Stephen Pace: Reflections

ST EPHEN PACE REFLEC TIONS

W I L D H O R S E S ( 9 6 - 6 ) , 19 9 6 , O I L O N C A N VA S , 4 2 X 6 0 I N .

ST EPHEN PACE | R EF L EC T I ONS M A R C H 2 1 – A P R I L 2 0, 2 019

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A L L I M A G E S © S T E P H E N A N D PA L M I N A PA C E F O U N D AT I O N

ART REVIEW ON STEPHEN PACE WRIT TEN BY PETER FRANK

57th Street Review, February 1976 STEPHEN PACE | February 14–March 4, 1976 | SACHS Gallery | 29 W 57th Street, New York City

W

hen, after a long period of relative invisibility, STEPHEN PACE had a solo show in New York— June of 1964, if I remember correctly, at Howard Wise— there was a great commotion over the fact that he was painting, gasp, figures!

Not that figure painting had become so rare, especially not by then. Pace had been a promising member of the Abstract Expressionists’ second generation; it was not his conversion to representation that raised eyebrows, it was the kind S E L F P O R T R A I T, S T O N I N G T O N ( 7 2 - 5 ) , of representational work he 197 2 , O I L O N C A N VA S , 4 4 X 3 6 I N . was doing. Pace had not thrown in his lot with the Pop artists or any other such New Imagists. Nor, however, had he taken up the restrained impressionism—such as that of Fairfield Porter, Elias Goldberg, Nell Blaine, and others—which has characterized a large and significant segment of New York painting since the second world war. No, Pace was insisting on having his cake and eating it, too—painting different things in the same way he used to paint. Pace painted his people and animals and buildings just as he had painted abstract forms and fields, maintaining various aspects of his Abstract Expressionist style: the large formats, the vivid, right-out-of-the-tube color sense, and the painterly stroke that bespoke not just the hand’s motion, but the whole arm’s.

What has developed in this work of Pace’s since 1964 is an intensification of brilliance—the colors have increased in brightness, and are painted more and more loosely—and the opening of figural space. With this Pace emerges as a natural inheritor of Milton Avery. And what Pace inherits from Avery, of course, is the legacy of Henri Matisse.

Recollections of Avery and Matisse abound in Pace’s latest show of oils and watercolors dating from the past few years. There is the same spirit of expansive intimacy captured in landscapes and in interiors charged with the warmth of human presence. And, like Avery and Matisse, Pace conveys this deep-breathing pastorality not by portraying scenes, but by painting broad suggestions of them. Pace does not seek the image of relaxed freshness, he seeks the feel of it. Pace’s sunny day is not so much on the canvas as in the paint.

Could a Pace picture be mistaken for an Avery? To put even obvious differences aside, could a Pace watercolor be dropped into a group of Avery’s without anyone the wiser? For a few days, at least, you have an excellent opportunity to make the comparison. Give the Pace watercolors a good examination, then go next door and peruse the Averys. Close, you will find, but no cigar. Pace’s contours are less angular than Avery’s, his coloration brighter and wetter, his stroke broader.

Despite how evaluative it may sound, this comparison is not to imply Pace’s superiority over Avery. Avery explored whole areas of paint manipulation—short, patterned strokes, darkly opaque coloration (those wine reds)—in which Pace seems to show very little interest. Likewise, Pace’s extreme fluidity and brightness outdistance Avery’s because Avery did not seek those qualities in particular. The coincidence of the Avery and Pace shows gives us an opportunity, not to see two artists com-

pete at the same aesthetic, but to witness two artists establish distinct personalities while sharing certain approaches.

Pace paints with long strokes of unmodulated color, limber and languid at once. To achieve shadow or depth or any tonal modulation, Pace does not mix pigment, he juxtaposes it on the canvas. Pace still has not forsaken Abstract Expressionist practice; the canvas is always where the painting—the act of painting and the appearance of the picture—takes place. But he has a good idea how the painting is going to turn out before he starts. The elements of the picture (figure/figure/ figure/table/flowers, or, horse/horse/horse/horse/horizon, or, simply, trees/ground) are derived from various drawings, some as much as a decade old. Pace’s memory, as well as eye, is activated by the new look at the old drawings; he gains an idea of the desired formation and colorations partly from his innate sense of design, and partly from recollections of that day five years ago when the horses ran on the beach near Provincetown, or a model stood in a doorway in Maine. Many decisions and emendations are made in the act of painting, of course.

But Pace does some calculating, just the right amount, and it shows, most distinctly in the tightness of his vibrant compositions. This tightness does not compromise the spontaneity of the paintings because so much else—his brushstroke, his broad rendering of features, his high keyed palette—have that immediacy and infectious joie de vivre which Matisse invented for the twentieth century, and which his best successors— including Milton Avery and Stephen Pace—keep reinventing.

U N T I T L E D , 19 6 5, O I L O N C A N VA S , 2 4 X 1 7 I N .

T W O C L A M D I G G E R S , Y E L L O W S U N S E T ( 9 3 - 4 ) , 19 9 3, O I L O N C A N VA S , 4 2 X 6 0 I N .

SELECTED MUSEUM AND CORPORATE COLLECTIONS Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio American University, Washington, DC Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas AT&T Corporate Offices, Chicago Baruch College, The City University of New York Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine Bristol-Myers Squibb Collection, Princeton, New Jersey

S A R D I N E B O AT I N F O G ( 9 0 - 5 ) , 19 9 0, O I L O N C A N VA S , 3 4 X 3 6 I N .

Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island The Bundy Modern, Waitsfield, Vermont Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia Ciba-Geigy Corporation, New York Colby College, Waterville, Maine Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Institut Curie, Paris Deloitte, Haskins & Sells, Washington, DC Des Moines Art Center, Iowa Evansville Museum of Arts, History, and Sciences, Indiana Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine Field Corporation, Chicago Fryeburg Academy, Maine Hallmark Art Collection, Kansas City, Missouri Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC Hospital Corporation of America, Nashville, Tennessee Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana J. Patrick Lannan Foundation, Venice, California JP Morgan Chase Collection, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Maine College of Art, Portland Miller & Chevalier, Washington, DC Monhegan Museum of Art, Maine Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston National Academy of Design, New York Newark Museum, New Jersey New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC Portland Museum of Art, Maine Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Massachusetts Prudential Life Insurance Company, New York Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC UC Berkley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California Union College, Schenectady, New York University of Denver, Colorado University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls University of Southern Indiana, Evansville Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro S I X S U N F L O W E R S , 20 01 , O I L O N C A N VA S , 4 2 X 6 0 I N .

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick

D O T T E D B L O U S E ( 7 9 - 0 8 ) , 197 9, O I L O N C A N VA S , 2 8 X 3 6 I N .

C O V E R : R E F L E C T I O N S ( 7 2 - 9 ) , 197 2 , O I L O N C A N VA S , 5 6 X 8 7 I N .

G R E Y N U D E ( 6 5 -1 3 ) , 19 6 5 , O I L O N C A N VA S , 6 1 ½ X 7 8 I N .

ST EPHEN PACE | R EF L EC T I ONS M A R C H 2 1 – A P R I L 2 0, 2 019

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