Erwin Panofsky's words about another oil painter, also mysterious in technique and effect, come to mind: "From the sheer sensuous beauty of a genuine Jan Van Eyck there emanates a strange fascination not unlike that which we experience when permitting ourselves to be hypnotized by precious stones or when looking into deep water." Since Giorgione and Titian, we have come to think of oil paint in terms of its rich impasto and the advantages of its opacity. How curious that one of the last of the oil painters has reached back, beyond 16th-Century Venice, to one of the first of the oil painters, to exploit once again the combination of intensity, mystery, and subtlety offered uniquely by the oil medium in its translucent, layered state.

In contradiction to these luminous strata, close inspection reveals the importance of the canvas's texture, suggestive more of soaking than of layering. The close view renders multiple layers of oil paint inconceivable; yet we are told the layers are there, and fundamental to the shifting glow of the surface.

Another aspect of the mystery, related to technique, concerns illusion: the illustion of depth, the illusion of changing light, the tendency of pointillist dots or vague forms to rise to the surface as one stares. The illusion grows from the interaction between the rich and laborious technique and the changing conditions of external light and the viewer's position. It is as if Berkowitz has managed to incorporate some effects of kinetic art (such as Thomas Wilfred's) into the static medium of painting.

His most recent works, such as "Light Fall" and "Day and Night" (both 1980), have given new substance to those shadowy forms that have always lurked beneath the surface of his canvases. In these paintings the vague becomes focused, the ethereal acquires volume, the haze turns from cirrus to cumulus. This move toward the substantial has developed in a series of pastels, which accompanied the show. In pastel, Berkowitz has found a medium in which he can develop ideas more quickly and experiment with new possibilities. It is here that his illusory forms have coalesced and become tangible.

A peculiarity of the last hundred years has been the artist obsessed with a single idea, repeated over and over. This obsessive trend has conceived each painting as a microcosm, filled with forces and possibilities awaiting resolution by the simplest but most suggestive means possible. The simplicity of such paintings approximates the simplicity of universal laws, in which complex factors are subsumed rather than bypassed.

Berkowitz has captured the mystical, hypnotic vision of this tradition, but in more refined terms than did any abstract expressionist or even Morris Louis. His are late statements, Tiepolos rather than Titians, and they do not burn with psychological or even intellectual challenge as much as glow with the emotive radiance of a masterful solution.

There is something satisfying about seeing an artist reach a peak and attain major recognition in the autumn years; the life becomes a long preparation for a proper climax. The beauty of Leon Berkowitz's paintings stems from more than visual effects; one can assume it to be the product of a lifetime of thought, and perhaps frustration. His autumn may coincide with that of the 20th Century's concept of modernism, of which these beautiful and mysterious paintings are newly rarified embodiments.




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