|
|
1989-Publication: Zimmerli Museum of Art,
Exhibition catalogue: An Introduction to small scale
painterly abstraction in America.
1940-1965,pages 142,143.
Title: Abstract Expressionism,Other Dimensions
Author: Jeffrey Wechsler
1990-Publication: Katonah Museum, catalogue
Essay -pgs. 6,10.
Title: Watercolors from the Abstract Expressionist Era.
Author: Jeffrey Wechsler
1990- New York Times,Sunday, April 15,1990
Title: Justice for the Abstract Expressionists
Author: Vivian Raynor
1990- New York Times,Sunday, April 22,1990
Title: Abstract Expressionism's Smaller Side
Author: William Zimmer.
1991- New York Times,Sunday, May 19,1991
Title: The Skill of the Watercolorist.
Author: Vivian Raynor
1993- New York Times, Sunday, July 14,1993
Title: At Zimmerli: A Focus on the Human Head
Author: William Zimmer
1995- Hunter College, Exhibition cat. pgs. 5,6
Title: Italian American Artists, A Limited
Survey, Works on paper,
Author: Lisa Panzera Melchor
1996-Publication:Staller Center for the Arts
University Art Gallery, State
University of NY at Stony Brook.
Exhibition Catalogue essay
Title: Vincent Pepi by Harry Rand
Author: Harry Rand
1996-New York Times, Sunday, July14,1996
Title: Power and Imagination in original work
Author: Phyllis Braff
Vincent Pepi by Harry Rand
Currently,it is impossible to discuss Vincent Pepi in the present tense.His art, Janus-like, looks to a past moment of elective seclusion and a future moment of restitution to his history. That makes him an "interesting" painter for the New York School and something of a test case for historians.
As his contemporaries' prestige ascended, their pictures were sought, and now, with a dwindling supply, all sorts of minor or ersatz reputations are being proffered as facile alternatives to the "names"; that is not Pepi's problem. There is nothing counterfeit or inauthentic about his work.
The artists who gathered in New York, as those who formerly convened in Paris, came from many points in an aesthetic empire invisible to the mapmaker. Guston from Canada, Kline from Pennsylvania, Pollock from California, Still from the Northwest,
deKooning from the Netherlands, Rothko from Russia, Gorky from Armenia-only Newman and Gottlieb were locals growing up in the vortex that attracted the others. Few really left: Jacob Kainen for Washington, Harry Jackson for a dream of a western sunset, and
Vincent Pepi, who, though born in Boston and trained in New York, returned from Europe to an America where he was invisible in plain sight.
Like "first generation" Abstract Expressionists, Pepi never lost his grounding in manual virtuosity and drew incessantly from still lives and nudes, and, as in other first generation Abstract Expressioinists, the residue if this surety of line and form elevates his art. As its absence can be felt as a hollowness in subsequent abstract art.
Pepi is very much an individual, with a consistency that courses through all of his works, right up to Eclipse/Kiss (No.657,1981), a richly painted oil, redolent of certain lyrical deKoonings of thirty years earlier without in any way emulating him.
Upon his return to America, Pepi became an in-house graphic designer for New York University,that was his day job. At the same time, he remained in the center of the art world,with Pepi's painting studio one floor below Franz Kline's and across the hall
from Conrad Marcarelli. In 1953 he showed at the Stable Gallery, which again situated him at the center of the painter's world. Long over-looked,partly by his own choices, Pepi is returned, a player in history.
The past will care for the future.
Condensed from catalogue essay by Harry Rand,1996
|
