Signs of Anxiety

By ROBERT HUGHES

Various American painters rode to fame in the 1980s, and the shake-out that is going on in the wake of that binge has been hard on most of them. Not on Susan Rothenberg, however. Her present retrospective of paintings and drawings, 20 years' worth of work -- it was organized by curator Michael Auping for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and is now at / the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington -- only confirms one's impression of the nerviness, durability and occasional brilliance of her development, and of the psychological integrity behind the twists and turns of her style.

Rothenberg first became noticed in New York in the mid-1970s, with a series of paintings that depicted -- of all things -- horses. Despite her other merits, she is no George Stubbs, and her horses were of a generic cast, crude silhouettes with a certain amount of texture and internal patterning but no modeling, with heads like wombats' and hooves of clay. The surprise that they occasioned at the time came less from their fidelity to the equine form than from the fact that they were there on canvas at all.

Rothenberg did her first horse, a pallid and watery sketch, in 1973, and it is hard nowadays to remember what an unyielding prejudice against any kind of hand-painted figuration existed in New York 20 years ago. Abstract art -- in particular its last whole-cloth style, Minimalism -- had done away with all that. It had also shaped artists' expectations about format: split and abutted canvases, "primary" X shapes, the whole pictorial rhetoric of the canvas as object.

And then, awkwardly and unexpectedly, with Rothenberg's gee-gees leading the field, figures started recolonizing the bare stage. Partly they did so in response to performance art, which had absorbed the body images that abstraction had driven out of painting. (Trained as a dancer, Rothenberg tried performance herself in the early '70s.) Partly it was just out of inarticulate need -- the need to reconnect with the world, through self-description that didn't exclude pathos. Auping is certainly right in seeing the horses as disguised self-portraits, or at any rate as "presences" that stood in for human presence.

The horse images were embedded in a lush, forceful and nuanced paint surface that -- as in Cabin Fever, 1976 -- could be very handsome indeed. They included Minimalist signs, X's and quarterings, which made them seem more heraldic than natural. (Though the vertical split line that bisects Cabin Fever might be read as the finish post at the end of a horse race, it's probably just a relic of Minimalist style.) The opposites didn't amalgamate well. As Rothenberg herself put it, "My formalist side was denying my content side." And so "I began tearing it ((the horse)) apart to find out what it meant."

Literally "tearing it apart." Rothenberg's paintings over the next few years were all about dismemberment, blockage and fright. She is one of the younger artists who took heart from Philip Guston: in the early '70s, Guston, an abstract painter for years, had returned to the figure with a controversial set of seriocomic paintings of Ku Klux Klansmen, which laid the ground for his formidable "late" style and often featured stray boots, feet and arms.

In the same spirit, but without the levity, Rothenberg started butchering her horse image: haunches, fetlocks and heads scattered on the ground of the canvas, with no gore but a lot of implied anxiety. Most of them started from small doodles, envelope-size, and the large paintings retain the cryptic and improvised look of drawings; in fact, since so much of Rothenberg's work is about linear figure and ground, it is hard to say where drawing leaves off and painting begins: for her, a drawing is something on paper, a painting something on canvas, and that's that. Her charcoal drawings, done with a fiercely scrubbed, hairy line that broadens out into areas of velvety black, are often of great intensity and beauty -- so much so that their initial attack sometimes appears diffused when they are taken up to canvas size.

But not often, and particularly not in the paintings from 1979 on, when glimpses of the human face and body start appearing in Rothenberg's work. These are bluntly autobiographical, fragments of depression that crunch a lot of extreme feeling into a very small figurative compass. They are miserable figuration, sparse in detail, almost resentfully so, but piercing in their plainness. They bear no relation at all to the general run of '80s Neo- Expressionism, which was overblown, self-dramatizing and almost industrially repetitive.

Instead they reach back to the earlier and more authentic anxieties of Alberto Giacometti. Some depict vomiting heads, which, as Rothenberg puts it in her catalog interview with Auping, were "divorce images," conveying "a sense of something threatening, like a stick in the throat . . . the whole choked-up mess of separating from someone you care for and a child being involved." Her combined face-hand images, like Red Head, 1980-81, are particularly strong, perhaps because they so vividly combine a sign for openness and approach (the human countenance) with one for rejection or warding off (the open palm thrusting one's gaze away, or the threatening closed fist). But what underwrites these pictographs, and raises them above the level of emotional complaint, is the messy beauty of the paint surface -- the churned white ground like dirty milk, the obsessed play of nuance within the thick lines.

Generally, Rothenberg seems to be at her best in paintings that combine a single image with anxious focus. In the later '80s she became preoccupied with a different, atmospheric style of painting and images of dancers (including one of her aesthetic heroes, the painter Piet Mondrian, imagined solemnly doing the fox-trot with a Rothenberg-like partner). In their cold, flickering, indistinct light, one catches long-distance echoes of Impressionism and of the sequential-position photography that was once copied by the Italian Futurists. In these, as in the drawings from this period, form is extremely provisional -- the shape of a body teetering on a bicycle, for instance, emerges out of a kind of fog produced by approximate lines, each an attempt to fix some aspect of that shape.

Rothenberg's latest work, done since she moved to New Mexico, is even more diffuse than these and rarely seems to cohere well -- apart from a change in technique (she uses a palette knife now, after watching local workers troweling adobe), she has not yet figured out how to deal with that immense landscape. But these are early days, and Rothenberg has a gift for mulling over diffuse impressions and suddenly pulling them together in one piercing image of near hieroglyphic force. A recent example is Blue U-Turn, 1989: an androgynous body, huge in scale and bent into an inverted arch, vibrant with sparkles and detonations of cobalt and ultramarine, swimming in deep marine space. It seems powerful and benign, dispelling the angst of her earlier work. It transcends Expressionism. Only a major talent could have produced it.