Extreme Eclecticism

By Robert Cozzolino

Jack Wolfe approached the act of painting with humility and curiosity. Over the arc of his long career he followed an intuition that guided him to numerous shifts in subject matter and process. In the late 1950s he made ferociously composed, emotionally volatile Crucifixion paintings. During the early days of the Civil Rights movement and American War in Vietnam, he made politically assertive paintings protesting the human rights abuses he felt were happening on U.S. soil and overseas. Wolfe’s calmly composed and gorgeously realized portraits of the 1970s and 1980s seem to have come from his close emotional bond with sitters. His monumental portraits of the courageous leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM), reveal the degree to which activism mattered to him and how he respected those who put their lives on the line for change.

Wolfe’s abstract paintings, which he made throughout his life, do not form a through line amidst these shifts so much as they engage in a conversation with his other work. As he made a wide range of abstractions Wolfe learned lessons that he applied to political and existentialist subject matter. Meaningful ways of deploying pattern and geometry affected the austerity of portraits. The scale and objecthood of his shaped canvases revealed powerful ways to compose homages to AIM leaders. Wolfe understood the value of pushing into new creative territory because of this relational practice. It was how he grew as an artist – accepting some discomfort and productively working through it. “You’re not anywhere unless

you’re beyond what you know, and you can’t even start to paint a painting until you reach the point where you are going beyond what you know,” he told an interviewer in 1961. “What you know is a security … I have to risk everything every time.”1

Contrary to what surveys of modern art in the United States may have proclaimed for many generations (and in response, museum installations of the period) the American art world reflected and supported the variety shown in Wolfe’s practice. Midcentury museum surveys of contemporary art regularly showcased a pluralistic artworld, and Wolfe himself showed purely abstract paintings alongside those that were explicitly representational. Many of his peers shifted back and forth to freely work between abstract and representational modes throughout their careers. Wolfe was self-aware and thoughtful about this voracious creativity. “It’s complicated because I’m not really an abstractionist – I’m a grossifier,” he noted. “I’m looking for some way to deal with everything. I want my approach to be open so that using any means and dealing with anything is a possibility each time I come to a painting. Of course, this is childish … and it’s childlike.”

For Wolfe, each new painting achieved its own character and fulfilled a need to express something of being in the world. Whether it was an ecstatic response to color and light, inspired by being in nature, or furious despair at seeing pictures of civilian dead and wounded in a war, that free exploration in the studio brought forth a form commensurate with the content, emphasizing his emotional relationship to that source. This approach was a way of “keeping the possibilities wide open, allowing for an infinite amount of interchange.” This strategy is evident even in the focused group of abstractions featured in the current exhibition. Chorus (1959) sets writhing organic forms that jitter from searing red to grey and then simmering oranges and yellows within a framework of hard edged architectural elements along the edges. The contrasts provide a tangible sense of depth, light, and space, despite no recognizable imagery. In Archer (1963) Wolfe shifted the axis of the composition at an angle to animate the square format of the canvas. Hard lines and bands of solid color at the upper right and lower left compress the vigorous gestural brushwork into the center, causing a thrilling tension between the frames and churning action in the core. Blubar (1976) presents a set of nine circles and squares, nested in one another and arranged in a three by three grid against a cruciform stricture. To soften the geometry, Wolfe gradated the color tones, varied the thickness of the shapes’ edges, made lines permeable, and subtly altered scale. These decisions enliven the composition, alleviating the rigor one might expect of such a painting.

So many myths pervade the histories of modernism in the United States. They still form the source for what the art market, museum world, and academia values. It is hard work to untangle them and to tell different stories that foreground what is unfamiliar to specialists, connoisseurs, gatekeepers. We can trace the source of these myths in successive critical attempts to impose order on unruly creative human beings. Critic Clement Greenberg is prominent here, writing in 1944, “The extreme eclecticism now prevailing in art is unhealthy, and it should be counteracted, even at the risk of dogmatism and intolerance.”2 Perhaps as unlikely a source as one might expect countered this two decades later – the artist Donald Judd, when he wrote, “The history of art and art’s condition at any time are pretty messy. They should stay that way. One can

think about them as much as one likes, but they won’t become neater; neatness isn’t even a good reason for thinking about them … Things can only be diverse and should be diverse.”3 That is an attitude Jack Wolfe would have approved, countering what Greenberg pled as he tried to corral creative production into a neat and tidy teleological aesthetic. Wolfe’s choices would have infuriated Greenberg.

Art audiences increasingly want to understand relationships in history better and to reconsider those discarded by the establishment. Upon deeper examination of how past art world communities operated on the ground, we find relationships were more fluid and people who are kept apart in canonical histories were there together, interconnected and at the heart of things. The heart of things was often not really a single place but networks, interconnected systems of community – a stronger model than the idea of a privileged geographical center. The center was everywhere, a shifting lens that broke ideas into fractals that reflected light throughout the world.

Among the pervasive myths in American modernism is the assertion that art made in one or two cities deserve our full attention while the rest of the vast country is minor and only tangentially relevant. Artists working outside of that place (e.g. New York City) are still relegated to the margins, despite the vibrancy of their vision or the communities in which they choose to live and contribute. These myths would have us believe that artists are/were abstract or they are not; these modes of working are irreconcilable, and become politically determinate. Consider the wellknown but absurd controversy over Philip Guston’s transition in the late 1960s back to recognizable imagery. Canonical wisdom has it that confident, selfassured artists should find a style and stick with it; if they are consistent it is better for the market – it can consider their name a brand. Finally – histories are already written, authorities have spoken, and what you see in textbooks and on permanent display in “major” museums is what matters.

Jack Wolfe proves all of this to be fallacy and it is significant that he is re-introduced to us now, when so many aspects of museums and the art world are being examined, interrogated, and remade. He followed his curiosity about the world and made art according to where it led him, regardless of how it did or did not fit into a known narrative or please a market. That meant shifting his focus in ways that might be surprising, but it is truer to how we navigate the world if we are vulnerable and open to its possibilities.

Robert Cozzolino Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings Minneapolis Institute of Art

1 “Quotes from a Conversation with Jack Wolfe,” in Robert Hamilton, Jack Wolfe: Recent Paintings (Lincoln, MA: deCordova Museum, 1961), n.p. Subsequent quotes by the artist come from this source.

2 Clement Greenberg, “A New Installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a Review of the Exhibition Art in Progress,” in O’Brien, Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism Volume I, 213.

3 Donald Judd, “Local History,” Arts Yearbook 7 (1964); reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings, 1959-1975 (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and New York: New York University Press, 1975), 151.