At the Galleries

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2008 by Wilkin, Karen

Jones's material palette enhances the ambiguity and allusiveness of her constructions. In the two largest works at the Studio School, she turned steel and the pale, matte surface of concrete into a range of greys, off-whites, and near-blacks, creating a tonal spectrum that both emphasized the spatial implications of the work and reinforced the character of each element. In one of the smaller works, suspended forms that bore the traces of having started life in clay were colored red, as if to emphasize that heritage; the color also underlined the visual weight of the masses and, at the same time, further animated the piece. Jones's last major New York exhibition, in 2001, marked her as a sculptor to watch with interest. It's good to have an opportunity to see how her work has evolved. Let's hope we don't have to wait another seven years for the next sighting of her original, inventive constructions.

Uptown, at Leslie Feely's elegant new space on 68th Street, "Earning His Stripes: Kenneth Noland in the 60's" reminded us of the associative richness and sheer beauty of abstract painting that aims at addressing our emotions and intellects through purely visual means-here relationships of color-the way music does through aural means. Twenty years ago, the kind of color-based, extreme abstraction that Noland has devoted himself to for the past half century, usually labeled Color Field painting, would have been readily visible in public collections and exhibitions, but until recently it has not been easy to see. In part, this has to do with the rising prestige of Duchamp-inspired "anti-optical" art that depends on verbal ideas more than visual ones; "process-driven" works of art that resisted language, demanded direct experience, and scrupulously avoided tackling sociological or political "issues" were decreed to be somehow less significant than "concept-driven" works that could be explicated as texts, while painting itself came into question as a "relevant" art form. Part of this hostility to Color Field painting, I suspect, has to do with Clement Greenberg's admiration for the approach; the artists associated with color-based abstraction suffered because of the animosity Greenberg often provoked in his last years. It may be that enough time has passed since Greenberg's death in 1994 that Color Field paintings can be evaluated for their own merits, rather than filtered through simmering resentments and preconceptions, but whatever the reason, there seems to be renewed interest in the period. Fairly recently, a large exhibition at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts examined the persistence of certain motifs in Noland's paintings over the years; a retrospective of works by Noland's friend and colleague Morris Louis traveled across the U.S. last year; a gallery of key works by Color Field painters, including Noland, is a high point of "Action/Abstraction," the survey of art championed by Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, seen last spring at the Jewish Museum, New York, and later at the St. Louis Art Museum and the Albright-Knox, in Buffalo; and Helen Frankenthaler, the doyenne of Color Field painting, was the subject of a survey show in London last spring. (Full disclosure: I am the curator of a touring exhibition examining the history of the movement, organized for the American Federation of Arts.)