Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) was the only Spaniard among the Abstract-Expressionists, and he was among the very few of them to devote considerable time to collage. His relative lack of recognition can be attributed to the fact that he started showing in New York a few years after de Kooning and Pollock—and perhaps, too, to the lyrical self-possession of his paintings, which did not entirely fit the prevailing aesthetic of savage gesture and primal effect. The Grey Art Gallery’s current exhibition of 80 pieces, spanning a full five decades, invites a reappraisal of his luminous work, bringing together for the first time his collages and his divertimientos, the miniature, toy-like sculptures he produced for his own amusement.
When Vicente started experimenting with collage in 1949—he was momentarily without his brushes—he brought to the medium all his substantial gifts as a colorist. He soon came to appreciate this other “mode of painting,” as he called it, for the directness with which he could rearrange colors. Unlike the Cubists and Dadaists, Vicente pre-painted scraps of paper with his own colors, and unlike most of his Ab-Ex contemporaries, he showed only passing interest in surface textures; the rough edges of his hand-torn paper were more a by-product than a vehicle of his expression.
“Number 7,” by Esteban Vicente.
What was the nature of this expression? While Vicente considered spontaneity and instinct crucial to his process, he was essentially a classicist. His “interior landscapes,” as he referred to them, are dramas of counter-tensions, with forms expanding across the surfaces in eloquent intervals. His early collages, built up of criss-crossing paper strips and marks in ink, charcoal or gouache, have something of Pollock’s gestural, all-over energy. But by the 1960s, the paper shapes had grown larger and simpler, their austere forms mobilized by leaps and shifts of color. (Two collages from 1956 incorporate labels from consumer products, but these seem to have been a momentary detour, the lettering serving as rhythmic focal points rather than commentary.)
While most collages are titled generically (“Red on Green”) or not at all, there are exceptions. The shifting blocks of off-white in “Manhattan” inevitably suggest a teeming cityscape, while the luscious sweeps of orange, coral-pink and blue-green bring a tropical depth to “Kalani Hawaii.” But the collages are never merely descriptive. Their “realness” lies in their self-completing rhythms. One compelling, untitled piece from 1994, consisting solely of unpainted bits of paper on canvas, achieves a remarkably complex wholeness—colorfulness, even—out of mere off-whites.
The 20 divertimientos in the exhibition fill several display cases. Constructed of painted wood, cardboard and foamcore (and in one case a plastic snake), they charm with their whimsy. I preferred the several unpainted ones for their momentum of form; in the rest, the colors seemed to decorate rather than define. (Picasso and Henri Laurens’ painted sculptures more convincingly quantify volumes with color.) But then, the divertimientos face some stiff competition at the Grey Art Gallery. Look up, and you’ll see the dense stubbornness of a particular cadmium red, holding within a field of flaming orange, which is in turn braced by pillars of the most delicate, translucent, speckled gray. This is an untitled collage from 1982, whose irreducible elements say nothing about practical life, but everything about the possibilities of color.
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Through Mar. 26, New York University Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East, 212-998-6780.
