LARRY POONS

The Joy of Color by Phyllis Tuchman

There were always high expectations for Larry Poons. Back in the day, when abstraction seemed to be the only game in town, everyone was looking for the next Jackson Pollock. Poons appeared on all the short lists. His large fields of color on which dots and lozenges shimmied across the surfaces were spell binding.

Now almost 73, Poons was only in his twenties when he had his first three solo shows at Richard Bellamy’s legendary Green Gallery. When the space closed, the still young artist joined the equally legendary Leo Castelli Gallery. In both venues, he exhibited with the emergent Pop and Minimalist artists. During the nineteen sixties, a painter could not have had a better track record.

Additionally, Poons was the youngest artist featured in curator Henry Geldzahler’s 1969 landmark exhibition, New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940–1970. After wandering through galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where Titians and Rembrandts were usually hanging, you exited the eponymous Henry’s Show through a room filled with dot and lozenge paintings by Poons. Talk about final impressions. Then, a few years later, Poons added another feather to his cap. When Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts opened its Mies van der Rohe designed Brown Pavilion in 1974, Poons was again the youngest artist in yet another imposing survey, The Great Decade of American Abstraction: Modernist Art 1960 to 1970. This round, his three paintings were seen in the company of Rothko, Gottlieb, Motherwell, Hofmann, Newman, and Still. His work more than held its own.

However, Poons was not interested in becoming the next Jackson Pollock. He simply wanted to make great paintings. When interviewed for Artforum in 1970, he was already concerned with aspects of picture making about which he continues to care deeply. For example, he said, “I’d like to really do an overloaded painting. Not just a little overloaded, really overloaded.” His latest paintings are bursting with energy. As one color interacts with another—and then another and another—Poons’s abstract canvases come alive. Purples, crimsons, ochres, and teals jostle, scurry, glide.

When asked in 1970, “Do you find it difficult working with so many different colors after working with relatively few?” Poons said, “The more colors the better.” That’s one reason his art stops you in your tracks. Wherever you stand, something else grabs your attention: the color couplings, the energetic rhythms, the resolute cadences, even pregnant pauses. From a distance, you glimpse the overall nature of each picture. Consider this vista as a libretto. While close up, it’s the details that captivate. An aria here, an exchange between two characters there—one named cardinal and the other magenta—a spectral image elsewhere.