Reviews
The New York Times: December 6, 1947
Several of the new names are identified especially stimulating canvasses, among them, Joe Lasker.
- Howard DeVree
The New York Times: December 2, 1951
The romantic realism of Joe Lasker. At the Kraushaar Gallery, Joe Lasker’s first one-man show confirms the very real and personal expression noted in his pictures in various group exhibitions. This is sound and sensitive painting, a little somber, exceptionally well organized, with clean and subdued color. But behind and beyond the technical aspect of his work, Lasker depicts children and street scenes with compassionate insight, personalizing them and never slipping into the trivial, the anecdotal or the merely illustrative. Light, clarity and rich if subdued color help him in carrying conviction. And there is a psychological warmth and penetration in the work which augurs well for development which should be furthered by his Prix de Rome year.
- Howard DeVree
The New York Times: March 17, 1957:
The earthy realism of Joe Lasker.
- Howard DeVree
The New York Times: June 23, 1957:
Joe Lasker adds a touch of restrained urban sentiment in his painting, “Barber Shop.”
- Howard DeVree
The New York Times: April 5, 1959:
Pictures by Joe Lasker at the Kraushaar Gallery comprise sensitive, sentimental studies of children, and delicate, understated landscape drawings. Lasker is a romanticist after the fashion of Berman and Tchelitchew, giving his figure studies extra amounts of self-awareness. This psychological intensity, expressed in the color as well, forms the main strength of these pictures.
- Stuart Preston
The New York Times: February 1, 1964:
Fundamentally an intimist painter, particularly responsive to the changing moods and uncertainties of childhood, this artist has a special way of seeing figures and landscape. His contemplative work, where feelings is underplayed, will please those who do not seek shock value in art.
- Stuart Preston
The New York Times: January 12, 1974:
There are sly references to the history of art and to such past masters as Rembrandt, “Van Gogh in South Norwalk,” for instance, depicts that artist wending his way home to the little frame house in which Mr. Lasker apparently lives – these works succeed as thoroughly creditable examples of contemporary realist painting. Mr. Lasker has considerable tact and expertise in the handling of generally soft, low-key color. The silky light with which he imbues so mundane a subject as “Pine Tree Studio” is marvelously effective. And the clever visual strategies of “The Jewish Bride,” – another studio view, with a glimpse of a Rembrandt masterpiece – produce a tour de force.
- James R. Mellow
Art News, December, 1951:
Joseph Lasker, now abroad on a Prix de Rome fellowship, has a first one man show of pictures that veil social commentary within a romantic realism. To be sure, the pictures painted three years ago clearly disapprove of conditions which force children to amuse themselves on city streets or in courtyards shadowed by tenements, but they reveal at the same time the excitement Lasker found in the brick-textures of these buildings and in the clarity of their shapes and shadows. “The Little Match Girl,” for example, stacks scrawny Christmas trees against a handsomely variegated wall while the youngsters at play are unobtrusive yet forceful symbols. The symbolism of the more recent works is far more insistent and dictates the form. “Der Grosse Metaphysiker” forfeits structural clarity as color planes interpenetrate and every object works to convey disillusion.
- B.H.
Art News, May, 1955:
Joe Lasker has a romantic feeling about slums (especially those ornamentally architectured or brick-filled), street Arabs, borderline case histories. He uses a rather obvious and creaking symbolism – for instance the scissors like a bird of prey in “Time.” He won a Prix de Rome, and the year in Italy has given an Italianate quality to the subjects of this second one-man show.
Art News, April, 1959:
In passing them Joe Lasker’s pictures, one looks back much as one does after seeing something a little out-of-the-ordinary in a street. The people and their attitudes in these canvases are so familiar that they stand out.
Art News, February, 1964:
Joe Lasker continues to paint isolated figures, usually in interiors. These are softened images whose recalled Surrealism is especially evident in “Rest”: a sleepy, thumb-sucking child moodily on the floor beside a pile of odd blocks. Especially when painting children, the artist captures the delicacy and drama of youth.
Art News, January, 2004:
This retrospective of 84-year-old Joe Lasker’s landscapes, self-portraits, and genre studies recalled the artist’s extraordinary technique, engaging wit, and lifelong preference for realism.
In “Horn of Plenty”(1951), which Lasker describes as Simone Martini’s symbol of peace attacked by the music of Dr. Strangelove, a woman in a flowing gown reclines on a cushioned chair, her garlanded head propped against her arm, while a red-coated musician, wearing a black knight’s helmet, blows an outsize tuba in her face. The drape of her gown and the shining curves of the tuba illustrate the facility with which Lasker manipulates pigment.
“The Forger”(ca. 1974) demonstrates the way Lasker recasts art-historical masterpieces. Following the 17th-century Dutch tradition of incorporating puns in paintings, Lasker here plays with Vermeer’s “Meeting at Emmaus,” depicting Vermeer painting his own forgery.
Devils appear frequently in Lasker’s later works. In “The Hand That Holds the Brush” (1990) the artist renders himself in a pigment-smeared apron, baseball cap, and dark glasses. His face is blurred, his skin fleshy. Surrounding him are vivid, open-mouthed red devils, one clutching his arm, another lurking behind his apron, and another lurking over his right shoulder. They emerge from a ground of red and blue pigment, like Lasker’s thoughts revealing themselves.
In “Exorcism” (2000), a sun-dappled New England church appears with flying devil figures – appropriated from illuminated manuscripts – descending Irons the steeple. They flee from two angels blowing trumpets from above. Lasker’s riffs on art history, life, and convention are delivered with refreshing charm, irony, and skill.
- Mary Schneider Enriquez
New York Observer, April, 2003:
Joe Lasker commands our interest. There are many fine paintings to be seen. (Remember painting? Like , you know, oil or acrylic on canvas?)
- Hilton Kramer, reviewing the 178th Annual Exhibition at the National Academy of Design
Apollo, April, 1959:
In his latest exhibition at the Kraushaar Gallery Joe Lasker proved himself to be one of the more talented representational painters active in New York today. With a tremendous debt to the influence of a stay in Rome, Lasker developed a style characterized by plasticity and pastel colour with strong classical overtones. Like other American painters who worked in Rome he was enthralled by the classical forms and proportions that surrounded him there and was deeply influenced by them.
In his work he uses many devices in colour and perspective that recall, and to some extent recreate, the atmosphere of classical Italy. Lasker once said. “I had heard that Italy was beautiful but I was totally overwhelmed by the beauty, warmth, and rich artistic inheritance of the country”.
Lasker’s iconography is peculiarly Italian – the Renaissance or Baroque square appears in many of his compositions painted in colours that evoke the Italian light. In all the work done since his Italian sojourn there is evidence of the lesson learned from Renaissance painting in clearly defined figures in colours that recall fifteenth century painters, was taken up for occasional use in views of town squares where exaggerating the recession magnifies the strange Romantic quality of the colourful classical buildings. The bold simplification of figures makes them more plastic and this, too, is reminiscent of the Renaissance, although handled differently.
One unusual aspect of Lasker’s work is the fact that expression to him depends on the representation of subject matter in real space, his simplification is never in the direction of abstraction but rather a means of heightening the plasticity to clarify the scene or the action of figures.
Unlike most painters of today, he does not visualize a scene as a total composition dependent on a flat arrangement of colours. His technique is a reaction against impressionism and later tendencies that diminish the importance of the subject for itself and emphasize the total affect of the elements of a picture.
This interest in subject matter has behind it a great sympathy for people and a leaning towards depicting themes that awaken one’s social conscience. The poor and the weak come into his iconography without doing much more than making one feel ashamed, the compassionate way they are represented seems to be simply the result of observation, not done to incite action. Lasker has reverted to earlier styles for inspiration but he has evolved vital style that has its own kind of freshness.
- Marvin Schwartz
Art Now Gallery Guide, September, 2000:
Like the Intimists, he celebrates the joy of tranquil moments snatched from the maelstrom of life. In the best paintings, Lasker captures a dreamy, reflective ambiance; his figures seem caught in their own private reveries.
Life Magazine, March 20, 1950:
“El Candy Store” by Joe Lasker, painted in New York’s Puerto Rican district, shows a forlorn and neglected child huddled against a window which is decorated with Halloween masks. Poor children appear in many pictures by Lasker, who is deeply concerned with the tragic effects of the slums on the young.
Spoken commentary:
Janet Flanner (New Yorker columnist) in conversation with artist Seymour Drumlevitch at the American Academy in Rome, October, 1951:
Joe Lasker is the artist laureate of New York.
Antoinette Kraushaar, former president, Kraushaar Galleries, 1970, responding to Lasker’s query about why she had kept him in her stable for so long when there were many dead artists whose paintings fetched higher prices:
It’s always easy to sell a painting by a famous dead artist, but you can’t have lunch with him.
Allen Tate, president, National Institute of Arts and Letters, at the grants presentation ceremony, 1968:
He is both a realist and a true humanist. His subjects are men and women – and often children whom he paints with special sympathy and understanding. He captures an evasive mood, a whimsical idea, notably in his Cezanne series. His work is quiet, sincere, and thoughtful.
