Paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and ephemera from 1970-2004 from the Estate of Lester Goldman
April 7 – May 26, 2013 PAST IS PRESENT WITH A PURPOSE In a society that seems increasing obsessed with living in the moment of here and now, a posthumous identity poses a challenge: how does an artist remain relevant in a world of Contemporary Art that is commonly understood as the art of our present (living) time, once they are deceased? The challenge of any community is to keep alive the memories of those who represent significant links to our past. Individually and collectively, our efforts to preserve both objects and stories become an important part of our own legacy and a measure of our humanity. Such is the case for the Estate of Lester Goldman and the Goldman family, whose responsibility it has become to catalogue, preserve, and share the prodigious output of one of Kansas City’s most well-known and beloved artists, Lester Goldman, who passed away in 2005 at the age of 63. Outside the scale of institutions, it remains no small task to establish and maintain an archive of a community’s artistic legacy, and Lester would be a worthy candidate for such an archive. He was an artist whose every environment was in some measure transformed by his presence, if not literally by his touch, and he leaves behind his signature in the form of copious sketchbooks, notes, drawings, paintings, sculptures, assemblages, whole installations, documentation, books, tools, and ephemera. Something less tangible, but no less memorable or expansive however, is Lester’s influence and an indelible and lasting impression born from four decades of relationships with collectors, peers, colleagues, and his former students. Lester was not one to make art so easy to archive or even to categorize. He commonly worked on canvases eight-by-six feet and larger; some of his sculptures were larger than a car and comprised of many kinetic parts; he presented a number of performance-based and ephemeral works; he experimented with many non-traditional materials; and his
life’s work on paper, unfurled, could easily map out the floor of any Kansas City warehouse. In a lengthy professional career that continues posthumously, Lester Goldman remains compelling to us through works of art that possess a vitality and the full energy of his life force. Lester’s artwork shares with us a generous intellect from which we may continue to learn more about his own personal mythology as well as the history of art that surrounded him during his decades of production. Tale of the Eye is but a brief overview, lighting upon a few examples of both well-established and lesser-known works of art and ephemera that only begin to inform the seeming ever-expanding enormity of Lester’s genius, and the largess of his contributions to a community and the greater art world. There is a limit to how much reality any one person may comprehend about the world around them, although some perspectives become quite broad by virtue of an insatiable curiosity. For an artist like Lester, his life’s work may be seen as a massive effort to perceive the world around him and assign meaning to what he saw. Throughout the trajectory of his life, however, he also acknowledged an inherent elusiveness and elasticity in assigning meaning and interpretation to things that become a kind of reality of his own making, of riddles, poems, a visual language of forms, and material moments.
A ROVING EYE, KEEPING PACE WITH CHANGE Born in Philadelphia, in 1942, to a Jewish family of Eastern European immigrants from Kiev, Ukraine, Lester began his artistic career painting murals and designing sets for summer stock theatre in the Catskills with his high school instructor. He remained in Pennsylvania to earn his BFA in Painting from the Philadelphia College of Art, in 1964, before moving to attend, first Iowa University, and then on to Indiana University, where he earned his MFA in Painting in 1966. It was among these college years that he spent a formative time studying and painting with artists Leland Bell and Larry Day, while spending summers at the Aspen School of Contemporary Art and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. During the late 1960’s, Lester Goldman’s artwork consisted mainly of highly rendered paintings from observation in the Dutch and Flemish traditions; landscapes from his travels as well as traditional figurative genre subjects painted from the studio model or when friends or family would pose for him. In this work we may observe that Lester was an excellent draftsman with a keen eye for rendering to exacting proportions. These pieces possess a solid foundation of observational drawing that yielded images of photo-realistic quality. It was also during this time that the larger art world was beginning to experience a growing multiplicity of simultaneous stylistic directions that would portend the breakdown of discernable movements by the start of the 21st Century. In the second half of the 20th Century, on the heels of the movement of Abstract Expressionism, artists were beginning to explore other modes of working that were increasingly reactionary to what had come before, or in response to some new and burgeoning Image left: Lester Goldman, A Life’s Work, 2008 (Goldman Family Collection) Photography courtesy E.G. Schempf
POLITICS & AMBITIONS: THE 1980’s & 90’s By the beginning of the early 1980’s, arabesque and gestural line drawing with paint would soon emerge from Lester’s experimentations to become one of the signature elements of his remaining life’s work. This development also coincided with the rise of the Graffiti Movement in the late 1970’s through the mid-1980’s with artists such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and A.R. Penck rising to prominence. Lester’s work from this time is a celebration and liberation of painting through the act of drawing, even as his narrative subjects grew weightier.
Image above: Lester Goldman, Self Portrait with Jakob, 1975 (repainted 1990), oil on canvas, 24” x 24” (Goldman Family Collection) influences. Artists began responding to a growing consumer culture and the development of mass media with Pop Art; they were questioning certain rules and accepted notions, limits, and definitions of art through Minimalism and Op Art; and they were exploring relationships among the arts and increasing political and multicultural spheres with movements such as Arte Povera, Actionism, and Fluxus, which blurred the line between, painting, sculpture, performance, poetry, music, photography, and film. Among this emerging multiplicity, still other artists were combining and recombining Classical modes of representation with late 19th Century and early 20th Century movements of Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism, or responding to evolving contemporary technologies, ways of seeing, and a critique of a traditional hierarchy of acceptable subject matter (i.e. Photorealism).
DESTINATION KANSAS CITY: THE 1960’s & 70’s Near the end of his college years, Lester met artist Wilbur Niewald, then Chair of Painting and Printmaking at the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI), who persuaded him to move to Kansas City to begin teaching in the Painting Department at KCAI in 1966. In KCAI’s Painting Department he would meet a number of fellow artists and influential colleagues: Ron Slowinski, who also hired on in 1966; Michael Walling, who joined the department in 1970; Jim Sajovic, who began teaching in 1971; Warren Rosser, who began teaching in 1972; and C. Stanley Lewis who taught in the department from 1969 to 1986. It was also in Kansas City where he would meet Kathrin Topp, marry, and begin to raise a family that would feature prominently in his life, his work, and ultimately his career. Wilbur Niewald was an artist emerging from his own beginnings as a Modernist abstract painter of the early 1950’s to pursue a rigorous form of observational Cubism by the time he met Lester. His influence upon Lester’s work grew, and by the late 1970’s, Lester’s observational realism was being supplanted, first by Cubist experimentations and sculptural investigations, and then by something softer and calligraphic that was more akin to Neo-expressionism – a style that would later grow into dominance among painters by the end of the 1970’s. For Lester, a dedicated student of art history, his work would remain at the forefront of larger developments within a broadening field of contemporary art.
Lester’s works of the 1980’s and 1990’s are full of expressions of space, and the energy of matter that makes up the universe, be it the laws of nature or humanity’s forces at work both for and against itself. Lester was becoming increasingly interested in the possibility of an artist to serve as a prominent voice, if not active participant, in a wider sociopolitical forum and, by the middle of the 1980’s, overtly political subjects began to find their way into his work. Common themes were likely to be Gulf War I, the rise of the AIDs pandemic, censorship, and freedom of expression. It was also during this decade that Lester became involved in designing posters for the American Civil Liberties Union’s national, annual anti-censorship campaigns in response to the US Government’s aggressive crackdown on the National Endowment for the Arts. (This last issue would hit close to home for Lester as he was a double recipient of NEA funding, first with a Grant for Painting in 1986, and then with a Senior Fellowship in 1989.) From 1986 to 1996, Lester would embark on perhaps the most ambitious project of his career – a ten-year, three-exhibition series called The Latest Blow to Mirth in which he intended to remove the “artist” from the proverbial pedestal of art history and present him as a collaborative member of a community alongside other creative disciplines. Lester also wished to collapse the space between artist and audience by inviting both to share the same creative space and process. Contemplated collectively, 55 Gallons of Blue Laughter (1989 at LeedyVoulkos Art Center), Kabalival: Carnival of Intrigue (1993 at LeedyVoulkos Art Center), and Womb Shot (1996 at Grand Arts) represents a staggering feat. Lester served as producer, director, and co-performer in these community productions in which he enlisted the participation of numerous fellow artists, musicians, writers, poets, students, and other volunteers. These participants would act out both intimate and universal narratives in choreographed and scripted performances of abstract and seemingly nonsensical, riddle-like prose within environments of large-scale paintings, and puppet-like, Rube Goldberg-inspired, kinetic sculptures that viewers could interact with or otherwise engage. Two external factors are worth acknowledging in Lester’s ability to realize projects of such scale: the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center had only just opened in 1985 with a cavernous 5,000-square-foot exhibition space (the largest such footage to be found in a commercial gallery space in Kansas City at the time); and in 1986 and 1989 Lester received the two aforementioned NEA grants that afforded him the opportunity to begin building and then complete construction of a studio outbuilding large enough for him to dramatically increase the scale of his work. (The artist’s first such studio outside his family’s home.) By the late 1990’s, not only was Lester pursuing a more interdisciplinary approach to the presentation and display of his work, but he was also combining and recombining an increasing number of his own internal artistic references – a visual lexicon of form language that stretched back two decades mixed with his own personal history and mythology. Among these efforts would emerge a continuum of experimentation in blurring the line between two-dimensional painting and threedimensional sculpture. (His family affectionately refers to many of these works as “paintings with issues.”)
NEW MILLENIUM – NEW DIRECTIONS: THE 2000’s By the start of the new Millennium, Lester was at the height of his creative and perceptual powers, having reinvented himself, yet again, with large, bold, minimal abstract paintings and a confident, new highkey color palette. This would give rise to an influential local school of narrative abstract painting that he shared with colleagues such as Warren Rosser, Nate Fors, and James Brinsfield. Together, they would enjoy group and solo exhibitions at two influential Kansas City-based galleries: Jan Weiner Gallery (operational until 2010), and the Joseph Nease Gallery (operational until 2008). One such color in particular from this palette would come to dominate Lester’s later work: the new “Cyber Green” metallic color, which was first introduced in 1996 as the signature color of the newly redesigned Volkswagen Beetle. In 2000, Lester traveled to Europe and to Germany, where he toured, among other destinations, the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and its Pathology Building, in Oranienburg, Germany. This experience had a profound affect on Lester, who had recently explored the subject of world wars and their related human toll such as the Holocaust within the context of his exhibition series, The Latest Blow To Mirth.
LIGHTNESS & WEIGHT Lester’s large-scale paintings featured in solo exhibitions at the Joseph Nease Gallery in 2001 (Welcome to the Ragball) and 2003 (Boxcar: The Paintings) would be the last complete bodies of two-dimensional work he would create before a growing, debilitating pain in his back forced him out of the studio and into his house, in 2003, where he began to contemplate other ways of making art. As his health diminished, Lester began looking around for lighter-weight materials that he could more easily manipulate: precast Fiberglass forms; Plexiglas; and particularly hard-shell gourds Lagenaria siceraria, commonly known as the bottle gourd with its shapes named for physical properties that reflected their actual historical utensil function over centuries in numerous cultures and civilizations.
Issachar’s Surveillance represented a seamless synthesis of Lester’s early and recent influences and was a culmination and distillation of ideas into one universal theme – the human condition – our frailty and vulnerability in the face of technology, and our reliance upon energies that have the power to give, transform, and support life, and conversely, to deform, wither, and draw it away. These last sculptures become a resonate metaphor for Lester’s creative process as an effort that was supremely manifold, offering multiple points of entry, layers of potential meaning, and an optimism that felt expansive yet grounded in an intimate intellectual and humanistic curiosity about the world. Our brain is literally a universe of cells within our head, filled with galaxies and constellations of thoughts and memories based on the experiences of our lives and what we come to understand as our individual reality. Lester’s career is like a concourse, from which the viewer may choose to arrive and depart for many destinations, and neither this text nor this exhibition will provide the viewer with a comprehensive mapping and understanding of the whole of Lester Goldman’s inner universe of thought and imagination. In fact, a challenge arises when a creator stops their creative process yet the results of their efforts continue to move through time and space. Dispersal takes over as these objects drift outward on a trajectory away from their origins. Some objects cease to exist altogether, while others remain protected, preserved, and sometimes restored. To the Estate of Lester Goldman, the lenders of this exhibition, and to those who have collected Lester’s work, we sincerely appreciate your efforts to preserve Lester’s memory, his life’s work, and to provide us with an opportunity to see the world through his eyes again and again. — Marcus Cain, Executive Director/Curator
It would seem ironic that, at a time when artists in the 21st Century were beginning to merge traditional fine art practices of painting, drawing, and sculpture with new technologies or engaging a growing Web-based social media audience, Lester would turn to one of ancient civilization’s first domesticated and cultivated plants in the world for inspiration. What Lester discovered in these organic protuberances, however, was a kinship of gesture that merged fluidly with his abstract biomorphic form language, while speaking to him on a biological, pre-art (or post-art) level. Through his manipulation of this ready-made material via cutting, gluing, sanding, and lacquering, Lester transformed these gourds into even more eccentric forms that added to his visual lexicon.
AN EXPANSIVE VISION In 2003, Lester learned that he had numerous cancerous tumors enrobing his spine, and he struggled to complete some final largescale paintings in 2004. Spurred on by this diagnosis and increasing debilitation, Lester embarked upon his last body of work. Through the efforts of his long-time colleague and friend Warren Rosser, and a host of supporters, Lester was able to mount his final exhibition Issachar’s Surveillance, at the KCAI Crossroads Gallery in downtown Kansas City in 2005. The exhibition drew its title from Lester’s Hebrew name “Issachar,” ( רָכשָּׂשִיyis-sakhar) described in the Torah as one of the twelve tribes of Israel and descendants of the son of Jacob and Leah (ninth son of Jacob, fifth son of Leah). The etymology of this name offers a range of translations and interpretations including “man of hire; reward; and recompense.”
Image above: Lester Goldman, Studio Shot (Estate of Lester Goldman) Photography courtesy E.G. Schempf
“…painting is not going to feed anybody, it’s not going to clothe anybody, it’s not going to heal directly, physically, anybody. But, it does participate in a very optimistic expression of the human spirit, and I don’t think that is something that can be put aside completely for the things that immediately heal somebody.”
– Lester Goldman
(Interview with Eric Sall for Speck magazine, 2001, Kansas City, MO.)
Images, top to bottom, left to right: Lester Goldman, Otto Portrait Case (Laocoon, Oak Cacoon), circa 1992 found objects, sculpted wood, photographs, mixed media, 4” x 28” x 9” (Goldman Family Collection); Lester Goldman, Untitled, (maquette for unrealized, public sculpture), circa 1995, aluminum, painted wood, Plexiglas, 25” x 14” x 10” (Estate of Lester Goldman) Lester Goldman, Soldier of Fortune, 1996, oil on canvas, 88” x 56” (Estate of Lester Goldman)
April 7 – May 26, 2013 5500 West 123rd Street, Overland Park, KS 66209 Ph: 913.266.8413 | Fx: 913.345.2611 | www.kcjmca.org
Established in 1991, the purpose of the Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art (KCJMCA) is to provide innovative art exhibitions and related programming that engage seniors and diverse audiences from all segments of our community to enrich lives and celebrate our common humanity through art. KCJMCA realizes its goal of connecting communities and generations through art in administering three programs: the Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom (a contemporary gallery housed within a continuumcare facility); ARTicipation (art therapy-based community art activities for audiences with special needs); and Museum Without Walls (an outreach partnership program that shares resources with other non-profits).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Kansas City Museum of Contemporary Art (KCJMCA) wishes to thank the Estate of Lester Goldman, Melissa and Craig Chabino, and Jakob Goldman for their loan of artwork to this exhibition, and Kathrin Goldman, Amanda Goldman, Warren Rosser, Brad Nicholson, EG Schempf, Beniah Leuschke, Chris Bell, State of the Art Framing, and the Kansas City Art Institute for their efforts and dedication to the realization of this program. KCJMCA would also like to acknowledge those who collectively support its efforts including UrbanSuburban Patrons & Artists, Friends of KCJMCA Members and Board of Directors, the Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City ArtsKC Fund, Herb & Bonnie Buchbinder, Flo Harris Family Foundation, the Francis Family Foundation, Gould Charitable Foundation, J-LEAD, Michael Klein, Menorah Women’s Foundation, Richard J. Stern Foundation, and Village Shalom staff, residents and their families.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Lynn Intrater, President . Sylvia Augustus, Vice President . Lynn Schweig, Vice President . Peter Beren, Treasurer . Lisa Theiss, Secretary . Herb Adler . Aimee Bernstein . Irene Bettinger . Jeffrey Chaikin . Alan Edelman . Nicole Emanuel . Ginny Epsten . Stephanie Finkelstein . Deborah Glassberg . Hanan Hammer . Ritchie Kaye . Eileen Kershenbaum . James Martin . Merry Quackenbush . Les Rosenfeld . Irma Starr . Jerome Tilzer . Sherman Titens . Shirley White
PAST PRESIDENTS
Saul Kass (Of Blessed Memory) . Michael Klein Regina Kort . Larry Meeker . Hugh Merrill
FOUNDERS Robert & Jacqueline Epsten Sybil & Norman (Of Blessed Memory) Kahn
STAFF Marcus Cain, Executive Director/Curator Beti Weber Moskowitz, Development Director EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR EMERITA Eileen Garry
Front cover/header image: Lester Goldman, The Tail of the I, 1998, oil on canvas, 73” x55” (Estate of Lester Goldman)
Brochure design by Abby Rufkahr, 1535 Design
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