Gabriel Laderman on Art

Tradition and the Future of Art.

Every artist, especially right now, has to make his/her own tradition. The model of older artists and especially older artists and members of earlier generations, now dead, should be especially valuable.  But each of these artists should be taken for what he/she is, a single example of a useful process, a model for our own action, but not a model primarily because of his/her specific choices, but because of the character of the process used.

Thus, it is clear that not everyone we like used the same models. Dufy and Bonnard certainly did not use the same models, nor did they use the models which Derain used. I would credit all three as wonderful models for us, without any negatives applied to any of the three. These are only three artists of a whole generation of useful ones. Among my friends who spoke of that generation positively, Leland also mentioned Vlaminck, Soutine, Roualt, Derain, Van Dongen, Matisse, Vuillard, Marquet, Modigliani [whose sculpture influenced Ulla],   Giacometti, Morandi [for a number of years], Braque [selectively], Picasso [selectively], Leger [selectively]. Two younger painters were Helion and Balthus.

Leland always spoke positively of Paul Klee. A new jpeg showing a figure of his painted in a manner distinctly out of Klee has been posted on the Midwest Paint Group, and supports this.

This seems to me an unexceptionable list of School of Paris modernists.  Only the surrealists are lacking. Morandi has been added, but Leland did not seem to know Di Pisis, whom I believe to have been the finest among the othe Italian painters roughly of Morandi's generation. For me, the early figurative paintings of Miro also were important, Especially the Farm of 1923 and the small Farm of 1924 at the Guggenheim. He was formally a member of the School of Paris, and his proto-surreal figurative paintings open to inclusion, here.

For Leland and Al Kresch, Derain was the central influence. Leland was also influenced heavily by both Derain and Balthus, and, especially in his drawing, by Giacommetti. Al, by Derain and more recently by Roualt. Both by Soutine, especially the late work.  Ulla was a little different.  She had a very big talent and often did life size standing premier coup self portraits which remind us of Nice Matisse, and the much slower painted Helion and Balthus figures.

I doubt that any of the artists I have mentioned thus far would have a bad word for Renoir. Renoir was a great, rich, full blooded, sensuous artist. A master of figure painting and composition. Unlike Monet, he went right through impressionism and came out the other side with a new passion for ancient Roman fresco painting. He was a paradigmatic neo traditional painter, as well as a modernist. His late figures were influenced by such work as the painting from the Villa of Mysteries, to their and our advantage. One can get right through post impressionism into modern times on his paintings alone. In my eyes even the great Derains look a little shallow and thinned out by comparison. On the other hand Derain was fully aware of Renoir and his value, and did continue him. Nothing else does this to Derain, and he stands out for his own modernist return to tradition, and his own new reconstruction of figurative painting after Fauvism. It was a different but parallel method to synthetic cubism which added in other parts of the tradition of picture making before impressionism. Impressionism, as you know, for the most part, deprived itself of earlier picture making methodology. Monet was the most radical in this sense.

I believe that modernist painting prepared all of us for a potential return. Learning to paint as abstract painters, and from nature again with some share of post Fauve, Derainist, Matissist or Cubist sensibility or the work of Balthus and selected Helions, prepared us to look at great painting from every era.  When I, in my early 20s, just after college, enrolled in courses taught by Richard Offner which emphasized 12th through 14th century Italian painting, and a little beyond for the Sienese, I was prepared to love Duccio, Lorenzetti, Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo, to mention just a few, and to find in them models for my own work.  I didn't need the intercession of any 20th century master.  I already knew and cared for Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat, Renoir, and the following generations, especially Giacometti.  A specific path through 20th century modernism such as the different paths advocated by Louis Finkelstein, Mercedes Matter, Carl Holty [an early Hoffman student], Burgoyne Diller, Leland Bell, Fairfield Porter, or others, seemed unnecessary to me. That is the major difference between me and the students of Leland Bell.

But, at the same time I value Leland and his work, and the path he made through painting particularly highly.  His own understanding of and painting through the formal issues of modernist figure composition seem to me, absolutely without peer in his generation, and on a level with his immediate predecessors, Balthus and Helion. His taste was impeccable, and his position regarding such issues as the use of the past, the rhythm of the brush throughout the canvas, color and value, seem to me exemplary. So he seems a very good model for younger artists. So does his life, in which he struggled with his talent and improved, enriched and fulfilled his work over a period of thirty or forty years.

But, do get it straight. I accept ALL of the fulfilled work done in ANY extension of modernist figuration into the present. Not just my students, or Leland's students, or the people from the Studio school. I believe that you all, should do that too. 

That is one reason why, when I fell on the Midwest Paint Group it excited me so much, and made me so happy.
Love,
Gabriel

East Meets Midwest

I guess I can't wait for other people's comments and will comment myself. There is something fundamentally different from the midwestern scenes and the New York and the East coast scene. In the midewest, nearly everyone who went to art school who continued as a knowledgeable modern figurative painter studied at KCAI. Although Wilbur, Lester and others were important, Stanley seems to have been a requirement for everyone who continued to paint figuratively. So, having almost all of those who are in the midwest and went to school out there as former students at KCAI makes absolute sense. The same is not true in New York. Neither the Studio School nor the Parsons program in which Leland and Resika taught were essential. Other schools where the requisite knowledge could be found were Queens College, Boston University [when James Weeks taught in the graduate program and don't forget, both George Rose and Langdon Quin were teaching undergraduates for a number of the same years], The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, with Larry Day, and some of his students;  Goddard College, with Jim Gahagan, and  Yale to some degree[especially because of Andrew Forge, Lester Johnson's drawing course, and seminar teachers like me].

Despite news from elsewhere, I did a good bit of teaching at the Studio School. I also taught in the Parsons program regularly after Leland got too sick to do so, taught with some regularity at Yale, and full time at Queens where other faculty included Cajori, Rosemary Beck, Louis Finkelstein and Marvin [Buddy] Bileck. All of these schools produced active, exhibiting figurative painters. None from Queens or Phila. are included, and few from BU and elsewhere. Some of those from Parsons have not been exhibiting, whereas several of those not included have reputations based on a dozen shows or more. So, I think the NY grouping is cliquish, but not the Midwest grouping. 

By the way, none of this is a qualitative judgment.  The large standing nude by Donald Beal who is one of the Parsons people unknown to me seems to me work I should know. The torso is particularly well realized, and the painting flows. It looks good across from Bob Brock's landscape. 

Still, I believe that Simon and John have purposefully misrepresented the New York scene to make their friends and special colleagues seem much more important and singular in New York, than they are.  There are people across the board whose work fits, and who have laid their own trail to get where they are, such as Peter Heineman, Richard LaPresti, [with a wonderful recent show, probably his 12th], Barbara Goodstein, John Dubrow.  These are not necessarily friends of mine. I hardly know two of them. I have not always liked Heineman's work.  He is an independent, self made artist. We should encourage more of these.

Love,
Gabriel

East meets Midwest / New Visions of Figurative Painting

This is the title of an exhibition which began first, I believe in Chicago in The Beverly Art Center Chicago, IL [April 14 - May 9, 2010]. It goes to Hoffman-LaChance Contemporary St. Louis, MO [July 9 - August 15 2010]. Then Westbeth Gallery New York, NY [Sept 11 -)ct. 3, 2010] and finally Andrews Gallery College of William and Mary Williamsburg, VA  [Jan. 26 - Feb. 17, 2011]. I was given an early catalog by an exhibitor.  I intend to list the organizers and the exhibitors as they are listed in the catalog and then repeat their names in order with the information which is given about them on their pages. If any one would like to comment on this information I would suggest that they do so at their own or another site. I seem to be unable to deal with that here. But I would love to have the information that they have done so, here and be able to go and look at what they say. Eventually I may get around to saying something about their comments and the show.

[Last page of catalog]

East meets Midwest / New Visions of Figurative Painting

Exhibition Sponsor
Midwest Paint Group
midwest - paint - group.org

This exhibition organized by
Simon Carr        Timothy King
John Goodrich   Megan Williamson

 [From the beginning with information as given]  [the first, third artists etc are NY choices, the second fourth artists Etc. are Midwest choices]

Donald Beal
Provincetown MA
MFA Parsons School of Design
BFA Swain School of Design

Bob Brock
Kansas City / Lee's Summit, MO
MFA Boston University
BFA Kansas City Art Institute

Simon Carr
New York, NY
MFA Parsons aschool of design
BA Goddard College

Glen Cebulash
DaytonOH
MFA American University
BFA Boston University

Henry Finkelstein
New York NY
BFA Cooper Union

Philip Hale
Wilmington OH & Colima de Tibas Costa Rica
BFA Kansas City Art Institute

John Goodrich
New York, NY
New York Studio School
BFA University of California at Santa Barbara

Timothy King
Chicago / Elgin IL
MFA Northern Illinois University
MA University of Tulsa
BFA Kansas City Art Institute

Albert Kresch
Brooklyn, NY
MA New York University
BA Brooklyn College

Lynette Lombard
Chicago and Galesburg IL
MFA Yale University
New York Studio School
BA Goldsmith College, University of London

Mark LaRiviere
New York, NY
New York Studio School
MFA Parsons School
BFA Swain School

Jeremy Long
Ithaca NT [Chicago, IL]
MFA American University
BFA Kansas City Art Institute

Stanley Lewis
Leads, MA
BFA, MFA Yale University
BA, Wesdleyan University

Michael Neary
Hastings, NE [Terre Haute, IN]
MFA from Indian University
BFA, the Kansas City Art Institute

Ying Li
New York, NY
MFA Parsons School of Design
Anhui Teachers University, China

Don Southard
Chicago, IL
MFA Yale University School of Art
BFA The University of Iowa

Ruth Miller
Washington Depot, CT
BA, University of Missouri
Art Student's League

Ron Weaver
Greenview Valley, AZ & New Harbor, ME
BFA, MFA Yale University
MS Indiana University
BS Manchester College

Thadeus Radell
New York, NY
MFA Parsons School of BFA Mercy College of Detroit

Megan Williamson
Chicago, IL
New York Studio School
BA, Knox College.

A true alternative to the avant garde idea.

I am not sure exactly how to start because a lot of this was covered in two beginnings which I can no longer find on the blog.So I will assume they are gone and begin from scratch. First of all While all of us believe that the avant garde rubric under which the art establishment has operated since its pallid acceptance of AE after the fact, is phony, no one has, as yet, spelled out what the differences between the two are and also given an alternative ideology.

First of all the avant garde began with the impressionists, and in my view ended with AE. In every case the artists produced work which the official as well as most of the unoffical art loving and art buying public, the museum directors and their curators, and the critics believed to be terrible art. Sometimes it wasn't even worth writing a word about. Sometimes it was worth a diatribe. Usually a different group of people from those in the official art world were the early collectors, they were offten foreigners to the country in which the art was created and the artists developed. Eventually some large portion of the work was seen to possess virtues which gave it merit beyond all of the establishment work being produced, and it became the art of its period, while the establishment art became the footnotes.

I will not spell out the differences, socially, economically and politically between that scenario and that of the work which is now going by the rubric of Avant Garde as it also garners all of the attention of publically funded gallery spaces, foundations, and of course the critics, collectors and museum people. It is a huge difference. The use of the word can not stand the comparison.

But on some levels, all of these people, who want to buy contemporary art and help define the artistic future, the critics, curators and collectors are people we can be proud of.  They badly want to do something for contemporary art in their own countries and across the world. They mean to do good, but in fact they are doing ill.

First of all let us define the work process of the artists after romanticism began, but  before the rise of the avant garde. Romanticism was the movement which began by calling for new art and new sensibility. It also was a movement which initiated the use of the word "interesting", rather than the word "classical" as a value word of approbation for new work and new motifs. Another of its words was nature as in natural. Natural opposes artificial, thus rendering work more acceptable because of its more "natural" rendering of nature. When the first Constables reached France early in the 19th century, one of the things which so awed the French was Constable's ability to paint rain on the foliage placing the painting just after a shower. His "natural" brushstroke was influenced by William Gilpin's idea of the picturesque "roughness joined to irregularity," and found also in Gilpin "on Prints" as "the artist's sketch, his first statement is preferable to the final work because of its roughness.[this is my approximation]" So, Constable already had new ideas about painting articulated by a well established countryman of his, whose reputation, especially for landscape gardening stretched all over Europe. They led to his larger brush stroke, and his freer work from the motif. Although his work did fit into the establishment of his time, some of his ideas were more acceptabkle to the French than the English. He became a member of the Royal Academy with the support of the genre painter Charles Robert Leslie, also his biographer.

A number of the other  radicals, on the French side of the channel, Delacroix, Gericault, Corot and Courbet. had some new strategies for self development. Between the four of them there was without doubt many fewer years of study at the Academy than among an equal group of the more conservative painters of their time. Neither Courbet nor Corot had recognized teachers for most of their study years. Courbet never had one. Both Gericault and Delacroix were known to have produced hundreds of painted studies of the model in teacherless classes, and studies from the old masters in the Louvre, also the favorite place for study for both Courbet and Corot. They taught themselves, but in the context of great renaissance and baroque art. When they finally began to exhibit, the work in each case was radical including both landscape painting directly from nature, and carrying into larger paintings many of the qualities of the sketch. Even though Corot's sketches were similar to those of classicizing landscape painters of his and the previous geneation, it was work which none of the classicists would ever show. Also he was working towards a complete painting, therefore his sketches use the pictorial devices for a fully developed painting, but within sketch size and paint application.  When they finally became well known it became clear that much of their quality was the result of a radical restatement of baroque and late renaissance models, French, Italian, Flemish and Dutch. Their chosen models were often not the same paintings by their sources to which the academics gravitated. Nor were all of them relating particularly well to the same pictures. Their choices were idiosyncratic. Thus it would be fair to say that, while they were each looking for models for their own future work, the combination of their art culture [what they looked at and what it meant to them] and their idiosyncratic desires for themselves as artists within the great tradition, bore the largest responsibility for how their work turned out.

Now, most of the artists whose work I respond to the most of my generation and  younger can be called  post abstract painters. This is true of all of the Jane Street GAllery members [Kresch, Bell, Blaine, Matthiasdotter, Rothschild]. It is also true of Larry Day, Natalie Charkow[a sculptor], George Rose, and a little younger, Stanley Lewis, Richard Chiriani, Richard LaPresti, Stanley Friedman and Barbara Goodstein [a sculptor]. It is also true of the members of the Midwest Paint Group and many of the members of the Bowery GAllery, some of whom were students of Leland. What that means is that the opening to figuration which they followed included a sense of the abstract construction of the forms and colors and their rhythm in light and space. This kind of construction was not only found in abstract art, but in the first 40 years of the 20th century it was found in figurative painting by the master painters of the school of Paris.

Now, what is my alternative to the theory of the present and future belonging to the avant garde?

Clearly, the model of pre Avant Garde procedures for development are a much better model for us now and in the future. These include, as of most importance, knowing your own pictorial culture, studying it intently and with the desire to learn what makes it make pictorial sense. A painting like Courbet's Les Demoiselles a  bord de la Seine which is full of non perspectival ways of describing both space and form is a development out of much earlier work where these methods were mixed with perspective. His radicality develops out of the existing pictorial tradition. Similarly, to begin with the degree of quality blended with our own vitality in our brush stroke and and its rhythmic flow, we need time studying the masters who already had it. But it seems to me that from such a process blending work from the masters and from the motif, the most intense and full future may come.

At this moment with so much abstract art full of cliches, and even worse being made by artists who have never even  heard of the need for painting to express, through its actions, the subject. We must realize that this is one of the two elements which must remain paramount in our work. The other is our full involvement in the quality of the painting of our motif.  This will be also basic to the fulfilled quality in our work. It seems to me that with this renewed contact and achievement within nature, we should become truly fine artists. But we must have the highest possible standards for a completed work, and keep it up there and try always for more, or the work will not justify a new success for us.

We should also realize that this is an alternative to the Avant Garde ideal which is behind all the nonsense covering so many establishment walls. Is it possible to be an abstract painter, today? It is, but if the artist is so involved with his own pictorial verities to ignore the pressure to become an eccentric, and his work is ultimately independent of his original sources, without negating their value. Such artists are probably rarer even  than we are.  And their process more restricted, limited by all of the success images on gallery walls.
If this what they are, they  will deserve their success.

Love,
Gabriel

Contemporary Art and the Tradition of Painting.

> I must admit to reading and frequently enjoying pieces in the New

> Yorker. Nothing about art, of course. Those major articles are

> usually about really dreadful artists whose work has begun to sell

> in quantity and at high prices. Several of them in recent months

> were figurative artists. Sad to say, always figurative artists who

> are completely unknowledgeable about the traditions of picture

> making which we all continue to develop.

>

> A recent issue had a piece on a fairly young Chinese movie director

> who came from provincial family so out of it that it was an

> adventure to ride his bicycle into the countryside where he

> could see a railroad train going by. Eventually through

> persistence, sheer cussedness and talent, he got into their big

> film school in Beijing.When he was ready he began to make films

> without any approval and won a prize in Hong Kong. Then he went

> through the program and made some docudramas mixing real and made

> up footage which featured problems in the lives of ordinary

> Chinese. Still winning prizes, the government finally cracked down

> and he was told he could make no more films. He was not allowed to

> buy film or use their equipment. With the help of friends he did it

> all. Then he sent the film out to Cannes where it won the

> festival's big prize, but was still unable to show it in China. He

> was already making compromise films and no longer corresponded to

> the ideal of the as yet unsuccessful younger film makers. But his

> films did continue to some degree dealing with issues in China. So

> he did it again and won the Venice biennale. Now he has made a lot

> of money from overseas showings, and he and the government are

> comporomising as to what he can film for showing in China, and then

> overseas. Sorry, the magazine is nowhere to be found, so I can give

> you no names. But, I think his story which is treated as a sort of

> miraculous fable, is nothing by comparison with what you, and

> people like you, face. I put myself in that same bag.

>

> I will explain. One of the things he had going for him was that he

> managed to see many foreign films while he was in Beijing. The work

> of people he felt especially drawn to, especially some French

> directors of decades ago, taught him a lot about film making. Also,

> outside of China, even in Hong Kong, European and American standards

> were fully engaged. He not only had examples, but ideologies. He

> certainly did not transgress on the ideologies of the world outside

> China. In sum, he had political problems with his government, but

> at this moment of Chinese desire to encroach on the world stage and

> challenge that world economically and in many other ways, he was

> good news.

>

> Well, what about us.?

>

> There is no ideology as constructed by a figure outside of our art

> world which justifies and ratifies our mutual work and its

> character. The reigning ideal is that of the Avant Garde. All of

> the recent headliners in the art world subscribe to it. First, work

> should contravene existing artistic truths and be objectionable to

> even, and especially, the last batch of artists who had made it.

> This portion of what true avant garde artists had done from the

> 1870s through 1950 has been held sacrosanct.  However the other

> half of the equation has not remained operative. Each of these

> Avant Gardes questioned the existing order of the art world and

> proposed a quite different one. They were usually relatively young

> and worked in, until then, obscure styles. Their work was picked up

> by collectors and critics very slowly, while the official art world

> of academics, peintres pompiers like Bouguereau, Cabanel, and

> Gerome and their followers held the center of the three ring 

> circus. Some years ago it would have been difficult to see the

> Pompier works anywhere. Now they are all on view in the Grande

> Gallerie of the Met, together with other equally bad somewhat later

> work of the same ilk. I approve of this as long as  we know who and

> what they are. They represented the dying breed of conventional

> picture makers who painted bourgeouis subjects.However, today,

> success in the art world by pseudo avant gardistes means instant

> success in the big moneyed part of the art world. New museums of

> art which feature only post World War II artists have sprung up in

> places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston.A new

> building has been added to the Tate housing also their modern

> collection as well as the rooms for contemporary  art. Poets,

> novelists, Philosophers, Art Historians and Art Critics vie with

> each other in endorsing various stripes of the new pseudo avant

> garde. At leat, a newly successful artist must be sufficiently

> eccentric to rate their approval.  Eccentricity as  well, something

> horrifying to the ordinary citizen who is not a part of the art

> buying public, is a useful positive part of an artist's portfolio.

> Mayor Guiliani did well by the Saatchi artists at the Brooklyn

> Museum some years ago. The elephant dung is a laughable ploy which

> neither does any good or any harm, pictorially to the work in

> question, but scandalizes religious Catholics. Unlike the Muslims,

> no Fatwa directed at him, but the anger and outrage helped him

> make stardom with not particularly distinguished work. His case is

> the one, because of the histrionics, which I remember most clearly.

>

> The post-Duchampian starting point for so much which is now en

> vogue has changed the way the art world establishment looks at

> everything. Duchamp spent most of his life in New York playing

> chess, talking and writing about art a little with his friends like

> Katherine Dreier. Essentially Duchamp was a retired artist. He had

> had a short career and a long life after it, which has now been

> reinterpeted as not a retirement at all,but the logical end to his

> years of questioning art with his readymades. The final act would

> be to stop producing work, and taught us a fitting end to his

> career.. When he found out that a new part of the art world was

> invoking his name he was thunderstruck. He returned to work, first

> with multiples and then with his last work, now housed behind a

> glass window at the Philadelphia museum. He was now held to be the

> ideological source of a series of avant garde movements. His

> attitude towards the art object, essentially against the production

> of art, but rather the naming of choices out of the ordinary world

> as art and giving them a new context on the wall, was now thought

> to be the substitute for all other artistic activities. His friend 

> and co-founder of the Parisian Dada movemnt, Picabia, spent his

> last years doing painted sendups of academic Spanish brushstroke

> academic art. Very few knew that, certainly not Eilshemius who

> Duchamp called perhaps the best American artist on the strength of

> a very bad Eilshemius painting which he read as he did Picabia's

> work. That was doubly unfortunate, for, while Eilshemius did more

> than his share of clunkers, much of his work is fresh, full formed

> and full. His preference for that Eilshemius does not follow from

> what is taken to be his newly constructed idea of what art is all

> about. It flows from a hatred for traditional painting, even in a

> modernist guise.  A real follower of Duchamp would have followed

> his last, possibly only, great work: "The Bird Stripped Bare By

> Her Own Batchelors, Even"  sometimes called "the large glass". But

> none of his recent followers are interested in that. The late

> combines are all that matter.

>

> What would an ideology that supports us look like?

>

> First of all it would not be avant garde oriented. It is surely

> true that we are not trying to produce art which contravenes

> previously held views of what art is about except for that of the

> anti art Pseudo Avant Garde view.

>

> So what are alternatives to that view? In the period just before

> the success of the Avant Garde [Impressionists, the first true

> avant garde] the reigning style was that of the Academy and/or

> Pompier painting. Those artists controlled their art world. In

> Paris they gave out public mural commissions and public sculpture

> commissions from the government. and painting and sculpture prizes

> for work in the annual salon. Both of these could lead to more of

> the same and to private commissions. We are not in that position

> and we do not want to be seen as a conservative group, because we

> are not one. we do not believe that we present a new sensibility

> which supercedes all the avant gardes to become another one.

>

> Now, why do people like to look at landscape painting?  Because the

> landscape represented carry emotional qualities which speak to

> them. This was the essence of Burke's original idea of the Sublime

> and the Beautiful. Compositions fulfilling his requirements are

> found in work by Courbet, Corot and Constable, and, in fact, in all

> the Barbizon School painters. With less quality pictorially, they

> can also be found in 19th century American painters,  like the

> members of the Hudson River School, perhaps most clearly in Kensett

> and Innes. It is also true of some Ryders, but Ryder also deals

> with romantic notions such as overcoming hostile and dangerous

> nature. Are landscape painters still working out of Burke? Of

> course they are. There also have been attempts to identify and use

> other tropes and metaphors in landscape painting? A few as in some

> of Balthus' landscapes which direct our minds back to the neo

> classicism of Poussin and Claude Lorrain, but with something

> unusual and perhaps obsessional thrown in which is clearly a 20th

> century. An example would be the huge fruit in his painting of a

> harvest scene.

>

> We are living in a very strange period artistically, and now I mean

> it in positive terms.. We can look at more of what was produced as

> art than any people on earth before our time. And we have been

> taught by the anthropologists to look at art from another culture

> in space or in time or both in terms of the values of that culture

> itself, rather than to superimpose our art values onto them. We

> accept not only the tradition of high art as the 19th century

> artists thought and painted it, but also accept the tastes of 

> those, back then reconstructing the art world of the past in

> Europe. So that, of course we look at the pre Raphaelites, meaning

> here the Italian artists who came before Raphael. Most of us love

> not only the early renaissance but both Florentine radicals of the

> Gothic period and the more conservative and story telling Sienese

> school, as well as their finest retardetaire Sienese continuation

> in Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo. But we go backward before the

> father and son Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano, to enjoy the 11th and

> 12th century Italian religious sculpture and painting. We also

> enjoy the ancient work of the Romans in mural painting, and Greek

> painting wherever we can find it, as well as their sculpture. Bear

> with me I go over the catalog a bit more: That is where 19th

> century artists would stop. Sure the museums were robbing Egypt and

> the Near East blind. But nothing outside Ancient Greek art was

> considered great art. They were considered historical curiosities. But

> not any more. Ancient Greek, Persian, Assyrian, Etruscan and Indian

> sculpture are all considered masterpieces which artists

> particularly enjoy. But, of course we don't stop there. We are all

> wild about prehistoric cave painting. Now this list is mostly

> European. But do remember the influence of Japanese and Chinese art

> near the end of the nineteenth century. If anything many of us love

> that work more than its European copyists did in the late 19th century.

>

> Now we have hit an interesting point. The one great art tradition

> which, except for some mural paintings in caves, had a completely

> different aesthetic than that of the West is the painting of China.

> Insofar they took part in that tradition, this is also true of both

> Korean and Japanese art. I am not going to try to define Chinese

> construction methodologies as they were in Sung since there is a

> great essay by a great practitioner which does it so much better

> than I could. It is in "the Essay on Landscape Painting" by the

> great Sung master Kuo Hsi, which was first translated some 90

> years ago for "The Wisdom of the East" series.

>

> Chinese landscape painting rather quickly became an abstract

> tradition which was judged by complex artistic standards. Artists

> learned how to paint by working from examples of master paintings.

> Their copies after a while were not only copies but also in their

> own hands. This was a guide line for younger artists to follow.

> After the Mongol conquest, the first generation of Yuan painters

> included a group who did something strange. They began to paint

> directly from nature and to make up new ways of dealing with space

> in a more naturalistic way. For the future of all these artists the

> most influential became Ni Tsan. While he did show much more clearly

> how the space developed, he did so with an idiosyncratic dotted

> brush mark and less emphasis on the differences between different

> kinds of foliage in earlier painting. Another one of those artists

> was Mi Fei, whose work is related to Ni Tsan's in several ways, but

> without the dotted stroke. The painter Huang Kung Wang had a lesser

> reputation, although a big one with landscape painters themselves.

> For that reason the large traveling show from the Taipei museum

> which was shown at the Met a few years ago, while it had relatively

> little of the other artists, had a larege and important scroll by

> Huang Kung Wang, the first I had ever seen in the flesh. He, it

> turns out, was looking at nature while he painted and there is

> something akin to the Cezannist method at work in his paintings,

> although I am still not so sure and cannot generalize from one view.

> At any rate the looked nothing much like great Sung painting.

>

> From the late Sung and perhaps even more in the Ming Restoration,

> artists whom the Chinese most prize often, after working through

> free copies of the best work of earlier masters available to them

> did something new. They looked around at whatever paintings they

> could find by other artists, not members of the reigning school,

> not major influences on them. They looked at not only Sung and Yuan

> artist but as far back as Tang and 6 dynasties art. Then their own

> style was a variation which included the influence of artists and

> ideas which heretofore had not been part of the living Chinese

> culture of art. History had become even more open and nurturing of

> new work by contemporary artists, some of whom have since been

> regarded as masters.

>

> This was not a very radical departure from past Chinese practice.

> But the historicism, and learning to paint by making copies had now

> been ideologically supplemented by looking for new artistic

> positions through this study. And the study of artists who were not

> an important part of the canon already was now crucial. The choices

> also told about the artist doing the choosing and his predilections

> as well as what was known or seen in the works of his new model.

>

> I believe that in many ways we have become as old a culture as the

> Chinese were in the thirteenth century when Mongol rule was

> established over all of China. I mean that we have an art history

> which goes back to the 4th century BC in Greece from the viewpoint

> of figures from the renaissance on, so at least 700 or 800 years.

> And we have also since at least the middle of the twentieth century

> loved the works of artists perhaps another thousand years back.

> And, of course we feel romantically connected with ancient

> cave painting, too. And then there is the 20th century.

>

> The artists of the 20th century as a group were the most radical of

> any time and place. They were the most diverse and artists as

> different as Balthus and Klee, who, for example, inspire me. Why should

> we not build in historical inspiration  into an alternate path for

> us all? We are not inspired by the works of the pseudo avant garde,

> which was the Avant Garde's role through say 1963. Leland Bell

> claimed to be a direct artistic descendant of Derain, Soutine, Roualt,

> Marquet, Helion and Giacometti and Balthus. His early, abstract

> work seems to me quite influenced by Hans Arp, too. As a figurative

> painter he looked for and found a line in twentieth century

> painting which he could climb on to. While he was not personally

> influenced by Derain's most radical theory of painting facteur, he

> knew about it, too, and spread the news. Derain said that an artist

> should cultivate his idiosyncratic stroke, or hand mark, but

> develop his works in this way. He should find a motif and then

> think of how it could be painted, for example a haying scene, and

> then paint it through the eyes of a local bar for use as a shop

> sign. As you know Balthus did try that once in his painting for a

> restaurant on the Cote D'Azur. Thinking of it with the crucial

> knowledge about Derain's idea changes it a lot in my mind. To the

> best of my recollection, though I cannot think of a painting of

> that sort by Leland. Leland did one thing I don't approve of,

> though. Having made his decisions and  created a historical line

> for himself, he did not suggest that his students do likewise, but

> he told them to do as he did. If this is not true, it does seem to

> be true of most of his students from Parsons to whom I have spoken.

>

> On the other hand Leland's personal historicism seems to have

> worked very well for him. He not only became a great teacher, but

> also a great painter. I found his show in Washington a revelation,

> especially the last several rooms of the most recent work. The same

> was true of the paintings he did after that show. I know I am not

> alone in thinking this.

>

> But my idea for a new kind of painting which could be worth

> developing over the centuries is that we should look for art that

> speaks to us which has not particularly influenced artists in the

> last hundred years or so, but not solely that art. We should

> already be practitioners of the best pictorial traditions in the

> last century. We should start out our personal journey with as

> strong a craft of picture making as we can get. Then, and only

> then, will we be ready to find inspiration in a different past

> which we will make out own.

>

> In my case an important part of my past is Sienese painting. I

> discovered it in an art history class of Richard Offner's at the

> Institute of Fine Arts in 1953. I have had Paul Klee as a model

> for thinking out a painting from early on and he probably helped me

> to get to Redon. Marquet and Dufy as models I probably owe to

> Leland. The late Braque to a retrospective I saw at MOMA when I was

> a kid. I couldn't understand where his color was coming from and it

> kept me thinking of him ever since. All of the light making

> Venetians got me. Not just Titian and Giorgione but also the

> Bellinis and Carpaccio. In Japan, the Shijo school primarily a late

> 18th and nineteenth century group who painted from nature in

> natural color with the big brush they got from the Chinese. Does

> all of this come together? I hope so, but I am stuck with it. It

> affects my touch, my compositions, and my color. I don't recommend

> it for anyone else. I do recommend in cultivating your own taste

> and seeing it in your work. There still is too much AE influenced

> work, too much out of the old Studio School stereotyped work with

> no personal taste taking part in the creation of the viewpoint, but

> merely a school style. Too many of the Ex Studio School artists

> show love for exactly the same works loved by the paradigmatic

> teachers there, and nothing else. One of the really good things

> which came out of the old Studio School was a strong sense of

> picture making which is essential for any artist's future growth.

> At the time, it was one of only a very few places where that could

> be gotten and I happily sent students there from Queens and

> elsewhere, and happily taught their students as well. But as long

> as the only path was towards the avant garde, those students have

> not done very well. It is necessary to provide yourself with the

> tools to get to a personal vision. Working without history is a

> kind of visual starvation. And even the most surreal artists like

> the paintings of Di Chirico from the Scuola Metafisica period

> -which I heard Leland call beautiful several times, at least

> sometimes in public, can be and often are both full of well

> understood picture painting as well as visual oddness making us

> experience a sense of loneliness and questioned space more

> powerful than Hopper's work at its best. This last century is full

> of great work which is capable of giving the artist a new

> direction. After all, most of it is now part of history and not

> part of our current art world. And then going back to the

> nineteenth century can be both a jump and an inspiration. Courbet

> was one of Balthus' heroes and models, together with Piero della

> Francesca and Poussin. In his hands it did not go to eccentricity

> but to more fully formed and poetic work.

>

> Let me hear how you feel about all of this.  I am trying to chart

> the future, always dangerous to do from the past.

Love,
Gabriel

Learning From My Show and Your Response.

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

More on Bonnard.

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
+

Caravaggio and Photography.

Here is a new story about Caravaggio and photography and my reply from a Librarians group.

At 07:05 PM 3/11/2009, you wrote:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/4968509/Caravaggio-used-photography-to-create-dramatic-masterpieces.html

Every few years another scholar comes out with a theory that some artist used photography or the close equivalent in his work. Some of the candidates to date, besides Caravaggio are Vermeer,  Karel Fabritius [who is sometimes also Vermeer's teacher], and Leonardo. There always is some evidence. Both Karel Fabritius and Vermeer were affected by the contemporary Dutch craze for the perspective box, Fabritius even designed at least one. Leonardo certainly made drawings and diagrams which are suspicious. Caravaggio has no extant preparatory drawings, except those for a lost painting underneath one of his others. There are two major problems. If any of these men had such a secret, it died with him.  How could Caravaggio have made such a major discovery, and none of his devoted following ever got a glimpse of it? For many years all over the European continent the Caravaggieschi either held sway, or competed for the prize. If there was some high road to it, would all of them have forfeited the chance and still worked it out by time honored, slow and thus conservative, pictorial techniques?

And, there is another problem. Miraculous as photography still looks to us, the generation of artists who had recourse to it in the 19th century, soon found that there were new problems using photography. The artist had to be very careful and wary of the perspectival distortions which could render the images incredible. For example in a series of paintings painted, not from life, but from photographs from life, Eakins produced a series of paintings full of these distortions. When drawing or painting from the model, though, he regularly eschewed them in favor of controlled spatial development.

A recent American painter, Leland Bell [he died in 1991] was very open to so much of the great tradition in art including the neoclassizing contemporaries of Caravaggio, Claude Lorrain and Poussin. He also adored the LeNain brothers who were influenced in some measure by Caravaggio. But for Caravaggio and his truest followers, Bell had the back of his hand. Even without photography, he felt that they gave too much of their concern to the appearance of light and shadow in perspective, and insufficient thought to those same shapes as forms in space. The attempt to imitate nature in all her details without also using the whole mind, refined taste, and connection of the artist through the art he had imbibed as well, doomed those artists to ignominious failure in his eyes.

No artistic technique by itself ever created greatness. Great apparent originality and the greatest apparent realism to date were not enough. Claude and Poussin were improbable masters. First of all they weren't Italian. There had never been a great French artist in terms which the Italians accepted. Both French artists studied with members of the school of Annibale Carracci, the Bolognese neo-classicists. Their way out of the ambiguities and extravagances of late mannerism was to go back to the more painterly and orderly forming of the Venetian high renaissance of Titian and Giorgone. Although Carracci was uneven, as were his brothers and their students, somehow their example settled into Claude and Poussin whose work was both consistently spatially logical and orderly, and who often aimed for the sense that these were arcadian groves, hills and lakes were where they spent their time, and wanted to be there even more. The sense of  "et in Arcadia  ego," was all over their work. Such work could not be corrupted by over realism, as among the Carravaggisti nor with spatial distortion and peculiarity, as in the mannerists.

They and other classicising French painters brought the Venetian renaissance to France, where it has stayed ever since. In the last century we called it "School of Paris."

My final point is that it really doesn't matter much whether Caravaggio used photos or not. It was the Bolognese, who had no tricks at all, who formed the future of European painting by reviving and continuing with the Venetians, who painted with wonderful passages which strayed through the forms, and fulfilled their space.

Best wishes,
Gabriel

Lennart Anderson's show and then to the Met for Bonnard.

Lennart, in his 80's and now being adjudged partially blind [he can only see with peripheral vision] has a show up of recent work, a block or so from the Met. The show is made up of paintings of the figure and of still life. The largest painting by far is an Arcadian scene with two nudes in it. The famale nude is in the foreground and there is a male nude in the near distance. He has been painting quite large Arcadian paintings for many years. This one is of modest size, it is probably about 5 feet by 6 feet. It is a misty day. There is more mist between us and the male figure, but we can feel it flowing over all the forms. Despite his visual limitations, this painting feels like he truly was in Arcadia himself. It is a wonderful part of an artist's late work.  Old art books used to be much involved in the artist's late style, as in Titian, for example. The looseness, and uninhibited assurance, which we see in Titian, in his paintings which free the passages from being subordinate to the forms which they describe are legendary. Well, with all his visual problems, I think Lennart has a great late style.

The show was not huge and the Met stays open until 8 on Saturday, so we went to see the Bonnard show.  I went back and saw it again roday. The show concentrated on interiors, often with a figure or two in them. Nothing was painted befure the 1930s and the works continue into the 1940s close up to the year of his death at 80.

At a panel discussion about the last NY Bonnard show, held at the MOMA, Jack Flam said that he taught 20th century art without mentioning or showing Bonnard's work. At that panel he did opine that he would rethink his options. He has an essay in this catalog. Actually, there were 2 rooms in the last Bonnard show which showed the same kind and quality of work as that in this show. There was a room full of the bathtub paintings, and a series of interiors with a figure up close overlapping a figure in the distance. Bonnard traveled a different path from both Matisse and PIcasso. His late work corresponds to late work of Dufy and Braque. All three artists painted large interiors during the last years. All of them spend a long time on some of those paintings, many years on each by Dufy, and solid months for Braque.The work is not exactly like much of each artist's other work. They each set themselves very serious and difficult problems. The work, in each case is their best.

Bonnard was neither a fauve nor a cubist. As one of the Nabis [prophets in Hebrew] he was a symbolist, self directed at finding newly poetic subjects and in painting them to achieve further metaphoric expression in color, composition and paint handling. Although his color can be very bright and his composition very much getting into full space from a taut picture plane, his form solving is never the reason for the work. Everything he does is meant to enrich our associations with the subject of the painting. This subject is often an interior with a still life in it and a figure or two.  There is no doctrinaire espousal of any compositional or coloristic program. These both change as they can increase the tropes we experience in the painting. Women are contrasted and compared with flowers. The flowers glow, and sometimed the women trump the flowers, doing more than glow. A figure in the foreground may have no large contrasts, and may remain invisible until we see a much more normatively contrasting small figure behind it in the middle distance. Then its rich associative nature becomes clear, if only temporarily as anothe element of surprise and feeling becomes unveiled. Their is multiple association between the forms, landscape, sitll life, figure, table covered with food, in which each element is compared with, or complements another.  The associations differ radically from one painting to another. Even apparently similar paintings in subject matter and size eventually show us that the connecting consequences of his pictorial process is to show us radically contrasting development and forming.

In his early work, as seen in the show at the Met some years ago, of large scale early work by the Nabis, he is perhaps the member of the group who shows the least talent. He was no wunderkind. As the years went by his work became more and more wonderfuland the work of his last twenty years was probably his best work. 

There was a small room filled with his studies for paintings. Many small scale with pencil only, and others with added color and paint. These are usually wonderful despite their dimunitive size. They are true working drawings. There is no attempt to knock us dead. It is work for his own edification. He gets it together and then he paints the hell out of it.

While he is no obvious virtuoso he does do something which neither of the two most famous of the school of Paris painters, Matisse and Picasso were involved with in their late work. Besides coming to terms with large spaces and forms expressing the subject and its relation to the canvas, quite radical picture plane oriented work, at times, he also means to have a way of reading the paintings in small takes. These are arrived at through the develpment of passages within the large forms which would otherwise verge on abstraction. These passages are exactly what Picasso despised. He thought of them as the second and third and so on guesses of an artist unwilling to come to terms with the one right color which should be in that form-and only that color.  In fact, Bonnard  purposefully worked out those passages to produce a work which could last longer for the viewer and attract him to the poetry contained in the work. These symbolist druthers seemed not merely bad but useless to Picasso.

Given the hard headed modernist spatial construction of so many of his later works, his later work can also be seen as work which comes historically after both Picasso and Matisse, and upholds the flag for slow painting,  as  a reconstructed space, unlike their work in that it is filled with passages of pictorial incident which add to and fulfill the composition.

I think that we will need to be revisiting some of the other members of his generation in their late work, such as those already mentioned, Dufy and Braque, at leastVuillard, late Soutine, and another, and comprehensive look at Derain. There were, of course other Fauves and Cubists whom we have not seen recently, like Leger and Gris.

Love,
Gabriel

Walter Strach Recent Paintings A Landscape Vernacular, -at the Bowery Gallery

I think that Walter Strach is a very fine painter. I must have seen ten shows of his work by now. This is very much the best one. But they were all a pleasure and have been getting better in small increments every time. Among the teachers he had at Pratt and Queens College were Mercedes Matter, Charles Cajori and Louis Finkelstein, who worked with him at Queens. Although Cajori also taught at Queens, Walter knew him from Pratt where he taught figure drawing. With that background there is no way he could have missed understanding modernist painting and its abstract structure. In this show, for example one of the paintings is long and thin, measuring 24 x 66, it is titled, Red Barn in the Middle. If you are someone who understands piocture making, that might be a difficult shape, since you want your viewer's eye to travel over the surface many times in many ways exploring the space which results. For a modernist painter, such a shape is a little less daunting than for some one of an earlier generation. That is because of the conceptualization which grew out of cubism and Cezanne of the paintings pictorial axes and their use to develop and control the space of the work. In this painting and the others in this shape, Strach has worked with that modern understanding and has visually, in his painting mind, divided the paintings into three irregular parts with two vertical axes, in order to fulfill that need.

Most of his shows have been in water base painting media like Gouache and Tempera, as is this show. He has been, for many years a virtuoso exponent of these media. One of the things in this show that is different from his past exhibited work is that wherever it was possible, and it helped intensify the feeling of the motif, he has let his first brushstrokes stand, without modification. These moments are often breathtakingly clear, clean and beautiful.

I have, in front of me two color images of the paintings on post cards used to notify us about the show. I am sorry to say  that they flatten out the color and generalize the paintings. One of them, which shows a "Sous Bois" composition from a little bit outside, does give a better idea of the original. The gray horizontal shadows in the snow at the bottom of the canvas are some of those first takes which he did not alter. Even in this poor card, they look electric.

The thing about Walter which does not fit into conventional modernism as it now is practiced, is that with all his sensitvity to modernisms pictorial issues, he has a desire for the big unfettered landscape of the great 19th century masters like Courbet and Corot. But he cannot imitate them. His form sense is different from theirs, although I do think he does things often in the spirit of Courbet. Some of his new work also reminds me of Derain's brushstroke Corot's of the 1920s, too. But if he had a path into landscape painting I could niot clearly characterize it as coming out of any specific Fauve or Cubist painters. I think that his eye was sophisticated by cubist and fauve work. Like all of us, he knows the quality of Nice Matisse, Marquet, Dufy, Roualt and Derain. But not one specific artist brought him to himself.

There is something very original about his slant on painting. In the past I can only think of still life painters who worked with a limited number of objects on a relatively consistent setting like Chardin, Zurbaran, and in the twentieth century, Braque, Morandi and Dufy[Dufy, rather for his late studio interiors, each of which took him years]. Strach paints only at one site. It is a house and barn on a property which hs wife bought many years ago, I think before they married. It is the only place he has painted for some years. This is treating a piece of the outdoors like a studio set up, in some ways, and it is another reminder that he is still with us as a modernist making up his own art as he goes along while honoring the masters of the past, including the twentieth century, but he still has to make it on his own, and make and break new rules which they never laid down.

Despite his quality and pertinacity, I believe that Walter has never been reviewed by any New York critic. If the Sun had not folded, he might have had a review this time, but it did fold. Many years ago, one of my formulations was that perhaps in the future instead of the avant garde paradigm in which we continually find the great art in the new, we might find it in something which seems unfashionable and not new, at first glance, which someone has pursued over time. I think many people, not necessarily those with bad eyes, walk into the galley and see what seem to them conventional and boring landscapes, and they walk right out. Over the years that must have happened with critics, too. Well, one of the things which Strach's show tells us, is that we deserve a better audience, and better critics, too.