Art
Mullarkey, Maureen
Art ICONS OF VULGARITY PLEBEIAN ENERGY & PATRICIAN REPRISAL THE ZONING LAWS that permit residential lofts, such as those in New York's Soho, to be sandwiched between commercial ones in the same...
...The figure, like any good narrative, didn't lose its popular appeal...
...In the early fifties Johnson was a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, an action painter with an inchoate interest in content...
...No soft flesh after all...
...In this instance, the bureaucratic imagination is well ahead of the popular one in granting art its secular status and in recognizing the nature of the art market...
...Johnson's present women are as brassy as ever but no longer matronly, and each with the same head of voguish frizzed hair...
...The canvases are finished with a thick coat of damar varnish...
...They are bits of art history performing as theatrical asides...
...There are strong echoes of Reginald Marsh in the feisty voluptuousness of the figures...
...But Leger applauded the coarseness of America (' 'Bad taste is one of the valuable raw materials of this country...
...Now, with the men in T-shirts, baseball caps, shades, and motorcycle insignia, the fabric also typecasts...
...Right now, Lester Johnson is a professor at Yale...
...He paints with just that blend of sensuality, scholarship, irony, and class consciousness — one could even say snobbery — that plants him squarely on his lawn in Milford, Connecticut...
...At the turn of the seventies, Johnson's figures, often depicted against suggestions of city architecture, jostled each other across the canvas with the same frenzy that propels urban adults through the endless purposes and digressions of midlife...
...There is only hostility...
...Salability hinges considerably on finding a convincing style that is also a formula allowing one to create relatively identical works on a production basis in much the same way as a bootmaker...
...Johnson borrows from Femand Leger for his formal vocabulary and its supporting concern with contemporaneity...
...Arms and legs swing forward and upward, shoulders hunch and turn, all in greater obedience to compositional and psychological demands than to anatomical truth...
...It is exquisitely suited to the late-summer afternoons for which these figures are dressed and to their ready sexuality that is as diffuse as the light that informs them...
...The Wall Street Journal, discussing slumping investor confidence, was blunt: "Since the end of the speculative sixties, few people have been willing to put their money on contemporary painters who chum out those while-you-wait abstracts...
...Outlines are tighter, applied with less bravura...
...Contrary to popular piety, which fancies the artist as a disenfranchised adversary of bourgeois values, Lester Johnson is the bourgeoisie...
...It is an invitation to voyeurism...
...A significant component of success on the current market is the willingness to replicate oneself...
...Thinned, fluid outlines are put down quickly with a calligraphic deftness that enhances the illusion of motion...
...Maureen mullarkey / August 1980: 437...
...Besides, by the seventies, the cash value of abstraction was in decline...
...And beneath that a certain yearning for something close to what Paul Goodman phrased "lilacs/or young ass...
...He is a careerist with a market sense that would be the envy of any commodities broker...
...The figures are still in motion, but at the tempo of a procession rather than a crowd...
...By now, Johnson's lonely crowd is both a stylistic and a sociological cliche...
...His work demonstrates that an artistic sensibility, far from pollendelicate, is a solid apparatus...
...Or an unseemly touch...
...As Johnson has become older, his figures have become younger, more obviously working-class...
...What few drips and blots still occur seem not so much "accidents" of haste as a mannerism calling attention to Johnson's past affinities with Pollock and DeKooning...
...The paint curving over these thighs and derrieres is irresistible...
...Contrasts are softer, the stridencies gone...
...It is this change of pitch, a shift of emphasis on age and class, that commands attention...
...Johnson's long shot paid off...
...These are the shop and office girls who spend their paychecks in Klein's and Alexander's basements...
...But in the earlier paintings, when the male figures wore suits and bowlers and carried newspapers, the patterning of the women's dresses served a strictly formal purpose...
...The previous overlapping of foreground figures against background ones has given way to a moving line of figures on essentially the same plane...
...Modeling, which creates a sculptural effect and sets figures solidly on the ground, is minimized in favor of contour lines...
...The recognizability of the product provides reassurance to a public that is overanxious to decipher what the artist is "saying" but underequipped to see what he is actually doing...
...At 61, Johnson seems to have lost interest in urgency...
...Abstraction was the reigning doctrine, the figure was declasse in theoretical circles, and young painters with ambition were jockeying for place in Hans Hofmann's do-your-own-thing retinue of expressionists...
...Johnson knows how to paint and how to accommodate his painting to market demands...
...Lester Johnson, one of the best known contemporary figure painters, knows his trade...
...The sense of assault is emphasized by the reiteration of Johnson's favorite pose: a raised knee...
...The tonal range is narrower...
...These paintings are less a comment on the condition of Man, as critics have been claiming over the last two decades, than a statement of the personal predicament of one now-successful man leaving middle age...
...The duplication of the product assures repeated sales to art marketeers who do know what the artist is doing...
...And why not...
...What makes his latest paintings interesting is not so much the subject matter as Johnson's own posture toward it...
...They functioned as abstract decorative elements, as well as spatial divisions, in the same way that patterns function Commonweal: 436 in medieval manuscripts and Persian miniatures...
...Art ICONS OF VULGARITY PLEBEIAN ENERGY & PATRICIAN REPRISAL THE ZONING LAWS that permit residential lofts, such as those in New York's Soho, to be sandwiched between commercial ones in the same building are based on the premise that the production of art is a form of "light manufacturing...
...The expression reads as a form of patrician reprisal...
...But the death of the figure never quite happened...
...Only a hard gloss appropriate to the simonized fenders of the secondhand Thunderbirds these barbarians drive to the shopping mall in...
...Bad taste, strong color,") whereas Johiison paints with none of Leger's proletarian sympathies or Marsh's good humor...
...In all of Johnson's cityscapes the sense of movement, of mise en scene, derives from the gestures of the figures and from the gestural, qualities of the paint itself...
...Johnson's color has never been more evocative...
...The young have the years ahead to distinguish and refine them...
...In his latest street scenes it is the minor premise that gives life to an otherwise overworked theme...
...This is youth from the .bitter vantage point of age: vapid, undifferentiated, commonplace...
...They are predictably dressed in the gaudy patterns that are Johnson's trademark...
...Antagonism is inherent in the combative, mechanical motions of these figures...
...Like Truffaut's Man Who Loved Women, Johnson is a leg man.But these knees could as easily be on their way to the spectator's groin as to the next step...
...His current canvases, life-sized Proustian friezes of young girls and guys, continue the pictorial theme he has been restating without let-up for the past ten years...
...The outlines bind limbs and color areas together in an undulating line that encourages the eye to pass like a rumor from one form to the next, from one color tract to another...
...They file across the canvas, limbs moving like piston rods and levers, in attitudes that owe as much to aggression as to locomotion...
...Golden earth tones, the ochers and siennas, are used to create a blonde glow that comes to a harmonic close in the cadmiums, cobalt and manganese blues, mars violets and browns of the patterning...
...They are granted no distinction other than that of class...
...His recipe permits him to produce about two dozen of these Lester Johnsons each year, priced at up to $20,000...
...It seems fair to ask whether or not the habit of self-copying has begun to lead to an art in which the only true content is the artist's own trademark...
...This is arnel-triacetate sleaze...
...There is no civility or empathy in these works...
...Color also slows the cadence of these recent canvases...
...The blank, characteristically stylized gaze of these young plebeians comes closer to caricature than in any of his previous work...
...Back then, figurative interest was chancy...
...These icons of breezy vulgarity are being paid back for their youth and energy...
...Nevertheless, this last show was a replica of his previous one...
...The subject matter of his recent New York show at the Gimpel Weitzenhoffer Gallery was established by 1970: panoramas of the man-in-thestreet, interchangeable people in passage, isolated individuals in a group...
...Over the years, as the canons of abstraction have become less formidable, Johnson's commitment to the figure has become more resolute...
...In the street scenes of 1980, the dynamism is still there but the hurry is gone...
...And the touch, when it comes, is a bit of a shock...
...That the work is still interesting is a testament to the durability and expressive power of Johnson's formularized iconography and to his own high craftsmanship...
...They have given the unseeing, homogenized expression that is part of any fashion illustrator's stock of devices...
...Forms have become sharper, outlines more definitive and less painterly, the imagery and its underlying attitude as hard and clear as the surfaces themselves...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 14
