Susan Rothenberg’s paintings are deceptively simple. She painted the outlines of her subjects without any details: be it a person, a horse or something else simple enough to recognise from a distance. The backgrounds are often monochrome: terracotta orange, Giotto blue, or tense white. The most straightforward way to make paintings like these would be to paint the canvas one colour, then trace the subject on top. That should take all of five minutes; longer only if you include the drying time.
Rothenberg’s approach was much more painstaking. Her paintings feel as if every square inch was an independent decision, a negotiation of each incremental addition of red until it covers the whole canvas. The brush strokes flutter, zig-zag, ripple and leap, evoking tension hidden within a superficial ease. She called this effect ‘the weather,’ hence the title of this show at Hauser and Wirth in New York. The show itself is similarly illusive, seeming larger than it is. There are only 14 paintings, spread across three rooms, but each painting commands the wall and, together, they cover nearly every period of her career.
When Rothenberg began exhibiting in the 1970s, critics praised her for reviving painting with renewed emotional vitality after minimalism. Today, in an art world full of figuration, it’s harder to read the work that way. To me, her practice embodies restraint – the discipline of only using what’s absolutely necessary.
Foxes on a Hill (1972), for example, is a blue canvas with a black arc swiped across it and two animals rounding over the peak. Their bodies are angled downwards, a second before acceleration. Their legs swing in a haze. Stripped down to the basics, the foxes evoke momentum itself. The blue paint of the background darts around in crisscrossing directions, like the chaotic wind on a mountain top. The shade of cool cobalt evokes dusk, just before the sky turns completely dark, when everything is tinted blue. The painting portrays a moment that might disappear just as quickly as it comes into sight.
Rothenberg deftly captures the fragility of moments of transition: literally (as in Foxes), but also aesthetically, identifying the point where abstraction and figuration meet. If one brush stroke were different, the paintings would end up on different sides of the border. Many of the horse paintings make this point explicitly. In Dos Equis (1974), for example, she traces two horses on a white background but crosses them out with X’s, highlighting their symmetry as if the marks were instructional diagrams. The horses’ boxy frames have heft, but the taper of their necks and legs gives a sudden spring of motion. Rothenberg seems to insist that the horses are just forms. Whether those forms are abstract or figurative does not matter; if they are dynamic enough, the canvas will come to life.
Rothenberg had no special affinity for horses before she painted them. She just wanted a shape that was legible and strong. Once she mastered the permutations, she looked for other subjects to make into horses, too. In the paintings Mary I and Mary II (both 1974) she depicted her studio assistant bending over in the first and on all fours in the second. Mary’s body is painted sparingly with a white contour on an orange background. Her simple outline smooths out the fine details of her shape to more closely resemble an animal. These poses can be read as sexual, but they are also balletic, perhaps inspired by Rothenberg’s dancing in Joan Jonas’s performance pieces. The drawing maintains the delicate hinges of Mary’s joints at her wrists, hips, back, and knees, just as Rothenberg did for her horses. In both cases, she tested just how far she could pare a form down before it dissolved.
As successful as Rothenberg was, however, it might be easy to lose her in the shuffle of art history. Her paintings almost have the umph of Rothko; nearly the grace of Matisse. She arrived at the tail-end of formalism but was too early for the return of figuration. Her paintings will always be out of fashion because they require hard work and patience to appreciate. They force us to focus on uncomplicated canvases, out of which emerge plain, but difficult, questions about the nature of beauty and where it is to be found. Art history often demands progress at breakneck speed, but Rothenberg commands us to hold our horses.
‘Susan Rothenberg: The Weather’ is at Hauser & Wirth, New York, until 18 October.