THE HARD-EDGE SIGN Art In America April 2013 Stephen Westfall

TheRobyn Denny:Ago, 1968-73,oil on canvas,94 by 74½ inches.Courtesy LaurentDelaye, London.Hard-EdgeSignEmploying flat color and geometric form, hard-edgepainters developed an abundance of styles and a rich,if restrictive, esthetic whose legacy is still felt today.by Stephen WestfallStephenWestfall is apainter and writerliving in Brooklyn.See Contributorspage.THE TERM “HARD-EDGE” was probably coined in thelate 1950s by Jules Langsner, then a Los Angeles Times artcritic, in reference to highly finished, flatly rendered, mostlygeometric paintings by Karl Benjamin, Fred Hammersley, JohnMcLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg (whowas married to Feitelson). The four male painters subsequentlyexhibited together in Langsner’s exhibition “Four AbstractClassicists,” which opened at the Los Angeles County Museumof Art in 1959. (Though impeccably refined, Lundeberg’s workwasn’t as thoroughly abstract as the others’, so it shouldn’t beassumed she was excluded from this show because of genderbias.) A revised version of the exhibition, curated by LawrenceAlloway under the title “West Coast Hard-Edge,” was shownin England and Ireland the following year. The term hadmigrated across the hemisphere and came to describe a certainlook in abstraction that harkened back to Mondrian, encompasseda wide range of sensibilities and represented a coolrationality in the post-Abstract-Expressionist era.Benjamin (1925-2012) was the youngest of the originalhard-edge painters, most of whom lived in or around LosAngeles (though Hammersley moved to Albuquerque in1968). When Benjamin died last summer in Claremont,Calif., at the age of 87, it seemed like a good moment to takea fresh look at the legacy and future of hard-edge painting.For the purposes of this essay I want to consider Benjaminout of the original “Four Abstract Classicists” before movingbeyond the American West to consider a range of painterswhose work has employed the hard-edge sign.Benjamin came to painting largely by accident. Anative of Chicago, he moved to California after a stintin the Navy between 1943 and 1946. He graduated fromthe University of Redlands as an English major and hadhoped to be a writer, presumably hard-boiled. In 1949,however, he found himself having to teach art as part ofthe general sixth-grade curriculum at the San BernardinoCounty school where he worked, and the task steeredhim in a new direction. He instructed his students to “fillup the space with pretty colors and don’t mess around.”Inspired by the work they produced and by modern art heencountered in magazines, books, museums and galleriesin Pasadena and Los Angeles, he soon began makingpaintings himself. In 1952, he moved his family to thelively cultural community of Claremont. He taught at agrade school in Chino for more than two decades andeventually, in 1979, became a professor of painting atClaremont College. Living with his family in a ranchhouse designed by the local modernist architect FredMcDowell, and working in a studio out back, Benjamin94 April 2013 Art in America 95

Oli Sihvonen:Untitled, 1968,oil on canvas,87 by 58 inches.CourtesyJames KellyContemporary,Santa Fe.made hundreds of paintings that came to stand for theLos Angeles hard-edge esthetic. (How easy and pleasurableit is to imagine a Schindler or Neutra home with aBenjamin painting and Eames furniture.) This estheticwas shaped in part by an embrace of the Europeangeometric abstract painting style that would come to bedenigrated as sentimental and inefficient by Minimalistssuch as Donald Judd and Frank Stella.Langsner, the L.A. Times critic, defined hard-edgepainting as the fusion of shape and flat, uninflected color,but he and the painters who touted the liberation ofabstract shapes from conventions of representation werenever caught up in the absolutist drive for self-definitionthat Clement Greenberg, Judd and Stella had set as theagenda of modernist painting. Benjamin represents analternative modernist, abstract vision of plenitude. His firstflatly painted abstractions feature Miró-influenced flameshapes. His patterns then shifted repeatedly and includedright-angled geometry, diagonals, organic shapes andlandscape references. He did not work toward some logicalend and sometimes doubled back to revisit earlier motifs.His colors are rich, like those in sign painting, bearing evenintensities but with the paint toned down a bit so that allhues seem to share a common light.Oli Sihvonen (1921-1991) was, like Benjamin, a Westernhard-edge painter who came from points east: Brooklyn, inSihvonen’s case. He studied with Josef Albers at Black MountainCollege from 1946 to 1948, and attended Taos Valley Art Schoolin New Mexico from 1948 to 1950. He committed himself toabstract painting in 1950 and never looked back. His work, alongwith Benjamin’s, was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s1965 Op art exhibition, “The Responsive Eye.” He moved backto New York from Taos in 1967, prompted by a surge ofinterest in his work from East Coast institutions and NewYork galleries, but he quarreled with his dealers and showedonly sporadically after the early ’70s.Sihvonen worked through nearly as wide a variety ofcompositional motifs as Benjamin did, but he didn’t revisitthem. The arc of his development runs from the simple tothe complex. He made his national reputation with large,sometimes enormous paintings that hold fat ellipses againsthot color fields. There followed simple vertical-band paintingsin a somewhat darker and softer palette, and worksthat contain forms resembling ladders. Sihvonen was amaddeningly lax record keeper and left many, if not most,of these paintings undated, but it has been ascertained thatthe ellipse paintings are from the mid- to late ’60s, and thevertical-band and ladder works from the ’70s. Sihvonendeveloped severe heart problems by the early ’80s but continuedto work, complicating his paintings further with brokenfields of tightly packed stripes, ladders interpenetrated byspiral bands, and fragmented quatrefoils, among other shapesand pictorial interweavings. Some of these compositions arenearly as optically dense as Al Held’s late, baroque abstractions,though without the illusionism.ONE PAINTER WHO DID briefly practice a sort ofhard-edge illusionism is Sven Lukin. Born in Riga, Latvia, in1934, Lukin immigrated to the U.S. in 1949. After studyingarchitecture at the University of Pennsylvania, he moved toNew York in 1958 and three years later had a solo show atBetty Parsons Gallery. In this exhibition, he showed a groupof paintings featuring flat shapes, at once biomorphic andemblem-like, on canvases bolted to exposed wooden beams,which curve at the top as well as the bottom. In subsequentpaintings, such beams were placed behind the canvas so thatthey tent it along its vertical or horizontal axis. With thesepaintings Lukin became known as “the father of the shapedcanvas.” He subsequently took the approach much furtherinto an abstract Pop territory, with curled panels that roll outfrom the wall like exaggerated tongues. The front and sidesof these protrusions are painted as unmodulated bands, andthe palette is hot pastels and grays. The ribbonlike panelscan also be a little blockier and lean in sagging loops againsta corner of the gallery like a drunk against a lamppost. Bythe late ’60s Lukin was flattening the forms back onto thepicture plane as painted shapes, in ways that suggest coils ofribbon seen in isometric perspective.Two solo shows in the last three years in New York, atGary Snyder Project Space and Gary Synder Gallery, havehelped renew interest in Lukin’s work from the 1960s and’70s, placing it in the context of his recent paintings. Someof these newer works utilize tree branches as stretchers forburlap. They recall Peter Young’s similar canvases from the1970s, but Lukin configures more irregular, organic shapeswith his twisted branches. Each piece of burlap is filled witha painted color or a collection of colored shapes, though thereare occasional glimpses of the raw burlap ground.Another New York artist whose work is decidedlyunder-recognized is Ward Jackson (1928-2004). Jackson grewup in Virginia and, after moving to New York in 1952, studiedpainting with Hans Hofmann and George L.K. Morris. After1960, influenced by Mondrian and Albers, he devoted hiscareer to painting geometric planes in flat hues. This styleKarl Benjamin:Red, Blue, Pink,1958, oil oncanvas, 30 by 40inches. CourtesyLouis Stern FineArts, Los Angeles.96 April 2013 hard-edge hard-edgeArt in America 97

Sven Lukin:Tucson, 1966,acrylic oncanvas and woodconstruction,51½ by 32 by17 inches.Courtesy GarySnyder Gallery,New York.began with a striking group of diamond-shaped paintings.In most of these works, black-and-white shapes areorganized along the supports’ horizontal and vertical axes,leading the eye to interpret cruciformality. Although a modestman, Jackson was admired by key artists. His diamondpaintings were first exhibited in an important group show atNew York’s Kaymar Gallery in 1964. The other participatingartists included Stella, Judd, Sol LeWitt, Jo Baer andJackson’s close friend Dan Flavin. Jackson’s career, however,did not take off with theirs. He continued to paint, but alsoworked for over 40 years as an archivist and a program directorof the Guggenheim Museum, and served as archivist andpresident of the American Abstract Artists Association.In 1968, Jackson shifted from the diamond paintingsto 3-foot-square paintings of trapezoids and triangles insoft but glowing colors. Collectively titled the “VirginiaRivers” series, the works feature long planar shapes thatsuggest abstract depictions of roads, rivers and riverbanks.After “Virginia Rivers,” Jackson used the same square formatto create paintings bearing vertical bands, which can beread as silhouettes of urban buildings. He was known, infact, to make small notebook sketches of the skyline acrossCentral Park on breaks from his duties at the Guggenheim.Although his imagery touched on subjects from the physicalworld, Jackson remained committed to hard-edge abstractionfor almost his entire career. In this, he was more likeBenjamin and Sihvonen than Lukin, who was somethingof an outsider, using the hard-edge sign for his own ironic,architecturally imposing purposes.Like Lukin, the English painter Robyn Denny(b. 1930) had a pivotal phase in the 1960s and ’70s whenthe hard-edge esthetic figured prominently in his work. ButDenny is more of a Romantic than Lukin and holds irony inabeyance. In the late 1950s, while still studying at the RoyalCollege of Art in London, he began to make paintingscombining stark gesturalism and elements of collage thatinvoke Abstract Expressionism and the French Tachismeand Lettrisme movements. It was the Lettriste influencethat appears to have been a bridge to his more geometricallyordered paintings of the 1960s and ’70s, which symmetricallyposition horizontal and vertical shapes resemblingfragments of letters or numbers in the center of brightcolor fields. These configurations have an architectural feel,recalling archaic gateways. Denny was also keenly awareof Rothko, Newman and Kelly: the cool wing of postwarAmerican painting, which he encountered in the late ’50s.You can see the incandescent mauves and grays of Rothkomerging with hard-edge composition in a painting like Garden(1966-67). There is also a slightly cartoonish quality tothe way that wide, colorful bands in Denny’s compositionsserve not only as discrete forms but also as outlines of other,interior rectangles. In 1969, he organized an exhibition ofAmerican artist Charles Biederman’s abstract geometricreliefs, a project that furthered his own thinking abouthard-edge abstraction. Denny’s best paintings from thisperiod are his larger canvases—as big as 8 by 6 feet—whosearchitectural compositions seem to envelop the viewer.THe visually compelling quality of hard-edgepainting reflects its relationship to architecture. Thehard-edge sign is meant to telegraph across space even asit draws us in to inspect the painting’s facture. Its clean,fast lines echo the lines where floor, ceiling and wallsmeet one another. The sign may mimic the luminosity ofstained-glass windows, as in Benjamin’s work, but it alsopushes forward into the room, rather than offering anescape from it. Lukin, Sihvonen and Denny purposefullyaddress architectural scale in their larger paintings. In1969, Lukin went so far as to install a phallic, 119-feetlongpanel painting in the Empire State Plaza in Albany,which remains his best-known work.Hard-edge painting seems to be innately optimistic. Butthere’s a range in that optimism. Benjamin’s and Sihvonen’spaintings offer different kinds of ebullience, due to theartists’ distinct approaches to scale and material surface.Sihvonen tended to go for a softer, more abraded surfaceand a tangier palette, creating works that suggest close-upsof finely woven, patterned fabrics. Lukin’s playfulness canbe much more louche than Benjamin’s and Sihvonen’s, whilealso containing a touch of Warner Brothers cartoon insouciance.Compared to these three, Jackson and Denny are thetrue “classicists,” to the extent that within the hard-edgestyle they work toward clear, harmonic geometries. Dennyis perhaps the most subtle colorist of these artists. Jacksonis possibly the most wizardly with scale. Though his worksactivate a significant amount of space in a room, few havedimensions greater than 3 feet.I selected these artists to write about precisely becausethey don’t constitute an actual group. They exemplify alevel of mastery that has largely been overlooked, as wellas an impressive range of affect, despite working in a stylethat most people tend to regard as purposefully restrictive.Today, a similar range can be found in the work ofyounger painters including, among others, Frank Badurin Berlin, John M. Miller in Los Angeles, and WinstonRoeth, Gabriele Evertz and Li Trincere in New York.Badur produces richly colored compositions of austere,rectangular forms and softer grids, while Miller createsoptically vibrant grids of hundreds of floating, preciselysized and spaced diagonal dashes. Such rigor is also foundwith Roeth, who, in multipanel paintings, builds up layersof tempera pigment with intense, devotional care. Evertzdazzles with vertical-stripe patterns, and Trincere endowsher angular-shaped canvases with Pop-Minimalist sass. Allthese painters demonstrate distinct, instantly recognizablesensibilities in works keyed to various aspects of the hardedgelegacy, which is far too big for any single artist torepresent. The joy of this esthetic lies partly in the abstractotherness it invokes and partly in its open appreciation forits models in European modernism. Some might see thehistorical interplay of such painting as a limitation, butI see it as providing an ongoing, deep conversation—onecontinually enriched by new forms.Ward Jackson:Virginia RiverSeries-Powhatan,1970, acrylicon linen, 36inches square.Courtesy DavidRichard Gallery,Santa Fe.98 April 2013 hard-edge hard-edgeArt in America 99