Material imperatives - exhibits of Louise Fishman's paintings at the Morris Gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Temple Gallery and Temple University's Tyler Gallery; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Art in America, Sept, 1993 by Miriam Seidel

While the look of Louise Fishman's paintings has continued to evolve, her tough, no-frills approach to abstraction has remained constant over several decades. Even though her work was loosely identified with Pattern painting in the late 1970s and Neo-Expressionism in the 1980s, it has always stood somewhat apart from any discernible movement, sustained instead by its own imperatives. Recently she seems to have turned yet another corner in her career, so it was particularly instructive this past season to see what amounted to an ad hoe retrospective of her work - a trio of shows organized in Philadelphia, the city where she was born and grew up.

Seven large paintings from the last eight years were showcased at the Morris Gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Dec. 15, 1992-Jan. 31, 1993). Eighteen smaller paintings, dating from as far back as the early '80s, were on view at the Temple Gallery, and over 100 drawings and experimental works, in mixed mediums were crowded into Temple University's Tyler Gallery (both Dec. 9, 1992-Jan. 15, 1993). The Tyler show was drawn from two periods, 1971-74 and 1990-92. Works in rubber, latex, canvas and found cardboard made up the earlier group; painted artists, books and layered tracing-paper works composed the later one.

The earliest pieces at Tyler documented Fishman's turning away from the grid-based painting to which she had been committed in the 1960s and her subsequent engagement with the example of Eva Hesse, who had died in 1970 at age 34 (Fishman was a few years younger). An untitled work from 1971, consisting of lengths of yellowed parchment-like rubber sewn together with black thread, is characteristic of this period in its clear debt to Hesse's process-based method.

Soon, however, Fishman began to cover her unorthodox surfaces with paint, as in the jungle growth of brushwork on the small rubber panels of an untitled triptych she completed in 1973. Also from that year, and coming out of the emotional matrix of a feminist consciousness-raising group shi had co-founded, are "The Angry Paintings," a kind of encyclopedia of female rage. With slashing acrylic strokes each of these works on paper essays an abstract feeling-portrait of a woman Fishman knows or admires), Angry Louise (a self-portrait), Angry Harmony (Hammond), Angry Nancy (Spero) and so on., more than 20 artists, writers, feminists and other famous women were represented in this show.

In the next decade (after a brief excursion into Pattern painting, unrepresented here) that energy seemed to release into works of an astonishing physicality and vigor; their signature marks were thick swabs of paint pushed around with palette knife or trowel. I thought of [the paint] like clay," Fishman has said. "I was trying to make paintings that felt like objects."[1] The large works Cinnabar and Malachite (1986) and Grand Slam (1985) both of which were on view at the Academy, are representative of this period, as are such small works as Bashert (1982) a stubby, blackened pictogram surrounded by thickly scumbled gray.

The two larger paintings achieve some pictorial depth through the overlay of hefty bands and sweeps of paint. The colors - vulgarly bright red and green-blue in Cinnabar and Malachite, and muddy grays and reds in Grand Slam - seem utterly liberated from any desire to please. In all these works, there is a bashert Cyiddish for "inevitable") quality to the way the underlayers and foreground gestures come screeching to a just-right halt at the point of each painting's completion.

A major shift in Fishman's painting was accelerated by a 1988 trip to Central Europe, specifically to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezin, with a Holocaust-survivor friend. Fishman's search for a new language to encompass the epic horror of this piece of her own Jewish heritage led her to overhaul her way of working. Of this period, she has said, I needed to skim off all the fat from my painting,"[2] a comment which in this context conveys additional suggestions of ritual fasting. She abandoned the thick slabs of color and instead began building up layers with numerous thin washes, often rubbed down and painted over again.

The ashen feeling of these color washes is literal, though subtle. Fishman had returned from her European trip with a fistful of ashes, cremated human remains gathered from the silt in the memorial Pond of Living Ashes in Aischwitz. This she mixed, along with a small amount of beeswax, into the paint used in this series. The darker, softer and vastly slower surfaces that resulted are exemplified in Sargenes (1988), a work whose floating rectangular veils of gray yield to a slight underglow of yellow only in a single, lower quadrant. With its quietly shifting equilibrium among planes and depths, darkness and light, this work inescapably recalls Rothko.

The many small paintings of this Remembrance and Renewal, series, shown at the Temple Gallery, demonstrate that intimate scale is the greenhouse, as it were, in which Fishman develops her introspective concerns. Each work allows a single gesture to explore an often uninflected mood. In the radically simplified Memorial Book, for instance, a dark path cuts through a lightly washed plane of grayed green and orange, like the trough formed by the binding between a book's opened pages. Spidery tracks of dripped turpentine precipitate around the path like tears.