“The expansive center of the universe, of the stars, and of nature is my constant challenge in abstract terms”—Vivian Springford Archives

By 1984, Vivian Springford had ardently established her defiance of a Greenbergianism coated with machismo, in favor of the more philosophically rich and boundless parameters that Harold Rosenberg’s 1952 essay “The American Action Painters” defined. Distinct from Greenberg’s call for clarity and purity free of reference, Rosenberg outlined the canvas as a place for indexical events to take place with associations. Evidence of Rosenberg’s position appeared in the work of Springford particularly after 1960, when he helped launch her first exhibition at Great Jones Gallery in New York. Even over two decades following the Great Jones show, Rosenberg’s conceptual platform for the artist to act along Kierkegaard’s thoughts on aesthetics emerged crisply from Springford’s hand, as the spiritual, feverish chroma rippling slowly outwards like a warm pond under daybreak in this canvas exemplifies.

Rosenberg’s 1952 insertion of Kierkegaard’s “anguish of the aesthetic” into the trajectory of postwar American painting summarizes the array of influences that would come to characterize Springford’s 1980s path. Kierkegaard for example in his 1843 Either/Or valued immersion in sensuous experience beyond actuality, which emanates here in Springford’s interlaced patterns of deep pink and violet as if from gathered and melted, multicolored chrysanthemums. Yet Kierkegaard’s notions of aesthetic existence by way of Rosenberg paved a roadway for Springford to express her own synthesis of Confucianism and Daoism, too, that her friend, the Chinese-American artist Walasse Ting had earlier inspired; she interprets Daoist Yin and Yang beliefs through immersive and uninterrupted while calligraphic liquid, and a palette exceeding actual earthly phenomena with near cosmic possibilities.

Springford’s paint becomes not only centrifugal, recalling Rosenberg’s discussion of “getting inside” the surface of the canvas, but it also suggests a Daoist natural order. Directed spirally but perhaps still by a twofold division of east and west, these progressions of rosy hue can relate to Yin and Yang connotations of shade, water, fire, and light; a penetration of the beyond which could have called New York gallerist Gary Snyder to exhibit her work in 1998, and thenceforth catapult its historic canonization prior to her passing in 2003.

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