From The Art
World Archives- The Abstract Artist Lionel Loren Storms The Post-Modern Art World- With A Vengeance
By Laura
Perkins
Some readers
have lightly, at least that is way I will take it, taken me to task for being
something of a naysayer about various artists and movements of late whereas
when I first started out to do some amateur art criticism I was some kind of
fresh voice against the stodgy entrenched art cabal (whose membership goes right
from those suburban matron visitor guides slumming in culture land down in the
trenches to the notorious art gallery dealers in the elegant mansions who will stop at nothing to clear inventory
with the hedge fund managers cum art collectors, the guys who shell out the
dough with the luxury Midtown condos in between). I admit that I have become
somewhat jaded since I have been looking much more closely than I ever did
before at the inner workings of the art world rather than just give an admittedly
amateur opinion of some piece of art.
I suppose this
so-called naysaying started with the last few archival captions I have done
around the over-bloated reputation of Frieda Kane whose patron saint has
morphed into one Clarence Dewar, professional art critic from Art Today
an old toady of Clement Greenberg’s who fouled
the air with his unabashed defense from A to Z of abstract expressionism who
has been my nemesis on almost every subject I have attempted to undertake. Of
course it did not help me, and it did sting him, that I exposed dear Clarence as
a shill for Nova Galleries who owner Larry Larsen just happened to be holding a
ton of Kane’ rather pedestrian work. Then on another front I added insult to injury
by calling James McNeill Abbott Whistler a pimp daddy and opium-smoking degenerate
who would have sold his dear mother (remember the sonata in grey and beige gag
he tried to pull) for three dollars to get a bag full of herb or whatever his
drug flavor of the month was at the time.
So, yes, the
way things have turned out I have had to torch some reputations, have to be
what did one reader call me-Cassandra I think. But not today. Today I can sing
praises and will for the not yet well- known modern painter, abstract painter too
for those like Dewar who thought I had trashed the whole genre just to take a
stab at his idol Greenberg, an infatuation he apparently never got over. Today
I want to tout, to ask politely that every New York City gallery owner take a
serious look at the work of Lionel Loren. I first saw his work when I was in
San Francisco looking at a Diebenkorn exhibit and saw in a corner a small group
of paintings by artists who were influenced by that great artist. Frankly the other
paintings were unremarkable to my eye, but Lionel’s popped out at me.
Of course everybody
should know that artists steal like crazy from each other and that each new trend
in art is just somebody like Diebenkorn and then Loren tweaking things a little.
Not a profound statement but one that makes the point. Loren’s most famous painting,
if you could call it that, the one that made the granite grey walls of the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art Squash Heaven is a case in point. We don’t
have to refight (unless Dewar wants to) the battle over abstract expressionism
and the post-abstract movements which are not as hostile to representational
art to know that Lionel Loren has tweaked something here.
No question
that his objects have nothing to do with the real world, none of the patches of
colors could even remotely be suggestive of squash (or any other vegetable for
that matter) yet the color patterns, the way the colors are laid out give a
powerful suggestion of such objects. Abstract expressionism took the smell, the
sound, the feel out of real objects and now without conceding anything to
reality Lionel Loren has pushed the boundaries and put those factors back into
play. Gallery owners the train is leaving the station on this one just like I
predicted on Franz Golder.
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