Giuliano's sister Pip's travels abroad bring back memories of France in the 70's and my introduction to Weltschmerz

  I had hitchhiked my way up from the Midi to Alsace via Paris where I spent some time with Alix and then moved on to find more work as a farm worker harvesting grapes in Alsace. I followed the northward ripening of the grapes. The last person to give me a lift as I approached Alsace happened to know a “vigneron” whom he thought might hire me. He dropped me off at the door of the wine grower’s estate (I believe his brother was part of the harvesting team) who did not hesitate to take me on. I learned later that even though they had enough workers they thought I had a pleasant smile. Like the family I worked for in L’Herault the vendanges were perceived to be a pleasurable social experience They liked to fill up the ranks of grape pickers with interesting characters, even though it was easier to hand the work over to professional farm workers from Spain who needed the work and would be more efficient. In Alsace many of the harvesters were buyers of the grower’s product, who came for a day or two to enjoy the outdoors and the camaraderie. Some I observed were certified alcoholics who enjoyed a bit too much the passing of the bottle at the end of each row and were quickly dispatched.  The time of year was like the mellow wine made of the “noble rot”. We were already getting into the end of October and mornings were chill.

One of the first co-workers I met was a sullen Cambodian who sported an oversized military jacket which judging from the way he wrapped his arms around his body didn’t seem to keep him sufficiently warm especially as I learned he was experiencing cold weather for the first time in his life. He had been sent to study in France by his father in Phnom Penh who was a wealthy jeweler. Whether intentional or not his departure from Cambodia coincided with the takeover of Cambodia by the Red Guard. His family was sent to concentration camps where they were killed. He did have relatives who were in refugee camps in Thailand that he communicated with.

The harvest lasted a week. I recall the evening meals were enjoyably shared with the owner. The lunch in the vineyards consisted mostly of cured uncooked bacon and wine to wash it down. Much to the disappointment of the family that hired me I overstayed my period of employment when I became horribly ill; I believe due to drinking the “new” wine in the village of Ribeauville and could not leave the dorm where I was housed. Alix had come to join me and nursed me back to health. 

However, all in all, I was better taken care of there than in the Midi where the workers were given lodging in cold water flats with a single unit gas stove to cook our own food on. We must have been advanced enough money to buy food. We got a quota of two bottles of free wine (“pousse au crime” they called it) each day on top of our pay that we could either save or return to the owner for reimbursement. I recall the Australians on their world tour hopping from one Commonwealth country to the next drank their quota. They marvelously could drink all night and get up refreshed the next morning to pick grapes whereas, if I were to march their consumption, I would wake up at 4 pm the next afternoon with a horrible hangover.  

Our boss in L’Herault created quite a presence. He drove a convertible Mustang. He was well over six feet tall and sported an impressive Asterix style mustache. I had worked for him the prior season when he hired Alix and I as we left an employment office where we inquired about work picking grapes. I suspect he waited to hire us after we left the office to avoid paying a finder’s fee. I remember the pleasure in being carried off to the grey village of Tressan, our place of employment, in the back seat of the Mustang with the top down. 

Tressan Languedoc

Living in the gloomy village, however, did have its entertainment value. Whatever happened out of the ordinary in town would make its way to be discussed in the central square in the evening by the “town fathers” so to speak. One topic that I recall inspired a few laughs was their mockery of the shape of the wife of a friend of mine who came to visit me from the States. She didn’t fit their French definition of femininity being a tad hefty or “big boned” as the euphemism goes. Another involved the interest an elderly woman Madame Thiollet showed in me by baking me on occasions traditional omelets mixed with flour. She worried that being alone without a mate I had no one preparing meals for me. She lived alone with her brain damaged husband who sat drooling off to the side of her poorly lit dwelling. He had been hit over the head accidentally with a shovel while doing road work. The dwelling smelled of spoiled fruit that she as a senior had permission to scour from the fields after the commercial harvest was done. In any case, the gossip of our friendship addressed what they (the evening news in the town square) thought was my intent through our friendship to inherit her house.  Years later after I returned to Boston living with my parents before starting my academic career, I received a letter In the mail ambiguously addressed to Mugar Belmont USA (or some address that should not have been sufficient to make its way to me) announcing her death. It came from her son. He had learned that I had made her acquaintance and that she thought enough of me that I should be informed of her passing. I vaguely recall the gossipers of the central plaza said her son’s wife had been a prostitute much to the chagrin of my elderly friend. Such unkind/ ungenerous g ossip. 

Hunawihr Alsace

I am not sure of the Cambodian’s name. Leng Noon or Noon Leng. We addressed him as Leng. We became friends, a friendship that lasted ten years even after we returned to the US where he once came to visit. He eventually found training in the hospitality industry. While Alix was finishing her degree at the beaux-arts I returned for a short stay in France and swung down to the Loire valley where Leng was living. He lived in a tent on the edge of a field in order to save money for his education. I passed several days with him. One memory that still haunts me to this day was a meeting he took me to of Cambodian refugees in a public hall. On the middle of the stage sat a man who seemed to have some authority over the others. Leng came up to talk with him in a seemingly deferential manner and then left. Leng must have explained to me who he was and what was the purpose of the meeting but I imagined that the meeting was of a political nature. Was it an anti Khmer-Rouge organization or maybe the contrary, pro-Khmer. A chill ran through me as the notion of politics and identity took hold of my imagination. Was Leng trying to assert his fealty to a political party, so as to avoid being on the wrong side of the power structure. I recall the way  Rosanna Warren brilliantly describes the peripatetic survivor Max Jacob as he negotiates  the complexity of the Parisian avant-garde only to find himself despite his conversion to Christianity unable to distance himself from his Jewish origins as the government of France is taken over by the nazi-sympathetic Vichy government. He was holed up in a monastery south of paris which he thought would provide him some sort of protection from the Vichy. He was found out, nonetheless. Others thought that Picasso his mentor or one might say that Jacob was his mentor had enough connections among the "powers that be" to save him from the hands of the Vichy. The avant-garde was a sort of meta identity beyond nationality but it had a small constituency. When the hold of national identity reared its ugly head certain ethnic identities were suddenly lethal. Hearing that Jacob was in a prison waiting his turn to be shipped off to Germany Picasso quipped that Jacob was an angel and he would lift himself over the walls to freedom. 

Rosanna Warren’s book on Jacob came out before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, all the trademarks of national identity, fealty and loyalty that marked WW2 reassert their terrifying presence. Notions of a sort of Ur Slavic identity independent of the Occident is dredged up to justify the invasion and of course the Western European hold on Ukraine is perceived to be one of decadence. It is like a deck of card that gets reshuffled and one never knows were one will end up in that deck of cards or whether one will be dealt a losing or a winning hand. If the story of Jacob and the revival of ethnic and national identities seemed distant when the book was published in 2019 before the violence of Ukraine, of a past more than 70 years ago Rosanna’s book was prescient of what was to transpire in Europe.

One night in Tressan, the vendangeurs were gathered together on the central plaza drinking; we were all drinking pastis. As the evening wore on an Irish boy and a French girl showed some interest in hooking up. They could not communicate since neither one nor the other knew the others language. I found myself negotiating this tryst. The essence of the discussion that all was OK as long the Irish boy would use protection. The Irishman had a friend who showed little interest in participating in where his friend was headed.  Over the next few days I got to know him better. He described how his personality had been irreparably marked by the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland where a bombing near by where he was walking left nothing but body parts. It must have blocked his interest in the passing pleasure that his fried would experience that night in Tressan. 

Like the Australians he had been on a world tour. He had not been home in several years. I asked him if I could do his portrait. I liked it so much I said I would keep it for awhile but if he would share with me his home address I would send it to him at a later date. When I left for Alsace at the end of the vendange I left my art supplies behind with the intention of coming back to pick them  up. I returned a year later. Oddly enough the wandering Irishman had come to Tressan that very day to see if I was still there. I don’t recall what he had been doing all that time. We passed the day together reminiscing, Among his stories he told I recall only one. Well before he finally made it home to his house in Northern Island his mother had received the drawing. When she opened up the package and saw the face of her long absent son, she broke into tears.

The last time I saw Leng was in the USA in 1986. His visit coincided with our family’s move from a job in North Carolina to one in New Hampshire. We had two cars that had to be moved up north so we gave one to him and let him drive it wherever he wanted as long as he ended up in Maine where we had bought a house. He and his girlfriend arrived in time although we were in a sort of chaos for not having hired a lawyer to finalize the contract on the new home as the moving truck arrived in our driveway. That day happened to be Leng’s birthday and he insisted we celebrate it. I was overwhelmed with the mess of the unresolved closing, so I ignored his request for a celebration or as I recall we may have done  something subdued at a local restaurant. I never heard from him again. 

Maybe one day I will receive a minimally addressed letter from him like the one from Madame Thiolet's son that will recall our good times together.

Moon over Montmartre 

                                      A link to a blogpost with an escape from Weltschmerz 

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

Just stumbled across this reply to my Lester Johnson piece on Berkshire Fine Arts by the poet Rosanna Warren. Google every gallery on earth and you will find 99% are exhibiting "one show": a found object(ersatz sculpture ) on the floor, photo-document on the wall and a pseudo-profound statement about some group in need of uplift into the Hegelian dialectic.Global group think!!

Figurative Expressionist:Lester Johnson -->

Dear Martin,

What an extraordinary piece. I wish I could have seen the Johnson

show; I'm living in New York this year, on leave, writing.

You put your finger precisely on the problem: the coercive Hegelianism

of Greenberg's vision, and the intolerance it institutionalized. Great

image too, about the media world of Pop (and post-Pop, conceptual art)

as a vast  pyramid built by an army of slaves (us!). It's refreshing

to have you articulate so strongly and lucidly the fact of mass

dehumanization in which our culture of mass advertising and

consumerism collaborates. And to set Johnson's art as a

counter-phenomenon, of highly intelligent (not romantic) response and

analysis.

I never studied with LJ, but have admired his work over the years, and

am sorry to miss this show. Good for Acme-

Warmly,

Rosanna

In rereading this essay I was struck by the author's reference to "willed vulgarity".I think what she is refering to was my conscious decision to accept our basic human condition of irrationality and raw will.It is something picked up stylistically from the late Guston.We must start from "the cruel chaotic base" before we can pretend to have any"raffinement".

  Camp on Canvas: Martin Mugar        

 

“My painting is about the desire that underlies the facts,” writes Martin Mugar in the handsomely illustrated announcement for his recent show of Oil and Wax series paintings at Suffolk University. The verb “underlies” provides one key to this enigmatic and sensuous new work: the fatty tissue of Mugar’s strokes springs out from the canvas, introducing a third dimension to this art of the flat surface, and teasingly suggesting the presence of a truth under the visible evidence. “Facts,” provides another key. Considering Mugar’s evolution from the still life paintings of the 1980’s through the Hofmannesque Abstract Expressionism in the 1990’s and into his new color field phase, we are led to ponder the different sorts of “facts” that painting proposes. And, “desire.” That word is not carelessly printed on Mugar’s announcement with its luscious, sherbet colors. Nor, for that matter, is the word “painting.” These days it takes either a very naïve or a boldly sophisticated artist to put brush to canvas. Mugar is of the latter breed.

            He loves the brush, and the delicate materiality of paint, and the symbolic properties of light and shape. An early still life from 1984 shows his allegiances: behind the blockily painted, laterally displayed cups, jugs and conch shell, and in the subdued tones of ivory, cream, granite grays, and umber, stand Chardin and his later interpreters, Cézanne and Derain. Mugar’s brushwork here is forceful, and most of all one notices the subtle distinctions in hue and value on the busily articulated tablecloth, the sides and shoulders of the objects.

            Two years later, in “Still Life 1986” shown at the M. I. T. Museum, Mugar has declared a certain independence. This is no longer homage or canny apprentice work. Table top, room, and objects have been severely reduced, and the palette has lightened to a kinky range of pinks, lavenders, mustards and crocus green. In their simplified shapes, the three discernible cups or jugs are no longer presented with any gesture toward three-dimensional illusion; they hover as sculpted cloud shapes in the dense atmosphere of the painting in which solid matter and air share the same molecular formula.

            In the 1990’s, Mugar moved into a phase he calls his Abstract Expressionism. At his own pace, thoughtfully, privately, he worked his way through the idioms and evolution of Modernist painting, years in arrears of the path-breakers DeKooning, Pollock, Hofmann, Guston et al., but proving the integrity of his own shape-making and of his translation of the tradition into his own terms. Mugar’s paintings from the 90’s are exuberant affairs. Often five or six feet wide and high, painted in bold, risky, but controlled strokes, these works often suggest landscape while disturbing spatial logic and playing depths against abrupt blockages of foreground. “Self in Landscape” of 1990 depicts no “self,” but some swashbuckling black calligraphy outlines a slender central rectangle within a larger frame and arranges a perspective reminiscent of an outside scene—mounds of juicy foliage and hillish backdrop, with a deep cobalt swatch of sky above—perceived through a window. The window itself seems to be promenading through outdoor-space, not attached to any indoor architecture. Thetwo awkward calligraphic rectangles might be taken as focusing devices, and thereby as a mark of an organizing human vision—the “self” in the landscape. “Still Life” (1989) proclaims itself, in its wadded block-like shapes, a kind of assemblage of objects crowded on a table top, perhaps beneath a window sill above which succulent green stalks and a golden background are visible.  The painting permits no conventional reading of objects in gravitational space, however; planes of color—the cerulean cloud in the foreground, the salmon pink box astride it—announce their own proud color and texture rather than “objectness.”

            By the late 90’s, Mugar has cut loose still further from referential conventions. “Mulch” (1996) shares a gestural language with “Mackerel Crowded Seas” (1997), so the titles no longer serve a descriptive function so much as an obliquely symbolic one. In both of these large paintings, a massive central cluster of drippingly brushed ovals dominates the surface. In “Mulch,” this Easter egg fantasia emerges from a background of slurpy, billowing cream, salmon and mustard, while the eggs themselves are outrageously striped in peacock blue, lemon, rose and burnt sienna. “Mackerel Crowded Seas” (the phrase from Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium”) suggests nothing fishy in its crayola-flesh cluster of ovals and trailing tentacles, except perhaps a dream of explosively fertile fish eggs. In both of these paintings and their weird coloration, a strong element of camp and of willed vulgarity generates a peculiar energy.

            Around 2000, Mugar’s work took a significant turn. As he has described it, “The third period is a stepping out of the push-pull of self and group and is a painstaking sensitizing of every mark, every stroke out of which is created a purer self.” Purer self or no (a matter impossible for an outsider to judge), these new paintings, including the Oil and Wax series shown last fall at Suffolk, have radically changed their focus and their organization of incident. They present a unified surface of repeated gestures, symmetrical drips, in a limited chromatic range. They flaunt bubble gum and sherbet colors: strawberry, pale lime, baby blue, café au lait, tangerine cream, lemon ice… To distinguish one painting from another and to read each individual painting, one finds oneself peering hard at the facture of the strokes. Some of the paintings have a tighter weave than others; some allow more ragged drip at the base of the canvas; some allow one color (say, pink) to predominate in the quasi-pointilliste scheme, while others yield (say) to lime.

            Let us take, for example, a pinkish 36 by 40 inch painting from 2003. Because the wax thickens the oil pigment to an almost sculptural medium, Mugar is able to energize the surface not only by chromatic variation across the surface, but in the goopy three-dimensional events that add the further graphic element of shadow. In the 2003 canvas, a considerable downward tension is provoked by the gobs at the top of the canvas that initiate the downwardly overlapping leaf shapes. In the main pattern, the elevated strokes, tightened by wax, cast shadows beneath their scales and stalactite drips, so that suddenly this light-hearted weave is complicated, in mood, by shade, the dark underlining of each stroke, the suggestion of secrete depths and cavities. The bottom edge has an even more sinister development: the final smears protrude beyond the border, leaving a ragged bottom with bits of bare canvas exposed. Some kind of illusion is broken here, about the tidy, sugary harmony proposed by the whole painting. That order is revealed as produced by a process, possibly a violent one, capable of dissolution.

            Scanning the works in the Oil and Wax series for their small but significant differences becomes a lesson in seeing.  They all enjoy a democracy of stroke and color. But then a tiny irregularity will announce itself—such as the small salmon scale with no overhang just below the center of the small square from 2005—and become an event that affects the entire composition.

            At times these strokes suggest leaves, at times scales, at times electrons. They seem to argue that reality is composed of an underlying geometric regularity. And it appears a celebratory regularity, funky and outrageous in hue. Celebratory, that is, and even pretty, until the unnaturalness of the colors become alarming; and until we note the shadow schemes and border clots that tell a more disorderly story. With this new series, Mugar has invented a mode that is entirely his own. It has visual and tactile authority, a high degree of craft (something one no longer necessarily expects from art presented in public), and a powerful metaphysical suggestiveness. It is intelligent, sensuous painting that has kept faith with its traditions and has at the same time registered an original mode of seeing for our age of quarks and fractals.

 

Rosanna Warren