“Nell Blaine, Artist in the World:
Works from the 1950s”
at Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
March 22, 2003-April 26, 2003
Nell Blaine (1922–1996) can tell a story through a remarkable economy of language. Her best work is lyrical, self-aware, in control, and inviting without the hints of self-indulgence that befell many in the New York School.
A native of Richmond, Virginia, Blaine began her career in New York as an abstract painter and the precocious student of Hans Hofmann. In 1944, at the age of twenty-one, she became the youngest member of the American Abstract Artists Group; her Mondrian-inspired, purely abstract paintings from the period remain well known and collected. She formed fast friendships with many artists on the scene, in particular those who were associated with the figurative, second generation of the New York School—Leland Bell, Robert De Niro, Albert Kresch, and Louisa Matthiasdottir (whose work was also exhibited in New York in April, at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries). Blaine was everywhere, even teaching painting to a young Larry Rivers, with whom she lived in France in 1950. A visit to the painter Jean Hélion in Paris that same year proved to be fateful to her artistic development, and she attributed her travels in France to inspiring a reawakening of painting’s possibilities.
It was through Blaine’s return to representation and the figure, as seen through the eyes of an artist trained in abstraction, that she arrived at a new personal style in the 1950s. The latest exhibition at Tibor de Nagy followed Blaine from the rigid structures of Léger-type cubism in 1950 to a rapid loosening of line and color that, in its balance of freedom and control, approached a high style around 1959, the year she contracted a crippling case of polio while on tour in Greece; the disease nearly ended her life.
After Milkweed (1958), a centerpiece at Nagy, might serve as a précis for the simple perfection that Blaine could achieve in the fifties. Constructed of an assembly of wide lines, commas, swizzles, and curlicues of color, this still-life of flowers and vase tempers a riot of color with an even consistency of structure and surface treatment. That which develops and runs wild is what Blaine permits; the freedom of line and color never strays far from the leash. “I never really left abstraction” she once remarked. “The sense of organization and the way of putting a picture together come from the abstract days.”
Yet the control that Blaine exhibits over her representational work did not come without experimentation and false starts. The daubs and color fields of Public Square (1951) lack cohesion and unity. The wild paint application of Merry-Go-Round (1955) swirls out beyond the artist’s reach. The successes come when Blaine was able to render out the irregularities of application through a slow boil of liquid, soapy pigment stirred in with a mix of wavy paint-handling—for example in the rippling Imaginary View of Mexico (1957), the shimmering Gloucester Harbor, Dusk (1958), and the hazy, Bonnardesque Interior at Stupa (1959)—painted during her stay in Greece. These works are big successes, and they herald a career that was not cut short by disease in 1959, but one that underwent a regeneration—we’ll have to wait for the next Tibor de Nagy exhibition to see that one up close. It should be another delight.