Acrylic Lyricist

The eminent abstract painter Robert Natkin died on April 20 in Danbury, Connecticut, aged 79. The Metropolitan, Guggenheim, Whitney, and Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hirschhorn in Washington all own Natkin paintings. In one sense, he was a magnificent survival of the New York School of abstract expressionism, an emissary from the fertile plains of the postwar era to the hard-baked artistic desert of today. But Natkin was no mere survival, because his art continued to grow throughout his career. His last paintings are his best. 

Robert Natkin

Formally, there was little change over the decades: Misty, delicate grids of color surround contrasting rectangles, circles, bent lines, or blobs that stand out like sudden inspirations just emerged from a colorful fog of thought. (Often he created his mists using a sponge wrapped in textured cloth.) His overlapping color-screens are each as nuanced and mobile as sheets of cloth in a mild, fragrant breeze. Sometimes the gaps in the many-layered mist (like stacks of delicate window screening) interfere; sometimes they coincide, giving you a view deep into the painting and revealing the strange incandescence at its core. Natkin’s color thinking grew stronger and more striking throughout his life until he achieved (at his best) sublime color chords, often built around peaches and light magentas or an arresting deep, cool green: Natkin green. He worked steadily, mainly in acrylics, until (in the last few years of his life) he was no longer able to paint. His work is, in fact, a lesson in the power of acrylics: He exploits their translucence to make deep, glowing color pools; their short drying-times make it natural for him to build his mesmerizing mists out of many superimposed layers that remain distinct.