PAUL HIMMEL

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As a photographer, Paul Himmel (1914-2009) was in a constant state of conflict over his chosen medium, struggling to use a still camera to capture phenomena that fell outside  the normal visual perception.  When he finally abandoned photography at the end of the 1960's, he gravitated toward unorthodox art forms that gathered together many strands of his interests, obsessions, and experiences.  A large series of needlepoints adapted a craft that his Russian seamstress mother had used for pictorial panels to his own passionate exploration of grid-based, or more precisely, graph-paper-based, geometric abstraction and psychedelic color.  A set of sculptures utilizing flower frogs and beads harkened back to his early days as a biology teacher and his fascination with such biological forms as radiolarians and sea urchins.  Together, these projects offered Himmel an opportunity to explore the two kinds of symmetry -- bilateral and radial--that are most common in nature, using popular mass-produced materials, like synthetic yarns and gaudy plastic beads, that he loved and shopped for avidly in New York's Garment District and around Canal Street.