1983 Essay by Robert Rosenblum

The following essay by Robert Rosenblum was published on the occasion of the exhibition Robert Moskowitz: Paintings and Drawings at Blum Helman Gallery, New York, February 16-March 19, 1983.

Those of us who were around in 1962 and who were lucky enough to step into Leo Castelli's on the right day never forgot an exhibition of paintings of nothing but window shades by an artist named Robert Moskowitz. The idea of identifying most of a picture's surface with a half­drawn shade, concealing a view beyond, had been explored earlier, and with a more overtly old-fashioned poetry, by Loren MacIver (in 1948) and would be tried later, with a more overtly up-to-date, cartoon-like symbolism by Philip Guston (in 1979); but Moskowitz's 1961-62 window shades were something else again. They seemed to push both the basic language of painting and the fundamentals of image-making to a rockbottom economy, where suddenly the two worlds were forever fused-a flat painting equalling a flat window shade. Since that show, Moskowitz has remained a shadowy figure, exhibiting more often away from than in New York, where he was most likely to be seen in group shows rather than in solo appearances, and where he survived mainly in memory and art world rumor.

It's a special occasion, then, to be able once more to savor the strange power of his work, which now, more than ever, merges what seems the most pruned and taut of abstract structures with the most puri­fied and isolated of identifiable images. Here, the commonplace becomes magical, with familiar objects, monuments, and natural wonders transformed into the icons of a private sanctuary. Who else would dare to make such a tall, thin painting out of nothing but the dark, flat shape of a smokestack piercing a monochrome ground plane? Who else would think of reincarnating the grandeur of Rodin's Thinker by ironing out its agitated sculptural surfaces into the cleanest, yet craggiest silhouette, projected upon a sea of vibrant paint textures?

The seeming simplicity of these icons, which often resemble illustrations from a child's idea of an encyclopedia, relates them to those paintings of the 1960s and '70s that have been categorized as "New Image" or "Primary Image," and indeed Moskowitz's work can feel at home in the company of a Jenney or a Rothenberg. But this said, his art might be lo­cated no less comfortably in the category of the American Sublime or of nocturnal visionaries like Ryder. For one thing, there is the epic scale of his paintings (and, more surprisingly, his drawings), which often puts him closer to the Abstract Expressionists than to his younger imagist colleagues. Like Newman or Still, he provides no anchor, no foothold for the terrestrial viewer, who becomes alien even to a domain that includes not only marvels of a prehistoric landscape but even such monuments of our own modern culture as the Flatiron Building, the Empire State Building, or Rodin's Thinker. Typically, the ground plane disappears entirely, so that a bottomless windmill or skyscraper rises what must be countless miles above the earth, and Rodin's image of primitive ponderation becomes a gravity-defiant colossus without a pedestal, looming over us like a deity. It is characteristic of Moskowitz's wish to dwarf human scale that he stipu­lated that his horizontal panorama of the image-making pair of Monument Valley, Arizona, rock formations, The Mittens, be hung just six and a half inches from the floor, a position which would locate the viewer above a sublime abyss.

Moskowitz's creation of a mythical scale, of an environment where any event might involve dinosaurs or supernatural beings, is simi­larly reinforced by his extremes of light and dark, a fairy tale polarity that excludes the familiar mixes and varieties of daylight and shadow of our waking lives. As dreamed up by Moskowitz, the Flatiron Building is an opaque, windowless expanse of murky black, seen against an even blacker night sky that suggests an uninhabited, perhaps post-apocalyptic world where the sun may never rise again. In his black-on-black fantasy of the Eddystone Lighthouse's steadfast column, this nocturnal realm is star­tlingly interrupted by its luminary extreme: an ominous blaze of light that emanates, without visible human presence, from the upper storey windows in a Genesis separation of light from darkness.

Such stark polarities and reductions pertain as well to his insistence on the most lucid of surface patterns, whose abstract life he emphasizes by underscoring a primary alphabet of the textures of painting. Often he runs the narrowest of colored lines down the painting's edge, as if to reaffirm the decorative continuity of his drumtight designs; in the painting The Seventh Sister (1981), he even runs a gold line straight down the center, from top to bottom, intersecting the geological silhouette of the mountain precipice in an effect that might be described as a pictorial wedding of the archetypal abstract images of Still and Newman. (Coincidentally, a similar effect could be observed in the Scandinavian "Northern Light" exhibition, in the painting Waterfall at Mäntykoski [ 1892-94], by the Finn Akseli Gallén-Kallela, in which a naturalistic rendering of mountain rocks and cascades is intersected vertically by five symmetrical bands of gold.) Moreover, far from being inertly flat or opaque, Moskowitz's surfaces constantly call attention to their physical presence as gorgeously painted skins, sometimes burnished to the sleekness of dense slate, sometimes flickering and luminous, but always apparent as a major abstract component in a decorative jigsaw puzzle.

Like most rewarding art that at first seems childishly simple, these works keep resonating with sophisticated layers not only of visual complication but of art-historical allusion. As for the latter, Moskowitz's images may at first seem so direct, so elemental that we can scarcely imagine their having a source; but in fact many of them reverberate with surprising precedents that give them still denser associations. If Rodin's Thinker and the Flatiron Building as subjects seem a very odd pair, didn't Edward Steichen select exactly those two motifs to create some of the most evocative, phantom-like photos of the turn of the century? If Moskowitz's ability to extract a haunting, hypnotic mood from a single smokestack seems uncanny, didn't De Chirico prepare the way for this in his own transformation of the tallest Ferrarese factory chimneys into potent dream symbols? If Moskowitz can reconstruct windmills and lighthouses as shrines of stability and faith in times of vast unrest, didn't Mondrian do exactly this in 1909-10, when under the sway of Theosophic mysteries? Moskowitz has a subtle, almost subliminal way of resurrecting some of modern art's most memorable images in his own stark language, while at the same time repaying his debt to this tradition so amply that his historic references seem only the dimmest, if ever-present, ghosts.

In general, Moskowitz weaves his spell with single images, but at times his ambitions can encompass a broader scope. His triptych, Big Picture (1979-80), is epic in size and theme, presenting nothing less than a transcontinental panorama that extends from Los Angeles to New York. Against the night sky so ubiquitous in Moskowitz's work we see at the far west the beacon searchlights of Hollywood, a familiar image that had al­ready been translated into art in Ed Ruscha's famous Pop icon, but that is expanded here to astronomic scale. Thousands of miles and two hundred inches away, across the black void of the North American continent, looms a fragment of the Empire State Building, whose Art Deco geometries are magnified almost beyond recognition, transformed, as in Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie, to an archetypal image of the New York skyscraper. This cosmic breadth, this alpha and omega vision of the United States, creates here an awesome apparition that is at once dream and apocalypse, a history of America made for the time capsules of science fiction. Once again, Moskowitz leads us on a dizzying voyage from the here and now of modern art and life to his own mythic realm, and once again the New York art world has access to its magic.

—Robert Rosenblum