To create the series of works that became “The Disaster Paintings,†Donald Sultan took tar, house paint and images from newspaper photographs, put them in cutouts or atop linoleum tile mounted on Masonite, then attached it to wooden stretchers that stick out a couple inches from the wall.
The massive paintings — most of them are 8-foot by 8-foot squares — dominate the space around them, seemingly so heavy they'll fall to the floor while their imagery dramatically blurs the line between representation and abstraction.
Ten of the 60 paintings Sultan created in the 1980s and early '90s are now on view at the Sheldon Museum of Art in “Donald Sultan: The Disaster Paintings,†a traveling exhibition organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.
In his exhibition catalog essay, Charles Wylie locates “The Disaster Paintings†in the Cold War, their dark depictions of destruction pulled from journalistic imagery reflecting an age of impending nuclear destruction.
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But some 35 years after Sultan made the first paintings in the series, they feel neither dated or fully rooted in their time. Rather, they resonate in our age of global warming-triggered natural disasters, terrorism and what appears to be the restart of the Cold War.
And the historic image of “Polish Landscape II Jan 5 1990 (Auschwitz)," a gray-dominated depiction of the railroad tracks and a building at the Nazi concentration/extermination camp will be forever haunting.
The gray tone of that piece is something of an anomaly. In the majority of the paintings, the color against the black of the tar is yellow, with, in cases like “Yellowstone Aug 15 1990,†the underlying light blue of the linoleum peeking through from beneath more thinly brushed areas.
A technical tour de force that is as impressive today as it was four decades ago, “The Disaster Paintings†bring together most of the post-World War II avant-garde art movements — abstract expressionism, with its drips of paint and gestural brushstrokes, the industrial materials of minimalism and, with the tiles, a kind of grid, together with representation that has been present in painting since its beginnings.
Even though rooted in photographs from newspapers, as were many of Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, including his “Death and Disasters†series, there’s nothing close to pop art in Sultan’s paintings.
Sultan was not interested in directly transferring the image from newspaper to linoleum nor in maintaining its integrity in the transfer. To be sure, in some paintings, like the depiction of an abandoned Pennsylvania steel mill in “Dead Plant November 1 1988,†the image is relatively clear.
Others, however, are nearly abstract. “South End Feb 24 1986,†for example, has a railing and an outline of an aerial ladder with the fire burning in the center of the painting. Or, it's just as easily a few lines against a bright-yellow field that’s between a pair of dark passages.
The variations in Sultan’s combination of abstraction and representation can easily be seen in a pair of paintings titled “Early Morning.†In “Early Morning May 20 1986,†which is on view at Sheldon, a firefighter stands atop a ladder battling a blaze in a multistory building.
As seen in the catalog “Early Morning August 1 1986,†the sharp lines dividing the firefighter from the apparatus blur into a dark mass, the detail in the building disappears as the painting tilts toward abstraction.
Sultan’s tour of history in “The Disaster Paintings†isn’t limited to post World War II art. Rather, he incorporates far-earlier imagery into some the works, including “Poison Nocturne Jan 31 1985,†in which he adds a sailboat from Whistler’s “Nocturne: Blue and Gold — Southampton Water†to the composition based on a chemical spill under the Goethals Bridge between Staten Island and New Jersey.
That mark is hard to suss out. But it’s not necessary to know about Whistler or anything else about the looming, thick, dark paintings to feel their power, appreciate Sultan’s mastery and get their foreboding meaning.