488
PARTISAN REVIEW
dently of image or even of his pictures as a whole, odd as that may
sound. Maybe that's the point. With rare exceptions, he can't put a pic–
ture together. Images are jammed, drift, or simply sit on backgrounds,
offering no convincing reason why anything should be anywhere. Scale
isn't the problem, since smaller pictures suffer from the same problems as
large ones. Winters is probably right to stick to his habitual
monochrome earth tones, since the few chromatic canvases in his show
were remarkably undistinguished. Anyway, everyone in the late eighties
knew that murky pictures were much more serious and hence more im–
portant than those with spectrum color.
Despite the catalogue's claims to the contrary, Winters's pictures
have much the same effect as those of his contemporaries whose strategies
he is supposed to reject; his work is portentous, bombastic, arbitrary,
bland, and surprisingly laclcing in presence, its large size and self-important
gestures notwithstanding. I kept thinking about Stuart Davis, whose first
retrospective exhibition was organized by the Museum of Modern Art in
1945 when the artist was fifty-two. Arguably, his best work was still to
come - the large, intensely-colored explosions of staccato patterns and
words, like the Whitney's taxi-yellow
Oll/h!
ill
Sail Pao
-
but he had al–
ready produced a body of complex, idiosyncratic pictures that set a stan–
dard for American artists of his generation. Winters is ten years younger
than Davis was in 1945. Almost certainly, his best work is still ahead of
him. The Whitney would have done well to have waited at least a few
years longer.
Winters is not alone in his fascination with natural forms, as at least
two recent exhibitions made clear. "The Metaphysical Landscape," an
extremely diverse group show in March at Art in General, brought
to–
gether a large number of younger artists who use images of the natural
world, literally or freely, for ends ranging from the aesthetic to the
metaphorical to the political. The quality of the work was as varied as
the approaches, but the intensity of the participants' concern for the
world around them, for its appearance and its ecology, was almost al–
ways clear. No matter what the result, the choice of imagery seemed
anything but arbitrary. Some of the artists in "The Metaphysical Land–
scape" were seen in January and February in a three-person show at the
Marymount College Gallery. Of these, I found Sue Johnson's
"Decompositions" most convincing. Like Winters, she uses specific images
from scientific texts but transforms and radically alters their meaning
by
recombining them as improbable hybrids. A series ofJohnson's drawings
in "The Metaphyscial Landscape" made her methods plain: not-quite
mirror-image two-headed "creatures," fused as if they were playing-card
figures, seemed like diagrams of a new natural history. The best ofJohn–
son's paintings use this principle, but less overtly, so the hybridized images
