John McLaughlin: Constructions

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN CONSTRUCTIONS

MAQUETTE–TITLE #1, 1973, COLLAGE ON PAPER, 12 X 18 INCHES (30.5 X 45.7 CM)

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MAQUETTE–TITLE #2, 1973, COLLAGE ON PAPER, 18 X 12 INCHES (45.7X30.5CM)

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MAQUETTE–TITLE #3, 1973, COLLAGE ON PAPER, 12 X 18 INCHES (30.5X45.7CM)

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MAQUETTE–TITLE #4, 1973, COLLAGE ON PAPER, 12 X 18 INCHES (30.5 X 45.7 CM)

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MAQUETTE–TITLE #5, 1973, COLLAGE ON PAPER, 12 X 18 INCHES (30.5 X 45.7 CM)

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MAQUETTE–TITLE #6, 1973, COLLAGE ON PAPER, 12 X 18 INCHES (30.5 X 45.7 CM)

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MAQUETTE–TITLE #7, 1973, COLLAGE ON PAPER, 18 X 12 INCHES (45.7 X 30.5 CM)

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MAQUETTE–TITLE #8, 1973, COLLAGE ON PAPER, 12 X 18 INCHES (30.5 X 45.7 CM)

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SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, CA Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Daimler Art Collection, Stuttgart, Germany Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, Scotland Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Stanford, CA Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Amherst, MA Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Tate Modern, London, UK University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

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The distinguished abstractionist John McLaughlin started out as a Sunday painter. Later, after a career that included selling Japanese prints and military service in the two world wars, McLaughlin became a full-time artist, and a golfer who played twice a week. The self-taught modernist made this commitment in 1946, when, at the age of 48, he and his wife settled in California, near Laguna Beach. From then until his death from complications of pneumonia in 1976, he worked in the studio in his garage in Dana Point—and a space in another house close by that he and his wife inherited in 1967—for almost three decades.

McLaughlin’s paintings are spare, elegant, modest, easel-size. They feature few colors: generally, robin’s egg blue, cardinal red, pollen yellow, and fairway green.

His canvases, many of which are black and white, are composed mostly of thin bars, thick rectangular blocks, and wide expanses of unembellished grounds. Verticals and horizontals predominate.

In the aftermath of a stunning retrospective mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last year, McLaughlin’s reputation has soared. Yet when the survey opened during November 2016, Christopher Knight’s rave review in the Los Angeles Times carried the headline, go to lacma for john mclaughlin , possibly the most important postwar artist you don ’ t know .

Knight has admired this work for fortysome years.

As the critic noted in his text, McLaughlin is “Southern California’s first momentous postwar artist.” And, after mentioning how profound and indispensable the painter is, Knight added, “His work rivals in imaginative depth and beauty any produced in the undisputed art capital of New York.”

These days, few knowledgeable critics, curators, and collectors would dispute the high regard that McLaughlin merits in the annals of American art history. To get from the abstractions of the Russian Kazimir Malevich and the Dutchman Piet Mondrian, two artists he respected enormously, to the space and light installations of the Californians James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Doug Wheeler, you first need to go past McLaughlin.

He showed the way.

As McLaughlin once put it, “My purpose is to achieve the totally abstract. I want to communicate only to the extent that the painting will serve to induce or intensify the viewer’s natural desire for contemplation without benefit of a guiding principle. I must therefore free the viewer from the demands or special qualities imposed by the particular by omitting the image (object). This I manage by the use of neutral forms.”

For McLaughlin, a “neutral form” tended to be a rectangular form. Yet these geometric elements were not necessarily uninflected. Though this quality is rarely remarked upon, at a retrospective of McLaughlin’s art that traveled to the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1996, Holland Cotter of The New York Times perceptively noticed that the paintings “are full of sensuous incident; the subliminal movement of the painter’s hand is everywhere. A black horizontal bar bears the trace of wavy strokes like the breeze ruffling water. A yellow rectangle carries diagonal strokes like patterns of falling rain. An undercoat of dark blue moves like a shadow beneath a powdery, matte red.”

McLaughlin probably would have found this description accurate. He often referred to Sesshu Toyo, a fifteenth-century Japanese painter, scholar, and Zen priest whose brush-and-ink landscapes he admired above all others. As a boy growing up in Sharon, Massachusetts, he had enjoyed the frequent trips he made with his mother to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, especially to the galleries displaying scroll

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paintings by Japanese artists active during the fifteen and sixteenth centuries.

McLaughlin even spoke about what he termed the “marvelous void” in Sesshu’s art, a guiding principle of his own pictorial efforts. Many curators and critics commenting on his practice repeat what he had to say on this subject. “Thus the viewer was induced to ‘enter’ the painting unconscious of the dominance of the object as such,” McLaughlin pointed out. “On the contrary” he continued, “the condition of ‘Man versus Nature’ was traversed to that of man at one with nature and enabled the viewer to seek his own identity free from the suffocating finality of the conclusive statement.”

By stressing the artist’s words rather than taking into account the overall imagery of scroll paintings, commentators have overlooked how McLaughlin also

the papers around until the right proportion of color to shape and scale had been intuitively found.”

Recently, eight constructions made during 1973 that were preparatory to a series of prints that were never executed have come to light. Signed and numbered 1 to 8 on their backs, they are revelatory about a direction McLaughlin’s art might have been taking. When seen sequentially, as they alternate between horizontal and vertical orientations, a rudimentary theme emerges.

McLaughlin seems to have created a visual riddle of sorts. The first construction has an atypical yellow orb mounted on a tan, horizontal band; the second work features two vertical blocks of white and black beside one another that also, atypically, are embedded in a field of green. The next six pieces are all composed of black and white shapes of various dimensions and backgrounds.

appropriated the geometrically shaped elements that make each Japanese artwork unique. For starters, there’s the character of the spaces above (heaven) and below (earth) the brush-and-ink landscape panels.

Similarly, the narrow silk brocade strips that often hang down from the tops of the vertical scrolls and other attachments also resemble McLaughlin’s abstract forms and compositions. The entire scroll inspired the California abstractionist. He appreciated how the ancillary components created infinite variations; he knew that it was not just the brush-and-ink landscape panels that distinguished one work from another during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The interior forms fluctuate between being horizontal and vertical. As the constructions progress from 3 to 8, they proceed from a large field of white to increasingly broader black grounds and then, at the end, go back again to white. Darkness follows light before returning to light once more.

The yellow disc that is Construction #1 resembles the sun about to rise above a swath of earth. The green field in Construction #2 reinforces this interpretation by suggesting that such black and white forms exist in a landscape setting. This reading is further strengthened by the way the rest of the sheets literally traverse states of light and dark.

Because McLaughlin emphasized the abstract nature of his art, it may be heretical to propose that something else could be taking place. After all, the eight constructions are nonrepresentational and deviate little from the rest of the modernist’s oeuvre. However, an observation recently made by James Turrell, another eminent artist and someone who knew McLaughlin, suggests that seeing the eight constructions in a new light is not farfetched. About McLaughlin’s art, Turrell recalled, “He always said he was making landscapes.”

The eight constructions in the exhibition that this catalogue accompanies appear to support this assertion. That they were executed late in McLaughlin’s career, perhaps at a time when the artist was addressing new concerns, cannot be overlooked. As it was, John McLaughlin ended his career on a high note, one in which he accentuated the visionary as well as the contemplative.

Just before executing his paintings, McLaughlin prepared to-scale paper constructions. These days, works of this nature are referred to as collages. To make these penultimate studies, he needed colored papers, Scotch tape, a ruler, a pencil, and a pair of scissors. In a letter from December 1973, McLaughlin indicated that he preferred paper constructions to preparatory drawings.

As he saw it, what he referred to as “the model” was “indispensable in working out the composition…” “Use of the model,” he further noted, “is also important in that I do not risk the anger of fortuitous happenings in composing as one paints, which in my case would be alien to my attitudes.”

In 1991, several dozen of these constructions were in a show at the Dan Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles.

According to Christopher Knight’s review in the Los Angeles Times, it was believed that McLaughlin began making these paper studies around 1970, when he was a septuagenarian. None were ever put on exhibition.

“Sometimes, one colored shape overlaps another,” Knight observed, “suggesting that McLaughlin moved

-Phyllis Tuchman

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ABOVE: THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO, 1974

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JOHN MCLAUGHLIN

was an American abstract painter born in Sharon, MA in 1898. In 1935, McLaughlin and his wife Florence Emerson (descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson) moved to Japan where they lived for three years. Upon their return in 1938, McLaughlin established a business dealing Japanese prints. It was around this time that he decided to start painting, which was brought to a halt just a few years later with the start of the war. Fluent in Japanese, McLaughlin was recruited as a translator by the Army during WWII. After the war, McLaughlin settled in Dana Point, California, where he started painting full time in 1946. Entirely self-taught, the artist continued to paint, with considerable success in his later career, until his death in 1976. Solo museum exhibitions include John McLaughlin: Retrospective Exhibition, Corcoran Gallery of Art, John McLaughlin, Quadrat Bottrop-Josef Albers Museum, John McLaughlin: Western Modernism, Eastern Thought, Laguna Art Museum and The Prints of John McLaughlin: Site of Contemplation, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction, November 13, 2016–April 16, 2017.

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN CONSTRUCTIONS March 28–May 11, 2018 Design by Ben Tousley Edited by Dorsey Waxter, Liz Sadeghi, Sophia Jackson and Nick Naber Essay ©2018 by Phyllis Tuchman Artwork photography by Charles Benton Additional photography ©1974/2014 by Rebecca Gabriel and Robert C. Morgan (p. 12).

John McLaughlin, 1959, by unidentified photographer, from John McLaughlin Papers, Courtesy Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (p. 13).

We would like to thank Phyllis Tuchman for the contribution of her essay.

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ISBN: 978-0-9908058-9-2 © VA N D O R E N WA X T E R , N E W Y O R K , N Y. A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D . N O P A R T O F T H E C O N T E N T S O F T H I S C ATA L O G U E M AY B E R E P R O D U C E D W I T H O U T P E R M I S S I O N O F T H E P U B L I S H E R .

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