Page 43 - Studio International - May 1970

its facture, repeatable. Sensitive to the has shown in using the circle, the curve imply- doubt that these paintings were widely, if
dynamics, scale, and inspired randomness ing circularity, and the stroke or bar suggests quietly, influential. They anticipated much—
variously associated with Abstract Express- that these shapes have a meaning for him that especially on the level of appearance, style,
ionism, he began to think of an art of essential approximates to the primordial significance of and finish. In attitude, of course, they were
forms, precise, regular or symmetrical, simpli- these forms as symbols of generation, female to have a more forceful impact; they re-
fied in colour, and all but static. and male principles. Pictorial incident, struc- emphasized art as idea, without appearing to
The results, over the decade of the 1950s, were ture itself, depends upon the interplay of these be merely the projection of designs or the
the 'hard-edge' paintings Liberman first ex- forms. They are stilled, held in tension; they elaborations of a system. In another sense,
hibited in numbers at the Betty Parsons contain or are contained; they are active, even they destroyed the art object's rarity by pro-
Gallery in the Spring of 1960. (There had violent; they interpenetrate or are penetrated. posing all art as potential multiples. Liberman
been an earlier public exposure of a single Liberman's sculpture, too, is apt to involve has sometimes turned away from this last idea,
painting : Two Circles of 1950 was shown in 1954 these forms in combination. Like the paint- but the deed was done.
in 'Younger American Artists' at the Solomon ings, many of the sculptures are appearances, In fact, Liberman's hard-edge paintings were,
R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.) The images of an action. Often, they work in the like Ellsworth Kelly's, an intensely personal
catalogue of the Parsons' show bore an epi- round; the 'action' changes; but the sculpture statement, even one with romantic overtones.
graph from Kierkegaard that is worth noting : remains the several-faced resolution of the But there the similarity ends. Kelly's work was
`Immediate sensation and immediate cogni- forms related, much in the way they are closely linked to observation—ought I to say
tion cannot deceive.' variously related on the picture plane. Linear was linked to close observation of the physical
Liberman's affinities in twentieth-century configuration is less important in these works world? Liberman's responses were internal and
European art were not with the Cubists or the than juncture, the points where the forms intuitive. Where he depended upon observa-
Bauhaus Constructivists, still less with the meet in tension or balance. Surface, too, is tion was in his sheerly decorative sense. Like
narrower absolutist doctrines of Mondrian or emphasized, at the expense of mass. Even the artists Paul Feeley and Frank Stella, he
Malevich. His sympathies seem to me rather the sculptures large in scale and grand in size recognized decoration as both intrinsically
to have lain with such artists as Kandinsky, deny weight and density. In particulars such structural and profoundly expressive. (Their
Kupka, Delaunay, more for the spiritual con- as these, Liberman is quite unlike David perception of the forces at work in decoration
tent of their art and their use of archetypal Smith and Anthony Caro, sculptors with lifts the art of these three men far above
forms than for their colour theory and brilliant whom he has been invidiously compared. He design. Their individual fastidiousness and
palettes. The imagery of these artists, taken is after quite different effects; his handling is personal understanding of scale refresh an
simply as shape and directional force, involves his own and serves personal intentions. His imagery as old as art itself.) Liberman, by his
also the circle and thrust that, stilled or sculpture is neither figural nor gestural, but selection of motifs and limitation of palette,
mobilized, were Liberman's characteristic emblematic or pictorial. achieves a graphic impact both in painting
motifs through the 1950s and through most of In his 1960 exhibition, Liberman showed—in and sculpture. This is true not only of the
the 1960s. (The exceptions to the foregoing effect—the painting of ten years. These works, hard-edge works, but also of the work that
are Liberman's 'vector' paintings, first shown an antidote to the hectic modes of then- shows the artist's mark directly.
by Betty Parsons in 1969; but even here colour current abstraction, seemed to some coldly Liberman's first appearance in London was
and triangle interacting tend to pressure or rational and unfeeling, the pursuit of an ideal early in 1961 at Arthur Tooth and Son, in the
animate angles and apex.) purity. To others, they seemed to announce a exhibition 'Six American Abstract Artists';
The extraordinary constancy that Liberman new posture of the avant garde. There is no his fellow painters, all from the Betty Parsons