I stumbled across Leon Berkowitz’s work by accident. I was in one of ACA Galleries’ back rooms to talk about a Luminist painting by William Stanley Haseltine, and there, taking up a whole wall of a back storage room, was this giant, radiant canvas. It seemed to glow—in fact, it seemed to glow just as a Luminist painting of the nineteenth century might, as if lit by a sun shrouded in fog. Berkowitz is hardly an outsider, but if you know his name from a deck of slides or a page in a catalogue of the Color Field School in which he was a leading light, it might not have made much of an impact. In person, however, the paintings are profound, and singular. I dispensed with the usual guessing game and just asked:
Who the hell is Leon Berkowitz?
II. Missed Connections.
It’s hard to look at novelty and know whether it is innovation or a passing bauble. To avoid getting it wrong, about ten years ago I committed to suspending judgment on anything that rubs me the wrong way for a quarter century. It’s too soon to know whether that maxim has served me well, but that’s how long it took Roberta Smith to come around to Cecily Brown, so probably a good grace period. A big chunk of what critics do is to see what has been done and to try to build an architecture to house it all. When something doesn’t fit into that structure, they have a choice: rebuild the whole damn thing? Or let the New shiver in the cold? In hindsight, it’s clear that Clement Greenberg, the master of midcentury criticism, made a mistake when he told Helen Frankenthaler there was no more room in the inn. But at the time, Clem was obsessed with the physical power of paint, and Frankenthaler was very literally diluting it. They had also been romantically involved. But anyway, when Greenberg visited Frankenthaler’s studio in 1953, he saw her using a cocktail of one part paint to ten parts turpentine, not painting but staining her canvases. Given the massive edifice of Paint’s Primacy he had just finished constructing, was Greenberg ready to call in the wrecking crew and start again, to accommodate this small but promising insight?
He was not. As Mary Gabriel writes in Ninth Street Women, “Not until the early 1960s did Clem finally mention Helen in relation to the artistic development that so intrigued him in others but that he had not registered publicly when she made it.”1
Missing a great idea too far ahead of its time is human; what makes Greenberg a troubling misogynist is what he did instead of writing about Frankenthaler’s work:
“At 6 pm,” Clem wrote in his appointment book on April 4, 1953, “[Morris] Louis & [Kenneth] Noland, along with . . . Leon and Ida Berkowitz & Margaret Brown and I visited Helen Frankenthaler’s studio, where some of us stayed until 11.”
Gabriel adds a crucial bit of information: “Helen wasn’t there.”2
Kenneth Noland records how the most famous of these “guests” responded to Frankenthaler’s staining: “It was as if Morris had been waiting all his life for [this] information. We went back to Washington high,” where he set to work using Helen Frankenthaler’s technique—soaking and staining his un-primed canvases with diluted paint.
Clem’s shittiness shouldn’t take away from Louis’s brilliance, but beyond the backroom machinations of either of these men, Frankenthaler’s insight fell on fertile soil in D.C. The vanguard painting scene there wasn’t dominated by the Greenbergian taint, and though all the AbEx painters you know come out of New York, the D.C. scene had a pluralism of identity and expression that might have been impossible up north.
Two other attendees at Clem’s studio invasion were Leon and Ida Berkowitz, founders of the Washington Workshop Center—a place to hash out new ideas that would eventual coalesce as the Washington Color School. Berkowitz didn’t like the name “Washington Color School”—it smacked of Greenbergianism and Berkowitz was trying to move past the macho physicality of paint that Greenberg represented.
Toward what exactly, he wasn’t yet certain. While the New York School was very siloed, many of the Washington painters had day jobs that put them in touch with the emotional effect of abstract art on unsophisticated audiences. Thomas and Berkowitz both taught high school art classes. After studying at the Art Students League of New York in the early 1940s, but the war brought him to Virginia, where he was charged with developing a “projective technique” for art therapy:
“What I learned from the Rorschach [test] was that it wasn’t the symbols that people saw, it was the abstract qualities that they saw, that were diagnostic, you know, a couple of colors, a concern with edges or the hole . . . all of these things supported the development of my own aesthetic.”3
As the Washington School embraced new techniques of laying on color—acrylic paints, spray paint, etc.—Berkowitz went questing for his own synthesis of these problems. After nearly a decade of looking and painting in Spain and Wales, he returned to D.C. to produce his mature works. They were fields of color, not unlike the great things by Louis, Alma Thomas, and others of the scene, but Berkowitz, still painting in oil, felt that he had found a subject past the materiality of the paint:
“I am endeavoring to find that blush of light over light and the color within the light; the depths through which we see when we look into and not at color.”4
Berkowitz returned from his journeys abroad just as American art historians were buzzing about the landscape painting of the late nineteenth century as “one of the most truly indigenous styles in the history of American art, a way of seeing so intimately related to the artist’s idea of world and his relation to it that it can be identified not only in landscape painting but also in still life, genre, and portraiture. One of those modes of seeing that —like Surrealism—had few pure practitioners, it nonetheless touched upon and flavored the works of countless painters who worked ostensibly in other forms.”5
Novak’s book on Luminism,6 along with work by John Wilmerding, was especially influential in the nation’s capital, where, as the bicentennial approached, old idioms of American identity were being dusted off and buffed up for renewed celebration. Berkowitz glibly took the name for himself, “a latter-day Luminist,” but you can see what he was trying to do with the term. Where the Color painters were making a flat object with formal properties crowding its surface, Berkowitz yoked himself to this long-dead school of painters for whom color was the gauzy medium through which we see some other thing. What that other thing was didn’t matter so much to Berkowitz, as indeed Novak claims it mattered little to the Hudson River Luminists—what was important was to see through the paint.
Luminism hasn’t fared especially well as a tool of critical theory, but expect to see it trotted out again as the American semiquincentennial rears its head. Louis was probably killed by the toxicity of the chemicals he worked with. Frankenthaler ended up getting her due. And Berkowitz’s extraordinary canvases are on view at ACA Galleries, no special access to the backroom necessary. School them as you wish; they are undeniably luminous.
