Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #8 Sanford Schwartz's "David Park"

David Park, Ball Game on the Beach (1953)

For me, one of the most important things an exhibition review can do is bring news of an artist I haven’t heard of before. I’m indebted to Sanford Schwartz for leading me to the work of two wonderful painters – David Park and George Ault. I’ve already posted an appreciation of Schwartz’s two Ault pieces, “Summer Nights at Russell’s Corner” and “The Drama of the World at Night” (see here). Both are “Top Ten” material. His “David Park” (The New Yorker, October 28, 1985; included in his superb 1990 essay collection Artists and Writers) is equally great, containing several memorable descriptions of Park’s work. For example: 

The most contemporary aspect of Park’s work is his sense of space. In the 1953 Ball Game on the Beach, one of his very best paintings, a boy is about to throw a beach ball to a group of fellows who run along the sparkling beach, their arms outstretched. The painting is like a photo from Life crossed with a Maori carving, all done in Halloween oranges, yellows, blacks, whites. The fellows on the beach are gesticulating stick figures: they are jaggedly drawn and painted, with parts of their bodies orange, parts black. The boy is naturalistically drawn, and our viewpoint is so close to his upraised arms and the ball he holds that we feel we’re “with” him, and that the stick figures in the distance might be in his imagination. In another first-rank picture, Berkley Jazz Band, of 1951-53, seven musicians are crowded into a small room, playing; we’re below them, looking up through their backs and faces to a bit of ceiling at at the top of the picture. It takes a while for our eyes to adjust to the dark browns, maroons, and tans; we have to search to see where all the hands and faces are. And there is a fearless passage of painting: the clarinet player’s shirt is a rich red, the background wall is a dark brown, and Park brings them together without any “air” between them, like two hot, strong, different sounds.

That last line is sublime. I first read it thirty-four years ago; I’ve never forgotten it.