Julian Lethbridge

OKAY = America! “Gestural abstraction as all-over is through and through a typically American kind of painting. To assert this may awaken unease or even alarm in the current period, probably the most chauvinistic in the history of our nation for many decades – were it not for the fact that the artist I am going to speak about was born in Ceylon and grew up in Great Britain. That is to say, he has been a New Yorker since 1972, which makes his – Julian Lethbridge’s – story a typically American, and that means a successful, immigration story. Apart from the native American population, „we“ all came from somewhere or other, for the most varied reasons and at the most varied times, in the course of which we have woven together, varied and marbled the culture of this country in a wondrous manner. In general, a broad spectrum of art after 1950 falls under the heading of „all-over-American-type painting“ – it is certainly a wider arc than was intended by Clement Greenberg, who coined the term – reaching from Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning to Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly. The common denominator lies concealed in the working principle that the amalgam of signs which evokes a more or less representational or poetic appearance – at times, as with Johns, an entirely prosaic one emerges from it – stands as a picture in its own right. (…) The visual and tactile density of the largest of these (more recent) pictures resembles nothing that was to be seen in Lethbridge’s earlier works. They may well mark a turning point in a body of work that has hitherto been subject to continuous, step-by-step change. For the moment, however, I am content to take Lethbridge’s current pictures for what they are rather than to interpret them as portents of what is to come. As the expression of an instinctively restrained sensibility, as reflective as it is disciplined but – in an entirely unapologetic manner – hedonistic, his canvases overwhelm and entice with a refinement that has a fascinating effect on all those who possess the requisite combination of patience and desire, and that is at the same time easily accessible. By and large and in the long run, these pictures are machines in constant motion whose whirring dynamism proclaims that all-over-American-type painting is a parenthesis in the history of modern art that is far from closed – that is, a task that continually awaits attention.” (Extract from the text by Robert Storr)