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Marvin Israel at Cheim & Read
Art in America, Nov, 2005 by Edward Leffingwell
Marvin Israel (1924-1984) enjoyed a considerable reputation as a painter, art director, photographer, graphic designer and teacher. From a series of works completed in the 1970s, the nine drawings that made up this macabre exhibition seem informed by the beasts of Goya's "Caprichos" and that artist's "Black Paintings," also the title of this show. In each of the drawings assembled here, Israel placed dogs, executed in grisaille, in angular passages of flooding light and the architecture of spare interiors expressively drawn in charcoal and other mediums on paper. Israel's canines, arranged in play, in rut or trussed up in rictus, have the feral look of jackals and were thought shocking at their first exhibition in 1974.
As art director at Seventeen magazine in the 1950s, Israel featured the work of Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand. At Harper's Bazaar in the early 1960s, he militated for the introduction of good art into the magazine, issuing an extended spread of Walker Evans's subway project and working with Larry Rivers, Milton Glaser and Diane Arbus. With Richard Avedon, Israel was responsible for the first frontal nude--an image of a countess--to appear in a major American fashion magazine, and he published a cover shot of a female impersonator. Such transgressions may have led to his termination in 1963. If the figures of Israel's paintings of the 1960s support some comparison to those of Richard Lindner and Tom Wesselmann, it is more his own work as a photographer that surfaces in his drawings of the 1970s, in an esthetic that involves prominent grain and a wide range of tone.
From 40 by 30 to 52 by 40 inches, these drawings were handsomely installed in Cheim & Read's towering front gallery, walls painted gray, and viewing was enhanced by the skylight above. A charcoal and oil on mat board, the sinister Untitled (Three Dogs) from 1978 opens to a slab of light illuminating a dog hanging by its back feet. Two others rest in the shadows, one beneath a table ornamented by what appears to be an item of discarded lingerie. A charcoal and pastel on paper, Hanging Dog (1973) consists of a canine suspended by a rope, caught in the light of an open door. A toppled stool and what appear to be small packages or a torn-up note sketch a bizarre scenario for suicide or an act of erotic asphyxiation. An untitled drawing of an abattoir (ca. 1973) depicts a pack of four dogs dangling by ropes from rings above, patched in the light of two unseen windows. Portraits of human nature in the darker and more personal zone, Israel's drawings occasionally recall the overtly political works of Leon Golub, but purged of even Golub's somber palette, and washed in the service of some unknown rage.
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