Herman Cherry "Rivers from 30,000 Feet": New York
In 1970, working in East Hampton, Herman Cherry had a prolific, breakthrough year of painting. Almost none of it was ever shown. Most of the canvases were rolled soon after they were made; a handful survived stretched, barely, on old and failing stretchers. Fifty-five years later, they are finally on view.
Cherry came to painting by way of Los Angeles, studying at Otis Art Institute and the Art Students League there under the Synchromist Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who taught at Otis. In New York he assisted Thomas Hart Benton on the mural Benton made for the New School for Social Research, before turning to a cubist-inflected abstraction in the 1940s and settling into the downtown milieu that became the New York School. He was among the first generation of members of The Club, brought in shortly after its founding, in 1950 or 1951, sponsored by his old friend Philip Guston. He was close as well with de Kooning and the critic Irving Sandler, and his work appeared in five Whitney Annuals through the 1950s, along with a solo show at the Stable Gallery. In 1962, the Poindexter Gallery dropped him as Pop and Minimalism took hold, and he would not exhibit commercially again for over twenty years.
He had kept a place in East Hampton since 1964, already old friends there with the de Koonings. When he lost his Cooper Square studio in 1968, East Hampton became his center of gravity, and he supported himself through teaching posts and artist residencies.
The paintings also mark a real shift in Cherry's own language. The chunky, built-up surfaces of his 1950s work, painted in dialogue with artists like Guston and Hans Hofmann, gave way in the 1960s to a flatter, jazzier vocabulary shaped by early European abstraction. By 1970, that flatness had resolved into something new again: compositions with the clean structural logic of Ellsworth Kelly, color handled with the formal precision of Kenneth Noland, and, running through both, Cherry's own reading of the American landscape. It is a sophisticated, hard-won synthesis, arrived at not by following the decade's dominant styles but by working alongside them toward his own conclusions.
The River and Summer paintings trace back to what Cherry had seen from airplane windows on those trips: rivers cutting their oxbows across the plains below, geology resolving into pattern at thirty thousand feet. The paintings and watercolors themselves were all made in East Hampton in 1970, the memory of that aerial view worked out on the ground. The results carry a hard-edge clarity and a way of letting color bloom into the canvas that recall Helen Frankenthaler's soak-stain compositions.
He kept working into 1972 and 1973, then stopped in 1974, forced out of his teaching position at Kingsborough Community College for having turned sixty-five. Most of the 1970 paintings went into the basement of the Mercer Street building in SoHo where he lived until his death in 1992; three canvases took longer, left in a shed in East Hampton until around 1978. None of it was ever shown, not in his lifetime, and not through the thirty years his widow, Regina, spent preserving his archive after. It is hard not to wonder what might have been if Cherry had shown this work in 1970. That show did not happen. This one finally does.
