I look around the studio, a week since the opening of my recent exhibit, at the pieces underway. “Where do I go, long run?”, I wonder. It’s not about the work. Although I don’t know where exactly how they’ll end up, I am being drawn into their dialogs, and enjoy working things out. No, I’m wondering about the long term, after that opening reception.

In many ways, the reception was fine: a good gallery with an ancestry of forty years’ involvement with avant garde art, a fine crowd, some good experiences and conversations, and a good curating by the gallerist. The “BUT” is that I am disappointed in the sales. I am thinking, now that I am older (many would say that, having made art for fifty years’ I am not “older,” but “an old guy”), what do I do with my hours? This show took many of them. I met with the gallerist; works were chosen; framing had to be done, records kept, photos taken, work transportation overseen, and time spent at the reception. Is all that worth it for “getting out there”? Maybe I should become a painting recluse—doing art but not participating in the art world. So, I’m going to drop this exhibition experience into the universe of the art world, and see what I know.

Conflicts between the experiencing self and scorekeeping self get an artist all tangled up. Here’s an example, not from art, therefore easy to see: Imagine listening to a favorite album for sixty five minutes. Bliss. Then the last five minutes of the recording get distorted and scratchy. If asked how they enjoyed what they just listened to, many would say, “The end ruined the whole experience!” Really? If asked the same question sixty-five minutes into the experience, before the five bad minutes, those same folks would likely say, “Awesome!” Clearly the experiencing self and the scorekeeping self can be at odds. Scorekeeping usually is more strongly remembered.

If our application or proposal is rejected, if a work we love is juried out, if gallerists are not interested—our art experience is, if not “ruined,” considerably dampened. We have ignored the much longer duration of the pleasure of making. Like everyone else who is not an alien, we artists remember our most recent experiences in scorekeeping mode.

Getting “recognized” is important scorekeeping for many artists. It is not the only thing of course, but it is a big thing. Recognition of some sort is very important for us human beings. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, well known for his concept of “flow,” points out in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, recognition by others is one way that shows we are creative for real.

While I know I’ll be making art for the sheer joy, challenge, and involvement as far as I can see into the future, it’s this “art world” thing, this scorekeeping “success” whose worth I’m looking at.

So, okay, what does it take to make it in the art world. The forces involved in getting recognized are revealed in Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World. These forces are both institutional and in human nature. The institutional forces include collectors, curators, gallerists, critics, art magazines, and auctions. What drives the bottom line, the auctions and collectors’ purchases, has little to do with artistic standards and everything to do with status. The art market is display of wealth, purchasing the highest-priced art, to impress oneself and the neighbors. The human forces behind the decisions made in those areas, however, are the most difficult to tease out. We humans are not as open-minded as we think. Both of these, art institutions and human motivations, deserve a deeper look.

Ah, standards. Every age complains about them. In 2800 B.C. Sumerians were writing on clay tablets that the new generation was going to hell in a hand-basket. Especially as an “old guy,” I don’t want to get caught up in that tendency. Besides, I taught college, and know the young people are generally fine and will make the world finer, in spite of the negatives and complainers among them. There is a way of looking somewhat objectively at our times, of getting out of a narrow focus: history. History helps us to understand through comparison, to give a much longer view, and allow focusing on what is really going on now, not just the perceptions generated by our friends and the media.

Let’s do Art History in a paragraph—well, just from the Renaissance on. Renaissance: great revolution, where human life, previously seen as not so important compared to the Divine Eternal (flat people against non-temporal gold leaf), was now inhabited by the Divine, and seen in natural, real dimensions. We humans and our world had God IN us. And, by the way, artists like da Vinci and Michelangelo were not just artisans, but learned voices in society. Skipping through several hundred years of the development of that theme of celebrating society’s accomplishments, we come to the Romantic Period, when artists turned against society, in this case the Industrial Revolution, which revolted THEM. The artist as society outsider picked up steam with Monet’s Gare St. Lazarre following his exclusion from the Salon and his seminal painting Impression Sunrise. The Romantic, outsider image of the artist continued to dominate, even until today. Whereas the Renaissance and Enlightenment affirmed the genius of human nature, now the image of the avant garde artist as against society gained strength. Robert Motherwell, a advocate for the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940’s and 50’s, said that there was nothing to affirm in our materialist society. In the 1960‘s the reactions to Abstract Expressionism and Modernism were many: Pop, Op, Installation, Minimal–unlimited freedom. And then came Postmodernism, in which all esthetic standards of Form as well as verve, affirmation, and optimism were scorned.

“Making it” in the postmodern environment was easier if an artist liked the cynical, the “transgressive,” and abject–which only a limited number could do.

Not only was the “anti-” attitude of art difficult to overcome, but standards for curators and critics, hence galleries and collectors, became nonexistent. “The Art Hunter” [by Ted Allen, Chicago Magazine, January 2003] reveals why the visual arts are getting slammed by theater in the competition for audience. In choosing work for the Venice Biennale 2003 Francesco Bonami, then senior curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art had these criteria: “transformative” works about “sexuality, politics, religion, class.” These are standards? Such criteria are both too narrow in subject and too lacking in esthetics (concern for Form). As an admirable absorber of cultural ephemera, Francesco Bonami was like one of the jurors of an important art exhibition in the Chicago area at about the same time who said, “As we [two jurors] looked through the slides, a shared sensibility emerged. I don’t have a way to describe it.” These standard-less curatorial decisions make art way too faith-based. They empower curators and critics to be something like mumbling high priests. Meanwhile, artists drift in irrelevance to a potential audience that sees very little to like. The situation is sadly funny, since many in the art world think that they are rebelling against an art they consider elitist and are dealing with more relevant, political issues.

Many of these curators and critics are likely smart; how could they be so wrong? The practical answer to that is another question: how could all the smart people in a political group we disagree with be so wrong, while they think the same of the smart people in our group? Clearly, tribal instincts are at work: the culture of the group (tribe) we are with overrides thinking. In showing our agreement with others, we strengthen our relationships with them. Many books explain how we tend to use our intelligence to support our preconceptions rather than question them. The art world’s standard-less, “I don’t have a way to describe” my picks except for “shared sensibility” has ruled for decades, ever since Postmodernism and its focus on words and critical subjectivity took over. Although the postmodern distrust of esthetics (“the retinal,” as they call it) and affirmation seems to be slackening, it still is a powerful force, as seen in this, from the English art critic Jonathan Jones in the April 2012 Art News: “There is nothing worse than good taste…nothing more absurd than someone who aspires to show good taste in contemporary art.”

Lack of identifiable, and therefore discussion-able, standards still exists. In a recent web publication, an influential Chicago art critic, curator, and activist was very excited about the “quality” of art in Chicago. And what were his standards? Works “completely different than what [the artist has] done before.” His standards appear to be newness and attracting the eye of the curator—not exactly standards at all. As for the depth, the critic noted that the work was “masterful,” “loosely based on the ruffles in Velazquez’s Las Meninas.“Ruffles”? Las Meninas WAS masterful because it was a deep look at the role of the artist in seeing, and of humanity itself. To consider the plain loops of the art reviewed as anywhere near masterful and/or saying something about the human condition is to not be thinking at all. (The artist’s works shown may or may not be good works; the example points out the weakness of this curator’s reasons for liking work.) The next artist covered in the publication is admired for showing “new growth and…innovative advancements” (no examples or comparisons from the author to support the dubious claim as to “advancements”). Another subjective judgment, void of standards except “new.” Surely there’s more to the possibilities of avant garde art than new.

However, this mushy irrelevance of no standards except the curator/critic’s subjective sensibility may be changing. Seeking to see if such work is in the majority, I decided to look at the summer issue of The Chicago Gallery News, at the first ten galleries, to see how many ignored Form (depth and esthetic beauty) for subjective or no standards. How many were there? Zero. Yes, none of the ten were as vacuous as the examples from the curator above. Would this finding be borne out on the international stage? I looked at the last Basel Miami, the first twenty galleries in its “Ars Nova” section. Here, the results were not as good, with nine of the twenty appearing to be subjective, over-theoried works rather than discussable under any shared points, the way to look at art until the recent postmodern interruption. Still, this interruption may be ending, as there seem to be more and more galleries, critics, and curators crying “Enough! Let’s find some common ground, other than ‘sensibility,’ for real discussion among ourselves and with the public.” I hope so, both for my own chances and for visual art to emergence to prominence on the cultural scene again, not as some one-page nod in the arts section of newspapers.

For those artists who want to be “Renaissance-like,” to affirm with Beauty and Truth, postmodernism’s sway over the past decades, the lack of standards, has been tough. Knowing that eases the sense of failure from the scorekeeping part of me, the urge to contribute to art history.

And, even if standards did exist, art is not like science, whose standards allow new discoveries to be objectively tested and proven. Alfred Barr, the original curator at the Museum of Modern Art (where standards, even though fought over, existed in the 1940’s) said that he would be happy if one in ten of the contemporary works he bought for the collection was considered worth hanging in twenty years. Great new art moves us forward, but there’s no way to determine for sure which new art is great. Even with standards, it would be tough for an artist to move ahead.

Getting to the attention of a major curator or collector even then was difficult, as becoming famous is for actors. There are many actors as talented as the stars, working in local areas but not having had the luck to be in the right place at the right time, or have the right friends, or have a strong supporter. From Machiavelli to contemporary sociological studies (Kahneman), it is known that luck plays at least 50% in getting what a person wants. If we want to succeed, we need talent, hard work, and luck.

Up to this point, most of the thoughts have revolved around scorekeeping: “How do I stack up against my peers or my own or others’ expectations?” This is a false way to measure the enjoyment of life, however. Recall the person who experienced sixty-five minutes of musical bliss, then felt that five minutes of scratchy distortion “ruined” the experience. Once we get away from scorekeeping, which is VERY hard to do because of our nature, our world is different—it is experienced. How good it feels to get into a painting, and wrestle out meaning! That’s the “flow” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes of. Doing art makes time go away and puts us fully in the moment. Yet, we tend to undercount those hours.

It is this, then, that I must resolve. How much scorekeeping and how much on experience will determine if I become an art recluse? I would never give up the experience of making art. I know scorekeeping depends a lot on chance. Do I have the hours to spend on that chance, though? And what about the people who are moved by the art, say so, but don’t buy? Is it worth my time to create this situation? Perhaps totaling up the hours will help clear things up, help me decide whether to continue seeking to show, to write proposals, to meet people in the art world.

In my current exhibition, there are sixteen works, mostly paintings and prints. I added up a guess of about 300 hours of making. These hours were enjoyable—sometimes difficult, but always involving, and ultimately good experiences. The exhibit took about 25 hours, consulting with the gallerist, framing, packing, and the reception. So, getting a show together is less that 1/10th of the time spent. It’s also less than a regular work week of 40 hours. I’d say that the “non-fun” hours are a small percentage of the creative hours, and certainly not a difficult chore compared to working in a steel factory or doing income taxes.

So, considering hours spent, I think I probably won’t become a painting recluse. Having checked my exhibition experience against the art world, I see that the time I’m devoting to the luck of major recognition is not that great in itself, nor compared to the great time I have making art. Experiencing wins out over scorekeeping. Besides, the art world is becoming more interested in the standards of truth, beauty, and wonder. I can live with that.

About
Robert Stanley has been exhibiting art since 1973. His works evoke a disjointed world, yet connections between objects suggest calm mystery in the chaos of life. Robert has been written about in the Koehnline Museum of Art’s Artwalk at Oakton, 2001 International Digital Art Awards, L’Association Musee D’Art Contemporai’ Une Brève et Ample Énonciation, Chicago Tribune, and The New Art Examiner.

www.robertstanleyart.com

Panel Discussion: New Art Examiner @ The Evanston Art Center, Evanston, IL, April 15, 2012. At the end of the panel discussion Derek Guthrie read the following statement which he has graciously allowed Neoteric Art to publish here.

Statement:

My following remarks are only an overview. They are today’s suggested topics for debate. There may be conclusions embedded, but if so they are spare and not well argued for reasons that I have just stated.

Criticism is only talking about art. It is the sharing of opinion. It may be philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, critical theory, cultural policy, literature, poetry, or polemic but it is a requirement of a civilized and a thinking society.

The art world is in a mess. The mess is not different from the mess that our society is in. This is a political issue. It is a social issue. It is a matter of the enfranchised and the disenfranchised. It is a matter of how money is distributed. The art distribution system has to be run on the same principles as how the political system works. Whether our systems in the UK and the USA are good for art is the question. The other question that is available – is art possible or has art died? The successful artists are the super stars like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. Whether they are worthy or not is the simple question that is in all of our minds. If we agree or disagree and the reasons why we agree or do not is not only our response to the individual pieces but also a response to the system and power which appoints them as the most significant artists of our time. The issue is complex as is the response to the approved artists places the respondent in a particular position – that he or she will naturally gravitate to others who share the same taste and ways of art is part of social definition. We may change our minds. That can be interesting and could be art criticism.

Our media is dominated by political discussion. Our media is not dominated by cultural discussion and when it does respond it will be inside the tribe of choice – Democrats or Republicans. Somebody once said if you stand in the middle of the road you are hit by traffic moving in both directions.

I think it is reasonable to surmise that many of us, maybe nearly all of us, had the hope – maybe naively – that involvement with art would take us into a world or a way of life that would be free from the veniality of a class-dominated society. The romance and discovery of art, we hoped, would transport us into a mythical world of enlightened people. The 19th century attempt to provide an environment for creative people was the salon. This idea became democratized and was extended into Parisian cafe society – and still today we dream of that dream that in imagination lives. It won an Oscar in Hollywood. The museum and even art departments are the modern attempts to continue and keep alive this ideal, but have betrayed it and are no longer open to people from all walks of life, just those with deep pockets and those who can afford to buy a BFA or MFA. However it was the achievement of the New Art Examiner that we made a little community that loved art and shared enthusiasm with others by the time-honored process of writing. We may have made mistakes but we made a contribution that now cannot now be denied. The most gratifying thing to me resulting from the publishing of the anthology was that it documented how the NAE carried a variety of voices by different editors and writers and removed the demonization of its founding editors. Liberal America emphasizes the idea of pluralism but is sometimes slow to recognizing it, particularly when it is not institutionalized.

The radicalism of the NAE is that it was not afraid of discourse and that ethic should not be considered radical. Maybe it is in present day America but there are still some people who like to think that free speech is an American value. The NAE respected passion. Today the pressures of the recession are activating voices of protest, namely the Occupy movement and a scattering of web sites, finding a space for new voices and seeking a new status quo – and passions are increasing.

The art system is not transparent and while this is so artists will have to live in “cuckoo land” as they operate in a world of which they know very little or nothing – yet they desperately search for approval within it. Artists, unless successful, live in a ghetto. Their hope is that their own significance and originality will filter up. Status and respect will be achieved and then they will move into an “up market” ghetto. This system has been well defined for decades. New York and London have art magazines and a market with academic infrastructure that certifies significant art and distributes it to the regions that usually follow the latest fashion of the avant-garde. Regional centers do not have the critical firepower to establish a new development or wrinkle in the culture of the avant-garde, yet regional art in Chicago made a heroic effort to work inside their own values and culture even though eventually it was not enough. As Phyllis Kind once said to me “There are twenty or thirty collectors of this art in Chicago. I have sold 7 or 10 pieces to all of the collectors. The market has reached its potential and I have to move to New York. I cannot mark up the prices any more.”

In the meantime the same collectors, naturally, were also buying the big name artists made in New York and attending the sales at Sotheby’s. Buying and selling – when it is right to get in and out of the market – is the trick of Futures Marketing. Wildenstein had established an international major New York gallery in the 40’s and 50’s and had a branch in Chicago. It closed its doors in Chicago as the proprietors sold more art to Chicago collectors from the New York gallery than from Chicago.

So the game is like casino betting – maybe with love on loaded chips. The recent collapse of Wall Street is nominated as casino capitalism. That is when rich people – the bankers and the investment houses – are playing with little people’s money along with the failure of government to protect the average saver. The museum is the casino and/or investors club that is the power and the secret information available to social networks of trustee collectors and their helpers the curators. The museums are not regulated and insider trading is given a free license under the rules of not-for-profit status and tax law. There is always a power struggle around art. Particularly today as we are not sure what art is. It is like the dollar being removed from the gold standard and the market deciding its value. The market tells us that McDonald’s is good for me and tasty. We all know it is junk food. The question is, is Jeff Koons junk food for the mind? As Jeff Koons says “the market is the critic.” Talking about hamburgers I cannot but recoil remembering when the Queen of England visited the USA a few years ago. The usual celebrations were put in place. To introduce the Queen to American cuisine the White House decided to provide her, in the Rose Garden, with the best cuisine America had to offer: the hamburger. Andy Warhol, with his genius for the social observation of celebrity culture, pointed out that the hamburger was very democratic as it was enjoyed by everybody – even the Queen of England. The sharing of bad taste is democratic. We are all human but the reaching for something else is of interest and the belief that there is something better is the dream of significant dreamers.

Jane Addams Allen wrote an authoritative article in November 1981 reprinted in The Essential New Art Examiner. She discussed the declining power of the art review well ahead of her time, stating that the independent critic or review was obsolete. The forces of marketing and distribution were too strong. James Elkins wonders Whatever Happened to Art Criticism? – the title of his 2003 book. It is a pity that he did not read Jane’s article. Raphael Rubenstein edited a great book Critical Mess in which leading critics contributed essays pointing to the problems of critics. I quote from Eleanor Heartney – incidentally a writer now in New York – who started her career at the New Art Examiner. Her essay “The Crisis in Art Criticism” is in the book Critical Mess:.

There are practical problems. The venues for art criticism are limited and impose restrictions on what may be discussed. Art magazines operating as trade journals and dependent on advertising for revenue tend to focus on reviews of artists or exhibitions that are in the public eye, while art coverage in general interest publications has a strong bias towards celebrity and entertainment. Academic journals, read by few, often unreadable, and operating largely as tenure generators, are more like private clubs than forums for genuine debate and discussion. As a result certain kinds of essays are never written simply because there is no place to publish them.

There is always a power struggle around art. To pretend otherwise is folly. Some simply believe that wealth does not guarantee discrimination and a greater ability to judge art.

We are here today to talk about the New Art Examiner in the past and whether it possible that it could have a future. The odds do not look good. I would loved to be talked out of this conclusion. It is not for me to say that the blood sweat and tears that the Examiner cost can be repeated. In 1974 everybody thought it would not last more than few issues. If it was to happen again the name and reputation of the New Art Examiner is not in doubt. It now has meaning and is a proven entity. Does that mean support? I do not know. I can guess it may mean some support in the form of grants, and that’s complicated as the giving of grants have their own politics. Getting a grant is like getting an endorsement and that is a question of convincing the giver one has the right social theology and the possibility of success.

The overriding point is that Chicago is not a good place. It was not a good place in 1974. But somehow something happened and we survived. The story of the NAE is partly told in the anthology The Essential New Art Examiner. It is not a history but it has made a history possible. As I wrote in the introduction all of this is the result of community support. The NAE would have disappeared from history if it were not for the vision of one of the anthology’s editors Kathryn Born. Kathryn took the enormous step of commitment to create this book. I learned two nights ago that Richard Seigesmund and Janet Koplos will join forces to write a history of the New Art Examiner and a third collaborator – an art historian – will probably join the team.

What I am moving towards is the reluctance and hostility of the Chicago art hierarchy – museums and art departments which have a studied indifference towards the New Art Examiner or even the idea of criticism outside their walls.

———-

The “Second City” is an empty city. It is also a part of American culture and that is draining away. I do not think that an original and innovative voice can make its way through the labyrinth of procedures – of social networking and deal making, the demands of the market, the politics and academic trading of tenure which in spirit is no different from the trading between congress and lobbyists: money for votes. I am not sure it is a manifested destiny. We all know that the last four governors of the state of Illinois as well as the chief of police have been indicated for corruption and torture. This always leaves the unanswered question – how does this affect the civic life of the citizen? I think it empties it out and makes the situation a vacuum. I believe this sets in place a destiny in which there is no filtering up, only filtering down. This is not good news for those outside the system. It is good for those that mange the system. As Sam Gilliam the Washington D.C. artist once said to me “There are two kinds of artists – ones that move the system and the ones that fit into the system.”

“Manifestation of human achievement” is the Oxford English dictionary’s definition of culture. Chicago around the turn of the century contributed remarkable architecture to American culture. Chicago is the living museum of early modern architecture – the urge to monumentality can be achieved inside the space of real estate. Heroic materialism in its glory adorns the cit and the lakeshore with the exception of the Trump Tower. But what has happened in the alleyways between the tall buildings in the shadows? Gangsters, Nelson Algren, Mayor Daley, Ivan Albright, the Chicago Imagists and the Monster Roster. They all struggle with the dark or are dark. I leave that distinction to you.

We are talking inside the context of Chicago. Chicago is in part my context but I have other contexts as did Jane Addams Allen. The plight of contemporary art is well discussed. Art supports a huge industry of education, trading and investment. This system has been captured by celebrity culture. The strains in our political system are the demands of celebrity culture put on the political system. Hollywood and the White House are interchangeable on and off the screen. Celebrity culture is a culture of mass media, something that Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons analyzed very well and cashed in on.

The difference between the mass market and the museum along with the educational system is that museum and educational system are meant to respond to a different voice than the norm: those that seek something better than the banality or the hum drum of the market. The authority given to those systems, with their tax exempt status as not-for-profit, is based on the idea that thinking and creative production are to be considered inside the idea of the humanities, which is not determined by the strategies of marketing successful products. Yet the market and the academic/museum coalition are in bed with each other. The Republican primary well illustrates the process of making a product or a person to fit into the White House. The marketing is more important than the product. American democracy is degenerating and if that is so then so will the culture. We will have to look to those who resist and art history provides many sterling examples of this to think about. Culture will degenerate unless the subtle tyranny of the media and PR is recognized. Orwell called it “Big Brother” and also pointed to the inventible lust for power in his book Animal Farm where he wrote “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

Patronage of art is hoped to have discrimination. It is fashionable, and has been since New York became the world center of contemporary art, to recognize the artist as heroic resister even if he or she is not. Jackson Pollock was a suitable icon during the Cold War as Harold Rosenberg pointed out with his words “the tradition of the new” and “the herd of independent minds.” The new emerging culture may have had built-in defects. I cannot miss this occasion to point out that it was the Partisan Review, a small left-leaning publication, that provided the platform and thinking which developed modern art criticism in the US.

Whatever sophisticated resources mustered by the MCA and the Art Institute they completely missed out on the originality of thinking and the contribution of the New Art Examiner to Chicago culture and the long list of professional writers and academics that emerged from the publication. They responded with usual American or Chicago fear of originality or “difference” as it might be destructive or belong to the other side, usually applied to intellectuals whose primary purpose is not love of money. As George Bush the second said “You are either for us or against us.” I think this thinking is a form of fascism – as is water boarding. The phrase originally came from Lenin.

———-

Chicago is the same town that once carried a literature emanating from large feelings to all men in all tongues, for it was here that those arrangements more convenient to owners of property than to propertyless were most persistently contested by the American conscience. The following words are courtesy of Nelson Algren:

Chicago has progressed, culturally, from the “Second City” to the second-hand city. The vital cog in our culture is not the artist but the middleman whose commercial status lends art the aura of status when collected into a collection of originals. The word “culture” now means nothing more than approved. It is not what is exhibited that matters as much as where – that being where one meets the people who matter.

The people who matter control money. The New Art Examiner survived on a shoestring. A fact of life once observed by Franz Schultz in the MCA catalog Art in Chicago from 1996 was that “the New Art Examiner was the most important thing to have happened in the Chicago scene in the 70’s and 80’s.” He also wrote that “Chicago is an ass hole but it is my ass hole.” I will agree with Franz except his very last observation.

I do not know the details of the death of the New Art Examiner. It became comprised as it moved into the academic orbit – or more to the point the art historians tenure club. I know that it gave up its original cover slogan The Independent Voice of the Visual Arts to be replaced by The Voice of Midwest Art. Jane Addams Allen and myself were elevated to the high sounding title of Publishers Emeritus. But this was a ritual sacrifice in the same way that an animal which is to be slaughtered is adorned with flowers. It signaled our death in the NAE as we could no longer contribute as writers. Even with this caveat it remains true that many excellent and valuable articles were published – but the orbit became restricted.

So the NAE was born as a resistance to censorship and it died when it exercised censorship.

As a matter of interest the 1975 article in The Essential New Art Examiner written by Jane Addams Allen and myself entitled The Tradition was the same article that was lifted three days before publishing by Art News and later accepted by Studio International. I do not think the editors of The Essential New Art Examiner realized that this article was such a cause célèbre. Its content is sane and not destructive. Today it causes no anxiety.

I have to be careful here as I do not want to be seen as whining. The NAE, in spite of its hardships, gave us a dynamic life and a little footnote in history. Occasionally I am invited to give lectures, even if sometimes for no money. I wish to avoid seeming to be the presence as an OLDIE trying to keep in the spot light after his time has passed. I would like to quote from Nelson Algren again – his words are better than mine:

Make the Tribune best seller list and the friends of American writers the friends of literature, the friends of Shakespeare and the friends of Frank Harris will be tugging at your elbow, twittering down your collar, coyly slipping a little olives into your martini, or drooling flatly into your beer with the drollest sort of flattery and the cheapest sort of praise, the grade reserved strictly for proven winners.

But God help if you are a loser and unproven to boot. The bushy tails will stone your name.

Victoria Waxman has made sure we have not made the Tribune list.

———-

Times have changed and online culture is a new element in our lives. However personally I do not think it will eliminate serious print culture. A book or a magazine is an object and has a physical presence. It is not fugitive. A magazine or book has an immediate presence when on the bookshelf.

If the NAE is to return it will have to have an online site. I may have a site donated in England, but the heart will be the community of the office that works together to collect information, discuss information, share networks, and have a place for writers to visit and above all gossip. Even if the new New Art Examiner produces only 4 or 6 issues a year it will be a start. Here I would like to say with emphasis that the NAE did not claim authority other than it collected writers of authority. It was also quite happy to give equal space to all. In this it was democratic. Not that many availed themselves of this opportunity to do so. Roger Brown did once. He called me “Fat Filth.”

Artists, even if not original, are more important than collectors. Artists make art and collectors arrive after the art is made, though I have met some collectors whose company is preferable to some artists.

The system correctly assumes there is a permanent supply of artists just like oil. Oil will run out but artists will not, therefore they have no value. BFA’s and MFA’s are an attempt to gain value. They are the inflow that is needed to feed into the art machine to make sausages of cultural products – as Marcel Duchamp implied with READY MADES – which, if well packaged , adding little spice of publicity, will sell.

———-

The simple point is that Chicago needs a dynamic art publication that is more than boosterism and that has a national art reach, or now an international art reach as the world is shrinking. If there is to be a new NAE it will have to avoid Xenophobia and not be afraid of the local provincial power base.

I dream of a new New Art Examiner in part like the old one – Without Fear or Favor – that will have roots in Chicago but would deal with the wider world of contemporary art in which a new critical language can be found which will be able to review an artist showing anywhere and that will make sense to a reader living far from the exhibition. This is a tall order.

An interesting quirk to be learned from the anthology is that the editors chose two articles by Frank Pannier, an impossible man and an alcoholic who died early. His passion and intelligence still lives – a rare combination. Frank, unlike his colleagues, was not afraid. His fight for authenticity probably killed him but it is a contribution that would have been silenced except for the reprinting of his views. The point is that Frank fought his corner and most are afraid to do so. In conclusion I must say this – that Chicago is so retarded that there is not even a working archive of the NAE in place. Therefore future scholarship and research is denied.

I want to conclude with the words of the only artist in Chicago who has had a street named after him.

Where have all the people gone? Electronic shadows of former selves watching video screens, ignoring the right of refusal….

Paint may seem like an outmoded medium but the human imagination is endless.

Ed Paschke – Speakeasy, February 1981, The Essential New Art Examiner.

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If the imagination can be fired again and if there is enough momentum I would like to help out. I still have a network of active art thinkers who will respond to a call from the New Art Examiner as writing for the New Art Examiner is considered prestigious. I can help out with my experience and knowledge of publishing. I cannot lead it. It has to be the driven by a new generation.

Thank you.

About
Derek Guthrie lived and worked in St Ives as a successful painter in the 60s before moving to Chicago and co-founding, in 1973, the New Art Examiner, an influential American art magazine which continued production until 2002. He moved back to Cornwall in 1996.

Hildegard Bachert is co-director with Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. It is the oldest gallery in the United States specializing in Expressionism and Self-Taught Art. Its predecessor, the Neue Galerie, was founded in Vienna in 1923 by the late Otto Kallir and was a principal exponent of German and Austrian modernism during the period between the two world wars. The list of prominent artists the gallery has championed includes Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Richard Gerstl among others.

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who resides in the Chicago area and was a student of art critic Donald Kuspit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987 to 1992. She also studied with printmaker Stanley William Hayter and abstractionist Sam Gilliam. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and has exhibited most recently at the Kouros Gallery in New York City and the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago and is also represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, The Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. Throughout her art and writing career she has held a special interest in Expressionism and its history.

Hildegard Bachert: Kallir did his first Schiele exhibition in 1941. The little bit he was able to sell was to somewhat richer Austrian refugees who already had knowledge about Schiele’s art. No American would be caught dead with a Schiele at that time.

Diane Thodos: Was that because the public considered the nature of his subjects to be prurient?

HB: Kallier avoided the “prurient” pieces – you couldn’t even show those – not until the 1960’s. There were some Schieles we wouldn’t show.

DT: Because they were considered pornographic or erotic?

HB: They were not pornographic. Schiele delved very deeply into the psychological aspect of his subject. He had no interest in prurient things as such although they appeared prurient to some viewers. Sexuality was a problem for him.

DT: A great conflict for him, both terrifying and cathartic.

HB: You have to realize that when Schiele did his mature works, starting in 1910, he was only 20 years old. He was a kid.

DT: Adolescence is certainly a time of raging hormones.

HB: He was a mature artist but not a mature person.

DT: Added to this his father died from Syphilis when Schiele was a boy, degenerating into a fit of madness during his final days.

HB: The whole attitude towards sex was very problematic. It was painful and he did not have really healthy relationships until 1912 when he met Wally and when he got married in 1915. By that time he was 25.

DT: Very interesting. I once gave a lecture about Schiele’s work, and noticed that at the times he was not involved with Wally – or his wife Edith who he met later on – he tended to depict his women subjects as foreboding sexual dolls…

HB: There was this period in 1914 known as the “doll” period.

DT: I noticed that when Wally was with him his art changed. She becomes a person that I recognize. There is this emotion and engagement.

HB: The 1912 Wally pictures were fantastic. Very great and very human.

DT: Meeting her opened up his feelings.

HB: Absolutely. That’s when he became more human and more engaged with the person. But even in 1910 when he did portraits of pregnant women in the clinic of Dr. Erwin Von Graff he somehow identified with them. That’s why they are not beautiful.

DT: There is an undeniable suffering in his work. It is different when you look at Klimt though there is a certain mystery in faces of his portraiture.

HB: In the late Klimt.

DT: Yes, I mean in the late work. Klimt’s drawings also become more loose and free. Klimt’s early work seems more academic and dominated by decoration. By contrast I sense that Schiele, who had been had been influenced by him, invented a fantastic transformation of decorative composition into expressive space.

HB: There is nothing decorative about Schiele, even in his Klimt influenced works.

DT: No he is not decorative. Even his depiction of a scarf or dress are an extension of feeling from the way that color, shape and pattern are used. A red stocking is not a red stocking but a cipher of feeling. I tend to see the deliberately decorative elements that Klimt used to fill up his spaces – the Jugendstil influence – become expressively transformed by Schiele in the way an arm or leg is cinched or contorted against the bodies of his figures. He activates space with a rhythmic efficiency that makes his subjects come alive – not interested, for example, in the niceties of pattern that you would find on a bourgeois sofa. Instead he used what he absorbed from Klimt to push feeling into the darker territories of human experience. Maybe that is why American audiences felt trepidation about his work, which brings up an important point. Why does the Expressionist art movement seem to have had a hard time entering the consciousness of the American culture? Have you found it to be this way?

HB: Absolutely. This was not only because it was “strange” and French art was “in” and German art was “out. “ It was also because of the war going on in the 1940’s. There was great antagonism to German art. The only German artist who was able to make it, even during the war, was Käthe Kollwitz. I grew up with Kollwitz. Even in Germany I knew her work, and lots of Kollwitz’s work was saved from Europe when it came over with the refugees who brought them. We began to launch Kollwitz exhibitions and specialize in that field too.

DT: Around what year?

HB: The first one was in the early 1940’s. I don’t know how many Kollwitz shows we had – 50, 60, 70?

DT: She was a very seminal artist.

HB: Seminal, because Kollwitz was always such a social engaged artist. She was not valued by the very rich collectors of French art but by doctors, lawyers and teachers.

DT: People who were concerned about social justice?

HB: Absolutely. There had been early publications about Kollwitz in this country, and we did very well, selling her work at very low prices. We became experts on her work. So Kollwitz was one of our mainstays.

DT: Did you ever get to know her personally?

HB: No. I could have but she was in Germany and I was here. I know all her living grandchildren very well, and Kallir knew her son. I did not but Kallir did when he made a trip to Berlin and visited him.

DT: You must have quite an insight into her work and life.

HB: I do. Now other German artists like Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Max Pechstein had a terrible time here. There were a few other dealers who specialized in German art, like Curt Valentin of the Buchholz Gallery, and the Kleemann Gallery, which is totally forgotten today. Kleemann had some German artists like Nolde and Pechstein. We concentrated more on Kollwitz and Modersohn-Becker.

DT: And the Viennese avant-garde.

HB: Right. So we had Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, and a few Gerstls that Kallir had managed to bring to this country. Then the problem was how do you get these artists on the “map?” Kallir knew some people from Europe like Gordon Washburn who was a curator at the Carnegie Institute. He helped Kallir by getting some of his artists into the Carnegie. Then he became the director at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and bought a very important London Landscape by Kokoschka from Kallir. But apart from this instance the American and French directors of museums did not know Kallir, so the first years in the US were very difficult for him.

DT: Did they know about his artists?

HB: They might have known them but they did not think much of them. Slowly Kallir met some other museum people who were knowledgeable, like Richard Davis who was curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He had been in Germany and Austria and had helped Kallir acquire a major Schiele painting, The Portrait of Paris von Gütersloh, for a major collector in Minneapolis. Kallir sold the painting to him for a song. The collector ended up donating it to the Minneapolis Institute.

DT: Gradually placement of works in museums raised his artist’s esteem in the public eye.

HB: Exactly. Kallir also met the director of the Fogg Museum at Harvard, who was American but knew about Gustav Klimt’s work. Kallir said that he would be willing to donate a major Klimt painting to the Fogg without charging them a penny.

DT: Very generous.

HB: He gifted works by these artists to museums in order to have the public see them because, unlike a museum, the Galerie Saint Etienne was limited as a public space. He gave the Fogg The Pear Tree, a painting which measures 39 by 39 inches. It is a fantastic pointillistic landscape that is now worth about 10 million dollars.

DT: Which brings up an interesting subject regarding today’s art world– the problem of the commoditization of art. I know this is an extensive subject but I would like to discuss the matter with you briefly. It seems that the commercialization and monetization of art has completely detracted from art’s reason for existing.

HB: It has destroyed it!

DT: Indeed. Money has destroyed its spirit. As a graduate art student attending School of Visual Arts in New in the late 1980’s I was deeply puzzled by the inner workings of the art world. Hype and commoditization came to dominate much of the art that was being shown. Inflated money value drove a decisive wedge between the art object and its meaning.

HB: Not only in this country but all over the world.

DT: Now it is promoted through the use of shock and “sensation” oriented events – spectacles.

HB: Yes of course. You know art is valuable. In order to collect anything you have to have a little money. But you must not forget that it is important for life. After the three essentials – food, clothing and shelter – comes art. That’s why I’m still in this business.

DT: To feed the soul.

HB: Exactly. Not only visual art but literature and music and so on. That’s what we need in order to remain human.

DT: I consider the Galerie St. Eteinne to be one of the last bastions to embrace this belief in the art.

HB: Jane Kallir (Otto Kallir’s granddaughter and co-director of the gallery) and I carry on in the spirit of Kallir. Jane got it right away when we started many years ago. This is our principle: even though we have million-dollar art we still wish it were accessible to everyone. Kallir who died in 1978 was appalled by the prices of art even at that time. The year he died was the first time a Schiele watercolor had sold for $100,000 at auction. He would have been horrified. Now of course top Schiele watercolors sell for several millions. We had to either get out of the kitchen or stay in it and do what we needed to do and still champion this wonderful art.

DT: The difference is that Galerie St. Etienne had authentic purpose from its very beginning.

HB: All the way through. So to continue with my story in 1957 we did another Schiele show. I’m concentrating on one example like Schiele because his work was a real success story. Not all the exhibitions were successes. There was a Schiele show in 1941, another one in 1948, and one again in 1957. That one took off. By this time Americans had traveled to Europe and Abstract Expressionism had happened here. Globalization had begun, which was a good thing at that time.

DT: By then America had a modern art movement of its own that it could have confidence in.

HB: There were the Klimts and the Schieles in the Belvedere and Albertina Museums in Vienna. By then American directors had acquainted themselves with a European art background which had been harder to gain during the years of WWII.

DT: The War had ruptured everything.

HB: Right. The people who had traveled to Europe in the 1920’s and early 1930’s went mostly to Paris and Italy although some had been to Germany and Austria. They recollected what they saw there like the Berlin scene of the 1920’s. When they returned they revived Kurt Weil in the music field, and also the playwright Bertolt Brecht and so on. Also European musicians came to America and made their mark. So many refugees influenced American culture and the country benefited greatly from all who came, including Kallir. During our successful 1957 Schiele exhibit the Museum of Modern Art bought some watercolors for $250. We sold some drawings for $100 and thought to sell for that price was very good. We did very well. It is important to remember that at that time money was worth much more. That’s when things began to look up.

DT: It was really your early efforts that established Schiele’s reputation in this country.

HB: We were alone on the scene. Kallir contacted museums constantly. Thomas Messer, who was a refugee from Prague and spoke perfect German (as did many from Prague in those days), was the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He visited our show in 1957. Kallir became friends with him and convinced Messer to hold the first museum Schiele exhibition in America. Messer admonished Kallier to not put anything that was too risky in the show.

DT: Too sexual?

HB: Because at that time Boston was extremely conservative to say the least. The Boston show was very successful, after which it traveled to Galerie St. Etienne. Then it went to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts because of the curator Richard Davis and on to Louisville Kentucky. Then in 1964 Thomas Messer became the director of the Guggenheim Museum. Kallir called Messer early in the morning as soon as he had read about the appointment. He said “You have become the director of the Guggenheim Museum, right? You like Egon Schiele, right? Do a Schiele show!”

DT: Did he?

HB: In 1965 he presented an Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt exhibition.
For the first time there were loans of paintings from Europe and even Jerusalem because before 1960 nobody could afford to have pictures sent from abroad. Previous exhibits were primarily composed of works in American collections.

DT: Kallir must have been thrilled.

HB: It was a huge success and that’s when things really started. Then other dealers got into the fray, and that was fine. Competition is a good thing. In 1985 several museums in Vienna staged a huge exhibition with Wiener Werkstätte art, Klimt, Schiele and many many other Austrian artists. It took on different incarnations when the theme was taken up by museums in Paris in 1986 and by the Museum of Modern Art in New York that same year. They called it Vienna 1900.

DT: So finally it got to the MOMA.

HB: I should also mention that in the 1960’s we did a Wiener Werkstätte exhibition.

DT: A very interesting design movement.

HB: It was totally unknown in this country.

DT: So your exhibition was a first?

HB: Totally a first. It took until 1959 to mount the very first Gustav Klimt exhibition at our gallery – the first Klimt show anywhere in America! Kallir sold the Klimt Landscape – The Park – to the Museum of Modern Art for practically nothing.

DT: He truly loved the meaning of the art. It reminds me of two friends of mine who are German Expressionist collectors. It is not about money for them – it is about serving the art in the spirit of the work. They are the keepers and the catalysts, but the power of the art speaks for itself. For them giving is not attached to ego, status or money. I am so glad to hear Kallir was a person of such selfless motives and deep intuition in the establishment of Galerie St. Etienne.

Part 3

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

“Trouble” shapes unconventional perspective on vintage erotica. Artist Nicholas Sistler plumbs the depths of the Kinsey Institute and brings old photos to a new light.

Chicago – “Trouble,” an exhibition of meticulously created small-scale paintings and prints, opens Friday, April 27, at Firecat Projects, 2124 N. Damen Avenue and continues through May 19, 2012. In each moodily suggestive piece, artist Nicholas Sistler incorporates vintage photo images gathered from the collection of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. An accompanying installation is designed to enhance the seductive nature of the artwork, which exposes power relationships as expressed through sexual situations. The artist will be present for the opening reception, Friday, April 27, 7-10 p.m.

For “Trouble,” Sistler has brought together some of the more unusual demonstrations of fetish and sexual experimentation, and positioned each in a psychological environment inspired by film noir. “I’m fascinated by optical illusions and how visual information can be ambiguous, first appearing one way, then morphing into something entirely different,” says Sistler. “I spent hours and hours poring through the Kinsey photo archives at Indiana University and was inspired by the multiple readings many photos could afford. In each painting and print, I tell my own dark story beyond the borders of the photographs.”

Sistler treats his miniature images (most would fit on a postcard) like advertising, captivating his audience with brilliant colors and meticulous detail, leading them into compositions of room interiors. The artist’s manipulation of the viewer reflects the domination played out in the vintage photos he uses as source material. The intimate scale redefines one’s relationship to the image, posing questions of supremacy between the spectator and the art object.

About the Artist
Nicholas Sistler received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute in 1980. He practiced performance art from 1977 to 1985, receiving critical acclaim both locally and nationally. He has received several grants from the Illinois Arts Council, including an Artist’s Fellowship Award and four residencies from the Ragdale Foundation. His work has been published as book cover illustrations and greeting cards. His works have appeared in more than 100 exhibitions, including 24 solo shows. He is represented in Chicago at Printworks Gallery. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois State Museum, Rockford Art Museum, Block Museum at Northwestern University, DePaul University Art Museum, Otterbein University, and Benedictine University, as well as numerous private collections coast to coast.

www.nicholassistler.com
www.firecatprojects.org

The publishing of the best of the “New Art Examiner” is an extraordinary event and bears witness to an important truth, which is that the community has the ultimate power to decide and acknowledge its own reference points of merit and appreciation. In this case the community is led by Kathryn Born and Terri Griffith, who, on hearing stories of the New Art Examiner that still linger discovered with amazement that the copy published decades ago is still vital and has relevance. Their efforts persuaded Northern Illinois University Press to publish the Book “The Essential New Art Examiner” This means that the New Art Examiner will not be airbrushed out of cultural history, which would have its destiny if left to the not so tender mercies of the Art Institutions of Chicago.

I wrote these words many months ago to appear as an introduction to the Essential New Art Examiner. The publishing of the anthology caused two institutional responses: one a two hour seminar at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, “Chicago Art Criticism – Past, Present and Future” and also a one day symposium, “Re-Examining the New Art Examiner at Northern Illinois University.

The two events could not have more in contrast. SAIC response was meager, begrudging and sparse. It seemed that the seminar was a forced response by the publishing of the book It would have been difficult to ignore it as the head of Art Journalism and Art History Jim Yood served many years as Chicago editor of the New Art Examiner. However the pulse of the symposium seemed as an attempt to bury the contribution, a goodbye kiss suggesting the magazine was being put on the train into history. There are probably art politically based issues that explain the diffidence factor. For more insight read Diane Thodos’s essay “Art Criticism in Chicago – Dazed and Confused” right here on Neoteric Art.

Not so at the Northern Illinois University – De Kalb event with Barbra Jaffee, the resident art historian. Barbara researched and produced a memorable catalogue and also exhibition of the New Art Examiner. This event demonstrated the New Art Examiners’ history and evolution through its 30 years run which was evaluated and the conclusion reached that the New Art Examiner had made an important contribution to American art criticism, more than Chicago’s requirements. The excellent scholarship was a triumphant of recognition considering the outsider status imposed on the New Art Examiner. As criticism was the focus at De Kalb the issue of cultural power politics was not probed though vaguely acknowledged. However the fact that the New Art Examiner professionalism is now authenticized may provide a solid stepping stone in a possible future.

To a point the community in Chicago is reawakened to the dynamic of yesterday. This has prompted Norah Dieterich the director of the Evanston Art Center to offer free office space to relaunch the New Art Examiner. This generous offer can be taken as indication of how the community or even the city misses the New Art Examiner.

Easier said than done. The blood, sweat and tears that were mobilized in 1974 may not be available in 2012. On the other hand the achievement of the New Art Examiner is now without question and that might shake support loose that was not available before.

I quote from Nelson Algren, Chicago’s greatest poet:

“Make the tribune best seller list and the friends of American writers and the friends of literature,the friends of Shakspeare and the friends of Frank Harris, will be tugging at your elbow, twittering down your collar, coyly sneaking an extra olive into your martini, or drolling flatly into your beer with the drooliest sort of flattery and the cheapest grade of praise;the grade strickly preserved for winners. But God help you if you are a looser and unproven to boot. The bushytails will stone your name.”

and

“Chicago has progressed, culturally, from being ‘The Second City’ to being ‘The Second-Hand City.’ The vital cog in our culture now is not the artist, but the middle-man whose commercial status lends Art the aura of status when he acquires a collection of originals. The word ‘culture” now means “approved”. It isn’t what is exhibited so much that matters as where; that being where one meets the people that matter.”

I go to Evanston to share experience and I hope a revival will be possible. We all know criticism has died and the New Art Examiner proved otherwise. I simply go to see if such a possibility is possible.

About
Derek Guthrie lived and worked in St Ives as a successful painter in the 60s before moving to Chicago and co-founding, in 1973, the New Art Examiner, an influential American art magazine which continued production until 2002. He moved back to Cornwall in 1996.

——————————————————————————–

On Chicago Art Criticism: A Panel Discussion
Date: Sun, 04/15/2012 – 1:00pm – 5:00pm

New Art Examiner co-founder Derek Guthrie and an intergenerational panel of local art writers discuss the historical significance and future of art criticism in Chicago. The dialogue will touch upon the current discourses of modern and postmodern approaches to art criticism, art writing, new arts journalism, institutional authority and influence (art schools, art museums, etc.) as well as contemporary art strategies that are shaping culture now. The perceived goal of this event is to establish certain histories and commonalities that can move our city forward.

Panelists currently include: Kathryn Born, W. Keith Brown, William Conger, Andrew Falkowski, Derek Guthrie, Annie Markovich, Bert Stabler, Diane Thodos, and Lauren Weinberg

We hope you will join us for this important discussion, which will be held at the Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan Road in Evanston. This event is free and open to the public. Donations are always welcome.

Evanston Art Center

Chicago is famous for its large geometric grid of streets. These streets are the framework for which the city’s rich and diverse population has built its neighborhoods. However, there is another network of roadways that is almost as large and maybe more interesting than its streets. A secondary lattice of alleys, overlayed and offset from the streets is where the burg takes care of its dirty business. It’s a place where garbage is collected, parking is accessed and power is delivered. It’s also a place where many acts that aren’t meant for public view are carried out.

As part of its mission to introduce new art, this winter very soon Neoteric Art will publish a book of studies by William Dolan that explore Chicago’s rich and diverse collection of alleyways. Here, we present the last of them.

Alley Study 13 with Newspaper Cart | digital marker | 10½"x7"

Alley Study 14 with Christmas Trees | digital markers | 10½"x7"

Alley Study 15 with Water Tower | digital markers | 10½"x7"

Alley Study 16 with L Tracks | digital markers | 10½"x7"

Alley Study 17 with 354 | digital markers | 10½"x7"

Alley Study 18 with Beach | digital markers | 10½"x7"

Alley Study 19 with 4 Plus 1 | digital markers | 10½"x7"

Alley Study 20 with Scavenger's Truck | digital markers | 10½"x7"

Re-Examining The New Art Examiner Symposium at Northern Illinois University on January 28, 2012 with Panelists Derek Guthrie, Josh Kind, Buzz Spector, Richard Siegesmund, Janet Koplos, Paul Krainak, Alice Thorson, Lynne Warren, Michael Bulka, Jennie Klein, and Susan Snodgrass.

The New Art Examiner was born out of censorship. ~ Derek Guthrie

As long as you don’t have a vetting process it’s hard to have credible critics. ~ Michael Bulka

You get what you pay for. You need an editorial framework so that you have some kind of entity that has a mission. ~ Alice Thorson

This much anticipated seminar at Northern Illinois University went far in amending the absence of provocative and historically informed voices about the New Art Examiner (NAE) that were not present at the School of the Art Institute’s art criticism panel on November 22, 2011. I begin with a rich exchange between Derek Guthrie, co-founder of the NAE, and several panelists on the critical subject of patronage in the arts.

Derek Guthrie: The elephant in the room is very simple. What are the strings attached to patronage? I don’t care whether it’s an industrialist, The National Endowment for the Arts under Democrats or Republicans, collectors, or academia. They are all systems of patronage and they are called reward systems. We have spoken about the NAE and its different evolutions and it is quite clear (and it delights me very much) that was started a long time ago under different editors. Somehow certain aspects of a certain kind of thinking repeated itself from generation to generation- with variations. The Examiner came from community. The Examiner was forced to live in community. This seminar, by serendipity and accident, has been a revival of community. I’m not going to make a definition of what community is or isn’t, but I’m old and I know what cultural fashion is. All generations start inside the fashion of their time….the issue of originality is absorbing the fashion and then getting out from under it, because if not then you die with the fashion of the time….New York stole the idea of the avant-garde from Paris. I happen to know what Paris was like. I’m lucky. The point is that the Americanization of the avant-guard is the cultural context which the avant-garde was shoehorned into. It is quite clear at this moment in time, for whatever reason you like, that it [the avant-garde] has waned and its dynamic is gone. So when I look back at art, I look back to between WWI and WWII- [Europe was] devastated, bombed to hell. Millions of people were on the street and angry. Guess what? It produced all the art and we still value it. So all I want to say is this…I think we have lost language. I think we don’t know how to address issues any more. I think it’s a cultural problem…I think this is our moment in time. I also think it might be a great moment…that the nature of modern art came out of a time when it was like this…we are exactly coping with the same kind of weird space and weird individualism that we happen to be living under. It [the NAE] could happen again. It’s very simple. You need 8 pages, you need an editor, you need a few writers, you need a few articles, and you publish – beginning and end of story. What’s more it would be easy because we got a brand name that everybody likes.

Jennie Klein: The NAE had the ability to recognize the cultural conditions and was somehow able to move above them, and that’s why the magazine was important and continues to be so.

Derek Guthrie: We never fell into the crap of being rewarded because nobody gave us a reward. James Elkins who is the chairman of a very important department of the SAIC published a very important book called “Whatever Happened to Art Criticism”, and this is a very good book and I like it…we all know what he reported on. That’s not the issue. It’s a cultural issue…the NAE, with little or no support and with great hostility [against it] came out of Chicago and James Elkins sits on the throne of Chicago culture. Why could he not recognize the phenomenon that we are all around here to say? – because we made art criticism and he did not acknowledge it.

Richard Siegesmund: What we have [today] is criticism that works within the academy. There is dialogue about establishing community. Those are two different things. Those are both called criticism. We get them switched back and forth all the time. Part of my own vibration in terms of art education …is that we don’t talk about the kind of art theory that James Elkins in talking about. We try to engage dialogue with students in order to create community in a kind of democratic space. The Examiner was clearly about that – the John Deweyan community aspect. That’s why the National Endowment for the Arts excluded [the NAE from funding] – it was ‘reporting’, it wasn’t ‘theorizing.”

Jennie Klein: [Compared with the UK] the academic system here in the US is flawed. It’s also very tied to tenure, which makes Elkins a big deal. He’s published a lot with respectable publishing houses whereas many of the Examiner writers were not big deals in the same sense that Elkins is.

Richard Siegesmund: There is the problem of editorship…with analysis. There is a problem of who is getting written about and why. We are in an age when the motives of institutions are questionable. I am enough of an insider of the art world that I saw some heavy duty sausage being made – with a lot of critical cover put over it so you don’t see the sausage making…its’ happened in the international biennale marketplaces.

Starting from the beginning of the discussion it was clear that the presence of Derek Guthrie and his perceptions on the heady spirit in which the NAE was born was the centerpiece of the seminar. The panelists consisted of former writers and editors brought many meaningful – sometime contentious – experiences and philosophies to the debate, plotting out how the discernable changes in the NAE’s content was based on who was editor at that time. Much discussion centered on how contention between the NAE and institutions of power in the art world – particularly the Chicago art world – developed and why.

Barbara Jaffee, Associate Professor of Art History at NIU, began with a brief summation of the importance the NAE assumed in the history of art criticism – a useful overview that was printed in a catalogue produced for the seminar – The New Art Examiner: Chicago’s “Independent Voice of the Visual Arts” 1973 – 2002. She opened by quoting the magazine’s original statement of purpose “by promising – and delivering – an often sharp-edged critique of…”

“The definition and transmission of culture in our society: the decision making process within museums and schools and agencies which determine the manner in which culture shall be transmitted; the value systems which presently influence the making of art as well as its study in exhibitions and books: and, in particular, the interaction of these factors with the visual art milieu…”

The catalogue outlined the NAE’s most potent years “Without Fear or Favor” 1973 – 79, followed by “Redefining Regionalism 1980 – 1992” and finally “Down and (eventually) Out 1993- 2002”, tracing its trajectory as a muckraking and art critical hub for a restless and energetic arts community to it’s final demise. Jaffe contrasted the NAE’s high quality editorship at its beginning from the editing in its declining years.

The intricate politics do not begin to account for the magazine’s true significance….where once the magazine had set its sights on making visible the hidden operations of institutional power, it was now equal parts poetry and politics…at it’s most principled such critical theorizing may seem like nihilism.

Following Jaffee Kathryn Born, founder of the online Chicago Art Magazine and co-editor of the newly published book The Essential New Art Examiner discussed her meeting with Derek Guthrie several years ago. “It was this fighting spirit that I found Derek and I had in common.” She saw the role of the rebel who rejects popular opinion as important. “Keep an eye out for disloyalty ….the person who seems unpopular has managed to tick off everybody and that just might be an excellent sign.” Co-editor Terri Griffith discussed the publication’s boisterous muckraking verve which died in its later years. “The NAE started out as a newspaper for artists and ended as an art criticism journal.”

On the first panel Derek Guthrie was joined on by Professor Josh Kind, a former contributing editor to the NAE, and artist Buzz Spector who is presently the art department dean at the St. Louis based Washington University. Guthrie described how the NAE came into being when he and his wife, NAE co-founder Jane Addams Allen, were dropped from writing for the Chicago Tribune and how a commissioned article was killed from being published in Art News. Regarding this cause and effect he mentioned “I heard through the grapevine that a letter writing campaign was organized by the MCA….thus the NAE was born out of censorship.” The essence of the magazine was the result of the chemistry between the two. For Jane that included the belief in the philosophy of her famous aunt Jane Addams. “Jane Addams made Hull House available to everyone, even Communists and Anarchists, for the simple reason that she believed what was quintessentially American was the constitution, and that was the right to free speech.” He described how the NAE came out of the 50’s and 60’s generation – a time filled with change, movements, and social dynamism.

We never hired a single person to write a review about an institution that they had an affiliation with. We didn’t care if someone wrote a good [positive] or bad [negative] review. I think the NAE gained a certain strength because it did that….We always assigned a review to what we knew to be the exact opposite of that person’s taste, and guess what? 9 times out of 10 that was the better review.

Spector mentioned that when he started working for the NAE he felt torn between careerist conformity and the desire to speak truth to power. The office at the NAE was

…the most striking culture of discourse and argument that I was ever privileged to participate in… the drug of choice was argument. As acerbic and sharp and incisive as some of the writing published for the magazine was, the arguments in the office were even better…it was an ethical training ground. We were constantly pushing back the notion we should be comfortable with what we wrote. It was about connecting of that personal experience…to a set of social, political and environmental circumstances. In this way the NAE was truly ahead of its time…. [it] was never corrupt, occasionally self-pitying but never corrupt. Corruption in this context means being comfortable with power.

Josh Kind spoke briefly on his regular writing of the column Thick Tongue published in the magazine’s beginning years. It was “an antidote to the engagement of unconscious pretense. Thick Tongue was always about shooting that down.“ He also mentioned his passion as a teacher and how important it was for his students to form a community to talk about their work after graduating. The NAE served a concrete purpose with its art audience. “The public needs the translation of art into another dimension – that language brings people closer to their feeling for art.”

Guthrie continued with his salvo on the decadence of current conditions in the mainstream.

To talk about art and not talk about the context of the larger world and the politics within which artists are creating is cheating the entire community….the publishers today cater to blue chip galleries and selling ads that do not want to alienate anyone. But for good publishing to survive it’s going to need sincere readership – people who enjoy content.

When discussion turned to the relevance of reviving the NAE today Guthrie replied, “Of course it is. Why not? It should happen. There’s no where for critics to go” and mentioned SAIC professor James Elkin’s book Whatever Happened to Art Criticism? which describes much about the source of this crisis.

A question was raised regarding the objection to the Essential New Art Examiner’s co – dedication to Kathryn Hixson, the editor who oversaw the period when specific changes in the quality of the magazine’s critical content occurred and who was active at its demise in 2002. Guthrie responded

I cannot sign off on censorship.…Kathryn was an academic. She wanted a full time position [at SAIC]. She had her passions…She was sincere and I have no problem with sincerity…the NAE got institutionalized inside of academia and academia will impose ways of doing things. The larger issue is what is the effect of academia on art? I would argue that if you take a population of artists there is a whole game that is not being talked about. Look at the history of Circle Campus. Look at the history of the Art Institute. Look at who does get and do not get teaching jobs…[it’s about] patronage, content, in other words a rewards system. Who is giving the rewards and what are the rewards for? Who do they and do they not give them to because they do not conform to the game that certain people are playing?

The moderator for the second panel, Richard Siegesmund, focused on the NAE’s years from 1980 – 92. He is Associate Professor of art education at NIU and was deeply influenced as a writer by Jane Addams Allen when he worked in the NAE’s Washington office. Panelist Janet Koplos, a long time writer for many art magazines including the NAE, described her primary focus on craft, and how this had been sidelined by the mainstream art world. “Craft is an underdog field.” She spoke about how Derek and Jane embraced craft as an important subject of art that deserved deeper focus and contrasted her writing against formalist and deconstructionist writing approaches. Siegesmund replied “at the time [Greenberg] wrote craft was not part of the orthodoxy…the NAE was open to challenging that error.” MCA Curator Lynne Warren mentioned, “It wasn’t as much a craft and fine art dichotomy as much as it was [about] materiality” to which Koplos responded “Skill is still an issue though…perhaps that’s the stigma.” Paul Krainak added that Chicago had been more associated with “the history of object making rather than the production of theory.” As a student of Josh Kind he recalled the necessity to

take responsibility for the contextualization of your generation’s work…the rise of alternative spaces [Artemisia, Name Gallery] and the NAE happened at about the same time. They nurtured each other – made each other vigorous and healthy. Chicago was considered a healthy place to begin a career – you could get your ideas out.

Siegesmund talked about the importance of government programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, before the money dried up under the Reagan Administration

[they] kicked the slits out from under the visual arts program and the NAE. But there was a moment of what I would call almost an experiment with European cultural thinking in this country….[government] was able to put up the bucks to support something like NAME Gallery. There was this moment of possibility created by government support of the arts which we had not seen since 1900 or so.

He also added that because of the fragility of funding to these alternative spaces “to actually give a critical analysis [of the art] was perceived as hurtful to the organization.”

A relevant quote from Barbara Jaffe’s catalogue – by Maureen Sherlock – explained how the culture wars of the 1980’s and subsequent funding loss led to the end of an era

The decision of the Reagan administration to both privatize support for the arts and the insistence that all institutions receiving public support follow standard business practices…[was] the death knell for more spontaneous responses to issues of the day [and] led to a vast system of both internal and external censorship.

Lynn Warren had written an article for the NAE on alternative spaces, but added that she was predominately “on the other side of the fence” working as a curator for the MCA. There was “perceived and maybe outright hostility between these two institutions from time to time.” She read an article from the NAE that described how both the MCA and Art Institute stores refused to carry the NAE because of its negative press. Warren mentioned that “throughout the 70’s the NAE wrote little or nothing about shows happening at the MCA.” Koplos responded that criticism in America is used as a form of PR and “Derek and Jane did not practice that…the expectations were that the dialogue would not be ‘respectful.’” Krainak added how in the past students took the responsibility for the discourse around their work but now you “get a curator to do it for you” and how the National Endowment for the Arts defunded the NAE because it deemed it’s writers were unqualified. They weren’t “theorizing in the way that was expected of the art world.”

An audience member asked if the visual arts in Chicago are being hampered because there is no publication that has replaced the NAE’s function. Warren mentioned there are lots of art blogs with greater access but more fragmentation “no one can get through everything out there.” Siegesmund replied

One thing the Internet does not have are editors. The Internet does not have librarians. The role of those very contentious [NAE] editorial board meetings …as much as they were wide open and their wasn’t censorship…is there were still standards of editorial guidance.

Alice Thorson, a former editor of the NAE and arts columnist for the Washington Times described how she was struck by Guthrie’s editorship. “What Derek did …was to really hold the art world’s feet to the fire in terms of letting everybody in.” This included embracing Feminism, lobbying on their behalf, writing about African American artists, and covering the crafts.

A question was raised about how critical dialogue and dialectic that engages an art audience has died and has been replaced by impenetrable theoretical discourse – was this the reason why the NAE lost its critical focus in its final years? Krainak recalls “how focused criticism was out of grad school in the late 70’s.” Art had much more clearly defined boundaries, whereas “what the art object is [today] has changed dramatically” which creates the problem of focus and generating a dialectic around it. Barbara Jaffe added that The NAE “flew in the face of theorizing” by focusing on the art object itself which theorizing did not do. “There is a tension there.“

The final panel began with writer Susan Snodgrass who described her early aspirations as a political reporter in Washington D.C. and switched to art writing for the NAE in the 80’s. “I was very happy to be working in what I saw as real true journalism.” Michael Bulka, who wrote regular columns for the NAE loved the “Raging arguments” his opinion created and missed “the passion that was generated on those pages – I would live for someone complaining about something I wrote. I would say stuff just so people would come after me.”

Siegesmund added “the Examiner let you address issues of community” rather than objects. Bulka replied “It’s not about objects anymore, its all about the delivery system – economics, sociology, politics – they will never be bringing in the weirdoes.” Jennie Klein, associate professor at Ohio University, wrote for the NAE in the 1993 – 2002 period when Structuralist theory was on the ascendancy. She expressed strong interests in Feminist and performance art and “the de-materialism of the art world” citing influence from writers like Doulas Crimp and Roland Barthes. Bulka raised his objections to this kind of writing. “I really hated the poststructuralist theory.” Siegesmund responded

Since Hegel and Marx we have been theorizing about art and we have an American exception to that – John Dewey and American Pragmatism – looking at art through experience and perceptions without theory. Dewey began in Chicago and was friends with Jane Addams. I see an element of Pragmatism in the way the Examiner started, and I think there is a case to be made that what happened in the 1990’s was the collision of American Pragmatism with European Continental Theory and we have still not sorted our way out of that collision yet.

A question was asked – how do we find an ideal forum for art criticism today? Michael Bulka replied “Part of the problem is editors are really important… [in the blogosphere] any monkey can have access. With the Examiner the writer needs to be vetted by an editor. As long as you don’t have that vetting process it’s hard to have credible critics.”

Jennie Klein mentioned “most of us were too young to have participated [at the NAE] in those halcyon days of the mid to late 70’s. We are going through a very strange period in American art history, very reactionary. I wonder if we will ever get back to such a great period for the arts.” Alice Thorson criticized the support for blogs as a substitute for art criticism “Do you get paid for that? You get what you pay for. You need an editorial framework so that you have some kind of entity that has a mission.”

Many of the audience questions did express that we need a new critical consciousness and the vitality of the NAE in our public sphere. During the last set of panelists it was rather chilling to hear one of the audience members ask what is the alternative to our current art writing options– descriptive journalism for commercial media or unvetted blogs. The panel gave no answer. This silence couldn’t help me from thinking the degree to which the ability to even imagine alternatives or resistance to the present systems has disappeared from the consciousness of the professionals in charge of the art world. Current BFA’s and MFA’s graduated from conceptual and theory oriented art programs like to wear the avant-garde badge – but isn’t this in fact disguising what is actually a rear-garde market servility, cynicism and apathy? As Guthrie mentioned, that avant-garde vitality has waned. The more that art writing media and institutions are incapable of supporting real critical consciousness the more that change will only be possible from the margins outside of power. Sound familiar? I will end with a quote from a recent January 2012 issue of Art in America article by Erin Sickler entitled Art and the 99%.

One error was abandoning our former resistance, our dedication to humane alternatives, and caving in completely to the market-only syndrome…once radical-institutions have seen their missions diluted by the corporate values of their funding institutions. Government cuts, which we have failed to stop, have allowed corporations and wealthy patrons to grow increasingly dominant in the culture sphere.

There will be a continuation of this seminar with a panel discussion aimed at opening up debate about problems in the contemporary art world, the revival of critical discourse and the NAE. It will be happening on April 15th 2012 from 1 – 5 pm at the Evanston Art Center 2603 Sheridan road (847) 475-5300. It is free and open to the public and panelists will include Derek Guthrie, Diane Thodos, Annie Markovich, Keith Brown EAC Director of Education, and SAIC professor Andrew Falkowski among many others to be confirmed in time. Hope to see you there!

Derek Guthrie

Derek Guthrie, Josh Kind and Buzz Spector

Richard Siegesmund

Lynne Warren

Paul Krainak

Buzz Spector

Michael Bulka

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Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a 2002 recipiant of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. She had a 2009 retrospective at the National Hellenic Museum in 2009 and is represented by The Kouros Gallery in New York City where she exhibited in 2011. The Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago, the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, and the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City also represent her.

Chicago is famous for its large geometric grid of streets. These streets are the framework for which the city’s rich and diverse population has built its neighborhoods. However, there is another network of roadways that is almost as large and almost as interesting as its streets. A secondary lattice of alleys, overlayed and offset from the streets is where the burg takes care of its dirty business. It’s a place where garbage is collected, parking is accessed and power is delivered. It’s also a place where many acts that aren’t meant for public view are carried out.

As part of its mission to introduce new art, this winter Neoteric Art will publish a book of studies by William Dolan that explore Chicago’s rich and diverse collection of alleyways. Here, we present the next three.

Alley Study 10 with Speed Bumps

Alley Study 11 with Church

Alley Study 12 with Newspaper Cart

The current traveling exhibition of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park Series offers a unique opportunity for viewers to participate in the artist’s grand achievement as negotiators – and re-negotiators – of visual dynamics and material effect.

“The painting is the story that is presently searching itself out.” – Jennifer Meanley¹

“I am amazed that some people can be so lacking in anxiety as to imagine that they have grasped the truth of their art on the first try.” – Matisse²

It is not often one gets to see a significant portion of a major artist’s oeuvre in one place at one time. We are used to knowing the canon of art history via the mediation of reproductions – such as they are – and often spend decades only imagining what the surfaces and colors actually look like. Taking cues from the few works we get to see, we extrapolate and do our best to apply what little direct knowledge we have to the pictures in glossy catalogs or musty old monographs, never really knowing how limited our grasp of the work might be.

So it is that artists and lovers of art value traveling to see great works of art in person. We make the Louvre, the Prado, and the Uffizi points of pilgrimage. We do our best to be with the works of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, to test out the feel of Rothko and El Anatsui, to walk along Goldsworthy’s wall or Smithson’s jetty. We solemnly venture into the interior space of Chartres or the resonant words of Elizabeth Bishop. These real-world experiences prove the truth of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura”³ of artworks, and they raise our visual IQs as we experience art in as direct a way as possible.

Having the opportunity to see a great number of Richard Diebenkorn’s iconic Ocean Park Series paintings together in exhibition has been something I have looked forward to for many years. My initial exposure to Diebenkorn’s art was through images of the Ocean Park works during the first few days of my undergraduate art school experience. In many ways these reproductions – and my subsequent reading about the works and artist – calibrated my entire perspective on painting in particular and art in general.

Over the years I have taken every opportunity to see Diebenkorn’s paintings in person. Given my placement in the Midwest, most of my repeated visits have been in that region: in Cincinnati, Chicago, Des Moines, Kansas City, and Milwaukee. But these examples left something to be desired. In Des Moines, Ocean Park #70⁴ was hung devastatingly close to an untitled Anselm Kiefer – the German master’s massive work was a stentorian presence that muffled the light and line of Diebenkorn’s piece. At the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Diebenkorn’s Interior with a Book⁵ is cracked and dimly lit. Other viewings suffered similar fates.

Thus more often than I would like to admit I have been disappointed rather than excited by my encounters with Richard Diebenkorn’s actual work. None of the paintings I had seen seemed as powerful as I had expected or hoped; they had been situated in the midst of other artists’ works, without enough breathing space in art fairs, or otherwise depraved of sufficient context of their own. Was I responding to some quality apparent in the reproductions but absent in the actual works? Was I merely uninformed, my assumptions tailored to expectations that the paintings could never meet? Was my sense that it was the cluttered museum context that failed them rather than some problem with the works themselves just wishful thinking?

Thankfully, this was not the case. The fourteen years I spent reading all I could find and tracking down what was available to see near me did not prepare me for the majesty of a whole space given over to the proper presentation of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings. The first iteration of Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, laid any lingering fear aside and cemented for me the power of Diebenkorn’s mature vision as embodied in the series. Fort Worth gave the works both dignified space and illuminating sequence, offering broad, expansive views and the opportunity to sense the deep connections and synergies that exist within this astounding body of work. In this setting where the paintings could breathe and sing in concert, I was able to more keenly perceive the underlying structure and deep-seated provisionality that operates in the Ocean Park Series.

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That word, provisionality, is perhaps the most particular and necessary one that I will use in my further discourse on the work in this traveling exhibition. There has been much discussion about “provisional painting” of late, stimulated by Raphael Rubinstein’s May 2009 Art in America article identifying practitioners of this mode of painting – artists such as Raoul De Keyser, Albert Oehlen, and Mary Heilmann. Rubinstein describes provisional painting as “works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-canceling. In different ways, they all deliberately turn away from ‘strong’ painting for something that seems to constantly risk inconsequence or collapse.”⁶

Sharon Butler, a painter, writer, and professor at Eastern Connecticut University, expanded on “the centrality of the open proposition in contemporary abstraction”⁷ in a 2011 article for The Brooklyn Rail. Butler talks about this approach to painting as “a studied, passive-aggressive incompleteness” and “subversion of closure” that exists within “multiple forms of imperfection: not merely what is unfinished but also the off-kilter, the overtly offhand, the not-quite-right.” Artists working in this vein, Butler suggests, “cast aside the neat but rigid fundamentals learned in art school and embrace everything that seems to lend itself to visual intrigue—including failure.”⁸

Butler’s and Rubenstein’s exploration of provisional or “casualist” painting today could be interpreted as an indictment rather than a celebration, yet it seems to me that they are on to something. I submit that there was provisional painting before its current practitioners surfaced, and it found its varying degrees of unfinished tentativeness through a negotiation of “rightness”⁹ rather than an acceptance of “the not quite right.” I believe that we see this in the work of artists such as J.M.W. Turner and Edvard Munch, as well as in the impulses of the Vorticists, the Fauves, and even the Impressionists. It goes without saying that Cubism participated in – even paved new avenues to – this arena. Making artworks through the calibration of a feeling of rightness beyond the expression of perceptual or conceptual truth – indeed, the denial of these things as entirely definable ends – is at the root of a provisional approach. This proclivity is distinctly evidenced in the work of Richard Diebenkorn.

To be sure, Diebenkorn’s methods and aims were far removed from those of the artists currently carrying the mantle of provisional painting. It seems to me that the artist inhabited a middle ground between the heroics of the abstract expressionists and what too often feels like the deadpan ennui of contemporary provisionalists. His mode and facture brought the flittering tenuousness of choice and perception to center stage and offered a vision of seeing and making that continued to move pictorial logic away from an if/then proposition to a both/and one. In the following paragraphs I will explore what I identify as Diebenkorn’s penchant for provisional action and show how it stimulates a provisionality of vision in his audience.

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Diebenkorn encoded provisionality in his work not via a “casual, dashed off” quality – though spontaneity and “commitment to improvisation”¹⁰ were key to his process – but by embracing uncertainty and tentativeness within an overarching compositional format. His working method was comprised of questioning choices and negotiating varied factures within a particular compositional schema: a “definition and re-definition of the relationship of line and tonal field.”¹¹ His work became a ceaseless reappraisal of the rightness of the constellation of visual dynamics in effect at any particular time within the work at hand.

Unlike the provisionalists of today, Diebenkorn was deeply concerned with the aforementioned rightness as well as with a necessary openness of potential action. His notion of rightness seems to have been related to a modernist sense of compositional balance and a feeling of effective effort toward that end through material and its application. In all of this Diebenkorn pursues his rightness while recognizing that it is not a specific, definite end. Therefore the openness he sought could be described as a desire to maintain the potential for each choice – whether of the artist in making or the viewer in looking – to have true over-all effect and discernable affect. These two seemingly opposed ends are set together, providing an arena for possibilities to begin or end, to coalesce or dissipate. Though we recognize that, in a very real sense, the works are forever locked in stasis since they can no longer physically change under the artist’s hands, we see that they can shift and modulate under the eyes of viewers.

This is exactly what they do. Diebenkorn’s paintings invite us to collaborate with – and second-guess – his choices in an active yet elusive viewing of the potential of the works to be what they are, or to become what they might be. The viewer participates in working out the rightness of the image and in so doing critiques its success. The Ocean Park Series is an investigation into the prospective and shifting nature of both painting and vision itself.

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To get a clear view of Diebenkorn’s connection with provisionality one must think about the sense of compositional balance exemplified in the Ocean Park Series. It is a balance that is hard-won yet still teetering on the edge of disarray. Though the works are in some ways locked, they flicker and undulate; these are compositions that don’t always feel as if rightness was absolutely achieved. When I initially encountered the series in books I was not aware that Diebenkorn was seeking that sense of rightness so often considered as his chief aim. I felt that the works exhibited a rather unbalanced, clunky sort of tension among their various parts. Years later, I still hold this view, but only as they read in reproduction, not as they appear in person.

Consider Ocean Park #38.¹² On the printed page or pulled from the web, this work presents an almost unbearably fast, tilted read; our eyes shoot to the top left, swiftly running over the sharpness of the interwoven diagonals there. These dark forms contrast with the rest of the image, their “V” shape and separation from the rest of the work standing out with iconographic strength. The painting is unbalanced and top-heavy.

In person the effect is dramatically reversed. Surface, color, line, and application become supercharged with multivalent weight and effect. The lower mass of light-infused color rises up slowly, monolithically, to countermand the angular insistence of the upper edges of the painting. The combined physical reality of the works – the symbiotic nature of their formal, material, and chromatic characteristics – is absolutely necessary to the true experience they stimulate. They are not balanced in a straight compositional sense at all; they are instead balanced via the interdependent visual effects that they initiate and propagate. We do not read these works directly by receiving all of their parts at once. Instead we wade through the indirect information they provide and must circle back for second, third, and fourth viewings to accumulate a semblance of the full experience.

Diebenkorn worked to orchestrate and manipulate the layered, syncopated reading of his paintings by making his various strategies, attempts and dead-ends the direct means by which we, the viewers, open them up. He enlivened the surface with arenas that take diverse levels of effort to move through, that require different visual solutions to understand. Yet these compositional forces and the quality of balance they achieve are illegible in reproductions of the works. They are, in a sense, unavailable to the eye in reproduction because it is the action of the eye playing over the actual surface that constructs – or rather works to reconstruct – the quality of rightness Diebenkorn sought. Our eyes alternate in stalling or speeding through the scintillating fields of line and hue, pausing in certain locations only to find another form, element, or color effect coalescing into importance before us. John Elderfield saw this effect in how the equally essential figure and ground aspects of Diebenkorn’s paintings so often seem to “fluctuate and interchange in importance… the surface vibrates like a translucent skin as if the space it encloses is the full and living space within the body.”¹³ The works flatten and bloom, are at once deep iridescent seas and impenetrably dense walls. They are simultaneously snapped to the bare grid and densely interwoven in layers. They are both “aperture and field.”¹⁴

Indeed, colors and shapes may flicker into resolution after sustained viewings; structures float up while others – previously more apparent – seem to drop away. This is a major aspect of reading the paintings and of perceiving the movement and weight they possess. The pieces play on the ability of our eyes to capture latent images and sustain them while interpreting subsequent visual sensations. There is a kind of planar phase transition in these works, something that rests on the dual nature of our eyes: ceaselessly motile yet able to retain aspects of what has been seen.

Thus the formalism at work in Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park Series seems directly connected to vision itself. It is in our activity of perceiving his work that the provisional nature of Diebenkorn’s painting has its power. The lines push us out or lock us in. Analogous angles sync up, seeming to define particular shapes, only to dissipate upon a second glance. An area of color that one once read as flat may instantly project out dimensionally and stimulate a sense of vertiginous parallax. The glacial movements of color fields counteract the speed of linear diagonals; they seem both dense and weightless. Edges where two colors meet may simultaneously indicate low spatial relief and mere tonal variation along a level plane. Open areas take on strength as they hold large swaths of canvas against the complexity and tension of the smaller, more active, geometric, or hue-charged areas. The artist’s famous pentimenti stall the route of one’s eyes and trap them into recursive delays amid muted apparitions of texture and shape.

These pentimenti are more visible and more powerful, and their importance all the more apparent, when one takes in a large swath of the Ocean Park works at once. Their functions in the paintings, how their varying uses may shift from cursory notation to indication of procedural reassessment to stabilizing post-and-lintel, are as central as color or composition to these works. They mediate the sense of scale, compositional tensions, and veils of light in the paintings. They pop in and out, never entirely giving away their reasons for being, yet always pressuring the eye to redefine its route over the visual field. There is so much going on in these paintings that has been perfunctorily obliterated yet remains incontrovertibly present. Diebenkorn said that it was “a great relief to obliterate,”¹⁵ yet these obliterations are less complete erasure and more obfuscation and tinkering. As Robert Buck observed 35 years ago, our experience of Diebenkorn’s “facture is purposefully and prominently retained in the works” allowing us to follow along with “the artist whether the method was finally acceptable to him or not.”¹⁶ The tentativeness of this reappraisal and reconstruction is signaled in the nature of what is left behind on the surface for viewers to excavate.

There are many layers to dig through, as each chromatic sheet, each ruled line, and each dashed-in brush mark has its own nature and particular effect on the overall work. What yellow may do in an interlocking diagonal group or as a swift line is entirely different when it is given over to the service of light-infused planes. A color that neatly subsumes into an area of analogous hue may violently react when, only a few feet away, it intersects with some seemingly innocuous middle tone. Any location in a work seems at the very least binary in nature, taking on a kind of duality: speed and stillness, position and vector, passivity and forcefulness. With Diebenkorn, almost any element can embody seemingly opposing states. In some sense it depends on the facture – how he put the marks down – but it can also be based simply upon the interdependency and indeterminacy of the formal relationships he created. In Ocean Park formal properties play on the provisionality of the audience’s subjective apprehension of the artist’s pursuit of his own rightness. He said as much when he told Gerald Nordland in 1976, “one’s sense of rightness involves absolutely the whole person and hopefully others.”¹⁷

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It is not only that Diebenkorn has constructed a dynamic visual maze for us; it is also that he built temporality into the effort we must expend to perceive the works. This is something we can readily understand – we recognize that the “V” shape in the upper left of #38 is “fast” to our perception. But do we sense the dozen other speeds that he has embedded within the work? What may in a small-scale illustration be read immediately and totally becomes a much harder prospect at full scale, and a much richer one.

The time it takes for us to read certain constellations of elements is a condition of the scale of these works, and it is not accidental. Most of the Ocean Park Series is human scale and their size – many of them are 100 by 81 inches – obviously forces a viewer to calibrate his or her bodily relationship to the work. Because of this the viewer must move to take in the tableau, tracking across a surface that will not allow for smooth, easy travel. Thus the amount of time necessary to physically move around the work – something done not only with the eyes, but also with the head and whole body – varies and is full of starts and stops. Any cohesive structure becomes a pivot point; a firm place from which to read/re-read the work, a place of calibration for the next interpretation. The material information on the surface of the work and the interactions of colors and shapes will, by turns, dictate or suggest different speeds of sighting and different levels of attention, alternating types of focus. All of this maneuvering takes time, both physically and mentally. That temporal aspect in the experience of the works adds weight to the negotiation of the different areas and, as we find more to excavate, more to challenge, we sense that the amount of time we have spent in certain areas adds compositional weight to them; their balance is not based on strictly formal principles.

This temporal quality in the works extends deeply into their making, clouding our ability to grasp clearly the process by which they were made. That is, their surfaces are inscrutable in terms of the order or sequence of their creation. One cannot emphatically state when one layer was placed down in regard to other layers; each layer seems sequentially multivalent. As a matter of course we dissect a work of art as we view it, considering this area part of the under-painting and that element a detail added toward the end. This aids in our processing of the work and enlivens the temporality of the work. Yet when Diebenkorn created each element is a variable unknown to the viewer, so what one may think is on top may suddenly appear distinctly embedded, and vise versa. The order of the layering may be chaotic or simply non-linear, yet we perceive it as an amalgamated whole and only through extended viewing can we try out different potential orderings or viewing strategies. This factor adds to the provisionality of our reading, since any determination we make may pressurize other layers and elements, causing them to move away from our prior assumptions about them and altering the feeling of the whole work.

Therefore, in the Ocean Park Series, formal elements and their interrelationships are as subtractive as they are additive. By this I mean to suggest that they do more than simply accumulate in one manner or toward one particular state. There are multifaceted ends at play in these artworks, more than one solution being simultaneously considered upon their surfaces. It is the overlapping of alternate purposes uniting or interfering with one another that create divergent and potentially unplanned syncopations in the visual field. Ocean Park is indeed more complex than it may appear on the printed page.

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From all of this it seems to me that the mode of painting in the Ocean Park Series is not intellectual or emotional so much as it is kinesthetic. Diebenkorn succeeded in creating zones of reference and incident that allow a viewer to feel out and maneuver through the tensions in much the same ways he may have. He knew that we each inherently read these sorts of dynamic visual forces differently and at vastly different speeds. His provisional manner purposefully encoded, as described above, many varied spatial and temporal effects into the total compositional effect of his paintings. The works become catalysts for the kind of search for rightness that he himself pursued.

His commitment to “tension beneath calm”¹⁸ and “an exciting kind of stillness”¹⁹ in the gestalt experience of his art never removes the astonishment of discovery and sense of reconsideration it stimulates. Though they certainly carry a sense of calmness or stillness, the paintings deny viewers any sense of particular point of view and initiate the plurality of reading that I have suggested above. The Ocean Park works of Richard Diebenkorn “invite the viewer into a moment of intense contemplation without enabling a fixed viewpoint, no Cartesian sense of where artist or viewer is situated in relation to the composition.”²⁰

Thus Diebenkorn’s rightness is not about collapsing possibility or locking in any particular read. Ultimately, that feeling of rightness may only be accessible via a condition of uncertainty rather than of objective facts. Perhaps that is why, at least in Ocean Park, the instinctive stroke of the artist is not a dogmatic assertion but a questioning reformation of what he has already done. There was vulnerability and risk in this methodology; it was a risk of which he was well aware. Yet he stated that he wanted to “hold onto the incidentals” and work with the “kind of tension that would involve a large flex” to create a sense that “potentially, something was about to happen.”²¹ He sought simultaneous “potency and impotency”²² in the work, an approach that kept it constantly open and pressing toward both resolution and beginning. Burying previous strategies and disrupting safe, settled areas in favor of new angles and more tremulous solutions were at least as important to Diebenkorn as was any clear rightness. In some sense, it seems that the only right kind of rightness would be the sort that allowed the incidental and provisional to exist in the formal point and counterpoint of works that could be balanced only by viewing, negotiation, and experience.

It is a remarkable gift to be given the opportunity to see as the artist saw, if not in the specifics, then in the general manner and force of his vision. In the aesthetic economy of Ocean Park, anything may be reworked, each line and edge and color challenged or reasserted. As viewers we participate in the review. We get to be with Diebenkorn in the resolution of the tensions. We follow along in the fussy ease, the relaxed awkwardness, the tentative tautness of the work. We try and retry our own perceptions, testing them, following the artist on “a path of continual new beginnings”²³. In this the work becomes involved with our experience beyond the mere making and display of pictures. It exists as an invitation to negotiate and analyze.

What a reward for deep engagement: that each viewing of an Ocean Park painting may be a fresh aesthetic experience, informed but never eclipsed by those past. Perhaps this explains the popularity and resilience of Richard Diebenkorn’s painting; every time we see them we see them for the first time.

Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series will travel to the following locations over the coming year:

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas
September 25, 2011–January 22, 2012

Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California
February 26–May 27, 2012

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
June 30–September 23, 2012

Note
I want to thank my student and friend Marcus Miers (http://marcusjmiers.net/) for traveling to Texas with me to see the Diebenkorn show. Our conversations during the trip were an integral contribution to my thinking in this essay; much of the above content is contingent upon his insight and clarity. I’m grateful to him for helping me to honestly reevaluate my understanding of Diebenkorn’s work.

Matthew Ballou is an artist and writer living in Columbia, Missouri with his wife and daughter. He is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Painting and Drawing at The University of Missouri, where he has taught since 2007. Recently his work has been seen in solo shows in Boston and Seattle, as well as in a two-person show with Tim Lowly in Louisville, KY. Ballou was a Finalist for The Ruminate Visual Art Prize, 2011. His extensive article on the work of Odd Nerdrum was the cover feature in Image Journal’s 2006 Summer Edition. Ballou has been a contributor to Neoteric Art since 2009, and Neoteric released a collection of his essays, titled Nine Texts, in October 2011. (http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Texts-Matthew-Ballou/dp/1105088936)

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Footnotes
¹Meanley, Jennifer. One Day: New Works by Barry Gealt. Indianapolis: Ruschman Gallery, 2008. Print catalog.↩
²Elderfield, John. The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn. 1st ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988. 22.↩
³Benjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. 1st ed. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217-252.↩
⁴Richard Diebenkorn. Ocean Park #70. 1974. The Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA. Web. http://www.desmoinesartcenter.org/images/thumbnail.aspx?img=/webres/Image/photo_gallery/54.jpg↩
⁵Richard Diebenkorn. Interior with a Book. 1959. The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. Web. http://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/CollectionDatabase.cfm?id=17593&theme=M_C/↩
⁶Rubinstein, Raphael. “Provisional Painting.” Art in America. May 2009: N.p. Web. 18 Jan. 2012. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/provisional-painting-raphael-rubinstein/.↩
⁷Butler, Sharon. “The New Casualists.” Two Coats of Paint. N.p., 04 06 2011. Web. 18 Jan. 2012. http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2011/06/new-casualists.html↩
⁸Butler, Sharon. “Abstract Painting: The New Casualists.” The Brooklyn Rail. June 2011. n. page. Web. 18 Jan 2012 http://brooklynrail.org/2011/06/artseen/abstract-painting-the-new-casualists/.↩
⁹Diebenkorn, Richard quoted by Gerald Nordland. “The Figurative Works of Richard Diebenkorn.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 40.↩
¹⁰Nordland, Gerald. “The Figurative Works of Richard Diebenkorn.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 34.↩
¹¹Buck, Robert T. “The Ocean Park Paintings.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 46.↩
¹²Richard Diebenkorn. Ocean Park #38. 1971. The Phillips Collection of American Art, Washington, D.C. Web. http://www.phillipscollection.org/research/american_art/artwork/Diebenkorn-Ocean_Park_38.htm↩
¹³Elderfield, John. The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn. 1st ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988. 32.↩
¹⁴Bancroft, Sarah C. “A View of Ocean Park.” Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series. 1st ed. New York: DelMonico-Prestel, 2011. 22.↩
¹⁵Richard Diebenkorn. Directed by Tom McGuire. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and TVTV, 1977. Videocassette (VHS), 22:40 min.↩
¹⁶Buck, Robert T. “The Ocean Park Paintings.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 46.↩
¹⁷Diebenkorn, Richard quoted by Gerald Nordland. “The Figurative Works of Richard Diebenkorn.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 41.↩
¹⁸Mills, Paul. Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting. 1st ed. Oakland, California: Oakland Art Museum, 1957. 12.↩
¹⁹Ashton, Dore. “Richard Diebenkorn’s Paintings.” Arts Magazine 46. December 1971-January 1972. 35.↩
²⁰Bancroft, Sarah C. “A View of Ocean Park.” Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series. 1st ed. New York: DelMonico-Prestel, 2011. 22.↩
²¹Elderfield, John. The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn. 1st ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988. 54.↩
²²Ibid.↩
²³Bancroft, Sarah C. “A View of Ocean Park.” Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series. 1st ed. New York: DelMonico-Prestel, 2011. 35.↩

Hildegard Bachert is co-director with Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. It is the oldest gallery in the United States specializing in Expressionism and Self-Taught Art. Its predecessor, the Neue Galerie, was founded in Vienna in 1923 by the late Otto Kallir and was a principal exponent of German and Austrian modernism during the period between the two world wars. The list of prominent artists the gallery has championed includes Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, and Richard Gerstl among others.

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who resides in the Chicago area and was a student of art critic Donald Kuspit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987 to 1992. She also studied with printmaker Stanley William Hayter and abstractionist Sam Gilliam. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and has exhibited most recently at the Kouros Gallery in New York City and the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago and is also represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, The Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. Throughout her art and writing career she has held a special interest in Expressionism and its history.

Diane Thodos: They [the artists in Vienna] had an interesting praxis of artists and intellects back then. Were there other artists who Kallir dealt with?

Hildegard Bachert: There was Oskar Kokoschka.

DT: This was after he had been wounded during WWI?

HB: Right. This was in the 1920’s. Kokoschka left Austria after the war and went to Dresden in Germany where he spent a lot of time. He was very shell-shocked and needed psychiatric help.

DT: Yes. We would call that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – PTSD – today.

HB: Right. When he had sufficiently recovered he started traveling. He went back to Vienna for a time, then to Paris and London where he painted his famous London landscapes. He would often visit his family in Vienna. Kallir staged Kokoschka exhibitions and purchased some of his art. But Kokoschka was complicated. He had many connections and he did not like Kallir’s engagement with Schiele’s art. During his lifetime Kokoschka did his best to discredit Schiele.

DT: Peculiar.

HB: No, not peculiar. Kokoschka insisted that he was the innovator of everything. Kallir also knew the artist Max Oppenhiemer. Are you familiar with Max Oppenheimer’s work? He was an Expressionist and a colleague and friend of Schiele.

DT: I recollect the name.

HB: He was generally called Mopp. He often signed his name like that. I came to know him personally much later. After his emigration to this country as a much older man Mopp was very innovative but Kokoschka kept saying “They all copied me!” He believed that Mopp and Schiele copied him, and the truth be told it was probably Mopp who was first. He was a friend of Schiele’s and he also became friendly with Kokoschka. Eventually they had a big fight with him. Kokoschka was very contentious and tried to influence some of the art historians to sweep Schiele under the rug.

DT: So that he would be perceived as the most important.

HB: Now, Kokoschka was a very good artist. However his best art was the early work. He did in fact do some good work later on but when he got happy – when he met Olda who later became his wife in Prague –- the tension of the older period left him.

DT: That’s an interesting point. I feel the same thing happened to Beckmann’s work when he came to the United States – a lessening of tension in the work. In his previous art the devastations of WWI and its catastrophic aftermath explode with angular tension.

HB: This not only happened to Beckmann, who was the least affected. The quality of his oils, particularly the ones from Holland, were good.

DT: That’s true. I was referring to the time he came to the U.S. That was when the change in his work became most apparent.

HB: Very true, but the works Kokoschka did in America were really not good at all.

DT: George Grosz had this problem too.

HB: George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein all had problems with their late work. Basically their spirit was killed by the Nazis.

DT: And Otto Dix.

HB: Dix – he disintegrated.

DT: I was told he was very troubled. In a previous interview I had with Donald Kuspit he related to me how he met Dix when he was a student of Theodore Adorno in Frankfurt during the late1950’s. According to him Dix was emotionally destroyed by the Nazis. Today it’s very hard to imagine what it was like, but your generation’s history is very important because you experienced the whole thing.

HB: Getting back to Vienna I need to mention one artist of fantastic talent and genius. His name was Richard Gerstl. One day in 1930 a man named Alois Gerstl visited Kallir’s gallery and said “My brother painted and his pictures are in a warehouse here in Vienna. I brought a few samples and I would like your advice: should we keep them or destroy them?” Kallir saw what Alois brought and said “These are fantastic! Take me to the warehouse- I want to see the rest.”

DT: To think that his brother had thought of destroying them.

HB: Gerstl was completely buried in oblivion. Kallir went to the warehouse where most of his pictures were rolled up. Some were not in great condition. Kallir had the pictures restored, stretched and put on exhibition in his gallery. He discovered him. It was a sensation beyond belief. We have press clippings from that time. In 1931 Kallir compiled a catalog of all the works, numbered each one, put a stamp on each one so they would be authenticated, and signed each stamp. Each Gerstl has a stamp on the back with Otto Kallir’s signature.

DT: He took tremendous pains to resurrect his art.

HB: He rescued it from oblivion. That’s what Kallir did. He was a trailblazer.

DT: He was in the tradition of those dealers who could see ahead, like Vollard and Kahnweiler. Of course the French art world circumstances were a different. I have a particular fascination with dealers andintellects who spearheaded Expressionist art in German and Viennese culture. The Decadent Art Show of 1937 – Entartete Kunst – was Hitler’s attempt to destroy everything it stood for.

HB: Not only that. When Kallir came to this country he found that German and Austrian art was unknown or else it wasn’t liked because French art was in and everything else was out.

DT: Interesting point. Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York encouraged the collectors on his board to buy mostly French art for donation to the museum. There were some German Expressionist pieces collected but nothing like the amount of French avant-garde art. What was the art world in America like when Otto Kallir arrived in here?

HB: He came in 1939, but I want to relate some events that date from before this time. He sent a traveling exhibition of Gerstl’s work to Germany and other places in Austria. The pictures returned to the Neue Galerie where they were kept over the period of the Second World War. Kallir had purchased many of them from Alois Gerstl before he left Vienna. He brought a few Gerstls to this country. First he emigrated with his family to Switzerland where they had friends. He was able to establish his home in Lucerene but didn’t get permission to work there. With his family safe in Switzerland Kallir went to Paris to open a gallery that he called Galerie St. Etienne in memory of Saint Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna. He didn’t keep the gallery open for even one year because he wanted to be reunited with his family. Then he managed to get sponsorship to emigrate to America. Kallir was always interested in America because of the country’s engineering achievements. He also loved Jazz. In August 1939 the four Kallirs – he, his wife and two children – arrived in this country. By October he had opened the Galerie St. Etienne in New York at 46 West 57th Street, just up the street from our current location. He thought that he was establishing a branch of the Galerie St. Etienne in Paris at that time, but then the war broke out. He corresponded with his secretary there and told her to put everything in storage and close the gallery. That was the end of Paris. Then Kallir struggled like crazy to establish his artists in this country.

DT: A heroic feat considering there was a complete lack of knowledge about his Viennese artists here.

HB: He also brought to America some amazing works of art that a Czech collector had placed in his hands on consignment. Of course Kallir knew that his artists weren’t known in this country so he had to come with something that could financially sustain him. But it was the time of the Great Depression and he was able to sell only one of those major paintings, a Cézanne. However he was able to exhibit them, paintings like L’Arlesienne by Van Gogh. Top works of art. He had a fantastic Cezanne portrait Man with the Crossed Arms which now hangs in a famous private collection in New York. He was always in the service of the artists. From the beginning he tried to support the art that he really knew and that he believed needed to be exposed. One of his very first exhibitions was a show that he called Saved From Europe with works by artists like Schiele, Klimt, and Kokoschka – all totally unknown here.

DT: By then the Germans had already staged the Degenerate Art show. They ridiculed Expressionist art. I understand the Nazis destroyed a lot of this art, didn’t they?

HB: They certainly did.

DT: They must have felt very threatened by the work to take such pains to destroy it.

HB: They felt that it was “Jewish” art. They caricatured people like George Grosz and Otto Dix. Of course as you know this Degenerate Art exhibition had one of the largest number of visitors of any art exhibition in the world.

DT: That is true. Of all the Expressionists who were Jewish that I can recall, only Ludwig Miedner comes to mind.

HB: Well, they hated that art you see. They wanted this “true blue” German housewife-type art that was exhibited in a parallel exhibition. That exhibition hall was empty of an audience.

DT: It was kitsch. The Greek god as a German Übermensch. Donald Kuspit has written about the Degenerate Art Show explaining how Expressionism told the harsh truth about the German culture of that time- the darkness and rottenness that lay at its core.

HB: Exactly.

DT: The Expressionists were showing the whole world upside down. I imagine Kallir must have had a critical sense of what was right and decent.

HB: He was a pioneer and he was certainly aware of what was decent and good. He was very upset with graft and cheating and the like.

DT: And of course anti-Semitism. It must have been terrible for him to experience that.

HB: Prejudice, yes. And he was also very interested in works by women. The very first Paula Modersohn-Becker and Grandma Moses exhibitions took place in this very gallery. Grandma Moses was not classified among the artists of the Women’s Rights movement. Why? I don’t know. She was such an amazing self–made person. She wasn’t a militant Feminist, not at all, but she knew very well what she wanted to do. She was the matriarch of her family – the person in control in her very quiet laid-back way. Of course one of Kallir’s amazing discoveries was finding Grandma Moses with the help of a man who was an engineer employed by the city of New York who loved folk art and traveled around New England. He brought a collection of Moses’ paintings to the New York galleries. One after another the galleries rejected the work, saying “who wants to deal with this old woman?” In 1940 she was 80 years old. Who cared?

DT: Didn’t she have a mature group of works at that time?

HB: No, not at all. It was the beginning. She painted only small pictures. She had wanted to paint all her life but being a busy farmer’s wife couldn’t find the time. Only in her 70’s did she start to paint because it was the time of the Depression. Where she lived it was terribly depressed.

DT: Where did she live?

HB: Eagle Bridge New York near Hoosick Falls, the place where John Deere equipment and trucks were made. The area fell apart. All these mill towns were shut down.

DT: Devastated I am sure. My father lived through the dark times of the Great Depression in Chicago and had many stories to tell. The deprivation is hard to imagine today and the hardship can leave a black spot on your soul.

HB: It did. Economically we are getting a little bit of that right now. There is a difference today but it hits the poor people the same way. Grandma Moses’ pictures were just 8 “x 10” or 14” and some of them were embroidered. Kallir saw a few of the best and said “This is fantastic, I’m going to give this woman a show”

DT: He had the insight to see the value in her work early on.

HB: Just like what happened with Richard Gerstl. By October 1940 the Galerie St. Etienne had been open in New York for one year. Kallir was something of a greenhorn. He didn’t know English very well though his French was perfect and he spoke it beautifully. However he had a good ear and learned English very quickly. He launched Moses and the exhibition was a success. He represented her from that day on until her death. We had a contract with her. She would send us all her pictures and we would buy them. After she died we continued to represent her estate up to this day. I knew her intimately for 20 years. Getting back to the 1940’s, it was a struggle beyond belief because the most expensive Moses picture cost $250.

DT: There are many stories about important art that is inexpensive in the beginning when the artists are unknown.

Part 2