Veiled in a Strong White Light

By ROBERT HUGHES

Some artists have long, honorable careers but are continually ignored. They are swamped by their colleagues' bow waves. Giorgio Cavallon's career has been of this submerged kind. He is now 73, having been born near Vicenza in northern Italy in 1904, and he was one of the first abstract painters in New York in the 1930s, when painting abstract seemed automatically to consign an artist to ridicule and obscurity. In the '60s some of Cavallon's contemporaries, such as Milton Resnick or Lee Krasner, long written down as minor or fringe figures in the aesthetic star system, began to get their due; Cavallon is perhaps the last to do so.

Benign Neglect. There is nothing overtly spectacular about his work. Nor has his career ever shown the kind of violent oscillation between styles and influences that invites a rhetoric of "breakthroughs." So the general attitude toward him has been one of benign neglect. But the current retrospective of 65 works by Cavallon at the Neuberger Museum at Purchase, N.Y.--amplified by two Manhattan exhibits of 25 early Cavallon paintings at the Patricia Learmonth Gallery and nine late ones at the Gruenebaum Gallery--shows how unjust that neglect has been. It brings into full view one of the most lucid, steadfast and lyrically articulate bodies of work in modern American painting.

Cavallon immigrated to the U.S. in 1920, at 16. He worked as a mechanic, winding armatures at a plant in Springfield, Mass., but "I put the idea of being a mechanic out of my mind because I didn't like the smell of oil." The smell of linseed oil was another matter; he spent five years studying art at the National Academy of Design in New York, did odd jobs as a carpenter and studied with the pioneer abstractionist Hans Hofmann. "I really didn't understand abstract painting," he recalls. "It took a long time to penetrate--so I have a sympathy for people who don't like it."

Delectable Glow. He came to abstract painting through still life, canceling out recognizable objects until the tabletop became a flat plane inlaid with small, quirky geometrical forms. But Cavallon's formative encounter was with Mondrian's work, and it is to Mondrian that the grid paintings he made from the late '30s onward incessantly allude. Cavallon's geometrical works, like one dated 1946, are not Utopias: there is little of Mondrian's austere, architectonic rectitude in them. They are sociable, warm, busy and a bit sloppy. They stand to the more purist kinds of geometrical abstraction as the plan of a hill town does to a Renaissance citta ideale. But they do supply the underpinning on which nearly all Cavallon's later work is based--a firmly cubist structure, distantly suggestive of fields, porticoes or rooms, veiled in strong white light.

Cavallon's northern Italian origins seem to be recapitulated in the light that comes from his canvases. It is a peculiarly subtle, dense light, a bloom that suggests the sun coming at a low angle through mist on the Adriatic marshes -- a Venetian glow, eroding the contours of objects. Its vehicle is white pigment, which, from 1954 on, became the key color in Cavallon's work. More and more, the local colors of the underlying grid -- some of them very strong, cadmium oranges, bright carmines, high cerulean blues -- become drowned under the slather of white.

Seen through the brush marks, the bright underpainting gives the white surface a delectable glow; Cavallon is a master of close nuances of tone and value. "I use white to cancel things out," he remarks in the catalogue for the Neuberger show, suggesting a censoring brush -- but that is not the effect of the white. It veils structure without removing it. Color leaves its ghosts every where. In half-effaced edges of what once were rectangles, in the small apparition of a line, the submerged bulk of a patch, each painting discloses the way it was made. Light is stored up in the paint as the day's warmth remains in stone; it seems to be a property of the material.

Cavallon remains a peculiarly Italian painter. No matter how large, his canvases rarely lose the air of self-containment and meditative discretion that one finds in Giorgio Morandi's dusty still lifes. In the art world of the late 1970s, nobody would think these eminently civilized images radical. But there are few painters alive who can use the traditional language of the brush with a sweeter eloquence than Cavallon's.

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