Paul Feeley: Space Stands Still

Paul Feeley A

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Waddington Custot

Space Stands Still Paul Feeley

Untitled (February), 1963

Syphos, 1958

Any Assumption about Art is an Assumption about Life Douglas Dreishpoon The fate of one’s creative existence can sometimes be as fickle as the hand dealt in a poker game. Being among the first wave of Marines to enter Nagasaki after its atomic detonation was nothing short of a bum rap for Paul Feeley, the resulting radiation exposure in all probability precipitating his untimely death from leukemia in 1966 at the age of fiftyfive. We’ll never know for sure. What we do know is that in less than twelve years, beginning with a solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1955 and culminating in a memorial retrospective mounted by his friend Gene Baro at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1968, the artist made a significant mark.

Fig. 2. Paul Feeley leading an art seminar at Bennington College, spring 1949

That Helen Frankenthaler landed in Feeley’s first-year painting class at Vermont’s Bennington College still seems like a serendipitous stroke of good fortune (Fig. 2). Not every student ends up becoming a star, and those who do don’t necessarily give back after graduating, to their teacher or the school. Frankenthaler arrived in Feeley’s class with obvious talent.

He recognised her gift, and under his tutelage she entered art’s pantheon through the eyes of a highly opinionated guide. ‘We had brain-tickling, drawn-out conversations, questions, battles over how artists had arrived at a certain solution. The meaning of space, light, content,’ she fondly recalled in 1976, during the dedication of the Paul Terence Feeley Visual

Fig. 1. Paul Feeley in his studio, April 1962

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Arts Building at the college.1 Feeley opened Frankenthaler’s eyes to art history’s expansive stream of images and masters, how paintings got made, and why some were better than others. In turn, after settling back in New York and mixing with bohemian peers south of Fourteenth Street, she refocused his eyes beyond the college campus.

Fig. 3. A snapshot of Paul Feeley (sitting) with Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, Lee Krasner and Helen Feeley, at Bolton Landing in winter 1952

Frankenthaler became Feeley’s ambassador to a New York art world on the rise during the postwar years. Straightaway she introduced him to her romantic partner at the time, the critic Clement Greenberg. The couple stayed with the Feeley family in Vermont on an extended road trip through New England and Nova Scotia during the year of 1952 (Fig. 3). And while Greenberg could be hot and cold when it came to any artistic friendship, the curatorial bond he forged with Feeley remains one of Bennington’s best-kept secrets. One day someone will write a book about the more 1. Helen Frankenthaler continued to lobby on Paul Feeley’s behalf well after his death, fundraising for the college’s Visual and Performing Arts Center through letters of support from Robert Motherwell, André Emmerich, Anthony Caro, Henry Geldzahler, William Rubin, Clement Greenberg and others; see Paul Feeley Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

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than twenty exhibitions the duo organised in the clapboard-clad space of the Carriage Barn during the early fifties and sixties – an impressive roster of prescient mini-retrospectives before many of the featured artists had any institutional cachet.2,3 Strategic introductions to New York dealers – John Bernard Myers at Tibor, Betty Parsons, André Emmerich and Samuel Kootz – led to premier venues for a coming wave of paintings, works on paper and sculptures. But it was Feeley’s early encounters with vanguard art in the red barn that reset his aesthetic compass.

Fig. 4. Paul Feeley (right) with Tony Smith at the Feeley home, September 1964, seated in front of a brick wall created by students in Lyman Kipp’s sculpture class at Bennington College

What the intrepid veteran was able to accomplish in such a short time still boggles the mind. Having a sympathetic cohort of critics, poets, curators and artists – Gene Goossen, Lawrence Alloway, Howard Nemerov and Tony Smith – many as campus colleagues, inspired him to draw and paint like a man possessed (Fig. 4). Drawing expedited formal explorations, and with annual solo shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery and multiple group invitations in between, he did it religiously. Literally hundreds of drawings mark the decade of the sixties. Even scraps of paper were fair game.

He recorded these stints of drawing on a 9 3 11 inch calendar, along with thumbnail sketches of finished paintings, road trips to Manhattan, art openings and important meetings and dinners (Fig. 5). These largescale calendar pages, a 1962 gift from his wife Helen, as well as another day planner detailing his comings and goings, reflect a manic lifestyle.

It’s little wonder the word ‘exhausted’ appears in one calendar with unsettling frequency.

2. Bennington’s red barn accommodated gem-like shows by David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Josef Albers, Theodoros Stamos, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Herbert Ferber and Robert Motherwell in the fifties, followed by Morris Louis, Milton Avery, Ken Noland, Julies Olitski, Frankenthaler and Jack Bush in the sixties; see Douglas Dreishpoon, Imperfections by Chance: Paul Feeley Retrospective, 1954–1966 (New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2014), p. 8 –10.

3. See Matthew Holman’s text on p. 49 of the present volume for more about Feeley’s curatorial practise.

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Fig. 5. Paul Feeley’s August 1964 artwork calendar, showing completed paintings including Alshain (p. 14–16) and Alnitah (p. 58–59), both 1964

The manic tenor of Feeley’s accelerated ascent is tempered by quiescent paintings whose minimal demeanor – based on balusters, polyps, peanuts, dumbbells and vessels – belies a complex gestalt. Undulating biomorphic curves, in contrast to straight-edged euclidean figures, pulsate with body English, humour and eros. Organic abstraction that mimics the natural laws of growth and form elicits myriad associations. ‘Contemplation and reflection’, according to Feeley’s pedagogical proclivity, didn’t rule out ‘the creative power of impulsiveness and spontaneity.’4 Being impulsive meant soft-pedaling codified instruction. Spontaneity courts imperfection as though it’s a golden egg. There’s nothing perfect about somatic images – Syphos (1958), Vespasian and Germanicus (both 1960), and Tiberius (1961) – whose blurred contours bleed into oscillating configurations. The same can be said of later canvases – Pijai II (January 23) (1963) and Alnitah (1964) – populated by jacks and quatrefoils, in which metaphorical space mediates social dynamics. Having read John Cage, Feeley knew that even non-hierarchical space is never neutral, and that chance can liberate one’s creative process.

Feeley instinctually understood that imperfections in works of art – inconsistent edges, poetic bleeds and kindred shapes dissimilarly conceived – signify a human condition prone to mishaps and mistakes. Perhaps this is why, when it came to ‘[encouraging] the desire’ in students to ask probing questions, he emphatically declared that ‘any assumption about art is an assumption about life.’5 Seeing art and life as inextricably bound grounded the artist’s affinity to classicism, evinced in watercolors of Greek islands bathed in Mediterranean light, in Greek /Roman/American names of local towns assigned to paintings as titles, and in the uncanny appearance of 4. Feeley, Art Policy for Bennington College, October 1959, number 18 [present volume, p. 65].

5. Ibid., number 8.

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p. 4–5, p. 29, p. 26–27 p. 32–33 p. 34 p. 58–59

two wooden Doric columns he rescued from a torn-down house in Troy, New York, and prominently installed next to his Murphy Road studio (Fig. 6).

Feeley’s classicism signaled a return to basics through pedagogy that elevated enlightened discourse and the pursuit of truth. But it also embodied a life philosophy that acknowledged the foibles of hubris and what it meant to be mortal. ‘Know thyself’, he scrawled (two years before his death) along the bottom of a sheet on which he had drawn a version of a jack with six faces, each bearing a cross. ‘Which means remember what you are, a man, and subject to the conditions and limitations of mortality.’6 A more fitting credo, from someone who had come so far so fast, would have been inconceivable.

Fig. 6. Paul Feeley (right) with Lawrence Alloway in 1965 at Feeley’s Murphy Road studio with the two Doric columns he rescued from a torn-down house in Troy, New York

6. Feeley found this quotation in his paperback copy of H.D.F. Kitto’s The Greeks (London: Pelican, 1963 reprint of 1951 edition). Gillian Feeley-Harnik in an email message to the author, 30 March 2015.

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Feeley in London Douglas Dreishpoon

Fig. 7. Exhibition invite for Paul Feeley’s 1964 exhibition at Kasmin Gallery, London

It’s been more than fifty years since Feeley’s distinctive work appeared in London, representing his only solo show outside of the United States.

John Kasmin negotiated with Betty Parsons to bring a stellar ensemble of paintings to his gallery in the fall of 1964 (Fig. 7). Parsons may have been an artist-centric dealer of prescient vision, besides being an artist in her own right, but her ability to promote her stable by brokering sales wasn’t as honed as it should have been. Which may explain why Feeley, encouraged by Greenberg, thought about recasting his lot with André Emmerich. Maybe Parsons sensed what was playing out, because she and her able assistant Jock Truman stepped up their efforts to place Feeley’s 13

paintings and sculptures in important private and institutional collections.

The London initiative could be construed as a conciliatory tactic.

By February 1964, Feeley had already determined which works would be going to Great Britain. On a page of his annotated calendar, three miniature paintings – Alioth, Alkaphrali, and Alkaturops (all 1964) – are meticulously rendered in watercolor, each inscribed with a note: “To Kasmin LTD Oct ’64.”1 These and other canvases were eventually rolled and shipped to the gallery, where they were stretched, framed, and installed a few days before the show’s premiere on 30 October.

It must have been thrilling, after toiling months and months in the studio, for Feeley to see the show open three days after another solo show at Parsons. Gene Goossen accompanied his friend to London to speak about his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art.2 By the time the show closed on 28 November, reviews had appeared in The Times (London), The Arts Review, and The New Statesman.3 Now, fifty years on, the current exhibition at Waddington Custot offers London audiences the opportunity to rediscover the fruits of this remarkable artist.

Fig. 8. Paul Feeley’s October 1964 artwork calendar, blank at the end of the month as he travelled to his exhibitions in New York and London

Dr Douglas Dreishpoon is Chief Curator Emeritus at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné Project, and consulting editor at The Brooklyn Rail.

1. This particular calendar page is reproduced (in black and white) in Paul Feeley (1910–1966): A Memorial Exhibition (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1968), p. 12; and (in color) in Paul Feeley: Painting and Sculpture (New York: Lawrence Markey Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery, 2002), p. 91.

2. See Feeley’s 1964 correspondence with John Kasmin (28 September; 27 October; 2 November), Paul Feeley Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. 3. ‘On the Rebound from Abstract Expressionism, from Our Art Critic,’ The Times (London), 5 November 1964; Karl Stoecker, ‘Paul Feeley, Kasmin Limited,’ The Arts Review, 14 November 1964; Robert Melville, ‘Kasmin Gallery,’ The New Statesman, 20 November 1964.

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Alshain, 1964

Fig. 9. Inside Paul Feeley’s Murphy Road studio, August 1964, with Alshain (1964) pictured in the middle

El Asich, 1965

Dubhe, 1965

Doing a simple thing well

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The restrained abstraction of Paul Feeley Ruth Bretherick p. 34

Paul Feeley’s Pijai II (January 23) (1963) is a substantially sized canvas, over five feet tall, big enough to fill one’s field of vision when standing close-to. Its centre is a deep navy, forming a cross with bulbous ends, a biomorphic shape, edged with a robust red line. The rest of the canvas is full with a muted yellow, that of cooked egg yolk. Between each colour field is a very deliberate gap: the colours do not bleed into each other, but stand their ground. The cross itself presses at the edges of the canvas, so that the red line cannot reach round its extremities. And this considered choice makes the shape appear to pulse with quiet energy, as if finding a point of stillness.

Pijai II is exemplary of Feeley’s mature work, of its poise and balance, and of the care with which shapes, measurements and colours are chosen.

But it is still very much made by hand: the symmetrical shape is not quite entirely symmetrical, and the red line shrinks and grows slightly as it skirts the blue edge of the cross. This is not the machine-made aesthetic of Pop or Minimalism, but nor is it the free gesture of the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning. While Feeley was a contemporary of these painters, the composure and restraint of his work is more akin to that of Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko. Indeed, seeing Pollock as such a powerful force in American painting that ‘he could very easily swallow [it] up’, Feeley saw Newman as ‘the one American artist who has stood for the way out of Pollock, who has stood for the big assist.’2 But we could very easily place Feeley himself in this position.

He trained in California (Menlo College) and then New York (Art Students League) in the early 1930s, later that decade going on to teach at Cooper Union in New York. From 1940 until his premature death from leukaemia in 1966, Feeley taught, very influentially, at Bennington College, a women’s liberal arts college in Vermont, founding and heading the art department there (Fig. 10). His early work and training took him from figurative mural painting to Abstract Expressionism, and he would later curate shows by many of the big names of Abstract Expressionism at Bennington (including Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell) and associate with its advocates (Clement Greenberg among them). Still, it was a pictorial language with which he would battle.

1. Paul Feeley, Art Policy for Bennington College, October 1959, number 11 [present volume, p. 66].

2. Paul Feeley, ‘Opinions of Paul Feeley: Interviewed by Lawrence Alloway’, Living Arts, April 1964, p. 45.

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Fig. 10. Paul Feeley in the classroom at Bennington College, looking over the work of students Helen Frankenthaler (left) and Ruthie Lyford (right), spring 1949

Eschewing gestural painting in the mid to late 1950s – having ‘some embarrassment about expression that eventually became for me unbearable’, as he put it – Feeley began to develop his own pared-back abstract language.3 Ongoing conversations about painterly technique with Helen Frankenthaler, whom he taught at Bennington, led him to experiment with staining, a practice that became synonymous with Frankenthaler’s work, but took on a different character in Feeley’s.

Using unprimed, unstretched or partially stretched canvas with dilute oil-based enamel paint, Feeley created fields of intense colour in curvilinear forms. Syphos (1958), one of the artist’s Cycladic paintings (so-called because they are loosely named after the Greek islands) demonstrates the allure of this technique. Unlike in the later Pijai II, in the Cycladic paintings, although forms are defined there is no hard line between the colours: they bleed into each other, forming a hazy edge. In Syphos, at the boundary between the colours, little rivulets of blue trickle into the orange, while the whole composition resembles a drop forming, liquids merging but held in suspension. Likewise, in Between the In and the Out (1957), from the same period, pale salmon pink bleeds into yellow, its title suggesting that moment of stillness between inhaling and exhaling. In both these works, each colour field shifts from figure to ground and back again, a breathing abstraction.

3. Feeley, ‘Opinions of Paul Feeley’, p. 30.

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p. 4–5

Fig. 11. Paul Feeley with Betty Parsons at his Murphy Road studio, 1964 (the paintings in the background are Untitled (March 2) and Untitled (March 7), both 1964)

p. 65

As well as playing a role in the development of Feeley’s technique, Frankenthaler acted as his ticket back into the New York art world in the 1950s, leading to exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1955 and representation by the Betty Parsons Gallery from 1959 onwards (Fig. 11).

Frankenthaler, for her part, remembered Feeley fondly as an energetic and inspiring teacher, who, as she put it, ‘challenged us, encouraging students to be independently productive.’4 He was known for asking his students ‘What are you saving yourself for?’ encouraging them to commit passionately to their work in the moment, and not lose out by holding back.5 Bennington itself had a special quality, and acted as a hub for painters and critics from Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski to Greenberg and Lawrence Alloway. Greenberg, who often lectured the ‘Bennington girls’, as he called them, found the students an engaged audience, ‘attentive and quick; they catch you out in contradictions and are not afraid to argue.’6 This atmosphere of lively discussion and debate was keenly fostered by Feeley. In his Art Policy for Bennington College, written in 1959, Feeley lays out point by point his approach to running the faculty. What shines through is his optimism for art and his generosity about who it might be for. Number 10 calls for ‘view[ing] the study of art in the light of making living worthwhile and not simply in the light of encouraging a talented few.’ 7 His suspicion of the heroic expressive painter is also threaded through this text, as Feeley encourages the avoidance of pretention, ‘complex uncertainties’ and ‘Wagnerian aims’, proposing instead a return to simplicity – ‘doing a simple thing well’ – and the pursuit of working together with ‘the sense that anyone can make a mark’.8

4. Frankenthaler describing Feeley in 1976 at the dedication of the Bennington Visual and Performing Arts Center, in Douglas Dreishpoon, Imperfections by Chance: Paul Feeley Retrospective, 1954–1966 (New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2014), p. 6.

5. Cary Cordova, ‘Tracing a Life: A Feeley Chronology’ in Dreishpoon, Imperfections by Chance, p. 238.

6. Clement Greenberg in Alan Solomon, ‘The Green Mountain Boys’, Vogue, August 1966, p. 152.

7. Feeley, Art Policy, number 10 [present volume, p. 65].

8. Ibid.

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A real polymath, Feeley let his life’s experiences truly colour his thinking and teaching. His troubling wartime tour with the Marines, during which he witnessed the aftermath of the bombed Nagasaki, taught him how vital art could be, in the truest sense of keeping his vitality alight. While he was unable to paint during the war, he would draw whenever possible, ‘on scraps of paper, on the pages of books, even on the odd piece of Kleenex’, the critic Gene Baro, recalled.9 For Baro, the centrality of drawing to Feeley’s practice is what eventually allowed the artist to create his mature work, for through it he found his ability to essentialise form.

Fig. 12. Paul Feeley with his two Doric columns outside his Murphy Road studio, 1965

In the 1960s, Feeley’s stain technique developed into something harderedged with more distinct geometric forms, as seen in Untitled (January 29) (1962). In this work, one of Feeley’s larger canvases, undulating forms of white and a steely blue tightly interlock, each colour jostling for visual dominance in a series of wave forms that set a rhythmical pace. The slight asymmetry of the composition lends it a liveness, a gentle sway defined by the crisp line between the colours, as if the forms are cut from paper.

Indeed, the bold curve of these organic shapes shares something with the cutouts of Henri Matisse, perhaps not a conscious reference but a similarity that points to the hinterland of Feeley’s visual knowledge.

Often, the artist’s choice of forms derives from patterns seen during his visits to Europe and North Africa – quatrefoils, arabesques, stylised foliage – where he admired the architectural decoration for the tension it held between structure and ornament.10 Feeley’s use of these shapes was not a superficial quotation, but the result of a deep interest in visual history – classicism in particular – which of course entered both his classroom and his own art-making, too; not only using Greco-Roman titles (such as Vespasian or Tiberius), but looking to the forms and approaches of history to find the centre and balance he sought to recreate. As Douglas 9. Gene Baro, ‘Introduction’ in Paul Feeley (1910 –1966): A Memorial Exhibition (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1968), p. 13.

10. Baro, ‘Introduction’, p. 18.

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p. 30–31

p. 29, p. 32–33

Dreishpoon has noted, this turn to classicism was, for Feeley, a means of finding order during the tumultuous postwar years (Fig. 12).11

Fig. 13. View of Jack (1966), installed in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of Paul Feeley (1910–1966): A Memorial Exhibition, 1968

p. 36, p. 45

While Feeley’s compositions of this era might seem aloof, they respond directly to a world that Feeley sometimes felt was ‘cluttered beyond my capacity to live with it’, leading him to seek to create moments of calm amongst the chaos.12 Indeed, rather than works that exist autonomously, the artist liked the idea of art objects that might ‘stand up in a routine human environment’, such as a home.13 His sculptures do just that.

With each dimension just under a metre, three-dimensional works such as El Rakis (1965) and Deneb-el-Algedi (1965) – titled after Arabic star names – are furniture-like, suggesting a direct relationship with the body.

The symmetry of these quatrefoil forms also gives them the unique quality of appearing the same from many angles. Unlike sculpture that shifts and reforms as one moves around it, Feeley’s objects shift and repeatedly return to form as one walks. This is the case for the gilded fibreglass sculpture Jack (1966), a three-dimensional incarnation of the bulbous cross motif seen in so many of his paintings (Fig. 13). The work, planned

by Feeley before his death and completed by his wife Helen, was aptly considered as a wedding ring by the artist because of the way it ‘goes round and round and never stops’, as his daughter noted.14 The oversized playing piece – over six feet tall – stands not as it would in a game of jacks, supported by three legs, but impossibly on its end, holding a position of balance and potential energy. Like all of Feeley’s sculptures, it is a determinedly still point in a world of movement.

Feeley pushed his exploration of sculpture further in the monumental nine-piece Karnak (1966), first shown in his 1968 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York (Fig. 14). Named after an Egyptian temple complex, Karnak, with its curvilinear blue, red and white columns, 11. Dreishpoon, ‘Imperfections by Chance’, p. 18.

12. Feeley, ‘Opinions of Paul Feeley’, p. 43.

13. Feeley, ‘Opinions of Paul Feeley’, p. 30.

14. Jennifer Feeley quoted in Cordova, ‘Tracing a Life’, p. 245.

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shows Feeley thinking through the relationship between sculpture and architecture, a relationship that was accentuated by the central placement of the work in the Guggenheim rotunda. With the winding ramp of the building wrapped around it, the dance between sculpture and viewer that Feeley explored in his smaller sculptures was played out on a larger stage.

This work was a deserved centrepiece for this immediate posthumous assessment of Feeley’s career: synthesizing the artist’s use of simple forms to explore the relationship between movement and stillness, for Gene Baro, the exhibition’s curator, it was ‘a Parthenon for the present’.15

Fig. 14. View of Karnak (1966) installed in the sculpture court of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of Paul Feeley (1910–1966): A Memorial Exhibition, 1968

Paul Feeley valued art that, in his words, ‘just sat still and had a presence rather than some sort of an agitated fit ... that isn’t unduly urgent, doesn’t push itself, but brings you to it rather than projects itself upon you.’16 15. Gene Baro, ‘Paul Feeley: “Serene and joyful vitality”’, Vogue, April 1968, p. 180.

16. Feeley, ‘Opinions of Paul Feeley’, p. 30.

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There is in Feeley’s work something we need at the moment as we weather a pandemic that may affect our lives for years to come. It has a kind of sustained and sustaining energy – not the bursting strength of the gestural painting that Feeley rejected – but something slower to release, that fosters resolve and endurance.

Dr Ruth Bretherick (née Burgon) is Curator of Research and Public Engagement at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. She completed her PhD in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh in 2017, with her thesis entitled ‘Pace, rhythm, repetition: walking in art since the 1960s’, supervised by Dr Tamara Trodd and Dr Glyn Davis. The thesis focussed on the work of Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Trisha Brown and Janet Cardiff. Ruth has published in MIRAJ (Moving Image Review & Arts Journal), Tate Papers and The Sculpture Journal and has a forthcoming paper in the Oxford Art Journal. She has worked for the University of Edinburgh, the ARTIST ROOMS Research Partnership and the National Galleries of Scotland among other organisations.

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Previous page: Germanicus, 1960

Vespasian, 1960

Untitled (January 29), 1962

Tiberius, 1961

Pijai II (January 23), 1963

Cor Caroli, 1965

El Rakis, 1965

List of Works

The Other Side

1957 Oil-based enamel on canvas 209.6 3 147.3 cm

Germanicus

1960 Oil-based enamel on canvas 169 3 240.4 cm

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Syphos

1958 Oil-based enamel on canvas 209.3 3 156.2 cm

Vespasian

Tiberius

1960 Oil-based enamel on canvas 241 3 169.3 cm

1961 Oil-based enamel on canvas 240 3 171.3 cm

Untitled (January 29)

1962 Oil-based enamel on canvas 143.4 3 205.7 cm

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Pijai II (January 23)

1963 Oil-based enamel on canvas 167.6 3 129.5 cm

Untitled

1962 Oil-based enamel on canvas 102.2 3 144.8 cm

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Untitled (February)

1963 Oil-based enamel on canvas 50.8 3 40.8 cm

Untitled

Arcturus

Alshain

Alnitah

1963 Oil-based enamel on canvas 150.6 3 120 cm

1964 Oil-based enamel on canvas 76.5 3 76 cm

1963 Oil-based enamel on canvas 147.6 3 147.6 cm

1964 Oil-based enamel on canvas 151 3 151 cm

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El Asich

Dubhe

Deneb-el-Algedi

El 9

1965 Oil-based enamel on wood 188 3 45.1 3 44.5 cm

1965 Oil-based enamel on wood 91.4 3 91.4 3 91.4 cm

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1965 Oil-based enamel on wood 90.8 3 91.4 3 91.4 cm

1965 Acrylic on wood 20.3 3 20.3 3 20.3 cm

El 5

Cor Caroli

El Rakis

Delta

1965 Oil-based enamel on wood 20.3 3 20.3 3 20.3 cm

1965 Oil-based enamel on wood 91.4 3 91.4 3 91.4 cm

1965 Oil-based enamel on wood 91.4 3 91.4 3 91.4 cm

1965 Oil-based enamel on wood 91.4 3 91.4 3 91.4 cm

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Deneb-el-Algedi, 1965

Fig. 15. Outdoors at Bennington, summer 1997 (from left: Delta, Deneb-el-Bola, El Rescha, all 1965)

El 5, 1965

The Other Side, 1957

Returning to First Principles Paul Feeley: Curator-Artist Matthew Holman In the clapboard gallery of Bennington College, Paul Feeley curated a flurry of remarkable exhibitions of postwar American art. Tucked away in the arcadian Green Mountains of Vermont, the ‘red barn’ was nearly 200 miles from Manhattan, often short on funding and sometimes borrowed for piano practice by students enrolled at the prestigious liberalarts college. Despite these modesties, Feeley patiently turned the Carriage Barn into a testing-ground for the display of avant-garde tendencies in painting and sculpture.

Over the course of his tenure at Bennington, from 1951 to his death from leukaemia in 1966, Feeley helped to organise more than 22 exhibitions.

His earlier shows were predominantly dedicated to Abstract Expressionism and Color Field artists, beginning with David Smith in 1951 and including small-scale retrospectives of Adolph Gottlieb (1954), Hans Hofmann (1955) and Robert Motherwell (1959). Visionary in hindsight yet largely unreviewed at the time, these events are described by Douglas Dreishpoon as having ‘immediate repercussions more like a lone cardinal chirping in the wilderness.’1 By the 1960s, Feeley was responsible for formidable monographic shows of his former student and lifelong friend Helen Frankenthaler (1962), as well as Kenneth Noland (1961) and Jules Olitski (1962), both of whom taught at Bennington. Freed from the clunky bureaucracy and commercial concerns of New York galleries, Feeley and his freewheeling curatorial collaborators could respond swiftly to vanguard developments in American art with perceptive exhibitions that paved the way for institutional recognition.

In November 1952, Feeley and Clement Greenberg organised the first retrospective show of Jackson Pollock, four years before The Museum of Modern Art posthumously awarded him the same honour.2 Featuring only eight paintings – among them Pasiphaë (1944), Totem II (1945), The Key (1946) and Autumn Rhythm (1950), one of Pollock’s most celebrated works – the exhibition eclipsed a simultaneous show at Pollock’s new gallery Sidney Janis, where almost nothing sold. In fact, Pollock was uneasy about the implication of a mid-career retrospective that his best work was behind him. He had been seized by a creative drought not helped by Greenberg’s insistence to include only one of his recent monochromatic paintings,

1. Douglas Dreishpoon, ‘Imperfections by Chance’, in Imperfections by Chance: Paul Feeley Retrospective, 1954–1966 (New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2014), p. 9.

2. Clement Greenberg, preface to A Retrospective Show of the Paintings of Jackson Pollock exhibition leaflet, Bennington College, November 1952, n.p. Crossett Library Archives, Bennington, Vermont.

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Echo: No. 25 (1951).3 Feeley, on the other hand, was confident that this was an opportune moment for such a retrospective at Bennington (Fig. 16) and was able to curate a show that kept ‘the experience fresh.’4

Fig. 16. Helen Frankenthaler’s snapshot of Clement Greenberg, Lee Krasner, Helen Feeley, Paul Feeley, Jackson Pollock and the Feeley’s beloved poodles outside the barn at Bennington College, at around the time of Pollock’s exhibition there in November 1952

The display was partly determined by the Carriage Barn’s various uses as a gallery space, recital hall and gymnasium. In one installation photograph, two students admire the horizontal-plane No. 2 (1949), which was positioned flush above the waist-height handrail (Fig. 17).

In the background, three visitors study Totem II, Pollock’s homage to Native American drip-and-pour technique, which is fastened to the upper bannister-rail of the mezzanine floor above. Wintry light falls from the top window, while unseen on the other side of the room a student plays piano with Autumn Rhythm as a backdrop, its lines of paint perfectly echoed by the harsh silhouettes of branches in the woodland outside.

Undiscerning critics might censure such a hanging display as amateurish or haphazardly provisional, but the approach speaks to Feeley’s admiration for exhibitions that could ‘stand up in a routine human environment.’5 One of Feeley’s curatorial models was European ‘old churches or old buildings’, where Renaissance paintings were positioned in the living space of daily

3. Pollock’s palpable anxiety was documented when Feeley told student Olivia Hirsch, the exhibition reviewer for The Bennington Evening Banner, that she ‘scared ... poor Jackson ... half to death’ in her interview with him.

See Olivia Hirsch, ‘College Notes: Pollock, Greenberg and Tanenbaum’, Bennington Evening Banner, 20 November 1952.

4. Lawrence Alloway, ‘Profile of Paul Feeley’, Living Arts (1964), p. 28.

5. Ibid, p. 30.

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worship, ‘where people rub up against them and where curating is.’6 The opportunity to study these works intimately enough to pursue the strength of a line or the trial and error of pentimenti drove Feeley’s dedication to curatorship as an instructive enterprise.

Fig. 17. Students view Jackson Pollock’s No. 2 (1949) in A Retrospective Show of the Paintings of Jackson Pollock, curated by Paul Feeley and Clement Greenberg at Bennington College, Vermont, 1952

p. 65

‘I think Pollock made me go back to school’, Feeley later reflected to his friend and sometime Bennington colleague Lawrence Alloway, ‘or maybe make a school for myself ... The most important lesson, I think, that I got from Pollock’s work was that willingness to face the worst in oneself, to escape taste ... by a freshness of experience that made taste by any common definition not the main issue.’ 7 Feeley may never have set down a manifesto for his curatorial practice in the way that he did in his pedagogical Art Policy for Bennington College (1959), but his role as an exhibitions organiser was indivisible from his life as an artist. If as a teacher he sought to bridge the gaps between art and life by encouraging the ‘study of art in the light of making living worthwhile’, it is clear that exhibitions such as the Jackson Pollock, staged in the centre of college life, offered a palpably didactic purpose for the student body and faculty alike.8 Around the time of the Pollock exhibition, in the early winter of 1952, Feeley produced several gestural paintings such as Untitled (1952) (Fig. 24) in which paint was spattered over newspaper and found objects. Much indebted to Pollock’s signature style, Untitled does not resemble what we expect from a Feeley painting: it lacks the serene and stable rhythms of curvilinear forms that would come to characterise his imagery. Perhaps 6. Ibid.

7 . Ibid.

8. Feeley, Art Policy for Bennington College, October 1959, number 10 [present volume, p. 65].

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sensing this disjunction, Feeley bequeathed Untitled to his friend Howard Nemerov, who responded with a poem The Winter Lightning (for Paul).

Failed experiments are often the most rewarding lessons.

Fig. 18. E. C. Goossen and an unidentified woman standing in front of Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51) in Barnett Newman First Retrospective Exhibition, curated by Paul Feeley and Clement Greenberg at Bennington College, Vermont, 1958

As the 1950s wore on, Feeley became increasingly ambivalent about the future of gestural abstraction in his own painting practice. ‘I’d say that my fight with Abstract Expressionism, if you’d call it a fight’, he later reflected, ‘had to do with deciding that all that dynamic stuff was more than the ever-loving world could stand.’9 What the modern artist really needed to do was to find a mode of art making that allowed them to ‘ease off’.10 Feeley found this release in the work of Barnett Newman who, like Pollock, also had his first retrospective exhibition at the Carriage Barn, in May 1958 (Fig. 18). Feeley recognised in Newman a closer compatriot in form and sensibility. The exhibition brought Feeley into extended physical proximity with Newman’s ‘zips’, and orienting his own body in relation to their vertiginous biomorphism must only have spurred his move to more rigorous colour balances and sensuous symmetry around the same time.

9. Alloway, ‘Profile of Paul Feeley’, p. 33.

10. Ibid.

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The Newman retrospective was the most ambitious exhibition of the Feeley-Greenberg partnership, featuring some 18 paintings, including Death of Euclid (1947) and Eve (1951), now held in the Tate collection.11 After working on several firsts together, the relationship between Greenberg and Feeley – two figures with wildly different temperaments – began to collapse under the weight of their competing personal loyalties.

In a terse letter to Gene Goossen dated 12 April, Greenberg explained that, ‘on second thought ... I’ve decided that I’d rather not come up for Barney’s opening [because of] the way I feel about Paul.’12 Nevertheless, the exhibition was a great success and Goossen, writing in the catalogue notes, echoed Feeley’s ‘full commitment for education in the present,’13 which would be his enduring legacy at Bennington.

A decade after Motherwell’s show at Bennington College, the painter would write of the Carriage Barn as ‘the scene of some of the most important and beautiful retrospective exhibitions’ and praised the ‘probing minds’ of Feeley and his colleagues, who offered ‘deep personal familiarity with the problems and aspirations of international modern art.’14 While Feeley will continue to be best celebrated as an artist, the impact of his role as a curator, not only on his own practice but on artistic communities across postwar America, is a story that has only been partly told.

Dr Matthew Holman is a writer and critic, and holds a PhD on the curatorial career of poet Frank O’Hara from University College London. Matthew has been a visiting fellow at Yale University, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin.

His art writing has been published by Frieze, The Art Newspaper, The White Review and Apollo, and he has contributed to exhibition publications for Lévy Gorvy and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum.

Matthew is currently Research Associate at The Perimeter.

11. Gene Goossen, ‘Catalogue Note’, Barnett Newman: First Retrospective Exhibition leaflet, Bennington College, May 1958, n.p. Crossett Library Archives, Bennington, Vermont.

12. Clement Greenberg, letter to Gene Goossen, 12 April 1958. Eugene C. Goossen Archive, Archivo Lafuente, Cantabria, Spain.

13. Goossen, ‘Catalogue Note’.

14. Robert Motherwell, letter to Helen Frankenthaler, 11 June 1969. Paul Feeley Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

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Untitled, 1962

Untitled, 1963

Alnitah, 1964

Arcturus, 1963

Fig. 19. Paul Feeley stretching canvases in his Murphy Road studio, April 1962

El 9, 1965

Delta, 1965

Art Policy For Bennington College Paul Feeley, October 1959

I have written my notes with respect to policy under the heading of aims.

In many cases these aims represent present purposes; in others, they represent notions the art faculty have discussed and may discuss further.

These aims are listed below:

1. Increased faculty common understanding so that students may be reassured and encouraged at meeting a facade of belief and conviction.

2. An increased number of projects and offerings that emphasize the importance of general human views.

3. A valiant attempt to define the 20th century so that we may know what we are working with.

4. The encouragement to do the most elementary and primitive things in art, if necessary, in order not to operate in a hollow, pretentious manner.

5. A willingness at all times to return to first principles, to get back to simple things in order not to get lost in complex uncertainties.

6. Increased understanding of past and present culture.

7. Increased integration of the visual arts with other ways in which man represents his insights and visions both individually and communally.

8. To encourage the desire to ask questions which make it clear that any assumption about art is an assumption about life.

9. To be challenged by the opportunity of finding life relationships in the rare arena where form is confronted by the word, and not to answer that challenge by an art school formula.

10. To view the study of art in the light of making living worthwhile and not simply in the light of encouraging a talented few.

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11. To encourage the achievement of some philosophic position in the visual arts which can give people the human satisfaction of aiming for something or going somewhere. Such a philosophic position is implied by a willingness to start all over again, that is, to see what one can do about doing a simple thing well. Some of these Wagnerian aims do nothing but disgust and frustrate one.

12. To increase all the studies implied by the word Art rather than the divisionistic sense raised by the pursuits that come under the different headings of art painting, sculpture, graphic arts, etc.

13. To give specific thought to what it means to study art in our time.

Clearly we are responding to world conditions that have never been quite this way before.

14. On the grounds that self-expression is too lonesome, to encourage all corporate enterprises in the visual arts.

15. To be unafraid of the lack of apparent absolutism in the visual arts rather, to preserve the sense that anyone can make a mark.

16. To recognize the necessity felt by the individual to make his own mark and lead toward more corporate enterprises after recognizing that necessity.

17. To place the study of art at the level of the study of poetry. This will make the nature of our commitment clear.

18. To encourage contemplation and reflection as sources of human action; however, not to deny the creative power of impulsiveness and spontaneity.

19. To train people to read art as an expression of human ideas.

20. To emphasize the notion of the study of art as a way of leading to a way of life, not the study of art as the acquisition of a vocational technique leading to immediate success.

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Fig. 20. Paul Feeley in his Murphy Road studio, 1964

Fig. 21. Paul Feeley sitting on the floor of his studio at the Old Fire House, North Bennington as Ruth Frendenthal, his assistant, touches up his sculptures, proof from Vogue, 1966

Chronology 1910 Paul Feeley is born on 27 July in Des Moines, Iowa, to a working class family from a local farming community. Religion is a central, yet contentious, part of family life, with his father, John, an Irish Catholic (and welterweight prizefighter) and his mother, Carrie, a Methodist.

Feeley chooses not to attend church when he is 11 years old.

1922 The family moves to Palo Alto, California. Feeley completes primary school and joins Palo Alto High School, where he is elected student body president in his final year.

1927 At a local art exhibition, Feeley meets landscape painter Hobart B. Jacobs.

Becoming lifelong friends, Jacobs supports Feeley’s developing artistic practice. In the evenings, Feeley uses his two sleeping younger brothers as models for a series of pencil and Conté drawings, which he later exhibits at the Palo Alto Library.

1931–1934 Seeking out an artistic career, Feeley moves to New York to train with American society portraitist, Cecilia Beaux. He enrolls in classes at the Art Students League (his teachers include Thomas Hart Benton, Frank DuMond and George Bridgman) and studies fresco painting with Austin Purves at The Cooper Union, teaching in the night school there. Joins the Rambusch Decorating Company and works on restoring private and public murals.

1935

Fig. 22. Paul Feeley in 1933

Spends the summer in Paris, enjoying the city’s modern art.

1936 Meets Helen Webster, his future wife, who is also from Palo Alto and visiting New York from Bennington College.

1937 Marries Helen in a Quaker ceremony in Palo Alto.

Feeley, now head of the Plastics Department at The Cooper Union, becomes interested in abstraction. Establishes the Feeley-Dikran Display Company with former student Dikran Dingilian, making shop window displays and theatre sets.

Paul Feeley, Guild Gallery, New York, NY Fig. 23. Paul and Helen in 1937

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1939–1942 Joins the art faculty at Bennington College, moving there with Helen who gives birth to Gillian, their first daughter, in 1940 and Jennifer, their second, in 1942. Meets Barnett Newman, whose work he exhibits at the college in 1958.

1943–1945 Enlists in the Marine Corps and draws continuously, capturing daily life in the camp. Spends, in autumn 1945, nearly three months in Nagasaki after its atomic detonation by the United States military.

1946 Adjusts to civilian life somewhat alienated from the New York art scene yet gains a staunch following in Bennington for his engaged teaching and passion for his own practice. Helen Frankenthaler enrolls in his painting class and a blossoming friendship with the Feeleys ensues.

1949 New England Painting and Sculpture, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA

1950 On sabbatical, travels with his family and their two black standard poodles to Carmel, California. There, Feeley’s figurative gouaches are noticed by gallerists and curators, leading to a flurry of West Coast exhibitions.

Paul Feeley, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA Art Faculty Exhibition, Bennington College Art Gallery, VT

1951 Meets John Bernard Myers, director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

Frankenthaler introduces Feeley to Clement Greenberg and they collaborate on a series of exhibitions in the Carriage Barn at Bennington. The 22 exhibitions organised there from 1951 to 1966 cement Bennington as an important avant-garde art satellite to New York.

Paul Feeley, Alexandre Rabow Galleries, San Francisco, CA Paintings by Ellwood Graham, Watercolors by Paul Feeley, San Francisco Museum of Art, CA

1952 With Greenberg, Feeley curates a seminal Jackson Pollock retrospective at the Carriage Barn. Starts to experiment with the expressive marks, layered colour and large-scale canvases associated with Abstract Expressionism.

Art Faculty Exhibition, Bennington College Art Gallery, VT

1953 Paul Feeley, Cummington School of the Arts, Amherst, MA Paul Feeley, Milton College, WI

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Fig. 24. Untitled, 1952

1954 Organises, with Greenberg, a retrospective of Adolph Gottlieb’s work at the Carriage Barn.

Emerging Talent, Kootz Gallery, New York, NY [curated by Greenberg]

1955 Curates, again with Greenberg, a Hans Hofmann retrospective at the Carriage Barn. Shows new work at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, his first major solo exhibition in New York.

Paul Feeley, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY Vanguard 1955: A Painter’s Selection of New American Paintings, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

1956 –1957 Begins work on a series of paintings loosely titled the Cycladic series (1956 –1959) for the chain of Greek islands. Travels to Malaga, Spain on sabbatical and paints colourful semi-abstract landscapes.

Paul Feeley, Bennington College Art Gallery, Bennington, VT Bennington College Art Faculty Exhibition, Robert Hull Fleming Museum, Burlington, VT

1958

Fig. 25. Ios, 1957

Curates, with critic E. C. Goossen, a Barnett Newman retrospective at the Carriage Barn, for which Greenberg writes the catalogue text.

Sculptor Tony Smith joins Bennington College to teach architecture.

Paintings by Paul Feeley, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY

1959 Moves off campus with his family to a house on Murphy Road, which has a white barn that Feeley promptly makes his studio. Writes his Art Policy for Bennington College, a manifesto of his visionary view of art and pedagogy.

Group Show, Section Eleven, New York, NY

1960 Feeley’s first solo exhibition with the Betty Parsons Gallery. Starts to name his paintings after Roman generals and organises shows of Color Field artists Morris Louis (1960), Kenneth Noland (1961) and Jules Olitski (1962).

Paul Feeley: Paintings, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY

1961 With deteriorating health but spurred on by Betty Parsons, Feeley works endlessly. Visits Italy and Greece and prolifically paints the landscape.

Lawrence Alloway joins the Bennington faculty.

Exhibition of Work by the Art Faculty, Bennington College Art Gallery, VT 64th American Exhibition: Paintings, Sculpture, Art Institute of Chicago, IL

Fig. 26. Rafina V, 1961

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1962 Spends the summer in Maine, again painting the landscape. Continues to work tirelessly, using a calendar to document his practise. Names his paintings after Greek cities and introduces a hard edge to his forms, repeating and arranging them on the canvas. Donald Judd reviews Feeley’s show at Betty Parsons Gallery for Arts Magazine.

Paul Feeley: Paintings, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY Four American Painters, Molton Gallery, London, UK Painting and Sculpture, Wolfson Studio, Salt Point, New York, NY A Selection of American Abstract Paintings, 1948–1962, Newton College of the Sacred Heart, MA Fig. 27. Betty Parsons Gallery exhibition invite, 1963

1963 Titles his paintings after stars, many with Arabic names and others after the stars of the Pleiades.

Briefly considers leaving the Betty Parsons Gallery and spends the winter holiday in California with Helen, driving back with Greenberg.

Paul Feeley, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY New Experiments in Art, De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, NE First Annual Retrospective Exhibition – The Art Dealers Association of America, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, NY Forty-Six Works from New York, Dilexi Gallery, San Francisco, CA Fig. 28. Southold, 1964

1964 Curates, with Alloway, a traveling exhibition of work

by Maxfield Parrish (whose mural Feeley had helped restore in the 1930s). Alloway interviews Feeley for Living Arts magazine. Feeley tours the East Coast for Bennington College, researching art school and museum buildings and making abstract paintings of the landscape. Travels to London for his first solo exhibition there, at the Kasmin Gallery, and speaks about his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Paul Feeley: Paintings, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY Paul Feeley: Recent Paintings, Kasmin Gallery, London, UK Art for Art Collectors, Toledo Museum of Art, OH The Painter’s Eye, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY American Painting III, Cincinnati Art Museum, OH Seventy-Second Annual Exhibition, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE Post Painterly Abstraction, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MI; Art Gallery of Toronto, CAN [curated by Greenberg] World House International, 1964, World House Galleries, New York, NY 118 Show, Kasmin Gallery, London, UK Color Dynamics, Katonah Gallery, Katonah, New York, NY Paintings and Constructions from the Richard Brown Baker Collection, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI American Drawings, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY [curated by Alloway] Dealer’s Choice: An Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings, Drawings, and Prints, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX The Shaped Canvas, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY [curated by Alloway]

Fig. 29. American Drawings, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1964

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Fig. 30. Betty Parsons Gallery exhibition invite, 1965

1965 Extends his biomorphic forms into three-dimensions and names these sculptures after Arabic stars.

With dramatically decreasing health, he visits New York and oversees the creation of the Bennington Visual and Performing Arts Center.

Wins the Old Fire House in North Bennington, in an auction, and quickly makes it his new studio.

Paul Feeley: Sculpture, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY Optical Painting, Philadelphia Art Alliance, PA Art of the 50s and 60s from the Richard Brown Baker Collection, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT 40 Key Artists of the Mid-20th Century: Paintings and Sculpture, Detroit Institute of Arts, MI 118 Show, Kasmin Gallery, London, UK Artists Against Racialism, Savage Gallery and Cassel Gallery, London, UK Colorists, 1950–1965, San Francisco Museum of Art, CA 25 Paintings ’65, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

1965–1966 The Responsive Eye, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (1965); City Art Museum of St. Louis, MI (1965); Seattle Art Museum, WA (1965); Pasadena Art Museum, CA (1965); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (1966) 1965 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

1966 Alan Solomon writes about Feeley, Noland and Anthony Caro for Vogue magazine, naming them the ‘Green Mountain Boys’. Travels by ship to Europe with Helen and curator Gene Baro, visiting Italy, France and Spain. A local doctor diagnoses leukemia, 22 years after Feeley entered Nagasaki. They return to New York where Feeley dies in June, aged just 55. After his death Helen fulfils his wish to make the sculpture Jack two metres square, incorporating a piece of gold leaf that Feeley had kept by his side for 33 years. Goossen writes Feeley’s New York Times obituary.

Paul Feeley, Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Paul Feeley: Paintings and Sculpture Never Before Shown, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY Multiplicity, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA Seven Decades, 1895–1966: Crosscurrents in Modern Art, Cordier & Ekstrom, New York, NY Whence Op, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York, NY Systemic Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Pattern Art: Twentieth Anniversary Show, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY Exhibition of American Painting and Sculpture, Midland Group Gallery, Nottingham, UK; Museum of Modern Art (now Modern Art Oxford), Oxford, UK

1966 –1967 Vormen van de Kleur (Amsterdam) / Formen der Farbe (Stuttgart and Bern) Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NI (1966); Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, DE (1967); Kunsthalle, Bern, CH (1967)

1967 Color, Image, Form, Detroit Institute of Arts, MI Painting & Sculpture from the Museum Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Seven Decades: A Selection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Artists /Bennington, Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL

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1968 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum organises a memorial retrospective, for which Frankenthaler and Motherwell host a cocktail reception attended by the who’s who of the American artworld.

Paul Feeley (1910–1966): A Memorial Exhibition, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Betty Parsons’ Personal Collection, Finch College Museum of Art, New York, NY Opening Exhibition: National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Fig. 31. Paul Feeley (1910–1966): A Memorial Exhibition, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1968

1968–1969 The Art of the Real: USA 1948–1968, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (1968); Grand Palais, Paris, FR (1968); Kunsthaus, Zurich, CH (1969); Tate, London, UK (1969)

1968–1971 Paul Feeley: Retrospective Exhibition of Drawings and Watercolors, 1927–1966, New Gallery, Bennington College, VT (1968); Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (1969); Akron Art Institute, OH (1969); Saginaw Art Museum, MI (1969); University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (1969); Munson-WilliamsProctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY (1970); George Thomas Hunter Gallery of Art, Chattanooga, TN (1970); University of Minnesota, MN (1970); University of Iowa, IA (1970); Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA (1970); University of New Mexico, NM (1971); Kutztown State College, PA (1971)

Fig. 32. Art of the Real, MoMA, 1968

1970 Paul Feeley: A Selection from the Late 1950s, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY

1971 Paul Feeley: Drawings and Watercolors, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY Recent Acquisitions: American, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1972 Selections from the Betty Parsons Collection, Montclair Art Museum, NJ

1973 Paul Feeley, Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York, NY

1974 Drawings Old, Drawings New, Parsons-Truman Gallery, New York, NY

1975 Paul Feeley: First Show of These Paintings in This Country, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY

1976 Paul Feeley, André Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY Artists at Bennington, Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, VT

1984 Art as Personal Relation: The Collection of Lionel and Laura Nowak, Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, VT

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1987 Fifty Years of Collecting: An Anniversary Selection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY

1988 Made in the Sixties: Painting and Sculpture from the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

1991 Stubborn Painting, Now and Then, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY

1997 Paul Feeley: Works on Paper, Lawrence Markey Gallery, New York, NY Works on Paper, Lawrence Markey Gallery, New York, NY

1998 The Green Mountain Boys: Caro, Feeley, Noland, and Olitski, André Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY; Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery Gallery, Bennington College, VT Painting: Now and Forever, Part I, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, NY

1999 Paul Feeley: Paintings, Lawrence Markey Gallery, New York, NY Shaping a Generation: The Art and Artists of Betty Parsons, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, WV

2001 Kasmin’s Sixties, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY Clement Greenberg: A Critic’s Collection, Portland Art Museum, OR Tenth Anniversary Exhibition, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, NY

2002 Paul Feeley: Painting and Sculpture, Lawrence Markey Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, NY

2005 Paul Feeley: Paintings and Watercolors, Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, DE

2007 Paul Feeley: Paintings, Lawrence Markey Gallery, San Antonio, TX

2008 Paul Feeley: Nine Paintings, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, NY Paul Feeley: Bennington College, 75 Years of Arts Education, Bennington Museum, VT Painting: Now and Forever, Part II, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, NY

2010 Color Fields, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, DE

2013 Paul Feeley: Paintings, Lawrence Markey Gallery, San Antonio, TX Paul Feeley: 1959–1962, Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, NY

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2014 Pop Abstraction, Fredericks & Freiser and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, NY Starting Out: 9 Abstract Painters 1958–1971, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY Contemporary Highlights: Abstraction and Form, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT A Drawing Show, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, NY Bennington Modernism, Bennington Museum, VT

2014 –2015 Imperfections by Chance: Paul Feeley Retrospective 1954–1966, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo,NY (2014); Columbus Museum of Art, OH (2015)

2016 Paul Feeley: An Artist’s Game with Jacks, Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, NY The Congregation, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY

2017

Fig. 33. Paul Feeley’s retrospective at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2014

Colour Is, Waddington Custot, London, UK Aspects of Abstraction, Lisson Gallery, New York, NY Vital Curiosity, Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, VT

2018 Paul Feeley: The Other Side, Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, NY Unpacking the Vault: Hidden Narratives in the Bennington Art Collection, Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, VT

2019 The Fullness of Color: 1960s Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Dilexi Gallery: Disparate Ontologies, The Landing, Los Angeles, CA

2020 Paul Feeley, Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles, CA

2021 Paul Feeley: Space Stands Still, Waddington Custot, London, UK

Fig. 34. Space Stands Still, Waddington Custot, 2021

This information is drawn from Cary Cordova’s ‘Tracing a Life: A Feeley Chronology’, published in Imperfections by Chance: Paul Feeley Retrospective, 1954–1966 (Buffalo, New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2014), p. 233 and Cary Cordova’s 1999 PhD thesis ‘Paul Feeley: His Life, His Art, and the Rise of the Avant Garde at Bennington College’.

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Selected Public Collections Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA Columbus Museum of Art, OH Detroit Institute of Arts, MI Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, WA McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires, AR Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York, NY Newark Museum, NJ Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

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Photography credits Every effort has been made to credit the source of photographs included here and any errors are inadvertent. Artworks by Paul Feeley are courtesy of the Estate of Paul Feeley and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

Fig. 1, 3 –9, 11, 12, 16, 20 –23, 32, 35. Courtesy of the Estate of Paul Feeley and Garth Greenan Gallery Fig. 2. Photograph by Ted Goodman, courtesy of Bennington College Archives, the Estate of Paul Feeley and Garth Greenan Gallery Fig. 10. Courtesy of Bennington College Archives, the Estate of Paul Feeley and Garth Greenan Gallery Fig. 13, 14, 29, 31. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Estate of Paul Feeley and Garth Greenan Gallery Fig. 15. Photograph by Vanessa Harnik, courtesy of the Estate of Paul Feeley and Garth Greenan Gallery Fig. 17. Courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution [Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner papers, c. 1914 –1984] Fig. 18. Photograph by Matthias Tarnay, courtesy of the Barnett Newman Foundation Fig. 19. Photograph by Lloyd Oppenheimer, courtesy of the Estate of Paul Feeley and Garth Greenan Gallery Fig. 24. Untitled, 1952, oil on paper, 55.9 3 70.5 cm Collection of Alexander and Mary Nemerov, courtesy of the Estate of Paul Feeley and Garth Greenan Gallery Fig. 25. Ios, 1957, oil-based enamel on canvas, 101.9 3 51.8 cm Courtesy of the Estate of Paul Feeley and Garth Greenan Gallery Fig. 26. Rafina V, 1961, watercolour on paper, 35.6 3 42.2 cm Courtesy Private Collection, London Fig. 27, 30. Courtesy of the Paul Feeley Archives, Museum of Modern Art, the Estate of Paul Feeley and Garth Greenan Gallery Fig. 28. Southold, 1964, watercolour on paper, 58.4 3 45.7 cm Courtesy Private Collection, London Fig. 33. Courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Fig. 34. Courtesy of Waddington Custot

Fig. 35. Paul Feeley in his studio, at the Old Fire House, North Bennington, 1966

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Paul Feeley, Space Stands Still Waddington Custot, 11 Cork Street, London, W1S 3LT 12 April – 6 June 2021 This publication accompanies the first solo exhibition of Paul Feeley’s work in the United Kingdom since 1964. This long overdue presentation has been enriched by the support of many people. In particular, Waddington Custot would like to thank writers Douglas Dreishpoon, Ruth Bretherick and Matthew Holman for their insightful contributions.

Thanks also to Garth Greenan, Hugh O’Rourke and Rachel Garbade, from Garth Greenan Gallery, New York for their wide-ranging assistance and to Michael Kelly from Fraser Muggeridge studio. Above all, the gallery extends its gratitude to the Paul Feeley Estate and the artist’s family: Helen W. Wheelwright, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Jennifer Feeley, Paul Harnik, Vanessa Harnik and Cary Cordova, for making this timely project possible.

First published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Waddington Custot.

Official copyright © 2021 Waddington Custot, London Artworks © The Estate of Paul Feeley and Garth Greenan Gallery, 2021 pp. 7–13 © Douglas Dreishpoon pp. 19 –25 © Ruth Bretherick pp. 49 –53 © Matthew Holman All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or other information storage and retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Edited by Louise Malcolm Designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio Photography by Christopher Burke Studio Printed and bound in Belgium by Graphius Coordinated by Noémie Freymond ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9164568 - 7 - 7 To find out more about Waddington Custot publications, please visit our website waddingtoncustot.com where you can browse our catalogues and buy any titles that are of interest.

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