Out of 10th Street into the 60s

OUT OF

Irving Sandler

10TH ST

INTO THE

60s

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OUT OF

10TH ST

Irving Sandler Ronald Bladen Mark di Suvero

INTO THE

60s Lois Dodd Al Held

Alex Katz Alice Neel

Philip Pearlstein George Sugarman

September 4 – October 11, 2014

525 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10001 212.695.0164 LORETTAHOWARD.COM

Give My Regards to Tenth Street Irving Sandler

The 10th Street artists group, a loose confederation of abstract expressionist artists, displaying some of their works on street, c.1956.

(Photo by James Burke/ The LIFE Picture Collection/ Getty Images)

The 1950s avant-garde art scene in New York, that is, the low-rent neighborhood within walking distance of Tenth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues, was the center of the global art world, or so we, its participants, believed.

On this block alone was the studio of Willem de Kooning, the most revered and influential Abstract Expressionist, and five galleries, organized, funded and operated by artists. Close by were artists’ meeting places, notably the Cedar Street Tavern and The Club (which was founded by the Abstract Expressionists in 1949). These “institutions,” along with perpetual studio visits, gallery openings and bring-your-own-bottle parties, sustained a community of some 250 avant-garde artists who lived in the vicinity. They joined together for mutual support in the face of the hostility of the official art world and the general public.

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In the 1950s, I was a member of this community, as the “Manager” of the Tanager Gallery from 1956 to 1959, the organizer of panels and other events at The Club from 1956 to 1962, and a supportive art critic for Art News after 1956 and the New York Post in the early and middle 1960s.

This community played a critical role in the development of American avant-garde art. The need to discuss aesthetic issues prompted the artists to attend panels and lectures at The Club most every Friday night. As Philip Pavia, the Club’s impresario from 1949 to 1955, recalled, the urge to talk was strong enough to keep “these highly individualistic artists together, their ideas criss-crossing and overlapping in a conflict that would tear apart any other togetherness.” He went on to say, “They faced each other with curses mixed with affection, smiling and evil-eyed each week for years.” (It Is, #5, Spring, 1960).

Club sessions then and later also enabled artists to assure themselves that their art was not delusional but was achieving what Franz Kline termed “the dream” of

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Alex Katz J.J., Clarice, and Joe, 1965 Oil on aluminum 59 x 29 inches

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creating art-for-the-ages. Club programs were followed by more conversation, drinking and dancing. On the non-Club nights, the artists continued their incessant talk about art at the Cedar Street Tavern.

The perpetual discourse and the impressive example of the Abstract Expressionist paintings of their elders led many, if not most, of the younger Tenth street artists to follow the then fashionable style, that is, “Gesture” or “Action” or “Painterly” painting in the vein of de Kooning, Kline and Philip Guston. However, a significant number, the most interesting and gifted of whom were Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein and Lois Dodd, who were members of the Tanager Gallery and Al Held, who showed across the street at the Brata, found the glut of brush-y painting sloppy, self-indulgent, enervated and outworn, in a word, academic, or as Alex Katz quipped, Dead on Arrival.

Toward the end of the fifties, the Tenth Street artists, who became my close friends, felt that avant-garde art was in crisis. As Held said to me, “There has to be another way of making art.” Reacting against the ambiguity and

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Philip Pearlstein Nude on a Blue Drape, 1964 Oil on canvas 60 x 50 inches

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amorphousness of Gesture Painting and intent on clarity, they suppressed smudged, scumbled and slapdash signs of the artist’s creative process.

Katz, Pearlstein and Dodd would develop a New Perceptual Realism and Held, a new Hard-Edge Abstraction.

These tendencies were part of a pervasive style change in avant-garde painting that began around 1957, a change that also included Stained Color-Field Painting, Minimal Painting, Pop Art and Photorealism. In fact, the very appearance of avant-garde art changed. Instead of the hot, dirty, equivocal and subjective direct-from-the-self look of fifties art, sixties art was cool, clean, clear and objective distanced-from-the-self. The “hot” expressionist facture of Gesture Painting gave way to finished surfacing that was in a word, “cool.” My advocacy of this new art was not at all to the liking of quite a few of my (former) friends, who continued to champion Gesture Painting.

Already by the mid-1950s, Katz had asked himself how figurative painting could be renewed and had concluded that it would have to become more literal and like

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Lois Dodd Apple Tree, 1964 Oil on linen 55 x 74 inches

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Al Held Echo, 1966 Acrylic on canvas 84 x 72 inches

Ronald Bladen White Z, 1964 Aluminum, 11 feet Edition 1 of 3

life. He suppressed loose brushwork because it obscured the specific details of his subjects, primarily portraits. With an eye to large-scale billboards and wide-screen movies, Katz anticipated Pop Art and by 1957 innovated the Big Realist Picture that could compete in visual impact, muscle and grandeur with the new Color-field, Hardedge and Minimalist abstraction.

Philip Pearlstein soon joined Katz in the development of a New Perceptual Realism. In the fifties he painted observed landscapes but overlaid the factual drawing with open brushwork. Intent on greater realism, he began to suppress gestural painting that blurred the images. As his primary subject, Pearlstein would soon adopt the fullbodied naked female model—naked, not nude. He was not interested in psychological and social attributes but sought to render physical substance as matter–of-factly as he could.

Like Katz and Pearlstein, Lois Dodd painted the observable world directly. However, in contrast to the size and assertiveness of their canvases, her pictures were

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Mark di Suvero Untitled, 1965 Wood and steel 18 x 14 x 12 inches © Mark diSuvero courtesy Paula Copper Gallery

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modest in dimension and painterly in facture. Dodd’s primary subjects were familiar Maine scenes—clapboard houses and barns, notably their windows and doors, sheets on a clothesline, and the like—which she depicted with affection and a discerning eye for detail.

If Pearlstein was a vocal champion of realism, his friend Al Held was an equally passionate advocate of nonobjectivity. Like Pearlstein, Held had been a gestural painter in the 1950s, but desiring greater concreteness, he cut away heavy brushwork and focused on geometric composition in his Hard-Edge paintings, creating a new kind of “classical” abstraction. He too painted the Big Picture.

Sculptors Ronald Bladen and George Sugarman, who were members of the Brata Gallery, and Mark di Suvero, who showed at the March Gallery, were just as intent on achieving clarity as Katz, Pearlstein, Dodd and Held. They reacted against welded constructions in which the torch was used like a brush, yielding bubbled, pitted and fretted surfaces—the sculptural counterparts of painterly paintings.

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George Sugarman Yellow and White, 1967 Acrylic on wood 251/2 x 351/2 x 271/2 inches

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The first works that Bladen showed in New York were paintings composed of slabs of impasto. Their projection into the room led him to create relief constructions and then free-standing sculptures. As his work developed, Bladen transformed organic images into geometric volumes. His aim as he said was to “push abstract art a little bit further,” that is, toward Minimalism, “but not lose the poetry.” Bladen’s “poetry” is often evoked by “human” elements, generally avoided by Minimalist sculptors, for example, diagonal forms that call to mind strutting or bowing.

Reacting against fussy welded drawing in space, George Sugarman built up bulky organic forms by laminating small pieces of wood, a novel move in avant-garde sculpture at the time. He soon began to paint his threedimensional elements, which was just as novel. In the process, Sugarman created a unique body of polychromed abstract sculpture distinguished by formal inventiveness.

Mark Di Suvero preferred to use unaltered readymades rather than the rubbishy detritus frequently found in fifties construction sculpture. Combined with well-defined

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Alice Neel Max White, 1961 Oil on canvas 401/8 x 281/4 inches Collection of Kim Manocherian

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abstract forms, these components accentuate the clearcut formal structure of his sculptures. However, many of di Suvero’s works incorporate a kinetic complex that introduces an element of freedom into the otherwise fixed structure.

The diversity of art shown in the Tenth Street galleries is often ignored but should not be. The painter Alice Neel is a case in point. She was one of a kind. Her penetrating portraits of friends and art world characters are at once unnerving and funny. Verging toward caricature but painted with brio, they can be viewed as the kinky kin of Katz’s and Pearlstein’s subjects.

What attracted me to the eight artists I selected for this show was their self-assured rejection of what was stale in current art and their ambition to arrive at fresh ways of expressing their original visions. In my memoir, titled A Sweeper-Up After Artists, I wrote that in looking back on my Tenth Street days, “If I were sentimental, recollections of the ‘dream’ and the camaraderie would make me misty-eyed. The years from roughly 1955 to 1962 were the best in my life.” n

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Irving Sandler and Lois Dodd in Tanager Gallery, 1956 / unidentified photographer.

Joellen Bard’s, Ruth Fortel’s, and Helen Thomas’ exhibition records of “Tenth Street Days: the Co-ops of the 50s”, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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This catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition

Irving Sandler

OUT OF

10TH ST

INTO THE

60s Thanks to: Irving Sandler Lucy Sandler Emma Hartman

above: Irving and Lucy Sandler on the Occasion of their Marriage, 1958 Courtesy Alex Katz Studio

A video interview with Irving Sandler by Bill Maynes produced in conjunction with this exhibition can be viewed on the gallery web site.

cover top row from left to right: Ronald Bladen c. 1940s, Courtesy Barbara Bladen-Porter Photographer Unknown Al Held c. 1966, in 5th Avenue Studio Photo by Andre Emmerich Lois Dodd c.1960s, New York Courtesy Lois Dodd and the Alexandre Gallery Philip Pearlstein c. 1965, Photographer unknown cover second row from left to right: Alex Katz 1966, Texas Photographer unknown Courtesy Alex Katz Studio Alice Neel

Loretta Howard Gallery 525 West 26th Street New York NY 10001 212.695.0164 www.lorettahoward.com

1961, New York (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images) Mark Di Suvero 1967, photo by Danny Lyon, Toronto, Canada Courtesy Spacetime C.C. George Sugarman c. 1960 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Photographer unkown

ISBN: 0-9842804-4-8 Design: HHA design

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