Stop and Look – Larry Day 1921-1998
Larry Day’s career spanned much of the twentieth-century and reflected a range of themes characteristic of his time.
An American based in Philadelphia, he began under the influence of the abstract expressionists, bringing a richly pigmented and passionate intensity to his pictures. Later he moved, as several painters of the period did, from complexity to simplicity. Mondrian and Ben Nicholson, for example, both adopted static compositions and a limited range of colour as they developed their mature style. Day made a similar transition, not into purer abstraction but into an austere realism that is a kind of figurative equivalent of the disciplined formality of late Mondrian or Nicholson.
He belongs in a sizeable school of mid-twentieth-century painters in the States, practising different forms of direct realism. But Day’s realism is conditioned by his sensibility as an abstract designer, and perhaps even more by his love of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. He paints with a cool simplicity of approach and a transparency of touch that allows nothing to come between us and our experience his depictions. His subjects often take the form of portraits of friends whose company he valued; and that sense of value, of cherishing, comes across clearly in these lucid paintings.
His subject here is a life class at the Philadelphia College of Art, where Day was a teacher. It is an affectionate tribute to the school and to his colleague Harry Soviak. A kind of celebration of the life of an art school – of the students and teachers, the models, the apparatus of the drawing class. All these details are crowded into a single, busy yet wonderfully clear composition.
It is a literal transcription of an everyday modern scene, yet the overall effect is somehow like that of a great Renaissance fresco: the mass of figures, both clothed and nude, all participating in a series of activities that tell a kind of narrative. The narrative explores the different ways in which models pose and students draw or paint, the complex interlocking spaces created by screens and partitions: all these elements create a pictorial drama that is brought under rigorous control by Day.
Considering his handling and the cool range of his palette, we cannot help but be reminded of the extreme simplicity and directness of fifteenth-century masters like Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico. And if the religious associations of those painters seem out of place, it is surely quite appropriate for us to see this complex scene as an enactment in paint of a type of sacrament: the sacrament of teaching and learning, of friendship and dedication to creative art, realised in the actions of a group of individuals privileged by their participation in a communal endeavour.