Robert Richenburg in New York

The mid-20th Century was a unique moment in history, when a new generation of American artists, clustered in and around New York— some native and some foreign-born but all more or less assimilated— redefined the European Abstract tradition in terms of a new, jazz-inflected idiom that reflected America's energy, self-confidence and world hegemony. For the first time, American painters would define the international style. Painters like Gorky and Pollock, who had begun their careers as epigones of Cubism, were all the rage.

Abstraction never went away, but in little more than a decade it had been eclipsed by Pop Art. By 1970, most of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists were gone; and some, like Philip Guston, had redefined their style. What remained were half a dozen "major" figures, the typical winnowing process that sorts out the names we'll remember from those whose works will gather dust in museum basements or private ateliers.

You lose a lot of good work that way, and occasionally you lose a figure who belongs with the heavyweights. Such has been the case with Robert Richenburg (1917-2006), whose best work can stand beside any.

Passed over

Richenburg had begun to attract major collectors and museums such as the Whitney in the late 1950s when a post-McCarthy dustup over academic freedom sent him from his teaching post at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute to upstate New York. At the same time, he lost his gallery, Tibor de Nagy. Pop Art was suddenly all anyone wanted to see— and, what with one thing and another, Richenburg, who'd been producing some of his strongest work at this point, never got the show that might have cinched his reputation.

Most commercial art galleries, then as now, were interested in peddling the latest fashion or marketing the hottest name. But New York's David Findlay Jr Gallery has dedicated itself to presenting the less well-known (although not necessarily lesser) lights among the Abstract Expressionists, some of whom remained active up to or even into the present century. Richenburg is among them, and the Findlay Gallery's present exhibition of his work, although modest in size, is a good introduction for those unfamiliar with his achievement and a welcome display for his admirers.

Scraping through paint

The 20-odd works in the show span Richenburg's most productive period in the 1950s and 1960s and run the gamut from large oil paintings to small acrylics and collages on paper. The signature piece, for me, is The City (1960, above), one of the so-called black paintings that were my personal introduction to Richenburg, and which remain my favorites. These canvases were made by overlaying fully painted surfaces with black, and then scraping through parts of the new coat to reveal sections of the original.

This would seem a recipe for randomness, but each work of the series combines an intensely lyric dynamism with a bracing sense of form. Perhaps the closest analogue is the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, Richenburg's close neighbor in Easthampton, entirely different though their styles and techniques were. A dream exhibit for me would be a roomful of Pollock's drips alternating with Richenburg's black paintings. Richenburg would come off none the worse for the comparison.

Pollock's mess

Pollock and Richenburg bear resemblance on another point as well. Both were restless artists who couldn't content themselves with a single approach or style for long. Pollock's drips were all produced in a three-year burst of energy, and when he later attempted to return to the style, the result was a turgid and clotted mess. Richenburg's black paintings were produced in a similar space of time, but he moved on and never looked back.

Richenburg's early work, with its broad strokes and swatches of primary color, was influenced by his teacher Hans Hofmann, though as in the Study for Flip Red it retains a freshness and originality of its own, as well as a characteristic feel for organic form. A particularly strong example is Redeem (1953), which— with its broken white verticals against open blue and darker, horizontal striping— vividly suggests a classical landscape.

Dialogue with Rothko

Richenburg moved away from color blocks in the mid-'50s in a series of large, thickly impastoed oils, of which Undeniable (1956) and Fidelity (1958) are the outstanding examples here. Dark Opening (1959), with its flame-like mesh of whites, reds and yellows against and above a near-blackened maw of banked, smoldering forms, shows Richenburg in dialogue with Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, though it's a work that speaks distinctly for itself. There's a family resemblance to the black paintings on which Richenburg was already embarked, but even in the midst of a series he was never content to work in one way, as the totemic Thinking (1960) here illustrates.

The bunched, bar-like forms that Richenburg experimented with in the acrylics and collages of the 1960s show a lighter touch and an at times Japanese-like sensitivity, although no less complexity of thought and imagination. Here was an artist who could reinvent himself from work to work and yet always retained his own identity; one, too, who seemed determined to explore the full range of possibility in abstraction, and never rested on accomplishment.

Urban pulse

The black paintings remain for me the summit of Richenburg's achievement for the way they capture both the pulse of urban life and open out on the dynamism of the cosmos itself— a New York sublime that reflected the greatness as well as the ironies of America's postwar moment.

With or without Pollock, it would be good to see them side by side again as they were in a memorable show at Stony Brook some years ago. But the pleasures of the present exhibition are considerable enough. No one who visits them, I think, will doubt the presence of a major artist.