Himmelfarb, Circulating Library

JOHN HIMMELFARB SELECTED WORKS SEPTEMBER 15 – OCTOBER 17, 2009

A Circulating Library

Paris Truck Mixed media drawing 7.5 x 11 in.

2005

One of the first views a visitor encounters as they step over a high threshold and enter the raw space that acts as a foyer in John Himmelfarb’s Chicago studio building is of a pair of library card catalogue cabinets stacked one upon the other. The grid of 300 drawers stands a little over 10 feet in height. The face of each drawer is 4 x 5 ½ inches and displays a brushed chrome pull and knurled screw-top that signifies the end of a rod which extends back through a small hole at the bottom of the hundreds of cards contained therein. The entire effect is that of a visual matrix that subtly provides an introduction to what one will encounter as one explores this center of creativity.

The carefully crafted cabinets, along with their cards, each of which was individually typewritten by an anonymous library worker, have been made obsolete with the advent of computer technology and the internet. Each card possesses a discrete, abstract summary of the book it represents, and a number which locates it within the three dimensional space of the library building.

Information and imagination have been distilled through research and creativity into a collection of singular works, each represented by a card in the catalogue.

John Himmelfarb’s studio

Himmelfarb incorporates these cards into his studio practice. He honors their previous life by recycling them as support for drawings he produces in a stream of consciousness that might: pun on the title of the card’s book; use the title as inspiration or, more often than not, disregard the title completely and create an “automatic drawing.”

They might focus on a formal concern; study another artist’s approach to a subject; make a to-do list; or capture that sparkling idea that shows remarkable promise but is just as remarkably fleeting.

He notes the day and often the moment they are created, providing

509 H17s

Hall, Alfred Rupert The scientific revolution, 15001800; the formation of the modern scientific attitude.

Beacon Press, 1956 390 p.

1.Science – History

I. Title

a sort of visual diary of his thought-processes and concerns over time. Although the library card drawings do not serve as the bedrock source for his artwork, they are a valuable reference tool for him and assist the viewer in following his restless exploration of form. Occasionally, they have been translated “verbatim,” if you will, with stunning results (see Borrowed Time (2007), & March, 2006 library card drawing, Living)

At first glance, it is perhaps surprising that all of the artwork in this exhibition was produced by a single artist. There is no prevailing polemic, no manifesto nailed to the door. The work is consistently outside mainstream approaches to abstraction and figuration. On view are paintings, sculptures, prints, ceramic vases and even tapestries.

Many approaches to subject matter are in evidence, but, like volumes in a library, each piece is a carefully considered, discrete work, a distillation of thought carved from decades of experience. Upon closer examination, it is clear that these singular works are united by elements collected in a circulating library of abstraction that the artist has been building, literally, since birth.

Borrowed Time Wool Woven by Fabian Cardenas Cori, Ayacucho, Peru 87 x 61 in.

2007

It is difficult to write about John Himmelfarb’s approach to making art without noting the contribution which his family has played in its development. Both the artist’s father, Samuel Himmelfarb (1904-1976) and mother Eleanor (1910-2009) were accomplished artists whose aesthetic was primarily abstract. Samuel attended art school in Milwaukee, then Madison, Wis., supporting himself as a musician.

He found his way to New York City where he took some classes

HISTORY

at the Art Students League and gravitated toward work with architectural firms. Eventually the deprivations of the Great Depression in Gotham forced a return to the Midwest. There, he worked through a variety of design-oriented positions before starting his own firm. His timing was good. Corporate America was beginning to realize that it was often cheaper and more efficient to farm out design problems to specialists. He saw the potential for Chicago’s growth as a national business convention center at mid-century and successfully positioned his business to take advantage of the many corporate conclaves and trade shows that made the city the center of business entertainment for decades.

The Himmelfarbs continued to paint and exhibit widely. They presented work at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Arts Club, and other exhibition venues throughout the region. They provided what must have been a fertile home life for a young man interested in exploring the arts. Himmelfarb writes, “My dad designed a beautiful house full of art, and it was full of art objects, art books, music, trips to theater, dance, museums.” The house was (at the time of its construction) a very contemporary design with an open plan, dedicated studio spaces, and sited on seven heavily wooded acres in Winfield. Young John took advantage of every opportunity to explore the undeveloped region.

Himmelfarb is not a man who “always knew” that making art was his destiny. A college professor encouraged him to commit to an independent study in drawing for a semester. “After a couple of weeks of intense drawing, self directed, the light bulb finally lit!”

Once committed, he staked out a difficult position that virtually all of his associates except his parents discouraged­—he wouldn’t teach, he wouldn’t design, he would make his living making art.

This workmanlike approach has served the artist well as he has built an exhibition resume that spans over 87 solo presentations, numerous public and corporate commissions, many artist-inresidence positions, and inclusion in major museums’ collections throughout the U.S. and overseas during the past four decades.

Deep Green Sea Acrylic on canvas 81 x 56 in.

2006

Growing up among artists who have made a practical choice to make a living through design and not chosen art as a life-style furnished Himmelfarb with an unpretentious sensibility in his dealings with the world-at-large. Educated at Harvard, he has always shunned ironyladen approaches to expression in favor of an almost blue-collar work ethic whose aesthetic celebrates thought and personal investment. Absent is the affected rebelliousness and signature trademark many artists feel is critical for recognition. Citing the shock of the new as the driving force behind artistic change during the 20th Century, the artist recently commented, “My point being, I suppose, that choosing an approach to art that is firmly based in “visual language,” refers to and builds on the past, and eschews the pursuit of ‘firstness,’ is the ultimate rebellion, paradoxically.” He rejected a move to New York and has always approached his work with a Midwestern practicality, purchasing a dilapidated 4-story brick building in 1971 and taking a year and a half making it habitable as both work and living space. This prescient move, made to establish financial stability and escape the cycle of gentrification and escalating rents that so often accompany artists’ urban homesteading, later allowed him to buy a building where he now has his studio.

Recently, Himmelfarb’s work has moved in several different directions while maintaining contact with basic stylistic signatures.

correspondences

High Style Bronze 9.5 x 5 x .75 in.

2003

Many artists find comfort and creative drive through a narrow focus on subject matter or technique. Each of Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings tells a separate truth about form, light, color, paint application, and patience. Josef Albers spent a lifetime parsing the relationships of hue, value, and saturation within a square format.

Other artists seek to experience the challenge of unfamiliar media, embracing awkward moments of uncertainty as they discover new truths about their personal aesthetic universe. One of the most fruitful avenues of access to develop an appreciation of John Himmelfarb’s work is to concentrate on continuously circulating relationships of fundamental elements over time and across media. The artwork selected for this show represents the disparate approaches to media, yet the consistent aesthetic sensibility, the artist has explored over roughly 10 years as he has enlarged his technical palette.

Himmelfarb has made a career of turning two-dimensional space inside-out and topsy-turvy: drawings so dense with imagery they appear to be calligraphy; calligraphic paintings that balance mark and space in an ambiguous dance of push-and-pull; colorful iconic forms that might be pictographs, could be figurative, might be pure abstraction; matrices of nervous line that are layered with residual forms/shapes from earlier paintings sometimes asserting themselves as foreground and sometimes acting as ghosts of paintings past, pentimenti offering quiet testimony to his persistent search for balance.

Wax Eloquent (2007) provides a clear example of one approach to playing with space. Many of the shapes reflect sources from the “real” world: cannon, trees, dogs, a ship. But the space surrounding each of the forms also creates a dynamic, abstract shape. It is through his close attention to how line and space define form that Himmelfarb’s art achieves its restless movement and continuous, dynamic sense of re-invention.

Wax Eloquent Cast iron 33 x 23 in.

2007

the truck arrives

Hope Acrylic on canvas 38 x 60 in.

2006

Himmelfarb began his considered exploration of sculpture by casting iconic pictographic forms in bronze. Echoes of these shapes had been present in his painting since the mid-1970s and are evident in works such as Tool Talk (2001) and Mop (2003).

The resultant sculptures reflect their origin in the artist’s continuing interest in calligraphic marks (see Reference, 2008).

High Style (2003) appears to be pulled from a Chinese scroll with its crosstrees of bronze enlivened by gestural surface treatment. Party Line (2003) uses a broad curve to imply negative space even as it puns on telephonic history and politics. By the time he arrived at Stretch and Rock Me (both 2003) he was making figuratively abstract objects that successfully activate the space surrounding them while remaining thoroughly flat forms. Leaning in Your Direction, also from 2003, is heavier, both physically and conceptually. The figurative work evokes thoughts of an archaic Northern European figurine with its broad planes, carefully placed holes, and sensitive patina.

Two library card drawings from 2005 seem to indicate a shift in attention toward a quintessentially American subject matter. On July 24, a tow truck appears alone inside a frame of iconic pictographs.

And in Paris on July 26, 2005, on a library card for “The Mammals of North America,” by E. Raymond Hall, a pencil drawing incorporates arched elements of his Inland Romance series paintings from 2003 as cargo for what may be a firetruck. On the back, the artist has written “at the restaurant near filles di cavaliers 10 PM ONZIEME/ ART; 80 RUE Amelot 75011; 0143 38 8525.” The definitive nature of his legend affirms the significance of the moment.

Perseverance Acrylic on canvas 53 x 133 in.

2006

Perseverance, a painting from 2006, reflects his blossoming interest in the subject. The wall-sized painting is an energetic accretion of jots, marks, color shapes, and a truck image that seems less of a picture than the result of flotsam coalescing at the surface.

Trucks continue to appear with regularity on library cards throughout the period from 2005 to the present. But it was a fellowship at the Arts in Industry program in Kohler, Wisconsin during the winter of 2007 that allowed the artist to begin seriously pursuing a threedimensional approach to this new topic. Immersing himself in the experience, he worked twelve to fifteen-hour days throughout the three month period taking every advantage of the remarkable opportunity and exploring varied approaches to ceramics, welded steel, cast brass, and cast iron.

Greek Opera, Reefer, Prepared and Bird in Hand (all 2007) emerged from this period of wide-ranging creativity. Greek Opera, with its six-foot length, is a hulking, militaristic amalgamation of Humvee and Mesa Verde ruins and is on long term loan to a private collector.

Reefer makes reference “to a refrigerated truck, but also to a reef, like you’d find in the ocean,� the artist said recently. The organic work, with its drippy, droopy, crusty forms appears to have been dredged from a South Pacific underwater graveyard for World War II relics.

Reefer Cast brass 14.75 x 30.5 x 9 in.

2007

Himmelfarb quickly began to refine and apply his characteristic spatial game to the new medium. The viewer will make out the restless line threading throughout his oeuvre in both Prepared and Bird in Hand. But, Bird in Hand, in particular, announces a familiar, yet freshly articulated, voice.

We immediately recognize the old, beaten-up truck. However, Himmelfarb has once again turned space inside out, or more correctly, abandoned space as we normally experience it and chosen to use the truck icon as a platform for experimenting with layered space and line. It’s as if Irene Ryan and Georges Braque got together to design a moving van. Himmelfarb’s gesture, his calligraphy, his pictographic shapes and ambiguous space are all there—but now it’s 3-D.

recent paintings

Inventory Acrylic on canvas 48 x 60 in.

2008

A comparison of three recent paintings provides insight into Himmelfarb’s general attitude toward art-making. Despite employing different approaches in each work, none are seen as more or less precious than the other.

Much of the artist’s attention in the past two years has been spent on exploring and enlarging his understanding of the truck as a subject. 2008’s Inventory functions much as Wax Eloquent—a listing of approaches and images that, this time, have to do with trucks. Some are dark on a light ground, some light on a dark ground, some frontal, some side view. Himmelfarb has lifted the lumpy-bumpy surface treatment from the three-dimensional work and deftly transposed it to canvas with a sense of urgency, layering and incorporating the drips and splashes that occurred as he attacked the surface.

Dug In (2008) is more like a blind contour drawing where the student’s pencil carefully maintains contact with his page as he draws from the nude without looking at his results. Himmelfarb’s line is no less engaged as it rambles across the surface creating luscious shapes and forms that at first glance seem as though they might define familiar cargo, but upon closer examination, dissolve into a loaded brushmark that’s as delicious as Welch’s grape jelly.

With Revelation (2009), he combines aspects of Inventory and Dug In to create a work that marries line, shape, and form with content— here the viewer experiences parts of the architectonic load visible in the library card drawing from 2005 and bits and pieces of other Inland Romance paintings, as well.

Revelation Acrylic on canvas 38 x 60 in.

2009

Dug in Acrylic on canvas 38 x 60 in.

2008

Rewriting

Bird in Hand Cast iron 16 x 27 x 13 in.

2007

The time at Kohler casting his fleet of trucks whet Himmelfarb’s appetite for challenge. In 2008, he acquired a 1949 International Harvester model KB-1 pickup with the idea in mind that he would create one of these works in the “real world.” The viewer’s experience of Conversion (2009) shifts through several phases: first, there’s the curiosity factor—What is this stuff? Gradually, one begins to pick out automobile grilles, two-man saw blades, farm whatchamacallits, and other obscure pieces of sculptural metal that have been welded and painted in a seemingly helter-skelter fashion. An antique typewriter and 16 mm projector imply the presence of a narrative known only to the artist. Himmelfarb addresses automotive history by making this a lil’ Red Pickup.

Finally, as if the viewer’s eyes are finally getting used to the dark, the ‘art’ part of the piece begins to surface. Here are shapes, lines, and gently curved planes which provide subtly graduated value relationships in abstract spatial arrangement. Here are forms and shapes that have iconic meaning and identity in their other lives, lives which have been subsumed in service to the composition at hand. Here is a sculptural realization of many of his painterly ideals. Once again, he’s checked out his own book, rewritten it, and presented it anew.

Over the past four decades John Himmelfarb has built a complex and compelling set of approaches to creating abstract works that remain firmly outside mainstream stylistic impulses. While tangling and teasing out iconic images in the language of abstraction in one series, he has incorporated references to real world objects such as plants, buildings, landscapes and trucks in other series of works.

His complex vision continues to unfold a rich dialogue of color and theme that, together, form a sumptuous library of recurring, yet freshly resonant, images for the viewer to ponder.

Conversion Found objects 11 x 25 x 10 ft.

2008

GEOFFREY BATES

gEOFFREy bATES HAS WORKED OVER THIRTY YEARS AS AN ARTS PROFESSIONAL. hE IS CURRENTLY DIRECTOR AND CURATOR OF THE NATHAN MANILOW SCULPTURE PARK AT GOVERNORS STATE UNIVERSITY AT UNIVERSITY PARK, ILLINOIS.

show dates –

SEPTEMBER 15 OCTOBER 17, 2009

OPENING RECEPTION – SEPTEMBER 24 4:30 to 7:30 pm

More info ABOUT JOHN www.johnhimmelfarb.com