While I have been very friendly with Leland Bell, and his wife, and their daughter, and his students and their students, it should be obvious that I did not follow a parallel path as an artist. Leland and his students and further students all believe that they have to tie on to a tradition in modernist painting which is figurative and express themselves by continuing it. Leland did open up, for his students, several figures who were not thought of as potential mentors and sources for continued work, such as Derain, the late Soutine, Balthus and Helion.
In my development something else happened. Bell and his friends in the Jane Street group were about ten to fourteen years older than I was. Al Kresch actually went to the same school I went to, Brooklyn College. But his Brooklyn College featured Amedee Ozenfant as it s best known artist, and he like most of the other Jane Street group then studied with Hans Hofmann who became their major influence as abstract painters before they changed direction and became figurative.
When I got to Brooklyn College, the painting department included Ad Reinhardt, Alfred Russell, Burgoyne Diller and the chairman, Robert J. Wolff. While I continued my studies there, Mark Rothko, Stanly William Hayter and Jimmy Ernst were added to the faculty. They did indeed reccommend the Hans Hofmann school to me and I went to it for a summer in Provincetown. But, after that summer [I had met deKooning there] I came back and studied with him, and studied printmaker with Hayter before he arrived at Brooklyn. Unlike Leland and his friends, abstract expressionism was not originally a dirty word for me. I found many of the artists, more than the ones who taught at school, exciting.
Note that none of my teachers were figurative. As a high school student I had a Saturday class with Isaac Soyer, thre youngest of the Soyer brothers. He was a very nice man, and he did try to help, but I learned very little about representation from him, beyond very basic concepts. So, when I began to paint after Brooklyn, and my work was related to the motif, I was starting from scratch.
One of the things which abstract expressionism gave to any of us who finally rejected its cult of personality and its overvaluation of the big brushstroke was a sense that we could start all over again. We could look for influences through out the history of art and not be content with occupying a seat in a coach driven by Picasso, Matisse or Bonnard. In between Brooklyn and my army days I went to an art history school, the Institute of Fine Arts. I had one teacher for two classes, Richard Offner. One was "Great Masters of Italian Art" which was supposed to get through the renaissance, but actually never got past the generation of Masaccio. The other was supposed to get up to the 14th century in Italy, and it did. But a great deal of time was spent on Italian painting of the previous two centuries as well. Now, aesthetically these periods were ones which modernist painters particularly loved. There was little that my elders among the artists would not have loved in the works of the Romansque painters through Giotto, Duccio, and the later Sienese and Florentines. But because of my exposure through a major devotee of these works, to them, I began to see them all as models for painting. Not through some cubist or fauve painter, but directly from them. That was very different from what the members of the Jane Street group thought or did.
It didn't mean that I stopped loving Marquet or Balthus, or Giacometti, or any other great modern master. It meant that I did not necessarily accept them as models.
Now, Derain's essay which he meant to publish as a kind of artist's manual, which was translated and publ;ished by Roseanna Warren in the Georgia Review in the 1970s explored a new idea. He felt that to manage a life in art without falling into the avant garde trap, one could look at a scene, think of it in terms of how it would be painted, say by a sign painter for a farmer's supply store in the 19th century in a provincial town, and paint like that. But using your distinctive brush as the major source of your painterly originality. I still think that is a viable idea, but it is nothing I ever wanted to do. There are many models from different centuries and different traditions whom we can emulate. In his recent book on Sienese painting, Timothy Hyman, who is a painter, argues for their work as a more useful starting point than the Florentines, because so many of their decisions are based on the needs of narrative painting. I never put that formulation together, in the abstract, but the more I was working in narrative compositions, the more they influenced me. This was all before I knew Timothy. Sienese painting had fascinated me since the early 1950s.
Now, what is my point in all of this? Well, I believe that most of the people who read this blog were students of someone from the Bell tradition. It is a short list, but a good one. It seems to me that you ought to know why I am different from you all, and that there is another tradition out there which has fundamental agreements with you, but is not completely congruent in its direction and thought.
The best New York painters, for example, whom I know about are people who had as their teachers, the people who later founded the Studio School, like Cajori, Mercedes Matter and Sidney Geist. Some of them also were my students. A number went on to the Studio School, which has produced very few figurative artists, despite the long apprenticeship to the model the students had.
During the period when Leland taught there, some of the students did become figurative, but when he left to teach at Parsons, his influence did not remain strong.
What does this mean? It means that not all the good painters whose work you will see, and the people whom you will find as potential comrades in arms out there, will have your exact training, and your exact favorite artists and prejudices. There is much more that unites you all than divides you. But expect to see work which is not familiar in all ways, and respond to it fairly.
There is another teacher who has had a broad and useful influence. Some of my students, Stanleys, and people from the Studio School studied with him productively, he is Lennart Anderson.
Now when he was a kid, he discovered a teacher who taught the method of Charles Hawthorne, which was essentially the method of Edwin Dickinson[a Hawthorne student]. That method was an American response to impressionism. It involves honing the eye to look at the motif in color in light and responding to these sensations as the way to build a painting. He represents a different path than the previous two but his students are part of your world, too like Christine Hartman, who found him useful after studying with Stanley. I know of others from different traditions who did so, productively, too, like Chris Sermergieff, or Sonia Fox. The last two came from Queens College, and the Studio school respectively.
Love,
Gabriel
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