PoN: What to do with Nathan Oliveira?

Up until now I've written about artists that I think should have been included in Kirk Varnedoe's Pictures of Nothing but weren't -- artists who don't fit Varnedoe's apparently favored mostly white, male, NYCers. But this post is about an artist I've had a hard time knowing what to do with: Nathan Oliveira.

For about a decade in the late 1950s and '60s, Oliveira made some of the most commanding, haunting, mysterious paintings in America. (I wrote about Oliveira's retrospective in 2003.) He was a major American painter: Oliveira was included in Peter Selz's New Images of Man show, for example.

After that show, MoMA bought one of Oliveira's paintings, 1959's Standing Man with Stick. It's a fascinating image, an on-canvas battle between representation and abstraction played out directly on a suggested figure. You can't see it from this rather dreadful, over-bright, something's-screwy-here image (the only one I could find, sorry), but that paint on the figure is squeezed directly out of the tube onto a rough outline of a figure. Oliveira mashed it around, palette-kniffed it and pinched it into shape. It's a little oil paint sculpture right in the middle (literally) of the canvas. Standing Man is one of my 15 favorite paintings of the post-war era. Whenever Jerry Saltz writes about how MoMA gives us only the greatest hits of modern art and none of the depth, I think first of Standing Man with Stick.

This is how I wrote about Oliveira's figures for Artnet:

There is a temptation to see a certain Goldwater conservatism in these early Oliveiras: one man, liberty, individualism victorious! But that's not quite right -- these paintings are too stark to evoke thoughts of triumph. Instead of seeing the power of one man, these paintings make me wonder if one man has power.

Over and over again, Oliveira shows us a person, alone, suspended against a streaked haze. These figures are rarely tied to anything more substantial than a chair; instead they hover against an abstract background. The canvases are marked with brushwork, but the figures are the product of hands-on exertion: They are pinched, rubbed, molded, knifed, scratched out and scratched in. If there is individual triumph here, it is of the action-painter type, the creator conquering his canvas, his paints, his subject.

But after a ten-year period during which he made these figures, Oliveira gave them up and wandered into the wilderness of hunting-lodge art. Which makes it harder for us to know what to do with him. I don't know that Varnedoe should have included Oliveira, but when he didn't even mention Richard Diebenkorn or David Park (and when Clyfford Still gets only one dismissive paragraph), I know Oliveira never had a shot.