Paul Thek: Real Misunderstanding

Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts … it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; “eternal values,” “immortality” and “masterpiece” were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.

ingmar bergman 1

In the context of mainstream American art, Paul Thek is an outsider. Except for three years in the late 1960s, his work has, almost exclusively, been created and chronicled in Europe. While he is well represented abroad, not one painting or sculpture by him has found a home in an American public collection. One can speculate endlessly as to why Thek has been so ignored in his own country. The adamant secularism of contemporary American art has certainly not helped to advance an artist so deeply responsive to Catholicism, scholasticism, current events, folk ritual, legend, and literature in his creative expression. But the simplest reason for his exclusion may well be expressed by a qualified saw from that most irascible of American thinkers, H. L. Mencken: “It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume

So, in a way Wagner’s head did finally come to Kassel. Instead of the original plan, it was brought by Nitsch, Beuys, and Syberberg. And as was originally feared, it provided an uncomfortable moment. It would be convenient to see Wagner’s legacy as belonging only to a specific time and place. But that’s wrong. It belongs to the West and he is all of ours. Our artists, Nitsch and Beuys and Syberberg, also refuse to fit gracefully into a structure. Their projects not only encourage followers, they demand them—that is the point. Without followers, they would simply have an audience and the world that they want would be left as an idea. Like Wagner, their aesthetic requires first reevaluation, then appreciation. Their effect, or potential effect, is what elevates their art to life—to our lives, to our collective society, which is no less exhausted than the one that longed to cry out “Brother … master” to Wagner when he took his bows at Bayreuth.

Artforum 21, no. 1 (September 1982): 68–70.

Sugar and Vice and …

Balthus: A Retrospective

I saw the polka dots dancing, so to speak, on the ruffled jumpers of the two smaller girls seated side by side in the warm grass and holding hands, blowing chubby laughter in my direction as if they had never seen me before. And the peace, the warmth, the stasis, the smell of it—in such circumstances how could I help but enjoy my own immensity of size or the range of my interests, how help but appreciate the adaptability of certain natural scenes which, like this one, allow for the play of children one minute and the seclusion of adults the next? I felt a coolness between my porous thin white shirt and the skin of my chest. In linen slacks and alligator belt and hard low-cut shoes the color of amber, I sensed the consciousness of someone carefully dressed for taking care of children.

john hawkes, the blood oranges

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installation of Balthus began with The Window (1933), in which a young model—her blouse ripped back to expose one breast, her hand raised to ward off something melodramatic—teeters precariously toward an open window. The emotional mood of the painting is unattractively underscored in Sabine Rewald’s catalogue comments concerning its genesis:

When the young model Elsa Henriquez first arrived at Balthus’s studio in the Rue de Furstenberg, he opened the door dressed in his old army uniform, a dagger in his hand and a scowl on his face. He grabbed her blouse and tried to pull it open. Elsa recoiled in horror,

Sugar and Vice and … Balthus: A Retrospective young child … was longing to hack off those cheeks with a razor and would have done so often had not the idea of Justice and her long cortège of punishments restrained him on every occasion.”5 (Every occasion, that is, except The Guitar Lesson.) Clearly Balthus strains toward the dark, self-conscious surrealism of Lautréamont and its “sweet atmosphere” of evil. Still, for all his efforting, he emerges as a poseur caught in an onanistic web of artifice. In the end, a drop of semen on a silk handkerchief is not really the stuff of great art.

Artforum 22, no. 1 (June 1984): 84–85.