[New York Peasant by Wilfrid, April 27 2007]
This show of photographs, prints, letters, and other attractive detritus, shown by Syracuse University at its New York outpost on East 61st, would have been better titled "Grace Hartigan and the New York School". Grace Hartigan, a gifted artist and, on this evidence, a beautiful woman, was part of a loose network of painters, poets and film-makers that consituted a kind of second-coming of the New York School, and her portrait (by Walter Silver) forms the frontispiece of the attractive and entirely free catalogue.
The original New York School of painters was informally constituted of husky drunks and geniuses born before the Great War: Pollock and de Kooning, of course, as well as Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and marginal mavericks like Arshile Gorky and David Smith. As this exhibition confirms, the name lingered to describe a much younger generation of painters influenced by, but always exceeding, New York abstract expressionism, and continuing to drift and drink together in loose social formations.
The alliance included the painters Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and the under-rated Joe Brainard, and the film-maker Alfred Leslie. To muddle the history of ideas a little further, art impresario John Bernard Myers of the Tibor de Nagy gallery threw the New York School mantle over a grouplet of poets who were drinking in the same bars: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest (see Myers (ed) Poets of the New York School (1968). And here we have the results of collisions between this New York School of painters and that school of poets, in the form primarily of Walter Silver's photographs of the radiant Hartigan at work and play.
Also included are a selection of Hartigan's silk screen prints; "Black Crows (Oranges No. 1)" - fierce fruit (as it were) of a collaboration with O'Hara; and pages from a selection of O'Hara's poems issued by the Museum of Modern Art shortly after his tragic death - the text exquisitely matched with drawings and paintings by various members of the so-called School. Along with some vitrined letters, this falls far short of a comprehensive review of its subject, but the emphasis on Hartigan can only be welcome. Mitchell, Freilicher, and even Brainard, have been much better represented in New York galleries over the last few years.
For more on the exhibition: Lubin House current events.
Incidentally, the historic (and illustrated) Myers anthology of the New York poets, in its distinctive black and white hi-rise dustjacket, is still readily available: copies used to be stacked high in the recently shuttered Gotham Book Mart. Try Abe Books.
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