Joseph Fiore: Small Collages

JOSEPH FIORE SMALL COLLAGES

JOSEPH FIORE SMALL COLLAGES ESSAY BY MARIO NAVES

Meredith Ward Fine Art 44 East 74th Street suite G New York NY 10021 Tel 212 744 7306 info@meredithwardfineart.com

JOSEPH FIORE SMALL COLLAGES Mario Naves

The painter Edgar Degas described drawing as a “a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, [the artist’s] true personality.” You’re likely to find agreement among artists that drawing is, among the myriad approaches to art-making, the most direct and spontaneous. But an argument could be made in favor of collage as being equally “true.” Think about it: scraps of this-and-that--periodicals, maps, textbooks, receipts and other oddments salvaged from the bottom of a desk drawer--offer ready access to color, shape and texture.

The road traveled from aesthetic initiative to artistic realization is only a glue stick, a magazine, and a pair of scissors away.

This is an oversimplification, of course--one that downplays artists who have made something innovative (Pablo Picasso), political (Hannah Hoch), profound (Romare Bearden), and ambitious (Mark Bradford) of the medium. All the same, collage was borne of deceptively casual and typically intimate means. That, and collage carries with it a democratic bent, especially in its affinities with vernacular traditions--quilt -making, for example--and the use of accessible (i.e., massproduced and reclaimed) materials. Kurt Schwitters divined the lyrical in objects rescued from the waste paper basket; Anne Ryan evoked an uncanny tenderness from fabric samples.

The advent of collage made the everyday part-and-parcel of high culture in ways that were previously unimaginable.

Untitled, 1997 Collage 4 x 6 inches 4

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The everyday is put into motion with a nimble sense of poise in the collages of American artist Joseph Fiore (19252008). Fiore isn’t known as a collage artist; for that matter, he’s not widely known at all. To say as much is no slight on his achievements as a painter. That significant art can go unheralded in its time is one of history’s more humbling (and recurring) lessons. It certainly couldn’t have been lost on an intellect as sophisticated as Fiore’s. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he took classes at that city’s Museum of Art, and went on to study with Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky and Willem de Kooning at Black Mountain College, the forward thinking institution fabled for its influence on post-war American art. After a stint at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), Fiore returned to Black Mountain as a teacher. When the college closed in 1956, he and wife Mary left for New York City; Manhattan--specifically, the Upper West Side--became their home. Given Fiore’s interest in advanced painting--Abstract Expressionism continued to reign supreme--New York was the place to be. Navigating it, then as now, could prove a challenge. The art world was a charged and volatile milieu.

Arguments were spurred, friendships broken, and reputations dashed because of differences in aesthetic ideology.

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The perpetual jockeying for commercial representation kept artists on edge. Fiore was in the thick of it. Over the next five decades, Fiore established himself as a reliable presence in the New York scene. Though his reputation didn’t achieve the renown of his former teacher de Kooning or Philip Guston, a painter whose work Fiore held in high esteem, Fiore’s art did have its admirers, and was exhibited on a regular basis. During the 1960s and ‘70s, Staempfli and Robert Schoelkopf, prestigious Manhattan galleries known for their devotion to serious painting, represented Fiore. The press took notice as well. Fairfield Porter, a critic of idiosyncratic opinions and independent taste, wrote about Fiore’s work in The Nation. Porter was also a painter, as is Rackstraw Downes, who wrote about Fiore’s paintings in ArtNews, extolling their “condition of stylelessness.” Downes’ compliment might seem a bit odd, but it gives some indication of the reserve inherent in Fiore’s vision--a reserve that stood in marked contrast to official culture. As the 1960s rolled on, mainstream art increasingly poached on popular imagery and anti-art nostrums, trends to which subtlety was, if not excluded, then considerably diminished. How was an artist dedicated to the complexities of perception, along with the astringent poetry that can accrue from them, supposed to thrive in an environment devoted to the flashy and nihilistic?.

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The answer, for Fiore, was to keep on keepin’ on. What else could a serious painter do? Art, not careerism, was the motivator. Whether painting the shoreline of Maine--where he and Mary summered for over 40 years--or distilling the natural world into an array of pictographs, Fiore stood clear of fashion, concentrating, instead, on the peculiarities and conundrums of representation. This decidedly traditional pursuit likely made Fiore’s art insufficiently “advanced” among tastemakers. (A constitutional inability to, in Mary’s estimation, “play the game” also hampered his success in the marketplace.) That the received wisdom has overlooked Fiore doesn’t mean the art will remain so. In many ways, the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of the work. Notwithstanding claims that we’ve reached “the end of art,” artists in the twenty-first century are experiencing a time of dizzying freedom. Stylistic strictures that were once inviolable have opened up dramatically--or been obliterated. The playing field is almost alarmingly broad: creative tangents can be explored with few qualms, and precedent viewed with less prejudice. It is within this kaleidoscopic purview--a beginning of art, if you will--that figures previously deemed idiosyncratic or marginal are being seen with fresh eyes. This climate is a gift for the unrecognized and under-sung. The “post-modern mayhem” Fiore once bemoaned, albeit with tongue in cheek, may well prompt his reappraisal.

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Fiore made three dozen or so collages between 1995 and 2003. None of them come across as Major Statements, nor was that necessarily the intention. Among the chief attractions of Fiore’s collages is, in fact, their loose-limbed informality--the pictorial equivalent of letting down one’s hair. There are, as one might expect, constants of motif linking Fiore’s efforts in different media. Landscape served as the abiding basis for Fiore’s works-on-canvas, and it funnels its way into the collages as well--sometimes obliquely, at other moments with blunt concision. Not a few examine how compositional armatures--the establishment of foreground, middle-ground and back-ground, say--can be distilled without losing the image altogether. Some collages feel more tangential: unencumbered exercises in form that, at moments, recall 1950s design or children’s book illustrations. A handful are diaristic in character and unapologetically sentimental: a collage celebrating Fiore and Mary’s 46th wedding anniversary, pasted together on October 10, 1998 comes complete with a pre-printed heart. When cutting-and-pasting, Fiore welcomed tokens of domesticity: dry cleaning bills, cancelled postage stamps, a bus transfer, and the stray grease stain. It’s been said that collage offers the convenience of being able to make a studio of the kitchen table. Fiore’s collages testify not only to the handmade, but the homemade.

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Fiore’s collages bring to mind his mentors at Black Mountain College. Anyone familiar with Interactions of Color, Albers’s seminal text on color, will realize how thoroughly the student absorbed the master’s lessons. Fiore’s juxtaposition of saturated hues against earthy neutrals generates the work’s warm and welcoming tonality. Fiore’s bumptious and balletic compositions recall Bolotowsky’s fractured riffs on Neo-Plasticism from the 1940s. And de Kooning? There the connection is less expressly pictorial than philosophical--an acceptance of the byroads afforded by improvisation coupled with the knowhow to give them vigor and purpose. Other influences are deftly touched upon: Fiore clearly knew his Schwitters, and one intuits the homely gravity of Arthur Dove, particularly in the emphasis given to shape and scale. But it is the modest sweep of the collages--a beguiling mix of sweetness and generosity, humor and humility--that is all Fiore. Attempting to deduce the personality of an artist from the art itself is always an iffy proposition, but Fiore the man comes across as something of a mensch. Funny, too: Albers the Square might have frowned at Fiore’s hippity-hop rhythms and figurative inclinations, but the rest of us are free to relish their engaging sense of comedy. And check out the use of text: punctuation marks and words--”up”, “ah”, a ticket reading “Admit One”--hold their own as shapes without relinquishing their literal meaning. That’s not an easy feat to pull off.

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How does one place the collages within the overall trajectory of Fiore’s oeuvre? As experiments, perhaps, or, given their conviviality, larks. One of the ironies of creativity is that an artist’s work--and here we return to Degas--is truest when tenacity is abandoned for play. The rigor informing Fiore’s paintings, whether they are landscapes or abstractions, is integral to their consequence. The consequence of the collages lies--at least, partly--in their ease. The good cheer Fiore’s collages radiate is impossible to deny and harder to resist. Even at their most austere--which happens when the collages are explicitly representational--the pieces have a dreamy, offhand elan. Comparing and contrasting the two bodies of work is unavoidable, but shouldn’t devolve into quibbles about ultimate worth. The differences are of kind, not quality. Any artist worth his salt is comprised of numerous and often contradictory facets; the resulting art provides a range of sidelong perspectives on a single temperament. The collages of Joseph Fiore are a gateway, offhand and charming, to a body of work that rewards the attention it deserves.

Mario Naves is an artist, writer and teacher who lives and works in New York City.

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Untitled, 2001 Collage on cardboard 9 1/8 x 6 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage 5 3/4 x 8 1/2 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 8 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches

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Untitled, c.1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 10 3/4 x 7 1/2 inches

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Untitled, c.1995-2000 Collage 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches

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Untitled, 1996 Collage 4 3/8 x 6 3/16 inches

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Untitled, 1997 Collage 4 x 6 1/8 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on board 10 1/2 x 8 3/4 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage 9 x 12 inches

Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on foamcore 9 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 8 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 12 x 8 1/2 inches

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Untitled, c.1995-2000 Collage 3 1/4 x 9 3/4 inches

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Untitled, 2002 Collage on cardboard 5 3/4 x 8 inches

Untitled, 2002 Collage on cardboard 6 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage 9 1/8 x 8 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 5 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches Untitled, c. 2000 Collage on cardboard 14 1/4 x 11 1/4 inches

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Untitled, c.1995-2000 Collage 7 3/8 x 8 1/2 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage 8 3/4 x 11 1/8 inches

Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 11 x 8 1/2 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 8 3/4 x 5 3/4 inches

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Untitled, 2003 Collage on cardboard 7 1/2 x 10 inches

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Untitled, c. 1999-2000 Collage on cardboard 5 3/4 x 8 1/2 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 8 x 6 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 12 1/2 x 7 3/4 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 8 1/2 x 11 1/4 inches

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Untitled, 1998 Collage on cardboard 11 1/4 x 9 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 8 3/4 x 11 1/4 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on paper (envelope) 5 1/4 x 7 1/4 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage 8 x 6 1/4 inches

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Untitled, 1996 Collage 4 7/8 x 6 7/8 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 5 1/2 x 8 3/4 inches

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Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 10 1/2 x 8 3/4 inches

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Untitled, 1992 Collage 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches

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Joseph Fiore (1925-2008) Joseph Fiore was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, Salvatore Fiore, was a founding member of the Cleveland Orchestra, so music and art played an important role in his upbringing. At the age of thirteen, after attending a summer sketching class at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Fiore decided to become an artist.

In 1946 he entered Black Mountain College on the G.I. Bill, studying alongside a group of artists who would later become some of the most important figures of the day, including Josef Albers, Jacob Lawrence, Ilya Bolotowsky, Willem DeKooning and John Cage. Fiore spent two years studying at California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) in 1948-49, but then returned to Black Mountain, where he remained as a teacher until the school closed in 1956.

After Black Mountain, Fiore and his wife Mary moved to New York, where he had his first exhibition in 1958 at Davida Gallery with fellow Black Mountain College alumnus John Chamberlain. In 1959, he and Mary began spending summers in Maine, which inspired him to begin painting landscapes from nature. He continued to exhibit landscapes from 1960-80, alternating between representational and abstract work. Fiore also taught at the Philadelphia College of Art, (1962-1970) and the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (1970), and over the next several decades exhibited his work regularly at galleries in New York and Maine.

Fiore’s work is represented in the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina; Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center, Asheville; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. ***

Joseph Fiore’s New York Studio Wall

On the occasion of this first exhibition of Joseph Fiore’s collages, we are deeply grateful to Mario Naves, who as a writer, painter, and collagist brings discernment, insight, and sensitivity to the subject. His essay opens our eyes to things that might otherwise go unseen or unnoticed.

As always, appreciation goes to David Dewey and Rob Gregory of the Falcon Foundation for their ongoing support of Fiore’s art and legacy. Thanks, too, to Julia Wilcox, who oversaw all aspects of the exhibition and catalogue.

Joseph Fiore: Small Collages is dedicated to the memory of Mary Fiore (1924-2017).

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PUBLISHED IN CONJUCTION WITH THE EXHIBITION

JOSEPH FIORE SMALL COLLAGES April 12 - May 25, 2018 Meredith Ward Fine Art 44 East 74th Street suite G New York NY 10021 Tel 212 744 7306 Fax 212 744 7308 info@meredithwardfineart.com www.meredithwardfineart.com

COVER Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage 7 3/8 x 8 1/2 inches FRONTISPIECE Untitled, c. 1995-2000 Collage on cardboard 9 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches DESIGN Cyndi Prince, Camden, Maine PRINTING Penmor Lithographers, Lewiston, Maine ESSAY COPYRIGHT ©Mario Naves PUBLICATION COPYRIGHT © 2018 MEREDITH WARD FINE ART