Fame has at last found Robert Moskowitz.
A curious, idiosyncratic, highly experimental and enigmatic artist now 54 years old, he came out of the same post-war New York school that produced such celebrities as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. But the acclaim and popularity they so quickly received eluded him-or more precisely, he eluded it.
His arresting, almost minimalist constructions and canvasses have long impressed and intrigued a number of art scholars and commentators with the profound ideas contained in their seeming simplicity.
With his 1982 pastel on paper ”Thinker,” for example, he managed to convey with a simple silhouette and cloudy blue background the hulking ponderence and metaphysical state of sculptor August Rodin`s famous figure.
Periodically-especially in the 1960s and 1970s-he was a painter of some fashion in artistic circles, but he always moved on to something else, and public attention went elsewhere.
Now, for the first time in his life, he is the subject of a major exhibition by a major museum. The Smithsonian Institution`s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is staging a large show of Moskowitz`s works, according him the establishment recognition his many admirers consider long overdue.
It is simply impossible to walk past a Moskowitz painting without pausing.
Though at first glance they might seem empty planes and unrelieved slabs of color, his canvasses reward the lingering viewer with a beguiling depth of looming shapes and forms-and moods.
The flat smudgy black of his 1973 ”The Perfect Painting” reveals upon close examination a shadowy dark corner recess focused by a perfect circle and two small bright lines of light-one short and straight, the other contorted and snarled.
Though his forms, techniques and conceptions have changed many times over the decades, he has remained an obsessively architectural artist.
Notable for his soft, gloomy interior corners, he also has produced a remarkable series of building portraits.
Chicago`s Wrigley Building is the subject of one-”Wrigley Building”
(1975).
Its two sections are rendered three-dimensionally. They appear on a slanting grade, but are set on their sides.
”Flatiron” (1979) hides the parallelogram of New York`s first skyscraper within a sheet of blackness.
The top third of the Empire State Building, the most prominent landmark visible from the window of Moskowitz`s Manhattan studio, is the affectionately repeated subject of a number of pieces.
Moskowitz`s stark background as foreground technique is applied with fascinating effect in two works: ”Big Picture” (1979-1980), a black rectangle pierced by the probing rays of two unseen searchlights and the hovering plane of a piece of brown lumber; and ”Swimmer,” 1977, in which only a man`s head and arm break forth in suspension in the vast dark field.
In his early years, Moskowitz painted much more brightly, producing first multi-hued abstractions and then moving on to gently lit room interiors painted on tiny canvasses.
The interiors became largely corners and the corners became dark.
Some of the works in this expansive exhibit appear unfinished, or at least experiments that did not quite work.
But one senses that all of Moskowitz`s career has been a continuous experimentation, and it is far from over.
The son of a Brooklyn dry cleaner, Moskowitz studied at New York`s Pratt Art Institute when its faculty was in the thrall of Abstract Expressionism.
After brief travels abroad, he settled in Brooklyn and was discovered by New York`s important Castelli Gallery in the early 1960s, but was soon crowded off its stage by the highly commercial intrusion of Pop Art.
While Johns, Rauschenberg, Stella and other contemporaries went on to win fame with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and other stellar showcases, Moskowitz went on to find himself.
Now the nation`s art establishment has found him and, as the Hirshhorn notes, he ”is held in esteem as a consummate artist`s artist.”
The show closes Sept. 17.
– With the Moskowitz show, the Hirshhorn is featuring (through Oct. 29)
some of the delightful neon sculptures of American artist Keith Sonnier.
A Cajun who grew up in rural Louisiana, Sonnier, 48, studied art in his home state as well as in New Jersey and France.
He has traveled extensively through India, Japan and Central America and claims to have been greatly influenced by the calligraphy and architecture of those cultures.
One can detect that influence in the circular patterns of his neon tubing, but Sonnier has wedded these conceptions to the mass and strength of modern high-tech metalwork.
”Sonnier`s neon work achieves its enigmatic power through the reconciliation of opposing materials and themes,” said Hirshhorn curator Judith Zilczer. ”Sonnier exploits the transcendent possibilities of neon with wit and elegant restraint.”
If nothing else, the electrical cords seem part of the sculpture. There are five pieces in the exhibit, including one with massive brass beams.
