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Things were very different when Frederic Remington attended Yale's art school (1878-80). Art's job as he learned it was to paint scenes naturalistically. A born illustrator, he roamed the vanishing West and before his early death in 1909, he did as much as any man to immortalize the Frontier. Hauling in the Gill Net captures the cold of work on windswept water; it was included in the memorial Remington show at Knoedler Galleries last week.
The Wild Ones
The Western "idea of beauty," Paris' Jean Dubuffet has proclaimed, is "a meager and not very ingenious invention." An ex-wine merchant, Dubuffet decided to help out by inventing what he calls art brut. But Dubuffet's works are more brutal than brut and have more the flavor of wet dirt than of dry wine. His Personage on a Red Ground graced a Dubuffet show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery this week. Other items: putrescent-looking half-length figures, pygmies roaming mud flats, luminescent cows. As usual with Dubuffet, the sloppy loudness of the whole exhibition was sure to reduce his fans to awed whispers and the rest to stunned silence. It hurts to laugh at Dubuffet, for he laughs first, defiantly.
George McNeil's Circumnavigation was part of a one-man show at the Egan Gallery. An abstract expressionist in the tradition of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, McNeil limits himself as violently as any. There is no subject matter in his pictures, only gobs of paint. It is as hard to criticize such labors as it is to laugh at Dubuffet's, for they offer no clue to their own meaning or purpose. Perhaps that is why critics generally have treated abstract expressionism with cautious respect. But last week New York Times Critic Stuart Preston reviewed the McNeil show in a manner that may mark the turning of the tide of caution: "Color [in George McNeil's paintings] is strong and imposing and through its light and dark areas squirm ropy shapes bursting their way in and out of heavy layers of pigment here and there clotted into mounds . . . This exploitation of texture for its own sake is something that characterizes a great deal of painting by the contemporary school of New York. It strikes me not so much a sign of strength as an admission of weakness, that shape and color alone are insufficient."
Light & Dark
Stephen Etnier, whose Black Bell hung in an Etnier exhibition at the Milch Galleries, obviously agrees that "shape and color alone are insufficient." But instead of trying to make up the difference by tortured textures, he does it with pleasant and recognizable scenes of the sort seen on vacations. His oil technique is in fact milk-thin; daylight carries what drama his pictures have. Born 51 years ago in Pennsylvania, Etnier has long based himself in a Maine fishing village and traveled frequently. The light of unsullied skies and the distance of sea horizons do much to compensate for the calculating coolness of Etnier's art. The way Black Bell (a buoy beached for repairs) looms toward the eye yet keeps its place in the picture is an example of his exacting craftsmanship.