KAREN WILKIN
489
overlap and fuse, while retaining some of their original character. John–
son can overload her images, to my eye, expending too much energy on
rendering. She is better when she lets go, as in a brushy snake head cum
exotic flower, flattened against a stylized but painterly geometric back–
ground, like a heraldic insignia for the deadly and the fragile .
Among the surprises of the winter was the large exhibition of Bill
Traylor's work at HirschI and Adler Modern in January. Traylor is that
rare thing, an authentic naif who makes art that requires no apologies.
Born into slavery around 1854, Traylor began to draw at the age of
eighty-five, when he stopped working as a field hand on the plantation
where he was born and moved to Montgomery, Alabama. There, he
slept in the back room of a funeral parlor. A young Montgomery artist,
Charles Shannon, found Traylor drawing in the street and began to
provide him with materials. For the next five years or so, Traylor pro–
duced a series of economical, elegant silhouette images of carousing fig–
ures, fierce dogs, mules, horses, people and their houses - a vivid evoca–
tion of Southern rural life. He had un unfailing sense of placement and
an equally unfailing eye for the telling detail: the swell of a hip, the angle
of arms placed akimbo, the tension of an extended finger, the set of ears
or a tail. The emblematic patterns of his birds and animals sometimes re–
call Inuit prints, but more often they are immediate and original. At his
most powerful, Traylor is capable of pictures that recall the best of
art
brllt
Dubuffet in their wit, simplicity, and deceptively pared-down natu–
ralism. The monograph on Traylor by Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco,
published by Knopf last year, which reproduces many of Traylor's
strongest pictures and includes an interview with Charles Shannon about
his friendship with the artist, should help to make this American phe–
nomenon known to a wider audience.
The Traylor exhibition introduced a virtually unknown artist. The
installation of Barnett Newman's monumental sculpture
Zim Zum,
at
Gagosian Gallery's Soho space in February and March, presented a pre–
viously unknown work by a well-known figure. Executed at the end of
Newman's life, with the assistance of the sculptor Robert Murray,
Zim
ZlIm
is a series of zig-zagging vertical plates, suavely proportioned, ar–
ranged like a pair of overscaled folding screens. The roughly welded
seams are like structural equivalents for Newman's celebrated painted
"zips."
Zim ZlInl
seemed far more personal and poetic than the familiar
Broken Obelisk,
which has always struck me as a kind of corporate
homage to Brancusi's
Endless Cohtmn. Zim ZlIm
is not so much an object
as a highly charged site. From the outside, it evokes hidden, sacred places,
like the holy of holies at Mecca, shrouded with its dark veil. Passing
between the two staggered planes suggests some solemn, ritual act.
