Gloria Klein: Beautiful Structures by aprilrichon

MAKING MARKS, MARKING TIME

Gloria Klein

MAKING MARKS, MARKING TIME

CHRISTIE’S

Gloria Klein

Gloria Klein, Number Seven (NYC 18), 1975-79. Photograph courtesy David Richard Gallery, New York. Artwork © Gloria Klein.

APRIL RICHON JACOBS

To discover the extraordinary body of work created by the artist Gloria Klein is to uncover a fascinating new realm, where a profusion of tiny, colorful marks create sophisticated arrangements that seem to pulse with an inner light. These paintings openly display the process of their creation, making evident the obsessive activity with which they were made.

awareness, including A Lesbian Show, in 1978 and the “Lesbian Art and Artists” issue of Heresies, an early feminist art journal. Klein used a system of numerical factors to create complex patterns out of a limited set of colors. Working with a 60-inch square canvas, she placed a series of one-inch diagonal marks within a 60-inch grid, the colors of which were based on factors of sixty.

This catalog marks the rst major solo exhibit in New York to delve exclusively into Klein’s paintings from the 1970s & ‘80s. It showcases the extraordinary talent of this largely forgotten artist.

These paintings are rooted in her early studies with the Conceptual artist Robert Barry at Hunter College between 1970 and `73. At Hunter, she also studied the phenomenological possibilities of color with the artist Robert Swain.

Born in 1936 in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, Klein came of age in New York in the 1970s and played a vital role in organizing many artist-based initiatives in SoHo and the Lower East Side. She also participated in several groundbreaking activities for lesbian artists’

Although her work shares certain af nities with both Minimalism and Color Field painting, it is rmly rooted in a Conceptual practice that is predicated on a self-devised

Making Marks, Marking Time

Making Marks, Marking Time: Gloria Klein’s Paintings of the 1970s & ‘80s

Despite relying upon a rational system or framework in her paintings, however, there are small uctuations in the length and width of each mark in Klein’s paintings. These subtle variations are a continual reminder of the physical presence of the artist’s hand and the “craft” of painting itself. In this case, seeing is believing. Encountering Klein’s hatch-mark paintings in person is breathtaking to behold. The slightly-raised surface texture of each individual mark drives home the laborious, time-consuming process of their creation.

Recent interest in the Pattern & Decoration movement brings Klein’s work to the forefront yet again. She was featured in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art catalogue in 2019, and the Blanton Museum of Art exhibited her painting Yellow Dawn (1975) in their Expanding Abstraction exhibit last Fall. In fact, Klein’s work was included in many of the early, seminal Pattern & Decoration exhibits in New York in the 1970s, including Pattern Painting at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in November of 1977. Like so many women artists whose work refused to neatly align within the prevailing artistic tends, Gloria Klein struggled to gain recognition in the era in which she lived. “Having felt myself to be an outsider,” she explained, in the 1970s, “I devised a system, the use of which grounded me and ordered my painting.” 1

Gloria Klein with her painting in an exhibit at 5 East Third St., 1979. Photograph by Geoffrey Biddle. © Geoffrey Biddle

Making Marks, Marking Time

system, executed in a meticulous, timeconsuming manner. Working within this rigid set of parameters paradoxically freed the artist to experiment with color, which, as the years progressed, she began to use more intuitively, creating shimmering, allover patterns that resemble woven textiles, needlepoint, stained glass, and the pointillist technique of Georges Seurat.

Ironically, it was often the very movements that championed feminism that ended up excluding Gloria and her work. As a result, she often had trouble tting in to any one prevailing style or genre. Instead, Gloria’s paintings are resolutely her own.

allowed her to express herself whist working within a unique, intuitive vernacular. Indeed, while Klein’s work is rigorous, mathematical and systems-based, it is also tender, intimate and deeply personal.

This exhibition allows her viewers to grasp the depth and breadth of her work through a new lens, placing her within an important cadre of women artists whose work has also been reappraised in recent years, including Yayoi Kusama, Ruth Asawa and Louise Bourgeois. Not unlike Kusama and Bourgeois, whose art was often sidelined by mainstream art, Klein suffered from emotional problems as a result. She ultimately sought refuge in an art form that was obsessive, meditative and even soothing, not unlike Kusama’s In nity Nets and Bourgeois’s Insomnia Drawings. This

Making Marks, Marking Time

Above: Gloria Klein, Magenta Divisor, c 1976. © Gloria Klein. Below, Louise Bourgeois, Insomia, 1996. © 2021 The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

“To structure the canvas, I use a grid and horizontal lines,” Gloria declared in an artist’s statement from the 1970s. “To mask this uniformity, however, I use predetermined colors in a random way.” 2 To create a painting such as Untitled (NYC 06), (1975, at left), a luminous arrangement of colorful diagonals on a bright, yellow ground, Gloria began by drawing a one-inch grid on a blank canvas. “I draw a grid of 1” square on the canvas. In each square I place a diagonal mark in ¼-inch tape and paint over the entire surface in a single color which varies from painting to painting. The tape is removed revealing white diagonal hatch marks which are then lled in with various colors.” 3 A standard 60-inch canvas, therefore, would contain a staggering 3,600 diagonal marks. These paintings are deeply rooted in a mathematical system. For a standard 60 inch canvas, Gloria used factors of 60 -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30 -- to distribute color, one at a time, according to its corresponding factor. Often complimentary colors were placed alongside each other, with red next to green, and so forth. “The brightest colors are put on rst and spaced furthest apart. Other colors are then added and distributed according to the factors but many hatch 4 marks are left blank at this stage.”

As her paintings progressed, Gloria began to move away from the factor system and placed her colors more intuitively. In paintings such as Number 7 (NYC 18) (1979; front cover & p. 21), a scintillating arrangement of candy-colored hatch marks on a blue ground, the placement of each color was decided at random. This was a timeconsuming and laborious endeavor that could take weeks if not months to complete. It was largely based upon her own innate

Her Process

Gloria Klein, Picnic at Wards Island, 1979. Photograph by Geoffrey Biddle. © Geoffrey Biddle

mastery of the intrinsic properties of color itself. “The end result is to stretch colors to their limits,” she explained, “examining how 5 different colors work in different situations.”

Her Origins Gloria Klein is a native New Yorker, born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, during the postwar boom of the early 1950s. Among her myriad in uences, she recalls her father’s career as a wallpaper hanger as having a formative impact on her work. It was Gloria who judged whether or not the enamel paint that her father mixed together actually matched the wallpaper’s exact hue. In the 1970s, Gloria attended Hunter College,

taking classes with the Conceptual artist Robert Barry. Barry encouraged her to think about the set of systems in which society and the world around us is organized. For Klein, this may have guided her toward developing the systems that she used to structure her paintings. Ironically, using a system of predetermined parts freed her up, allowing her to experiment with newer and more elaborate color variations and greater and more intricate patterning. Also at Hunter, Klein was introduced to the phenomenological possibilities of color and its relationships by the artist Robert Swain. Swain was a longtime member of what would become the “Hunter Color School,” which took a meticulous, scienti c approach to color by investigating how it is visually perceived.

Making Marks, Marking Time

Gloria Klein, Untitled, 1979. © Gloria Klein 2021

Gloria Klein would go on to claim ownership over the succinct diagonal marks that have become her signature, declaring in 1977: “I 6 wanted my own identity.” She continued to create these extraordinary paintings throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, with her canvases taking on ever more greater, and more elaborate patterning. In paintings like Untitled (NYC 02) (1981, see pp. 12 & 27), she creates a pixillated display of vibrant and pulsating color, where the individual one-inch hatch marks have been replaced by full color one-inch squares, arranged with the improvisatory air of a jazz musician. “She tried to push the limit of what each square of the 7 graph could hold,” the scholar Rachel Beaudoin explained. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Gloria’s work would become associated with the Pattern & Decoration movement of the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

Robert Swain, Untitled 703, 1978. © Robert Swain, courtesy the artist, New York

Making Marks, Marking Time

The optical quality of pure color had also been explored in the 1960s by Color Field artists, such as Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. Ellsworth Kelly’s early experiments with color seem particularly apt to Gloria’s work, but was not necessarily a known in uence on her paintings.

Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance III, 1951. © Ellsworth Kelly, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Pattern & Decoration The Pattern & Decoration movement of the late 1970s has been described as “the last genuine art movement of the Twentieth Century.” 8 In a sense, P&D was a natural outgrowth of mostly women artists who opted to reject the “emptying out” of Modernist painting that had been championed by the art critic Clement Greenberg in the 1960s. Greenberg insisted that a painting adhere only to the a priori elements of its own making -- at canvas and pigment. Early supporters of P&D, like the art critic Amy Goldin, knew that Greenberg’s reductivist parameters could not stand: “Artists are not notably renunciatory -- they don’t give up anything they want,” she declared in Arts magazine in 1966. 9 The P&D artists were a tight-knit group, based in New York and California, whose members were largely women, including Valerie Jaudon, Miriam Schapiro and Joyce Kozloff. Together they embraced color, patterning, and the traditional handicrafts of “women’s work” like ceramics, quilting, wallpaper and tapestries. Often

Gloria Klein, Untitled (NYC 27), 1981. Photograph courtesy David Richard Gallery, New York. Artwork © Gloria Klein.

Making Marks, Marking Time

Although her paintings were included in many of the early, important P&D exhibits, including Pattern Painting at P.S.1 in November of 1977 and Decorative Art: Recent Work at Douglass College Art Gallery at Rutgers University in November of 1978, Gloria was often excluded from what she considered to be a “cliquish” group. Perhaps as a result, her work did not appear in any of the P&D exhibits after 1978. Around that time, Gloria’s work became associated with the Criss-Cross art collective out of Boulder, Colorado. Criss-Cross was a rather quirky movement that championed the democratizing effect of pattern painting, speci cally its reliance upon a nonhierarchical system. This was in line with

Gloria Klein, Untitled (NYC 02), 1981. © Gloria Klein

Making Marks, Marking Time

childhood memories served as source material, with in uences seemingly everywhere -- on carpets, on walls, printed fabric, Persian miniatures, trips to the department store or a visit to Grandmother’s house. “Everything,” as Robert Kushner explained, “that was left out of Janson’s 10 History of Art.”

Criss-Cross Art Communications. (Image courtesy Rule Gallery, Denver and Marfa)

their origins as a rural, hippie commune in 1963 and their collective vision of a cooperative society. Although Gloria never belonged to the commune, her work was often included with Criss-Cross because it was visually similar to those in their group, such as George Woodman, the husband of ceramicist Betty Woodman. George and Betty were close personal friends with Gloria and she often stayed with them when participating in exhibits in Boulder. The system that Gloria adopted for use in her work was a deeply personal one. Its origins date back to the summer of 1970, stemming from a series of interpersonal relationships that had troubled her at the time. In speaking with the sculptor Mary-Ann Unger in 1978, Gloria revealed this, the fascinating origin story behind her use of diagonal hatch marks. It indicates the rejection she felt on a personal level and even the proto-feminist motivations that spurred her on: “I began inventing this system in the summer of 1970, not because I felt organized, but because I was angry. I was sharing a beach house with

Gloria Klein, Untitled, 1979. © Gloria Klein 2021

people who irritated me — and worse, I didn’t even have a place to paint. So I sat around and drew. I would strike out on graph paper with jabbing marks. … [D]iagonals are like striking out at someone or something… [and] I think in this situation the diagonals somewhere re ected my anger at the people who were around me at the time. …. I felt isolated and was in a controlled rage doing these hatch 11 marks on graph paper.” Gloria’s technique is revealed in a series of works on paper from the 1970s, many of which feature these slashing diagonal marks (see above, Untitled, 1979). A select group of these drawings were titled after women she either knew or knew of, including Gertrude Stein, Kate Millett, and the artist Joyce Kozloff (1979, ink on graph paper).

From a personal standpoint, the series of diagonal marks that Gloria came to develop cannot be prized apart from the era in which they were created. “With this system, I created an order in my paintings that satis ed my need to mark time [and] to place 12 myself.” Indeed, Gloria had found a way to situate herself within a world that didn’t necessarily always welcome her. The curator Rebecca Lowery, writing in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art catalog With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, from 2019, summarized this effect, writing: “[This] shift was tied to her search for an authentic artistic voice, and it 13 had a freeing effect.” In early 1978, Gloria included one of her signature hatch mark paintings in A Lesbian

Making Marks, Marking Time

Gloria Klein, Statement, 1978. © Gloria Klein 2021

Show at 112 Greene Street, curated by Harmony Hammond. This collaborative event proved to be one of the seminal moments in the history of queer artists’ relevance. “Because of the attitudes in this society towards lesbians,” Hammond wrote in the exhibit’s brochure, “there were some women who felt that they could not participate, and some were forced to withdraw. …. Hopefully, this exhibition will begin to dissolve the isolation of lesbian 14artists as well as give visibility to the work.” Gloria was also included in the “Lesbian Artists” issue of Heresies in the Fall of 1977. Gloria’s slow and methodical application of thousands of minute marks helped her to “right the ship,” slowing down time and establishing a rational order over things. As an artistic practice, her slow, methodical application of countless individual marks can be compared to Yayoi Kusama’s In nity Nets (opposite), which she has painted, off and on, since the 1950s. Like Gloria, Kusama is single-minded and unrelenting in painting the

Making Marks, Marking Time

In nity Nets, which she has described as stemming from the hallucinations that had plagued her since childhood -- and a subsequent feeling of depersonalization, being detached from reality. So, too, did Louise Bourgeois contend with the legions of personal memories and trauma of her childhood in the series of over two hundred drawings she produced between November 1994 and June 1995, that have become known as the Insomnia Drawings (see p. 7). In the 1980s, Gloria’s paintings became even more ornate. As the years progressed, she began to combine her signature diagonal hatch-marks with longer diagonal lines of the same 1/4-inch width, but stretched out like thin streaks of light or skeins of yarn. She paired these with squares of varying sizes and colors. In paintings like Happy New York #4 (1982, p. 33) and Orange Pageantry (1982, p. 35), she lets loose, unleashing her full potential. It is in these paintings of the 1980s

Yayoi Kusama, Nets Blue, 1960. © YAYOI KUSAMA

that Gloria’s innate mastery of color, pattern and design comes into its own. Gloria Klein’s work does not neatly align with any one artistic practice, but instead shares af nities with many of the radical movements coming out of New York in the 1970s. Her paintings are indebted to the Pattern & Decoration Movement and the legacy of “women’s work,” with its obsessive markmaking. Their shimmering, tessellated surfaces have been also compared to pointillism, stained glass, Illuminated Manuscripts and Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. Conceptually, they are rooted in her early studies with Robert Barry and Robert Swain at Hunter College. Above all, her powerful body of work demonstrates her remarkable talent for inventing, and sustaining, her own, unique artistic vision. April Richon Jacobs is an art advisor based in Austin, TX.

Endnotes: 1 G. Klein, quoted in an artist’s statement dated September 1, 2000, np. 2 G. Klein, quoted in an undated artist’s statement, circa 1975, np. 3 G. Klein, quoted in op. cit., 9/1/2000, np. 4 G. Klein, quoted in M.A. Unger, “Interview with Gloria Klein,” Criss-Cross Art Communications, No. 6 (March 1978), p. 9. 5 G. Klein, quoted in op. cit., c. 1977, np. 6 G. Klein, quoted in op. cit., c. 1977, np. 7 R. Beaudoin, in conversation with the author, March 21, 2021. 8 H. Cotter, quoted in “Scaling a Minimalist Wall with Bright, Shiny Colors,” New York Times, Jan. 15, 2008, p. E1. 9 A. Goldin, “A Note on Opticality,” Arts Magazine, May 1966; reprinted in R. Kushner, ed., Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt: Art Criticism 1964–1978, Stockbridge, 2011, p. 41 10 R. Kushner, quoted in G. Adamson, “Reassessing Pattern & Decoration: The Last Art Movement of the Twentieth Century,” ArtNews, September 3, 2019. 11 G. Klein, quoted in M.A. Unger, op. cit., March 1978, p. 9. 12 G. Klein, quoted in op. cit., 9/1/2000. 13 R. S. Lowery, “In nite Progress: Criss-Cross and the Gender of Pattern Painting,” in With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972-1985, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, p. 116 14 H. Hammond, quoted in A Lesbian Show: An Exhibition of Visual Art, Performances and Readings by Lesbian Artists, exh. cat., 112 Workshop, New York, Jan. 21-Feb. 11, 1978, np.

Making Marks, Marking Time

Gloria Klein in her Chinatown studio, 1982. Photograph by Geoffrey Biddle. © Geoffrey Biddle. (Artwork © Gloria Klein)