Oil on canvas, 66 x 76 in.
Private Collection
A casual visitor to the Rosa Esman Gallery in February might have been taken aback by the unexpected nature of the exhibition there, which will certainly be remembered as one of the most notable or the year. Imagine the surprise or the unprepared viewer who finds himself confronted with a hitherto unknown body or work which is apparently that or a previously unrecognized contemporary or, say, Arshile Gorky (or, to step outside the ranks or painters, Martha Graham). Here were grandly conceived, brilliantly executed symbolic/abstract paintings on themes connected with myth and vision, strulggle and transcendence — paintings whose earned intensity might remind us or just how ”cool” Schnabel & Co. have really been playing it in those hot neo-expressionist canvases of theirs. All the more surprising, then, to find that these were not paintings which had been unjustly languishing in storage for forty years, but new works by a young painter having his first one-person show.
Yet Philip Allen is no pasticheur, nor even (tempting though the analogy may be) a practitioner of that inspired ventriloquism by means or which, in the Thirties, Gorky spoke more eloquently in Picasso’s idiom than, sometimes, the master himself could. While other artists have realized that their Art History 101 slide show could be a source for imagery on the same level as their TV sets or girlie magazines (a logical extension of the Pop sensibility), Allen has made a different use of the history of art. He has realized that there was a certain point in the Forties when the best American art was beautifully balanced belween the poles of expressionism and formalism, and that since then the overwhelming weight of practice has fallen more and more on the side of the latter. And neo-expressionism, it is becoming clear, is mere)y formalism by other means, at least in the hands or its best-known practitioners. If one is to effectively resist this trend, it becomes reasonable to make a strategic retreat, going back as it were to the point just before the balance of power shifted to the other side in order to make that one’s starting point. Allen may not be the only young painter who has, consciously or not, come to this position, but he is certainly the one who has done so in the most intransigent way.
“To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible.”1 One might think or Philip Allen as being in an analogous position to that of Pierre Menard in Borges’ celebrated story, but only until further viewing of Allen’s paintings reveals that for all their affinities with that period, they would have been as unlikely (let’s avoid the hyperbole of “impossible” which Borges offers us) in 1943 as they are today. For one thing, they are simply better than anything any of the New York School painters (with the exceptions of Gorky and, at his best, Pollock) could have painted in 1943, in the sense that (in part because of all that has happened since then) he is able to keep more complex and sophisticated formal mechanisms under control than they could. But more to the point is the fact that he is in a position to enjoy a richer relationship to the art of the past by virtue of the fact that the doubly onerous task is not incumbent upon him of having to invent modern American art. Again. with the exception of the voraciously assimilative Gorky and of such isolated instances as the impact of Ingres on de Kooning, the American modernist painters appear to have been far more uncertain than Allen that they could incorporate what they loved in classic art into their own. The result is the remarkable eclecticism of Allen’s work, which is not immediately apparent because it is subject to a tremendous opposing pressure toward unification.
Courtesy Rosa Esman Gallery.
What Allen is called upon to invent is, simply, the painting at hand — difficult enough, when the paintings are as rich as these. Typically, they involve virtuosic manipulation of pictorial space, bravura paint handling productive of a rich dialectic between the material and representational properties or the medium, and an opulently ambiguous symbolic repertoire whose metamorphic tendencies rival those of Bosch or Miró.
Take Imbattled Seraphim as an example. If images are the lifeblood of a painting, here they have coagulated. This profusion of imagery seems to nearly strangle the spatial structure of the canvas, yet the eye is given a kind of circuit to follow, complex though it may be, in its apprehension of the painting. And the angelic struggle of the Miltonic title even occurs within a recognizable landscape – one with testifies to its symbolic capaciousness by including the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water. killing the foreground is a disturbing concatenation of strange, violently truncated and fused forms — vegetable, animal, and human — which must represent the Seraphim. Above, emerging from the sky (which is thereby wrenched back to the foreground from the background), a trumpet blares, spewing out its sounds as a reddish fluid. These Seraphim are not the celestial beings we expect; they are sinister Boschian hybrids whose battle is also a form of carnal congress.
We can better understand the spatial organization of Imbattled Seraphim by comparing it to an earlier painting, Aphrodite (1981). Space in the latter is far more homogeneous, in the sense that it is not taken through the wrenching extremes of depth we find in Imbattled Seraphim. Yet it is equally far from any kind of unified flatness. Instead Allen seems to fold or manipulate the picture plane itself (rather than the figures that occur within it) in a dramatic yet ambiguous way. Thus there is far less modeling within this space than there is in the later work; this flexing of space would become impossibly complicated if there were a more emphatic manipulation of its contents.
Not all of Allen’s work presents the complexity of paintings like Imbattled Seraphim. There are numerous smaller panels as well as (often fairly large) black and white paintings in enamel on canvas. While these less elaborate works do not pose the same difficulties for Allen, they allow him to rehearse, in a looser, less pressured way, themes which appear in more ambitious works. Tney also allow him to explore qualities he has not yet been able to incorporate within more highly charged contexts. Man with Hat, for instance, suggests a kind of Dubuffetesque humor which would be welcome more often as an emotional counterpoint to the perhaps monotonously fervid tone of the big works. These paintings are also generally more nearly abstract, with a more homogeneous spatial structure than the major paintings. How long would it have taken us, without the title, to find the Man with Hat in that painting? Or having done so, how sure would we have been that we were not simply reading his presence, without justification, into a purely formal structure?
For all the interest of the panels and grisailles, and despite the fact that they are probably the more immediately attractive works, they derive much of their interest from the light they shed on the origins of the more ambitious paintings. Allen recently remarked that he had begun work on a new canvas, and that alter a certain amount of work, he could foresee three possible ways of developing it — three possible paintings that could spring from those initial marks — each of which would take several months to complete. But he also saw a fourth possibility, a more difficult one to see through, “and I knew that if I went that way I’d still be working on it two years from now. And I knew that that was the one I wouldn’t be able to resist.”
The less elaborate works show us what happens when Allen has the power to resist the lure of difficulty — of overelaboration, some might say — and that is never without interest, but the most powerful of his paintings result when he accedes to that tortuous bliss. The most recently completed of these, Sounds from the River — Departing Spirit, is arguably his strongest achievement so far. The whole scene seems to exist as a kind of emanation from the blind statue-head at the bottom left corner. The trumpet of Imbattled Seraphim reappears, now tripled. Inis time there is an angel recognizable as such, its body (but not its head) filled with eyes. One imagines fog-horns being transformed into heralds of a Last Judgment, the East River near which Allen lives becoming the Styx upon which the dying soul sails into oblivion. Sounds from the River — Departing Spirit impresses us as a kind of tragic affirmation of the human spirit and body in their encounter with suffering and death. One is slightly embarrassed to speak in such terms, for they are not ones to be used lightly; but paintings such as this, if we are lucky, may at least momentarily shame us out of that iron which comes all too easy for us. The grandeur of thought and execution here shows no tendency toward lapsing into the sort of generalized high-mindedness which say, Motherwell might be accused of.
Of course, in an art world so long dominated by irony, distance and taste (good or bad, it makes no difference), there will be something deeply unacceptable about a shameless appeal to the tragic and heroic potentialities in art. This, along with the structural and coloristic overload which Allen sometimes practices, can make his paintings literally hard to see. They are, as Edwin Denby once wrote of Martha Graham’s choreography, “violent, distorted, oppressive and obscure.”2 Like her, and like other exorbitant artists from Tintoretto to Mahler, from Blake to Joyce. Philip Allen has taken as his subject nothing less than human existence as heaven and hell. Are we willing to recognize ourselves there?
- Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Manard, Author of the Quixote,” in Labyrinths, ed. by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 41 ↩︎
- Edwin Denby, Looking at the Dance (New Yore Horizon Press, 1968), p. 407. ↩︎
