Sun, Wind, and StarsCarl BlairU.S.A., b. 1934For some years now, Carl Blair has been gradually edging away from abstraction toward figuration in his new work. In other words, he is transcending his own previous stylistic manner. In this tendency he has some very good company. Other artists of his approximate American generation are also beginning to desert the late-dismantlement esthetic of deconstructive Post-Modernism: artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, and Jim Dine. These artists have realized, and correctly so, that they had reached the logical end of a whole period of art history, in which they themselves were primary participants. Johns's early paintingsof the American flag, of targets, and of Arabic numeralshad the iconoclastic intent of trivializing the content of high art in order to dismantle its claim to unique value, a quintessential strategy of Pop Art. Johns and others saw that with the analytic dismantlement of high art nearly complete in their own work, there was no interest for them in proceeding farther along that road. The most advanced and perceptive painters of the older generation have therefore quite naturally seen or intuited that the only logical thing to do now is to begin reclaiming the resources of painting which they and others had fully dismantled and discarded by the early 1980s. Having foreseen no further advantage in proceeding to the present dead end of the late- dismantlement esthetic, such artists have turned to an innovative recovery of the technical and expressive resources of the art of painting. Carl Blair figures in this sea-change in a subtle but clear way. 20th-century abstraction derived ultimately from 19th-century landscape painting, channeled through: Cézanne's piecework, disintegrating depictions of Mont Ste.-Victoire; the dissolution of late Monet water-works into merely gestural strokes of color; and the acute angles of Georges Braque's early Cubist paintings done at L'Éstaque in 1908. In a 1961 interview, Braque said that in those paintings, "I said goodbye to the vanishing point." Carl Blair's painting, until recently, had been pretty decisively abstract. His pictures often bore landscape-like titles, but neither his primary nor secondary forms would coalesce into recognizable figuration. His compositions always bore hints of more concrete form underlying the visible surface of color. As in Kandinsky's series of Improvisations (1910-1913), the visible world seemed in Blair's paintings to be the blueprint basis for a picture that blurred everything through myopic vision. Yet one could not decipher the composition any better by backing away from it. |
![]() Sun, Wind, and Stars Oil on canvas 56.75"w x 39.75"h Carl Blair ![]() Gone the Sun Oil on canvas 40"w x 57"h Carl Blair | |
Lately, however, Blair has been unabashedly presenting his pictures as imaginary landscapes. That is, his constant palette is much too broad to represent any real landscape and its accompanying sky, but the juxtaposed forms are clear enough to suggest the three-dimensional coherence of a place on planet Earth. In any case, we can say of Blair that he is an artist who has always been very much in step with his own chronological time in art history. His evolution now places his latest work decisively at the threshold of the next great age in art, in which he can be expected to be a remarkable participant. | ||
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April 8, 1997 | ||
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