John

Dubrow

Animating Warmth
By Roger Kimball
The Spectator
September 19, 1998

In the second act of The Tempest, when the King’s shipwrecked party awakes to find itself on Prospero’s island, there is a memorable exchange between the cheerful old counsellor Gonzalo and the rascals Sebastian and Antonio:

Gonzalo: How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green!
Antonio: The ground indeed is tawny.
Sebastian: With an eye of green in it.
Antonio: He misses not much.
Sebastian: No; he doth but mistake the truth totally.

Among other things, this vignette suggests that the island appears differently to different people: lush and welcoming to the mild Gonzalo, desiccated and unwelcoming to his unpleasant companions.

I thought of this passage when looking at John Dubrow’s panoramic views of Manhattan, a handful of which, along with a half-dozen other pictures by the artist, are on view at Salander-O’Reilly. Painted from temporary studios on the 85th and 91st stories of the World Trade Center, these pictures present the crowded metropolis bathed in a beneficent light.

The 40-year-old Dubrow has managed to impart an unusual spaciousness and amplitude to these cityscapes. Seen from his cyrics at the southern tip of the island, Manhattan vibrates with a cheerfulness most of us would associate more with San Francisco, where Dubrow studied, than New York. Despite their almost aerial perspective his cityscapes do not so much look down upon as forward to their subject. In a view looking north, the uncluttered band of sky at the horizon helps to open up the picture, while patches of green and russet in the foreground humanise or ‘naturalise’ the packed intensity of the urban scene. The warm, southwesterly light in which Dubrow has swathed the city infused the picture with a solicitous clarity and repose. This is recognizably Manhattan – the Empire State Building, for example, rises up, a familiar beacon, anchoring the reticulated quilt of architecture that is unfolded before it – but it is Manhattan made habitable, almost peaceful, by generous eyes.

Dubrow communicates a very different feeling in a view looking south over the harbour and, glittering in the right middle distance, the Statue of Liberty. In the foreground, two clutches of buildings stand divided by the grey strip of an almost deserted thoroughfare that terminates at Manhattan’s tip. The early light and sharper shadows impart an almost Hopperesque aura to the picture, a sense of minor desolation only partly tempered by the radiant belt of sky at the top of the picture plane. This is a scene of suspended possibilities and lonely habitation; the only movement is the white trail of ferry steaming homeward across the green-grey-blue wash of the limitless bay. The poignancy of that gash of white lies in the distance and unreachableness of the human purposes it conveys.

Dubrow has a special aptitude for enlisting perspective to his aesthetic ends. He is particularly adroit at manipulating vast distances without sacrificing the pulse of lived-in space. While his cityscapes with their lofty, bird’s-eye views are perhaps his most distinctive pictures, the most ambitious work on view at Salander-O’Reilly is undoubtedly the huge 7 by 14-ft depiction of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. In this picture, the perspective is more or less eye level. But here, too, a vanishing distance plays a critical role in organizing the picture’s space and arranging the figures that populate the canvas in graduated zones of intimacy. ‘Prospect Park’, which Dubrow has laboured over on and off again for four years, is a remarkable painting. Its obvious compositional allusions to Seurat’s ‘Grande Jatte’ adds an element of art-historical sophistication to the rus in urbe theme of the painting. Dubrow’s achievement here is twofold. He has managed to communicate a sense of absolute contemporaneity while maintaining a high level of visual decorousness. He has also managed to combine a vivid sense of local activity – especially among the several canine figures disporting themselves in the park – with the caesura of a tableau vivant.

The animating warmth in Dubrow’s pictures shows itself in its most concentrated form in two recent portraits of a woman called Phippy. Notwithstanding the dehumanization presupposed by much contemporary art, it is in treating the human figure, and especially the human face, that an artist reveals himself most conspicuously. These portraits, particularly the small fetching depiction of Phippy seated and leaning forward with her chin resting lightly on her clasped hands, reveals a rare power of solicitude. I would not insist that it is this feature that sets John Dubrow apart from his peers. His paintings exhibit too many qualities, aesthetic as well as temperamental, to elevate one at the expense of all the rest. I have no doubt, however, that he is an artist whose work amply repays one’s attention.

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