speaking at his plush TriBeca studio, the bespectacled Sultan is warm, amiable, and an avid conversationalist. Over hot coffee, Sultan and I spoke at length about his decision to revisit the disaster paint- ings. But veering off course at times, Sultan also shared his thoughts on world affairs, the slow death of Hollywood cinema, the over-inflated fine art market, and (my favorite subject) the gentrification of New York City.

Adam Lehrer: So this is the first time that the disaster paintings will be shown as a group, it seems like that body of work has become more immediately relevant to the culture with things like climate change and corporate greed.. Were you aware of any political relevance whilst painting these?

Donald Sultan: Not really. I thought of them less as disasters and more as events. But I also used them as reference to the materials that I was using: linoleum, tar, and plaster. So the materials fit the content. And I wanted to reference other art. I referenced Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximillian, and Monet.

I thought of them as not romantic landscapes but true landscapes. And also dark pictures. I was thinking of Clyfford Still and Pollock. Part of the American way of painting was industrial. I never was comfortable with illustration; I was interested in the way paintings were made.

Adam Lehrer: You’ve said something to the effect of, and I’m paraphrasing, you paint only what you can see. You’re not interested in painting your dreams or the unconscious. Why is that?

Donald Sultan: The closer you work from reality the more abstract things can get. Like if you just did a cigarette with smoke in a painting than that’s very abstract.

Adam Lehrer: When did you stop painting the Donald Sultan, August 12, 1990. disasters?

Donald Sultan: People asked me why I quit and it was because the imagery I was using became pervasive. That’s not why I did them. I did it because that was the way the world was going. Part of the American way of painting was industrial. I never was comfortable with illustration; I was interested in the way paintings were made.

Adam Lehrer: But something must have reignited an interest in the disaster imagery within you?

Donald Sultan: Also, what I like about these paintings is that they are all differ- ent. You have to confront each one and they are all quite hard to read. During an actually disastrous event it’s confusing. When the World Trade Center came down,I thought, “Is that really true?” We were never afraid. The further from Ground Zero people were, the more frightened people were. People in the Mid- west were more frightened than us who were right at Ground Zero. it’s interest- ing that when you’re at the thing it’s not quite as scary. Because it’s confusing.

Adam Lehrer: And you hear about people living in war torn countries that hear a bomb go off next door, and it doesn’t phase them. Because it becomes a part of their existence.

Donald Sultan: Of course if it keeps coming…. Adam Lehrer: Then you better get out of there.

Donald Sultan: (laughs)of course. One of the things I find interesting is that I don’t know the type of harm that social media does. But it’s enormously harm- ful. You think about [Arab Spring in] Egypt and the guy from Google was going to have this big role in the gov- ernment, and that they were going to overthrow the dictator with all of these people from social media. The idea that social media is going to save you is preposterous.

Donald Sultan, Southend February 24, 1986.

Adam Lehrer: I just read about the Arab Spring and Egypt especially that it really wasn’t the revolution of the people it was the revolution of a disgruntled upper middle class. So what seemed like a glorious moment in fighting the power was actually a coup of a few rather many.

Donald Sultan: They got screwed. That’s what happened in Iran. When I was growing up, Iran had all these moderate, anti-Shah leaders talking about over- throwing the Shah, getting the U.S. to help, and bringing forth a new Iran. As soon as the Shah went down they hunted him down and killed him.

Adam Lehrer: There’s this magazine called Dust Magazine that just dedicated an entire issue to the examination of the modern Middle East and they did a history of Iran’s revolutions, and it’s literally just one dictator after another, each running on a bill of improved human rights.

Donald Sultan: The oppressed becomes the oppressor. Look at Russia, it’s heading back to Stalin.

Adam Lehrer: Was it a confluence of all these events in the world that made you want to bring the Disaster Paintings back out?

I just think not enough people got to see them. My son owns a painting that I gave him as a baby for his trust. He was born in ’88 and never saw these paintings. Adam Lehrer: The disaster paintings were done in the ‘80s. Was there anything about that decade that bled into the work?

Donald Sultan: In the ‘80s the parties were happening but New York was dangerous. It felt dangerous. Though I come from Chicago and New York always felt comparatively safer than Chicago. But those days you could dance in the bars like any other sane part of the country. And then [Rudy] Giuliani killed it. You can’t dance in bars which turned the whole dance scene over to the clubs. I don’t understand how people can even go to clubs. They are too noisy and you can’t meet anyone. And don’t even get me started on “VIP areas!”

Adam Lehrer: Giuliani is the worst.

Donald Sultan: The worst!

Adam Lehrer: Giuliani and Bloomberg saw this city get so unreasonably expensive. I do love living here and being young here, but you aren’t saving any real money, and I can’t help but think, “This would be by far the best city in the world if it was just a little cheaper.”

Donald Sultan: I see these young women working at galleries and they are pretty and nice and come from nice families and they get paid nothing,but they are out at restau- rants that cost $300 a meal. Where do they get the money? It’s very hard here.

Adam Lehrer: So you saw it change a lot?

Donald Sultan: Well, it got fancier. But you don’t really see it [in TriBeca] like you do in SoHo. I loved SoHo back in the day. There were galleries and artists and great lofts. It was fun. I’m sure it’s fun in Brooklyn when people have their own scenes, but it is Brooklyn.

Adam Lehrer: founder one said, “Art stars of the ‘80s were like the rock stars of the ‘60s or the fashion designers of the ‘70s.” Basquiat, Schanbel, Haring, you. Art stars now feel like their fame is limited to the art world. But you guys were widely known by anyone reading magazines back then. Was it strange to have such fame thrust upon you?

Donald Sultan: No, it probably affected me but it didn’t feel strange. It was just what I was doing and it was a small world. A lot of people did well. Most people that are known now are known through branding. It’s really about money. The value of art is how much it’s valued at art auction houses. The auction houses didn’t even sell contemporary art until Mary Boone and Saatchi started manipulating the market and holding auctions for younger artists and as a result jacking art prices way up. That created a monster.

Adam Lehrer: (laughs) You showed with Mary Boone, correct?

Donald Sultan: I did, that was my first gallery. I left her for the Willard Gallery. It was probably a business mistake, but I went with them because I thought they really had ter- rific artists at the time. But they weren’t great dealers. So I left and joined Blum Helman which was a terrific dealer. I always liked uptown. I never showed in SoHo again after Mary’s. And I never showed in Chelsea until recently. I don’t like Chelsea.

Adam Lehrer: Well there isn’t much reason to go there other than the galleries.

Donald Sultan: These big mega galleries, you have to fill them up, and everyone judges them by the scale of the gallery and not the actual art. There’s a reason artists make huge works and if it’s just to fill a gallery space than the point of it is missed.

Adam Lehrer: I read that you said the scale of a painting has no effect whatsoever on the impact of a painting. Do you still feel like that?

Donald Sultan: I think you can make a small painting just as powerful as large paintings.The smaller paintings were still lives but they could hold a big space and that was the idea. Scale has some- thing to do with it. But the size has to be because it’s what the painting needs. You talk about big paintings, the French 18th Century painters, it’s hard to make paintings bigger than that, like The Coronation of Napoleon or The Wrath of Medusa. They were made to fill pal- aces, not galleries. We don’t have the same lifestyle to support paintings that size. Donald Sultan, Forest Fire, May 14 1985.

Adam Lehrer: Do you think your early experience working in theatre imbued within your paintings a taste for theatrics?

Donald Sultan: Yes. I’ve always thought of [my paintings] as stages. My big book is called The Theater of the Object. It asks, “What is the drama around the painting?” The thing about painting though is it doesn’t tell you the story right away. It’s not like there is a beginning, middle and end. You, as a viewer become, a part of the its finish. And a painting should be deep enough that you should be able to get something out of it despite your knowledge of art.

Adam Lehrer: Why did you give up set design for fine art?

Donald Sultan:. I wanted more control. Painting was the only way to do it yourself. Movies require too many people. You can have an auteur vision but there’s a lot of mon- ey involved. And there’s a lot of people telling you what to do.

Adam Lehrer: And in movies now, there’s only maybe 10 American directors that have full creative control.

Donald Sultan: I’m not even sure they have full control. Not even Coppola can get funding.

Adam Lehrer: It’s crazy to me that the piece of shit superman movie gets a $200 mil- lion budget while the new PT Anderson film gets $10 million.

Donald Sultan: They don’t have the audience. Movies are just spectacles now. And Hol- lywood does spectacles well. I like the new James Bond film quite a bit (laughs).

Adam Lehrer: Spectre, yeah, I thought it was great

Donald Sultan: Yeah, they do these kind of explosions, but then people get however much for a painting, and you think, “Low budget picture,” (laughs).

Adam Lehrer: Do you feel most in your element undergoing really strenuous or dif- ficult labor and tasks?

Donald Sultan: I don’t know. I like to move through the work. I like to do new things. That creates a challenge.There’s a period in which the paintings must convince people they are good. When I first started doing paintings, people couldn’t understand them. Then they started to sell, and eventually everyone was doing flower paintings.

I have so many ideas that I don’t have the time to do them all. Someone tells me to get more assistants, but I don’t know that you can grow that way. You need the painting you just finished to find what to do next. [American painter and photographer] Chuck Close said a lot of the artists are just CEOs of art making enterprises. Why would you want to give up the fun part? Making the work, that is. I’d get completely lost doing that.

Adam Lehrer: Your art is so physical so if you weren’t connecting with the physical act of making it, it wouldn’t work? Donald Sultan: It’s what I’m comfortable with. I like the architectural quality. My work feels like it’s impossible to just walk by, it doesn’t fit in.

Adam Lehrer: I wanted to talk about Arte Povera, what spoke to you about their phi- losophy of only using every day materials?

Donald Sultan: It was about American everyday work. Abstract Expressionists weren’t dandies, they were real people, blue collar almost. Arte Povera artists weren’t like that but they valued simplicity in materials. I used them economically. I could buy tar at hardware stores and didn’t need to build a huge supply of oil paints. I figured: “paint, tar, it’s all manufactured anyways.” In the old days I would spread the tar, and think this is where [mid-20th Century American labor leader] “Jimmy Hoffa was.” It came from Jersey (laughs) I like the strength of the material. Pushing it is a wonderful feeling .They sometimes change the materials within the tar so the paintings change with the material.

Adam Lehrer: With art having gone digital, and as someone who believes in physical craft, do you think we’ve lost something as craft has gone wayside for concept?

Donald Sultan: No. Art has always grown with technology. Nothing is lost. People are creative, and people will keep creating. Whatever medium you choose. I used to do a lecture about how painting has evolved with technology, from cave paintings to wood- en panels, which allowed illusionism. And then the invention of oil paints. A lot of people might not be able to paint but they still want to create. ARTINFO

“Early Morning May 20 1986,” one of Donald Sultan’s “Disaster Paintings.” Credit 2016 Donald Sultan /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Private collection, New York.

A ‘Disaster Paintings’ Tour

Between 1983 and 2000, the artist Donald Sultan created his “Disaster Paintings,” featuring images of fire and industrial mishaps rendered in Masonite tiles and tar. But over the years, they have scattered to various public institutions and private collections.

Now, apparently for the first time, a group of them will be shown together at not one museum, but five in succession.

Opening at the Lowe Art Museum in Coral Cables, Fla., on Sept. 29, “Donald Sultan: The Disaster Paintings” will include 11 of the 73 works in the series.

The show will then travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington; the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh; and the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Neb.

“They’re quite dark — you’re in the middle of a toxic spill or the pollution of rivers or the Rust Belt disintegration of factories,” Mr. Sultan said. “I wanted people to see them again and re-evaluate them.”

While Mr. Sultan used imagery from newspaper photos as his source material, the paintings have powerful resonance today, said Alison Hearst, an assistant curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which organized the show.

“It’s a relevant moment to show a body of work, given all that’s going on in the world,” she said. “He’s talking about the life and death of architecture, industry — the man- made colliding with the natural.”

The show will be accompanied by a book published by Prestel, which features the entire series.

“The idea was, all these things happen simultaneously in our lives — decay and fecundity,” Mr. Sultan said. “Architecture or systems, no matter how strong, are fragile, and empires come and go.”

“The works were never meant to be political — I’m not making statements about the inhumanity of man or the nostalgia for the industrial heartland,” he continued. “They’re just facts. Being confronted with truths.” January 2009

Donald Sultan Show Delivers a Substantial Impact by Phyllis Braff August 25, 1996

Donald Sultan Fotouhi Cramer Gallery, 16R Newtown Lane, East Hampton. To Sept. 7. 324-8939.

By emphasizing a broad spectrum of Mr. Sultan’s themes and approaches over the last eight years, this show of works on paper delivers a more substantial impact than some of the artist’s more focused recent presentations in New York.

There is ample evidence of the way he takes familiar images out of context, alters ideas about their physicality and challenges perceptions with after-images. Flowers, fruit, bugs and buttons move from the specific to the generalized, taking on arbitrary colors and becoming flat schemes even when descriptions of substance and volume are included in the surface configuration. The most winning examples manage to combine their schematization with a measure of sensuousness.

Several of the charcoal and conte drawings of a single species of fruit have dissolving, halo-like contours that call attention to the way Mr. Sultan explores the line between material and optical sensations.

Wonderful, large dynamic pieces executed just last month are among the show’s strong points. They introduce conceptual considerations by assigning equal dimensions to an 8-ball and a bright beachball. Although the two are stacked as flat design elements, a diffused, halo-like echo around the 8-ball implies a difference in substance and weight.

In ‘’Album Series,’’ another new direction, the artist recasts his frequent subjects as motifs in an old scientific encyclopedia format. His post-modern touch is to transpose facts into perceptual statements.

Spacial manipulations have long been important to the Sultan work. The recent ‘’Four Red Buttons,’’ another highlight, uses an off-center placement to create energized areas of white space. The striking earlier screenprint, ‘’Quince,’’ takes an opposite tack by filling the surface and pushing past the edge with fleshy, rounded, dramatically tilting forms. Surface pressure generated by mammoth scale also plays a role in the success of the ‘’Wallflowers’’ screenprint.

A comparatively quiet, but effective series of aquatints based on playing cards features subtle, haunting nuances, soft scumbles and gentle perceptual ambiguities. Art: Sultan’s Tar-on-Tile Technique by VIVIEN RAYNOR April 12, 1985 -30’s, Donald Sultan is descended from the Process artists of the late 1960’s in that he makes art out of materials that are very much a part of contemporary life. Yet even as his coeval, Julian Schnabel, has cornered plates as a medium, Sultan seems to have been the first to work in tar, combining it with spackle and latex on a ground consisting of vinyl tiles attached to Masonite.

The artist doesn’t treat materials and process as ends in themselves, either; in fact, the new work at Blum Helman, 20 West 57th Street, implies that they are disguises. Beneath these curmudgeonly surfaces there beats a romantic sensibility that is profoundly stirred by nature. Often, but not always, it’s nature ruined by man. To some extent, this links Sultan with the Hudson River School painters who deplored the Industrial Revolution even as they incorporated its picturesque effects in their landscapes. More so, though, it connects him with Manet, who could as easily make progress his subject - for example, ‘’The Railroad’’ - as a lemon.

It has always been a mystery to me that the lemon, so beautiful and so indispensable, has never achieved symbolic, let alone religious status in human affairs. Lemons are conspicuous in Flemish and Spanish art, and Manet was forever inserting them into his compositions, but Sultan has beatified the fruit. Monster lemons grouped in threes and fours abound in this show, their surfaces unmodulated so they merge into single yellow masses. With their nipplelike protuberances, these repose on grounds divided between troweled spackle, tinged with brown, and solid, brown-black tar. It is interesting to see that when Sultan chooses to translate Manet directly, he takes an atypical work, ‘’Moonlight Over Boulogne Harbor,’’ of 1869, in which the masts of moored sailboats stand black against a dark blue sky. Taking just the boats, Sultan enlarges them, colors them tar and sets them against a livid sky effected by scumbling a brown glaze over the grayish tile.

The monochromes are unforgettable, especially ‘’Firemen,’’ in which figures looking like the slickered fishermen in Homer’s ‘’Eight Bells’’ are outlined against a fire and the view of a poisoned river that could be somewhere in Newark. But all are beautiful and what makes their beauty so miraculous is that it is achieved by textures and hues suggestive of some ghastly skin disease when viewed close up. Murky tones become tints of indescribable delicacy; incomprehensible, lumpy stretches of tar on a mottled and scaly field of no particular color metamorphose into trees, waiting for a fire to consume them.

Handsome though they are, the lemons, the painting of a black-sailed boat on a blue sea and that of bright flowers against a black background cannot compare with the monochromes for grandeur. Sultan is no revisionist, but in this show he belongs more to the 19th century than to the 20th. And while he resembles Anselm Kiefer not at all, he has something of the German painter’s spirit. (Through April 27).