Maurice Golubov

“I have had an abstract mind since very early…I wanted to make order out of chaos. I started to put a line here and one there, to make visual sense out of it. I started to make landscapes of the mind.”

Heather James presents an exhibition of paintings by Maurice Golubov, an early pioneer of abstract art in America. Golubov’s career spans the breadth of the twentieth century era when easel painting and sculpture dominated art. His early work resonates well with the American modernist movement, anticipates, then quietly shadows the all-over patterning of several New York School Abstract Expressionists including Bradley Walker Tomlin, for example, and finally, without planning his trajectory as an artist, it explodes into ever more complex networks of closely packed informational forms; a language all his own and full of boundless imagination.

There are many versions of abstraction. But Golubov is a particularly poignant, solitary figure in twentieth-century art; the rara avis among the many Avant-garde artists who looked to expunge the past, not resurrect it. Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, and Cezanne inspired him, not Mondrian, Picasso, or Matisse. As a result, Golubov worked within a veritable vacuum onto himself, and it is important to acknowledge and celebrate what is unique to his work. He did not, for example, communicate ideas as Malevich would in conveying a higher-dimensional reality in his characteristic diagrammatic, hard-edged formal language.

Gestalt describes our ability to recognize patterns and make associations, to group objects into larger units, and to relate and group objects of similar shape. Mysticism could have some sway in the late works of which Untitled (50 in. x 40 in.) or Untitled (26 in. x 34 in.) are fantastic examples, but it seems clear Golubov looked at these forms as structure not mystical scripture, and that the geometric formalities provided a gestalt-like whole that represents what he increasingly characterized as an exploratory adventure within the realm of the fourth dimension, a theoretical discourse of vital significance expressed in a rich painterly tradition of grappling with higher dimensions.

He counted Max Weber, Lyonel Feininger and Stuart Davis among his earliest artist friends; Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, Theodore Stamos, and Robert Motherwell later, and when Arshile Gorky crossed the park at Union Square for a visit at his studio on 14 Street and offered to trade one of his paintings for one of Maurice’s, it was a moment worth recounting as an example of the respect they all accorded him.

Indeed, Maurice Golubov, an artist of independent spirit and with an early preoccupation with Jewish mysticism, Eastern and Transcendental philosophies pushed the boundaries of abstract art to embrace a spiritual undertaking that sought to depict a reality beyond the world of daily experience; a realm of infinite potential and possibilities.

Maurice Golubov was a long-time member of the American Abstract Artists and the American Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. His work was handled for many years by Hugh Stix of The Artists Gallery and later, The Tibor de Nagy Gallery and is in the permanent collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Riverside Museum, New York, NY; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO.