The Brooklyn Rail

I once asked a friend, a specialist in French art, why the Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau, whose imposing masterpiece Forest in Winter at Sunset (ca. 1846–67) remains perpetually on view at the Metropolitan Museum, doesn’t get his art historical due? Sandwiched between Romanticism and realism, he explained, Rousseau is an artist whose legacy is to be “rediscovered” every twenty years or so. A similar fate seems to have befallen Paul Feeley, painter, sculptor, and longtime head of Bennington College’s storied art department. Most discussions of Feeley place him in the coterie of artists associated with Clement Greenberg, himself a mainstay at Bennington during the 1960s, only to then describe how his work departs from that critic’s “formalist dogma.” (How dogmatic was formalist dogma, though, if Kenneth Noland was painting on shaped canvases by 1966 and Jules Olitski executed a couple dozen flamboyantly colored sculptures two years later?)

The Shape of Things, currently on view at Garth Greenan Gallery, demonstrates why Feeley’s art deserves a more expansive context than that of an aberrant formalist. The continuity of thought evident among the exhibited paintings, drawings, sketches, and sculptures shows Feeley to have more in common with the polymath Tony Smith, who taught alongside Feeley at Bennington beginning in the late 1950s, than with the college’s “Green Mountain Boys”: Noland, Olitski, and sculptor Anthony Caro. Like Smith, Feeley followed an idiosyncratic path. Born in 1910, the same year as Franz Kline, he belonged to an older generation but developed the work for which he is best known in the context of a subsequent, younger group.

Feeley was evidently tapped into the aesthetic currents of his time, particularly Minimalism and Pop art. The painting Ariolica (1961), for example, with its metallic pigments and central oval cutout, was created in the same year as Donald Judd’s black painting with an inset baking pan, while the four identical tondo panels of Canopus (1964), each with its own square cutout, almost unavoidably call to mind contemporaneous works by Robert Indiana. This is not to suggest influence in one direction or another—Feeley was too independent-minded an artist for that—but rather to say that his practice unfolded more in parallel with the art of the 1960s than is usually acknowledged.

Aside from such morphological similarities, the central, multivalent role that the body plays in Feeley’s art places his work in a context shared by a range of phenomenologically oriented 1960s artists. Two early figurative sketches, smartly included among abstract drawings from decades later, indicate the depth of Feeley’s engagement with the body as a generative form. On a nearby wall, an untitled sketchbook drawing from 1965 features a linear silhouette of a figure above a related abstract design, showing how the artist extracted the biomorphic shapes of his paintings from the human form. We see this relationship too in sculptures such as El Rescha (1965), whose proportions and vertical alignment create a presence which mirrors that of the viewer.

A more subtle sensory engagement is offered by paintings like Alnitah (1964) and Untitled (1964), which feature several identical forms hovering upon raw canvas. Though they share the concentric organization and stained paint surface of Noland’s circle paintings and Thomas Downing’s related dot pictures, Feeley’s compositions are more perceptually stable than the former and less decorative than the latter. I sensed a therapeutic quality in these paintings. Their radial symmetry focuses awareness on the center of the canvas, while the repetition of gently colored, softly curving forms prolongs one’s attention. The configuration and suspension of these shapes in the undefined pictorial space of the bare canvas affords a calming, meditative experience.

In addition to the tall, totemic sculptures described above, there are six smaller ones, each of them three feet in every dimension, five in painted wood and one constructed of hollow masonite volumes. Each of the wooden sculptures consists of two or three identical interlocking planes in the characteristic shape—like a butterfly wing or a ballooned hourglass—seen in Semara (1963) and elsewhere in Feeley’s paintings. Though these works were conceived singly and not as a series, their common dimensions and recurring forms cause relatively minor variations to yield outsize effects, not unlike the units of a wall-mounted Donald Judd box piece. The broad lavender planes of Delta (1965) feel heavier to the eye than the leaner linear design of Dubhe (1965), for example, while the openness of El Rakis (1965) recalls the airy quality of Feeley’s paintings. Deneb-el-Algedi (1965), with its bisecting horizontal plane, approaches furniture design, and indeed all of these sculptures are domestically scaled.

A vitrine of sculptural maquettes in the side gallery, along with the sketches, drawings, and archival material described above, shows some of the directions Feeley may have pursued but for his untimely death at age fifty-five. A couple of these works are assembled in Plexiglas and others are made up of intersecting triangles (these being some of the only hard angles in the entire show). The works included in The Shape of Things and their careful, deliberate installation encourage us to engage with the patterns of Feeley’s visual thinking and invite new readings of his art.