In 1980 or ’81, I met Philip Allen through his childhood friend, the painter Jon Imber, who died of ALS on April 17, 2014, at the age of 63. In 1982, I included Allen’s work in a “New Talent” show that I organized for the A.M. Sachs Gallery, located in an Art Deco building at 29 West 57th Street, just down the hall from Tibor de Nagy. During the ‘80s, I frequently went to Allen’s studio, which was then in a fifth-floor walk-up on East 83rd, but somewhere towards the end of that decade our lives began taking different directions, and we saw little of each other until recently.
Imber’s fatal illness was the reason we reconnected. When Richard Kane, who was making a documentary film, Jon Imber’s Left Hand (2014), called to say that he wanted to interview me, I urged him to get in touch with Allen, who had contacted me a few months earlier, telling me of Imber’s condition. Shortly before Jon died, Phil and I began renewing a friendship that had become dormant, and we started hanging out. I was in the process of undergoing three operations, and it was not until after my second operation, in the winter of this year, that I was able to go to Allen’s studio — it is also where he lives — on the upper West Side. This long overdue visited whetted my appetite to see what I had missed in the intervening years. And so we decided to meet at his storage space near the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and talked away the afternoon while looking at a lot of his work.
Allen’s sources run the gamut, from Veronese’s lavish details to Max Beckmann’s use of symbols. He has looked at the work of many artists, learned what medium they used, and how they applied it to canvas, board or paper. There are many paintings in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Frick Collection that he can speak knowingly and passionately about, and it has long been clear to me that he has internalized many possibilities from a variety of artists. Over the course of our conversations, he has talked in-depth about early Sienese painting, 16th-century Venetian painting, 19th-century French painting, and Jackson Pollock’s paintings from ’43 to ’46.
He knows a lot about painters who worked during the late ‘30s through the mid ‘50s, many of whom have been forgotten or overlooked. The enthusiasm is part of his DNA, as his father, Abe Allen, studied with Hans Hofmann. When he was a child, he watched his father paint, and worked alongside him. Instead of moving towards flatness, Allen has worked hard to carve out a traversable space populated by all kinds of forms, from the mythical to the abstract. This is where I think Allen distinguishes himself. He has rejected flatness in the favor of the fictive. Paint is not just paint. If you look at the gestural strokes in “Crab’s Voice” (2015), you will see that he has gone back into them, and added shading, making luscious passages of paint into palpable forms. Nothing is quick or casual. What might initially look like automatist brushwork isn’t — every mark is deliberated.
Allen is committed to making one-off paintings, something I have known about him since the early ‘80s. Drawing is central to what he does, and he has done many, many works on paper. The pen and ink drawing “Samson & Delilah” (2015) is a good example of the strange world he might envision. Who knows how many others he has dreamed up? At one point, during the visit, he opened up a portfolio and began showing me some of the drawings and paintings on paper he had stored there. There were many other portfolios that remained unopened, keeping their treasures to themselves. When Allen hesitated over showing me something, I urged him to do so, having no idea what I might see. He showed me three juicy paintings on paper of dinosaur skulls, which he had done during the time he and his son, Daniel, were going to the Museum of Natural History three times a week to look at dinosaurs. Allen gave the name of each dinosaur as he brought it out, which isn’t surprising. Ever since I met him, I felt that one of the impressive things about him is his intensity: when he gets into something — whether it is a particular artist or a technique, such as using latex enamel on unprimed canvas, as he did in a number of works he made in the ‘80s — you can count on him to be thorough.
At another point during the visit, he mentioned a painting he had done for a fisherman friend of his who had died while Allen and his family were in Stonington, Maine, where Jon Imber and his wife, the painter Jill Hoy, also worked during the summer. I asked to see it, and, once again, saw a work that both surprised and delighted me. “Death Goddess Ingesting a Drowned Lobsterman” (1986-2015) is, as the title suggests, funny, vulgar, and irreverent, even as it is solemn and horrifying. The death goddess’ pose and the way Allen painted her muscular thighs and protruding belly convey a vehemence that one seldom encounters in contemporary painting. Bizarre details such as turquoise toenails and meat hook nipples feel daringly perfect.
Allen seems to have wanted to match the death goddess’ voraciousness by putting everything he could into the painting: a Janus-headed female figure cramming the fisherman into her bloody maw; a red and white lobster boat with neat stacks of traps on its aft deck; monstrous fish and sea monsters; two dinghies with wings ascending to heaven; two green boots sticking up from the ocean. The incongruities of “Death Goddess Ingesting a Drowned Lobsterman” evoke the moment that Allen learned of his friend’s death. The space in this and other paintings and drawings, which Allen has crammed with forms ranging from the representational to the abstract, is always navigable.
What struck me about this visit was the vulgarity and humor Allen got into his work, and how, in “Death Goddess Ingesting a Drowned Lobsterman,” those traits just barely covered the tenderness and horror lurking beneath. And yet this was only one work, and there were many others I looked over that afternoon, in addition to those that I saw in his apartment on the upper West Side. Clearly, there is much more looking that I have to do.
