September-October 1973
Peter Bradley’s show at the downtown Emmerich (April 7-25) reveals yet another artist exploring the color-field lyrical abstraction idiom that Emmerich presents in his galleries–probably the most consistent taste of all the New York galleries. His uptown space is devoted primarily to well-known artists while the downtown space is often used for younger, less experienced artists. In providing these younger artists a space Emmerich is attempting to encourage painting which expresses a taste connected with the last phase of Modernism and which is sympathetic with his own. Bradley is a good example of this taste; essentially romantic in nature, Bradley’s paintings are reminiscent of the dictum of the early English Romantic poets that poetry should be a free outpouring of feeling. The expressive qualities of Bradley’s work, their free flowing beauty does not, however, express specifically but rather mindless manifestations of an emotional or psychological state. The major qualities of these paintings is not their expressiveness but, like most paintings in this idiom, a kind of picturesqueness.