"Nothing is real and nothing to get hungaaaa-bout... ...Strawberry fields foreveeeeer... John Lennon, 1966

The amuse-bouche; it was another one of those days when my mind was on automatic-melodic and the mournful John Lennon was in my head with a fruity song as I deposited myself in a furred blur to 'D-A-M.' Just before departing the humble homestead there was a surreal infraction with my 4-year-old daughter about her sparkly red shoes; surely a beatific vision for Frank Baum but not the comfort-thing for waddling around a metropolitan art gallery. Then there was her 'punkish' bob which only a super-Wahl could remedy, and in a grand finale, to put the cream topping on the cake she wanted to take her mother-made sock rabbit which looks more like a maniacal giant rat... oh what domestic joy!

Driving around in automatically vacant circles for an hour in a desperate quest for a parking spot... Libeskind's armored weltschauung; lance-like shards of glimmering zinc threatening to pierce the remaining tattered nerves of my sanity... a perverse thought; ' tight angular corners that suck the dim and dusty imaginations of corporate cleaners.' The deceased Beatle was still playing around in my cranial recesses (without legal permission) but I managed to turn down the volume sufficiently to concentrate on some sort of inspired haze. I was trying to melt the eleventh hellish artic age of my mind in preparation for a paradisiacal display of artistic errant colors.

Thus we were; wander-lusting round and about, staring and blitzing and swirling in that strange solipsistic dance that only abstraction (and minimalism) can induce. Forgive me, call me a hairless primate from the early Pliocene but I always half regarded this vague oeuvre as existentialist visual jazz. I had already come to terms with the haloed Mark Rothko in the meditative room named after him in the London Tate; that reclusive chanting essence, an incardinate mystery which brushes indefinably between illuminative construction and asphyxiating oceanic chaos. Here I had the chance to submerge my subconscious into the deepest mythic realms of a rainbow tribe.

Just when you think the fascistic anti-art forces of the world are about to break out and consume you in a tidal wave of anonymous grey slab-work a savior appears; Adolph Gottlieb has to be the firm anchor of the show. With the 'Sentinel' of 1951 as a runic crack-fest of expressional primitivism,the aggressively portentous shadow of a hand-crafted 'golemic' Frankenstein, emerging reconstructed from millions of previous pictographs, stepping through our fields of dreams... in a tightly packed vestibule Gottlieb's monster is a silent berserker on the edge of a catastrophic new world of political confusion, a timely comment on current events.

Meanwhile Morris Louis transforms and extends his Hebraic visions and evocations; colored veils in which we are invited to contemplate a supreme majestic force, sweeping through a desert with monumental strokes in a phenomenic fashion and then hurtling through ancient geological strata with the broad and indefinable sensuality of lost manuscripts. We relinquish our hold on the solidity of a golden calf and emerge reborn through a tinted gossamer caul.

Green Web1967 by Sam Gilliam is surprisingly ecological, and I adored the scented sensation of being plunged into damp Amazonian foliage; reveling upward into rustic mossy textures, dripping molds encroaching and spreading. Gilliam is the only African-American artist in the show, and in this work I got a real sense of his reputation of the painter as a linguist and lyricist, glistening layers of thought and invention, iridescent weaving, improvisation, the dynamics of exploration, transformation and personal evolution. My impression here was his struggle to chant an ancient primeval myth, to express the delicate inner beauty of humanity and the relationship with nature and her legends.

The epic ends on a sticky note with a marshmallow confection from Larry Poons' Yellow and brown womb.' Layers of dense opacity struggle to mumble a message from deep within, unformed but developing and waiting for the right moment to emerge from its plastered cocoon... thus we have his later glittering paintings, rich and decadent with a unctuous delectability, contrasting greatly with his earlier op-art pieces which stimulate and fascinate through carefully chosen discordant notes and colors.

Dessert; or so I thought that was the end! Browsing through other professional reviews of the show I stumbled across Kyle Macmillan's observation that the exhibition had in fact be chopped 'schizoid-like' into two halves; most in the suitably spacious Gio Ponti building, but the remainingone-half dozen odd eggs into the third floor gallery in the Hamilton. Nothing within or without the expanse of the principal body of the exhibition indicates this dissection, no markers or arrows to guide the bewildered abstract art groupie to further visions. Was this a conspiratorial pre-meditated act of sabotage on the part of a reckless curator or did he/she simply not count the art work before hanging it? I suggest an arithmetic 101 course and a suitable tape measure made readily available.

Otherwise I found the works lyrical, meditative and thoughtful. It can take an incredible stretch of imagination to encompass any abstract art form, but in that extension of our perception we find ourselves in a land of unlimited potential. Through this art we might break out beyond the boundaries and conventions we have created to maintain our sense of reality, and experience the beauty of chance and discovery, to become like children again... tapping along a colored road in bright red shoes! Long live Oz and painting by jazz. So, this is your last chance to dance to symphony of color: only one week left. After Sunday you will have to hike all the way up to the Smithsonian to see it.

Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975. November 9, 2007 to February 3, 2008. Paintings by color field artists Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, and Frank Stella, Adolph Gottlieb, along with their precursors, important abstract expressionists like Sam Francis, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.

Denver Art Museum

The DAM is part of the Civic Center Cultural Complex on 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock Streets in downtown Denver.

http://www.denverartmuseum.org/home

Color as Field is a traveling exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts: Exhibition itinerary: Denver Art Museum (November 9, 2007-February 3, 2008); Smithsonian American Art Museum (February 29-May 26, 2008); Frist Center for the Visual Arts (June 20 -September 21, 2008).

For more information, contact Yvette Lee Crowley at 212-988-7700, Ext. 236 or ycrowley@afaweb.org.