KAREN WILKIN
At the Galleries
It
has become increasingly common for commercial galleries to mount
exhibitions we would normally expect
to
see in museums: careful exami–
nations of aspects of a career or a movement; retrospectives of serious
artists fallen from - or never in - fashion; historical surveys; all accompa–
nied by substantial catalogues. Oust why the museums aren't doing these
shows is another issue.} Admittedly, the phenomenon can pose problems,
since at best, commercial galleries aren't always able to pry loose key
loans the way museums can and, at worst, harsh economic reality can
overwhelm even the most high-minded intentions, but more often than
not these exhibitions are thoughtful, intelligent, and answer real needs.
Last season's surveys of Marsden Hartley's late figure paintings and
Stuart Davis's early works, at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, were exem–
plary, and last fall they continued in the same vein with an economical
retrospective of the work ofJules Olitski. The show offered a chance to
review the achievement of a painter last seen in depth at the Whitney
Museum in 1973, in a retrospective exhibit organized by the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston. Last fall's show concentrated on works from the
1960s and the 1980s, with only a few - albeit very choice - paintings
from the 1970s, presumably because the over- all expanses of luminous
color or crusty monochrome of those years are what Olitski is best
known for. Only one complaint: I missed the early "modeled" pictures
that Olitski executed in Paris in the 1950s. These sturdy, iconic paintings
anticipate the density and solemnity of his most recent works and would
have given them a new context.
Still, it was a pleasure to see the early stain paintings again, with
their overscaled swoops and pools of intense color; they looked
startlingly fresh, uncalculated and contemporary. Seeing them together
with Olitski's recent pictures, with their aggressively ploughed surfaces,
like the sweeps of giant paws, made the constants in his work evident,
despite the shifts in palette and paint application over the years. The en–
ergy and generosity of Olitski's drawing remains unchanged, whether it
spreads across the canvas as a broad stain, as it does in the 1960s, or asserts
