Larry Poons

INTRODUCTION REFLECTIONS ON A PHOTOGRAPH

By Michael Fried

About halfway through the catalogue of a recent exhibition of paintings by Larry Poons is a full-page black-and-white photograph I had never seen before, one that brought me up short with a mixture of pleasure and sadness.1 The photograph is of two young painters, Frank Stella and Larry Poons; it was taken in March 1966, on the occasion of Stella’s show of Irregular Polygons at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Both artists were then still in their twenties, but in the photograph they look, well, even younger. Neither is glancing at the camera, but one has the feeling they are aware of it. Stella is wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a trim light gray jacket with a high collar, and has his hands in his pockets; Poons is wearing

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Frank Stella (left) and Larry Poons at an exhibition of Stella’s work at the Castelli Gallery, March 5, 1966

a dark jacket and a tie with a loud pattern. Stella is smiling. Behind them on the gallery wall hangs one of the Irregular Polygons.

The photograph captures a moment in time as well as in the history of modernist painting. My sense of pleasure had to do with both. A moment in time because my friendship with Stella had begun years before (at Princeton, where he was a year ahead of me), and because it was through him that I had become alert to Poons’s early work. And a moment in the history of modernist painting because the Irregular Polygons marked a major departure in Stella’s artistic development, and because I already knew I would be writing about them in the near future. (My essay on those paintings appeared in Artforum in November 1966.) As for the sense of sadness, it had to do with the consciousness of something quite wonderful that was now definitively past—not just the extreme youth we all had shared but also, more to the point, the world, specifically the art world, the photograph so effectively evokes.

What I have in mind, needless to say, is not the economics of New York galleries in 1966, which I barely understood, or the interplay between art magazines and the galleries that advertised in them and hoped for positive reviews of their shows, which anyone then writing about contemporary art had to negotiate. What I saw (indeed still see) in the photograph is something far more arresting—the extraordinary sense, virtually an aura, of artistic possibility that was still available to ambitious young artists in the Stella-Poons generation and that both of them embodied in the strongest possible terms. That was largely what made writing art criticism during those years such an exciting project, though having said that I am bound to admit that I was slow to come to a full admiration of Poons’s early “optical” canvases, which struck me at the time as perhaps too “surefire” in their effects. (No longer; encountered today they seem both subtle and ravishing.) Quite possibly by 1966 Poons himself was beginning to look beyond them, though it was not until 1968 and a work like Brown Sound (plate 1.15; today in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) that he gave up the systematic character of the dot-and-lozenge “optical” paintings, all of which had been determined by an underlying grid, as well as their meticulous execution, in favor of something darker, more tactile, more arbitrary-seeming. Not an easy painting to like on first viewing, Brown Sound grows in stature with each passing year.

By 1969, as Alex Bacon remarks in an excellent essay on the artist, Poons “set aside the brush and picked up the bucket, at first to pour masses of acrylic paint in layers onto floor-bound canvas, which later became known as the ‘elephant skin’ paintings.”2 And by 1971, as Bacon also notes, he lifted the canvas from the floor, draped it vertically (eventually forming virtual rooms), and began to fling buckets of paint at the canvas with the result that the paint impacted against it and then flowed downward in heavy

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pours, forming a densely tactile surface that nevertheless was coloristically intense in a distinctly new way. The first Throw painting was Railroad Horse (1971, plate 2.7), which Frank Stella wrote about admiringly in a brilliant short essay first published in 1999. (“The speed of the horizontal sweep of the color and imagery is opposed but not decreased by the weight of the vertical pour. The sustained conflict, experienced as a storm-driven sheet of rain spilling over 25 feet of canvas surface, pits propelled pigment against the simple force of gravity. This inspired pictorial dynamism made Railroad Horse into a lasting as well as beautiful painting.”3 Writing about abstract art doesn’t get better than that.)

Again, I wish I could claim that I fully grasped the quality of Railroad Horse when I saw it in a one-man show at the Lawrence Rubin Gallery in 1972. In my review of that show in Artforum, I called it “superb,” but in fact I was not quite easy with its enormous expanse as well as with its casualness, its own sense of ease, with respect to its lateral limits (more broadly, to its enclosing shape). I was more immediately taken with a more modest-sized and compressed-feeling painting, the vertical rectangle Ly (1971), which appeared to me to align with what I characterized as “the compulsion of certain recent painting of major ambition to affirm that the entire surface, which is to say every bit of it, is spread out before the beholder—that every grain or particle or atom of surface competes for presentness with every other.”4 Some such compulsion still seems to me to have been basic to the Throw paintings generally, which I regard as marking one of the absolute high points in Poons’s oeuvre. The proximate inspiration for such an emphasis on surface was the spray and gel paintings of an older painter and magnificent colorist, Jules Olitski, but Poons’s Throw works staked out new ground by virtue of their overwhelming physicality: one sensed, as never in Olitski, the sheer weight of the pigment in a given picture, a weight made all the more apparent by the force of gravity that drew the pigment down the surface from top to bottom (as Stella remarked of Railroad Horse), at the same time as one was led to approach the surface closely in order to perceive and indeed relish the extremely fine-grained play, the intensive micro-juxtaposition, of individual colors within the thrown mix. All this was made possible, as Bacon and others have noted, by the physical properties of acrylic pigment, that vital technical resource for Color Field painting generally.

The further crucial issue was that of shaping the final painting, which involved taking the large expanse of worked canvas that the painter had erected around himself—the virtual room mentioned earlier—displaying it flat on the wall and on the ground, and cropping it in a number of places so as to isolate and then cut out as many individual paintings as the total expanse could be made to yield. (The individual paintings had to be “discovered” by a process of trial and error, using lengths of masking tape

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REBEL WITH A CAUSE

THE 1950S AND 1960S

By Barbara Rose

Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia. (I am I and my circumstance.)

—José Ortega y Gasset, Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914

My baby’s always the one to try the things they’ve never done. And just because of that, they say, “He’s a rebel, and he'll never ever be any good. He’s a rebel ‘cause he never ever does what he should.”

—The Crystals, “He’s a Rebel,” 1962

Larry Poons has been called, in succession, a hard-edge geometric painter, an Op or optical artist, a lyrical abstractionist, a post-painterly or Color Field painter, and most recently, a postmodernist who turned his back on fashionable art theory to rethink the Neo-Impressionist concern with allover composition and interactive color. In fact, his work fits no category, and neither does he. Born into a middle-class family, he broke every mold, going his own way from the time he was a teenager. Surveying his long career, one concludes that his characteristic traits are rebelliousness, curiosity, and ingenuity. Yet none of these words adequately describe the originality, restlessness, and constant experimentation of his long and

Detail of plate 1.39, Aqua Regia, 1964

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1.1

Art of the Fugue I, 1958

Oil on canvas, 56 × 56 in. (142.2 × 142.2 cm)

Private collection, London

1.2

Art of the Fugue III, 1958 Oil on canvas, 56 × 56 in. (142.2 × 142.2 cm) Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto

1.18

Yangtze, 1969

Acrylic on canvas, 6 ft. 71⁄8 in. × 15 ft. 10¼ in. (2.01 × 4.83 m)

Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California

1.33 Jody’s Double Speed, 1962 Acrylic on canvas, 6 ft. × 12 ft. 1 in. (1.83 × 3.68 m)

Private collection

A CONTROLLED MOMENT OF LIGHT

THE 1970S

By Karen Wilkin

I

“If only we could make paintings that look as good as the paint,” Larry Poons once said to me in his studio, as he contemplated a bucket of unnameable hues loosely swirled together. He sounded wistful, but in fact he could be said to have fulfilled that ambition many times over during his long life as a painter, especially with the distinctive body of work, the so-called Throw paintings, that he produced in the 1970s and early 1980s. Paintings such as No More Greasy Boots Allowed in Here (1975, plate 2.1), with their unstable, mysterious cascades of hues and their hard-to-grasp variations in texture, appear at first acquaintance to depend almost entirely on color, in all its permutations and tonalities, its intensities and modulations. But when we spend more time with the Throw paintings, they prove to depend equally on the intrinsic character of paint itself: its fluidity, its responsiveness to gravity, its ability to flow and intermingle, even its variable density. In trying to come to terms with these elusive, fascinating works, it would be easy to say that the Throw paintings are about color or about paint. But as Poons’s friend, the painter and critic Walter Darby Bannard, was fond of saying, “Art is not ‘about.’ Art is,”1 an assertion that I feel certain Poons wholly supports, since he is usually dismissive of any verbal explication of works of

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Detail of plate 2.28, Bordertown, 1972

No More Greasy Boots Allowed in Here, 1975

Acrylic on canvas, 105 × 109½ in. (266.7 × 278.1 cm)

Collection of Linda and Robert Schmier

2.1

art—a notion contained in Bannard’s use of “about.” “All we have is sensibility,”2 Poons has said. Speaking of how one judges the excellence or lack of excellence of a painting, he has asserted that “it’s only your senses that can ever determine—it’s senses before words.”3 Works of art that lend themselves to discussion of what they are “about” or that demand that kind of discussion if they are to be grasped at all, rather than yielding directly to sensory experience, are often termed “concept-based.” In its most rarefied form, concept-based art is fully preconceived. It begins with carefully considered ideas and meanings that are usually more easily expressed verbally than visually and then attempts to illustrate them. Poons alluded to this type of work when he said, “There are things that look like paintings, but they’re not. They can be a kind of propaganda—posters, illustrations, this, that, and the other thing—which can be wonderful. But they’re not the same. They’re different from Cézanne or Pollock.”4

Bannard would obviously have included Paul Cézanne’s and Jackson Pollock’s work under the heading of art that simply “is.” He would just as obviously have also included Poons’s wordless, visually eloquent Throw paintings of the 1970s and early 1980s, works such as Rain of Terror (1977, plate 2.2) or Wheeler (1978, plate 2.3). The products of an unexpected, essentially unprecedented method invented by the artist, the Throw paintings were developed without a previously arrived-at verbal idea or a preconceived image. Instead, they were visible records of Poons’s spontaneous responses to whatever emerged in the course of working. They were painted with a fairly precise but unpredictable technique that he continuously adjusted, refined, and altered in various ways as he made new discoveries over the years. (Poons has described this as “learning as he made the pictures.”) Far from being images of anything planned, preexisting, or even imagined, they often surprised or even startled their author, providing evidence of a series of intuitive yet informed reactions to the painting in progress. While Poons was constantly alert to the nuances and demands of the picture as it developed before him—making decisions about color progressions, for example, provoked by the harmonies and dissonances manifesting themselves as he worked—the result, at its very best, could be something more exciting and unexpected than he thought possible.

If Poons’s Throw paintings can be said to be “about” anything, it is the history of their own making and the challenges posed by some of the most innovative, inventive painting in the history of modernism. The extraordinarily complex color relationships among the threads of pigment that make up the Throw paintings, for example, trigger thoughts about Pierre Bonnard’s flickering zones of richly combined hues or the gorgeously orchestrated chroma of Claude Monet’s late paintings. Similarly, the expansiveness of Poons’s compositions immediately makes us think about Pollock’s authoritative announcement of alloverness and Jules Olitski’s

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2.2

Rain of Terror, 1977

Acrylic on canvas, 111½ × 108 in. (283.2 × 274.3 cm) Private collection

2.3

Wheeler, 1978 Acrylic on canvas, 85 × 75¾ in. (215.9 × 192.4 cm) Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto

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Larry Poons

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

REBEL WITH A CAUSE

INTRODUCTION REFLECTIONS ON A PHOTOGRAPH

REBEL WITH A CAUSE

THE 1950S AND 1960S

A CONTROLLED MOMENT OF LIGHT

THE 1970S

Rain of Terror, 1977