Reading about the painter Pat Adams’s process, you’d be excused for shuddering at such a proudly theoretical, ruminant approach to art making. Adams, the reading proves, is an artist unafraid to expound upon her sturdy understanding of cosmology, microbiology, paleontology, and philosophy. Her imperious art parlance includes the use of such words as “quiddities” and “internality.” She takes years to finish a painting because she needs to “think it through.” All of it suggests an art that revels in its own cerebral depth, the kind of work that begs to be branded with a multi-hyphenate word, or one ending in -ic or -ism. Who could blame you for a little shiver of fear?
Alexandre Gallery, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has mounted an exhibition of Adams’s work from the 1950s and 1960s, the first two decades of her career. Almost entirely executed in gouache on paper (as the work of young, poor artists is wont to be), these works launch from Pat Adams’s rapacious intellectual development. By the end of the 1960s, she was producing a “hypnotic bath of completely delightful visual detail,” as Hilton Kramer described it in a review from the 1970s.
In 1950 Pat Adams was a twenty-two-year-old aspirant from Stockton, California, freshly arrived in New York. Her education followed the abstractionist ordinances of the University of California Berkeley art faculty, at that time staunchly devoted to the ideas of Hans Hofmann. Hungry for knowledge and new references, she spent 1951 and 1952 making her Grand Tour through Europe. Throughout the early works on display at Alexandre, signifiers of her discoveries from this trip flutter forth like spring leaves. Norfolk—August 9 (1957) hangs its gyrating circular forms on the same peg as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Consequence In and Out (1960) unrolls in streaking panes of pale color like a Turner seascape.
It feels unwieldy to lump Pat Adams in with others of the New York School’s second generation, not only because she wasn’t from New York and only briefly lived there, but more because she was forever her own entity. Adams may have seemed a worthy Greenberg acolyte, bustling intellect and all, but she was too single-minded, too idiosyncratic, too discrepant to ever cohere in that category—or any such category, for that matter. From all reports, Adams still is all of those things—she’s ninety-five and continues to work regularly from her studio in Vermont. In the large-format heyday of the 1950s and ’60s, Adams went small, inspired by the any-size-will-do manner of the Quattrocento. Her early work turned away from the extreme non-figuration dominating the era, with forms freely arranged but recognizable to the eye, contained in hard bounding lines and discreet fields of color.
If Adams can’t be pinned down, the same is true of the paintings on show at Alexandre. All of them are in a mighty struggle against the limits of the canvas. It’s commotion, expansion, movement. Paintings such as Ingress and the Rivet (1961) appear to spiral off beyond the frame and into the beyond. This is one of numerous aspects to Adams’s work derived from the forms and functions of nature. From her very first interaction with art, gazing upon the calla lilies her great-grandmother had painted in 1875, Adams was swept away by the desire to capture in art all she couldn’t describe of the material world. Sanary-sur-Mer, painted in 1957, constitutes an astral projection of eye shapes, concentric circles, and waveforms. The painting’s loose arrangement and wiry lines hold the viewer between a moment of poise and a moment of grand release. Adams’s aforementioned fascination with cosmology and microbiology served to satiate a hunger for knowledge, but her application of organic materials like eggshell, mica, sand, and mother-of-pearl in her paintings is a tactile expression of what her mind had feasted on. In another life Pat Adams might have practiced Shinto; in this one, she turned her feeling for nature into mesmeric art. “I really feel the world,” she said in a 2022 interview. “I extract particulars from everywhere I go.”
What, then, of nature’s violence? You can’t have a love of nature without a fear of it, and much of Adams’s early work rides high on a savage energy found in the confluence of warring forces. The violence in Adams’s paintings is the violence of an amoeba eating a paramecium. Nature’s forces collide unknowingly. Tetrad (1965), one of the clearer examples of Adams’s microbiological imagery, confines four cell-like forms in such attenuated space that they seem on the point of engulfing one another. Elsewhere, the use of heavy paint splotches, jagged outlines, and visceral colors in high saturation lend a painting such as Il me plaît (1959) a heady air of death, as if we’re seeing the contents of an archaic animal form cut open and spilled out onto the canvas.
If her 1950s work was immediate and feverish, something seemed to change for Adams in the Sixties. In 1964, she took a job in the art school at Bennington College, which she occupied for three decades. Perhaps it was the serene grounds and contemplative atmosphere of her new Vermont surrounds that led Adams to abandon the hemoglobular mania of her mid-Fifties cytoplasm-bloodbath paintings. Perhaps it was just the maturing of an artist’s mind. But no longer do we see the warring organisms and serrated edges. A vision of the most minute elements of nature has been exchanged for a vision of the galaxy. We are entering something coherent, unified.
In showing her 1960s work, the exhibition suddenly reveals that Pat Adams’s career is underscored by an indomitable desire to lead herself, and her viewer, into oneness. Early on she was finding oneness in the cell; by 1968 she was finding oneness in the cosmos. Her late-Sixties paintings are stunning encapsulations of an entire world. The color fields are completely discreet, the brushwork and linework is much more refined, and violence has turned to equanimity. Green Run Around Red (1969) encapsulates the best of what Pat Adams achieved in these first two decades of her career. Its faintly marbled texture is miraculous, and its boldly drawn lines place the viewer in what appears to be a kind of frame, a window into a new universe. In this way she’s like a Hiberno-Saxon manuscript, or a Miró: illuminating everything we see, and evoking everything we can’t.