'The Green Mountain Boys' at Andre Emmerich

Art in America, July, 1998 by Richard Kalina

It's a little too easy to be dismissive of Color Field painting and the school of welded-steel sculpture that accompanied it in the '60s and early '70s; also, of course, decrying the baleful influence of Clement Greenberg, the movement's critic-in-residence, even now remains a popular pursuit. True, outsized claims were made for the historical inevitability of Color Field painting, it sold awfully well (particularly outside of New York), and other significant directions in art -- Minimalism and Pop, especially -- were rejected out of hand by Greenberg and the movement's practitioners. But, seen from a distance of 30-odd years, works from Color Field's heyday in the '60s have a refreshing clarity and an appeal as much sensual as intellectual.

The recent exhibition, in Andre Emmerich's pure white gallery, of works by Anthony Caro, Paul Feeley, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski was undeniably handsome. Swaths, fields and bands of optically charged color were arrayed on the walls, complemented by Caro's carefully balanced painted-steel planes on the floor. The show's title (taken from a 1966 Vogue article by Alan Solomon, then director of the Jewish Museum) refers to these artists' association with Bennington College -- as teachers, consultants or nearby residents -- as well as to the literal meaning of the name "Greenberg." The Bennington connection is more than coincidental. in art we tend to think of the Arcadian in terms of landscape, either as the depiction of a benign wilderness or of a peaceable and fruitful man-made order. But the art in this exhibition suggests the Arcadian as seen through the lens of abstraction. Bennington College, set away in the Green Mountains of southern Vermont, is a small school, all women until the late '60s, that forms the center of a community of intelligent, idealistic and artistic people. Greenberg's core critical proposition -- that a work of art must adhere to those formal premises that distinguish its discipline but must do so without sacrificing esthetic verve -- implies both distance and pleasure. Bennington, then as now, was intellectually connected but removed from the gritty tussles of urban life. So, too, was the art that came from it in the '60s.

Of the artists shown here, it is Kenneth Noland whose work seems best to embody the movement's strengths. His unruffled presentations of stained-in stripes, concentric circles and chevrons are marked by a use of color that, at its most interesting, works in visceral counterpoint to the logic of the structure. The three blue circular bands of Spring Cool (1962), for example, while locked into a clear targetlike format, do not present themselves in a chromatically ordered manner, as they would in a similar work by Jasper Johns or in a Stella concentric-square painting of the same year. They fall roughly into the blue camp, but the inner band is bright ultramarine, the middle a darker grayish-green tone, while the outermost ring is a soft, light teal. The painting works -- it seems to breathe -- but exactly why is hard to say. And in the 1968 Transvaries, a horizontal stripe painting about 5 feet high by 12 feet long, the profusion of colors and tones threatens to overwhelm the straightforward composition, but, by an act of esthetic legerdemain, the painting does manage the synthesis. It is the lusher and livelier for it.

Greenbergian postpainterly abstraction may be low on intellectual cachet now (it was very meagerly represented in the 1996 Guggenheim abstraction show), but at its best it produced works that pleasurably hold the eye and engage the mind. There are, after all, different forms of seriousness. To see this work at a judicious distance from the rhetoric that supported it puts both the art and the theory into better perspective.