What is fair and foul in the art world.Tim Nichols Boston Artist

-->Reprinted on Berkshire Fine Arts with some interesting comments not printed here.

Tim Nichols(work from around 2007)

My friend Addison recently wondered if we both had the tendency to churn the same ideas over and over in our blogs. He chides his readers for not appreciating how to enjoy the freedom they have been bequeathed as artists by spending too much time trying to figure out where they fit into the art scene. The art culture does a good job uniting buyers, critics, galleries and museums to convince us of a status quo and we are hard wired to bow down to authority whatever it may be at any given time. I have tried in my blogs to jump out of the noise of contemporary art as well by imagining an ideal art scene where artists speak to each other from across generations and participate in a kind of cosmic art dance. Its only premise is that the past has a lot to teach and any movement forward has to arise out of a dialogue with the past. I suspect that Addison would find that too much of a constraint. But unlike me he can make the claim that he once had a niche within the scene in the 80’s with shows at blue chip New York galleries. If he says ignore the scene and be free he knows what kind of stranglehold that world can place on one’s creativity, as his novel so passionately stated in its title:” Life and Art, in that order.” For me there was nothing to lose as I had an inordinate talent for always going in the opposite direction of any group that claimed to be the center of the universe, such as going to Paris after my MFA at Yale when the scene was clearly in New York. I have always just plodded along talking to my artistic ghosts.

So some artists are picked out of a hat or so it seems to strut on the scene. Their work is shown regularly, collected and written about. Of life’s unfairness we should be constantly reminded. It is a subject of a few of Addison’s blogs. His answer: get over it. There is one and only one reason we should not dwell on it: it is bad for your health. Nietzsche devoted a great deal of ink to his analysis of “ressentiment”. Dionysian that he was, He too wanted people to be free to create not weighed down by anger at the system. He preached Health.

In a private collection purchased in the 90's

Tim Nichols, Boston painter, legendary teacher at the Museum School and friend, who died several years ago in his late 70’s, comes to mind as someone who struggled for recognition and was never granted it. He was someone who cared deeply about a lot of things. Maybe because he was already a practicing Harvard and Columbia trained corporate lawyer when he decided to pursue painting he knew that art comes from within, and is in conflict with the veneer of the world of commerce. Unlike the contemporary content providers that litter Newbury Street and SOWA he was incapable of giving the galleries what they wanted. Boston has always suffered from a sense of its own history and the current choices in the galleries run the gamut from Boston Expressionist schmaltz to John Singer Sargent wannabees with a good deal of neutered art objects that go well over the divans of Boston’s moneyed class...I gave him a show at the Art Institute of Boston in the early 90’s and to my mind he was the best painter in Boston. It was work informed by abstract expressionism, which was banned by the Boston expressionists as too French, but he didn’t pursue its purely energetic goals. In that sense there was always something indigestible about his work. Each painting seemed to deal with some inner vision tangled in the web of day to day life. The only artist I can think of who resembles him is John Walker. He went off to work each day like someone going into battle. There were wars to be won, wrongs to be righted. I recall an all night bout of drinking that ended with a discourse on the misery of the lives of those in the ghetto that he knew his art could not help. He brought this same kind of proselytizing to his teaching and in turn did attract admirers such as Jim Falck, an artist who abandoned a career as chief landscape architect for the MDC late in life to become an artist.

We first met at the Bromfield Gallery, a coop gallery, in Boston where I was briefly a member in the late 70’s and again in the mid nineties. He was living with the Chicago based still life painter Catherine Maize, whom I had met at Yale / Norfolk in 1970. He remained a committed member of the gallery until he died. Exhibiting in a coop gallery provided him a self-image as outsider, free from the art industry and allied with the community of artists. Since I was out of touch with him in later years I don’t know what kind of success he had there .The last time I heard about him was when we were included in Addison Parks” Severed Ear “show at Crieger Dane. There was some chatter about how he had someone deliver the work for him while he waited outdoors on Newbury St

.He did not want set foot in a commercial gallery. He did not come to the opening.

The only images I have of his work are several that exist on a site” Slow Art”. They are among his last work. They seem serene not tormented and not typical of the work I recall from the 90’s. When I learned belatedly of his death I tried to introduce his work to Chawky Frenn who was writing at the time a two-volume work on Boston Artists for inclusion in the series. I did succeed through the dean at The Museum School in contacting is children by email but nothing came of it. It is unfortunate. I would like to think that future historians will stumble across his work and acknowledge its superiority.

Tim Nichols(around 2007)

Nichols stayed committed to being an artist in Boston. He stayed loyal to his coop and taught vigorously until his retirement. As far as being continuously out of sync with Boston’s artistic seasons I suspect that he didn’t heed Parks’ advice: He didn’t get over it. Unlike current artists who favor antidepressants he was more in the style of Bukowski when it came to self-medication.

Tim was always on the ramparts, trying to overcome what he saw as the inherent unfairness of a system where people go about their roles in the art establishment like somnambulists. Art has become corporate and the artists are just content providers. Art had saved him from a life as a corporate lawyer and he spent the rest of his life spreading the word of art’s sacred content, that a painting is a poem where as Wallace Stevens said we perceive “ghostlier demarcations keener sounds”.

follow up blog

Jim Falck and Addison Parks,artists

Jim
Falck

Addison Parks

Art at its best reflects on its own optical origins. Even when it appears to be breaking away into new territory as in the work of the Impressionists and the Post Impressionists, it is meditating on its roots that were evident in the optics of the perspective of the Renaissance and the chiaroscuro of the early Baroque. Western art seems to fluctuate back and forth between seminal periods of rigorously based optically grounded art and art that takes that construct as dogma and perceives it as reality. My favorite concept from Marxist criticism is the notion of reification. It is used to critique concepts of social organization that are taken for reality rather than as human inventions. It can be applied to art when the world of Bourgeoisie, for example, is solidified into the Realism of the late 19thc. Although used by the Marxists to accuse people of Bourgeois bad faith and to recommend them for a curative stay in the gulag, when used to critique art it does a pretty good job of detecting when large groups of people smugly take the shape of things in the visual world as just the way things are.

A good example of reification was evident in the work I saw of many, heretofore unknown to me, Realists at the Petit Palais in Paris, who appeared to be followers of Courbet’s Social Realism. Their subjects were the poor of Paris. One huge large scale painting showed a street theatre presentation comprised mostly of young children, whose sorrowful looks conveyed obvious exploitation. In my essay on my blog on the Impressionist show at the MFA from the the mid 90’s I quoted Michael Baxandall, who felt that the work of Chardin drew its strength from the way it understood that the structuring of the visual reality had its roots in the eye/mind and its language of chiaroscuro. http://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2011/11/modern-arts-considered-this-article-for.html

This notion becomes reified in the hands of the artist of the late 19thc where the balance between seer and seen is lost. The paintings are too much about the sad-eyed urchins and not the event of seeing them. The limpidity for example of the work of Caravaggio is achieved by its hypersensitivity to how the eye organizes the visual world. Subtle distinctions between the seer and the seen (scene) are the sine qua non of great art.

In the 20thc, this balancing of that distinction is most evident in the work of the Abstract Expressionists. The evanescence of Rothko’s late work appears as an optical apparition. It partakes of the reductionist chromatic trope supported by Greenberg’s philosophy but stays rooted in the language of seeing in its use of subtly juxtaposed warms and cools. It stays in the Western Tradition of seeing that goes back to Vermeer and in fact his work seems at times to be a detail of, say a pearl, on the necklace of the woman in one of his most famous paintings, the so-called “Woman with a Pearl Earing”.

Rothko’s work has been seen as an example of Talmudic mysticism. When it comes to respecting the namelessness of God it seems Abstraction is a most authentic vehicle .It intrigues me as I hear myself use seer and seen that it resonates with the words of mystics from the Upanishads. Or the constant reference to the struggle to merge the observer and the observed in the work of Krishnamurti evidenced by his constant frustration at finding the right word for this conundrum.

There seems to be a relationship between the interest in how the eye sees and mysticism .If the cognitive structure of the eye shapes reality, then an exploration of this structure puts the artist on the edge of knowing and unknowing. Is it any surprise that the artists, who walk this line, this razor’s edge are not the happiest people in the world? The comforting sense that the world we move in is a seamless whole has not been granted to them. A simple figure/ground exercise for Rothko becomes a meditation on Being and Nothingness.

For the artist ,who pursues abstraction, the risk of reification becomes enormous. There is the assumption that, of course, abstraction is not reality, so there is no risk but it can be as leaden as a Bougereau. It seems that artists think they are given two choices, that they think are incompatible: Either you have a unique vision or you are a follower. That you have to be both seems to escape them. If you are influenced, you really can’t be an artist. This seems to be the case of the winners of a recent annual art show and competition comprised of New England Artists, in which I was included. In its generosity to include as many artists as possible it ran the gamut between sophistic and amateur. The art is divided into work selected by an outside curator and the rest is included in a concurrent show with another name. In the end there was not much difference in quality between the two groups. For the most part the show is made up of Abstraction, that wallows in a mix of expressionist mark making and a vague sense of pattern and Photorealist work, both of which seemed to catch the eye of the outside curator. The abstract artists who did not question or embrace their roots  were among the winners of the competition. It would have been refreshing to see some humble exploration of the rich language of 20thc abstraction.

We are in a post-ideological era in art. Therefore, the realism is not suported by the doctrines of a movement, as it did in the late Sixties and the Abstraction does not have the austere words of  Ad Reinhardt to push it toward purity. Maybe that is a good thing. But the results are not encouraging for the future of painting. In this show the work floats on its own merits, which are no longer to seduce the viewer with its ideological purity, but to do so by the lowest common denominator of emotionality in the case of abstraction or crass facticity in the case of the realism. I suppose that this is a normal evolution similar to that from the High Renaissance to the Mannerists in Italy, before chiaroscuro regrounded painting in the Baroque. But in the case of the prizewinners, they show no intelligence in regards to their sources. Like little bubble boys and girls they can’t absorb any influences. They suffer from terminal narcissism. Maybe that is the Modern aesthetic. The current manifestation of reification.

I can think of two artists who are presently painting in the Boston area, whose art radiates a gracious interest in the tradition of painting .Jim Falck and Addison Parks.For them the Tradition is the period from the beginning of the 20thc: the world of Matisse and Picasso, which could be summed up as the pushing of paint, with the dynamics of color and figure ground, toward the simplicity of the written word. Recently I witnessed the finished product of a mural Jim was asked to do at the gallery at Montserrat College of Art. It was a full-sized mural, that was constructed of abstracted figures woven together with as much understanding of time and space as Picasso’s “Desmoiselles d’Avignon”. Figure and ground give the figures a visual life that keeps the viewer’s eye constantly moving. The colors bounce back and forth between warm and cool to create a mood of sunlit Italy and the Mediterranean. This is not a blind use of the tradition but a respect for how it can integrate the figure into the environment to create one organic being, which is “Life”. Jim’s favorite word. All one had to do was compare his mural to the other ones done on adjacent walls to know how smart Jim is. The others used paint  in a additive manner. One mark on top of the other with no sense of integration.

Addison nourishes his work with the artists he loves, Hoffmann and Marin, Hartley and Miro. Here is the love of painting as language, that allows for buoyancy and joy, to permeate the work. The language paints the painting. This guy lives art, thinks art. There is such an abundance of letting things be, through the language of painting. Parks, who is a writer, knows how words live as part of an organic whole. You never know how they will react, when they are juxtaposed with each other. 

In a culture where everything has its shelf life, I don’t expect the art community to carry these artists on their shoulders through the streets of Boston, as local heroes. I have been in Boston long enough to recall the hushed tones with which a new local art hero is discussed, and remember that in every case the work of these artists has reeked of emotionality. The art dealers knew that was needed for it to jump off the shelf in the art supermarket. None of these artists were capable of organic evolution. Their success made that lack of organic growth inevitable.  For Falck and Parks, their love of art as language gives their art a life of its own and because it is "Life" itself, it breathes and pulsates and continue to grow.

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