Chris Crosman – Nicole Wittenberg: Cheek to Cheek

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

F. Scott Fizgerald, The Great Gatsby

Encounters with art mean different things to artists, curators, and the public at large. Famously, in John Logan’s play about Mark Rothko, Red, it is the artist before a blank canvas who is confronting what the question is. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any work of visual art that is not an encounter of one kind or another and whatever that might mean. Such encounters might include the physical jolt of seeing something new or unexpected in a museum or gallery, or encountering surprising relationships joined by disparate artworks in a group show. These encounters often lead to associations with works that speak to precursors and precedents that nearly every contemporary artwork is heir to, or finds necessary to reject. For certain artists, these encounters attest to the individual and varied interactions and intentions ranging from social and cultural critique to simply homage and inspiration. Or not. For the attentive viewer with mindful receptivity, there await those brief but enduring encounters that make certain works of art forever memorable, that imprint themselves with lost or difficult to retrieve personal experience—childhood memories of place, for instance. More than familiar imagery—strikingly original, that it is—Nicole Wittenberg’s work enlists inchoate, liminal thoughts and feelings akin to encountering nature for the very first time.

Nicole Wittenberg, with summer exhibitions in Maine and Paris, is having a long, and for admirers of pure painterly hedonism, a moment of what curator Suzette McAvoy rightly describes as unabashed beauty. The exhibition, Nicole Wittenberg: Cheek to Cheek, curated by McAvoy, is at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (24 May–14 September 2025) with concurrent summer shows of landscapes at the Ogunquit Art Museum, titled A Sailboat in the Moonlight (18 April–20 July), and pastels and studies in Ain’t Misbehavin’ at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris (12 June–19 July).

Flower paintings in Maine, even a few edging toward the erotic, are by no means new. I recall a wondrous group of sixties Maine landscapes by Grace Hartigan from a summer at Clark’s Cove, then and now a popular getaway and honeymoon destination. While Hartigan’s early ‘60s paintings marked a shift away from her own pioneering (and little recognized) achievements as a key figure in Abstract Expressionism, Hartigan’s Clark’s Cove paintings can be seen as celebrating newfound love and marriage to her fourth and last husband. Among several paintings from that summer, blue Maine lupines rise in pulsing, priapic splendor.

Like Hartigan’s lupines, many of Wittenberg’s most recent large paintings are of Maine wildflowers, hardy perennials stubbornly regenerating year after year, surviving harsh, long winters on rocky soil and framing hidden coves among the “pointy trees,” as her fellow painter and friend, Ann Craven, describes them. They are nature’s floral “foundlings,” in all their bright, gritty majesty and sudden presence. Wittenberg’s paintings literally drip with color, at once trumpeting and tender. Sensual, organic fecundity, and un-still nature are leitmotifs running through Wittenberg’s entire oeuvre.

Different series variously reference aspects of an irresistible, seductive nature. Relatively matte, dry surfaces open to fluid, fluttery wash-like passages. Vertical drips articulate high-keyed spring-green leaves and stems. Flowers emerge confidently in full bloom with vibrant, saturated, bright orange edging and underpainting. It is telling that her recent large paintings are based on smaller plein air studies and sketches—a longstanding and continuing tradition of artists from Marsden Hartley to Andrew Wyeth, Hartigan, Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, and Lois Dodd, among so many others. Wittenberg’s ability to translate her small studies into monumental paintings while retaining a sense of spontaneity and intimacy, however, belongs to a touch that is uniquely hers. The largest canvases invite the eye to wander among the stems crossing over and under each other, complex compositions spreading over wall-size expanses, even as the eye wants to linger on a discrete leaf or petal, each rendered with touching delicacy and painterly self-reference.

In a world of constant crises and dispiriting disruption, people need art for relief from every day dispiriting realities. Truly, Wittenberg’s paintings of Maine wildflowers in the Cheek to Cheek exhibition may be seen innocently and joyously singing, “I’m in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak,” from Irving Berlin’s musical Top Hat (1935). But the artist may also be gently reminding us that the film opened to immense popular acclaim in 1935—in the very teeth of the Great Depression, a time of world-wide cultural and political uncertainty including the rise of fascism. The popular and the polemical might not be the first thoughts occurring to audiences ravished by Wittenberg’s electric colors and exuberantly slashing, “Ain’t Misbehavin” brushwork (although her brushes do break rules whenever needed). Even so, such historical associations are difficult to dismiss in our turning present—up is down, spinning, mediated, everything all at once, world of nothing will ever be the same again. Except, perhaps, in paintings like these where the high-stepping colors, syncopated rhythms, and large gestures offer escape to brighter worlds of nature’s silent entertainers, her “ready for my close-up” portraits of wildflowers. Fred and Ginger’s perfect pirouettes out into a world of lavish fantasy and momentary escape; then the exuberant, unapologetic beauty of Maine wildflowers distracting, if only briefly in our hopefully fleeting now.

Wittenberg sees her recent paintings, “as a group of interlocking forms that overlay to create a massing of stems, flowers, and leaves—in that way, these are Baroque images. ” Baroque in material sensuality and sensory excess as might be seen in Italian 17th-century churches. Moreover, the wildflower paintings are composed of overlapping, irregular forms in shallow indeterminate space while simultaneously pushing out against the framing edges. Forms coalesce and compress, releasing energy throughout the stretched canvas. Movement is decentralized, asymmetric. These are dramatic paintings in which artifice prevails, commands attention—these are not flowers; they are adamantly, emphatically, paintings of flowers.

Wittenberg lifts the commonplace wildflower though scale and surface incident with a flashing, darting surface energy. Invoking the Baroque’s thrusting dynamism where earth-bound sensuality collides with the metaphysical, Wittenberg’s paintings are all the more miraculous for their origins in the prosaic—wildflowers. There is something of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s heavenly lit Baroque sculpture and arcing rhythms along with Caravaggio’s lowly peasant and prostitute saints in Wittenberg’s golden rods and Queen Anne’s lace. Edgar Degas’s late ballet dancers slip into this viewer’s imagination as well.

Electric orange underpainting, breaking through, like the backing chorus or base-line for an outdoor rock concert, shocks these paintings into action. Streaking, yet controlled drips of high-keyed chartreuse (Paris green) breathe as new-born shoots and stems. Bright, sun-dappled blooms arise in close, jostling clumps. The compressed, swaying flowers open and are seen against ever-deepening cobalt skies or azure depths.

Depth and illusion are simultaneously cancelled and carried by writhing form and twisting movement. Wittenberg’s loose handling, at once gently caressing and brashly skittering, charges these complexly layered and textured surfaces with a sense of life forming and transforming itself even as we look. These are restless paintings. Giant, floating flowers and leaning stems looming over the viewer are hardly defenseless. And there exists a sense that Wittenberg’s wildflowers are indeed nature’s returning “witnesses to a world that will continue without us” to borrow John Yau’s poetic description of another artist whose work rages from within, too.

In a recent conversation with the artist, she shared memories of growing up in rural northern California with its rolling, coastal terrain. Separated by more generations than I care to count at my age, both of us recall childhoods of launching flattened cardboard boxes from slopes covered with tough, golden grasses on steep hillsides—neighborhood kids, dogs, the occasional kidnapped preschooler or visiting toddler, tumbling and whirling, slipping and yelping our way to the low, prickly bushes at the hillside bottom where sudden bone-jarring collisions sent us sprawling and laughing in all directions. Wittenberg says that these Marin County hills mostly remain wild and empty save for thrill-seeking kids and startled jackrabbits. Her joyful, tumbling, peripheral vision-erasing, limb-twisting, wild and sun-shot, emergency-orange-flashing paintings are those parent-free, California-cardboard-dotted golden hillsides.

Up close, these large, color-shot, ricocheting paintings envelop, even stun the eye into viewing Maine’s sudden summers from the perspective of butterflies and bees or Gatsby’s “moths among the whisperings and champagne and the stars.” We encounter forms towering over us, stretching their lengthening stems and leaves into abstract, erupting blooms. They ask us to dance—close, intimate, alive. Cheek to cheek.

Image at top: Nicole Wittenberg, Climbing Roses 4, oil on canvas, 72 x 96 in., 2024 (photo: © Nicole Wittenberg).