A quieter study of abstract expressionism
Menil show looks at how artist friendships shaped works and broader genre
Art history, like every other kind of history recorded by humans, can be incomplete or biased. As new facts come to light, it also can be corrected.
The story of abstract art in America has long focused on the male stars of the New York School, the giants of abstract expressionism including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who sought to convey emotion rather than form. The influential women in their midst, including Helen Frankenthaler and Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, have only recently begun to get their due.
With a small but elegant show at the Menil Collection, curator Michelle White makes a case for broadening the narrative another notch: On the heels of the abstract expressionists, another group of artists had different ideas about abstraction that would pave the way for other movements like minimalism and pop art.
They also distanced themselves physically from the gang up on Tenth Street, perhaps partly out of necessity.
During the late 1950s and early 60s, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana, Jack Youngerman and Lenore Tawney were a closeknit network who lived in old maritime-industry lofts far downtown in a rugged 18thcentury seaport neighborhood along the East River. Their studios were clustered in a tiny, triangular spit of infill known as Coenties Slip.
The slip became “an incredible crucible” for individual expressions that had formal similarities, White said. In particular, she noticed how in touch the artists were with nature.
“You see seaweed, aquatic things, the water, sunlight,” she said.
Unlike the abstract expressionists, who wanted to ignore the world around them and communicate their inner psyches, some of the Coenties Slip artists pushed the language of abstraction to bring the real world in, with a quieter palette.
They weren’t the first to feel the romance of the slip’s environment. During the 19th century, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville frequented publishing houses in the area.
Melville describes it during the opening lines of “Moby Dick” as a kind of portal to the other side of the world, with ships headed to China, a landscape “washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.”
By the 1950s, the crowds of “water gazers” Melville wrote about were mostly gone, and the area was a decrepit backwater with only one little grocery and one laundry. Many of the lofts didn’t have plumbing or kitchens. Technically, it wasn’t legal to live there, precipitating an adventurous lifestyle that may have added to the appeal. And of course, rents were cheap.
In 1958, a magazine writer suggested the slip was a Bohemia on the waterfront “that may be New York’s last stop for the non-conformist.” Youngerman once compared them to the characters of the film “Band of Outsiders.” Not just friends and colleagues, some of them were also lovers.
Aside from all that, the lofts had expansive views and natural light.
Art historian Christina Bryan Rosenberger, whose new book about Martin’s early career helped inform the Menil show, notes how Martin appreciated the slip’s triangular shape because it afforded views of the East River, the mouth of the Hudson River and the Upper Bay of the Atlantic Ocean, along with the Brooklyn Bridge.
Tawney, one of the world’s first great fiber artists, once suggested her nearby South Street loft felt like an island surrounded by boats at night whose motion and lights reminded her of Venetian glass.
With just 28 artworks, many of which are small, the show connects the dots between artists in ways that make it clear how they shared inspiration, to different effect.
Other artists also worked in the Coenties Slip area, which also attracted writers, filmmakers and actors. James Rosenquist, who would become known for gutsy, pop-inflected work, was nearby, along with the nearly forgotten Ann Wilson, whose collages had literary sources. Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg and flag- and map-centric Jasper Johns were a few blocks away.
White limited herself to works from local collections and artists who trafficked in “cool, refined abstraction,” she said.
Several of the show’s pieces pre-date the slip years.
Youngerman and Kelly both spent about a decade studying in Paris after their U.S. military service, and were clearly already thinking about landscapes in the abstract.
Youngerman’s 1953 “Rochetaillée,” the largest and most colorful painting, contains long, horizontal bars full of faceted fragments of blue, green and yellow. It interprets a horizon line where land and sea come together, near rocky cliffs.
White put that work in the concourse so that when visitors turn to go into the show, they’re facing Kelly’s equally horizontal 1951 “Rouleau Bleu,” whose white bars on awning material mimic the glass tiles in the roof of an old factory the artist saw from a bus in Paris.
Kelly pushed the idea that abstraction is already out in the world, White said. “You don’t have to invent it. You just have to find it. He called it ‘already made abstraction,’ taking off on the idea of the readymade.”
Kelly’s 1949 “Teasel,” one of his early plant drawings, underscores his interest in nature. He grew sunflowers on the roof of his studio just so he could draw them, White said. “So you have flowers being pushed into a very fine language of abstraction.”
A few pieces of Kelly’s legendary “Tablet” (which contains about 200 studies) show him considering the shapes of sails and the Brooklyn Bridge, and experimenting with an “X” shape.
A companion show of works from the late artist’s own collection, in the Menil’s foyer, includes some of those paintings. In “Tablet” study of X’s, there’s evidence of Kelly’s close friendship with Martin; one X is cut from an envelope addressed to Martin.
“We think of artists in isolation, kind of doing their own thing,” White said. “In fact, this was a community.”
Kelly was the most established of the group, “rich” enough to own a Volkswagen; and his flat, hard-edged paintings provided a new model for artists such as Martin and Indiana.
Martin liked to say her career began at the slip, but a minimalistic-surrealistic canvas from 1955, when she lived in Taos, N.M., suggests otherwise. She was 48 when she arrived at the slip, and she had already been seeking her artistic voice for 20 years.
Martin had lived in New York before, earning degrees at Columbia University, but art dealer Betty Parsons enticed her back. Parsons was the glue behind much of what happened at Coenties Slip. She also represented Kelly, Youngerman and the Greek-born Chryssa. Parsons also introduced Martin to the influential Newman.
At the slip, Martin soaked up the New York scene, feeling the pull of abstract expressionism. For a while she emulated Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, eventually finding her own signature in gridbased compositions. The small 1960 paintings “Horizon” and “Island No. 1” offer a glimpse of all that was to come.
“You see the sense of landscape that’s not going away,” White said.
Virtually any painting by Martin, even a small one, has the air of a special event for reverent fans. This show offers four pieces, plus a small interactive sculpture Martin made for a group show of games by artists.
Tawney moved to the slip about the same time as the others, from Chicago. Five years older than Martin, she was the elder of the group — and a widow, with more money and less dependence on galleries. She helped support Martin financially.
Tawney had trained at the Chicago Bauhaus and invented an approach to open warp weaving that’s breathtaking in the 10-foot-long “Seaweed,” from 1961. It looks inspired by ancient Chinese scrolls. White considers it a drawing made with thread.
Tawney worked until she was 100, White said.
“Tawney and Chryssa have not received the attention they deserve. We need to start thinking about this time and place as being really impactful for the history of abstraction in the 20th century.”
White has hung Martin’s “Island No. 1” next to Tawney’s “Seaweed,” illuminating the relationships between their use of lines. Martin could have chosen a finer canvas for her small painting, but the threads of the linen she used instead are prominent and integral to the composition.
Tawney also made mixed-media works with objects she, Martin and Indiana scavenged around their studios and the docks. Her “Seed Puzzle on Three Levels,” made with wood, linen threads and seeds, is a fine example.
Indiana made sculptures with found materials because they were free. His 1959 mixed-media painting of conjoined ginkgo leaves hints at Kelly’s strong influence, and his 1960 painting “Coenties Slip” clearly riffs on Martin’s 1959 “The Book,” which hangs on an opposite wall. But the small 1960 painting “GOG” shows Indiana starting to find his own, text-based style, using brass stencils for sail cloths he found in Tawney’s studio.
Two works by Chryssa, who didn’t know English well, also show a proto-pop interest in text. The more minimal reliefs from her 1955 series “Cycladic Books” make their earthy, terracotta material truly luminous. In form and spirit, these pieces resemble the ancient Cycladic sculptures in the Menil’s east galleries.
By the mid-1960s, the old maritime buildings were being demolished. (Martin’s first loft at 3-5 Coenties Slip is the only one still standing.) And as they so frequently do, the pioneering artists moved on.
“Between Land and Sea” reminds us why such ephemeral moments of art history matter.