Art News:
December 1951: Pictures that veil social commentary within a romantic realism…The pictures...clearly disapprove of conditions which force children to amuse themselves on city streets or in courtyards shadowed by tenements....The Little Match Girl, for example, stacks scrawny Christmas trees against a handsomely variegated wall while the youngsters at play are unobtrusive yet forceful symbols.
May 1955: Joe Lasker has a romantic feeling about slums (especially those ornamentally architectured or brick-filled), street Arabs, borderline case histories.
January 2004 (Mary Schneider Enriquez): This retrospective [at Kraushaar Galleries, New York] of 84-year-old Joe Lasker’s landscapes, self-portraits, and genre studies recalled the artist’s extraordinary technique, engaging wit, and lifelong preference for realism.
In Horn of Plenty (1951), which Lasker describes as Simone Martini’s symbol of peace attacked by the music of Dr. Strangelove, a woman in a flowing gown reclines on a cushioned chair, her garlanded head propped against her arm, while a red-coated musician, wearing a black knight’s helmet, blows an outsize tuba in her face. The drape of her gown and the shining curves of the tuba illustrate the facility with which Lasker manipulates pigment.
The Forger (1968) demonstrates the way Lasker recasts art-historical masterpieces. Following the 17th-century Dutch tradition of incorporating puns in paintings, Lasker here plays with Vermeer’s Meeting at Emmaus, depicting Vermeer painting his own forgery.
Devils appear frequently in Lasker’s later works. In The Hand that Holds the Brush (1990) the artist renders himself in a pigment-smeared apron, baseball cap, and dark glasses. His face is blurred, his skin fleshy. Surrounding him are vivid, open-mouthed red devils, one clutching his arm, another lurking behind his apron, and another lurking over his right shoulder. They emerge from a ground of red and blue pigment, like Lasker’s thoughts revealing themselves.
In Exorcism (2000), a sun-dappled New England church appears with flying devil figures — appropriated from illuminated manuscripts — descending from the steeple. They flee from two angels blowing trumpets from above. Lasker’s riffs on art history, life, and convention are delivered with refreshing charm, irony, and skill.
Apollo:
April 1959 (Marvin D. Schwartz): Lasker...has evolved a vital style that has its own kind of freshness.... One unusual aspect of Lasker’s work is the fact that expression for him depends on the representation of subject matter in real space.... This interest in subject matter has behind it a great sympathy for people and a leaning towards depicting themes that awaken one’s social conscience. The poor and the weak come into his iconography.
Life Magazine:
March 20, 1950 preview of group show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: El Candy Store by Joe Lasker, painted in New York’s Puerto Rican district, shows a forlorn and neglected child huddled against a window which is decorated with Halloween masks. Poor children appear in many pictures by Lasker, who is deeply concerned with the tragic effects of the slums on the young.
National Academy Museum, New York:
2011 (Marshall N. Price, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art): Joe Lasker belongs to a generation of artists who carried forth that important American tradition of social realism. His figure-based works and his landscapes are filled with narrative content and can be understood within the context of the long lineage of humanist painting.
National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York:
1968 (presentation of the Grant in Art by Allen Tate, President of the Institute): He is both a realist and a true humanist. His subjects are men and women – and often children whom he paints with special sympathy and understanding. He captures an evasive mood, a whimsical idea, notably in his Cezanne series. His work is quiet, sincere, and thoughtful.
The New York Observer:
April 2003 (Hilton Kramer reviewing the 178th Annual Exhibition at the National Academy of Design): Lasker…commands our interest…. There are many fine paintings to be seen. (Remember painting? Like, you know, oil or acrylic on canvas?)
The New York Times:
Howard DeVree:
Dec. 6, 1947: Several of the new names are identified with especially stimulating canvasses, among them, Joe Lasker.
Dec. 2, 1951: The romantic realism of Joe Lasker: At the Kraushaar Gallery, Joe Lasker’s first one-man show confirms the very real and personal expression noted in his pictures in various group exhibitions. This is sound and sensitive painting, a little somber, exceptionally well organized, with clean and subdued color. But behind and beyond the technical aspect of his work, Lasker depicts children and street scenes with compassionate insight, personalizing them and never slipping into the trivial, the anecdotal or the merely illustrative. Light, clarity and rich if subdued color help him in carrying conviction. And there is a psychological warmth and penetration in the work which augurs well for development, which should be furthered by his Prix de Rome year.
March 17, 1957: The earthy realism of Joe Lasker.
June 23, 1957: Joe Lasker adds a touch of restrained urban sentiment in his painting.
April 5, 1959 (Stuart Preston): Pictures by Joe Lasker at the Kraushaar Gallery comprise sensitive, sentimental studies of children, and delicate, understated landscape drawings. Lasker is a romanticist after the fashion of Berman and Tchelitchew, giving his figure studies extra amounts of self-awareness. This psychological intensity, expressed in the color as well, forms the main strength of these pictures.
Feb. 1, 1964 (Stuart Preston): Fundamentally an intimist painter, particularly responsive to the changing moods and uncertainties of childhood, this artist has a special way of seeing figures and landscape….His contemplative work, where feeling is underplayed, will please those who do not seek shock value in art.
Jan. 12, 1974: (James R. Mellow): There are sly references to the history of art and to such past masters as Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Ensor in these paintings. But despite the good humor and the obvious self-kidding – Van Gogh in South Norwalk, for instance, depicts that artist wending his way home to the little frame house in which Mr. Lasker apparently lives – these works succeed as thoroughly creditable examples of contemporary realist painting. Mr. Lasker has considerable tact and expertise in the handling of generally soft, low-key color. The silky light with which he imbues so mundane a subject as Pine Tree Studio is marvelously effective. And the clever visual strategies of The Jewish Bride, — another studio view, with a glimpse of a Rembrandt masterpiece – produce a tour de force).
The New Yorker:
Nov. 4, 1950 (Janet Flanner): “Joe Lasker is the painter laureate of New York.”
Audrey Ushenko:
Professor of Art and Art History, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, 2011: At this point, Joe Lasker is American history. He is a major narrative American realist who has played a vital role in the continuation and development of the country’s distinctive brand of narrative realism.
As a realist, he points out aspects of the real world and represents them with a freshness that tears the veil off reality.
Never having succumbed to the modernist cliché that contemporary art should be shocking, distasteful and disturbing, Lasker illuminates the miraculous in a world we take for granted.
He is also notable for his sensibility to design. This is manifest in the streamlined compositions within which he distills the richness and complexity of visual reality.
His work is proof that the indigenous realist tradition is as seminal an influence on American painting as the influence of European modernism. In the future, these artists will be recognized for their important contribution to 20th-century art. This contribution is their ability to evoke detail and richness with fairly minimal means, which makes that art distinctive from European realism.