Albert Kresch

© Albert Kresch
Horizontal Landscape

Do yourself a favor and see this show. Albert Kresch is a painter's painter, almost indecently reticent about showing his work over the years, so that at the age of 79 he is just getting some recognition. Last Spring he had a small retrospective at the Center for Figurative Painting. Now this.

Born on July 4, 1922, in Scranton PA, Mr. Kresch came to New York and studied with Hans Hoffmann during the early 1940s. He showed at the first artists' co-operative gallery in the city, the Jane Street Gallery, and then taught for many years. He was in the circle of figurative painters that included Leland Bell, Louia Mattiasdottir, Nell Blaine and Robert de Niro, Sr., and you see these friendships in the pictures here.

There are about 35 landscapes, most of them are very small and totally delectable, all recently painted. They are scenes of Maine, Nova Scotia and the Catskills. The style can put you in mind of Ryder and Derain.

The surface is dry, thickly built up, with color carrying the expressive weight. Colors are bright, contrasting jolts of yellow, blue, orange and red, in jazzily geometric, off-kilter configurations. The scenes are sweetly modest, closely observed and loving evocations of summer and fall.

A 1979 poem by Denise Levertov, written for Mr. Kresch, describes how "once-cold arbitrary violet/reveals itself as radiance, a defining halo / and discovered / geometries in interplay/ show in their harvest time.&; That's right. These are heavenly little paintings.

Michael Kimmelman
-- reprinted from
The New York Times

© Albert Kresch
Catskills Landscape

The exhibition was on view at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, New York, NY 10021.

by Michael Kimmelman ©