Divagations on Jed Perl's second volume of "Calder"

As I began to think about finishing my reading and reviewing Jed Perl’s monumental second volume of the life of Calder, the art world was inundated by the responses to the publication of Blake Gopnik’s thousand page book on Warhol. I gathered from a few exchanges with Gopnik online that he sees the media saturated work of Warhol and Koons as the incontrovertible art of the present and in that sense world changing. The edge between mass culture and the individual has broken down and this duo with their philosophically hip intersubjectivity are defining the present and are the wave of the future. I came away with this encounter with Gopnik and the reading of Perl with what seemed to be a vision of two worlds diametrically opposed. On the one hand you have Calder who has uploaded the modernistic visual language of Miro into his own mobile work and in so doing added to its self-understanding as a transcendent language in defining the modern experience. He then heroically shepherds it from the world of kinetics down to earth into stabile sculpture where it takes its place in the public spaces created by the new urban landscape. On the other hand you have Warhol downloading the images of mass culture into his consciousness and calling them or at least being called by the art world high art. To make that claim requires that we acknowledge the overwhelming reality of mass visual media(television and movies) as dominant of the world we live in. It is a passive acknowledgment of the way the media colonizes our consciousness. It is in a sense reactionary as it is based on a parallel understanding between the flat screen of painting and the flat screen of the cinema and television. Nothing can be more antipodal to Calder who explodes the flat images of Miro into mobile 3D imagery. It is a continuation of the modernist vision of transforming our science-based notion of space and time started by the cubists. The history of Western art experiences this sort of upheaval periodically as in the perspective of the Renaissance or the chiaroscuro of the Baroque. Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro affected a change on painting that lasted three hundred years until its decadent manifestation in the Salon painters. Even the epigone of “everybody can be an artist” Jerry Saltz has come out with an article in New York magazine acknowledging his world changing genius.(did he plagiarize that as he did my exercise on abstract patterns from my book on drawing and painting where I made the above point about Caravaggio? )

In the context of Gopnik’s attempt to supplant the centrality of the modernism of Picasso and Miro with the media critique/pastiche of Warhol, Perl’s book could not be more timely. It reminds us of the uniquely inventive transformations that individuals bring to the greater culture. If Gopnik’s Warhol gives credence to the importance of the mediated world we live in by downloading its banality into his imagery, Calder uploads the individual creations of Miro into sculpture with a new notion of time and space. Reading Perl’s description of Calder’s life midst the movers and shakers of modernism creates a lucid image of the negotiations and strategies these artists pursued as they take their place on both sides of the Atlantic in the creative storm of modern art. Those events take place in the context of the political turmoil of the 20thc that could have easily swallowed them up. Interestingly, we see that the intellectual evolution of Calder’s work seems to parallel the architectural transformation of the urban scene so as to create a kind of urban space starting in the 1950’s perfectly adapted to Calder’s work. At the very beginning of the second volume, Perl describes the events leading up to the installation of the stabile “Grande Vitesse” in Grand Rapids Michigan. There was a newfound pride in the city that created sufficient wealth to replace the antiquated landscape of 19thc America with a sleek new modernism. Although the industrialists were for the most part pedestrian in their artistic tastes, in the case of Grand Rapids one town father was married to an artistic sophisticate Nancy Mulnix who had been aware of Calder’s work early in her life and was an aficionado of modernism at a time when a taste for its subversive ideas was not shared by the general public. Perl reminds us that the world out of which Calder’s work came was defined by the writings of Joyce, the art of Picasso, the music of Stravinsky and the dance of Balanchine. At mid-century this was still the avantgarde. As the old 19thc Grand Rapids succumbed to urban renewal and the 19thc city hall despite protests from a public ,who as in so many cases such as Boston, came to appreciate the old just as it was being destroyed, a new city hall was being designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill. (Ironically some of the modern buildings that replaced 19thc Boston are slated for demolition). The building that might have looked impressive if it was on the scale of a New York City skyscraper it comes across as a rather squat low budget expression of the modernist spirit. Doing some research on the Vandenberg plaza now commonly called the Calder Plaza, it appears that to this day few citizens are pleased with the outcome of the urban renewal of a half century ago. Much nostalgia is expressed toward the destroyed city hall. However, the disappointment over the antiseptic urban space does not extend to the Calder which is for the most part admired and appreciated on its artistic merit. The high tide of modernism left its mark with numerous Calder’s throughout the Urban landscape. 

Calder Plaza Grand Rapids MI

What intrigues me is the lifespan of artistic ideas from their inception and to their waning.  Perl does a marvelous and painstaking job doing contact tracing of the ideas of Calder and the avant garde of the time. He was the avantgarde and Man Ray is the only other American I can think of who played as successfully in the transatlantic stage of modernism as did Calder. One gets a sense of its transcendent nature of ideas being exchanged from mountain peak to mountain peak although the image that often comes to mind is a rather mundane one of a ball being tossed sideways or downfield in a match of rugby on its way to its destination. Or maybe a better one would be the Monty Python soccer match of philosophers shouting out their oracular insights to the world without going anywhere. Although Calder was not a theorist and kept his ideas to himself, Calder’s world seemed to function on the belief that ideas matter and that his work was destined to be the vehicle for a new expression of time and space. The ball that is being passed around on its way to the stabiles started out with Miro. One sees its effect on Gorky. So dominant and salient is his influence Perl at one point in the book wonders if Calder who was a neighbor of Gorky in Connecticut had influenced Gorky’s late work. Maybe so, but a case could be made for the parallel influence and evolution of Miro on both their oeuvres. 

The ideas embodied in Calder’s work are embedded in our day to day life. The most salient  example are the mobiles as the conceptual basis for crib toys. It is easy to ignore the fact that their prevalence has to do with the depth of their scientific understanding of time and space. Mondrian and de Stijl had an influence on architecture and fashion but to have transformed the experience of a child’s first years of life is quite astounding. Moreover, they are so seamlessly inserted into that realm that it is hard to imagine crib life without them. 

But this is the way that new concepts work. They shake things up reshaping the world we live in. And then because of their ubiquitousness like electricity their conceptual depth is forgotten. 

Reading “Calder” required an adjustment of my habitual expectations of the reading of Perl’s writing. I always enjoy his incisive critique and deflation of the art “powers that be”. I have spoken with many artists who are part of his fandom. We all seem to suffer in silence from the exclusivity of the art world with Perl our sole public voice. I wonder if they found it difficult to read a book by Perl that is unequivocally enthusiastic about its subject. Calder’s life is nothing short of a never-ending story of successfully achieving venues for his work and the best critical response. The successes come from the start: being born to a family of artists who provided important career connections, a perfect marriage, meeting up with the French avantgarde at the right time,  joining the transatlantic artistic aristocracy and then toward the end of his life achieving a near total conquest of the world of public sculpture in the USA and Europe. The only way to read this biography is to go along for the ride. Perl has provided not only the large arcs of that life but the infinitesimal detail.  

Warhol version of a Calder Mobile

The strange disconnect of this glorious life and work and its seamless embodiment of a positivistic scientific understanding of time and space seems distant from our postmodern times. A large majority of what is exhibited manifests the societal critique of the self, caught in the web of a societal construct whether it is shaped by a notion of Marxist false consciousness or the pandemic of social media.  This is Warhol’s era. Cynically Ironic. Power hungry. No wonder that Warhol and Trump were both mentored by Joe McCarthy’s lawyer Roy Cohn. 

 this essay has been picked up by Woventale Press with some edits that accentuate the difference between Warhol and Galder

 

Artists without faces. Or what do you hang your hat on? Jean Gabin, Cecily Brown, Dana Schutz and John Currin.

                         Artists without faces.

               Or what do you hang your hat on?

          Cecily Brown, Dana Schutz and John Currin.

.

Jean Gabin:"We had faces then"

"We had faces then." Words that describe the Hollywood actors of Gabin’s era: Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich to name a few. What does it mean to have a face? A sense of fate etched into the face, when you accept the persona which is one part what life casts across your bow and the other part  how you deal with it. Maybe grounded in the singularity of Christ’s body and face on the cross as he fulfills his unique destiny/apotheosis in a discrete moment in time. Or the heroes and heroines of the Iliad born to families that already doom them to a fate beyond their control. Does not apply to Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, who still looks like to me the pre-adolescent he was one in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”. Too much a baby face to my taste for his gangster roles and Johnny Depp who always intrigued me with his performances in “Ed Wood” and “Edward Scissorhands” is not growing old gracefully. Unlike Gabin he won’t find a role  for an aging personality that Gabin created in “The Dominici Affair”. Nor will Jim Carrey transcend his iconic roles in “The Truman Show” and “The Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”.  In this postmodern age the self is dischargeable, it carries not burden of debt;  it has no beginning, middle and end. Things seem to bog down in the middle. We are more Buddhistic now! Or transcendental meditators like Carrey. …In our culture if our image is no longer pretty to the public then we had rather euthanize ourselves than seem less than perfect. OK, acting is a job and your face is what you sell. But there seems to be a way that some careers transcend that purely mercenary definition. Their way of persisting to the bitter end.

Grant and Bergman

 From Wikipedia on Dietrich:

Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer. Throughout her long career, which spanned from the 1910s to the 1980s, she continually reinvented herself. 

Dietrich

It might be that Hollywood no longer likes it characters to age (obviously Weinstein, the gatekeeper, liked his women young) or is it so pervasive that our society cannot accept the wisdom that comes with age. The notion of the self consistently prevailing over or outwitting  death has disappeared in our throw away culture.

                                   Belmondo did his own stunts barely surviving them

What to hang your hat on?  Nothingness?  This strange sort of erasure has oozed into the painting world. Three cases in point: Dana Schutz, Cecily Brown and John Currin.

When I wrote my seminal piece on “Zombie Formalism” I started the essay discussing some philosophical ideas that are current in academia that may be the underpinning of this new notion of self-erasure:

Gabin

“In the first few pages of Santiago Zabala’s  “The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy”, there are incessant quotes and statements about how Tugendhat and other 20^th c philosophers overcame the subject/object fallacy of Western metaphysics.  First Charles Taylor in a heading states: “Tugendhat is very certain of the kind of construal of self-consciousness he cannot accept. He calls it the subject-object model, and its basic error is to construe consciousness as a relation to an object.”  The author in the first paragraph goes on to quote Gadamer: ”….the subject as starting point, just as orientation to the object, is contested by making the intersubjective communication in language the new universal system of reference.” A few paragraphs later he says:”The impossibility of the mental eye means the end of any pure subjectivity, the end of Cartesian subjectivity, which implies that objects can be seen “objectively” or “scientifically”.”

This is the end of the central role played by the Socratic notion of knowing thyself. Further along in the essay I write:

“The counterattack on this sort of male gaze in 20th century philosophy is the subject of Martin Jay’s “Downcast Eyes”. To make his point about the domination of the visual in our culture, his first paragraph uses a laundry list of words etymologically based in the visual. In the first two sentences he succeeds in using: glance, demonstrate, vigilantly, keeping an eye out, illuminating insight and mirroring.”

The dethroning of the male gaze.

“And, of course, it got extended to the objectifying gaze, which was found most obviously in the male ego, responsible for all that was wrong with the world from slavery, sexism to the despoliation of the environment.”

Schutz

What struck me about Dana Schutz at her Boston ICA show beyond the obvious hip ”in your face” cartoony funk of the brush stroke was the un-thought out color palette. It seemed to arise out of a beginner’s paint kit of ochres and umbers with a few primary colors thrown in as spice. There was no self-doubt or even a bow to the exploration of 20thc color's ability to move the viewer. It seemed to come right out of the tube. I pointed out in my Schutz essay how in Kirchner and Beckman, who could be considered precedents of Schutz, set off the human gaze against the acid color as in  Kirchner's case or with aggressive cubism as in Beckmann’s, that both try to dissolve it. Instead of seeing the erasure or distortion of the face as a fault or lack maybe it is just the final exit of a Shakespearean/Socratic/Christian self-consciousness. The self-consciousness that arises out of the inevitability of sin or as one sees in the American Westerns the plodding perseverance of the actor who in spite of the burden of sin tries to do good and in the end can etch something substantial into the human gaze.

Currin's cloning 

But we are postmodern. We gain our identities by being part of the group/herd or experiencing no separation between the mass media and the self. Hence the cartoon faces in Schutz’s work. Currin has faces, indeed, but with his ironic gaze deconstructs the vanity of women who imagine themselves to be unique fashion plates into generic good looks. Warhol bequeaths the face to the replicability of the silk screen. But still with the recognizability of the movie star or politician of the larger culture. The persona that still might seduce us with the magic of a Dietrich or of a Garbo is in the clammy hands of Currin devoid of magic, never star quality but intentionally cloned. The snark of a scientist looking at the world through a microscope, the human entity now subject to the replication of a virus.

Cecilly Brown adds her physical presence to her work

The best abstraction acknowledges a self that is not necessarily synonymous with the human face yet tries to achieve the steadiness of a gaze constantly undercut by the psychological and bodily drives. Gorky, Pollock, Rothko had fragile mastery of those underlying forces. Our contemporary practitioner of abstract art Cecily Brown suffers from what Baxandall perceived to be the weakness of so much late 19^th c Realism. It was not grounded in the self but was merely descriptive of the current social world. The artists of the Salon painted identifiable landscapes not their perception of them. Brown thinks herself to be an abstract painter who paints abstractions in the tradition of Pollock and de Kooning but like Schutz she never thought twice about the dynamics of color and the tension of flattened space. There is no hovering of the neural matrix over the void that one finds in Pollock, the angst of Rothko knowing his colors hide the reality of one’s nothingness or Gorky’s incredible synthesis of the languages of psychology(surrealism)  and Cubism that tear at each other like angry cats. With Brown it is not zombie formalism but flaccid “Descriptive Abstraction” similar to the dead end of late Salon figuration of the 19thc. All great abstraction takes a bow to Picasso’s "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" with its violent flattening of space and his outrageous imposition of his portrait on the women.I am reminded of  a discussion I had with Al Held of a portrait that Matisse did of his wife that he so much admired. A compression of foreground and background that releases an explosion of energy. 

I once imagined a day when the earthy angst of the early work of Lester Johnson would matter more to our culture than what Blake Gopnik sees as the radicality of a Warhol. Yes! radical in that it uproots the human presence from any authentic meaning on earth. Once pulled away from the body and inserted into the matrix of mass media, it will never be radical in the true sense of the word again. It will roll on and on like tumbleweed over the modern desert. Still waiting for someone to create a radical art that is faithful to its real definition  that it  is “rooted” in the human presence.

Otherwise what is there to hang your hat on.

if you are interested in learning more of my ideas on art get my book on Drawing and Painting

These paragraphs subvert the message of my book when I recall Heidegger's dictum that Western Philosophy does not think

PART TWO: PAINTING

Chapter 1

The cognitive structure of the eye and the road to pure color painting

(An aside on the role of abstract thinking in seeing and art)

Abstraction that is created by the power of the concept to shape and establish structure is visually exciting. When it becomes mechanical, it loses its élan. The concepts that we teach are not new to the world but they are new to the student and the freshness of discovery is part of the experience of drawing and painting. All the concepts that give us space and the objects in it are embedded in the visual apparatus of the eye and mind and when they are uncovered there is often a sense of surprise and enhanced power. The revelation of the concept can carry the student’s work along for weeks, as it seems to magically shape their visual world.

For example, the simple understanding of the underpinning of value in all perception can have a liberating effect on the student who once labored under the misconception that everything has its own technique. “How to paint” the still life or the landscape or portraiture is the title of many an art textbook that can befuddle the student. Even watercolor is best understood as grounded in the perception of light and dark and color and at least should be seen as an extension of ink wash; however, many people love technique and will pay enormous amounts to study with a watercolorist guru with some magic formula that will create the veneer of professionalism. 

On the other end of the educational spectrum and typical of the education I had in the liberated 1960s and ’70s is the idea of the individual as a source of novelty and invention. We were taught to startle and to wow the viewer with something surprising. It often had to be big and bold. I remember a classmate who threw himself through his painting in one blazing gesture of self-expression. To navigate between the cult of the self, premised on the uniqueness of individual vision and the dry concepts of visual technique was a challenge, to say the least. The personal epiphanies about the role of perception in art became my touchstone. 

From the first discovery of the primacy of value, to the role of directional lines, to the reversal of figure and ground and how each would shape my work for months on end was the grounding of my existence first as a student and then as an artist. It often meant moving in territory already trod by others and, within the culture of self-absorption in which I grew up in, I was considered reactionary. Comments about how such and such a style was dead were standard. My freshman design teacher told me that painting was dead when I decided to paint the grill of an Oldsmobile for a design project on the automobile. Take a photograph, he said, to which I replied I don’t have a camera but I can paint. 

In the 1990s, I became engaged in Abstract Expressionism and tried to integrate its concepts into my work. An art history professor at UNH saw abstract expressionism solely as an event in the art historical record and therefore as something that was over and done with. But by pulling this art out of the historical context and seeing its connection to perception makes it accessible at all times to all artists. It isn’t inaccessible but grounded right here in the human brain. In truth, it always astounds me how the major figures of 20th century art work with the gradual liberation of the underlying principles of seeing. Take the example of Cy Twombly mentioned above: His linear work is said to be inspired by ancient Roman graffiti but it can be seen also as a continuum of the gradual liberation of the line from form that began with Cézanne, advanced through Mondrian and finally reaching its apotheosis with the Abstract Expressionists. You have to have Gorky before you have Twombly.

As I write about the role of perception in Western Art I begin to hear the words of Heidegger that most of Western Philosophy does not think, that it is, for the most part, technological. If Mondrian’s work can be seem as having its origin in perception, it could be 

Matisse

seen as only a generalization of perceptual structures. As I stated earlier, the hidden linear structure that Cézanne liberated became the source of Mondrian’s further abstraction. His attempts to reduce everything to the simple language of line filled in with color seems in its seductiveness to pretend to be an underlying metaphysical structure and Mondrian’s theosophical interests seem to support this thesis. But like so much Western thinking it does not doubt in any way its own validity and inevitability. 

Matisse’s life long reduction of color from its Impressionist roots to the color cutouts can seem some sort of triumph over complexity. But when seen as being propped up by the ability of the eye to simplify complex value into shape it appears purely technological. Al Held’s “Big N” is a play on shape recognition that jumps out of abstraction into letter recognition from a low level to a higher level of cognition but it does not say “So what.” This is in keeping with the Humpty Dumpty theory where for example the liberated lines of Cézanne which are imbedded with color and planes and a feeling for the holistic pull of gravity become an end in itself in the work of Mondrian and devolve into a kind of quirky liberated gesture in Twombly. But the whole that was still attempted in Cézanne is abandoned. We are left with a pile of parts that can’t be put together again.

(Link to a blogpost from the mid-nineties on the primacy of perception that I critique here)

Link to buy book on Amazon

The Gorky Connection:My great uncle Marvin and Arshile Gorky in Boston

In the mid-Nineties Armenian art historian Levon Chooksazian was asked by a German publishing house to write short biographies of Armenian artists of the 20^th century for inclusion in a world lexicon of artists. Because I am an artist of Armenian descent, he contacted me to learn about my history and those of other Armenian/American artists whom I knew. One artist that he had already heard about was my great uncle Marvin Julian.  Since he was someone, whose story was part of family lore, I was able to fill in lots of details about his life. Levon always enjoyed coming to Boston from Armenia to lecture, and, moreover, as a lover of the Armenian language, to hear the dialect of Western Armenian still spoken by the nonagenarians, who came from Western Anatolia around the beginning of the last century. With the passing of that generation and the extirpation of their ancestors in the towns of central Turkey such as Harput, this dialect is now disappearing. Such is the lot of the Armenians. Their moments of political coherence are short lived. Levon always goes about his work with a sense of urgency to document the actors and players in Armenian culture, while there is still an Armenia in which Armenian culture can thrive.

If it were not for the persecution of Armenians in Turkey, Marvin Julian, born Chooljian,(alternate spellings from his early years in America are Chooljean and Chovilijean) would not have come to this country. The Ottoman overlord's pogroms on the Armenian minority, periodically, reminded them of their inferior social position and  confiscated their money in a rude sort of taxation. My grandmother, Marvin’s sister, said that during these assaults the young boys were rolled up in oriental rugs to hide them from the soldiers.  When the dust settled on one of these sporadic attacks, my grandmother, just a little girl, wandering the streets with her mother inquired  why there were so many people sleeping in the street.

It is out of and from this turmoil that Marvin and his extended family came to Boston. I have always marveled to what degree, originating from the rural interior of Anatolia, he was able to sort out the cultural reality of New England in short order, so as to eventually establish himself as an artist of no mean repute in the city of Boston.    

Photo taken in Turkey with Marvin seated at the lower left

Piecing together his early years leaves much that is out of focus. He enlisted in the American Army before World War 1, but never went to war, remaining at Fort Devens outside of Boston. He survived the notorious influenza epidemic in 1918, that killed more American soldiers than died on the Front. My father remembers being so proud to see him in uniform in Boston, when the American Army replaced the police, who went on strike in 1919. It was probably prior to his service in the Army that he met John Singer Sargent, who worked on the Boston Public Library murals up until 1919. He would run errands for him such as buying a newspaper and would receive art instruction in exchange. The story was already part of his resume in the 1930’s article on him in a Boston newspaper. By the early Twenties he moved to Paris to study at the Academie Julian, a haven for American artists, which functioned as an avant-garde alternative to the L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It trained not only the French Modernist Matisse but Americans of note such as Sargent, Henri and Prendergast. He made money as a gravedigger in the American military cemeteries of the Great War, and frequented Sunday salons organized by wealthy Boston matrons living  in Paris. His father who worked like many Armenians in the Hood Rubber Plant in Watertown, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, helped him out financially, until some monetary setbacks made it impossible to continue his support.Marvin was forced to return to Boston. The story goes that in despair he threw all his art materials into the Seine.

                    

His life in Paris was brought into focus several years ago, when I went on a tour with my wife on the Left Bank of Paris to locate the school, where she had studied before going to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. When we found the school and entered the courtyard I noticed inscribed above a door: "Academie Julian". Was this once the location of this famous school that my great uncle took his name from?  The school was on break, so that our presence in the school was noticed by  the school’s director. We addressed our questions to him and learned that indeed this had been the location of the famous Academy, before it became in the 1950's the preparatory school for the Beaux-Arts that my wife attended. When I told him of my uncle, he said that there would be a record of his attendance and that in fact the vice-director of the school was writing a book about the history of the Academy. The vice-director was in his office and spent sometime with us looking up Marvin’s name. Indeed, his name was on the list of students and moreover, he had won an award for his painting.

Back in Boston with Academy Julian credentials under his belt, he became over a period of time a teacher in several art schools.We are in possession of a catalogue from The Exeter School of Art that lists him as an instructor. Several anecdotes that he related to me of his early years in Boston concerned his relationship with Arshile Gorky, who lived in Watertown with his sister for several years on Dexter Ave, where Marvin’s parents lived. Marvin, who was born in 1894, was ten years older than Arshile. Marvin said that Gorky studied art under him at The New School of Design and Illustration, which the Gorky Foundation lists as the school he attended and eventually taught at. In a discussion with the director of the Gorky Foundation I was told that they are going to research more thoroughly his life in Boston and hopefully turn up class lists that would confirm his relation to Marvin. Marvin described Gorky as a larger than life character, who would dazzle his fellow classmates with his ability to draw perfect circles free hand. At that time, Arshile painted in a tonal style similar to what was popular in Boston and a style that Marvin never strayed from. Gorky moved on  to New York and began his transformation into a Modernist, absorbing Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and Miro. My uncle attended Gorky’s first opening in New York City. He recalls being snubbed by Gorky at the opening, who Marvin wrongly thought was embarrassed to show his old teacher what must have appeared to Marvin, the student of Sargent, as crudely wrought images. I have always contended that Gorky was embarrassed by his former teacher, who appeared to him as a representative of the old guard. In the end neither interpretation is accurate. The answer to this interaction between Marvin and Gorky, only became clear to me upon seeing Cosima Spender’s documentary on her grandfather: ”Without Gorky”. It depicts in the words of his wife, still alive, and his two daughters, the oppressive shadow that this inspired genius cast on their lives. It was not at all flattering of the great Armenian Painter. One aspect of Gorky’s life was spelled out emphatically in the film: he was very intent on maintaining the myth of  being the son of Maxim Gorky. So much so, that his wife only learned of his Armenian heritage toward the end of their life together from a grocer in Sherman Ct.. Obviously, Marvin knew Gorky was Armenian and his presence at the opening, risked blowing Gorky’s carefully constructed cover as the son of Maxim Gorky. Hence the snub.

Marvin to  Gorky's left
from Herrera's book
(referred to as Felix Choolijian
in Mooradians' book)

Family photo  of Marvin from 1925
(notice similar suit to what is
worn by Felix Chookjian)

Gorky's resume  at the Grand Central Art School that I read on the Gorky Foundation website says that he studied at the Academie Julian under Jean-Paul Lauren. The Gorky Foundation admits that this is totally fabricated by Gorky to plump up his resume and in my opinion is taken from his teacher Marvin at the New School of Design and Illustration. According to Gerard Vallin, who is writing a history of the school,  Lauren was a teacher at the Academy Julian when Marvin was there.

There is a good deal of circumstantial evidence to support the relationship of Gorky and Julian. The most intriguing is a photo that is an iconic part of the Gorky memorabilia, which appears in several biographies of Gorky. It portrays the young Gorky in 1925 at The New School of Design and Illustration in Boston, looking princely with a fur coat seated next to two women (one identified as an instructor Ethel Cooke) on his right and an artist to his left  named  Felix Chooligian in one biography(Mooradian) and Felix Chookjian in another(Herrera).  A recent search by my sister on Ancestry.com has uncovered a passport request from Marvin Chooljian to study in France with a letter of support from the New School of Illustration and Design's director Douglas Connah, which describes him as a student of said school. The date is 1920. He came back from Paris in 1922 and presumably started teaching there, where, as Marvin claimed, he had Gorky as a student. There is also a photo of Marvin from 1925 that was in the possession of Marvin’s sister (my grandmother) wearing what appears to be the same suit worn by Felix in the photo of Gorky. I have shown numerous people the two photos side by side and no one has doubted that Felix is Marvin. The difference in spelling of the last name does in no way discount my theory that the Gorky photo is of Marvin as Armenian names were transcribed phonetically and were subject to various spellings. The only fly in the ointment is that the first name Felix is not one I have ever heard attributed to Marvin and also in the Mooradian biography he is referred to as a Vanetzi, i.e. born in the province of Van, Gorky’s birthplace, whereas my great uncle was Harpetzi. The director of the Gorky Foundation Melissa Kerr said that Karlen Mooradian, Gorky’s nephew, who labeled the photo, tended in his writings to mythologize about Gorky’s Armenian roots and would have found it supportive of the myth  to have Felix be a fellow Vanetzi. All that is left for me to confirm the connection to Gorky would be to find evidence of Marvin's  role as a teacher at the New School.                          

Alexander Woollcott

In the thirties he taught magazine illustration at the Exeter School of Art in Boston’s Back Bay. Among several examples of magazine covers he did for Microphone, a journal of radio topics, there is  well- known critic Alexander Woollcott.

"Art Week in Boston" in a Boston Newspaper 

Marvin was already in his sixties, when I was old enough to remember his presence at family get-togethers. He lived a bohemian life in a sparsely decorated studio at 110 Newbury St in Boston’s Back Bay with his mother. He was seemingly able to subsist on a diet of coffee and cigarettes. He often said that if he were ever to be burglarized, the robbers shocked at his poverty, might be compelled to leave something for him. I recall that he had no refrigerator and kept the milk for his coffee out on the balcony in Winter. On occasion our family would visit him and his mother on a Sunday bringing with us a meal of chicken and pilaf. I recall his window shades were attached to the bottom of his windows and lifted up from there to keep the north light always lighting from above. Over the years, I learned bits and pieces of about his life in Boston and Paris, but there is much he kept to himself. I asked him once about the “Bal des QuatZ-Arts” in Paris that was a notorious Saturnalia, where participants typically dressed up or rather undressed as classical Greek sculptures. He admitted attending but was unwilling to talk about the details and said: ”Mum’s the word.” He displayed the same diffidence in the Boston newspaper article(above) about the details of his relation to Sargent.

Portrait of Father with Ashcan school influence

Stylistically his best portraits showed the influence of the Ashcan school, especially when he was free from having to flatter the subject, as in his portraits of his parents. On Askart, a site that lists artist's auction history, he is noted for “floral still lives”. Indeed, our immediate family is in possession of many of them. To my eye it is in these works that the aesthetic of Marvin shines. Each bloom is delicately and never generically observed. There is a feeling of tenderness for each bloom, which must be cherished and not harmed.  Although his work may be lacking in any dialogue with the dozens of “isms” that ruled the 20thc and remained within the language of chiaroscuro, which he learned from his idol Sargent, there is always a sensitivity to presence. It just sings out the fragility and nuance of the moment, the exact instant of apperception.

                                           

Flowers by Marvin for which he is known on "Askart"

    

My father told me, which was typical of his pessimistic reminders of the fickle nature of the economy , that the Exeter School of Art closed down during the Depression. The next evidence of Marvin’s presence in Boston comes in the late 30’s, when he was commissioned through the Federal Arts Project to do a portrait of an admiral for the Naval War College. From then on, he became well known as a portraitist in the Boston artistic community. There is an article about a portrait that he did the early Sixties of the wife of then Governor of Massachusetts, Foster Furcolo.Within the family he was, as it were, the court painter, doing pastels of his nieces and nephews.

Marvin in front of commission of Massachusetts Governor's wife Kate Furcolo

                       

He spent his later years alone in his apartment on Newbury St. His second home was the Boston Public Library, where he read copiously in classical literature. I once noticed him reading Rousseau’s “Confessions”. He must have been somewhat bewildered by the evolution of the art scene in Boston, which in the Fifties was very much defined by the Boston Expressionists. They complained that the explosion of Abstract Art in New York, which they felt was too French and immoral, had sidelined them. I can imagine that Marvin and his devotion to the art of the 19thc felt even more sidelined. Interestingly enough, my teaching career in Boston began two years after his death in 1988 at an art college just up the street from where he taught, as though in some strange notion of karma I had to fill in for his absence from the Boston art world. I had moved to France as he did and  spent a commensurate amount of time there. When I came back in the late 70's and showed the work I had done there at the Bromfield Gallery he came to the opening and quietly advised gallery goers what to purchase. The notion of presence has shaped Western Art and Philosophy since the time of the Greeks, and for several centuries from the Renaissance on this notion of beauty, grounded in the disinterested gaze, reined supreme. It clearly was the underlying principle of all of Marvin’s thinking about painting.

Recently, I came across an inquiry about Marvin on “Askart” by someone one who knew him in the late 70’, early 80’s. Marvin would have been in his mid 80’s at the time. I replied to the email, which was already sitting on the site four years and got this reply, which sums up better than I could the last years of an independent artist who always followed his muse.

       

Mother Sarah who lived with him the later years .
Painting recalled by Tomas Jonsson

Hello,

I received, with pleasure, your email regarding Marvin Julian. How did you come by my name? I am surprised, since it was so many years ago that I had met Mr. Julian (as we all referred to him). I was his neighbor in an apartment on Newbury Street, back in the late 1970's/early 1980's. I used to take care of him; visit with him, fetch groceries sometimes, make sure he was okay in the cold. At the time I believed he was one step away from being homeless, and it broke my heart. As you say, he was extremely private and would not talk about much, except his painting. I can still picture his apartment, and smell it…..it had the strong smell of paint and linseed oil. It was like stepping in to another world, another era. His apartment was always cold in the winter, too cold for an old man with failing eyesight. He often wore a sort of blanket/shawl over his shoulders. *I made him hot drinks, kept him company.

One day he said he would paint me, and I was thrilled and bewildered. I didn't know what to expect. But I knew it was important to him, as his sight failed, and he needed to paint. And, I think, it was his way of saying 'thank you' to me, although he didn't need to, as far as I was concerned. To me he was a great man, mysterious, mercurial, but clearly brilliant. In his almost empty apartment (he insisted, one day, that I should take the area rug, something someone must have given him)  he had two amazing portraits on the otherwise empty and dirty walls. One, which I was awestruck by, was his mother; dark and serious and very formal (I'm sure you know it). So, I sat for him, and very quickly he had a painting which I think captured me so well. I look at it now and find it funny and glorious, as who would not! I'm a young man sitting there, trying to look formal and serious myself, long 1970ish hair, wearing a formal tie and sport coat. I thought I should look the part for Mr. Julian.

I moved house after two years there, and lost touch with Mr. Julian. Although I think he enjoyed my company, he was closed tight, didn't really know how to relate very well, and seemed, so sadly, to be alone and lost in the world and, frankly, waiting out his remaining time. I have always remembered him, always think kindly of him, always will.

Mr. Julian told me that the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. has some of his paintings, do you know if that is the case? I would so love to see more of his work. John Singer Sergeant(sic) has always been my favorite painter, and I see the strong influence in Mr. Julian's work. I've always felt he should be celebrated more for his incredible work, do you know where his paintings are located, museums etc.?

Thank you so much for your email, and I wish you well,

Tomas C. Jonsson

*When I shared this  letter with a cousin whose mother was very close to Marvin, they were somewhat taken aback by the grim image of Marvin's last days portrayed by Mr Jonsson. They periodically visited him  to clean his apartment and replace items which were old and frayed with newer ones. My aunt suggested that the rug he gave to Mr Jonsson was one that she had given him.  Marvin enjoyed the concern of an extended family,who were equally enthralled by this most enigmatic of artists,but proudly portrayed himself as an independent artist to Mr. Jonsson.