Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Ernest Briggs at Anita Shapolsky

Ernest Briggs at Anita Shapolsky
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Matthew Guy Nichols

As I walked through this show of mostly untitled paintings from the 1950s and '60s, I found myself checking the wall labels to confirm that Ernest Briggs was the sole artist on display. Not only did the 16 canvases vary greatly in size, but they also possessed a stylistic breadth that read like a concise history of the New York School. Yet if Briggs's abstract paintings can often resemble the work of his better-known peers, they collectively represent an artist who was not so much derivative as protean.

Before moving to New York in 1953, Briggs studied painting in San Francisco under Clyfford Still, whose influence may be detected in early works, like a mostly brown and black canvas of 1949 that contains a Still-like fissure of taupe pigment at its center. But where his teacher's passages of contrasting color tend to suggest slow, geologic movements, Briggs's central slash of paint looks swift and sudden, erupting from the surrounding darkness like a crack of bright light.

An explosive energy is also conveyed by a composition from 1958, one of many large, unprimed canvases that Briggs stained with thinned oil paints in the late 1950s. While obviously informed by Helen Frankenthaler's earlier efforts, Briggs's painting is no less impressive for its technical borrowings. Dominated by puddles of gray and black near its upper edge, this top-heavy composition rains down streamers of red, orange and mustard paint, and suggests either the festive busting of a pinata or the more gruesome spectacle of an actual disembowelment.

The most distinctive works in this show were two small, subdued paintings from the late 1960s. Both exchange the vibrant palette of Briggs's earlier work for monochromatic markings on raw canvas. After laying down discrete patches of dark umber in grid formations, Briggs dragged an unloaded brush through the pigment, leaving behind episodic squiggles that vaguely resemble Chinese characters. This calligraphic impression is stronger in the roughly square canvas that is bisected by a faint vertical line, and thus alludes to an open book or tablet covered with a cryptic text. While it is tempting to praise these later works as highly original statements from an artist who finally found a personal voice, it is noteworthy that Briggs cycled through numerous other abstract idioms until his death in 1984. Perhaps, then, Briggs's relatively low profile as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist speaks less to his originality and more to art history's demand for signature styles.

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