Berkshire Fine Arts has picked this up.
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Charles Giuliano picks up on my rant with his own insights
Insider/Outsider
My blog on
Tim Nichols and the subsequent comments from
people who knew him, opened up my eyes to the difficulty of simple descriptions
of a life as long as Tim’s. As we all navigate our life, how we must appear to
others is so variegated that in the end there is not one Tim but as many as there
were observers of his life. My take on him was colored by what stages of our lives
our path’s crossed. The Nichols, several years out of grad school that I first
met in the late 70’s who was running his own summer school to earn extra money was
not the well-established teacher of the Museum School, who was one of the
artists I showed in the mid-nineties at the Art Institute. The comments on my
blog, one from a former student, and another from someone who was aware of Tim’s
public persona in the Boston scene both belied my take on him as an outsider. The
student saw the power he had as a teacher over his students and felt
marginalized by his criticism, the latter saw him from afar as a player in the
world of Boston art with the prestigious Museum School his platform. Both saw
themselves more outside the orbit of the Boston scene than he was.
I guess my effort to perceive in his contrarian demeanor
artistic, authenticity, has a good deal of self-projection in it. I see myself
as an outsider but I am sure with my Ivy League pedigree and almost 30 years of
teaching at the college level, most people would not allow me any pity that I
did not have access to the punch bowl.
As social beings we must have an innate sense of there being
a scene and what is our relationship is to it. It is hard to shake. It is the childhood
image I have of the guys hanging out in my hometown of Watertown at the drugstore,
that I would walk by on my way to church on Sunday. By standing out there for
all to see, they wanted to let you know they were the insiders. They were going
to play the game. There were stories of rumbles and territory and stabbing
deaths at Five Corners in Arlington, where an Armenian gang had it in for who
knows an Irish gang an Italian gang or maybe it was just Arlington vs. Watertown.
As we exit another political silly season, I can see that these fellows were
driven to set themselves up as the go-to guys, ersatz politicians.
I always admired
Charles Giuliano’s sense of Boston as an
art-hood. He put himself out there like the guys at the drugstore with his
column “Perspectives” in “Art New England”. He went to the openings and knew
because of his clout as a critic there were many good bashes and meals to be proffered
by those who courted his opinion. Although he pissed off a lot of people by not
writing about them or offering only grudging praise, by being there in the trenches
on the scene like a good reporter or politician he helped create the warp and
the woof of an art community.
The Boston art scene is a hard neighborhood to define and a
minefield of potentially wounded allegiances. There was a lot of homegrown
stuff coming out of competing schools and the history of the Boston Expressionists
and Boston Realism to accommodate. But hovering beyond all that was New York
and Europe. Major movements that would come and go that gained footholds at MIT
or the Krakow gallery. You could have enormous success in Boston but never be
considered hip enough to be talked about by the cognoscenti who read “artforum”.
There were even subcultures of realists like Robert Douglas Hunter, married to
the daughter of Ives
Gammell who sold his pictures for enormous amounts to the
Suburban rich, that I am sure most of my art buddies had never heard about. Artists,
who taught in the Boston art schools tended to achieve some notoriety within
one scene or another, which often lead to their being hired in the first place.
But as the tide moved out on their scene, they found themselves stranded without
much relevance to the current scenes and amazingly ignorant and disdainful of
the younger artist who came along. If they had tenure they could remain
employed and ignorant. But the younger generation would have their chance at
irrelevancy. Their time would come to be ignored.
So we have worlds within worlds, parallel universes, constellations
appearing and disappearing with the seasons: all coming under the same tent of Boston
art. Sargent probably embodied that ambiguity as much as any contemporary Boston
artist of what it meant to be a Boston artist. Born in Gloucester MA, he grew
up abroad and created a reputation as one of the great European Portraitists of
his time. He came back in the end to Boston to reclaim his reputation as Boston’s
premier artist in the 20’s when he did the Boston Public Library Murals. But he
was nothing without the international imprimatur.
I had a conversation recently with Addison Parks in which he
related his unpleasant dealings with Bernard Chaet in the 80’s when Parks applied
to Yale from RISD. It started me thinking about Bernie in terms of
insider/outsider, and art allegiances. I first met him in 1970 when I took his
drawing seminar along with several students’ including Gary Trudeau. In regards
to the hierarchy of the art scene, the Yale MFA program was way up there. It cut
a pretty impressive figure. First lead by the epigone of modernism, Josef
Albers, Al Held came in the 70’s to anchor the program and stayed into the eighties
putting the school on the map as the place to go for the the young ambitious artist.
Under Albers it produced Serra, Close, Eva Hesse. Chaet had taken over from
Albers as department head, a moment related to me by a student at the time, Don
Lent, who headed up the art department at Bates College.
Bernie was never a Modernist. Born in Boston he initially
painted with the Boston Expressionists. I recall seeing early paintings in his
home of Talmud’s and menorahs. He told me, when I was a finalist for a position
at BU, where many of those Boston Expressionist artists ended up teaching, that
he broke away from that group and was considered an apostate by them for his
interest in French art. According to some of the literature surrounding the Boston
school, they detested the abstraction of the NY School, which was for them an
offshoot of Paris in the early 20thc;Abstraction was somehow sinful for not embracing
the human condition in the raw and direct way of the German expressionists. I
related this story to a professor at Tufts who is Jewish and he thought it
ironic that the Jewish Artists of the New York School such as Rothko and Newman
were probably more in keeping with the Jewish religious taboo on creating graven
images of God than the Boston school of Jewish artists. So here was Chaet, rejected
by his Dorchester shtetl for being too French and in the period of High Modernism
at Yale, this guy was painting in the style of the artist despised by Picasso
as a “piddler”. Of course, Held was the cock of the walk. He despised everybody
and anybody who did not embrace his aesthetic. You didn’t have to be a grad
student to be the recipient of his wrath. He walked by my undergrad friend Bob
Sabin, who was doing a landscape on the roof of the Yale A&A, and made a “feigning throw up” gesture. He wanted to put himself at the center of the art
universe and marginalize everybody else.
Therefore, by any account,
Chaet stylistically was twice
over an outsider: Apostate Boston Expressionist and misguided follower of
Bonnard at Yale. I was grateful for his presence at Yale as my work came out of
an infatuation with the stylistic variations of realism and I would have
finally left Yale if he had not been there to recognize the validity of my endeavor.
He understood the subtleties of looking at a Matisse or Corot etc that never
made it into the conversation of your typical Yale student, bent on scaling the
wall of New York Art. But to head the Yale art department made him an insider politically.
He could get you into the school and get you jobs outside after graduation. He
knew it. He could turn the faucet on and off at will. Although no longer living
in Boston he never lacked for representation either there or in New York. When
a recent book on Boston artists came out he was included in it. To spend an
afternoon with him in Rockport was to inevitably reminisce about your classmates
from Yale and if you didn’t know what they were up to he was sure to fill in
the blanks.
Addison sees him as the consummate gatekeeper. If Addison
wanted to get within the orbit of the New York Power grid Chaet made sure it
didn’t happen at least via the Yale conduit. Getting to the point in the
acceptance process where he was being interviewed directly by a committee
including Chaet, he was astounded that Chaet kept his back to him during the
whole interview. Only later did he
learn that his mentor at RISD a Yale grad was Chaet’s mortal enemy.
As an artist trying over a lifetime to incorporate a little
of the universe‘s infinite into my work, I think back with gratitude to
whomever kept me focused on understanding the language of paint whether that of
Bonnard or Albers without reference to the hierarchies and powers of the
current scene. To separate out the love of art from the talk of who had more centrality
and power within the art world, was at times really hard. My ten years at AIB
was spent constantly trying to assert my relevance within the shifting balances
of who was a rising star within Boston Community. Colleagues who were nullities
themselves would invite the latest art hero of the week to the department and
try to expand on their reputation by association. On the one hand there was the
large group within the department who took pride in their tangential affiliation
with the Boston Expressionists, an historical fact and well engraved in the Boston
psyche. On other hand, there were older artists who loved to tout their
connection with some avant-garde movement of the sixties long in desuetude. One
faculty member imagined himself the protégé of Michael Mazur. A new faculty
member pumped herself up by playing the new game in town, Installation. Another
made a smart move with a“none of the above” decision to pursue a graduate
degree at Harvard in Critical Studies. I remember my last semester there my
always well subscribed class in painting with color was scheduled next to a
course on art and gender which the dean of students felt compelled to run. No
one took my class. The language I was struggling to give birth to in my shows
at Crieger-Dane over four years on Newbury St did not fit into the allowable
niches of Boston Art and never sold at all. My colleagues never showed up at
the openings.
There must be a strong political instinct in me as I take
some pleasure in sorting out who controls what territory, but my naïveté shows
in how long it took to realize that a lot of the decisions that were made about
whether I got tenure or not were all about political power, not absolute
notions of being a good artist.
This brings us to another topic: Is the world we perceive
out there the result of an endless proliferation of errors. To be continued…
