John Moore: Portals

JOHN MOORE: PORTALS presents the work of American artist John Moore (b. 1941) by bringing together an esteemed group of art historians, poets, curators, and critics who responded to Moore's canvases through prose and verse. Writers Carl Little, Suzette McAvoy, John R. Stomberg, and Rosanna Warren make art-historical and literary connections from Nicholas Poussin to Bob Dylan. Poems by Vincent Katz, Wallace Stevens, Rosanna Warren, John Yau, and Geoffrey Young are featured throughout, and in her afterword Christina Kee shares the vision of art collector William Louis-Dreyfus (1932-2013) who acquired forty Moore paintings. Critical essays by the writers explore four thematic sections: Windows, Urban, Industrial, and Elegies. "Moore embraces the idea of illusionistic painting," writes McAvoy about his window paintings, "but constructs his own reality. . . a synthesis of the seen and the imagined." Stomberg, who writes about Moore's urban paintings, notes that the paintings "find him looking for echoes of the past with both feet firmly placed in the present." In his essay about Moore's industrial paintings, Little notes how, like the painter Charles Sheeler, Moore seeks "to combine the memory and the present in a given painting." And in addressing Moore's elegiac works, Warren views the painter as "both a classicist and a savvy late-twentieth-, early-twenty-first-century artist working in full awareness of the idioms of abstraction, grids, and color field." Published by Marshall Wilkes, John Moore: Portals pairs a comprehensive collection of 82 color reproductions thematically with insightful essays that place the artist in the larger canon of American realism. The poet John Yau sums up John Moore's work: He uses paint, Yau writes, to arrive "at a threshold moment when the daily world, and everything in it, suddenly holds our attention, and we look at it as if we are seeing all of it for the first time."