TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031290/0312400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 111 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 82

Zen and Perceptual Hiccups


A show surveys the mysterious paintings of Robert Moskowitz

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Along with Susan Rothenberg, Joel Shapiro, Neil Jenney and a
few others, the painter Robert Moskowitz usually gets credited
with bringing figurative imagery back into "advanced" art at the
end of the 1970s. Whether you think this true depends on where
you were looking. In fact, serious figurative art never went
away -- it just got hammered out of fashion by minimalism, the
last great American style, in whose reductive embrace Moskowitz
grew up just as it was coming to an impasse. As for "advanced,"
who gives a damn anymore? But no matter: Moskowitz's current
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (on view
through April 24) contains some admirable paintings, even if the
run-up to them is gradual.

    Moskowitz, 54, was a slow developer, and has remained a
decidedly uneven artist. But he never fell into the ghastly
Warhol ethos that gelded so many talents in the '80s. The show
starts with early collages involving paper bags and window
blinds, pale elegant things haunted by Jasper Johns. It proceeds
through a prolix series of paintings from the '60s that depict
the corner of an imaginary "ideal" and utterly banal room with
no furniture in it, done in very close-valued colors that turn
the image into a benign parody of Ad Reinhardt's black
paintings. Odd little signs -- a blurt of pigment here, a "Have
a Nice Day" face there -- float in front of the room. You get
the impression that Moskowitz, who has been a Zen student most
of his adult life, is repeating a sort of koan without giving
the slightest clue to its meaning.

    The same mild frustration is built into his even more
spaced-out images from the '70s, in which legible but quite
unrelated signs for things float on a field of color in a way
that very distantly recalls Miro. Cadillac/Chopsticks, 1975, is
just what it says: the rear-half profile of a '60s Caddy,
bulbous with fins, and in the lower right a red X depicting a
pair of chopsticks. Nothing else. One is not much helped by the
otherwise useful catalog essay of Ned Rifkin, to whom, it seems,
Moskowitz "revealed that the Cadillac might represent Hollywood
glamour and the car culture of the West Coast, while the
chopsticks could allude to a New Yorker's love of Chinese food."
No kidding. This, you could say, looks like art history at the
end of its rope.

    Things firm up toward the '80s. The picture that changed
Moskowitz's style was Swimmer, 1977, a canvas bearing the head
and raised arm of a figure in the sea. This figure is quite an
abstract form, and it is embedded, heraldically, in a dark field
of Prussian blue. From now on Moskowitz's work would look for
strong, immediately recognizable icons that were submerged into
abstraction by their elaborate, non descriptive surfaces. They
combine frankness of silhouette with loss of detail, and the
effect is mysterious and poignant.

    He is fascinated by large enduring things: monuments of the
relatively recent past such as the Empire State Building and the
Flatiron Building in New York; old practical forms like a
windmill, a smokestack or a lighthouse; or things that have
acquired a sort of timelessness as artistic stereotypes, like
Myron's Discobolos or Rodin's The Thinker. But few of them are
immediately recognizable, and they all derive from other kinds
of art, including photography. The looming profile of
Moskowitz's Flatiron Building comes from Edward Steichen's
famous gray-silhouetted photo of that structure, made almost
three-quarters of a century before; Thinker begins with another
moody Steichen photograph. But because the shape of the Flatiron
Building is so close in value to its background, black on black,
it induces a perceptual hiccup, like stepping off a step that
is not there; for a moment you do not know whether you are
looking at something abstract or not, and even when you have
seen the building, the abstractness remains.

    Moskowitz's vividly imposing red windmill alludes to
Mondrian's great early paintings of that motif. The side of the
Yosemite cliff in The Seventh Sister, 1981, recalls Clyfford
Still and, through that, the American Romantic tradition of
heroic landscape. Such works do not escape the second-handedness
that comes with quoted images, but at least they are quite
without smug prophylactic irony.

    Moskowitz's roots lie in abstract expressionism: he studied
with Adolf Gottlieb and married Jack Tworkov's daughter. His
paintings clearly show that he feels the loss of the pristine
Romantic tradition. He has an unaffected appetite for the
sublime and its subjects: towers, cliffs, icebergs and heroes
(even if we see only the backside  of the discobolus, even
though the thing in his hand looks more like a bowling ball than
a discus). Just as clearly, he doubts if sublimity can be
revived. His rendering of a Giacometti sculpture into a long,
ghostly streak of thick white pigment on a black ground is
poignant for this reason; it catches an artist in the act of
wondering whether Giacometti's painful authenticity is
culturally possible anymore. In this way, Moskowitz's better
paintings become icons of loss and constraint, even when their
making seems most involved and obsessive.