I recall a conversation I had with Bill Bailey sometime in
the Nineties, when I was making a transition from Figuration into Abstraction,
in which I expressed the notion that maybe Abstraction one day would evolve
into a trans-historical movement similar to Chinese landscape painting where
Ming artists were still in dialogue with Sung artists. There would be an
assumption of a metaphysical basis that was so rich and deep that one could
forever draw upon it for inspiration. At the time I was playing with figure/ground
tension, as I perceived it in the work of Al Held. It resulted in visual events
where the eye is drawn into a visual play that keeps the painting alive. I can
imagine abstract artists of the future being drawn to Held’s work for the same
lesson it provided me about painting and moreover in the “Big N” the shared
space of the visual with the written word. This dialogue would be akin to the
hermeneutic circle espoused by Gadamer, where the present is always in dialogue
with the past. The artist could be projected into a new space but only after
orbiting an earlier conception of reality. Sort of like a satellite achieving
escape velocity from an orbit around the earth.
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| "Equilibrium" Helion |
I recently received a copy of “Double Rhythm” (subtitled: “Writings
About Painting, Jean Helion”), collected and with an introduction by Deborah
Rosenthal. I had written about his influence on American figurative artists in
another blog post, so I was pleased to have the opportunity to read his essays on art and in particular learn more about his life as an abstract painter. Helion
started his career in the Twenties as an abstract painter in
France, moved to the United States in the Thirties where he exhibited his work
and wrote extensively on art. He returned to France at the outset of WW11 and embraced
figuration after the war. The quality of the figuration was such that it had an
enormous impact on a generation of American painters in particular Leland Bell,
who in turn as an educator became an important force in the figurative revival
of the late Sixties and Seventies. The essays range from an interesting
analysis of how Abstraction evolved from Impressionism to an extended
description of his life as a prisoner of war in Germany and his spectacular
escape. There is no doubt from Deborah Rosenthal’s introduction (also published
separately in the “Yale Review” this October) that Helion was a major player in
the movement of abstraction and instrumental in introducing European
abstraction to an American audience. I was intrigued by the level of
self-awareness he expresses with the questions he raises about notions of
lineage. What is the essence of Abstraction?
Is it found in the relation of reduction to complexity and growth? Are they mutually exclusive or can reduction
lead to complexity? The questions all appeared to me to be crucial to any self-awareness
of an artist painting abstractly .
This notion of the hermeneutical way of thinking that I
referred to in the first paragraph is evident throughout Helion’s writings. One
intriguing essay tries to untangle the origins of Abstraction’s roots in Seurat
and Cezanne. Who was more important in influencing Abstraction? Helion comes
down on the side of Seurat. Cezanne, he feels, is still attached to the real
space of objects and is more Janus-like looking backward as well as forward.
Seurat’s work lends itself to further reduction, which is crucial to
abstraction. Whether you agree with his analysis or not, it, again, seems
important that this sort of question be asked by any artist embarking on the
path of abstraction.
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| "Pegeen"(Guggenheim) Helion |
After the war his work turned decidedly toward figuration.
As he describes in “They Shall Not Have Me” about his imprisonment and escape from
a forced labor camp, his fantasies always turned to the untrammeled life of the
city. Upon his return, it became his subject matter. He also wanted to achieve
what he called “the maximum” in painting, a word he was fond of and something
he found in Poussin. It is strange this haunting of the real that pursues
abstract painters like the hound of heaven. Stella who started out his career
embracing Abstraction and reducing it further to minimalism made an about face
in his Norton lecture “Working Space” after sensing the power of Caravaggio’s
work in which I assume he found the same sort of maximal qualities that Helion
found in Poussin. Caravaggio had it all, abstraction, dynamic relation of parts
to a whole. But most importantly a sense of the real, the feel of things as
they present themselves to us moment to moment in deep space. Helion seems to
say that the road to reduction can only go so far. Is this what Helion felt was
being done to him as a POW ? Reduced to an animal, or a mechanical cog defined
to fulfill narrowly designed tasks? It were as though music could aspire to no
more than the reality of a hearing test in a soundproof box. I have written elsewhere of what I call the
Humpty Dumpty effect of Modernism. It breaks things down but never lets us put
them back together again. That there is a tragedy in all of this reduction is
not often seen.
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| "Conquest of Jerusalem" Poussin |
His imprisonment I think had a two faceted effect on his art
after the war. Imprisonment was both cold and abstract, yet human and real. Although
reduced to a unit of production by the prison system, Helion’s day–to-day life as
a prisoner was managed by human beings. If the system that enclosed him was “not
to have him”, he had to be conscious at every moment of how to manipulate the
actors of the prison system by an appeal to their humanness so as to avoid the
most painful jobs that could kill him or to coerce out of them the pleasures we
take for granted in the real world, such as coffee and cigarettes. Every gesture
every word had to be judged as to whether it aided or impeded survival. When he
escapes and finds at one point that his ruse was working to deceive the
omnipresent police, he breathes a sigh of relief and says: ”Good”. This
expression of relief sounded so true and real to me as to render everything we
might think of as good about our lives, inconsequential.
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| Stella |
The title of the collection of essays “Double Rhythm” refers
to the dynamic that should exist in a “maximum” painting between the parts and
the whole. Poussin is quoted by Helion as having said : ”I have ignored
nothing.” I mentioned above how this
notion of complexity haunted Stella. This notion of parts and whole clearly was
an obsession of the late Held. The early
work of both with limited numbers of color looked to achieve one visual punch.
Held’s midcareer work imposed pure geometric order, an overall structure, which
resembles a schematic drawing of the linear structure hidden in a Poussin or a
Piero. The work at the end of his career tried to bring the two together, using
color for visual impact in the parts but engaging geometry to tie it all into a
whole. I recall listening to Guston in the 70’s talk about the importance of
Piero to his work. It was the admiration for someone who could do it all: Piero
had Christian metaphysics and a language of geometry to imbed that metaphysic
into the painting.
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| Held |
This interest in the “maximum” sought by these artists is attempted without what I would believe to be the necessary foundation in an overarching world view. To see our individual existence in that context has not been possible, since Ficino and Pico de la Mirandola attempted the NeoPlatonic /Christian synthesis of the Renaissance that inspired Botticelli and Piero de la Francesco . But that does not stop someone like Helion from attempting to make paintings which he, to use his own words, will be ”loud with meaning”.
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