The Brooklyn Rail

I got to know Thornton while serving as editor-in-chief of Artforum, in the late seventies, and being on a crusade for abstract painting. It was then chic to despise all painting: a stance based, however un-dialectically, on Walter Benjamin. (And hey, wasn’t the whole photography kerfuffle about representational painting?!) I produced a series of thematic articles designed to highlight many abstract painters, then mostly unknown, while taking advantage of opportunities such as being able to put the first woman painter on the cover of the magazine: Elizabeth Murray. Besides studio visits, I was fortunate to be able to “hang with certain artists, including Tom Nozkowski, Sean Scully and Thornton, who at the time was doing the wedges that thus have always seemed classic to me.

It was especially these earlier wedge paintings—the chamfered, quadrilateral ones more than those like mountain peaks, with their Romantic overtones—that struck me as evoking a person without assuming bodily form. I hoped to acclaim them in a wide-ranging but forever unfinished essay. Believe it or not, I was taking Stanley Kubrick’s stele in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as the only Minimalist object most non-art people probably ever contemplated. It would be oversimplifying to stress that Kubrick’s stele had an actual, non-metaphorical voice; but, believing that that there is no such a thing as Minimalism in painting (meaning, all painting other than anything deliberately hampered for the sake of argument), I could see how Thornton’s wedge motif, without representing any thing, does manages to be a presence in itself.

Thornton himself was a fine fellow: kind, gentle, witty. On canvas or in oilstick on paper, his brushwork or mark-making—what for pianists is called the “attack” (!) on the keyboard—is typically firm without being violent, but also not lyrically flowing either. Even in discussion he was characteristically firm without being either violent or docile.

What did Thornton, his wife Vered Lieb, myself, and others present tend to discuss? Often enough aesthetic questions like “the decorative” (especially after my long essay on “The Carpet Paradigm” came out in Arts in September 1976). I think Thornton came to like skirting that issue with more patternistic devices later on, especially whatever can be taken as a plaid. Then again, obsessing about such a given formal scaffold as a plaid can mean missing the point of an expressively jazzy blare of colors.

At a certain point Thornton and I tended to drift apart, though quite without affecting the high regard in which I held his work. For my part, I had to deal with major problems in both my academic career and my work as a critic. I found myself teaching at Harvard on a three-year lectureship while also wanting to take an interest in what a younger generation of artists burgeoning on the Lower East Side, was up to, many as evidently discontent with the bourgeois art world as I was.

I trust it’s okay to speak of a couple of small works by Thornton which will always remind me of him. One is a smaller version of the oil-stick wedge drawing in the Museum of Modern Art called Garden at Night (1982), for which it could have been a study. Its wedge of verdant green on a cerulean blue field is a combination that usually evokes Matisse. But here it also reminds me of Thornton’s daredevil aspect: Okay., Buster, try using a blue field without connoting sky—something Malevich warned against. Thornton was also a daredevil in challenging his own penchants, such as, later, effecting rigorous edges between forms instead of the expressive “inaccuracy” he must have known he was good at, as a way of extending the excitement of the game.

One doesn’t think of our friend as “into” objets-trouvés, but the other work was just such a gift: a 5¾ x 3¾ x 5/8-inch piece from 1981, somewhat constructed to begin with as well as by augmentation: a little oddball “modified readymade” that proves to be materially complex. It is built up of corrugated cardboard and fronted with a painted paper “painting” of sorts, by the most careful tearing of the surface of which has produced a symmetrical blue upon red-orange device. Signed and titled Found Piece, it carries the notation “Worked on.” Nice going, my friend!

Something I’ll always remember. Having always wished to track down the never exhibited, never reproduced, abstract “icon,” so called, that Ad Reinhardt painted for the hermitage of the peacenik monk Thomas Merton, which when I came to Artforum I was able to do (for December 1976). I didn’t expect many to like it. But our friend had his Beat side, and Kerouac would have cottoned to it too. Yes, Thornton—himself the “son of a preacher-man”—really loved it.