Abandoning his signature color field spray paintings that were identified with Clement Greenberg’s post-painterly abstraction, he began to make the squeegee pictures using a thick acrylic gel and iridescent spray paint. At about the same time in the late 1970s and ’80s, Jules Olitski took the most extreme approach to addressing the gestural. Despite such artifice, Hodgkin’s aesthetic signified sincerity, authenticity, and subjectivity. The British painter Howard Hodgkin also employed oversized brushstrokes to offer a self-conscious commentary on their presentation and placement as self-contained objects. Unlike Diao and Whitten, who were interested in material processes, Clark sought to sustain Abstract Expressionism’s sense of urgency and action. For instance, Ed Clark, a second generation Abstract Expressionist painter, started to use a push broom to paint oversized brushstrokes on the surfaces of shaped canvases. They instead employed the iconography of the gesture to formal ends, as a way to make an abstract painting that could still claim authenticity though they did not necessarily depend on an assumed emotive content. Many of the painters working at the time with gestural abstraction and process did not push in the direction of post-Minimalism. Jack Whitten, and Mary Heilmann was abandoning the quest for authenticity.

Critically, during this period Marden was transitioning from Minimalist monochrome paintings while Reed along with such artists as David Diao, Harriet Korman. I deduced from my reflections that Reed and Marden’s introduction of the spontaneous brushstroke was a sign that must also be thought of in the context of the post-Minimalism of the 1960s–70s. Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1960, oil on sized stretched canvas, 36 x 36 x 1 3/4 inches.

Though Ryman was originally identified with post-Minimalism, with its erasure he, Richard Serra, and Eva Hesse have come to be re-positioned critically as Minimalists. In this context, one must mention Robert Ryman’s work of the 1960s and 1970s, which occupies an intermediary position in that it is unabashedly procedural, whereas Reed, Marden, and Richter, however fraudulently, seek to preserve the aura of intuition. To achieve this, each painter devised an aesthetic built on the simulation of authenticity. Their works are a response to the intricacies of abstract painting and highlight their audiences’ habit of seeing their expectations rather than what is actually presented to them. Like Richter’s work, Reed’s paintings are mediated while Marden’s tend to be made in series built on thematic repetitions with variations. Marden, Richter, and Reed intentionally blur the boundaries between spontaneity and control by subversively introducing into their work the simulacrum of spontaneity and process: Reed’s early repetitive brushstrokes are nearly impossible Marden’s looping bands of color, on close inspection, are anything but spontaneous or intuitive and Richter’s works are indirectly – mechanically – produced. Hantaï and Frize are part of another genealogy. Instead, I decided I would focus on Richter, Reed and Marden, who all seem to transgress the formalist and modernist dictums that were generated in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and then exported abroad. While Hantai (the modernist?) and Frize (the post-modernist?) fit the question of what constitutes post-modern abstract painting, their references and histories are different. Slowly, I came to focus on the question of why Richter is identified with post-modernism, while Marden and Reed’s works are most often critically identified as being quintessentially modernist and formalist. Gagosian (980 Madison): Brice Marden, Let the Painting Make You, 2023, installation viewĬontributed by Saul Ostrow / “Let the Painting Make You,” the exhibition of Brice Marden’s last paintings at Gagosian Gallery, set me to thinking about the relationship between Marden’s earlier gestural works and Gerhard Richter’s process-oriented abstract paintings, which in turn led me to consider the connection of their works to those of David Reed and then to the French artists Simon Hantaï and Bernard Frize who, like Reed, creates the illusion of an impossible spontaneity.

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