Lorraine Shemesh and the impossibility of the Romantic

Where we are currently in the cultural history of ideas is hard to pin down. Ex post facto is always easier. The past has already been packaged and defined by countless historians but the present as it evolves into the future is hard to fix and if we try to paste the past on the present we get into a lot of trouble. It seems to work momentarily like assuming Trump is Hitler or the removal of a statue of Columbus from a college campus is akin to the destruction of a Buddhist statue by the Taliban. But is the past really so well categorized and no longer open for discussion. This struck me when I wrote about a visit I made to Edwin Dickinson on Cape Cod in 1970. After I had seen his work at the Biennale in Venice in 1968, I found myself encouraged by his love of the observed world to persevere in my pursuit of realism in the context of the overwhelming dominance of High Modernism in mid-century America. However, in my more recent analysis of his work I noticed that his phenotype was more 19^th century than 20thc and from the perspective of where we stand now seemed to float further and further into the past like some flotsam and jetsam thrown into the wake of a steamship until it is irretrievable and disappears out of sight. And I would add that if such a person were to live in our day and age he or she would be so out of  sync with the prevailing zeitgeist they would most likely go insane.

Dickinson

The most salient characteristic of Dickinson is artist as observer. Not an observer who looks coldly at the world but one who seeks to be at one with what he sees. He takes an anti-solipsistic stance where like Stevens in his great poem “Idea of order at Key West” Dickinson interweaves the self and nature. And most importantly Dickinson’s persona yearns for a meaning to one’s life on earth, a romantic ache for for a meaningful story on the world's stage.  It has a strong narrative bent where he is an actor in his own play. Not Beckett but Shakespeare with a beginning, middle and denouement. I have talked elsewhere of the deconstruction of the strong self at the hands of the deconstructionists or the supremacy of things a la Duchamp or the cosmic melding of self and society from Hegel where we are always mediated by being part of society. This is where we are currently in our world of art, a place where in in an essay on Jed Perl’s criticism I expressed the idea that we have been turning around in circles for quite some time. At the end of history there are no more mysterious unknowns ahead of us to conquer. We are surrounded by all the detritus of society that is circling around an immense black hole. As it circles around we are totally unaware that is slowly sinking into the abyss.

Recently, I sent out images of my new work to several names on my email list.  A few thoughtful replies came back acknowledging that the color of the new work was richer and more evocative. An unexpected reply came from Lorraine Shemesh whom I met , when we both studied at the BU Summer program in Tanglewood, Massachusetts in 1969. Phillip Pearlstein was the artist in residence and several well-known New Realists came to visit most notably Al Leslie. There was a lot written about the New Realists in the art press at the time, which peaked with a cover story in Newsweek in 1970 featuring a painting by Bill Bailey on the cover. Two years later he would be my senior project advisor at Yale. Another fellow student at Tanglewood, Paul Dinger arranged a visit to Leslie’s studio in NYC after the program ended for an article in the art magazine “Boston Review of the Arts”,  that he had recently founded. Probably for the only time in my life I felt as an artist part of a movement.

Shemesh

Shemesh shows at the Allan Stone gallery in New York. Judging from the images in the two catalogs she sent me, she is clearly well trained in the tradition of classical painting as it was taught at BU where she got her BFA in 1971. The first catalog is a retrospective of her work, which culminates around 2009 with her iconic pool paintings that have evolved from swimmers at the surface or just below to a view of their now faceless bodies and body parts totally submerged. Whereas the earlier painting retained the notion of an observation of swimmers in a recognizable setting, the latest work puts the observer in with the observed. She does not rely on a romantic search for connections between herself and the environment that allows Dickinson to overcome his solipsistic isolation but conveys rather the inability to jettison the self in such a liquid realm. Of course to swim casually in a non-competitive manner implies the desire of the swimmer to enjoy being buoyed up by a warm and caressing world similar to the amniotic fluid that supports a fetus.  Shemesh retains a strange, almost awkward, disconnect between the possibility of a merger between the water and the physical hardness of the body that resists it. There is built into her work the impossibility of the kind of cosmic explosion of the self of a Pollack or the a priori connection one finds in Dickinson or for that matter the poems of Walt Whitman.  I think that this is inherited from her realist background but also from the edgy postmodernist zeitgeist of the New York scene. I find myself using the word impossible again as I did in the essay on the play at BAM on Thomas Merton that stated unambiguously  the impossibility of transcendence in a world awash in physical drives and passions. Or the word incommensurable to express the distance of paint and meaning when I wrote about a show I had with Paul Pollaro at the Bromfield Gallery in Boston. 

Shemesh 

Art as Survival of the Fittest

AL HELD

At Yale 1972-1974

Held

Our relationship was fraught with conflict, a conflict he enjoyed, I am sure, as his notion of teaching was more based on pugilism than on dialogue. The few punches that got through both early and late pushed my art in surprising directions. Our relationship got off to a great start at the first party for faculty and students when he seemed intrigued by my year in Paris between undergrad and grad school on a fellowship from Yale College (we both had studied at La Grande Chaumiere) and my notion that the Yale School of Art should invite poets such as Robert Penn Warren to speak to the students, as there seemed to be little dialogue between the Yale’s artists and its creative writers. As I think back on our relationship at this point in my life, his comments on painting all pointed toward his interest in creating “flatness”. In 1972 flatness was something taken for granted by most students. It was not something to be created or achieved. I marveled at how easily my fellow students pushed paint around on the surface of the canvas. I subsequently learned the inertia of flatness had become a worry for Stella as well, which he spelled out eloquently in “Working Space.” When I first started studying with Held, I was completing a six-year devotion to figuration. The word “devotion” may seem overstated in regards to a painting style but there was a religious component that could be heard in the language of Bill Bailey or Al Leslie. In the case of Bailey it was a sense of cultural decline that he hoped to reverse by tapping into the spiritual bases of Renaissance painting. (A course I took in the art history department concurrently  “Art and Magic in the Renaissance” spelled this out for me explicitly) and for Leslie a kind of messianic Marxism that did battle with the forces of capitalism. Both attitudes I espoused at different times during those six years. By 1972 I had studied with Leslie (at the BU School at Tanglewood), Laderman (critiqued my Scholar of the House show at Yale), and Bailey (as an undergraduate advisor of the same project). I spent a year on a scholarship traveling through Europe at one point seeking out the work of Piero in Italy whose work I discovered in a lecture by Phillip Guston at Yale /Norfolk. Flatness for me was a sort of blasphemy, since in my mind humanism was related to deep space and the way it enveloped people in a shared environment. I had just started to consider color my last year as an undergraduate, but I would have been content to paint in the style of the Macchiaoli and in fact my first fall as a grad student was spent working on a large 6 foot by 10 foot historical painting of a murder in a New Haven parking garage in a pointillist style.

Matisse's Wife

In the fall of ‘72 I saw a show of Matisse’s early still lifes that came from the Pushkin in Moscow to New York at Pierre Matisse. It was quite an event to get the work here considering where we were in the Cold War. For me it was my Armory show moment. Seeing the liberation of energy through the color and the dynamism that it set up brought an end to my ambitions to create the large historical machines I had painted my first semester. Al was a good person to have as a teacher at that point because he knew what Matisse was about. He talked once to me about a portrait of Matisse’s wife from 1913 and we marveled at its flatness but I think the word he used was the compression of space. There was always the act of flattening, not flatness, hence it was a dynamic act not a play of patterns. One other bit of advice he gave me came back to me ten years later when I was working on a large still life in North Carolina, where I was teaching at UNC-Greensboro. I was painting an indoor/outdoor space from observation, where the outdoor was a large expanse of playing field, the indoor a table of objects. Al had told me once how to revive a stagnating painting by placing a piece of paper on the canvass and reworking the painting so that the paper instead of being just stuck on the canvas would be an integral part of it. At the time he made the suggestion, it made absolutely no sense but it worked its way up from my memory bank to suggest a solution to a painting that was bogged down in disparate detail. I slashed large black and red lines from the top of the painting to the bottom and diagonally through the nicely sculpted still life objects. I then started to rework the painting and noticed that I was giving attention to the negative spaces as well as the positive, which resulted in a great liberation of energy. It flattened the space out, connected inside and outside, but in a dynamic way and brought all parts of the painting into a whole.

The” Big N” is all about the compression of space. At UNC-Greensboro where I taught for several years there was a small Held in the museum called “Black Square marries orange circle”. It showed a square that had squeezed a yellow circle into the corner of the painting. I realized that the goal of his color was not to seek harmony but was based on a Nietzschean use of color as “will to power”. I had to laugh that he used the word marriage to describe this relationship. Harmony is the word most often used to describe marriage and in this painting the marriage allowed for no merger but rather domination of one element over another. An honest portrayal of marriage to say the least.

Black Square Marries Orange Circle(Held)

I had heard from Joe Nicoletti who graduated from Yale in the early 70’s and saw Al occasionally in Todi during Al’s later years that he had mellowed and had come to show some remorse about the aggressive teaching style of his early years. In a show of the later work at BU I seem to recall some reference in the accompanying literature to metaphysics, Platonic higher realms etc., the very sort of thing that he avoided talking about in the 70’s.If that is in fact the case and it allowed him to create the deep space of the later work that he so vehemently suppressed in his early work, it was unfortunate. It didn’t seem to be built up out of the dynamism of the early work. Then again the black and white geometric paintings may have already been a movement toward Pythagorean imagery of essential forms. It appears in the last work he wanted to understand the whole of the universe, how all parts add up to one large cosmos. In his early work he was like a scientist who liberates subatomic particles in an atom smasher. His legacy, if any young painter is willing to receive it, is this tight compression of space and the subsequent explosion of energy generated by that compression. He had learned it from Matisse so there is continuity historically. But that language of painting has not been picked up by subsequent generations. They don’t study its antecedents in Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso. They didn’t bother to contradict standard visual expectations that all three were capable of. It is unfortunate that Deconstruction focused on social constructs and political issues, all imbedded in language and didn’t realize that Cezanne, Picasso, Mondrian and Matisse were ardently deconstructing the visual language of 2000 years of painting. Held pushed that deconstruction one step further. Held understood that there is always conflict and tension between any two things. No two things sit passively side by side without turning on each other; that conflict creates real relationship. This also introduces the notion of time, which has not often been considered as a vital component of painting. In Al’s figure/ ground play the picture does not permit a uniform scan but rather pulsates between being taken in as a whole ,where for example the “Big N” is seen as flat space with triangles in the corners and then as an N that is suppressing another color shape behind it. Thus a passage of time is marked by two distinct events.

He once showed a glimmer of sympathy towards me. I was painting still lifes in my studio where I was beginning to introduce color in a more potent manner but the work was not on the scale required by the Yale Faculty and I knew they preferred the over–sized, over ambitious attempts at story telling from my first semester. Al sensed the difficulties I was having transitioning from history painting to color studies and told me that I was probably torn apart by too many influences. The advice was aimed at directing me toward what was typically said in critiques, simplify and master one thing well. e.g. do black and white before color. At the time I bristled at that sort of criticism and said ,”You are right and you are one influence too many. Get out of my studio”.This is probably the response he wanted. He got me to enter the ring.

My reworked still life from 1986