Peter Plagens

Peter Plagens (born 1941) is an American artist, art critic, and novelist based in New York City.

Plagens was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1941 and grew up in Los Angeles.

He attended the University of Southern California, where he majored in painting (BFA, 1962) and drew cartoons for the Daily Trojan.

He left USC an abstract painter, influenced by Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, which set him at odds with the somewhat conservative painting faculty at Syracuse University (MFA, 1964) where he did his graduate studies.

He moved back to California in 1965 and took an Assistant Curator position at the Long Beach Museum of Art; soon after, he approached Artforum editor Phil Leider for work as a reviewer—at five dollars per review—in order to keep up with the Los Angeles art scene.

In 1966, Plagens accepted a teaching position at the University of Texas, remaining until 1969, when he accepted a position at California State University, Northridge.

Plagens began exhibiting professionally in 1967, and was featured in the 1971 LACMA show, "24 Young Los Angeles Artists" and the 1972 Whitney Biennial.

During his time at Cal State, Plagens shared a 3,000-square-foot studio with painter Walter Gabrielson on the same block in Pasadena as artist Bruce Nauman's; in 1975, he appeared in Nauman's short film Pursuit.

He has shown at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 1975, and showed regularly at the Jan Baum Gallery in Los Angeles (1977–1992) and Jan Cicero Gallery in Chicago (1986–98).

He taught there until 1978, and at the University of California, Berkeley (1972), the University of Southern California (1978–80), and the University of North Carolina (1980–4), where he also chaired the art department.

Increasingly minimal works, such as Cleveland Defaults on Its Debts (1979) or Cubist Landscape (1980), have been recognized for carefully calibrated compositions that challenged conventional rules about balance and probed the line between elegance and awkwardness, and friction and harmony.

In pivotal paintings of the mid-1980s, such as Wheels of Wonder (1985) and Wedge of Life (1987), Plagens incorporated angular, eccentric polygons, greater surface variation and a new sense of movement that reviewers such as Grace Glueck deemed "witty balancing acts."

Plagens married the painter, Laurie Fendrich, in 1981.

They moved to New York City in 1985 where they continue to reside, while also maintaining a studio outside the city.

Critic Dave Hickey, among others, has characterized Plagens as "an irrevocably abstract formalist painter," who, regardless of fashion, has rooted his work in modernist and Abstract Expressionism syntax, formal rigor, and a willful embrace of dissonance and contradictions—such as hard-edged geometry and messy, gestural abstraction, "happy accident and copious correction," and beauty and intentional clunkiness.

During this time, he also created the drawing series "My Father Worked in Advertising" (1986), which featured dappled, abstract expressionist-like areas around the edges over which he painted and collaged fields of color and hard-edged and irregular shapes.

He is most widely known for his longstanding contributions to Artforum and Newsweek (senior writer and art critic, 1989–2003), and for what critics have called a remarkably consistent, five-decade-long body of abstract formalist painting.

Critics noted a building complexity and immediacy in Plagens's output from 1989 to 2000, the result of a more expansive mix of materials, markmaking and palettes.

In paintings such as Benton Way and Sunset, LA, 6/28/55, 1:40 pm (1989) and Learning of the Tragic News (1996), he introduced expressive drips and gestural, free-form marks and shapes, that Michael Kimmelman wrote had "a looping calligraphic eloquence" recalling Arshile Gorky and Richard Diebenkorn.

Of particular note were the small, brightly colored, discordant geometric forms that Plagens set against primarily off-white and slate-gray backdrops, which critics suggested "snapped" his rhythmic compositions into place.

Between 2000 and 2003, Plagens sought to create a greater degree of tension In a series of untitled works on paper by subdividing them into two fields: one containing fluid, expressive shapes and linear forms on gray or khaki-colored grounds, atop another, featuring configurations of jarring, hard-edged rectangles set on black or off-white fields.

In later paintings, he dispensed with the subdivision, creating more centralized compositions that featured flat, irregular, near-fluorescent color shapes directly painted on neutral grounds of contrasting gestural shapes and marks.

In 2004, the USC Fisher Gallery organized and held a 30-year traveling retrospective of his work.

Critics have contrasted the purely visual dialogue his art creates—often generating more questions than answers—with the directness of his writing; they also contend that the visibility of his bylines as a critic has sometimes overshadowed his artmaking—unduly.

Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel described Plagens's painting as a "fusion of high-flying refinement and everyday awkwardness" with an intellectual savvy, disdain for snobbery and ungainliness he likened to Willem de Kooning's work.

His 2004 retrospective at USC traveled to Columbia College Chicago and the Butler Institute of American Art in Akron.

David Pagel wrote that Plagens's 2004 retrospective traced "a remarkably consistent arc" of stubbornly held abstract work of "sophisticated inelegance."

Plagens works improvisationally, sometimes pushing his paintings to the edge of failure, by his own admission and according to critics.

He maintains there is no symbolism in his work; he often appends enigmatic titles to his work upon completion, however, that indicate his ruminations while in the studio.

Throughout his career, he has produced works on paper that generally correspond in style to his paintings, incorporating collaged photographs, fragments of commercial packaging, and colored and textured paper.

Plagens's early work featured single, emphatic shapes—circles with wedges removed, diamonds, trapezoids, and thin letter "C"-like rings—which he placed on vivid red-orange or creamy white color fields that sometimes disintegrated at the canvas edges into irregular, soft bands of subtle color.

In the 2010s, Plagens garnered some of the best reviews of his career for shows that critics described, variously, as "jaunty, accomplished disquisitions" or heated, "intimate discourses" exploring the co-existence of incompatible styles, formal concepts and paint application in single works.

Plagens has written three books on art, Bruce Nauman: The True Artist (2014), Moonlight Blues: An Artist's Art Criticism (1986) and Sunshine Muse: Modern Art on the West Coast, 1945-70 (1974), and two novels, The Art Critic (2008) and Time for Robo (1999).

He has been awarded major fellowships for both his painting (John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts) and his writing (Andy Warhol Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts).

Plagens's work has been featured in surveys at the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Whitney Museum, and PS1, and in solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Las Vegas Art Museum.

These paintings (e.g., The Ides of October or A Literary Sensibility, both 2017) and works on paper employed three main visual elements: a gestural, improvisational field of squiggles, loops and loose grids partially blotted out by a large, irregularly edged expanse of opaque orange, pink, lavender-gray or aqua, upon which Plagens set hard-edged, irregular polygons built from six or seven shards of bright color that he dubbed "color badges."

Critics suggested that these badges mediated an ongoing flux between coherent wholes and fluid parts, order and disorder, freedom and restraint, establishing an uneasy, but engaging, "strange harmony."

Reviewing Plagens's 2018 exhibition, New York Times critic Roberta Smith called the show an "eye-teasing sandwich of contrasting formalist strategies," the hard-won result of a decade of focused experimentation.

Plagens's recent works on paper, such as The Sinister Man 2 (2018), have largely relied on centralized compositions, anchored by collaged photographs or found paper with text or graphic images that are contained by colored-paper or painted rectangular fields.

Smaller in scale and less off-kilter in composition, these works have been seen as expressing a greater intimacy and poignancy than Plagens's paintings.