Biography
“ART NEWS”
New York
Daniel Lifschitz (Touchstone): Lifschitz’s 60 pastels form a scintillating first one-man show. Their cumulative impact is powerful enough to erase all suggestion that pastel is an over-delicate weakling among art media; Lifschitz reminds us that since Degas one can not longer think that way about pastel. The Italian artist Morandi was an early influence on Lifschitz, but at this stage the influence of Degas and Whistler is much more palpable in his work. Though brilliantly colored pastel compositions punctuate his oeuvre ( such as On the Beach), Lifschitz frequently will restrict a series of compositions to greys (the Nocturnes of the late 1960s and early ‘70s), and has most recently found white a fascinating and rewarding colour (Winter Landscape, 1976).
Refusing to let even the length of a pastelstick intervene between his hand and the paper, the artist rubs the sides of the stick flat into his favourite black paper and achieves what he describes as a “velouté”, a velvetly texture that lends itself well to the creation of the mood Lifschitz seeks in his remembered Landscapes, interiors, and even still lives.
Margaret Betz 1976
