126
PARTISAN R.EVIEW
found Cohen's smaller, darker, more deliberately worked pictures to be more
convincing than her large, lyrical eflorts. The bigger paintinsrs seemed rather
arbitrary, their component gestures too finicky to sustain their energy across
the whole expanse, while the intense smaller pictures were more rhythmi–
cally coherent and the scale of their marks more satisfYing. Those qualities,
along wi th their greater physical densi ty, made them some of Cohen's
strongest works to date.
Cohen is not unique, of course, in conceiving of painting as a process of
courting spontaneity, of "getting out of your own way," as Larry Poons has
put it, in order to allow the materials of painting somehow to become
charged with the artist's emotional and intellectual baggage. This attitude
fueled the practice of generations of Cohen's ancestors, Poons incl uded, fi·om
the Abstract Expressionists to the present; witness, for example, Pollock's
pours or Poons's thrown paintings of the I97()s and 19HOs. (The miracle, of
course, is that the skeins and waterfalls of paillt and the miscellaneous accre–
tions that punctuate Pollock's and Poons's pictures
do
end up being
expressive and capable of moving us.)
Poons's fundamental assumptions about what a picture can be have
remained unchanged over the years, but his paintings haven't. As his last show
made clear, he has increasingly allowed all kinds of things to sur(;lCl' in his
recent work that he previously suppressed or ignored-boldly colored, con–
tained shapes; deliberate drawing gestures; fleeting references
to
things seen;
all usions to landscape, and more- as though he had simply decided to put in
everything that interested him, wi thout edi ting. Itecentiy, he has explored
these ideas in monotype, a medium whose directness permi ts him to preserve
the immediacy of his usual process and, because of the transforming proper–
ties of printing, adds yet another element of the untoreseen. The results,
shown at Claudia Carr Callery, were a mixed bag, but the best were fresh ,
energetic images in which seemingly all usive imagery dissolved into non–
descriptive internal rhythms and all-over abstract structures; when the hints
of illusionistic reference became too obvious, the l11onotypes suffered.
In
some, slashing strokes and a palette of clear red, blue, yellow, and green con–
spired to suggest outdoor space wi thout describing it Ii terally , rather in the
way that a 19-Hls Hotil1ann landscape does. Others werc more subdued, evok–
ing (as much through their scale as through reterencc) the tabletop world of
the still life, although they were no nlore literal than the "landscapes." The
small 1l10notype format sometimes seelllS to
cr~lInp
PO()IlS'S style, as though
this master of the vast canvas had trouble translating ti.dl body gestures into
movements of the wrist, but he is clearly f;Jscinated and challenged by the
possibilities of this new mediUlll. I am cager
to
sce where it takes him.
Among the
(;111
season's more
rcchcrrld:
treats were Itobert Natkin's
recent abstractions at Iteece Gallerics and L30b Thompson's
Heros, ,\/orf)'rs,
