An especially thick layer of smog hung over the city. At House of Seiko, situated on the corner of Santa Monica and Heliotrope in East Hollywood, six large paintings by Fred Reichman hung on three walls of the space in an exhibition titled Koan. Reichman (1925–2005) was a San Francisco–based painter who, though influenced by postwar abstraction and the art and religion of East Asia, produced a body of domestic, spiritually inflected figurative paintings that resist easy categorization within canonical 20th-century American art movements—a kind of Zen Fairfield Porter.
I was struck by the sense of serenity upon entering the gallery. The paintings are pretty and not pretty, in a banal, inoffensive way, but they are carefully created, glowing with layers of color. Each picture possesses an implied horizon toward the top or bottom of its canvas, a sense of orientation that anchors the spare compositions of mundane objects and figures. I was immediately drawn to what was probably the sparest painting in the show, Horsescape (1976), a mostly white canvas framed by golden rolling hills and two tiny yellow birds, before realizing that what I was looking at were not hills at all but the top half of a horse in profile, missing its head and legs. Reichman displays a monk-like restraint in this picture, at once a landscape and a figure study. Using only a few lines, he evokes a holistic aesthetic experience of a horseback ride through the hills of Marin County, and with layers of underpainting, he makes his pictures glow and become greater than the sum of their seemingly humble parts. Underpainting is particularly important in achieving this effect, evident in all the works on view: pinks, yellows, and purples show up at the very edges of the canvases, and these layers vibrate underneath his spare figures.
A few obvious references rise to the surface: the quiet luminosity of Édouard Vuillard’s interiors; the gentle starkness of Milton Avery and the early American modernists; the florid, layered canvases of the Northwest mystics Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. Reichman was taught by and was close with Clyfford Still, and though the comparison with Still’s all-over abstract paintings is not an obvious one, I can see a shared compositional sense, an eye for arranging seemingly unrelated forms in vertical space. With Fairfield Porter’s work, Reichman’s shares diffuse color, serene compositions, and gently pastoral settings.
By the late 1950s, as Reichman entered the mature period of his career, the influence of Japanese calligraphy and East Asian painting became increasingly pronounced in his work. Reichman met Tobey at a New York exhibition of the latter’s work, where Tobey encouraged the younger artist to look at Asian art. His works from the late 1950s and 1960s in particular have a calligraphic quality, a sense of reserve and remove. Paintings from this period, such as Buzzard Hilltop Touching (1962) and Below Tree – Orange Cat (1962), prefigure the works in Koan: the figurative abstraction of Horsescape, the domestic scenes of Two Brushes in a Yokohama Studio (1982) and For Matthew’s Colored Strip (1969). Reichman knew the Japanese American artist and writer SaburÅ Hasegawa in the 1950s when Hasegawa was teaching in San Francisco. Hasegawa’s paintings and criticism are credited with introducing European abstract art to Japan in the 1930s, and his writings in turn linked Japanese calligraphy, classical Chinese painting, and European modernism. Hasegawa and Reichman were both devotees of Paul Klee, whose strikingly nonillusionistic paintings, inspired by non-Western practices and organized around internal, intuitive rhythms, clarify Reichman’s own emphasis on surface and restraint. Reichman’s Zen Buddhist practice was central to his work, and the pictures in Koan draw inspiration from the koan and the haiku as aesthetic forms that suspend a moment or an observation in amber.
Reichman’s work has a lyrical purity of form, an open receptiveness to the surface of things. He presents the pathos of raw perception—the feel and look of leaves underfoot, fruit placed in a bowl, light playing on water. Narrative is only implied, reduced to simile, a description of an afternoon, the tension between two curvilinear forms. There are no foregrounds or backgrounds in the paintings in Koan, only luminous surfaces.
Koan coincides with a larger movement to recover underrecognized California artists. Curators and gallerists are, in effect, assembling an alternative canon of 20th-century California art, informed by the European avant-garde, the arts of Asia, the global counterculture, and the bohemian underground of the West Coast, rather than the familiar delineations of Bay Area Figuration, Finish Fetish, institutional critique, or Light and Space: a movement that would include Ariel Reynolds Parkinson at House of Seiko, Raymond Saunders at David Zwirner, Marie Wilson at Wendi Norris, Alan Lynch at Chateau Shatto, and Charlie Tweddle at Et al. These are artists whose work doesn’t fit easily into the established art-historical narratives about California, and the gently domestic paintings of Fred Reichman are part and parcel of this burgeoning alternative canon.
