112
PARTISAN REVIEW
easy to see from these tightly focused works how much Tobey learned
from the Eastern miniatures he admjred.
Tobey occupies an odd place in the history of recent American art.
Always difficult to classifY - stubborn, mystic, independent - he was ac–
claimed in the fifties but lost some of his status, at least in New York,
after he moved to Switzerland in 1960. (He spent the rest of his life
there, until his death in 1976 at the age of eighty-five.) Yet for the past
three decades, Tobey has remained an important figure in the Pacific
Northwest, where he lived and taught for many years, and his European
reputation has soared. His elegant, delicate, intimate pictures appealed to
European sensibilities in ways that much American postwar painting did
not. In this country, especially in New York, Tobey's fragile webs of
drawn line were sometimes compared to Pollock's large-scale pours and
suffered from the confrontation; on the West Coast, connections with
Asian meditative art were more usual, while in Europe, it seemed obvious
that Tobey's obsessive, intensely private works had more
to
do with the
quasi-devotional explorations of, for instance, Paul Klee, than with most
of his compatriots. Daverio Gallery is to be congratulated for reintro–
ducing New York audiences to Tobey. (This is their second survey of his
work.) It's useful to be reminded that American abstraction is not solely
about heroic gestures.
This is not to deny the vitality of the heroic in American art. It still
flourishes, as was made plain by Edvins Strautmanis's forthright new
paintings at Stephen Rosenberg Gallery in October and November. It
would be easy
to
dismiss the Latvian-born, Art Institute of Chicago-edu–
cated Strautman is as the last Abstract Expressionist, if the undeniable in–
tensity of feeling in his pictures didn't make them so convincing. Straut–
manis's overscaled brushstrokes, sometimes insisting on the dimensions and
proportions of the canvas, sometimes fighting against them, and his
brooding color seem motivated by authentic emotional impulses. In the
context of the nineties, Strautmanis's Silver Paintings, as his current series
is known, become the abstract paintings that Gerhardt Richter's recent
work parodies. Like Richter's, Strautmanis's canvases are rough-hewn,
layered, full of sensually ploughed paint, and monumentally scaled. The
difference is that Strautmanis's paintings are "straight" - the real thing,
minus the modish irony, the detachment, and the cynicism. Strautmanis
has been at it a long time, with unflagging seriousness and energy, and his
new pictures, with their luminous darks and odd veilings of dragged
color, are the strongest of his works that I've seen to date. It's easy to
identifY the artists he regards as his ancestors - de Kooning, Hofmann,
maybe even Kline - but I suspect this is largely due to like conviction
that a painting is a visible record of a state of mind. That the state of
mind is a passionate one is what separates Strautmanis's assertive works
