The Brooklyn Rail

Maurice Freedman was a quintessential modernist, painting what he saw from everyday life while channeling his inner vision. The artist split his time between New York and Maine, the journey between a well-trodden path beloved by many artists. The works that make up In the Eye of the Beholder, the New York to Maine Connection at Greenhut Galleries focus on these two subjects and reflect back Freedman’s relentless spirit. From Maine shipyards and mountain streams to Manhattan’s urban parks and architecture, everything in Freedman’s paintings feels somewhat crazed and off-kilter. While courting disorder through color and composition, Freedman then tames it with value and line. Although the works were painted at least half a century ago, they seem to address our own chaotic time, glimpsing a continuum of disruption and change that has echoed through the century.

New York City has many personalities: lively, restrained, delirious. Freedman’s Times Square (1940) certainly tends towards the latter. Here, an ominous magenta sky lowers behind a city both creased and unfolding. Heavily outlined buildings are painted in broad, black strokes, with suggestions of cars racing across the foreground. Gaping advertisements leap out of their frames as our vision is led down avenues with competing vanishing points. V-shapes repeat across the composition, folding the iconic Manhattan street into an accordion, contracting and releasing. We come upon this scene as the natural light fades and the city’s electric light switches on, capturing a moment between shutting down and turning on. My favorite moment is a billboard to the far right that contains an explosive red eclipse. The gesture suggests some kind of advert and appears to be falling out of its frame, and yet it somehow remains contained, a microcosm of all Freedman’s work.

While Times Square crowds its middle space, Harbor Haze (1970s) keeps the center open. In many ways, these two paintings are inversions of one another. In Harbor Haze, the silhouette of a diagonal roofline funnels our vision downward to a jumble of fishing nets and lobster traps. They are crammed together among wooden planks which jut out in each direction, a combination that curiously echoes the composition of Times Square. A group of boats on their moorings emerge from the tangle as though made from the same material. Look closely at the surface of the water and you will see many colors emerge, a complex overlay of warm and cool, just like staring into hazy light. Our vision swings back and forth over this expanse, connecting disparate piers with distant islands. Like the drooping nets drawn below, the whole visual experience swings from one form to another. It's a surprisingly peaceful scene for Freedman, but his use of diagonal lines and triangular arrangements suggest that disturbance lurks beneath the surface. 

Winter Formations (early 1940s) is the most enigmatic painting in the whole exhibition. I would love to see this one alone in a giant room, a luxury that is not afforded this time around. The painting teeters beautifully on the edge of representation and abstraction. A great rocky ledge covered in snow takes up nearly a quarter of the canvas, with sharp green icicles hanging from its underside. Below, another rock pokes out from the snow and a cold blue mountain stream rushes behind. Here, Freedman pairs long sweeping lines with chunky abstract planes, and I felt like I was witnessing a world being turned upside down, shaken. This climate of solid ice and snow is being upended, its hard and cold properties rushing and crashing into each other. On the surface, paint is slathered on with a pallet knife, with passages that testify to scraping and scratching throughout, evidence of revision and discovery.

Freedman’s dramatic compositions and sophisticated colors are a joy to discover. I like having my eye jostled around and pushed off balance, then soothed by harmonious color. It’s an exciting and captivating visual experience. There is also a psychological pull to the work: I see agitation and turmoil in the worlds Freedman build, and this ceaseless tumult reminds me of my own upendedness. I think everyone comes to painting with some amount of unease, even the most well-adjusted viewers. It's a feature of being human. Perhaps these days we all have a little more of that inside of us—the fear of being tipped over, of not being able to stand, of things falling apart. But in Freedman’s world, things hold on despite being jostled, perhaps a reminder that we’re more resilient than we think.