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PARTISAN REVIEW
bilities of light and dark. The cumulative effect was not only to bring the
seventeenth-century master vividly to life, but to make the evolution of
some of his most subtle paintings visible.
As the exhibition made clear, Poussin had no single way of making a
drawing. He could suggest a battle or stage an allegory with tellingly
placed, calligraphic strokes or conjure up the essential masses of a packed
city square or a pastoral landscape with broad passages of wash. Some–
times he did both at once. Whatever his method - muscular, evocative
line or painterly strokes of tone - Poussin's drawings are at once seductive
and impressive, as his paintings are, and revealing, as his paintings are not.
In
the drawings you admire his virtuosity at the same time that you can
see, in some, the strategies he adopted to overcome an intermittent
tremor of the hand. You acknowledge the severe, rational order imposed
on the complexities of elaborate narratives, but at the same time, you are
enchanted - as you never are in the cool, formal canvases - by the spon–
taneity with which the figures who enact these solemn dramas are
described. The drawing show at the Met was modest, tightly focused, and
magnificent, and it got even better with repeated visits.
In
addition, the
Met provided a context for its British visitors by mounting a small exhibit
of drawings from its own holdings of works on paper by Poussin's con–
temporaries and associates. All in all, a treat.
You could leap across the centuries, as well as the slush at the comers,
if you went downtown from the Met to the exhibitions of Adolph Got–
tlieb's paintings from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s at Knoedler
&
Company and of works by a little-known near-contemporary of Got–
tlieb's, Steve Wheeler, at Snyder Fine Art. The two shows provoked
interesting comparisons. The Gottliebs, variants on his signature
Bursts
and powerful
Imaginary LAndscapes,
were striking for their generosity, their
ample, assured gestures, and their subtle color. The Wheelers were note–
worthy for their crowded, almost airless compositions, tight wrist
drawing, and complex polychromy.
Among the stars of the Gottlieb show were two pictures from the
1950s: an elegant
Imaginary LAndscape
dependent upon a marvelous dia–
logue between a rigid arc of geometric elements in the "sky" and a
swoop of bold calligraphic fragments in the "earth" zone, and a brooding
mineral green
Burst
variant, with a hovering blue oval turned into an
ominous storm cloud by ferocious black drawing.
Exca/ibur
#2,1963 was a
subtly-layered, pared-down stunner, with a haloed red disc pulsing against
a pale ground and creamy overpainting that carved out lean, authoritative
passages of over-scaled drawing below; a tough, lyrical picture,
Excalibur
#2 reminded us once again of how brilliantly Gottlieb could orchestrate
color, surface, and audaciously scaled marks to create ambiguous dramas.
