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PARTISAN REVIEW
paint handling, broadly applied patches of color, and manic energy of the
early pictures. I'm not convinced you could anticipate Maurer's severe,
near-monochrome, subtly inflected Cubist stilllifes from-say-the sin–
uous silhouettes and bravura flourishes of his early cafe scenes, for all
their chromatic and compositional inventiveness, but you can certainly
tell that their author was someone to keep an eye on. Absent that full
scale retrospective in a proper setting, I'm grateful to Epstein and Hollis–
Taggart for this imperfect but impressive glimpse of Maurer whole.
Further up Madison, at Janos Gat Gallery, other revelations awaited:
the work of Istvan Farkas, a Hungarian modernist, killed at Auschwitz,
unknown here, but acclaimed as his own country's leading painter and
well known in Paris before World War
II.
The survey show, spanning the
mid-I920S to the early 194os, was of necessity small and made up of
available pictures, but still, a recognizable personality emerged-a sort
of central European Milton Avery, a chronicler of domestic pleasures
veiled with angst. Farkas, like Avery, seems to have been equally drawn
to the flattened planes of Synthetic Cubism and the broad expanses of
heightened hues of Matisse; some pictures suggested, too, an interest in
Braque's dense, generous manner of composing and his way of pulling
lights and brights out of darks. What seems Farkas's own is a brushiness
and delicacy verging on wispiness and a mood of wistful melancholy. An
at fresco
lunch party, painted in 1929, was at first glance, sunny and
robust, with figures compressed into blocky planes brought close to the
surface in a setting of springtime greens, embedded in a matrix of
brushy blacks. Longer viewing made the pastoral idyll seem unstable.
About a decade later, Farkas treated the theme even more somberly, as
a group of figures relaxing in a rather bleak garden, a wide, featureless
space separated from even wider, more featureless spaces by a fragile
picket fence, with everything bathed in rosy, curiously gloomy light. The
sense of impermanence and transience was heightened by Farkas's pre–
ferred medium of tempera on wood. His paint sits up on the surface,
making brushmarks into major events; the opaque tempera seems–
oddly-almost transparent, so that materiality and thinness compete
for dominance. The show was a useful reminder of how messy and
irregular the history of modernism really is, not a neat linear progres–
sion, but a nearly incomprehensible maze of tangled threads.
A very different aspect of modernism was examined by
Pasted
Papers: Collage and Abstraction in the 20th Century,
organized by
E. A. Carmean, Jr. for Knoedler and Company. This thoughtful sur–
vey of what Carmean calls "one of the twentieth century's great
inventions" included exemplary (and often surprising) works by just
