I cannot imagine that condition for Julian Schnabel's paintings. The quality of the mind on view in the recent traveling exhibition of his work from 1975 to 1987 is a strangely grandiloquent evasiveness that begs for a sustaining environment of response, and its primary tone is an exuberant flirtatiousness. A familiar complaint against Schnabel's work, acknowledged by Thomas McEvilley in his essay for the exhibition catalogue, is its gesturalism, nonfigurative marks used as a private, improvised, haphazard code of feeling. I think, however, that it's the actual pictorial representation of gesture in his work that indicates its exemplary limitations and its coquettishness. In the 1981 painting Prehistory: Glory, Honor, Privilege, Poverty, a figure hanging by his heels on the far right has the face of a Cycladic statue (or of Ezra Pound drawn by Gaudier-Brzeska); out from his side emerges a reddish cord, part of his bindings, which forms a hoop that hovers over the painting's central figure, an oversized infant floating upright at the center of the canvas (not canvas, in fact, but pony skin). The baby points to our left, to a large masklike face that stares out at us like an accusation. As a manipulative image, the picture playfully bullies us. Schnabel draws us into the image with the upside-down figure (antlers mounted to the surface look like thorns wrapped around the figure's chest), loops our attention to the plump, elongated baby, who points us to the face, which returns our stare. It is a clever shuttling from one gesture to another and demonstrates how an artist can kick us out of a painting as readily as he draws us in. Each gesture, though, is a pictorial contrivance numb of feeling. One wishes the manipulations were enlivened (or made brutally contrary) by anger, or nuttiness of some kind, to relieve the pedantry of the forms. It is an artwork eager for, and dependent on, the smother of self-consciousness.

In many instances, the theatricality of gesture that makes some of Schnabel's paintings at first glance seem energetically defiant turns out to be bombast, because it must depend on a contractile, literalist vocabulary. The found forms of art history that rattle through his paintings are moody, ambiguous quotations. He takes over an old image not to re-engage or quarrel with its formal life but chiefly to demonstrate his powers of owning such an image, and he pretends to hold some secret to the fact of the appearance of an old image but is not about to disclose it to us. The appearance, for example, of Caravaggio's Youth with Flower Basket in Exile (1980) is an inert quotation. Caravaggio's picture is a portrait of self-offering; the flowers the beautiful youth bears are a token of mysterious carnal promise. What can it mean, then, when Schnabel paints Caravaggio's voluptuous figure in gummy, flaccid textures? Is he mickey-mockering the belief in figurative representations of desire? I think he wants us to see Exile as an art-history emblem, as an intentionally garbled re -representation of a famous painting event. McEvilley suggests that this sort of quotation is a miniaturized expression of Schnabel's larger ambition: "The sense of time or history as an ocean filled with the fragments of the past and randomly laying them on the beach of the present [which is the dominating "sense" in Schnabel's work] is duplicated at another level by the presence of quotational elements throughout the oeuvre." Painting as a register of time's tidal debris the canvas as a sort of oceanic dump has an absolutely legitimate part to play in the criticism an artwork embodies; Robert Rauschenberg's big culture-anthology canvases and Robert Motherwell's collages are brilliant enactments of this. But the Caravaggio youth and the other figure in Schnabel's painting a featureless ball-and-stick figure taken from a child's comic book exist not for the energy of the relation established inside the pictorial space but for the frontal, toneless display. To argue that it is meant to be a display piece enjambing two given representations of the human figure one carnal, the other mechanical is to confirm its purely academic quality.

It is not always easy to identify and evaluate the tone of formal mimicry in Schnabel's work. Arthur Danto has said in his book The State of the Art that Schnabel sometimes uses velvet as a support because, since it is commonly associated with a vulgar idea of opulence, it is a mockery of the art world whose expectations his ambitions evidently gratify; it is, in Danto's words, "a nose thumb at his pushy clientele and an acknowledgement of the crass structure of the art world he has so ingeniously internalized." The "Maria Callas" series probably bears this out. The forms are an anthology of abstract-expressionist mannerisms, from Jackson Pollock's early archetypal herms to Franz Kline's frayed pigment swathes, laid on velvet; it's the same compound of the vulgar and the heroic suggested by the series' title. But the issue gets more complicated in a painting like Ethnic Types No. 15 and No. 72 (1984) where Schnabel presents a black male and female (and snakes, chalices, and other decorations, a few of them made of animal hide) on a velvet ground. The material certainly gestures, as Danto says, to "the stuff of cheap ornamental pillows and sham tapestries found in bazaars and puces in bordertowns or in the luxury motel." But I think Schnabel is also reaching after a pop iconography that can accommodate heroic types, and his use of materials refers inevitably to a specific cultural situation that has little to do with the commercial art world. In the 1960s and early 1970s many self-declared black and Hispanic folk artists used cheap Day-Glo colors on velvet to declare the sources of their racial identity. Those productions were authentic, if crude and rigidly conventionalized, expressions of spiritual and cultural need. The visual operatics Aztec princes, African queens, Zapata, Huey Newton, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, blooming in tropical yellows and violets had an evangelical appeal because they were directly connected to political and religious streams in American subcultures. That extravagance blended social discontent, artistic ingenuousness, cultural piety, and commercial aggressiveness. (Anyone who ever dealt with such an artist hawking his or her wares in a subway or bus can testify to the volatile social-artistic compound I'm trying to describe.) When an artist like Schnabel appropriates these mannerisms, he retools them as gestures to serve his own schematic purposes. Just as much as in the Caravaggio quote, he absorbs precedents into his image field only to neutralize, by aestheticizing, all residual moral quality. Another velvet painting, Salinas Cruz (1984) is a smallish piece showing punch-drunk putti faces mounted on what look like harpy wings. Wound around one is a Möbius sign. Another of the faces is obliterated, its features erased in a colorist mash. The alarming derangement of traditional religious iconography and the laid-on symbol of infinity are blatant theatrical conceits, and they may charm us with their cleverness. But they also push us out of the painting, since there is no charged relation sustained among the compositional elements. There are only the rather banal signs of mimicry. The painting, like a good deal of Schnabel's work, has its appeal, but like most of his work it's little more than brilliant schoolboy banter.

His paintings do help us, however, to understand some of the problems artists are struggling with. Figurative artists of Schnabel's generation he was born in 1951 and expressionist painters in particular, feel more than ever the need to punch into and distend the painting space so as to absorb the facts of our moment (one of the most critical being the awareness of painting as a representational act). At the same time they feel the need to recapitulate past modes of representation, as the Impressionists, for instance, recapitulated genre painting while also forging representations that could absorb, as T. J. Clark has demonstrated in The Painting of Modern Life, the material facts of a capitalist economy. But the Expressionists of the 1980s have also had to modify or build on Pop Art's encyclopedic scrutinizing of culture facts. Schnabel is certainly aware of the task. His monsters and gargoyles in The Wind (1985) suggest the demons and incubi of Hieronymus Bosch and of romantic visionary painting, but they also absorb as sheer information the commercial renderings of the demonic that flooded popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s in the form of record jackets and bookcover designs. Executed with a willful deftlessness characteristic of his work, The Wind illustrates a formal crisis: What to do when essential images in consciousness, the pictorial expressions of evil and nightmare, become so self-consciously owned that any new expression of them must be sheathed in irony or bristled about by our enervating powers of cultural mimicry? Schnabel does not make the picture zone a field of actual engagement with the problem. His talent and desire are so cautious, at least at this early stage of his career, that he can only illustrate it, showcase it for our examination. This limitation is due, I think, to his unwillingness to sustain an intimate conversation between himself and his materials one that is not "framed" to be overheard. At the same time, it's precisely the snarling awareness that others are watching him perform that gives his images their belligerent waggishness. He is like the brash, self-satisfied poet whose poems illustrate or mock the trouble of self-consciousness but never realize the feeling of living out the trouble.

To judge by his commercial success, Schnabel's image rhetoric is fairly persuasive. But I cannot help feeling that the intention powering the rhetoric is often callow, that he means not to make art in answer to internal need but rather to create study pieces or object-occasions. I know it's difficult to separate such an intention from the theatricality of most young Expressionists, but the work of an artist like Anselm Kiefer, for all its extravagant rhetoric several of Kiefer's gigantic canvases depict theatrical architectural spaces possesses a moral consistency of representation that in Schnabel's work is either absent or fragmented. Some of the critical debate about Schnabel converges on his interest in religious and historical subject matter, what the media shyly refer to as Big Subjects. (Poets, too, must speak awkwardly of having major themes, as if in a crepuscular time we are all inevitably muted by the wretched modesties of self-consciousness.) He may claim religious subjects, but Schnabel is not an artist of religious imagination, whose activity enacts in images the processual encounter of the form-making will with a mode of being that it takes to be larger than itself. Schnabel's chief purpose, I think, is to announce the importance of a subject, not to express an encounter with a subject. His method is declamatory, not investigative or revelatory. A religious painting by him thus seems like a preliminary to some other, as yet nonexistent, work. A work like the 1987 Diaspora declaims in a pictorial shorthand the attempt to master a subject. Done on heavy tarpaulin (an old truck cover) Diaspora is one of a series of panels titled "Stations of the Cross," and its title comes out of William Gaddis's novel The Recognitions . The work is shaped like a stump-winged cross, its base a pedestal upon which are painted the letters D I A S P O R A . Except for the emblematic force of the cross, nothing in the drab, lethargic diffuseness of color (the khaki green ground is streaked with fluffy white and yellowish ovoids) suggests any specific quality of impassioned response to the subject. The overall configuration is expressionist in its gestures the emblematic tarp, the bold letters, the ovoid gashes, the entire field of paint conceived as a shout but in execution the compositional elements are restrained to a bafflingly indifferent, affectless decorum. The imposing size and glamor of the piece cannot overcome what is essentially a pictorial cliché: Christianity triumphant over, and built upon, the Diaspora. Schnabel has said, however, that although he means the painting to be seen in its full historical dimension, it can also be detached from "meaning" and that he chose the word diaspora in part for the formal quality of its characters. (There is some foolery enfolded into all this: Gaddis's novel, from which the key words for all the panels in "Stations of the Cross" are taken, is about forgery and confidence games.) We are advised, therefore, to regard Diaspora as both a statement of historical relations and an artist's response to them, and as a neutral formalist image related more or less to Jasper Johns's alphabet paintings. I don't believe we can have it both ways. The consciousness of exile, suffering, deprivation, as it lives in our historical memory, cannot be so casually deposited and retracted (or made visible and erased) from its representation. Diaspora shows the strain of this double mood. It has the belabored clamorousness of a subject that has not really seized its interpreter, or that its interpreter has failed to penetrate. If we compare this to Kiefer's struggle to situate religious and historical material in paintings that possess a complex, extremely unsettling tonal variety and to make the image field a value-laden space, a work like Diaspora feels tinny and evasive. Kiefer accepts the sublime as a primary tone and is chagrined only insofar as he knows better than most that Western culture needs to believe it has exhausted the sublime of its images and sentiments (and that the sublime is intrinsically dangerous politically because it entails uniqueness and hierarchy). Part of the ambition of the new Expressionism is to recover whatever expressions of the sublime may have survived Pop Art's invincible ironies. Schnabel's work, by contrast, tends to drift from one illustration to another.

His St. Sebastian Born in 1951 (1979) coolly displays the challenge of recovering a classical form (the archaic torso) and a familiar topos of Christian art. Long wounds, like weals, are channeled into pasty, clay red flesh, but from the normal icon of St. Sebastian the painter has excluded the standard pain registers: the face, the arms and legs straining at their bonds, the arrows. Part of the pictorial drama is to make us aware of these subtractions, and also of the addition of bloody wounds carved into the normally pristine torso of ancient sculpture. If the "1951" means that this is a self-portrait, it's self-portraiture as art history. The painting's chief interest, in any event, lies in its concepts; as painting, it's a dull, mechanical execution of a thesis. Schnabel conflates two pictorial facts and affixes to them an autobiographical fact; the result is a mock-up art-history problem. If we take the painting as expressionist, a work that bears the torture marks of its passage from the painter's fevered consciousness into its image existence, Schnabel's St. Sebastian is surprisingly tame and subdued.

Kneading unusual or found materials into the pigment field has become an identifying assertiveness for some of the new Expressionists. Kiefer not only accumulates massive loads of pigment and emulsions on his canvases but builds up textures and gouges depth into the image by affixing straw, sand, lead, and other things. To one recent painting, Osiris and Isis, he attached a circuit board at a crucial passage; on another he mounted a pair of iron skis; and in a recent series, ferns are both the subject and the material. Additions like these enlarge the thing life of a picture. Both Kiefer and Schnabel want to make the picture an open frontier available to things spiked into the painting from other orders of use. (The Surrealists and pop artists prepared the way for the more severe energy these young artists exercise.) Skis and straw, broken plates and antlers, all with autonomous identities, do not simply enter the formal configuration of a painting but enlarge and complicate what it represents. The world's work fieldwork, factory work, and their products extends its life into the representation made by the painter.

Schnabel seeks to build up the dimensions of an image by constructing secondary surfaces, scales on the skin of the canvas. The most famous are the craterous, eruptive canvas-scapes made of broken crockery. In Vita (1983), the central figure is a crucified woman; the pieces of shattered plates that frame her emerge from the painting's surface like star bursts, and some of the stellar debris tumbles into the configuration of the body itself. The fusion of oil pigment and jagged, rippling plate fragments makes the image look at once muscular and dismantled. The figure has a high, intense resolution even while it seems about to disintegrate. Formally, the painting is brilliant; conceptually, however, its presentation of the suffering female seems calculated to win sympathy (or approval) by virtue of its correct political tone. The predetermined content of the image constrains Schnabel's explorations. There is a different, more formal, kind of constraint in Aborigine Painting (1980), a two-panel work. On one side, an aboriginal crouches, his head turned toward us as if he were about to tell a story; his body is all streaming yellow flesh tones outlined in red. His face is indigo with red and yellow highlights. Across from him, filling the left-hand panel, is a blotched, swirling land mass in amber and mud brown, roughened by the scales of broken plates. The compositional elements exist in dramatic relation: the pictured setting might be an image from the aboriginal's own consciousness. And yet the coloring of the figure is very derivative of Nolde, and conceptually the picture owes perhaps too much to Edvard Munch's renderings of a turbulent mind in a turbulent universe.

Vita and Aborigine Painting are interesting because they are at least toiling somehow with feeling and form. More often, however, the rhetorical purpose of Schnabel's work is to charm. The Sea (1981) is a compendium of exciting materials: big chunks of broken terra-cotta angels, fish, animals; a fragmented crèhe; clay pots funneling out from the surface; and antlers. In front, freestanding, is a stout piece of charred wood that looks like an expressionist herm. The imagery is vaguely Mesoamerican. The title is the only definition of subject. This is presumably an image of history and its sea wrack, its allusive fragmentary representations swept along at different depths. Like much of Schnabel's work, it has designs on us. It comes at us not to manipulate us through a system of images, as Prehistory does, but to instruct us on expressionist ambitions. It announces the desire to disturb the picture surface into new definitions; the announcement is itself an inarticulate cry of turmoil; the canvas-scape is proposed as a register of the turmoil. And yet the picture is governed by a serenity, a certitude, that I feel even when I'm looking at pictures with the most violent flourishes. What's missing is the desire for form made sensible in the forms of the work. Schnabel's paintings, most of them, are finally so placid because they are not committed to the disequilibrium artists need to feel sometimes even to cultivate if they want to find their way to new resolutions.

Jerome Witkin

In Diane Arbus's famous image of the scrawny boy in Central Park holding a toy hand grenade, the child's body is seized up in a convulsive but ludicrously posed anger. His left side contracts in a spasmic rage to a point just below his shoulder his hand is a baby steam-shovel claw about to jackknife and tear off a piece of flesh. The male figure in the third panel of Jerome Witkin's polyptych Subway: A Marriage (1981-83) imitates the spastic, half-collapsed stance of the hand-grenade child, but whereas Arbus's subject poses for us the contrived menace accounts for the travesty of innocence dramatized in the image Witkin's figure is not posed or arranged; it does not "project" anything. The mysterious pain he suffers is a sensation thought through the body, the figure modeled by interiorized torsional forces. Photography, of course, cannot think through the body as painting can; it is constrained by the given fact of the pose. For Witkin, painting the figure is often an essay in eruptive sensation; the expressiveness of his figures is florid, peaked, an articulation of tremendous pressures built up within or "before" the finished work. Witkin may have used Arbus's image as a source. He's a painter who takes in as much of the ancient and modern tradition as he can to extend and discipline his own energies, not so much to resolve formal painterly problems (his exertions to push color into new expressiveness are evident enough) as to master his theme, which is sensation lived out in crises of public and private conscience.

In Subway: A Marriage, a suffering conscience is modeled into the anatomy. We see its physical bite remorse (remorsus ) means to feel bitten again and again, gnawed at the wound that erupts from within and threatens to rip the body apart. The narrative armature of the polyptych is almost drearily familiar: a wife, her presence disclosed only in the last panel, provides comforting witness to her husband's dream agony, the vision of which is hammered forth in the three preceding panels. The dreamer, in pajamas, stands in a subway car; the interior is wreathed with graffiti. Two vipers have eaten their way out of the pillowcase clenched in the sleeper's hand. On the seat next to him is a manikin's hand. The pillowcase, residue of his waking life, dissolves as the nightmare unfolds; in the second panel it's ghostly, and a hooded executioner now occupies the seat, holding what is either a baby or a frighteningly lifelike doll. The sleeper now cringes from some unseen hurt. In the third panel, the executioner, female, grins, eyes still hooded, her teeth like those of Francis Bacon's popes. The baby has become a green-faced doll, with a doll's perfectly spherical head, and its sweet, round mouth seems to be singing, though it and nearly everything else in the frame is spattered with blood gushing from the sleeper's shoulder. He looks like a torture victim, unable to return to life's normalcies. But the source of the torture is the dream life. The snakes and pillowcase are both gone, absorbed into the vision's transmutations. When the dreamer awakens in the final panel, he stands at the bedside as he stood in the subway, his body shaken loose from the torment, which now concentrates entirely in his worldless gaze. He stands amid spilled night-table debris an overturned telephone, a lamp, and a notepad where Witkin has signed the painting.

Because he is determined to recover the narrative energies of figurative painting without falling into the plaintive exercises of Neorealism, Witkin depends heavily on scenic anecdote. But I don't think he's interested in narrative for its own sake. Clarity of event, the outlines of dramatic situation, act as formal constraints upon the forces he wants to represent. The subdued, oblique narratives of a painter like Eric Fischl seem genteel in contrast to Witkin's extravagant Venetian manner and thematic openness. Subway: A Marriage dramatizes not so much a fear of women (though erotic anxiety is certainly one of Witkin's subjects) as the dread of the wounding containments of married life; and that disclosure is driven by the revenge that imagination takes while we sleep. The final panel presents a comfortably middle-class marriage, and the husband's shock is complicated by the figure of his wife, whose extended hand is a moving and unequivocal sign of solicitous affection. The previous panels expose the lacerations of a conscience terrorized by a woman, a child, and family relations. The later triptych Division Street (1984-85) presents a consequence of that dread: the father walks out the door, suitcase in hand, the worldless gaze of the sleeper in Subway now transformed into the anonymity of a turned back; the young son cringes in a chair as plates loaded with food explode melodramatically against the door frame, around the departing father's head. The mother's fury and the father's slouched withdrawal converge in the horrified loathing that contorts the young boy's face.

Anecdote is essential to Witkin's work, but he pushes against its compactness, its tendency toward oversimplification and the formulaic. Because he possesses a moral imagination that is, he is concerned with evaluative representations of the qualities of human action he must remain available to tumultuous surprise. And so he pushes against the constraints of anecdote with aggressive operatic color. He paints clothing as shimmering foils that melt in the glare of floodlighting. In Division Street, the dinner plates shatter into gouts of blood and flesh, like shrapnel in a fever dream; in Subway: A Marriage the sleeper's pajamas glow a silvery TV green. (Witkin says he got the aluminum green of the mother in Division Street from Peter Pain, the Ben-Gay trademark.) In painting after painting, light seems flayed off the substance of the clothing, in which the flesh is provisionally housed. In his 1980 portrait Jeff Davies (Plate 9) the green of the parka the huge man wears is a bulbous exfoliation of the greeny tints of his eyebrows, cheekbones, beard, and hair. The swollen, tubular sleeves, collar, and pockets pick up the rhythm of his big belly and tight little breasts. All that voluminous robustness looks tenuous and frail. For all his bulk, Jeff Davies looks about to disappear.

Witkin's most disturbing works are those where the suffering or passion of conscience is enacted in a public, historical context. In the triptych Death as an Usher Germany 1933 (1979-82) the subject is Nazi terrorism fouling the stream of ordinary life's ordinary amusements. More recently, in Mortal Sin: In the Confession of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1985) an explicitly sacramental intimacy enfolds public consequences, but in a manic pandenominational way: the unorthodox Jew Oppenheimer, purveyor of Eastern religions, participates in a Catholic sacrament. In counterposing scientist and priest, Witkin is restoring and readjusting the tradition of crier and listener in religious art. In the left panel of the diptych Witkin paints his way through the picture space the way a storyteller moves through time Oppenheimer kneels at a cutaway confessional. Behind him a blackboard is jazzed with equations, the word sin tangled and almost lost among them. One hand grips the jaw of his open mouth as if to rip it off, while the other points to his heart. The figure is one of inexpiable fault, of a knowledge that brings gnawing pain. The body, as in so much of Witkin's work, is conscience's torture room. In the right panel, somber and unmoved, a priest hears the confession. His space is all disorder, and it's hard to tell if it's a bombed-out residence or an artist's messy studio. The priest's work is to absorb the narration of humanity's worst crimes. He tilts his head down in the usual way, so that Oppenheimer's raised mouth cries out through the Judas hole above the confessor's head. Witkin has so cunningly deployed his materials that he allows our eye to assemble most of the crucial constructive details the armature of the anecdote before we realize that the peach tones of the priest's forearms are not the colors of flesh, but prosthetic devices with hooks. Then we see he has only the stub or stump of an ear.

It may seem that Witkin sets a man of the church, maimed presumably by the devastations of war, against the man of science who helped to develop a more "efficient" way of slaughtering populations, in order to illustrate a thesis. That's the anecdotal harness, and in some of his work it leads Witkin into sentimental simplifications. But illustration is not, I think, what really matters to him, though his skills as a draftsman are such that the paintings have almost too much "attack." What matters is the quality of moral feeling. The priest is sullen, unresponsive; the pasty red outlines around his eyes make them seem bleary and attentionless. In the knifelike figure of Oppenheimer we see one kind of religious feeling, ecstasy, turned into self-accusation. Even his most intimate confidences are cries to the heavens. Both figures inhabit spaces in disarray, both express powerlessness to control a reality authored by them both. If the painting can be said to have a subject, it is the devastation of conscience when acts produce consequences that render the author of those acts inconsequential.

What makes this and Witkin's other political-historical paintings compelling for their formal values is that he is working, consciously I think, in the tradition of the lives of the saints. His impulse, and the tableaux format he favors, sets his work in the tradition of Renaissance cycles about St. Francis, St. Mark, and the Gospels. His presentations, however, are never devotional. His subjects are secular and historical, but the turbulent religious feelings expressed in them the awakening, emergence, and testing of transfigured realities are sometimes nearly as intense as those in Tintoretto. Witkin's "texts" are not Scriptures but newspapers, chronicles, and broadcasts, and he has absorbed into his form language some of the effects of those other technologies. He says that for some paintings he works up his palette the way "you can play with a television set and 'fry' the picture." He loves to draw and makes numerous elaborate preliminary drawings for his paintings, but he cannot stay away from painting too long. "I need to paint," he says, "because it will take me to a visceral experience of making light, of making all sorts of impulses with color and line." For him paint is often the florid handwriting of suffering and dispossession. If Witkin is working in the tradition of the lives of saints, his work is representation as investigation or interrogation of moral value. What's given is historical fact, not pious disposition. At any rate, the sulfurous surfaces and glassy radiance in his larger canvases make it obvious that Witkin's "sourcebook" is usually not a hagiography but a demonology.

An art so driven by the theatrical momentum of subject matter risks hysteria and the complacency of its own conceits. In our grindingly self-conscious age we know that even horror can be made into "good material." Witkin avoids the trivializing hysteria of poster art by blending into his chosen events complex, ambiguous nuances. He needs extravagance and operatic gesture to both release and master feeling. But a few of the paintings are narrowed by conceit. In an earlier work like The Devil as a Tailor (1978-79), for example, Witkin's devil is a Teutonic scholarly craftsman in shimmering, embroidered robes a studious dandy. His face is "fried" by a floodlamp; the light sizzles red and yellow around his skull bone. Hanging from a rafter behind him are finished products, army uniforms of different countries and a jacket with a yellow Star of David. The fiery flakes and motes of the devil's face seem reflections of his mandarin finery; the reds and golds of his own costume rhyme with the colors of his Singer. He's an avuncular presence who enjoys the becalmed dignity conferred on him by his occupation. But the entire composition is locked into a thesis: that nationalism, which encourages self-righteousness, divisiveness, and exclusivity, is evil. The platitude is only slightly upset by the devil's serene, benign, self-assured countenance. Part of Witkin's enterprise, however, is to challenge formulas of historical wisdom and journalistic platitudes that numb us to moral ambiguity. The risk is that adequate formal response will tip over into illustration and sentimentalist opportunism.

Witkin perhaps fits Ruskin's description, in Modern Painters, of men who "live entirely in their own age, and the greatest fruits of their work are gathered out of their own age . . . all of them utterly regardless of anachronism and minor error of every kind, but getting always vital truth out of the vital present." Much of Witkin's work reminds me of Ruskin's comment, not because of the facts of the case the topicality of the work but because of the felt quality of relations among the human figures and the events they devise or are caught up in. One of his latest pieces, a five-panel work called A Jesus for Our Time (1986-87), serializes the aspirations of a charismatic evangelist named Jimmy. He intends to preach in Beirut, which he will enter as Christ entered Jerusalem, except that he enters like a rock star, his pulpit the rear of a truck. His aspirations are defeated when a car bomb goes off nearby. The mix of tones is dazzling: the visionary call, the vocation, is almost tenderly presented in the first panel, but later we feel Jimmy's manic righteousness when he preaches, as well as the devastation not only of his faith but also of his carefully arranged public self the ingenuous religioso in a white Jerry Lee Lewis suit in the face of sectarian terrorist violence. Panel by panel we are made to witness the falsehoods and ideological viciousness that slash across the life of religious belief in our time.

When Jimmy is brought to his knees by the explosion, twisting away from the storm of glass and debris, he strikes the kind of contrapposto that Tintoretto loved to paint. But Witkin, for all his powers of recapitulating the figurative tradition, has his own vision of the body as an architectural structure in jeopardy, about to spring apart from the stress of circumstance and obsessive feeling. For the preparatory drawings for Unseen and Unheard (In Memory of All Victims of Torture) (1986), he had his models pose "dead," stretched horizontally on a hard surface, pelvis lifted in a position of maximum tension, breakability, and exposure. In the painting, a naked male strapped down to a bedspring thrusts his pelvis upward at the moment when the electric shock from a torture device turns his body into a pain conductor. The shape of that pain the flesh is painted in long light bands as if it possessed an excruciating elasticity arcs across the middle foreground. In the background, where Witkin has taught us to look for messages, traces, signs of some sort, a flak jacket, ammunition belt, and field jacket hang from a scarred wall another ravaged interior expressive of moral disorder.

The picture enacts the oblivion of physical torture when all time converges on the instant of pain or release, when consciousness, owned by the torture masters, resolves into a shriek. The daring complication in what might otherwise remain mere earnest grandiloquence is a second figure, the anonymous collaborator, sitting in the corner of the room. American by his look and dress, gone to fat, he's shouting into a telephone, his face contorted by grief and disbelief, covering one ear as if to shut out the screams of the torture victim. But the collaborator clearly occupies a different narrative space; detached from the field of the painting, from the enforced relation to the victim, he would be an unequivocal expression of shocked sorrow. Witkin blends the two zones, and here there's no architectural artifice like Oppenheimer's cutaway confessional to separate the crier and the listener. The two moments of suffering are engaged in a horrific conversation, the hermetic domestic existence of the collaborator (his corner is lit with the same interrogating glare as the sleeper's corner in Subway: A Marriage ) fused to the public world of ideology, State Security, and terrorist force. Blended into one frame, one congestive narrative space, the collaborator can no more easily escape the victim's cries than the victim can evade the pain inflicted by his torturers (who are absent, represented only by their technology, by the coils and generator of a device that looks like a field telephone). The devastation of the body and of consciousness in the name of ideology or political rectitude becomes, in Witkin's visionary theatricalism, an inescapable fact in our awareness of ordinary life, and one we labor not to forget.

The immediate force of Witkin's paintings comes from their act of witness. I don't mean to trivialize his art by suggesting it contains homiletic content or is moralistic. (Unlikely in any event, since the serial paintings are all blistered with mysterious, irrational, utterly unprogrammatic elements.) But his work has a weird restorative power, restoring to us facts of consciousness and of feeling that we hazard to ignore.

The Starns

The art marketplace has changed so much in the last thirty years that the kind of patience exercised by some early modern artists must now seem a liability to young artists, who come of age in circumstances that pressure them to develop a signature manner or subject matter as early in their careers as possible. Matisse spent nearly fifteen years picking his way through the influences of Cézanne, Pissarro, Impressionism, and Divisionism before he emerged with his singular fauve style in 1904 with Woman in a Hat . Cézanne himself had retreated into an aloof, obsessive practice that brought him only a long delayed (and contested) fame. Giacometti was in his late thirties and had been making art for many years before he began to discover what became the most identifiable sculptural idiom of the century. But the pressures and expectations artists are alert to have changed dramatically. The number of exhibition spaces in New York has multiplied several times over in the past quarter century. Jed Perl, describing the situation in The New Criterion (June 1988), says that in just a couple of weeks he saw about a hundred shows in SoHo alone, few with anything worth writing about: "The scene is now so crowded with frauds, clones, and mediocrities that it's become a test of patience and willpower to find the genuine article." It is not simply the artists who must compete for dealers to represent them, but the dealers themselves who must compete for attention from collectors, the media, curators, and corporate interests. In such an environment an artist's early emergence, or breakaway, is crucial. Artists who developed the famous breakaway styles of the late 1970s and early 1980s Schnabel's histrionic canvas-scapes; David Salle's laminar grisaiues and his juxtaposition of old master quotes with teasing nudes; Eric Fischl's deflected sexual narratives have met with an intensity of early fame that only a few of the major artists, under very different market conditions, experienced in the first half of the century.

Mike and Doug Starn are identical twins born in 1961. They are represented by a prestigious gallery (Stux) and have had their work on exhibition at Boston's Institute of Fine Arts, the Whitney Biennial, Documenta 8, the Saatchi Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the University Art Museum in Berkeley. The art they make rough-cut, pieced together, toned enlargements of single or multiple images is a plastic treatment of photographic material. In Boots with Metal and Film (1983-87) the image of two standing laced boots is a reconstructed 5- × 6-foot enlargement patched together so that the work seams where the print has been cut, folded, torn, taped are visible as traces of the dismantling and reassembly process. The treatment, the edited restoration of the master image, is really the chief subject of the work. The Starns do not break down or dissolve the initiating image. Even in their most heavily webbed pictures, the ghost of the original whole remains visible everything they produce, in fact, seems a cracked memorial to some lost seamless form. The boots picture (which is owned by Julian Schnabel) is an industrial-strength image, with seedy boiled tints and surfaces mottled by chemical bubblings. The texture is spread so fine by enlargement that the boots look vaporous. Clamped to the surface are several small square metal sheets and a piece of maroon film; all the paper patches are wrinkled. Everything in and about the picture looks worked, used. The compositional field, however, has no elasticity. The elements are not deployed in any dramatic or formally compelling relation to one another, though the image does seem to project a less disintegrated spectral duplicate of itself that floats before it. Like many of the Starns' pictures, and strangely for artists so young, Boots has a stately, unaggrieved equipoise.

The same equipoise is apparent in the other dismantlings that go on in their work. Absorbing the influences of pop, conceptual, and performance art, the Starns not only unmake, then reconstruct, the photographic image but also hack away at the conventions of exhibition. The boots picture, for example, has no frame: its irregular shape (or "patch print") is stuck to the wall with push pins, as it might be found in the artists' working space. The crisscrossing of work space and exhibition space has a shaggy informality which, executed in the solemnly welcoming air of a modern museum, can seem mildly disingenuous, like an academic poet who reads to a classroom filled with students a poem endearingly contemptuous of the academy. When a picture by the Starns does have a frame, it usually just hangs there like a harness on a hook, glassless, around a push-pinned image. Sometimes they attach or hang mere fragments of a frame, or lean a glass sheet against the image. These disruptions, however, seem to express a rather mild-mannered formalist curiosity more than compulsiveness or anarchy. By executing these playful determinations so frequently, they run the risk of making the rhetorical setting of their work work meant to reform our notions of finish and completeness so monotonal and self-conscious that it becomes mere conventionalized rigor. It may be the Starns' intention to contrive and then to live by such conventions, and there is a genuine hangdog affability in their manner, but their charm cannot woo us out of our complacencies. The formal problem of making busted framings a part of the image life of a work (the most recent and glamorous solution being Frank Stella's swirling, long-horned aluminum constructions that both support paint and frame or define its action) is now so familiar that the real question for artists of the Starns' generation is how to escape from or detonate the academicism of the "problem."

When Matisse was twenty-six years old, he painted a copy of Philippe de Champaigne's Le Christ mort, pulling the image into his own youthful idiom. The planes of Christ's face were prototypes for the sheeted colors he would be using in portraits twenty years later. The de Champaigne, however, not only offered Matisse an object occasion to develop his own style but also inaugurated him as a religious painter. Painting was his way of expressing what he later called his religious awe of existence. The Starn Twins recently took over the same model, though they treat it not as a subject but as an object, as material. Their "Christ" series consists of twenty-one works developed from a single negative made when they visited the Louvre a few years ago. Their energetic manipulation of the image the folding, scissoring, blistering, Scotch taping is a festive violence that suggests the eager intensity of students getting classical art. Theirs is a new way of copying a classic. They don't really copy or imitate it, they appropriate it, so that the master image itself becomes a medium to be worked. The elaboration of the given form that is, pulling it through the mutations available to the photographic process and then adjusting that product thus becomes the primary task. Their range is impressive. They drag the image through all sorts of visual registers, from the plaintive, open-grained garishness of newsprint photos to the sullen, crepuscular shadowings of pictorialist photography. But the Starns also draw heavily on Andy Warhol's example. They seem to share his sense of art as the banal pushed toward exaltation by replicating or stuttering the image. The Starns' multiple images though, like the Triple Christ made of three differently toned slabs of the de Champaigne picture stacked like bunks, have an inquisitive disintegrating heat that is far from Warhol's calculated affectlessness.

That heat is generated, however, by a purely secular curiosity; their concern for the symmetry of multiple images and for the mechanics of dismantling dissipates the hush of ancient sacrifice surrounding the image of the dead Christ and replaces it with a familiar reverence for the painting as a culture object. One of the most compelling images in the series, Rose with Christ, crops all but the torso from the picture. The body's frailty is beautifully articulated in the swollen, thinned-out consistencies of flesh and musculature. But on a square patch at the figure's armpit is pasted a purplish rose. To what purpose? To signal a meaning? To assert or fix a feeling tone? To posit an allegorical equivalent to the Redeemer? Or is it there for its morally neutral formal character? The Starns are trying to find their way, I think, through what David Salle calls the condition of simultaneity, by which "everything in this world is simultaneously itself and a representation of the idea of itself." This extends naturally, and in its most defiant form, to any art thing as "a representation of an idea of itself." This skein of self-consciousness is what I think leads the Starns to graft the rose image: its presence represents the will of the artists to put it there.

The Ascension, from the same series, is a big smoky blue-toned print that incorporates a literal illustration of its title. Implanted in the major Christ image is a snapshot (covered with a messily creased strip of transparent tape) showing an overhead view of some oceanic expanse. The artists clearly want to recover and maintain the religious icon, but only as a culture fact, a material to be worked. The representational gestures are so busy the old image preserved in intentionally banged-up shape, the new little image spiked into the other, its little vastness grafted onto the singular mythic human form that the picture is more interesting as a formalist conundrum than as an expression of religious feeling. The Starns do not address the image of Christ as a representation of mythic fact loaded with feeling, they address it as an institutional artifact. (The issue gets even more complicated: the Starns insist that these images be arranged in exhibitions in imitation of the deployment of pictures in the Louvre.) The "Christ" series is intentionally denaturalized and culture-obsessed. For all the imposing, large-scale presentation of the Christ in Ascension, and the instructiveness of its aerial-view snapshot, like most of the works in the series it expresses at best a very feeble nostalgia for the idea of transcendence.

The Starns have in any event struck young and fast with a singular idiom. The range of formal possibilities available to them seems rather narrow. The doublings and replications are already signature patterns. Double Chair shows mirror images of a chair cocked both sides of a diagonal axis. Lake Michigan Steps is a doubled image. Horses is a series of one hundred differently toned and patterned prints, all developed from a single negative of a pair of horses. There is a Triple Landscape and a Multiple Rembrandt and a Triple Seascape, all of which suggest the formulaic, the prescriptive. But there is also the fabulous Double Stark Portrait in Swirl (1985-86), where the scorched, bandaged textures of the composition are indistinguishable from the felt drama of the figure. The subject, a young man, is doubled; the horizontal axis that divides the image is like a reflector, but cutting across the neutral doubling are discordant, melancholy tones russet, charcoal, purple gray, silver. These, along with the twisting meditative posture of the figure, fill the space emotionally. It is a portrait of sullen youthful withdrawal. But the most challenging of their works I've seen is Homo Faber, which measures 6 × 10 feet in a bulky aluminum frame. It shows what looks to be a burnt-out warehouse interior or underside of a bridge. Though it does not have the high definition of much of their work, it is more detailed in its feeling. The vague ravaged or decayed structures, some wrecked product of civilization, are intensified by the macerated discolorations of the Starns' methods. Inserted into the major image is a snapshot of that same image, the specific locale no more discernible in miniature than in its enlargement but with the feeling of devastation more impacted. In this case the Starns are not simply doubling an image, they are doubling the process by which an image or representation is realized. And each picture enacts a different intensity of the shape of a piece of our world coming undone. Here and in the Double Stark Portrait in Swirl they are pushing beyond the moody limitations of their manner. To say that they are still young and may yet break through to new forms no one can foresee is to patronize them and pretend that they are unmoved by the expectations of the art world. It does not matter that they don't have real subjects yet. When Wallace Stevens told Robert Frost that Frost's problem was that his poems had subjects, he meant that a modern artist does not need anecdote, narrative, or sensational occasion. The artist does need curiosity and passion for the life of forms in consciousness. That curiosity, at least, flashes in some of what the Starn Twins have already accomplished.

Gregory Gillespie

Now in his early fifties, Gregory Gillespie has followed the advice Delacroix gave himself in his Journals: "Choose stubborn material and conquer it by patience." Gillespie lived in Italy from 1962 to 1970, during which time he developed his major pursuits: landscapes, often squirming with strange vegetative details; still lifes, where organic textures become nightmarishly clarified in studio light; portraits, which have challenged his technical skills at representing temperament; and "shrine" paintings, modeled on the votive images of dead people sometimes seen on walls in Italian towns and often used to mark grave sites. He has also done numerous street scenes and figure groups, most of them derived from Balthus. Whatever the material, most of his work has clustered around the technical task imposed by the shrine paintings, where he has addressed a crucial formal question of our time; Frank Stella has plotted his career by the same question, and younger artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle noisily contend with it. The shrine paintings were occasions for Gillespie to punch into or distend a pictorial scheme and create new opportunities for deploying dynamic space. He seemed especially interested in creating a space that could bear the full awareness of surface flatness and also allow for illusionist depth, without turning the pictorial event into paradist trompe l'oeil. Once he returned to the States, Gillespie continued these investigations in his studio paintings by turning his actual working space into a shrine site.

Because he has been so obviously influenced by old masters, the temptation of parody, of infusing technical or thematic facts from the past into a new pictorial event, is a constant shadow presence in Gillespie's work. He went to Italy to study Masaccio, and the shrine paintings were at first not simply an American way of appropriating foreign subjects but also formal tributes to the architectural housings of Masaccio's figures in the Brancacci Chapel and in Santa Maria Novella. But the Italian who meant the most to him was the fifteenth-century Venetian Carlo Crivelli. Gillespie admits to the technical breakthrough he owes to his study of Crivelli. Frustrated by his inability to render the form of things accurately by blending paint in the usual way "If I put a squash or rubber ball in front of me," he said in an interview in the early 1980s, "I couldn't make it look round with the usual blending" he took over Crivelli's method of crosshatching. This corrected and sharpened the clarity of objects; it made the coloring thicker, busier, yet still fluid and resilient. By crosshatching he could, like Crivelli, condense the volume of objects and give them an unsettling vitreous solidity. Although there are few conventional religious icons in his paintings, especially when compared with the tabernacle rattlings of younger neo-expressionist contemporaries like Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer, there's a consistent devotional tone borne by the formal values Gillespie confers on brick, mortar, stone, color, and wash. This gives evidence, I think, of the other major influence on his work. The Italian trace is mixed with, and secularized by, Dutch genre painting. One painting, the 1981 Untitled Landscape (After de Hooch), is testimony to that influence. In several of his figure groups we see the smudged physiognomies and sheeted lighting of Vermeer and de Hooch; his still lifes and interiors often borrow and revise the brickwork arches and tiled surfaces so commonplace in baroque painting. At the same time, though, Gillespie contests the restraints of influence by folding and buckling the picture surface into telescoped boxes, with no intention of dramatizing depth or discovery. And the walls and floors in his studio paintings, like his landscapes, become fever dreams of volume and massive color. To pursue his own visionary contrariness, he learned painterly disciplines of a conventional kind.

Gillespie is very much of his moment in the way he infuses debris into painting both as a pictorial subject and as material that complicates and disrupts the conventional surface. Ever since his years in Italy he has worked magazine and newspaper photographs into many of his pictures, taking them as a used, found armature on which to construct a scene. In several paintings of the 1970s he introduced all sorts of studio wrack: wooden models, old photographs, discarded studies for paintings, palette scrapings, still life items, and his children's toys conforming to the atelier convention of including whatever happens to be on hand. But Gillespie arranges and distorts the material to suit his own purposes. Studio Wall (1976), which at 96 × 120 inches was the largest piece he had ever done, is constructed like a double shrine divided by a strip of wall with a light switch and notepad. The shrine on the left is a punched-in recess of four telescoped boxes; the fastidious (but in dramatic terms inconsequential) perspective and crisp edges of the nook are mocked by other objects painted into that devotional space: a houseplant, a leering mask, a crosshatched sketch tacked to the wall, a photo cropped like a classical bust. The right-hand shrine holds a doll, a toy airplane, more photos (one of them of a 1968 self-portrait), cinder blocks, and a teddy bear. Deployed as objects of painterly attention, the studio clutter has the look of holy objects. The devotional rigor of an inquiring imagination confers on these ordinary things an almost sacramental value. Maybe this is what Gillespie had in mind when he said in the mid-1970s that his recent paintings were "moving toward religiousness in a positive sense."

If Gillespie's technique in the shrine paintings perforates the flatness of the pictorial surface, in his landscapes it amasses weeviled textures. In the 1974 Visionary Landscape, for instance, mineral and organic matter is built up so thickly that the picture plane melts into the encrustations and engorgements of the scene. The vegetative forms seethe so densely that Gillespie's realist gesture here is one of bringing back alive not the appearance of reality, not a persuasive or affecting likeness, but rather the feeling for a vital force that infuses all matter. Looking at this and other of his landscapes is like looking into a shattered pomegranate, or at a mad elaboration of an anatomical illustration by Vesalius. His visionary natural forms are cellular, viscous, cankerous. He paints nature's appearances as if they were viscera, a concealed hyperarticulated mass. Vines, shoots, flowers, weeds, soil, and rock all seem to bloom and rot in the paint itself. (A realist's favorite worst dream must be that the paint becomes the thing it represents.) The homunculi and vegetable excrescences that spill from the labial hives in Visionary Landscape remind us inevitably of Hieronymus Bosch.

Gillespie's forms, though, do not have the episodic deployment of figure groups that we find in Bosch and Bruegel; moreover, in these artists we always feel the restraining hand of the draftsman governing the turbulence. Gillespie renders the eruptions in nature's ordinary appearances as a fused detailing of the resolution and decay of matter. He catches natural process at the stage when ripeness rots. The images can be overpowering because they seem beyond the artist's control or beyond his will to control. The tendriled and bulbous forms of the 1973 Night Garden seem to possess a consciousness borrowed from the human and are yet utterly strange to us. Gillespie is, as we might expect, aware not only of these effects but also of their pedigree: "Lots of people say Bosch or Bruegel when they speak of my work. I've liked them from time to time. . . . I don't know who these kinds of paintings [like Night Garden ] really relate to. Maybe that Victorian Irish painter, Richard Dadd. He was actually insane and he painted little creatures. . . . He's interesting, this Dadd he painted the anthropomorphic qualities of nature goblins, leprechauns." Dadd was a literary, illustrational painter, and most of his work is quite conventional. What attracts Gillespie, I think, is Dadd's queasy ability to make images in which we see the world of fairy little people, animated vegetation, sprites menacing normal waking perceptions and reason with a vaguely horrifying mischievousness, horrifying because it may at any moment invade and derange consciousness.

Gillespie's drawing becomes all the more rigorous when his subject threatens to burst the norms of composure and right design. His Landscape with Perspective (1975), for instance, has an elegant, almost somber, formal structure that is studiously observed because of the turbulent matter stirring within it. The title suggests an academic exercise, but the picture has a subversive sexual force. The "perspective" is in fact a vulval funneling from a pale misty sky filling the upper hemisphere of the picture (which is smallish, even by Gillespie's standards, roughly 16 × 12 inches) down to conical terrestrial forms that tumble and spill down the picture plane. Nearly buried in the scene are signs of culture, a farmhouse, a small church, a row of houses, provisional structures embedded in the heavily combed surface. Gillespie is trying not only to present culture's orders as they occupy pieces of the earth's surface but also to make visible the plasmic throb inside the actual physical ground of existence. Although technically the peer of any of the Superrealists of his generation who emerged in the 1970s, he is not interested in the vaporizing dilations of photorealist portraiture. ("Realism," Delacroix wrote, "is the grand expedient that innovators use to revive the interest of an indifferent public, at periods when schools that are listless and inclined to mannerism do nothing but repeat the round of the same inventions. Suddenly a return to nature is proclaimed by a man who claims to be inspired.") He aspires not to porous exactitude but to mass and volume, and to a kind of molecular movement. In a painting like the 1975 Self-Portrait (Torso), he wants us to see the tiny blood vessels under the skin not so we can experience the skin's transparency and frailty but so we can feel the movement and mass of blood channelings. Of his portraits in particular he has said that he wants "a suggestion of veils, that things are happening underneath." That ambition applies equally to the landscapes. (Over the years he has also done several "curb-scapes" or "gutterscapes," crawl-space views of houses and landscapes in which he offers literally an underneath view of things.) It accounts for the atomization process visible in the color in many of his works: the pigment seems consubstantial with the subject matter. Gillespie is willing to forgo the tedious perfections of Super-realism to achieve what he calls a sense of colossal mass. However small the format most of his things are modest in size and executed on wood his pieces look heavy, not because he loads the surface with pigment but because the image itself expresses the feeling of the density and heft of matter.

Gillespie prepared for the paintings of the 1970s by some of his experiments with collage in the street scenes and shrine paintings of the 1960s, when he frequently worked magazine pictures into the pictorial scheme. His 1968 Soccer Star shows a photograph of a famous Italian athlete collaged into a street scene, but his seated figure is eviscerated, split from neck to groin. It's a shocking but rather impassive image, as clinical photographs sometimes are; it is also one of Gillespie's very few schematic and academic pictures. Its juxtaposition of the body's familiar exterior form with its hidden interior is judicious and contrived, though it obviously prepared the way for Gillespie's more subtle interrogations of the relation between the seen and the unseen. And out of earlier works like Exterior Wall with Landscape (1967) and the 1969 Naples Shrine and Viva Frances, where square crannies showcased all sorts of cultural debris, religious imagery, wormy human figures, and distant landscapes, came the mysterious landscapes, portraits, and still lifes of the 1970s and 1980s. Landscape of the Realm (1973) takes the visual format of the shrine and melts it into a stream of dark terrestrial recesses in which Gillespie sets his familiar homunculi, bladders, and intestinal coils. If a picture like Soccer Star offered too much of the mere shock of disclosure, Landscape of the Realm is executed by a mature artist who has found and is pursuing his theme. Gillespie admits that many of his paintings are about change. The organic matter he so often takes as a subject is painted as a changeful, intermediary substance. The massive color resolution of his technique, though, allows these larval stages to look like adult identities, final and completed. The most representative Gillespie image is at once larva and imago. (He would be the ideal American illustrator of Ovid's Metamorphoses .) His methods sometimes participate in the process they express. He likes to use the dried paint from his palette in much the same way he has used photographs: "If the paint on the palette gets interesting, I'll pick it up and paste it down on a panel and start painting into the shapes 'Rorschaching' into it." The mixed, unwilled, haphazard formations become a larval presence infused into the painting to bring it to some higher, more richly molecular, resolution.

Gillespie's many self-portraits display the formal disciplines he learned from the study of Italian and Northern European art. They also play out another dimension of the transformations evident in the landscape paintings. From one to another, his image in the self-portraits is revised, redecorated, re-emergent as a different tone of self-regard. In a 1978 painting his hair is long, he has a beard and wears a T-shirt, and the frontal pose of the head has not only a Venetian depth and complexity of color but also an intensity of mind registered in the gaze that recalls the Venetians Gillespie admits to admiring most Bellini, Carpaccio, and Crivelli. The brushwork shows the fastidious attention to detail practiced by Gillespie's friend William Beckman, but in this and other self-portraits Gillespie continues a tradition, not usually evident in figure painting in the 1970s and 1980s, whereby likeness, as John Berger has written, "defines character, and character in man is inseparable from mind." In a 1976 self-portrait, the artist is stripped to the waist; his physiognomy and coloring have a historical shadow life that recalls Masaccio's and Mantegna's treatment of the figure. The painter looks at us, or at the imaginary mirror that returns him to himself, with a wariness and suspicion that releases the mind's anger at its own nagging candor. In Self-Portrait in Studio (1976-77) he is clean shaven, with a cropped skullcap of hair, and he sits behind his palette and worktable as if behind a barricade, his materials cunningly positioned as protective, explanatory intermediaries between his imaged self and painting self.

In the most complex of these pieces, Myself Painting a Self-Portrait (1980-81), Gillespie rips through the complacencies apparent in so much American figure painting since the 1950s in which the parody of old master images and styles has conveniently served as a gesture of extravagant self-heroizing exhaustion. His patient, methodical work over a fifteen-year period led Gillespie to what we see in this image, a transformation of the entire space of the painting into a shrine, a canvas lair. He shows himself enclosed and bound by the materials of his work. A woodsy green backdrop forms the wall behind him. To one side is a grid-covered wall it looks like a comb of cells on which drafting instruments hang. Before him, to our right, the easel is braced by another grid wall. On the table barricading him from us are pieces of fruit familiar from earlier still lifes, his palette, and two tiny manikins, shrunken versions of the forms that appeared in the 1980 Manikin Piece . The work space is just a pinched interval between those surfaces, a shrine pressurized by the planes that define the limits of the picture-making activity. The painter, the ostensible votive object, is bare chested, skinny, his torso wiry and torqued like a Cimabue corpus; his facial expression blends matter-of-fact concentration with a surly, self-absorbed impatience. It's the look of a person whose intelligence can never be satisfied by its own best products. The activity we catch him at is that of reimagining the appearance of the self, or rather of an emergent image of the self. And that portrait-in-progress on his easel is hilariously unsettling: a horsey face, with a toothy slice of a grin, looking into the middle distance between us and the painter, like a prankster mediator between what the painter might discover while painting and what we checked and deflected by convention, historically determined expectations, moods, and fashions think we see. That larval image, its goofy openness so unlike the severe look on the face of its maker, is in the scheme of the painting a completed, mature image, even though its flaccid textures lack the colossal mass of the fully painted objects, the completed natures of all the other objects in the picture.

Gillespie's ideal of colossal mass is palpable in a painting like Still Life with Eggplants (1983; Plate 10), where a leathery red pepper, an overripe banana, pears and squash and eggplants mysteriously bear forth, in their solemn stillness, the febrile densities and molecular movement of the earlier landscapes. Still life painting is a ritual of offering; in presenting his subjects, offering them to the viewer, the painter is offering also a formal interrogation by which technique and historical memory transfigure thing life into image life. Still life perhaps registers change more tremulously than any other kind of painting. A painter like Morandi, whose work Gillespie admires, can occupy an entire career investigating the spiritual qualities suggested by the forms of bottles, cans, and beakers; instrumental in such investigations is the veil of line and color that deflects or inhibits exact rendering. In Gillespie's still lifes generally, but particularly in Still Life with Eggplants, the objects are veiled by their own voluminous textures. The close-knit colors are weighted with a mineralized, night-garden light that exposes on the surfaces of the objects the physical energies of fruition and decay. In the orange-russet flesh of the squash sitting on its shelf, in the webworked purple sheen of the eggplants, we see released the changes that go on in the boggy undersides of the natural order. The actual making of the images sometimes partakes of the same changeful process. Gillespie has said that his paintings "go through a lot of turmoil and change." He said of a still life that he was working on in 1983: "It was going to end right under the edge of the table. That's where the painting ended in my mind, and I was just going to saw the wood at that point. Then, during the last month or so, I decided I wanted to make it bigger. It was a feeling that it's alive, you know, that the concept didn't prevent some spontaneous change from happening."

Gillespie possesses remarkable painterly skills, he exercises an unusual visionary imagination, and he works steadily (if very slowly) through his themes. His work seems all of a piece. I've passed over the trattoria interiors that he did in the late 1960s, which formally coincide with the shrine paintings, and the nudes and erotic paintings of the same period, a few of which were very controversial. (Two Women [1965], showing one woman in a robe, another nude in a frontal pose, was mutilated when it was exhibited. Seated Man and Girl [1965-67] shows a bare-chested man leaning toward a seminude woman standing in a doorway: the male figure began as a photograph of de Chirico sitting at his easel, wearing a shirt that Gillespie then painted out. Two Women also began as a photograph.) As for the public presence of his work, Gillespie is at some disadvantage. The small panel format he prefers does not recommend itself at a time dominated by physically large and flamboyant canvases. He may also have momentarily slipped the armature of critical formulas. He is a painter of brilliantly executed physical detail, but he is not a superrealist or a trompe l'oeil artist; his visionary landscapes and still lifes have little in common with the visionary mood of the Neo-expressionists, and he's not interested in narrative painting; he recapitulates old master facts but is neither a parodist nor a historical sentimentalist; and his classical rigor enacts high romantic themes. His career shows a coherence and sustained intensity that certainly rival the careers of younger artists who, for social, ideological, or commercial reasons, have drawn the attention that might be spread about to include a marginal, independent artist like Gillespie.