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PARTISAN REVIEW
well as your intellectual faculties, demanding, for example, that you con–
sider the ways oppositions of super-saturated colors seem to alter
proportions, or the way off-set lines can warp space.
In
some recent pic–
tures, Westfall has introduced a second, not quite congruent grid that not
only implies another layer of space and sets up new relationshi ps wi th the
shape and proportion of the canvas, but also allows the introduction of
more color in unpredictable ways. The syncopated rhythms and erratic
pulses that result make these paintings, to my eye, some of Westfall's most
arresting and challenging to date.
And to celebrate the advent of spring, nothing seemed so appropriate
as Salander-O'Reilly Galleries' extraordinary exhibition of late works by
Joseph Mallord William Turner, a show that, like Mitchell-Innes and
Nash's Braque exhibit, any museum would be proud to have mounted.
The selection of "near-abstract" color studies of effects of light and atmos–
phere was dazzling, their disconnected floods and pools of transparent
hues, like their minimal distinctions between earth and sky, land and water,
making these century-and-a-half-old pictures seem immediate, fresh, and
downright
modern.
(No, I am not suggesting that Turner was an abstract
painter
avant fa lettre.)
A couple of canvases in only slightly more developed
form reminded us of the state in which pictures often left Turner's studio
for the Academy's exhibitions, to be coaxed into more literalness by judi–
cious retouching on varnishing day. A small selection of modest
"developed" paintings completed the survey. Of course, the fascinating
question remains of just what the pared-down oil on paper studies, some
obviously not meant for public consumption, meant to Turner himself. It's
astonishing to think that an early nineteenth-century painter could pro–
duce pictures that still look radically simplified, but it is just as astonishing
to realize that two diaphanous strokes on an almost empty sheet of paper
could allow that painter to reconstruct, in his studio, his responses to a spe–
cific effect of light and atmosphere. The many sides of these issues, and
more, including a good deal of fascinating technical information, can be
found in the excellent catalogue that accompanied the show, an elegantly
produced volume that brings together the often divergent, evolving opin–
ions of a distinguished group of Turner scholars, past and present.
