Odd Art Couples by Donald Kuspit

 Claudia Alvarez, Smoker, 2018, Glazed Ceramics, 28 x 10 x 9 in. 

By DONALD KUSPIT December 5th, 2025

            They’re legally and presumably happily married—why else would they exhibit their art together in the grand, celebratory space of the gallery named for the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in New York’s Rockland County Center For The Arts—especially because it suggests that they have nothing in common?  For their works are radically different—altogether incommensurate, which may say nothing about the state or character of their relationship, but says a lot about the pluralism that prevails in the art world—the abundance of ambitiously complex and subtle and at odds works.  Claudia Alvarez’s exquisite glazed stoneware, particularly her Lavender, Red, and Black versions of Memory of a Portrait, all wonderfully fresh and insightful, are masterpieces of perception as well as freshly beautiful.  Made in 2025, like virtually all the works in the exhibition, it testifies to the fact that insightful originality is not the monopoly of any mode of art.  Her husband Terry Rosenberg’s paintings are vigorous, turbulent, impassioned abstractions, one of which bears his wife’s name as its title, although altogether antithetical to his wife’s solemn, sturdy, even stoic portraits, concentrated rather than flamboyantly and provocatively aggressively in your face, like Rosenberg’s manic paintings.

Terry Rosenberg, Juliette, 2019, oil on canvas, 87 x 76 inches

            The works of the second couple, Jennifer Coates and David Humphrey, are even more completely at odds:  Coates’ abstract naturalism and Humphrey’s neo-surrealism are irreconcilable.  “Neo” because Humphrey is self-conscious about being surreal and irrational, that is, absurd and dreamlike, even oddly demented—“the artist’s impulse control is non-existent” Humphrey wrote, the lack of impulse control a sign of insanity.  Simulated insanity has always been an ambition of surrealism, and Humphrey simulates it with a brilliant vengeance.  Free-floating lines, oddly metamorphosizing shapes, a self-portrait of the artist with his eyes closed as though in inspired inwardness, all converge to form an incoherent whole, suggesting the dream-like absurdity of the artist’s self-contemplation, not to say of his relationship with and peculiar indifference to the world outside him, in comparison to the world of forms generated by his creative fantasy.  Jennifer Coates’ lyric abstractions of nature, some densely packed with images of natural growth, are masterpieces of lyric abstraction, their often wide-eyed vistas of nature altogether at odds with Humphrey’s introspective delusions, peculiarly schizophrenic.

Jennifer Coates, Leopard Attack, 2022, 16 x 20 inches, acrylic and spray paint on canvas.

David Humphrey, Rear view, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 44 x 54 inches
 

            Michael Zansky’s huge masterpiece of grotesque monsters, intimidating by reason of their form and size and predatory character—the work is a sort of satanic altar, the epic creatures are dragons no Saint George can slay, gargoyles on a cathedral of devilish art, not to say the devil triumphant—is altogether at odds with Pam Marchin’s exquisite, delicate, lyric constructions, linear abstractions meandering in space even as they remain self-contained, conveying a delicate autonomy and subtle spirituality altogether at odds with Zansky’s blasphemous demonic, not to say viciously sinister work.

What are we to make of these male masterpieces—ruthlessly aggressive and peculiarly subversive, whatever their theme—and female masterpieces, empathically inviting rather than aggressively off-putting, works that seem to arise from and convey love for their material medium and theme—Alvarez’s clay and faces, Coates’ paint and nature, Marchin’s wire and “twittering forms,” to use Paul Klee’s term—in contrast to works that seem deliberately  perverse, the “erotic form of hatred,” to allude to the psychoanalytic idea of perversion.  Zansky’s monsters epitomize hatred, Humphrey’s oddly random, incoherent work seems fraught with malaise, Rosenberg’s storm and stress painting signals nothing.  They are all masterpieces of their kind, but what they have mastered is alienation.  Alvarez’s portrait busts are full of empathy, Coates’ nature is alive with hope, Marchin’s lyric sculptural abstractions convey joie de vivre. 

Michael Zansky, Ecliptic 0600, 2018, 40 x 32 in

The exhibition is what in the Italian Renaissance was called a paragone, that is a comparison of the relative merits of painting and sculpture, more broadly of different artists, their works seemingly completely incompatible, with one supposedly superior to the other.  When Donald Judd dismissed Picasso’s and Baselitz’s figurative work as inferior to his purely abstract art, and when Clement Greenberg said figurative art was beside the aesthetic and creative point of abstract art—it was impossible to paint a figure in the age of abstraction, he declared—they were engaged in the cruel practice of paragone.  The officially first paragone was the competition—dare one say conflict?—between Leonardo and Michelangelo, both commissioned in 1504 to paint a mural on opposite walls of the Council Hall of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio.  Appropriately, since a paragone is a kind of battle, Leonardo was to paint the Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo was to paint the Battle of Cascina.  Trivializing Leonardo’s painting, Michelangelo said “he paints men like gods, but they look like puppets.”  Leonardo dismissed Michelangelo’s figures as “unfinished chalk sketches,” and mockingly declared that emphasizing muscles for their own sake made the figures look like bags of walnuts.  It has been argued that the paragone between Leonardo and Michelangelo, in which dismissively mocks the other, bespeaks the paragone between color and line, implying not simply their incompatibility but fundamental irreconcilability.  One can supposedly be a serious master only in one but never in the other, implying there are fundamentally different kinds of artist and art.

Wittingly or unwittingly, comparing the works of male and female artists—officially compatible, as their marriage affirms--is implicitly a paragone, as the serious difference—dare one say incompatibility and individuality—of their works makes conspicuously clear.  I have no idea of what the personal relationship of any of the couples is like, but one can hardly imagine that their works belong together.  The exhibition is reflective of the general paragone of men and women that informs and shapes contemporary society.  The exhibition also confirms the strangeness of the marital dialectical relationship, for it is both positive and negative, supportive of the creativity of each partner even as the art of each is implicitly critical of the art of the other.