Category: Art

on by

If someone twisted my arm and told me I had to cite my favorite painter, a name I would be as likely to utter as any would be Francis Bacon. The first piece of his to which I, as a pre-teen, was exposed was Two Figures, reproduced in the book The Art Treasures of Europe.1 After I became more familiar with his work, two paintings that were, and continue to be, near my top of not only Bacon’s oeuvre, but among my top pieces made by anyone, ever, were two examples of his papal portraits,2 Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) and Figure with Meat (1954). However, perhaps my favorite of Bacon’s pope paintings is one I discovered later, Study after Velázquez (1950).

I first became familiar with Study after Velázquez upon seeing a black-and-white reproduction in David Sylvester’s book of interviews with the artist.3 The photo was the only known evidence that the piece ever existed, as it was never shown and in 1951 Bacon had sent it, along with a few other paintings, to an artists’ supplier to have new canvases put on the stretchers, apparently with no instructions as to what should be done with the old canvases. Bacon confided to Sylvester on more than one occasion that he regretted that Study after Velázquez had been destroyed.

The papal portraits are often referred to as Bacon’s “screaming popes,” although many of them aren’t screaming. Some seem stoic, some look anxious or agitated, at least two appear to be laughing. Study after Velázquez’s figure, however, is definitely screaming, and quite vehemently, with his hands desperately clenched as if he’s shackled in an electric chair. From the late 1940s through the mid/late 1950s, Bacon often utilized vertical striations, which he called “shuttering,” to merge figure and ground in his work. The shuttering employed in Study after Velázquez is his most emphatic use of it of which I am aware – while in other paintings it often appears like folds in a lace curtain, here it looks more like bars of a cage running through the figure. It is the most bold and intense of the papal portraits, of which there exist roughly fifty. Both Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X and Figure with Meat are more subtly evocative, but in terms of immediate, authoritative impact, Study after Velázquez is the apex of the pope paintings.

In 1992, Francis Bacon died after having a heart attack while on holiday in Spain. Some time later, Study after Velázquez, along with several other Bacon paintings, was discovered at the artists’ supplier, where it had been rolled and carefully stored since 1951. Study after Velázquez was shown for the first time in 1998, nearly fifty years after its completion, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City.4

Most of Bacon’s papal portraits are based on Diego Rodriquez de Silva y Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c. 1650). Since Bacon had spoken of the “magnificent color” in that piece, one couldn’t be faulted for assuming he might have attempted to replicate it in Study after Velázquez, his first pope painting to incorporate the whole of Velázquez’s composition. The most notable color in the Velázquez is the red of the pontiff’s cape,5 which Bacon made purple; he would continue to do so for years to come – as far as I know, he wouldn’t paint a pope with a red cape until the early 1960s. When Study after Velázquez came to light, it turned out to be largely black and white; it actually doesn’t look much different from the photo by which it was for so many years exclusively known. Apart from the purple, Bacon only employed red in the piece, not as part of the pope’s vestment but below the railing in the bottom quarter of the painting.

Francis Bacon’s work was so different, in both subject matter and execution, from anything I’d seen before. He is one of the artists whose work opened my eyes when I was young to what could be achieved in painting. Study after Velázquez is a piece that embodies that recognition of the possibilities of art.

 

1 Charles Wentinck (Simon and Schuster, 1974). I’ve mentioned this book a few times previously in this blog; it was my introduction to several painters who remain among my favorite artists and it made quite an impression on me as a youngster. Two Figures could have easily been the subject of this post.

2 The image of the Pope doesn’t hold any particular emotional weight for me, nor apparently did it for Bacon. Although he conceded the Pope held a singular position in the world, he was a devout atheist and his main papal interest was the Velázquez portrait of Innocent X. My main papal interest is the Bacon paintings.

3 My copy is The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon/Third enlarged edition (Thames and Hudson, 1988); prior to purchasing it in the late 1980s, I had read a library copy of an earlier edition. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Bacon in particular or 20th century painting in general.

4 I did not see the show, although I do have the accompanying catalogue, Francis Bacon: Important Paintings from the Estate (Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 1998), which was given to me by my better half after she found it on the sale table of a bookstore in Seattle.

5 Or “pellegrina,” for the Catholics out there.

on by

I’m not exactly sure why my father bought a drawing of a cat, but he did. The pastel is for the most part delicately detailed, with some looser strokes which make up the fur around the cat’s neck. It’s a charming little piece – I don’t know if the artist knew or lived with the cat, but it certainly seems like a portrait of a specific animal. My father was not someone who would ever have had a pet – they’re too unpredictable, too untidy.1 My mother had a dog before they were married, but after Yuki died when I was six or seven years old, the only animals to enter the house were goldfish and hamsters. And a drawing of a white cat with blue eyes.

When I was in fifth grade, my mother surprised me by enrolling me in a weekly after-school drawing class at the elementary school I attended. Aside from making a value scale,2 I don’t recall any of the assignments or exercises we did, although I do remember the class fondly. The teacher was encouraging and seemed to genuinely care about what she was doing. There was no art education to speak of in the regular curriculum of either of the elementary schools I attended, so simply having some instruction in the subject I loved was engaging for me.

Two or three years later, my father and I took an evening drawing class at the nearby high school. At the first meeting, we walked in and he greeted Carol, the teacher. He had taken a class or two from her previously and they had become friends. I thought she looked familiar, but didn’t say anything – I was a pretty shy kid. She recognized me, though, from a class she had taught at the elementary school a few years prior. She could have been the only person teaching art classes in this manner in our small suburban town, but at the time, it seemed an incredible coincidence to me.

In the evening class, I was the only kid there. However, nobody was patronizing to me – Carol and the other students treated me like just another person taking the class. I probably felt more comfortable there than I did with the other kids in school. Although I did have some friends and a few teachers I liked, at that time I didn’t find school to be a particularly welcoming environment.

Carol had us draw from still lifes she’d set up, from live models, and from photos. She also spoke about what she called the “seven elements of design” – value, shape, size, line, texture, direction, and color.3 I took in this information, but besides simply continuing to draw, didn’t do much in the way of any serious study. However, I am glad I was introduced to these components of drawing and was asked to consider them at that age. Carol was my first art teacher, and the only one I had until I entered high school. The classes I took in junior high were just a waste of time; I learned nothing from them.

One evening during class, Carol did a sketch of my father, and gave it to him. The face is made up of fine lines, done with a pen, while the hair and shadows are represented by several bold strokes of a charcoal stick. It’s a good likeness, and I remember being impressed it was done so quickly  – I also remember my father’s smile as he showed it to me, minutes after it was finished. He treasured that drawing, and it was soon framed and hanging.

My father continued to take both drawing and painting classes from Carol, and bought several of her works, which joined her portrait of him on the walls of our home. After she moved out of the area, they remained friends and corresponded regularly until she passed away in the late 1990s or early 2000s.4

My father passed away in 2022, and as my mother has been giving away a lot of his possessions, she asked me if I wanted any of Carol’s work. Most of the pieces are too large for the space I have; however, I did remember one of a cat, a smaller pastel I quite liked, even though I was never really around cats until I was an adult. Of course, there were cats in the neighborhood, but I don’t think any of the kids I ran around with lived in a household with one. I’ve lived with two cats in my life, and I loved them both; the cat in the piece bears a slight resemblance to one of them. I inquired if the drawing were still available, and my mother laughed and asked if it reminded me of WK. I told her it kind of does, and she said the piece was mine.

So I have a new piece of artwork, one that reminds me of both my father and my first art teacher. And a white cat with green eyes.

 

1 Kind of makes one wonder why he had kids.

2 A value scale is a graduated chart that starts with the lightest value (white) and continues through several equal steps to the darkest (black).

3 I don’t know if she based the syllabus of her class for kids on this same concept, but I suspect she did, since we did make that value scale.

4 My father was a dedicated letter writer, a trait I have inherited.

on by

The answering of questions, showing of a Real ID, emptying of pockets, x-raying of possessions, stepping through a metal detector, all under the supervision of four armed guards was a bit much, but I get it – it is a federal building. My only business at the courthouse was wanting to see a particular painting again, so all the rigamarole was forgotten when the elevator doors opened on the ninth floor and I stepped out… and gasped.

Unlike many of the artists I’ve written about in this blog, Deborah Oropallo is not a household name, but this is my third post about her.1 Since the early 1990s, I have followed her where she has gone, even when that road has been a little uncomfortable for me. When, in the early 2000s, she began “painting” with a computer, and in 2008, when she started creating video installations, I was skeptical of the media. Although I had no doubt she would create something of worth, I could only hope it would be something to which I could artistically relate. I needn’t have worried, as she brought to these media the same strong painterly aesthetic that had imbued her previous work.

Back in 1997, when Oropallo was still producing paintings that were oil on canvas, she had a solo show titled Flat Pictures at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. The paintings were executed chiefly with silkscreens, which she had utilized before, but to my knowledge, never to such an extent. My favorite paintings in this particular show were of railroad tracks. There were several, some of which employ color; I prefer the black and white ones, which have a Franz Kline-esque quality to them. I seem to remember reading at the time the images were based on photos of pieces from her child’s toy train set, and that there were also actual tracks running past her studio in an industrial area of Berkeley, CA – Oropallo often makes reference to her personal environment in her work.

Although I didn’t, and still don’t know what the railroad track paintings are “about,” I do know Oropallo later used the motif in a very different manner, when she was commissioned by the General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program to create a piece for the United States Courthouse, Sacramento, CA.2 She was among the fourteen artists asked to draw inspiration from the natural, cultural, and/or political history of the building’s site, located in what was, during the Gold Rush and for decades afterward, a thriving Chinatown, one of the first in California.

China Pattern pictures nineteen rows of vertical tracks running the height of the piece. To thirteen of the rows, Oropallo added Chinese writing to pay homage to the roughly 15,000 Chinese immigrant laborers who in large part built the western section of the Transcontinental Railroad – these tracks signify the thirteen mountain pass tunnels through the Sierra Nevada range the workers completed. With its high-contrast, minimal palette; all-over composition; and size – nine feet tall – the painting is immediate in its visual impact. Like the earlier rail paintings, China Pattern is heavily layered; there are seemingly endless tracks, representing the nearly eight hundred miles they laid, visible under washes of white.3 The effect is dizzying, hypnotic.

Although it does have color, China Pattern has more in common visually with the earlier black and white paintings than it does with the color ones. The only color in the piece comes in the form of the characters, which spell out “fire cart” – the translation of “train” – in red, which Chinese culture associates with fire. The characters are sparse near the top of the piece and become dense at the bottom, as if the red, which Western culture associates with blood, is pooling – approximately 1200 Chinese laborers died because of the treacherous working conditions.

China Pattern would never be commissioned today – not for a federal building, at any rate. Its salute to the immigrant workforce would not be tolerated in this Brave New World we live in, one in which recognizing the contributions of people of non-European descent is considered DEI and therefore not acceptable. As a statement that serves not only as a lesson regarding a specific period in US history, but also as a rallying cry against what is the contemporary environment in this country, it is more relevant now than it was when Oropallo painted it, more than a quarter century ago.

 

1 See Moving Pictures (March 5, 2020) and Not Your Grandmother’s American Gothic (July 30, 2023).

2 The courthouse opened at 501 I Street in 1999 and in 2005 was renamed the Robert T. Matsui United States Courthouse. Matsui, a second-generation Sacramento native whose earliest memories were of the internment camp where he spent his first few years, served in the House of Representatives from 1979 until he passed away in 2005. 

3 A year after China Pattern, Oropallo had already moved on from this method of working. Although she continued to utilize silkscreens as part of the process in making her paintings, the period in which she made the rail and other related pieces didn’t last long. However, during this short time, she made work that was not only unlike the silkscreen paintings of both Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg – two artists who pioneered its use in fine art – but unlike any silkscreen paintings I’d seen before.

on by

Sometimes, one comes to know and appreciate something in a roundabout manner. No bolt from the blue, no epiphany that life and the world will never be seen in quite the same way again, but rather a slow realization over time that this could be important.

As a teen, I became a fan of “non-musician” Brian Eno, who was a member of Roxy Music and had worked with David Bowie. Like them, Eno made arty records and had a postmodern approach to rock and roll. His song “Kurt’s Rejoinder”1 features a recording, home-taped by Eno from a BBC Radio Three programme, of painter/collagist/sculptor/designer/writer Kurt Schwitters performing a sound poem. Eno didn’t use the recording as the vocal for the song, but more as a textural element; it sounds like some unknown, mysterious instrument in the distance. The liner notes credit Schwitters with “Voice (from the Ur Sonata).” Eno’s lyrics to the song gave me no clue as to Schwitters’ work – or to anything else about him, for that matter, including to what he was supposedly responding. I didn’t know much about Schwitters, although somehow, I was aware he was associated with Dada. Never mind I really didn’t know what Dada was.2

In 1986, by which time I had become familiar with Schwitters’ work, the Brian Eno/Russell Mills collaborative book More Dark than Shark3 was published. It contains the lyrics of all the songs from Eno’s initial four rock albums, and a corresponding piece of artwork by Mills. I purchased my copy very soon after it came out, for the work of both contributors. Mills’ interpretation of “Kurt’s Rejoinder” contains what he called “semi-Schwitters collages” – his imitations of Schwitters’ work – and his commentary on the piece includes a short summary of the sad trajectory of Schwitters’ career.

In the following years, I learned little details about Schwitters’ life – he was born in Germany in 1887 and studied art at the Dresden Academy. When the National Socialist cretins came to power he was branded a “degenerate artist” and his books were burned. In 1937 he fled to Norway and, when that country was overrun, to England. By 1948, in dire financial straits, he had been trying to sell his collages for £1 a piece. He died that year, one day after being granted British citizenship and less than two weeks before the opening of his first solo exhibition in the US. I’m not sure if his work was Dada, but his life certainly was.4

I’m most interested in Schwitters’ collages, the work for which he is now most celebrated. He collected rubbish from the street to make them, and they often don’t contain “imagery” but consist of texture, both actual and visual; shape; and color. Text is frequently employed, generally as a compositional device rather than for the actual meaning of the words. To create a more cohesive surface, he regularly utilized paint on the collages, and used a flour and water mixture not only as paste, but to mute any color that was too vivid. Although Schwitters sometimes incorporated faces and figures in the work, I prefer the pieces without such representational aspects. His employment of modern-world detritus such as bus tickets, newspaper clippings, shipping labels, and candy wrappers anticipated the work of Robert Rauschenberg, and as far as I’m concerned, was more revolutionary than Picasso’s use of collage, which was illustrative in nature.5

I have a preference for the pieces with a grid-like structure. I find these, especially, to be quite elegant, despite the lowly origins of the materials used. Schwitters’ subtle use of color, along with the relatively small scale of the work and his eye for harmonious composition, gives his oeuvre this intimate, poetic quality, while he called attention to the mass-produced, the everyday, the ignored.6

Several years ago, I purchased a used copy of the catalogue Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage.7 I’d had it a few days when I noticed on the copyright page the exhibition had come to the Berkeley Art Museum in 2011. I hadn’t been aware the show had been less than eighty miles away, and I missed the chance to see all the actual work that I had been poring over in reproduction. I was crushed, as I imagined it would be quite some time before I would again have the opportunity to see a large selection of Schwitters’ work. I’m still waiting.

Postscript: Although over forty-five years after its release, “Kurt’s Rejoinder” remains one of only two rock songs I’ve heard with a title that cites Schwitters,8 I do know of another reference to him in the genre – the sleeve for The Rolling Stones 1989 single “Rock and a Hard Place” is based on a Schwitters piece.

 

1 From Before and After Science (Island Records, 1977), the fourth of Eno’s solo rock albums; it was his last record to be comprised of songs until Wrong Way Up, which he made with John Cale in 1990.

2 Mainly I was familiar with the term because both Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were often referred to as “Neo-Dada.” In the wake of World War I, the Dadaists created absurd “anti-art” and rallied against the circumstances in which mankind had put itself, those which resulted in more than ten million casualties. Maybe if I’d known more about the movement, Eno’s lyrics would have made more “sense” to me.

3 Faber and Faber. I learned about this book via the liner notes of the companion compilation LP, More Blank than Frank (EG Records, 1986) – “Please send check for US $25.00 + $2.00 postage and handling to…,” which I did. The title of the album is derived from Eno’s song “Blank Frank,” which doesn’t appear on the record. The title of the book, according to its acknowledgements page, was “kindly and unwittingly supplied” by one Mike Clark.

4 As was his death – he was buried in an unmarked grave in England, but in 1970 his remains were disinterred and re-buried in Germany, where he had vowed, because of Nazi atrocities, never to return.

5 Bring on the arguments.

6 Several decades later, the Pop artists would employ this idea in an exeedingly different manner.

7 Yale University Press, 2010.

8 The other one being Jim Carroll’s “I am Not Kurt Schwitters,” from the album Pools of Mercury (Mercury Records, 1998).

on by

A few days ago, October 1, marked five years that I have been posting monthly installments to this blog.1 The idea of writing a blog was suggested by my friend Michael as a way to keep this website, which he designed, active. I really hadn’t done much writing since high school – that was a long time ago – so I had my doubts I was even capable of producing a newspaper column-type piece of writing2 every few weeks. Despite my ambivalence, both Michael and my better half were encouraging, so I figured I would give it a whirl.

In an attempt to prepare for this undertaking, I searched for and read blogs about art, but was unable to find any that I could use as a template of sorts for what would keep me engaged and might be of interest to those who hold my work in some regard. Despite this, I did figure out fairly quickly what I wanted the blog to be, although it took a few months before I was able to find my footing.

Initially, I wrote about things I had recently experienced – exhibitions I’d just seen or other art-related activities in which I’d taken part – but less than six months in, COVID-19 reared its ugly head. In order to continue, I started to write for the most part about large retrospective shows I’d seen in the past. I have fairly good recall about such things, and often have very specific recollections of these exhibitions, but it certainly helps if I’d purchased a catalogue which I could use to jog my memory. For a few of the posts, I asked those who were there what they remember of the time. Since my first post-vaccine trip to the San Francisco Bay Area in the spring of 2022, which spawned two posts – about Alice Neel’s People Come First retrospective at the de Young and Paul McCartney’s Got Back Tour at the Oakland Arena – the blog has dealt with a combination of recent events and those from the past.

The scope of the blog has expanded a little over time – in addition to painting, I’ve also written about music, books, and movies. This was largely a result of my fear, which I continue to harbor, of running out of topics to write about. I still often feel I’m ill-equipped for the whole endeavor, but it has turned into something of which I’m actually proud.

All of which brings us to the present. This will be my last monthly entry for a while. Over the last few years, life has become increasingly complicated – I currently have neither the time nor the energy to keep up that schedule and I don’t foresee this situation changing in the near future. However, I’m not finished here; there are artists, some of whom have been favorites of mine since I was a teen – those whose work is so ingrained in me I can’t imagine who I would be had I never discovered them – that I have yet to write about. There are also plenty of artists with whom I have become familiar in the intervening decades – those whose work I love and is important to me, but hasn’t been an integral part of my consciousness for the majority of my life. I will continue to post on an intermittent basis and do hope to re-establish a regular timetable before too long. I have very much appreciated the feedback and comments I’ve received about specific posts and the blog in general, and I hope everyone will check back occasionally and continue to read my ramblings. Thanks.

“My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare…” – David Bowie, “Five Years”

 

1 In that time I’ve only missed my schedule once.

2 I grew up reading newspaper columns, back when there were such things. Back when there were newspapers. Mike Royko was my favorite.

on by

When I was a young child occasionally someone I didn’t know – usually one of my mother’s co-workers – would give me an art book, generally of the Walter T. Foster “how to” variety. Walter T. Foster published those large thin paperbacks with titles such as How to Draw Horses and Of Course You Can Paint. I recall one particular occasion when my mother brought home a few of these books for me. One of them, Russell Iredell’s Drawing the Figure, had a nude on the cover, and my mother’s co-worker had warned, “You might not want to give this one to him until he’s older.” I don’t remember exactly what my mother said her response was, but it was obvious to me she thought that very idea was patently ridiculous.

While I did look at and appreciate these second-hand books, I don’t believe I ever did any of the exercises – I’ve never constructed form by first drawing a collection of cubes, cones, cylinders, and spheres; or started a figure drawing with a “line of action.”

The books I most treasured were those with lots of reproductions from art history. The anatomical distortion of Parmigiano’s The Madonna with the Long Neck, the vivid color in Degas’s Blue Dancers, the indescribable humanity of so many of Rembrandt’s figures – these were images that obsessed me as a child, images I knew from books. Even when I got a little older, however, I only had a handful of this type of volume. So what’s an idle young teen out to bend his mind a little to do? Go to the library, of course. As a kid I would from time to time make that trip, but I started frequenting my local branch of the Sacramento Public Library system specifically to look at art books during the summer after ninth grade, just prior to entering high school.

Sacramento Central Library; Downtown Sacramento, CA.
Sacramento Central Library; Downtown Sacramento, CA.

In the following few years, a whole world became available to me through those visits – the artists I learned about at the library during that time included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. Some of them I already knew a little about; others, as far as I can remember, I discovered there – they are all still among the artists most important to me. The fact that at the time five of these painters were still alive and producing made their work feel as immediate as a new album by a favorite rock and roll band.1 As with the musical artists, I wanted to know about these painters whose work seemed so romantic to me. Although I still gravitated toward books comprised mainly of reproductions, I read biographies, as well. The first time I read both Popism: The Warhol ’60s and Interviews with Francis Bacon,2 two books which had a major impact on me, they were library copies.

It’s amazing to me now how recent much of this work was at the time; Pop Art made its splash less than two decades before, and Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s first shows took place only a few years prior to that. It also surprises me that books featuring these artists were on the shelves of my humble suburban branch of the library. I’m sure in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the general public considered these artists to be no-talent charlatans,3 but there those books were, waiting for me to discover them.

After I got a job and was able to purchase books for myself, I did so with some abandon and my personal collection really started to grow. Nevertheless, I continued to go to the library and discover artists new to me. When I moved to Midtown Sacramento in the mid-1980s, I lived just a few blocks from the McKinley Library, which I’d visit, but the Central branch became my favorite, as it had a considerably larger art section than the others. My life has been enriched immeasurably by books and the public library system, and this was especially true during those pivotal years as an impressionable teen and young adult.

For the last several years, that very system has been under siege by little brownshirts who are attempting to erase from public discourse the personal stories of individuals and the histories of whole populations. According to a report by the American Library Association, the number of titles targeted for censorship rose by 65% from 2022 to 2023. Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol all belong to one of the most heavily targeted groups, the LGBT+ community. Currently available through the Sacramento Public Library are books about or by all the above artists, plus others of whom the Thought Police would not approve, including Jenny Saville, Ross Bleckner, and Kara Walker. Let’s make sure those books and so many others stay on the shelves for us and for those kids seeking to expand and elevate their hearts, minds, and lives.

“Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” – Heinrich Heine, 1823

 

1 From The Beatles and The Stones, to Roxy Music and David Bowie, to Patti Smith and Television, rock and roll had a liberating power that held sway over me at the time. Sadly, although those old favorite bands still embody that spirit for me, rock and roll as a genre no longer does.

2 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980) and David Sylvester (Thames and Hudson, 1975), respectively.

3 Judging from many comments I’ve overheard even at recent museum shows, maybe they still are. For example, at From A to B and Back Again, the 2019 Andy Warhol retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I witnessed a man browbeating his female companion because she stopped to look at some examples of the “Death and Disaster” series. “Car crashes?! Car crashes?! That’s not art!”

 

Recommended Reading: Susan Orlean: The Library Book (Simon & Schuster, 2018). Ostensibly about a 1986 arson fire at the Los Angeles Central Library, this book is part memoir, part true crime, part historical account, part love letter – all engaging, all wonderful.

on by

In 2002 the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art presented Andy Warhol: Retrospective, which included 240 pieces from 1942 through 1986. That’s a large show. Since I spent the whole day at the museum, I did occasionally feel the need to sit down and take a rest. Fortunately, the museum has a small auditorium where a selection of Warhol’s Screen Tests was being shown continually throughout the day, so a few times during my visit, I took the opportunity to watch some of these short films.

Between 1964 and 1966 Warhol made nearly 500 of the silent, black & white Screen Tests with his Bolex camera. Completely unedited, they were shot on 100-foot 16mm rolls in the standard twenty-four frames per second. However, Warhol conceived the films to be projected at a slower sixteen frames per second, extending the running time from under three minutes to over four minutes long.

Some of the subjects self-consciously pose. Or smoke. Lou Reed drinks from a bottle of Coca-Cola®. Jane Holzer brushes her teeth. Warhol often instructed the sitters to look straight into the camera and to not move. Edie Sedgwick and Mary Woronov both did a Screen Test in this manner, but Ann Buchanan adheres to the instruction most strictly – she goes the entire length of the film without blinking. At about the two-minute mark, a tear comes down her left cheek; by the end, tears are streaming down her face, but she still does not blink.

At one point while I was watching the films, a couple and their young daughter entered and sat down. The girl was probably seven or eight years old. She watched for a little while, but soon it became too much for her, and, obviously agitated, she loudly exclaimed, “This isn’t good! This isn’t good at all!”1

Although over the past twenty-two years I’ve often wondered what it was about the Screen Tests that elicited such a strong visceral reaction, I do realize it was perfectly rational, albeit a little over the top. Her parents probably told her they were going to watch some movies, and she reasonably thought in a movie, people do things. This does not occur in the Screen Tests; the subjects just sit there. Her parents, however, jumped into action, and the family quickly exited the auditorium.

The little girl’s judgment notwithstanding, I find the Screen Tests to be enthralling works which are most effective when the subject followed Warhol’s dictum. The slow motion gives the films a druggy quality, although not the amphetamine rush one associates with the Factory scene; the Screen Tests are more like a suspended barbiturate haze. The films relate to Warhol’s paintings of the time, especially the Most Wanted Men series, which are largely made up of mugshots. The face-front, unflinchingly factual nature of the police photos is echoed in the composition and starkness of the best Screen Tests. In essence, Warhol invented his own genre – film which reveals its subject in a similar manner as does painted portraiture.

Epilogue: A few years ago at a Goodwill Store in Sacramento I found the 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests DVD2 and purchased it for three dollars. On it, one can view the films with or without soundtracks by Dean Wareham & Britta Phillips, both ex of the band Luna and who have a distinct Velvet Underground fixation. Although I am a casual fan and enjoy their music, the Screen Tests are most powerful when viewed in silence, as nature intended.

 

All Screen Test images © 2009 The Andy Warhol Museum. All rights reserved.

 

1 Her outburst would become a running gag between my better half, who was also there, and me.

2 Plexifilm/The Andy Warhol Museum (2009). This was the first-ever authorized DVD release of films by Andy Warhol, and is now out of print.

on by

Willem de Kooning: Seated Woman (c. 1940).When I was eighteen or nineteen years old and started studying the work of Willem de Kooning, I was mainly interested in the human form as subject matter. Upon acquiring a general, cursory knowledge of his career, including the aggressive Women from the 1950s and the watery figures from the ’60s, I gravitated toward his late ’30s/early ’40s figures. I don’t remember what my thinking or feeling was at the time, but I imagine because the earlier figures tend to be more rooted in actual anatomy, they were more accessible to me. Although I soon came to love the later work as well, Seated Woman, c. 1940, is still among my favorites in an oeuvre that is arguably the strongest of the twentieth century.

There were many reasons I was so attracted to this particular piece. I don’t believe I’d ever encountered a painting in which the distinction between the figure and the ground was blurred in such a subtle and engaging manner. The geometric ground suggests an interior with a window, a table, and the chair in which the figure is seated. Her right arm has morphed into a large teardrop shape which could also be an object, possibly a vase or a pitcher, on the green tabletop. The oval shape above that, next to her head, could have initially been her right hand. The method in which the legs are painted, as well as the outlining and visible pentimento, flattens the figure and merges it with the ground. Juxtaposed with the more modeled head, neck, and upper torso, this creates a push/pull dynamic that I found endlessly seductive.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: Portrait of Madam Louis-Nicholas-Marie Destouches (1816). Graphite on paper, 17” x 11 1/4”.

In several ways, Seated Woman is reminiscent of the work of Jean-Augusta-Dominique Ingres, for whom de Kooning never shied away from declaring his admiration. The figure’s elongated left arm resembles a mannequin’s, detached from her body. This fragmentation relates to the anatomical restructuring that Ingres often utilized, and the length of the arm, as well as the composition as a whole, recalls Ingres’s 1816 Portrait of Louis-Nicolas-Marie Destouches. In his drawings, Ingres often left portions of the figure in outline, with no modeling at all, as de Kooning did the legs, here.

De Kooning reportedly once said he’d like to paint like Ingres and Chaïm Soutine – simultaneously. Although in Seated Woman he did not attempt the Soutine side of that unlikely but strikingly enticing marriage – it’s less expressionist and more cubist-inspired – he did succeed in evoking Ingres and producing what was perhaps the first major work of his career. It was also the first painting of his that made me realize why he is considered a master, although when he made it, he was only known to a few painters in the New York City art scene – he wouldn’t even have his first solo show until 1948.

Over forty years after the paint was dry, Seated Woman was a revelation to me, opening my mind to seeing the figure in a whole new way.

on by

In late 1988, I was newly single and needed a roommate to share the Midtown Sacramento apartment from which my ex had moved. I proposed the situation to M, a young woman with whom I had become acquainted a few years before and who had recently done some modeling for me, and she accepted. She was a budding songwriter who also played bass,1 and had a small record collection – all vinyl; neither of us owned a CD player during the few years we were roommates.

In the Venn diagram of musical tastes, ours had some overlap which grew as she heard the records I played. She didn’t act as DJ much, but one LP I recall her owning is Japan’s live album Oil on Canvas, which is notable for the Frank Auerbach painting that graces the jacket. With its heavily impastoed surface and virtuosic brushwork, the portrait of Juliet Yardley Mills, who sat regularly for Auerbach for over forty years, is representative of his arresting technique and as far as I know is the only example of his work on a record cover.

I didn’t know a lot about either the band or the painter, but was vaguely familiar with both. I’d heard a couple of Japan’s albums and some of leader David Sylvian’s solo work, but didn’t know any of the records well. As for Auerbach, I was aware of paintings similar to the one on the album cover and that he ran in the same circles as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, two other renowned British figurative artists,2 but that was about the extent of my knowledge.

That situation didn’t change much for many years, but when my friend Laureen Landau passed away in 2009, she left much of her estate to a mutual friend of ours, the aforementioned ex, who, from Laureen’s possessions, gave me a black leather blazer of which I am very fond, and several art books, including a Frank Auerbach monograph.3 Of the work reproduced therein, the portrait heads interest me the most, and I have a preference for the charcoal drawings over the oils. Also appearing in the book is a compelling series of forty photographs documenting the progress of a single drawing, Portrait of Sandra. Auerbach would rub out the drawing prior to each session with the sitter and start over with the pentimento of what had been done before as a foundation. He worked and re-worked all his drawings until they were so abraded he often needed to patch them where the paper had been worn through. The resultant layers and textures from this working method give the images a captivating expressionist quality.4

Earlier this year, The Courtauld Gallery in London mounted an exhibition of Auerbach portraits from the mid-1950s to the mid-’60s. I didn’t make it to Merrie Olde for The Charcoal Heads, although I did stroll through the gallery and see the show in the online virtual world.5 In addition to the seventeen titular drawings in the show, there were six oil paintings from the same period, all depicting sitters who appear in the drawings. The work is simultaneously sensitive and brutal; it evokes an emotional desolation that could be viewed as reflective of not only the circumstances of Post-War Britain, but also Auerbach’s personal trauma – in 1939, at eight years old, he was sent to England from Germany via Kindertransport. He never saw his parents again; they were among the over one million people murdered at Auschwitz. Still in his early twenties when he made the earliest of the pieces in the show, he was astonishingly young to be producing work of such sophistication and depth.

Frank Auerbach is now ninety-three years old, and still works every day in his studio. In 2023 he had a show of new self-portraits, both drawings and paintings, most of which were done when his regular models couldn’t sit for him during the COVID lockdown. His process hasn’t changed – he still rubs out all his drawings and scrapes down all his paintings prior to starting again. Although he said the show included “what may be [his] last paintings,” I imagine he will continue that practice until he is unable to work at all.

It’s been well over thirty years since M’s and my living arrangement came to an end. Despite her moving to several different cities up and down the West Coast in subsequent years, she has modeled for me occasionally since then, and we’ve managed to stay in touch all this time. Maybe she’ll take a page from Auerbach’s models, and sit for me regularly for the next few decades.

 

1 Shortly after she moved in, I was listening to Keith Richards’ first solo album, Talk is Cheap, which had just been released and was in heavy rotation at the apartment. The first song on side one is called “Big Enough,” and while it was playing, she asked, “Who is that on bass?!” It’s Bootsy Collins.

2 Decades into their respective careers, all three painters were deemed part of the School of London, figurative artists based in and around England’s capital. Besides these three, the only other artist associated with the group with whom I was familiar at the time was David Hockney. 

3 Robert Hughes: Frank Auerbach (Thames & Hudson, 1992).

4 Like Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, Auerbach has denied any expressionist intent in his work.

5 In the actual real world, I purchased the catalogue. Barnaby Wright and Colm Tóibín: Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2024).

on by

Ross Bleckner: One Day Fever (1986). Oil and wax on linen, 48" x 40".For much of the 1990s, I had a magazine subscription to Art in America. Occasionally, my favorite part of an issue would be the monthly advertisement for recently-published art books that could be purchased at a slight discount through the magazine itself. If memory serves, there would be four different ads a year, one for each season. It was in one of these ads that I first saw the Ross Bleckner painting One Day Fever, which appears on the cover of the catalogue to his 1995 Guggenheim retrospective. Even in the tiny reproduction – the photo was not much larger than a couple of postage stamps – the painting was striking. It captured my attention and for weeks I kept flipping back to the ad. I was already somewhat familiar with Bleckner’s work, which, since the early ’80s,  I had occasionally read about and admired in Art in America and other magazines. On the strength of its cover image and my rudimentary knowledge of his work, I decided to take the plunge and ordered the catalogue through a local independent bookstore I frequented. Apparently one can judge a book….

Bleckner utilizes an ever-expanding set of motifs, but his dark interiors are still among my favorites of his oeuvre. The obscure environment in One Day Fever, as well as those in several other pieces in the catalogue, brought to mind the rooms in many of Francis Bacon’s dark paintings from the 1950s. However, whereas Bacon’s spaces feel airless and claustrophobic, Bleckner’s appear open and expansive – those in the Examined Life series, with chandeliers or other lamp-like objects, often resemble the dance floors of discotheques. The shaft of light coming down on the left side of One Day Fever also recalls Bacon’s ’50s work; it resembles the vertical brushstrokes he used to merge figure and ground and which he referred to as “shuttering.” Despite these similar aspects, Bleckner’s piece no more resembles a Bacon painting than it does El Greco’s Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, a detail from which Bleckner based his composition. Bleckner has obviously studied the vocabularies of a myriad of artists from the past, but the manner in which he employs them is his own.

Bleckner transformed the El Greco angel’s pale, fleshy legs into spectral limbs which float at the top of the scene and are a principle component of his composition. The roses, lilies, and urn, which fill the majority of the picture plane, create the funereal atmosphere which permeated Bleckner’s work of the time. The urn doesn’t even seem to have a physical presence – it appears to be composed completely of light reflected off an object which is no longer present. Although Bleckner’s approach to referencing HIV and AIDS was actually quite oblique, One Day Fever immediately and unmistakably evoked all the issues surrounding that crisis. As far as I know, Bleckner explicitly referred to AIDS in only one piece – 8,122 as of January 1986 – but in the 1980s and ’90s it was impossible to view his paintings of loss and mourning without thinking about the disease.

It’s been almost thirty years since Bleckner’s “mid-career” Guggenheim retrospective, almost thirty years since I became familiar with One Day Fever. I believe seeing the piece for the first time today, out of the context of the times, would be a very different experience, although it continues to embody the gravitas it held then. I admire Bleckner’s compulsion to make work based on his sociopolitical concerns, I admire his need to do so on his own terms, and I admire the paintings themselves, of which I’ve only seen a handful. One Day Fever has not been among them.