The Brooklyn Rail

The first Myron Stout exhibition at Peter Freeman since the gallery announced their representation of the artist’s estate comprises an extraordinary group of never-before-seen charcoal drawings from the late forties to the early fifties, sourced from Stout’s own collection. The exhibition is beautifully installed: the drawings are all hung at the same height in a frieze-like arrangement spanning both gallery spaces. In the first room, earlier Cubist-derived images retain a degree of figuration as pictorial armature, while the drawings in the second are structured on geometrical, frontal forms. Stout tended not to abandon works, believing that either he would continue them at some future point or that some aspect of an interrupted drawing or painting could be revived in another work not yet begun.

Though Stout began his career in the heyday of Abstract Expressionism—he attended Hans Hofmann’s studio classes, a fountainhead of this style—his interest in artists such as Piet Mondrian and Constantin Brancusi, together with his passion for ancient Greek theatre and sculpture, pulled him toward a different orbit, making him an outlier of contemporaneous trends. This explains the leanness of his resume relative to some of his colleagues; Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Clyfford Still were contemporaries. He always worked at easel size, and never made large-scale, enveloping paintings, another distinction.

Stout’s late, biomorphic oil paintings are his best-known works, making this exhibition of charcoal drawings a revelation. It is clear that what we see is not a succession of stylistic options, or the honing of one single motif, but rather a search for the images and processes necessary for this particular artist, achieved over a lifetime. The planar distribution of tone relations, already evident in Stout’s figure drawings, progressively evolves, gradually shifting focus to geometric concerns. Any residual representation of the figure is left behind to pursue the flat light and dark transitions that Stout tilts until eventually, at key moments in certain drawings, they become fully frontal, each plane containing its own modulated tone. Intermediary stages are abandoned: some drawings, although without any recognizable anatomical features, continue to assemble accumulations of shape that approximate the overall human form and its component parts, now fragmented into Cubistic compositions.

What emerges, and we see this in the second gallery space particularly as we look around the row of drawings on each wall, is that there are some drawings that reform compositionally in diagonal sections, or broken patterns of uneven rectangular parts. These works retain a subtle perspectival slant, offsetting frontality to set up spatial ambiguities and animate the transitions of dark to light tones. There are several drawings, like Untitled (1952), that practically erase any shape and focus on a purely linear structuring of space, only implying shape, and are unusual in their lightness and eschewing of stark tonal contrast. Another, Untitled (1950), shares a similar sense of scale in its internal parts, but differs in composition: pale, circulating triangle shapes float against a dark ground. As in all the drawings on view, Stout uses the properties of charcoal to produce a range of tones from the deepest black to the softest grey, the latter blending with the shade of the Strathmore paper itself. Most of the work here is undated, but it appears from those few Stout did date that he revisited compositions, or elements of them, over time.

Two undated, fully frontal compositions that play with the positive/negative relationships inherent in positioning rectangles of opposing tonalities invite visual movement in such simple yet complex ways. The scale of the rectangles to each other, and their relationship to the outer edge of the sheet, deserves and rewards prolonged looking, as the pair challenges the notion that drawing, or painting, is static. Durational examination reveals that what is rationally straightforward belies the wild, unfathomable reality surrounding us. Uncovered from our self-edited perceptions, we realize our tendency to parcel reality into so many passed over parts. This fact was, I would think, as clear to Stout as it was to the ancient Greeks that he admired.