Arthur Monroe, Know Your Axe, Van Doren Waxter

Arthur Monroe, Untitled, oil on canvas, 84 x 96 inches, 2003

By Kelly Jean Egan

In the soaring second-floor gallery of Van Doren Waxter, the late painter Arthur Monroe commands attention in Know Your Axe, a panoramic survey of monumental canvases that span three decades of restless, improvisational abstraction. From his use of chartreuse yellows and burnt oranges to his sweeping black and white gestures anchored by recurrent themes, the works pulse with jazz-inflected rhythm and a confident spontaneity that refuses quietude. More than a mid-century continuation of abstraction, Monroe’s painting emerges as a deeply personal language: one forged by his Brooklyn beginnings, his Korean War service, his time in Mexico and California, and his refusal to yield to the narrow confines of the white-dominated post-war art world. 

While Monroe’s work has appeared in numerous solo exhibitions over the decades, from intimate retrospectives at community art centers in Oakland to focused presentations in institutional settings, Know Your Axe feels markedly different. Here, Van Doren Waxter gives the artist the full spatial and curatorial rigor his work deserves. Rather than contextualizing him solely within the lineage of Bay Area abstraction or the Black Arts Movement, the show positions Monroe as an essential raconteur between action painting and lived experience. The installation allows his canvases to breathe and converse, illuminating a continuity in his practice that earlier exhibitions could only gesture toward; a lifelong negotiation between chaos and structure, intuition and discipline, exuberance and restraint.

Arthur Monroe, Untitled, oil on canvas, 17 ¾ x 24 inches, 1998

I was fortunate enough to see Monroe’s retrospective at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art last year, a memorable presentation that, amongst other aspects of his career, highlighted his connection to the Bay Area’s postwar abstraction and its intersections with the Beat and jazz-inflected cultural movements of the mid-century. While the inclusion of these regional and historical contexts offers an important foundation for understanding his artistic landscape, Know Your Axe shifts the frame and pulls us from our instinctual compartmentalization. Here, Monroe’s canvases are seen less as artifacts of a particular time and place, and more as part of a wider, ongoing inquiry into gesture, identity, and persistence; an abstraction grounded in experience rather than geography.

Untitled (2003) epitomizes Monroe’s ability to translate improvisation into visual form. At nearly eight feet wide, the painting feels both expansive and contained, an orchestration of gesture that channels the off-beat rhythm of jazz while maintaining an undercurrent of restraint. Layers of saturated yellow, red, cobalt, and viridian collide and overlap like competing melodies, anchored by the assertive black and turquoise markings that slither across the lower register. These gestural inscriptions, part calligraphy and part graffiti, introduce a kind of coded language, one that resists legibility yet insists on presence. Where earlier readings of Monroe’s work have focused on its alignment with the spontaneous energy of Abstract Expressionism, Untitled reveals something more intricate: a negotiation between control and abandon, a visual tempo that rises and subsides like breath.

Arthur Monroe, Untitled, oil on canvas, 77 x 96 inches, 2003

The works in Know Your Axe span several decades, allowing viewers to trace the evolution of Monroe’s painterly language without reducing it to a linear progression. Across these years, his visual syntax remains consistent; an insistence on gesture as thought, on rhythm as structure, but the tone and tempo shift. The early canvases carry a dense immediacy, their surfaces charged with color and motion, while later works reveal a measured reconsideration of that energy, a testing of how far improvisation can be pushed before it collapses into silence. Taken together, these paintings suggest not change for its own sake but refinement; an artist repeatedly returning to the same visual vocabulary to find new inflections within it. 

This sense of sustained inquiry becomes particularly evident in works such as Untitled #1 (1989), where Monroe’s handling of surface becomes more introspective, revealing a quieter but no less assertive dialogue between gesture and erasure. The composition is dominated by an expanse of grey; an earthy, almost muddy field that appears to have been layered over earlier bursts of color. This veiling effect suggests both concealment and preservation, as if the painting is negotiating what to reveal and what to withhold. Flecks of blue, yellow, and red emerge at the periphery, hinting at a buried vitality beneath the subdued surface. The heavy black lines that traverse the canvas operate less as structure than as interruptions; momentary pauses in an otherwise fluid visual rhythm. Compared to the exuberant saturation of his later works, this piece feels more deliberate, more concerned with the act of revision than expression. The grey field, potentially covering previous layers, alludes to time, reconsideration, and perhaps a resistance to closure. It is in this tension, between gesture and restraint, visibility and obscurity, that Monroe’s work achieves its complexity, extending the language of abstraction into a meditation on endurance and self-editing.

Arthur Monroe, Untitled #1, oil on canvas, 96 x 84 inches, 1989

Know Your Axe is refreshing not only for its scale and curatorial clarity, but for the way it reframes Monroe’s place within postwar abstraction. By allowing the paintings to exist on their own formal and emotional terms, Van Doren Waxter offers a complete view of Monroe as a painter who engaged the central questions of abstraction while grounding them in lived experience. His canvases remind us that abstraction need not be detached from biography or social context; rather, it can serve as a record of endurance, intuition, and thought in motion.

Arthur Monroe, Untitled, oil on canvas, 27 ½ x 18 inches, 2010

Monroe’s true place in history may lie not in the margins of any movement, but in his persistence outside of them. The exhibition asks viewers to reconsider how histories of American abstraction are constructed—who is included, who is deferred, and why. The show feels less like a discovery and more like a recalibration, a necessary correction that complicates familiar narratives of mid-century painting. Standing before these works, one senses both the urgency and the patience of an artist who painted to locate meaning within chaos, to test what the language of abstraction could still say. In doing so, the exhibition reminds us that Monroe’s art is not a rediscovered echo, but an essential, ongoing conversation.

ARTHUR MONROE - KNOW YOUR AXE
VAN DOREN WAXTER, NEW YORK
September 17 – November 8 2025