TABLE OF CONTENTS

PRINT SUMMER 1969

ALLAN HACKLIN, DAVID

DIAO, DONALD
KAUFMAN
I

ALLAN HACKLIN, DAVID DIAO, AND DONALD KAUFMAN are three

relatively unknown New York painters who number among a larger
group of young artists such as Ralph Humphrey, Dan Christensen,1 Kenneth
Showell, David Paul, Alan Shields, and others who have been exploring a new kind
of painted expressiveness which, though varied in appearance, is definitely in
reaction to the major trends of sixties painting (hard-edge geometrics, stained
color-field, deductive structuring, Op, Pop, etc.). Attempting to register their
changing attitudes about art as a mode or quality of attention without necessarily
undermining the notion of the picture as a discrete and particularly artificial kind
of esthetic object, these painters are nevertheless concerned with establishing a
kind of visual impact which opposes itself to the structural literalness, aggressive
optical and coloristic brilliance, or obdurate formalism which has been the lexicon
of painters like Noland, Stella, Frankenthaler, Poons, Louis, Held, Kelly, Olitski,
and others who gained prominence in the last decade.

The three artists discussed here have not entirely abandoned some form of
diagrammatic structuring (characteristic of some of the previous art), nor have
they rejected the sumptuousness of either color or surface. But a new and
ambivalently perceived order, filtered through color formulated as a disembodied,
aerated radiance or through a restrained lyricism, is substituted for the visual,
intellectual, and formal density of works by some of the older artists mentioned.
Affects are no longer achieved in terms of that immediate and
gripping gestalt confrontation of image, form, or color which has been emphasized
in much of the pictorial or three-dimensional work of the sixties. Instead of being
asserted with a gripping or all-encompassing immediacy, the picture itself is
established with much lower voltage and less tension—in subtle, sometimes nearly
invisible ways which elicit an attenuated perception, spaced out in time. This new
kind of circumspect, inverted, more timed sensuousness is another current
alternative to the ascetic restraint or undetailed, weighty impact of Minimal art.
Interest has been shifted to more ambiguous areas of perceiving through light
radiation, chromatic temperature changes, elusive spatiality and illusive tactility.
While careful consideration is still given to the picture as an artifice—as still
patently dependent upon and emerging from its specific illusions—the drift is
away from unmediated frontality or openness as such, towards a more
cerebralized painterliness, more reticent but also more coolly relaxed, even
offhand, about being painterly and expressionistic. Overt metrical structures may
be apparent, but they are also made to disappear either in an effulgence of soft
burning light (Hacklin), through precisely balanced and delicately modulated
colors (Kaufman), or by a freehand but deftly qualified and incorporealized kind of
texture or gesturing (Diao). Although the organizational devices and pictorial
dimensions may be diffused and obscured by these effects, a certain amount of
explicitness is also made to counteract a merely amorphous or chance
indeterminacy. Decorativeness may be accepted in and of itself without the
pejorative connotations the term has acquired in recent criticism and parlance.
Further generalizations are self-defeating, however; the work of these artists
differs greatly one from the other and each must be looked at separately.

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II

ALLAN HACKLIN is 26, was born and grew up in Harlem, and graduated from
Pratt Institute, where he studied under George McNeil and Richard Lindner and
Constructivist Lucien Krukowski. His student paintings were competent Abstract
Expressionist trials, but more native to his own thinking were a later series of
pictures in which simple geometric objects suspended Surrealistically in space
were seen in a contradictory volumetric perspective. A further development of this
vein comprised fields afloat with irregular or staggered chevron stripes,
rectangular shafts and blocks in bright chromey orange, red, navy blue, or white,
and diagonally played off against the sides of pale grey-green oil painted grounds.
Slight spatial ambiguities were already apparent in these works, as well as in a
group of “light box” paintings done in late 1966, when Hacklin was still finding
himself ill at ease with strong color and with the weight and volume of the visual
structures. He felt increasingly belabored by the painstaking brushed modulations
of oil paint, and at this point he switched over to sprayed acrylic in order to attain
the kind of atomized radiance of his current work.

Hacklin accepts an almost saccharine prettiness as one of his main working

premises, but in his most successful paintings he manages to overcome the merely
pretty. He uses a range of color which admittedly evokes pearlescent nail polish
and eye makeup, cosmetic blushes, 1940s silk pajamas, and bandbox tints, but he
disdains the Pop attitude of making such banal constituents more banal by a
calculated and self-conscious intellectual treatment of them. Still involved with
more abstract concepts of equivocal space and with finding his own brand of color
expression, Hacklin, in October 1967, began some rectangular paintings of vertical
lines and grids with the idea of making a glowing, sometimes shaft-like haze
radiate from within these slender linear elements through a more uniform ground
color. The format seemed wrong, however; he wanted to control both the frontality
and the obliqueness of this illuminating chromatic expansion without the strong
figure-field relationships which had become too evident. The rectangular shape of
these earlier works also forced Hacklin to think too specifically in terms of
composition, which does not interest him as much as does the use of color and the
regulation of light as a focused thermostatic factor. He plays a soft haziness and
powdery diffusion against sharp delineation and a sometimes acidic coloring,
though harsh contrasts and light-dark modeling are eliminated by his spraying
technique and by the general choice of colors. A changeover to the square format
got rid of both the constriction and the window-like suggestions which had
dissatisfied Hacklin, and he began a series of extraordinarily lovely paintings
whose refinement has occupied him most of 1968 and early 1969.

To characterize these works in general: they are square fields crossed by stacked
diagonal stripes (three-quarters of an inch wide) which are graded in hue from the
two borders they touch, and as they pass through the center. There are no Day-glo
pigments or iridescent suspensions used in the acrylic, which is sprayed onto a
primed ground. The field itself is imperceptibly graded so as to create a centralized
squarish cloud which seems to burn through, or even simultaneously lie above, yet
is also coincident with the bands. The cool overall glow of light accounts for this
confusion of optical and spatial planes. Where the color of the stripes as they
traverse the center of the painting is the same as the color of the wider “ground”
channels around the edges of a picture, the effect is strangely cerebral. It is as if
the image and its tinted light had arrived (already perceived) within the brain
without having first passed through the mediation of the eyes. Sometimes
phosphorescent framing after-images seem to echo the central cloud and edge it
with more intense flashes, like heat lightning. Depending on the color balance, the
cloud may look negative to the stripes or the stripes may read as slightly more
negative than the cloud—but this may change within each single painting and the
changes might be better viewed or conceived of in terms of a two-way electrical
circuit reversal, rather than as a figure-field contrast. Hacklin is careful to avoid
the kind of color valuing which would make the bars look like Venetian blind slats
through which the eye might fall backwards into a spatial pocket. The illusion of
such deep space is minimized (though spatiality itself is not precluded) by the way
in which the diagonal bands are made to run half or one inch short of the actual
limits of the canvas, so that the image is candidly set in some artifice of extremely
shallow space, or coated on a colored surface. At first the edges were bordered
with bands, but this too obviously suggested a pictorial window, so the bands were
removed in later works. This abrupt elision of the stripes also emphasizes the
explicitness of the picture’s artificiality, of its willfully designated physical
boundaries, in contrast to its luminous chromatic pulsations.

Hacklin often drives his colors as far as he can into the icky, candied, and pretty;
then he is forced to rescue them from a pasty density which may (though
infrequently) result. An impressionistic list of the hues he typically favors may give
some idea of this problem: almond cream, satiny peach, powdery apricot,
iridescent chiffon blues, lavenders or greys, cosmetic pinks and plum taupes, pale
yellow, pistachio green and chartreuse, burnished strawberry-bronze, etc., etc. In a
painting like Barracuda I he manages to keep both color and configuration on the
most subtly radiant level, sweeping a pale pinkish-white field with stripes of
lavender edged with blue, which diffuse a slow, icy, visual burn. Others like Sweet
Sue are more saturated in color and draw more attention to the flickering contrast
between the central cloud and the fluorescence of the bars. Hacklin has
experimented with molding a greater sense of volume around the bars (Soft
Circus) but this has not worked as successfully as pictures like Milan W,2 which is
at once a light and a dark painting with its stripes appearing to glow faintly from
behind themselves. Here an echo of rose is the surprising exhalation of crisp blue
and lavender bars passing through a cloud of filmy buff-grey.

In some of the most recent works the aim has been to either veil color, so that a
quiet inward pulsation seems to motivate the iconic square cloud, or to make the
sides act more forcefully upon it; the bars are tentatively being superseded by
complex herringbone webs. Polly Snow Queen (recently exhibited in a group show
at the Betty Parsons Gallery) has this more keyed-up balance. Its lime-yellow bars
running through a pale blue and lavender aura are transformed into an almost
neon aqua in the center of the field. This aqua makes the citrus color of the bars,
when they move nearer to the edges of the canvas, transmit vibrantly, as though
another aura were circuiting the cloud. This strongly sensed optical pressure also
reinforces the centrality of the image, while the high-frequency operation of the
color points to its lateral gradations from edge to center to edge. Hacklin works
quickly and restlessly, though he is tenacious in exploring each problem until it
seems concretely resolved in a number of paintings. He is not content with an easy
virtuosity, and if anything mars the already rich and exceedingly rapid
development of his work in the past year, perhaps it is only his intense self-
consciousness about what he hopes to achieve in each picture.

III

AT THE AGE OF 25 David Diao has received no formal art training other than the
four years he has spent living in New York and finding a way through his own
painting. He feels that his current work is a clear, but still constrained, even
conservative reaction to color-field painters like Noland, although the latter’s
bull’s-eye paintings had an influence on some of Diao’s first “X” paintings. In 1965
to 1966 he worked on softly metallic Rothko-esque pictures whose dark blending
pillars were osmotically layered with complementary colors. By 1967 Diao had
chosen to work with fewer, even more consciously academic variables in a series of
square paintings whose two diagonals graphed the field with a large X. Cool-warm
transparencies interested him most at this time, as did the simplicity of the
centered, equally stressed, almost imageless organization of the canvas. In the
paintings which he has made since the summer of 19673 Diao has been occupied
with surface and its light-reflecting properties which are played up through loose,
though somewhat systematized allover gesturing and an extremely subdued,
modulated range of neutral colors.

Diao’s canvases are usually dark monochromatic grounds in silvery or dry earthy
tones (like coffee, putty white, amber mauve, beige green, rust, brick red, teal blue,
aqua, lavender grey, sand pink, or mustard ochre) with touches of lighter diluted
color brushed and soaked into the wet grounds. They are reminiscent of finely
tempered Chinese pottery glazes or silk embroideries, and this is not far-fetched in
terms of the artist’s own experience or sensibility, since he lived in China until he
was about 12. The rectangular fields are marked by four to seven vertical, or three
to four horizontal divisions (sometimes with a few diagonals crossing the corners)
which are the register of the stretcher bars behind the taut canvas fabric. Diao
accepts these visible registers as a literal underpinning which rids his work of any
deliberately designed kind of hard-edged or configurational interior drawing.
Their regularized phasing serves as a physically secured contrast to the freeness
and casualness of the more illusory painted strokes. He does not plan to have the
stretchers constructed in any specific way, but leaves a painting’s design to the
chances of its size and the corresponding demands of the armature.

Wavy brush trails, mottled undulations, zigzags, or cloudy blottings are almost
invisibly absorbed into the ground colors, yet their markings and sedimentations
create a multi-layered but suspended and shallowly compressed kind of space
which leaves open to question the location of any one layer of paint or space in
relation to any other. This surface hazing, which from certain angles looks like
shop-window glass streaked with dried cleaning wax, is also the light-reflecting
medium of the pictures. There is often a great disparity between the view of a
painting from a directly frontal position and from a more oblique angle: varying
degrees of actual absorption in the painting itself as well as differences in the
transparency and opacity of the pigment create a richly changing and elusive
surface. The liquidity of these patterns is frequently offset by the tertiary dryness
of the colors. Diao usually begins by painting wet-into-wet, but later he may sand
down the canvas, overpaint with his hands as well as brushes, or wash more color
into the alternately hard or soft looking surfaces which end by resembling fragile,
weathered finishes. But these are purely optical surfaces which somehow are not
sensed as tactile or palpable. Although it is evident that Diao is involved. with
texture, he creates what is only the illusion of both surface and texture—which
curiously avoid outright assertion of themselves as surface or texture. Ode is a
taffy-colored painting with a more scraped looking, harder surface, but under
certain lighting conditions it can appear as pearly as the more intentionally lyrical
works like White Fang Silver Heels with its short swishy strokes flowing through
long horizontal zones, or Aqueduct, a seven-register wide rectangle shimmering
like a pool with its liquefied aqua-white waves and ripples.

Sometimes the gentle suffusion and ease of the gesturing is vitiated by the rigidity
or even the sheer quantity of the stretcher marks, though their repeated vertical
courses provide an organization which combats suggestions of atmosphere or
landscape in the texturing. When these linear elements are horizontal they tend to
pull the shallow separation and shuffling of space which occurs between a darker
ground and the lighter streaks back up to the surface plane. There is a nice
ambivalence here between the control of spatial or structural constituents and the
extemporaneous, though graceful, expressive means.

IV

DONALD KAUFMANN IS 33 and is a Midwesterner by birth and education,

though most of his painting has been done in New York. His work before 1965 was
semi-figurative with Surreal subjective and formal overtones. Ladder-like images
were often used in these spatially abstruse compositions. His first wholly abstract
canvases contained checkerboard squares in multiple tones of grey and beige,
which were expanded through 1966–67 into big staggered rectangular stairs and
flat intersecting blocks, still neutral in hue and close in value within any given
picture, but more spatially plastic and more visible than Ad Reinhardt’s red and
blue paintings of the early fifties, which are their historical precedents.4 Thin
horizontal bars in brighter lime, or pungent rose and yellow colors were more
confectionary and experimental compared to the austerity of the larger
rectangular canvases. painted in the dove greys, cream beiges, soft buffs and
ochres, steel blues, pale hospital greens, and smoky rose-mauves he still employs
in his current work.

Kaufman aims to control space without depicting it, and to this end he uses a
severely limited color scheme, circumscribed in tonality and range, but balanced
in a way that subtly activates and inflects the planes within, around, and beyond
the painted field. In his most recent work Kaufman has made his format devices
more recondite and virtually invisible through a complicated and close keying of
color: but the visibility of these now more erratically organized, non-hierarchical
fields becomes the function of a certain kind of timing. One is made acutely aware
of the limitations imposed on both format and color only after a considerable
amount of viewing time and attention. The heat and strength of exterior lighting
may make important differences in the degree to which both surface relief and the
intricacy of the image and coloration become apparent.

In his paintings of 1968 and 1969 Kaufman sectors horizontally rectangular or

square fields with X-ing or V’d single and double bars which partially edge the
canvas, intersect, or form cropped parallelograms, rhomboids, triangles, and
smaller rectangles as they crisscross through the nearly monochrome ground tints.
The bars do not look divisive in the normal graphic sense, however, since they are
painted with the same evenly modulated keying as the broader areas of the field.
While these field areas are often closer to each other in hue (gradations of a
lavender grey, ochre beige, or a dusky pink, for instance), the parallel and
diagonally crossing bars may be more variegated with contrasting green, blue,
mustard brown or plum colors abutted meticulously. Sometimes the bands
themselves do not occupy enough space in proportion to the full size of a picture,
so that as they fall out of scale and begin to look incidental (especially when seen
from a distance), they correspondingly fail to galvanize the tenuous space which
Kaufman is trying to manipulate. A certain stiff inertness which comes from
fussily over-organizing, or contriving a field, may also dull the soft luminosity of
the chromatic adjustments which body forth the format. Though he tends to use
his colors more as visual properties than as the primary expressive vehicles of his
painting, their quiet expansiveness is both integral and instrumental to the
spatiality of the works. It is only when a finicky structural syntax impedes that a
condition of dry stasis sets in.

Some of the more complex and successful paintings such as Topeka, Downer’s

Grove, Rotation, and Triballoon admirably fulfill Kaufman’s spatial aims with
their elusory parallaxing surfaces. The orientation of the bars is either
asymmetrical within a field, or they are graphed off-axis to the canvas edges,
which makes them seem to lie obliquely to its surface. The whole structure which
is otherwise flattened out by the monochromatic tonality of the colors is then cast
tangential to the actual visible surface; the bars sometimes look as if they are
extending into the spaces where they do not actually continue (like fleeting
imaginary projections), and the sectored areas overlap or deflect from each other
like shingling. When the X’d or V’d bars are anchored more conventionally along
the upper, lower, or side edges of the field they hold the surface more firmly to the
plane. In Triballoon the plaid-like, though irregular, pattern of pale greenish greys
and pinked greens exists on the surface of the canvas with a peculiar concreteness
(as many as six to twenty coats are painted onto each area), but the discontinuity
of the bars makes the partial diamond, parallelogram, or triangular sections blink,
shuffle, or fade out of focus, as if behind a temporal smoke screen. At some
moments this evokes a strangely spaceless kind of relief which is almost
exclusively optical. Rotation is a harmony of pink-brown mauves and greyed
lavenders with olive, lime, and taupe bars forming the kind of distorted or
parallaxed surface mentioned above. The movement is never a push-pull
fluctuation—it is a distinctly lateral or oblique passage which is more elliptical and
indistinct than the precision of both technique and organization would imply.
Though it is too often assumed that maturity should not be expected from the
work of younger artists, Hacklin, Diao and Kaufman all exhibit an extraordinary
degree of sophistication and self-awareness in work which is not lacking in depth,
focus, or originality. All of the three are positively critical and cognizant of their
sources, innovations, and historical precedents, yet their paintings have a
freshness which, though still cautious and exploratory in some cases, speaks well
for the always hazardous enterprise and difficult conditions of being a young
painter in New York.

—Emily Wasserman

—————————
NOTES

1. See Max Kozloff, “Light as Surface,” on Dan Christensen and Ralph Humphrey,
in Artforum, February, 1968.

2. Most of these paintings were exhibited in March and April at the Galerie Willer
in Stuttgart, Germany, this year. Hacklin has not had a one-man show in New
York as of this date, though he has been included in group showings here and in
Canada.

3. Some of these and more recent paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli
Gallery in February, 1969.

4. Shown at the Richard Feigen Gallery, September, 1967. See my review of this
exhibition in Artforum, November, 1967, p. 60.