Page 37 - Studio International - April 1972

Jack Bush
independence, manifested in the very beginning and Alex Katz, much too artificial. (Katz's This Time Yellow 1968
in their ability to look at the work Greenberg earliest treatment of his theme, looking as Acrylic on canvas, 86 3/4 x 68 in.
was talking about and to reach their own though done on the spot, was better.) The Coll : Dr and Mrs R. Tasker, Toronto
unexpected conclusions. Today, nineteen and freshest things were a couple of small landscapes 2 Jack Bush
fifteen years later respectively, the results of by Lennart Anderson and a painting of 1964 by Zip Red 1971
this contact—their work—speak for themselves. Fairfield Porter. However, nothing in the show Acrylic on canvas 674 x 1644 in.
My visit to Boston gave me, quite unforeseen, had the sense of involvement with the landscape Coll : Mr and Mrs Richard Albright, Boston
another chance to study Louis's work, as there which I've enjoyed in the work of some
were three of his 'unfurled' paintings, privately Saskatchewan painters (Dorothy Knowles, Reta
lent, hanging with a vertical stripe painting in Cowley, Ernest Lindner) and which I've missed
one room. Here it was possible to see the variety since I came from Canada to Washington.
in this series of work which Louis rightly Nevertheless, it seems to me that things may
regarded as his most ambitious achievement, and be stirring in American figurative art, for I
to appreciate how he would pick up colours, stopped off in New York on my way home from
almost at random, to play with them, try them Boston and observed how this year's Whitney
out, see what they would do together when Annual show of painting (always superior to the
cascaded down and across the canvas. Here was sculpture show of the odd years) had a higher
painting reduced to its simplest components, general level than usual. I put this down to the
liquid colour and canvas —a radical poetry, a fact that more good figurative artists were
radical vision, a radical questioning. Spending a included, among them three (Philip Pearlstein,
quiet twenty minutes with these paintings added Sidney Tillim and Richard Estes) whose work
to my hunch that Louis, a truly supreme artist, has recently improved. Used as we perhaps all
is perhaps the one whose work we now need to are to the drama displayed in the 'break-
look most at. throughs' and sudden changes of image of
Something else I had not anticipated was an contemporary abstract painters (Frankenthaler's
exhibition of 'The American Landscape 1972' story of painting Mountains and Sea, Noland,
at the Boston University Gallery. Concentrating Poons, Motherwell), there is a danger of our
on artists who work from the motif (as opposed not noticing the 'tortoises' whose development
to those who aim simply to imitate photographs), and grasp of their style are more gradual :
this show was a timely, if rather disappointing perhaps it is in today's figurative art, rather
one. The large painting by Alfred Leslie harked than in abstraction, that this type of artist will
right back to mid-nineteenth-century American be found. However, I have to say that, for me,
landscapes, with a similar finicky brushstroke the one really moving painting of the entire
and glossy finish, and I found other landscapes, Whitney Show was an abstract: Olitski's
such as those by Neil Welliver, Vincent Arcilesi Irkutsk Dawn. q
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