Pat Passlof: At the apex of a leap
Pat Passlof, Hawthorne, 1999, oil on linen, 87 x 75 inches
Contributed by Jason Andrew
Before the painter Pat Passlof, who died in 2011, would allow me to visit her in her Forsyth Street studio, she insisted that I join her and her Tai chi class held in the park across the street. “Sounds just like my sister!” exclaimed Aileen Passloff (Pat dropped the second “f” early in her career after discovering when signing a painting that she didn’t leave enough room for two), the noted dancer, choreographer and Bard College professor. “She was fiercely demanding about art and about everything else, really.”
It was exciting that the first painting I encountered at her current survey at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation was the very same one that Pat had set aside for a show I curated. Titled Hawthorne and made in 1999, it is a stunning example of her distinctive talent. It’s well-chronicled that she studied with Willem de Kooning and was married to Resnick, and parallels are certainly decipherable in this exhibition. But it was Pat who straddled the canvas and directed the brush. While she was deeply connected to those figures, she was also a frimly independent artist. At last it’s exciting to see a major survey all within an institution that Pat built.
Curated by the venerable Karen Wilkin, the show fills three floors of Foundation. On each floor there is a non-chronological hang mixing the decades and revealing the diverse directions of Passlof’s nearly eighty-year career. For instance, on the first floor, fifty years separate one of the earliest works on view, Gulf (1949) from Hawthorne (1999). For those unfamiliar with Passlof’s work, this discontinuous approach to a survey could prove disorienting, even jarring. I found it liberating. The strategy does require patience. But, as Passlof said, “Painting is inconvenient. It is slow and may require a whole life.”
On the second floor, an untitled painting from 1995 greets us at the top of the stairs. It’s colorful, depicting a period when Passlof recorded dreams and explored myths. The painting features two horses with riders and one lone horse within a gestural landscape built up from bottom to top with painterly yellows, greens, and blues. A bright orange cloud reflects a setting sun. Aileen recently told me that before their father married, he was an officer in the mounted police. “My father rode six horses at once. He could pickup a handkerchief with his teeth – the horses all along galloping.” Aileen didn’t take to riding as Pat did. Perhaps Pat was teasing out an autobiographical lament: she rides with their father and Aileen’s horse waits for her to climb on.
