One of the most mercurial and dissident members of the first generation of the New York School, Alfred Russell (1920-2007) alternated between aspects of modernist abstraction and post-modern figurative forms. His vision was formed by poetic intuitions of what physicists would call a "transfinite space" of oceanic wonder and its existential implications.

His close friend and colleague Ad Reinhardt humorously labeled Russell the “Buck Rogers of abstraction” in one of his famous collages. Russell's early critical supporters included Leo Castelli, Clement Greenberg, and Meyer Schapiro in New York, and in Paris, Georges A. Mathieu, Francis Picabia, and Michel Tapié. Russell’s youthful influence can be felt in the early abstractions of Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Norman Lewis, and Al Held.

Moving between the US and France, Russell became a significant bridge figure of concepts on both sides of the Atlantic. His history helps fill in the gaps that highlight the true interrelations between artists. Russell saw modernism as a cosmopolitan adventure. He rejected the CIA’s efforts to promote postwar American abstract art as embodying American freedom, in contrast to the Soviet figurative approach of social realism, and stood against all nationalistic assertions of hegemony.

In his statement for Véhément Confrontées, the historic 1951 pairing of European and American abstractionists at Gallerie Nina Dausset in Paris (Pollock and de Kooning were the other Americans), Russell stressed the importance of “a free and defiant expression of the profundity and dignity of human intelligence.” He characterized his fellow travelers “as the spokesmen for their own work, their own critics, and some of the last free men in the Western world.” These words offer a rebuke to the McCarthy era, which was then in full swing. Russell saw himself as a truth-telling iconoclast, unafraid to break with significant early supporters like Greenberg in disavowing the oppressive determinism of his abstract art theory, disregarding and even embracing any costs to his career.

Two years later (1953), on a panel at the Artist’s Club, Russell delivered a highly provocative and incisive critique of the new abstraction, which he saw being debased by a rising tide of careerists with an eye on the marketplace and mass culture. The resulting denunciation by the art world marked his exit from the ongoing history of abstraction and his gradual disappearance into obscurity. His final Whitney appearance in the 1955 "New Decade" show, after being represented in every Whitney Annual since 1949, was effectively a swan song.

An intellectual and a contrarian, Russell spoke about reconsidering the figure as an abstract painter. He initially paralleled the seeming defection from pure abstraction by de Kooning with paintings where figures began to emerge from abstract webs of forces. But Russell went one step further, by including the first clarion call to a post-abstract, post-modernist position: “I believe the language of traditional painting can only be revived by painters who have been absorbed in the non-objective world for several years but who return to the human figure and find it as elusive a mystery as non-objective form.” Card-carrying abstractionists turned away from him, but others, moving in the same direction, were inspired: Larry Rivers, Elaine de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Grace Hartigan, Leon Golub, Al Leslie, Gabriel Laderman, Paul Georges, Paul Resika, and the sculptor Walter Erlebacher.

His wry credo was issued that same year, in a catalog statement: “Now is the time to paint the wrong picture in the wrong century and the wrong place, paint Diana of Ephesus....”

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Russell’s commitment to art began at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1935, where he was inspired by Giorgio de Chirico, Andre Derain and Juan Gris. By 1944, his Klee-inspired geometric abstractions quickly morphed into surrealist hybrids some echoing aspects of works by Stanley William Hayter, Roberto Matta and Arshile Gorky. By 1948, after studying at Atelier 17 and Columbia University, Russell referred to his first mature abstractions as Tentative Signs, where web-like lattices of pulsing color planes, shifting in tectonic structures, reveal a metaphysical vision, at once lyrical and tragic. These works form a spatial ambiance in which a vital life force and mood is conveyed.

Certain vertical works became known as his street paintings, due both to their titles—e.g., La Rue St. Denis, La Rue de Nevers—and their dense central core of ever-shifting tracery opening out into an expanding space. Paradoxically, these works balanced automatic drawing and the sensory logic of Euclidian geometry with the spirit of DADA’s celebration of a contradictory universe. These are the works that won him an early reputation in New York and Paris, where he contributed to both Abstract Expressionism and L’Art Informel.

Despite continuing to paint abstractly in secret, Russell insisted on committing the Greenbergian formalist heresy of becoming a figurative painter, transposing his vision of the new reality into figurative styles designed to outrage his vanguard contemporaries (and realist camps too). His human figures have a distinctly hybrid form: blending life drawings, figures from classical reliefs fractured and distorted with mannerist inflections. These abstract personages were meant to signify a new Hellenicism linking Titus Lucretius’s cosmos with that of Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac.

Reflecting a self-consciousness of coming late to the classical tradition, Russell’s ghostly figures are realized in broken tones of summary touches, and calligraphic drawing. The whole of each composition maintains a metaphoric incompleteness, a non finito linked to his continued use of an unstable space: Russell’s Heraclitean nightmare. Descending from the ancient Greeks, Western classicism with its ideal of beauty—its logos, or divine universal reason—is founded on the rational ordering of the universe. To this Russell adds its opposite: a pictorial language which incorporates the irrational. We are invited to enter into a poetic madness, another form of knowledge.

Writing in 1972, Russell reflected on his work: “Abstract Art was and still is for me a Pythagorean voyage into the far outer regions of the mind and spirit, a voyage which was necessary for my personal vision of the world of matter and my interpretation of Human Destiny.”

© 2024 David Carbone