Fields of dream: born a Mennonite farm boy in Pennsylvania, Warren Rohrer channeled his feeling for the land into abstract paintings whose "fields" of color take on an enliveningly literal connotation. Two Philadelphia shows offered a look at his unusual career - Biography

Art in America, Jan, 2004 by Miriam Seidel

Simply looking at the shimmering squares of Warren Rohrer's late abstract paintings, you would not guess the cultural distance he traveled to create them. By the time a teenaged Rohrer was photographed wearing a minister's collar at a Mennonite college in the 1940s, he had already distanced himself from family expectations and an agrarian childhood that could have belonged to the 18th century. From that moment to his mature work represents an even longer, more improbable leap.

The Philadelphia-based Rohrer, who died in 1995 at age 67, followed a career path characterized by reserve and rigorous serf-questioning, arriving in his middle years at a compelling integration of personal and art-world influences. Employing a square format and complex, Minimalist-inflected rules of mark generation, his later works transmit a breathtaking beauty and contemplative power, directly fed by Rohrer's conscious linking with the experiences of his youth.

The recent retrospective "Warren Rohrer: Paintings 1972-93," organized by Susan Rosenberg at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, succinctly revealed the subtly evolving phases of his last two decades of work. A concurrent exhibition at Philadelphia's Locks Gallery (Rohrer's longtime commercial venue) concentrated on earlier work, while a show last fall at Locks focused on his square-format paintings from the 1970s.

Rohrer was born in 1927 to a Mennonite family whose ties to their rural Lancaster County home went back to the early 1700s. Though not as strict in rejecting the trappings of modern life as the Amish, his close-knit Mennonite community was founded on frequent church attendance, Bible study and hard work on family farms. The beauty of the roiling farmland seems to have offered Rohrer, from childhood on, a kind of direct access to experiences that others went to church for. He graduated from Eastern Mennonite College in Virginia, not as a minister but with an education degree, intending to teach and paint. An early landscape was accepted in the Pittsburgh International Exhibition in 1955.

His decision to move back to Lancaster County with his young family in 1961 revealed less a desire to reconcile with his original community than an intentional reconnection with the land and light that had formed his way of seeing. (1) However, his professional home from then on would be Philadelphia. He commuted until moving there in 1984, teaching in and around the city and exhibiting there regularly through the 1960s. After teaching at Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) for seven years, he joined the faculty full-time in 1974. He had several solo shows at the Makler Gallery, then the city's preeminent gallery for modern art, between 1963 and 1971.

Much of his work from that period--some of it featured in the Locks exhibition "Warren Rohrer: Turning Point"--has a curiously unmoored feeling. Not only do his forms often seem to float, as even field and mountain do in the lightly painted, abstracted landscape Farm: April 2 (1971), but Rohrer himself drifted through numerous styles during that period. There are landscapes recalling Milton Avery's, some small, muted still lifes showing the influence of Giorgio Morandi (2) and a group of dark, thickly impastoed abstractions. Taking yet another experimental direction, in 1969 he created a series of big, biomorphically shaped paintings on plywood that playfully refer to local folk signage while also responding to contemporaneous art practices.

A trip to Europe in 1972 catalyzed the breakthrough to his mature work. Financed by friends, the trip took Rohrer and his wife, Jane, to Corfu, with further travel allowing them to see the memorial retrospectives of Barnett Newman in Amsterdam and Mark Rothko in Paris (both had died in 1970). Soon after returning, he made his fret grid-based painting, Barley (1972), a glowing square of yellow-orange loosely flecked with purple. (This and the other paintings mentioned below all appeared in the Philadelphia Museum exhibition.) The working method he would use the rest of his life quickly emerged, as he began with a thin or wiped-down ground over which he deployed rows of small brushstrokes in minutely varying colors and textures.

Grid-based work was in the air then (though Rohrer preferred to describe his compositions in terms of "rows"). Agnes Martin's austerely minimal grid paintings made a profound impression on him. Although he later confessed to feeling "aghast at how mechanical it seemed, like graph paper" when he first saw her paintings in 1967, (3) he continued to follow her work, eventually meeting her and inviting her to speak at his painting class at the Philadelphia College of Art.

But Rohrer's embrace of a square, loosely geometric format also represented a knowing and deeply personal alignment of this new approach with his own source materials. The field of color and the planted field; the "sowing" of marks left to right across the painting's surface, an arm's-reach wide in his larger paintings; the flat prepared ground covered by thicker growth; the ragged edges left open, revealing earlier layers: all his artistic strategies stood as palpable embodiments of an agrarian way of life that still resonated in him, though he had left it behind. (4) In a 1989 interview, he made the connection explicit: "The painting now becomes the field on which I do my work. I mean my heritage as a farm boy or growing up in the generation of farmers.... The field is where you go out and do your work." (5)