1 Aristodimos Kaldis: Discarding the Unessentials
The history of art is an untidy affair. Instead of the orderly series of neatly defined movements chronicled by survey courses, it is probably better described as a shapeless constellation of sometimes recalcitrant individuals. That some of them, at a given time, share assumptions about what a work of art could (or should) be, gives rise to those survey course categories and more importantly to the idea of a zeitgeist or at least, a mainstream. Yet there are always artists who bypass or are bypassed by such collective aspirations, who choose to pursue, often in isolation, directions that have nothing to do with dominant ideas of what is possible or desirable. More remarkable are artists who are at once "insiders" and "independents" painters or sculptors who are part of the mainstream circle yet remain stubbornly apart from the mainstream aesthetic. Fairfield Porter, a fixture in the social and intellectual life of the Abstract Expressionists who determinedly painted naturalistic images of his domestic landscape and his family, belongs to this select order of unclassifiable individuals. So does Aristodimos Kaldis. Kaldis was a legendary figure in the postwar New York artists' vanguard, a multilingual polymath famous for his mane of unruly hair, his impressive eyebrows, and his flamboyant, trailing scarves. He was famous, too, for his voluble discourses on art and on much else, besides. He was described as "able to speak on the grand design of the universe" and once delivered a lecture at one of the celebrated gatherings known as The Artists Club on "The American Artist as Magician, Healer, Outcast, Redeemer, and Savior." A relentlessly gregarious participant in the downtown art world, Kaldis seems to have known everybody. He counted Gorky, Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning as friends; Elaine de Kooning painted his portrait. And more. Yet for all his notoriety as an outsize personality, Kaldis was not simply an art world curiousity, but a serious painter, albeit a selftaught one who began to paint only after having done many other things. His original, expressionist images were admired by his artist friends and his exhibitions were well received by critics and discriminating viewers. The famously exacting Albert Barnes bought one of Kaldis's figure