Robert Mangold at Peter Freeman - New York

We rarely get to see a large selection of a mature artist's earliest work except in museum retrospectives. In that context, with the more familiar material just around the corner, so to speak, we tend to judge those early, and sometimes shakier, efforts against works where principles have been clearly defined and esthetic rough edges smoothed out. The exhibition of Robert Mangold's paintings and drawings from 1964 to 1966 at Peter Freeman showed us an artist assembling his repertoire of ideas, materials and techniques.

Consisting of 10 paintings and four works on paper, the show felt both historical and up-to-date. Connections to other early Minimalist work abounded. We saw echoes of Robert Ryman, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Tuttle. Mangold's early work is, for the most part, small-scaled, and with its varying mix of cobbled-together materials (oil, acrylic, graphite, wood, masonite, metal) appears engagingly handmade.

While Minimalist in look, these works were not generated, as LeWitt's were, by systems. Rather they resulted, in large part, from observation of the urban world. Mangold paid particular attention to the spaces between things, especially buildings, and also to isolated architectural detail. Window Wall Yellow and Tan Sketch (1964), in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., is an 18-by-10-inch oil-on-plywood painting. In the top section, painted a creamy yellow, a vertical rectangular piece has been removed from the upper left corner, suggesting the presence (or absence) of a window. The bottom, ocher section, somewhat smaller in area than the top, can be read both referentially--a shadow or a wall section in another material or color--or purely formally. The work has aged well. The paint has cracked and weathered, and the nails are coming up, but rather than diminishing it, the effects of time have given the painting a funky elegance and charm.

Understandably, not everything in the early work made it into the more developed paintings. One path not taken was the use of a spray-painted color gradation. The spray ranged from the suggestion of a lightening sky framed by wall and rooflines in Pale Area (Tan and Pink), 1965, to the more full-blown atmospherics of Untitled (Sketch for Blue Area), 1965. Another avenue not pursued was the application of additional materials to the surface of the painting, as in Sketch for Gray Window Painting (1964) or Red Panel of the same year.

The great pleasure of this show was seeing the way Mangold thought and felt his way forward. The device abandoned is a perfect marker, for that which was not done helps to define that which was. It was good to look at this work on its own. While pointing the way to Mangold's later paintings, this group possessed more than enough coherence and creative energy to claim our interest and admiration.

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