The New Criterion
by Brendan Dooley
April 9, 2013
On view through May 31, “Painterly Pasted Pictures” at FreedmanArt in New York is a small but smart exhibition that brings together a group of collages from the 20th century united by the stylistic trait of “painterliness.” Popularized by Swiss art historian Heinrich Wolfflin, painterliness describes paintings that are loosely and openly styled, with emphasis placed on visible brushstrokes and the application of paint rather than on the sharp delineation of forms and objects. Featuring rare collages from Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Alfred Leslie, Robert Motherwell, Anne Ryan, Kurt Schwitters, Jack Youngerman, Frank Stella, and Ellsworth Kelly, among others, the show has been carefully selected to demonstrate different manifestations of painterliness in the collage form.