Leon Berkowitz at Edison Place

The Washington Color School put the nation's capital on the art map, and although Leon Berkowitz (1911-1987) emphatically denied being part of it, one cannot help placing him there. Not only did the nascent group cluster around the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts, which he co-founded in 1945, but the subsequent paths of these artists moved collectively through Abstract Exressionism to a breakout color purity. Small wonder that D.C.'s "ColorField.remix" project this past summer of museum and gallery shows underscoring this heritage included a Berkowitz career overview at the Edison Place Gallery. Titled "Looking into Color: The Paintings of Leon Berkowitz," it was organized by the Washington Arts Museum, an institution with a high regard for homegrown art and artists.

Thirty-plus paintings revealed Berkowitz's fascinating artistic journey, beginning in 1953 with a rather overwrought, Gauguinesque self-portrait and curious Fauve portraits of color-schoolers-to-be Morris Louis and Tom Downing. The Phillips Collection esthetic of light-saturated color is at work here. But Enter (Spain), 1957, painted soon after Berkowitz started a 10-year sabbatical abroad, shows the spell of Willem de Kooning--in fact it could be a de Kooning--who had taught with Berkowitz at the Workshop. The next works, in the spirit of Diebenkorn's "Berkeley" series, are broad, grayish, abstract landscapes of Wales from 1962-63, when the artist spent time there.

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In 1965, Berkowitz switches to a softly geometric Op-Minimalist style, but then, presumably as a result of a Jerusalem sojourn, hits us with sizzling red, green and black horizon lines on a tipped-back rectangle, suggesting a desert sunset. During the late 1960s, after Berkowitz resettled in Washington, his works continue in the geometric, hot color mode, with traces of Barnett Newman's zips, Louis's color bleed-ins and, more distractingly, Gene Davis's stripes.

But who cares? All of a sudden, in the 1970s, Berkowitz comes into his own. In some 15 examples, thin borders of high-octane color meld into a large, surging, central color field; it's hard to believe that so many colors exist, but Berkowitz finds and masterfully marries them. What's more, the works show no sign of the artist's hand, since he adopted a technique of applying ultra-diluted paint to the canvas through rice paper (conservation issues, alas, plague certain works as a result). Berkowitz allows the object to be the atmosphere. A case in point: five portal-sized paintings from the "7 Lights" series of 1975 on one wall, which shared a room with equally nuanced single abstractions. This was an achingly beautiful, godly, sublime space--more like a James Turrell light environment than a gallery of paintings. What a shame the Berkowitz show had to close.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning