At the Galleries

Back in New York, “William Perehudoff: Boundless Color” at Berry Campbell, in Chelsea, was testimony to the power of chromatic relationships and a variety of shapes to stir our emotions. Perehudoff (1918–2013) lived in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, for almost all of his life, apart from formative studies of art, early on, and extensive travels, later, in part for his own exhibitions, in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. The selection, spanning the 1960s to the 1990s, made clear both his originality and his sophisticated awareness of what his fellow abstract painters were doing, mostly in New York, over the years. Perehudoff, like many ambitious Canadian painters, benefitted greatly from the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops, a summer program of master classes for serious artists, held at a rural outpost of the University of Saskatchewan, with the participation of international art stars ranging from Barnett Newman, to Kenneth Noland, to Frank Stella. Working side by side with artists they admired was intensely stimulating for participants and heightened their daring. Perehudoff’s wide recognition as an important abstract painter with a highly individual way of orchestrating color for maximum expression—as well as his friendship with acclaimed artists such as Anthony Caro and Jack Bush—owes something to his experience at Emma Lake.
 
The works on view explored the resonance of the raw materials of painting, as manipulated by a distinct personality. Perehudoff rang changes on floating strokes, sometimes conditioned by the shape of the support, sometimes independent, crisp or gestural, wide-ranging or disciplined in layered stacks. Washy transparencies competed with bold densities. Some works depended on fragile pastels, others on assertive gatherings of saturated hues, with color always luminous and in unexpected relationships. Changes in the scale of the strokes, like variations in their edges and placement, altered the mood of the paintings, almost as much as the chromatic gamut did, a complexity that triggered analogies with music. While there were familial connections among some works, it was clear that Perehudoff, like his friend Caro, never wanted to repeat himself but kept finding new ways to investigate the possibilities of placing colors together on a surface. The Canadian master is well-known north of the border. He should be better known here.

 

— Karen Wilkin, The Hudson Review