488
PARTISAN REVIEW
these toughly modeled,
zaftig
forms back into the expanse of the canvas,
while a painted label, with the artist's initials and the date, seems to have
been slapped on to keep everything in its place. It's a witty, ingeniously
constructed picture, with Stuart Davis's kind of "American Scene meets
High European Modernism" energy and wisecracking humor. I hope
there are more paintings this good in Levy's emerging
oeuvre.
If "historical modernists" were well served by the past season's shows,
there were also rewards for anyone interested in modernism's more recent
permutations. A generation-spamling series of shows offered ample proof
that the persistent rumors of the death of painting are, as Mark Twain said,
greatly exaggerated. Robert Natkin's exhibition at the Reece Galleries was
inelegantly titled "Jism and Grace," a reference to something said by the
fifteen-year-old Natkin's black tap-dancing teacher during his Chicago
boyhood-a remark described by the artist as "my first aesthetic lesson."
The phrase gave unfortunate connotations to the milky veilings of some of
the best pictures in the show, but it couldn't obscure the fact that they were
among Natkin's strongest to date. The paintings still depend on his "sig–
nature" stacks of teetering, blunt-edged blocks, shallow stage-set-like
spaces, and dappled patterns, but they have become more atmospheric and
painterly than in the past, and as a result, they seem more mysterious and
unexpected.
The show included numerous studies for larger works: spontaneous,
seemingly rapidly executed, richly inflected images that derive much of
their charm and drama from the contrast of casual mark-making and
"mechanically" produced patterning (actually the resul t of transferring
paint with-and sometimes through-textured cloth). The studies have a
looseness and transparency that often sets them apart from Natkin's fin–
ished works, but in the recent series, even the largest and most complex of
his developed paintings retained the directness and the sense of the hand
that is such an important component of the studies. The result was to make
Natkin's curiously constructed "tableaux," which often read like abstract
stills from some jerky, out-of-focus silent film, appear even more unstable,
elusive, and compelling. In some, a subdued, earthy, creamy palette added
to their freshness and luminosity, while in others, such as a large aqueous
green painting that fused pastoral associations with spring hillsides or deep
water to the artist's more usual playful, street-smart allusions, translucent
layers of paint created a new sense of air and expansiveness. Natkin is an
intelligent, witty painter who sometimes seems a little too willing to set–
tle for producing "Natkins." It was encouraging to see him show
accomplished recent works that moved into unfamiliar terri tory.
For less equivocal landscape references, you had to go to Chelsea,
to
Julian Hatton's exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery-which is not to
