Not to be repeated

“As if revolting against the sogginess of my feelings,’’ he wrote around this time, “I’ve been trying to make a series of light, very trivial, almost facetious paintings.’’ The result of this endeavor was a series of large abstract paintings restricted to the colors red, white, and blue. Some kind of ironic reference to the flag seems to have been at the back of Tworkov’s mind, but it was hardly the point. As paintings, they’re hit and miss, but one of them, “Spring Weather,’’ in which an intense crimson color streams from the top of the frame, is a stunner.

During this period Tworkov was honored with two solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was a founding member of the Eighth Street Club and he showed with Leo Castelli.

But his painting, he felt, “had reached a stage where its forms had become predictable and automatically repetitive. Besides, the exuberance that was a condition of the birth of this painting could not be maintained without pretense forever.’’

Where Pollock’s response to a similar apprehension seems to have been a steep increase in alcohol intake and a suicidal car trip, Tworkov was able to switch to a lower gear. And so around the time he took up a teaching post at Yale (where he transformed the art program into one of the best in the country) he started making works that were based on straight-lined geometries, especially grids.

He liked, he said, the sense this kind of painting gave him of a connection with “something that exists besides, outside, myself.’’ It was “less hypocritical,’’ he felt, to paint this way than to fake the “ecstatic self-expression that a more romantic art calls for.’’

Many of the resulting canvases, including “Crossfield I’’ from 1968 and “Idling II’’ from 1970, feel like real victories — rhythmically repeated marks over geometric structures, resulting in commandingly harmonious orchestrations of what Tworkov called “measured and random activity.’’

Tworkov kept painting compelling works into the 1980s. According to his friend, the poet Stanley Kunitz, he admitted near the end of his life to having “misgivings about my present work.’’

Well, he was nothing if not candid. But misgivings and doubt are animating. They put Tworkov, at any rate, in the same company as that other great doubter, his hero, Cézanne, about whom Picasso famously said, “It is his anxiety that forces our interest.’’

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.