Peter Plagens (born 1941) is an American artist, art critic, and novelist based in New York City.Online Archive of California. Peter Plagens papers, 1938-2014. Retrieved January 18, 2018.Smith, Roberta. "Peter Plagens," The New York Times, February 7, 2018. Retrieved January 18, 2018.Wilkin, Karen. "Peter Plagens," The Hudson Review, Spring 2018. He is most widely known for his longstanding contributions to ArtforumNewman, Amy. Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962-1974, New York: Soho Press, 2000. Retrieved January 17, 2018. and Newsweek (senior writer and art critic, 1989–2003),Newsweek. "Peter Plagens," Authors, Newsweek. Retrieved January 21, 2018. and for what critics have called a remarkably consistent,Pagel, David. "Push It to the Edge," Los Angeles Times, December 1, 2004. five-decade-long body of abstract formalist painting.Hickey, Dave. "The Jabberwocky and the gorilla in the Corner," Peter Plagens: An Introspective, Los Angeles: Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, 2004, p. 16–25. Plagens has written three books on art, Bruce Nauman: The True Artist (2014),Plagens, Peter. Bruce Nauman: The True Artist, London: Phaidon, Inc., 2014. Retrieved January 17, 2018. Moonlight Blues: An Artist's Art Criticism (1986)Plagens, Peter. Moonlight Blues: An Artist's Art Criticism, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986. Retrieved January 17, 2018. and Sunshine Muse: Modern Art on the West Coast, 1945-70 (1974),Plagens, Peter. Sunshine Muse: Modern Art on the West Coast, 1945-70, Berkeley: UC Press, 2000; re-issue of New York: Praeger, 1974. Retrieved January 17, 2018. and two novels, The Art Critic (2008)Plagens, Peter. The Art Critic, New York: www.ArtNet.com (2008) and e-book, Hol Art Books, 2012. Retrieved January 17, 2018. and Time for Robo (1999).Plagens, Peter. Time for Robo, Seattle: Black Heron Press, 1999. Retrieved January 17, 2018. He has been awarded major fellowships for both his painting (John Simon Guggenheim Foundation,John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Peter Plagens, Fellows. Retrieved January 18, 2018. National Endowment for the Arts) and his writing (Andy Warhol Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts).ArtsWriters Grant Program, "Peter Plagens," Grantees, Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation, 2008. Retrieved January 21, 2018.USC Fisher Gallery. Peter Plagens: An Introspective, Los Angeles: Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, 2004. Plagens's work has been featured in surveys at the Museum of Modern Art,Museum of Modern Art. "Peter Plagens," Artists, Retrieved January 21, 2018. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Whitney Museum, and PS1, and in solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Las Vegas Art Museum.Clark, Joseph. "Waxing Idealistic: Post-art melancholy effortlessly reigns in Peter Plagens Painting, 1989-2000," LVcitylife, November 30, 2000. In 2004, the USC Fisher Gallery organized and held a 30-year traveling retrospective of his work. Critics have contrasted the purely visual dialogue his art creates—often generating more questions than answers—with the directness of his writing;Zona, Louis A. "Afterword," Peter Plagens: An Introspective, Los Angeles: Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, 2004, p.27. they also contend that the visibility of his bylines as a critic has sometimes overshadowed his artmaking—unduly.Saltz, Jerry. Review, Peter Plagens, New York Magazine, March 4, 2018. Retrieved January 18, 2018. Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel described Plagens's painting as a "fusion of high-flying refinement and everyday awkwardness" with an intellectual savvy, disdain for snobbery and ungainliness he likened to Willem de Kooning's work. Reviewing Plagens's 2018 exhibition,Nancy Hoffman Gallery. Peter Plagens, January 25–March 10, 2018. Retrieved January 18, 2018. New York Times critic Roberta Smith called the show an "eye-teasing sandwich of contrasting formalist strategies," the hard-won result of a decade of focused experimentation.
Life and career Plagens was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1941 and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended the University of Southern California, where he majored in painting (BFA, 1962) and drew cartoons for the Daily Trojan. He left USC an abstract painter, influenced by Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, which set him at odds with the somewhat conservative painting faculty at Syracuse University (MFA, 1964) where he did his graduate studies.Holo, Salma and Peter Plagens. "Why an 'Introspective'," Peter Plagens: An Introspective, Los Angeles: Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, 2004, p.7–15. He moved back to California in 1965 and took an Assistant Curator position at the Long Beach Museum of Art; soon after, he approached Artforum editor Phil Leider for work as a reviewer—at five dollars per review—in order to keep up with the Los Angeles art scene. In 1966, Plagens accepted a teaching position at the University of Texas, remaining until 1969, when he accepted a position at California State University, Northridge. He taught there until 1978, and at the University of California, Berkeley (1972), the University of Southern California (1978–80), and the University of North Carolina (1980–4), where he also chaired the art department.
During his time at Cal State, Plagens shared a 3,000-square-foot studio with painter Walter Gabrielson on the same block in Pasadena as artist Bruce Nauman's; in 1975, he appeared in Nauman's short film Pursuit.Knight, Christopher. "What Is an Artist? Peter Plagens's 'Bruce Nauman' Illuminates,'" Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2014. Retrieved January 21, 2018.Pocaro, Alan. "Every Damn Moment Counts: A Conversation With Painter and Critic Peter Plagens," New City, October 26, 2018. Retrieved January 18, 2018. Plagens began exhibiting professionally in 1967, and was featured in the 1971 LACMA show, "24 Young Los Angeles Artists" and the 1972 Whitney Biennial.Livingston, Jane and Maurice Tuchman. ''24 Young Los Angeles Artists'', Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971. He has shown at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 1975, and showed regularly at the Jan Baum Gallery in Los Angeles (1977–1992) and Jan Cicero Gallery in Chicago (1986–98).Muchnic, Suzanne. Review Peter Plagens exhibition at Jan Baum Gallery, The Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1977.Greenstein, M.A. "Whitewash: Peter Plagens at Jan Baum Gallery," Artweek, February 6, 1992.Bucholz, Barbara. "The Art of Peter Plagens," Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1998. Retrieved January 18, 2018. His 2004 retrospective at USC traveled to Columbia College Chicago and the Butler Institute of American Art in Akron.Tranber, Dan. "Critic Gives a Lesson, in an abstract sort of way," The Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 18, 2005.Wachunas, Tom. Review, Dialogue, September–October 1996. Plagens married the painter, Laurie Fendrich, in 1981. They moved to New York City in 1985 where they continue to reside, while also maintaining a studio outside the city.Einspruch, Franklin. "Star-Crossed Painters: Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens," artcritical, February 14, 2011. Retrieved January 18, 2018.
Artwork and reception Critic Dave Hickey, among others, has characterized Plagens as "an irrevocably abstract formalist painter," who, regardless of fashion, has rooted his work in modernist and Abstract Expressionism syntax, formal rigor, and a willful embrace of dissonance and contradictions—such as hard-edged geometry and messy, gestural abstraction, "happy accident and copious correction," and beauty and intentional clunkiness.Artner, Alan G. "Appreciating the Abstract," Chicago Tribune, March 13, 2005. Retrieved January 18, 2018. David Pagel wrote that Plagens's 2004 retrospective traced "a remarkably consistent arc" of stubbornly held abstract work of "sophisticated inelegance." Plagens works improvisationally, sometimes pushing his paintings to the edge of failure, by his own admission and according to critics. He maintains there is no symbolism in his work; he often appends enigmatic titles to his work upon completion, however, that indicate his ruminations while in the studio. Throughout his career, he has produced works on paper that generally correspond in style to his paintings, incorporating collaged photographs, fragments of commercial packaging, and colored and textured paper.
Art, 1970–1999 Plagens's early work featured single, emphatic shapes—circles with wedges removed, diamonds, trapezoids, and thin letter "C"-like rings—which he placed on vivid red-orange or creamy white color fields that sometimes disintegrated at the canvas edges into irregular, soft bands of subtle color.Russell, John. Review of exhibition at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, The New York Times, February 15, 1975. Increasingly minimal works, such as Cleveland Defaults on Its Debts (1979) or Cubist Landscape (1980), have been recognized for carefully calibrated compositions that challenged conventional rules about balance and probed the line between elegance and awkwardness, and friction and harmony.Raynor, Vivien. " Art: Swirl of The Golden West," The New York Times, January 6, 1978. Retrieved January 18, 2018. In pivotal paintings of the mid-1980s, such as Wheels of Wonder (1985) and Wedge of Life (1987), Plagens incorporated angular, eccentric polygons, greater surface variation and a new sense of movement that reviewers such as Grace Glueck deemed "witty balancing acts."Glueck, Grace. "Art: Abstract Painters Regain That Old Charisma," The New York Times, March 8, 1985. Retrieved January 17, 2018.Henry, Gerrit. Peter Plagens at Nancy Hoffman Gallery," Art in America, February, 1985. During this time, he also created the drawing series "My Father Worked in Advertising" (1986), which featured dappled, abstract expressionist-like areas around the edges over which he painted and collaged fields of color and hard-edged and irregular shapes.
Critics noted a building complexity and immediacy in Plagens's output from 1989 to 2000, the result of a more expansive mix of materials, markmaking and palettes.Kimmelman, Michael. "Peter Plagens," The New York Times, January 3, 1997. Retrieved January 18, 2018.Cotter, Holland. "Peter Plagens," Art in America, Summer 1990. In paintings such as Benton Way and Sunset, LA, 6/28/55, 1:40 pm (1989) and Learning of the Tragic News (1996),Plagens, Peter. Learning of the Tragic News, 1996. askART. Retrieved January 18, 2018. he introduced expressive drips and gestural, free-form marks and shapes, that Michael Kimmelman wrote had "a looping calligraphic eloquence" recalling Arshile Gorky and Richard Diebenkorn.Dickensheets, Scott. "Peter Plagens," ARTnews, March 2001. Of particular note were the small, brightly colored, discordant geometric forms that Plagens set against primarily off-white and slate-gray backdrops, which critics suggested "snapped" his rhythmic compositions into place.
Art, 2000–
Between 2000 and 2003, Plagens sought to create a greater degree of tension In a series of untitled works on paper by subdividing them into two fields: one containing fluid, expressive shapes and linear forms on gray or khaki-colored grounds, atop another, featuring configurations of jarring, hard-edged rectangles set on black or off-white fields.Plagens, Peter. Untitled (VIII), 2003. Cover painting featured on Peter Plagens: An Introspective, Los Angeles: Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, 2004. Retrieved January 18, 2018. In later paintings, he dispensed with the subdivision, creating more centralized compositions that featured flat, irregular, near-fluorescent color shapes directly painted on neutral grounds of contrasting gestural shapes and marks.