Counterpoint: a retrospective

Counterpoint: Nan Montgomery by Virginia Mecklenburg

Intersection, Trajectory, Trilogy, Grace---the range of Nan Montgomery’s paintings is no less than the range of human experience. From skyscraper-like towers, to musical forms that resonate across centuries, to those subliminal feelings we (sometimes futilely) try to name, Montgomery probes structure and nuance. Her paintings are often joyous, sometimes witty, and always profound in the depth of their understanding---and translation---of things seen and unseen that exist in the world.

Best known for the geometric abstractions she has created over her 50+ year career Montgomery initially explored the emotional and metaphorical implications of structure and color, then ventured beyond to create her own kind of still-life painting. In these canvases the commanding presence of a single flower emerging at the top of a sinuous vertical stalk acknowledges that Nature offers striking analogies to the human condition. 

Montgomery moved to Washington, DC in 1960. She had learned the lessons of proportion, balance, and optical color from Josef Albers, the German émigré who spent half a lifetime exploring color theory and creating mathematically proportioned paintings he called Homage to the Square. Albers’ carefully calculated compositions argued for the infinite optical possibilities of squares divided into quadrants of muted tones. He imposed order on an unruly world. In retrospect, though, Montgomery seems more spiritually akin to Piet Mondrian, whose geometries and grids use only white, black, red, yellow, and blue. Livelier than those of Albers because of their often exuberant color, Mondrian constructed abstractions using only verticals and horizontals; diagonals were not permissible. Not until he arrived in New York City at the start of World War II, did he realize that his artistic toolkit could capture the energy of urban life. Dynamic and pulsing, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43, Museum of Modern Art), seems an apt jumping off point for reading Montgomery’s abstractions. 

However much she was drawn to the optical and compositional rigor of both Albers and Mondrian, Montgomery experimented briefly with brushy expressionism, then turned to geometry. But she refused to be bound by Albers’ or Mondrian’s self-imposed restrictions on palette and shape. Instead, she upends the rules to apply these most fundamental of artistic devices to probe emotional states and explore metaphorical associations. Her canvases lead to larger meanings. 

The nine panels of All That Jazz (1984), for example, hint at the infinite possibilities of an artistic vocabulary of colored lines and rectangles configured on square planes. Saturated colors against a light  backdrop upend ideas of balance, weight, and visual focus as they dance across the visual field. The elements are rigorous, intentionally ordered. Yet together they have the jazzy impact of Mondrian’s Boogie Woogie. As individual panels, All That Jazz poses questions of alternatives and options and defies conventional pictorial formats. Were the small paintings arranged in a different configuration, the impact of the whole would be very different. 

Many of Montgomery’s paintings are titled for places, others bear names of Greco-Roman mythical figures (Artemis, Juno), months of the year (March Day, 1999; August, 1998), even, as in Asmuth (Azimuth) (1981), methods for measuring our place within the world. But titles alone can’t account for the sheer joy of looking at a Nan Montgomery painting---the thrill of pure color unmodulated by shadow, shapes syncopated through juxtaposition, competing notions of balance and stasis, and arcing forms that suggest soaring trajectories. There is a sense of unfettered freedom in Sky Trails (1980) and The Swing (1980), for example, and others with aerial and nautical associations (Sea Farer, 1989; Wind Shift, 1985). We’re cajoled into a feeling of flight or of wind propelling us onward.  

Place---North Capitol (Construction II) (1983), North West (1983), Hanover (1983), and Alstead (1983), her home in New Hampshire---became a particular focus for Montgomery in the early 1980s. A form resembling a Swedish crane in North Capitol calls to mind the building projects that clogged Washington’s street; in Urban (1982), shapes proportioned like tall buildings project skyward. The vertical rectangles that comprise Alstead may contrast a tall narrow sunlit structure with a broader one cast in shadow, but without additional information, we’re unable to link the abstract forms to the physical characteristics of the location. 

Not so with Tregaron and Rampart. Montgomery and her family spent three months in England, Scotland, and Wales in the 1970s. They went to Stonehenge and visited prehistoric stone circles in other parts of England. The power and mystery of the primal forms in these archaic sites echoed for a decade in Montgomery’s memory.

There is something ancient in the double megaliths of Tregaron (1983). Those who google the name discover that Tregaron is a Welsh town chartered in the 13th century as a gathering place for farmers and herdsmen who drove cattle, sheep, and even geese hundreds of miles to markets in England. It was also the likely home of Twm Sion Cati, known as the Welsh Robin Hood. The painting’s sheer size (it is seven feet tall) and the palette---yellow at the left and black on the right---evoke mystery and command attention. The towering forms dominate our space as we stand in awe. 

In Rampart (1984) we feel surrounded by a high “wall,” above which we detect blue “sky.” A rampart is a fortress, a stronghold that defends and protects. It is a physical structure, but it is also a symbol of strength. There are, of course, no “walls” in Rampart. The dominant black form is a single planar shape whose top right edge projects diagonally outward. On a two-dimensional surface, this angled form, which was painted in a different tone of black, reads as a perpendicular wall that completes the enclosure and defies intrusion from beyond. 

Intersection V (2017) is similarly architectonic. The planar rectangles, triangles, and trapezoids are configured to evoke a room and an adjacent hallway. The composition implies the position of the viewer, who stands at the right side of the space. We understand that if we were to move left, we could follow a hallway into an implied space beyond. If Rampart suggests the safety of enclosure, Intersection V offers the option of choice. We can stay or move forward. 

Did Montgomery intend for viewers to literally “read” these paintings in terms of their provocative titles? Probably. The titles offer points of access, clues to the optical and psychological realities the images convey, and confirm our instinctive responses. 

Increasingly Montgomery’s fascination with structures expanded to acknowledge phenomena that have no static physical form. Sarabande (1987) is a dance and musical structure that originated in the Spanish colonies of the new world in the 16th century, before migrating first to Spain and subsequently throughout Europe where it became hugely popular during the Baroque era. Bach incorporated it into his Fifth Cello Suite; Handel composed his Sarabande in D Minor for a solo harpsichord. More recently the Sarabande prompted a series of solo piano pieces by Erik Satie, it was used in the period film Barry Lyndon, and was the title of the last film (2003) Ingmar Bergman directed. Montgomery’s three-part painting---a large, dark square with lighter gray bands at left and top and separate panels above and adjacent---embodies both historic and contemporary precedents.  

Spatially disconnected, the three parts function as both a whole and as individual units, each of which possesses a potential for independent action. In Sarabande Montgomery acknowledges these multiple aspects of a single personality – sometimes moody, sometimes jazzy, sometimes serene. These intangibles reflect the nature of dance in which each dancer performs movements that are read both individually and as an ensemble. Embraced several hundred years after its introduction by those who understood the excitement and energy, and also the pleasure, of its lively sequences, Sarabande has historical roots, but it resonates across time.

And what of the flowers---the single gladioli that bisect fields of color? Following 9/11, Montgomery took a course at the John James Audubon Center, a 200 plus-acre sanctuary near Washington, DC committed to preserving natural habitats for birds of the region. Crisscrossed by trails, the ground’s wilder spaces are punctuated by gardens that offered a place of spiritual nourishment. Montgomery examined plants and flowers and in 2002 painted a gladiolus, against a cadmium red field. (see Tebow, p. 10). She later wrote an artist’s statement for a 2008 exhibition “Nature and Metaphor” at Osuna Gallery in Washington, D.C. In it she said she had recently introduced realistic imagery into an oeuvre that had previously been committed to pure abstraction. “Using metaphor as a means to convey loss, reverence or portent, the marriage of abstraction and realism becomes a means to portray a dichotomy between man and the natural world.” In the introduction to the catalogue, Jack Rasmussen wrote of Montgomery’s “perfect balance between abstraction and representation, hard edges and subtle modeling, intellectual rigor and emotional embrace. Her latest work,” he continued, “is all we could wish for: beautiful surfaces and depths of meaning.”  

The 2002 gladiolus was the first of what would become a signature series of paintings in which gladioli, birds of paradise, and lilies bisect sometimes monochromatic, sometimes bifurcated fields of color. Slender stalks, adjacent vertical lines, and subtle color divisions retain echoes of the architectonic paintings. Although described in terms of naturalism, the flower paintings are only partly so. In Lumenesce (2012), a brilliant orange Bird of Paradise blossom emerges from the tip of an electric blue stem.  In Fire and Ice (2007) red flowers grow from an almost white stalk that emerges from a slightly darker red stem. Dividing fields of subtly toned whites, Fire and Ice, through both title and image, speaks to passion, frozen spaces, and the understanding that life persists even in challenging circumstances. The whimsical Leaning Toward Red (2004) implies choice. Rather than stand erect, two white calla lilies arc toward the thin red edge of the canvas in a literal manifestation that Montgomery’s images, like those of all painters, involve decisions. 

Montgomery remarked recently that there are no straight lines in nature, but the grids, monolithic structures, and acute angles she paints argue to the contrary. Natural forms and the built environment may follow this observation, but unseen forces, and emotional and sensory realities that are as real as they are invisible, function otherwise. With titles like Intersection, Trajectory (a path of movement), and Drop (the gravity the earth exerts on objects in the world), Montgomery gives tangible form to realities that have no physical form. Each configuration or block of color that optically impinges on another reflects phenomena that exist in the natural world. 

The order and simplicity of the compositions Montgomery has created over more than fifty years are evidence of a world filled with options. This is clear from the watercolors Montgomery paints simultaneously with the more formal oils. Smaller and more delicately rendered, the watercolors of plant life, though intentionally arranged, reflect the appearance of plants in nature. The sprigs in Wild Ginger (2003) and Bind Weed (2002) and the tiny berries and withering leaves in Solomon’s Seal (2004) reveal Montgomery’s close looking at plants in nature. Absent context, though, like the still lifes of 17th century Dutch painters, they become metaphors---of resilience, aging, and life.

Montgomery understands the idea of counterpoint as the “resolution of opposites.” The painting she titled Counterpoint (2010) reflects her profound awareness of the multiple, seemingly opposite, directions she has pursued. At the lower left edge of a dark canvas emerges a thin blue line that angles upward to suggest the corner of an interior space, ala the geometrical paintings that have preoccupied Montgomery for significant periods of her life. At right a red line, thinner below than above, grows vertically before angling downward. It is stemlike, organic, like the leaves in her floral still lifes. Two approaches, two choices, positioned against a single field of black. 

Throughout her work Montgomery acknowledges dichotomies and explores choice. Sometimes witty or whimsical (as in Leaning Toward Red), her canvases reflect conscious decisions the artist made when creating the work, as well as the concept of choice---those moments of decision she (and we) face every day. Most of the decisions we make don’t matter, but many do. The tic-tac-toe-like X’s and O’s (2013) calls to mind the children’s game. But the ten panels spread out over 15-feet march brightly across space. Uncontained within the 3 x 3 grid of the tic-tac-toe game, each panel becomes an individual choice that alternates with its opposite. They function like opposing points of view in a conversation. In today’s cultural parlance, X means “no,” or blocks entry and access. O denotes the reverse, saying “come on in.” With the inevitable association to tic-tac-toe, the X’s and Os’ prompt us to chuckle, think, and think again.

The same is true of the eight panels that make up Dialogues (2015). Triangles are perhaps the most stable of artistic forms. Renaissance masters configured religious groups as pyramids (Michelangelo’s Pieta is one) to convey the eternal foundation of the religious concepts. For Montgomery, though, the forms in Dialogues become individual “personalities,” each different from the others of its shape. The colors of the triangles operate vertically. Each precisely rendered half is different in impact from the others; each circle is bisected by a symmetrical bar that suggests greater complexity at work than the simple enter/no entry visual access it defines. 

In the ten plus years since she painted Counterpoint, Montgomery has continued to explore geometries and the infinite possibilities offered by juxtaposing shapes and lines of contrasting colors. Lines, triangles, squares, and circles balance each other and reverse positions. A small, untitled gouache on paper from 2018, for example, represents new directions that are ever more complex. Intersection IV (2017) conceptually links to Nan’s paintings of the 1980s and 1990s, reinforcing the idea of a crossroad, which inevitably poses multiple decision points.   

The arc of Montgomery’s work across the fifty plus years since her studies with Josef Albers at Yale and subsequently with Washington’s color field painters at the Corcoran (Leon Berkowitz was especially important) prompted her to begin making the brilliantly colored, geometry-based canvases she is celebrated for. But she has never followed a linear trajectory or moved from one stylistic or conceptual approach into a next “logical” sequence. She is fundamentally a conceptual artist whose compositions are based on the human response to the world around her. She is concerned with the contemporary moment and with values, ideas, and subliminal associations that echo across time. Although Paper Studies of 1985 and All That Jazz (1984) were painted almost thirty years apart, Montgomery’s impulse, and her impeccable handling of paint, reveal philosophical constancy. There are no limits. The ideas, forms, and associations that emerged in her works of the 1980s find echoes in those she pursues today. But the arc is not “full-circle,” a coming back to its place of origin. Instead, the trajectory of her work spirals outward, into new directions as she rethinks motifs and reexamines color relationships, dimensions, and proportions. New events, new places, and the changes Nan herself has experienced prevent her from looking back. Nan Montgomery continues to push us toward the unknown.

This essay is published in the forthcoming catalog for this exhibition. You can reserve your copy through our contact page.