Page 53 - Studio International - July-August 1969

to his principal metaphor of vastness. When
Motherwell is more consciously simple, as he
is in a tall ultramarine blue canvas with a
white-line open rectangle, he fits more readily
into the current anti-lyrical phase of painting,
but he seems uncomfortable in the role.
The younger painter Brice Marden, who
shows at the BYKERT GALLERY, is wholly at ease
in the austere language within which he limits
his expression. Marden has reduced his palette
to its lowest light and hue value, working
mostly with accented greys: yellow greys,
mulberry greys, moss greys, mustard greys,
etc. These are arranged mainly in juxta-
positions of pairs of equal canvases. Their
surfaces are dimmed to a rubbery evenness,
with encaustic rubbed into a dull shine. There
is almost no contrast between canvases.
What is it then that gives these highly res-
trained paintings their authority? I think it
is Marden's extremely subtle technique which
enables him to suggest a light-held prisoner
behind the final impervious surface. The den-
sity he suggests, in some ways similar to the
Clyfford Still density where light is always
repressed, has a life of its own. Behind the
extremely fine variations—so fine as to be
almost imperceptible— on Marden's surfaces
are a convincing series of inner lives. The
paint is endowed with a pre-history. These
paintings are withdrawn, wan and the very
opposite of exuberant in character, but they
do possess a stubborn veracity which can only
be accounted for in terms of the decisions
taken at the very beginning, successfully
realized by a painter with a painter's instinc-
tive sense of craft.
A very different enterprise is Robert Ryman's
at the FISCHBACH GALLERY. Ryman has gone
far in the 'environmental' approach, having
filled the gallery with series of nearly identical
units. He paints loosely, so casually as to be
almost annoyingly sketchy. He relates his
identical canvases by means of two irregular
whitish stripes that run through and around
the room. A certain pleasing watery atmos-
phere emerges of necessity. It is hard not to
find loose paint washes attractive. But it is
just as hard to accept this single notion, for all
its environmental success, as anything quite
as weighty as Ryman's defenders propose.
The slogan 'paint as paint' is inane enough
to warrant contempt, and yet, that is what the
rhetoric around Ryman's painting contends.
If paint as paint is enough to satisfy the new
audiences, then the crisis in painting we have
heard so much about is really upon us.
DORE ASHTON q

Jules Olitski
Whip out 1968
Aluminium with acrylic air-drying lacquer
5x 21x21 ft.
2
Robert Motherwell
Open No. 33: in charcoal on raw sienna 1968
Polymer paint and charcoal on canvas
89 x 129 in.
3
Robert Ryman
Installation Fischbach 1969