Page 46 - Studio International - December 1965

Life and movement without recession

New York Commentary by Dore Ashton
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lngres insisted on the contour. Oelacroix on the
volumes in drawing. If the volumes are right, Oelacroix
maintained. the contours will take care of themselves.
Matisse. recognizing the Justice of Oelacroix's argu­
ment. found a way to fuse both views and established
a tradition that has fortified many younger artists.
Jack Youngerman. a 39-year-old painter. long ago
assimilated Matisse·s rhetoric. Like a plant. he turned
to the sun and nourished himself to maturity. Now. in
his exhibition of drawings at the Byron Gallery, and
paintings at the Betty Parsons Gallery, Youngerman
shows in his work how beneficent an influence Matisse
can be. It is to his credit that he submitted to a master
and emerged with a distinctive personal style.
Youngerman·s drawings probe the subtle relationship
between the white of the paper. treated as mass. and
the black ink volumes activating the mass. Keeping his
rhetoric clear and consistent. Youngerman generally
uses dense. unvarying black treated in a non-linear
mode as if black were colour. His results vary.
Occasionally his drawings are more ornamental than
dynamic. More often. they reach emphatic precision.
The problem he tackles in both his paintings and
drawings is one of the thorniest in contemporary
painting: How is it possible to suggest life and
movement without resorting to either planar recession
or tonal modulation?
Youngerman undertakes the problem in terms of
drawing. He strives to find the precise volume­
therefore the precise contour-which suggests at
once that it remains on the picture plane. and that it is
foreshortened. Foreshortening is the key, both in the
colour forms. and in the white spaces they either
circumscribe or activate.
Most of Youngerman·s paintings are organized around
two roughly similar shapes. They can be either
diagonal. roughly rectangular shapes, or fanlike shapes
that move out axially from an imagined centre. By
altering the contours of the two major forms. Younger­
man suggests a dynamic shifting of space. Although
so-called 'negative space· plays its part. more often
the whites on his canvases are positive legislators of
the final direction the compositions take.
Some of his canvases. because they consist of a
single colour and its white counterbalance. are more
2 like enlarged drawings and lack the thrust of compelling
contrast. But one painting, almost 10 ft. high, is a
masterful summary of all the preoccupations that have
enthralled Youngerman for years. Its bold division on
a diagonal axis; its plane of white swiftly covering
and moving out of the upper picture; its echo of white
below. as though reflected in glass or water. give this
picture a grandeur. and a suitable complexity. Yet.
it is essentially one of the most simple statements here.
By insisting on the validity of the foreshortened form.
Youngerman retains a vital connection with basic
visual experience-for instance. of walking in a land
scape and observing natural forms-and yet, partakes
of a highly developed abstract. plastic language.
A similar view is expressed in Patrick Heron's modest
English paintings at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery.
Heron carefully weighs the recessional qualities of the
warm colours in his paintings and juxtaposes them in
infinitely simple shapes. His gentle modulations from
red to orange are always restrained. Yet, there is a
slow rhythm perceptible in his paintings. Like Younger­
man. Heron has reduced his means to a minimum,
seeking to give spatial experience in quintessential
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