CATALOGUE ESSAYS

Robert Moskowitz: The Meaning of Leaning

in Robert Moskowitz Drawings, Lawrence Markey, San Antonio, 2017

When you are standing in front of Robert Moskowitz’s pastel drawings, you might ask yourself “What are these?” One possibility might be “buildings.” Another thought, after a moment’s pause, is “skylines,” which might seem a more precise one. But that, too, doesn’t tell the whole story. If we read the drawings as representations of silhouetted buildings (a reasonable and accurate thing to do) we have to acknowledge that in nearly every single drawing the black forms depicting architectural motifs occupy much less of the paper’s surface than do the empty white spaces above or alongside them—spaces that are, let’s quickly add, neither empty nor white but, on the contrary, indelibly activated with countless random and inevitable traces of the artist’s tainted fingertips. So maybe it would be still more accurate to say that Moskowitz’s subject matter is neither buildings nor skylines but the skies above a city, and that these skyline images serve only to indicate where those skies stop.

Buildings? Skies? In Moskowitz’s drawings both of these motifs are so stripped down, so purged of identifying details that their status as representations hang by a thread. If you were to come across many of these drawings singly, and if you didn’t know they were done by Moskowitz — an artist who has long been celebrated for his paintings of iconic architectural monuments — you might very well interpret them as abstractions, studies in reductive geometric form that trace their lineage back to Malevich and Theo Van Doesburg. In a number of drawings one or two black geometric shapes hugging the corners or edges of the otherwise empty paper do nothing to betray their architectural origins. 

But, of course, we do know that these drawings are by Robert Moskowitz and we also know that they represent architecture, so we can read them, even at their most reductive and reticent, as architectural silhouettes. And yet the abstract option never completely withdraws. Frequently, Moskowitz invites us into a vertiginous back and forth between representation and abstraction. A shape that in one instant your mind processes as a building reappears the next as a black shape, before again becoming a skyline. Crucially, this alternating identity is indistinguishable from another simultaneous gestalt argument between figure and ground. The drawings also demolish, thanks to their smudged grounds, another binary: clean modernist geometry vs. messy modernist expression. Geometry, they remind us, can be an emphatically handmade thing.

Moskowitz has long patrolled the frontier where shapes snap into recognizable images and he is an expert at creating enigmatic pictures by withholding visual information, but this series may be his most mutable and abstract. Along with the absence of detail and specificity (only one structure in the series is recognizable, the Flatiron Building, though others do subtly evoke the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers) there is a third and equally important factor that complicates the city skyline reading: the tilt. Every shape in the series leans to the right, sometimes slightly, sometimes perilously. Although this rightward tilt is not meant to be a literal allusion to recent developments in U.S. politics, the precariousness and disorientation implied by the slanting towers and tilted horizons is connected in the artist’s mind with what he described to me during a recent studio visit as a sense of “fragility” surrounding the 2016 Presidential campaigns and election. Formally, the tilt plays subtle havoc with the rectilinearity of the paper supports; in narrative terms the angled shapes imply movement even though they are perfectly still—not because the buildings might be on the verge of collapse but because of the suggestion that the beholder/frame is in sideways motion, as if each drawing was a moment from a pan shot or a photo taken from a passing car

After contemplating these drawings for some time the suspicion has begun to dawn on me that their real subject, their deep content, might be the very condition of tiltedness itself. This is not a minor or incidental subject. After all, the planet on which we live is tilted on its axis. And what is an artist if not someone who views the world from a skewed perspective? The precisely canted chimneys, towers and rooftops in Moskowitz’s drawings remind me of that beautiful phrase E.M. Forster crafted when he wanted to convey the particularity of his friend the Alexandrine poet Constantine Cavafy: “A Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.”