I can remember panel discussions as well as private conversations in the period 1950-1980 during which the point was made that there were various paths to painting, good painting, "now". One group-most of them associated with the New York Studio School at that time, seemed to feel that the only way to get to good figurative painting now was through Cezanne, after which there were choices from among 20th century radicals. Other people thought it was possible to get there through Seurat, especially the Seurat of the landscape paintings [from ten by fourteen inches to about three feet in the longer direction]. Once Leland Bell began teaching at the NY SS, his version was through Renoir into Derain. Clearly some abstract painters came through very late Monet,-the Nympheas.
Somewhere in these pages I take a contrary view. Once we have accepted the idea that AE with its series of ideations, one per artist, and each different, opened the door to any historical model, and did not require an earlier 20th century model to lie in between the potentially very old or even ancient works and the artist, just one acceptable historical source looked silly. Leland and Ulla felt that they needed some kind of continuity with the recent past to justify their work. The proximate influence on the whole Jane Street group was the meeting with Jean Helion, just as he was transferring his allegiances from abstraction to modernist figuration. They followed his lead, and in all of them the first figurative paintings they did showed his influence and the influence of such artists as Roualt, Leger, Derain, Balthus, Vlaminck, Dufy, Marquet, Matisse, Ozenfant and others who were followers of post Cubist and Fauve styles.
But the next generation of serious figurative painters did not necessarily follow the same model.
In my own case, I know that I was overjoyed by the detailed discovery of European ancient, Romanesque and Gothic wall painting, and the early renaissance figures who came out of it. I did not feel that I needed a specific late 19th century or early 20th century master to serve as my interlocutor to guide me through to those earlier artists. If, for example, my work looked like the work of a Gothic painter, or early renaissance master, because I used some of their conventions in a specific painting, as long as the forming was congruent with the subject, as was true in the work of good Gothic and early renaissance artists, I would have been satisfied. Our entry into a new zeitgeist which is ahistorical and lacking in "Progressive" moves, like avant garde style art confirmed my views.
If we are not controlled by an avant garde kind of thinking, who is to say which work and which style is "Progressive" and which is "Academic, or "Pompier?" I think that the subject needed this very short essay because I have been hearing of people who think that some wonderful artists are old fashioned, while they themselves are up there and with it. I have also heard that one of the people whose name is mentioned as an academic is Walter Strach.
Walter Strach, who is a friend of mine and a former pupil was most influenced while he got his MFA at Queens College by Louis Finkelstein and not by me. He had been my student at Pratt Institute, where I thought very highly of him. Unlike the work of an academic, though, no one gave him his style[and it certainly wasn't me]. Through Pratt, where his pictorial choices were fought against by the chairman of his department, who assigned teachers to his class who did believe in the avant garde and who did see most of the students as various kinds of conservatives or academics, he was one of the odd men furthest out. His work was denigrated because he was not a member of the pseudo avant garde which was already functioning in the middle and late 1960s, when he was an undergraduate. While I think that labeling was unfortunate because it undervalued his intelligence and his choices as an artist, it was more accurate for pseudo avant gardistes to find him wanting than for members of the same group of post abstract painters, now working figuratively, to label him an academic by comparison with themselves. For post abstract figurative painters to believe that one style or one group of styles is the high style for new, serious art, and other styles are old fashioned and contemptible is to make a terrible mistake.
Although my position is [and was] very different from both that of Leland Bell and Al Kresch in the mid 1960s, I celebrated their taste and their artistic goals in an article I wrote for Art Forum called "Expressionism Eccentric and Concentric." And published a short note then, crediting them for many of the opinions I expressed. At the time, my work was even more different from theirs than it is today.
I also have felt friendly to all of the Jane Street artists and their work from then to now.
There is no reason to make up a party line and exclude serious and worthwhile people from the party because of their painting style. We should be able to recognize quality where ever it shows up. One further place where it is to be found is in the work of serious, intelligent and independent abstract artists. Not merely the artists of the past, but living artists, too.
I am not interested in "outing" any of the people who look at work with school conscious, partisan eyes, I want to shame them into rethinking their positions, because I also like them and their work and expect to continue doing so.
It is important to realize that in this time of an establishment which supports a fake avant garde position, and artists, dealers and collectors all of whom celebrate it, that serious independents who reject that establishment not try to look for reasons to put down their fellow independents, and their colleagues in venturing towards a range of newly chosen goals which deny the status of the avant garde. It is the establishment which is the issue, not their colleagues who have not all made the same choices in working towards quality and value that they have.
Love,
Gabriel
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