Howard Kanovitz essays about the artist

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nothing of this eye-provoking interaction between homogeneous and mutually contradictory realities. They nevertheless already reflected differentiating and diverging levels of reality. These works show the artist in a completely different relationship to the world -a completely different painter. In his almost abstract yet more figurative expressionist style of this period, Kanovitz only thematically approaches his immediate environment and day-to-day life. "Four A.M. Eastern Standard Time," painted in 1956 (plate, p. 10) depicts an early-morning jam session in Kanovitz's Lower East Side loft. The scene is captured in a free, spontaneous improvisation. The eye needs some time before it can recognize the room or any particular details, until it grasps, for example, that the background to the left of the jazz band includes a big studio window opening to a view of the neighborhood cityscape in the early hours before dawn. Kanovitz paints himself and his friends on this canvas, not as an anecdotal portrait but as an atmosphere and mood of a free, unselfconscious, youthful group. In his contribution to the present catalog, Michael Florescu has proposed that the self-portrait which Kanovitz has placed on the left-hand edge of the group represents him simultaneously as player and observer. Until the early 1950s the painter Kanovitz was an accomplished jazz musician. He was introduced to art and then to art school by a member of his own band in the late 1940s. He was close to concluding this chapter of his life when in 1956 he planned an extended European trip to see the art of the old masters in Rome, Florence, and Paris. With this painting he bids an almost sentimental farewell to his period as a jazz trombonist. The palette limits itself to a rare confrontation and interplay of two colors, red and blue, which vibrate with life. But despite the boisterousness of the colors, which might be appropriate to the jam

4 AM Eastern Time

session theme, he freezes this nocturnal music-making in an almost melancholy stillness. He remains introspective, despite all the tumultuousness of the brushwork reflecting his uprooted inner life. The artist tries to render feelings of joy that are suffused with a powerful yearning for life, directness, and unobstructed openness. That explains the spontaneous brushwork, which does not aim at a kind of art that is locked into a static, hermetic, stable order. Instead, it insists on being a direct slice of life, a notation of the present moment, guided only by feeling. One theme is already present in the foreground that will preoccupy Kanovitz again and again -that is the confrontation between inner and outer worlds. His handling of the theme aims to evince internal through external reality and thereby define its relations to the world. In these early paintings he achieves this by presenting an emotionally charged interpretation of figures and objects and an expressionistic exaggeration of their external form. At the same time, the painting is characterized as an ordinary everyday occurrence. But because it is emotionally charged, the unconscious and subconscious is suspended in the content. The psychological aspect of Howard Kanovitz's art is discernibly related to the manner of his brushwork. Almost 25 years later, he will formulate the same problem in a completely different way. Then, through his use of photography, everyday objects will be rendered in a state of alienation, but so precisely rendered that their loss of physical presence becomes visually tangible as they become an almost abstract image of themselves. Simultaneously, the concept of the object takes over the object itself. For Kanovitz it is only in this contradiction that he finds it possible to make the life around us intelligible by means of images. Thus, the nature of the subjectivity with which objects are charged in