3 Americans in Paris Review

8/11/2019 3 Americans in Paris Review

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Trois Amricaines Paris

John Levee

Joe Downing

John Franklin Koenig

Galerie 53 and Galeria Route

53, rue de Seine 75006

September 18th

October 25th

, 2014

Published at Hyperallergic.com as

Three Americans Find Leeway in Postwar Paris

http://hyperallergic.com/154011/three-americans-find-leeway-in-midcentury-paris/

The first thing I noticed was that the work exemplifies that being outside of ones own

American system, yet not really within the French system, is tremendously liberating for

an artist.

Galerie 53 and Galeria Route, two side-by-side galleries in Saint-Germain-des-Prs, have

joined together to mount an historically interesting exhibition of abstract paintings titled

Trois Amricaines Paris (Three Americans in Paris). This show celebrates the

accomplishments of three American abstractionists in Paris who were inspired by the city

as well as by Abstarct Expressionism. The artists themselves, their experiences and

discoveries are an important element of this spirited exhibition.

All three of these Francophile American painters contributed to the liberation of France

and chose to live in the country they had helped liberate. In the immediate postwar

period, receiving scholarships from the GI Bill and revisiting liberated France, they all

decided to settle and paint there. Which is understandable, as since the late 19th century

American artists, such as Mary Cassatt and, much later, Man Ray and Alexander Calder

were drawn to Paris to work. Indeed after World War II, Paris was a center of importance

for Joan Mitchell, Ellsworth Kelly, Peter Saul, Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe, Norman


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Bluhm, David Budd and the three expatriate American painters presented here: John

Levee, John Franklin Koenig and Joe Downing.

John Levee (born 1924 and the only living artist in the show) took a master degree in

philosophy from UCLA before becoming an aviator in WWII. Following the war he

decided to stay to work as a painter in Montparnasse, after studying at Acadmie Julian.

John Levee, "September III" (1957) oil, 150x150 cm


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John Levee, "Composition" (1954) oil, 195x130cm


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Levee is a magnificent painter of force and guts and forthrightness. He exhibits a talent

for gravitas here with strong gestures rendered in blacks and understated colors, as well

as a penchant for impasto surfaces. Intense in passionate emotions, the painters muted

hues have a deeply moving, arousing deportment, such as in his "September III" (1957).

Its charcoal blacks, grays and greens explode on an idiosyncratic gray-and-blue ground

that opens up more peacefully to the right. It is a painting dense with explosions and

growth.


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With the furious loose brushwork and roughened surface of "Composition" (1961), his

straightforward accomplishments are not to be denied. This hot off-hand elegant painting

expands the field of the Abstract Expressionists, continuing their use paint as a physical

thing. Even in the suggestive waving thicket of its surface, we still see the AbEx mandate

that we look at paint simply as paint, so that the surface is neither given to narration nor

to intellectual content.


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Joe Downing, "Abstract Composition" (1964) oil, 92x73cm


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Joe Downing, "Abstract Composition" (1970) oil, 130x97cm


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Joe Downing, "Recall" (1975) oil, 46x55cm

Joe Downing, (1925-2007) also participated in the Second World War, where he served

as an artillery observer assigned to a unit that landed at Normandy soon after D-Day. He

then studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to France in 1950, living in

Paris and Menerbes until his death. Downing also left us several books of his poetry.

Joes surfaces, such as in the marvelous "Abstract Composition" (1970) and "Recall"

(1975) are much smoother and cooler than Levees, by which he achieves a delightful

form of lyrical abstraction that deserves acknowledgment superior to what he has

received until now. The works exquisite complex surfaces, as seen here, should do that,

as in them I detected a vision of an open system of free-floating signifiers altogether

fitting to the present-day digital atmosphere. With Yellow Abstraction (1965),

Downing exhibits a delightfully light touch of a capricious spirit, that called to mind my

penchant for whimsy.


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Joe Downing, "Yellow abstraction" (1965) oil,92x73cm

John Franklin Koenig (1924 - 2008) was also in the war and indeed sustained a wound.

After recovering with the help of studying art, he too moved Paris, working at the

bookstore of Jean-Robert Arnaud, who became his longstanding professional and

personal partner. In 1950 the two opened the Galerie Arnaud, and in 1955 began

publication of the art review Ciamise, dedicated to non-figurative art.


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John Franklin Koenig, "Le tombeau de Belial" (1960) oil, 110x110cm

The flowing surface of Koenigs painting "Le tombeau de Belial" (1960) has something

of the unfathomable velvetiness of intimacy and hesitancy. It is subtly calibrated,

suggesting doubt as well as strength, thus uncertainty through perhaps premeditated

clumsiness. It allowed me to see the artist slowly make up his mind and then shift, like

the sea. As we see with "5,4,3" (1969), his painterly gifts included experimentation with

subtle color and complex but contained marks in rather original and very pleasing ways.


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John Franklin Koenig, "5,4,3" (1969) oil, 120x240cm

All told, the quality and diversity of this exhibition demonstrates the power of abstraction

to suggest musical composition. And it reaffirms that special thing Americans in Paris

often feel (see, for example, the French book Trois Amricaines Parisabout Jacqueline

Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis). There is something unique about

how artists relate to each other in Paris, and to the people who write about art, and to the

few people who buy art here. It is about that wonderful space of being not really in nor

not really out: the space of leeway.

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3 Americans in Paris Review