LARRY ZOX OPEN SERIES
(1972–1975)
NOVEMBER 14–DECEMBER 20, 2019
ALBERMARLE SOUND, 1973, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 71 X 51 ½ IN.
LARRY
With subtle grace and exquisite nuance, Larry Zox’s Open Series paintings of 1972 to 1975 create sublime space. They arouse what Roger Fry called “cosmic emotion,” the sense of transcendence implicit in pure abstraction. Each work is an aesthetic masterpiece in its own right, while the series forms majestic choral music. Zox’s Open Series refines—or “quintessentializes”—so-called musical painting. This ideal of abstract painting began with Kandinsky, acknowledging Walter Pater’s view that all art aspires to the condition of music, in which form and content are indistinguishable. Kandinsky’s musical Compositions are Maximalist and expressionist, fraught with turbulent gestures; they tend to sprawl chaotically in euphoric self-indulgence. By contrast, Zox’s Open Series compositions are Minimalist or Fundamentalist; that is, they distill abstraction to its essence, concentrating it into enigmatic innocence. The vertical gestures— geometrically restrained and calmly in place—are unblemished by expressionistic excitement. They grandly flank central open spaces that are virginally pure. Where Kandinsky stayed on manic surfaces, Zox strips musical abstraction to its core. The Open Series paintings burn with a bright, gem-like flame, their deceptive simplicity masking their gravitas.
Kandinsky called his musical abstractions mood paintings. By such a measure, Zox’s abstractions are mood paintings of somber exhilaration. Zox has been labeled a Color Field painter, but his art is not characterized by the disengagement that often denotes such work. What distinguishes the color in his Open Series is its peculiar sobriety, discretion, and intimacy: it draws us into the space of the painting, rather than pushing out at us in a sort of frontal—confrontational—attack, as does the color in Gene Davis’s stripe paintings and in Morris Louis’s “unfurled paintings”— to mention two artists with whom Zox has been associated. More to the point, Zox’s Open Series has an affinity with Robert Motherwell’s Open Series, but Zox’s works are more introspective. Motherwell addresses the theme of the window, in homage to Matisse’s window series, suggesting the presence of a window that separates interior from exterior space—inside from outside. Zox’s space is all interior, even when it alludes to the exterior. This is the case in works that reference the space of nature, such as Collingsville, 1972, Hudson Canyon, c. 1973, and Hudson Strait, 1973. Nature is a point of departure for Zox: its open space becomes his inner space. For Zox, landscape transforms into what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “inscape.” Slowly and surely, Zox abandoned landscape—he no longer needed it as a stimulus, a source of inspiration. In the two Untitled paintings, Open White, c. 1974, and Untitled, 1975, he made resolutely pure, transcendental abstractions—absolute painting, as it were.
The Open Series paintings are peculiarly theatrical: one can read the central open space as an empty stage, while the sober-colored geometrical stripes that vertically flank it can seem to function as flattened curtains. This phenomenon is present in
the isosceles triangle that marks the right edge of Untitled, 1974, and in the geometrical form on the left in Untitled, 1975, that appear to unfurl or fold.
Resolutely flat, Zox’s Open Series has an important place in the history of planar painting, a term alluding to the Museum of Modern Art’s 1979 exhibition, The Planar Dimension. Accordingly, the grandly elongated stripes—thinner ones mark the top and bottom of the paintings—finesse the edges or frame of the painting, as the noted critic Clement Greenberg said they should in a good modernist work. But testifying to their uncanny character, each is a sort of modified, self-contained expressive gesture. By incompletely measuring the central open space, they it acknowledge its immeasurability. By tentatively limiting it, they suggest its sublime illimitability.
COLLINGSVILLE, 1972, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 108 X 77 IN.
Committed to abstraction throughout his career, LARRY ZOX played a central role in the Color Field discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. His work of the time—consisting of brilliantly hued geometric shapes in dynamic juxtapositions—demonstrated that hard-edge painting was not cold or formalistic. He reused certain shapes, but he did so less to explore their aspects than to “get at the specific character and quality of each painting in and for itself,” as James Monte stated in his essay for Zox’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. In the early 1970s, he began using a freer, more emotive method, in which he softened the geometry of his forms while maintaining the autonomy of color, which would increasingly become more important to him than structure in his later years.
Zox began to receive attention in the 1960s, when he was included in several groundbreaking exhibitions of Color Field and Minimalist art. These included Shape and Structure (1965), organized by Henry Geldzahler and Frank Stella for the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, and Systemic Painting (1966), organized by Lawrence Alloway for the Guggenheim Museum. Zox’s solo exhibition at the Whitney in 1973 acknowledged his significance in the art scene. In 1974, he was represented in the inaugural exhibition of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., which owns fourteen of his works.
Zox was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He attended the University of Oklahoma and Drake University in Des Moines. While studying at the Des Moines Art Center, he was mentored by George Grosz. Despite his own figurative approach, Grosz encouraged Zox’s forays into abstraction. In 1958, Zox moved to New York, joining the downtown art scene. His studio on 20th Street became a gathering place for artists, jazz musicians, bikers, and boxers. He occasionally sparred with the visiting fighters. He later established a studio in East Hampton, where he painted and fished.
From 1962 to 1972, he produced his Rotation, Scissors Jack, Diamond Drill, and Gemini series. In these works, he used hard-edged shapes, employing white as a foil between colors to produce negative spaces. The result is that the colored shapes seem to have only been cut out and laid down instead of painted. The New York Times noted in 1964: “The artist is hip, cool, adventurous, not content to stay with the mere exercise of sensibility that one sees in smaller works.” Zox used regularized formats as a means of revealing how color can change our perception of shape. In a single work he often combined industrial epoxy paints with acrylic to set up tensions between colors that would not exist otherwise. At the time, Peter Schjeldahl observed in The New York Times: Zox “is one painter who shows an ability to play by the rules without cramping at all an essentially romantic and exuberant sensibility.” His art of the period was equated with that of Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland.
In his Open Series of the early 1970s, he broke free from hardedged painting. The change in his art occurred when he was creating a monumental work, entitled Big Bang. Before the paint dried on the canvas, he brought a sharpened piece of wood to it, creating an undulating surface. Thus he liberated himself from the uniformed
surfaces that had dominated his art for a decade. From the Open Series and lasting throughout remainder of his career, he explored a variety of new means of applying paint, including using squeegees and other large tools. He continued to stretch Color Field limits in the 1980s, combining the detachment of paint staining with gestural brushwork balanced between intuition and intentionality. He created more
UNTITLED (ORANGE), 1974, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 85 X 49 IN.
UNTITLED, C. 1973, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 93 X 82 IN.
fluid yet still rigorous paintings in the early 2000s that were receiving critical praise when he died in 2006 from cancer.
Zox taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1967–68, 1977, and 1980. He was artist in residence or guest artist at many universities such as Yale, Syracuse, Cornell, and Dartmouth. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1967) and awards from the National Council of the Arts (1969) and the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation (1985). Throughout his career, Zox had annual solo shows in galleries in New York City and elsewhere. In addition to the Whitney exhibition of 1973–74, he had solo shows at the Hopkins Center,
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (1970), the Akron Art Institute (1971), the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (1974), and the Marsh Gallery, University of Richmond, Virginia (1993). He participated in many notable museum and college gallery exhibitions at venues including the Whitney; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York; the Palm Springs Desert Museum; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Charles H. MacNider Art Museum, Mason City, Iowa; the Des Moines Art Center; the Blanden Memorial Art Museum, Fort Dodge, Iowa; and the Muscatine Art Center, Iowa.
LISA N. PETERS, PH.D.
UNTITLED, C. 1973, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 97 X 78 IN.
MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio
Akron Art Museum, Ohio
Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
Baum Gallery, University of Central Arkansas, Conway
Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida
The Brooklyn Museum, New York
Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida
Dallas Museum of Art, Texas
Daimler Art Collection, Stuttgart, Germany
Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, Missouri
Des Moines Art Center, Iowa
The Fralin Art Museum, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Fred Jones Jr Museum of Art, Norman, Oklahoma
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts
Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, New York
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
Indianapolis Art Museum, Indiana
Kresge Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida
Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma
Palm Springs Art Museum, California
Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York
Portland Art Museum, Oregon
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Tate Modern, London
University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan
University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington
Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina
Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen, Germany
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
UNTITLED, C. 1974, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 80 X 92 IN.
UNTITLED, 1974, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 77 X 72 ½ IN.