Word: moskowitz
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...just what it says: the rear-half profile of a '60s Caddy, bulbous with fins, and in the lower right a red X depicting a pair of chopsticks. Nothing else. One is not much helped by the otherwise useful catalog essay of Ned Rifkin, to whom, it seems, Moskowitz "revealed that the Cadillac might represent Hollywood glamour and the car culture of the West Coast, while the chopsticks could allude to a New Yorker's love of Chinese food." No kidding. This, you could say, looks like art history at the end of its rope...
Things firm up toward the '80s. The picture that changed Moskowitz's style was Swimmer, 1977, a canvas bearing the head and raised arm of a figure in the sea. This figure is quite an abstract form, and it is embedded, heraldically, in a dark field of Prussian blue. From now on Moskowitz's work would look for strong, immediately recognizable icons that were submerged into abstraction by their elaborate, nondescriptive surfaces. They combine frankness of silhouette with loss of detail, and the effect is mysterious and poignant...
...windmill, a smokestack or a lighthouse; or things that have acquired a sort of timelessness as artistic stereotypes, like Myron's Discobolos or Rodin's The Thinker. But few of them are immediately recognizable, and they all derive from other kinds of art, including photography. The looming profile of Moskowitz's Flatiron Building comes from Edward Steichen's famous gray-silhouetted photo of that structure, made almost three-quarters of a century before; Thinker begins with another moody Steichen photograph. But because the shape of the Flatiron Building is so close in value to its background, black on black...
...Moskowitz's vividly imposing red windmill alludes to Mondrian's great early paintings of that motif. The side of the Yosemite cliff in The Seventh Sister, 1981, recalls Clyfford Still and, through that, the American Romantic tradition of heroic landscape. Such works do not escape the second-handedness that comes with quoted images, but at least they are quite without smug prophylactic irony...
...Moskowitz's roots lie in abstract expressionism: he studied with Adolf Gottlieb and married Jack Tworkov's daughter. His paintings clearly show that he feels the loss of the pristine Romantic tradition. He has an unaffected appetite for the sublime and its subjects: towers, cliffs, icebergs and heroes (even if we see only the backside of the discobolus, even though the thing in his hand looks more like a bowling ball than a discus). Just as clearly, he doubts if sublimity can be revived. His rendering of a Giacometti sculpture into a long, ghostly streak of thick white pigment...