Contributed by Saul Ostrow / “Let the Painting Make You,” the exhibition of Brice Marden’s last paintings; at Gagosian Gallery, set me to thinking about the relationship between Marden’s earlier gestural works and Gerhardt Richter’s process-oriented abstract paintings, which in turn led me to consider the connection of their works to those of David Reed and then to the French artists Simon Hantai and Bernard Frize who, like Reed, creates the illusion of an impossible spontaneity. Slowly, I came to focus on the question of why Richter is identified with post-modernism, while Marden and Reed’s works are most often critically identified as being quintessentially modernist and formalist. While Hantai (the modernist?) and Frieze (the post-modernist?) fit the question of what constitutes post-modern abstract painting, their references and histories are different for consideration here. Instead, I decided I would focus on Richter, Reed and Marden all who seem to transgress the formalist and modernist dictums that were generated in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and then exported abroad, as such Hantai and Frize are part of another genealogy.
