Let’s write about some art I like, for a change. It’s easier to just tear some richly-deserving creep a new one than it is to do justice writing about something you love. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the work of a lot of artists, here are a few who have consistently meant something to me, for my own work and life.
In the order I thought about them:
Willem de Kooning
The second big abstract expressionist, after Jackson Pollock. Trained in the Dutch guild tradition, as more an applied artist than art artist, immigrated (quite illegally) to the US in the 1920s. People will recognize the very rock & roll hatchet-like stroke from his most famous work in the early 1950s, but he was a highly skilled draftsman, with a very refined, serpentine, Ingres-like line. It looks like porcelein. And it ultimately won out, that line was the one continuous thing through a lot of overt style changes over his ~50 year career.
His stuff can be very loose, but with tremendous structure. It’s not that easy to do. However quickly it looks like he painted something, he said he would spend ten minutes looking for every one minute of painting.
There are a few key quotes from him I’ve lived by, in different ways:
On using house paint when he was dirt poor— I’ve largely modeled my whole economics of everything on this:
On 4th Avenue I was painting in black and white a lot (…). Not with a chip on my shoulder about it,
but I needed a lot of paint and I wanted to get free of materials. I could get a gallon of black paint and a gallon of white paint, and I could go to town.
My approach to finish in general— in attitude if not always in reality:
I never was interested, you know, how to make a good painting. For many years I was not interested in making a good painting, you know, like you could say: now this is really a good painting or a perfect work. I didn’t want to pin it down at all. I was interested in that before, but I found out it was not my nature.
He was relentless about reworking canvases, scraping them down and starting over every day, at times. It’s a major feature of his work— him continuing to do it. He used oil of cloves in his medium to slow the oil paints in drying.
He’s not about design, he’s generally not about color— except for a period around 1960 when he was working with beach-influenced harmonies. Other times he would work in acid tones (30s), industrial ochres (early 40s), black and white (mid/late 40s), regular palette colors— just paint from the tube mixed with white (50s-70s), and primary colors (80s-90s).
In the 1940s de Kooning was working closely with Milton Resnick. Pat Passlof (who was ~25 and 10 years their junior, and was later married to Resnick) also was de Kooning’s student, and worked in a similar style, more skillfully than either of them, to my eye. I had a professor who knew both men, who felt Resnick was better with design than de Kooning, and was maybe a better painter, but a more difficult personality— ultimately he seems to be a sort of New York artist lifer personality, like a jazz musician, where de Kooning was more able with the machinery of society and fame— a different kind of New York thing.
Robert Rauschenberg
To me he’s a direct continuation of abstract expressionism, especially de Kooning, with a softer Billy Higgins-like voice compared to his very dramatic elders. He has a really deep informality going. He’s not about high energy, or about impactful design.
During the 50s he was doing “combines” of found objects, junk he found in the street, with painting, and printed materials, and collage, in some sense, was always a feature of his work.
Early in his career he was also doing some idea-heavy neo-Dada work that got him a lot of attention, which isn’t so important to me— his Erased de Kooning drawing, white paintings. In that work he was also closely connected with John Cage, like his white paintings were a direct analog to Cage’s 4’33”. But the white paintings were just an edgy gesture, 4’33” is a real, enduring subversive masterpiece.
It was common at the time for artists to come up with a single “iconic” type of imagery, and then basically do only that, as we see with Rothko, Newman, Gottlieb, Noland, Louis, others. That was kind of the stock move then, and people were very obvious with how they went about it.
Rauschenberg did not do that. He would have periods where he was working in similar methods, but the compositions would be different for every work, sometimes suggesting landscape, usually just a unique graphical composition based on the materials he was using, an orientation he learned through studying with Josef Albers.
I had a harder time with his work in the 60s and after, which mostly involved silk screening— it’s a little lacking in physical substance, and the rectangle of the printing screen was a very intrusive design element, and he rarely did much to soften it.
Much of his later stuff takes that informality and soft design to another level, you feel there’s barely anything happening. There is a design there, but it’s very elusive, very lightly handled, and his materials often compete with it. At all periods there will be design elements in his found materials that both contribute to, and conflict with the overall composition of the work. Later there are some works with torn cardboard boxes that are very minimal— there’s some poetry in it, but you could be forgiven for not catching it.
He is profiled in two books by Calvin Tomkins— The Bride And The Batchelors, and Off The Wall. Both are highly worth reading.
Franz Kline
Kline is the other big quintessential, high-drama abstract expressionist. If de Kooning was mostly preoccupied with the figure, and fairly intimate landscapes, Kline was doing epic landscapes— a lot of bridges, dynamically composed. You could also look at him as a large scale calligrapher, in a way— with his imagery, not his methods.
During the high point of his career he worked mostly in black and white. His compositions varied, but the key “branding” element [author runs to the restroom to throw up] is the black and white paint. They appear to have been painted in black onto a white surface, but he did actually paint in white to form the negative space.
Later in his career— he only worked in his familiar style for about 15 years, before dying in ’62— he began using color again.
His paintings don’t do so well for me in person— the surfaces are a little grubby up close. I need some distance, which sort of defeats the purpose of seeing it in person. I’ve had a similar experience with Rothko. I feel that if I need a lot of distance for it just to hold together, I may as well just look at reproductions, the scale of the work becomes kind of irrelevant. They wouldn’t be fixed by making them nicer to look at close up, it’s just a problem with me as a viewer.
Paul Klee
I’ve been around his pictures all my life, in reproduction. Picasso as well— even more so, but at this point I feel closer to Klee. A lot of Picasso just feels like production to me now, him exercising his talent, making product. Klee is more pure, more engaged, there is an intellectual purpose to every work. He’s a great theoretician, too, though I don’t understand his writing.
Just looking at his work, and his sketchbooks, is an education in the logic of lines, there’s a very close connection to music there. I would have liked him to design a system of music notation.
Most of his works are easel-scale, tending towards graphic/water media more than oils. He does these child-like drawings that are nevertheless very sophisticated, never fraudulent. Like we see Dubuffet and others doing that as an affected style. He’s gotten to a real personal, adult expression in that kind of language.
Color is handled the way Beethoven or Chopin handle harmony in music, tremendous sophistication dealing with pure hues.
He also thought more about the dynamics and logic of lines on paper than I think anyone who ever lived— see his notebooks. Also a very Bauhaus appraoch to handling of materials for their native properties, which I think was carried on in the teaching of Josef Albers. The book about Albers’s teaching Too Open The Eyes is very worthwhile.
Arshile Gorky
Short lived Armenian-American immigrant painter, he learned the way a jazz musician learns, informally, through copying— he spent years painting in Cezanne’s style, then Picasso’s, then Miro’s, before doing his own thing. He and de Kooning were close, and the relationship was formative for de Kooning, I think he really learned what it is to be an artist from Gorky.
de Kooning said about him:
I had some training in Holland, quite a training, you know, the Academy. And then I met Gorky, who didn’t have that at all, he came from no place. He came here when he was sixteen, from Tiflis, in Georgia, with an Armenian upbringing. And for some mysterious reason, he knew lots more about painting, and art, he just knew it by nature – things I was supposed to know and feel and understand – he really did it better. He had an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head, very remarkable, so I immediately attached myself to him and we became very good friends.
His later work is very much in a late surrealist vein, with similarity to Miro, Matta, Tanguy, with drawn biomorphic forms, and larger areas of color. I’m most interested when he was working with a lot of turpentine, with the colors weeping down the canvas.
Robert Motherwell
Very literate, sophisticated Abstract Expressionist, with strong Spanish-philic tendencies and Matisse influence.
It was a thing with abstract expressionists to create some kind of personal branded imagery or high concept, and maybe his were weaker than some of the other artists (see his Elegies For The Spanish Republic and his “open” series), but his work overall is very attractive.
Uses a lot black and ochre, in big, sweeping washes. Brushwork is gentler, more liquid than Kline and de Kooning. Great collagist.
The Spanish artist Antoni Tapies is like Motherwell, one step further— he’s both more radical, and ultimately more decorative.
Mark Tobey
Pacific Northwest artist, contemporaneous with the abstract expressionists, and doing something very similar, in a distinctly northwest way, with a Zen/Japanese influence.
Much of his work involved a stylistic thing that got called “white writing”— very dense layers of calligraphic figures, in uniform overall textural composition. Very Pollock-like, thought the personalities couldn’t be more different. Even as Pollock was a westerner, he’s very New York— very big, crude, and rock & roll, with a certain high society and media dependency.
Tobey is a quieter religious and academic type of figure, with none of Pollock’s type of media imagery.
Like other northwest artists (like Morris Graves and Guy Anderson) he worked mostly in water media on paper— a lot of red oxide and white gouache.
Philip Guston
For many years I didn’t get him. I doubt many people instantly dig him. Maybe he belongs in another post, “artists I have warmed up to.”
His later career he was really in a sweet spot as a pure American-style artist. In his early career he was an Abstract Expressionist, and prettier than most, sometimes called an “abstract impressionist”, using generally warm, rosy hues. Mid-career settled on these cartoonish figures, with a limited range of color and drawing elements— a sort of grubby middle aged character, lots of shoes, Klansmen, etc. Done with a whole lot of pink and black paint. They’re not very visually appealing, but as you see multiple works, you see that a lot of creativity is going into them.
This exchange between the artist Georg Baselitz and an interviewer was instructive:
Baselitz: What he did later, the shoes and socks, is very difficult for me.
Interviewer: I think they’re difficult for Philip, too.
It’s easy to just use your talent and taste to crank out a lot of product (a la later Picasso, again), which is ultimately lazy, almost mechanical— it shouldn’t be that easy. I think here Guston was deliberately using these unaesthetic elements to force a state of challenge on himself.
There you go, I’m not a total negatively oriented barbarian. I have a couple more of these posts brewing— artists I have warmed up to, artists I have cooled on, artists I simply never did get. Later.
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