Painting and Grace: John Dubrow, Back from Paris

When I saw John Dubrow’s paintings for the first time, I was shocked. It was certainly not “the shock of the new;” it was the pleasure of the unexpected.

A painter today who produces figures on canvas and who uses a brush is no longer rare, even at the most trendy contemporary art biennials. I’ve been looking at these and thinking about them for years. All have disappointed me. I’m not so tired of installations, videos, of the festival of “concepts” and the flood of photography as to become a single-minded zealot for painter-painters, even if I’m biased in favor of their naiveness or their courage. Never mind standards. I look for the pleasure of expression, and if it isn’t there in a “figurative” canvas, I note it as coldly as if I’m looking at a pile of soiled tissues passing itself off as an “installation.”

I don’t need to name the oldest of today’s painter-painters, since both are deservedly famous, both have their own grandeur, which I won’t deny. I admire them deeply for imposing among us, with the formidable authority of patriarchs, as a counter-current the living nobility of an art whose memory they at least in part embody. I admire them, but they don’t move me. They do, I repeat, have a certain grandeur, and with it intelligence, energy, and defiance, but they don’t make me happy. In this sense, they may be great, even heroic, but they still belong to the contemporary they resist, whose most characteristic trait is a complete rejection of pleasure. They are violent. Nietzsche said that modern philosophers are inferior to ancient ones because they are not real lovers. True lovers know the paradoxical secret that softness is strength. Happiness, in art as in philosophy, and the grace that is its reward, belongs to true lovers.

When I first laid eyes on Dubrow’s paintings, I felt what I thought was impossible—happiness and the grace of great love in the work of a contemporary artist. From the outset, this feast of canvases simply made me happy. Happy without knowing why, like the rose of Angelus Silesius is beautiful. Bonnard and Vuillard and Matisse were happy along with me. And not only them—Chardin, Corot, and Cézanne, too. It was strange to sense them happily at my side on Madison Avenue. Here, I knew immediately, we didn’t need the “theory” of Clement Greenberg or Arthur Danto to propel us: We felt ourselves personally invited to break bread together, to celebrate this unknown American who had painted these paintings and who truly was a brother.

Yet when I stood before each of these canvases, none looked in the least like anything painted by the French masters assembled so joyfully around me. Portraits, landscapes, urban scenes, all were resolutely today; their light was New York’s; the air of democracy they breathed was distinctly that of the American century. They could never have been painted long ago in “old” Europe.

Each took on its subject directly, head-on, familiarly, on a first-name basis, equally, whether the person depicted was a rich young executive in his plush house, a wise old film director, unmindful to appearances, resting at his editing desk, a young girl, dreamy and half-dressed, on her couch, subway riders or pedestrians at a Broadway intersection, landscapes of rooftops or bridges, or even the painter himself, standing and greeting a visitor in his studio, his eyes still dilated from his painter’s otherworld.

No pastiches, no words on the paintings, no post-modern deja-vu. What was sure, even before one discovered how this unknown painter managed to create such a trusting immediacy between his paintings and the viewer, was that he wasn’t hoping to plunge the latter in the molasses of the everyday, to tautologically thrust him into weightiness, sorrow, the incommunicable, the neon desert, all of which have become the pseudo-existential and stolidly sociological commonplaces of the non-art that calls itself “contemporary.”

In each of Dubrow’s canvases, a sort of magic lightens, illuminates, transfigures, and brings together beings and things, whose represented “reality” is there only to anchor them in their own happy fleetingness, and there it harmonizes them with a natural candor that is unaware of angst. It is not through drowning in raw materials that this reunion happens; instead, it’s the unexpected blossoming of a flower on a compost heap.

In this collection of canvases whose “subject” would have qualified them, as people used to say, as “genre” paintings, one notes a unicum—a “Biblical” painting, “Rephidim.” Old Moses sits on a hill during the battle between the Hebrews and the Amalekites, straining to keep his supplicating arms skyward so that Jehovah will come to his people’s aid, and two attendants do all they can to help him keep from lowering them. Seen from behind, one of the attendants, the younger one—isn’t it a self-portrait of Dubrow? Could this religious subject be an allegory of art? Yes, I thought: Art, for Dubrow, isn’t there to increase the weight of the world, or of ourselves, nor in any sense to tell us what we already know (photography and television help do that)—ugliness, vulgarity, meanness, vacuity—but to help us ease, lighten, refine matter and unleash our own capacity for grace.

The ultra-American Dubrow is related, in his way, to the ultra-European Balthus. He seeks in the a fresco simplicity of his solid colors, in the light that his giornate open up and in the space they know how to construct, and, too, in the design of his figures’ movements and repose, finally in the di sotto in sù or d’in sù in sotto framing of his portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, to allow the heart of the real to bloom, to rid it of its whys, to unveil it as the crossroad where our neglected powers of contemplation and softness awaken and recognize each other.

Is this the American dream? Yes, in its belief that happiness is possible and open to all. No, because the determined rigor of this quest for shared grace refuses to let go of the presence of beings and things, and to project itself brutally into the abstraction of an imagined better tomorrow; Dubrow’s art aims instead to uncover the grace that is already there, hidden in the modesty of the real, like a sacred gift refused out of ignorance and rash incapacity to see it because we’re not looking for it.

That is why the American artist Dubrow has so many affinities with French intimate painters, from Chardin to Bonnard, from Corot to Cézanne, who have sought before him and with him the common ground of the gaze, not over or on the surface of perceptible appearances, but in their center and in their heart, where they quietly invite the democratic gaze to the feast of the real. Dubrow’s art, like that of French painters of grace, proposes to share what the real contains—the delicious, the humble, and the soft—once its hard rind is removed and its flesh offers us, naked, its simple and poignant flavors. The art of a true lover.

It was inevitable that one day Dubrow would cross the Atlantic and, like Chad, the Bostonian hero of Henry James’s “The Ambassadors,” or like the great Edward Hopper, come to live for a time in the land of his spiritual ancestors. He was in Paris for only a few months, and it was Paris, the cityscape, its streets and boulevards, its museums, its climate, its very light that attracted him, since he had no affinity with an artistic environment in thrall to the political correctness of so-called “contemporary art.”

Of the four canvases he brought back from that brief and relatively solitary stay, one was a self-portrait in blue—a monk in his cell, concentrating hard—and three magnificent urban landscapes, one of the Boulevard Saint-Denis, the two others of streets off the Square de la République.

The light of Paris, even if polluted, is the same as Edward Hopper found it in 1904—white and pale, attenuated even further by the roofs of slate and gray zinc and by the blue, often very thin and clouded, of the sky. It’s the cold light of a studio, better suited, at first sight, to etching or drawing than to painting, but in it the least touch of color assumes a striking force. For a long time, French painters, who developed in and were fascinated by the bright light of Latium and Campania, overlooked that of Ile-de-France. When they discovered it after Théodore Rousseau and Corot, the history of landscape, both urban and rustic, was revived. Once painters had explored the resources and nuances of this pearl light, they were so excited by the delicate life of colors that, off again on the conquest of the Mediterranean south, but this time in Cannes, Saint-Tropez, Marseille, and Aix-en-Provence, they knew how to feel color under a hot and violent sun with a very different sentiment from that of their ancestors in Rome and Naples.

A New York painter, Dubrow has marvelously sensed the cold and pearly quality of Parisian light and its deep affinity for shades of gray. All it takes is comparing his New York painting “Prince and Broadway” (2002) with his Parisian painting of the Boulevard Saint-Denis to understand the delicate translation he has carried out between almost identical subjects, going from one local spirit to another, from the striking light of New York to the cold one of Paris. The rare touches of bright color in the Parisian canvas assume a strange mute power that they don’t have in the more chromatic New York painting.

The horizontal and vertical geometry of the perpendiculars in the New York landscapes, for instance “Bridge” (2001-02) and “Westbeth Roof” (2001-02), is answered by the two Parisian landscapes of old streets. The one of the rue du Temple, of medium dimensions, interplays gray on gray against a background of pale overcast sky with rare spots of dark red and light blue paint. Without having sought to, Dubrow has rediscovered the palette, the touch, the feeling for space and volume of Albert Marquet. The smaller landscape (“Paris 2ème”), silhouettes against the sky the sharp, saw-tooth angle described by a long, narrow street and its juxtapositions of differently sized buildings. Never have those V’s that rise up in your wake anywhere you walk in historic Paris, like so many champagne flutes filled and overflowing with sky and luminous clouds, casting the street into pale shadow, found such a precise and sensitive poet.

With these three masterpieces of the urban landscape, the Dubrow of his brief “Paris Period” has captured the essential features of the French capital’s urban space from the most popular of its old quarters. The self-portrait he brought back from Paris concentrates, in great, Cézanne-like strokes, the strength of soul it took a painter-poet to withstand the desert for his art, which he found in places that were his most fruitful oases.

A memorable stay, and memorable testimonies to it.