Arlice W. Davenport

There is a loneliness at the heart of the abstract painter’s calling. As Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), the erudite patriarch of Abstract Expressionism, described it, the painter stands before his canvas seeking a unity between art and the darkening cosmos around him – our ever-expanding universe whose existential meanings have been shipwrecked, cut adrift from all but the most abstract scientific equations, bereft of any kind of vital emotion or spiritual urge.

Now well into his seventies, artist Norman Carr has vigorously reinvented himself as an abstract or non-objective painter.

What I call “pure painting” is a concept that has prevailed in American aesthetics since at least the 1940s. Most prominent among its...