The painting of Don Shambroom

 Don Shambroom and his work looms large in my blogging that started in 2012. Mostly his opinions that have been shared with me either at visits to his studio on the Millers River in Massachusetts, via email or comments left on my blog posts. Just a presence that added up over time. What he had to say on culture and art were most often very prescient. He has a knack for thinking deeply about any subject that he decides to focus on. Most recently an interest in the life and work of Marcel Duchamp resulted in the publication of a monograph on Duchamp’s last day published by the David Zwirner gallery. In order to write the book he had to enter and hold his own in the world of Duchamp scholars and chroniclers which was no mean task.   When we first met at Yale and then again when our paths crossed in Boston exchanges were face to face. Since the advent of the internet these exchanges have been hijacked by the web and have become part of the very subject matter of his painting.  

Cow Bird

The imagery of the art world in the 20th c to my eye is torn between a Hegelian systematization and the Kantian sublime. Newman, Rothko, de Kooning define the sublime. Of course, Rothko and Newman deal with the numinous presence of the self and de Kooning with the terror (an aspect of the sublime) of being torn apart but somehow surviving to be reconstituted in the real. For these painters the artist still wields power to move the viewer. These artists represent the part that resists being overwhelmed by the whole. The Hegelian trope can be seen in the part being subsumed in the whole. Here the part can either resist strongly or acquiesce subserviently. I noticed this subservient stand in the work of Dana Schutz. She applies a cubistic language that in the end is not a structure into which parts are grounded in the real but a system that obliterates a meaningful use of the parts. It embodies the postmodern dream of the death of man. We are uploaded to the mediaverse  starting in the 50’s with the tv understood by Marshall McLuhan as messaging through it mediatic structure and coopting our whole physical reality finally on FB or at last dreamed of in the metaverse qua Oculus.  

The artists who no longer resist this effacing of the human presence can be seen in the artistic phenomena of zombie formalism that I was one of the first to talk about. It seems to have grown out of the branch of modernism that does not ground itself in the human body a case in point being Frank Stella whose early graphic design-based work is already one degree removed from embodied perception. 

String Theory 

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe a painter and critic who stumbled across my writing emailed me in direct response to something I had written about the characters in Zombie Formalism. I found it applied to the work of Dana Schutz. His words addressed the struggle of the part and the whole in any Hegelian inspired work of art where the part provides “no bodily surprise” (to quote Gilbert-Rolfe). Nothing that can break out of the whole.  He sent me a link to his writing on the Sublime. The art of Shambroom like any smart artist who wants to find his or herself engaged in understanding the human condition of late modernity has to sort out this Hegelian/ Kantian struggle of the system v.s. the Sublime. Unlike the submission to the systemic like Schutz whose visual world seems to grow out of Saturday morning cartoons or the Zombie formalists who bleed any life out of abstraction, he creates a hybrid of both the intensity of seeing by the artist one on one with things of the world and a systematic world derived from Rauschenbergian space. On the one hand the face, the individual is lifted up into a societal miasma on the other hand things of the world are granted a kind of beauty in their isolation, a stance that exalts their magic of having appeared in time and space. Like a Janus face he looks backward into the 19thc on to the Renaissance and Baroque where the artists were capable of holding up the moment and the thing in its beauteous moment of revelation and on the other absorbing the language of modernism where the human presence is swept up into a higher structure. By straddling the two worlds he is casting doubt on any attempt to see the imagery of mass culture as a superior sort of transcendence as in Warhol, a Hegelian “aufbehung” which ambiguously means both a cancelling and a lifting up. 

Symbolic Drift

This strategy of maintaining both realities side by side without sublimating one into the other, resembles the task that Ernst Junger set for himself. In his writing. He is famous for his WW1 account of trench warfare  ”Storm of Steel” that I recently learned that Don read while attempting in his own scholarly manner  to understand warfare as manifested in WW1 .For Junger WW1  represented a dramatic change in the role of the individual to technology. It is technology that drove the battle not individual acts of heroism. The book had a big influence on Heidegger’s understanding of the growing nihilistic role of technology in 20thc life that he called “enframement” and more particularly ”machination” (that continues to this day in more and more insidious fashion on the internet.)  In my own blogging I have called this transformation the “Humpty Dumpty” effect where the integration of the image of the individual into the whole as we knew it and as it is represented in the art of the west say in the work of Piero or Michelangelo is irretrievably lost as we move into the 20thc. All the king’s horses and all the kings men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. 

John Singer Sargent's "Gassed"

 In the interim between the wars Junger pondered in his writing how the life of the individual might function outside of the political and technological system. achieving in “The Adventurous Heart” an  almost mesmerizing descriptions of the objects of the day to day reality that he encounters sometimes enhanced by drugs. His goal was to describe the surface of the real with such intensity so as to reveal something of a hidden reality. It also represents a shift of weight from the individual subsumed in the political to its own private inner magic. In many ways it parallels the power of many individual artist such as Picasso who functions as free agents outside the system. Or the proliferation of shamanic types in the 20thc century such as Alistair ‘Crowley, Krishnamurti  or Rudolph Steiner who attempt to integrate divinity in a post Christian  era. Another short book written by Junger between the wars “Forest Passage”  posits the strengthening of the individual in connection with the natural world as it steps outside the leviathan. I was taken aback by the first image described in “Adventurous Heart” in overwhelming detail of a tiger lily, which in turn brought to mind a painting by Don Shambroom of a daylily represented in almost stereoscopic detail. There is no postmodern cynicism in this painting. This is not the world of Yuskavage or Currin that keeps pushing the envelope to further dimensions of perversity.  The realm of Blakean innocence finds its place in Don’s openness to the opening of a flower. 

"Circle of the Lustful" William Blake

Shambroom’s art embraces a hybrid notion of the societal whole and the individual as its own kind of whole. He leans on the structure of a visual language derived from Rauschenberg  to insert images of faces known from mass media side by side with those of people in his immediate family. Sometimes there is text given the same weight as the faces and bodies. Interpenetration of the 19thc world of portraiture and that of billboards or flashing internet imagery. Everything is on the verge of overwhelming the individual. A child on a swing is impinged on by graffiti/slogans. What one must remember in observing these paintings is that everything is hand painted. There is the 20thc lingua franca of collage but the 19th c love of paint to represent the here and now. Again we are helped by a seeing Shambroom as hermeneutically orchestrating a sort of clash/crash between two periods of time and two notions of the universe, that seem to have bifurcated irretrievably to which his work  says adamantly No. The dreamscape of people carried along in a sort of cosmic stream seems to remove a purely societal critique and opens up the possibility of a Blakean insertion into a higher spiritual realm. Shambroom’s work can only make sense if seen as issuing from a shamanic magic incantation. An attempt to merge the media images of mass culture with the domestic play of children

Day Lily

Lester Johnson's painting

Johnson 1960's

History has established itself as the final arbiter of the value of the life the artist lives and the art they produce. Having navigated the art scene for over forty years , I have observed that the current manifestation of History’s evolution and the fear of not being part of it has been the cudgel that has been wielded by the arbiters of taste over the head of any poor fool who dares enter the arena of art. 

I have images in my mind from “The Lord of the Rings” of Sauron, art critic, throwing Gandalf , artist into the abyss. This is not a world where sin will send you to eternal damnation; this is where the flavor of the month and whether you know what it is, can make you relevant or irrelevant. To get a sense of how one’s sense of self -worth is predicated on being aligned with “what’s happening”, just sit in on a graduate school critique or witness as I did your favorite class in color and observation get dropped from the curriculum by an administrative hack who wants to offer classes on gender theory.

The historical system that these arbiters use is that of the German philosopher Hegel.  It is not a linear system of dates and events; it is a logic which states that History marches forward dialectically, each era supplanted by the next. This transition is dynamic, i.e. the current structure is challenged by a new one and eventually supplants it but not before there is a synthesis of the two. It is premised on the role of conflict. Therefore, it sees man as inextricably forced to interact with or against societal norms. He gains his consciousness there and has no identity outside of it. Hegel formulated his system during the French Revolution which for him was consciousness realizing itself on an historical plane.

 The individual players were just acting out a huge cosmic plan. Individuality matters little except as it participates in or is transformed by the dialectic. History according to Hegel is a meat grinder, which shapes ordinary men into uniform hamburger patties that can be easily consumed by societal appetites.



 His most devastating insight into History’s trope gives me chills when I read it: ” What is rational is real, what is real is rational”. How does it feel to be caught in this vise: Nothing can be real for us unless it is reduced to thought so that rationality becomes the only reality. It pretty much paints the picture of the 20thc. 

Increasing rationalization of society by science interspersed with periodic paroxysm of horror at what has happened or delirious self- assertions of the self. The German Expressionist and the Abstract Expressionist shows side by side at MOMA represented those latter periods of individual revolt. 

Every revolution and its participants of the past two centuries have all justified their acts, violent or otherwise, by an appeal to a more rational order. The goal of Hegel’s world is pure consciousness where there is no distinction between self and world as self and object as both are subsumed in pure reason.

Johnson 1970's

In art, the evolution from representation to abstraction that was described by Clement Greenberg, a Hegelian, has the inevitability of the movement politically from monarchies to the modern state. Without this system of thinking there would be no mass culture, no zeitgeist or the repetition of generational selves that we are forced to identify with. It enframes how we dress, how we talk and how we paint.

The first inkling I got of the impact of this historical process in art oddly enough appeared to me in a late work of John Singer Sargent, exhibited at the MFA Boston some 16 years ago. It is a large mural of soldiers returning from WW 1 blinded by mustard gas, walking in a long line, the hand of the one behind on the soldier in front, the blind leading the blind. All 
are in uniform, somewhat tattered from battle, repeatable units without sight. 

"Gassed" John Singer Sargent

This is an uncanny image from the master of the exquisite moment, the painter of beautiful and egotistical upper class people of the Belle Époque surrounded by luxury and symbols of power; it is about blindness and uniformity. An artist, who had the ability and technique to represent anything placed in front of him, now shows an extraordinary courage in representing a new reality where the moment is deprived of nuance and subtlety, and the individual is reduced to a repetition of units where excessive observation is irrelevant. This is emblematic of the end of realism in a sense because the excessive sensory impact of bombs, shrapnel and mustard gas overwhelms any attempt by the senses to capture the world in a figurative fashion. 

Abstraction will be the lingua franca of 20th c art where all the rough edges of the real will be filed off ultimately dissolving the human presence all together. Greenberg inspired as he was by Hegel established a theory of the visual that made that movement from representation to abstraction inevitable. Much of the evolution had already taken place by the time he defined it, but it accelerated the process by creating a theory that gave artists who wanted to jump on the art train a goal of total reduction that could be easily predicted and imitated. It is Hegel’s art of pure rationality and it slowly dissolves the world of the bourgeoisie replacing it with uniform, blind monads that can be shaped into abstract patterns for war or commerce.  

In America of the ‘20s thru the ‘40s the realism of the Ashcan school and the Regionalists exist side by side with Abstraction but by the ‘50s Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism will have started a thirty year reign ending in the minimalism of the ‘70s and ‘80s. However, an ironic sort of realism appears in the form of Pop Art in the ‘60s and runs parallel to Abstraction. 

According to the literature about Lester Johnson, its ascension to power helped marginalize the figurative expressionism that he was identified with. The critical community had allowed him to ride on the coattails of Abstract Expressionism as a sort of variant that kept the action of the gesture but brought the figure back into the painting. 

Shifting the spot light away from Johnson to Pop art which, with its imitation of mechanical reproduction, put another nail in the coffin of any kind of representational art based on the individual either painting their real or psychological environment. It seemed there was no room for the deeply nuanced meditations of Lester on the relation of self and society.

 Pop art is in fact the perfect product of the rationalized society that Hegel said we were moving toward; millions of mass-produced items that could not exist without the industrial technology to produce them and a mass culture manipulated by the media to purchase them. It was the new representation of man and society. The artists who painted in that style were considered by the art historians to be incredibly clever and even cunning tricksters in figuring out that the individual with all his ambiguous relation to others and society was dead. The Self was now a strange meta-self that existed only in the media. Warhol in his shamanic way understood how the media would lift up the individual to realize this meta-self for his fifteen minutes of fame only to let him subsequently descend into obscurity. 

The media is our current equivalent of the pyramids, a collective project upon which millions slave to create and maintain. It is not for nothing that Warhol called his studio The Factory. The critics and artists who embraced this world view got to lord it over those artists with the epithet of Bourgeois, suffering  from a false consciousness. I recently saw a biopic of Camus where Sartre leveled that insult at Camus . That insult and the following were the mantras I heard repeated throughout my career: Death to painting, Death to the individual. The air got sucked out of Lester’s expressionist world very quickly.

Maybe the distance we now have from the art world of the ‘60s, will allow us to reappraise the importance of Johnson’s work . A student today would have to look hard to locate it in the literature which shines its light on those movements surrounding it but bypasses his figurative endeavor. Maybe the inevitability of art history can be reversed or redirected. The current show at the Acme Gallery in Boston provides a broad swathe of his work that has helped this artist, who studied with him at Yale, rethink his importance. 

His painting’s interface with the Abstract Expressionism out of which it grew and with Pop art, which supplanted it in the critical community, is complicated. First of all, he would be considered a second-generation abstract expressionist and secondly a figurative expressionist, so twice removed from the source. 

Both de Kooning and Pollock ended their careers painting centrifugal works that are Whitman-like in their expansive notion of the self. They resemble the sensibility of Romantic American landscape painters such as Bierstadt or Frederick Church and become quintessentially American. Lester is no romantic. He sees the human condition as fraught with ambiguity grounded in the active human presence and by extension the human community. It is not mankind or humanity in the abstract that he paints, but “Da-sein”, the Heideggerian term which puts man beyond his self-consciousness into the human community without giving primacy to either one or the other. 

Johnson’s early heads from the early to mid sixties ‘60s are emphatic in their message that we are here in this world not somewhere else. The implied effort of his stroke states that Lester Johnson is in a shared space with the head of the person he is representing. There is always a sense of decision in the splash of the paint on canvas. Man cannot avoid deciding for or against something.  His frequent use of the Classical Greek head seems to say that this idea of man has always been with us. It is trans-historical, anti-Hegelian. His work has that knotty difficult quality of a Beckett play, where despite all the gestures and acts nothing is resolved; Human existence is reduced to its essence in “Waiting for Godot”, where act upon act doesn’t seem to resolve their angst. In the end they are there, just there. 

Lester Johnson came of age in a generation that did not buy into ecstatic notions of pop culture. He did not lose himself in the social mood, like my generation does. He was not part of the generation that wanted to be “groovy” or “go with the flow” a generation that imprinted on mass media. They are the artists of the death of the individual, the exaltation of the corporate man. In that sense Pop also becomes the next quintessentially American art form. It is just a tip of the hat to those images crafted as artifacts created for mass culture. 

The complexity of the self is gone as artists like Warhol glory in the vacuum that has been created. Johnson’s work is a much more nuanced and sophisticated revelation of the individual vs. the group. With his series of paintings of people joined arm in arm from the late sixties he acknowledges that people join groups; they lock hands like the Rockettes of Radio City Music Hall to act together as a crowd. Some recent writing on Heidegger makes the case that he did not use the term ”They” in a pejorative way. It was an inevitable aspect of da-sein, part of the human condition. 

Lester Johnson could be considered asking the same questions as a phenomenologist trying to describe the shape of what it means to be human. However, being part of the group is not an unquestioned given as it was for the pop artist. The line up of generic men in Johnson’s work is often scary. They are reminiscent of the living dead that pour out of the Underground in T.S Eliot’s London. They are unsmiling and unaware of the condition that defines their identity with the group, carried along by some mass hysteria. 

In his work of the Seventies and Eighties, the generation where the media co-opts every attempt of the individual to break the mold, the “They” in his work has changed its story. The light is brighter and sunnier. His characters are dressed each in different patterns of the period and although they are locked arm in arm like the bowler wearing men of the ‘50s they gaze out dreamily in different directions. Despite those slight gestures toward individuality they are still side by side. They are always plural not singular.

Lester Johnson places himself in the midst of the world Janus-like  looking at  the self and the group at once and asking so many questions: Who am I who is forced to decide and act? And who are “they” who act as a whole? Is there such a thing as “We”? And what is this hand that creates this image in a kind of existential act? Where do I end and the other start?

In one painting from the late sixties, he paints himself with a focus on his hand holding a brush in front of a painting of his men in the street asks the question” Who is this person, what is this hand who has created these characters.” Other self-portraits show a blunted hand as though the brush is tied to it reminiscent of the photograph of Renoir who had to tie a brush to his arthritic hand toward the end of his life in order to paint. The hand translates the world within to the canvas. Is he saying it is just an extension of the will and an instrument that is forced to blindly act, or is it too limited and clumsy to convey everything within? If you are capable of any subtlety in your thinking, these paintings will initiate it. They warrant multiple viewings and their graphic simplicity belies their complexity.

One drawing in the show at Acme that I took great pleasure in looking at was an ink brush drawing of a view through a window of the ocean in Provincetown from the fifties. The space depicted starting from a table and chairs in front of him, to the window frame, then the porch and finally the boats on the water are all rendered by the same black unmodulated stroke. The space is compressed and all the things are simply depicted.  My first thought on looking at it, was that this guy is visually astute. He can draw.

 I remember that he was the only faculty member at Yale to talk with me one on one about my thesis show. He said he admired the kind of space I had created in my still life’s, which were in fact very flattened out and very influenced by Matisse .He had understood the importance of space even within flatness and how without space Matisse would only have been a mere designer. I thought as well of how drawing is not offered in grad school at Yale anymore, at least according to a conversation Bernie Chaet had with the current Dean Robert Storr while Chaet was doing his portrait (interestingly enough a portrait with blue smudges instead of eyes). How do you abstract from the real in front of you; is it only an old fashioned exercise in epistemology? Is there any nature left to learn from as we spend most of our lives in front of the computer screen. Lester created so much light in that drawing by activating the page with his use of black. Such old fashioned concepts: space and light.

How do we work our way back to Johnson’s work and let it tell its story? Current art criticism and the art of the academy because it is under the thrall of Duchamp with the primacy of ideas over the optical, is highly critical of painting that carries a scent of representation, as though someone like Johnson’s work does not think; The art criticism of the past leaves him towered over by their mythological treatment of the Abstract Expressionists and Pop Art. 

I hope that what little I have written here lets us see that Lester Johnson’s work is a profound meditation on our being in the world, with all the ambiguities between self and society. A psychologist and a sociologist can use these terms to describe the structure of both but they can’t tell you how it feels to be a self among others and witness to the masses of people in the modern city who define themselves as a single self. What do all those definitions look like? The hand knows more than the conscious mind. Lester trusted it to reveal secrets about our world and self that the mind could only over-simplify. 

He knew that to paint/see with a brush at the end of your hand as an extension of the body and the mind allowed him to discover unconscious insights not explicit in our day-to-day existence. This discovery was an event in paint . To the contemporary artist who accepts that they are doomed or destined (sometimes I don’t know which verb applies) to express themselves in a language of painting that in kindergarten was the universal language by which every child described their world and became an expressive medium in the 20thc in the hands of Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky and their American students, Gorky, deKooning and Pollock, they should find much to give them comfort and inspiration in viewing and studying Lester’s work.

Painting treads a path of cognition unique to the visual artist. It must break free of the burden of history and the predications of the priestly class of intellectuals who establish a priori what can or cannot be done in the world of art. That class has been enormously successful; there is currently one show in the  galleries world-wide, whether in Paris, Rome New York or Shanghai: Photo originated image on the wall, a found object on the floor and a title about the oppression of some group excluded from the Hegelian dialectic. An artist must proclaim like Lester: ”Here I stand.This is my experience and this is how it feels to be alive. ”


HANDROSE


You almost became 
“They”
Your rockettes
Arm in  Arm.

Or Eliot’s living dead
That flowed over London Bridge.

The Brooklyn
That Miller left for 
Paris and from a private paradise
Shaped the flower of  the 
70’s (1)

You stuck it out.
You knew that it all added up  to 
Nothing, anyway.
Sacrificed the
caress of private moments to 
monitor  the storm troopers
Marching to and from work.

One day in front of your stolid men
last weeks stump
Bloomed. Your tortured hand


(1)Miller’s  grim images of Brooklyn in  “The Tropic of Cancer” make me think of Johnson’s men. Miller escaped New York and created a private love nest with Anais Nin in Paris, out of which grew private notions of self-realization that were fodder for the delirious sex drugs and rock and roll culture in the California of the sixties and seventies. Mamet in a recent essay on American theatre sees Eliot and Pound as escapists and I am sure he would throw Miller into this category. Lester’s world is one of men who are compelled to act not knowing what the consequences are. Somewhat like a Mamet play, Johnson’s painting has a stolid determination about it.

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.