Gary Stephan’s steadfast modernism

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Gary Stephan has been an abstract painter for over fifty years. His command of that vocation – touch, line, color, concept – is duly acknowledged. But he is far from content. Stephan came of age at what was arguably the extended peak of modernism, when creative people across the board presumed to tackle existential problems for the ages. He is having a righteously hard time shaking off this sensibility. Post-modernism, whatever that nebulous term means, seems to be morphing from a rather benign phenomenon featuring a retreat to modest quotidian concerns to a malignant one involving invented facts and inane conspiracies instrumentalized by demagogues to distort the world. The corresponding intellectual laxity and licentiousness coincides with aesthetic laziness and indulgence. Stephan fervently hopes that viewers will not confuse subject matter with meaning – that how a painting is composed and created will mean more to them than what it depicts. Think of Morandi’s bottles. Given this ideal, Stephan can’t summon much empathy for young artists who settle for insularly autobiographical painting, blinkered identity politics, or narrow explorations of sexuality. At the same time, he abjures grandiosity. A rigorous formalist, more Matisse than Picasso, Morandi than Kiefer, he believes art works best as a progressive force when it proceeds incrementally and systematically. That is not a message most contemporary art students want to hear, either.

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His newest paintings, now hanging in his Tribeca studio, are relatively compact, which – as no doubt intended – enables viewers to size them up handily and get on with dispatch to the business of exacting scrutiny. Their central motif is an H shape, giving them the superficial look of a twentieth-century prison layout – IRA prisoners referred to their residences as “the H-blocks.” This is fitting, as Stephan is concerned with entrapment and liberation; several paintings are titled Black Sentence or Red Sentence, with numbers. In the earliest piece, the brushwork is subdued and the colors, though muted throughout the series, are denser, firmer, and more neatly situated. As the series progresses, line and application become more erratic and kinetic, hues a little washier, edges more ragged. “The whole gag of the work is using the tools of formalism to build surrealism,” he says, adding that he is compelled to “problematize the geometry such that the viewer wonders, ‘Maybe I’m not in good hands.’ That’s the essence of modernism.” Before its advent, he observes, state power was entrenched and pervasive, and state patronage rendered art essentially propaganda. “With modernism, the wheels come off, and you have to decide whether you buy in.”

Prompting that decision calls for subtle visual provocation. In Stephan’s view, the initial take on a painting should be one of familiarity that morphs into doubt and discomfort, and he has achieved this double-whammy of seduction and subversion. Not long ago, a couple of collectors walked away from the new work a huff, dismayed that it had turned out to be such a downer. He interprets their brusqueness as affirmation. His admittedly somber paintings are very much of the moment, and he sees part of his job as unnerving people by illuminating a fraught status quo. “Some artists can whistle past the graveyard,” he says. “I can’t. Now we’re in a state of radical pluralism – nobody knows what’s going on. There is a politics to these paintings.” It is nicely encapsulated in Closing The Door That Will Not Open, which Stephan made as COVID hit. The image is tilted, the leading color a wan ocher that imparts aloof indifference towards this apparent geometrical slip. The piece is distinctly unsettling in its suggestion of acceptable disorientation, the title adding a tinge of fatalism and resignation. After painting it, Stephan learned from a documentary on The Third Man, Carol Reed’s 1949 film noir of Graham Greene’s monumentally cynical novel, that Reed had used the slanted “Dutch angle” to connote alienation. This too was affirmation.

Stephan’s mission is to quietly weaponize alienation as Brecht did, deliberately dislodging people from complacency. He is not in abject despair: another painting in the series is titled Opening The Door That Will Not Close. The worry he evokes – “Maybe I’m not in good hands” – leads readily to the iconoclastic if stoic edict of modernism to “fail better.” Beckett, its author and a disruptive modernist par excellence, had to endure many a withering review and flummoxed theatergoer before winning critics and audiences over to Waiting for Godot. That doesn’t faze Stephan, whom modernism itself has prepared for a measure of disdain. In The Third Man, rebuffing grim intimations of moral depravity, Orson Welles’s Harry Lime riffs: “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” It’s not hard to imagine some right-wing intellectual entrepreneur, drunk on Trump’s retrograde cant, lionizing the authoritarian clan and state in an analogous way, somewhat as Niall Ferguson championed imperialism when the George W. Bush administration cranked up the Global War on Terror after 9/11. Gary Stephan aims, well and truly, to sober us up.

About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.