NEW YORK TEN/69 serves as an introduction to the works of ten young painters residing in New York City, some of whom at the time of publication have not yet exhibited in New York galleries.
The Portfolio reflects a poetic trend in painting – a renewed involvement of artists with their medium which produces a surprisingly joyous and expressive lyricism. Nothing could be more in contrast to the cool and detached imagery of the Pop and Op painters of the mid-sixties.
It is remarkable that in many of the works of most of these young artists the ground of the painting has taken on a new importance, as painters concern themselves with the interaction of color which is poured, sponged, and most often sprayed on canvas.
In this collection, Stafford, Pettet and Diao are exclusively involved with the ground of the print, whereas Landfield and Showell superimpose additional elements. In his print, Juniansha, Stafford is engaged with the change of shapes and colors produced through the overlapping of large areas of transparent inks. Pettet has airbrushed four lithographic plates to produce a delicate superimposition on a dense blue-purple ground. The quiet texture of Diao’s silkscreened work relates to the sponged surfaces of his paintings. In this instance, the change in tonality is achieved by screening the back of a Bodleian cream laid paper and gluing it onto heavy etching paper. The reaction of the glue against the transparent red ink produces the subtle surface effects so typical of Diao’s painting.
Landfield sets off the subtle varied dark blue ground of his print with darting “sticks” and patches of color. Showell’s bluish-gray ground seems to form an undulating landscape accented by sharp-edges chromatic islands.
Color relationship, rather than concern with the ground of the painting, is the particular interest of Cote, Young and Shields. In Cote’s silkscreen print, his sticks of color are carefully plotted on the smooth opaque black velvet background; Young’s bright eccentric dots create a pointillist fantasy. The geometric color shapes applied by pochoir in Alan Shields’ print provide the look of a fresh water color study, while the perforations simulation the appearance of his fine stitched lines on unstretched canvas.
As opposed to the above painters, Brice Marden’s concern is not with color but with weight and texture. In his lithograph Gulf Marden creates a tension between two horizontal bands of somber color. He prevents the upper black mass of the print from bearing down on the gray area by his painterly definition of the two bottom edges.
Perhaps the most strikingly different work in this collection is Lee Lozano’s A Boring Drawing. The “sci-fi” quality of the enlarged drawing of the interior of a drill and the literary conceit of its title are belied by the sensitive tonality of this graphic work. Though originally drawn in 1963, A Boring Drawing remains an integral part of Lozano’s current involvement in art and language, and has been reworked for this photolithograph.
Certain artists and critics, fascinated by new scientific and industrial developments, have taken the position in recent years that easel painting is dead. We believe that NEW YORK TEN/69 demonstrates, quite the contrary, that easel painting is alive and well and, as nurtured by the present young generation of artists, should have a happy future in the seventies.
—Rosa Esman
