Revealing the Light and Color Within the Darkness

The current exhibition of Robert Richenburg at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery of Baruch College provides a rare opportunity to see paintings from different phases of this notable artist's career. Richenburg, born in 1917, just five years after Jackson Pollock, was one of the original Abstract Expressionists. His powerful, painterly work looks as fresh today as when he first painted it. Indeed, Richenburg richly deserves a place among the more well-known names like Pollock or Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife. Richenburg knew and worked alongside them and many other artists associated with the New York School of action painting.

The artist received much acclaim during the 1950s and early '60s, but sacrificed it to relocate to Ithaca in northern New York State at a time when moving away from "the city" was tantamount to relinquishing recognition in the art world. It seems that when school authorities at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (where he had taught for 13 years) tried to coerce him into curtailing student freedom, he resigned from his teaching position, and accepted another one at Cornell. Leaving his job and his dealer in the city, and facing a shortage of space, he rolled up his huge canvases and put them into storage, uncovering them only decades later. Although he never stopped making art, he turned primarily to smaller works on paper. He seldom showed his work between 1964 and 1983, when he returned to East Hampton—first for the summer, then permanently.

Clockwise from top left: Hurry, 1958, oil on canvas; Study for Pregnant Woman Contemplating Flight, 1947; Clouds, 1950, oil on canvas. Collection of Richard Zahn, courtesy of David Findlay Jr. Fine Art, New York.

Richenburg shared with his fellow artists of the New York School a response to World War II that transcended figuration. Like others who found themselves unable to paint in a representational manner after the horrors of the war, Richenburg reacted viscerally, invoking gesture and texture, rather than literalness. He never strayed far from great predecessors, however; among the most evocative of these was Goya, master of war memories, nightmares, and grotesqueries in black.

Additionally, Richenburg suffered a freak, disfiguring accident as a two-year-old that affected his entire life, causing him recurring nightmares. The accident, combined with memories of his three years of Army service in World War II as a combat engineer, making and dismantling mines and explosives, certainly influenced his "dark" paintings of the 1950s and early '60s (more than 60 in all). Although these betrayed a certain amount of pessimism, the practice of making art provided the artist with an antidote to negativity. He energetically attacked the darkness, mining it to find color and light beneath. Sometimes his canvases resonate with religious overtones, though he seldom painted overtly religious or even figurative works.

In almost all of his oeuvre, a mysterious process seems to occur, in which he excavates colors and light from under black paint. Often Richenburg's work reminds me of the method my friends and I used as children, in which we madly scribbled onto paper bright splotches of every crayon in the box, covered them with black, and then scraped through to find the exquisite luminosity beneath.

Somehow, this metaphor—of finding light and color in darkness—expanded throughout the artist's life. In some ways, it is like creation itself: God saying, "Let there be light." This emergence into the light seems especially apparent in his work from the '60s. His reading of Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism, recommended by his friend John Cage, had an immense impact on him. The interrelatedness of all things and acceptance of paradox had special resonance, as did the emphasis on pro-cess, change, and risk. Richenburg's own work encompasses the paradoxes of creation and destruction, being and nothingness, black and white. He celebrates the surprises and epiphanies that painting itself provides. The word "palimpsest" (referring to a page reused after the original text or image has been scraped off, though traces of it might still show through) describes much of his output, with its constant painting, stripping down, repainting, and creation of multiple textures. His work pays tribute to Paul Klee, with its grids and its mosaic-like, pointillist patterns. He also acknowledges Mark Tobey. And the dark, nighttime urban landscape, unevenly lit up, recalls Whistler's Nocturnes.

Richenburg's work is not all dark. In fact, he often displays a sense of humor in his painting. One example in the show, a small, light-hearted gouache titled Study for Pregnant Woman Contemplating Flight (1947), whimsically references Klee and the Spaniard Joan Miró. Clearly modernist, it blends European surrealism with home-grown American flavor. The huge (76 x 56 inches) oil painting Hurry (1958), on the other hand, epitomizes American "action painting." Its flame-like, choppy red and orange slashes of the brush alternate with blue and black fragments, evoking its title.

Several writers have used musical analogies to describe Richenburg's work. Dore Ashton compared his grids to the electronic music of Edgar Varèse. Robert Long, in the essay for this show, finds the improvisatory nature of Richenburg's work comparable to jazz. He specifically singles out the jazz of Lee Konitz, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonius Monk. He also refers to the discord of Charles Ives.

Richenburg does not have a "signature style," such as can be discerned in Franz Kline's black paintings, Adolph Gottlieb's Bursts, or Barnett Newman's Zips, but his work is immediately recognizable. In every painting, he repeats modules in a grid-like pattern, whether rectangles, circles, or irregular patches, powering them with energy. This permeates every single canvas, no matter what the ostensible subject. Organic in quality, sometimes small units resemble the kernels on a dried ear of corn, but much expanded in size.

Today the 89-year-old artist no longer has the physical strength to paint, but he is able to clearly articulate his ideas. I was fortunate to meet and speak with him this past summer. Looking together with Richenburg at his paintings in his East Hampton house and studio, I became convinced of his importance as a creative seer and prophet. He described one painting in his house as representing a kind of angel of resurrection. Currently in a precarious state of health, he expresses a keen awareness that he is progressively moving toward another realm—"and it's okay," he told me.

"Robert Richenburg: The Path of an Abstract Expressionist," featuring works from the Richard Zahn Collection, is on view at Baruch College's Sidney Mishkin Gallery through October 27. The gallery, which is located at 135 East 22nd Street, is open Monday through Friday from noon to 5 p.m. (and until 7 p.m on Thursday).

Art historian Greta Berman has been on the liberal arts faculty since 1979.