I wrote a new article about the show from another angle in the Concord Monitor,Concord, NH

I just read the article and found it botched beyond recognition:In any case the link has expired.

Here is the original:

Artists left to right:Parks,Mugar,Travers and Pollaro(Susan left earlier)

It is commonplace to think of Abstract Art as solely work of the imagination and fantasy and Realism because it represents recognizable things as well! Real. But we have to ask: What is reality? Big questions that we don’t ask ourselves everyday but they have to be asked and are asked by the artists in this show. Just to ask it means there initially has to be more than one answer. Another way of putting it is as follows: How is the world we live in shaped. If we turn on the TV and watch our favorite sitcom it will no doubt be staged in a living room, a kitchen or an office, enclosed spaces where a small group of people exchange quips and repartee that remind us enough of your own life to keep us glued to the screen. This constrained world where we recognize ourselves most easily is the one we live in for the most part at home with family and friends or at work with colleagues and this is the world that is most often depicted in Realistic painting. But if one steps back from this conventional arrangement of people and things and ask how is this scene transmitted to our eyes in the first place, how is it shaped by us into a believable world, then we enter into the world that Abstract Art is better suited to depict.

                                                     
                                              Click here for: "Video of shows details"

It is a world that is put together by waves of light, broken down into a spectrum of colors and transformed by the complex physiology of the eye into the image we see in our mind’s eye that we call reality. It is also a world of laws and principles and mathematical formulas. If we look out our window and see our garden it is not just a beautiful landscape with trees and shrubs but through science we have knowledge of how a tree grows, how it absorbs energy from the sun, and adjusts to the seasons or climate change. Science has penetrated so deeply into the goings on of the body that there is no longer just one doctor to take care of you but a myriad of specialties for each organ and function of the body. Let’s imagine for a minute the effect of science on an artist like Matisse. The show of his abstract cut-outs that he did at the end of his life just closed at the Museum of Modern Art, and was one of the best attended shows in the history of the Museum. At the Armory show in New York in 1913, that showcased the avant-garde of Europe of which Matisse was a part, there were protests over what was perceived as the cold and inhuman nature of that kind of work. A little more than a hundred years later abstraction is sufficiently assimilated into the culture that crowds no longer express horror at its perceived crudeness but have come to praise its beauty. All that Matisse did in his work was to acknowledge the role of color in our perception of reality and push it to the foreground of his depiction of the world. He found that color when used in isolated patches of warm and cool can be used to rebuild reality on another platform. He understood that eyes use receptors that respond to color as well as light and dark. Until the Impressionists picked up on what the scientists had already studied in the physiology of the eye, art tended to use color in a literal sense of say the color of a dress being green or red. But when you realize that red and green are an optical construct of the eye, it opens up a whole new energized world that ultimately leads to abstraction.

The artists in this show are probably the fourth generation of abstractionists since the turn of the last century. The general direction of abstraction since Matisse has tended toward simpler and less empathetic shapes that ended in a movement called Minimalism, which dominated the art scene in the Sixties and Seventies. Many of the artists in this show studied with artists who were Minimalists or proposed in their teaching the use of austere and simple shapes like a square within a square or just a canvas of one color. We are all in our own way either wish to break out of Minimalism stylistically or add the human psychology that Minimalism ignored. In the work of Paul Pollaro it is the darkness and power of the earth not lit by the light of the Sun. Jason Travers with his multi-paneled paintings is the most beholden to Minimalism of all the artists in this show. On at least one panel within each painting there is one that is a romantic atmospheric landscape. He pointedly seems to say: Is flatness all there is to the goal of painting since Matisse. Susan Carr’s work comes out of the tradition of Abstract Expressionism that preceded Minimalism. There are none of the smooth flat planes typical of abstract art, just thick paint that is heavily reworked that seemingly comes from a deep source like molten lava pouring out of a volcano. My work reintroduces gestural marks that are three dimensional as a reference to the three dimensional language of perception that had had been part of representational painting prior to abstraction. The colors play with the notion that color can be appetitive as well as just optical and evokes flavors. Addison Parks uses the push and pull of Matisse’s color language merged with the iconic shapes of nature to express the vitality of organic form. His interests in the origin of abstraction in Matisse remind me of the work of Bram Van Velde the famous Dutch painter admired by Samuel Beckett.

As Art moves forward in its explorations it does not abandon earlier movements but, as it moves toward ever broadening horizons, it circles back to relive what was left behind. That is the strategy of the artists in this show. We create a sort of hybrid art by taking the language of abstraction and infusing it with the emotions of real life associated with realism.

I 

Lighting Out for Territory , a group show at the Kimball Jenkins Galleries in Concord NH

I have curated a show of painting at the Kimball Jenkins School of Art 266 Main St in Concord,NH(right off I 93). It includes Susan Carr,  Martin Mugar, Addison Parks, Paul Pollaro and Jason Travers. It will be up for the Months of March and April.The opening reception is 5-7 on Friday March 13th.There is also an article I wrote for the Concord Monitor that I wrote .Link Here

ESSAY FOR THE SHOW   

When the artists in this exhibit exchanged emails with ideas for the show’s title, I had hoped to push a concept involving “topos”, the Greek root of the word topology. I have always had affection for ancient Greek words that embody concepts about the shape of existence such as “logos” or “aletheia”.  In taxonomy Latin is used to provide distinct forms, for philosophy Greek provides distinct concepts. When thinking about Paul Pollaro’s work some years ago the word Chthonic, which means “hidden under the earth”, came to mind as a way to encapsulate what his work is about. He liked it. It may be a fallacy in this post-modern world to fall back on words, which evoke essences. But it provides a ground for our thinking; in short a topology, a place to stand on (understanding). So be it. I am not post-modern.

Paul Pollaro "Mound Point Armor's Grace" 2014

Mugar

“Topos” didn’t go far in discussion especially when I suggested it should replace painting as the noun to underpin the show. No! We are painters seemed to be the consensus and that was that. I wasn’t going to force the issue. In any case I agree, we are painters first and come out of the world of painting. In our search for a title, I recalled from my high school days the line spoken by Huck Finn at the end of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that he wanted to  “light out for the Territory.” The context was that American Civilization as it was shaped and defined by slavery pre-civil war was pretty murky and Huck thought he needed to flee somewhere to try out new options. That phrase is embodied in American Westerns, which are often set in the unincorporated territories of the West, where conflicting interests were not easily adjudicated as laws were either non-existent or unenforceable. It dawned on me I had injected the notion of “topos” through the backdoor. Territory is derived from terra and is probably the latinate word for “topos”. Artists are always nagged by a need to move out to some new terrain, to not stay put. The “the” before territory got dropped along the way, but that worked as well since artists are not moving out into a specific place but their own psychic plot of ground. Huck’s words struck a chord and stuck.

There is a mixture of buoyancy and alacrity in the phrase. There is also a sense of sneaking off, shirking one’s duties. Both aspects apply to the artists in this show; impatience with the status quo of art, and a letting go of the topics we were told in school were the only route for a serious painter. The artists in this show are New Englanders by choice or by birth, a part of the country known as being overly civilized and cerebral.  Tell anybody west of the Mississippi that you come from New England and they will call you an abolitionist or expect you to wear a three-piece suit. I heard from a carpenter who works winters in Arkansas that they like to hire Yankees down there as foremen. They are good taskmasters. We are hard on ourselves too, our own taskmasters. The artists in this show inhabit the same rugged inner psychological terrain as the New England poets such as Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Lowell. Or artists like Hopper, Hartley, Marin.

 

Susan Carr 2013     

The original impetus for this show came from a message on Facebook informing me that my painting accepted for the annual “Off the Wall” show at the Danforth Museum last June was hung side by side with Susan Carr’s work. The message said it was a fortuitous paring as both of us work our paint heavily off the surface. I recalled her name from a show curated by Addison Parks in the late Nineties at Crieger-Dane in Boston called “Severed Ear. (the poetry of abstraction)” that brought together the work of New York artists such as Richard Tuttle and Leon Polk Smith with Boston artists such as Tim Nichols, Addison Parks and myself. I went on to Facebook to look up Susan’s work. I could see immediately why we were put side by side. A love of paint but more than that an impulsion of the paint to reach out as though pushed by some energy not constrained by logic. Chthonic seemed to apply here, except it was more the thrust of molten lava than the earth itself.

Susan Carr

To select the rest of the participants was not difficult. We are all painters, a distinction that makes a difference these days and moreover we all are in our own way artists who want to put back together what was torn asunder in painting over the last fifty years. We don’t ignore the ideas that motivated that deconstruction but work with them. There is a paring down of art to bare essences in the Greenbergian ethos of painting. And it extends to the point where artists start taking the very material and ground of the painting apart. Where does it end? The work of Kelly, Stella, Ryman, Tuttle and Richter, artists I’d like to label as artists of the ‘bare minimum’, informs our painting.  They provide us with the iconic shapes and notions of canvas as sculpture set free by their research into the underpinnings of painting. But our plan is to do something different to them.

So Huck Finn has to light out for new territory, out from the concentration camps of the slave states. Among the artists in this show there is a conviction that the terrain of Modernism that they grew up in, admired, studied and accepted is not the endgame for painting and not to be rehashed ad nauseam. All that was jettisoned from Minimalism: earthiness, anxiety, passion, affection, mystery, magic, surprise, place and space the so-called attributes of the real which were somehow secondary to concepts and ideas come back to haunt the work of these artists. I once seemed perplexed about how personal experience came to inform artwork. You spend time in nature, you move in it, dig in it, touch it smell it, but where and how does it feed into the painting. Addison said it does unbeknownst to you. It is absorbed through your pores, the accumulation of days and nights inhaling the smells of autumn and one day haptically without forcing the issue it pops up in your work. You just let go and it does its magic. The touch and feel of being in the world rejected by the bright lights of logic come back to haunt these painter.

 

Jason Travers "Illusion" Corot's Field 40"x65" 2014

Jason Travers turns “the bare minimum” into a question: ”Is that all there is?” Can this earlier generation of artists proclaim once and for all that an aesthetic broken into parts should be the last statement of painting? For Travers working inside this tradition on panels of pure color or value, each panel becomes an event created patiently over time of endless strokes and marks like someone scratching to escape their enclosure, or insisting that the analytic event that takes apart is important but not more than the abiding presence of the human touch. The multiple panels and the foregrounding of texture are his acceptance and participation in the thinking of the “bare minimum” but at the same time the 19^th century of Turner or is it Ryder pops up in certain panels of Travers paintings in part as nostalgia for a bygone world but hints with the slow time of the hand and touch at new notions of time and terrain to light out for. But in the true spirit of a Modernist he raises more questions than he answers.

 

Addison Parks"Wroots" 24"x18"  oil on linen 2014

Addison Parks uses the tradition of abstraction literally as a background for a foregrounded gestural event yet more recently he has foregrounded the abstract pattern.  He acknowledges its role in giving to pure colors an iconic force. However, he learned personally from Tuttle’s evolution as an artist that breaking down has to be followed by putting back together. Tuttle, himself, was as much a maker as a deconstructionist: But what forces us to put things back together is life itself. Parks’s  work asks in the end: are we just scientists working isolated in our studio/laboratory? If we are alive to nature, our family and those around us in the larger community, then our art must reflect the constant merging and rearranging of our relationships. His works are events, transitory moments of meaning where things fall into place. But any arrangement no matter how ecstatic implies that true to life in the end it can only be transitory.

Mugar

In a recent blog post I discussed the possibility of painting jumping out of the “enframent” of technology. The word was coined by Heidegger to describe the domination of technology over our thinking about the world. If one accepts the premise that much of modern art has been enframed by the methodological notion of providing simple shapes that are easily recognizable, (Husserl’s eidetic reductions) then the question could arise: how can you get back to the garden where all the reductive parts find their whole again. I discussed this issue in relation to my work and came up with the notion of waiting. Painting not as a power play but as an opening up to possibility. When I began this body of work now in its 15^th year, I started not from reduction but multiplicity, a field of colors. All that has initiated change in the work has come about from questions such as: What happens when you use a frosting applicator to create a gesture with volume and smooth surfaces? What happens when you use letters instead of individual marks? The answer to this last question has thrust my painting into the earth/world dichotomy, that Heidegger established, moving it from the earth side of the equation to world side.

 

Paul Pollaro "A Light of Dark.Hyperbolic and Elliptical Graph "2015

Paul Pollaro’s work is in part about the dark light of nature. Not the optical light that lights the world but the energy that radiates from rocks and plants, something that you can pick up with infrared cameras. He has succeeded in pushing the envelope of physicality but most recently the work turned on him in a most unpredictable way. Like Travers and Parks the self-awareness of the paintings presence and language comes from the artists of the “bare minimum” and in particular Richter the master of paint as paint and the canvas as sculptural presence. In his latest work the dichotomy of nature and culture meet in a way that has allowed him to engage the same earth/world dichotomy found in my work. It asks the question: are the abstract constructs of the mind also nature?

Addison Parks"Well Being" oil on linen, 16"x20", 2014 

In a blog post I wrote about the French painter Jean Helion, I drew a parallel between his prison camp experience in Germany in WW11 that reduced him to a raw unit of labor(arbeit macht frei) and the abstraction that he rejected after the war. All he could think about besides trying to survive during his confinement was the vibrancy of life in Paris. When he escaped and came back to Paris, he abandoned abstraction and embraced figuration in the form of paintings of people in urban settings. I thought of a parallel evolution in style in the work of Stella and Held who abandoned the minimalist trope of their early work to embark in their later years on multifaceted paintings, where there was a complex relation between the parts and the whole. Jean Helion was subjected to a physical and emotional “minimalism” by the Nazi’s. Was the minimalism of abstract art a sort of scientific asceticism in some way parallel to the emotional oppression of life in prison camp?  The essence of this show speaks to the primacy of life in the creative process and the topography of time that does not try to crush the spirit but opens up islands to the stream.  To borrow the title of Addison Parks’s novel: ”Love and Art, in that order”.

"Flotsam"Jason Travers

The Gorky Connection:My great uncle Marvin and Arshile Gorky in Boston

In the mid-Nineties Armenian art historian Levon Chooksazian was asked by a German publishing house to write short biographies of Armenian artists of the 20^th century for inclusion in a world lexicon of artists. Because I am an artist of Armenian descent, he contacted me to learn about my history and those of other Armenian/American artists whom I knew. One artist that he had already heard about was my great uncle Marvin Julian.  Since he was someone, whose story was part of family lore, I was able to fill in lots of details about his life. Levon always enjoyed coming to Boston from Armenia to lecture, and, moreover, as a lover of the Armenian language, to hear the dialect of Western Armenian still spoken by the nonagenarians, who came from Western Anatolia around the beginning of the last century. With the passing of that generation and the extirpation of their ancestors in the towns of central Turkey such as Harput, this dialect is now disappearing. Such is the lot of the Armenians. Their moments of political coherence are short lived. Levon always goes about his work with a sense of urgency to document the actors and players in Armenian culture, while there is still an Armenia in which Armenian culture can thrive.

If it were not for the persecution of Armenians in Turkey, Marvin Julian, born Chooljian,(alternate spellings from his early years in America are Chooljean and Chovilijean) would not have come to this country. The Ottoman overlord's pogroms on the Armenian minority, periodically, reminded them of their inferior social position and  confiscated their money in a rude sort of taxation. My grandmother, Marvin’s sister, said that during these assaults the young boys were rolled up in oriental rugs to hide them from the soldiers.  When the dust settled on one of these sporadic attacks, my grandmother, just a little girl, wandering the streets with her mother inquired  why there were so many people sleeping in the street.

It is out of and from this turmoil that Marvin and his extended family came to Boston. I have always marveled to what degree, originating from the rural interior of Anatolia, he was able to sort out the cultural reality of New England in short order, so as to eventually establish himself as an artist of no mean repute in the city of Boston.    

Photo taken in Turkey with Marvin seated at the lower left

Piecing together his early years leaves much that is out of focus. He enlisted in the American Army before World War 1, but never went to war, remaining at Fort Devens outside of Boston. He survived the notorious influenza epidemic in 1918, that killed more American soldiers than died on the Front. My father remembers being so proud to see him in uniform in Boston, when the American Army replaced the police, who went on strike in 1919. It was probably prior to his service in the Army that he met John Singer Sargent, who worked on the Boston Public Library murals up until 1919. He would run errands for him such as buying a newspaper and would receive art instruction in exchange. The story was already part of his resume in the 1930’s article on him in a Boston newspaper. By the early Twenties he moved to Paris to study at the Academie Julian, a haven for American artists, which functioned as an avant-garde alternative to the L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It trained not only the French Modernist Matisse but Americans of note such as Sargent, Henri and Prendergast. He made money as a gravedigger in the American military cemeteries of the Great War, and frequented Sunday salons organized by wealthy Boston matrons living  in Paris. His father who worked like many Armenians in the Hood Rubber Plant in Watertown, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, helped him out financially, until some monetary setbacks made it impossible to continue his support.Marvin was forced to return to Boston. The story goes that in despair he threw all his art materials into the Seine.

                    

His life in Paris was brought into focus several years ago, when I went on a tour with my wife on the Left Bank of Paris to locate the school, where she had studied before going to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. When we found the school and entered the courtyard I noticed inscribed above a door: "Academie Julian". Was this once the location of this famous school that my great uncle took his name from?  The school was on break, so that our presence in the school was noticed by  the school’s director. We addressed our questions to him and learned that indeed this had been the location of the famous Academy, before it became in the 1950's the preparatory school for the Beaux-Arts that my wife attended. When I told him of my uncle, he said that there would be a record of his attendance and that in fact the vice-director of the school was writing a book about the history of the Academy. The vice-director was in his office and spent sometime with us looking up Marvin’s name. Indeed, his name was on the list of students and moreover, he had won an award for his painting.

Back in Boston with Academy Julian credentials under his belt, he became over a period of time a teacher in several art schools.We are in possession of a catalogue from The Exeter School of Art that lists him as an instructor. Several anecdotes that he related to me of his early years in Boston concerned his relationship with Arshile Gorky, who lived in Watertown with his sister for several years on Dexter Ave, where Marvin’s parents lived. Marvin, who was born in 1894, was ten years older than Arshile. Marvin said that Gorky studied art under him at The New School of Design and Illustration, which the Gorky Foundation lists as the school he attended and eventually taught at. In a discussion with the director of the Gorky Foundation I was told that they are going to research more thoroughly his life in Boston and hopefully turn up class lists that would confirm his relation to Marvin. Marvin described Gorky as a larger than life character, who would dazzle his fellow classmates with his ability to draw perfect circles free hand. At that time, Arshile painted in a tonal style similar to what was popular in Boston and a style that Marvin never strayed from. Gorky moved on  to New York and began his transformation into a Modernist, absorbing Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and Miro. My uncle attended Gorky’s first opening in New York City. He recalls being snubbed by Gorky at the opening, who Marvin wrongly thought was embarrassed to show his old teacher what must have appeared to Marvin, the student of Sargent, as crudely wrought images. I have always contended that Gorky was embarrassed by his former teacher, who appeared to him as a representative of the old guard. In the end neither interpretation is accurate. The answer to this interaction between Marvin and Gorky, only became clear to me upon seeing Cosima Spender’s documentary on her grandfather: ”Without Gorky”. It depicts in the words of his wife, still alive, and his two daughters, the oppressive shadow that this inspired genius cast on their lives. It was not at all flattering of the great Armenian Painter. One aspect of Gorky’s life was spelled out emphatically in the film: he was very intent on maintaining the myth of  being the son of Maxim Gorky. So much so, that his wife only learned of his Armenian heritage toward the end of their life together from a grocer in Sherman Ct.. Obviously, Marvin knew Gorky was Armenian and his presence at the opening, risked blowing Gorky’s carefully constructed cover as the son of Maxim Gorky. Hence the snub.

Marvin to  Gorky's left
from Herrera's book
(referred to as Felix Choolijian
in Mooradians' book)

Family photo  of Marvin from 1925
(notice similar suit to what is
worn by Felix Chookjian)

Gorky's resume  at the Grand Central Art School that I read on the Gorky Foundation website says that he studied at the Academie Julian under Jean-Paul Lauren. The Gorky Foundation admits that this is totally fabricated by Gorky to plump up his resume and in my opinion is taken from his teacher Marvin at the New School of Design and Illustration. According to Gerard Vallin, who is writing a history of the school,  Lauren was a teacher at the Academy Julian when Marvin was there.

There is a good deal of circumstantial evidence to support the relationship of Gorky and Julian. The most intriguing is a photo that is an iconic part of the Gorky memorabilia, which appears in several biographies of Gorky. It portrays the young Gorky in 1925 at The New School of Design and Illustration in Boston, looking princely with a fur coat seated next to two women (one identified as an instructor Ethel Cooke) on his right and an artist to his left  named  Felix Chooligian in one biography(Mooradian) and Felix Chookjian in another(Herrera).  A recent search by my sister on Ancestry.com has uncovered a passport request from Marvin Chooljian to study in France with a letter of support from the New School of Illustration and Design's director Douglas Connah, which describes him as a student of said school. The date is 1920. He came back from Paris in 1922 and presumably started teaching there, where, as Marvin claimed, he had Gorky as a student. There is also a photo of Marvin from 1925 that was in the possession of Marvin’s sister (my grandmother) wearing what appears to be the same suit worn by Felix in the photo of Gorky. I have shown numerous people the two photos side by side and no one has doubted that Felix is Marvin. The difference in spelling of the last name does in no way discount my theory that the Gorky photo is of Marvin as Armenian names were transcribed phonetically and were subject to various spellings. The only fly in the ointment is that the first name Felix is not one I have ever heard attributed to Marvin and also in the Mooradian biography he is referred to as a Vanetzi, i.e. born in the province of Van, Gorky’s birthplace, whereas my great uncle was Harpetzi. The director of the Gorky Foundation Melissa Kerr said that Karlen Mooradian, Gorky’s nephew, who labeled the photo, tended in his writings to mythologize about Gorky’s Armenian roots and would have found it supportive of the myth  to have Felix be a fellow Vanetzi. All that is left for me to confirm the connection to Gorky would be to find evidence of Marvin's  role as a teacher at the New School.                          

Alexander Woollcott

In the thirties he taught magazine illustration at the Exeter School of Art in Boston’s Back Bay. Among several examples of magazine covers he did for Microphone, a journal of radio topics, there is  well- known critic Alexander Woollcott.

"Art Week in Boston" in a Boston Newspaper 

Marvin was already in his sixties, when I was old enough to remember his presence at family get-togethers. He lived a bohemian life in a sparsely decorated studio at 110 Newbury St in Boston’s Back Bay with his mother. He was seemingly able to subsist on a diet of coffee and cigarettes. He often said that if he were ever to be burglarized, the robbers shocked at his poverty, might be compelled to leave something for him. I recall that he had no refrigerator and kept the milk for his coffee out on the balcony in Winter. On occasion our family would visit him and his mother on a Sunday bringing with us a meal of chicken and pilaf. I recall his window shades were attached to the bottom of his windows and lifted up from there to keep the north light always lighting from above. Over the years, I learned bits and pieces of about his life in Boston and Paris, but there is much he kept to himself. I asked him once about the “Bal des QuatZ-Arts” in Paris that was a notorious Saturnalia, where participants typically dressed up or rather undressed as classical Greek sculptures. He admitted attending but was unwilling to talk about the details and said: ”Mum’s the word.” He displayed the same diffidence in the Boston newspaper article(above) about the details of his relation to Sargent.

Portrait of Father with Ashcan school influence

Stylistically his best portraits showed the influence of the Ashcan school, especially when he was free from having to flatter the subject, as in his portraits of his parents. On Askart, a site that lists artist's auction history, he is noted for “floral still lives”. Indeed, our immediate family is in possession of many of them. To my eye it is in these works that the aesthetic of Marvin shines. Each bloom is delicately and never generically observed. There is a feeling of tenderness for each bloom, which must be cherished and not harmed.  Although his work may be lacking in any dialogue with the dozens of “isms” that ruled the 20thc and remained within the language of chiaroscuro, which he learned from his idol Sargent, there is always a sensitivity to presence. It just sings out the fragility and nuance of the moment, the exact instant of apperception.

                                           

Flowers by Marvin for which he is known on "Askart"

    

My father told me, which was typical of his pessimistic reminders of the fickle nature of the economy , that the Exeter School of Art closed down during the Depression. The next evidence of Marvin’s presence in Boston comes in the late 30’s, when he was commissioned through the Federal Arts Project to do a portrait of an admiral for the Naval War College. From then on, he became well known as a portraitist in the Boston artistic community. There is an article about a portrait that he did the early Sixties of the wife of then Governor of Massachusetts, Foster Furcolo.Within the family he was, as it were, the court painter, doing pastels of his nieces and nephews.

Marvin in front of commission of Massachusetts Governor's wife Kate Furcolo

                       

He spent his later years alone in his apartment on Newbury St. His second home was the Boston Public Library, where he read copiously in classical literature. I once noticed him reading Rousseau’s “Confessions”. He must have been somewhat bewildered by the evolution of the art scene in Boston, which in the Fifties was very much defined by the Boston Expressionists. They complained that the explosion of Abstract Art in New York, which they felt was too French and immoral, had sidelined them. I can imagine that Marvin and his devotion to the art of the 19thc felt even more sidelined. Interestingly enough, my teaching career in Boston began two years after his death in 1988 at an art college just up the street from where he taught, as though in some strange notion of karma I had to fill in for his absence from the Boston art world. I had moved to France as he did and  spent a commensurate amount of time there. When I came back in the late 70's and showed the work I had done there at the Bromfield Gallery he came to the opening and quietly advised gallery goers what to purchase. The notion of presence has shaped Western Art and Philosophy since the time of the Greeks, and for several centuries from the Renaissance on this notion of beauty, grounded in the disinterested gaze, reined supreme. It clearly was the underlying principle of all of Marvin’s thinking about painting.

Recently, I came across an inquiry about Marvin on “Askart” by someone one who knew him in the late 70’, early 80’s. Marvin would have been in his mid 80’s at the time. I replied to the email, which was already sitting on the site four years and got this reply, which sums up better than I could the last years of an independent artist who always followed his muse.

       

Mother Sarah who lived with him the later years .
Painting recalled by Tomas Jonsson

Hello,

I received, with pleasure, your email regarding Marvin Julian. How did you come by my name? I am surprised, since it was so many years ago that I had met Mr. Julian (as we all referred to him). I was his neighbor in an apartment on Newbury Street, back in the late 1970's/early 1980's. I used to take care of him; visit with him, fetch groceries sometimes, make sure he was okay in the cold. At the time I believed he was one step away from being homeless, and it broke my heart. As you say, he was extremely private and would not talk about much, except his painting. I can still picture his apartment, and smell it…..it had the strong smell of paint and linseed oil. It was like stepping in to another world, another era. His apartment was always cold in the winter, too cold for an old man with failing eyesight. He often wore a sort of blanket/shawl over his shoulders. *I made him hot drinks, kept him company.

One day he said he would paint me, and I was thrilled and bewildered. I didn't know what to expect. But I knew it was important to him, as his sight failed, and he needed to paint. And, I think, it was his way of saying 'thank you' to me, although he didn't need to, as far as I was concerned. To me he was a great man, mysterious, mercurial, but clearly brilliant. In his almost empty apartment (he insisted, one day, that I should take the area rug, something someone must have given him)  he had two amazing portraits on the otherwise empty and dirty walls. One, which I was awestruck by, was his mother; dark and serious and very formal (I'm sure you know it). So, I sat for him, and very quickly he had a painting which I think captured me so well. I look at it now and find it funny and glorious, as who would not! I'm a young man sitting there, trying to look formal and serious myself, long 1970ish hair, wearing a formal tie and sport coat. I thought I should look the part for Mr. Julian.

I moved house after two years there, and lost touch with Mr. Julian. Although I think he enjoyed my company, he was closed tight, didn't really know how to relate very well, and seemed, so sadly, to be alone and lost in the world and, frankly, waiting out his remaining time. I have always remembered him, always think kindly of him, always will.

Mr. Julian told me that the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. has some of his paintings, do you know if that is the case? I would so love to see more of his work. John Singer Sergeant(sic) has always been my favorite painter, and I see the strong influence in Mr. Julian's work. I've always felt he should be celebrated more for his incredible work, do you know where his paintings are located, museums etc.?

Thank you so much for your email, and I wish you well,

Tomas C. Jonsson

*When I shared this  letter with a cousin whose mother was very close to Marvin, they were somewhat taken aback by the grim image of Marvin's last days portrayed by Mr Jonsson. They periodically visited him  to clean his apartment and replace items which were old and frayed with newer ones. My aunt suggested that the rug he gave to Mr Jonsson was one that she had given him.  Marvin enjoyed the concern of an extended family,who were equally enthralled by this most enigmatic of artists,but proudly portrayed himself as an independent artist to Mr. Jonsson.