Word: sultanic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...trouble with the exhibition of the work of Donald Sultan, which opened at the Brooklyn Museum recently after a seven-month run in other American museums, is its date. It should have begun in 1997. Then there would be a larger oeuvre to assess, a longer career to discuss, and not just a bright reputation to inflect...
...Sultan was born in Asheville, N.C., in 1951 and is certainly among the more gifted American artists of his generation. But this show's catalog hums with inflated comparisons and claims. "He seems formed in the Manet mold," writes one contributor, Ian Dunlop, adducing by way of proof that Sultan, like the great Edouard, is ambitious, paints images from "modern life," looks at old master paintings, etc. Sultan does have a crush on Manet; a small still life with asparagus pays homage to Manet's famous single asparagus stalk, and a little detail of masts and sails in Manet...
Another catalog eulogist, Lynne Warren, noting Sultan's commitment to formal painting and his commendable lack of interest in grabbing quotes from visual mass media, winds up with the startling claim that "his works are meditations on the possibilities of transcendent meaning for an audience that has forgotten . . . how to believe." Aw, come on. There is nothing "transcendent" about Sultan's work. It is decorative and materialistic. Most of its motifs come from photographs, not direct observation; its style is distanced and gloomily elegant, enlivened by discreet erotic puns between, for instance, lemons and breasts...
Much of the character, and indeed the strength, of Sultan's paintings lies in their odd, slightly fetishistic technique. He works on square plywood panels, faced with Masonite and then covered with ordinary vinyl tiles. Over these goes a thick coat of black glop -- industrial butyl rubber, used by roofers. Once this tarry skin is dry, Sultan cuts and blowtorches his design into it, filling in white patches with plaster and enriching the whole with color. The seams of the tiles and panels impose a grid on the image, a ghost memory of the minimalist grids that pervaded American...
This laborious process favors contour and flatness, light-and-dark contrast rather than color, and the single iconic shape. Sultan does decoratively what an older American artist like Robert Moskowitz does grandly: by taking a familiar shape and rescaling it, mainly as profile -- one still life of an egg and three lemons on a plate is also 8 ft. square -- he slows up recognition and provokes, in the more successful paintings, a sense of strangeness...