Esteban Vicente

Esteban Vicente

E ste ban Vi c e nte

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel (212) 445 0051  www.amy-nyc.com

By Natural Light: The Late Works of Esteban Vicente

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Esteban Vicente’s Blue Orbit (1998) is landscape-like abstraction awash in the most refined palette of robin-egg blues, rich gold-yellows and weightlessly soft violet. The deep space of a distant sun is suggested in the composition by a spot of dimly glowing orange. A prolonged dash of reddish-violet running along the bottom of the canvas affirms a horizon in its spatial advance. There are just enough hints to signal a natural exterior, and yet everything is afloat—held in an inviting state of dynamism that perfectly evokes the tender light-echoes of dawn or dusk.

As with so much of Vicente’s late work, the seductive effect of Blue Orbit is derived as much from subtlety as from statement. The nuanced—even delicate—sensibility of these paintings can be surprising considering Vicente’s direct association with the first generation of Abstract Expressionists —those widely considered to have reinvented American painting through a bold and uncompromising adherence to challenging new forms. Vicente’s artistic interests throughout his long career are inseparable from the innovations of abstraction that occurred in this period, and yet his late paintings read less as assertions of a brave new form, and more as personal responses executed through what had become fluidly internalized abstract means. Mediating between disparate forces—inner and outer, spatial and planar, tonal and coloristic—Vicente’s late paintings reflect a life dedicated to navigating the forms and theories of early American abstraction, and the consequent achievement of an individual style that is at once universal and direct.

C h r i st i na K ee

Among the more distinctive features of Vicente’s late work is an elusive aspect of “apparition,” lending his abstract subjects the quality of entities seen without ever being fully approached. A useful comparison might be made between the aesthetic effect of Vicente’s later work and that of some of his fellow New York abstractionists: the body-based solidity of Willem de Kooning, for example, the “concreteness” of Barnett Newman or the object-like surfaces of later Color Field painters like Kenneth Noland or Morris Louis. Vicente’s canvasses, by comparison, progress through a play of atmosphere and incident that conveys the sensation of space being traveled through toward a destination, as though the driving motive of the painting is a journey somewhere to find something. The effect is poetic in works like Horizon (1995), which feel as though they refer to some form of real or natural space, and uncannily powerful in more abstract works like Perception (1995) that have the quality of the sought-after conclusion to an internal pilgrimage. Vicente manages in these later works to manifest that which remains desired, combining yearning and attainment in images alive with simultaneous wanting and having.

It is interesting to note that the term “Abstract Impressionism” was temporarily adopted in relation to the work of Vicente and some of his near-contemporaries, such as Jack Tworkov, Milton Resnick and Hans Hofmann. The term has not survived in common usage today, likely because the stated aims of the New York School artists had, as Irving Sandler has pointed out, little if anything in common with what we

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imagine those of the Impressionists to have been.1 There might, however, be some indirect usefulness of the category as applied to Vicente’s late works. It would be hard to deny, for example, that many of these later canvasses invite at least superficial comparison to the enveloping atmospheres of Claude Monet in their spatial sensibility and in a palette that so easily evokes sea, air, sky and sunlight. In addition to these initial visual echoes, there are, perhaps, also more meaningful connections that can be made between Vicente and the first plein-air painters that serve to illuminate, at least in part, the slippery subject of content and motive within Vicente’s abstraction.

By all accounts, Vicente painted nearly every day in the studio, and always by natural light.2 Daylight remains the best environment by far for viewing the completed works, whose color relations maintain perfect equilibrium in varying intensities and shades of brightness, and whose inflected surfaces brood and dazzle according to the whims of the day. Vicente’s dedication to natural light may partially account for why there is in his abstract works a spark of not only optical pleasure, but of what feels like recognition. The paintings suggest an exquisite matching of form to some kind of shared experience: thoughts of a specific landscape, perhaps, or exact time of day.

An important influence on the later works was the studio in Bridgehampton that Vicente kept from 1962 until his death in 2001. Here his painter’s sensibility extended with graceful exuberance to the color and rhythms of the natural world, to the changing coastal light and the opulent colors of the garden the artist kept with his wife, Harriet. It would be a mistake to make too direct a connection in Vicente’s case between painting and place, and yet his late works are entirely expressive of a visual sensitivity shaped by countless hours spent in careful observation of a changing landscape and living, growing things.

Seen together, Vicente’s works recall the simple truth made explicit in Monet’s “series” paintings: that as far as visual reality is concerned, four o’clock in the afternoon is a universe apart from six o’clock in the evening; that there exists a limitless and ever-changing

reservoir of sensation available to the artist at every minute. Vicente’s abstractions appear to spring from this principle, not only as applied to external sensation, but also as applied to the parallel inner world of reflection, memory and thought. It makes sense, as Sandler recounts, that Vicente’s test of a painting’s completion was when its own mysterious internal light was correct, and when the entire surface of the canvas was somehow expressive of a unified experience of a singular space sensation.3 The quiet power of Vicente’s late works is especially moving when it is understood as a conclusion to a long, varied and sometimes difficult career. Born in Segovia province in 1903, not far from Madrid, Vicente decided at a very early age to be an artist. He was likely influenced, at least in part, by his father, who was an amateur painter and who regularly took young Esteban to the Prado and to other cultural institutions of the capital. Vicente would later remember his reaction to the “very dark, gloomy” Prado with ambivalence, 4 but his visits there, in addition to his later studies in sculpture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, formed an important part of the thorough education he received in the rich tradition and techniques of Spanish art.

A restless student, Vicente, even at the earliest stages of his education, sought out news of the modern, abstract and surreal movements that were developing in Paris and other major European centers at that time. The institutions of 1920s Spain however, generally held firmly to an academic tradition. Vicente soon found himself part of the “Generation of ’27,” a now-famed group of poets and artists whose members included Federico García Lorca and a young Luis Buñuel. Their interest in the new art was almost by necessity accompanied by a youthful drive against the “putrefactos,” as they dubbed those who upheld the conventions of what they perceived to be their provincial cultural environment. Although Vicente in later years came to be known as a dignified (and elegant) figure within the many institutions at which he taught, a certain psychology of artistic contrarianism—of self-positioning outside the mainstream in order to gain critical distance—appears to have persisted throughout his career.

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Vicente lived in Paris before he settled in New York in 1936, in what must have been a difficult move amid the uncertainty created for his family by the Spanish Civil War, which began that same year. He married his first wife, Estelle Charney, in 1935, and in 1943 they suffered the loss of their daughter, Mercedes, who was born with a heart ailment and passed away at the age of six. Excluding a two-year sojourn working for the Spanish consulate in Philadelphia before the end of the Civil War in 1939, Vicente’s early years in New York were devoted as much as possible to working in the studio. It is from this time onward that we begin to get the clearest image of the painter—slowly forming friendships with important figures of the time, such as Harold Rosenberg, Edgar Varèse and de Kooning, and participating in historically important exhibitions such as Talent 1950, curated by Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro, the Annual Exhibition at the Whitney in 1950 and the groundbreaking 9th Street Art Exhibition of 1951.

This period in New York artistic life is retrospectively characterized by the heady debates among abstractionists that were held at venues such as “The Club” on Eighth Street, where Vicente was a member. He has recalled remaining somewhat aloof, however, from much of the discussion of that time. Like many of his generation who were newly arrived in New York from Europe, Vicente would have come on the scene with some already well-formed ideas about the role and larger implications of art-making.

He had by that time been exposed to art as a means of cultural reinvention, as a vehicle for transmitting tradition, and as even an instrument accompanying oppression. His exposure to the experiments of the surrealists and to the mystically oriented strain of early European abstraction would also have enriched his thinking on the collective mythologies, unconscious drives and conscious instincts that might all be posited as forces of the creative act. Elizabeth Frank, in her biography of the artist, builds a compelling portrait of Vicente developing his artistic individuality through a total commitment to the hands-on work of the studio, making gradual gains through disciplined cycles of painterly engagement, struggle, departure and reengagement.

What emerged as Vicente’s mature style was a sophisticated approach poised between the expressive force of purely flat abstraction and the rich potential of spatial depth naturally read into the painted surface. From a formal and technical point of view, Vicente’s works are spectacularly well executed. The balancing act he came to achieve between depth and flatness results from the intuitive mastery of countless variables: determining the visual “weight” and position of color; knowing when a shape would hold, and when it would slip within the picture plane; and knowing when the instinct toward drawing needed to be unharnessed, and when it needed to be reigned in.

We can see, for example, in works like Untitled #5 (1998) areas where decisive lines of charcoal quietly support the cloud-like marks above. A close look at the work also reveals that a nimble interplay of whites has been used to create the necessary surface tension. In some areas, it is the white of the primed canvas beneath that has been left visible; in others, a near-impasto of identical shade has been applied as a kind of purposeful camouflage. As with the best of Vicente’s work, the invention and spontaneity of Untitled #5 is underpinned by a careful and conscious series of decisions based on hard-won knowledge of how paintings “work.”

The element of care and restraint, so central to these works, was for Vicente linked to a personal philosophy of painting. In 1964, he wrote Painting Should Be Poor, an essay whose wonderfully evocative title illuminates a crucial aspect of his work—a firm resistance to indulgence in effect at the expense of “essence,” or what might be called the central content of the painting. It is notable that Vicente excelled at the notoriously difficult midsize format, which relies neither on the peripheral impact of large-scale abstraction, nor on the jewel-like quality of smaller works. For all their visual drama, Vicente’s works derive their strength more from an incisive clarity than from any kind of impact of scale or purely chromatic punch.

It is tempting to link the austere aspect of Vicente’s approach with the Spanish tradition (one thinks of sparse Francisco de Zurbarán still lifes, Francisco Goya’s stark

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portraits) that formed his first education in painting. Vicente was once described as “Castilian as a chickpea,” 5 but he retained an ambiguous relationship to his artistic heritage, establishing what ultimately proved to be an energizing tension between the rejection and incorporation of tradition. Oddly enough, it is perhaps through his remarkable color sense that the Spanish influence can be traced. His early works frequently include the ochers and somber tones associated with the Iberian landscape and are often based in a distinctively Spanish use of pure blacks. Working with a kind of logic of opposites, it could be said that the blacks and grays so central to his early work form a foundation for the richly chromatic paintings of Vicente’s mature style. It is a well-worn truth that vital color in painting is part and parcel of an understanding of chromatic relationships to tonal equivalents, and that behind every great colorist is a painter who can accomplish phenomenal works within the grayscale. In Vicente’s case, his achievements with color can feel like direct inversions of the palette’s darkest hue. It is as though his rich colors contain within them the intensity and mystery of their inky alter ego, in parallel fashion to the way in which Vicente’s work yields most voluptuous effects from an austerity of means.

Works that have an almost monochromatic reliance on a single color, like Luz (1995), are especially rewarding. Vicente’s command of color at this stage allows for a single hue or shade to evoke any number of moods, associations or effects, and to hold any position within the canvas, advancing or receding, as per the artist’s intention. As Frank writes: “[Vicente] penetrates, like a deep-sea diver, the landscape of a single hue, opening up and freely moving through what can be almost infinitely various gradations, inflections and fluctuations…sometimes building toward a hue of maximum saturation, as if searching like a harpooner for its innermost heart.” 6 The works of this exhibition are especially valuable presences in the context of painting at the present moment. It might be said that there is a predominantly designed, or illustrative, instinct in much work being done at this time (arguably visible

equally in abstract works), in which colors and forms so often seem to be extensions of premeditated effect. The intention and directness of this approach can carry its own form of power, but Vicente’s associatively complex abstractions, which feel as though they are built from the inside out; serve as an important source of contrast.

The sustained subject matter that takes form in these late works similarly seems like a lesson passed on from an entire life spent painting. Having the artistic means to express any inflection and any association within his mode of abstraction, Vicente chose to provide in these late works a rich and generous visual experience in canvasses replete with a sense of beauty, abundance and open possibility. Like a love song, the shapes and colors of works like Unity (1993) coalesce in a perfect arrangement of parts: here green and orange forms nestle in the bold turquoise ground, all the while maintaining a clear visual echo of the expanse of pale bluish green above. Like so many of Vicente’s late works, Unity seems to reflect an environment that is both mysterious and uncertain, but ultimately structured through a system of harmonious connections— a universe that is both gentle and complete.

N otes 1. Irving Sandler, Esteban Vicente: The Aristocratic Eye (New York: Ameringer Yohe Fine Art, 2007), p. 8.

2. John Goodrich, Esteban Vicente/ Paul Resika (East Hampton, NY: Lizan Tops Gallery, 1998).

3. Sandler, Esteban Vicente: The Aristocratic Eye, p. 11.

4. Elizabeth Frank, Esteban Vicente (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1995), p. 11.

5. Sandler, Esteban Vicente: The Aristocratic Eye, p. 12.

6. Frank, Esteban Vicente, p. 79.

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Ode to Sun V i ncent K atz

You are on the sidewalk It is hot but there is a breeze There are people here But out there is no one But there is the flush Of air moving down space

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There is a sense of action As no history, just gesto That is nature bringing it Down through air you sit in Ashes make the journey home Home is somewhere in the mind Spends the winter there rather Than coming back here

Here is comfortable, as Wisdom is a horizon

But earlier, there was orbit Buildings rising high in sludge

People are comfortable when A view is curtailed scene

Legs straddle mise en scène Yesterday expansive splash

A grabbing also insistent Is the desire to remain here

Abrupt support for hurtle Looking back, ahead

But let go is to go away Let sensation reign infidel

And the past is conjoined Ashes to loam sunrise

Space is cradled between thumb And fingered element drop

A layer, ayer, third one Substance on the surface

Otherwise known as balance In the interim in the back

Dense, involuntary Substance of the body

Forward into intermingling Thrust is meaning around

A term for ground, here For those abound above

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U n i ty   1993

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Inte rvals   1993

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Aye r 1993

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unt i tled 1993

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T ens i on   1994

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unt i tled   1994

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C ompos i t i on  1995

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E a r ly   1995

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Ho r i zon   1995

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L uz 1995

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P e r cept i on   1995

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Rad i ant space   1995

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s i n T i tulo   1995

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unt i tled   1996

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O n S pace ( Ha r r i et )   1996

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P e r cept i on   1996

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S i lence   1996

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Ha r mony   1996

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F r om A bove   1997

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N YC L andscape   1997

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unt i tled # 1 5   1997

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unt i tled # 5   1998

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B lue O r b i t 1998

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Ove r 1998

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H i g h E nd   1999

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unt i tled   1999

P late li st

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p. 15 Unity, 1993 Oil on canvas 40 x 50 inches (101.6 x 127 cm)

p. 25 Untitled, 1994 Oil on canvas 40 x 32 inches (101.6 x 81.3 cm)

p. 35 Perception, 1995 Oil on canvas 42 x 50 inches (106.7 x 127 cm)

p. 17 Intervals, 1993 Oil on canvas 37 x 46 inches (94 x 116.8 cm)

p. 27 Composition, 1995 Oil on canvas 50 x 42 inches (127 x 106.7 cm)

p. 37 Radiant Space, 1995 Oil on canvas 36 x 48 inches (91.4 x 121.9 cm)

p. 19 Ayer, 1993 Oil on canvas 33 x 44 inches (83.8 x 111.8 cm)

p. 29 Early, 1995 Oil on canvas 42 x 50 inches (106.7 x 127 cm)

p. 39 Sin Titulo, 1995 Oil on canvas 42 x 50 inches (106.7 x 127 cm)

p. 21 Untitled, 1993 Oil on canvas 38 x 28 inches (96.5 x 71.1 cm)

p. 31 Horizon, 1995 Oil on canvas 50 x 42 inches (127 x 106.7 cm)

p. 41 Untitled, 1996 Oil on canvas 40 x 52 inches (101.6 x 132.1 cm)

p. 23 Tension, 1994 Oil on canvas 42 x 50 inches (106.7 x 127 cm)

p. 33 Luz, 1995 Oil on canvas 50 x 42 inches (127 x 106.7 cm)

p. 43 On Space (Harriet), 1996 Oil on canvas 50 x 42 inches (127 x 106.7 cm)

p. 51 From Above, 1997 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches (132.1 x 106.7 cm)

p. 59 Blue Orbit, 1998 Oil on canvas 26 x 36 inches (66 x 91.4 cm)

p. 45 Perception, 1996 Oil on canvas 50 x 42 inches (127 x 106.7 cm)

p. 53 NYC Landscape, 1997 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches (132.1 x 106.7 cm)

p. 61 Over, 1998 Oil on canvas 26 x 36 inches (66 x 91.4 cm)

p. 47 Silence, 1996 Oil on canvas 36 x 38 inches (91.4 x 96.5 cm)

p. 55 Untitled #15, 1997 Oil on canvas 42 x 32 inches (106.7 x 81.3 cm)

p. 63 High End, 1999 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches (132.1 x 106.7 cm)

p. 49 Harmony, 1996 Oil on canvas 36 x 30 inches (91.4 x 76.2 cm)

p. 57 Untitled #5, 1998 Oil on canvas 42 x 52 inches (106.7 x 132.1 cm)

p. 65 Untitled, 1999 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches (132.1 x 106.7 cm)

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S elect P ubl i c C ollect i ons

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Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York Art Institute of Chicago Baltimore Museum of Art Banco de España, Madrid Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin Broad Art Center, University of California, Los Angeles Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing Brooklyn Museum, New York Brunnier Art Museum, Iowa State University, Ames The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio The Carl Van Vechten Museum, Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn.

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington

Dallas Museum of Art Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington Detroit Institute of Arts Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York Guild Hall, East Hampton, N.Y. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington Honolulu Academy of Arts Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H. Housatonic Community College, Housatonic, N.Y. Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, N.Y. Institut Valenciá d’Art Moderne, Centre Julio González, Valencia, Spain Los Angeles County Museum of Art Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Museo Colecciones del Instituto de Crédito Oficial, Madrid Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid Museo Patio Herreriano de Arte Contemporáneo Español, Valladolid, Spain Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Modern Art, New York National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo. Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York, Purchase New Jersey State Museum, Trenton Newark Museum, New Jersey Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, Calif.

Patrimonio Nacional, Spain

Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, N.Y. Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, N.J. The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Syracuse University Art Galleries, Syracuse, N.Y. Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Ariz.

University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn.

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Mass.

Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Mass.

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.

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Vi ncent Katz is a poet, critic, and translator. He is the author of the book of translations, The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton, 2004), and is currently translating the poems of Hesiod from Ancient Greek. He curated an exhibition on Black Mountain College for the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (MIT, 2002; reprinted 2013). He was the recipient of a Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature for 2001–2002 and has had residencies at the American Academy in Berlin and Yaddo. He curates the Readings in Contemporary Poetry Series at Dia Art Foundation in New York City.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

Esteban Vicente 16 December 2014 – 31 January 2015 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel (212) 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com

Publication © 2014 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe All rights reserved

By Natural Light: The Late Works of EstebanVicente © 2014 Christina Kee Ode to Sun © 2014 Vincent Katz Ode to Sun was written in response to the late paintings of Esteban Vicente.

Made in the USA Catalogue designed by Dan Miller Design, New York Printed and bound by Puritan Capital, Hollis, New Hampshire Photography of the art by Tom Powel, New York Cover: Harmony (detail), 1996, Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 inches (91.4 x 76.2 cm) I SB N

978-1-4951-300-7-6