Excerpted Critical Reviews

2024

David Ebony begins his essay titled “Tales of Intrigue, Danger and Humor: Carmen Cicero’s Drawings and Watercolors” for the book Carmen Cicero’s Drawings and Watercolors: Tales of Danger, Intrigue and Humor (Abbeville) by stating:

Carmen Cicero is a born storyteller. As a musician, he can convey feelings and even various types of human interactions—from tense confrontations to romantic encounters—by means of a sequence of hot jazz riffs on his saxophone or clarinet. One can hear these rhythmic tales on his 2007 album, Play Me a Sad Song, which in my home is a frequent soundtrack to friendly gatherings or solitary moonlit evenings. In conversation, Cicero spins lively and comically nuanced stories of people, places, and novel situations that he has experienced and recalls in vivid detail. He expresses a wide range of human emotions and evokes complex social entanglements using an economy of words and gestures.  

Imparting these tales in person as well as in his visual art, Cicero is never judgmental or sanctimonious. As he noted in The Human Condition, a statement he wrote in 2020, “Artists tell how it is; moralists tell how it ought to be.” He employs a similar philosophy in his approach to and creation of visual art. The images he presents in his drawings and watercolors, as well as in the paintings, are full of dramatic proposals, complex social conundrums, and intriguing inuendo. Yet to complete the story, each viewer is invited to find their own way to absorb, navigate and reflect upon the quixotic ingredients he offers. The tale becomes the viewer’s story as much as the artist’s… 

In her Foreword for the Abbeville book, the art historian Annette Blaugrund writes:

For me, the artist’s subjects conjure such figurative expressionist paintings as Philip Guston’s cartoonish political characters, and even more the satirical, exuberant, comical genre of Robert Colescott whose paintings seem closest to Cicero’s distinctive figurative style. Yet Cicero’s oeuvre is unique. It is a spontaneous, modernist interpretation of challenging subjects - surrealistic fantasies that spontaneously emanate from the artist’s imagination onto the paper. At times, he transforms a beautiful dream-like landscape by the insertion of an incongruous figure or a stranded car. In today’s post-modernist world, art takes many forms in increasingly diverse media. The images and text in this volume confirm Cicero’s enduring vitality and relevance.

2020

Exhibition of recent paintings at June Kelly Gallery titled The Human Condition, with a catalog announcement essay by John Yau, who concludes: 

Carmen Cicero has more lives than a cat. Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1926, and now in his mid-90s, he shows no sign of slowing down. The paintings that he has completed since 2018 are bold and exuberant…If you did not know Cicero’s age, they might lead you to think an artist in his 30s made them. In these paintings, Cicero defines a world of multiple and even contradictory feelings. There are hints at despair, isolation unfulfilled desires, and jealousy, all shot through with a jauntily mordant humor. I do not know of any other work like this, which is to say that it is original. That an artist made these paintings in his 90s makes them all the more remarkable.

2015

An important show at the June Kelly Gallery, Early Works: 1970s–1980s, is reviewed in the New York Times by Roberta Smith (April 2, 2015): 

A disastrous studio fire in 1971 seems to have turned Mr. Cicero toward his own comical version of neo-Expressionist figuration, a vibrant, sometimes visionary style enlivened by vigorous brushwork, radiant color and a sense of high drama. The earliest work here is “Crime” from 1976, which features a blizzard of short rapid brush strokes—a kind of parody of Abstract Expressionism—that, with study, reveals a tough guy firing a gun in the viewer’s direction. . . . The generally white-on-white “Nightmare” (1986), which depicts a madman in a frozen landscape dotted with faces has some wonderful moments, while the relatively small “Man with Mask” (1987) contrasts a green hat and a vivid orange mask. It is in many ways a perfect painting that some museum should add to its Cicero holdings.

2013

The Art of Carmen Cicero is published by Schiffer, presenting an overview of his oeuvre. Phyllis Braff ends her foreword to the book by stating: 

A predilection for edginess runs through Cicero’s art. It is interesting to note how this seems to have propelled his work from its earliest phases, and to note, too, a consistent degree of timeliness that reflects the artist's reaction to changing social conditions.

2012

Single-artist exhibition at PAAM of Carmen’s Visionary works. In his review for The Boston Globe (July 5, 2012: G3), Sebastian Smee writes: 

One thing Cicero has that is missing from 90 percent of the art showing in Provincetown’s galleries is conviction: You look at his paintings and instantly know that he believes in what he’s doing. As an artist, once you have that kind of conviction, anything is possible. As an observer, at the point you detect it, taste doesn’t come into it anymore: the belief itself—in the vision, the making—is volatile, and inherently exciting.

2007

In a catalog essay for an exhibition at the June Kelly Gallery in New York titled Carmen Cicero Watercolors: Things That Happen in The Moonlight, Robert Berlind wrote:

Jasper Johns famously characterized his subject matter as “things the mind already knows,” Cicero might say the same, although he would be referring to another part of the mind: not that mental file furnished with its catalog of received, habitual formations (a target, a map, stenciled numbers) but a realm where deeper, archetypal narratives are in play. For all their surreal quirkiness we encounter Cicero’s mysterious pictures as if returning to some site in a dream we have dreamt countless times before.

2004

Ken Johnson of the New York Times (November 26, 2004: E33) reviews Carmen’s exhibition at June Kelly, writing: 

Mr. Cicero’s cartoonish, easel-size narrative painting combine humor, gothic mystery, and Magritte-style surrealism. . . . Mr. Cicero is not an outsider. He has been exhibiting his work since the early ’50s and earned a M.F.A. degree in 1991—but his work has the hair-raising feeling of a self-taught visionary’s.

2001

Ken Johnson reviews Carmen’s show at June Kelly Gallery for the New York Times (April 20, 2001: E33), writing: “A big glowing derby hovering mysteriously in the woods, an old brick factory stranded in a yellow wheat field, a midget airplane flying over a stream in the moonlight—these are some of sweetly surrealistic scenes generously painted in an appealing cartoonish style by Mr. Cicero, a Montclair State College professor of art.”

2000

A survey of Carmen’s large Figurative Expressionist and Visionary works is held at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Donald Kuspit writes the catalog essay “Fantasist”, Carmen Cicero: Paintings—a Survey noting:

…The heroics of the abstract expressionist paintings have been replaced by the heroism of the individual alone with death, and heroically defying it with humor. It is a remarkable career from dead serious abstract paintings, fraught with existential drama—the self enacting its deepest emotions in the arena of the painting, as Harold Rosenberg called it—through tragicomic image of human relationships at their mot raw, and back to the existential drama of the self, now facing the end of its life with good humor. Good humor is rare enough, but so is an authentic sense of tragedy, with or without color. Carmen Cicero’s works have been appreciated for their wit and humor, but not for their seriousness—their existential earnestness, insight, and courage—and visual sophistication. They tell the story of his journey through life with a charm that belies their conviction.

1999

Exhibition at June Kelly Gallery is reviewed by Cathy Lebowitz in Art in America (February 1999: 110-111), who notes that “the eight paintings and watercolors at June Kelly juxtaposed a knowingly naïve style with clever narrative humor, incorporating airplanes and cars as stand-ins for the psychological complexities of human presences.” Reviewing the same exhibition, Barbara Pollack of Artnews (March 1999: 136) writes: 

Since the late 1950s, Carmen Cicero has been thumbing his nose at art trends. While his peers pursued Abstract Expressionism, Cicero revived figure—so successfully that he was included in four Whitney Annuals in the 1960s. Most recently, Cicero has combined several unfashionable influences—from Surrealism to Maxfield Parrish—in paintings full of surprise

1998

In a catalog essay for Carmen’s exhibitions at June Kelly Gallery in New York and Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco, critic Gerrit Henry writes: 

Visionary? Yes, to lasting effect. But, no—Carmen Cicero is not, for his many art-historical references, derivative. He’s one of the few post-modernists around who has accumulated enough years, and is young enough in outlook, to realize that “post-modern” can no longer mean post-art, and that a good appropriationist never lets appropriationism get in his way. These new Ciceros, we realize, are meant to be, and are, a kind of art-hymning summa of a remarkable career, blending “abstract” with “figurative” styles to come up with works that are as stylistically and narratively hybrid as the rarest desert blooms. Dream is mated with reality, symbol with visual fact, the lyrical with the heroic, and—the toughest coupling, perhaps, and most beautiful—vision with ultimate painterly authority.

1994

Invited to participate in Italian American Artists, 1945–1968: A Limited Survey, Works on Paper at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College, and Krasdale Foods Art Gallery, White Plains, NY. Vivien Raynor reviews the exhibition in the New York Times (December 25, 1994: WC13), noting that though not all of the seventeen artists included in the show want to comment on the relationship of their work to their ethnic background, 

Carmen Cicero, however, deals with it forthrightly: “I have always lived by the notion that personality is more important than nationality and being overly prideful about one’s ethnic background is unseemly.” Mr. Cicero concedes to preferring the Renaissance to other periods in art and concedes that his own work has qualities—humanism and humor among them—that are commonly associated with Italian art. Nevertheless, he ends by saying that “we can never be sure” if “the ethnic influence we perceive is no more than fanciful speculation.”

1991

William Zimmerman reviews an exhibition at the Montclair State University gallery in the New York Times (April 21, 1991: NJ12), commenting: 

His art immediately recalls that of Red Grooms, but the thoroughness of his investigations of urban life seems to have made Mr. Grooms mean-spirited; rather than celebrating his subject matter, Mr. Grooms derides it. In contrast, Mr. Cicero is never cynical. If things get too unspeakable for him, he veers off into a blithe kind of Surrealism. . . . The more recent work evinces a deepening in his art. For one thing, he has mastered watercolor, as clearly demonstrated by The Pond.

1987

Included in an exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum titled Expressionism Across the Generations, curated by April Kingsley. William Zimmer writes in the New York Times (March 29, 1987, NJ22): 

The viewer never knows what to expect from Mr. Cicero except that it will be rich in paint and anecdote, but in the show here the coolness of his images is striking. Both of his paintings, in which an unattainable female looms across a wide but calm sea, are laden with nostalgia reminiscent of the late Philip Guston. 

Vivien Raynor reviews Carmen’s two-artist exhibition with Irving Kriesberg at Graham Modern Gallery for the New York Times (February 13, 1987: C28), writing: 

The artist wears an equally satisfied but more jubilant expression in the caricature of himself seated on a deck with a twilight drink and wearing eyeglasses that are the same green as the stripes on his purple shirt and the streaks in his hair. It is an elaborately patterned image and one of the most finished in the show, but it doesn’t compare with the studies of flowers, especially the marigold that stands in a crooked glass vase against an urban skyline and under an indigo sky. No joke here—just perfect placing and beautiful color.

1985

Ronny Cohen reviews Carmen’s second show at Graham Modern for Artforum (January 1985: 91), writing: 

The grand tradition of Western symbolic painting lives on, although sharply redirected toward decidedly personal ends, in the work of Carmen Cicero. At 58, this New York artist offers one of the freshest figurative visions around. With an approach that is allegorical in a purely visual rather than any literary sense, Cicero emerges as more the suggester and the seducer than the storyteller. The kind of artist who seems to relish the challenge of talking difficult-to-describe situations and feelings, he is capable of striking through to the complex and contradictory sensations at life’s core. At the source of the impact of his painting is its extraordinary power as image, a power that in turn results from the active relationship between figure and ground, abstract and representational content. . . . Never didactic, always reflective and searching, Cicero’s paintings are independent statements that call for awareness of the self and curiosity about other people. 

Reviewing the show in the New York Times (April 7, 1985: A10), David L. Shirey states: 

Much art that one sees these days seems to be more imitative than creative. It is especially evident among a number of painters who seem drawn to the Expressionist styles but who are indifferent to the spirit behind Expressionism. It is politely called neo-Expressionism. Since it is hardly new and since it is wanting for feeling and fervor, the name endows the movement with more credit than it deserves. However, there are artists who adopt a style that has affirmed itself in the past and who reaffirm it with their own individuality. One is Carmen Cicero, who is an Expressionist at heart and in mind. Mr. Cicero came to Expressionism many years ago not as an imitator, but as a painter whose artistic sensibility was inherently consonant with Expressionism.

1984

Cicero is invited to join the Graham Modern Gallery in New York by its director, Berta Walker, and remains with the gallery until 1990. His initial exhibition there marks his first mainstream exposure to the New York art scene since the 1971 fire that destroyed his early work. Lowery S. Sims, associate curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, interviews Carmen and writes in the catalog, writing:

For Carmen Cicero, it has been a long patient wait for the rest of the world to catch up with him. He is not alone. One can think of several other artists—including Philip Guston—who left abstraction in the late 60s and began doing a “funky” figuration that is so much in vogue these days, and who were ridiculed until the art world finally modified its exclusively formalist point of work… Perhaps it is because Cicero’s subjects include the cast of characters in the most enduring battle of all times—that between the sexes, and he depicts them in a variety of interactions: love, hate, lust, violence and above all drama. But like Thurber’s indomitable adversaries, Cicero’s are always equal in the fray. There are no victims, no underdogs. This factor is all the more interesting because, like any male of his generation, Cicero’s feelings on the contemporary situation between men and women are contradictory. He may be put off by the current female prototypes, which are quite different from those he knew growing up, but he can’t help but persist in finding salvation in the same women he fears. The narratives in these works can be seen as allegories for situations he has been in, various states of mind, and above all as vehicles for him to work out all these feelings…

This show is positively reviewed by John Russell of the New York Times (October 5, 1984: C24), who writes: 

Living on the Bowery, Cicero takes late-night subjects that are both rough and raw—death hailing a cab, a young man fleeing in terror from an invisible enemy on the waterfront, or his near-double running for dear life from a burning city in which even the flagstones are red hot. Others have had hideous fancies of the same kind, but Cicero’s paintings have an educated presence. We see at once that he is a true painter, and one who has labored hard and long for his effects of spontaneity. From Currier and Ives to Milton Avery, and from the comic strip to German Expressionism, this former pupil of Robert Motherwell lives with learning lightly borne. 

Reviewing the show in Art in America (December 1984: 165), Donald Kuspit notes Cicero’s “odd affinity with the new expressionism” but points out that some of his earlier works from the ’60s also point to an “affinity to an older type of expressionism” in their “attitude of anxiety as well as the handling.” Kuspit writes: 

The use of the comic to repress has something to do with Cicero’s interest in social observation, as in Tex (1983) and Me Patriot (1984). In another age Cicero would probably have been a social realist and/or satirist. As it is, he is forced to be a farceur, partly because the reality of his age is too malevolent for him to handle, and partly because his sense of color overwhelms his sense of scene.

Ruth Bass ends her review in Artnews (December 1984: 152) by stating: 

Though The Battle of the Sexes (1972–74) shows a man and a woman in violent physical combat, Cicero seems to have mellowed a bit with age. The more recent Golden Dreams (1984) shows a man by the ocean conjuring up the bust of a smiling big-breasted female who materializes out of golden clouds. This work too is shocking at first because of its raw color, rough brushwork and crude drawing, yet in the context of the show it was most engaging—a dream of joy that contrasts sharply with the fear of violence that characterizes Cicero’s urban scenes. 

Reviewing a summer exhibition at the Graham Modern Gallery for the New York Times (July 13, 1984: C22), Grace Glueck writes: 

The inspiration Cicero offers is in his recovery from a fire in 1971 that took what was then his life’s work. Indeed, he seems to have been purged by the experience. Having previously been an Expressionist suspended between abstraction and figuration, he is now an entirely figurative Expressionist, albeit with tinges of Dubuffet. . . . It may or may not be significant that much of the action in these paintings takes place under romantic moonlit skies. Cicero is an accomplished draftsman. But in his oils, he goes to dramatic lengths to deform most of the figures (less so in the more decorative watercolors) while retaining his competence as a painter and, in some wood cutouts, as a sculptor. As a man, however, he seems to be taking refuge in jocular ambivalence. But that being the fashion of the time, why shouldn’t he?

1975

Exhibition at the Leslie Rankow Gallery is reviewed by Barbara Zucker of Artnews (February 1975: 85), who writes: 

Cicero showed small, eclectic paintings (a group of larger works was exhibited simultaneously at the South Houston Gallery). Early influences are clear on this second generation Abstract Expressionist. Cicero’s forms, defined by taping, are spatially related to Synthetic Cubism. Still, they have the look of cut and pasted papers; and two tiny collages seem representative of all the work. Cicero’s masterful use of color—pure hues set against offbeat tonal relationships—is the most innovative aspect of his work. 

1973

Exhibits collages at the Rankow Gallery. The show receives a positive review from Hilton Kramer in the New York Times (May 19, 1973: 33), who describes the pieces as “having the precision and elegance of Persian miniatures” and ends by stating, “This is splendid work by an artist who has lately been absent from the exhibition scene.” In Artnews (September 1973: 95), Al Brunelle writes: 

This long-known New York artist showed a series of small collages, about six inches square, built of painted paper. These tiny abstractions are exquisitely arranged and rich in color and detail. The imagery in each case, is a bold expressionist signal that charges the miniature format with a curious and highly satisfying tension. 

Ruthann Williams, writing for New Jersey Music & Art (September 1973: 33–36, 27–38), interviews Cicero in his Bowery loft and asks him how the New York art world has changed since the late ’50s and ’60s. He responds: 

Then what could happen in New York was somewhat predictable it seemed. Though how the whole thing worked was somewhat of a mystery. Not many people were interested in art. No one was in it for notoriety because nobody got notoriety. Painting pictures. Notoriety? There didn’t seem to be much money in it. There didn’t seem to be much fame in it. There didn’t seem to be anything in it. The first time Pollock got into Life magazine was startling to everyone. Now people see that you can make some kind of money, some kind of notoriety, that you can get in to a history book. Everybody wants in on the action. So the place is inundated. There must be thirty or forty thousand artists around here. But despite that, and the most interesting thing about it is, and I feel this very strongly, if you do fine work it is recognized. There are a lot of sharp eyes around. I think if you did something extremely avant-garde and unintelligible to the art intelligentsia in New York, it might not get recognition. But aside from that I feel if you do really fine work, it gets recognized. There are a lot of people around New York who really know the difference. There are a lot of people who are just in “on the art scene.” You know, they go to Max’s Kansas City Bar and sit around to impress people in their costumes. But the painters are home painting.

1972

An exhibition at the Leslie Rankow Gallery in New York is reviewed by Natalie Edgar of Artnews (Summer 1972: 15), who notes that the artist 

does not let his stripes extend to the edges of his canvas. Rather he shrinks them to the size of a sacred word which floats in an other-worldly ambience. A brilliant slot of narrow striping fuses and flashes in the neutral background. Cicero is after optical aftermaths. He connects his illusion to a Hard-Edge technique. Each canvas has a specific color mood which should lead to a contemplative viewing. Cicero has had many shows: this is his first since a total-loss fire destroyed his studio a few months ago. Appropriately, his show marks this opening of a new gallery. 

Gordon Brown of Arts Magazine (September/October 1972: 66) also reviews the exhibition, writing that Carmen 

paints the impalpable and the ephemeral in the most ghostlike pictures that I have seen for some time. Although the colors are different, each painting has the same design, a central bar of luminescent colored stripes with a circle above and below. Each circle contains a horizontal bar. The glow produced by the stripes resembles an actual light source but is really an optical illusion. The viewer does not see the circular forms at all at first—then they suddenly begin to flicker. While painting, Cicero sees after-images and they dictate the color that he is going to use next. 

1969

Kim Levin of Artnews (January 1969: 17) reviews Carmen’s latest show at the Peridot Gallery, writing that he 

uses a number of techniques (taping, stenciling, spraying) in his paintings of scribble-contoured abstract figures. Their capricious capacious outlines are now filled in with rainbow stripes, solid colors and shadows. He is a proficient colorist in lush areas, but sometimes sabotages his effects by letting the drawing become too cute, as in a long painting of four spectrum-hued females floating like clouds over a flat blue.

1966

In a New York Times (February 5, 1966: 24) review of Cicero’s joint exhibition of paintings at the Peridot Gallery and drawings at the American Gallery, Hilton Kramer notes that the artist has changed his style from one that was “very graphic . . . all hard black silhouettes and unambiguous design” to one with “expressionist feeling.” He remarks: “In the small gouaches of figures at the American Gallery, one has the sense of certain ideas out of de Kooning and Dubuffet being tested and explored, while the head studies at Peridot seem to look further back in the century to more conservative sources for their precedents.” In his review in Artnews (March 1966: 12), Fielding Dawson writes that Cicero 

showed angry, amused, contemptuous, mixed-up, enthusiastic and worn-out faces, with real old-fashioned zip; they grow on you. There was one in blue, blue-white and grey, a woman in an eskimo hood with a peeved expression, looking at Pan/Satan out of the corners of her eyes. He was very amused. Painted with dash and moxie: most refreshing. 

Amy Goldin, reviewing the exhibition for Arts Magazine (April 1966: 68), writes: 

Cicero paints dashing portraits of dramatic types—the outlaw, the savage, the street fighter—all of them with expressive eyes. His artistic strength lies in his line, which combines the old Abstract Expressionist fervor with facile descriptiveness.

1964

Reviewing Cicero’s fourth exhibition at the Peridot Gallery, Stuart Preston of the New York Times (January 11, 1964: 20) comments: 

Abandoning his familiar mazelike black-and-white compositions, the painter shows two kinds of recent work. One is a series of semiabstract landscapes in pastel, velvety in texture, unearthly in lighting effects, where the medium is brilliantly exploited. The others are fine line figure drawings, leaning heavily to grotesque and bizarre subjects and done in an impeccable way, being, in fact, an advertisement for spectacular linear gifts. 

Reviewing the same show, Thomas Newmann of Artnews (January 1964: 13), writes that the artist

shows small line drawings, gouaches and pastels. His drawings are anatomical fantasies with sexual overtones, melancholy lassitude and vague sadness due to a kind of melting inability of the figure to keep its form. They are done with a line that controls suppleness, delicacy and cold precision. His pastel landscapes, atmospheric, elegant and mystical, drift at the same time towards fantasy and abstraction. 

Sidney Tillim, reviewing the show for Arts Magazine (March 1964: 70), writes: 

“Surreal abstractions” is only an approximate term, but it gives more than a vague idea of these images which are all muscle-like tissue and fiber, moving totally by reflex and instinct. Their anatomy is defined by an irregular filigree of black line. Colorless, their translucent illumination and delicate integumentation (which is slightly smeared) might be more effective in a small print, for the aspect is graphic. But despite their repetitive physiognomic value, they are constantly refocusing their author’s sensibility, which simply requires a greater challenge to move it from the point on which it is fixed.

Participates in The American Conscience at the New School Art Center, featuring a group of fifty-six works related to the death of President Kennedy. Grace Glueck reports for the New York Times (Feb. 23, 1964: X16): 

Many of the works were conceived almost directly after the event, when artists, shocked and depressed as were their fellow citizens, turned to their studios and the distraction of work. “I really had no idea what I was doing,” says painter Carmen Cicero, whose pastel drawing titled He Is Gone depicts a group of people on a lonely shore. “I didn’t want to acknowledge my emotions, so I started to work. But when I finished, I realized that my drawing clearly revealed the grief and feeling of loss my conscious mind had been trying so hard to suppress.”

1962

In the New York Times (November 29: 1962: 41), Brian O’Doherty lauds Cicero’s latest exhibition at the Periodot Gallery, which consists of a series of large Figurative Expressionist oils. Three of these—Bird Courts the Muse, The Exit of E-5, and The Stars and Stripes Forever—are purchased by Joseph Hirshhorn (now in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden). O’Doherty writes: 

There’s a jewel of a show at the Peridot, 820 Madison Avenue at 67th Street. The artist’s name combines grand opera with classical over tones—Carmen Cicero. He paints up to his name. In fact—it’s one of those shows that sends you out on the town with a dizzy joy.

The critic Lawrence Campbell notes in a review in Artnews (December 1962: 17) that Cicero’s works in the Peridot show 

bulk large in memory because of their complexity of technical means and because of a certain mysterious playfulness never absent from this present exhibition of oils. This is a parade of paintings of abstract figure subjects. He tends to block out unevenly shaped areas in a thin washy color, then he “draws” on the painting with colored or black line. The result is a transparency of rhythmic, jazzy for us. It is as though he had driven through the painting, stopping starting, turning corners without warning, working his way through a traffic which he created as he went along.

1961

His fourth exhibition at Peridot is reviewed by Valerie Petersen of Artnews (November 1961: 17), who writes that the 

drawings are witty fictions about ridiculous catastrophes, like headlines on the 42nd Street dummy dailies. He crashes airplanes, but makes Martians the mourners; slides sizes out of scale and mixes up metaphors with automatic images in black on white lines that just begin to tell the whole story. The bleeding edged, full dimensional many-valued patterned paintings are made of hard quick descriptive lines. 

Sidney Tillim comments in his Arts Magazine review (December 1961: 55) of the same exhibition that 

Cicero’s paintings were always rather like large wash drawings, so it amounts to something of an admission of his limitations that he has confined himself to black-and-white ink drawings for the past two years. The results so far justify the experiment . . . fascinatingly intricate and beautifully executed. 

This exhibition is also reviewed by Brian O’Doherty in the New York Times (November 2, 1961: 34), who writes that the 

drawings at the Peridot Gallery, 820 Madison Avenue, are ingenious, resourceful and highly competent. His imagination constructs events, insects and machines with a profuse complexity that derives a little in impulse from Klee. 

1959

Stuart Preston reviews Cicero’s third show at the Peridot Gallery in the New York Times (March 29, 1959: X13), noting: 

The multiplication of whirlpools and eddies of calligraphy in Carmen Cicero’s new nonobjective paintings at the Peridot Gallery reaches the point of complexity of an initial in the Book of Kells. And, too, the ambiguous cunning of these cat’s cradles demands as careful a search for meaning as any monkish chronicle. A far less explicit and meaningful Matta is suggested here. Cicero employs considerable technical skill in these linear mazes which might, for the spectator, have been devoted to more sensible ends. Color is black-and-whitish, paint being applied with the delicacy of water-color. 

The same exhibition is also reviewed by Sidney Tillim in Arts Magazine (May 1959: 58), who notes that “Cicero, who used to paint insect-like abstractions, seems to be marking time in these line drawings which spoof Neo-Classic themes by freely displacing male and female anatomies and fusing them frequently with rocks.” Herbert Crehan of Artnews (May 1959: 14) likewise reviews the Peridot show, writing: “Carmen Cicero had the pulse beat of the great Italian tradition of drawing controlling his hand when he did the ten large oils in this recent show.” 

1957

Irving Sandler reviews Cicero’s second show at the Peridot Gallery for Artnews (May 1957: 12), noting that he 

places light animal-insect-bird amalgams, outlined in black, against dark backgrounds, although the recent work is more monochromatic. Cicero is fundamentally a Surrealist, closer to Parisian than to New York painting. His figures are symbolic ancestors (Jung rather than Freud) that lurk in the penumbra of consciousness. In The Lesson, primordial creatures poke out ironically to see if they too have anything to learn. These oversize multiple image forms move rapidly across his ideographs, yet are constrained within the immobility of a dream state by vertical lines creating an ambiguity of stationary movement. 

Elizabeth Pollet begins her review in Arts Magazine (May 1957: 51) by commenting that

Cicero has developed a powerful and easily identifiable imagery: one large splotch shape, animal in character, is defined, like a negative, by a surrounding solid-color area. The shape is not entirely without color, however, apart from the canvas off-white, for it is usually smudged and tinted, or toned by a few drops of color, concentrated in the background, widely disseminated in the shape. There is a third element moreover. Controlled by the shape, but occasionally overstepping its boundaries, Cicero draws with a very articulate brush, and his linear graphology characterizes and energizes the so-called “negative space” of the shape.

Stuart Preston reviews the show positively in the New York Times (May 5, 1957: 139), remarking that 

His shapes, locked in the center of the canvases, with arms and legs flying in every direction, resemble giant squid in combat. Color, faintly flushing and fading, and paint handling are austere and unemotional. But the energy and finesse of the tense, springy line, often approaching the self sufficiency of a calligraphic exercise, declare Cicero’s eminent gifts as a draftsman.

1956

Has his first exhibition at Louis Pollack’s Peridot Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York. Regularly exhibits at the gallery until Pollack’s death in 1969. First exhibition is given a positive review by Rolf (Meltzer) Nesch in the New York Times (January 31, 1956: 59), who writes: 

In the graphic paintings of Carmen Cicero, a young Newark artist having his first one-man show at the Peridot Gallery, 820 Madison Avenue, fluent dark lines carry an original imagery. Cicero’s chief subjects are taken from the insect world, but strong fantasy coupled with first-rate draftsmanship lifts his paintings from the domains of science-fiction or surrealism. Using the horny or globular shapes of beetles, spiders and other creatures, Cicero suggests a nearly human analog in the alternately aggressive and 

affectionate attitudes his figures take. 

Fairfield Porter also reviews this exhibition in Artnews (February 1956: 52) and, noting that Carmen was a jazz musician and studied with Robert Motherwell, comments that the paintings are in 

two values of transparent nearly monochrome wash: a dark background and a lighter creature, whose forms are gathered like puckered pillows. It is hard to tell much about this work because it is as if you were seeing sketches in advance of the finished paintings he could have intended them for. 

Bruce Glaser concludes his review in Arts Magazine (June 30, 1956: 54): “On the basis of this exhibition one has hope for a painter who has extended the New York school definitions of abstract expressionism.”