Well, as you all know I have been busy with my show which is finally in my home town. Seeing a lot of your work together helps you to realize what you are doing and have been doing. I was surprized that the earlier paintings, brushed on intently without the brush showing much, and with less pushed color did fit with the later ones. The color sense continued from the first to the others, in large measure. I was also surprized that I had done a figure painting that I still like in 1973, because I must not have been very secure about it, since I did not start painting narrative paintings until 1986.
I also learned something else. You can get to work with all the best intentions and even be inspired by some things that happen while you are working out the painting and you can still make major errors. Having good intentions and good skills does not armor you so that your work will be successful. Intense introspection and self criticism is always necessary.
I have had very good experiences with younger artists. Many years ago when I was working on my first serial subject matter painting, Barbara Goodstein came to my studio and gave me a crit on the first version of the first panel of "A Crime and Its Consequences." I thought that what she said was apt, and after continuing and completing that painting, which was a horizontal painting, I started over again with a vertical one, which did do much more of what was needed and I finished the series. I no longer remember her specific comments, but I know that they worked.
There is one finished painting in the show where the reactions of another younger artist have set off thoughts in my mind about my handling of the composition. There are things in that composition which do not function as I wanted them to function and I will go back and try that same subject again and hopefully improve on the result. Although I have not done this much, it was basic to Leland's process. He worked over and over on the same composition through a series of paintings. Ultimately solving it in different ways on several finished paintings. It is interesting to note that this process was not borrowed from any of his heroes like Derain, Helion, Renoir,or any other twentieth century figurative painter, but is more closely related to the way some twentieth century abstract painters worked. I think that it may be the reason that his late, large figure paintings seem to me better than any large figure paintings by either Derain or Helion, which I have seen. It was very successful for him over a number of years through to his last work. I should be heartened by his experience since I am going to follow it a bit, now.
There was one curious incident, too. At the symposium when a panel of artists discussed my work, near the end of the question period a young women asked the panel to comment on how and where the paintings showed anything Jewish. It happened that she is the older daughter of my cousin at whose house we spent the second Seder just a few days earlier. It was a curious question because she knows me, and, I think, was surprised to find nothing Jewish in the work. And, of course she was right, their is nothing overtly Jewish about the work. Unlike some of the better American Jewish writers, I do not have an autobiographical need in painting. And I have done no subject matter paintings about a specifically Jewish subject. The closest I get is Freud, in the subject "Family Romance". And that is surely not canonical, but rather the work of an acculturated Jewish scientist.
There is a connection though to Judaism in a family tradition. My father, who was was an inspiration to me, spent 18 years of his life as a believing Orthodox Jew and a Chassid, and had Smicha by the age of 18[smicha is ordination]. He then tried to work a great wonder for all, with no selfish thoughts, through what amounts to religious magic and failed. When he failed he had a break down, both physical and mental, and was hospitalized in the big town, Warsaw, and there read his first secular words in a Jewish newspaper. His mind now refused belief in Judaism, and he was no longer a believing, pious Jew. This radical change affected the lives of his brother and two sisters, especially when he broke off an engagement he had had since he was very young with an equally young girl, because he would not be the scholarly rabbi her parents expected but an unbeliever. Since arranged marriages for the sisters had now become impossible in the small town they lived in, his father ultimately took the four children of his first wife [who had been dead for some years], leaving his second wife at home with her children. When they all eventually reached New York City where the story was not known, his two daughters got married and my father and his younger brother found good jobs [he was in his early twenties by this time], and my grandfather went home. Now that he could not do any good works using religious magic, he became a socialist and rather quickly a union organizer rather than a craft worker in leather [yes, the name is a trade name]. The rest of his life was spent as an idealist working for worker's contracts, integrating by a clever trick, a segregated union in Virginia, and finally spending many years as the representative to the American labor movement of the Histadrut, the Israeli labor movement. He was a hard act to follow. But it was clearly his and my mother's standard that we should all do something useful, not only for ourselves but for other men and women. Originally they had hopes of my becoming a scientist, since as a child I was so interested in natural history[collecting bugs, snakes, salamanders and the like, breeding tropical fish, Etc]. But It was art that excited me and that became the thing I wanted to do. The thing is, that although I am neither very political nor someone who aspires to do Jewish art I do mean to do something useful with my work. I hope that the experience of the works will rub off on the observer and help with his/her psyche by giving it new paths to travel. That is supposed to be true of my landscapes and still lifes as well as my figure paintings. They are about people and their lives. I won't try to specify more, partly because my hopes are not necessarily in the work.Although I am neither a political nor a religious painter. I am soneone who believes that good art can do good.
And that is one of the reasons I am made happy by seeing so much good and striving art among the younger artists.
I will be writing about other things in my next post.
Love,
Gabriel
I wrote some of this in answer to a letter and left it there, but I think I want it to be here, too, because its says something about Bonnard which I had not said earlier.
There is much more to Bonnard's late style and all the rest. Bonnard never left symbolism behind him. As a Nabis he was pledged not to use known symbols including known subjects like a madonna and child. He was also pledged to try to find new sources of poetry in painting.His color is not meant only to report on what some things looked like on a particular day or even a selection from what something looke like, once. It was more important to deal within the sensations and feeling he got from those things, fruit, flowers, landscape, interiror in conjunction, often with a figure. The beginnings of one symbolist composition is the comparison between a woman and a bunch of flowers. That comparison was begun by Courbet where it usually turns up in small or middle sized paintings. Several of the wonders of this Bonnard show include women, flowers, and sometimes women with landscape, or all three. In one painting her reflection can be seen in the mirror behind her, where Bonnard's head may also be seen. The reflected figures, far away, do not have the light and color of the one in the foreground, which may almost be seen through and might be a wanderer arrived from faery. Now, don't get the idea that I have gone sentimental like a bowl of slush. We need some extraordinarily sharp metaphor to make sure that we see the strangenesses in his paintings. There is no such thing as a normative figure in any other painting-think of the one where there is a crouching female figure in the darks between two table tops, which fits completely into the space between and in tone almost disappears in the darks. Can we believe that was an accident? I don't. He is a child of both Gauguin and Redon, always at their best in poetry and construction. There is nothing like a pictorial method in his color, he adds and subtracts for specifically poetic reasons in that motif. And we have to learn to read and almost translate his poetry to know what he is doing and what he could mean to us. [I had a typing error and said -use-but that too is true].
It is also important to remember that he was the one major direct influence on Balthus, whom we all read both formally and in terms of the added meanings in his subjects, Symbolic ones [from a symbolist viewpoint.We need tofollow how it affects his painting practice, as in the several pictures which carry the meaning of the Dream-not the painting with the nude and the dwarf-but the one with the sleeping girl and another wafting by and the meaning of the detailed surrounding patterns and of the rose she is carrying to the sleeper-dreamer. That line of symbolism is not foreign to exactly one of the major artist of the school of Paris-Bonnard.
You know, it took me twenty or thirty years to look seriously at Redon as a model. But he and Gauguin and Seurat and Vuillard are better models for our futures than Matisse or Picasso. most especially not Matisse after 1930 and Picasso after Guernica. That is because his aim in painting was not to simplify and intensify as in Matisse or, at that point in his life, to use his life's discoveries in paintings to show new mastery, rather than new poetry, as in Picasso. Bonnard continues to look for new poetic statements. In his work, even radical reduction of diagonals to parallel vertical lines ends up being part of a poetic whole. There is no coloristic logic in relation to nature. Istead there is the many possible tropes which can be found in nature through intense observation rather than a few simple potentially caricatural color choices. Picasso was 100% wrong when he complained about Bonnard's many small color changes. They were part of the strength of his late work. His strining toward those nuances which enhance and can totally transform our experience. It is a great shame that Matisse decided to do with out them after 1930, and they never were a part of Picasso's attention. The greatness of Picasso's inventions were not available to others of his and the next generation, except as part of Picasso's well known bag of tricks.
What Bonnard did is a pictorial mnethod available to others which should in the hands of others, with different pictorial and life experiences, have different outcomes.
Love,.
Gabriel
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