LATTER-DAY LUMINIST

Between 1956 and 1964, the painter Leon Berkowitz and his wife, the poet Ida Fox, traveled throughout Europe. They spent two and a half years in Wales and made trips to London, Paris, Italy, Greece, and Jerusalem. For the painter, who had been a fixture of the Washington, D.C., arts community since the early 1940s, the trip served as a major turning point in his practice.

Berkowitz said of this period, “Living and working as I did during those years in Europe in the open air under expanding skies, light itself became an ultimate goal. I became concerned with the dissolution of matter, the fragmentation of light, the conversion of ‘matter into spirit.’ I wanted to look into color, not at color.” If one were to wonder, what does transcendence look like, Berkowitz’s newfound approach might be an appropriate answer.

He took as inspiration Monet and the American Luminists. He began to think of himself as a “latter-day Luminist,” pivoting away from post-painterly abstraction and the “so-called color school people” who occupied the second wave of Abstract Expressionism.

In the catalogue for “Leon Berkowitz: Big Bend Series 1976,” a 1977 exhibition at the Phillips Collection, the pioneering video artist Douglas Davis wrote, “Leon Berkowitz is often compared and related to Morris Louis, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning—artists whom he knew and admired. But there is a concentration on the experience of seeing (in light) in Berkowitz that reminds me of something Malevich said, thirty years