Here is a more recent and grimmer version of the essay on Pollaro and Mugar

Mugar

Pollaro

                           Mugar and Pollaro at the Bromfield opening Feb 1,2013

Why the pairing of Martin Mugar and Paul Pollaro’s paintings? The obvious difference binds them together as artists in the tradition of Western Painting: Mugar loves color and Pollaro value. Mugar’s color hints at an overall value and Pollaro’s values suggest colors. This focus puts their interest in light as revealed through color and value from the Greeks to its dissolution in Kelly, Richter and Ryman. These three linger at the endgame of a long tradition of optics and seeing as the ground of painting. One foot in the tradition and the other where? They still tempt you to look with remnants of the language of light but imply that there is nothing to see if not the space between and around the paintings or just the paint as paint, which is not pointing the viewer anywhere beyond the canvas. In the end Kelly just puts up a plywood board, the substrate and abandons the color, his last link to the tradition of seeing. Richter stays with the paint as paint and the human presence still allowed with nothing more than a perfunctory smear. Ryman’s limitation of value to barely perceived shifts lingers longest with paint as seeing.

Pollaro’s and Mugar’s art references paint’s physical reality on the canvas and puts them more in the company of these artists that bookend the history of painting than the abstract painters who precede them such as Mondrian and the Color Field Painters. Mondrian supplied the ground upon which was built a full century of abstract painting. It was an intellectual ground of proportions and harmonies organized into clear wholes constructed out of distinct parts, sharp edges. Ryman, Kelly, Richter, artists of their time, take apart this language by casting doubt on our belief in the illusion of painting itself. If Mondrian moves beyond painting as an illusion of the real then these artists deconstruct painting as the illusion of a metaphysical reality. Everything in the painting can only point to itself and the message is the self -effacement, the wiping away of paint that might vibrate with something beyond itself.

These three artists attract Pollaro and Mugar due to their relentless cutting of ground from under one’s feet. Maybe they see more clearly the grim nihilism embodied in the work of Ryman, Kelly and Richter than the artists themselves do. For the grad school ingénue these artists provide an easy way to produce market ready product but for Mugar and Pollaro they challenge any easy notion of visual meaning. They seem to relish the site of painting’s demise as a sort of challenge to their creative drive to resurrect painting. Both Pollaro and Mugar seem to ask: is this end of painting to be constantly reiterated?  Is it the contemporary artist’s only role as spelled out in the academies and the galleries to constantly hammer nail after nail in the coffin of painting?

Their notion of a ground and support goes beyond the canvas or board supporting the paint and becomes a metaphysical ground hidden beneath the visual. It is a harshly altered notion of the visual on the canvas. For both these artists their inspiration for ground does not come from some lofty notion of a higher world but from the world they move around in. The surface of paint does not just refer to itself but is the crust where the hidden becomes visual, but almost simultaneously withdraws. It is a rather precarious zone where meaning no sooner gained is lost.

Pollaro’s notion of ground is mud, embodying a murky primordial earth, beneath the surface of visuality, from which the Buddhists knew the lotus drew its strength. Like some miner he leaves the sunlit surface of the earth to look in the sunless earth for veins of ore that glow of their own accord. His work seems to have its locus in sites of volcanic activity where earth is formed or consumed. The work is self -referential in that the object is the subject: it is made with tar that looks like mud. But the journey he follows as he manipulates the tar becomes a strange amalgam that speaks of certain special and sensual qualities: from limitlessness to the armor of a giant crocodile. To quote again the Buddhists: it is not the finger that is pointing at the moon that we should look at but the moon itself. But what is he really pointing at? Pointing at himself. Maybe not much more than the grim stoicism of the toiler of the land knee deep in the field unsure of the payback of his efforts.

Mugar has set sail on a sea whose flickering surface is the interface of the sunlit world and the swelling body of the ocean’s restless flux. This is not a world of people and things, of sunlit porches and verandas looking out on the world. Nor the distinct forms of abstract rationalism. The individual units of the painting are an impulse themselves as the flat units of Mondrian are questioned as a basis for painting. But what if all this repetition of marks no matter how well crafted hints only at a grim monotony that all the color cannot belie: the repetition of waves ad infinitum that reveal nothing or only serve to hide the truth.

Pollaro and Mugar wrest technical deconstruction from Ryman, Kelly and Richter to expand the vocabulary to let painting say something about the seen and the unseen. It is an unseen that is always present in the day to day, as close as one’s body that surprises us when we look out at our hand that reaches out to the world. Everything hovers between sense and non-sense, understandable as a clear summer day at sea but escaping clarity when swells suddenly manifest themselves as waves and engulf the sailor. The toiler in the earth despite a lifetime of assiduous toil knows that one day he will be part of that soil. There are no claims here to having accomplished some heroic meaning in the face of the void.

(link here to 2015 show essay with Mugar Pollaro et alia)

Mugar and Pollaro at the Bromfield, Boston Jan 30-Feb 23

                             

Why the pairing of Martin Mugar and Paul Pollaro’s paintings? The obvious difference binds them together as artists in the tradition of Western Painting: Mugar loves color and Pollaro value. Mugar’s color hints at an overall value and Pollaro’s values suggest colors. This focus puts their interest in light as revealed through color and value from the Greeks to its dissolution in Stella, Kelly, Richter and Ryman. These four linger at the endgame of a long tradition of optics and seeing as the ground of painting. One foot in the tradition and the other where? They still tempt you to look with remnants of the language of light but imply that there is nothing to see if not the space between and around the paintings or just the paint as paint, which is not pointing the viewer to anywhere beyond the canvas. In the end Kelly just puts up a plywood board, the substrate and abandons the color, his last link to the tradition of seeing. Richter stays with the paint but it is paint as paint and the human presence still allowed with nothing more than a perfunctory smear. Ryman’s limitation of value to barely perceived shifts lingers longest with the use of  paint in the tradition. Stella is the only one of the group to overcome his minimalism of the late 50’s with his misinterpretation of Caravaggio that results in a garish maximalism. He would have been better off staying put and lingering at the site of paintings demise. In any case the zeitgeist of the last quarter of the 20^th century was one of deconstruction of big metaphysical concepts and Stella was too much of a builder. So we will remove him from this group.

 20^th c painting owes its trajectory to Mondrian. If any one artist supplied the ground upon which to build a full century of abstract painting it was Piet. It was an intellectual ground of proportions and harmonies. The lines of measurement and pure color spread out into the culture as a whole and defined architecture and interior design for at least 50 years from its inception. A theosophist, he imagined that he was bringing to the surface hidden harmonies. In the end he was a rationalist that establsihed the language for the scientific culture of the 20^th century painting, constructed out of distinct parts, sharp edges and organized into clear wholes. Ryman, Kelly, Richter, artists of their time, take apart this language by casting doubt on our belief in the illusion of painting itself. If Mondrian had killed painting as illusion of the real then these artists killed painting as the illusion of a metaphysical reality.Everything in the painting can only point to itself and the message is the self-effacement, the wiping away of a painting that might vibrate with something beyond itself.

Their self-consciousness that keeps referring back to paint’s physical reality on the canvas puts Pollaro and Mugar in the company of these artists that bookend the history of painting. However, both seem to ask: is this ending of painting to be constantly reiterated? Is it the contemporary artist’s only role as spelled out in the academies and the galleries to constantly hammer nail after nail in the coffin of painting? What if painting points to something beyond an artist’s intentions to play their role as stern-eyed dispassionate contemporary painters? What if their notion of a ground and support went beyond the canvas or board supporting the paint and became a metaphysical ground, which is hidden from the visual, but, which a harshly altered notion of the visual could point to? For both these artists their inspiration for ground does not come from some cerebral notion of a higher world but from the world they move around in.

-->

Pollaro’s ground is the underground. There is in his painting a grim stoicism of someone who works on the land, knee deep in the soil. The return on one's labor is slow and the earth unforgiving. Or like some miner he leaves the sunlit surface of the earth to explore the sunless earth for veins of ore that glow of their own accord. His work has its locus it seems in sites of volcanic activity where earth is formed or consumed. His use of tar embodies it.

Mugar has set sail on a sea, whose flickering surface is the interface of the sunlit world and the swelling body of the ocean’s restless flux. This is not a world of people and things, of sunlit porches and verandas looking out on the world. Nor the distinct forms of abstract rationalism. The individual units of the painting are an impulse themselves as though the flat units of Mondrian are questioned as a basis for painting. The very building block of the painting is "physis" itself.

 If Mondrian brought the light that had defined the real for centuries into the flat patterns of modern rationalism, and Ryman, Kelly and Richter deconstruct that notion of painting into its physical parts, Mugar and Pollaro forge a new path for painting if not reinstating its original one, to let painting say something about the seen and the unseen and to marvel at the sheer beauty of our life on this planet!

http://www.bromfieldgallery.com/exhibitions.html

Billy Lee:A former colleague from UNC-G whose work can be found in sculpture gardens throughout the world

"Guardian of Nature" 2000

"Split "1996

-->

I was first introduced to Billy Lee’s work in the mid 80’s when he was a candidate for a teaching post at UNC-Greensboro and I was on the selection committee.  His work at that time made it clear that he was very much an artist in the Modernist tradition. His imaginatively engineered geometric wall pieces spoke of the ground and pattern of an underlying reality. His demeanor was imbued with the air of someone aware of his accomplishments. And indeed in the modernist realm he has accomplished a lot. He came to the US in the mid- Seventies from England to study as a Kennedy Scholar at MIT ‘s School of Advanced Visual Studies and subsequently had risen up in the ranks at the University of Michigan. The senior faculty at UNC-G were not uninterested in the work presented for his application but were more intrigued by those candidates influenced by Postmodernism which was exemplified at that time by the style of sculptor Tom Otterness. The tide of Modernism that had filled the top ranks of many of the top schools in the country during the Sixties and Seventies such as Michigan was already beginning to subside. If Otterness was all cleverness, play and social relevance, Billy embodied the seriousness and purity of a scientist looking for the logical shape of the visual world. It seemed to me his seriousness about the role of a coherent visual language in the making of art, made him a good choice to be a professor at UNC-G and I think more importantly stood him in good stead as a sculptor for the next 30 years.

Billy Lee has always been a maker and shaper of material. For several years between his stints at Michigan and UNC-G he lived in Vancouver,B.C. where his extended family resided. He got involved in some building and renovation projects in the family business. I remember he talked about them with the same relish he would talk about sculpture. His preternatural drive is to reach out into our physical world and reshape and remake it. He is an artist who spontaneously connects with the material and the processes that allow him to manipulate it. That love of material places him in the company of such artists as Ron Bladen, Carl Andre and Richard Serra among others of that generation for whom sculpture reflects back on its reality as physical material and the raw physicality of the world.

Billy Lee knows that tradition thoroughly and can talk about it cogently. In our last meeting at UNC-G where I returned recently to give a talk on my work, it was a thrill to hear him bring up the above mentioned names from the Sixties and Seventies, which he said he was trying his best to put back on the radar screen of today’s students. He has internalized that tradition but surprised me when at the beginning of the Millenium he made an uncanny return to the figuration of Henry Moore. If there is a dynamic of material vs. form in all sculpture and if you were to calculate which dominates in any given artist, Moore’s art would fall on the side of form taking the upper hand. The same thing happened in Billy’s work.

"Sentinels"1994

Since Moore the history of sculpture would evince a split of materiality from form,  and, moreover, the notion of form becoming ever more detached and Platonic in the work of Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt. Materiality now detached from form, would often become absolutely formless. This is to say nothing of the development of installation art and its tendency toward a political critique of commodification. The notion of sculpture as a terrain for conveying the traditional push and pull of natural forces in the universe has not found many adherents in the contemporary scene. And in the arts ever obsessed concern for the New you have also the mix of recent technologies such as cell phones that succeed in dissolving the intimate interaction of viewer and sculpture that has defined sculpture from its very beginning.

"Helmet" 1997

What is lost in all of these evolutions and permutations of sculpture in the last thirty years and has not been lost on Billy is the notion of the artist as someone who creates himself in making and building within an ancient tradition of sculpting. He is a maker who knows the language’s roots which go back to the Kouros of the Greeks or the ancient Cycladic forms of the Aegean.The notions of a body in space and time defined by gravity, negative and positive space, of heft and haptic touch, of the slow movement of the body and eye as it moves around the sculpture inform all his work. But informing it more deeply is his understanding of the will that allows the self to persevere and to hold one’s physical place in the world. I have always marveled at the  psychic force and energy that Billy applies to the building of his sculpture.Is not this the ultimate meaning of works :They embody the will to create. They are the artist creating himself.

His series on warrior’s helmets, which reference images of armed men and which are a looming presence throughout the history of sculpture, are emblematic of individual self-assertion but also of holding one’s ground. Warriors can also double as guardians or sentinels, both titles of work done over the last ten years. Guardians and sentinels sacrifice themselves for the group in order to establish barriers, deciding who can enter or leave the homeland. Except for the Big Head series that allows for an ironic interpretation there is a seriousness about Billy’s work that is startling, because it has been so absent from art since after the Abstract Expressionists: the artist as hero, as Mahler in the European sense. This  leads to another notion about his work: these sculptures represent a defense of the precious values of sculpture’s homeland from the effacement of the modern tide.

Most contemporary sculpture inserts itself in a dialogue about man’s place in society or in relationship to the ever changing world of technology. It comes out of sociology, critical theory and deconstructionist ontology. It’s message is a reminder that we cannot transcend the way in which the media and technology define us. We are like a fly caught in a spider’s web of societal norms. Lee’s work suggests that our individuality cannot avoid its mythic roots. Our individual efforts embed themselves in ancient tropes of meaning that we are unable to escape. When we confront their power and inevitable reality it is like the epiphanies at the end of a Greek Drama. They are as transformative as the energy contained in a Guan Yin figure or a Michelangelo pieta.

P.S.

I have been out of touch with Billy Lee for awhile. I feel I should now back away from the melancholy mood of this piece and this more recent piece as Billy has made a leap into the world of global art where the influence of Koons and Oldenburg take over. It is no longer metaphysical and inward looking but has joined the currency of an extroverted global culture. Amazing leap out of metaphysics as Derrida would say. His roots in the UK are nicely dealt with here in this interview on the BBC.

"Changsa"

Thinking back on more than twenty years of art criticism by Jed Perl on the occasion of the publication of his most recent collection of essays by the Eakins Press Foundation

 Phil Press, fellow Boston artist and founder of Cambridge Adult Ed's Studio School, first introduced me to Jed Perl and his writing in the early 90’s. They had met as young painters at Skowhegan in the early 70’s and remained in contact during the intervening years. Occasionally, Phil would invite Jed to Cambridge to lecture to his students on some topic related to the New York art scene. I would always make a point of attending these talks, as his insights into the vacuity and hype of whatever scene was current, were an inspiration to persevere in my solitary struggle to make paint and painting a vital language of self-expression.

We are all three products of the figurative revival of the late sixties and early 70’s that gave credence to the language of painting from observation, a method that had been brutally sidelined by Abstraction, Conceptualism, Minimalism and Pop Art. Phil had studied at the Studio School in New York City, which was a stopping off place for many painters who wanted to work in a representational visual language, when it was hard to find such instruction elsewhere in the academic world. Phil went on to get his MFA at Queens where Louis Finkelstein, a luminary of the figurative movement taught . Phil seems to think that Jed studied painting for a while at Brooklyn College, where Philip Pearlstein and Gabriel Laderman were instructors. Laderman was known as much for his polemics on behalf of figuration as for his painting. I studied at Yale, whose identity as a center of the avant-garde was tempered by the arrival of Bill Bailey, who succeeded in bringing in as visitng artists many of the above-mentioned artists of the figurative movement.

To understand Perl’s philosophical stance, that he has steadfastly held for more than twenty years, it is necessary to see his thinking as formed in the context of that figurative revival. For a moment and in retrospect a very brief moment there was the hope of an alternative direction for art, or at least that figuration could continue on a track parallel to the avant-garde. I have written elsewhere that figuration wanted to revive the particular experience of being in the here and now, in contradistinction to an art object totally Greenbergian: on the one hand with its obsession with absolute forms, and mediatized on the other with its need to place the individual in an absolute socially defined identity. I recall vividly wandering the museums and galleries of New York and Boston and feeling a deep sense of alienation from the minimalsim, the conceptual sculpture, the media based Warhols, all issuing from an extreme rational analysis of modern life. A language that jumped out of the physical space that our bodies moved in replaced the magic of  art that could make real and tactile the present. There was never the smell of grass, the wind in your face nor the vibrancy of the seasons. The paintings of Gretna Campbell or Stanley Lewis that Perl admired were  literally a breathe of fresh air. The human existential reality of being in the world had found a place to stand. For one brief moment the grey clouds of rationalism opened up to a vivid blue sky where the senses of the body pulsated.

Another key to understanding Jed Perl can be found in his admiration for the great critics and artists of early modernism. Confronted, with now several generations of American artists that see art as  providing a wonderful playground for experimentation with lifestyles, Jed, whose understanding of the tradition of Western Art allows him to talk intelligently about Chardin, Poussin and Vuillard sets up camp in the tradition of the art critics and shapers of early Modernism, such as Edmund Wilson, Meyer Schapiro, Lincoln Kirstein, (all of whom are dedicated individual essays in the “Magicians and Charlatans”). When the Bourgeois world of the 19th c fell apart under the weight of science, there was in part a dancing on the grave of the past by the new guard but there was also the awareness that something had been lost as well as gained.The representational language that had held the real in its thrall for over 500 years had broken open, and that deconstruction liberated incredible energy. Perl sees that energy in Picasso’s semantizing of Cezanne in the “Les Demoiselles ‘d’Avignon” or in his appreciation of Edmund Wilson’s understanding of Stravinsky’s musical energy. These were makers and shapers (the title of his essay on Lincoln Kirstein) who would pick up the pieces like Eliot and Pound and make new realities. They knew and cherished the pieces of the past and ruefully accepted that the Europe they loved had suffered a catastrophe and like Humpty Dumpty no one could put the pieces back together again.  There still was the will to recreate a whole in the face of the wholesale destruction of the first World War. In the laissez-faire aesthetics of the contemporary art scene (the title of the introductory essay in this new collection of his essays) that is hell bent on chopping up bourgeois reality into smaller and smaller pieces, Perl sees no love of history. And when the past is referenced by contemporary figurative artist like Currin it is distorted to appear to be as ironic and cynical as their own work. It is brought down to their level.

I still have several photocopies of Perl’s essay from the October, 1992 issue of “The New Republic”, entitled ”The Art Nobody Knows” . It spells out the way in which the art scene, in its ever anxious need to promote the “new”, makes it impossible for those artists, who see art as a coherent language, deserving a lifetime of study, from having the air, space and money to pursue that goal. I would hand the article out to my painting students at the Art Institute of Boston in order to give them some perspective on where the tenets of my classroom came from and hopefully encouraging them to avoid being sucked into the latest fad at Yale and New York. The essay referenced the English artists Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff as paragons of figuration. From a pedagogical point of view, they were valuable as stopping off points on the road from figuration to abstraction, which was the essential goal of my teaching experience. Unfortunately, few of my students, despite intelligence and talent, heeded Perl’s message. Their talent got them to Yale and to New York, but the human all to human need to belong to a status quo got the better of them, and they imprinted on whatever was then the current scene.

Many of the issues in the essays in “Magicians and Charlatans”, culled from his writing of the last decade, are already present in the essay I have from 1992:  The Whitney Biennials, commercialism, the art industry, the importance of the slow making of art over time, the need for patterns and form and the way the structure and culture of the New York scene make this slow growth impossible. His interests represent the effort of someone ,who cares not only about New York artists, but always tries to put his finger on the pulse of a larger meaning or zeitgeist in which they all participate. I recall a more recent essay that appeared in the “The New Republic” on the Cindy Sherman retrospective at t MOMA, that was sent to me by Mark Gottsegen, the author of the “Painters Handbook.” This one pulled out all the verbal weaponry and pearls of wisdom that he is capable of. It was a full-fledged frontal assault on Sherman, deconstructor of female myths mythologized in a major retrospective. After the smoke had cleared she still remained intact. Cindy as Perl points out is an industry supported by dealers, curators and collectors. When you unleash an assault on her you are only one person fighting an army.

The worlds of Rome and Bernini are so well fathomed as to appear as fresh and new as the early 20thc in New York, that he exquisitely depicts through essays on the writing of Meyer Schapiro, Edmund Wilson and Lincoln Kirstein. The contemporary scene of Oursler, Viola, Gober and Currin leave him for the most part without a label. Except for Gober they are dismissed as lacking the seriousness that he would like to see in their work but he does not dismiss them out of hand. He gives them their day, tries to understand why they have achieved their notoriety. Why this refusal to give them and others such as Yuskavage, Heilmann and Peytona a positive value? Those artists, who were reviewed in the earlier part of our new millennium are probably past their shelf life and for all I know aren’t even taken seriously today by even the hipster critics. I have to agree with Perl there is something missing. But what?

To shed some light on this, it is interesting to try to sift out Perl’s politics. I am sure he often gets backed into a corner where someone says: if you are so conservative in your tastes in art you must be right wing in your politics. He never hesitates to say he is for Obama or that Reagan destroyed the economy by cutting taxes, which in turn inflated the art market of the 80’s. In art he is an elitist but in politics he is an egalitarian. This distinction is current in some circles of New York Intelligentsia and was said of William A Henry 3rd’s book “In Defense of Elitism” in the early 90’s, that he bemoaned the weakening of the hierarchy of excellence over popular culture but was still egalitarian in his politics.  Maybe this is why Perl uses the economic expression laissez –faire culture (the title of the introductory essay of this collection) to point blame to the conflation of commerce and art culture, as seen in his attack on the multi-millionaire Eli Broad’s museum in LA, where the endower and the endowed see no separation of interest. The collector who purchases Jeff Koons gilded pop items then builds a museum/supermarket to promote his purchases.  Castelli is depicted as no more than a crass opportunist. The guilty parties are the capitalists, that need something to sell the public and choose art that pretends to challenge the commercial enterprise they are involved in.  I beg to differ: I think a different reading of history would point to egalitarianism as the cause of the vacuity in the art of today as much as unfettered capitalism.

I think what haunts Perl’s work is that the generation that came of age after the Abstract Expressionists, in particular, the boomers let themselves be defined by the media. It was a cultural narcissism in extremis, where the inner world becomes "colonized" by the outer world. But what if all these successions of styles and cultural moods only reflect a slow unraveling or winding down of the unmediated self. The Abstract Expressionists had found some latent strength in the systems of Jung and Freud to map out an inner landscape. There were drives to be defined that could push out against the world and psyches rooted in a collective consciousness that would surprise us about our true selves. These systems were a modern religion for those who were no longer capable or willing to embrace traditional religion.They created a map of an inner life that has  been replaced by several generations now that are medicated and mediated on all levels. If the inner and outer are the same, can we even talk about the self.The hipsters don't care.

”Postcards from Nowhere” points out that the art collectors and the artist are on the same page. This state of things could be seen as the result of the loss of a mandarin class, of an elite that could differentiate the good and the bad, but it must follow that this demise of an intellectual aristocracy will end in an egalitarianism that validates any and every attempt of the masses at self- expressions. I think the modern art scene is the result of "here comes everybody". The skill necessary for painting is abandoned for installation that appeals to the practical craft of the ordinary citizen as renovator of her own space. Painting was always based on the metaphysical power of the artist’s gaze to take their momentary observation and turn it into the eternal moment. Marxist critics felt that stability came from having money to buy the time to stop the visual clock and impose their vision on the world. Now that the metaphysical base has been undercut, there is no direct contact between man and nature, man and the cosmos that one finds in Cezanne and Van Gogh or the raw imposition of the Freudian id on form that you find in Picasso or Pollock. Warhol, our John Singer Sargent, best embodies this shift of private consciousness to a totally mediated self. Now the parts are reduced to miniscule grains that are too small to piece together. To quote Nietzsche:

“Are we not well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small soft round, unending sand.” The ability to put things back together has long past? The reduction ad infinitum has become a reduction ad absurdum/. Perl is the chronicler of this never-ending train wreck.


I find it telling that the frontispiece of “Magicians and Charlatans” is dedicated to Leon (presumably Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of “The New Republic”) with a quote from Po Chu-i (a Tang poet):

To Leon:

"Till day broke we sat in the moon’s clear light
 Laughing and singing, and yet never grew tired.
 In Ch’ing-an, the place of profit and fame,
 Such moods as this, how many men know?"

If Po chu-i, who was exiled for having violated Confucian precepts in his role as an assistant to the Emperor, had been born during the Maoist cultural revolution, such private moods would have made him a candidate for a good rinse of brainwashing. What Perl could explore more thoroughly is that the Marxist notion of how the bourgeoisie suffers from “false consciousness” has so permeated our culture that, although we don’t send our artists off to a gulag for not toeing the party line, there is a shunning that is prevalent in academia for those who are not always current in their tastes. The real heroes for Perl are those artists that didn’t win the jackpot. Whether they rose to the stature of those artists like Matisse that they emulated is not the issue as Updike and Plagens insist it is in their reading of Perl. Artists such as Leland Bell, Nell Blaine, and Stanley Lewis embody and embodied a tradition of artists, who understood painting as being as subtle and structured as the language we speak. You can’t judge them badly for not rising to the same level as their predecessors. They thought it more valuable to codify the magic of the language of seeing and like the monks of Ireland in the Dark Ages, who preserved the wisdom of Greek and Latin culture in their codexes, to save it from the barbaric hordes.The invasions have already begun: to quote Perl:"For Matthew Barney, Richard Prince and now Cai-Guo qiang, having a retrospective at the Guggenheim is like being a Visigoth, who has been given the keys to Rome."

Perl’s essays are a lamentation for a paradise lost, for what little we have gained on this modern train to nowhere. Like the old man on the train who bemoans the fact that he missed his stop but won’t get off at the next stop to take the next train back, he understands the arrow of time points  forward. But maybe we have the wrong metaphor. Maybe we are just going around in circles.

I published this on my blog awhile ago.Charles Giuliano thought this was a good sequel to his critique of MFA programs today

"Impressions of France",1995 Museum of Fine Arts,Boston
It was picked up by Karen Wright at "Modern Painter" for an issue on Cezanne and was considered
"thought provoking" but ultimately was not published.

Elodie LaVillette,(1842-1917)

Paul Cezanne(1839-1906)

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

Berkshire Fine Arts has picked this up. -->
Charles Giuliano picks up on my rant with his own insights

Insider/Outsider

My blog on Tim Nichols and the subsequent comments from people who knew him, opened up my eyes to the difficulty of simple descriptions of a life as long as Tim’s. As we all navigate our life, how we must appear to others is so variegated that in the end there is not one Tim but as many as there were observers of his life. My take on him was colored by what stages of our lives our path’s crossed. The Nichols, several years out of grad school that I first met in the late 70’s who was running his own summer school to earn extra money was not the well-established teacher of the Museum School, who was one of the artists I showed in the mid-nineties at the Art Institute. The comments on my blog, one from a former student, and another from someone who was aware of Tim’s public persona in the Boston scene both belied my take on him as an outsider. The student saw the power he had as a teacher over his students and felt marginalized by his criticism, the latter saw him from afar as a player in the world of Boston art with the prestigious Museum School his platform. Both saw themselves more outside the orbit of the Boston scene than he was.

I guess my effort to perceive in his contrarian demeanor artistic, authenticity, has a good deal of self-projection in it. I see myself as an outsider but I am sure with my Ivy League pedigree and almost 30 years of teaching at the college level, most people would not allow me any pity that I did not have access to the punch bowl.

As social beings we must have an innate sense of there being a scene and what is our relationship is to it. It is hard to shake. It is the childhood image I have of the guys hanging out in my hometown of Watertown at the drugstore, that I would walk by on my way to church on Sunday. By standing out there for all to see, they wanted to let you know they were the insiders. They were going to play the game. There were stories of rumbles and territory and stabbing deaths at Five Corners in Arlington, where an Armenian gang had it in for who knows an Irish gang an Italian gang or maybe it was just Arlington vs. Watertown. As we exit another political silly season, I can see that these fellows were driven to set themselves up as the go-to guys, ersatz politicians.

I always admired Charles Giuliano’s sense of Boston as an art-hood. He put himself out there like the guys at the drugstore with his column “Perspectives” in “Art New England”. He went to the openings and knew because of his clout as a critic there were many good bashes and meals to be proffered by those who courted his opinion. Although he pissed off a lot of people by not writing about them or offering only grudging praise, by being there in the trenches on the scene like a good reporter or politician he helped create the warp and the woof of an art community.

The Boston art scene is a hard neighborhood to define and a minefield of potentially wounded allegiances. There was a lot of homegrown stuff coming out of competing schools and the history of the Boston Expressionists and Boston Realism to accommodate. But hovering beyond all that was New York and Europe. Major movements that would come and go that gained footholds at MIT or the Krakow gallery. You could have enormous success in Boston but never be considered hip enough to be talked about by the cognoscenti who read “artforum”. There were even subcultures of realists like Robert Douglas Hunter, married to the daughter of Ives Gammell who sold his pictures for enormous amounts to the Suburban rich, that I am sure most of my art buddies had never heard about. Artists, who taught in the Boston art schools tended to achieve some notoriety within one scene or another, which often lead to their being hired in the first place. But as the tide moved out on their scene, they found themselves stranded without much relevance to the current scenes and amazingly ignorant and disdainful of the younger artist who came along. If they had tenure they could remain employed and ignorant. But the younger generation would have their chance at irrelevancy. Their time would come to be ignored.

So we have worlds within worlds, parallel universes, constellations appearing and disappearing with the seasons: all coming under the same tent of Boston art. Sargent probably embodied that ambiguity as much as any contemporary Boston artist of what it meant to be a Boston artist. Born in Gloucester MA, he grew up abroad and created a reputation as one of the great European Portraitists of his time. He came back in the end to Boston to reclaim his reputation as Boston’s premier artist in the 20’s when he did the Boston Public Library Murals. But he was nothing without the international imprimatur.

I had a conversation recently with Addison Parks in which he related his unpleasant dealings with Bernard Chaet in the 80’s when Parks applied to Yale from RISD. It started me thinking about Bernie in terms of insider/outsider, and art allegiances. I first met him in 1970 when I took his drawing seminar along with several students’ including Gary Trudeau. In regards to the hierarchy of the art scene, the Yale MFA program was way up there. It cut a pretty impressive figure. First lead by the epigone of modernism, Josef Albers, Al Held came in the 70’s to anchor the program and stayed into the eighties putting the school on the map as the place to go for the the young ambitious artist. Under Albers it produced Serra, Close, Eva Hesse. Chaet had taken over from Albers as department head, a moment related to me by a student at the time, Don Lent, who headed up the art department at Bates College.

Bernie was never a Modernist. Born in Boston he initially painted with the Boston Expressionists. I recall seeing early paintings in his home of Talmud’s and menorahs. He told me, when I was a finalist for a position at BU, where many of those Boston Expressionist artists ended up teaching, that he broke away from that group and was considered an apostate by them for his interest in French art. According to some of the literature surrounding the Boston school, they detested the abstraction of the NY School, which was for them an offshoot of Paris in the early 20thc;Abstraction was somehow sinful for not embracing the human condition in the raw and direct way of the German expressionists. I related this story to a professor at Tufts who is Jewish and he thought it ironic that the Jewish Artists of the New York School such as Rothko and Newman were probably more in keeping with the Jewish religious taboo on creating graven images of God than the Boston school of Jewish artists. So here was Chaet, rejected by his Dorchester shtetl for being too French and in the period of High Modernism at Yale, this guy was painting in the style of the artist despised by Picasso as a “piddler”. Of course, Held was the cock of the walk. He despised everybody and anybody who did not embrace his aesthetic. You didn’t have to be a grad student to be the recipient of his wrath. He walked by my undergrad friend Bob Sabin, who was doing a landscape on the roof of the Yale A&A, and made a “feigning  throw up” gesture. He wanted to put himself at the center of the art universe and marginalize everybody else.

Therefore, by any account, Chaet stylistically was twice over an outsider: Apostate Boston Expressionist and misguided follower of Bonnard at Yale. I was grateful for his presence at Yale as my work came out of an infatuation with the stylistic variations of realism and I would have finally left Yale if he had not been there to recognize the validity of my endeavor. He understood the subtleties of looking at a Matisse or Corot etc that never made it into the conversation of your typical Yale student, bent on scaling the wall of New York Art. But to head the Yale art department made him an insider politically. He could get you into the school and get you jobs outside after graduation. He knew it. He could turn the faucet on and off at will. Although no longer living in Boston he never lacked for representation either there or in New York. When a recent book on Boston artists came out he was included in it. To spend an afternoon with him in Rockport was to inevitably reminisce about your classmates from Yale and if you didn’t know what they were up to he was sure to fill in the blanks.

Addison sees him as the consummate gatekeeper. If Addison wanted to get within the orbit of the New York Power grid Chaet made sure it didn’t happen at least via the Yale conduit. Getting to the point in the acceptance process where he was being interviewed directly by a committee including Chaet, he was astounded that Chaet kept his back to him during the whole interview.  Only later did he learn that his mentor at RISD a Yale grad was Chaet’s mortal enemy.

As an artist trying over a lifetime to incorporate a little of the universe‘s infinite into my work, I think back with gratitude to whomever kept me focused on understanding the language of paint whether that of Bonnard or Albers without reference to the hierarchies and powers of the current scene. To separate out the love of art from the talk of who had more centrality and power within the art world, was at times really hard. My ten years at AIB was spent constantly trying to assert my relevance within the shifting balances of who was a rising star within Boston Community. Colleagues who were nullities themselves would invite the latest art hero of the week to the department and try to expand on their reputation by association. On the one hand there was the large group within the department who took pride in their tangential affiliation with the Boston Expressionists, an historical fact and well engraved in the Boston psyche. On other hand, there were older artists who loved to tout their connection with some avant-garde movement of the sixties long in desuetude. One faculty member imagined himself the protégé of Michael Mazur. A new faculty member pumped herself up by playing the new game in town, Installation. Another made a smart move with a“none of the above” decision to pursue a graduate degree at Harvard in Critical Studies. I remember my last semester there my always well subscribed class in painting with color was scheduled next to a course on art and gender which the dean of students felt compelled to run. No one took my class. The language I was struggling to give birth to in my shows at Crieger-Dane over four years on Newbury St did not fit into the allowable niches of Boston Art and never sold at all. My colleagues never showed up at the openings.

There must be a strong political instinct in me as I take some pleasure in sorting out who controls what territory, but my naïveté shows in how long it took to realize that a lot of the decisions that were made about whether I got tenure or not were all about political power, not absolute notions of being a good artist.

This brings us to another topic: Is the world we perceive out there the result of an endless proliferation of errors. To be continued…

B.Chaet,1924-2012

B.Chaet dies after battling with dementia for several years

Here are some words I wrote about his work in 1991 for an essay that accompanied a group show of landscape painters at AIB."For Chaet no sun will create  the same patterns of color from morning to morning.Every day greets him with so many variables:humidity,cloud cover,wind conditions,wave patterns and time of year.Yet undaunted he succeeds in creating the fleeting uniqueness of each dawn."

I imagine the sun that he greeted each morning is now wondering where his friend Bernie has gone.

Larry Deyab reflects on his time with Ron Bladen in "Artdeal"

Larry Deyab and Ron Bladen

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.

.

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.