marizupilami

lost were panther

For young painters today, Abstract Expressionism is ancient history; a few rooms in MoMA’s permanent collection galleries, a handful of images from the pages of Gardner or Janson, all set before a backdrop of a now mythical Downtown Manhattan of $200-dollar-a-month lofts. And yet there is a commonality to be found between painters today, struggling along the L train line and points far east of the East River, and their counterparts of the early 1950s — not the giants, but the smaller creatures scuttling about in the undergrowth. For a chance to revisit AbEx from the unique vantage of the humble and the striving, I suggest a short trip to the Upper East Side’s Hollis Taggart Galleries, where one can currently study a gathering of canvases representing what a very young Audrey Flack was up to while breathing the rarified air of mid-century New York. It’s a collection that reveals intriguing aspects of that period from the vantage point of a student.