Tales of Two Artists: Alex Katz and Eric Fischl

By Carl Belz

Invented Symbols by Alex Katz. Charta/Colby College Museum of Art, 2012.
Bad Boy: My Life On And Off The Canvas by Eric Fischl and Michael Stone. Crown, 2012.  

How do we currently write current art’s history? How, given its elastic chronology and ever-widening geographic reach, its self-consciously elusive look, the multiple urges and identities and media it comprises? How, in the absence of a canon of artists around whom a history might be structured, its sources and development traced, its context established, its achievements described? How, in the face of its censure on quality distinctions, its scapegoating of formalism, its dismissal of originality and artistic intent? How, in other words, do we write art’s history within the broader context of postmodernism’s prevailing hegemony?

Our unwieldy culture and its academic strictures increasingly nudge us to write the history of current art not from the outside in but from the inside out, personally and informally, more often than not via the autobiography and the memoir, genres rooted in direct experience that is unique to the individual writer. In doing so, our voices may be unauthorized by institutional structures, but likewise are they unfettered by those structures and the conventions they embody. In the publications considered here those voices richly inform our understanding not of any classroom theory about art’s making but of its day-to-day studio practice – the actual source material upon which any history of painting during the second half of the 20th Century in New York City must ultimately be based.   

Alex Katz, Ted Berrigan, 1967, oil on linen, 48 x 48 inches (photo courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York).

A pair of distinctly separate generations overlap in bringing those years freshly before us. Born in 1927, Alex Katz grew up in an “off-the-boat” Russian-Jewish family in St. Albans, Queens in the 1940s. He first encountered art at the Woodrow Wilson Vocational High School where “you could do artwork for three or four hours a day, and they’d didn’t really care what you did” – pursued it seriously at Cooper Union after serving in the Navy, and then steadily brought his work and his career to early maturity during the 1950s within the legendary hothouse environment of low budget, artist-run galleries such as Tanager and Hansa on 10th Street in downtown Manhattan. 

Eric Fischl, Sleepwalker, 1979, oil on canvas, 69 x 105 inches.

Fast forward 20 years to Eric Fischl, born in 1948. His childhood was spent in Port Washington – ”a leafy suburb on the north shore of Long Island” – and he grew up in the 1960s living “on the cusp of privilege” that was “designed to paper over our family disfunction.” He stumbled through private school in Maryland, “escaped” for a year to Waynesburg College near Pittsburgh that ended in failure, and first tried art at a community college in Phoenix – his family had moved there in 1967 – ”because – well, nobody fails art.” He painted for a year at Arizona State but developed his art in earnest during the 1970s, first at the California Institute of the Arts, his own generation’s hothouse environment, where he earned his BFA; in Chicago, where he was impressed by the countercultural Hairy Who; and then at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he taught for four years before moving to New York in 1978. 

Observations about art making and the art world anchor both of these autobiographies, though in neither are they presented in equal measure. For Alex Katz the art world is effectively a community identified not first of all by dealers and critics and collectors but by fellow artists working in genres ranging from painting and poetry to music and dance. While he’s circulated widely in that world – and enjoyed wide appreciation within it – art itself is what matters most in the story he offers here. Art as embodied in the modernist tradition, art as art, self-aware and self-defining, art that grasps experience in moments of an ongoing present, art that’s autonomous and impersonal, its existence justified simply by its being before us. In particular, what Katz was already after in his studio in the 1950s was not to tell stories or express himself but to be “an image-maker,” to craft large-scale realist pictures that memorably grasped the look of experience in the here and now, pictures that were clear and sharp, “that made sense as art and as decoration” and would be “strong enough to hang in Times Square.” He got that opportunity in 1977 when he was asked to design a billboard displaying a frieze of women’s heads, each 20 feet high, that was executed from his drawings by a sign painter. “One person recognized his ex-wife in the billboard from a plane circling over New York, waiting to land. We all thought that was pretty sensational...It was one of the great experiences of my life.” 

Alex Katz Times Square Mural, 1977.

Eric Fischl inventories the dead ends he ran into while exploring modernist abstraction during the 1970s before realizing that his real passion lay with the self-expressive, narrative-based “phychosexual suburban paintings” that he began making at the end of the decade and that catapulted him to art world attention at the beginning of the 1980s. While describing at length the genesis of those paintings and their deeply personal meaning for him, the thrust of his narration following their  spectacular reception shifts inexorably from art making to the art world, in particular the over-the-top SoHo art world of the 1980s. A world that was like a force of nature which Fischl compares to surfing: “That’s what the eighties were like, at least at the beginning: that feeling of being swept up and carried by something so much bigger and more powerful than yourself, something you’d worked so hard to catch, and now you’ve caught it and you’re in it.” A world that was also a mass media gold mine: “Going into those dailies and weeklies, the culture of art became populist. We were being written about and photographed on the same pages as movie stars, fashion designers, and rock stars, and by the eighties we had become rock stars ourselves.” Nonetheless, a world that was not without irony: “The truth is I felt like a fraud. I felt I didn’t deserve the recognition I was getting. And part of me wanted even more. And of course the greater the hype surrounding my work, the more distanced I felt from myself.” 

Eric Fischl, Bad Boy, 1981, oil on canvas, 66 x 96 inches.

While both narratives extend beyond the artists’ seminal decades and into the present, their respective emphases on art making and the art world reflect how in each case art discourse was then conducted. Art writing in the 1950s and 60s was based primarily on style, on formal innovations and developments, as it had been since Fauvism and Cubism established modernism as synonymous with the 20th Century. And so it continued with Abstract Expressionism, with the styles of Pollock and de Kooning and their colleagues, when the art world’s critical mass shifted from Paris to New York following World War II. At its best the writing cut through the romanticized artspeak of the time and focused clearly and directly upon formal elements that could be pointed to, described in terms of their interaction and visual effect, and assessed for their originality and significance within the context of modernism’s larger history. Art in that context was perceived as standing on its own and possessing meaning in and of itself, requiring no reference to the artists who made it, other than singling them out for their achievement. By the close of the 60s, however, events both within and outside the art world were shifting art discourse decisively away from that model and bringing it under fire, increasingly associating modernist autonomy with art for art’s sake, with mere decoration, and with engaging formal problems that had little or nothing to do with lived experience.

The new art history that emerged during the 1970s and 80s aimed to correct those shortcomings by focusing not on the formal concerns of individual artworks but on a more inclusive picture of the art making process, on the times and places where particular artworks were made, on the social and political and economic conditions that prevailed then and there, on the media arts that were then popular, and on the backgrounds and lifestyles and personal relationships of the artists who made them – that is, on the contexts in which the artworks were created and exhibited and collected. No longer confined to a timeless Olympian status, the artworks became embedded in the fabric of everyday culture, which was just where Pop Art had positioned them in the process of blurring distinctions between high and low art during the 1960s. And thus, at its best, did the new art history likewise democratize art and make it more accessible. What came to undermine its effectiveness in doing so, however, was the tendency to equate context with content, as if referencing a context – a family relationship, a course taken in art school, a love affair – wouldn’t  just inform the meaning of an artwork but could actually account for it. The quest for accessibility brought art making and artworks closer to our grasp, but it also risked reducing them, leaving us with no appreciation about how hard artists work in order to make art making look easy, and at the same time allowing art objects themselves to seem merely like ordinary, day-to-day things.

Their differences in emphasizing art making and/or the art world notwithstanding, neither Alex Katz nor Eric Fischl possesses a reductive vision of his enterprise. Katz no more engages in solving academic formal problems than Fischl glosses his figures’ psychic identities. On the contrary, the evidence of their respective narratives suggests that each artist conceives of art as capacious and embracing, its practice bountiful in yielding objects that are unique in being identified with meaning. Which makes me think that our concerns about the inadequacies of modernism and postmodernism, about the discourse then and the discourse now, may perhaps say more about those of us who wield the quills than those of us who wield the brushes, more about ourselves than about the artists who make the art in which we currently find insight and delectation – makes me think maybe we should attend a little more closely to their visual and verbal voices when we write their current history.          

Once More With Helen

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Seas, 1952, oil on canvas, 86 ⅝ x 117 ¼ inches (on loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington).

By Carl Belz

(Writer’s note: The exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler paintings from the 1950s currently at the Gagosian Gallery on 21st Street naturally triggered memories of the Frankenthaler exhibition I did at the Rose Art Museum in 1981. I described the curatorial development of that exhibition in one of my Curatorial Flashbacks here on Left Bank a couple of years ago. What follows now is a brief description of my experience installing the exhibition, which turned out, not altogether surprisingly, to be a memorable collaboration with the artist herself. It was written in 1986 for a show celebrating the 10th anniversary of the museum’s patrons and friends program, which sponsored an annual major exhibition and included “Frankenthaler: The 1950s.” I have edited it slightly for the occasion.)

Helen Frankenthaler,  Jacob's Ladder, 1957, oil on canvas, 113 ⅜ x 69 ⅞ inches (MoMA, Gift of Hyman N. Glickstein. © 2013 Helen Frankenthaler / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York).

Helen Frankenthaler was a perfectionist. Her concern extended to every mark on every picture she made and to every detail of every significant project she engaged in relation to her work. Nathan Kolodner, a former student at Brandeis who became director of the Andre Emmerich Gallery, told me as much when we first discussed an exhibition of her 1950s work in the spring of 1980, and I learned it firsthand during the various stages that led to the completion of the show a year later. For me the culminating experience in the process was the installation of the 48 paintings and works on paper that comprised the exhibition, a selection of images that I had discussed at length with the artist, that I had visited in public and private collections throughout the northeast, and that I had come to feel I knew as well as the painter who made them. Armed with confidence, I spent a week arranging the pictures in advance of Helen’s arrival preceding the Saturday evening preview of the exhibition, though I didn’t actually hang them, for I anticipated she might suggest a few changes.

Helen Frankenthaler, Eden, 1956, (Photo: Robert McKeever/© 2013 Estate of Helen Frankenthaler/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York). 

We walked through the show together, Helen looking quietly at the pictures, remembering them, for in many cases she had not seen them in the flesh since they left her hand more than 20 years earlier. Certainly she had not seen them assembled as she was seeing them at that moment, and I began to realize that what I assumed was a triumph--the full spectrum of her first decade of achievement--was also her vulnerability, a laying bare of her initial urge in the direction of genuinely ambitious painting. She admitted as much, acknowledging the nervousness she had felt on her way to the museum, but she also said she was deeply satisfied with how everything looked, and she congratulated me for my knowledge of, and sensitivity to, the work, asking in conclusion if I would mind if we rearranged a few pictures.

Helen Frankenthaler, Mother Goose Melody, 1959, oil on canvas, 81 ¾ x 103 ½ inches (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis). 

During the next three hours we moved every picture at least once, many of them several times, and a show gradually emerged that I had not seen before. While I had tried to indicate subtly the work’s chronological development, Helen pretty much discarded that textbook approach. Treating the entire museum space like a stretch of raw canvas and each image like a gesture to be expressed within it, she created an environmental painting right there on the spot. And a wondrous painting it was, allowing each part to stand on its own but at the same time generating among those parts an internal rhythm that revealed each more fully. I received a lot of credit for that installation. That I could not accept it was fully compensated for by what I had learned in watching it happen.

Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. 

Elusive Geometries: Don Voisine and Ken Greenleaf

By Carl Belz

What goes down in the studio, in the coordination between hand and eye, in the blending of passion and intelligence, in the urge toward meaning, generally has little to do with what goes down in art writing and academic discourse in the name of theory. Before there are words there are images, or objects or actions of one kind or another, and that’s been the case in the art of our time regardless of whether that art has been abstract or representational, modernist or postmodernist, installation or assemblage or performance or even conceptual. Yet there persist claims that painting in particular became persuaded during the last half-century to reduce itself to its essence because formalist critics had perceived purity as having been painting’s guide since the whole last century began. Thus did a perception of pictorial development become projected upon, and confused with, pictorial inent.

Which is not to say formal issues don’t matter in the studio, far from it. As surely as images precede words, just as surely are formal issues bound to content, to enabling its articulation and earning its credibility, to testing and stretching its reach while acknowledging its limits and thereby tethering it to lived experience. In a modern world where all experience is problematic, those acknowledgments--of painting’s flatness, for instance--aim not inward to provide hermetic, self-indulgent, art for art’s sake contemplation, as we’re often told, but outward to provide frameworks for the expression of thoughts and feelings that we as beholders are in turn free to know, not in the way we know matters of opinion but in the way we know matters of fact, which is with the conviction that they are neither arbitrary nor merely personal but objective--and true.

Don Voisine, Tumble, 2011-12, oil on wood, 60 x 32 inches (Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Miami, FL).

Don Voisine knows flatness. Having worked with it and in it and around it for more than three decades, he knows it not as an end but as a beginning, as a place to start. Which he initially grasped via drawings he made in 1980 when, as he says in a highly informative 2009 interview with Brent Hallard, “I began working with imagery derived from floor plans of places I worked in or lived in. It was an attempt to attach a subject matter to abstract shapes. The drawings were basically a quick sketch with marks to indicate the location of certain architectural features, doors, windows, stairs, etc...along the lines of what a carpenter might sketch out to visualize where certain things would go. Over time the paintings became more and more geometrically structured and less about a specific place but retained a reference to architecture.”  In their structuring of fictive space and light, at once precisely limned and intuitively distributed, ordered yet felt, they referenced as well the experience of visually inhabiting such a world. While the process of achieving that effect may have begun with a strictly two-dimensional sketch, it has become realized in Voisine’s mature paintings by means that are altogether pictorial.    

Don Voisine, Full Stop, 2011, oil on wood, 28 x 22 inches (McKenzie Fine Art, New York, NY).

From start to finish the process entails constant adjustments--in determining the saturation of the overlapping black geometric figures, whether matte or glossy, that dominate the center of the pictures; in paring down or building up their size and scale by altering their edges, which in turn necessitates accounting for their impact on the triangular white interstices exposed by the figures’ placement and rotation in the first place; in selecting hues for the coupled horizontal bands, thick and thin, that border the central area, top and bottom, and complete each composition. 

Don Voisine, Carré, 2011, oil on wood, 44 x 44 inches (McKenzie Fine Art, New York, NY).

While each adjustment is undertaken to orchestrate and tighten the relation of each pictorial unit to every other pictorial unit, to secure formally the integrity of each painting as a whole, the overall effect of the process is also to enliven the space, to acknowledge its flatness while simultaneously allowing it visually to twist and warp and bend, to project and recede, to be positive and negative--and thus to explore and personalize what’s become natural to pictorial space since Cezanne and Cubism radicalized it more than a century ago. Don Voisine’s process yields painted worlds that are lucid and dignified, accessible and at the same time reserved, firmly balancing ideas and emotions in equal measure and appearing before us as metaphors for the worlds we fabricate as well as models for our being in them. His geometries offer stately reference to his membership among the American Abstract Artists, and they likewise reference individuals such as Mondrian and Malevich, but no less do they reach back to Ingres and Poussin and the western classical tradition in general.


Ken Greenleaf’s geometries are of a different order. They’re mostly irregular polygons that combine only fragments of the geometries we’re familiar with, triangles, squares, rectangles and so forth, into hybrids whose radical abstractness strongly resists naming. They’re also restless, constantly jostling and probing the flattened spaces they occupy, interacting with and against them, and energizing them in the process. And finally they’re pretty clearly worked by hand, whether in acrylic on raw canvas, charcoal collages, or oil pastels, which in each case imparts to them an aura of physical presence that in turn heightens their immediacy. I think Greenleaf’s welded steel sculpture, on which he focused his studio practice for most of three decades starting in the early 1970s, here becomes relevant. Fully abstract like his paintings and drawings, it everywhere comprises planes and armatures that literally as well as visually overlap or splay and angle into space in order to frame or extend it. Such shared effects tempt us to account for the paintings and drawings by appealing to the sculpture, a reasonable gambit for a stylistic analysis, but only insofar as we’re willing to also allow that the paintings and drawings equally reveal how essentially pictorial the sculpture was in the first place. What I’m suggesting is that Greenleaf’s current work represents a defining aspect of his artistic enterprise and persona, one that’s been there all along but has only become foregrounded with his shift from a three-dimensional art to a two-dimensional art. Which is another way of saying his art has become more fully his own.

Ken Greenleaf, Alea, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 26 x 23 inches.

In probing and jostling and energizing space, Greenleaf’s hybrid geometries generate pictorial worlds in which flatness and depth hover together in dynamic yet ambiguous and even contradictory couplings. His exploration of the challenges and resolutions of those couplings begins with the 2010 acrylic paintings, which mostly comprise irregularly shaped single masses positioned within irregularly shaped canvas supports, the relationships between them suggesting constant optical shifts between flatness and depth, solid and void, interior volume and contour. 

Ken Greenleaf, Blackwork 8, 2012, charcoal on paper, 8 ½ x 11 inches.

The charcoal collages that follow are more loosely and immediately articulated, still basically flat but more visibly physical, more painterly; they appear to have pried open the singular masses in the paintings to expose the complex angled framework within them, as if to reveal them in the process of becoming. 

Ken Greenleaf, Gauge 33, 2012, oil pastel on paper, 8 ½ x 11 inches.

Most recently, color appears for the first time in the oil pastels in which mostly scalene triangles and irregular quadrilaterals float weightlessly in space, delicately touching and occasionally abutting while tilting this way and that, their expansive scale utterly surprising in relation to their diminutive size. Together the series thus offer an impressive range of ideas and feelings, their very fecundity suggesting a breakthrough of some kind to an aspect of Greenleaf’s artistic self that became fully accessible to him, and to us in turn, only when he confronted painting directly and experienced the exhilaration that attends exercising its freedoms in concert with its limitations.

Don Voisine and Ken Greenleaf. Linear and painterly. Intellectual and emotional. Idealism and realism. Being and becoming. Classical and Romantic. I invoke Heinrich Wolfflin here, along with the sweeping generalizations of art’s larger history, and in doing so I take liberties with both artists. But I do so not to contextually aggrandize them, only to suggest that what goes down in their studios, which is the art of modernist painting, is perhaps larger and more expansive than art writing and academic discourse in the name of theory sometimes lead us to believe.   

Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. 

The Carrie Mae Weems Odyssey

By Carl Belz

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, edited by Kathryn E. Delmez, with contributions by Kathryn E. Delmez, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Franklin Sirmans, Robert Storr, and Deborah Willis. Frist Center for the Arts in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2012. Published in conjunction with the exhibition organized by the Frist Center for the Arts, Nashville, TN, September 21, 2012-January 13, 2013. Travel itinerary: Portland Art Museum, Oregon, February 2-May 19, 2013; Cleveland Museum of Art, June 30-September 29, 2013; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, February-May, 2014.

Curator Kathryn Delmez begins Carrie Mae Weems’s artistic odyssey in San Francisco in 1974, when “ a friend gave her a camera for her twenty-first birthday, and she quickly realized the potential of documentary photography to be a tool for tangibly expressing abstract political and social theories,” yet right from the start she allows Weems herself to articulate the odyssey’s impelling mission as “my responsibility as an artist is to…make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless, to shout bravely from the rooftops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.” The exhibition, which in the catalog is chronologically structured, invites us to observe the odyssey as it unfolds through nearly 30 series combining images, texts, audios and videos, each introduced by brief curatorial comment. Here, a sampling of representative excerpts:

Family Pictures and Stories, 1978-84: “Together, the photographs and narratives create an in-depth and realistic portrait of a middle-class African American family. The book is meant to stand in contrast to the 1965 Moynihan Report, which blamed ‘the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society’ on a weak family structure.”

Ain’t Jokin’, 1987-88 and American Icons, 1988-89: “In these two series, Weems demonstrates how aspects of mainstream popular culture can perpetuate the entrenchment of negative stereotypes and debilitating prejudices…Weems’s intent in both series is for viewers to acknowledge the persistence of an undercurrent of racism in American society and to consider…their potential role as accomplice, be it as participant, consumer, or silent witness.”

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Man and mirror) from Kitchen Table Series, 1990. Gelatin silver print, 27 1/4 x 27 1/4 inches. Collection of Eric and Liz Lefkofsky, 115-128.2010, promised gift to the Art Institute of Chicago. © Carrie Mae Weems. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago

Kitchen Table Series, 1990: “The images trace a period in a woman’s life as she experiences the blossoming, then loss, of love, the responsibilities of motherhood, and the desire to be an engaged and contributing member of her community…Although Kitchen Table Series…is loosely related to her own experiences, Weems strives for it to reflect the experiences of Everywoman and to resonate across racial and class boundaries.”

Sea Island Series, 1991-92: “Weems became interested in the unique Gullah culture found on the Sea Islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina while studying folklore in graduate school…Because of the islands’ physical isolation from the mainland and their majority black population, the residents were able to retain many aspects of African culture throughout the period of slavery and into the present day.”

Slave Coast, 1993 and Africa, 1993: “A desire to examine more deeply the history and legacy of slavery spurred Weems to travel beyond the southeastern United States to Africa, stopping first along the so-called slave coast of western Ghana and Senegal. The photographs of now empty but once important centers along the slave trade route, such as the holding facilities on Goree Island, move beyond documentary. Powerful words summon the fear, humiliation, and helplessness inevitably felt by the recently captured Africans as they waited to embark on the treacherous journey across the Atlantic to a life of slavery.”

The Hampton Project, 2000: “Hampton Project” critically examines the connection between race and education as experienced at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University). Founded in Virginia in 1868, the school provided an education and vocational training for recently freed African Americans as well as young Native Americans. Despite largely good intentions, the students were stripped of cultural specificities in favor of conformity and forced assimilation. Weems reveals and grieves for this loss…”

Carrie Mae Weems. The Edge of Time—Ancient Rome from Roaming, 2006. Digital chromogenic print, 73 x 61 in. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Carrie Mae Weems

Roaming, 2006: “Weems reflects on the collective human experience in the series Roaming, created…during her residency at the American Academy in Rome. Here she wanders like history’s ghost through the streets and landscapes of various Italian sites, pondering humanity’s past and present condition…A sense of the passage of time, human accomplishment, and an individuals’ relative insignificance are simultaneously evoked as she stands before once grand monuments and sweeping vistas.”

There you have it, a small taste of the social and political concerns driving the Weems odyssey, along with some of the thinking that informs it and its steadily broadening and deepening scope. In the context of the art of our time, Weems emerges from the curatorial comments and essays, and from the essays of the catalog’s guest contributors as well, as quintessentially and definitively postmodern—in the conceptual grounding of her serial practice, her interdisciplinary approach to media, her wide-ranging appropriations and ironic inflection, her probing cultural and institutional critique, and perhaps above all her reliance on performance and the multiple identities it affords as a vehicle for her message.

Concerning which, I think Robert Storr says it best: “Indeed, like a moving-picture auteur, she is the director, set designer, costumer, and star of her own unmoving pictures. By stepping in and out of multiple roles in a manner that only the most inattentive viewer could miss, she signals not only her complete authorial control over every aspect of her production…but her frank admission that nothing in it is ‘natural,’ least of all the part she plays as omnipotent conjurer.”    

And here’s the bottom line: “The author can be anything she wants to be, anything she can imagine being—in art as distinct from life she can ‘fly’…and the viewer can accept what she has to offer without doubting the authenticity of her impersonations since their explicit artificiality is publically posted.”

And there you have postmodern freedom, the grail central to the Weems odyssey.

A Note on Pop Art: 50 Years and Counting

By Carl Belz

A half-century’s now passed, yet I vividly recall the excitement we felt when Pop Art happened in the New York art world at the start of the 1960s. And exciting it was, especially among the generation of artists, critics, curators and art historians who, like me, were entering the field at that moment. Exciting, in part, because the new art was up for grabs, it hadn’t been claimed, as Abstract Expressionism seemed then to have already been claimed, by patriarchs like Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Thomas Hess. Exciting, too, because its link to everyday experience, to billboards and soup cans and comic books, made it immediately accessible, even fun, in sharp contrast to AE’s seriousness of purpose and sometimes unfathomable depth. In addition, but by no means least among the excitements it stirred, Pop’s accessibility also extended to the art market, its product was inexpensive, it could be acquired and lived with for the equivalent of a new suit when a new car remained out of reach. 

Amid such excitements, Pop at the same time incited voices of discontent. Its bark on behalf of the commonplace was said to recall Dada, but it lacked Dada’s political bite and was therefore found wanting. It was said to be flawed as art because it only duplicated the look of the supermarket display and the tabloid front page, it failed aesthetically to transform them. And it was even dismissed out of hand--by no less than Greenberg himself--as a phenomenon belonging not to a proper art history but merely to the history of taste.

Greenberg was right and wrong. Right, insofar as Pop wasn’t first of all about art, it didn’t engage the formal probing and stretching that had characterized modernism’s urge to meaning since the middle of the 19th Century, it mostly adopted the formal tenets that modernism currently practiced, and thus was it considered tangential to modern art’s history. Which is very much the way kindred predecessors such as the Surrealists were regarded at the time of Pop’s happening, and the same was true even of Pop Godfather Marcel Duchamp, who at the beginning of the century had appropriated Cubism’s shallow space and shifting planes to structure his stories about nudes descending a staircase, chess players in competition, and a virgin transforming into a bride stripped bare, but who then abruptly retired from art-making in favor of playing chess himself, becoming in the process an artist interrupted: a fascinating but marginal figure, a major-minor player rather than a force, within the big art historical picture as it was viewed through Greenberg’s modernist prism.

What Greenberg got wrong was in large part a function of what he got right, which in both cases derived from a vision of art historical change based on the model of a mainstream and its tributaries. It was in the mainstream that formal originality powered art forward and in doing so regularly shaped our understanding of its history, at times even prodding a rewriting of that history--as Abstract Expressionism was in the process of prodding a rewriting of the late paintings of Claude Monet at the very moment when Pop appeared. All of which Greenberg surely knew, yet he wrote Pop off as just another example of our culture’s capricious, ever-changing taste. He dubbed it “far out” to indicate it was vanguard in appearance only, and he accordingly judged it as ephemeral, a blip on the radar screen the way Dada had been. It deserved maybe 15 minutes of our attention, but it didn’t affect the writing of art’s history.

Except that it did. From the outset, Pop was more widespread than any cultural alternative we’d previously seen. There seemed overnight to be Pop artists on every street corner and Pop pictures everywhere we turned, in gallery and museum exhibitions and in the media, nationally and internationally. And when the initial excitement about it waned, when the buzz subsided, and when the media spotlight moved inevitably to the next great thing, we realized that Pop had ushered in a sea change of historic proportions. 

To wit: Independence from elite culture had been declared, modernist hegemony in turn had been ruptured, taste had become democratized, and each of us had been set free to indulge without external sanction--and without the guilt and anxiety it engendered--the artistic excitements and pleasures and entertainments that piqued our interest;  free to enjoy Andy Warhol’s gaudy Marilyn in tandem with Mark Rothko’s somber abyss; even free--pace Clement Greenberg--to couple avant-garde and kitsch, to listen to tunes on a headset, say, while cruising art’s history at MoMA or the Met or the Frick Collection. Free, as well, to read artworks without regard for the artist’s intent and to conjure our personal histories of art based on those same favorite pleasures and excitements--the way Roy Lichtenstein did over a span of four decades as he served up his versions of classic ruins and romantic sunsets and Mondrian look-alikes and Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes and riffs on Surrealism and Cubism and Art Deco and Chinese landscapes, and in doing so produced an art historical panorama as entertaining as any theme park at Disneyland or anywhere else. 

As a crown upon these abundant excitements, finally, the new democracy of taste decade by decade spread steadily into the art market, at each heightened level bringing gasps of breathless wonder as collectors exercised their freedom to pay as much or more for an Andy Warhol as for a Jackson Pollock, as much or more for a Lichtenstein brushstroke inspired by Willem de Kooning as for a de Kooning itself, as much or more for all kinds of cultural commodities that nobody among us--at least nobody among 99% of us--could previously have imagined. True, Pop was inexpensive in the beginning, but its humble origin in the market only enhanced the creation myth that was pitched on its behalf, a myth that gradually accrued the iconic status of an investor’s fairy tale about free enterprise and the American Dream.

So Pop was a blast, and we reveled immediately in its exploits and rushed to absorb its message. We looked at Duchamp anew and watched his enormous influence catapult him into the exclusive company of Matisse and Picasso. We rediscovered Surrealism, not in the dreary nightmares of its founding fathers, but right in front of us, in the marvels of America’s everyday mass media culture and dazzling technology. We everywhere saw photography as it blossomed in a veritable renascence of theory and practice. Modern art’s arena seemed suddenly to have been leveled and expanded, no longer was modernism by itself in the spotlight, no longer did we have a mainstream and its tributaries. The non-hierarchical structure of modern society that Greenberg had insightfully found mirrored in Pollock’s overall pictures had come full circle to the gates of the elite world of modernist art. Our methodologies for dealing with both the modern and the modernist art of our time were in turn affected. In the face of Pop’s celebration of everyday subjects and instant access, formalist analyses were felt to be inadequate, even irrelevant. From the outset, news about Pop told us about the artists’ backgrounds, how Andy Warhol had been a commercial illustrator, how James Rosenquist had painted billboards. Constantly reminded that artists made art while living in the real world, at particular times and in particular places, we wanted increasingly to know how those factors affected the objects they made. Increasingly, then, the formalist autonomy of the object yielded to studies emphasizing the context of its creation. 

Pop arrived like a blast of fresh air, welcome and invigorating, and it remains in many ways synonymous with the upbeat aspect of the 1960s. But like the 60s as a whole, not all of Pop, let alone all of its postmodern progeny, has always worn well or been all that it was advertised as being. Not for me, anyway. I sometimes fret, for instance, about the high/low union: Warhol and Rothko may both flatten me, but in radically different ways that are in no way interchangeable. Having come to art via the study of titans like Velasquez and Rembrandt, Manet and Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso, I also fret over news about the death of the author, for I have not the arrogance to assume the author’s stead. I fret further about the claim that artworks need only be interesting when experience tells me they can be, even urge to be, meaningful. Art as entertainment likewise makes me fret, so I reach for the remote. In the grip of our media culture, even the democratization of taste occasionally makes me fret about our being marketed ever more products in the name of cultural pleasures and excitements and thereby pitted against one another in competition for more artistic toys--and becoming in the process more divided from one another, more alone. And naturally I fret about the democratization of the art market, about large sums of money being equated with artistic quality or entitling museum trustees to dictate what their museums collect and exhibit.

But in closing, let me assure you that I’ve made my peace with the market: I have at home a Campbell’s soup can, chicken noodle, signed with my name by Andy Warhol and given to me by a friend in 1966. When I saw a similar can in an auction catalog 25 years later with a $2500 to $3000 estimate, I felt the ultimate excitement, the excitement of cashing in. Hastening to the kitchen, to the shelf where the soup can had sat all those years, to check my modest treasure, I was stunned to realize how shabby it had become, how faded, Andy’s signature barely visible under a film of grease. I knew for sure it was worthless, and my heart ached. How could I have let that happen? How could I have exposed the can to the risks of everyday experience? How could I have just lived with it? Then the lightbulb went on: Worthless on the market, the can was still filled with memories--and they were still worth plenty.    

Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.

The Color Picture Now: Feeling Foremost

By Carl Belz

Into our modern era the job of color in painting was to articulate the visible world, which it did anew with eye-opening freshness and authority in the hands of the Impressionists, only to have their successors advance the case that color could be shorn of its descriptive function and employed expressively, to embody feelings not otherwise visible. Thus liberated, emphatic personalized color provided, during the past century, the engine that drove the Brucke and Blaue Reiter expressionists in Germany, the Fauves in France, and, following World War II, the Post Painterly Abstractionists of the New York School. What the latter gave us—what Rothko and Still and Newman and Hofmann, Frankenthaler and Louis, Noland and Olitski and Stella, gave to the art of our time—were pictures as visually arresting and emotionally moving as any produced by moderns and modernists alike since the middle of the 19th Century.

Postmodern sensibilities that germinated in the 1970s haven’t generally endorsed the value judgments guiding that synopsis of color picture history. Disillusioned by the failed promises of the previous decade—a reaction quickly transferred to 20th Century modernism generally—they’ve opted more for cultural deconstruction and critique, for irony, and for detached, anti-aesthetic interest than for quality and conviction. From such a position, the tradition extending from Matisse to Stella, say, is seen less as a pictorial achievement than a decorative art historical sidebar, an assessment echoing a concern that was initially voiced decades before, most notably by Marcel Duchamp, who, in the face of the Fauves and Cubists, declared the new art mere visual pleasure—in a word, retinal. As a corrective, he called for art to restore ideas to itself, the implication being that it would otherwise devolve to comprise objects lacking meaningful content, objects, that is, which were indistinguishable from ordinary things in the world, things that could only nominally be considered art, like bottle racks or bicycle wheels, for instance, instead of the real McCoy, like the things in museums. And so was born conceptual art—art that equates content with ideas.      

Conceptualism’s critique notwithstanding, the colorist equation of content with feeling continued to figure prominently—as it had figured prominently since the late 1940s—across our visual culture’s increasingly pluralistic stage during the later 1960s and the 1970s. Which is when the three painters presented here—Ronnie Landfield, Sandi Slone, and Darryl Hughto—were coming into their early maturity. Each was fully schooled in modernism, and each absorbed from the start the ways and means of Post Painterly Abstraction, in particular its primary emphasis on a personal and expressive use of color, but also its techniques of paint application, staining and pouring among them, methods of getting paint from the can or tube and onto the canvas that minimized paint’s physicality on the one hand and indulged it on the other, but in either case suppressed the gestural handling of it in order to allow color its maximum impact. Each has now been painting for more than four decades, and each has in the process periodically made ambitiously large pictures, as well as pictures that are frankly and unapologetically beautiful, candid in celebrating color as a vehicle of emotional content, intuitively smart in structuring its deployment to assure the content’s credibility. Regularly inspired by their modernist past, yet at the same time unburdened by it, each has also looked periodically to nature, not in opposition to abstraction, which was the charge presented against painting nature in the 1950s, but as a resource for enriching it.

In that context, here is Ronnie Landfield:

My inspiration has been my conviction that modern painting is fueled by the combination of tradition and the realities of modern life. Spirituality and feeling are the basic subjects of my work. They are depictions of intuitive expressions using color as language and the landscape…as a metaphor for the arena of life. The revelation of a primal image that delivers an immediate response in the viewer is my goal. 

Here, Sandi Slone:

The recent works do not describe nature. They attempt to imitate the processes of nature in the way they are made, relying on the fluidity of chance and rigorous control that is rooted in exploring the unexpected and the unknown.

And here, Darryl Hughto:

My absolute favorite motif is the imaginary landscape, usually just consisting of a horizon, sky above and land or sea below, maybe a blob or two on the horizon reading as islands or clouds. With this format I am the most free with color and paint handling. It puts more pressure on the color, and the simplicity of the drawing allows the viewer to relax and just feel it. I can have my cake, as I had it when I was totally geometric and painting diamonds, and eat it too, great savory hunks of paint swimming in buckets of puddles and pours. 

Ronnie Landfield’s signature paintings generally comprise stained fields of light-breathing color bordered by a single color geometric band along the lower framing edge and sometimes one or two additional bands rising along the sides of the picture. The bands represent a formal element he first employed in minimalist paintings of the 1960s in response to Donald Judd’s quarrel with painting’s inherent spatiality and part-by-part relationships—his claim being that painting was flawed by illusion, that it wasn’t its literal self—so Ronnie Landfield added the bands as a way of reminding us of painting’s flatness. All of which probably sounds kind of academic, even a little preposterous from the distance of nearly half a century, but such were the issues informing critical discourse at the time—they were immediate, they felt genuinely urgent, and they occasionally found their way into the studio, just as their counterparts do today.

Ronnie Landfield, For John Keats, 1978, acrylic on canvas, 81 x 93 inches.

Ronnie Landfield, Joseph’s Coat, 1986, acrylic on canvas, 88 x 81 inches.

But you don’t have to know all about that discourse when you look at the pictures themselves, you just have to know that what the bands might have meant in the past isn’t necessarily what they might mean now. I, for one, find the bands highly effective. They lend structure to the paintings but without suppressing them, without imposing their will upon the range and spontaneity of feeling that’s lyrically articulated within them or the exhilarating release we experience in looking at them. Concomitantly, the freedom that is expressed and celebrated within the paintings, and that is identified with our response to them, is acknowledged as existing within limitations—which is how freedom invariably exists in lived experience, for it would otherwise be not a reality, but a hollow concept. The bands’ meaning in these paintings thereby becomes timeless.

Ronnie Landfield,  The Deluge, 1998, acrylic on canvas, 108 x 120 inches.

Ronnie Landfield,  On the Threshold, 2008, 44 x 29.5 inches.

Ronnie Landfield,  Blue Wall, 2010, 44.5 x 53 inches.

Sandi Slone is clearly sensitive to the bonding of freedom and limitation in citing her reliance on the “fluidity of chance” in tandem with “rigorous control”. What I especially appreciate in the statement about her current working procedure, at the same time, is the urge whereby chance and control enable her pictures to “imitate nature in the way they are made”. The urge is certainly evident in her recent pictures, which appear as phenomena that have come into being entirely on their own, like celestial or aquatic torrents, brilliantly illuminated from within, that sweep through space without human agency or intervention, without being shaped or composed, as if obeying rules of their own—like natural forces.

Sandi Slone, Tiger Eye, 1976, oil and acrylic on canvas, 69 x 80 inches.

Sandi Slone,  Rasputin, 1984, oil and acrylic on canvas, 84 x 120 inches.

To an extent, that effect has been present in Sandi Slone’s pictures from the outset: in the earth-color masses abutting in her 1970s broom paintings, in the cascading and pooling washes and stains in her pictures from the 1980s and 90s, in the minimally, yet visibly stroked circles of the past decade that seem, like a crack of lightning, to have happened out of nowhere in an instant. It’s an absorbing effect that stimulates a wide spectrum of feeling, wide and full, like the bounty of nature itself. In the face of it, I’m reminded of what modernism is all about, how it’s about creating worlds and how to go about the process of shaping their character—as it has been since its beginning. Which in turn reminds me of what Flaubert said at the moment of that beginning: “The author in his book must be like God in the universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible.”

Sandi Slone, Fire Wave, 1990, oil, acrylic and sand on canvas, 60 x 126 inches.

Sandi Slone, Sky, Field, Lips, 2009, oil and acrylic on canvas, 36 inches diameter .

Sandi Slone, Vast, 2011, oil and acrylic on canvas, 18 x 14 inches.

Darrly Hughto’s painting format in the 1970s comprised diamonds within rectangles or squares, sometimes centered and aligned with one another, sometimes askew. It sustained an effective run of pictures through the decade, but the work then slackened, whereupon he tried working en plein air, he cast about and wrestled with himself, and, by the later 1980s, he emerged as a landscape/still life/figure painter. He wasn’t alone in radically shifting gears during a career in full stride. David Park and Philip Guston had both famously done so out of dissatisfaction with abstraction and the urge for a more outwardly focused kind of pictorial content. But Darryl Hughto wasn’t after a new kind of content.

Darryl Hughto, Saint Gingerbread, 1978, acrylic on canvas, 78 inches diagonal.

Darryl Hughto, Radiance, 2002, acrylic on canvas, 58 x 81.5 inches

He harbored no argument with modernist abstraction, far from it, but neither was he out to demonstrate the kind of virtuosic, many-voiced performance—already a postmodernist trope at the time—whereby a solo show of new work looked for all intents and purposes like a group exhibition. Rather, what I think he was looking for was a new format, one that would anchor and extend anew his reach into the color-as-feeling territory he’d been inspired to explore all along. Which he found in landscape more than anywhere else, as his own words clearly acknowledge, and as the chromatic splendor and emotional exuberance of his pictures surely attest. He’s referenced both German Expressionism and the French Fauves in connection with his newer pictures, bringing to mind Kandinsky and Matisse. I’d personally add Nicholas de Stael, from the 1950s School of Paris, whose luscious physical color reminds me of Darryl Hughto’s sensuous “hunks of paint.” As you probably know, French painting back in the 50s was regarded as the kind of painting our Abstract Expressionists didn’t want to make. It was too French, too arty. Today, however, the deep satisfactions of Darryl Hughto’s paintings enable us to see in the present the pictorial exuberance that was being overlooked in the past. Good art can do that, it can make you rewrite art’s history.

Darryl Hughto, Pillar Point, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 52.5 x 68.5 inches.

Darryl Hughto, Great Spruce Head Island Sunrise, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 57 x 47 inches.

Darryl Hughto, Cherry Island, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 29 x 36 inches.

Paintings I really like I think about living with, like the paintings of Ronnie Landfield and Sandi Slone and Darryl Hughto. The worlds they take me to are generous and accommodating, pleasured by art that is meaningful in and of itself, art that is justified simply by being, like nature. I like to think there’s room in my own lived world—even in the lived world at large—for that kind of experience. I share Matisse’s dream of “an art filled with balance, purity and calmness…a spiritual remedy…for the businessman as well as the artist”—even though I’m no businessman or artist myself.


Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.

Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, Blue Coat. 1965.

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, translated by Ralph McCarthy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1911. (This review was originally published in Art New England (April/May, 2012).)

By Carl Belz

When I assumed my post as director of Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, in 1974, my first task was to move the collection from a handful of makeshift sites scattered around campus to a proper storage vault that had recently been added to the museum itself. It was a great opportunity so see just about every painting and sculpture we owned—prints and drawings, mostly unframed, would come later—and I was excited by the chance to handle the objects, feel their heft, study their condition, and read the labels on the stretcher bars to see whence they’d come to the museum. To greater and lesser degrees, I was familiar with the artists they represented, some widely acclaimed, some lesser known, and some whose names meant nothing at all to me. There was a woman’s coat, for instance, it was entirely covered with visually buzzing, aqua- and black-striped cotton phallic protuberances that gave off a weirdly disturbing sexual vibe. A registrar’s tag identified it as having been made in 1965 and accessioned in 1967, which meant it had been acquired by William Seitz, the Rose’s second director. Bill had been a curator at MoMA and had come to Brandeis shortly after mounting “The Responsive Eye”, an ambitious international survey of Op Art, a passion I assumed he brought with him when he came to Waltham. For me, that provided a handy context for understanding the dress itself and its presence in the collection, and with that I was pretty much satisfied.

Little did I know. Little, in fact, did a lot of people know, unless they’d hung around New York’s downtown art world where Yayoi Kusama set up shop and operated from the late 1950s through the 1960s, in which case they would have known the coat wasn’t just a one-hit Op Art wonder, known it also referenced Pop Art’s celebration of common objects and their sometimes surrealist transformations, known it demonstrated the gripping formal effect of Minimal Art’s modular repetitions, and known it signaled the first tremors of the women’s revolution that would erupt at the close of the decade and affect art’s history into the new millennium. They’d further have known how the phalluses—or, in some cases, Kusama’s signature polka dots—could proliferate, spread from an article of clothing to nearby tables and chairs to surrounding walls and thereby generate whole obsessive environments, sites for Kusama Performances and Kusama Happenings that she dedicated to peace and love. At the same time, they probably wouldn’t have known the full meaning, for the artist, of her friendships with Georgia O’Keeffe and Joseph Cornell and Donald Judd, yet they did probably wonder whatever happened to her when she left New York in 1973, returned to her native Japan, admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo in 1977, and, for the most part, dropped off everybody’s cultural radar screen.

But they surely know now: Through the many major exhibitions, starting in the later 1980s and continuing at the moment I write, which have celebrated her achievement in cultural centers around the globe; and through Infinity Net as well, her generously personal autobiography, which was first published in Japanese in 2002 and is now available in a 2011 English translation. It’s a terrific read, packed with information—about her life, her art, her career, her vision—that I’ve merely glossed here, because what especially fascinates me about it is how similar it is to her visual art—and yet how different. Similar in what I would call Kusama’s minimalism, her use of simple, modular units, the spots and dots of color and light in her installations, for instance, units that pair comfortably with her penchant for unembellished sentences and the direct, matter-of-fact literary voice of her autobiography. At heart, the art and the writing proceed with a steady and absorbing rhythm. It’s when the elementary units begin to accumulate that each medium begins to yield its separate and distinct aim. The installations become visually cacophonous and disorienting, reaching for the heavens, dissolving our selves among the stars, while the prose feels earthbound and determined, directing us inward to know ourselves in the here and now. Heaven and earth: pretty impressive, especially from an artist I initially identified as an eccentric seamstress.

(Editor's note: A major exhibition of Yayoi Kusama can be seen at the Whitney Museum of Art until September 30, 2012.)

Wherefore the Figure, Wherefore the Self

By Carl Belz

Of all the subjects available to painting, subjects ranging from stripes and squares to fields of color, from landscape vistas and city streets to ordinary objects close at hand, none is brought to the task of expression with more baggage than the human figure. Understandably so, for even while modernism has stripped narrative from painting, the figure projects a story simply by being there before us, being our other, being our mirror. Understandably, too, despite what the figure’s been put through in order for painting to accommodate it, the fragmentations and distortions and attenuations, the flattening and reshaping of it into images we may not recognize in the mirror but in which we are nonetheless compelled to acknowledge our reflection. Whatever its story, then, and however it appears, the figure verifies our being in the world and substantiates our claim to possessing identity as an individualized self.

Yet there’s no easy-to-follow recipe for meeting the challenges to expression that attend figure painting. Some of those are internal, others come with the territory—like the challenge of competition. Half a century ago Pop and Minimalism gave us a new art that was fast and immediate, that delivered its message in a single and unequivocal flash, that could grab and momentarily hold attention in the media-saturated culture with which it suddenly found itself in competition. That competition continues with a vengeance today. Think of the visual culture we each day everywhere encounter, think of its irresistible formal allure, think of its insistent and instantly gratifying punch, and think, too, about the vehicle bearing all that meaning—think about the human figure, how over-the-top appealing it is, how shaped to perfection, how sexy and engaging, then think about competing with that! Just remember in the process never to underestimate your opponent.

Of course it’s the internal challenges that remain after the dust stirred by the battle for media attention has settled—the challenge to be good instead of merely interesting, for instance, or the challenge to be original, or the challenge to plumb the inarticulate speech of the heart. Risk attends those challenges, for the ever-elusive and evolving self that elects to confront them may in the process be laid bare, its vulnerabilities, along with its strengths, exposed. A will to meaning via the human figure—the figure first and foremost as a source of meaning—is in turn required: meaning as it is felt to be embodied in painting’s history, at once acknowledging its achievement and also seeking continuity with it; and meaning as it is shaped anew within the limits of modern secular experience by the expressive free-agent self. Freedom within limits, which is to say freedom bound to and by responsibility. More directly, perhaps, than modern paintings based on other subjects—it’s a matter of degree, not kind—modern paintings based on the figure nudge us in the direction of moral propositions.

Kyle Staver’s is an ample world, generous in accommodating couples and individuals who are self-contained without being self-absorbed, figures comfortable with themselves and equally comfortable with one another. As couples, they’re pleasurably involved in life’s daily routines—feeding the pet, tasting the morning tea, reading the paper—or sharing a leisurely outing—riding bicycles, ice skating. Along with them, though not in their immediate company, individual female figures occasionally appear: Danae, Europa, Lady Godiva, subjects drawn from myth and legend, subjects famously imaged by Old Masters, subjects identified with the sensuous delights of the human body—subjects here brought freshly forth and ingenuously re-presented as engaging whimsical fantasies. At ease in their surroundings, they signal the ease with which Staver navigates between art’s past and present. For past and present are in her world continuous, history representing not a burden but an inspiration, not a source of irony but of sustenance, as if in that world the making of new art constantly rewrites art’s past and revitalizes it in the present, as if that process not only shapes and defines that world but is entirely natural to it—as natural for those who inhabit it as breathing the salubrious air within it. A recent picture of Adam and Eve notwithstanding, Staver’s pictorial world is overall more Arcadian than Edenic.

Kyle Staver, Danae and the Parakeet, 2009, oil on linen, 63 x 53 inches.

Kyle Staver, Godiva, 2009, oil on linen, 58 x 68 inches.

Kyle Staver, Adam and Eve with Goats, 2011, oil on linen, 56 x 64 inches.

Staver herself seems to breathe art. She’s an art maven who regularly posts albums on Facebook, images clustered around a theme or subject plucked for sheer delectation from what appears to be a vast storehouse of pictorial memories. Not surprisingly, their inspiration echoes in her own images, though more faintly now than even a few years ago. Writing about the work in 2008, Karen Wilkin accurately associated Staver’s intimate domestic settings with Pierre Bonnard and her broadly brushed figures with David Park. In newer pictures, the intimacy continues, but with fewer incidental details, and the breadth, previously concentrated in the figures, increasingly spreads across the entire surface and more effectively integrates them with the natural or domestic spaces they occupy. The resulting pictures seem more whole, more clearly and fully meant, more her own. One of them audaciously shows two nude boys playing with turtles by a stream, an unmistakable iconographic homage to Matisse, but thereby also a statement about paintings intended not for momentary satisfaction but to stay the course.

Kyle Staver, Feeding the Cockatoo, 2009, oil on linen, 56 x 48 inches.

Kyle Staver, Releasing the Catfish, 2011, oil on canvas, 64 x 54 inches.

Kyle Staver, Skaters, 2009, oil on linen, 50 x 50 inches.

About a century ago, in Paris, Ranier Maria Rilke memorably became aware of how many faces there are and decided, “There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.” Anne Harris knows what Rilke was talking about. She paints faces, bodies too, but even her bodies resemble faces in the way they tell stories, each one different, each compelling in its own way, each face and body reflecting a facet of the self within, the modern self ever questing on its own to know its ever-evolving identity. Some of her faces belong to adolescent girls, some to other women, but all of them, at the beginning and in the end, are essentially self-portraits—self-portraits not in any conventional sense, for they’re not likenesses, rather self-portraits ontologically, in the way they function within our experience of them, in the way that that experience can be said to yield knowledge of them, of ourselves, of our world.

Anne Harris, Angel,  2007, oil on linen, 44 x 30 inches.

Anne Harris, Portrait (Beaded Dress), 2000, oil on canvas, 36 x 30 inches.

Anne Harris, Portrait (Blonde), 2003, 12 x 12 inches.

Anne Harris, Portrait (Pearls), 2001, oil on canvas, 36 x 30 inches.

Anne Harris, Portrait (Pink Eyelid), 2010, oil on linen over panel, 11 x 8 inches.

Anne Harris, Portrait (Red Robe) - in progress, 2010, oil on linen, 52 x 33 inches. 

The identity quest we track in Anne Harris’s pictures is a challenge comprising conflicts and contradictions. Each figure is isolated, presented to us front and center, facing us but without seeing us, looking through us or past us, trance-like, as if in a world of her own, a world that is not a place but a vaporous and abstract pictorial substance, emptied of things, out of which she magically emerges, becomes momentarily focused, and into which she just as magically then dissolves. She may wear a brocade or satin dress, she may be draped in pearls or a velvet robe, her skin may glow through delicate layers of thinned oil pigment, and she may be rendered with the patiently exquisite touch of the Northern Old Masters the artist so deeply and abidingly admires, but she is otherwise a spectral nightmare, grotesque, misshapen, hideous to behold—her image sears our vision yet leaves us enthralled, unable to take our eyes from her.

Harris’s challenge to painting reminds me of Faulkner’s challenge to literature, which was, “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” As to her pictures being self-portraits, I think of them sometimes when I look in the mirror and wonder if I’m seeing my better self or my own worst enemy—which is when I realize her pictures know me the way I know myself.



Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.