THE 30'S PAINTING IN NEW YORK
Patricia Passloff [Editor]
Patricia Passloff [Editor]: THE 30'S PAINTING IN NEW YORK. New York: Poindexter Gallery, [1957]. Original edition. Slim quarto. Thick printed stapled wrappers. [32] pp. 29 black and white plates. Former owners dated signature [1957] to first page. Faint pencil notations to margins of a de Kooning image. Wrappers sunned at edges and fragile at spine. A few leaves faintly ruffled to fore edge, so a good copy of this rare document.
9.25 x 10.375 saddle stitched booklet with 32 pages and 29 black and white illustrations. Highly evocative snapshot of the New York school featuring letters sent and received, statements, forgotten pictures, many visits to artists' studios and conversations gathered here for the first time. Includes a few period photographs by Rudolph Burkhardt and others. Exhibition of early work by abstract expressionists and geometrical abstract artists of the period. The project was suggested by Patricia Passloff, who gathered reminiscences and commentary of the period by various artists and art dealers, many of their recollections centering on Gorky and de Kooning. Essay on the thirties New York art scene by Edwin Denby. Text of letter dated Bellesguardo, 29-12-56 signed by Mougouch Fielding, Gorky's wife. Features words and images by Rudolph Burkhardt, Arshile Gorky, Peter Busa, Mougouch Fielding, David Smith, Carl Holty, Milton Resnick, A. Kaldis, Paul Burlin, Hans Hofmann, Herbert Matter, George McNeil, John D. Graham, Willem de Kooning, Edwin Denby, Burgoyne Diller, Milton Avery, Joseph Stella, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krassner, Stuart Davis, Earl Kerkam, Jack Tworkov, Max Schnitzler, Arthur B. Carles, Ad Reinhardt, Franz Kline, and George Cavallon.
“Although she showed regularly in New York galleries, [Pat] Passlof often garnered more attention for her active art-scene presence and her associations with other artists than for her own work. Happily, this seems to be changing. In 2017 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired its first work by Passlof, a ca. 1950 oil on paper that the museum has already shown twice, in “Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction” in 2017 and in the current reinstallation of the collection.
”The work at MoMA—a horizontal composition in which interlocking, variously colored gestural passages are distributed around a gridlike armature—is related to the earliest painting in “The Brush Is the Finger of the Brain,” a 1949 oil on board titled Gulf. Both paintings show the strong influence of Willem de Kooning, with whom Passlof studied for several years, first at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1948 and later, privately, in New York. While still an undergraduate at Queens College, Passlof had discovered de Kooning’s work through his first solo show, at Charles Egan Gallery in 1948. It’s a salutary reminder of the challenges facing the artists who would become known as “first generation” Abstract Expressionists that de Kooning was forty-four years old at the time of his solo debut.
”After Black Mountain, Passlof, who was then twenty, followed de Kooning’s advice to return to New York to pursue the artistic life, though she subsequently bowed to her parents and spent two years at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where she acquired a bachelor’s degree that would help her find teaching jobs. (For much of her adult life, Passlof taught at colleges around New York City. An inspiring instructor, she often penned letters to her students, some of which were collected in a small volume titled To Whom the Shoe Fits: Letters to Young Painters, published by the Foundation in 2018.) Interestingly, de Kooning’s educational method was grounded in the traditional training he had received in Holland. While her artist friends imagined that de Kooning was teaching Passlof how to paint abstractly, under his instruction she was actually making, as she later recalled, “large, tight still lifes” and being “tutored in the ways of the Rotterdam Academy.”
”Even as she was absorbing de Kooning’s lessons and marveling at the work of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, Passlof was keenly aware of the differences between the artists of de Kooning’s generation and her own. For one thing, the younger painters weren’t prepared to languish for decades in obscurity and poverty, working arduously until a sympathetic art dealer came along. During the 1950s, in what was then a novel approach, they banded together to create cooperative galleries, many of which were located on East Tenth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. (It was this block that Clement Greenberg blamed for the decline of New York painting when he wrote, “If Eighth Street in the late thirties and early forties meant catching up with Paris, Tenth Street in the fifties has seen New York falling behind itself.”) Passlof, who helped found one of these spaces (March Gallery), later observed that by “flouting the proprieties of waiting to be ‘discovered,’ artists broke the mystique of the galleries.”³ She also recognized that by the mid-1950s the era of manifestos and ideological battles had come to a close. Comparing herself with older artists, many of them immigrants who were formed by the 1930s, she recalled, “I was young and free of their years of investment in tradition and free as well of the pressures of doctrine, whether political or aesthetic.”
”As the 1950s progressed, Passlof forged an approach to painting that borrowed from de Kooning’s post-Cubist gestural abstraction yet possessed its own distinctive properties. She sometimes introduced quasi-figurative elements, as in the 68-inch-square oil on linen Promenade for a Bachelor (1958), which is centered on a birdlike shape embedded in loosely woven gestural patches. Here one can already see a feature that would be a constant throughout her career, across many different compositional strategies and even, in her last years, at the service of explicit figuration: a reliance on the relentless repetitive movements of her brush rather than on the smearability of oil paint. Where de Kooning and many of his acolytes privileged the viscous properties of oil paint, Passlof preferred a drier materiality, one that left each gesture, each brushstroke, visibly distinct. In a 1961 review of her show at Green Gallery, Judd called this “scribbly brushwork”;5 Wilkin, writing in the catalogue of the current survey, observes how “every painting is conjured up out of Passlof’s eloquent, wristy brush marks.”6 Another early example of Passlof’s brushwork is Mark’s House (1960), a large canvas in which a half dozen clunky geometric shapes are unified by a film of yellow and white brushstrokes that continually switch between respecting the contours of the shapes and ignoring them.” — Raphael Rubinstein
Margalit Fox wrote the obituary “Pat Passlof, Painter of Shimmering Abstracts, Dies at 83,” for the New York Times on November 24, 2011: “Pat Passlof, an Abstract Expressionist painter whose canvases vibrate with unpredictable line and thick, luminous color, died on Nov. 13 at her home in Manhattan. She was 83.
“A member of the New York school of Abstract Expressionists who was less widely recognized than male colleagues like Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, Ms. Passlof had been immersed since the 1950s in the heady, impecunious cultural ferment of Downtown Manhattan.
“As a profile of her in The New York Times last month recounted, she lived and worked in a former synagogue on Forsyth Street, on the Lower East Side, which she had bought in the early 1960s and renovated almost entirely herself.
“Ms. Passlof’s husband, the painter Milton Resnick, had, until his death in 2004, lived and worked in a renovated synagogue of his own, around the corner on Eldridge Street.
“As Ms. Passlof told The Times, for more than 40 years there had been three of them in the marriage — he, she and art — and by mutual agreement the demands of art often trumped those of connubiality.
“Ms. Passlof’s canvases are distinguished by the primacy of the brush stroke: they were sometimes so thickly worked in oils that reviewers commended their smell as well as their visual aspects.
“This deliberate, dense layering of paint makes it hard for the viewer to tell what is figure and what is ground, and the constant, jockeying interplay between the two gives Ms. Passlof’s work much of its dynamism.
“She was also known as a master colorist. In some paintings her palette centers on muted, desaturated earth tones; in others it exploits saturated colors from deep night blues to vibrant oranges.
“To a degree, Ms. Passlof cleaved to the pure geometry the Abstract Expressionists adored. In “Eighth House,” a recent series, each painting depends crucially on sets of colored bars, organized in alternating vertical and horizontal bands like the blocks of a quilt.
“But her geometry is almost always fluid and off kilter — lines disappear, reappear and go quietly askew — which lends her work a sense of buoyancy.
“Patricia Passloff was born in Brunswick, Ga., on Aug. 5, 1928. She parted company with the final “f” of her surname early in her career, after she finished a painting only to discover that she had left insufficient room for a full signature, her sister and only immediate survivor, Aileen Passloff, said in an interview.
“She studied with de Kooning at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and received a bachelor’s degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. In the late 1940s she moved to New York, where she took private instruction from de Kooning.
“Ms. Passlof, who was a longtime faculty member of the College of Staten Island, has work in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and elsewhere.
“Though her art was rooted in abstraction, Ms. Passlof did not shun representation. Some years ago, intent on painting the human figure, she hired a model. It was then she discovered she could not paint legs — at least not the kind that came two to a set — to her own satisfaction.
“She resolved to concentrate on more-than-two-legged creatures. The result was a noteworthy, hauntingly allegorical series featuring centaurs.”