Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Tony Smith
American; 20th-century
St. Louis, MO: Pulitzer Arts Foundation
77%
Untitled. 1962. Oil on canvas
A work like this of "quasi-minimalism" — historically on the boundary between modernist abstraction and all the stuff that came after it — is notable for still being painting. Namely, the edge shared by the black and the tan sections of the picture is unclean, almost expressively so, and the unpainted expanse is, in aesthetic terms, less a literal swath of canvas than an attendant feature of the black bar above it. (This is perhaps because the black is so thinly applied that you can see warp and weft beneath it, such that the painted/unpainted shift maintains a fundamentally optical character: the jump to raw canvas isn't sufficiently jarring to be "conceptual.") Also, the achievement of vortical action through such limited compositional means is significant. If this painting has a failing, it's in its stuckness between expressivity and rationalized order/application. (2024)