Impossible Blossom: Paintings from The New School Art Collection June 24 – September 8 2016 Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design Curated by Silvia Rocciolo, Eric Stark and Macushla Robinson Photography by Marc Tatti
Most of the art in The New School Collection has a clear, understandable, although not always defensible, provenance. Historically, art comes into the collection one of two ways: gift or purchase. There is usually a fairly accurate accounting of who gave, what they gave, when they gave, and sometimes why they gave. In the case of the painting by Emilio Rodriguez-Larrain, however, we can only guess the provenance based on the labels attached to the back of the painting. They tell us two things: the painting hung in the 1964 Venice Bienniale and it was purchased at auction sometime after that date. Who, when, and why are a total mystery.
Emilio Rodriguez-Larrain L’Homme est Sujet a Errer, 1964 Tempera on paper mounted on wallboard
Rodriguez-Larrain’s painting, the title of which translates to Man is Subject to Wander, may be understood by way of the artist’s biography. Rodriguez-Larrain was born in Lima, Peru in 1928, but lived and worked for periods of time in Paris, Milan, and Berlin. He initially studied architecture at the Universidad de Ingeniera in Peru and his early more geometric works reflect his architectural training. He later synthesized the influences of traditional Peruvian image-making with the European Modernism he encountered on his travels. He was known to have made contact with several influential artists of the time including Dali, Man Ray, and Duchamp. L’Homme est Sujet a Errer embodies that influence: its strange shapes are evocative, on the threshold of being recognized as things from the world, but ultimately resist identification. His use of flat, smooth surfaces punctuated by patterning echoes European Surrealism with its enigmatic, impenetrable surfaces. The psychedelic, other-worldliness of this painting captures the wonder of nature with its biomorphic forms and saturated atmospheric vibrations.
Two moments bookend Cleve Gray’s life and tell us much about his artistic disposition. His widow, Francine du Plessix Gray, recounts those moments. The first, at the age of four, when he begged his mother to buy him some colorful paints which he then smeared on his body when he got home; the second, some time after his death, when she and her son entered Gray’s studio and found a hotplate that had been left on low, warming up the oil sticks that he used in his late work. By the end of his life, Gray, suffering from a degenerative eye disease, continued to work using simpler means, his gestures drawn more automatically than visually.
Cleve Gray Steady Quick, 1979 Acrylic on canvas Gift of Francine du Plessix Gray, 2006
His early days as an artist were influenced by his time as a G.I. in Paris. He enlisted in the army in 1942 and was sent first to London, where he sketched bombed out buildings, and then to Paris, where he was said to be the first G.I. to pay visits to Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. But the life-changing experience for Gray was meeting the Cubist painter Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp’s brother. Villon would go on to be a great influence and mentor. Gray was a vocal critic of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Yet, of all the artists in the exhibition, he is perhaps the one most closely related to the movement. In reality, Gray, like most artists, synthesized many influences: Abstract Expressionism through his close friend Barnett Newman; Yuan Dynasty painting, on which he completed a PhD thesis at Princeton; Japanese calligraphy; and Zen painting.
Roxy Paine Plug-in Painting, 1995 Mixed media on linen Gift of Vera List, 1995
Roxy Paine grew up in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. He escaped to New York in the early ’80s and enrolled at Pratt Institute. This experience was short lived because “the faculty seemed to be full of bitter old Abstract Expressionists.” While distancing himself from an older generation, Paine has equally resisted the “ghetto” of mechanical and machine-based artists. To paraphrase Steven Henry Madoff, Paine sits between Jackson Pollock’s famous assertion, “I am nature,” and Warhol’s claim, “I want to be a machine.” Paine sees all human endeavors as part of nature. “I think humans are both machine and nature. We’re incredibly complicated constructions of nature, and I want this incredible awe of nature to be there when you look at my work.”
The New School has two works by Paine in its collection, Dinner of the Dictators (1993-95) and Plug-in Painting (1995). While they are physically very different, they are conceptually the same, both examples of his interest in our pervasive human urge to classify, catalogue, and observe from a distance. “It’s something innate in us, and I find it disturbing, although I engage in it as well. I’m trying to investigate that urge.” In Dinner of the Dictators Paine researched the dietary histories of twelve notorious dictators and created a fictitious table setting with all the individual meals desiccated and preserved. Dinner of the Dictators will be shown at the SJDC in Fall 2016. Plug-in Painting is a do-it-yourself gestural kit. Paine contends that the work does not satirize abstract painting, but it clearly pokes fun at the uniqueness of gesture by creating a typology that a contemporary painter might reference.
Shinro Ohtake’s artistic practice is multi-dimensional, including both sound and visual components. As well known in the experimental music scene as he is in the art scene, Ohtake’s band JUKE/19 (1978-82) has been influential in a genre of Japanese music referred to as noise music. The visual element of his work is more related to the history of collage than to abstraction. He recalls that at the age of six or seven, “I cut out two comic images that I was particularly fond of and pasted them together on one surface. I was mesmerized by the new world that appeared in front of me, and I still remember that moment vividly.” His paintings reflect his predilection for cutting and pasting, collecting, collating, and “not-editing.” Her Black Board looks and feels like the annotations leftover on a classroom blackboard—signs and symbols that are evocative, but no longer make sense.
Shinro Ohtake Her Black Board, 1986 mixed media Gift of the Estate of Jay Chiat, 2004
Ohtake was influenced by American Pop Art; Gutai, a post-war Japanese movement focused on the body and performance; and Mono-ha, a Japanese movement of the 1960s that explored the relationship between natural and industrial materials. In 1977 he traveled to London and this trip was to have a lasting effect on his work. On a pilgrimage to David Hockney’s parents’ home, he met a man who obsessively collected matchbooks, placing them into the pages of a book. Ohtake was so taken with the practice that he purchased the books and began making his own “street books,” now at the core of his practice.
From an abandoned sailmaking loft at Coenties Slip, a centuries old inlet on the southern tip of Manhattan, a group of artists turned the art world on its head, prefiguring two major movements that influenced art making in Post-war America for the ensuing decades – Pop and Minimalism. For almost a decade starting in the mid-fifties, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist, Robert Indiana, Jack Youngerman, Lenore Tawney, Fred Mitchell, Charles Hinman, and Ann Wilson (Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were nearby), lived and worked there, “to seek a barer life, closer to reality, without all the things that clutter and fill our lives.”
Jack Youngerman Summer Yellow, 1966 Acrylic on canvas Gift of the artist
A few of these artists came to define the period, while the others filled in the edges and broadened the dialogue. Jack Youngerman is part of the latter group, and yet his paintings are unique, distinctive, and have a certain economy that distilled several genres being explored by the larger group. Like Kelly and Hinman, he was a colorist, using flat planes of color to create shapes that were more ethereal than Kelly and less sculptural than Hinman. Despite the purely abstract nature of his paintings, Youngerman’s work also has a pop quality reminiscent of Rosenquist, Indiana, and even Johns. The austerity of these paintings further recalls Agnes Martin and early Rauschenberg. Youngerman’s early use of the hard edge became a staple of geometric abstraction and was later utilized by many of his peers.
Kes Zapkus fled his native Lithuania as a child during World War II. His father, a freedom fighter, remained and died in the ruins of a continent. His paintings hold both the urgency of the call to arms and the musicality of the march that takes them there. The renowned art critic, Lucy Lippard, once commented that the works resemble “aerial views of bombed cities,” further reflecting that the paintings “are not merely chaotic. They have something to say about chaos,” a cacophony of gestural language.
Right: Kestutis Zapkus Saqqara, 1974 Acrylic on canvas Gift of John L. Tishman, 1988
The compositional scoring embedded in Zapkus’ painting embodies both the sensual pleasure of music and the fractured lens of war. His paintings are passionate, yet patient—his dense grids vibrating and persistent. This painting’s title, Saqqara, refers to a vast, ancient Egyptian necropolis. Zapkus picks up the warm, dusty palette of the desert landscape, allowing the layers of paint to shift like the desert sands, quietly burying and uncovering the surface of the canvas. It has been said that Zapkus is a “Maximalist Minimalist,” a moniker that implies that the process is excessive or redundant, but that the paintings are spare in what they are trying to accomplish. Repetitive phrasing and obsessive layering over a relatively simple framework suggests that this may be true.
Castoro’s work was influenced by her practice as a dancer and choreographer. She was president of the dance and theatre workshops at Pratt Institute where she studied graphic design. Ultimately, she left the dance world to pursue a more independent artistic life as a visual artist. She attributed her graphic style of painting and drawing to her work doing paste-ups: “I also came out of graphic arts, which means that I dealt with calligraphy, I dealt with typesetting, I dealt with letters, I dealt with linocuts, and I dealt with the hard edge of something.” Her work’s relationship to dance and choreography, however, remained strong: “When I danced I leapt through the air and continued to remain up there... I felt a selfpropelled air-stretch. It was a way to leave this earth, to bring coherence to reality, to find a path again, to deepen the grooves and push the forest of the half blind.”
Rosemarie Castoro 1969-2 Inventory V List, 1969 oil on canvas Gift of Vera List
Art history has not been kind to women artists. In the 1960s there emerged a commercial gallery system that largely excluded women. “Liberated,” but not fully accepted in a male dominated art world, women artists and their work were rarely seen in either the museums or the galleries of New York City. Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptual art, were on the rise and there were few visible women artists on the horizon. Some of these now betterrecognized artists also suffered in the shadow of male artists who commanded the moment, and who were their partners. Rosemarie Castoro was one such artist. Self-effacing and not driven to pursue opportunities to show her work, she has been largely overlooked.
1969-2 Inventory V List is a conceptual work. Long colored pencil lines dissect the canvas like a children’s game of pick-up sticks. Each line, drawn on raw canvas in two colors, seems dependent on every other line that it crosses: it is a delicate mass of interdependent marks. The painting’s condition is largely attributed to the way in which Castoro worked. Most likely painted on the floor of her loft space, the footprint and coffee stains are probably hers. The delicacy of the lines makes restoration almost impossible, and so we are left to appreciate the embedded life that was lived and the contribution she made in linking performance and visual art in a way that retains the vitality of both. In the late 1960s Castoro became increasingly conceptual. In 1969 she rode her bicycle through the streets of Manhattan, from Spring Street to 52nd Street, with a punctured can of white paint leaking and leaving a trail of her journey. Though not widely known, this act foreshadowed the artist Francis Alÿs’s Green Line, first performed in 1994 in São Paolo, in which the artist punctured a tin of green paint and walked with its contents, creating a trail.
“My paintings are about a lot of different emotions. They’re as much about joy as they are about grief. Those are both combined. It’s the electricity from experiencing one and experiencing the other that makes them become stronger, just through the contrast.”
Moira Dryer Close Up, 1989 Casein on wood Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles M. Diker, 1994
This statement by Moira Dryer speaks to both the life that she lived and the artists who inspired her. Her husband, whom she met at the School of Visual Arts, died at age 29 of congenital heart failure, one year after their marriage. Dryer died ten years later, at 35, of ovarian cancer. Her paintings, rendered on wood with a thinly applied milk-based paint to create a translucent wash, have the feel and sensibility of fresco. They harken back to the work of the European painters she loved from past centuries: Goya, Velasquez, Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Piero della Francesca. Like the works of these artists, Dryer’s work is instilled with a similar sense of spiritual longing and tender alienation. Perhaps reflecting Dryer’s early work as a theatrical set designer, Close Up, with its two columnar structures at the edges of the image suggesting a proscenium arch, still resists any singular interpretation. Its oceanic colors and fluid brushwork recall ancient Greek mythology—the pleasures and tragedies of the seas.