Connie Fox’s Wild Classicism

By Gerrit Henry

It’s tempting to think of Connie Fox, initially, as a very gifted, second-generation Abstract Expressionist. The age is about right, and there are long-ago degrees from the University of Colorado and the University of New Mexico. The guts are there: Fox has taught some: perilously enough, in a high school in Boulder, Colorado, at the University of New Mexico, and at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon, and even an experimental college in Denmark. And she’s showed here, there, and everywhere: Albuquerque, San Francisco, the Richmond museum of Art, and the “Tenth Street”-type Camino Gallery, FAR, and now Ingber, all three in Manhattan. A seasoned vet, we might assume, of the Abstract Expressionist wars- she was there, in time, if not always in place. Then there are the paintings: high-energy, high-color abstractions- certainly feisty and painterly enough, at first glance, to qualify her for status as an Action painter who’s been out on many an aesthetic bender.

On closer examination, however, we find that Connie Fox is no more a second-generation Abstract expressionist than she is an East Village Neo-Expressionist working as a waitress to support herself. In fact-despite the deliberate excesses of her paintings- Fox is not an Expressionist at all. She is not into de Kooningesque transpainterliness, nor Pollock-like cosmicism- or, as with some of the new generation, glib borrowings from Kokoschka or grandiose graffiti-izing. She does not fling down paint, or splash or splatter it, with vehemence and anger and “reckless disregard” for all of culture. If she does splatter or splash, it’s coming from a different impulse than the Expressionist’s—coming from the impulse of a modern classicist, whose splatters and splashes are only part of a comprehensive formal vocabulary. Charged as her canvases are with the puissance of life as lived in this startling century, there is something going on here that is a far cry from Expressionism old or new. The works have- for all their all-over harum-scarum- a certain, very thoughtful, reserve, an eloquent cool in a distinctly modernist mode, which more about in a minute.

It’s been a long time getting to her newfound maturity. Fox started out in the ‘50s painting odd, abstract-tending figures and landscapes, which, she readily admits, owed a great deal to European surrealism, to which she was first exposed as a student at Los Angeles’ Art Center School. One Fox painting from that period features huge, petal-laden flowers, some with human faces, like something out of some high-art “Alice in Wonderland”. But she was not impressed- or mowed down, as were so many of her peers- with the artistic apocalypticism of a William de Kooning. “I saw a show of his early on, and I said to myself, ‘Sure, I understand that.’ The Abstract Expressionists were like family.” But Fox was bound to be a black sheep. She did not really arrive in New York (or, more properly, in East Hampton, where she now lives) until 1980- preferring Albuquerque (where she met painterly fellow travelers Robert Dash and Elaine de Kooning), then San Francisco and Berkeley, and, finally, Pittsburgh- to the Freon glare of Manhattan’s art scene. Fox had a talent to nurture; obviously, she thought it could be best cultivated out of the limelight, in its own times and to its own ends.

And- as mentioned earlier- there was always this classic modernism to consider- the examples of Albers, Kandinsky and Klee, Miro, and Picasso, constituting a “great tradition” that predated Action Painting by many years. Wait a minute- Albers? Well, there is a certain kind of color symbolism to Fox’s work, and the deployment of geometric figures for their own sake is more than implicit. Kandinsky? The author of On the Spiritual in Art was a lot more exploratory and inventive in his art than that famous book title would indicate. Klee was a great wit as well as a genius- and Fox is ‘into’ wit. And the jaunty, mysterious Miro certainly would have had something to teach Fox in her early, one-person surrealist revival.

But, perhaps above all others, Picasso is exemplary here- more so through the decades, as Fox’s work began to take on the brash and bravura, but self-describably “awkward”, formal self-examinings of the later years. Picasso, in his early Cubist experimentation, was painting himself out of a dilemma- the dilemma of late 19th-century academic illusionism. Even Impressionism had to be finally cast aside. The game was up, and painting had to take on a new life to distract from the cheaper diversions of an increasingly technological Europe. Well, then, back to basics- back to still life. But how to paint still life and “make it new”? By tilting a lance at illusionism, of course- by breaking down traditional painting strictly into its own components, and making the investigatory breakdown the style and content of the art, rather than pitcher with lemons. With courtly grace, but with a fool’s wide-open eye, Picasso exposed the inner workings of illusionism and simultaneously created a “new realism”, one to which all 20th-century painters have had to, or will have to, pay homage, if not now.

Like Picasso, Fox faced a dilemma as she headed toward her maturity- only this dilemma involved acing not the academic establishment, but the avant-garde, as represented by Abstract Expressionism. One might wonder even today, before a giant Pollock, “Where do we go from here?’ Fox rejected the many solutions paraded before us in the years directly after the international triumph of Action painting- Pop. Op. Color Field, Minimalism, and, finally, that cure that was worse than the curse, Conceptualism- partly because she is a natural, Colorado-bred loner, and partly, perhaps, because Abstract Expressionism was the ethos in which she’d been nurtured, and felt a kinship to. The question then became, how stay true to your roots- roots which stretched all the way back from 1910 and up to 1965 or so- while establishing your own identity?

Fox solved the problem, progressively, by creating her own artistic identity. There is nothing quite like a Fox, in the galleries, or on the streets, or in museums (although the Brooklyn and the Albright-Knox and the Santa-Barbara own Foxes.) To stand before a mature Fox painting is a little like being faced with Turandot’s riddle- there is an answer, but only the Unknown Viewer can reply. She has exploded the picture plane into haplessly random fragments- “I can relate anything to anything.” Says Fox, not without reason. And it is perhaps the artist’s innate classicism- her sense of order within disorder, of sobriety in abandonment- that knits it all together. Take, for example, the wittily titled An Egyptian Temple For My Mother. To the left is what looks like a Greek (not Egyptian) temple, under swirls of blue and aqua sky, dissolving, via arcs of black and aqua and blue, into a lower field of hot pinks and reds, enclosing vague, intriguing geometric formulations that never quite seem to gel. The center is a lovely conflagration of freely brushed reds and yellows, with a placid blue and pink-striped cone just above; to the lower right stands one of Fox’s favorite figures, a kind of giant’s barber pole, with thick, relieflike stripes curving around it, all in grays. Upper right we see more swatches of pink and blue and red and black, with a drawinglike depiction of a heart (?) at top right. The painting teeters, as do all the works, on symbolism; Fox even hints at a kind of Jungian archetypalism, in recent works (a wolflike dog, for instance), without, however, committing herself to it. She is, rather, committed to the artwork- its rhythms, its disparities, its continuities. “I’m interested in the kind of activity they perform in a lifelike way” and in how a keen reserve and cool passion can somehow unite these wildly differing images into a wildly cohesive hole.

What Fox doesn’t say is that the very modernist dilemma- to put it bluntly, the struggle between representation vs. abstraction- makes for its own solutions, if followed through to its illogical conclusions. The on-the-canvas exposition of the conceptual and plastic problems Fox faces as a pioneering post-Abstract Expressionist becomes the painting itself. And this exposition- in the form of that vocabulary of barber poles, whirling-dervish circles, monolithic rocks, snaky arcs, thick crosses, pyramids, coils, and, preeminently, paint- accounts, oddly, for her classicism. For exposition means analysis, in the classical mode, an analysis which becomes, in these hands, a kind of gorgeously unhinged form of formal play, in the recreational sense of the word, and even in the theatrical.

But what about the bugaboo of all 20th century art- meaning? Well, certain associations can’t be avoided. In one painting, bulbous red clouds float over a lumpy red sea, But a loosely triangular area of hellish blues and purples touched onto the canvas in a kind of heavenly iridescence negates any less-than-superfluous connotations with nature, as does, ultimately, a kind of black and white, geometrically inclined whirligig that dominates the canvas. But- doesn’t that look like the underside of a mushroom? Well, yes, but it’s been so fragmented into areas of intense color that the association hardly matters- and that gray and black sphere behind it looking like the dark side of the moon isn’t.

And, finally, that is the excitement behind the style, true of all classicism, from Homer to David to Stravinsky- the overweaning possibility that such sublimely self-generated art has no organic necessity, and is a matter of pure human invention. It’s an elegant conceit- and a profound one, bearing, as it does, on the venerated l’art pour l’art character of the best modern art.

And Fox’s is some of the best. Her painting is a kind of on-canvas suspension of all the elements of traditional painting gone askew, deftly, daffily, celebrating the infinite possibilities of artistic and human being and non being, “lost”, as we are, “in America”. Having come into the world almost purely on its own terms, it now stands proud and manic, dreamy and aggressive, challenging the viewer, seducing him, disowning him, and making large promises that will never be kept, the fufillment of which can, however, be sensed in the very chaos. Yet Fox maintains her classical stance throughout- she presents the whole bundle to us without flinching, without a murmer, like some laurel-wreathed goddess of Post-Modernist eros. Indeed, the very concept of post-Modernism bears out her points: there are no easy resolutions to be had for artists in the ‘80s, just wonderful, painted or sculpted ways of complaining, with viewers enjoying the complaints. Perhaps the game has really been up for almost a century now- but look what Connie Fox has gone and done. In the face of everything having been finished, already, she paints up a plaintive storm; in the grip of late-modern futility, she dazzles. Fox is mastering the task of putting it all together- the more inconclusive, somehow, the better.