Collected in Gallery Going: Four Seasons in the Art World (Harcourt 1991)

When an artist makes radical innovations in a familiar medium, or combines several familiar media in a radically original way, it takes a while for the rest of us to catch on. Barbara Goodstein’s relief sculptures, which are done in plaster and modeling paste on rectangular pieces of plywood, may not startle us, but they’re just about the only works to have emerged in this decade that can be said to add something new to sculpture. All European relief sculpture since Donatello has in some respect been an extension of painting; Goodstein is the first artist to evolve a relief sculpture style out of an aesthetic derived from painterly painting. Even when her reliefs don’t look like painterly paintings, she’s deriving her rhythms and inflections from them. In her third solo show at the Bowery Gallery in January there were some very high points and some very low points; there wasn’t the across-the-board clarity of thought that the finest pieces in the show might have led one to expect. The Barbara Goodstein who can pull off a work of the caliber of Resurrection (1) can’t yet sustain that level of accomplishment; still, she’s one of the few artists around who has a level of accomplishment to fall off from.

There’s no way of knowing for sure if the three faceless white figures in Goodstein’s Resurrection (1) are male or female. Ambiguity is integral to the coolly impassioned mood Goodstein spins. In Resurrection (1) all we can be sure of is that three figures are locked in a pitch-black place; a place that – judging from their tensed-up, straining gestures – they would like to leave. Working with the most modest of materials, Goodstein transforms human anatomy into a series of expressionist graphic signs. She simplifies people, but she also brings us close to them – she shows us their experience. Goodstein’s subject here is striving; and perhaps, the something we strive toward. The central figure, with the broad shoulders and the substantial upper arms, is helping the other two. The figure at left is just a few looping lines; the one at right is made of some scrabbles of plaster. These two look toward the stronger one, and the stronger one – a bulky torso on sturdy legs – faces forward and prepares to hoist them all, together, up on high.

The inspiration for Resurrection (1) was a fourteenth-century Turkish fresco of the Anastasis (a scene actually preceding the Resurrection) in which Christ raises Adam and Eve from the dead. This late Byzantine composition presented Goodstein with a store of concrete information off which she bounced her own less-is-more sensibility. Goodstein has done much of her most forceful work – including the Pieta in this show and the series of Three Graces in her last show – in response to models in older art. At forty-two, she’s one of the most intelligent of the art-besotted artists of her generation; few are quite so alive to the possibility of making something really new out of the pieces of the past. Goodstein is liberated through her attachment to tradition. Models such as the Byzantine Anastasis give her a world that is preabstracted. She doesn’t have to wonder how to turn an area of sky or floor or earth into a flat shape – it’s already done. She’s free to pursue her quirky figuration without the constant question, “How does this size up to reality?” The flat black space of Resurrection (1) has no relation to “real” space – it’s the space of memory, and of art.

Mostly, though, the black-painted rectangles on which Goodstein does her sculptures don’t have that metaphoric resonance. In her recent show Goodstein was using relief sculpture as a medium through which to develop thematic and structural ideas we generally encounter in the work of painters. It’s an audacious program, difficult to bring off, and in many of the landscapes and single figures in this show the beautiful modeling in plaster ended up looking landlocked. Goodstein’s pats of plaster are an analogy to the loose brush stroke of nineteenth-and twentieth-century French painting; the winning eccentricity of her work rests in her attempt to re-create sculpture within a painterly, expressionist sensibility that is, broadly speaking, antisculptural. The danger is that as Goodstein goes into three dimensions she calls into question the very essence of French modernism: the idea of the picture surface as a discrete world. When she reduces a landscape of trees to a few strokes of plaster, or puts a seated studio nude in the midst of a black space, the pictorialism of the reliefs begins to backfire – the black space can seem like an afterthought. The white plaster signs don’t always activate the rectangle. Two treescapes looked too much like Ab Ex explosions by Franz Kline or the great ribbon of mountain rises maybe two inches off the surface, has its problems: where in this landscape space is one supposed to locate the blank space below the hills?

In her recent show Goodstein wasn’t standing still; she was trying different things. But the two most daring pieces were also the weakest ones. How Goodstein cooked up the idea of doing polychrome reliefs on a base of Styrofoam packing materials covered in wire mesh and modeling paste I have no idea; in any event, the results are unpleasantly bizarre, like a hardened version of soft sculpture. In Five Figures in a Landscape Goodstein is working to activate the surface by filling it with colored shapes. Some of the nude women here, reminiscent of Matisse’s sculpture, are magnificent piece of plaster modeling; but by setting them amidst areas of blue stream and green grass and mustard sky she banalizes them. In Four of Iris, several views of a woman’s back, marvelously worked, are arranged amidst fragments of interiors that look like bad geometric painting. More interesting as a solution to the problem of activating the surface overall is the substitution of dark blue or green for black on the board, or the use of plaster thinned to a gray tone.

Still, I don’t know why Goodstein hasn’t extended the implications of Resurrection (1) into more of her work. She is an extraordinary figure sculptor. Here, as in her last show, she turns out standing and seated figures in which the wonderful simplifications, derived from a close study of the model in the studio, rival Alexander Archipenko and Henri Laurens at their very best. Why, then, does some of the work seem unfulfilled? A larger version of Resurrection, three by five feet, was too loose, a bag of scraps Goodstein hadn’t filled the space; it was as if she’d just fizzled. And two small, very fine studio nudes, seated on chairs, would have been better yet if they’d been two or three times bigger. Sometimes Goodstein seems to want to be the Corot of relief sculpture: a miniaturist. It’s a mistake. Her real affinity is with French painting that’s more idiosyncratic and monumental: the tile decorations in Matisse’s Chapel at Vence, the final black and white figure compositions of André Derain, the late street scenes of Jean Hélion.

Goodstein’s work, with its arresting simplifications, suggests a devastating critique of contemporary taste in representational art, which runs to nit-picking demonstrations of naturalistic virtuosity. And yet the only community that has ever given Goodstein any support is the community of representational painters that has been an important part of the New York art scene since the fifties. Thus does one of the wisest members of the community revolt against communal pieties. Goodstein’s art, which has really taken off only since she reached her late thirties, also exemplifies what I see as a new calendar in artistic life. It now seems to take a serious artist most of his or her thirties to develop the inner strength to make peace with the art world and go it alone.

Yet the painful sense of isolation from the larger world that all serious artists now feel has its dangers. Working, as Goodstein does, for a small group of artists and connoisseurs, she may feel that it’s enough to maintain a holding operation. How much can you risk doubting yourself when the wide world gives you no support? And how much can an artist risk reaching out – enlarging art – when chances are that few will be there to respond? A certain diffidence could be felt in ways both large and small in Goodstein’s show. A small but important matter was the sloppiness of the presentation – the messy wall labels, the inelegant nails that held the work to the wall, the sometimes warped and roughly cut boards. I think I understand Goodstein’s diffidence. It’s as if she’s saying that if the wide world won’t care about her, then she can’t be bothered with the niceties of presentation that the wide world demands. But Goodstein is too important to overlook these things. Someday the wide world will pay attention. She must be ready.

All art today is created under conditions inhospitable to art. Goodstein’s purest works are a response to a situation in extremis; she creates compositions in black and white. In Resurrection (1) she speaks not only for herself but also for the hopes of her friends – for a generation of artists that wake up every morning to the terror that it’s going to be buried alive.