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Brightness Falls
John Haberin New York City
Pat Lipsky: Brightening Glance
"You could tell them by the stains on their jeans." If I tell you that I quote from Brightening Glance, Pat Lipsky's memories of the art scene a generation or two ago, will you be able to guess what you can tell?
It might be to tell the working artist from writers, musicians, and other creative souls in the creative ferment of New York—but then a constant struggle for survival and recognition leaves its own stains on more than just jeans. It might be tell them all from dealers and collectors, assuming that those on the business side would deign to wear jeans, especially back then. Lipsky tells of a studio visit from a particularly snotty dealer as he hops from one artist to the next, always ten minutes late, for the day's quota of one work worth buying. And, he lets her know, it will not be hers. She has small talk with perhaps the greatest contemporary arts dealer of them all, Leo Castelli, dressed as he learned to dress back in Italy. "You chose the wrong group," he tells her, and that, of course, explains everything. 
On the evidence, she seems to have met everyone and to have chosen well. I quote her chapter on Max's Kansas City, the restaurant near Union Square (and Andy Warhol's Factory) that had only two things on the menu, steak and lobster, but no end of artists to order them. The stains, she says, distinguished painters from sculptors, and I leave the chemistry to you as an exercise. Both camps, though, had nothing on her. On the book's cover, she stands with her jeans stained in more colors than I have ever seen outside an art's supply store. She may not always write memorably, but she covers quite a scene and plenty of local color.
A mind of her own
The stains show a devotion to art and, above all, to color. I last saw her work some time ago, at a gallery devoted to abstract art that closed just this year. Now in her eighties, Pat Lipsky deserves better. Exhibitions are taking more and more to women in the wake of Abstract Expressionism as well, and a book, I hope, can help. Subtitled Art and Life, it never does have a sequential narrative of either one. Still, when she speaks of brightening, she has to mean paint.
Lipsky's career overlaps that of painters known for fields of color, like Larry Poons, whom she mentions several times. Her star has faded a bit since the 1960s and 1970s, but she is still going strong. She has outlasted Minimalism, too, but she pares the "action painting" of postwar art down as much as anyone. A typical painting has wavy horizontals, each with its own color and each refusing to follow a straight line. Work with shapes approaching squares defies easy division between figure and ground. Either way, geometry conveys color, and color defies geometry.
Lipsky says as much, if only indirectly, through her judgment of others less willing to paint. Robert Rauschenberg was "mediocre," and Pop Art in general was worse. Still, this is a report on a lifetime in the midst of things, and she not going to waste it all on insults. Maybe Andy Warhol "wasn't an artist," but he was still a force of nature and, she adds, a showman, which is not all bad. What good is art, she implies, if it cannot put on a show? Even André Emmerich, the legendary dealer who exhibited her early on, had no qualms about telling artists what to paint because of what will sell.
What, though, will she paint? She never really says and hardly talks about how she decides. But then she is not much for telling stories, especially about her art. The very first chapter has her in the classroom, with a student who cannot help taking over the discussion by name-dropping Julian Schnabel. (Oh, those broken plates.) Perhaps the book has to show its relevance by leading with Postmodernism before moving firmly on.
Later chapters are roughly chronological but barely connected. They read like separate anecdotes—or, in the last chapter, several anecdotes, to make sure she mentions everyone and everything. The prose has its limits as well. The preface would be a marvelous introduction to a native New Yorker if only it did not indulge in stock phrases. World War II "seeped into my baby formula," New York was a "tough town," "the country was reeling," and "in the sixties I became an adult." And "the times they are a-changin'."
But then something happens: she relaxes, she looks outward, and the book takes off. If she seems newly able to speak for herself, in her own voice, perhaps she was. She was divorced now, with two children but a mind of her own. She had her first successes. She had evenings at Max's and a Soho loft.
Every generation
At under two hundred pages, Brightening Glance can say only so much. Lipsky does not attempt a true memoir, although she is the heroine of her anecdotes. She leaves failure for later, with the snotty studio visit. What she does have is the art world. If her account has its pleasures, they are the pleasures of an earlier, nonstop New York, when artists could afford even Soho. All it took was "Sheetrock, polyurethane, plumbing, and lots of cursing."
"In the end," she reports, "every generation turns out to be the same; they just wore different clothes." And she should know, with jeans like hers, but I have my doubts. At the very least, they used to have affordable housing. They had their circles and their movements, their ideas and their silences, their power plays and their politics, but they knew each other. She compares Soho to early Renaissance Florence, when the artists that still matter most were all within walking distance. Or does that make things worse?
Lipsky's title may speak of the brightness of art and its obligation to look, if only for a glance. It quotes, though, William Butler Yeats in "Among School Children." Yeats, too, starts in the classroom and ends, late in life, with a greater glory. In its famous last line, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" To return to the art scene, though, is to offer a very different answer from the poem's. A dance like the one Lipsky knows so well has many dancers, not always in harmony with one another and not always able to keep from falling.
If you picked up her book to know them intimately, you may be disappointed. This is the art scene as seen from the outside, in all its collective confusion. Individuals may be little more than names on the way to their table at Max's, but then even the street names in Soho appear out of order. "Dancing was big" back in Soho, but who held her and what did they feel in holding one another? You cannot always know the dancer from the dance. You may not always want to try.
If anything about Lipsky comes across, apart from who she knew, it is that brightening glance—the hoped-for detachment of the artist looking. There are, though, exceptions. She remembers the loss through early death of one she loved. And she remembers two men whom she encountered warily but who became mentors and friends. She met Pierre Rosenberg, the former director of the Louvre, in complaining about the museum lighting and Clement Greenberg, the critic and champion of Abstract Expressionism, right outside the Met. Given her dislike of where she saw art heading, you will not be surprised that they both cling to the past.
She takes to both men for the meeting of the minds and for the regrets. Rosenberg retires from the Louvre while Greenberg, in by far the longest chapter, continues to make his pronouncements knowing that, as in years past, someone is always listening. In their different ways, they have lost the authority on which they depend—for their hopes for art and for a sense of who they are. There is poignancy in watching as her guiding lights have begun to dim. That leaves only artists themselves and their brightening glance.
Pat Lipsky's "Brightening Glance" was published in 2025 by University of Iowa Press. Another book from the same press makes the case for two other overlooked artists, Andrew Topolski and Cindy Suffoletto.