Eugene Newmann intimidates me. He has been a ranked chess master, whereas I am the kind of guy who could lose 20 bucks in 20 seconds trying my luck with a hustler in any New York City park. So when I look at Newmann's paintings I'm always convinced that he's thinking at least eight or 10 moves beyond what I'm
capable of perceiving. Then there's his short, solid build, a voice with the commanding presence of heavy earth moving equipment and, not least, his confident hand tangible in every smudge, mark and line that churns in an elemental
boil on the surface of his work. When he recently described himself as a 20th century painter it made perfect sense. He could piss in a fireplace and I wouldn't be surprised. He could wreck the car or take everybody at his opening to a bullfight. The Modern Lovers might have written a song about him and his attitude problem; forget that he's a thoughtful family man with a well-tended garden.
Being a casting agent's dream for playing out the romantic antics of a carousing, modernist Ab Exer isn't, of course, what Newmann meant when he called himself a 20th century painter, even if it is part of the reason I find his presence so unnerving. To get a better idea of what kind of a painter Newmann is, one has but to visit
From Painting to Painting
, his solo exhibition at Linda Durham Contemporary Art (1101 Paseo de Peralta, 466-6600; through June 3). From the first canvas it's clear, as I feared, that Newmann is thoughtful and assured, working his paintings with a kind of muscular ease, an almost-brutal seduction. The cunning here isn't pompous-it's gracious, just as the strength in each brush stroke is more balletic than belligerent. Like any painter worth looking at, Newmann adeptly guides his audience through his work, leading the eye through the story he's telling. Here, though, the narratives are not straightforward and the artist allows the viewer to play with different structures as much as he himself is experimenting.
The structure that Newmann is tweaking is that of Rogier van der Weyden's "The Escorial Deposition," or "Descent from the Cross," a circa 1435 depiction of a post-crucifixion Christ being carried from the Place of Skulls. Ten figures crowd that altarpiece, one of those inconceivable tangles of bodies in dramatic pose that was once common to narrative painting, but would be more recognizable to current generations in the combat vamping of
Charlie's Angels
. But if cultural standards have so plummeted in general, the same is not the case for Newmann, who refuses to relinquish neither his personal devotion to van der Weyden's masterpiece hanging in the Prado nor his devotion to the more universal tradition of painting and exploration of human and divine essence that the Deposition represents. In
From Painting to Painting
, Newmann has created his own Descent sketches-stunning gestural figures in umber tones on white and pale pink-and then painted over and beyond them. He never duplicates van der Weyden, but instead constructs new possibilities chiseled with rugged, expressionist aplomb, especially from the two horizontal figures of Christ and Mary. In some works the initial sketch is all but erased into a field of yellow or blue, interrupted only with vigorous horizontal slashes of red, black, white. At other points it's clear that Mary is crumpling into the arms of the disciple John, even as Christ takes the abstracted form of dark-limbed lightening. Always, Newmann brings forth new provocations of the figure, or adds his own, as when Christ's crumpled body is accompanied by a sagging datura bloom visible through the painter's window.
The heaviness of seasons cycling can be felt through the drooped blossom and vicariously back into the artist's hand, sigh and gaze, just as the weight of longing for meaning and commonality fills the lines of Christ's body, similarly crooked. Carefully balanced elements lock the viewer into a reverberation from figure to figure, from foreground to underpainting, in a continuously realigning shuffle between surrender and ascendance, both in the instinctive placement of brush strokes and in the options posed by figures visible and partly obscured. Newmann tackles forms, emotions and human frailty as his own intuition guides him, but he does it within a framework of rules, a language of initiates comprised of the guttural tones of impasto, the high melody of pentimento. He knows that when he sets brush to palette, he has no vocabulary for frozen moments of popular culture, no wry political slang nor easy iconic cues to contemporary wit-he speaks only within the honest materiality of paint, knowing it to be enough. That, for me, is what makes Eugene Newmann a 20th century painter.
