ART REVIEW; 'The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward'
New York Times | September 20, 2002
By HOLLAND COTTER

Selected Works by Harry Smith, Philip Taaffe and Fred Tomaselli
James Cohan Gallery
41 West 57th Street, Manhattan
Through Oct. 19

In 1987, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art did a kooky thing. In the middle of an intensely materialist decade, when theory-intensive "commodity art" reigned, it produced an exhibition titled "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985." New York didn't want to know from the show, which traveled no farther east than Chicago. Maybe we're catching up with it now.

This thought has struck me several times of late, most recently when I saw "The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward," a showcase at Cohan of three artists who are kindred spirits. Harry Smith (1923-1991) is best known for his 1952 "Anthology of American Folk Music," an archival recording project that influenced the course of American music in the postwar years and is shaping it still. But Smith was also the maker of exquisite hand-painted films and an inventive, self-trained painter.

The paintings were repositories for and reflections of his esoteric interests. These included alchemy, theosophy, jazz, cabala, modernist painting, psychoactive drugs, folk art, Celtic poetry, Hindu thought and the culture of the Beat and hippie eras. The earliest of his paintings in the show, from the 1940's, are geometric abstractions à la Malevich and Kandinsky. From the 1960's on, he produced mandalalike designs of painstaking intricacy in luminous, Eastery pinks and yellows or in the mossy greens and golds of the Book of Kells.

The exhibition, organized by Raymond Foye, an independent curator, brings Smith together with two contemporary artists who admire him and made work especially for the show. Philip Taaffe's new paintings, mostly small, are wonderful. They mix and match Surrealism, tantra, biomorphic abstraction and formal techniques of marbling without being merely a sum of these parts. There's a whole laboratory of new ideas bubbling away here.

Fred Tomaselli, who is represented by Cohan, is seen in some of his best work to date. He's a collagist as much as a painter, and the two media are seamlessly joined. In his images of human figures ‹ pieced together from photographic images of body parts, birds and flowers, then painted with a miniaturist's delicacy ‹ Blake, Arcimboldo and "The Teachings of Don Juan" meet. Pills and marijuana leaves are used as collage elements, as in the past, but their presence is played down. Mr. Tomaselli is concentrating ‹ and the concentration is ferocious ‹ on creating an art of rigorous, trippy exuberance primarily from paper and paint, and he's bringing it off brilliantly.

Future gallery solos by Mr. Taaffe and Mr. Tomaselli are something to look forward to, and a museum survey of Smith's career is in order; maybe Mr. Foye, who has done an exceptional catalog for the Cohan show, will take charge of it. Meanwhile, the spiritual in art, however that is defined, seems to be in the air, on the evidence of recent or coming exhibitions devoted to Malevich, Mondrian, Alfred Jensen and Sigmar Polke; to Shaker gift-drawings, Indian tantric painting, Hebrew micrography, Islamic calligraphy and African-American quilts; and to the work of young artists like Sam Gordon, Jutta Koether, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Amy Gartrell and Chris Johanson, and the many aesthetic astronauts now speeding around far out in the ether of cyberspace.

appeared: New York Times | September 20, 2002