GALLERY VIEW; Albert York Abides in His World With Grand Aloofness
By MICHAEL BRENSON
Published: March 20, 1988
Albert York is a strange case. This reclusive painter of deliberate, dreamlike landscapes, still lifes and portraits was born in Detroit in 1928. He went to art school in Canada and Michigan. He moved to New York City in the early 1960's and studied briefly with Raphael Soyer. He has lived for more than 20 years on the east end of Long Island, where he has witnessed more than his share of development and change. Not much more is known about him.
According to his dealer, Leroy Davis, who has been showing his work since 1963, York almost never comes into the city, makes no effort to keep up with contemporary art and hardly ever visits galleries and museums. He paints every day and finishes almost nothing. Mr. Davis says York has made 11 paintings in the last three years. And we are not exactly talking Julian Schnabel scale here: the average York painting is around 10 inches square. But then Mr. Davis cannot know for sure. He has never been in York's studio. He has not seen York in at least six years.
Nevertheless exhibitions are scheduled. Sooner or later the artist sends along a few paintings - on plywood, masonite, tin or canvas board - in a brown paper bag; they arrive without titles or frames. Since there is never enough for an entire show of new work, paintings from earlier shows are borrowed. Every exhibition - including the one at the Davis & Langdale Gallery, at 231 East 60th Street, through March 30 - is something of a mini-retrospective.
York may not be widely known by the general art public but painters know very well who he is. Fairfield Porter, another painter with a passion for Long Island light, wrote about him. He was selected by Susan Rothenberg for the ''Artists Choose Artists'' show at the CDS Gallery in 1984. He is as much of a perfectionist in his own way as Myron Stout, another reclusive painter obsessed with the relationship between figure and ground. To maintain his search for the absolute, York, like Stout, needed space and time that cannot be found in the city. He is proof that it is always possible for an artist to stay out of the limelight and make art that matters.
No one should be under any illusions about what this involves. York is anything but a primitive. He is steeped in 19th-century French art, particularly Manet, but also van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne. There is a lot of the 50's and 60's in his work, including an irony not all that different from that of Jasper Johns and a commitment to the kind of pictorial integrity and discipline characteristic not only of Stout but also of Ellsworth Kelly.
The quiet, self-effacing tone of his work is both genuine and deceiving. There is a privacy and isolation - and sometimes, particularly in the trees, a modesty and shame -that suggest Watteau. But York is also nervy, even hip. When he blends artists like Manet and Gauguin, it is unexpected. So is presenting Father Time as a woman. So is painting holes through dense foliage of summer trees so that sky is visible and the world closes in.
One of York's main achievements is his ability to use traditional themes and sources in a convincing way without concealing, attacking or mocking them. This alone suggests the complexity of his intensely economical works. For example, there is a continuing tension between real and imaginary. Are the flowers and trees in those fields painted from nature or dreamed?
The uncrowded compositions, the abstractness and the glow of his light create an impression of innocence and purity. But there is also muted, even murky color and the construction of a hybrid artistic world in which everything is meticulously measured and pictorially resolved but nothing fits. York's quiet work is an arena in which corruption deepens and innocence endures.
The exhibition includes 30 paintings that span 25 years and fill one small gallery. The 1964 ''Farmhouse, East Hampton,'' with its roofs, windows, doors and trees closing and opening like an accordion, has intimations of Vermeer. On the east end of Long Island, artistically identified with painters such as Jackson Pollock and Larry Rivers who are known for their responsiveness to music, York makes paintings in which interval and rhythm are indispensable.
The 1978 ''Reclining Female Nude With Cat'' suggests how rich his economical work is. With its naked reclining woman and its cat, it is clearly based on Manet's ''Olympia.'' Instead of inviting us to untie the ribbon around her neck, York's nude wears a slipper she is eager to flick off. The rose is over her right ear, not her left. The setting is less a closed room than a cave. In his patient, respectful way, York lets us know that Manet's subversive painting is being subverted.
Instead of a black cat at the far right, York has painted a cat as big as a wolf, and it is not so much the woman's pet as her guardian. Indeed it may actually to be half-cat, half-wolf, which leads back not to Manet but to Gauguin, whose reclining female nudes painted in the South Pacific occasionally had canine companions. The cat-wolf suggests danger. So does the woman's left arm and hand, which slither towards and over her genital area like a snake. This perennial symbol of temptation, fertility and sin is a regular in York's landscape. This 9 1/2-by-12-inch painting has a fascination out of all proportion to its size.
The ''Skeleton and Nude in a Landscape'' from around 1968 is also allegorical in an unexpected and puzzling way. A naked woman seated beneath a tree admires herself in a hand mirror. Facing her, and almost in a mirror position, is a skeleton holding a scythe. The deathly figure is staring at the young woman but apparently not seen by her.
The painting develops the familiar vanitas theme of the effects of time and the inevitable disintegration of the flesh, but there are twists. For one thing, the figure of death is a woman, which reinforces the sense of the young woman's eventual decay.
More surprising is the ambiguity about who is looking in the mirror. It is possible that the young woman is holding the mirror for the skeleton and the figure of time and death is vain. This opens up a field of possible interpretations that are humorous and sinister. What is sure is that darkness seems to blow through the ripe landscape like a summer wind.
Indeed York's work is filled with images of bloom and decay. In the paintings of trees in a field, the different shades of green suggest both. In addition, while the trees are always in flower, the trunks are spindly, and they seem to float. After nature erupts, its roots vanish.
Continuity fights against rupture. In the remarkable still lifes, cultivated house flowers can seem as tall as trees. Other flowers bloom in cans or glasses. Proud Indians, the indigenous population of the east end of Long Island, hover over York's landscape like ghosts. Cows, in all their wholesome bulk, are ethereal but unforgettable presences.
In this vanishing world, painting has a role. If what is here today may be gone tomorrow, every stroke matters. York's brush strokes are often conspicuous, and they move across paintings like lines on a map. In the 1985 ''Landscape With Two Trees,'' the brushwork not only builds but also caresses the image. Its authority is also a statement that looking and painting matter.
The dialogue between figure and ground has very much to do with place. In a painting like the 1987 ''Landscape With Three Trees and Pond,'' the need to make sky and trees fit, and the ferocious attention to every edge at which they intersect, suggest why York can only paint slow and why such small paintings can have such weight. As much as any artist in the mainstream, he is helping to preserve enduring possibilities of painting that have been around since Pompeii - as vehicles of laughter, wonder and doubt, and as mortar for holding change and permanence together.
Photo of Albert York's ''Landscape With Two Trees'' (1985)