Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents POST, featuring artists Gandy Brodie, Earl Kerkam, Elaine de Kooning, Lester Johnson, June Leaf, Jan Müller, Milton Resnick and Bob Thompson. This exhibition gathers a group of artists working in NYC between 1945-65, in the period after World War II. There were three strands of representation in the postwar period- the flat graphically influenced painting of early Pop, the neo-naturalist lyricism of painters coming out of the Hofmann school and, finally, a third way- artists who made images out of abstraction- owing as much to their inventions with paint as to observation. This exhibition examines that third way, images emerging from painting.

In 1945, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the world was like a broken robins egg on a bright morning. Millions lost in Europe, in Russia, and in the east. Art was an engine that helped to feed the rebirth of a new world with redrawn boundaries and geo-political divisions. The dominant language of postwar painting in New York was abstraction. But as Jean Helion, the French painter, remarked it was impossible for him to continue with neo-plastic abstraction after the charnel houses of Europe.

Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989) found her own language in portraiture. After working with her partner, William de Kooning, who had been both her teacher and significant other, she learned to draw using images of women from magazines. In 1945 she was in the studio of Fairfield Porter who was painting his wife, the American poet Anne Porter. In her book, Ninth Street Women, Mary Gabriel recounts de Kooning’s memory, “I thought she had a terrific face, very strong and beautiful with wonderful shapely eyes. I made a very careful drawing of her and then later made two paintings from it. ” De Kooning’s seminal drawing of Anne Porter appears to be the work included here. It led her into a body of twentieth century portraiture that combined her fluent paint handling, a sense of grabbing the character of her sitters, who were often powerful men, including John F Kennedy, numerous artists and critics, and her friend, the Greek painter Aristodemos Kaldis. She depicted artists and writers, such as Tom Hess, Bill De Kooning, Harold Rosenberg, and Charles Egan, in a way not uncommon to female sitters- as objects of desire. This portrait drawing of Anne Porter was acquired by the American painter (known for his brilliant portraits) Lennart Anderson from the Graham Gallery, where they both showed in the early 60s. Anderson’s provenance is itself high praise for this sheet.

Gandy Brodie (1925-75) was born­­ in the Lower East Side and became a self-taught painter by visiting the Museum of Modern Art, looking especially at Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Klee. He studied dance with Martha Graham. Hans Hofmann was supposed to have acquired one of his early paintings and opened his school in Provincetown to him. Dream of an Olive Tree from 1955 parallels Francis Bacon’s early 50s paintings based on old photos of African wildlife. His 1951 portrait of Stravinsky, whom he portrayed a number of times, is an almost entirely abstract reconstruction of a head.

June Leaf (b.1929) had been loosely associated with Chicago’s Monster school, while always following her own way with unique and peculiar imagery. The Ballroom, 1962, was made after the artist had moved to NYC in 1960 from Chicago. This work, painted with black and white acrylic on canvas, possess a quality of paredolia- personified imagery seen in clouds. Leaf mentions having seen Peter Brook’s Marat Sade, but the motif of a ballroom and theater have long been part of her iconography.

Earl Kerkam (1891- 1965) was a highly paid painter of movie billboards in Philadelphia, who ultimately took himself to France “to learn to paint.” He returned to NY as a kind of mendicant monk of painting sharing a studio with Franz Kline, whose work he described as having good “Ying Yang.” Thomas Hess termed a Kerkam a “tough cookie.” Hess continued, “His voice was a rasp. His face was like bunched knuckles under the hat brim he always kept pulled down tightly over his eyes. He was totally cynical about the art world.” Kerkam was a fellow traveler from a different dimension to the New York School painters. His work was figurative, Hess saying that his real subject was himself. Sometimes he would paint a model in his studio and when she left, he would tie a towel around his head and keep painting.

Lester Johnson (1919-2010) was with Gandy Brodie and Bob Thompson in Provincetown in 1958. He was working towards an elegant, awkward figuration which often depicted crowds on New York Streets in monochrome. It is said that when he had a studio at 222 Bowery, he could paint the hobos who wandered on the Bowery from observation as they moved in alcohol fueled slow motion. Johnson went on to become an important teacher at Yale. He made polychrome walking figures, which seem to owe much to Leger, but the authenticity of his existential approach to making figures in the early 60s has never been matched. Mulberry Street is a rich blue spider web of men in hats being subsumed into waves of blue paint.

Bob Thompson (1937- 1966) was 29 when he died. Three of the artists in this exhibition (Brodie, Muller and Thompson) had abbreviated careers, but Bob Thompson’s was the shortest. In the short span between 1958 and 66 he produced a complete oeuvre of 1000 works in all sizes and media. Thompson arrived in Provincetown in the summer 1958 from his native Louisville, where he had been studying at the University. In Provincetown, he met Lester Johnson and Gandy Brodie, among others. The art historian Judith Wilson supposed that Brodie had a profound influence on Thompson’s fast developing early style. He also met Dodi Müller, the widow of Jan Müller, who invited him into Jan’s studio. Thompson painted a marvelous homage to Müller (Jan Müller’s Funeral). Where Müller’s figures in the woods are in many senses beatific, Thompson’s Bacchanal from 1960 is riddled with sexual violence and interracial sexuality. April Kingsley wrote: “Whereas violence was intimated in some Müller canvases, it is overt in many of Thompson’s. Women flee, stretch their arms out in panic, are grabbed, even tackled in Thompson’s bacchanals.”

Jan Müller (1922-1958) was the first of the Hofmann School painters to work figuratively. He came from Europe in 1941. He suffered from Rheumatic Fever that ultimately killed him at 36 years old. The included work from 1953 is one of his mosaic style paintings, but one where the figurative elements undergird the swirling mosaic-like patterns. Hovering between abstraction and figuration, Two Nudes presages the figures amidst woods in last passage of his work. After escaping the claws of Nazism in Europe, Müller fell to his own weak link, his heart, after receiving an early valve replacement surgery,that left him with an audibly ticking heart.

Each of these masterly artists made their work against all odds, with great panache, and painterly surety. They made their work despite poverty, fascism, racism and sexism. They made great work as part of their epoch. Each in their own way challenged dominant aesthetics and changed the language of painting.

Please contact Lauren Fowler at lauren@shfap.com or call 917-861-7312 for more information or images. View available works on instagram @shfapselections.