Review Excerpts
Herman Reuter, Hollywood news, June 1945
“The Cherry canvases, no matter in which category they happen to fall, are invariably well painted; they come from a brush that knows what it is doing all along……. When it sticks to color, it takes on magical quality. It then becomes a partner in an emotional, manipulative revel which is a pure delight for the beholder. A brush like that really creates something in paint.”
MRK.s art outlook, April 14, 1947
For sheer inventiveness in use of materials, Cherry, who creates mobile pictographs, excels. These pictographs, now being shown at the Weyhe Gallery, 794 Lexington Avenue, are a form of painting in sculpture.
Life Magazine, June 16, 1947
“When these sculptured doodles were exhibited recently at New York’s Weyhe Gallery, the show was almost completely sold out, somewhat surprising their creator, who says he makes them mostly because they are fun. critics, however, take them seriously, describing them as “forms and colors expertly organized”
Sidney Geist, Arts Magazine, January 1958
After a season in a dim-lit hell of close-value painting, Herman Cherry decided about a year and a half ago to come out into the clear, with all its colors and contrasts. He did so in two stages, both of which are on view at t e Tanager Gallery (January 16.February 6): a series of black and-white drawings, and a series of oil paintings on paper. ………
…….., and combines the brilliance of watercolor with the solidity of oil; and Cherry has employed it to excellent effect, allowing the white paper to illuminate his bright, freshly applied color.
…….. It is a common assumption that gesture, any gesture, anyone's gesture is per se a matter of interest. But the art of gesture calls not only for skill in the artist but for character in the man. Cherry, as it happens, is a practiced, knowing, adult artist whose brush is fully capable of making equivalents for spiritual states; and the spirit he reveals is witty, lyrical and full of grace.
Irving Sandler, Art International, April5, 1961
…….. of Herman Cherry at the Poindexter Gallery is like jumping from the Bowery into the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. However, Cherry's nature is color, and his delight in and command of it is evident in all of these luxurient and radiant works. …… For some time now, Cherry has attempted to work with the spontaneity and fluency of Oriental calligraphers, but using pure color rather black and white. He succeeds beautifully in his recent lighthearted and lilting and fresh pictures.
Vered Lieb, Brochure, Nobe Gallery, 1978
……… Herman Cherry's use of color also reflects serious considerations, due in some part to, direct exposure to pre-Renaissance Italian art. "Color in Trecento art is unsystematic, free from the scientific theories of the Renaissance, and ultimately connected with the environment as the expression of feeling for space."
…….. The forms, edges, and fragments, shimmer and expand with the painted surfaces of these beautiful paintings. Cherry manages, however, so that we do not have to choose between the sum of the parts. His achievement is to make all "parts" of the picture seem to have affinity with one another, so that the picture as a whole seems the differentiation of a unified field of perception, intimate unity without turning into any permanent organization. Cherry's forms always remain fugitive, transitive, so that they can generate the sense of intuitive relationships, unity is communicated without forfeiting freedom. The viewer confronts a series of paintings which are intrinsically unified by a perception that is "daring the moment", an organic investigation of the "felt", that never appears predetermined or serial. These paintings glow with the inner love of nature and human life, which is Herman Cherry's art.
Phyllis Braff, The East Hampton Star, April 19, 1984
Herman Cherry’s recent abstract paintings, ………….show he has managed to achieve an art that is both cerebral and optical. It appeals to the intellect, with an emphatic structure of carefully studied color relationships, but its flood of resonating colors also appeals to the eye's capacity for sensuous reaction.
……… when the intention is to create a lyrical mood, flowing curves guide the eye and juxtapositions of color are purposely gentle. In other instances, the color composition is extraordinarily bold, and shapes might even take on an emblematic configuration. The goal seems to be an invention of new ways of using color to achieve movement, as well as a subtle perception of changing depth.…….. One will find many ways in which the Impact seems both "sophisticated" and "raw."
Phyllis Braff, The East Hampton Star, August 9, 1984
……. Mr. Cherry's approach to inventing intensely gripping surfaces depends on establishing an emphatic architectonic structure, allowing the motion to be within a controlled but vibrant area. His work, which is totally abstract, is built with an admirable command of the dynamics at an artist's disposal.
Sidney Drum, New Art Examiner, Chicago, Jan. 1984
……… It is typical of Cherry's work that opposing elements are given due respect. They are reconciled rather than subsumed.
…….. Tranquility found through and in painting sums up the Cherry exhibition. Other painters of his generation have strained and sought the unknown and unknowable. A few have found radically new visions in painting.
Helen Harrison, Arts Magazine, November 1984
………… His aesthetic maturity and technical mastery are now at their peak, and he brings to his recent canvases a mellowness gained over decades of experimentation. Without fanfare, he has emerged as one of the most gifted colorists at work today. …….Like his contemporary, Mark Rothko, he subjugates the emotional expressiveness of lively brushwork to allow the subjective resonance of color to make the primary impact. Yet the canvases are far from flat or uniform in terms of color modeling; on the contrary, his hues have the lusciousness of velvet. He has stated, "I want the surface to live," which is precisely the result he has achieved.
……… Conflict, expressed through chromatic contrasts and sharp, angular shapes, seems to seek resolution, and strive toward harmony, as if paint had the intrinsic capacity to heal breaches and silence opposition. ……..His colors become characters that act out roles relative to each other, according to their own scenario - sometimes dramatic, sometimes mysterious, occasionally even humorous - as directed by the master's hand.
………The lines play a visual counterpoint to the gentle curves and soft, ragged edges of his color areas; in his words, they "pull the imagination" into another dimension and "destroy the centrality" of the canvas. In contrast, other forms tend to be massive and simple, hanging in space like drapes of pigment woven into malleable raw materials that the artist delights in arranging to show off their subtleties and sensuous textures.
………. Cherry has arrived at his present synthesis of line and tone, form and gesture, after many years of experimentation. ………Line, used to define contours and introduce another type of manual gesture into canvases purged of brushstrokes, became a major factor in the mid-1960s; but there was soon a shift toward more complex tonal layering. ……Yet the same factors that now account for the chromatic intensity, compositional variety, and emotional ambiguity of the new paintings (the "sophisticated innuendoes and intriguing tensions" described in the catalogue of his 1967 exhibition at the University of Kentucky, …….), were already evident. In retrospect, the works of this period seem to symbolize the confined but insistent dynamism of the painter's imagination, a force that only in the past few years has succeeded in finding transcendent release.
………. Cherry has often been characterized as a "painter's painter," a term which, it seems to me, implies that ordinary mortals will neither like nor understand what he is up to. It does him no disservice to acknowledge that, over the years, his most appreciative audience has been his fellow artists, partly because only a colleague would be fully aware of the intensity of his struggle with the purest problems of painting. That he has now succeeded in resolving many of those issues in a manner that expands our consciousness of paint's possibilities, while appealing directly to the senses, belies any danger that he will remain of interest only to the specialist.
Sidney Drum New Art Examiner, Chicago, January 1984
HERMAN CHERRY Grayson Gallery 356 W. Huron St.Chicago ILL
Herman Cherry, in his 74 years, has seen and survived most of the significant art movements in this country. He studied with synchromist Stanton MacDonald Wright in California, and regionalist Thomas Hart Benton in New York; he has explored abstract expressionism, color field painting and the pluralism of the 1980's. The 18 paintings he exhibited bear testament to his profound respect for the sensual beauty of painting and its spiritually-sustaining capacity.
Typical of the earliest paintings in the exhibit was Implosion (1959), a five-by-six foot oil on canvas. Broad swathes of saturated colors layer and enfold each other, clustering in the center of the canvas. In another composition, Somnabulate (1954), soft grays, blacks and a delicate peach form fluctuating, cloud-like rectangles under an assertive textured surface. These paintings' spatially complex play of colors and values gradually simplified in the sixties. Touched by the theories of minimalism and color field painting, Cherry flattened and geometricized his compositions. However, he never forced his colors into rigidly bounded, undifferentiated shapes. Instead, Cherry weaves large, subtly modulated areas of unusual colors for example, desaturated green-grays against alizarin and rose red. A case in point is the ambitious, three-part painting of 1978, Imaginary Territories. Here, overlapping muted greens and reds are sparked by smaller, more intense contrasts of ultramarine blue and orange, creating a complicated, vibrating whole.
It is typical of Cherry's work that opposing elements are given due respect. They are reconciled rather than subsumed. In The Crystal Heart (1960-1983), the composition accommodates a large, dense black mass, optically resting on top of adjacent greens and reds, and a contrasting, brushed gray field. Unlike Robert Motherwell's black masses and white spaces, which exist as dichotomies struggling to overcome each other, the black in Cherry's painting is strong but not repressive. Motherwell's vision is surrealist and tragic. Cherry's is formal and tranquil.
Tranquility found through and in painting sums up the Cherry exhibition. Other painters of his generation have strained and sought the unknown and unknowable. A few have found radically new visions in painting. Almost none have found the peace, luminescence and evident pleasure in painting inherent in Cherry’s work. That pleasure is to be savored by art viewers in Chicago.
Rose Slivka, The East Hampton Star, May 29, 1986
……. Cherry brings a new resolution to color and space; at the same time he raises new questions, new dilemmas.
……… In the end, Herman Cherry is a supreme colorist and an orderly thinker. The structure of diagonal stripes and intersecting lines, with hushed and feathered edges, rather than hard and fast ones, composed in a sobriety of thought and intellect, gives these works an air of distance and deliberation, the silence of an endless sky. Even the brush marks have been sublimated to this sense of quiet time. The surface is calm yet compelling, grave and gripping, serene and spooky. The dynamic is that of essence. There is such essentializing and clarification, such condensation of color-space within the grayed spectrum of tonal values, these works positively shimmer with light. They seem to me deeply spiritual, perhaps like prayers of grace.
Rose Slivka, The East Hampton Star, February 19, 1987
…….His vigorous brush and pallet knife paintings of the ‘50s ranged from pure, high color to a dark brooding impasto with spurts of light. Mr. Cherry, involved in the push-pull of space and color, now resolves his obsessions in an equilibrium of nuance and passion. His architecturally structured canvases with calibrated lines and diagonals shine geometrical light in a reverberant, shimmering space.
………. Color is the challenge, the mystery, the soul, the structure, with all structural elements emanating out of the color, light modulated by the painter's temperament and mood. He makes a picture in which color is space and the experience of that space is through color in a circularity of forms and experience. Volume and space leapfrog as planes of color emerge and recede, shrink the space, enlarge the volume, and vice versa.
…….. At the same time, his canvases are quiet and serene, as if the paintings were listening to themselves, watching, and thoughtful.
………Like Cezanne, Herman Cherry is a plugger in his search for the structure of space and the color to inform that structure. His drive is to find his way through the elements the painting itself compels him to do as a real experience, not as an illusion.
Helen Harrison, The NY Times, 8/20/89
……His fields of color are marked by the autographic touch that identifies them with his personal stamp. Each canvas bears the evidence of his hand's progress over its surface, building layers of tone and texture with unerring skill and sensitivity. ……
……His paints are applied thinly so that translucent surfaces reveal layers of other tonalities beneath. And the edges of color areas are delicately feathered, allowing them to blend ever so discreetly with their neighbors. ……..
…… Mr. Cherry is a master of luminosity, calling forth a glow that seems to emanate from within the canvases themselves. ……
Rose Slivka, The East Hampton Star, May 25, 1989
……..What comes through……..is courage, stamina, insistence, the inability to leave it alone. His austere fusion of paint insists on the visual power of abstraction.
There is an actual optical radiance in shifting veils of color, as if from the spiritually-infused stained glass windows of a church.
…… In his struggle to define his question and his place, he has essentialized all the elements to their simple components, common denominators, and exposed for the artist's speculation his ruminations on the process. It's as if he struggled "to find the right thing to do to the painting that would be wrong for it, to put a kink into the music as Schoenberg did," as the artist himself expressed it. …….In an age in which the ideal no longer is a necessary attribute for the recognition of a work of art, Mr. Cherry continues to pursue it, as well as an absolute obsession with art at its highest achievement. One feels the presence of Cezanne, Rothko, Matisse, de Kooning, not to mention all the others.
……….. Mr. Cherry has grappled with all the forces of his environment, unafraid to pay close attention to his heroes. He faces the dilemma from which he knew he could never extricate himself as no authentic artist in our time can.
……….. He has come through the labyrinth of Abstract Expressionism into an area that combines soft geometry, disciplined forms, and color that beckons and whispers, pushes and shoves. Color - the forces of its energy - is Mr. Cherry's structure.
Jonathan Phillips, The Art World, June 2, 1989
…….His work now is all about color saturated compositions which resolve their internal dynamics as they develop toward a conclusion. Their diagonals, verticals, swatches, and thinly built up fields of instinctively 'right' colors present themselves in configurations which are gestalt conclusions between hue, form and tonality, and only occasionally line.
………In one of the most challenging pieces in the Shapolsky Gallery: "Push Comes to Shove", 1988-9, Cherry's color field build of geometric action comes to blows around the picture plane's disputed center. ……….. These are beautiful colors, but it is not a pretty picture. It is feisty and intelligent.
Judd Tully Herman Cherry A Retrospective , Ball State University Art Gallery, 1989
…………The point here is to introduce Cherry as a major American abstract artist who found his path slow and arduous. Luckily for us, he painted most of the way. …………
Study of El Greco (cat. no. 3) mirrors the artist’s continuing quest to learn from the masters, whether they be Giotto or Matisse. A kind of rumbling expressionism informs his early work, a sensibility that bridged his eventual leap to abstraction. You can see it in his floating Lovers of ca. 1938, about to crashland onto a cloud,
…………Cherry’s portrait of his close friend Archie Musick (1944) (cat. no. 6) depicts this artist outdoorsman who abandoned New York for the canyons of Colorado, immersed in a nervous lined abstract drawing, his black pencil hovering like a divining rod over the roadmap of lines……… . The composition’s most striking attribute is the glowing red checkerboard squares of color that are part of Musick’s flannel shirt. Stripped from the rest of the canvas—and held up by the vertical blue bands of suspenders—the multi-hued squares can be viewed as potent precursors to Cherry’s future work. In the meantime, Abstract in Red Squares (cat. no. 15) from 1951/2, and the more complex Color Clusters from 1955 (cat. no. 22) seem to be torn from the same fabric as Musick’s shirt. Indeed, Cherry’s journey to abstraction can be plotted along a graph paper map of increasingly abstracted still lifes after a lengthy stay in Paris in 1948-49.
………….Cherry often described his process of painting as akin to spelunking in dark and dangerous terrain. And it became clear that Cherry’s poetic metaphors are often backed up by real-life experience.
…………..His moody and magically luminescent Black Cave (Black Painting #6) from 1954-55 (cat. no. 20) captures the terror and elation of interior exploration. The rich and lusty enamel of the black pigment sparks against underlying films of smoky blues and bursts of incendiary reds. For added texture—perhaps to bring the viewer closer to the experience—the artist added coffee grounds to the volcanic and pocked areas of paint, a signature gesture echoing his longing for the flotsam and jetsam of found things.
…………(Cherry) “My life was so difficult from a money-making standpoint…I think that’s partly why my work has had fits and starts, flashes of something going to happen and something gets in the way again…It’s only been in the last ten years that I’ve been able to make enough living off my paintings to be able to maintain continuity. Maybe it was the bringing together of these various periods—which were truncated at one time or another—when I couldn’t develop certain areas, so now I go back to them to see what I might have missed.” Asked to amplify his remarks on what kept him struggling at finding his footing in abstraction, Cherry stirred the pot some more and said, “The abstraction of painting is a very, very difficult fence to climb. It took me a long time to see non-objectively. . . I went through an exploratory period until I found my own idiom. I’m influenced by the past in so many different ways which have since merged into my own past:” Cherry stopped for a moment and told me to read Gauguin’s letters to see how the artists of that time rushed to each other’s work, of excitement that was rekindled with the Abstract Expressionists.
“I don’t think about it today when I’m working. I always seem to be in a landscape I was never in before so I have to rediscover the way to get to it, that place I vaguely see. I have to make my own roads and sometimes I go the wrong way. But I’m always willing to take the chance. If I discover a straight road, then I’ll get bored. Then I look for other ways to get to it. It’s very difficult to explain but you have to create a struggle that could be made easier—to create situations that are untenable. How else can you get energy into paintings?”
………..Crystal Heart I (cat. no. 55) is a painterly mirror reflecting the artist’s long march to a territory he could genuinely call his own. Still lugging some of the nostalgic freight of past skirmishes, the broad bands of dusky color engage coal-fired lanes of red. The alternating salvos of low- and high-keyed colors trigger a kind of palpable oscillation—new to the work— that bonds the opposing forms and outlines their respective negative spaces. Cherry begins to loft his non-objective forms into an illusory semblance of sky and earth, water and mass. Hovering over the surface like an alien dervish is the crystal form sheathed in a dazzling shade of azurite blue. The painting represents Cherry’s clarion call (in-progress) to his own brand of synchromy, neither post nor two.
…………..Implosion, Reds on Green, Shapes Moving Downward, and Truncated Movement swept in with tidal force (cat..nos. 30, 26, 28, and 32). Just as he would later accomplish in his River series, the artist created new steps, refining the familiar, chopping off the excess, coming up with taut and emotive passages. With Zen-like accuracy he achieved what the sculptor and critic Sidney Geist once called “making equivalents for spiritual states.”
Cherry’s long-term fascination with the Far East (first sparked by his classmate and lifelong friend, painter Hideo Date), in both Haiku poetry and the miniature painting of the Muslim Mughal empire, has emerged as a potent influence, replacing the Sturm and Drang of Abstract Expressionism with another kind of power.
…………….The mature Cherry comes into his own when he encounters the less visible contours of the non-objective world. Never completely abandoning the modernist web of Cubism, Cherry says of his recent work: “It looks free and loose when you look at it but the structure is there. Otherwise, it would just be nothing!’
Cherry’s slim volume of poetry, Poems of Pain—And Other Matters, bridged the contemplative period between his abandoned Window series and his decision to resume painting. If the cycle had ended there his body of work, based on the grand suite of his night paintings alone, would hold a place in the pantheon of New York School painters. But Cherry came back and vanquished his demons, producing a new generation of paintings. With the strength of ten solo shows in as many years Cherry has distinguished himself as a master colorist of the non-objective world.
……….…His feathery stroke (a signature really) carries not just pigment but a sorcerer’s wand of light. It is not sun or lamp light but Cherry’s own incandescence illuminating the canvas, darting between silky layers of pigment that throb with measured beats………
Push Comes to Shove (cat. no. 69), completed in 1989, is an amalgam of Cherry’s painterly chemistry. …… …….,…..The chiseled forms are not heartless or taped with Mondrian’s unforgiving lines, but sensually softened with all over dabs and touches resembling the untrimmed deckle edges of fine handmade papers.
The Cherry of the eighties is his own man. At times the paintings seem to represent flags of continents or, like his Cenotaph, an abstract epitaph of another time, either future or past. Cherry’s deceptively simple forms and high keyed incursions of color lay claim to the canvas territory with instantaneous authority. In the end, Cherry’s paintings live up to the aura and breadth of his extraordinary life.
Luminous Coloring Proves Rewarding Helen Harrison The New York Times, 8,20,1989
During the last 10 years, the painter Herman Cherry has been developing and refining a luminous approach to color that gives his canvases a characteristically sensuous, vibrant quality. His works are also rewarding on a formal level, since they illustrate a variety of compositional devices by which the artist achieves harmonious balance without sacrificing dynamic tension.
The current exhibition of 28 of Mr. Cherry's paintings from the last six years, now on view through September 9, at the Staller Center for the Arts at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, testifies to the fact that he has yet to exhaust the possibilities of this strategy.
Born in 1909, Mr. Cherry is a contemporary of the vanguard Abstract Expressionists, such as Pollock, deKooning and Kline, with whom he debated aesthetics and other timely issues at New York's Cedar Tavern and the Artists' Club, of which he was a member.'
Like his more-celebrated colleagues, Mr. Cherry was deeply involved in what amounted to a reinvention of painting in the post-World War II years. The result was a commitment to the creative act itself, a belief that the product was of no more consequence than the process.
Thus, for artists like Mr. Cherry, the evidence of that process is a vital ingredient in the work, regardless of its formal character. His fields of color are marked by the autographic touch that identifies them with his personal stamp. Each canvas bears the evidence of his hand's progress over its surface, building layers of tone and texture with unerring skill and sensitivity.
Yet, it is quite clear from the results that Mr. Cherry does not view process as an end in itself. His paintings are by no means mere exercises, for, although they can be viewed as object lessons in composition, color balance, paint application and a host of other formal and technical considerations, they never appear dry.
What gives them their liveliness is the intriguing interplay of color and shape that sets up dynamics within the pictorial space. This tends to be pressed against the canvas surface, but it occasionally suggests illusionary depth, especially in the more recent works.
In those works, shimmering layers of tone no longer move along a flat, one-dimensional plane, but now shift into relief, advancing and receding as they pulse with inner energy.
Such effects are achieved partly through color choices, such as reds against blues or greens, that set up optical vibrations, and also by Mr. Cherry's handling of those colors.
His paints are applied thinly so that translucent surfaces reveal layers of other tonalities beneath. And the edges of color areas are delicately feathered, allowing them to blend ever so discreetly with their neighbors.
Mr. Cherry's shapes often seem to float on or near the surfaces of his paintings, the way reflections appear to float on water. The subtle shifting of natural forms like passing clouds and drifting ice is echoed in the implicit movement that many of his paintings suggest.
For example, "Sliding I" is composed of two angled shapes pressing together near their corners, as if they were being pulled m opposite directions. Their slanted placement guarantees that gravity will get the better of them sooner or later. Their bristly edges almost crackle with internal tension, the only thing that keeps them from slipping apart.
Of course, there is no actual gravity in this pictorial world, any more than there is physical tension holding the two shapes together. Such impressions are the product of the artist’s ability to develop interior forces that animate the painting and give it presence.
Several of Mr. Cherry's most recent works feature a soft, amoeba-like form that resembles an egg cell about to divide. This suggestion of protoplasmic life is often juxtaposed with firmer, more linear elements that imply barriers, enclosures or constraints.
By pairing the organic and the geometric, the artist sets up a dialogue between two extremes of pictorial form, while modifying both to bring out their resemblances instead of emphasizing their differences.
Mr. Cherry is a master of luminosity, calling forth a glow that seems to emanate from within the canvases themselves. In "Alien Light”, "Mosque" and other similar works, the interplay of complementary tones sets up a low-key vibrancy that makes them appear almost electrically charged.
Such effects appeal directly to the senses, as does the pure beauty of many of Mr. Cherry's paintings. To say that they are beautiful in no way diminishes their complexity or overshadows the other concerns they address, but it is to the artist's credit that he has found the means to stimulate both the senses and the mind simultaneously.
A complex painting like "Ukiyo-E" illustrates this synthesis. Its central field of shadowy grays shimmers like" a dark cloud passing across a pool, while linear elements hover over the surface. Patches of brilliant color intrude at the edges, brightening the introspective mood and providing chromatic variety. As the title implies, this is a floating world, one in which shape and tone, as well as line and plane, exist in harmonious balance.
Rose Slivka, The East Hampton Star, July 26, 1990
……..His new work, done during the last year, mostly in 1990, crosses a new barrier, or maybe an old one. His canvases encompass the movement and music of segments of circles and tangential arcs, veering vectors and turning wheels of color, the entire painting structured with the movement and music of color, the painter's subject on the surface."
………. The power of these paintings is strange - familiar, but at the same time strange - as if Mr. Cherry had reinvented the wheel. If so, it needed to be reinvented in his fresh vision.
In his search for the inexhaustible, Mr. Cherry makes a series of stops along the way. These paintings are the signposts of the total journey - his stops, his starts, and his goes.
…………… Abstract in their feathered-edge geometry, they [the paintings] have a core reality anchored in the beat of the cosmos, in its trajectory through space and suns of the universe.
Steve Mannheimer, The Indianapolis Star, Jan. 14,1990
………..Herman Cherry has lived his mature years as a footnote, at the periphery of fame or two steps beyond. While his contemporaries - Pollock, DeKooning, Rothko, Guston, et al - earned their monographs and paragraphs in art historical annals, ascending posthumously to coffee table success, Cherry painted.
……….. The results, the works of the last decade were worth the wait. If matured in the 1960s, Cherry became ageless in the '80s.
…………. And In Push Comes to Shove (1988), one of the most piercingly, softly, logically, lyrically (yes, all of that) ambiguous pieces in the 60-work show, Cherry traipses through the metaphysics of unknowable form and wafts of color to glimpse for a moment in the painting's lower right corner, the quadrant of departure, a high blue emptiness.
This is a view from a hard-earned height. If others have failed to award Cherry a peak, he has scaled his own. His vision from that elevation is every bit as clear and distant as, and ultimately more subtle than so many others of greater fame. The viewer will be reminded that every name has a mountain.
Lawrence Campbell, Art in America, December 1990
In a career that began in the 1930s, came to maturity in the '50s, and then proceeded in near invisibility until very recently, Herman Cherry has forged a distinctive abstract colorist style.
………. By the early 1950s, however, Cherry had worked away from Benton, passing through a variety of representational, Expressionist and Cubist-influenced styles to arrive at a kind of personal, nonrepresentational abstraction that emphasized color as a compositional force. Indeed, by the close of the decade, Cherry's work had become recognizably his and his alone.
…….. As the writer Rose Slivka put it recently, "Cherry's generation either made it in the '50s or it faced some thirty years of loneliness and neglect until it finally got old enough and stubborn enough to prevail." On the evidence of a number of recent exhibitions in New York and elsewhere, Cherry is one '50s artist who didn't pack it in despite the vagaries of taste and time. His full-fledged return to the art-world fold has been, to say the least, a personal and artistic triumph.
…….. Cherry plots and adjusts his color forms in relation to one another and to the grounds he chooses. The often tilting forms divide the canvas and sometimes draw the viewer's eye away from the picture's center;
………. At other times, two or three forms will work against each other in a kind of drama that celebrates "flatness"- a concept which, as Elaine de Kooning said many years ago, is purely pragmatic, meaningless in art yet applicable to daily life, where it makes sense to, say, a man driving a car across the desert.
………"When I put the colors down," Cherry writes, "I want them to stay there, like painting a wall, with no resonance." Yet the opposite effect is sometimes achieved in those paintings which, in Cherry's words, "have resonance from the depth of the canvas to the open sky."
…….. We look at Cherry's paintings, and the colors mysteriously come and go. The way they shift reminds me of the physicist Werner Heisenberg's theory that both experiment and experimenter are changed in the act of observation. I wrote to Cherry to tell him how mysterious I found some of his paintings, most notably their fluctuations from dim to bright, and how the colors at times seem to creep in from the sides of the painting when one's eyes are turned away.
Jeffrey Wright, Cover Magazine, May 1990
…….. In his latest paintings one finds a deep, almost, heady, resolution of contravening impulses. There is the bewildering perspective - are we level with a horizon line or is our view aerial? Controlling elements such as right angles and solid blocks of color are set in motion by slashing diagonals and feathery edges.
Robert Long, The East Hampton Star, Aug. 29, 2002
When Cherry does let loose with a blast of orange or violet you feel it, because everything else has been so subtly modulated.
When he introduces a single lightning bolt of red in one picture, you realize just how narrow his tonal range is everywhere else,
Helen Harrison, Catalogue Essay, October 2005 David Findlay JR Gallery
Color's symbolic and emotional resonance, enhanced by equally significant and distinctive paint application, is a hallmark of Herman Cherry's work. The sensuous beauty of his color abstractions is the result of the magical interaction of those elements. Whether the overall tonality is dark or light, whether the dominant shapes are thickly layered or open and free-floating, whether the brushwork is calm or agitated, whether the surface is translucent or dense, velvety or grainy, all aspects of the work act in harmonious balance. This was clearly an artist who relished the engagement with his material, appreciated its potential and wanted to explore every possibility it had to offer. ……
…… Cherry took his painting in many different directions, but he never found it necessary to choose between Abstract Expressionism's two major trends, gestural abstraction and color field painting. There was a third way, one that unified Abstract Expressionism's opposite poles, and Cherry is among those who successfully followed it.
……… Tworkov summarized the contrasting trends. He maintained that members of the group "lean largely to the use of pigment as material first and as color secondarily--much as paper, cloth or sand is used in collage. But for some painters in the group, color is the chief source of power in the picture, and is exploited for maximum impact rather than for ordered structure, resulting in an unprecedented use of color--comparable to adopting an air-raid siren as a musical instrument (as does [the composer Edgard] Varese).
…. Tworkov acknowledged the validity of Cherry's approach when he wrote: "You cannot in any way separate form from color without destroying the unity of the imaginative act.
……. Even in Cherry's brilliantly colored, overtly gestural abstractions of the later 1950s, the balance he achieved earlier is maintained. Far from giving up pictorial structure in order to get maximum chromatic impact - as Tworkov framed the dichotomy - Cherry resolved the apparent impasse. Like the imagery in the earlier work, here the structure is inherent, so fully a part of the composition as to be invisible, yet anchoring it just as firmly as if it were evident.
THE PULSE OF LIGHT – THE HEARTBEAT OF COLOR * Catalogue Essay for Triad David Findlay JR Gallery
ALCOPLEY, HERMAN CHERRY, and REUBEN KADISH, three artists and close friends, each danced a very different dance, stood a separate stance, yet moved together, expressing their very personal signature styles. Reube’s need to anchor in the earth, reconnect with the source, Al’s reaching for lofty spaces barely touching the ground, in spite of his imposing frame, and Cherry’s gregarious dance on the canvas, light footed, quick, yet firm - a bantam weight boxer’s moves – all their idiosyncrasies manifest in their creations.
Cherry’s skirmishes, nervous steps and jumps mark a path or course leaving traces of color structures and rhythms, harmonies and dysfunctions. Perceptions and emotions shaped into thought translate into a new, personal language for uncharted territories of experiences.
“What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event”, reflected Harold Rosenberg** at the time.
Once Cherry lost the image and cubist informed abstraction completely, by the early Fifties - thinking in color and using color as a compassionate force and structure, become the major focus. Color shapes, their relationships to one another and to the ground, begin to create a new, particular space and beyond, attempting to break the limitations of the picture plane – diffusing the Renaissance center, something he absorbed early on in California from S. Mac- Donald-Wright’s Synchromist and Asian art teachings. Cherry’s love for and influence of Chinese and Japanese art on his work can be traced throughout his work.
He paid much attention to gesture and control of paint handling. “I want the surface to live”; “Color is its own light,” and “The light of color – not of light”; “Light has no substance, it is a presence”, are just a few quotes expressing these concepts.
His balance and structure, choreography and dislocation, harmonies and dissonances, all point to a duality that is apparent in the work, at times bifurcating the pictorial space; clear intense colors are surrounded, accentuated by what he called “dirty colors” creating continuous tension, somber glows, a sour note on occasion. “I like to probe between the intensities of color” and “Put a comma between the colors”.
“Color in abstract has its own orbital sun where color becomes its own space; it might be called emotional space, where they touch, disengage – parting to meet another engagement with another color or shape – a humanistic abstraction. Colors are humanoid things to me, [they] create intensity of feeling or repulsion – the space they occupy is the structure – bones of the paint.” That effort to shape and structure his emotions infuses all his work through its different periods and developments.
“Throw caution, take unknown liberties, dive in where nobody has been ……I can’t see why you can’t fly high – it seems so close to you – and who else has color?” encouraged his close friend, David Smith***. Throughout Cherry’s artistic endeavors, his paintings become testimony to his pursuit of charting “the pulse of light – the heartbeat of color”.
Regina Cherry November 9, 2007
*Quote by H. Cherry, as all others in quotation marks, when not otherwise attributed.
**Harold Rosenberg was an important art writer and friend to artists in the Fifties and Sixties.
***David Smith, in a letter of April 30, 1957