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Excerpt
from Working the Grid
By David Kapp
David
Kapp: Painted Streets/Urban Grids
by Robert G. Edelman
David Kapp has been painting the urban landscape, in particular New York
City, in all its relentless pace, irresistible dynamism and precarious
balance of order and chaos, for some twenty years. As his powerfully wrought
paintings attest, through their gradual and distinct evolution over two
decades, his subject matter has grown with him, that is to say, his familiarity
with this formidable city is reflected in the clarity and accuracy of
his vision. Yet one cannot call his paintings realist (as in the work
of Photorealists like Richard Estes) because Kapp has invested a great
deal of his time trying to get to the essence of the urban experience
by way of his medium; paint and its unique ability to capture light and
space. And that is one of the essential ingredients of Kapp's paintings,
his use of paint to convey the particular combination of light, color,
structure, movement and shadow that together make up the place where all
urbanites must be if they want to go anywhere: the city street.
To find the beautiful in a scene of congested traffic, of mammoth trucks
maneuvering a narrow passage, or of a pattern of shadows cast by looming
buildings and lines of cars on Canal or Houston Street, is a challenge
that Kapp apparently relishes. Clearly Kapp regards these streets, the
complex choreography of vehicles, pedestrians (what we all become when
we take leave of the apartment, office, store and health club) and the
dramatic play of light, shadow and color, as constituting the urban experience
we all recognize and take for granted. Standing in front of his paintings,
one is made aware of the fact, for better or worse, that the urban dweller
is more at home on asphalt and surrounded by metal, glass and concrete
than wandering through a forest. Not that one won't still dream of or
indulge in such things, but then again, isn't nature all the lovelier
by contrast?
Like Corot's silvery forest at dawn, Turner's golden haze on the Thames,
Church's Catskill mountains or Marsden Hartley's beloved Mt. Katahdin,
Kapp has sought out an urban landscape that is emblematic and quintessential.
To observe the stylistic transitions in Kapp's paintings is to witness
his profound curiosity about the way we choose to live. An examination
of his work over the last twenty years affords the observant and curious
viewer the opportunity to discover, through the painter's eye and touch,
how rich and varied the urban experience can be. Kapp's struggle to get
at what is essential to and in our collective environment and make it
palpable (the slight of hand of the painter), is the magic that underlies
these otherwise familiar city scenes. The urban landscape seen as a microcosm
of human endeavor, ambition, frustration and hope, but also as the stuff
for a painter to explore the nuances of his medium, his ability to translate
and transform his world into paint.
The Urban Scene: A Brief Historical Overview
As a vehicle for the contemplation of nature and beauty, piety or sensuality,
painting in the Western tradition since the 15th century generally relegated
the village or town to a role of backdrop, suggesting that the earthy
matters of city life were antithetical to the aspirations of art. The
venality and material preoccupation of city life seemed to provide the
threat against which the painter could counterpoise his version of purity
and redemption. Jan Van Eyck painted some of the most beautiful cities
ever rendered, but they were invariably a mere location indicator for
more important matters taking place in the foreground; the devout patron
kneeling in prayer before the holy mother and child.
The Netherlandish painter Pieter Brueghel portrayed the everyday village
life beyond the morality-based restrictions on the art of 16th century
Europe, to a point where it became the subject of his work. The art historian
Carel van Mander saw him as "basically a peasant painter among peasants"[1],
but in fact Brueghel was more likely "a city dweller conscious of
the burning theological and humanistic problems of his time."[2]
Brueghel's preoccupation with the human condition, however, did not distract
him from such modern pictorial devices as dramatic lighting and perspective,
complex spatial and asymmetrical compositions, and elevated viewpoints.
Not until the late 19th century and the advent of German Expressionism
in particular did the city once again play a critical role as subject
matter in painting. Well know are Monet's views of Paris from a terrace
above Boulevard de Capucines, but more challenging are the aerial of the
same city by Gustave Caillebotte, whose best pictures are more rigorous
in their formal structure and far less sentimentalized than Monet's. The
Expressionists (or Die Brücke), including E.L. Kirchner and Erich
Heckel, took the Fauvist color to an extreme, using distortion and angularity
to emphasize a new, near violent image of the city.
In America, the so-called Ash Can School, including George Bellows and
William Glackens, painted city life as directly and unsentimentally as
possible, albeit colored by a decidedly French sensibility. Influenced
by photographic realism, the Precisionists Charleses, Sheeler and Demuth,
simplified the urban landscape to the point of cubist abstraction. Stuart
Davis also explored the cityscape as abstract construction, leading to
a highly sophisticated pictorial style. Edward Hopper's Night Hawks, among
other similarly dark and moody pictures, are unique expressions of American
ambivalence toward urban life that simultaneously romanticize its tough
exterior in the manner of Noir fiction writers like Dashell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler. The themes of alienation and anonymity in American urban
centers is fairly common in works from the 30's to the 50's, exemplified
by such disparate artists as Joseph Stella, Romare Bearden, Mark Rothko,
Philip Guston, and many of the WPA artists.
Abstract Expressionism brought other issues to the fore, urban subject
matter was more obliquely present (though certainly not eliminated) in
the appropriately heroic-scaled, black and white paintings of Franz Kline.
Pop Art brought the fragmentary urban collages of Robert Rauschenberg,
the news-clipped car crashes of Warhol, Oldenburg's cityscape cardboard
cutouts and Christo's wrapped storefronts. All were focusing on elements
of the urban experience, locating iconic images from the collective urban
vocabulary. Photorealists Richard Estes and Ralph Goings brought back
urban scene painting to a new audience, one that was weaned on photography,
and John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha glorified the American car and the gas
station, respectively. More recently, Martha Diamond and Alex Katz have
reduced city buildings to their basic geometry, using paint to convey
a more poetic reality. Painters John Button and Robert Birmelin employed
urban motifs throughout their careers, the latter portraying the anonymous
rush of people on New York City streets. The implication is that the city
as subject has continued to challenge contemporary artists, both painters
and those who work in other media.
A Tendency Toward Abstraction: Early Career Influences and Artistic
Environment
"When
I was a kid I had this scrapbook, I was eight or nine, and from my
parents magazines, I would take these car ads, cut the cars out and
paste them in my scrapbook. I cut out the '63 Lincoln, I used to know
these cars so well, and it occurred to me, about 15 years ago, I realized
that I was so into these things even then..."[3]
Kapp began
his life as an artist, as a painter, at the precocious age of twelve.
Kapp did the European tour with his family in the summer of 1965, visiting
ancient sites and museums, with all that a first experience of this kind
would imply. The young artist was energized by the Robert Motherwell show
at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and, using his parents' attic for
his studio in their Riverdale home, began making his own black and white
abstractions, a la Motherwell and Franz Kline. His personal study of Abstract
Expressionism lead Kapp back to its sources, Surrealism and Cubism. Upon
entering Walden High School, Kapp began to paint figuratively, influenced
by the Bay Area School work of David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and most significantly,
Richard Diebenkorn. Kapp spent as much time in galleries and museums as
possible in his teenage years, absorbed the energy of the New York School,
gradually shaping his own approach to painting.
At Windham College in Vermont, Kapp worked with sculptors Charles Ginnever
and Peter Forakis, former members of the Park Place Group, a loosely knit
group of artists in the New York area. Through Ginnever, Kapp met several
New York artists at Wyndham, including Conceptualists and Minimalists
Lawrence Weiner, Carl Andre and Robert Barry, who built site-specific
works at the college. Kapp was also assisting Ginnever in the fabrication
of large-scale outdoor sculpture and installations in New York City. Working
with a sculptor afforded Kapp the opportunity to absorb critical information
that did not conflict with his commitment painting. As for his own efforts,
Kapp was painting geometric abstractions on the grand scale, responding
to the minimalist atmosphere of the time, as well as to his immediate
surroundings, the Vermont landscape.
After graduating from Windham, Kapp drove to Texas to see Robert Smithson's
Amarillo Ramp, and then to the Salt Lake Flats of Utah to see the sculptor's
legendary Spiral Jetty (which was under water at the time). After a sojourn
in Italy, Kapp entered the MFA program at Queens College, studying painting
with Louis Finkelstein, and art history with Robert Pincus-Witten. The
environment was conducive to dialogue, to meeting other artists, and to
pushing his work in new directions.
At this juncture, however, Kapp was going through a crisis with abstraction,
as his work had begun to seem to him too preconceived. The problem was
with the process; the inherent difference between the execution of painting
versus sculpture (as it was practiced by the Minimalists, where the emphasis
was on idea and a clean and spare fabrication), was now all too apparent
to Kapp. Doubtless this went against Kapp's innate sense of what painting
was, one of a process of discovery. Kapp would have to come to terms with
his own aspirations as a painter, despite his enthusiasm for the austere
work of Robert Ryman (whose retrospective exhibition Kapp had recently
seen), among others, in order to continue working in the medium. Kapp
was in search of a synthesis between abstraction and representation, and
found the solution in landscape painting, at the time much debased and
all but ignored mode of pictorial content.
On his painting teacher's suggestion, Kapp studied the work of the 20th
century French painter Albert Marquet, focusing on Finkelstein's own theory
concerning, by his description, "pictorial movement into deep space
carrying a powerful emotional charge". The message was about the
articulation of space in painting (something that Frank Stella would promote
in his Norton Lectures "Working Space" at Harvard some six years
later, but to very different ends), a groundbreaking concept for Kapp,
whose paintings had recently been paeans to flatness. Marquet's painting
(described by Kapp as "the perfect box of air"[4]) was a liberating
factor for the young artist, both his aerial views and his subtle, naturalistic
use of color and light. In addition, Kapp had also encountered the work
of artist Jane Irish, whose surreal nocturnal paintings of the Long Island
Expressway, with "these big, long, skinny, snakelike shapes",[5]
as well as Marquet's nocturnes, influenced his thinking about the larger
potential within the urban landscape. Kapp took a studio in Long Island
City, and began a series of paintings of the outlying areas of Queens,
the start of a thematic journey that has continued to the present.
Having graduated from Queens in 1977, Kapp moved his studio from Tribeca
to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where he executed large, seven-foot square paintings
of cityscapes, combining his enthusiasm for the New York and Paris Schools
of painting. Kapp, in yet another studio in Greenpoint in 1979, a very
isolating but stimulating environment, commenced his series of dramatic
night studies of cars and traffic in Brooklyn, taking his work into an
entirely new arena.
The Car:
Mobility and the Tedium of the Commute
"When I started really working from the cityscape as opposed
to landscape, what got me was something I'd read in the John Constable
diaries (you glean all these wonderful aphorisms from various painters
over the year); Constable said, in terms of landscape, that the sky
was the source of light, which is an interesting idea...so when I
started doing this work, I was always terribly conscious of what the
source of light was, and the source of light is unbelievably complex
when it comes to painting the city, because it bounces off everything.
The nocturnes were wild in this respect, because there were headlights,
light from windows, streetlights, and light from the sky, artificial
and natural all at once; that was wild stuff..."[6]
The motor
vehicle, the car, bus or truck, as unpromising a leitmotif for painting
as Cezanne's apples or Morandi's bottles and jars, seems for the Kapp
the most intriguing of subjects. One might not be inclined to consider
cars and urban traffic as appropriate subject matter for the landscape
painter, yet it is, perhaps, the closest we can get to the way that contemporary
society chooses to organize itself. The urban planner Robert Moses was
a visionary who applied common sense and a missionary zeal to the realization
of traffic flow in and around the city of New York. Kapp's initial attraction
to the subject was based on the immediacy, the availability of the scenes
he chose to paint. Over time, however, the potential of these scenes,
the inherent metaphorical content to be found in the images of cars at
rest and in motion, led to major developments in his work.
During the early 80's, the New York art world was assaulted by a new,
dynamic group of artists practicing what came to be known as Neo-Expressionism.
After at least a decade of minimalist and conceptual art, painting was
again back in the forefront, albeit heavily influenced by the original
Expressionist period of some fifty years before. Bold, post-modern, and
unabashedly figurative was the prevailing style for painters, including
Americans Julian Schnabel and David Salle, the Germans Baselitz and Keifer,
and Italians, Clemente, Chia and Cucchi, among many others. In addition,
there were the rebellious Graffiti artists, led by Jean-Michel Basquiat
and Keith Haring, whose hit-and-run tactics on subway platforms made their
work a veritable public challenge to younger New York painters. Into this
mix came a group of unaffiliated painters, including David Kapp (whom
Robert Pincus-Witten described as having "the emphatic reflection
of a Whitman-like independence"[7]) who were determinedly figurative,
but not beholden to the expressionist mantra. That said, the energy and
exchange of ideas during the early 80's was palpable, and no painter (especially
one as conscious of the artscene as Kapp) could afford to ignore the Renaissance
atmosphere that painting itself had been experiencing.
Kapp's paintings from the early 80's are indeed expressionistic, but it
can be argued, far more informed by the Die Brücke group than by
his contemporaries. The emphasis for Kapp was on direct application of
paint, and the immediacy, the directness, of the image. Of the few paintings
extant from this period, it is clear that Kapp was still searching for
the balance between image and abstraction, finding structure in the highways,
tunnel entrances and bridges of his Queens neighborhood. Kapp, in conversation,
expresses the pull of abstraction at this point in his career, combined
with a curiosity about this marginalized part of the city. The environment
was conducive to Kapp's development in a variety of ways; the discovery
of untapped thematic resources in the vicinity of his studio, the painter's
method of making things familiar and knowable through their apprehension,
the notion that the unique strangeness of a place can work in an artist's
favor, if such a thing can be captured in paint.
Kapp's early city scenes have a raw, immutable power. The paintings are
made with speed, and express speed. In fact, the vehicles careening through
the streets of Queens, entering its tunnels, seem to be flirting with
danger, even courting it. At the same time, these cars and trucks also
appear to be familiar with the territory, as if they drive this way all
the time, habitually. The threat of an accident, of a collision, is part
of what make these paintings vital, suggesting lives lived in constant
motion.
Color, at this stage in Kapp's work, is kept to a minimum; just enough
is used to provide a sense of place, of moment. Or, as non-descriptive
in its general tonality, to give the sensation of a light or heat; dim
street illumination or the lingering warmth of a summer night. Compositions
are spare and graphic, perspective (as was the case with the original
Expressionists) is exaggerated, drastically foreshortened, giving the
viewer an uncomfortable feeling of vertigo. Kapp also employs the diagonal,
often bisecting his painting to dramatic effect; a compositional device
carried over from his days as an abstractionist.
Kapp uses drawing to give structure, lines are thick and fluid, defining
or dividing form and space. One immediately senses the importance of drawing
to Kapp's process; it has been, from the beginning, at the foundation
of his work. As has been noted by several writers, Kapp worked directly
from the site. Standing "in the middle of these crazy medians, like
Turner lashing himself to the mast"[8], sketching the Greenpoint
Avenue Bridge or the Pulaski Bridge at night], Kapp later translated the
sketches into paintings in the studio, maintaining the sensation of place
as much as possible. Kapp had immersed himself in his subject, traversing
"a God-forsaken landscape...but with terrific content"[9], among
drug-dealers and prostitutes, in pursuit of the motif.
Works such as Midtown Tunnel], Cars (both from 1983) and Billboards (1984)
have a powerful, graphic quality. The surfaces of these paintings are
dry, rough, heavily pigmented. The views are from above, but close to
the action, as from an overpass or a third story window. The diagonal
composition in the latter two works (one Theo van Doesburg would doubtless
approve) plays dramatically with the square format of the painting. Kapp
indulges the viewer in the specificity of the moment (cars passing in
the street) while seducing the eye with the alluring tactility of boldly
applied paint. Add to this the melodrama of New York streets at night
and all the associations that go with it; adventure and danger commingled.
Kapp's Lincoln Tunnel (1985)] is at once both nightmarish and soothing,
depending on how one interprets the funneling of multiple lines of cars
into a maw under the Hudson River. The cars glow in an eerie illumination,
otherworldly, or rather, under-worldly. The shape of the entrance drive
(which Pincus-Witten described as resembling Bosch's Earthly Delights
bagpipe) suggests a large vessel through which the cars pass like droplets
of an irradiated substance. Like insects suspended in amber, these motorists
are resigned to their fate, the traffic congestion that is a constant
in New York City.
Oncoming Car (1985) was one of a series of paintings that constitute some
of Kapp's most mysterious and compelling work during the 80's. The car
emerges out of a murky darkness, with its headlights on highbeam, catching
the viewer by surprise. With impressive dexterity, he smears and drags
paint across the linen surface, capturing the effect of raking and reflected
light on the wet street and car windshield. Kapp has executed many variations
on this ominous vision of contemporary anxiety, one the viewer is forced
to confront and react to as the image of the car emerges from the gloom.
These paintings veer toward portraiture: our vehicles as extensions of
our personalities, albeit a dark, brooding one.
Traffic Patterns and The Urban Circulatory System
There is
a threatening element to the nocturnes, particularly the oncoming car,
but I never viewed it that way at all. I was fascinated by the lights,
the artificiality of the light, and the simplicity of the image, the fact
that the thing was in motion. It was as if the painting had a face, two
eyes that could stare back at the viewer, it was an Abstract Expressionist
notion, that a good New York School painting should be alive and look
back at you, then it's not a picture of something, the thing is something,
it comes alive. But I never thought of them as being threatening...[10]
By the late 80's and early 90's, Kapp's painting process had coalesced
in several critical areas; drawing and painting had become more integrated,
compositions more sophisticated in form and space, and color took on a
more dominant role. Kapp had also begun to use photography (in the late
80's) as a method of recording a particular place at a particular moment,
a means of framing his subject that was reflected in his compositional
strategies. Moreover, Kapp's application of paint had become more confident,
bolder, particularly when applied to the difficulties of rendering effects
of light or the dramatic contrasts of light and shadow.
Kapp quickly acknowledges that the vision of Edward Hopper was always
there, a presence, even if in the back of his mind. As a younger artist,
Kapp noted that Hopper "was too literal, a bit sentimental",[11]
but grew to admire the work over time. He owns a print of Hopper's Night
Shadows, a man seen from above, caught in lamplight, a long black shadow
cutting across his path, a working model for some of Kapp's recent overhead
views of city streets such as Walker by the Fence (1998)], or Walker in
Queens (1999). Hopper's use of light, for compositional and emotional
effect, have not been lost on Kapp, who emulates the clarity and sound
construction of this idiosyncratic American artist. Despite Hopper's need
for "content", that is, narrative subject matter, the formal
sophistication of paintings such as the Whitney's Early Sunday Morning
make his work a crucial precedent for Kapp. It is this combination in
Hopper's work of architectonic fabrication, illumination and moment that
appeals so much to Kapp, elements that are all integral to his own painting.
Despite their clear differences, no other painter (with the exception,
perhaps, of Diebenkorn) has had as profound an effect on the look and
feel of Kapp's cityscapes.
Kapp now employed light in various ways, either to energize form or to
define a space. In paintings such as Intersection II from 1991, the aerial
view of the street describes a cruciform in the center of the painting,
with the corners of the composition cast in shadow. Suggesting the vertical
structure of a Mondrian, the painting is bisected in an almost blatant
way, as a kind of challenge for Kapp to see if he can make it work (and
he does). Similarly, in Crossing the Grid (1990)], a single car is subsumed
by light and shadow, the vehicle nearly disappearing in the complexity
of street grid.
Again, Kapp plays with the image of cars stuck in heavy traffic as a minimalist
device in The Hill] and Gray Hill, both from 1990. In the former, cars
are lined up haphazardly, seemingly motionless, caught in a late afternoon
twilight, brake lights glowing, their rooftops reflecting the last light
of day. These paintings, with their low, intimate viewpoint, are ruminations
on city life, offering an almost mesmeric, steady beat. Perhaps Kapp is
suggesting that there is a silent beauty in this stalled traffic, a suspension
of activity that for a viewer at least, can be a restful experience.
Ascending (1991)] is a big homage to abstract painting, displaying a bold
colorism that threatens to dissolve the dwarfed cars waiting at an intersection.
Like a Clyfford Still, areas of red and blue-black are locked in place,
the few details of the white street grid and the burnished cars giving
form to the vast, vertically propelled space. Having located and defined
his subject, Kapp was now focusing in on the painterly options within
his chosen demesne.
The Painted City: TV, the Movies and Photography
Black and
white, we grew up on it; black and white TV, film and photography, but
none of it came close to the experience of looking at paintings. In high
school, when I would come down and go to the Met, seeing the huge Hofmann
show and the Still show, in the late 60's, nothing took the place of seeing
those paintings, and it still doesn't, because when I see something fabulous,
I've got to come back to the studio and paint...I never go to the movies
and want to come back to paint...[12]
Kapp's admiration for the precision of photography, and the work of Steichen,
Steiglitz and Strand, for example, is evident even if it has not had what
the artist would consider a direct influence on his painting. As previously
stated, Kapp has used the camera since the late 80's as a tool for capturing
a particular moment, a scene that encapsulated his curiosity about the
intersection of the formal with the accidental. The dramatic shots of
New York by Strand (his Wall Street photograph in particular) lead Kapp
to look at others, including work by Bernice Abbott, Lee Friedlander,
Harry Callahan, Gary Winogrand and Rudy Burkhardt, but Kapp points out
that it was more of a correspondence with their work than an influence,
since "I was already doing my thing."[13].
Kapp does not ascribe to a particular influence from the movies, per se,
despite the cinematic aspects of his skewed viewpoints or carefully framed
cropping of an image. Not even Welles or Hitchcock? Perhaps the early
Ingmar Bergman, because of the light, which Kapp credits mostly to the
great cinematographer, Sven Nykvist. Kapp recalls, however, during the
opening credits for the late Million Dollar Movie, the black and white
images of cars driving through a dazzling New York at night (probably
Broadway) accompanied by the schmaltzy theme from Gone With the Wind,
creating the proper movie watching mood. This image is quintessential
Kapp, appearing every weeknight on television for many years; "Not
a huge influence, but it's in there"[14], he admits with a laugh.
It is hard to imagine that Kapp has not been affected, at least in passing,
by such purveyors of New York City imagery as Hitchcock (Saboteur), Kazan
(On the Waterfront), Scorsese (Taxi Driver) or Woody Allen (Manhattan,
etc.). Yet Kapp maintains that there is for him rather an affinity with
film than an influence; his work is more about recording a moment in the
life of the city than in telling a story. That is why the medium is so
important to the effect he is after, for Kapp the paint is the vehicle
of expression and content, it is all that he needs to create the atmosphere
of the city that he is after. One can't look at recent paintings such
as Looking Up Broadway and Houston Street East (both from 1999) without
being aware of the implied (yes, cinematic) camera angles, but Kapp's
deft handling of paint brings the viewer's attention back to the surface
of the canvas. That is why Kapp is so adamant about his marginal connection
to film and photography; it is painters and painting that provoke, intrigue
and challenge him. Kapp mentions, in conversation about painting, the
Baselitz show at the Guggenheim a few years ago, "kind of got me
going", the sheer painterliness of the work, or "a good de Kooning
or a Thiebaud"; nothing can compare, says Kapp, to "this incredibly
rich thing that can move you".[15]
In this vein, it is easy to see Kapp's connection with other painters
who have used city imagery as a vehicle of expression. De Chirico "aesthetic
synthesis"[16] of the metaphysical period comes to mind, especially
his poetic use of light and shadow, and a seemingly arbitrary, quirky
use of viewpoint and perspective. Again, Alex Katz's recent series of
large-scale city views at night have a magical, timeless quality, verging
on abstraction in their reductive simplicity. Yet the painter with whom
Kapp's work can be most directly compared is that of Richard Diebenkorn,
a traditionalist who steered a lifetime course between abstraction and
representation. In fact, Diebenkorn's paintings dwell so comfortably between
the two (something like Rauschenberg's bon mot of working between art
and life) that he appeared not to have the creative turmoil, say, of a
Jackson Pollock. Yet that would seem to deny the "equivocal nature"
of his working process over his career, what Jack Flam describes "as
a model of constructive ambivalence."[17] Kapp shares with Diebenkorn
a strong connection to the New York School, but also to Matisse's paintings
from 1913 to 1917, when the French master experimented with "the
methods of Modern construction."[18] Both painters avoid any semblance
of symmetry, and eschew any indication of a horizon line, resorting to
it only when necessary. Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series represents a culminating
point in the development of landscape painting, as well as a pinnacle
in the history of American abstraction. Kapp has clearly absorbed Diebenkorn's
example, and has derived his own, cumulative vocabulary for interpreting
and structuring the urban landscape. As in Diebenkorn's work, Kapp does
not allow reality to stifle invention, nor does he permit the vicissitudes
of abstraction to preordain structure or composition. One feeds and nourishes
the other. The process is reminiscent of that of Giacometti (another artist
Kapp deeply admires), who used reality, in his case a model, to check
the veracity of his invention. For Kapp, these are lessons derived from
his own experience, and his recent paintings are illustrations of that
personal journey.
Color and Light: Images of a City in Perpetual Motion
At this
stage, the streets, the city itself is an unbelievably rich subject matter.
What I've done recently, which occurred to me just in terms of spatial
orientation, just in view of changing things around a little bit, instead
of always looking down at something, I began to look up; let me do the
antithesis or the opposite of it. Coming Out of the Subway came out that
way. The city really affords a lot of dynamic aspects to look at it from.
There's a lot yet to come; it keeps opening itself up to me...[19]
The cars pick up the light like a string of colored glass beads on a necklace.
The street is a bleached gray; the deep blue shadows are sharply delineated,
cast by the heavy industrial buildings of lower Manhattan. We see the
light traffic from a distance, perhaps a block, maybe two, five to six
stories above street level; one can almost hear the muffled sounds of
traffic, near and far. A single figure appears to contemplate crossing
the wide thoroughfare, and a cab tentatively pulls away from the curb.
The traffic flows like a river, somewhere in a gorge or deep canyon, and
the steadiness of its movement is hypnotic. Looking inside of Kapp's The
Bend in Houston Street (1998), a work typical of the latter 90's, is to
be transported to the artist's world. The maturity of approach, in both
the treatment of subject and in technical execution, is clearly evident
in this new body of work.
The structure of Chelsea (1999)] is immediately reminiscent of a Mondrian
from the 20's, a tightly organized composition in a nearly square format.
From a view directly above the street, two cars, (one white, one green),
line up along the center of the painting, one moving, the other parked.
Both are caught in an intense mid-day light, strong enough to cast an
imposing shadow across the left quadrant of the painting. In the shadow,
two more cars are discernable, their fenders picking up shards of reflected
light. Two people are attempting to cross the street, seemingly in mid-block.
The sidewalk holds the bottom of the painting steady, the painted yellow
street divider holds the top. Taken in altogether, it actually resembles
a Mondrian in motion, or a Calder mobile caught in a sudden breeze. Everything
is in flux, but in slow motion (since it remains a painting), by implication.
Composition has become an increasingly important factor in Kapp's recent
paintings. October (1999)] is orchestrated with minimlist precision; four
cars are arranged (or so it would seem, since one assumes they are positioned
by chance) in a horizontal diamond, viewed from almost directly above.
Actually, on second thought, there is only a cast shadow of the car on
the left, but its presence is manifest. On the sidewalk below, four figures
are evenly spaced in a similar diamond pattern, casting long shadows.
The element, however, that introduces spatial complexity to the whole
is a streetlight that arcs gracefully from the lower right corner to the
upper central section of the canvas. Kapp allows the viewer to "feel"
the space, offering a subtle clue to gauge our distance from the street.
Again, it is the portrayal of a random moment, one that most people would
miss or ignore, had we come upon it ourselves.
Yet it is always the paint, the liquid pleasure of it, that catches and
holds our attention. West-East (1999) is a tour de force of painterly
gesture and nuance. Kapp conveys the essential information with least
amount of paint necessary, for example, to make a car hold the road, or
to give volume to a building. One immediately notices the variations in
warm tawny and cool grays of brick and window, real city color, and the
shades of dark blue and violet to gray-black in the cast shadows along
the wide avenue. It looks so familiar, but we're caught up in the reality
of the moment, the trueness of Kapp's vision. Here vision must be stressed,
as Kapp is offering his version of what he sees. As Matisse noted, "Exactitude
is not truth",[20] and I believe Kapp would wholeheartedly agree;
the painter must interpret the subject, transform the experience into
what we have come to know, through its long history, as painting. Kapp's
early career immersion into the New York School, and abstraction in general,
has served him well. His recent paintings, taking into consideration their
embrace of the visible world, have the look and feel of a late 40's Reinhardt,
a 50's Kline, or a 60's Motherwell. It's as though Kapp had to discover
his subject so that he could fully absorb what the painters of the New
York School were after: freeing painting from any and all external restraints.
It is really all an artist can ask, that their process be a dialogue with
their chosen subject, a give and take, so that the act of painting remains
as fresh as possible. Or, as de Kooning is purported to have said to Philip
Guston at his opening at Marlborough Gallery of his strange, iconoclastic
figurative paintings in 1970, "It's about freedom..." Painting
can and should be a process of discovery, for both painter and audience.
David Kapp has observed, sketched and painted his way around New York
for more than twenty years, and as the work continues, the artist comes
to know his subject intimately. As his painting Coming Out of the Subway]
amply displays, one can approach the city with trepidation and anticipation
simultaneously. But as we look up the subway stairs, slightly dizzy from
the climb, the light above is celestial, and we look forward to what lies
just beyond the edge of darkness. Kapp challenges us to emerge into the
light, not looking back, as did Orpheus, but fully expecting to take on
the city, in all its glorious confusion.
Footnotes
1-2 Stechow, Wolfgang. Northern Renaissance Art, 1400-1600,
Prentice-Hall, 1966, p. 37
3-6 Conversation with the artist, May 31, 2000
7 Robert Pincus-Witten. "Kapp's Grant", David
Kapp, Manhattan Art, 1985, page 1
8-15 Conversation with the artist, May 31, 2000
16 James Thrall Soby. "Meditations of a Painter
", Giorgio de Chirico, Museum of Modern Art, 1912
17 Jack Flam. Richard Diebenkorn, The Ocean Park Paintings,
Gagosian Gallery, Rizzoli, 1992, p. 30
18 John Elderfield. Henri Matisse, A Retrospective, Part
IV, 1913-1917", Museum of Modern Art, 1992
19 Conversation with the artist, May 31, 2000
20 Hershel B. Chipp et al. Theories of Modern Art, "Fauvism
and Expressionism", University of California Press, 1984, page 137
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