One Famouse Peice of Art Work of Nicholas Marsicano Artist
New Life in the Nude and the Still Life
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May ix, 1971
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IN the right hands, those classic subjects in painting—the nude, the nevertheless life—are notwithstanding capable of yielding up surprises. The nude figure, for example, that serves as the focal subject area in the paintings of Nicholas Marsicano, now on view at the A.M. Sachs Gallery, 29 Westward 57th Street, is non the voluptuary paradigm one normally assembly with that time‐honored theme in painting.
Art
Marsicano, a 57‐year‐onetime New York painter showing in his 12th one‐homo exhibition, displays a somewhat aggressive and strictly painterly version of the nude. The painting style, here, is abrupt and audacious; the cartoon, ofttimes in crude black lines, is rough and brash; the color is bright and given to few subtleties. The urgency of Marsicano'south brushwork, the drips and splatters that follow its tralectory, gives his figures — whether reclining or seated — the sense of a barely contained or restrained muscular energy. In terms of colour, there is a Fauve‐like intensity — the figures, in grayed flesh tints, are locked into lushly painted grounds of vivid red or dense bluish.
In these paintings, one scarcely looks for those languid refinements, that heightening of erotic fantasies, that i normally associates with the nude. This is, if y'all will, brusk, assured masculine painting whose style and syntax is fatigued from Abstruse Expressionism, just whose subject thing is a holdover from earlier conventions.
I think that the alone figurés — rather than the groups of two or 3 nudes — work best in the present exhibition. There are several stunning pictures hither: "Yellowish with Baronial," for example, or "Arabian Red" and "Old Xanthous" — the latter, an awkwardly positioned, seated figure against a deep, emphatic blue, is peculiarly fine. Among the grouped figures, "Firstlings," with its two nudes — 1 a dulled pink, the other a milky yellowish — placed against a smacking red background, is probably the most successful. Only, ordinarily, Marsicano's assail upon the figure and its kinetic energies and rhythms is so strenuous that a kind, of counter‐productive event results when more than 1 of them is confined to the same space.
The verve of Marsicano's painting derives a good deal from the artist'due south brisk drawing style. (A few of his brush drawings have as well been included in the exhibition.) The painting, "Arabian Ruby," for instance, with its angled, reclining figure seems an entirely logical development from Marsicano's rapid, pragmatic draftsmanship. There is simply the sketchiest definition of detail, simply the whole grasp of the effigy, the way it plummets into its vivid red, undifferentiated space and takes command, seems inevitably correct. For all the apparent looseness, dash, fluency of the brushwork, this is painting of very exact and exacting intentions.
JANE WILSON
Dissimilar figure or landscape painting, or even history painting for that matter, still life is hardly the genre from which 1 expects radical developments. Its theme is mostly the celebration of the serenity and the ordinary; its subjects — vases of flowers, the pleasures of the table, the disorder of the artist'south studio — are drawn from placid, everyday life. The Cubists, who were defended to all the same life and fabricated it the principal vehicle for their far‐reaching innovations, provide the great, notable exception. With their disjunctive studies of musical instruments, newspapers, bottles of liqueurs, pipes and playing cords, they managed to radicalize what has often been the nearly domesticated of subjects.
The recent still lifes of Jane Wilson, currently being shown at the Graham Gallery, 1014 Madison Avenue, are riot radical inventions by any ways. Yet, they are so rigorously designed and executed, take become such analytical exercises, that they seem quite out‐of‐the‐ordinary examples of the genre. Moreover, the calibration of several of the paintings—some of them measure five or six anxiety in width or height—places them beyond the usually prophylactic, intimate proportions of conventional still life painting.
If one mentions, then, that these recent works of Miss Wilson'due south are Vuillard‐like in their insistence on dumbo, nearly claustral, patterning, or that they display a Matisselike flair for colour and manship, it is not to brand the work equally derivative in whatever way, just simply to point out that the artist has obviously looked hard at the masters of still life painting in the grade of realizing her own ambitions.
These are aggressive paintings; chiefly by reason of their complex structuring and their scale, but likewise because of the actually consummate style she has deployed color, draftsmanship and incidental detail, Flowers, fruit, fretwork screens, illustrations of works of art, sumptuously colored silks, elaborately patterned oriental rugs provide the basic paraphernalia for the paintings.
In one of the best, the large "White Tulips, Eagles and Limes," the welter of detail becomes nearly boundless. But here, the artist has toned down the values of the colors, —chiefly tans and beiges—with such finesse and played off, with striking virtuosity, the positive and negative "repeats" of the patterned fabric on which the nonetheless life objects rest, that the painting becomes a beautifully sustained series of formal challenges and solutions. Furthermore, she has a knack for introducing just the right colour accents—the light majestic vase, the green of the limes—at the precisely opportune moment. They ready the center and blast down the activeness like hammer strokes.
At that place are a number of paintings in the bear witness—"Some of Willa'due south Things," and "Gloxinia, Begonia, Petunia," amid them—that are equally ambitious and effective. The entire exhibition, in fact, is a remarkable bout de force, a kind of summa of however life painting: everything yous wanted to ask from the genre but were agape lo risk.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/09/archives/new-life-in-the-nude-and-the-still-life.html
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