Well, so I went into the hospital, and I didn't come out for months. The original operation was much harder and longer than my doctors including my surgeon though it would be. But it was a success. However, I quickly got one of those hospital based pneumonias, and sank into a coma for something like a week or more. Finally, I did come out of it. And then I tried to stand up, and eventually walk. But I wasn't supposed to.. Eventually I went into a place for rehabilitation and there relearned how to walk, and how to deal with a kitchen and a bathroom. When I got out I still could not do that much on my own. This is now some months later, and I am still not back to my old strength. Stopping about two weeks ago I fell down three times at different times of day, in different rooms. In each case, we had to call someone [one of the people who work in the building] to pick me up. After all of that I decided that I was not going to fall again, and have been working on it. I now have a physiotherapist, one whom Carol was using. He is doing me good. I also decided that, what with my poor record of falling down, that I would use a walker whenever I go out of the building. I had been using one that was meant for indoors only, still on loan from the rehabilitation place, but it really worked poorly outside. I am still not working, although the studio will be possible. Meanwhile I am still trying to get rid of the remains of my miscellaneous collection of books. That is, anything I can send out to auction.
I am not getting to shows, yet. I have not been to a museum since that last not I wrote about Poussin and Courbet. Meanwhile David Carbone discovered that most of the frame for the House of Death and Life was missing, and it had to be reproduced. There also were bits of paint lacking, and what look like knife cuts in one panel. That had to be fixed. There were other problems with that and other paintings. A restorer had to work on some of them.
That is about the traveling show of about 25 large paintings made between 1963 and 1990 which is already up in the University of Virginia Museum.Next it goes to the University of New Hampshire Museum, and I don't know their dates.[but it sounds as though it most probably will open some time in October or so]. It will also go to the Southwest Missouri State University, January 23rd to March 15th, 2009; and LSU from September 4-October 23, 2009; it will be shown in the New York Academy of Art March 31-April 28, 2009.
There is a catalog with a large color plate for each of the paintings in the show. The curators were Langdon Quin, David Carbone, and Lincoln Perry. Lincoln wrote the long catalog essay. They were the people who decided to do the show and worked it up. It was not my idea, and I was only told about it when it became clear to them that it was going to happen. Lincoln writes well and apparently with ease. His long essay was a big undertaking. I am also happy about both Langdon and David's much shorter, written contributions. David, also, being here and involved, found out about all the problems with individual paintings which required repair, most of which I was unable to do. Because of him we do have all the paintings in the catalog in the show. They are all eloquent as writers, and they did very well in choosing the show. Since so many of my paintings are "oners", ideas I had once, and have not repeated, there are still another 25 paintings which would have made a different show. That goes as much for still life and landscape as it does for figure paintings. I also paint the nude, that is a nude single figure with no pushy story line, although I do have one called "Brian as Helios." Also, the show has only large paintings, and only one painting which can be called, in part, a study for another. My smaller paintings and my pastels are not included. At some point in the early 1980s I stopped drawing in pencil and charcoal and worked only in color with pastel. In my Schoelkopf shows it was very easy to fill a room with that year's pastels, so you can tell I did a lot of them. None the less, this is by far the largest group of my work ever to have been gathered together for a show. It does give an idea of what I am about.
Now some mea culpa's. I know I have not kept up the blog. Writing it now, is a sign I am feeling better. But I missed letters, and missed getting together with people who wrote. I also have been getting letters from Mahasti Khalili but nothing works in my attempt to reply to them. If you look around the internet[Mahasti] you should be able to find me. I can't find you. Some of the people on the Midwest artist's group know how to do it. And this note, here, should prove your Kashrut to them.
I hope that all of you have been healthy and had productive painting summers.
I do intend to keep the blog going, but I will have to get a little better yet, so that I can see some art which will inspire me to write to you, or even read a book or catalog that gets me going..
Love,
Gabriel
On Saturday we went to the first opening for at least 6 months. I was in decent shape and the show was a two person one of Natalie Charkow Hollander and Ruth Miller. They are both people in my age bracket. Ruth qualifies as a midwesterner, too. Not only does she come from Missouri, but she graduated from the college of Missouri U. which used to be where the Missouri school of mines was, more recently, in Rolla, a rural town which we know because I was posted to an army camp not far from their during the Korean war.
In the show, Natalie showed a group of carved reliefs. Ruth exhibited still lifes. They were not larger than earlier work of heres I have seen, nor were they more colorful, or much more brushy. But they were often marvelous, this time. All of her pictorial tricks seemed to be there for no other reason than to reach the objects and then pour them out in a wonderful flood of color so that we all became wonderfully wet with genius. No one got wet, just a manner of speaking. The virtuosity for the sake of the motif was really mind bending and a great pleasure for me. There really is no single thing to point to. Everything she tried, eventually [not on the first try] added up to part of a wonderful small world that was busting its boundaries. Natalie's work at the same level as the last time, was miraculous, too. But I have been seeing her miracles for many years, and won't push them harder. She really started the way everyone did, making drawings from Poussin and Claude and others, and learning how to paint and draw, and in her case, how to paint and draw figure groups.
Now, today we went to the Met and saw the Poussin show, and then the Courbet. The Poussin is far and away the largest Poussin show and the finest I have ever seen. It is all about his effort to produce poetry from invented landscapes with roles in them for the Greek Gods and heroes. It was awe inspiring and humbling. I am not even close enough to attempt the things he achieves. I think it is a good catalog to buy. And in paper not too dear. So many of his paintings were meant to celebrate a scene in twilight, or even darker. The light is part of his amazing crew of hard workers. It is hard to talk about, but I will get back to it, before I leave on Wednesday.
I will be going into the hospital for the most major operation I have ever had. My doctors hope, that after they will do it, I will have enough of all the various bodily fluids so they won't have to add any of them regularly. Then they hope that they can find out what else is really wrong and try to cure it. The alternatives were not wonderful. And I do believe I have some very good doctors. So I have to go along with them and let them do what they hope will bring me around.
Doctors are much like everyone else. They are bright and dumb, hard working and lazy, good hearted and crass. But the best ones, besides having good minds are caring and hard working. I think one of them is mad at me right now because I didn't [that is my body didn't] recover from the use of the chemo he had me take for two months. One of my others who used to call us his comic relief [most of his practice was HIV] has stopped doing that. He became a specialist in infectious disease in that short period when everyone was thinking we are about to lock away for good all of the worst such diseases, and we won't be dealing with death causing disease. And then came aids. Doctors, including him, hate to see patients die. They want to cure them, and subconsciously value themselves by how well they are doing that.
Yeah, so this is a major operation, and all of them think the danger is worth the potential for cure. So after Wednesday afternoon, I should be recuperating in the hospital while they all take their best chances at getting more information which will help in future.
But the last thing I want to talk to you about before is a little bit more about Poussin, and then a little about me, that is what I do as an artist and why. Everyone thinks he/she is special and not like any one else in how he/she/they think and how they work things out. Like everyone else I think that too. So I decided I would try to spell out what is different in how my head works in painting. I don't think I ever did that. Like most of us, when I have been writing I have been writing about others and wonderful things I see in art which are out there for all of us. This time, that is not what I want to do.
Love,
Gabriel
Hi! I really can't spend much time here. I lose more than hgalf of 5 days a week to doctors, clinics and hospital procedures. I am not getting better, overall, but I am not getting worse, either. Thereare various chances in the future. All of them are risky, and some of them will have to be taken one after the other.
I have finally figures out how to show any comment anyone sends here. I think I didn't get there in time and some disappeared. I will try not to let that happen.
Nothing has happened with me in gallery going, because I haven't gone.
I did get a privately printed book of Louis Finkelstein's writings which I intend to read. I also get cards with images of artist's work on them. One from a gallery in New Jersey had a landscape by Harold Bruder on it. I think it is the best thing of his I have ever seen.
Otherwise I have been getting art world crap in all the mailings. It is important not to mention names negatively, if possible because it all becomes useful for sales.
Now and then I think about past conversations. I can remember Sidney Tillim's idea of what I called Little men's marching and chinese chowder group, after an organization Barnaby's flying godfather belonged to.[Barnaby was a strip in PM and the Compass I believe when I was much younger].
The group included both Lennart and Leland. One day, Leland made it clear that he despised both Lennart and Degas. I don't know why it was important to him, but it does show that serious people cutting against the art world tide could disagree violently. Actually I didn't much like it, but I liked them both and I also like Degas. The big Degas show at the Met was a great show if you started at the end and worked backward until you no longer like the work. He actually became a great artist, but he started off as a very talented academically trained one, influenced by Manet. Look at the work starting with Cassatt in the hat shop. Except for unfinished paintings, signed with the auction stamp, the paintings and pastels from that point forward are all wonderful. But I do think that much of the earlier work is problematic.
Love,
Gabriel
Dear Kurt,
You do sound very changed, and very serious. I was thinking of the Reinhardt under glass at MOMA and the others. The Klee book I have been mentioning is by him and called the Thinking Eye. There are 2 volumes of it. I think the first volume is enough for a few years. It is now out of print and expensive. I am sure that any art library in a place like Uppsale, for example, would have it. So would any library connected with a museum which collects 20th century painting.
You know, all of those letters are there. I didn't know how to validate them, or even read them. I think the letter I am answering should now appear, but I am not sure of that. Even if it doesn't, I am closer to getting it
It is true that abstraction has had only a short life, thus far, so it is hard to say, avoid the influence. I do believe that if you spread it around there is a lot to be learned. But I think of most of the people on that list of yours as people who are spending the interest on someone else's principle rather than investing their own minds hearts and souls in their work. I tend to believe that AE was not the dog, but only the tail of the dog, waving. That gallery which handles the Reinhardt estate had a show of Reinhardt/Mondrian a year or two ago. And it was no show of equals. Mondrian's very best follower was, in my eyes, Burgoyne Diller. And that is because, while keeping all of Mondrian's pictorial laws [no secondary colors, no diagonals, no brush strokes] in his late work, Diller was able to arrive a wholly different concept of power and a sensibility not so much foreign to Mondrian as very, very different. I had studied with Diller in 1950 or so when that was not yet true, but his work then, was very much like the best Mondrian, just before his last 3 or 4 paintings.
I certainly do not believe that any one like you has to know and go through all the work which has made it to the top of the hit parade and is abstract! In fact, that strikes me as the best way to douse your own feelings in ice water. Not all of the biggest reputations represent wonderful artists. Sometimes it is the ideas of an artist which are most exciting, not even the work. You should read Hodler. He was a big enough deal back then so that there may even be writings of his translated into Swedish, if your German is not too hot. The one essay in English, his essay on parallelism of 1888 is a gem. He was such a big deal back in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century that I can remember a book whose title was "Cezanne und Hodler."
Actually, how abstraction came out of figuration and a variety of other sources is really very mysteriou s. Rather than worrying about Ryman, I would worry about Malevitch or Boccioni, or Wyndham Lewis, or Sophie Tauber[Arp]. There is nothing happening in the 19th century which reliably can predict that there will be such a thing. Learning about how and why and looking at those works seems to me a more productive way of getting there than following all the followers who followed the followers who....Etc.
I don;t know whether I told this story here. My younger son is a flutist. Albert Roussel wrote a work before WWI called Jouers des Flutes. It is a suite for flute and piano in which each movement gets a double name. One name for a living flutist, and the other for a character in a book of fiction, poetry, or in one case a great religious epic, who played the flute. Michael had been playing movements out of the suite, and in fact the whole suite for some 15 years before he realized that he hadn't been going about it the right way. He need ed not only to look up all the flutists and find out what they were like, as well as learning as much how they played as possible, he needed to read all of the stories, poetry and the religious epic to find out what was in Roussel's mind. So, he did. One of the references was a French novel of the period,not very common today, but he found it and read it. Krishna, of course was easy to find, but a long read. Well when he was all done reading and had worked out the personalities of all of the flutists and fictional flutists, he worked it up for performance again. Nothing was the same. He played everything differentl;y, not because he was an eccentric, but because he had done his homework and understood it all differently. One day he found a recording of a performance he had given some 15teen years earlier, and it sounded like all the other performances flutists had been giving. He had realized that living in the 1990's he was in a different wor ld from Roussel and he had to treat him historically in order to give a really definitive performance.
Well we are living that far away in time and space [it was all in Europe] so that we don't really understand what abstract art was about for those radicals who were living and producing it from the 19teens through 20s when it all began. So studying them and their ideas would seem to make real sense for anyone really interested in abstract art. None of the people around now who didn't do that really understand what they are up to. They are on the tail end of the bandwagon. If you start over again trying to understand, you won't be. And,by the way, there were some mystics involved with some of it. People like Madame Blavatsky, and an American architect from Buffalo who wrote about four dimensional space being described in three dimensions. He made drawings of such things as tessaracts, for example. I will try to remem ber his name. It would also be interesting to read what Wyndham Lewis wrote, or what the futurists wrote. If you know Russian, maybe they wrote, too.
A little bit of scholarship, and study as to what these people thought they were doing and why might open something good for you.
When Ad [Reinhardt] was rich enough, he made a trip around the world in the summer time. When he got back, he showed us at Brooklyn his slides. He repeated it at the Club as well. There were two kinds of slides: 1. slides of details of Islamic mosque construction showing the shapes of the architecture and chunks of the words of the Koran cut into the stone and shown as part of the forms of the building. 2. The interiors of very dark Buddhist and Hindu temples full of marvelous figures of which we could only get a trace as we looked. I don't know that he had painted the black paintings yet, but they were all there.
Love,
G abriel
This is the last of three answers to Kurt's letters. I am not sure the other ones will show up. GL
Dear Kurt:
I started this one already but it suddenly threw me out and I cannot
find it again. The problem with painting something "Mystical" is that
, ideally you should be at least student of mysticism.
Mysticism has a hard and precise definition [with an exception]. It is
the belief that individuality [individual personality and individual
souls] are an illusion and one inclusive soul is the reality.
So, in so far as most 20th century artists were striving to express themselves in all their particularity, most of them cannot be called mystics. In so far as he was able to hold that position Thomas Merton could be called a mystic. I knew Ad Reinhardt too well to call him a mystic. But I would agree that he believed that there was something distinct from human life and different from other forms of thought, and that was art. In his paintings over a period of some 20 years, he tried to separate the connectedness from the differences more and more, and finally in the black paintings achieved his greatest success in making paintings in which the flutter of connection ambushed you after you had been looking at the painting for some 20 to 60 seconds. His paintings [with out glass on them] will produce a wonderful movement up and out the top at that time. That, though, did not make him a mystic, it did make him an illustrator of mysticism. And I think he would have been satisfied with that.
A mystic is someone who believes that the many individual egos [to a religious, souls] are illusions, and we are all u ited in one soul. Usually mystics are to be found in a known religion. All of them, except Judaism will allow that definition. Judaism believes in the imviolibility of the sould so greatly that in it, mysticism is the desire to be as close as possible to the presence of G-d for all time, but not to be lost in him. There is mystical Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, and even Muslim art[although without any images]. And it is possible to think about several early 20th century abstract artists as people who were concerned with these ideas.
If these is what you were talking about, it is possible, although I dopubt that anyone much out in the art world today, thinks that way.
Love,
Gabriel
I had a friend, he died some years ago, who wrote reviews for New York art magazines all his life. When I first met him, in 1958, he was writing for Art News. His name was Lawrence Campbell[but always Larry]. One of his absolutes was that he would never write a negative review. His taste changed some over many years, and he did write raves of the work of friends, but the majority of his reviews were of artists, not necessarily people he knew, whose work he admired. There is more of a tradition for that among American literary critics. If I am not getting the name wrong Robert Gorham Davis who was active till about 20 years ago was another such.
But he generally reviewed prose fiction.
Decorum is a word not found much in the art world. Although some of Larry's principles do get carried out out there in the establishment. The art magazines are full, only, with the kind of work which the editors and critics have a feeling for. As someone who has been seeing the Art mags for some 55 years I do have some general comments to make. The New York Times used to have very exciting weekday and Sunday art pages. This is not so true any more, because somewhere a critical pen has been wielded and the number of reproductions of work which the paper reviews has gone down precipitately. We all saw Giuliani go foaming at the mouth with the show of some recent Saatchi people in the Brooklyn Museum during his tenure as mayor. Most of the material raved about in the Times might very well get a very strong negative reaction if reproduced, so that the general Times reading public could actually see what the critic was raving about. So, no one gets to see the stuff. The Sunday page tends to be filler, or, plants for friends of some one on the newspaper[not necessarily among the art critics] and is rarely written by one of their major critics.
Decorum is encouraged by these devices, and ignorance is kept, happily, blissful.
The other week, Kimmelman [who is actually a wonderful writer about pianists and the piano literature] was given the task of reviewing the great Tintoretto show in Vienna. In order to get into the mood, he had to get to a Viennese restaurant[and wine bar] which put him into the mood for looking at those old, and old fashioned paintings. To see a really great show, he had to get into the mood and the period somehow!! Most of his reviews have had that sort of problem. He is the Times' number 1 because he is thought to be a good newspaper man, and the times has the idea that all those critical jobs can be handed around to people with that sort of credentials.
I am used to the idea the the old Paul Georges crowd, who were hungry, dressed and acted broke [although they weren't] and used Paul as their critic and psychotherapist, would use any public event to attack other artists violently in speech and loudly in manner. I find it mildly perplexing that someone who supported a wing of the establishment should find it necessary to act like that, too. It makes me sure that we are all doing right. Of course the supporters of various parts of the establishment must feel very insecure about the true value of the artists whom they prefer. The names which have come up most, thus far are Rackstraw Downes, Lucien Freud, Neil Welliver and quite a few others.
Actually I think that it should have been expected in our context, that some artists would take a rethinking of realism as a starting point for a neo-Avant Garde position. There must not be any kind of art which is being made which does not fit into the historical idea of the avant garde. So some of the people I have already mentioned as well as a number of others fit that bill.
Unfortunately, I don't think so. There is something about working from the motif which can produce good art, even new good art. The point is that no one can stop learning, adjusting and readjusting to the motif and the canvas and new insights, so that they can produce a nice new and easily graspable neo-avantgarde realism. Skill and intelligence, talent and sensibility are not enough. The artist has to keep being aware of him/herself and recognize when something has happened which requires new developments. I am talking about constant non-vanguard development and change in the work
I think that it is clear that Stanley's path follows the changing understandings which develop in his paintings and drawings. And all of us know that there is still his sculpture, and figure painting to see, some day. He is a much messier artist than any of the establishment. It is not possible to cut off one idea and say, that's it!! Because each new idea is also in the middle of a step to somewhere else. This is what new art which is good and new and not avant garde looks like.
Love,
Gabriel
I will get back to the topic of my unfinished essay later. I did manage to get to an opening, Stanley's new show. He is always surprising. This time, for the first time he has gotten his gnarled and curious detail, which has been so great in the big drawings, into the paintings!!! They now have a whole series of changes in color within any plane which help both to organize the larger shapes and to produce a counter melody [as it were]. I think that at least in some ways these are his finest paintings yet. Starting on your right as you enter, and around the corner, those three paintings are the ones which can be seen to do it best. One problem is that the light on the short end wall, opposite, does not do its best for the two very fine paintings hanging on it and the light in the opening corner is just fine. There also are wonderful drawings of all sizes, some of which seem to have new ideas which are wonderful to see.
He is a completely independent artist with his own pictorial needs, which are different from every one else's and he keeps on making giant moves towards ideas he has about what he wants to get. It becomes clearer and clearer that there is no artist out there who can be his model. He has learned from great 19th century masters and from 20th century ones, but he looks like something new. Now, is this something avant garde, new? No it is not. It is not hard to understand where he is coming from and what new portions of his sensibility he is adding into the work. It is hard to understand why he wants to do it, until you see it done. I would say that he is not so much an innovator as another voice to add to past masters, who enriches our understanding of them and of the world outside by seeing it in a another way. It does not require the kind of great jump that fauve or cubist art required of their audiences, but it presents new ways of getting at those same truths which so many 19th century pleine aire painters had, as also reconstructions from nature as in Soutine, Matisse, Marquet or Modigliani.
Don't Miss The Show!!! There is nothing else like it, and there won't be until he shows again.
Love,
Gabriel
That same hypothetical painter who wants something powerful for herself wants to go to graduate school in painting. I have taught at several of these with soe regularity and at others now and then. One of the things theylike most to see is someone who has skills and sensitivities which show through the current work, and wants to change and do something radically different. Back in the days when I taught in such schools, I found it hard to believe that there wer e such people, but there were and there are, and faculties just loved the idea.
A young artist who has been exposed to several fruitful approaches, seems to have accepted one and done good work within it, and now wanted something else, was the ideal of a strong faculty member. The character and quality of work done in graduate school it seems to me should reflect the student more than what was done before. Noone really matures in two years, and it is my belief that it would be better for someone working for an MFA to end up in the middle of a step. I agree with Douglas Florian that the process produces more than a series of products would offer. It is good for the soul to be attracted to qualities not quickly arrived at. Also, which, when arrived at allow for a new procedural trip. There is a painting in the MOMA by Klee which is either called around the square, or the square. It is a fully enjoyable painting, and seems like the end rather than the middle of such a quest. The last time there was a museum Klee show in New York, I think it was at the Modern, it seemed to turn out that way. There were about a dozen paintings assembled, and because of Klee's habit of dating everything it turned out that the one they have was the last. They were all about tat square in a grid. They are all wonderful, but that one seemed like the most wonderful after which it seemed to me Klee would have to go to some other idea. Klee was a serial painter, much of the time. He tested out a new logic which would produce paintings unlike any he had done before, and work on it until he had realized that idea. I am not sure that I understand his sources of inspiration, but for anything to get to have pictorial, sensual meaning it must get to a place near the heart. Even with " the Thinking Eye" to guide us, we can't get inside his head to make sense of what moved him and why. It is hard enough to do for yourself, impossible to do for someone else. Now and then I think I can work it out with Nice Matisse, Klee, Odilon Redon, Marquet or Masson. So, the desire to make some kind of painting very far from what we do now is much less sensible than thinking of a procedure which might produce some results which would be, perforce, different from our current work, and then within the new procedure trying to work it out.
