“Untitled, 1950 (May 20),” oil on canvasboard, by Myron Stout.


  Myron Stout was one of those marvelous independent spirits who came of age with 
  Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism was big, extravagant and self-obsessed. 
  Stout’s work was small, intimate and spare. Among midcentury geometric painters like 
  Burgoyne Diller, Ilya Bolotowsky and Stuart Davis, he was the most poetic.

A modest, ascetic man of generous disposition, he could appreciate de Kooning
(“the tremendous and vital energy of his struggle,” Stout wrote in his journal) 
but declined to feel any influence himself. Instead, his mentor remained Hans Hofmann, 
who helped him see how to construct a purely abstract picture, while his great inspiration
was Mondrian, about whom Stout observed that “the tangible and sensational world was still
the raw material for the universality which he would create for himself.” 

In other words, Mondrian, like Stout, remained firmly connected to nature and the real world.

This small and beautiful show of paintings from the early 1950s reminds us of Stout’s
monkish devotion and eloquence. His art was never strict, and he slaved over pictures 
for months, sometimes years, to produce a richness of surface (with various,
nearly invisible erasures and adjustments) that was both inspired and touching. 
Good art, Stout implied, is never quite finished. His contrasts of black and white
or the tension he suggested between not-quite-parallel lines carried the weight of 
heroic clashes, although at a glance it all looked utterly simple.

Stout split his time between New York and Provincetown, Mass., 
where, until his death in 1987, he painted to the sound of the ocean.
“Untitled, 1950 (Late September-December 10),” in khaki shades, 
looks like cobblestones moving swiftly into the distance or like
sand beneath a receding wave. “Untitled, 1950 (May 20),” 
is like a Mondrian version of a stained-glass window, all bouncing, 
jazzy colors in a loose, busy grid.

“The canvas,” Stout wrote, about another painting,
“came not from any remembered form of flowers or flower beds but from
a tree outside the door, a tree that the thin foliage of the lower 
reaches allowed the rising branches to be seen, rising, yet moving 
sideways, toward each other.” In the end it came down to the most
personal sort of encounter with nature, translated into gossamer abstractions.
MICHAEL KIMMELMAN