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'Every passion in the sky':
Jon Schueler paintings in New York
Jon Schueler paintings in New York
Robert Zaller
The acknowledged masters of American Expressionism— the most important movement in 20th-Century American art— were all (with the exception of Hans Hofmann) born in the decade between 1903 and 1913: Rothko and Gottlieb in 1903; Gorky, DeKooning and Still in 1904; Newman in 1905; Kline in 1910; Pollock in 1912; Guston in 1913. The survivors of that group (Gorky died young in 1948, Pollock in 1956, Kline in 1962) continued to paint in the Expressionist style through the 1960s and beyond, with the conspicuous exception of Guston, whose return to figurative painting in 1969 was denounced by some as an apostasy.
By 1960, however, new styles had begun to emerge, particularly color-field and Pop, which emphasized a flatter, cooler and (in the case of Pop) more ironic style. A younger generation of Expressionists who arrived on the cusp of the new age got lost in the wash. Eclecticists who arrived in the 1950s, such as Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, managed to thrive, but true believers in the old-time Expressionist religion vanished from view.
The recent show of "Action/ Abstraction" at New York’s Jewish Museum, which covered the years 1940-1976, went some way toward acknowledging the persistence of a viable Expressionist tradition beyond its celebrated heyday, but its effect was blunted by the variety of styles it embraced. Second-generation Expressionists are still awaiting their due. But one gallery, David Findlay Jr., has largely devoted itself to giving them exposure, and some very fine painters are at last beginning to emerge from the shadows.
A feast of color
Robert Richenburg (1917-2006) is one such, and his best work will, I believe, become an essential part of the Expressionist canon. Jon Schueler (1916-1992) is another, and Findlay’s current show of his work from the 1950s and 1960s should not be missed by anyone interested in the style and the period, or, for that matter, just in a splendid feast of color.
Schueler, like Richenburg, was crucially influenced by his wartime experience: Schueler was an aerial navigator. Not only did he bring home traumatic memories of Europe, but he returned to spend considerable time in the Scottish Highlands, where he had made his first landing after a bombing run. After the war, Schueler studied in California with members of the emerging San Francisco school, particularly Clyfford Still; but the Scottish landscape, with its moody, shifting colors, became the ground of his art.
“I loved every passion in the sky,” he would write (Schueler was a gifted writer and musician as well as artist). The sky became for him, as for Turner and Constable, a living canvas whose turbulence and variety— Nature’s own Expressionism— he would seek to capture.
Small scale, large impact
The Findlay show is modest in scale but extraordinary in impact. Some of the work— Ballachulish Mist or A Field in the Morning (above)— is done in an all-over style in which, like certain paintings of Schueler’s exact contemporary Richard Pousette-Dart, color itself is structure. In others (North of Ullapool, Red Snow Cloud and Blue Sky), rifts open up that suggest Expressionist figurations of the sublime. And in some— notably The Island (1956)— natural forms emerge clearly, but no less mysterious for that.
As with so many of the American Expressionists, in Schueler’s work the impulse to figuration beats powerfully behind an abstract idiom, only to suggest further mystery when it merges. The landform in The Island is clearly recognizable between a pallid sky and a vivid sea, yet it is at the same time a living creature that, like the artist himself, seems set upon a ceaseless exploration.
Above all, there’s a sense of unslaked curiosity and superabundant vitality, anchored in the vigor of short, decisive strokes of the palette knife. Passages that suggest other contemporaries— a touch of Guston here, of Still or DeKooning or Kline there— remind us of the extraordinary cross-fertilization of the period. One painting, Skye, is startlingly Turneresque. But Schueler is very much his own man, and the world he conjures up is distinctive, powerful and vivid in a way all its own. The later work is less dramatic, more contemplative. To the end, however, Schueler’s mastery of color remains undiminished.
Jon Schueler needs to be reckoned with. This show is a good start.
By 1960, however, new styles had begun to emerge, particularly color-field and Pop, which emphasized a flatter, cooler and (in the case of Pop) more ironic style. A younger generation of Expressionists who arrived on the cusp of the new age got lost in the wash. Eclecticists who arrived in the 1950s, such as Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, managed to thrive, but true believers in the old-time Expressionist religion vanished from view.
The recent show of "Action/ Abstraction" at New York’s Jewish Museum, which covered the years 1940-1976, went some way toward acknowledging the persistence of a viable Expressionist tradition beyond its celebrated heyday, but its effect was blunted by the variety of styles it embraced. Second-generation Expressionists are still awaiting their due. But one gallery, David Findlay Jr., has largely devoted itself to giving them exposure, and some very fine painters are at last beginning to emerge from the shadows.
A feast of color
Robert Richenburg (1917-2006) is one such, and his best work will, I believe, become an essential part of the Expressionist canon. Jon Schueler (1916-1992) is another, and Findlay’s current show of his work from the 1950s and 1960s should not be missed by anyone interested in the style and the period, or, for that matter, just in a splendid feast of color.
Schueler, like Richenburg, was crucially influenced by his wartime experience: Schueler was an aerial navigator. Not only did he bring home traumatic memories of Europe, but he returned to spend considerable time in the Scottish Highlands, where he had made his first landing after a bombing run. After the war, Schueler studied in California with members of the emerging San Francisco school, particularly Clyfford Still; but the Scottish landscape, with its moody, shifting colors, became the ground of his art.
“I loved every passion in the sky,” he would write (Schueler was a gifted writer and musician as well as artist). The sky became for him, as for Turner and Constable, a living canvas whose turbulence and variety— Nature’s own Expressionism— he would seek to capture.
Small scale, large impact
The Findlay show is modest in scale but extraordinary in impact. Some of the work— Ballachulish Mist or A Field in the Morning (above)— is done in an all-over style in which, like certain paintings of Schueler’s exact contemporary Richard Pousette-Dart, color itself is structure. In others (North of Ullapool, Red Snow Cloud and Blue Sky), rifts open up that suggest Expressionist figurations of the sublime. And in some— notably The Island (1956)— natural forms emerge clearly, but no less mysterious for that.
As with so many of the American Expressionists, in Schueler’s work the impulse to figuration beats powerfully behind an abstract idiom, only to suggest further mystery when it merges. The landform in The Island is clearly recognizable between a pallid sky and a vivid sea, yet it is at the same time a living creature that, like the artist himself, seems set upon a ceaseless exploration.
Above all, there’s a sense of unslaked curiosity and superabundant vitality, anchored in the vigor of short, decisive strokes of the palette knife. Passages that suggest other contemporaries— a touch of Guston here, of Still or DeKooning or Kline there— remind us of the extraordinary cross-fertilization of the period. One painting, Skye, is startlingly Turneresque. But Schueler is very much his own man, and the world he conjures up is distinctive, powerful and vivid in a way all its own. The later work is less dramatic, more contemplative. To the end, however, Schueler’s mastery of color remains undiminished.
Jon Schueler needs to be reckoned with. This show is a good start.
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