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Robert Jay Wolff at Canfield - Santa Fe

Art in America, Dec, 2003 by Arden Reed

Robert Jay Wolff (1905-1977) had a one-man show at the Guggenhelm in 1951, was collected by several major museums, the Tate Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago among them, and for nearly 20 years chaired the art department at Brooklyn College, where his colleagues included Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko. After a posthumous exhibition at New York's Joan Washburn Gallery in 1980, Wolff's reputation waned--the work stored away in a Connecticut barn--until Canfield Gallery brought it back to life last summer. "Encounters with Light" comprised 13 of Wolff's final canvases (there are another 30 or so), arrangements of hard-edge, interlocking quadrilaterals of pure color from the years 1965 to 1972, after which illness prevented the artist from working.

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Although he began as a sculptor, training in the U.S. and Paris, by the mid-1930s Wolff had turned to expressionist painting. In 1938 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy invited him to join the faculty of the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Thereafter, Wolff's style underwent several metamorphoses. In the 1940s he often painted under the sway of Klee and Kandinsky. The soft-edge checkerboards from the early 1950s turned sharper over the course of the decade, and the 1960s paintings displayed a new interest in color relationships.

Wolff's late non-objective work addresses formal problems of composition, particularly systems of rectangles and squares that recall the investigations of Joseph Albers. Some paintings show squares framed by rectangles, while others reverse the process and another does both. On one rectangular canvas, Wolff nests several overlapping rectangles that become increasingly squarish as they diminish. In this process, color is essential: typically a bright central square stands out against darker surrounds. But Wolff also counterpoints strong contrasts with subtle shifts, illustrating the Bauhaus principle that our perception of form's color is influenced by the characteristics of adjacent colors. Other decisions concern paint application, which ranges from thick and uniform to thin and uneven, with traces of canvas and hints of gestural marks revealed. Similarly, the edges between colors sometimes wander slightly from straight lines, thus avoiding an impression of mechanical precision.

Dwelling on squares and rectangles might make Wolff sound formulaic, and a few paintings resemble perception exercises. But most are convincingly realized, self-contained worlds: Apollonian, harmonious, impersonal. His subtle and rather surprising palette includes eggplant and olive, slate and coral. Color choice and the sense of proportion are both unerring and reinforce one another. In Light of the Night, the only titled painting in the show, form and color in tandem lead you smoothly from square to rectangular, from dark to bright, evoking a sure yet otherworldly serenity.

Robert Jay Wolff at Canfield - Santa Fe

Art in America, Dec, 2003 by Arden Reed

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