Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life edited by David Galloway - Abrams

S TA RT I N G O U T M AT THEW ISR AEL IN CONVERSATION WITH BARBAR A NESSIM I was constantly being told by my art directors and illustrator friends that I was, in fact, a fine artist. I would protest and argue against this notion in part because I knew that making a living as a fine artist was even more difficult than it was for an illustrator. Furthermore, the prevalent trends in art were still abstract—Pop Art was just starting to gain recognition—and what I did was figurative. I didn’t feel I fit in anywhere.

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Opposite page: cover for Print, November/ December 1968. This page, left to right: Lipstick Colors sketch for Harper’s Bazaar, 1962; Marijuana, for Status & Diplomat, December/January 1968.

what that meaning was,” she explains. “I was telling stories in my personal art and naturally it transferred to my illustration. My studio art flowed freely without too much thought, but it was different when I created an illustration because it was informed by an outside idea.”

The majority of her early concepts were showcased in such Playboyinfluenced “girlie” magazines as Gent, Nugget, and Escapade, which included a healthy serving of alternative writing, art, and design.

“Working for these magazines was interesting because as an artist you had freedom,” Nessim reflects. “The art directors used artists they loved, and there was nothing you could not do. The stories were interesting—I illustrated a chapter from Terry Southern’s novel Candy, for example. I think it was even before it was published as a book. I also was commissioned to do a story on Coney Island in winter for Gentlemen magazine, and I did monotype etchings.” Eventually, she worked for the brash new journalism-focused New York Magazine, where the design director Milton Glaser and the art director Walter Bernard opened opportunities for dozens of young conceptual illustrators.

New York initially published Ms. Magazine in 1971 as an insert; it became a landmark opportunity for illustrators and photographers of all kinds. The first stand-alone issue appeared in January 1972. It was a perfect fit. Gloria Steinem and Nessim had been roommates from 1962

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to 1967 (around the time the former was working on her famous Playboy Bunny exposé). And since Nessim’s approach was naturally “womencentric,” she received work from Ms. and other women’s magazines. Even the staid Redbook commissioned art. Although a very different focus, Nessim explains, “I always managed to keep my balance, no matter what type of publication I worked for.”

Early in her career, Nessim translated social issues into pictures, but the results defied what might best be called the Käthe Kollwitz look of lugubrious Expressionism. Symbolism was Nessim’s forte, and she became expert at using allegory and metaphor, disguising the obvious behind an image that could be decoded. On the surface, her work evoked classic beauty, but underneath was a very different agenda. “You had to look at it to get the significance,” she notes. The TIME magazine cover she did for the week in which the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated by three states was an important work both aesthetically and emotionally. “It was for the July 12, 1982 issue, and the art director said to the seven women illustrators that we could do anything we wanted since the story hadn’t been written as yet. I decided to illustrate what was happening at the moment. The world of women was waiting to see how the vote went after ten years of lobbying for this change in the Constitution. It was a huge disappointment when the defeat was announced.”

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Above: cover art for Art Direction, October 1973.

Opposite page: Wish for the World’s Future for Mother Jones, September 1978.

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analog illustrations. As computers matured and Photoshop entered the picture, it was easier to integrate. “When I got a job, I decided how I would do it,” she says. “The cover I did for a story on breast cancer for The New York Times Magazine was a 50/50 job. The simple line was drawn by hand and scanned into the computer and the color was added with the computer.” Nessim’s adventures influenced other illustrators and designers to push further, and today, of course, the computer is just another tool.

Curiously, despite its pioneering status, Nessim’s computer work does not appear tentative. She never let anyone see her sweat. “For me selfdoubt comes during the intervals when I’m living a life that is so different from what is considered normal. Then I think I’m perfectly ‘normal,’ but I’ve also questioned many times exactly what that implies. I never felt that I fit into any one place in any world, be it the illustration world or the art world. I have no idea as to where my place in history is, which can be very disorienting at times. What I do know is that I can’t do anything else but what I’m doing, and that gives me the feeling of doing the right thing. The other feeling I have that helps me conquer self-doubt is to consciously turn doubt into feeling positive. Sometimes that is hard to do and then I have to go with the feeling until it changes, which I know it will.”

In the days when women illustrators could easily have been seamstresses, there was little creative leeway, since illustration was as prescribed as any other service. Nessim defied that paradigm. “I never felt illustration was a limited practice. In fact, for me it was very interesting in many ways. Illustration is a way to get images out into the world to a mass audience. A visual can deepen the way a person understands what she is reading. I’ve illustrated stories and subjects that would otherwise never have crossed my path. It’s one of the most interesting professions I can imagine,” Nessim adds. She never got much work, but the work she did get was seen. “It was always puzzling when people compared illustrating to prostitution,” she says.

Nessim made it possible for women illustrators to speak their minds but asserts she has “no idea as to whether I made a difference. Obviously the Women’s Movement has a lot to do with making people—both men and women—aware of the concerns. I was not aware of the magnitude of issues to be discussed, but I did know there were issues of equal pay and equal respect and more that I could not articulate fully. We were all learning how to live with one another.” In 1976 she did a job for Mother Jones in which artists and writers were asked what they would like to see in the future. “My answer was true friendship between men and women. Now that sounds strange. But at the time men and women were not friends!”

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Top: color study for Common Sense in Short Supply. Bottom, left to right: Common Sense in Short Supply, 1993; color study for Veiled Egg, 1993. Opposite page: Global Thoughts, 1993.

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retrieve a few sketchbooks then sit back and ‘read’ them. A few appropriate drawings are selected and used as the basis for the new work.”

In 1987 Nessim also embarked on a series of flags from different countries, motivated by her fascination with the world’s cultures and the opportunity to work with a Polaroid camera system. The artist began the flags by selecting seventy-two drawings from her sketchbooks, which she then drew with a stylus on an Amiga digital tablet. The completed drawings were recorded as small Polaroid prints that she arranged and hinged onto an archival mat board to form the distinguishing linear features and coloration of each flag, including those of the United States, Belgium, Hungary, and Sweden. She used the same seventy-two images, in different configurations, varying the background colors for each flag.

In an attempt to see her work and decipher it, the viewer of Nessim’s flags is drawn both physically and psychologically into the artist’s universal yet highly personal world. We are ensnared and enveloped by the very anonymity and timelessness of her characters, who are simply going about the rituals of everyday life—reading, eating, reflecting, talking on the telephone. Physical and emotional proximity are often synonymous here. We relate to the people depicted in a manner similar to that in which we interact with the people who come close to us, either emotionally or physically, in our daily lives. The dialogue becomes increasingly intense as stories are both invented and exchanged. Nessim not only brings her own stories to her artwork but also encourages viewers to imbue her characters with themes and situations from their own lives.

Even a simple line drawn by Nessim is provocative of layers of meaning.

In the case of the flags, she believes that they are open to different manners of “reading,” though without a prescribed sequence. The artist acknowledges their cinematic potential, with the small drawings assuming the role of frames in an animated film. Despite the intimacy of such viewing experiences, Nessim’s themes are grand. She tackles the very essence of societal transformation: cultural clashes, changing modes of communication, and basic cultural divides between the haves and the have-nots in our world. She is also preoccupied with the idea of how travel and the movement of peoples have increased and the ways in which this new ease of movement has changed our world.

Nessim approaches project after project with an analytical rigor, never complacent about the restrictions of her vocabulary or tools. In a manner not unlike that in which she tackled and triumphed with the Norpak 2, at the same time she was working on the RAM 400 series she embarked on the series Large Tiled Paintings. For each three-by-four foot composition,

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Page 194: Reach, 2001 (left) and A/B, 2001. Above: Nessim and Rudisill with model, 2008.

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Sometime in spring 2001, Jill Brienza, director of the Roger Smith Gallery in New York City, asked Barbara Nessim to participate in a project entitled Bad Behavior 2 that she was curating for the photographer Bill Hayward. In addition to exhibitions, Brienza also held regular salons at her gallery, with dinners and lectures for authors, artists, and performers. Hayward had been photographing artists in front of white backdrops with various props while they painted or posed. His collaborations with artists led to dynamic, often amusing portraits, published by Rizzoli in 2001 in the first volume, Bad Behavior. Nessim became one of Hayward’s muses.

In retrospect, the encounter would gain increasing, if unexpected, significance. Although she had once worked on a project with Richard Avedon, this was not only the first time Nessim directly collaborated with a photographer but also the first time she drew before a “live” audience. Brienza’s gallery was a storefront, so the event inevitably acquired a performance aspect. Two of the four large drawings Nessim produced were subsequently exhibited for three weeks in the window. Bad Behavior 2 could be seen as a kind of prelude to the commissioned works for public spaces that would soon follow.

The first of these was realized at 600 Washington Street in 2004 in the lobby of a seven-story residential building that formed part of the Morton Square development, where Nessim herself would soon occupy a new atelier. In Curious Secret and Unspoken Home, two mural-like paintings commissioned for the entrance hall, the artist examined the fluid and subliminal boundaries between the public and the private with respect to this interim space that transitioned from the city’s thoroughfares to the sanctuary of the home. The works conceived for Washington Street are composed of isolated blocks of color or “rooms,” in which we see figures enthralled in solitary reverie.

Nessim depicted the condition of the retreating self through concentrically reductive shells that mirror our withdrawal from the public sphere to the domesticity of our bodies: with her characteristic minimalist strokes, the artist demarcated the walls that isolate us by degrees—first within our homes, then inside our rooms, and finally within the circle of things we cherish. The windows offer views into separate milieus, drawing lines around progressively interior worlds that eventually close around the virtual edges of our bodies, our thoughts. Along the base of Unspoken Home is a row of houses that symbolizes refuge. Joining them are dotted pathways that twist away and lead back to a home—a place of shelter and a retreat into a non-combative zone. Within these intramural spaces lie our secret selves.

Nessim had numerous reasons for addressing such themes at this transitional moment in her life. She had recently finished her academic duties as Chair of the Illustration Department at Parsons The New School for Design, concluding thirty-nine years of teaching, and was preparing to move from her studio on Greene Street to One Morton Square, situated in the West Village directly on the Hudson. The move was preceded by the archiving of more than fifty years of artwork and personal documents. Both literally and figuratively, this was a crucial moment of appraisal and reappraisal. There were many setbacks along the way, but by January 2006 Nessim was firmly ensconced in her spacious new quarters.

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