A TIME BEFORE WE WERE BORN: Visions of Arcadia in Contemporary Painting

A TIME BE F ORE W E W E RE B ORN Vi s i o n s o f A r c a d i a i n C o n t e m p o r a r y Pa i n t i n g

SUSAN BEE, KATHERINE BRADFORD, JOOYOUNG CHOI, RAFAEL FERRER, ROY DE FOREST, PAUL GEORGES, CHRIS JOHANSON, PO KIM, FAY LANSNER, JUDITH LINHARES, DONNA MOYLAN, JAN MÜLLER, ARCHIE RAND, PURVIS YOUNG

Cover image: Roy De Forest, View of Lake Louise, 1979. Acrylic on canvas, 75 x 87 inches. © The Estate of Roy De Forest. Private Collection. Courtesy George Adams Gallery, New York

A TIME BE F OR E W E W E RE B ORN Vi s i o n s o f A r c a d i a i n C o n t e m p o r a r y Pa i n t i n g

SUSAN BEE, KATHERINE BRADFORD, JOOYOUNG CHOI, RAFAEL FERRER, ROY DE FOREST, PAUL GEORGES, CHRIS JOHANSON, PO KIM, FAY LANSNER, JUDITH LINHARES, DONNA MOYLAN, JAN MÜLLER, ARCHIE RAND, PURVIS YOUNG Curated by

Raphael Rubinstein June 26th - September 29th, 2018 Opening Reception: Tuesday, June 26th 6:00 - 8:00 PM RSVP for reception and events: rsvp@waldandkimgallery.org

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Raphael Rubinstein A TIME BEFORE WE WERE BORN: VISIONS OF ARCADIA IN CONTEMPORARY PAINTING If we think of modern art, that is, the new modes of painting that appeared in Paris around the middle of the 19th century and all that has followed since, as defined by a direct confrontation with the realities of actual life rather than being deflected, as the art immediately preceding it had been, then we must admit how deeply paradoxical it is that so many of the paintings that helped define and direct modernity depicted pastoral idylls in realms far removed from the everyday “modern” world. I am thinking, of course, of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Gauguin’s Tahitian works and Matisse’s sequence of “Dance” paintings from 1908-1910, along with many other lesser-known works. How was it that a pastoral mode, an Arcadian impulse, became central to modern art?

This isn’t the place to answer that question, and I am not enough of an art historian to do so with any authority, but certainly two of the forces driving this impulse were an attraction to symbolism and the embrace of non-Western art.

The symbolist impulse was perhaps best expressed by Baudelaire in his poem “Correspondances”: “Nature is a temple whose living colonnades / Breathe forth a mystic speech in fitful sighs; / Man wanders among symbols in those glades / Where all things watch him with familiar eyes” (trans. Richard Wilbur).

The role of so-called Primitive art, so crucial for Gauguin and Matisse, had a similar effect insofar as it posited and evoked, through the appropriation of spiritual instruments, worlds far removed from industrialized Western society.

This exhibition looks at how painters have drawn on existing mythologies, as well as inventing their own, to create visions of lost (or maybe promised) paradises, visual songs of innocence and experience that transcend periods and cultures, speaking to a deeply imbedded human need for images of hope and harmony. Yet at the same time, there are often darker intimations haunting these images of Arcadia. The exhibition spans multiple generations and decades, beginning with a look back to the cohort of painters who in the 1950s married the energy of Abstract Expressionism with a rediscovery of figuration and mythological and literary allusions. Representing this tradition are paintings by Paul Georges and Jan Müller, both of whom studied with

Hans Hoffmann. An artist who worked simultaneously in multiple modes (landscape, political allegory, portraiture, still life), Georges frequently used the carefully observed circumstances of his everyday life (here the backyard of his Long Island summer home) as settings for mythological dramas, in this case quietly occurring in the off-center shadows. Although he is not included in this show, painter Bob Thompson is a key artist in the rediscovery of symbolist landscapes populated with mythic figures; his work is indirectly evoked through Jan Müller, who was a crucial influence on Thompson. Represented by a late work—Search for the Ball 2, 1957—Müller, who died in early 1958, found the inspiration for his paintings in ancient myth and literature (Goethe’s Faust was a favorite source), but always with a declarative materiality that was very much of its moment. It was that tension between elsewhere and presence that marked Müller’s work. As he put it himself, “The artist. . . cannot take flight to the Elysian Fields of the preciousness of perfection, the prism of the eye, but has to deal with matter complex.”

In the 1970s, Roy De Forest, a proponent of California Funk art, depicted his own brand of an earthly paradise, seen here in View of Lake Louise (1979), a densely-packed, pattern-filled vision that imagines a circus-like Eden. New York painter Fay Lansner, who also studied with Hoffmann and is known for her collaborative works with poet Barbara Guest, developed a liberated figurative style drawing on the legacy of Matisse. Lansner was constantly drawn to myth as a means to explore herself; Jackson Pollock’s quest for a personal mythology meant much to her, and influenced her use of Jungian imagery. Contributing to a renewed interest in figurative painting in the 1980s, artists such as Archie Rand and Donna Moylan infused their narrative paintings with multi-layered references to art history and world religion. Rand’s Sisters features his typically virtuosic brushwork and wide ranging high to low cultural references; an epically scaled painting that challenges the viewer to juggle several intriguing narratives simultaneously, it hasn’t been shown in New York since it debuted in 1983 at Tibor de Nagy. Deeply affected by her studies of Asian art, as well as by many years living in Rome, Moylan endows her landscapes with a strangely liquid quality, as if they were mirages or reflections, transient images that a breath of wind or a slight ripple could disperse. In Plymouth, the landscape is inset into the paper support, surrounded by a sketchbook-like border that declares: “This is not a landscape.” As if to underline the marvelous, fantastic nature of the image, a ghostly figure emerges at its center.

Often Arcadian paintings can carry in them an implied critique of injustice, as one sees in the work of Po Kim and Rafael Ferrer. In the 1980s, after a decade of drawing realist still-lifes, Kim began to create a world of highly simplified figures placed within zones of pure color decorated with simply drawn plant forms and loosely executed patterns. Male and female figures, often little more than silhouettes with the merest of facial features and sexual characteristics (genitalia, breasts), share the canvases, which become increasingly large in scale, with quickly sketched animals (fish, elephants, birds of various types).

These paintings have strong affinities with a generation of Neo-Expressionist painters who began showing their work widely in the early 1980s, as well as looking back to the heritage of Symbolist art, but it wasn’t art history that drove the artist, rather it was his endless compassion for his fellow human beings, a compassion that had its source in his own sufferings in war-torn Japan and Korea. An artist who has worked over his long career in many different modes, including installation, sculpture, conceptual art, Ferrer began painting intensively in the mid 1980s, often taking subjects from his native Porto Rico and other Caribbean locations. The artist knows perfectly well, and never lets his viewers forget, the very specific legacies of underdevelopment, poverty and colonialism that affect the lives and landscapes in his tropical scenes, and yet the paintings are too complex, too transcendent to be taken as anecdotal. Writing in The Nation in 2010 about the complexities of Ferrer’s work, Barry Schwabsky observed: “Wariness and curiosity register in the faces of many of Ferrer’s subjects, although others appear more ingenuous. There is no false familiarity here, but rather a distance to be negotiated. And it can be negotiated.”

With playful visual wit, Chris Johanson draws equally on the languages of abstraction and figuration in paintings where nature and culture find an uneasy truce. In recent years, the gritty scenarios that once pervaded Johanson’s work, influenced by his beginnings in San Francisco’s Street Art scene, have given way to calmer, even idyllic scenes, but with the same distinctive visual energy. An artist who often painted on pieces of scrap wood and other items scavenged from the street, Purvis Young wove together a personal mythology that he used to express and celebrate the lives of African Americans. Evoking figures and landscapes with the barest minimum of marks and colors, Young nonetheless is able to conjure up rich narratives in which heroic Zulu horsemen

often appear, here accompanied by ants that appear to have assumed mythic proportions.

More recently, artists such as Susan Bee, Katherine Bradford and Judith Linhares have employed highly personal styles to populate imagined worlds with allegorical figures and motifs. Drawing on diverse sources from Caspar David Friedrich to film stills, Bee constructs pictures where the whimsical and the tragic coexist, and where there is a palpable yearning for harmony. In a 2006 interview in Bomb Magazine with Madison Smartt Bell, Linhares warned her viewers: “Don’t let my bright color and exuberant paint fool you. [. . .]

The edge in my work comes from growing up with the relentless California sunshine and blue sky—undermined by earthquakes, wildfires and mudslides.”

In a recent email to me she made a similar point: “There are plenty of snakes and spiders in my gardens of Eden.” The swimmers and divers in Katherine Bradford’s paintings (interestingly similar in posture, sometimes, to Jan Müller’s figures) seem to inhabit a realm suspended between Earth and Space, as if the buoyancy of a body in water was sufficient to escape from gravity altogether.

In short, this is a metaphysical space where the celestial and the terrestrial fuse.

Chez Bradford, swimming is neither a sport nor a leisure activity, but more of a psychedelic journey where one goes to meet the self, or escape from it.

Infused with references to popular culture (especially comic books) and to her own life as an immigrant, JooYoung Choi’s work transpires in a fictional territory she calls the Cosmic Womb. Fearless when it comes to working in different mediums, Choi employs video, sculpture, animation and performance as well as painting to pursue an overarching theme: the overcoming of trauma and prejudice through imaginative visual narratives.

In the 1983 song by Talking Heads—“This must be the Place (Naïve Melody)”—that gives this exhibition its title, David Byrne creates a love song from a string of non-sequiturs, but running through the song is the motif of “home” (“Home is where I want to be”; “I’m just an animal looking for a home”). Elusive and transitory, sometimes nightmarish, but always ardently desired in its perfect state, home is itself a kind of Arcady; it is, to end as I began with a phrase from a Baudelaire poem, one famously taken up by Matisse, a site of “luxe, calme et volupté.”

Paul Georges, Backyard Sagaponack w/ Muse, 1980-82.

Oil on linen 55 x 165 inches Copyright 2018 Paul Georges Studio, NYC. Courtesy Paul Georges Studio, NYC.

Paul Georges (1923 – 2002)

Jan Müller (1922 – 1958)

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1923, Paul Georges was an American painter who mainly lived and worked in New York City and France. He died in 2002 at his home at Isigny-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, at the age of 77.

Jan Müller was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1922.

His father was a political activist who fled from Hitler in the 1930s, immigrating with his family to the U.S. in 1941. Müller studied painting under Hans Hofmann from 1945 to 1950. In 1954, Müller underwent heart surgery, during which a plastic pacemaker was implanted. This constant reminder of the passage of time is perhaps, in part, responsible for both the fury with which he painted until his death in 1958 and the urgency with which he made the radical and courageous shift from abstraction to figuration. Jan Müller’s work has been included in exhibitions at the

After serving in World War II, Georges became a student of Hans Hofmann in Provincetown in 1947 before studying under Fernand Léger in Paris from 1949 to 1952. Throughout his career, he painted numerous self-portraits and large-scale figurative allegories that embrace myth and Edenic freedom.

Georges’ diverse body of work is a result of the artist’s endless search for a language capable of expressing a broad range of feelings uninhibited by stylistic constraints.

Paintings by Paul Georges are held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; National Academy Museum, NYC; Rose Art Museum, Mass; Weatherspoon Art Museum; Virginia Art Museum; Parrish Museum Southampton; Guild Hall Museum East Hampton and numerous others across America.

Jan Müller, Search For The Ball # 2, 1957 Oil on canvas 9 x 12 inches.

Courtesy of Bookstein Projects, New York.

Enjoying success both on the West and East coasts, De Forest exhibited widely and continued to create art until his death in 2007. His work is included in major public collections internationally, such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Artist Institute of Chicago and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Archie Rand (b. 1949)

Roy De Forest, View of Lake Louise, 1979. Acrylic on canvas, 75 x 87 inches. © The Estate of Roy De Forest. Private Collection.

Courtesy George Adams Gallery, New York.

Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, The Jewish Museum, and the 1962 Venice Biennale among others. The artist regularly showed with the Hansa Gallery, of which he was a founding member, until his untimely death.

Roy De Forest (1930 – 2007) Roy De Forest was born in North Platte, Nebraska, in 1930 and raised in Yakima Valley, Washington.

He moved to San Francisco in 1950 to study at the California School of Fine Art, going on to earn his MFA from San Francisco State in 1958. He was involved with early artist-run San Francisco art spaces such as King Ubu and Six Gallery and was included in Peter Selz’s ‘Funk’ exhibition of 1967. During his career, which spanned over half a century, De Forest developed a unique painting style that grew from his experimentation with Boardism and Abstract Expressionism as well as aboriginal art, with characteristic bright colors, paint dots and frequent depictions of dogs.

Archie Rand, Sisters, 1983.

Acrylic, enamel and crayon on canvas 58 x 143 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Archie Rand is an artist from Brooklyn, New York.

Throughout his career, Rand has been considered a respected and unclassifiable figure in the art world whose paintings range considerably in style and scale—from large-scale murals for synagogues to potato prints and works with poetry—often forming series or suites. Exhibitions from the mid-1970s onward announced a return to mural-scale paintings and showed a prescient neo-expressionism joined with a devotion to narratives which were drawn in cartoon style. Throughout the 1990s, Rand produced abstract and figurative works simultaneously, although all of the works indicated an intention to reintegrate representation into conceptual formats.

Since his first exhibition in 1966 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, Rand has had over 100 solo exhibitions, and his work has been included in over 200 group exhibitions. His work as a painter and muralist is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Po Kim (1917 – 2014)

Donna Moylan

Po Kim was among the first generation of Korean artists who immigrated to the United States in the 1950s. Instead of committing to any one school, Kim continuously explored various styles and forms, from Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s to a hyper-realistic idiom in the 1970s and figurative and allegorical works in the 1990s and 2000s. His diverse body of work oscillates between an expressive release of trauma and a yearning for an Arcadian escape, echoing a trajectory of extraordinary events throughout his life.

Donna Moylan currently divides her time between Brooklyn and Kinderhook, NY, where she maintains painting studios in both locations. Over the last sixty years, she has lived in Houston, TX, Pasadena, CA, New York City, NY, Rome, Italy (23 years) and Boston, MA (her first 18 years).

Ever-evolving and challenging himself as an artist up until the end of his life, Kim developed a unique personal style through a unification of his Korean cultural heritage and his Western academic training, fused together within the invigorating artistic environment of New York, his chosen home base.

She began showing her work in her thirties, during her time in Rome, with Mario Diacono and Gian Enzo Sperone. Since that time she has exhibited in Europe and the United States, mostly in New York. Her work is held in public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the New York Public Library and the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy, in addition to a number of private collections.

Works from his six-decade career have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in distinguished institutions throughout Korea, Europe, and the U.S. His works are also held in many national and international collections, among them: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Chicago Art Institute, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea.

Donna Moylan, Plymouth, 2016.

Watercolor on paper, 21 x 28 inches.

Courtesy of the artist.

Po Kim We Are 1992-1994 Acrylic on canvas 84 x 216 inches.

Courtesy of The Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Foundation, New York.

Rafael Ferrer Conquista de La Soledad 1990-91 Oil on canvas 60 x 72 inches Collection Francoise Ferrer.

Photo credit: Gary Mamay.

Chris Johanson (b. 1968) California-native Chris Johanson is a key member of San Francisco’s Mission School. Johanson engages with the meditative qualities of art-making and sincere direct communication through painting and sculpture. His work plays between the techniques of figuration and abstraction, as he sees these two modes of working as interconnected expressions of strong beliefs in environmentalism, compassion, and peaceful co-existence.

Rafael Ferrer (b. 1933) Rafael Ferrer currently lives in Greenport, New York and Vieques, Puerto Rico. His most important early influences were exposures to artists and writers exiled in Puerto Rico from the Spanish Civil War, through whom he met artists active in Paris in the 1950s. He began his engagement with the art world of the United States in the mid-1960s working as part of the first wave of conceptual and postminimal artists. He was included in several of the groundbreaking exhibitions in 1969 and 1970 that would come to define the art of that era, including When Attitudes Become Form, curated

by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern; Op Losse Shroeven, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and Information at MoMA, New York.

Ferrer has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions at major museums, including recent notable group exhibitions at the Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2013, at the Guggenheim Museum in 2014, and at the Whitney Museum’s inaugural downtown exhibition in 2015.

His work has been the subject of solo shows at the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon (2014); LA MoCA Pacific Design Center, California (2013); and the Modern Institute in Glasgow, U. K. (2013). Johanson has been featured in important group exhibitions including Glasgow International 2012 and the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Chris Johanson You and Everyone Else (In Some Way), 2016 Acrylic and household paint on found wood 43 x 57.75 x 3 inches © Chris Johanson; Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC.

Purvis Young, Angel with Ants and Zulu Riders.

Early 1980s Paint on plywood, 83 x 33.5 inches Courtesy of the Daniel Aubry Collection.

Purvis Young (1943 – 2010)

Susan Bee (b. 1952)

Devastated in the 1960s by the building of Highway I-95, the once prosperous black community of Overtown, Miami has had one of the highest druguse and crime rates in Florida. Yet, even though Purvis Young’s work hangs in innumerable private collections and over sixty museums, including the Smithsonian, the Corcoran, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purvis never thought of leaving Overtown. For over thirty-five years, he painted in a series of abandoned, rat-infested warehouses. “I paint what I sees…I paint the problems of the world,” he said, and in public he wore dark glasses to “hide his tears” at the injustice and sadness he witnessed every day.

Susan Bee is an artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She has had eight solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery, NY, and solo shows at Southfirst Gallery and Accola Griefen Gallery in NY. She has a BA from Barnard College and an MA in Art from Hunter College. Her work has been featured in numerous group shows. Bee has also published sixteen artist’s books and has collaborated with poets including: Johanna Drucker, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, and Jerome Rothenberg. Bee is the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings, Theory, and Criticism, Duke University Press, 2000, and the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online.

Her artist’s book archive and the M/E/A/N/I/N/G Archive are at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

A self-taught artist who never attended high school, Purvis Young was highly influenced by the work of Rembrandt, El Greco, Van Gogh and Delacroix, whose art he discovered in books at the Overtown public library. Because the artist could never afford canvas, Purvis painted on every surface available to him—discarded plywood and cardboard, refrigerator doors, table tops, scraps of fabric and metal trays— mostly brought to him by scavengers in his neighborhood. Of his own work Purvis Young had this to say: “I want people to know that I wish there would be peace in the world, and I will paint the way I paint until there is, and then one day maybe I could just hang up my brush and not paint no more.”

Susan Bee Idyll Wilds, 2011 Oil on linen, 34 x 50 inches Courtesy of the artist.

at the Modern Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Broadly recognized for her achievements, she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, a Pollock-Krasner grant, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.

Judith Linhares (b. 1940)

Katherine Bradford, Grand Night Swim, 2018.

Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 inches Courtesy of the artist and CANADA, New York.

Bee’s artwork is in many public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the Getty Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Bee’s work has been reviewed in: Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, ArtNews, The Brooklyn Rail, Artcritical, ArtSlant, The Forward, Huffington Post, Art Papers, and Hyperallergic. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2014 and has had fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo.

New York-based artist Judith Linhares creates animated, vibrant paintings that blend the imagined and the real. Her paintings often depict groups of women, most often nude, engaged in various activities—sweeping, playing, swimming, eating, lounging—capturing fleeting moments of everyday life. Her subject matter is inspired variously by her upbringing, memory, dreams, and imagination, and the resulting works are surreal and oftentimes fantastical depictions of everyday activities and objects.

Her work is included in the collections of major museums including: the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Crocker Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Katherine Bradford (b. 1952) Katherine Bradford lives and works in New York City, attended Bryn Mawr College and holds an MFA from SUNY Purchase. Her work is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon. She has recently had solo exhibitions at CANADA and Sperone Westwater in New York and

Judith Linhares, Water, 2012. Gouache on paper, 29 x 40 inches.

Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W, New York.

Joo Young Choi (b. 1982) Through painting, video, sculpture, animation, and music, multidisciplinary artist JooYoung Choi documents the interconnecting narratives of a highly structured, expansive fictional land called the Cosmic Womb. This paracosm, which stretches over 6,732 miles, is governed by Queen Kiok with the help of her council of Tuplets and one Earthling from Concord, New Hampshire, named C. S. Watson. Guided by the Cosmic Womb mythology, Choi creates work that merges the autobiographic with the fantastic in visual form.

Fay Lansner, Untitled, 1960s. Oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches Courtesy Estate of Fay Lansner.

Fay Lansner (1921 – 2010) Fay Lansner was an American painter known for her Abstract Expressionist and figurative paintings and her strong use of color. Lansner’s work evolved from her geometric abstract pastel and charcoal drawings of the late 1940s, when she was a student of Hans Hoffman, to a series of expressionist figurative paintings in the 1950s and 1960s followed by large bold portraits and still-life drawings in the 1990s. Her work was the subject of thirty solo shows from 1951 to 2009, and she was included in over one hundred group exhibitions in the United States and Paris throughout her career.

In her later years, Lansner continued to work in her studio on Broadway and 10th Street and at her home in New York City. She is widely represented in private, public, and corporate permanent collections including the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C., the Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York University Art Collection, and the Philadelphia Museum. Her work is currently represented by the Quogue Gallery in Quogue, N.Y.

JooYoung Choi Welcome Home, We’ve Been Waiting for You, 2015 Acrylic, paper, and painted canvas on stretched canvas 96 x 72 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Choi immigrated to the States in 1983 by way of adoption. In 2008, she returned to South Korea and reunited with her birth family. This experience continues to influence the stories and ideas behind her art. JooYoung Choi is both an Artadia and Ideafund grant recipient. Her artwork has been exhibited in venues such as the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, the Project Row Houses, the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience (Seattle), the National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago), and the Lawndale Art Center (Houston).

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