
Pat Lipsky is an American painter. Her work is associated with
Color Field painting and
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical abstraction arose from either of two related but distinct art movement, trends in Post-war Modernist painting:
* European ''Abstraction Lyrique'': a movement that emerged in Paris, with the French art critic Jean José Marchand being cr ...
.
Early life and education
Lipsky grew up in
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
. She graduated with a
Bachelor of Fine Arts
A Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) is a standard undergraduate degree for students pursuing a professional education in the visual arts, Fine art, or performing arts. In some instances, it is also called a Bachelor of Visual Arts (BVA).
Background ...
BFA from
Cornell University
Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...
in 1963, and then received an
MFA from the Graduate Program in Painting at
Hunter College
Hunter College is a public university in New York City, United States. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools ...
in
Manhattan
Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...
, where she studied with the painter and sculptor
Tony Smith.
Career

Raised by a painter mother and an engineer father,
[Crum, Katherine. ''Woman's Art Journal''. "Pat Lipsky and the Challenge of Formalism." Volume 14, 1993] Lipsky had her first one-woman show in New York, at the
André Emmerich Gallery. Her work at the time was strongly in the mode of "Lyrical Abstraction." The 1969 canvas ''Spiked Red'' (Collection of the
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Bienstock, New York) demonstrates Lipsky's then-approach: close hues, bright color waves and bursts. In ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'', the critic
Hilton Kramer found that the painter's work looked both to the aesthetic past and future: "Miss Lipsky reintroduces the drip, splatter and smear of
abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depressi ...
for notable anti-expressionist purposes ... She also demonstrates a very clear identity of her own. Her pictures are very handsome, and it will be interesting to see how she develops what is already a bold pictorial intelligence."
Lipsky was invited to participate in the influential 1970-1971
Lyrical Abstraction exhibition which traveled the country and culminated at New York's
Whitney Museum; the critic Noel Frackman highlighted her contributions for freshness, gesture and exuberance, finding the style "sustained a mood which celebrates the sheer splendor of color. The edges of these shapes lick out like flames and there is an incendiary vividness in the impetuous yet directed forms ... These are mouth-watering paintings."
By the later seventies and eighties, Lipsky had expanded her palette to include bolder colors and geometric forms. She had also begun to explore, as the critic Katherine Crum later wrote, a pictorial vocabulary in direct challenge to her roots in lyrical abstraction.
By 2003, the critic
Karen Wilkin would declare Lipsky in ''
The New Criterion
''The New Criterion'' is a New York–based monthly literary magazine and journal of artistic and cultural criticism, edited by Roger Kimball (editor and publisher) and James Panero (executive editor). It has sections for criticism of poetry ...
'' to be an "unrepentant abstract painter." Wilkin found in the work, "A lifetime's accumulated experience of all kinds, including the experience of looking at art. That, of course, is what all art worth taking seriously—whether abstract, figurative, or somewhere in between—is supposed to address."
In the 1980s and 1990s Lipsky continued to refine her broader color concerns, achieving a brooding, more sharply defined palette. A selection of works from this period, "The Black Paintings," was exhibited in Miami in 1994 and New York City in 1997. Wilkin found the "deliberately limited" dark work of this period to be "dramatic" and "powerful." The critic Elisa Turner again described them as a step away from the "sleekness" of modern abstract painting, toward the direction of vertigo, emotion, and ambiguity: "This vertigo adds an unnerving, emotionally-charged twist to the tradition of sleek, impersonal abstract art ... Such ambiguity about the location of lines and shapes in space is echoed in her exquisite sense of color." ''
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
'' magazine instead drew a connection of her work in this period to the "classic" style of calmly
modernist
Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...
painters
Piet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian (, , ), was a Dutch Painting, painter and Theory of art, art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He w ...
and
Paul Klee
Paul Klee (; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented wi ...
.
In the 2000s, Lipsky began another redefinition of palette, reincorporating color within a bold central image. Writing in the ''New York Times'', the critic Ken Johnson associated these pictures with mechanical forms and music. Noting their "seductive, egg-shell surfaces," Johnson linked them to the
minimalist painters
Frank Stella
Frank Philip Stella (May 12, 1936 – May 4, 2024) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. He lived and worked in New York City for much of his career befor ...
and
Ad Reinhardt. "The effect is polyrhythmic in three dimensions; the bands seem to push up and down like valves in a machine
enhancing the feeling of Bach-like musicality. The more you gaze at them, the more absorbing they become." Lipsky began to focus on single images presented in series. Her more recent exhibitions have contained repeating colors, in a stripped and repeated form. The painter and critic Stephen Westfall, in ''
Art in America'', called these paintings "her most successful," finding her "classicism" to be "ultimately idiosyncratic in the best sense," and finding a link to Ad Reinhart and
Philip Guston: "Guston meeting Reinhardt, then; a synthesis that, however full of painting culture, feels just right in our present moment." The critic David Cohen, in ''
The New York Sun
''The New York Sun'' is an American Conservatism in the United States, conservative Online newspaper, news website and former newspaper based in Manhattan, Manhattan, New York. From 2009 to 2021, it operated as an (occasional and erratic) onlin ...
'', noted instead the opposite of classicism, "a steely, seemingly dispassionate composure" that contained "seething reserves of aesthetic emotion," stating, "Lipsky is not merely the dean of contemporary
geometric abstraction but its dominatrix."
Karen Wilkin, reviewing Lipsky's 2006 exhibition, discovered in the work a simplicity that served the reverse function—to be ultimately liberating: "Lipsky's complex, richly allusive counterpoint demands that we pay close attention to her paintings as paintings ... and then rewards us by setting free our imaginations."
In 2015, Lipsky's most recent decades of paintings were exhibited at Boston's Acme Fine Arts, "Pat Lipsky: Twenty Years." Critic Cate McQuaid, in the ''
Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe,'' also known locally as ''the Globe'', is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes. ''The Boston Globe'' is the oldest and largest daily new ...
'' called the work "breathing and organic, restrained and voluptuous."
In 2016, twenty paintings from Lipsky's early years were rediscovered after having been preserved for nearly a half century. Eleven were exhibited the next spring at Gerald Peters Gallery in New York. As critic
Carter Ratcliff wrote in his catalogue essay, "Lipsky emerged in the forefront of a generation of painters," and added "Each of these paintings draws us into the extended exuberant moment of its creation—intuiting the artist’s power to reconcile uninhibited spontaneity with disciplined judgement." Lipsky is represented by
James Fuentes Gallery.
Collections
Lipksy's paintings are represented in twenty-five public collections, including
The Whitney Museum,
The Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum,
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
The Boca Raton Museum of Art,
The Walker Art Center,
The Brooklyn Museum of Art, and
Harvard's Fogg Art Museum.
Influences
While Lipsky is sometimes identified with the
Post-Painterly Abstraction school centered around the critic
Clement Greenberg, a long-time friend of the painter, others have disputed this view.
In a 2007 interview, Lipsky listed a broad range of influences, from outside the field of visual arts:
I'm interested in what 'difference' means. My reading of Proust and Eliot, my viewing of Bellini and Giorgione and Titian and Albers and Cornell and Pollock, my listening to Bach and Thelonious Monk, my liking Eric Rohmer and Monty Python might seem totally unrelated, but they teach the same lesson: differences matter. When Monk plays a single note instead of another, a piece is either saved or ruined. When Albers puts a white next to a yellow, the yellow is changed—and the white is changed too. If Proust chooses to follow one character instead of another, to write fifty pages instead of four, the reader's experience is altered in the most intimate and immediate way. We look at works of art as single large units—but they're actually composed of hundreds, of thousands of individual and tiny units, each one a decision. It's those units that I've been experimenting with throughout my career.
Lipsky has also discussed the influence of first-generation
abstract expressionists like
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko ( ; Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz until 1940; September 25, 1903February 25, 1970) was an American abstract art, abstract painter. He is best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular reg ...
and
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock (; January 28, 1912August 11, 1956) was an American painter. A major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, Pollock was widely noticed for his "Drip painting, drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household ...
, along with second-generation painters like
Helen Frankenthaler and
Morris Louis, as well as her mentor,
Tony Smith.
Writing
Lipsky's essays and criticism have appeared in ''
Tablet'', ''
Public Books'', ''
The New Criterion
''The New Criterion'' is a New York–based monthly literary magazine and journal of artistic and cultural criticism, edited by Roger Kimball (editor and publisher) and James Panero (executive editor). It has sections for criticism of poetry ...
'', among others. In Fall 2024, it was announced that Lipsky's memoir ''Brightening Glance'' would be published in Fall 2025: "A revealing portrait of the struggles and sacrifices, joys and excitement inherent in a contemporary painter's life."
[''Publishers Marketplace'', "Brightening Glance by Pat Lipsky," October 9, 2024.]
Honors
* 2012
Department of State,
Art in Embassies
* 2008
National Academy of Design Invitational Exhibition
* 2008
Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant
* 2003
Lincoln Center
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (also simply known as Lincoln Center) is a complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It has thirty indoor and outdoor facilities and is host to 5  ...
Print Editions ''Keyboard Variations''
* 2001
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Hassam Speicher Betts Purchase Prize
* 2000
Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant
* 1999
Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant
* 1999 Jerome Foundation, ''Dark Love'' (the Black Paintings)
* 1998
New York Foundation for the Arts, ''Dark Love''
* 1998
New York State Council on the Arts, ''Dark Love''
* 1996
New York Foundation for the Arts, Painting in Ireland
* 1992
New York Foundation for the Arts, Painting in France
* 1972
New York State Council on the Arts
References
Bibliography
* ''History of International Art'', Mario Monteverdi (Editor), Universita' Della Arti, Italy, 1981–1992.
* ''Trends and testimonies of Contemporary Art'', Accademia Italia, Salsomaggiore, Italy, 1983.
* ''Women Artists in America, 18th Century to the Present'', Jim Collins and Glenn Opitz (Editors), New York, 1980.
* ''Who's Who In American Art'', Allison McGowan (Editor), 2004 (25th Edition).
* Pat Lipsky Papers, Lipsky, Pat, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., 1997.
* Pat Lipsky: An Interview by Ira Goldberg, LINEA , How Artists Think, New York, 2013
External links
*
David Cohen on Pat Lipsky* ''Art in America'', February 2005, "Pat Lipsky" http://images.dcmooregallery.com/www_dcmooregallery_com/Art_in_America_2.pdf
* ''The New York Times'', February 2003, "Pat Lipsky" http://images.dcmooregallery.com/www_dcmooregallery_com/NY_Times.pdf
* http://www.asllinea.org/pat-lipsky-2-2/
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lipsky, Pat
Living people
American contemporary painters
Art Students League of New York alumni
Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning alumni
Hunter College alumni
Painters from New York City
20th-century American painters
20th-century American women painters
1941 births
21st-century American women painters
21st-century American painters