1971 Essay by Judith Wechsler

Robert Moskowitz's paintings are of corners and passageways- convergences of walls—architectural illusions which transcend their geometry. They are essentially monochromatic, with four tints of a single hue in each painting, usually blue, sometimes violet, mixed in advance and applied evenly, without inflection, to each plane. Confronting these paintings one gets a sense of having been painted into a corner. Claustrophobia. And yet, the atmospheric color, in its stillness and density, is at the same time expansive in its effect.

It is significant that Moskowitz has chosen to work with the appearance of a real room. Like de Chirico in 1912, Moskowitz has taken a more representational point of view than most advanced painting currently allows; yet he staves off a return to the space of the traditional picture. The perspectival space is convincing but Moskowitz so minimizes the cues that one's relationship to the illusional space becomes problematical.

Why at this time are some artists, such as Moskowitz, Ron Davis, Miriam Schapiro and Alan Siegel building a new approach to illusionist painting when, in the recent past, it was unthinkable? Illusionism was seen as a deflection away from the inescapable fact of the flat picture surface. To refer through illusion to a space beyond the plane was inadmissable because, in terms of the physical properties of the canvas, such references are false. Thus modernist painting increasingly addressed only those formal problems intrinsic to itself. Even so this painting continued referring to experiences of a world beyond its literal flatness. This it did by analogy and through metaphor. Color fields, though they do not contain literal references, can call up such sensual feelings as lushness and somnolence.

A further postulate of painting which shuns illusionism is that, because the work is experienced only by vision and not by touch, it must not evoke tactile experience or allude to a space in which one's body might move. Yet it has been the burden of modern psychologists to show that sense experience cannot be partitioned off into the data of sight, the data of touch, etcetera. It is precisely their continuity and inseparability that gives one the sense of density and structure of the real.

Moskowitz seems to be joining a set of advanced painters who regard the formalist prohibition as invalid. They find themselves confronting the fact that the meaning of painting has always been centered on the givenness of a space which seems to exist beyond the surface of the painting even before the first mark has been placed upon it. Therefore these artists feel that the problem of illusionism must be confronted directly.

Like minimalist artists, Moskowitz does not want to symbolize. He wants to describe--as explicitly as possible --the precarious omnipresence of a space. His space is made plausible by the coherence of the perspective, but it is minimally stated. The diffuse light source gives logic to the slight changes in value of the different planes which identify and bound the walls, beams, corners, and passageways. But all of these elements are reduced to the most subtle gradients. At first one barely can decipher the volumes they define. Once noticed, they become visible in an irradicable way. These paintings might be viewed as stages in a process, or as a progression of ideas; they form a series based on a corner of a motif.

In an early work in the series a single beam runs along the wall just under ceiling; it stops at the corner. Six planes define the space, a minimum of articulation, enough for a clear mapping of the depth. This work is followed by two paintings with two beams on opposite walls, one along the floor, one along the ceiling, both stopping at the corner. In several paintings of the series a pier is wedged into the corner meeting a ceiling beam (fig. 1). All these are scenes of intimate enclosure.

Then Moskowitz paints the way out. In one picture a passageway cuts behind the pier at the corner (fig. 2). The corner has been relinquished, and the illusion of space has become more complex. He paints this motif several times, varying the lengths of the walls and the position and size of the passageways. This and other paintings of the hidden corner lead the way to alternate strategies for opening the wall space. In one the central focus is no longer the corner or its absence, but rather a rectangular passageway through the left wall, which leads into another "room" whose space is not revealed: one sees the opening but not the space into which it opens (fig. 4). This gesture portends an expansion but in fact opens onto a labyrinthian sense of enclosure. In the final work of the series, the corner itself has become a pointed archway, the corner inverted and projected outward, toward the viewer, while its supportive dimension recedes, forming an archway through which one sees an outside corner (fig. 3).

The canvases are not so large as to entertain the illusion of real space. If they were larger, say, the size of the wall on which they hang, they would themselves be illusionistic walls and corners. Nor are the paintings of such a small scale as to readily offer themselves as objects. Moskowitz equivocates between painted illusion and paintings of that illusion.

The effect generated by the positioning of the walls is of a distant view treated as if close up: the architectural elements, though volumetric, are not placed in deep recession. The experience which this forces on the viewer is similar to looking through a telephoto lens which invariably flattens the perspective. The ambivalence is deliberate; Moskowitz conveys a feeling of distance while maintaining the ambiance of an intimate space. In a telephoto view one is conscious of the intervention of the lens between the viewer and the image. The simultaneous presence and precariousness of depth in Moskowitz's painting similarly makes the spectator aware of the painter's medium.

There is further ambivalence in Moskowitz's color. Blue, the color of dimensionless sky, the color of undifferentiation, pervades the canvas. If blue is the color of the wall, floor, ceiling and beam, the foreground space is a colorless vacuum, empty. But if the blue is air which fills the walled enclosure, the space is full. The color is made to read both as the local tone of the architectural components and as atmosphere, the color of air and space; together they form a new dialectic of inside and outside. The emptiness of the space thus becomes positive. It provokes the spectator to negate its neutrality with thoughts about enclosures and immobility.

His is a geometry of silence and solitude--he paints an empty view, a space outside of time. The quality of haunting stillness likens Moskowitz's work to the American precisionists of the twenties. He thinks of his paintings as particularly American; he feels a sympathetic connection of his work with that of Demuth, O'Keeffe, and Sheeler, especially with their smooth surfaces, precise shapes, gradated and crystalline color. Like them, Moskowitz prizes order, clarity, and finish, and like Sheeler in particular, he is concerned with architectural subjects, formal structure, and esthetic austerity. Along with Sheeler, Moskowitz runs the risk of sterility in presenting empty space in the guise of a formal problem, but he manages to go beyond the mechanics of space to evoke the way one's body accepts and rejects the proposition of emptiness. Both paint the image and evoke the sensations of solitude, but Moskowitz's work is more intimate. He paints an internal city image, rooms without views. He is the Piranesi of the motel.

Among the polarities and ambivalences that Moskowitz creates is the co-existence of an illusionism, which explores the world beyond the picture plane, and an imagery of a state of being immured in solitude and immobility. The external space--based on optical vision, outwardly directed--is a mirror image of an internal space. The picture plane opens before the spectator. Yet one's extension of vision results in feeling in one's body the presence of that space. Moskowitz makes vision--the only sensory experience involving outness--the catalyst toward inner sensation.

The experience of space is ambivalent on still another level. Corners are havens, places to seek security. One experiences stillness and enclosure in Moskowitz's corner but without comfort, for the space has been flattened.

These pictures evoke reverie but do not invite entry. They are like the space of a self-contained imagination moving between restraining enclosure and what Gaston Bachelard, the French phenomenologist, calls "intimate immensity."

—Judith Wechsler