“The work never fit an ‘ism,’ an attitude that was hot in a given moment,” says the celebrated artist Chuck Close, who has long admired Nozkowski’s work. “There’s not a lot of bravura paint handling, but they’re still painterly. They’re not decorative—they don’t just hang on the wall for background for cocktail chitchat. They’re serious works of art.”
Particularly when he began showing in the Eighties, the age of overblown Schnabels and Salles, Nozkowski’s paintings, small enough to carry home on the subway, seemed to be coming out of nowhere. “He represented this antithesis to the highly mannered, bombastic aesthetic that was in vogue,” says Siena, who took a lesson from the elder artist and began making small paintings. “It’s about inviting contemplation rather than forcing confrontation.”
Ironically, Nozkowski’s paintings are powerful in part because of, not despite, their intimate size. Storr, now dean of the Yale School of Art and himself a painter, first became aware of him about 15 years ago and was impressed right away because Nozkowski had succeeded at “things I had struggled with in my own work—how to make a picture that had real impact, that had imposing presence, without making a big picture and without pyrotechnics.”
A modest sort by nature, Nozkowski for years quietly endured his paintings getting short shrift in group shows—hanging behind the receptionist’s desk, for example, because they fit there. Now he demands the same amount of wall space as the largest piece in the show. “And this isn’t to claim turf,” he says, “but so they can be looked at more seriously.”
Notes Storr, “He’s a very good definition of a hugely ambitious artist who has never in his life swaggered. He intends to make pictures that count, but he has not put on a show about it. He has just done it.”
There’s also a general consensus that Nozkowski is an unusually likable guy. Both Storr and Schjeldahl cite his expert taste in detective novels and old movies. “There are lots of artists whose art I’m crazy about but I couldn’t stand to have dinner with,” says Schjeldahl. “He is a mensch of the first water.”
An abstractionist in the studio, Nozkowski is nothing if not a realist in life. He is philosophical about being on the verge of art stardom at a time when the term is being applied to many artists of his son’s generation. “You don’t have to be in the art world 15 minutes,” he says, “to realize there is no God.”
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