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Lux Lovely

In 1962 , Billy Al Bengston put somewhat simple shapes at the center of attention with little fanfare around them: An oil-painted emblem based on Army sergeant stripes floats within ovals and minimal colors on a piece of masonite six feet and one-quarter-inch square. Select areas of the finished painting were coated with nitrocellulose lacquer. The work, Lux Lovely, was made in 1962, not long after the heyday of this type of lacquer’s use as a shiny finish for car paint jobs. Bengston blends a hard-edge style of very distinct shapes and clean lines with a pop art-minimalist feel. And yet, he manages to cleverly evade each of those descriptions in this work.

The outer border is precise, a very saturated, thin and even blue line. Moving inward, there are two more borders that are wide and gauzy, as if spray painted on. The first is a rusty orange, followed by a wider light olive-green color. Where they overlap, they blend and create a darker brownish tone. The olive-green border gives way to the painting’s central tan field, also somewhat light and airy. At the very center, Bengston returns to the precision of that outermost blue border with a medallion made of three elements. A gleaming silver oval lies on its side. Standing up in the center of it is a smaller olive-green oval, its top and bottom edges touching the inner border of the silver oval. Brushstrokes in the olive-green oval arc around the whole thing like the whorls of a human fingerprint. At the center of all this, with extremely precise lines, is the third element. It is a take on a sergeant’s stripes in pink with three pointed chevrons on top of three arches. The arches are each like a very shallow letter “u.” This central medallion could be an eye with the silver oval as eyelid rims and the olive-green as the colored part of the eye. If it were an eye, the sergeant’s stripe would be a very interestingly-shaped pupil. But they are just as likely to be interesting, everyday shapes to Bengston. He seems content to leave it abstract and ambiguous.

A final note: The painting’s name uses “lux” without an “e” at the end. In other words, it is not the luxe that one relates to ideas of luxury or sumptuousness. Bengston’s lux refers to a technical way of measuring light, and it derives from the Latin word for “light.” This lighthearted word play seems right in line with a painting that uses recognizable images in unusual ways; you can latch onto any one interpretation you can think of or all of them.