While in Lori Bookstein Fine Art gallery, in New York City during midsummer the visitor might, for a moment, ignore the caption to Morning (Small II) that reveals it is the work of Leland Bell, or that this oil painting on canvas, which has a small-scale, timeless majesty, was completed relatively recently, in 1985. Morning (Small II) is less than two feet wide and two feet long, and is as deceptively modest as its title. A female nude stands near a bed with her left arm raised theatrically, beckoning, or entreating, a nude male in bed. The male is sat up, weary, his tired head supported by his hand and upraised arm. Near the bed, a dark gray cat arches its back. And, as far as narrative content goes, that is all there is to it. xxxxxx

Though thoroughly painted, the two nude figures are thickly outlined and silhouetted. They seem part of composite anatomical studies, rather than being, as this painting is, the culmination of earlier such studies by Bell from the 1980s, painted and drawn on paper. In fact there are eleven other works here depicting these two figures and their lithe cat in ever-changing poses, many of them mixed media studies characterized by a symbolic, abstract setting, agitated line drawings and emphatic brushwork. Each of these works by Bell seem as if dynamic, how-to illustrations from Bridgman’s Life Drawing had been painted by Picasso.

The ever-variable configuration of the two anonymous subjects who are waking in the Morning series parallels the painter’s process as he renders the same basic scene into the most satisfying rearrangements and altered textures he can imagine. Some of the painting is flat, elsewhere it is thick or impressionistic. The outlines accentuate the gravity and heaviness of their bearing. The rapid, molded rendering of their heads, torsos and limbs conveys lightness, reveling in the harmonious proportions and interconnections within the human anatomy, even in its frozen motion.

So is Morning (Small II) the handiwork of a realist painter with renegade neo-abstract tendencies? Or studies by an abstract painter who is reconciling himself to naturalism? Bell in fact exceeds these categories.

For one, the figurative realism and domestic setting of Morning (Small II) is counterweighed by the painting’s bright, nearly fantastic colors. The redness of the male figure’s skin is a rosy contrast to the patchy pale and tan flesh of the woman. Similarly the wrinkled segments of the sky-blue bed-sheet, in which the male is half-swaddled, are rendered in thick outlines, drawing attention to the bedding, as if it were a separate entity, not unlike the mattress, or the bedframe, which is painted a striking dark blood-red. In this evocation of dream-like reality, “Morning” resembles certain unnerving works by Giorgio di Chirico which depict the monumental bulkiness and hammering light revealed in ordinary locations.

Yet Morning (Small II) is not without shadows. On to the pinkish clay-colored ground, red shadows are cast by the legs of the standing female nude and the arched cat. Also on the floor is a stray blue and turquoise object, perhaps a scarf, or a stocking, or, as it seems in some of the other studies, two entwined fish. It sits there, distracting the eye, inexplicable, lending the otherwise recognizable domestic scene of “Morning,” an otherworldly feel. Adding to this effect is the square backdrop on the bedroom wall, above the couple, which might be an outlook on a beach, in its boxy, reciprocal planes of browns and blues. Or perhaps that large square isn’t a window at all, but a wall-sized abstract painting hung up over the bed by the figurative painter who is, it seems, drawing our attention to the conflicting categories of recent Western art.

Or we can call this painting, like the twelve others in Morning Series, a visual joy and leave it all at that. But we will surely wonder about the artist behind these marvels.

Born in Cambridge, Maryland, in 1922, and raised in Brooklyn, Leland Bell was completely self-taught, and spent his formative years contemplating master paintings in museums, and getting valuable encouragement from the American painter Karl Knaths in Provincetown. Like Knaths, Bell absorbed into his personal idiom the technical breakthroughs of European Modernism. But instead of merely replicating Kandinsky or Braque or, one of Bell’s most favored painters, Andre Derain, Bell seamlessly integrated their innovations into lyrical figuration, expressive landscapes and still life paintings suited to a postwar American optimism.

By the late 1940s, Bell had settled in New York City, working blue collar jobs. He started showing in the various downtown galleries while keeping a studio on West 16th Street. As his artwork gained notice, he traveled between America and Europe. He became an influential teacher, best remembered for his tenure as one of the founding faculty members at the New York Studio School, which opened in 1964. A talented jazz drummer, Bell painted and drew rhythm into all of his artworks. Poised form and spontaneous syncopation are his twin muses and both seem to be exemplified by the moveable twosome and the feline who constitute the living, active presences in Morning Series.

Bell’s relative obscurity puts him in distinguished company from a halcyon New York scene that is frequently reduced, in art history annals, to the short-lived supernova of Abstract Expressionism. Indeed Bell was by no means alone in his resistance to that movement’s excesses and obfuscations. Like his overlooked peers, Bell was a figurative painter who used Modernist techniques, such as instantaneous and overlapping perspectives, an effervescent palette, intensely colored negative space, and compositions that feature emblematic movements, color-field patterns and totemic figures. Like Bell’s other New York peers who were born in the 1910s or ’20s, he evolved a species of energetic American representational art that was an advancing of, rather than a retreating from, early 20th Century European examples.

The list of such like-minded colleagues includes Bell’s own wife, the Icelandic-born painter, Louisa Matthiasdottir, whom he married in 1944, as well as prolific first-generation New York figures who worked at representational painting over many decades, doing so squarely in Bell’s very neighborhood, including, among others, painters like Aristodimos Kaldis, Paul Resika, Fairfield Porter, Robert De Niro Sr., Anne Tabachnick, Elaine de Kooning, Rosemarie Beck, and Sherman Drexler — not to mention the many second-generation avant-garde representational painters south of Fourteenth Street who, by the early-to-mid 1960s, found themselves, as Bell did, trapped in an art market’s no-man’s-land between the burnout of AbEx and the deluge of Pop art.

The dust has long settled on all of that, and Bell, who died in 1991, is getting his due.

Bookstein showcases Bells’ late career Morning series so that the paintings, hung in very close proximity to one another, resemble reframed expositions, each with a luminosity and intimacy that resembles both early Renaissance Italian frescoes and the Degas’ sketchbooks filled with studies of dancers.

Each painting brings to the foreground the varied positions, tones and pathos in the depiction of this same couple as they “move,” suspended in time and space. Most of them are masterful studies executed on paper. The paintings are, like the figures they represent, involved in a gradual, surreptitious process that requires a complicated positioning and repositioning of mass and energy, all of which Bell captures strikingly. He slows down time and foregrounds the embodied nature of that precipitous period — morning –a transitional stage which we tend to attribute to the mind’s willpower over the body rather than to instinctual, muscular responses and physiological kinesis.

Each work combines different mediums and materials and applies them to this same subject, including acrylic and oil paints, graphite, chalk, charcoal, and pencil . Some are more nonconcrete and diffuse or intentionally incomplete than others. One acrylic study, Untitled Morning Series X, combines the heavy-limbed figurative style of Gauguin with the ink-like, black painted outlines that recall Matisse. Even more remarkable than how the human and animal figures dominate the small frame is the fact that it is painted over an original Rudy Burckhardt photograph of Bell’s own work.

Psychologically, each version of the nudes in the series suggests unspoken tensions and antagonisms between these two semi-abstract human beings. But in Bell’s paradoxical drama, the language of their human bodies is communicative and mute.

For instance, in Untitled Morning XVI, the rosy-fleshed female figure is turned away from the recumbent male, who is painted in patches of earthy browns. The woman stands nimbly, her arms stretched out, wing-like. In others, her gesturing signifies impatience, or frustrated influence. She often resembles a priestess.

Far left: Untitled (Morning Series XVI), c.1980s, Acrylic and charcoal on paper, 6″ x 5″; left: Untitled (Morning Series XV), c.1980s, Acrylic  and charcoal on paper, 12 1/2″ x 8 1/2″

In Untitled Morning XV, the female figure is all outline and aggressive motion while the half-painted male figure seems half-turned, perhaps about to rise from the bed. The couple are forlornly segregated by their respective horizontal and vertical positions and by two competing color banners, purple on her side of the room and sea blue on his. Those bookended colors are painted so aggressively on the paper that it makes the work seem like a collage.

The sculpted and mobile illusions achieved by Bell derive from the intersecting mediums, the high speed lines, and the insistent mechanics of their changing stances.

Untitled (Morning Series XIII) combines acrylic and charcoal. There the formidable precision and energetic smudging in Bell’s drawings of the two figures compete with his orange and blue painting in the margins of the frame, causing the composition, like many in this series, to seem at times to be a dance-like ceremony between the couple and at times a rendering of their isolated, anchored solidity.

The nimblest of all, Untitled (Morning Series V), relies on its sketches rather than on the sparely applied paint. Bell’s fluid, penciled outlines of the female form aspire to Da Vinci’s gesture drawings, as the curvaceous fine-point lines entwine, spool and soar, giving the female the aura of a liberated goddess while the gestural sketch of the man huddled nearly face-down on the bed connotes melancholia. Across all twelve works, the most surprising achievement is how the passivity of the reclined male figure, in all his various positions, seems as active as the gesticulating female who stands over him.

On this constancy of action, Bell has said that, “The artist’s role is to invent rhythms and forms to reveal a deeper apprehension of reality for the viewer.” Behind this plainspoken observation is the premise that reality conceals the pulsations and reverberations that animate our bodies and the bodies of others, including animals like the peripatetic cat. Bell implies that we fail to see rhythm at all times so we conceive of it as an incidental phenomenon, or aspirational, an offspring of played music, rather as a facet of moment-to-moment being. The painter’s “invention” of rhythm, in Bell’s formulation, must therefore be restorative in its effects, the gradual revelations of tempos and pulses that are invisibly present.

Overall, there is no story conveyed by the twelve pictorial “chapters” that make up Bell’s Morning Series. Instead the complimentary nudes spell out the color-filled, formalized swaying, rotating, and verging. These simple actions define human existence once it is stripped of the concealments of speech, habits, culture, and clothing.

Showing the myriad ways that the flesh responds to daybreak, Leland Bell’s Morning Series wakes us up to this personified, universalized sense of time. His art is inseparable from biorhythms and anatomical turns which, like the sun itself, seem so much to precede us each morning that we never realize they are all we really are.

© By Tim Keane, Contributing Writer

Tim Keane’s art writing has appeared internationally in Modern Painters,
The London Magazine, Utne Reader, Vision (China), Hyperallergic Weekend, and
The Brooklyn Rail. He teaches literary modernism and creative writing at
BMCC, CUNY. www.timkeane.com