Innocence and Experience

Conversations at the Bow St gallery in Cambridge, once the most interesting alternative art space in the Boston area, were a fertile source for interesting blog posts. Owner/Artist, Addison Parks would bring groups of artists and art dealers together and the discussions that transpired were often lively. I would typically stand back and observe the banter. I could not keep up with the rapid repartee between Addison and book dealer/gallery owner John Wronoski. The late artist Larry Deyab once observed that all that back and forth was reminiscent of a Pinter play.

I recently participated in a curated show at an art center in VT managed by Katherine French, the former director of the Danforth Museum. I had no great hopes for the work being purchased or written about as it was too far from the art circles of Boston. However, toward the end of the show the art director informed me that a local collector had taken an interest in my painting. He wanted to hang it in his home for a trial run to see if it stood the test of time, so to speak. The painting belongs to a body of work that is recent and more complex in its use of color that has slowly evolved from bubble gum to richer and more saturated colors with marks transmogrifying into the cyrillic alphabet.  I was flattered that here was a collector in the Vermont woods who could possibly “get it”, even as it turned out, only for a week or two.

I had on occasion wanted to broadcast the potential sale to family and friends but I have become a laconic Yankee and knew not, to use the cliché barnyard saying that a Vermonter might appreciate, to count your chickens before they hatch. I was curious nonetheless to know what had happened and instead of stoically accepting the verdict asked the director what had led to the collector’s change of heart. She divulged that it was in fact the collector’s nine years old daughter who was smitten with the work and wanted her reluctant father to purchase it. I envisioned a young aesthete stamping her foot down stammering “I wanting my painting and I want it now”. What she loved about it were in fact characteristics that I thought were no longer part of my work: the candy color and bubbly strokes applied with a cake decorator. “No daughter you can’t have a painting with the rainbow colors of the Little Pony.”  I assume to have a painting with such cloying infantile traits was more than he could stomach even if it might please his daughter. Anyway, realist that he presumably is, he knew that one day she would out grow it and like all her childhood toys it would be relegated to attic clutter.

#76 2017 oil and wax on board  applied with pastry applicator 42"x 38" (later style with cyrillic letters)

Is there a moral to this story? Although certain critics have deciphered a hidden sinister aspect to my work that is being covered over by the colorful strokes applied with a pastry applicator (Rosanna Warren) or a sense of time in the paced application of my strokes (David Raymond) , my paintings have made several people angry to such a degree that they felt compelled to comment on my blog how repulsively saccharine they appear in color and mood. Or in the case of one artist/ critic, whom I was hoping would review my work in “Art New England", he had no idea what they were about. He just drew a blank. The use of my candy colors elicited excited responses in Provincetown years ago, where they were shown at DNA. Cate Mc Quaid in ”The Globe” responded twice to the  sensuality of the work. First in a show curated by Charles Giuliano. In her second review she found the sensuality was over the top. From my perspective the paintings challenge the typical viewer who is habituated to color used in optical color swatches in so much of the “Shake and Bake” abstraction that I see on line. My use of color eliciting synesthesia to merge appetitive and visual experience appealed to the hedonistic P’towners. But what if this child aesthete saw in the work something that partakes of the dichotomy between innocence and experience. Barbara O'Brien, currently director of the Kemper Museum, quoting Milton, titled the show of my work that she curated: "A Wilderness of Sweets". Addison Parks has pointed to my predilection for the feminine on several occasions in his reviews of the work on Artdeal and from the inception of this style at Crieger Dane in 2000 saw a paradisiacal return to the Garden.

#48 2013 44"x 46" oil and wax on board applied with pastry applicator (earlier bubblegum style)

Assuming that my premise is correct that that the nine year old girl saw in the work is analogous to the simple and innocent joys of a childhood toy like the “Little Pony”, I am reminded of analogous pleasures in Blake’s “The Lamb” : The mood of Spring, eternal recurrence of the prancing newborn lamb’s sheer delight in being alive. What is interesting is that this poem is spoken in the persona of a child:  ”I a child & thou a lamb”. It universalizes the spirit of the child’s and lamb’s innocence. What is this innocence? Why must innocence exist, when the lamb’s frolics in the green of Spring, end only in its  slaughter as a Spring lamb a few months later? Let us all be realists and scowl at the girl’s love of her little pony. The sooner she gets over it the better. As Beckett imagined, the newborn drops right from the womb into the grave.

                                                   The Lamb

                                        Little Lamb who made thee 

                                        Dost thou know who made thee 

                                        Gave thee life & bid thee feed. 

                                         By the stream & o'er the mead; 

                                        Gave thee clothing of delight, 

                                        Softest clothing wooly bright; 

                                        Gave thee such a tender voice, 

                                        Making all the vales rejoice! 

                                        Little Lamb who made thee 

                                        Dost thou know who made thee 

                                        Little Lamb I'll tell thee, 

                                        Little Lamb I'll tell thee!

                                        He is called by thy name, 

                                        For he calls himself a Lamb: 

                                        He is meek & he is mild, 

                                        He became a little child: 

                                        I a child & thou a lamb, 

                                        We are called by his name. 

                                        Little Lamb God bless thee. 

                                        Little Lamb God bless thee.

#66 26"x 24" 2016 oil and wax on board applied with pastry applicator (Picture the girl wanted)

For Blake, Christ was both a child and a lamb putting the innocence of the child and the lamb of the poem a priori in the realm of the godly. One cannot be a lamblike or a childlike without that innocence of God, which raises the question: what then is experience without innocence? Experience can only be a loss of innocence. Why do I in my painting linger in this realm of peachy keen colors if not to insist on the importance of this innocence that precedes experience. Or once out of the preternatural childhood realm of innocence can you ever get back to the garden? Can we move backward from experience to innocence so that innocence can be experienced at deeper and deeper levels as Nishitani says is possible with Nothingness?  Maybe the way back to the garden is to try to abandon the ego that one must have in relation to one’s interaction with the world. Is experience only the illusion of the shadows in Plato's cave. created by the light of pure innocence that we, so fixated on the here and now, cannot fathom?

Woven Tale picked this up and published it on their site with some editing

In BFA Charles Giuliano has written about the Sargent watercolor show at the MFA. This piece, about a 1999 show, first appeared on Addison Parks "Artdeal"

"Boit Sisters"

To the painting enthusiast, professional or amateur, who admires the techniques of realism, the matching of flesh tone, the verisimilitude of satin, the glisten of a moist eye,  JSS provides a sumptuous visual feast. Painting in the stylistic tradition of Velasquez with its direct evocation of human presence, he shares in the bravura brushwork, the love of chiaroscuro, surface and texture that typifies Velasquez's painting. Most importantly he shares an affinity for similar subject matter: both painted the rich and famous of their day. Ultimately it is the sociology of Sargent's work that intrigues this viewer. In the comprehensive exhibit of Sargent's work at the Boston MFA I imagined that I was viewing stills from PBS's Masterpiece Theater or a Merchant Ivory production, that year in and year out satisfy some insatiable appetite in the American viewer to peer into the lives of upper class Europeans of the Belle Époque. It's all there: the arrogant gaze of the powerful, the smug gestures of people, who seem to pursue a life of perpetual leisure, and the languorous gazes of desiring and desirable young women. Self- sufficiency radiates from their gazes and signs of wealth from the elegance of their clothing and surroundings.The medium by which you displayed status was how you carried yourself and what you wore. It was immediate, to the point and incontrovertible. Sargent's cast of characters act out powerfully these moments of self- display.

The rich and famous that JSS painted were on the top of the social heap as was the court of King Philip that Velasquez painted. Whereas the courtiers of King Philip were in no doubt about their standing in the universe, the people of Sargent's world are actors, playing at being a king or assuming the airs of a corrupt and decadent European cardinal (in the case of the gynecologist dressed in scarlet) and know they have to act their part well if the public is to be convinced. A kind of aestheticism pervades their poses. They can at times appear to be pretentious. Something you would never say of Philip the 1st. He doesn't have to pretend. The huge fortunes of the Gilded Age have raised these select few to the top but in the boom and bust economy of that era their position in the world is no divine right. Sargent's paintings are a kind of documentary of the Transatlantic Bourgeoisie of the late 19th century(he stopped doing portraits in 1907), but the work has something of the puff piece: he has no desire to deflate their self -image as Goya was able to do to the Spanish Royalty. He gives them what they wanted. This acceptance of the values of the subject seems to have a regressive effect on his stylistic development. Sargent does not grow as an artist, either technically or spiritually. He never surpassed The "Boit Sisters" in any way. Technically, there is everything that you'd find in his later work and something that the later work doesn't have, a certain success at making the viewer conscious that the image is an illusion. This effect is in part due to several factors: a majority of the image looming out from obscurity, its references to Las Meninas, which is itself a profound meditation on seeing and reality, and a simplicity of the mark making. 

I keep thinking of Alice Neel's models whose clothes hang on their bodies. They slouch, and drape themselves across the sparse furniture. Some sitters are fatigued, others angst ridden.... and all very mortal. Sargent is taking his social models from the past, as did so many artists of that period, but this posing is just a mask, a cover up that allows them to hide their mortality. It was the Pre-Raphaelites archaism that ruled the day in England. Although, on the one hand, Sargent's sitters are very real, because of Sargent's technical abilities, on the other hand they are a cast of characters derived from Shakespeare's lords and ladies.

The mural of soldiers blinded by mustard gas in the World War is an unlikely statement from an artist for whom the indulgence of observing pleasurable scenery was the core of his visual language. In this mural he did confront the horror of it all and the result is an image that for me is emblematic of the end of an era. Painted in muted tones, the soldiers are also rendered undifferentiated by their bandages, which mask their faces and uniforms. The landscape is war torn and desolate. Gone is the world of wit and play, of garden parties or sunlit Italian vacations. The subtleties of moods or the assumption of theatrical poses is effaced by the horror of mass annihilation. The 20th century is there with all its uniformity and scouring of individual particularities.

I have pursued the critical tack that Sargent and his sitter are out of touch with reality. The mass warfare of WW1 and the revolution of the working classes would wipe the smugness from the faces of the rich and stylistically, the art of the 20th century would show the traces of effort, labor and science. However, the agonic posing and strutting,  the exquisiteness of the sentiment of exquisite moments of that Bourgeoisie cannot be duplicated today, and, as that world recedes further back in time, an art that describes it so perfectly cannot be dismissed. No matter how much one might find that his work suffers from a kind of false-consciousness, I cannot help but feel a pang of regret that this world, which Sargent renders so palpably,  is forever gone...

"Gassed"

Charles Giuliano on Sargent in Berkshire Fine Arts

A reprise from Charles Giuliano's Beer and Burger series of discussions with Boston Artists.In our case it was over beer and pizza at Santarpio's in Eastie

An interview from 8 years ago.

http://berkshirefinearts.com/09-17-2013_artist-martin-mugar-beer-and-burgers.htm

Rethinking the premiss of my Nichol's blog as to the notion of insider and outsider

Berkshire Fine Arts has picked this up. -->
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…

As artist we live mostly surrounded by incomprehension of various varieties. Sometimes there is disdain and resentiment or pure philistine disgust for someone who dedicates their life to the pursuit of a private vision. This article reinforced this notion.There is a happy end to the story:at least over time the writer met me half way.I have added a few more slights to make my point.

The Weekly Dig 2006

Martin Mugar at New England School of Art and Design

KATE LEDOGAR

A few summers ago, my sister and I took a week-long class with Martin Mugar at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. It was a sort of paint-what-you-will situation. Mostly, I was just happy to be out at the beach, surrounded by fishermen and drag queens, and eating lots of Portuguese pastries. I gave the painting I was working on a sort of good-natured, half-hearted attention. OK, I dabbled. The only part of the class that truly caught my interest was Mugar’s slide show presentation of his own work.

At that time, he was painting dots: vaguely patterned, and in a few repetitive colors. His slides—which spanned a good 25 years—traced his development from exceptionally lifelike figurative works, to a transitional period where he broke down the subtle colors forming surfaces, to the dots-only approach he currently practices.

In my own painting experiences, there were instances where I found myself nearly mesmerized by surfaces. Expanses of walls and skin started breaking down into moving particles of color the more closely I looked at them. Eventually, I felt unable to reproduce their colors at all. In Mugar’s interim paintings—which fell stylistically between the realism of his early work and his most abstract canvases—he was painting surfaces as I saw them, and doing it well. His paintings gave me a mixed feeling of awe and resentment by showing me that it was possible to do what confounded me.

His current paintings interested me less. I was suspicious that he had worked into abstraction in order to appear more contemporary in style. Plus, I was probably too distracted at the time by the promise of some local delight (perhaps a late afternoon "Doggies in Drag" parade) to give the matter much further attention.

Now in the bleak of winter, up from the slushy, grey streets of downtown Boston, I'm in a much more focused frame of mind to view Mugar's paintings. Along for the trip is my sickly boyfriend, who wanted to get out of the house.

In the small pass-through lounge/gallery at the New England School of Art and Design, Mugar's paintings look like sherbet-colored globs of icing on the wall—something that a little kid would like to eat. They consist of large globs of paint in bright, chalky hues repeated in different combinations on rectangular and square canvases. I watch the sickly boyfriend out of the corner of my eye. From the abrupt way he stops in front of each painting, gives it a couple of seconds, then moves onto the next, I can tell that he's decided he's been duped. He says, "Well, when you seen one, you seen 'em all, right?" and slips out into the hallway to look at the student assignments pinned to the wall.

But Mugar’s paintings are meant to be gazed at for extended periods of time; they offer a sort of mute conversation for the eyes about the act of looking. The paint sticks out a good half-inch from the surface; pastel smears poke out from the sides and drip off the bottom. This texture buildup creates a topographical landscape that would challenge an ant trying to get from one side of the painting to the other. Due to the subtle variations of color, each painting—though similar to the ones on either side of it—offers a unique visual experience.

After studying them closely, I no longer think that Mugar's abstract works are contrived solely to attract attention—in fact, just the opposite. I suspect these paintings represent an obsessive attention to sorting out a visual "problem" that fascinates Mugar, which he has pursued whether galleries and critics notice or not.

If you visit the show, I recommend that you visit Mugar's website (www.martinmugar.com) beforehand—it gives some good context and background to appreciate his work.

MARTIN MUGAR’S WORKS WILL BE ON DISPLAY AT THE NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF ART & DESIGN THROUGH 2.5.06. 75 ARLINGTON ST., BOSTON. 617.573.8785.

Here is a recent example of stupidity: I was accepted into a group show into a NY gallery (First St Gallery)  only to be told to remove the painting ASAP after it was dropped off. I had to hire an art mover as I had already returned home to Boston. 

In the first decade of the Millenium I was grateful to Charles Giuliano for including me in several group shows at the New England School of Art and Design. One show there was favorably reviewed in the Boston Globe. That kept my work in the eye of the Boston art goers after commercial galleries Crieger-Dane on Newbury St and the Rising Tide in Provincetown closed at the end of 2000. Charles had reviewed my work and I always had the impression he thought highly of it. During the second decade I was included in a series of show at the Danforth Museum. Katherine French was the director of the Museum and the shows purported to represent the New England art scene. In the nineties I had participated in similar shows at the Fitchburg Museum and the Brocton Museum to favorable reviews. French left the Danforth a few years ago and took over the art center in St Johnsbury VT where she recreated the same sort of group show bringing in New England  based critics to select the work. Covid 19 has brought an end to this annual event. My last encounter with French was before the last show when I dropped off work in Boston to be shipped by her to Vermont. I was still smarting from the unceremonious treatment at the First St gallery and was hoping that she might promote a piece that represented my work at its best.Yes it was heavy. I sensed her unwillingness to take it and when I explained the rejection of my work by the New York gallery that had been selected by Ronnie Landfield after I had dropped it off  she started in a  long litany of complaints of having to hang my work over the years. I dawned on me she had never complimented me on my work. It was just a heavy burden. So much for respecting my 50 years of showing and contributing to the art scene in Boston.