American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists

Provenance:

Davis Galleries, New York, New York.

Acquired directly from the above.

Private Collection, California.

Lot Note:

Albert York, a self-taught artist who shunned celebrity and was perpetually dissatisfied with his work, has nonetheless gained steady recognition as a groundbreaking, if somewhat elusive, figure in 20th century American Art. His paintings are characterized by strikingly economical means and methods, including broad, swath-like brushwork, palette uniformity, as well as flat and pared-down forms. This apparent simplicity, however, is cleverly challenged by myriad nods to seminal themes and techniques gleaned from aesthetics of past decades and centuries, indicating that York’s practice was quite intentional.

Girl in Rowboat echoes the Impressionist focus on ease and leisure, depicting a relaxed young woman amidst a verdant landscape. Lush as it is, however, the scenery is deserted, stressing the figure’s solitariness, a motif previously explored by American Realists such as Edward Hopper. And by blending support and medium, York calls attention to the materiality and artifice inherent in artistic representation and subscribes to a key Modernist tenet. The saturated green hues interlock effortlessly with the deep brown shade of the board intermittently showing beneath the painted surface, simultaneously activating and suspending disbelief. Indeed, just as the painting draws the viewer in, it also gives away its illusory quality. York further blurs the line between the real and the imagined, the organic and the artificial by suffusing the painting with discordance in gentle but unmistakable ways. Perhaps most unsettlingly, the rowboat sits on grass rather than the body of water visible just behind it, a visual legerdemain reminiscent of Magritte’s Surrealist paintings.

All of these seemingly innocuous incongruities seep the painting in quiet uncertainty. A barely perceptible yet inescapable unease emerges from the sun-dappled, carefree, blithely uneventful moment depicted here, like an elicited feeling or underlying mood rather than an outright statement. This perhaps works as a commentary on artistic practice, in keeping with York’s rejection of trends and straightforward categorization, a reckoning that art, an inherently vain undertaking, cannot fully encapsulate the breadth and depth of human experience. York powerfully presents a modern sense of existential angst, transcending longstanding art historical principles to distill the most profound and vulnerable of human sentiments.