don’t mean to put down private collectors per se, many of whom are the very people who often loan and eventually donate their collections to public institutions.  The point is that owning great works of art implies a huge responsibility and squirreling them off for exclusive private consumption is not only crass but also a bizarre form of censorship.

Consider walking through a museum where you are confronted with several rare and expensive works of art.  You don’t own any of these objects but you get to have them, to savor their esthetic pleasures, their concepts, their being. The museum and its many benefactors and contributors make this possible and what an act of generosity it is.  In the end we humans are also corporeal and ethereal but even more so than the art objects that outlive us.  Ownership of anything comes and goes with death. The beautiful thought here is that, as living beings, we can all claim ownership of the most valuable thing about art which is the experience of enjoying it.

This show presents a fine range of Nell Blaine’s paintings and drawings from 1944 to 1959. In this relatively short span of years you are able to witness her shift from a complete commitment to abstraction to the inclusion of representational imagery. She was a member of the second generation of the New York School and her work from the 40s establishes those credentials.  But after an extended trip to Europe in 1950 with Larry Rivers and exposure to old master paintings (the presence of Rivers is interesting given the inclusion of old master imagery in his work from then) she began painting from nature. Her style shifted too; from a graphic approach to a splashy, painterly treatment.

So did Blaine turn her back on abstraction in the 50s?  I don’t think so. Consider the work from the 40s where the imagery embraces a bouncy organic quality.  While some of the forms are

Nell Blaine, Decorative Contours, c 1944, oil on board, 6 x 8 in and
Abstraction, 1948, oil and gouache on board, 12 x 11 3/8 in

explicitly defined and starkly contrasted, these are far from hard edge paintings. Look at a piece like Gray Abstraction with Blue, Red and Yellow from 1944 (the finest from that period in this show) where the foreground imagery mixes it up with a ‘feathered’ approach to the background forms that echos Rothko’s paint handling.  Here  the forms float about in space without being locked down as in White Figure in Blue.  Implied in these shapes are subtle references to nature which carry over into the later figurative work.

By the same token the representational work is most often not directly referential.  Yes, you can make out flowers in a vase in the painting,

Nell Blaine, Gray Abstraction with Blue, Red and Yellow, 1944, oil on canvas, 47.5 x 68 in