Page 47 - Studio International - August 1966

My other encounter at one remove with Graham is only three passages marked by Graham, all referring to
perhaps of interest here: I found a copy of Ozenfant's the mathematics of art. The one doubly marked passage
`Art' in a second-hand book dealer's, with Ozenfant's began : 'Everything seems to grow following mathematic
inscription to John Graham (`this souvenir of better "forms" which are precisely the elementary forms of the
times') dated 1940. Looking through the book I found language of art...'

Graham evidently was much preoccupied with science
and mathematics, and pushed beyond, wherever possible,
into the realm of alchemy. His drawings are frequently
scored with graphs and zodiacal (or what appear to be
zodiacal) signs, and other hermetic allusions. Even in
one of his most impressive later paintings of a Renais-
sance beauty, he places a dodecahedron at her side to
remind us that he is concerned with things other than the
private melancholy of his wall-eyed Venus.
Among the many undated works are a group of roman-
tic portraits of cavalry officers, all fine fellows, and a
group of self-portraits. When he painted his own visage,
Graham invariably suggested Roman emperors, yoga
masters and even, I suspect, the venerable Gurdjieff. His
other male characters seem revenants from the days of the
Imperial Russian ballet.
If anything influenced the American painters, it is
perhaps Graham's palette. His use of strong pinks, blacks,
greens and violets is singular and personal. Shades of his
schema can be found in early works by Gorky, deKooning
and Pollock. In a period when black was still despised by
academic painters, Graham used it with ornamental
relish. His dissonance was in keeping with his theory
stated in his book, that 'beauty is the beautiful expanded
to the verge of ugliness.'

The end of the season is a good time to do things not
ordinarily possible, as the KORNBLEE GALLERY proved in
its exhibition of two works by two artists. All too rarely
are we permitted to concentrate on a single work on a
single wall.
In this case, Larry Zox is represented with a few tiny
sketches leading up to the huge horizontal painting
dominating an entire wall. And Dan Flavin has one
neon construction and a miniscule sketch for it.
Zox has been working his way outward in his composi-
tions for at least two years. He works with thin, brittle
planes arrayed along a horizontal axis. They are planes
in foreshortening, moving at once inward and outward.
Central diagonal rhomboids in varied greys are forced
Above Below to incline while their orange neighbours open out like
John Graham Poussin m'instruit 1944 the flaps of a box.
Larry Zox Single file 1966
Liquitex on canvas 7+ x 17+ft Kornblee Gallery
Oil on board 60 x 48 in. While he takes care that a rectangle is never pure (one
side almost always slants, suggesting arrow-like visual
directions), Zox depends largely on the rectangle's
symmetry which he tries to upset only very slightly. His
forms are designed to stand alone first, and to form pat-
terns only after contemplation. He aerates each shape
with white so that the 'object' quality of the form is intact.
His effect is one of cool dynamism. Restraint is almost
impoverishing here. While the paths the eye takes are
pleasing, and while the colour is satisfying, the final image
feels thin and unreasonably meagre. Yet, it is more vivid
than most young painters in this austere idiom can
achieve and carries within it the promise of a much richer
deployment of form when Zox is ready.
Flavin's neon-tube construction is composed of seven