Ben Aronson: Urbane Paintings by Donald Kuspit
Ben Aronson paints the urban scene, but, more to the esthetic point, his paintings are eloquently urbane: not just painterly, but suavely painterly. There’s a sophistication to his handling that matches the sophistication of his scenes: surface has come a long, civilized way since its gritty gestural days, just as New York has since the Depression, and Paris since it was the alembic of modern art and a bohemian haven. The “new” art is no longer “shocking” let alone new, nor is modernity: the dislocations of both have been assimilated and become trite. Art has moved on, and so has modern life, which no longer seems as “heroic” as Baudelaire thought it was. Aronson has brilliantly adapted to these changes rather than nostalgically beating an old drum about the tribulations of modernity and harping back to the old idea of “primitive” in-your-face painting.
The point is made by Aronson’s Nighthawks, 2008, inviting comparison with Edward Hopper’s work of the same title. Hopper shows us a dismal Depression era scene: a lonely couple having a cheap cup of coffee in a barren diner. Aronson depicts a luxurious cocktail lounge; it’s a long way from Hopper’s world. Aronson’s couple are prosperous; the man makes a pass at the blonde, her legs seductively displayed. There’s an aura of elegance, intimacy, and, dare I say, beauty to Aronson’s picture that are lacking—would be out of place—in Hopper’s picture. America has changed: it’s become more hedonistic and wealthy. Aronson’s painting is as true to its time as Hopper’s painting, and it’s a better time.
What makes Aronson’s picture particularly important is the way it is painted. Hopper’s surface is as spare and dry—impoverished--as his scene, while Aronson’s has a certain liveliness and richness. His painterliness gives his scenes an aura of freshness for all their everydayness. He takes us into the streets of the Big City, allowing glimpses of different people in different relationships. He’s particularly interested in business types, moving forcefully through the crowds. There is an insistent tension in Aronson’s moving figures and scenes, felt through the surface tension generated by his perpetually moving paint.
But what makes them magically “click” is the light that spontaneously informs them. Aronson is a master of the varieties of constantly changing light--light making the blonde’s hair angelically radiant, planes of rumpled light in the Wall Streeters’ white shirts, light reflected in glass skyscrapers. Aronson grasps the light in grayness, as his Paris scenes show, and the interplay of light and darkness, as his New York scenes indicate. He is a master of the subtle gradations between them.
This is civilized painting of scenes from modern civilization--pictures of people in routinely modern society. Yet Aronson’s luminous surface, with its atmospheric painterliness, opens our eyes to the extraordinary sensuousness that informs the ordinary world. What Baudelaire called the “atmosphere of the marvelous” that he found in Paris lives on in New York. As Wanda Corn writes, the ambition of New York “is to be modern, as modern as possible, not to be merely New, but ever-new, York.” It is Aronson’s handling and perception that confirms that New York continues to be marvelously and uncannily modern, and that his painting is the new modern painting.
