Ralph Wickiser at Walter Wickiser - Brief Article

Art in America, Dec, 1999 by Gerrit Henry

Ralph Wickiser, father of New York dealer Walter Wickiser, died in October '98, at the age of 88. Wickiser pere had no small reputation in New York art circles, especially those that swirled around later-century semifigurationists like Stephen Pace and George McNeil. From 1959 to '78, Wickiser was head of Pratt Institute's undergraduate and graduate schools of art and design and its art education department. Some of his educational books--especially An Introduction to Art Activities--remain standards.

Wickiser spent almost 20 years of his long artistic career as a pure abstractionist. Perhaps the most evolved of such paintings is the "Compassion" series of 1950-56, all fleet, somber brushwork and warm, richly off-keyed color. Then things changed. While building a house for his family in Woodstock, N.Y.--he was director of the division of art education at SUNY New Paltz from '56 to '59-- Wickiser noticed that the bulldozer clearing the land had deposited four monumental stones in close proximity to each other in the backyard. He was fascinated, and he photographed the rocks at different times of day, in different kinds of weather, in the grip of different seasons.

But he didn't get around to painting his stones until the early to mid-'70s. He would never again paint purely abstractly. Instead, he synthesized, in scenes of rock and stream, the formal with the gestural, the painterly with the less refined. The 1970-75 series "Four Seasons: Spring, Summer, Winter and Fall"--featured in this recent exhibition along with one smaller work--was a vision-changing labor of love. Nothing escapes his probing gaze: rocks devolve into complexes of pattern. Then, as the eye is adjusting to this sort of legitimately two-dimensional trickery, they reassemble themselves into rock upon rock, rocks on grass amid trees, gray presences under scintillating blankets of snow, or strange icons in the hale light of a spring afternoon, just a little after the thaw.

Wickiser was a master of natural light as seasonally manifested--its bright passages and its dark, its passion and its piquancy. The "Four Seasons" series, which, astonishingly, has only been seen once before, briefly, at the United Nations, is wonderfully expressive of the seen and the felt.