Aristodimos Kaldis at Broome Street - New York, New York - Review of ExhibitionsArt in America,  Oct, 1994  by Lawrence Campbell

It is impossible to think of East Tenth Street and of the gallery and museum scene during the 1950s without including Kaldis in the picture. His friendship with leading members of the New York School dated from the '30s. During the '40s he sometimes supported himself by giving lectures on art and archeology in a room at Carnegie Hall - with Willem de Kooning at the slide projector. These lectures were attended by large numbers of New York artists.

However, Kaldis was much more than a somewhat eccentric public personality. He was also a painter, and a good one. Since 1979, the year of his death, there have been several exhibitions of his work, including one in 1985 at the Artists' Choice Museum. The catalogue, containing memoirs and reproductions of some of his best paintings, is marred only by a caption below a photograph of Kaldis and Philip Pavia, the sculptor, that identifies Pavia as Franz Kline. (Both artists were close friends of Kaldis.)

This latest show, titled "Magic Mountains, Sporades, Cyclades and Cote d'Azur," took place at the invitation of the New York chapter of Artists Equity, and was a prelude to a nationwide tour. All paintings in the show were fairly small landscapes, and of these a few were of motifs suggested by the south of France.

In a Kaldis painting the subject is always broadly recognizable, especially in such minor details as trees, ladders, piers and porticoed temples. But Kaldis was really more of an abstractionist at heart, notably in the placement of colors and the colors themselves. He might begin a painting with some drawn outlines, but while painting he would ignore these outlines and place the colors quite freely. At first the distribution of his colors and the shapes they take seem somewhat haphazard, but careful scrutiny reveals invisible compositional lines leading to and from these patches to make an overall schema. At the same time, the colors reaffirm the flatness of the surface, uniting sky with ground. Kaldis's colors are like bugle calls - echoing, responding, now clear, now distant. In themselves they are not especially bright, and yet the paintings have brightness because of the large areas of white-painted canvas left untouched.

While considering these beautiful paintings I thought of some lines from a poem by Tennyson, "The Eagle": The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls / He watches from the mountain walls / And like a thunderbolt he falls."

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