Art: Zen And Perceptual Hiccups

Along with Susan Rothenberg, Joel Shapiro, Neil Jenney and a few others, the painter Robert Moskowitz usually gets credited with bringing figurative imagery back into "advanced" art at the end of the 1970s. Whether you think this true depends on where you were looking. In fact, serious figurative art never went away -- it just got hammered out of fashion by minimalism, the last great American style, in whose reductive embrace Moskowitz grew up just as it was coming to an impasse. As for "advanced," who gives a damn anymore? But no matter: Moskowitz's current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (on view through April 24) contains some admirable paintings, even if the run-up to them is gradual.

Moskowitz, 54, was a slow developer, and has remained a decidedly uneven artist. But he never fell into the ghastly Warhol ethos that gelded so many talents in the '80s. The show starts with early collages involving paper bags and window blinds, pale elegant things haunted by Jasper Johns. It proceeds through a prolix series of paintings from the '60s that depict the corner of an imaginary "ideal" and utterly banal room with no furniture in it, done in very close-valued colors that turn the image into a benign parody of Ad Reinhardt's black paintings. Odd little signs -- a blurt of pigment here, a "Have a Nice Day" face there -- float in front of the room. You get the impression that Moskowitz, who has been a Zen student most of his adult life, is repeating a sort of koan without giving the slightest clue to its meaning.

The same mild frustration is built into his even more spaced-out images from the '70s, in which legible but quite unrelated signs for things float on a field of color in a way that very distantly recalls Miro. Cadillac/Chopsticks, 1975, is just what it says: the rear-half profile of a '60s Caddy, bulbous with fins, and in the lower right a red X depicting a pair of chopsticks. Nothing else. One is not much helped by the otherwise useful catalog essay of Ned Rifkin, to whom, it seems, Moskowitz "revealed that the Cadillac might represent Hollywood glamour and the car culture of the West Coast, while the chopsticks could allude to a New Yorker's love of Chinese food." No kidding. This, you could say, looks like art history at the end of its rope.

Things firm up toward the '80s. The picture that changed Moskowitz's style was Swimmer, 1977, a canvas bearing the head and raised arm of a figure in the sea. This figure is quite an abstract form, and it is embedded, heraldically, in a dark field of Prussian blue. From now on Moskowitz's work would look for strong, immediately recognizable icons that were submerged into abstraction by their elaborate, nondescriptive surfaces. They combine frankness of silhouette with loss of detail, and the effect is mysterious and poignant.