RON

ALD

BLAD

ENPA

INTIN

G 19

55

-196

2

cover: Untitled (black painting)oil on canvas96 x 72 inches

left: Two Yellow Arms, c. 1957-59oil on wood panel22 x 14 inches

below: White, Blue, Green and Red all: Untitled, ca. 1960-61 oil on masonite, 48 x 36 inches.

In the past twenty-five years, since a cache of some thirty-five canvases and panels was discovered behind a wall in his studio that Bladen built in 1978 to seal them from sight, a legend has grown about his New York pictures.

Although not so formally confident looking as the sculptures, like them, his paintings are saturated with the feeling that what is there is what he most wanted to see. There were no sidetracks. Bladen’s conviction was fueled by an array of epiphany moments. He once told his longtime companion, Connie Reyes, of standing high on Partington Ridge at Big Sur sometime in the 1940s, stretching out his arms and seeing his shadow spread on clouds below. Later he would speak of wanting to place a sculpture on a mountaintop so that its reflection would be similarly cast. His work can be seen as bringing together high-pitched sensations of coastal landscape experienced in both the Pacific Northwest, where he grew up, and California, where he lived as a young man, as well as of the spatial dynamism he came to know in New York.

Success as a marker of phenomenal free-standing objects may have effectively blotted out from critical memory his long career as a painter. But Bladen, for his part, seems to have followed a primary vision through the baffles of many contiguous styles and changes of me-

dia, each marked by his off combination of simmering originality and quick resolve. (That he insisted on neither signing nor dating his works, and only acquiesced to titling them if a friend’s suggestion struck his fancy, prob-ably signifies his attunement to a fundamen-tal theme-as constant as it was unnameable.) The revelatory glimmers he eventually distilled into highly simplified instances of what he called “space, dramatic relationships, excite-ment” led him to cloak his inmost aspirations in secrecy. But those close to him knew the stakes involved: as Al Held has said, “It was always there––the mystical inscape, and a fierce sense of the heroic.” According to Bill Jensen, who helped build his sculptural instal-lation in the 1970s and early 1980s, Bladen worked “like rowing a boat across the ocean-he knew his directions internally.”

Bladen’s first New York pictures show broad, buttery hints of landscape: some suggest peninsular outcroppings seen from above; others plunge the eye amid frontally massed tendrils or trails. A ruined canvas from around 1957 has gobs of paint so

PAINTING 1955-1962

heavy that they sagged on the fabric and caused it to tear away from the stretcher bar at the top; from then on, Bladen used only Masonite or plywood panels. His paint, too, increased in density: having blended powdered pigments with small portions of stand oil on a work table, he would haul the mixture with masonry trowels or lengths of two-by-fours and then knead or pound the colors to make them adhere. He told Irving Sandler: “I liked the strength that was in it….the heaviness. I also liked the blocky feeling you could get by just throwing it up there. I even hammered some of it on––it was so hard.” So that the piled colors would bind together well, he eventually took care to work

them wet-on-wet in single sessions. Thus, the final, lucent “mound” paintings, with their gritty concretions protruding-sometimes as much as four inches-amid stucco or froth-like expanses, were painted very fast, starting at the top and finishing, he said, at the bottom, “like pulling down a window shade.”

Bill Berkson

The present text is excerpted from “Ronald Bladen: Early and Late” in the catalogue accompanying the 1990 exhibition of that name, curated by Bill Berkson for the San Francisco Museum of Art.

April 19 – May 25, 2012

525 West 26th StreetNew York NY 10001212.695.0164www.lorettahoward.com

opposite: Japanese, c. 1956-59dry pigment and oil on masonite48 x 231/2 inches

above: Space Landscape, c. 1957-59oil on masonite191/4 x 141/4 inches

also on veiw

RONALD BLADEN

IN CONTEXT

Works on paper by

Carl Andre

Stephen Antonakos

Larry Bell

Bill Bollinger

John Chamberlain

Tom Doyle

Walter De Maria

Mark di Suvero

Michael Goldberg

Robert Grosvenor

Eva Hesse

Al Held

Dan Flavin

Donald Judd

Sol Le Witt

Robert Morris

Forrest Myers

Robert Murray

Salvatore Romano

Richard Serra

Robert Smithson

Tony Smith

David Smith

Sylvia Stone

George Sugarman

Anne Truitt

David von Schlegell

Dorothea Rockburne

Connie Reyes

Richard Van Buren

Ruth Vollmer