The New York Times - August 21, 2005
THE exhibition "Thomas George: A Retrospective" honors a gift by the artist to the Princeton University Art Museum of 37 of his paintings and drawings spanning 50 years.
It is a small but enjoyable show, presenting the opportunity to look at in one place a selection of the work of Mr. George, an 87-year-old Princeton-based painter. It is not often, also, that the lordly Princeton University Art Museum honors local artists.
Mr. George might be ungenerously described as a fringe member of the abstract school. Fringe because he is regarded as something of a pack runner in art historical stakes, but also fringe in the sense that he is not a conventional abstract artist. He makes landscape-based abstractions with a broad range of media, concentrating on capturing mood and atmosphere more than pouring his feelings or emotions into the work.
The exhibition begins with an anomaly -- two figurative studies from the 1950's. They are here to remind us that Mr. George, like most artists of his era, was schooled in drawing. "Portrait Study of Gino" (1951), the most arresting of them, depicts an Italian friend and fellow artist with a disease that prevented him from growing much larger than a child. You sense the sadness in the young man's downcast eyes. He died at age 23.
Landscape dominates from here on out, beginning with "No.17" (1962), a large, beautiful, largely abstract painting and the best work in the exhibition. It brings to mind cloudy, turbulent skies, as well as a forest hillside glimpsed through heavy snow. It also reminded me of a variety of organic natural forms, in particular lichen patches. But it is really just an intuitive accretion of marks and scrapes with a brush and palette knife.
"No.17" was worked up slowly in the studio over days and possibly weeks. That gives it a solidity lacking in other works here, many of which were probably done rapidly out of doors. Beneath the surface also beats movement and feeling, the artist not really knowing entirely -- you sense -- what he is doing or wants to say but going deep into himself. It is risky and a bit out of control, but somehow holds together.
Mr. George loved traveling. Here, on view, are paintings, sketches and drawings from travels to Norway, Japan, Wales, France, Italy, China and other places. Mountains frequently caught his attention, as in a series of schematic brush and ink paintings of the spectacular limestone peaks of Guilin in southern China. Their form is endearingly simple: inky black shapes and wavy lines against a white paper backdrop. But it was Norway, of all places, that exerted the strongest pull on this peripatetic artist. He was enamored of the Lofoten Islands, some 125 miles above the Arctic Circle, and in 1966 established a second home on the Oslo Fjord. He spent the next 30 summers living and working there, camping and painting outdoors in some of the more-remote parts of Norway.
The Norwegian paintings, three of which are here, hint at various different artists and art styles. The black ink on paper format and calligraphic brushstrokes recall Chinese scroll painting, while the choice of picturesque mountain landscapes follows closely in the footsteps of a slew of painters from the late 18th and 19th centuries allied with Romanticism, a pan-European phenomenon that, in art at least, stressed the heroic and sublime.
Mr. George also painted extensively in the United States, often in the Southwest but also in his home state. Showing here, for instance, are some pastel paintings (from a long series produced between 1984 and 1996) done by the pond at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. They are soft, fuzzy and intimate, the artist delicately recording the play of light, its movements and its effects on foliage. They are an avatar of the exquisite.
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