Page 67 - Studio International - April 1970

2 4 5
Jack Beal Virgin of Ourscamp Larry Zox
Dundalk
Peace Northern France, about 1200 1969
Oil on canvas Ivory Acrylic on canvas
84 x 212 in. 14 in. high 50 x 150 in.
Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
3 on loan from Muse du Petit Palais, Collection
Alvin Loving Dutuit, Paris, France
Photo Bulloz, Paris

was engaged in other ways in changing mores interested in 'new' ideas. What interests him
and habits. (Among the causes for the unusual is pictorial illusion in the true sense. He uses
quickening of European life were Philip modules of hexagonal shapes which are pain-
Augustus's effective unification of France; the ted in delicate tones to suggest recessive or
sudden popularity of a revived Aristotle; the projective illusion. But there are other illu-
Crusades and concourse with the Near East; sions as well. These shapes are ranged on the
a larger development of bourgeois business walls with delicate gradated transitions in
initiative, and individual minor noblemen colour, seeming to melt away at the edge, or
vying with the Church to patronize artists.) to extend to an infinity point. By taking the
These artists who lived around the centres complex problems of painterly illusion and
where money was being used to sponsor art coming at them from various points of view,
were also, like our benighted Whitney artists, Loving subtly controverts the principle of the
engaged in forays of retrieval. In freely devel- module, and returns to the basic problems—
oping their individual views, they ransacked the abstract problems perhaps—of the modern
the art of the past just as artists always have. painter. In thus drawing from the modern
But they did it, as did Picasso, to escape from tradition in order to establish his peculiar
the strictures of history. If a standing female identity within it, Loving shows the vitality
figure from Winchester looks like an ancient that sustains the tradition.
Greek sculpture oddly transposed; if Nicholas Another abstract painter, Larry Zox, con-
of Verdun at times looks like a late Roman tinues in his new work to expand the possibili-
draftsman; if a fabulous ivory of mother and ties of the narrow range of problems he set
child looks little like its Romanesque proto- for himself some years ago. Zox commenced
type, it is because the artists were departing with sharply defined, geometrically oriented
from the received ideas of their immediate paintings in which colour was strictly flat, and
past. And they did so with a verve and origi- only the drive of the force lines animated the
nality that struck so many art historians that surfaces. Now, he has seemingly tired of the
they have now decided that there is such a stern surface qualities of flat colour and applies
thing as a 'Style 1200'. Fortunately, they his matte colour in order to suggest tides of
have dealt out this show from the point of movement beneath. The modified star shape
view of connoisseurship. Otherwise, they of central forms is more like a gently hanging
might have struggled to bring together as drape than a rigid flat surface. It is suspended
many similar works as possible, regardless of from the four corners of each section of his
quality, in order to make their point. Had horizontal paintings as though it were some-
they done that, they would have been good how detached from its surround, and this of
information purveyors perhaps, but bad course changes the whole context of his work.
connoisseurs. As it turns out, nearly everyone In fact, one of the longest paintings in four
who enters the beautifully-installed exhibition sections is determinedly romantic with its
is overwhelmed with the number and excel- washed, grainy greys progressing from left to
lence of artists represented—and from only a right and suggesting an experience in time not
forty-year period. unlike that proposed some years ago by
El
Turning now to one-man shows: In a small Motherwell.
anthology of recent works by Alvin Loving at
the WHITNEY, the vein of abstract art is
properly acknowledged. Loving is a very sen-
sitive painter who, as he says, is no longer