TitleBattle One
Artist
Robert Goodnough
(American, 1917 - 2010)
Date1992
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 18 × 34 in.
Framed: 19 5/8 × 35 1/2 × 1 1/2 in.
SignedSigned at lower right: "Goodnough / 92".
SubmissionANA diploma presentation, January 6, 1993
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1993.5
Label TextConsidered by many a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter, Robert Goodnough grew up in rural upstate New York and took classes with a local artist as a child. He won a scholarship to attend Syracuse University and after graduation was drafted into the army, serving briefly in the South Pacific during World War II. Prior to the war Goodnough's art was figurative. However, it was while he was stationed in New Guinea that the artist was first exposed to the modern art of Picasso and Mondrian illustrated in a magazine. Following the war Goodnough moved to New York where he continued his studies with Amédée Ozenfant and soon thereafter with Hans Hofmann. Influenced by both artists, Goodnough has continued to work in a pluralism of styles that reflects both the discipline and control of Ozenfant and the expressiveness of Hofmann.Goodnough began exhibiting in New York with his inclusion in the 1950 landmark exhibition New Talent organized by Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro and held at the Kootz Gallery. Not particularly influenced by the gestural approach to abstraction as some of his New York School colleagues, by 1952 Goodnough was experimenting with collage, and his work began to incorporate stronger geometric elements. Much of the artist's work at this time, as many have noted, took on a decidedly Cubist tendency of arranging geometric forms within the picture plane. Greenberg, long a champion of Goodnough's work, wrote perceptively of the artist's use of layered geometric shapes in the composition: "they convey a wealth of force by slight-seeming means: the placing and proportioning of the clustered leaf-facets in relation to large areas of unmarked canvas; the microscopic spacing of the leaf-facets themselves; their changes of hue and value, their thickened surfaces, which lift from the canvas almost imperceptibly-that's how some of the best art of our time gets itself made."
In Goodnough's work of the 1970s and early 1980s his unmistakable clusters of triangle shapes were often situated within a large, neutral tone field, floating within the picture plane. These works retained the tactility of his work from the previous decades but did so in a more sparing way. By the mid-1980s, the artist returned to activating more of the negative space within the painting, a trend in his work that has continued. While he never completely abandoned the use of gesture, and sometimes incorporated it into his paintings, he is better known for his collage-like geometric works. "Battle One" is one of these paintings from the early 1990s that demonstrates the artist's interest in greater activation of the composition. Inherently process-oriented, "Battle One's" collage effect is most evident by the layering of white triangular shapes over those of red and blue. While he strives to elicit a reaction from the viewer, it is also the formal issues of painting with which the artist has grappled: "It was a matter of using each shape as I felt it, and trying to relate it to other shapes, or trying to create a conflict between the different shapes and resolve that tension."
MNP
