Pat Adams
Pat Adams
Pat Adams W O R K S F R O M T H E 1 9 70 S A N D 8 0 S
NEW YORK
Pat Adams, 1985. Photograph by Abe Frajndlich. Frontispiece detail: Innately Abounds, 1999
Pat Adams: Of Mere Painting Faye Hirsch
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
—Wallace Stevens, “Of Mere Being”
To wander through Pat Adams’s abstract paintings is to be immersed in a visual surround, in which we find ourselves increasingly aware of shifting optical and sensuous stimuli. Whether in mural-scale canvases or modest works on paper, we experience a state akin to the “world watching” that Adams long ago noted in Buddhas perched in temples in Southeast Asia. See What Happens is a gouache from 1971, and, in keeping with the title, we find ourselves discovering myriad visual events via a meandering arabesque that stretches through a dappled ground, doubling and tripling in its looped and angled course, and modulating chromatically as it goes. The line is alive, activated as it is followed, “happening” in conjunction with our own act of seeing. In Adams’s paintings, created over seven decades, we are asked to notice minute changes in texture and surface as well as form, as in this line that moves us through the pictorial field. “Whatever heightens alertness,” she said in a conversation at the National Academy of Design in 2000, “whatever achieves a personal vividness I see as politically potent; it argues for the freedom of the individual, for the will to form, and for the independence of message concerning what is that is coming to be.”1 That is, she sees the act of painting, and the experience of
viewing it, as potentially liberating. In this, the work feels truly contemporary, in an era when we must be aware of our environment in all its subtle and not-so-subtle changes. The philosopher Timothy Morton, writing in 2010 on what he called the “ecological thought,” exhorted us for the sake of our planet to become intensely aware of our environmental surround, of those forces both seen and unseen that directly impact us in our daily lives as well as implicate our future.2 Adams offers the visual opportunity to practice such watchfulness. Attentiveness was required in viewing her work from the start—beginning in the early 1950s, when she began showing at Zabriskie Gallery in New York, and where she had solo shows roughly every two years from 1954 to 2008. Her paintings’ central demand—their injunction to remain alert—has remained constant. Adams received critical notice early on, but because she followed her own course through the shifting tastes and fashions in the art world, remaining unaligned with any particular school or movement, she has often flown beneath the radar. She began her career New York at the height of Abstract Expressionism, and certainly her work had parallels with Ab-Ex’s implication of a boundless frame and the promulgation of an allover field. Works from the ’60s have affinities with Color Field—perhaps not surprising, given her long association with Bennington College—and some of her off-kilter geometries in the 1980s show parallels to certain abstractionists of that era. She has said, however, that she is more interested in “the intrinsic” quality of painting taught by Hans Hofmann, not in the “purity” so sought by Clement Greenberg and his “Green Mountain” boys. And she always maintained an uncom-
promising kinship with the world, with nature and with ancient artforms that she assimilated, transformed and credited. When she talks about her own history and the art that has influenced it, she sounds as much like a philosopher or poet as a painter, and one senses an evolution that has proceeded somewhat on its own, like a distinctive ecosystem that, breaking off a continent long ago, has developed its own very specific biology. Adams grew up in Stockton, California; her ancestors were pioneers and miners, her mother and grandmother amateur artists. Her grandmother bought her a set of oils when she was 12, and she began to study art locally side-by-side with adults. Graduating high school at age 16, she went to Berkeley, where she majored in humanities, studying art on the side, and spent her summers at various art institutes. By the time she graduated, she knew that she was going to be a painter full-time. Her rather stunning erudition—she is dauntingly well-read and the most articulate enunciator of her own work—was shaped early, and one senses an intellectually ambitious young woman making her own way as an artist. She moved to New York in 1950 and enrolled in the Brooklyn Museum School, living nearby in a tiny apartment to which she had brought just a phonograph and recordings of Rachmaninoff and Webern. Among her teachers was Max Beckmann, with whom she was quite taken and who told her, she recalls, to “smoke Fatima cigarettes.”3 While in New York she met her first husband, the artist Vincent Longo, who brought her to a seminar in Jungian psychology and then to Italy, where he had a Fulbright. Adams’s own Fulbright carried her to France in 1956, where she became friends
Piero della Francesca (Italian, c. 1415– 1492), The Flagellation, c. 1455–65, oil and tempera on panel, 23 x 32 inches, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino. Hieronymus Bosch (Dutch, c. 1450–1516), The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1490– 1500, oil on panel, 81 x 152 inches, Museo del Prado in Madrid.
with Shirley Jaffe and Joan Mitchell, among the few contemporaries she is willing to cite. She moved to Bennington, Vermont, with Longo, who was teaching there, and accepted an offer to teach at the college from Paul Feeley in 1964. She has remained in Bennington every since, retiring her post in 1993. She continued to travel with Longo and, after their divorce in the 1960s, undertook other extended travels on sabbaticals to Europe, the Mid-East, and Asia with her second husband, the late R. Arnold Ricks, an historian and professor at Bennington College. Traveling around Europe during that first sojourn, Adams followed her voracious appetite for art, and the objects she saw, be they masterpieces of the Western canon or objects of decorative art, began to infiltrate her wide-ranging abstract aesthetics. What first registers as undifferentiated atmosphere in her paintings reveals, on closer scrutiny, a rigorous attention to detail and composition. “Your surface is your first shape,” she says, and in conversation she refers often to “that surface, that stage.” In that, one can almost trace her back to the Piero della Francesca Flagellation that she loved during that first trip, where the surface is opened into a theatrical arena in which the drama unfolds; the allover particularities of her applications are a tribute to Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, with its myriad minute distractions, which she saw on her way home, at the Prado. To Mirò she attributes her playful arabesque. But equally, she became entranced with the gold line of medieval cloisonné enamel—not so much the images on many liturgical objects, but the glowing abstract line that shaped such representations. And so it went on subsequent trips: her fascination with
the transhistorical phenomena of ornamentation was piqued by the carpet pages of Hiberno-Saxon manuscripts; the dots on Malta temples (which she likened to the raindrops that fell so rarely in that arid climate); the mazelike carvings on the megaliths of Gavrinis, Brittany; and late Turner at the Tate in 1952. After all, as Adams says, painting “provides evidence of homo sapiens. The artist makes a report to the world.” For her, the artist’s net must be widely cast. To experience a large painting such as Tethered Ease, nearly 6 ft. square, from 1971, we begin by getting lost in what at first seems a barely differentiated all-over expanse of silvery tone. The act of visual liberation unfolds slowly, in understated events that feel increasingly dramatic as we notice them: slippages into drifts of yellow or rose; innumerable white crease-like marks Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893–1983), Morning Star, 16 March 1940, gouache, oil and pastel on paper, 15
that transform the surface into a distant
x 18 inches. Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, gift
topography; patches of nubby canvas that
of Pilar Juncosa de Miró, Successió Miró/Artists
seem to float to the surface, like flotsam.
Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
Just off-center, a long, slender drawn line loops near the base and bifurcates upward
in a sweeping diagonal. The delicate, looping line does not so much take over as perform what the rest of the field abdicates: it coalesces, taking on what Adams
Left: The Fieschi Morgan Staurotheke, early 9th century, Byzantine, gilded silver, gold, enamel worked in cloisonné, and niello, 11⁄16 x 41⁄16 x 213⁄16 inches, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917. Right: Dorestad Brooch, c. 800 AD, likely Swiss or Burgundian, gold, glass, almandine, pearls and enamel, 3¼ inches, Rijksmuseum van Oudheden.
has cited as “the just noticeable difference” written about by the panpsychic philosopher Gustav Fechner (1801–1887). An effect of zooming between great distances—of looking at faraway vistas or being pressed close-on to surfaces—is just one of the many extremes in which these paintings situate us. Top and Bottom, a tall vertical painting also of 1971, is pressed with glittering mica, which makes us keenly aware of the material surface. We may feel as though we are projected into a cosmological infinity, but, as the materials remind us, the expansiveness is of this earth. The looping line of Tethered Ease is here snipped into fragmented bits that resemble broken DNA—the smallest of building elements—set loose as if untethered in a great wind. Earth, dust and
Stupa 3, 1st century, Sanchi, Madhya Pradesh, India. Photo: Kandukuru Nagarjun. Clava Cairns, Bronze Age, Inverness, Scotland. Photo: David Lyons/Alamy Stock Photo.
wind—the irony is that there is no “top or bottom,” as the title might suggest; here, as elsewhere, the canvas is an expanse that feels limitless. “Adams’s emotional universe,” wrote Donald Kuspit in 1994, “is made all the more intense and ‘asymmetrical’ by the textural means she uses to make it tangible and organically alive.”4 In Vermont Adams maintains a studio complete with a wall fixed with pulleys that allow it to be raised and lowered, permitting her to paint both flat and upright, and to view her work afar from a little balcony. It is a real mystery, when perusing an Adams painting, to figure out what came first and what later, what is under and what on top; the picture plane is quite compressed, though the effect is one of great expanse and even depth. And while she often cites the many places she has lived—not least the river delta near Stockton where, as a child growing up, she used to go fishing—and her decades in Vermont, the paintings carry no specific
geographical allusions. “I really feel the world,” she told me, “I extract particulars from everywhere I go.” Beyond her fascination with Celtic cairns and Buddhist stupas, there is also her deep love of nature, of ammonites and other fossils gathered on walks, of the mineral properties of the earth and its inhabitants, the sand and mica and eggshells that she incorporates into her work. In the mottled red triangle, hypotenuse curved, that intrudes from the right edge of Out Come Out (1980) we almost get a whiff of developments in painting of that
George McNeil (American, 1908–1995), Yes?, 1978, oil on canvas, 75 x 60 inches
decade—deemed at that era dead by the critical establishment, painting would nonetheless thrive in the colorful off-plumb geometries of Elizabeth Murray (who may well have known Adams’s work) or George McNeil. The title Out Come Out seems to urge the various elements along—the pools of rainbow colors that submit to chromatic compromises in the field, the gay splatters and beaded arabesques. “In [my] attempt to objectify the subjective resource, I cannot stress sufficiently the shaping force of the hunch, the bump, the oscillation, the reiteration that slips to variant,” Adams wrote in 1996.5 Indeed, the color seems to oscillate, and the
curlicues of the arabesque echo in white and violet threads below. Executed in oil and pastel as well as her by-now preferred acrylic (actually isobutyl methacrylate, introduced to her by one of her teachers, Charles Seide, in the 1950s), the work is also embedded with eggshells, sand and mica, which give it a gritty, sparkling quality when viewed up close. Smaller works on paper made in the late 1970s exhibit a similar exuberance, with geometric shapes articulated in mottled surfaces that maintain a kinship with that of the overall dissolved field. The field’s framing edges expand into narrow triangles that make it feel as though the outside is infiltrating, conveying a sense that the picture breathes with the world beyond. In Apparent (1982), a gay, scalloped circle—a form that appeared much earlier and recurs over decades—hovers above what look like cartoon swoops of wind. The work is executed in acrylic over a lithographic proof, demonstrating the range of mediums in which Adams is willing to experiment. The “inclusiveness” that Adams told me she values is on view here in a later work, from 1987: Interstitial, over 11 feet wide, in which we are plunged into what at first seems a chaotic display. Again, one finds the subtle modulation of hues reminiscent of color-field stain painting. Seemingly flung through the field are colored lines expanding into broken curling strands and squiggles or cohering into open circles. Semi translucent disks further disperse focus, as if we are looking through a telescope at changing details at different times of day and night, and gestural gray marks resembling photo emulsion activate the field. Triangular edges along the bottom of the work act, as in the smaller works on paper, to imply the world
beyond the frame. It is as if Adams is collecting together fragments of the many “decorative objects or situations” that she has encountered over the decades— what she has dubbed a “gatherum of quiddities”— in order to convey the mission of “we . . . as artist” being “carriers of the vividness of man’s emotional, imaginative, dreaming desiring self.”6 Adams deliberately leads us through what appear as spontaneous events—yet each of the marks is carefully placed and meticulously rendered in order to give the painting a living, breathing sense. In the end, it is the artist’s inclusive vision that guides us, even as we feel the total ease and pleasure of our own absorption.
1
There is a good selection of excerpts from Pat Adams’s own writings in Jamie Franklin, Gatherum of Quiddities: Paintings by Pat Adams, Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont, 2017. For the National Academy quote, see p. 60.
2 3
Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, 2010. Unless otherwise indicated, unattributed quotes in this essay come from conversations I had with Adams in 2020 and 2021.
4 5
Donald Kuspit, “Pat Adams,” Artforum, September 1992, vol. 31, no. 1, p. 94. Pat Adams, “’. . . in Nature’s chemistry distilled . . .’: A Gatherum of Quiddities,” College Art Association, February 23, 1996; quoted in Franklin, Gatherum of Quiddities, 2017, p. 58.
6
Ibid, p. 60.
Faye Hirsch is an art historian and critic based in New York. She is co-author of a forthcoming book about the Skowhegan residency program, 1946–2021.
Pat Adams is a philosopher and a sensualist. She is one of the most thoughtful and articulate artists I have ever met, and yet she is intensely attuned to this world we live in, composed of visual sensations, emotions, intuitions. She creates rich, colorful, and jarringly material paintings.
I see parallels between her work and a consistent transcendental strand in modernism leading from Paul Klee through Joseph Beuys to Anselm Kiefer, which involved both an acute sensitivity to material and facture and a deep sense of meaning and allusion. Each of these artists created his or her own intensely personal symbolic language, and each was acutely aware of the romantic capacity of material itself to speak to our most intimate souls, the speaking power of stuffs: fat and felt, in the case of Beuys; lead and straw in Kiefer’s work; mica, sand, and eggshell in Pat Adams. The essential difference is that Adams does not share the same heroic sense of tragedy that draws on German Romanticism, nor the literary and historical references. She draws instead on the American experience of crossing the continent, engraved into her own family’s legacy.
— Robert Wolterstorff, 2017
Top and Bottom, 1971
Tethered Ease, 1971
More So When, 1971
It Comes to This, 1978
Cardinal, 1978
Pass, 1980
Out Come Out, 1980
Interstitial, 1987
Innately Abounds, 1999
Works on Paper
I don’t think it is farfetched to suggest that Adams’s material consciousness helped expand her understanding of nature, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, as well as deepened her desire to learn from divergent discourses, such as alchemy and the various disciplines of science she studied while a student at the University of California, Berkeley: paleontology and physics. She has traveled widely as well as looked at every kind of art, from the archaic to illuminated manuscripts to the work of early abstract artists to her contemporaries. She is possessed by a boundless curiosity and acute sense that the beautiful and meaningful can be found anywhere.
At a time when the art world was moving towards large scale works and bold graphic images, and the emphasis was on art-about-art, Adams chose a path rooted in wonder and speculation and pursued this possibility without hesitation. It is her unshakable belief in the inexplicable that elevates her work into a domain that is all her own. Looking at Adams’s inimitable work, we feel pulled into a celebration of the unfathomable, the fact that the Magellanic Clouds have a few billion stars and orbit the Milky Way once every 1500 million years and each other once every 900 million years. Adams does not turn away from the incomprehensible nor does she ever become literal. The awe running through her work speaks to us on the deepest levels: it both delights and challenges us. — John Yau, 2020
Glistening Drowse, 1970
Equal and Other, 1971
Errand of Honey, 1971
See What Happens, 1971
Surface Climate, 1971
Begin Again, 1972
Go Round, 1974
How it Starts, 1974
Tender Spots, 1975
As When, 1977
Eye Bite, 1977
In the Way of Sense, 1977
Willingness, 1977
Season of Grace, 1979
Avec, 1979
Disquiet Dappled, 1979
Else, 1979
On the Table, 1979
Rebound, 1979
Our Time, 1979
Noah’s Ark, 1979
Au Point, 1980
Not Apart, 1980
Drawn On, 1980
Uncoiling, 1980
After, 1981
Arise, 1981
Au Bord de, 1981
Nice, 1981
Run Into, 1981
Apparent, 1982
Slowly When, 1984
Uprise, 1985
Surfacing Round, 1985
Not About, 1986
Interior Matters, 1987
High Time, 1987
Dark Pass, 1987
Calculus of Rhyme, 1987
Celebrating As It Seeks, 1989
In Adams’s paintings aura returns to abstraction: explicitly in the circle that is a body aura as well as a cosmic body, and implicitly, through their ecstatic surfaces. Indeed, Adams is trying to articulate a sense of ineffable ecstasy through basic Modernist means, indicating that their evocative magic is far from exhausted. In general, Adams has produced a body of art that reminds us that abstraction can still deal with matters of the deepest concern to us, and that its formal possibilities are not yet fully realized. Hers is not routine signature painting. Indeed, her work indicates that abstract art is likely to have as long and complex a history as that of figuration in the Renaissance. — Donald Kuspit, 1992
Checklist Top and Bottom, 1971 oil, isobutyl methacrylate and mica on canvas 77 x 24 inches Tethered Ease, 1971 oil and isobutyl methacrylate on canvas 70 x 72 inches More So When, 1971 oil, isobutyl methacrylate and mica on linen 68 x 68 inches
Innately Abounds, 1999 oil, isobutyl methacrylate, enamel, mica and bead on linen 49½ x 121 inches Glistening Drowse, 1970 gouache on paper 17½ x 15½ inches Equal and Other, 1971 gouache on paper 19½ x 10 inches
It Comes to This, 1978 oil, isobutyl methacrylate, mica, eggshell and pastel on canvas 80 x 100 inches
Errand of Honey, 1971 gouache on paper 20 x 10 inches
Cardinal, 1978 oil, isobutyl methacrylate and eggshell on canvas 80 x 86 inches
See What Happens, 1971 gouache on paper 22½ x 16¼ inches
Pass, 1980 oil, isobutyl methacrylate, eggshell, mica, sand and pastel on linen 79 x 82 inches
Surface Climate, 1971 gouache and pastel on paper 21 x 8½ inches
Out Come Out, 1980 oil, isobutyl methacrylate, pastel, mica, eggshell and sand on linen 80 x 80 inches Interstitial, 1987 oil, isobutyl methacrylate, shell, mica and pigment on canvas 80 x 131½ inches
Begin Again, 1972 gouache on paper 22¾ x 13½ inches Go Round, 1974 gouache on paper 22¼ x 17¼ inches
How it Starts, 1974 gouache on paper 17 x 9¾ inches Tender Spots, 1975 acrylic on paper 22⅛ x 15⅞ inches As When, 1977 acrylic, mica, crayon, ink and charcoal on paper 18⅛ x 16¾ inches Eye Bite, 1977 crayon, mica, ink and acrylic on paper 14 x 13⅝ inches In the Way of Sense, 1977 acrylic, mica, sand and crayon on paper 19 x 11½ inches Willingness, 1977 acrylic, mother of pearl, pastel and ink on paper 16½ x 15 inches Season of Grace, 1979 acrylic, ink, mica and eggshell on paper 21⅛ x 18⅝ inches Avec, 1979 acrylic, ink and eggshell on paper 19½ x 17¼ inches Disquiet Dappled, 1979 acrylic, eggshell, ink and crayon on paper 16¾ x 24⅜ inches
Else, 1979 lithographic ink on Japanese paper, acrylic, eggshell, crayon and pastel on paper 21½ x 28¼ inches On the Table, 1979 acrylic, ink, mica and eggshell on paper 22½ x 30¾ inches Rebound, 1979 acrylic, mica and graphite on paper 5¾ x 23 inches Our Time, 1979 acrylic, ink and mica on paper 21¼ x 29 inches Noah’s Ark, 1979 acrylic, ink and mica on paper 23 x 17 inches Au Point, 1980 acrylic, mica and eggshell on paper 17¾ x 23 inches Not Apart, 1980 acrylic, eggshell, charcoal, mica, ink and crayon on paper 12⅛ x 20 inches Drawn On, 1980 gouache, ink, mica and pastel on paper 29 x 19½ inches
Uncoiling, 1980 gouache, ink, mica and eggshell on paper 16½ x 16½ inches
Uprise, 1985 acrylic, lithographic ink, crayon and mica on paper 25¼ x 17¾ inches
After, 1981 acrylic, mica and eggshell on paper 23⅜ x 18¾ inches
Surfacing Round, 1985 acrylic, charcoal, crayon and sand on paper 17 x 18½ inches
Arise, 1981 acrylic, crayon and sand on paper 23 x 18¾ inches
Not About, 1986 acrylic, bead, sand and shell on paper 15¾ x 21½ inches
Au Bord de, 1981 acrylic, gouache, mica, pastel and eggshell on paper 19⅜ x 16¼ inches
Interior Matters, 1987 acrylic, gouache, mica and pastel on paper 18 x 25½ inches
Nice, 1981 acrylic, mica, eggshell and ballpoint pen on paper 10 x 29¼ inches
High Time, 1987 acrylic, gouache, ink, mica and pastel on paper 21½ x 25 inches
Run Into, 1981 acrylic, gouache and eggshell on paper 9⅛ x 16¼ inches
Dark Pass, 1987 acrylic, ink, mica, pastel, eggshell on paper mounted on linen 7¾ x 10½ inches
Apparent, 1982 acrylic over lithograph proof on paper 25½ x 18 inches Slowly When, 1984 acrylic, gouache, mica and sand on paper 18 x 23⅛ inches
Calculus of Rhyme, 1987 acrylic, sand and pigment on paper 18⅛ x 16½ inches Celebrating As It Seeks, 1989 acrylic, pearl, sand and shell on paper 18¼ x 27⅝ inches
Pat Adams (b. 1928) was raised in Stockton, California, and began painting at the age of ten. She studied painting at UC Berkeley from 1945–49, where she first encountered the ideas of Hans Hofmann as she studied under his former students—Worth Ryder and Margaret Peterson O’Hagan, who had arranged for Hofmann’s migration to the States in 1932, among them. During her summers at Berkeley she pursued programs at the California College of Arts and Crafts (1945), the College of the Pacific (1946), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1948). In 1950, following her graduation from Berkeley the previous year, she attended a summer session at Brooklyn Museum Art School, remaining in the city after its completion. She received her first solo exhibition in 1954 at the Korman Gallery—later to be renamed the Zabriskie Gallery, which would continue to represent her through 2018. Her work was greatly motivated by her international travel during the 1950s: in Italy in 1951, after her first husband, painter and printmaker Vincent Longo was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, and in France in 1956, after she received her own Fulbright scholarship. In the fall of 1964 she was invited by professor Paul Feeley to teach at Bennington College, where she joined the social circle of the famous “Green Mountain Boys,” including Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. In 1972 she married fellow Bennington professor R. Arnold Ricks, and they set off with her two sons on a four month journey through Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and all of Europe, which impacted her work significantly. She continued teaching at Bennington through 1993. Her lengthy career has also included many teaching appointments at Yale, as both a visiting professor and artist, as well as the Rhode Island School of Design, among numerous other institutions across the country. She has received notable awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Academy of Design, and the College Art Association. In 1995 she was awarded the Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Her work has been the subject of over fifty solo exhibitions. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.
This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition “Pat Adams: Works from the 1970s and 80s” and marks the gallery’s first one-person exhibition of Pat Adams’s work since beginning to represent her in 2019. The show remains on view March 5 through April 16, 2022.
Catalogue © Alexandre Fine Art Inc. Images © Pat Adams Photography: Maria Stabio Photographic Production: Maria Stabio Essay © Faye Hirsch Photo of Pat Adams © Abe Frajndlich Editorial Production: Emma Crumbley, Marie Evans and Maria Stabio Design: Lawrence Sunden, Inc., Harrington Park, New Jersey Printing: The Studley Press, Dalton, Massachusetts
Donald Kuspit’s quote excerpted from September 1992 Artforum article, “Pat Adams.” Robert Wolterstorff’s quote excerpted from a catalogue essay on Pat Adams written on the occasion of Bennington Museum’s 2017 exhibition of Adams’s work, Gatherum of Quiddities: Paintings by Pat Adams. John Yau quote excerpted from an essay on Pat Adams written on the occasion of the gallery’s first planned show of Adams’s work in 2019.
No portion of this catalogue, images or text may be reproduced, either in printed or electronic form, without the expressed written permission of the gallery.