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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An interesting movement centered around Leland Bell that still exists in enclaves here and there in academe .

Addison Parks has this on artdeal with more comprehensive illustrations

Helion

Leland Bell self-portrait

In a discussion with Addison Parks about his recent acquisition of a painting by Pegeen Guggenheim, the name of her husband, the French painter, Jean Helion came up. I recalled that he had been the hero of William Bailey who as a young artist made a point of seeking him out in Paris. Addison then remarked that Helion was greatly admired by his teacher at RISD, Leland Bell. Through Helion we were able to piece together a group of American artists that was a subset of the figurative revival of the late 60’s and 70’s that featured more prominently Bailey, Pearlstein, Leslie and Beal. These artists included Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Louis Finkelstein, Gabriel Laderman and Stanley Lewis among others. In fact Bailey, Laderman, Matthisadottir and Bell showed at the Schoelkopf Gallery in New York. It is a world gone by at least in terms of what is being written in the art press, but in the 60’s through the 80’s they had a following among critics and as all of the members of this group were teachers in prominent art programs they shaped the styles of many young artists. Knowing how the art world works they may be due for a revival.

I was included in a show in the late 80’s entitled “Vision and Tradition” curated by the painter Hearne Pardee to whom I had been introduced by the poet Rosanna Warren. It included many of the aforementioned artists and another artist not usually mentioned along with the group Robert deNIro. The show travelled from Colby College to the Morris Museum in Morristown NJ in 1987. In 1991 I participated in a show with the same group less deNIro at the Art Institute of Boston but with the addition of Bernie Chaet, who stylistically belongs to the group but up until that point had not shown with them. Janet Cavallero who was a student of Louis Finkelstein at Queens College curated it.

The title of the Colby College -Morris Museum show sums up the ambitions of these artists. Their work was optically based deriving its language from the progenitors of abstraction such as Cezanne, Matisse, Bonnard and Derain. These founders of abstraction never made the leap to pure abstraction but hovered in a world of direct observation of the things of this world with sensitivity to the underlying perceptual structure of seeing.  Derain, unlike Matisse who pushed his work to the edge of pure abstraction, returned to a chiaroscuro based realism in the latter part of his career. He seemed to embody best the notion of vision and tradition.   

Pedagogically that penumbral world is very fecund. It respects the role of visual cognition in the work of the Impressionists and Postimpressionists, yet avoids turning it into a cold sort of scientific methodology, which eschews the naïve acceptance of the world we live in. As a teacher with this approach you can still use the still life setups and live models of the academic tradition as vehicles to move out of the 19^th c into the color notions of 20thc. A Midwestern artist Wilbur Niewald who taught at the Kansas City Art Institute was tangentially part of this group. He influenced several generations of artists with his theories on teaching with a primary color palette, and although not his student I would include his one time colleague Stanley Lewis as a protégé. The Studio School in New York where Stanley now teaches is still a haven for those sympathetic to the tenets of this optically based approach to painting.

It is interesting to note that unlike the “Vision and Tradition” artists, the prominent realists of the time never worked in a style that could be taught.  Who are the followers of Bailey or Pearlstein? They were both idiosyncratic and their enduring commercial popularity has something to do with their inimitability. Their techniques are more like barriers set up to hide their emotions. Pearlstein said as much in a catalogue for a show at Betty Cunningham where he was tellingly matched with Al Held.

But the painterly figurative painters (the best I can do with a label, though vision and tradition might work) had lots of ideas. Visually the Postimpressionists and the Fauves gave them a methodology for painting, and the direct observation of the lived world gave them an association with Existentialists who feel we know the world not through analysis but through the haptic subliminal notion of the self in it. Unlike Pearlstein and particularly Bailey who seem hermetic they are open to describing the world in which they move no matter how prosaic and banal. In contrast to Bailey’s hermeticism they are hermeneutic, in other words, engaged in a dialogue with the past and the things of this world at the same time.

Addison Parks describes Bell’s teaching style as pugnacious and his message as “Hoffmanesque”. There was a lot of talk of the energy of mark making and the power of color to create space. In that sense it is a hermeneutic similar to Abstract Expressionism that grew out of an encounter with Picasso, Matisse and Kandinsky. But their attempt to engage the past without any “anxiety of influence”(to borrow the title of Harold Blooms canonic book) so obvious in deKooning, Pollock and Rothko’s efforts to forge a new style is strange and in the case of Bell his work is a wholesale imitation of Helion.

That artists should worship at the altar of a certain style is no sin and the codifying of the late 19^th and early 20thc project of the Postimpressionists and Fauves into a teaching method preserved ideas and techniques about paint that leap frogged over the ever recycled deconstructionist ideologies to a new generation who might not have been exposed to it otherwise. In sum, it is about the love of paint and color and its musicality that had always been part of Western painting. Imagine(no need to imagine just look around you) a world without the pleasure of pure sound and harmony and you can see why these artists wanted to spread the good word of pure color.

Champing at the bit to take a bite out of the Champ.

"To be Looked at....." 1918 

Duchamp studies are the terrain of some of the brightest minds writing about art today and his ideas are so universally championed in art academia I am quite fearful of being pilloried or more likely ignored for what will appear to be pedestrian ideas about the subtleties of his thought. I can only deal with this hero of the avant-garde from my own anecdotal experience toiling in the fields of artopia and from an accumulation of observations try to sort out why his influence is probably more pervasive now than ever before. I would have liked to deal with the issue in a more scholarly fashion but am champing at the bit to get to the suffering inflicted by his acolytes on anyone who still believes in painting.

Duchamp’s legacy functions on multiple fronts. But philosophically it is grounded in the 20^th century project to deconstruct representation. This is not just visual representation to which it is obviously related but philosophical representation, which believes that the truth of what we represent gains its validity in the coherence of our consciousness. Originally that coherence was rooted in the onto- theological ground of God’s infallibility and humanity being created in the image of God. Later the work of Descartes places that coherence in the logic of mathematics. Even then he leaves God in the picture albeit in the background. His famous dictum “Ego Cogito ergo Sum” translates: Cognition makes me who I am and everything I can think about gains its validity in the clarity of that cognition, which is most evident in mathematics. The Baroque through the beginning of the 20^th century is a period of the glory and majesty of Western egoism. I will never forget the segment from Herzog’s “Aguirre the Wrath of God” where Aguirre the explorer descends the Amazon and lays claim to everything that he sees from his canoe, although at that point in the film he is alone and helpless. Perspective, which radiates from a fixed view and its power to subsume everything in its gaze, is the visual paradigm for this era. Versailles’ s gardens are laid out on a perspectival system radiating from the bed of the Sun King himself, Louis the XIV.Moreover, it is the canvas and the use of Chiaroscuro which orders whatever the human eye lays its eyes on. From the use of the camera obscura in Vermeer and Caravaggio to the study of color theory in the Impressionists the eye/self brings order to all it sees.

This coherence begins to break down in the late 19^th c and early  20^th c with Freud’s theories that put the ego in the vise of Eros and the superego. The Copernican revolution continues to devolve man from the center of the universe. Quantum mechanics puts in question the notion of a fixed reality that we can pin down. If you look at the art world of the late 19^th century (which is on display for the first time in Paris’s Petit Palais) you see a sort of schizophrenia developing where the followers of the Salon and Courbet continue the representation of the world from the perspective of the individual but creeping into the work is a lot of emotional baggage that is not well contained in the format of realism. Impressionism is already dissolving that fixed reality and cubism is waiting in the wings to use Cezanne’s version of Impressionism to create a language that integrates time and space in a way that leaves one point perspective behind for good. Duchamp joins this revolution with his “: Nude descending the staircase”. It is an incredibly masterful treatment of this Heraclitian view of the world, where nothing stays the same. Unlike Cubists Braque and Picasso who remain within the tradition of painting on canvas for the rest of their careers, he sees even his masterpiece as part of the optically based language of western painting that must be extirpated. The canvas as a mirror to the world and its long reign in Western art for him has to come to an end. What better artifact to use than transparent glass as he used in "To look at..."that reflects nothing and captures erotic odds and ends like amber traps insects. I get the feeling that he is  a Bolshevik like Strelnikov in Doctor Zhivago who wants to destroy all the trappings of Chekovian bourgeois culture.  Symptomatically, he is on the right side of history .Who can look at the images of Sargent’s imperious lords and ladies of baronial splendor and not feel the ending of an era and moreover a sense of irrelevance and that the future will be in the hands of those who can manipulate mass culture like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and FDR.

Several years ago I was recommended for a grant or as a fellow artist said recommended for a rejection .The only compensation for this rejection was a gift of a catalogue of the winners. More than half of the winners were installation artists. That was not the case forty years ago when I did my graduate work at Yale. The population of students was divided between the figurative acolytes of Bailey and the minimalist followers of Held. 

This shift to installation is abetted by Duchamp’s preference for the readymade. Here the displacement from the creations of the individual genius to utilitarian objects made by consensus in factories is another acknowledgement that we live in a corporate and highly socialized culture. It is this gesture that sets the stage for installation art where the artist tries to take the pulse of the culture through the artifacts that it creates. Warhol is pure Duchampian as well in his preference for images and objects of mass-production. The unique canvas that had once been the surface on which the individual acts of authenticity were recorded are now no more than objects of mechanical reproduction.

What permeates all this art is a kind of hipster ethos embodied by Warhol’s life which mocks the individual who thinks that the power of their private consciousness can overcome that fact that they are part of a larger social structure that manipulates them. I remember attending a lecture by Robert Longo in North Carolina , which he ended with the statement that on his death bed his last thought will be to eat at Burger King.

Everything from politics, philosophy and technology militates against the power of the individual vision expressed on canvas. The psychic weight of a Caravaggio or a Van Gogh will always have their place in the museums and attract the melancholy art student lost in the waste land of modern art. The linguistic turn from Wittgenstein to Tugendhat analyzes language as a purely social phenomena where meaning is not achieved privately but in a shared language. The space where meaning was achieved by a self-conscious bracketing in Husserl is considered a bad faith remnant of attempts to ground everything in the  Cartesian ego. The inextricable web of technology such as Facebook traps us into a fantasy of individuality which the system uses to track our habits so as to better exploit us. And in politics individualism is only a posture assumed by certain politicians who are helpless to turn back the clock of the every expanding leviathan of the state. In the theatre of Becket the romantic hero is reduced to the sadistic and cruel Pozzo .

There is a harsh honesty in the work of Duchamp . He coolly observes the demise of the bourgeois culture and its preferred vehicle for self-expression, the canvas and gives the next generation of artist’s tools to use in their Kulturkampf. That intimate space that we observe from our own self of  family friends and objects we care about or just what it feels to be alive, is nothing compared to the enormous web of highways, internet, industry and media that we are  are wired into. It was first about the death of god and then the death of the self. Issues of right and wrong only apply to how well we understand the irrelevancy of our private notions of the self. I think the battle has been won by the Duchampians not so much through the power of their irony but through a very scary non-ironic fact that the ties to the individualism of the Renaissance onward have been forever severed by the mass culture we live in. All Duchamp did was provide a path for the artist to be on the right side of history.

What Nietzsche said of Christ applies to Duchamp: There was only one true Christian and he died on the cross. No one except maybe Warhol will ever match the icy cerebral operations that he enacted. Even in the world of theatre, Becket his closest parallel seems warm hearted in comparison. His objects resist being turned into aesthetic objects, which you can’t say for Warhol’s. Rauschenberg’s deconstructions of the canvas look a little musty to me these days.  In a previous essay on BFA I commented that the little pasture of Duchamp has expanded into an infinite steppe including every world class gallery that all show the same exhibit of political commentary, a photo document on the wall and readymade or found object on the floor. Greenbergian aesthetics dead-ended in minimalism and Zombie Formalism and require as much mental contortions to figure out as Duchamp’s.The figurative resurgence of the late 60’s and 70’s exists in isolated cults in academia without much affect on the greater culture. So Duchampists have the field to themselves. That it is an arid infinite steppe, there can be no doubt.”The waste land grows”.

 I think the tragedy of Duchampian thinking rests in the following: in his single minded attempt to destroy painting as a mirror of reality he moved art permanently into a purely social act. Put in the context of late 19thc art his assault on the canvas as mirror makes a lot of sense but that it should be enacted ad infinitum as it is by the current Duchampians is absurd. It could be that the purity of his art objects and their resistance to aesthetic interpretation remain a lofty goal that each generation of followers aspires to. It puts a permanent damper on the use of painting as a vehicle for expressing any great intuitive insights into the shape of our universe as we saw in Piero de la Francesca and Botticelli in the early Renaissance or Cezanne and Van Gogh in late Impressionism or Hsia Kuei in the early Sung in China.There are times to build up and times to take apart.Those who deconstruct have the wind behind them and the attempts at metaphysics can’t compete.In my readings of Duchamp I came across a reference to Becket and him playing chess together.I couldn’t help but think of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

"Nude Descending a Staircase"

Julian and Julian

My great uncle was an anomaly on the Armenian side of the family, that came to this country at the beginning of the 20thc. The family was working class not by choice but by necessity, but Marvin was an artist and his sense of necessity was to follow the demands of his love of art. While still a young man in Boston, he befriended John Singer Sargent, who was working on the Boston Public Library Murals and received periodic instruction from him. He contintued his studies in Paris at the Academie Julian and came back to Boston, where he became a very successful portrait painter. Among his commissions were Admirals and Massachusett's Governors. Arshile Gorky, at that point known as Manouk Adoian, studied under Marvin at the New School for Art and Design on Boylston St, where he taught after coming back from France. He described Gorky as showman of sorts, who dazzled the female students with his ability to make perfect circles freehand. After Gorky moved to New York,  Marvin attended the opening of Gorky's first show in the city. According to Marvin, Gorky ignored him at the opening. My uncle felt that this response was due to some embarrassment by Gorky about his new work, which was no longer tonal but clearly influenced by the avant-garde. I learned from the film "Without Gorky" that Gorky did not want anyone to know he was Armenian and in fact his wife only learned of his heritage from the local grocer in Sherman CT. Even then when confronted with the truth he denied it. I suspect the presence of Marvin at his opening irked Gorky. Marvin, who knew he was Armenian, would have blown his cover as the son of Maxim Gorky. Hence the snub. I have subsequently studied the chronology of Gorky's life  on the Gorky Foundation website and noticed that Gorky borrowed Marvin's credentials as a grad of the Academie Julian and student of John Paul Laurent for his resume, when he was  a teacher at the Grand Central School of Art in New York.

Recently in Paris I was wandering  with my wife Alix on the West Bank, when we found ourselves by chance on the Rue du Dragon. Alix said that the school she attended, Ecole Met de Penninghen before going to the Sorbonne to study art education, was on that street. We decided to revisit her old haunts. When we walked into the courtyard I saw inscribed on the wall above the entrance:Academy Julian.There was a little confusion, as I tried to figure out what the connection was between the two schools, since Alix had never mentioned that the school she attended, which was rather new at the time, had been previously the Academy Julian. The school was out of session, but, by chance, we encountered a man who happened to be the director. He was interested in chatting with us in particular Alix, since she was able to recall some her fellow students, one of whom was now a teacher at the school. He explained the connection between the Academy and the current school, the details of which I don't recall. I told him about my ancestor who had gone there. The assistant director was writing a book on the history of the Academy.The director asked us to talk with him about Marvin. At this point the reader might have noticed that Marvin's last name is the same as the academy. Marvin's Armenian last name was Chooljian, just enough of a phonetic resemblance to swap one for the other.

The assistant director went through a data bank on his computer and found Marvin's name. He asked me to send him some information on him to include in the book.This is what I sent him:The list of some faculty at the Exeter School of Art in Boston from the 1930's.

an article from "The Boston Sunday Advertiser" from the 1930's

A Portrait of his father Hovaness

Another portrait of Hovaness,

                             

Sarah:Marvin's mother.the painting that Tomas Jonnson refers to in his comment

Marvin in 1924

The photo on the top is of Marvin(Chooljian)Julian taken  from our family photos.The photo below is of Gorky and friends.It is taken from"Black Angel". The man on the right, identified as Felix Chookjian, looks a lot like Marvin. The photo is also published in Mooradian's "Adoian" with the man on the right identified as Felix Choolijian. Since they were all translating from the Armenian, spelling variations are to be expected..So far no one in the family remembers Marvin ever being called Felix.(Ellen Mugar,my sister, found the photo in "Black Angel" as well as the photo of Marvin).

Link to an essay I wrote for Addison Parks's show at Crieger-Dane in 2000

http://www.bowstreetgallery.com/Addison_Parks/Catalogue_Essay.html

Addison has reprised a conversation I had with him from 1999

A Painting from the show at Crieger-Dane on Newbury St Boston

Link:
Art Deal Magazine 

or read it here:

AP When a painting gels, it seems like it is much more than just getting it to "work." In a funny way it seems like it is put to rest on the one hand and set it motion on the other. That point when everything comes together and the fusion sets in and it jumps into a kind of hyperspace, that whoosh, and the whole thing becomes so much more than the sum of its parts that it is almost an understatement. At that point it is as though the work is out of our hands, and in that funny way, ready to go, like a child that grows up. I find that I like it when this maturation comes in the natural process of painting; however I also enjoy the challenge of finding that certain something which propels the work to that other level. The hardest ones are those that are so close and could be really great but the next second crash and disappear forever. Does this happen to you? Those paintings that come along and promise so much and never deliver? What happens there? I get tight, I guess. Pitching a no hitter into the ninth and then losing my focus and blowing it because the promise was too great. I would have to say t hat most of my "best" paintings never made it. What about those last few moments? How do you treat a painting at that point? What sort of factors come into play? What does it depend on,hang on, how do we know? MMWow!Where to begin.How a painting occurs and how it at its best can correspond to some truth,not absolute,just an exhilarating correspondence between it and some unknown part of yourself.I know the "dropping the ball" sensation to keep with your sports metaphors or striking out as you put it in the ninth.Someone said that the beauty of baseball is that 300% in batting is damn good and as such corresponds to life.So the implication is that you have a lot of failures for the few successes you have.I was thinking that today in my studio that the last two days of new color,return to brushes,lots juicy paint might not gel; I thought of the waste,but recalled something from Robert Frost that waste is part of the game.Something about butterflies destroying themselves as they gorge themselves on milkweed nectar.All the little sperm that don't make it. But I know also what you say about just feeling right about it doesn't mean the painting works. Often I get sort of bogus recognitions in my work;for example I'll see some contemporary philosophical principle at work."How post modern of me""This is so intersubjective"I can rest assured that the next day I'll wince at what I've done.The best work either is pushed over the long term step by step piece by piece to a point where the whole goes beyond the parts.(That is I sweat over the interrelationship of the parts,back and forth,and may find by chance that the parts begin to resonate unawares in a way that I may never have intended)(is this the hyperspace you are talking about) or having just discovered some new realm I can knock off a series of images within that mode for a few weeks..Until its novelty wears off(obviously the new mental configuration is initially pleasurable)then some new problem presents itself or the painting wants to be more. I think that what I want most is the painting to be a presence that people will keep coming back to.I said something to that effect in response to Richard Tuttle's NYT interview.He said it was an American phenomena this need to create an intense personal presence.Not to clobber the viewer but to grab them maybe but give them so much complexity they can't let go.Bringing complexity into our visual space.He said it should not be fast like signage or ads.But I think at some level it should be fast and then slow. I think most people are very clever,clever to a fault.They've got their back covered, they never let down their guard.I think I am easily mesmerized by the surface of things,the beauty of light,the candy in the store window.And I get burned,taken advantage of,while you are dazzled by the candy,someone is picking your pocket.Now in day to day life which is made up of deals,negotiations over territory,what's yours and mine I suppose one had best not be too naive.But in art I think it is an advantage to be susceptible,to be open,to lose boundaries.This "promesse du bonheur" thing I was talking about. It gets you into new territory like the promise of fertile and rich frontier lands for the pioneer. APWhat about clarity of purpose, intensity, conviction? For better or worse, is obsession a must for the artist? MMThose are the things you hear about as a student.At least I did at Yale.If you say that you are an artist than you must act like one.You got to do art,obviously to be an artist.I was that way especially in the beginning.It was all or nothing.Every day every event had to confirm this self image.I wasn't much fun and the girlfriend I had at that time bore the brunt of my obsessive nature.Self narrowly defined constantly needing to have the definition mirrored back.It is a trap.I was definitely an insufferable type.I see things differently now.Focus, clarity in art is a mode I can shift into.When I am there in the studio,I am totally there.I let go of it all when I am out of the studio.There is so much else that makes you an artist,like being an engaged human being,involved with others and influenced by one's surroundings.Eric Bogosian has a new great monologue which includes a bit on the narcissistic actor who seeks a reflection of his fame at every moment of the day; for relaxation at night he watches himself on TV.You aren't real unless you are getting that reflection. It is the danger of teaching.A built in cast of fans. Teachers are like football coaches.I heard the pep talks,from my parents too.Self immolation is the only way to get that recognition.All or nothing,your whole life has to be in it.But you know if there is nothing else feeding you,then you dry up.You end up imposing a very narrow definition of self that boxes you in.I like to be surprised to see how I can spontaneously be redefined by my work. The "lived life" contradicts the image you had grown accustomed to. It crops up in my paintings. AP How did you get going as an artist? MM As usual you ask some tough questions.My experience in the art world is that people just don't talk about the life,the struggle etc.I think that a lot of people I have worked with in academia over the years are happy to have a job in the arts and their art is just a kind of passport to that world.If there is a struggle it may be that there is a part of that world that is closed to them.A gallery,NYC,critical acclaim etc.But the struggle with the work,the split between what is and what you want never comes up.I don't hear that very often.Except from you.I remember once helping to organize a symposium at the Art Institute for a group of narrative painters.They showed their work and then talked about it.The essence of what they said was a long whine about rejection,not getting from the art world what they thought they deserved.All of that is real ,no denying,but someone asked what about the work,the joy the pain,the vision,the hope. Well your questions get to the core of it all to that inner debate and struggle that keeps us moving and creating. I'm just an ordinary guy.I enjoy the different kinds of weather,landscape.(Sounds like I'm putting together an ad for men seeking woman)I get lost in my senses very easily.They are like clothing, a a garb that we cloak ourselves in.They define us.Until something catastrophic happens.The cloak is rent.This oscillation gets me going. AP What do you credit for your love of art, and what lead you to dedicate your life to it? MM As for dedicating my life to it:The seeing just happens unless you shut you eyes.And all that seeing,the whole environment,other art,the people in it has to be digested.I really often suffer from a sort of visual indigestion.It can only get processed through art.I remember having a clear sense of this at the end of High School>I had dedicated myself to academics quite successfully,beginning to master the world of words and their meaning when I became quite lethargic as though there were 18 years of images that had to get processed.At that point I was doomed to be an artist or else go crazy with this excess of visual stuff inside of me.And so it continues to this day.And a love of the language,like someone can love words. I like the underlying structure that keeps rising to the surface when I paint. AP What do you think the kind of work you do has to offer the art community at large? MM Thank god for other artists.Who else can truly the enjoy the games I play and the risks I take with the tradition. AP A lot of people think that twentieth century art will end up on the trash heap, if it hasn't already. What contributions do you think will last and why? MM The severed Ear show I think established an interesting connection between pure abstraction a la Polk Smith and a more lyrical approach embodied in Joan Snyder for example. Abstraction was moving away from a scientific,reductive trope to becoming something like abstract letters that when combined into words can begin to open up the world of life and emotions.It moves out of a self reflexive mode into a life world of meaning.It is just beginning.I feel that I am part of it. AP How does being an art educator affect you as an artist? What about your recent experiences?(optional) MM Just as my life as an artist is based on all sorts of assumptions,so was my teaching.Not everybody wants to buy into them.I tend to think that as a person I am quite transparent: What I am should be clear to others.In fact So much is lost in translation. WE should all have spin doctors just to survive in academia.The most important thing in teaching is to remain at heart an artist,Everything should come out of that.That is what the students want to hear in any case.I think a lot of people to teach because they want to be needed.The student teacher feed back loop is insidious. Martin Mugar with Addison Parks, July '99--Part 2

 

 

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My review of Cosima Spender's film"Without Gorky"

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“Without Gorky” a documentary about the family of Arshile Gorky made by his granddaughter Cosima Spender was shown this past Thursday at The Wasserman cinematheque at Brandeis to a large crowd mostly of Boston Armenians. Cosima was present and did a Q&A after the film. Gorky committed suicide in 1948, when his daughters Maro and Natasha were still children. The story is about his looming presence in their lives to this day. This is a story about victims and victimizers and unresolved guilt. It has much in common in its format with Dominic Dunne’s TV “who done it” series of the crimes of the rich and famous “Power Privilege and Justice”. The film’s premise is that something horrible if not quite a crime happened and seventy years after the event, the victims are interviewed and fingers are pointed at the guilty. Like a jury taken to the scenes of the crime, the mother, daughters, Matthew Spender and Cosima from behind the camera visit the locations where Gorky and Agnes had lived from the Union Sq studio in New York to the Sherman Ct farmhouse, where Gorky committed suicide and finally, in at attempt to rise above the horizon of the family drama, they all make a visit to the remnants of Khorkom near Lake Van in eastern Turkey where Gorky was born. The documentary ricochets between the lofty and the petty and at times with the way it piques our love of gossip and voyeurism it might easily be serialized into a reality TV show like that of another metis Armenian family, the Kardashians.

The victims are Maro, Natasha and Agnes, although Agnes gets her share of criticism as a victimizer as well.  She is a still stunning woman who radiates a kind of aristocratic hauteur, even in her late 80’s. Cosima, who hints at a not so easy childhood as the daughter of Maro, appears to be unscathed enough to be the disinterested observer of the crime. I think she made this film as a catharsis to get over Gorky’s svengalian power to define the life of her mother and aunt. The film could have easily been entitled ”Getting Over Gorky”. Both Maro and Natasha seem damaged to varying degrees psychologically in particular Natasha*. Just a toddler when Gorky committed suicide, she has no memories of her father, although upon a return to the Sherman CT farmhouse some long repressed memories do resurface. Matthew Spender who wrote a book on Gorky interjects insights about him in the detached manner of an art historian talking about Gorky as the important art historical figure that he has become. At one point on a tour of Union Sq he comments about the way the urban environment inflected his work and at the end at Lake Van on the manner in which the landscape of his childhood gave him an endless source of memories and images that would nourish his work as an adult.

The film pointedly reminds us that when the family shared the same physical space Gorky was an impoverished struggling artist. Family life was fraught with tension and possibly violence. “Mougouch” the affectionate name Gorky gave Agnes and which she seems to prefer, had pretty much abandoned any artistic ambitions to keep Gorky painting. Agnes after Gorky’s suicide put both daughters in a boarding school for six months to travel around Europe with her lover and Gorky’s friend Matta. It apparently was more devastating to them than the loss of their father. In the end it is hard to place any blame on anyone still alive who lived with Gorky. Gorky’s deteriorating health, his old fashioned attitude toward women and the years of Agnes’ subservience to his goals finally absolves her of any guilt of abandoning Gorky before his suicide and her children for six months after his death, at least to this viewer of the film. The films strength is that it accepts the messiness of life and love and eschews  the elegiac.

And how does Gorky fare? He is not around to defend himself. We depend upon the words of Mougouch to know what happened. She describes him as a “full catastrophe” to use Zorba’s words for marriage. However, what seemed to hover around the edges of the film to its credit and that transcends the often pathetic gorging on the reputation of being a “Gorky “ is that something larger than life happened when Gorky and Agnes met. On the surface he was a handsome bohemian with a reputation for being an exotic, who would save Agnes from her predictable destiny as an upright flower of Yankee culture. But beneath the surface was his history, which she wasn’t prepared for. Gorky was a man with a destiny that he had to live out. The shared life could not help but be explosive. On the one hand was a need to work out all the disparate influences he has absorbed from Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky and the Surrealists and that lead many of his generation to see him as talented but unoriginal. On the other hand those mysterious years of his childhood are a mystic source that he drinks from for the rest of his life. They are so sacred that he hid them from everyone, including his wife. It was a sacred font that he has to honor and cherish in the way he cherished his mother’s memory in that evocative painting he did from the photograph taken in Armenia. 

ADDENDUM#1:

I see in Gorky an example of a shamanic personality that I've witnessed in other Armenian artists, for example  Varujan Boghosian and the late photographer Arthur(Harout)Tcholakian. Stories I’ve heard about Saroyan , Gurdgieff and the filmmaker Parajanov seem to  point to the reality of an  Armenian wizard with a Zorba-like predilection for the unpredictable. They reach beyond the rational to the creative power of the irrational.  A quote from Kazantzakis seem apposite here:

Alexis Zorba: Damn it boss, I like you too much not to say it. You've got everything except one thing: madness! A man needs a little madness, or else...
Basil: Or else?

Alexis Zorba: ...he never dares cut the rope and be free.

ADDENDUM #2
My great uncle taught Gorky in Boston.Here is the blog on that topic: http://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-gorky-connectionmy-great-uncle.html

addendum #3 Here is a blog on the Armenian as perennial outsider 

*

When watching a  documentary  one is lulled into the belief that what one sees is fact when it is just part of a storyline.  I sensed this when I watched “HarvardBeats Yale 29-29” about the classic game in 1969 where Harvard comes from behind to tie what looked like a certain loss.( I did attend that game,which claims twice the number of attendees as seats at Harvard Stadium) The story is based on interviews with the players about their recollections of the game around 40 years later. Yale player Mike Bouscaren turns his experience of the game into a transformative story of how he learned to get beyond a grudge match against Harvard’s Hornblower so as to finally see the opposition’s humanity. It fit nicely into the background references to the ongoing Vietnam war and the machismo that lead American into the war. By the same token Natasha’s forlorn look played into the theme of victim and victimizer and as in Bouscaren’s case in the end may not be factual.

A great example of writing that let's things be without killing the subject with labels.

http://artdealmagazine.blogspot.com/

Addison Parks reassessment of his Forrest Bess essay from 30 years ago

link

I discovered this painting I did in the 90's on line .It had been in auction in Provincetown last year.

http://www.bakkerart.com/2011_Sampler_Auction.html

Scroll down to the M's.It did not sell according to the text file.It was from a series all of which I regrettably gave away as either birthday gifts or to auctions.I think this may have been from an AIDS auction in Boston at the Cyclorama.I was looking at Howard Hodgkin and Al Held.
Addison Parks and Larry Deyab see a Bess influence but I did not know his work at the time.

Here is another one.They are both small paintings on board.

 

There seems to be a momentary revival of interest in Forrest Bess.Roberta Smith wrote about him in the NY Times.Here is Addison Parks from 1981 in a much more insightful essay

http://www.forrestbess.com/

Compare Parks to Roberta Smith's need to put Bess into the context of the Minimalists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/arts/design/forrest-bess-paintings-at-christies-and-whitney-biennial.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=forrest%20bess&st=cse










Addison's latest essay on Bess on his new and improved blog Artdeal

m/

Elaboration of a recent essay from my blog appears on Berkshire Fine Arts

Berkshire Fine Arts

                                             A work by Don Shambroom in the Met

After Becketts's struggles during WW11,fighting with the resistance and trying to not be caught by the Nazi's,a change came over his work.Some called it a sort of passivity.I think openess would be a better term,closer to Meister Eckhardt's Gelassenheit.This quote points to what happened within him.

At the close of this long, impassioned letter of March 9, 1949, Beckett declares himself “no longer capable of writing in any sustained way about Bram or about anything,” a disclaimer that is almost comical when one considers the dense pages of forensic disquisition that have gone before, as Gunn points out. Yet we must fix on the vital word here, for in the next breath Beckett declares: “I am no longer capable of writing about.” This is far more than—perhaps is not at all—a confession of critical impotence. Years earlier, at the end of the 1920s, in an essay on Finnegans Wake the young Beckett had insisted that Joyce’s final masterpiece is not about something, but is something, a thing-in-itself that is only comprehensible in its own terms. Now, in the controlled frenzy of the composition of L’Innommable, Beckett is aiming at a similar autonomy of the work, by seeking to instill in himself as artist that sense he perceived in Cézanne “of his incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape but even with life of his own order, even with the life…operative in himself.”⁸