The Rehabilitation of R. Moskowitz : After decades of neglect, the artist is finally getting the recognition he deserves

In these days of shameless careerism, it warms the cockles to come across an artist who has stuck to his guns through decades of neglect. Robert Moskowitz has been glimpsed by the art world’s peripheral vision since the ‘60s when he was briefly in the limelight as a member of the Leo Castelli Gallery. The gallery was making history showing the deadpan flag paintings of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg’s upended bed. Their art closed off the era of Abstract Expressionism and launched the Pop movement. Moskowitz was a part of it and the feeling must have been heady. But his work moved into uncharted waters and the prestigious showplace dropped him.

Now nearly a quarter-century later he is the subject of a full-dress retrospective visiting the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (to Jan. 7). Organized by Washington’s Hirschhorn Museum and headed for Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, it includes some 60 works and comes with a thoughtfully written catalogue. It is, in short, about the best that the art world has to offer the artist.

So why, rather suddenly, all this attention for an artist who has only had a dozen solo exhibitions and has never been anybody’s idea of a hot property? The short answer is that by hindsight he looks to have been ahead of his time. He makes art that raises questions about where the line is between pure abstraction and recognizable pictures. A typical Moskowitz painting might look as simple as a looming craggy blue shape on a white background. As long as it looks that way, we read it for its formal values--its general impact, the interplay between the shapes and how it relates to other abstract art. When we finally make out the big blue shape as a simplified silhouette of Rodin’s “The Thinker” it drastically alters our take on the picture.

In other words, Moskowitz deals in questions about the internal language of art. Since a much more superficial version of his approach has come to aesthetic domination in recent years, Moskowitz now looks like a prophet and is rehabilitated. That is the way it works, but that answer is really about recognition and career, which is precisely what Moskowitz’s art is not about. Moskowitz’s art, with its brown paper sacks, tiny drawings of duck heads and pale depictions of blank walls, is not particularly pretty. Nobody is going to be ravished by it’s sheer loveliness. It does not make titillating social commentary, tell stories or reveal strong emotion. Even his biography is a little dull.

He was born in Brooklyn on June 20, 1935. His father abandoned the family when he was 13. He trained as a technical illustrator and worked at it until he got interested in fine arts, made his first work during a year in London and then showed at Castelli. In 1964, he married Hermine Ford, a fellow artist and daughter of the prominent painter Jack Tworkov. He received a couple of grants, did some of the academic gigs familiar to struggling artists and acted as an assistant to the legendary photographer Walker Evans on a landscape project. From 1968 to 1980 he drove a cab in New York to make ends meet.

Not real glamorous. Everything about this art makes it impossible to be interested in it without being seriously concerned about art’s tougher questions, the central one here being, “How does art communicate?” Aside from the philosophical questions the only other legitimate reading of the work comes from divining its poetry. When it comes to that, Moskowitz is one of the most oblique artists in living memory, calling to mind only the Californian, Joe Goode.

Moskowitz’s earliest work reflects the abstract Expressionists but he was very early on asking himself questions as he worked. A 1959 collage looks like the Italian Alberto Burri but it is already puzzling about arts ancient questions about what are commonly called “the picture” and “the background.” This abstract collage makes them of equal weight, so a tan shape seems to move flatly upward while a dark gray patch moves down like drawn window shade.

Something about that drawn-down look stayed on his mind so that by 1961 he was making paintings incorporating real window blinds with their curious, discouraged tan color. One appears to have been jerked down so abruptly the pull cord is still swinging. Philosophically this is our first encounter with a work that wonders what happens when you put a real common object into an essentially abstract painting. The answer, of course is that it sets up mental associations that form its poetic. This one feels as if the artist has rushed to pull down the blind and splattered paint on the wall. It is about keeping one’s thoughts secret and preserving the purity of troubled privacy.

The marginal hand-to-mouth quality of the artist’s life in London comes across in it. He had this terrible rickety studio but he loved it because it represented his first real freedom as an artist.

Maybe the idea of the blind’s pull cord lingered in Moskowitz’s mind later when he hung a brown lunch bag in front of a similarly dun-colored canvas. At least one observer has seen it as a metaphor of a gallows but it doesn’t come across that way in La Jolla. There is a lot of tenderness in Moskowitz’s art. It’s always a bit worried and unsure of itself but it’s shyly affectionate.

After President Kennedy was assassinated, Moskowitz made a little tableau of a rocking chair against a blue sky. It’s very touching but it is also asking itself, “How come that patch of blue paint comes across so surely as sky?”

Blue sky questions are always a little naive. A lot of humor comes from Moskowitz’s art but you’re never quite sure if it’s intentional or just a side effect of his earnestness.

There was a notable shift of emphasis in the mid-’60s when he painted a series of heavy walls in pastel colors. They are rendered schematically like hard-edge paintings, but they read as thick concrete. There’s no fuzzing or blending of the paint but they seem softly atmospheric on account of being rendered in shades of one pastel hue.

He was dealing in contradiction as he often does, making something hard look soft when it shouldn’t, and giving a gentle glow to a subject that could easily be the corner of a prison yard.

They say he’s interested in Zen.

By the ‘70s he was up to really eccentric work that marks a final break with overtones of Pop and Assemblage. A series of all-black canvases each bear just one motif--a tiny schematized drawing in white. Most are extremely ambiguous in meaning--a duck’s head, a pipe-chrome chair which he titled, “The Perfect Painting.” In the midst of all this obscurity he made one composition with a swastika motif. Evidently because the symbol is so loaded, the museum put up a label explaining that before the Hakenkreuz was tainted by the Nazis, it was an ancient symbol of good fortune and the artist was trying to reassert it’s original meaning.

Here, Moskowitz is in the vanguard of what became artistic fascination with the meaning of signs and symbols. The works do come across like those psychological tests where subjects read their own meanings into essentially noncommital drawings. But Moskowitz’s tiny drawings, lost in Stygian galaxies, also speak of the distancing that comes with extreme spiritual isolation.

His most recent works--certainly the motive for the retrospective--are at once his most affecting and most problematic. He’s moved way up in size to canvases 10-feet high. The best of them do an extraordinary job of distilling the essence of a visual experience. “Stack” is just a symmetrically placed dark upright against a nighttime purple but it evokes the whole feeling of smokestack America. “Moon Dog” is just a black field with a centrally placed white circle and the corrugated silhouette of a baying dog. It is somehow so accurate you can hear the animals howl.

Other images are so whacked-out eccentric that you start to laugh. What can he be up to in a huge painting that is nothing more than the outline of the rump and hand of a discus thrower? The giggle fades away when you realize somehow this painting is very serious. On evidence, he seems to be worried about the oppressive mental weight of previous great art.

In the end it is not Moskowitz’s probing for meaning that moves one. It is his kind of metaphysical sincerity and candor. His images of the top of the Empire State Building have the same other-worldly quality as some of Georgia O’Keefe’s skyscrapers, except that there is an ominous giant-robot edge to Moskowitz’s version, like a controlled but unshakable fear of the city.

Moskowitz raises questions and leaves us with our own. What is it about the conventional life of modern reality that makes artists withdraw from it into a small sphere of peers who are the only ones who really understand the work? Why does an artist of Moskowitz’s undeniable gifts have to avoid even the more fashionable precincts of his own subculture to protect his sensibility?

We used to ask, “What was wrong with those crazy artists?”

They are beginning to make us ask, “What is wrong with this crazy world?”