Artwork Title: Twin Trees

Twin Trees, 1963

Albert York

Artwork Title: Twin TreesArtwork Title: Twin Trees
... to the right hangs the chilling pair of landscape studies, the very green Landscape with Two Trees and River and the very brown Twin Trees. Both offer subdued and charged looks not only at the landscape but at the kind of open-air painting artists used to gather in the fields of southern France and the Hudson Valley to do. (http://artseditor.com/site/domesticated-nature/) The small, boxy and wholly idiosyncratic paintings of Albert York, have garnered the artist a coterie of admirers so unobtrusive in their fervor as to constitute the most genteel of cults. If "cult" seems too strong a word, one might consider the peculiar figure the artist cuts. Reclusive, enigmatic and, one imagines, more than a little stubborn, Mr. York was the furthest thing from a careerist one could imagine: He worked slowly and didn't let a picture out of the studio since 1992. Mr. York's allure can, in part, be traced to the integrity of his contradictions. He was solitary if not as constrained as a folk artist, and as cultured if not as cosmopolitan as his collectors and admirers. Haunting and eccentric, Mr. York's depictions of forests, flowers, damsels and Indian chiefs meld the mythic, the biblical and the densely personal. Putting brush to canvas with a torpid ease, Mr. York infuses every pat, slur and mottle of oil paint with consequence. (This accounts for his high standing among painters.) A somber sfumato envelops the work from the 1960's, imbuing it with a dire, perhaps even repentant nostalgia. Pictures of a more recent vintage trade the richly atmospheric for the impenetrably symbolic-their sign-like mysteries don't entrance so much as rebuff. Nonetheless, Mr. York was, in his own dourly indelible manner, a treasure. He never underwent a temperamental makeover to start cranking them out like Robert Rauschenberg. The Davis & Langdale gallery is about as good an opportunity as we're likely to have any time soon to puzzle over Mr. York's homely, humble and mesmerizing pictures. (http://visualvamp.blogspot.nl/2009/11/albert-york-jackies-favorite-reclusive.html) ...Rarely measuring more than 12 inches on a side, Mr. York’s paintings evoke a world in which time and art seem to stand still or even move backward through history. His trees had the symmetry of those in Renaissance paintings. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/nyregion/01york.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=albert york obituary&st=cse)
Uploaded on Apr 19, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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