A Timely Exit From Anti-Art

Dan Lang is one of the few modern artists who has found a way of reconciling technology and nature. Most of us allow the technological age to alienate us from aesthetic experience. We can't look at nature without seeing beer cans. "Pop" and "Op" art have dominated the art market for more than two years; but they don't present a new trend. Instead, they undercut traditional artistic values and divert out attention away from aesthetic experience as a defense against this discomforting sense of alienation.

"Op" experiments with the language of art and avoids all of the feeling. While fascinating mechanically it remains barren of emotion. It rebels against expressionism just as "Pop" -- with its emphasis upon hygienic reality and arbitrary selection of subject matter -- repudiates abstraction. This opposition to the expression of emotion and to the aesthetic selection of subject material is fundamentally anti-art.

With an appreciative eye to the potential good in technological living and a sensitivity to what is natural, a few modern painters have found, in technology, a new medium for exploring nature. Fusing "life in the car", as one critic put it, with a nostalgic appreciation of the natural landscape, the painting and graphics of Daniel Lang break down the barrier between technology and nature in a new way. The artist portrays the experience of seeing nature through the window of a moving car. He uses the car to enhance his experience of the landscape and we feel at rest with his effort to bring technology into harmony with nature.

"The Red Road" and the "Yaddo Road" summarize all the best qualities of Dan Lang's work. The primitive flavor of Gaugin's palette and the firmly drawn, simplified outlines of Gothic stained-glass underlie his very contemporary notion of abstraction. The radically simple planes of color contain only the essentials of space and form.

Somebody or other recently commented that "an artist is most isolated yet most exposed in a drawing, since nothing else comes so purely from within him or shows him to us more intimately." Lang's drawings are definitely his forte. They present his refreshing sense of harmony in its purest form. He handles the medium with such case that questions of mastery become irrelevant and he leaves us free to lose ourselves in his lyrical themes.

This show, however, does have its weak spots. Lang occasionally strays from his purpose in "The Orange Table." The triangle he uses to suggest shadow are more geometric than suggestive. In some of the other works, his colors are overstated; but "Dog in the Road", in its disunity, is the only work that should not have been shown.

The quality of Lang's painting is excellent; and his drawings beguile us with a quieting nostalgia that makes looking at them well worth a trip into Boston. On the whole, the show sparkles with a fresh idea of technological man in nature. It suggests a way of reconciling the technological world with enriched aesthetic perception.