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New
York Notebook
A
Review
"The
Street is Their Beat"
The
Street Painters
Exhibition
of Paintings
at ASL
On View:
September-October
Monday-Thursdays: 9am - 8:30pm
Friday: 9am - 4pm
Closed: Saturday & Sunday
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Although
we have seen other exhibitions by The Street Painters over
the years their most recent, in the gallery at The Art Students
League of New York, 215 West 57th Street, NYC, showed this
loose-knit group of painters at their raucous best.
Formed
in 1977, the Street Painters have been praised by elder colleagues
no less distinguished than Alice Neel, who cited their
"passion and immediacy", and Raphael Soyer,
who enthused about their pictures "fairly bursting with
vitality and energy."
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The
Street Is Their Beat
Peter Schwarzburg
Strictly
speaking, not all of the Street Painters specialize in streets.
The name seems to bespeak an attitude rather than a required
subject. Peter Schwarzburg paints landscapes that appear
lit by neon rather than sunlight. |
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There's Myron Heise
!
Myron
Heise has his own grasp of Gotham's nocturnal mystery
in his darkly pristine paintings of smoky, funky cellar jazz
clubs ight out of a novel by Jack Kerouac; atmospheric
little streets illuminated by glowing storefronts; subways
or porno theaters populated by lonely zombies; or visions
of bridges, boats, and twinkling skylines that flirt with
black velvet kitsch - yet rise above it to become compelling
statements by sheer virtue of Heise's passion for the city
in all its aspects, from the seamy to the scenic.
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Also including
strong work by Andy Pizzo and Richard Rask. Other
Street Painters, such as Tad
Day and Ronald De Nota catch the spirit of the
city from slightly more mellow angles - a church steeple soaring
high above the humped backsof parked cars, a sunny day in a
funky park - contrasting transcendent and mundane elements to
powerful effect. Strong
portraits by both Richard Castellana and Ivan Nunes bring their
sitters alive through vibrant color and vigorous paint handling.
Jessie
Benton-Evans, the sole woman in the group, captures the
visionary aspects of nature. The League is where members of
the Ashcan School such as Robert Henri and John Sloan
once taught. Among their students were Reginald Marsh,
Isabel Bishop, and Raphael Soyer, who could have
been called Street Painters in their day. Ken McIndoe
teaches at the League and it appears that the loaded brush of
lively, humanistic urban genre painting is being passed like
a baton to a new generation.
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