Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Sherman Drexler at Mitchell Algus

Sherman Drexler at Mitchell Algus
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Daniel Belasco

One hundred years ago, Matisse and Picasso vied for the leadership of the Paris avant-garde through paintings of the female nude. About a half century later, New York painter Sherman Drexler began wrestling with the female figure. Pleasing to the eye with their often sumptuous monochrome backgrounds, Drexler's paintings also activate the viewer's imagination. They concentrate an existential state in the female body, whether she's bear-hugging a man (his glasses rendering him like a young Drexler) in The Embrace (You and Me), 1988, or seeming to plunge into the abyss in Large Figure in Black (2004). Though Drexler's professed influences range from the decorative moods of Bonnard to the creepy details of Albert Pinkham Ryder, this critic detects a longing for a specific pre-Cubist moment in modern painting. Drexler's paintings operate through the human dramas embedded in gesture and pose.

The mini-retrospective on view at Mitchell Algus covered nearly 60 years, from Drexler's earliest brown-toned paintings of his pregnant wife, painter and writer Rosalyn Drexler, in Pregnant (1947), to his recent obsession with dabbing nudes on fragments of concrete, brick and tile. Much has been said about the artist's primitivist urges and interest in ancient cave drawings, but his primitivism does not appear to extend that far back. The four leaping women of Empty Center (1974), their pink skin ravishing against the dark green background, are a scattered rendition of Matisse's The Dance (first version). Three Horses, an oil on canvas from 1978, finds the animist pathos in a troika of thoroughbreds pounding toward the viewer, the roughly sketched charcoal outlines heightening a sense of movement. The white horses, set against a field of reddish brown, are reminiscent of the timeless steed in Picasso's Boy Leading a Horse.

Some of the best paintings were among the 36 small untitled works on canvas, paper and board hung salon style over a table of pseudo-antiquities (Drexier's own works on concrete, brick and tile). One painting was nearly all black save for a small female nude at the bottom right corner. Her right hand clutches the top of her head in frustration. Drexler borrowed the pose from a photograph of Pete Rose's sorrowful retreat from the batter's box after he blew his chance to break Joe DiMaggio's hitting-streak record. More upbeat was a lovely painting of a nude, Adam-and-Eve-like male and female, stepping forward into a new life against a background of lime green. The women in Drexler's paintings, whether alone or paired with men or animals, appear not as individuals but as archetypes.

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