A few days ago I was fortunate to see the Bay Area painter Frances McCormack’s retrospective at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. I’ve known her work well for nearly 40 years, and first wrote on it in 1991. At the opening I was particularly struck by her painting ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ from 2019, which struck me as part of a new phase, perhaps the beginnings of a ‘late style’ wherein (as famously characterized by the social philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno) the artist withdraws the charms and sweetness of her mature style, turns harmonies into dissonances, and aims for a barer expression of her basic concerns than she could achieve within the stylistic monument—or is it a prison?—of her earlier works. In late work the artist breaks the bonds of her former form in order “to cast off the appearance of art”. The late work “still remains process, but not as development; rather as a catching fire between the extremes” (Adorno, pp. 566-67). I found it hard to leave the work, and spent most of my visit looking at it, and talking about it with my companions. Frances told me that the couple who own the work were curious about what that odd man, looking and talking so animatedly, was saying. I volunteered to write it up and stick it on my blog. When I first was trying to come to grips with the characteristics and values of this dawning late style, I found myself inarticulately thinking ‘There’s something about transitional Arshile Gorky and later Georges Braque here, something that goes back to late Bellini’. I’m not done with thinking about the painting, and so will present here on the blog some remarks in two parts. First there’ll be a cleaned- and -gussied-up version of what I thought and said at the opening, then an attempt to draw out the painting’s historical resonances. Two parts, then: ‘Perception (Day One)’ and ‘Reflection (Day Two)’.
‘Sprites in a Thicket’ shows the lower trunks of perhaps a dozen trees near what seems to be a shallow pond, perhaps vernal, whose surface is rendered in patches of blues, reds, various greens, and blacks. The water is streaked and ruffled, sometimes with undulating horizontal lines, sometimes with the vertical drips of paint characteristic of McCormack’s works, and here partially obscured and scumbled with liquid horizontal patches of pink and blue-gray. The ‘sprites’ seem to be first of all the two tangles of tendrils (McCormack’s signature motif) which seem uncertainly attached front and back to the nearest trees. Another possible sprite is the roughly globular shape on lower left, faintly suggestive of a large walnut and rendered in with ham-fisted outlines that contrast sharply with the fluidity of the tendrils’ strokes. More distantly possible candidates for sprites are the two bushes, one at the near left presented in graceful cursive silhouettes,
the one on the right more distant and made of solid monochromes and backlit, providing with the thin tree just behind it an otherwise unavailable sense of the direction of light.
The relative size of the trees and the visual occlusions among them provide the large-scale sense of space. With the more distant trees the transition between tree and ground is sudden and sharp; these trees have no roots, but their visual solidity lends them a weight that stabilizes them in the otherwise unstable and perhaps swampy ground. The bottom of the dark tree in the center tumbles out in an unnaturalistic scumble, and the nearest tree seems to merge at its lowest part with the foreground tendril, which itself stretches to the nearest pool and shares its substance. A striking feature of the trees is their uniformly cut-off branches, which for the most part extend into the proximal plane of the background or a neighboring tree, then suddenly end. Not long after making this painting, McCormack turned to collage, and here already with these sharply juxtaposed planes, connected only with the branches’ outlines, the poetics of collage seeps into the oil-painting.
To see something of the break in McCormack’s poetics marked with the painting, consider a typical earlier work such as ‘Plunge’ of 2009:
Here the tendril is the foremost and focal element, and one that carries most immediately McCormack’s with presenting the sense of simultaneous emergence and decay, and also with the sense of the tendril as a kind of strange attractor, something that entices and traps the viewer’s attention (as in the anthropologist Alfred Gell’s characterization of artworks as traps set for the viewer), sends the viewer into the other elements of the work, out of which the viewer endlessly returns to the tendril. In her mature style, I would suggest, elements and details overwhelmingly function in light of the contribution they make to the sense of the whole and the visual paths of which they form parts. The great change in ‘Sprites in the Forest’, I think, stems from two great shifts. First, details such as the bushes are given a sense of integrity, dwelling points for attention, and so do not lose their individuality in the whirl of the painting’s connections. Second, whereas in the earlier works the canvas, the material surface of the painting, tended to remain artistically inert as a mere atmospheric background of shallow depth. In the late style, the collage-like use of monochromes and juxtapositions immediately identifies the pigment with the material surface. Charm is sacrificed for something more immediate, more startling, more unassimilable. I love it.
So much for my initial impression at the opening. In my next post I’ll reflect on the nature of McCormack’s achievement here, with particular attention to Arshile Gorky’s transitional series of paintings from the late 1930s to early 1940s referred to individually as ‘Garden in Sochi’.
References and Works Consulted:
Theodor Adorno, ‘Late Style in Beethoven’ (1937), in Essays on Music (2002)
Matthew Gale, Arshile Gorky: Enigma and Nostalgia (2010)
Alfred Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’ and ‘Vogel’s Nets: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps’, in The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (1999)
--Art and Agency (1998)
John Golding, Visions of the Modern (1994)
Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose 1945-49
Patrick Heron, The Changing Forms of Art (1958)
Signe S. Mayfield and Frances McCormack, Frances McCormack: Rooted in Wonder: Paintings, 1984-2024 (2025)
Harry Rand, Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols (1980)
William Seitz, Arshile Gorky: Paintings, Drawings, Studies (1962)
Kim S. Theriault, Rethinking Arshile Gorky (2009)
Johannes Wilde, Venetian Art from Bellini to Titian (1974)
Karen Wilkin, Braque (1991)