Robert Richenburg at Mishkin Gallery (NY)

Robert Richenburg:
An American Master's scandalous neglect

ROBERT ZALLER

Shortly after its run began, the superb retrospective exhibition of Robert Richenburg at Baruch College’s Sidney Mishkin Gallery in New York became a memorial show. With the passing of Richenburg, who was 89, the living career of America’s greatest art movement, the New York School that dominated the international postwar art scene (and remains the most important general body of work produced anywhere since then) has come to a close. A few peripheral figures remain, but the last indubitably major one has gone.

Richenburg was born in Boston in 1917, deployed and dismantled explosives across Europe in World War II despite a childhood scalding that had left him physically and emotionally scarred, studied with Hans Hofmann, and exhibited with De Kooning, Kline, and others in Leo Castelli’s famous Ninth Street Show in 1951. By the late ‘50s, his work was being shown and collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim, bought by such prominent patrons as Walter Chrysler, and represented by the cutting-edge Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Critics such as Gail Levin and Irving Sandler hailed the “intense, original and commanding” power of a “personal and uncompromising vision.”

Falling out of favor

Richenburg’s reputation seemed secure. And then he fell over a cliff. He resigned a teaching post at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute over a freedom of expression issue, severed his connection with Tibor de Nagy, and moved upstate to teach at Cornell. A new generation of artists arrived, and a new movement— Pop— replaced the abstract expressionism of the ‘50s. The New York School scattered, and some of its leading figures— Pollock, Kline, Reinhardt— died prematurely. Others, like Philip Guston, sought to reinvent themselves in a neofigurative style. The heroic, heraldic moment of postwar American art, with its brash, jazzy, confident raid on the sublime, passed into the cooler, self-reflective, and heavily ironic atmosphere of the ’60s.

Richenburg was hardly the only survivor of the New York School to fall out of favor in this climate, even though his own work was evolving in other directions, too. But his eclipse was the most serious of any major figure associated with it.

Richenburg’s neglect has since been a scandal of American art. He has not however lacked for advocates, particularly in the art critic and historian Bonnie Grad, who began to champion his work 20 years ago and has been largely responsible for its revival. There has been a series of shows, beginning at Brandeis University and SUNY’s Stony Brook campus, and latterly at the David Findlay Gallery in New York, which now represents him. Full redress won’t be made until one of the major New York museums that collected his work early mounts the major retrospective he deserves, and the standard reference works on the New York School make room for him in their pages. For the moment, however, the Mishkin Gallery show, which begins with a page of sketches from 1940 and ends with a small, exquisite frottage from 1990, gives a good idea of the range of Richenburg’s achievement. It helps, too, that the work is beautifully lit and suggestively arranged.

Intense energy, dynamic suspension

The exhibit’s core, supplied by the discerning collector Richard Zahn, shows a painter slowly evolving his own style in the 1940s, with nods in the direction of Picasso, Mondrian, Miro and other of the Cubists and Surrealists whose work undergirded the New York School’s abstraction; then coming into his own in a burst of strikingly brilliant and exuberant canvases in the 1950s; and climaxing in the late ’50s and early ’60s with one of the most impressive series of works produced by any American artist of the 20th Century, the so-called Black Paintings.

In these latter works, with their titular glance at late Goya, Richenburg painted brightly colored and fully realized works on his canvas, completely overlaid them with a thick coat of black, and then scraped through to produce a totally new work in which the elements of the original figuration showed through the black ground. The result, inevitably, was partly improvisational, but also tightly controlled: an intense energy field held in dynamic suspension.

Some critics have seen in it, reasonably enough, an evocation of nighttime New York at the end of its most ebullient decade; but it has, for me, even more directly cosmic resonances, as perhaps it did for Richenburg himself, who entitled one of the last canvases in the series, “Genesis.”

Like a gaseous nebula

Only two of the black paintings are on display here, but they are of exceptional quality: a smaller canvas, “Syria,” from the Zahn collection, which beautifully balances horizontal lines of color at the top and bottom with a free fall of verticals in the middle, like a sonorous theme balanced by counterpoint at the top and bottom of the register; and “Homage to Valery,” one of the largest works in the series and arguably the greatest, which is stunningly mounted on a white wall marked off by two black pillars. Here, a basic yellow grid is threaded by a pattern of blue, like a gaseous nebula wandering through fixed constellations, with red, orange, and white filling out the palette against the black. The extraordinary dynamism and vitality of the painting is maintained by scorings and slant rhythms that cross against the dominant pattern, and circles that play against fragmentary forms. The eye is thus kept continually working and moving, I should say, from delight to delight, even as the black ground holds the forms in powerful tension.

One could certainly wish for more of the black paintings, which were so memorably represented in the Stony Brook exhibit, but their relative paucity here gives welcome room for the work of the ’50s. There are residual influences— Hofmann and De Kooning— but in this, his most vigorously experimental decade, Richenburg seems to do nothing twice, but to approach each canvas as a fresh adventure, taking the most primal, elementary, and varied pleasure in the act of creation. From “Slumber” at the beginning to “Syria” at the end, one’s sense is of an artist continually involved in discovery, an imagination too fecund to consolidate, much less settle a style.

The surface of “Slumber” is a coppery black-brown as richly worked and ridged as a Ghiberti door, with a mysterious drift of gray across the center and a small, key-like red form at the top right, like the entry into a dream. Next to it is the entirely monochrome “Lactescence,” whose raised forms float like an elaborate archipelago on a cream-colored sea. In “Proclamation,” greens predominate, with strips of paint-saturated cloth that look from a distance like metal, and tiny dolls affixed at strategic points: a seeming mélange, but worked into the powerful whole that justifies the title. “Thunder in the Wind” and “Hurry” share a thick impasto laid on with broad strokes, but otherwise only a furious energy, a deadlock of forces that leap into fierce renewals.

An imagination almost too fertile

Seen from the perspective of these works, the black paintings appear as an attempt to discipline an almost too-fertile imagination; yet at the same time they lead into an utterly new dimension. Perhaps paralleled only by the contemporary but very different works of Clyfford Still, they stand as a uniquely American evocation of the sublime.

Abstract Expressionism was a risky game, especially as practiced by the leading figures of the New York School. Almost all of them fell back eventually on an achieved style— Pollock’s drips, Newman’s zips, Rothko’s color-cakes. In a sense, Warhol’s Campbell soup cans, the iconic moment of Pop, was a wry comment on the exhaustion of Expressionism in the early ’60s, its reduction to formula. Richenburg, however, didn’t settle for what he had done. He abandoned the black paintings after 1964, and instead moved into new forms and media that worked with a lighter touch and an expressive sense of space. Like Pousette-Dart, an artist with whom he contrasts interestingly (see a work such as 1961’s “Blaze,” also represented at Mishkin), he gave up a wonderfully rich palette to produce monochrome works, and late, partly figurative enamels in black, white, and gray. To the end, he kept trying to make it new.

The best art exhibits have for a long time been in galleries, as museums increasingly resort to commercial blockbusters. Richenburg will be at Mishkin until October 27. See him if you can, and discover an American master.