The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Early last season, it became apparent that in painting there was a movement away from the geometric, hard-edge, and minimal toward more lyrical, sensuous, romantic abstractions in colors which were softer and more vibrant. Painters were creating, in significant numbers, works that were visually “beautiful”–up to then, in the art world of the sixties, a dirty word. Though they were not going back to any previous style, these new young painters related to men who have been doing painting of a more painterly nature for twenty years or more–Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and others. The artist’s touch is always visible in this type of painting, even when the paintings are done with spray guns, sponges, or other objects. Surfaces are never anonymous in minimal paintings; they are delicately nuanced and often suggestive of cloudy void. These paintings all represent a distinct shift to an expressive interest. As Larry Aldrich researched this lyrical trend, he found many young artists whose paintings appealed to me so much that he was impelled to acquire many of them. The majority of the paintings in the Lyrical Abstraction show were created in 1969, and all were at the time a part of Larry Aldrich’s collection.