Painting in the 1980s: Reimagining the Medium 1789385571, 9781789385571

Table of contents :
Cover
Painting in the 1980s
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. New Image Painting: A Prelude to the 1980s
2. Painting as Puzzle: The Downtown New York Art World of the 1980s
3. Abstraction: Ideas about the Thing and the Thing Itself
4. Addressing Germany's Past: Painting in a Divided Nation
5. A Sense of Place: The Italian Transavanguardia
6. Worthy Misfits: Defying Categorization
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

PAINTING IN THE 1980s

PAINTING IN THE 1980s REIMAGINING THE MEDIUM ROSEMARY COHANE ERPF Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2022 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2022 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2022 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Copy editor: Newgen KnowledgeWorks Cover and layout designer: Aleksandra Szumlas Cover photo: Detail of Mary Heilmann, The Thief of Baghdad, 1983. Oil on canvas, 60 × 42 × 1.75 in. © Mary Heilmann. Digital image courtesy of the artist, 303 Gallery, New York, and Hauser & Wirth. Photo credit: Stephen White. Full image on page 93. Frontipiece image: Georg Baselitz, Orangenesser IX (“The Orange Eater IX”), 1981. Oil and tempera on canvas, 57 1/2 × 44 7/8 in. (146 × 144 cm). Private Collection 2022 © Georg Baselitz/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Friedrich Rosenstiel, Cologne. Courtesy of Archiv Georg Baselitz. Production manager: Laura Christopher Typesetter: Aleksandra Szumlas Print ISBN 978-1-78938-557-1 ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-558-8 ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-559-5 Printed and bound by Short Run Press To find out about all our publications, please visit our website. There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print. www.intellectbooks.com This is a peer-reviewed publication.

To Sharon Romayne Taylor, and to the memory of my beloved sister Margaret Mary Cohane

All I know is that painting is useful and important, like music and art in general—painting is an indispensable necessity of life. —Gerhard Richter

Contents Acknowledgmentsix Introduction01 1. New Image Painting: A Prelude to the 1980s07 2. Painting as Puzzle: The Downtown New York  Art World of the 1980s

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3. Abstraction: Ideas about the Thing and  the Thing Itself

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4. Addressing Germany’s Past: Painting in  a Divided Nation

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5. A Sense of Place: The Italian Transavanguardia185 6. Worthy Misfits: Defying Categorization225 Conclusion269 Bibliography273 Index291

Acknowledgments

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hank you to James Campbell, Laura Christopher, Naomi Curston, Tim Mitchell, and everyone at Intellect Books who worked tirelessly on this publication. My brilliant editorial assistant, Madeline Long, was invaluable in bringing this book to completion. My gratitude to Sharon Taylor, Peter Cohane, and Ellen Cohane DePalma who gave freely of their editorial expertise. Peer reviewers Pam Allara and Emily Taub Webb provided insights and suggestions while I was completing the manuscript. For taking the time to read the manuscript pre-publication, I thank Dan Cameron, Lowery Stokes Sims, Eleanor Nairne, and Dominic van den Boogerd. Family and friends who provided love, support, and encouragement at every stage of the book-writing process include Megan Erpf, Ellen Cohane DePalma, Lorraine Smith, Elizabeth Callaghan, Timothy Cohane, Lisa Cohane, Peter Cohane, Patti Cohane, Susan Barocas, Nancy and Thomas Galdy, Priscilla Lundin Schwartz, Imani Michelle Scott, and Mary Hodel. Gratitude to Anton Lakatos for unwavering belief in my writing. My thanks to many people who helped find images and research materials. They include Rebecca Africano, Jason Andrew, Lisa Ballard, Tobias Bäumer, Jennifer Belt, Katherine Borkowski, Jonathan Boyd, Natalie Bryt, Regina Barunke, Franca Candrian, Carol Chapin, Heidi Coleman, Carolyn Cruthirds, Alessandro Cucchi, William Davie, Natalie Donohue, Stephen Ellis, Esther Flury, Julia Fromm, Paul Gabrielli, Michael Harrigan, Patrick Hillman, Andrew Huff, Peter Kaiser, Sofia Kofodimos, Kerstin Küster, Maurizio Lanzetta, James McKee, Shayna Miller, Weng Yee Mooi, Sara Piccinini, Benjamin Provo, Omar Ramos, Chris Rawson, Inae Rurup, Jamie Russell, Mary Schwab, David Stark, Kelsey Tyler, Willem ter Velde, Caroline Wallis, Hetty Wessels, Stephen Westfall, Julia Westner, Helmut Wietz, Virginia Yearick, and Austin Yoon. To the following galleries, I am so appreciative of your generosity in sharing digital images: Collezione Maramotti, Craig F. Starr Gallery, David Zwirner Gallery, Sammlung Froehlich, Gagosian Gallery, Gladstone Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Marc Strauss, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Michael Werner, Skarstedt Gallery, Sperone Westwater Gallery, and 303 Gallery, as well as Artestar, Index Magazine, and Regen Projects. Museums and foundations: Art Institute of 

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Chicago, Daros Museum, Hall Art Foundation, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Jennifer Bartlett Trust, Kunsthaus Zürich, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Art Boston, Museum of Modern Art, Philip Guston Foundation, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Stedelijk Museum, The Willem de Kooning Foundation. Thank you all for your help. Thank you to the artists who gave of their time, including Peter Halley, Carroll Dunham, George Condo, Mimmo Paladino, Sandro Chia. I’m grateful to Achille Bonito Oliva, who provided me with a long interview, and to Thomas Galdy for his translation skills. Thanks to Paula Wallace, President of Savannah College of Art & Design for awarding me the fellowship at the American Academy in Rome where I studied the Italian Transavanguardia. Thanks also to Julian Schnabel for taking the time to discuss this book with me and provide more materials and commentary than I could have asked for. Special thanks to Peter Halley, Julian Schnabel, George Condo, Studio Dumas, Atelier Anselm Kiefer, and Archiv Georg Baselitz for fact checking. It takes a village to write a book, and I’m grateful for the support and assistance from everyone.

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Introduction

Introduction

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ainting reemerged in the 1980s with an unprecedented force, since unmatched. Remarkably, this happened in spite of claims that painting was dead. This book explores painting by a wide swath of artists who were at the heart of that painting resurgence. Although there are books aplenty that examine twentieth-century art, they tend to emphasize painting as part of European Modernism, American Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art, with late-twentieth-century painting often given short shrift. Excellent monographs and exhibition catalogues on individual artists exist, but my intention is to counter the paucity of literature devoted to a larger group of painters. This is not a comprehensive look at all the artists who contributed to the 1980s paintings revival. Including a larger, more comprehensive group of 1980s painters would preclude a detailed study of each artist. Gallerists, curators, and art historians assigned labels such as New Image Painting, Neo-Expressionism, Italian Transavanguardia, Neo-Geo, and the blanket designation Postmodernism to categorize painting in this era. Yet these classifications denote a false sense of homogeneity, which will be made clear in this book. This book aims to excavate and analyze the art and ideas that shaped each artist’s style, and their diverse and often ambiguous content. The conception for my book is founded on an interest in the painting that emerged during the 1980s and was identified within a postmodern dialogue. This happened primarily in the United States and Europe. No doubt, painting was practiced worldwide during this decade, but it is my understanding, although sweeping generalizations always have exceptions, that much of this painting followed earlier traditions and the most noteworthy painting which reflected issues of postcolonialism, responses to geopolitical situations, fresh interpretations of cultural mores, and a more rigorous consideration of gender roles, race, and cultural biases—although often sparked by pioneer painters in the 1970s and 1980s such as Robert Colescott—came into full flowering in the 1990s and after. Additionally, many important artists who were painting in the 1980s would not reach their mature styles until the 1990s. For example, works from the 1980s by the great Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang are tentative. But in 1993, he came into his own with his powerful and influential Bloodline-Big Family series. Each chapter is organized around an overarching theme, such as “Painting as Puzzle” to describe painting that emerged in downtown Manhattan or “A Sense of Place” to give the reader an underlying premise linking the work of painters in Italy, which will give readers context to connect works that vary in style and subject. This text will also illustrate the ways in which the genre was labeled, contextualized, and situated in critical discourse while tastemakers and collectors,

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new and seasoned, swarmed to support the work in a rapidly expanding art market. Painting practices will be situated in an art historical framework, teasing out factors which rang true to painters while detailing overriding similarities and differences to provide an understanding of how the genre reinvented itself. The narrative begins just before the 1980s with the Whitney Museum’s 1978 exhibition New Image Painting (Chapter 1). Against the anti-painting sentiment, its curator Richard Marshall took the unlikely step of displaying a group of young, New York City painters who had started depicting recognizable images. The New Image artists were the forerunners of painting’s revitalization and growth in the following decade. Following New Image, a new set of edgy New York painters emerged in the 1980s and were by no means a homogenous group despite the fact that they became known as American Neo-Expressionists, a flawed label that remained an unwelcome presence for New York painters in the 1980s. They challenged the viewers to find the ambiguous meaning, even as no singular meaning exists. Even among this diverse subgroup, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eric Fischl, Julian Schnabel, and David Salle blazed through New York City’s art scene and upended expectations of what painting should be (Chapter 2). At the same time, abstraction was getting a new life of its own. Peter Halley, Mary Heilmann, and Gerhard Richter approached Abstraction in terms of the personal, the theoretical, and the process and materials (Chapter 3). Overseas, German (Chapter 4) and Italian (Chapter 5) artists were making names for themselves as well. Following the horrors of the Nazi regime, and Hitler’s erasure of indigenous German art, painters addressed the realities of living in a divided Germany. In very different ways, artists Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, and A. R. Penck exposed the horrors of Nazism that had been sequestered in Germany’s postwar collective amnesia. Italian painters in the 1980s reversed the dominance of non-painting art forms and drew from their regional identity and personal histories. Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Enzo Cucci, Sandro Chia were all instrumental in reviving the rich tradition of Italian painting. Several artists from this period do not fall neatly into categories or styles, but they merit discussion nonetheless. Lari Pittman, George Condo, Carroll Dunham, and Marlene Dumas contributed to the artistic dialogue of the 1980s through their multifarious painting styles. These great individualists were fully committed to taking their own artistic proclivities to the max. This particularly varied group defies easy classification—worthy misfits. In many instances, their lone voices have had far-reaching influence on younger artists even today (Chapter 6).

Introduction

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Women artists in the 1980s A great number of important women artists emerged in the 1980s, but their brilliance in non-painting modes had the greatest impact. Many were part of “The Pictures Generation,” a term stemming from the 1977 exhibition titled Pictures curated by Douglas Crimp and later set in stone when the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted the 2009 exhibition, The Pictures Generation 1974–1984. These artists used photography, video, and film, often appropriating and reframing images. In an era of endless reproductions, these artists recycled pictures from divergent sources ranging from advertising to art history. The question of originality is a thematic constant in this group, which they often used to reveal societal attitudes and biases. The long list of female Pictures artists includes Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum, Barbara Bloom, Sarah Charlesworth, Nancy Dwyer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons. Many female artists such as Gretchen Bender, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Nan Goldin, Sandy Skoglund, Kiki Smith, Andrea Fraser, Martha Rosler, Judy Pfaff, Annette Messager, Sophie Calle, Marina Abramović, and Laurie Andersen incorporated photography, film, installation and performance art. Women were central to all forms of 1980s sculpture as seen in the art of Alice Aycock, Petah Coyne, Andrea Fraser, Maya Lin, Shelagh Cluitt, Alison Wilding, Helen Chadwick, Isa Genzken, and Katharina Fritsch. Rosemarie Trockel was one of the few German artists afforded equal footing with her male counterparts. The artists mentioned above are in no way a complete listing of female artists who emerged in the 1980s. Susan Rothenberg, Jennifer Bartlett, Denise Green, Mary Heilmann, and Marlene Dumas, all discussed in this text, represent only a small sampling of women painters who were significant in the 1980s. Painters Julie Wachtel, Moira Dyer, Martha Diamond, April Gornik, and Yvonne Jacquette also made significant contributions. Moreover, other painters who emerged in the 1970s or earlier continued to contribute enormously to the genre, and their work carried great influence; these included Elizabeth Murray, Judith Murray, Pat Steir, Nancy Spiro, Ida Applebroog, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joan Mitchell, Louise Fishman, Joan Snyder, Agnes Martin, Viga Celmins, and Catherine Murphy. A book devoted to painting by women in the 1980s is long overdue. Neo-Expressionism Now that there is some distance from the 1980s, and as this is beginning to be defined as a distinct art historical period, a complete rethinking of the term

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“Neo-Expressionism” is in order. The label was applied to almost any painter that emerged in the growing art world in New York and Europe, particularly Germany and Italy, in the 1980s. The differences among the artists examined in this text make clear that a common denominator never existed, and the artists rejected the label categorically. Consider the two exhibitions that are generally cited as proof of Neo-Expressionism: A New Spirit in Painting and Zeitgeist. These shows marked a new international era where there were many centers for art—London, Milan, Rome, Dusseldorf, Berlin, and so on—rather than just New York, which had dominated the art world for three decades. The 1981 A New Spirit in Painting exhibition held by Royal Academy, London, has become part of art history for the introduction of new tendencies in painting. But the styles of many of the artists were not new; it was a real hodgepodge. Of the thirty-eight artists spanning three generations, several had been painting for years and were already considered senior artists of great stature, particularly Philip Guston, Francis Bacon, Balthus, Willem de Kooning, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Jean Helion. It was an incoherent show, as Stuart Morgan pointed out, saying, “The link between the three major groups represented—the British realists, the German Neo-Expressionist and America in the ’60s—remains a secret.” The exhibition also featured several late Picassos in an attempt to make the claim that these paintings, often held in questionable esteem as many think the quality level declined in Picasso’s last decade, had a major impact on the younger artists in the exhibition. The Zeitgeist exhibition of 1982 cemented the legitimacy of NeoExpressionism as an art movement, even though it contained artists who had not been working in expressionistic styles. The term “zeitgeist” originally comes from Hegel, in reference to an objective spirit that appears in history, revealing the individual manifestations of that period. The organizers of the exhibition intended to exhibit the spirit of the 1980s when changes in art had become evident. Held in Martin-Gropius-Bau the former headquarters of the gestapo, galleries appeared next to what had been torture chambers with the Berlin Wall a mere ten meters away. It brought the political component of art, most particularly as it applied to German art, into sharp focus. Work by Joseph Beuys, who in no way could be characterized as an expressionist, was included as a point of reference for a change in thinking that had served as a catalyst for subsequent changes in art. Although sculpture was included, the work shown was primarily painting, including commissioned pieces for specific areas by Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Mimmo Paladino, David Salle, and Helmut Middendorf. There was

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a critical mass of expressive, physical painting that made claim that the NeoExpressionist movement international. There are too many approaches to and styles of painting to be so casually defined. A blanket designation masks those differences and undermines the individual contributions and ways of reimagining the genre during this time. This book has been a labor of love. Painting has been my passion always and at the core of all my scholarly endeavors. It is my hope that you will find the same appreciation in this text. Endnotes 1. Morgan, “Cold Turkey: A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, London,” Artforum.

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1 New Image Painting A Prelude to the 1980s

New Image Painting

New Image Painting

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W

hy did painting go out of style in the 1970s? What brought it back? Abstract Expressionist painting in the 1950s established New York as the art center of the world; art movements that followed either extended or broke with that powerful legacy. By the 1970s, however, Minimalist sculpture became the “cutting edge” in Contemporary art; painting was thought to be outmoded, and imagery, particularly in a figurative mode, was an intractable offense. Into this non-painting milieu, the Whitney Museum’s 1978 exhibition New Image Painting ushered in the art movement of the same name, giving a shot in the arm to painting as a whole. Whitney Museum curator Richard Marshall assembled artists who combined imagery with abstract painting styles, especially Minimalism, resulting in paintings with elusive meanings. Images gained a psychological edge when taken out of their usual settings and narrative functions. Marshall laid out his tenets in his catalogue essay, which were observable in the paintings by New Image artists. In this, he illustrated a shift in painting that led the way to the painting revival that flourished in New York’s downtown. The premises in the exhibition catalogue are largely borne out in the art of Neil Jenney, whose paintings for the exhibition dated from 1969 to 1970. Philip Guston was a key influence on New Image painting as well; his example shaped many 1980s painters, especially Susan Rothenberg. The most surprising thing about New Image painting is that it surfaced in the midst of, and despite, speculative theories regarding the “crisis in painting.” Numerous artists’ panels addressed the question of whether painting would return. Artforum magazine even dedicated its entire September 1975 issue to the status of painting. The pundits got it wrong; predicting what artists will do is never wise. New Image Painting served as an early marker foreshadowing the novel use of images, whole or fragmented, which would dominate the painting landscape of the 1980s. By the 1970s, Abstract Expressionist painting was considered outmoded, while Minimalism and Conceptual art had gained favor in the art world. Painting had no place in that world, causing critics’ estimation of painting to decline precipitously. The Abstract Expressionists who came to the public eye after the Second World War, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Barnett Newman, attained legendary status as the 1970s unfolded. Sadly, it took longer for female Abstract Expressionist painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Lee Krasner to get their due. Additionally, second-generation Abstract Expressionist painters were ubiquitous in the galleries by the 1970s, and even though a commercial market for

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these artists was on the rise, it no longer represented the vanguard. Pop Art stars of the 1960s such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist had also moved into the category of “blue-chip” artists, producing reliably high-valued works. Conceptual art, which also emerged in the 1960s, gained credence throughout the 1970s, as did the myriad of related art movements, including Language, Installation, Performance, Video, Earth, and Feminist. Process art, a style initiated by an artist’s action, often used nontraditional materials and formats, and it garnered much critical attention throughout the 1970s. Minimalism also emerged in the 1960s, and it was considered the most important and serious art during the 1970s. Its use of geometric structures to create three-dimensional forms that referred to no other reality but its own was a defining force in the art world, to the specific exclusion of painting. Donald Judd, (Figure 1.1) the chief arbiter of the Minimalist art movement, gave the following statement, which held sway among art experts: “Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”1 A few Abstract painters who all worked in a highly reductive, geometric style were given the moniker of Minimalism even though the sensibilities were vastly different, as with artists Frank Stella, Brice Marden, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin.

Figure 1.1: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1971. Orange enamel on cold-rolled steel, eight units with 12-inch intervals, 4 × 4 × 4 ft. (121.9 × 121.9 × 121.9 cm) each; 4 × 39 × 4 ft. (121.9 cm × 11 m 88.7 cm × 121.9 cm) overall. © 2022 Judd Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, New York.

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The 1970s painting movements Photorealism and Pattern and Decoration Painting, promoted mainly by the Louis K. Meisel Gallery and the Holly Solomon Gallery, respectively, never gained traction or critical acclaim. The 1978 exhibition Bad Painting, curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum, created a momentary sensation due primarily to its shock value. Tucker laid out a raucous array of inelegant tastelessness, which included the West Coast funk of Joan Brown, the paintby-numbers clumsiness of Robert Chambless Hendon, and the mock Classicism of Charles Garabedian. Kitsch and irreverence reigned, particularly in an installation by William Copley, the artist known as CPLY, titled The Tomb of the Unknown Whore, 1986. Nothing made a dent in the anti-painting bias until New Image. Philip Guston, a significant catalyst for the return of the image in 1970s painting and an influence on many painters during the 1980s, made way for New Image painting. Guston was known as an Abstract Expressionist from the 1950s until 1967 when he shocked the art world by radically changing his style. He left his graceful Abstract Expressionist fields of red and pink behind—in great part because he “got sick and tired of all that purity!”2—and started painting brash, simplified images. As Guston transitioned to his new way of painting by making images look as though they materialized out of abstraction, painters paid attention while critics initially panned his radical move from transcendence to crude cartoon figures. This courageous stylistic about-face had a tremendous impact on artists of the late 1970s and 1980s. His imagery constitutes a specific autobiographical reflection without compromising the material intensity of the paint. By the mid-1970s, Guston employed the iconography of his personal obsessions and demons, eating, sleeping, smoking, and drinking, which manifested in works such as Painting, Smoking, Eating, 1973 (Figure 1.2). The painting visually depicts the feeling of a colossal hangover. The artist lies immobile while smoking a cigarette with a plate of french fries precariously balanced on a blanket that covers his large belly. Here, Guston displayed all the things that would kill him in 1980—he smoked three packs a day. The profile of his peanut-shaped face with patches of stubble and a wide-open Cyclops-like eye staring up at the ceiling is harsh indeed and made more so by its execution. He painted it in a manner that flew in the face of sanctioned painting conventions of the 1970s. A stack of shoes that represents unfinished paintings creates a wall behind him beside the bare light bulb of his studio hanging down. (The light bulb here bears an uncanny resemblance to the one in Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, 1885.) The images are outlined in red or black, and the slap-dash paint applications appear crude, rough, and strong. The precedent set by Guston made many New Image artists aware of the psychological and symbolic possibilities of painting the quotidian.

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Figure 1.2: Philip Guston, Painting, Smoking, Eating, 1973. Oil on canvas, 77 1/2 × 103 1/2 in. (196.85 × 262.89 cm), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © 2022 The Estate of Philip Guston. Courtesy of the Stedelijk Museum.

Joel Shapiro exerted his own force on New Image painters. Shapiro’s small sculptures were particularly important to New Image artists such as Susan Rothenberg and Denise Green. He created a spatial gulf between the viewer and the object by placing his small bronze 6-inch sculptures of geometric houses directly on the gallery floor (Figure 1.3). Although drastically altered in scale, recognizable imagery replete with associations seamlessly fused with the geometric language of Minimalism. Denise Green remembered in the 1970s, “I was very much trying to convey this psychological thing. And I was then engaged in the dialogue with Neil [ Jenney] and Joel [Shapiro].”3 In speaking of Shapiro’s house sculptures, Michael Hurston noted the psychological impact created by the tiny objects situated in the illusion of enormous space.

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Figure 1.3: Joel Shapiro, un-

titled, 1975. Cast iron, 7 1/2 × 10 3/4 × 8 1/2 in. (19.1 × 27.3 × 21.6 cm). © 2022 Joel Shapiro/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Joel Shapiro Studio.

The idea for the New Image Painting exhibition came to Whitney Museum curator Richard Marshall when he noticed several artists who were using images but not completely abandoning abstraction. As Robert Moskowitz remembered, at the time, “there weren’t many people working with imagery.”4 Nevertheless, Marshall saw a distinct and noteworthy style emerging. He never intended to create a label for a new movement, but his 1978 landmark exhibition New Image Painting gave the nascent style a name. Marshall included Nicolas Africano, Jennifer Bartlett, Denise Green, Michael Hurston, Neil Jenney, Lois Lane, Robert Moskowitz, Susan Rothenberg, David True, and Joe Zucker in his exhibition. The commonality among them was their combination of recognizable imagery with abstraction. Marshall laid out his view that the styles all grew out of a matrix of post-Second World War styles of abstraction, nonobjectivity, and expressionism. As he put it, an artist “draws upon and rejects aspects of each of these types of painting. The images fluctuate between the abstract and the real.”5 I would counter that the images are grounded in an abstract language rather than fluctuating between two artistic modes, and that a fusion of, rather than a vacillation between, abstraction and representation takes place in the conception of the artworks. Marshall established similarities among artists in the exhibition. He structured around his view that the depicted image, “often isolated on an abstract field, is drastically abbreviated or exaggerated, retaining only its most basic identifiers. The images are radically manipulated through scale, material, placement, and color.”6 Because of their isolation and alteration, they create a distance from the viewer. A figure, house, horse, or boat are recontextualized and removed from

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a narrative setting or clues that framed its meaning, giving way to a free-floating range of interpretations. The paintings were provocative in their refusal to be overtly emotional or totally distanced. They occupied a new mental space in art by rejecting the sanctioned styles and expectations of that time. Marshall also understood that the viewer brings their own take on the cultural, symbolic, associative, and emotional meanings of each image. Narratives are implied, not stated, and mediated by the viewer. Marshall’s analysis centers on an image’s removal from a commonly accepted role or setting to a nonspecific location that provides no frame of reference. He spoke of this recontextualization of the image: “When confronted with an illusion of an object that is devoid of the surroundings that provide clues and keys to its meaning, the viewer’s interpretation becomes undefined and open-ended.”7 This free-floating range of interpretations inherent in New Image Painting is one of the strongest common denominators among the exhibition’s artists. Chicago-born artist Nicolas Africano painted freeze-frame pictures of stark, almost awkward figures that illustrate distressing situations such as arguments or cruel discussions. In An Argument, 1977, (Figure 1.4) the two figures, presumably father and son, are miniscule against the pale green background of the canvas roughly 7 feet across—the scale transformation Marshall identified. Both face to the left; their inability to communicate is so great that they cannot even look at one another. Their hostile arm gestures indicate a heated discussion. Africano does not give the viewer enough to infer exactly what is happening, making his encapsulation of psychological states such as alienation, despair, rage, loneliness, and withdrawal even more poignant. He explained that these psychological references in his work are intended “to be about something— their human experience.”8 Scale shifts, narrative fragments, and psychological undercurrents are also apparent in the work of Brooklyn-born painter Robert Moskowitz. In Untitled, 1973, he used a simple white line to paint a modernist-looking chair as a barely visible speck on a 7-foot canvas; one needed to get close to decipher what the image actually was. Feeling that the chair looked vulnerable, Moskowitz drew a simple circle around it for protection. Scale continued to serve as a pictorial and psychological hook. In Swimmer, 1977, (Figure 1.5) displayed in New Image Painting, the arm and face of a man bobs in the midst of a choppy sea of deep blue pigment rubbed by hand into the canvas. The image creates a sense of unease. Is the figure drowning or swimming? Painter and critic Thomas Lawson pointed out that Moskowitz’s images of “flight and vertiginous movement counterpointed by periods of calm and rest” have a “strain of whimsical anxiety […]

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Figure 1.4: Nicolas Africano, An Argument, 1977. Acrylic, oil, and wax on canvas, with wood

frame, 68 5/8 × 85 3/16 × 2 1/4 in. (174.3 × 216.4 × 5.7 cm). Purchased with funds from Mr. and Mrs. William A. Marsteller © 2022 Nicolas Africano. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York.

The images are simple, even childlike, but reverberate with a psychological intensity.”9 Marshall’s assertion that the image is combined in a mode of preexisting styles holds true here. Although Minimalist in its stark two-color composition with only a simplified fragment of the swimmer’s body breaking up the monochromatic field, the blue ground also has some patterning as opposed to total flatness. Marshall observes, “The method of paint application mimics the activity of swimming and also suggests movement and the dense fluidity of water.”10

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Figure 1.5: Robert Moskowitz, The Swimmer, 1977. Dry pigment, oil, and graphite pencil on

canvas, 90 × 74 3/4 in. (228.6 × 189.9 cm). Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art; gift of Jennifer Bartlett (82.9). © 2022 Robert Moskowitz/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Figure 1.6: David True, Chinese Sea, 1977. Oil on canvas. 44 1/16 × 66 3/16 in. (111.9 × 168.1 cm).

Purchase, with funds from Mr. and Mrs. William A. Marsteller and the National Endowment for the Arts © 2022 David True. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York.

David True’s Chinese Sea, 1977, (Figure 1.6) is a simplified image of a sailboat surrounded by waves and sky. The image came from wistful remembrances of sailing off the coast on Martha’s Vineyard in younger days, but there are no sentimental overtones in his depiction. True studied beautiful designs of finely crafted sailing boats, which shaped his painted imagery. The sparseness of the composition recalls Minimalism. Australian-born Denise Green wanted to imbue her simple images with sharp psychological imagery, and, like Rothenberg, she wanted to convey a particular mental state. Her paintings in the New Image Painting exhibition had a sparse image on a gridded monochromatic or solid-colored background, showing the Minimalist influence. Isolated images emphasized aloneness as in Chair, 1976. Green intended her imagery of windows, chairs, vessels, and trapdoors to function more as a metonym, referring to a figure of speech where a name stands in place of a related object or concept of which it is an attribute. For Green, that

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Figure 1.7: Denise Green,

Trap, 1976. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 48 × 48 in. (121.9 × 121.9 cm) © 2022 Denise Green/Copyright Agency. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

meant representing an entire feeling in one painting. Trap, 1976, (Figure 1.7) expressed confinement and all the feelings and circumstances bound within it. She bundled the fear, despondence, and resignation of the feeling of confinement all into one painted object. Many of the artists in New Image Painting were engaged with Neil Jenney’s work long before the exhibition took place. Susan Rothenberg cited both Guston and Jenney as early influences. Denise Green recalled her interest in the conversations that she and Jenney were having about imagery as metaphor in the early 1970s rather than in the dialogue others were having about abstraction.11 Lois Lane (yes, that really is her name, not a Superman-inspired pseudonym) remembers when Jenney was invited in 1970 to speak to students at the Graduate Art Department at Yale where she was a student, since his work was of great interest to the Yale art community. David True came to know Jenney’s work through other artists on whom it had had a significant impact. Jenney had strong opinions about art. He once told me that Renaissance art was bunk and that he hated de Kooning’s art.12 “Jenney was the one involved with realism early on, and the artists knew about his paintings,” dealer Holly Solomon said, further affirming the pivotal role Jenney had played at the time.13 Jenney believed that realism was the style of the future but that its parameters had not been properly defined. He called this renewed interest in representation New Realism, but the term did not take. It was not until the New Image

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Painting exhibition ten years later that a term was coined to describe these representational leanings. For Jenney, New Image painting did not constitute a movement so much as a somewhat arbitrary grouping for an exhibition for which he thought his work served as a forerunner. He explained, I kept saying New Realism. That’s what I’m doing—New Realism. So, the people at the museum with that show, New Image, they were looking for a way to give me some exposure with some context. So that’s how they came up with New Image. Cause those people are a little after [later than] me, and they don’t kind of share that motivation that I had. It was just a reason to have a show. There was no movement.14

He was not the only artist in the exhibition who did not think New Image constituted a movement; this thinking is common when people start assigning labels to a group. Deliberately organized movements are rare; more often, similar things happen at the same time. This was the case also in Pop Art artists when James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol were creating art unaware of the similarities. Only after exhibitions were organized under the rubric of Pop Art did they become aware that other artists were using elements from pop culture as well. In Jenney’s paintings such as Girl and Vase, 1969, (Figure 1.8) sketchy, isolated images sit on a ground of big, slushy paint strokes that flatly dance over the surface. One critic noted that the paintings, cleverly crude, “must have required great skill to look so awful.”15 The imagery is based on the fundamental relationships of one thing to another: a disgruntled man with an angry woman in Husband and Wife, 1969, or a young girl crying over a broken vase next to her in Girl and Vase. This narrative fragment without any context or setting leaves the viewer without the whole story. Jenney’s work shows a sparse small image in the midst of flurried brushstrokes, a melding of Minimalist simplicity and Abstract Expressionist paint application. By the mid-1970s, Jenney became obsessed with realistic exactness, elaborate framing devices with visible titles and allegorical references to social and environmental issues. The proportions of these works are idiosyncratic, almost mannerist. One version of the oddly shaped Meltdown Morning, 1975, measures about 2 feet tall and 9 feet across, not including the elaborate black enamel frame with the title etched on the molding. His imagery was ordinary but symbolic. Jenney explained, “Some people like to do images of the Tetons, Niagara Falls;

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Figure 1.8: Neil Jenney, Girl and Vase, 1969. Acrylic on canvas in artist’s frame 58 × 76 1/2 in. (148 × 194 cm). Hall Collection © 2022 Neil Jenney. Photo credit: Robert McKeever. Digital image © Gagosian Gallery, courtesy of Hall Art Foundation.

I’m doing the back yard. I think it’s important, and I think I can make poetry there. I think I can make it timeless.”16 Jennifer Bartlett’s work in the New Image Painting exhibition makes the strongest case for the way this group combined Minimalism with imagery. Originally from Long Beach, California, Jennifer Bartlett came to New York in 1968, after attending Yale University. She was aware of Conceptual, Minimal, and Process art, but she was looking for her own artistic statement. She discovered it by using inexpensive baked enamel steel plate tiles that she found in Canal Street surplus stores. She overlaid these unlikely supports with silkscreened quarter-inch grids in light gray, then painted them with both abstract and representational motifs in geometric dots of Testors model paint. Using a mathematically derived system in the Minimalist tradition to guide her, she created variations of repeated motifs on the plates and installed them in gridded patterns. As early as 1968, an image of a house debuted in Bartlett’s work and became a common feature in her paintings. In the early 1970s, she expanded

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the parameters of the house motif to include a picket fence and a duck pond. She reduced the imagery to geometric signs that served as a schema that she repeated in various forms within the 61 enamel plates comprising House Piece, 1970. She gave us several versions of the house, ranging from realistic and shaded to geometric and outlined. Minimalist artist Sol Lewitt’s system-driven installations informed Bartlett’s progressive permutations of limited elements. In a sense, Bartlett was increasingly separating out the elements of a painting, as well as a range of stylistic approaches; this went against the artistic focus of the time, a bias against painting itself. As critic Roberta Smith saw it, “Bartlett emerged at a time when reports of the death of painting, if greatly exaggerated, were also widely circulated.”17 Bartlett made Rhapsody, 1975–76, (Figure 1.9) the 144-panel piece shown in the New Image exhibition, in the summer of 1975 and exhibited it for the first time at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1976. John Russell reviewed that exhibition glowingly in the New York Times, stating, “[I]t was the most ambitious work of art that has come my way since I started to work in New York […] enlarging […] notions of time, and of memory, and of change, and of painting, itself.”18 After reading that review, collector Sid Singer raced in from suburbia to purchase the piece. Bartlett used subjects such as houses, trees, mountains, and the ocean as well as geometric shapes in this piece. Her simple images showcase an almost encyclopedic range of paint markings ranging from pointillist dots to gestural strokes. Bartlett’s aim was to create a large artwork in which images and styles would start, stop, and intersect like the dense sound of language in a room full of conversations. Bartlett’s artistic process is procedural and systematic. She would first decide on the imagery, then spend time in the library doing research to determine what constitutes the essential, prototypical mountain or tree. For example, she used a picture of an alpine peak to represent the quintessential mountain. “It was supposed to be like a conversation,” the artist has explained, “in which people digress from one thing and maybe come back to the subject, then do the same with the next thing.”19 In the early 1970, Susan Rothenberg and other downtown artists felt that abstraction had become aestheticized. Conceptual, Process, and Information art strains were exhausted, leaving open the possibility of more psychologically charged content. In 1974 Rothenberg tapped into a repressed desire for image and content emerging from the collective artistic consciousness by combining Minimalist and Abstract Expressionist styles in the image of a horse, adhering to some Minimalist ideals while infusing it with her own personality and identity. The genesis and evolution of her much-heralded horse paintings provide

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Figure 1.9: Jennifer Bartlett, Rhapsody, 1975–76. Enamel on steel, 987 plates, each plate 12 × 12 in. (30.4 × 30.4 cm); overall approximately 7.5 ft. × 153 ft. (228.6 × 4663.4 cm) Gift of Edward R. Broida © 2022 Jennifer Bartlett. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York. Courtesy of the 2013 Jennifer Bartlett Trust.

a fascinating case study of the only New Image artist who segued into an international movement termed “Neo-Expressionism.” After graduating from Cornell University where she studied both sculpture and painting, Rothenberg moved often, trying to find her niche. During a postgraduation trip to Formentera, a small island off the coast of Spain, Rothenberg lived an expatriate lifestyle with all the earmarks of an “extended lost weekend.” After returning to America, she was looking for some direction, so she enrolled in 1967 in the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, but dropped out after a short time. The late 1960s were uncertain, difficult times for Rothenberg, riddled with false starts, isolation, and emotional trauma. She was determined to make a new start, and in 1969 she left her family home in Buffalo, New York, and headed for Nova Scotia. During a wait between trains in Montreal, she impulsively changed direction and boarded a train for New York City. Intuition and instinct always guided Rothenberg, and her later art would imitate her life. A new life quickly fell into place for Rothenberg. With her suitcase and skateboard stored in a locker at Grand Central Station, Rothenberg looked for a place to stay. Fortunately, John Stoutman, a friend from Cornell, spotted her on the street and offered her temporary residence. She quickly connected with other Cornell friends, artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Alan Saret, who introduced

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her to the downtown art crowd. Within two weeks, she was staying at painter Mary Heilman’s loft on lower West Broadway. Through Heilman, Rothenberg’s circle expanded to include Philip Glass, John Duff, Jeff Lew, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Steve Reich, Tina Girouard, Keith Sonnier, Robert Wilson, Dickie Landry, and future husband George Trakas. “My whole life began over again,”20 she recalled of this time. The interdisciplinary nature of her circle, in which collaboration was the norm, was in many ways an extension of the communal spirit fostered in the 1960s. Painters helped sculptors fabricate and install sculpture pieces. Sculptors took part in performance projects. Performance artists would enlist friends to enact experimental pieces. Artists in Rothenberg’s circle frequented rehearsal sessions of composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Rothenberg was an active participant in this stimulating milieu. She attended dance classes given by Deborah Hay, an important dancer in the experimental Judson Dance group; assisted sculptor Nancy Graves in transforming marble dust and wire into bones and fossils for her animal sculptures; and participated in three Joan Jonas performance pieces. Rothenberg was bombarded by a lively mix of new ideas, and by her own admission, it was a transformative experience. New York was welcoming, expansive, energetic, and fascinating. Rothenberg remembers it as “a state of grace.”21 After she had a child in 1972, she spent more time in her loft-studio and became more serious about her art. During her first years in New York, she dabbled in process-oriented works, but she became bored with them. In a bold move, she changed course. She stumbled upon the horse imagery in her studio while scribbling on a piece on paper, and when Marshall asked how it originated, Rothenberg answered, “I was very disgusted so I stopped working on process pieces and doodled a horse one day.”22 Soon after, she made a small gouache on canvas titled First Horse, 1974, painting an outline of a horse divided by a penciled centerline with both image and ground in a pale terracotta wash. The sketchy image on crepuscular earth colors recalled prehistoric cave art, which Rothenberg confirmed was part of her thinking at that time. She recalled, I was looking at all this Minimal stuff. I was seeing all this work, and when I started painting pink horses I thought, well, my dear, you aren’t going to be seen around New York, but I just wanted to do it. I wasn’t ambitious.23

When Rothenberg painted her first horse in 1974, she expected to be perceived as a “ghastly intruder”24 on the art scene. Fortunately, Holly Solomon, who already had collected Pop Art and was receptive to new art, purchased

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Figure 1.10: Susan Rothenberg, Triphammer Bridge, 1974. Synthetic polymer paint and tempera on canvas, 67 1/8 × 114 in. (170.5 × 292.1 cm). Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Edward R. Broida (769.2005) © 2022 The Estate of Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York.

Rothenberg’s Triphammer Bridge, 1974, (Figure 1.10) from a New Talent exhibition at A.G. Sachs Gallery. It was over 9 feet in width with a black horse that looked like a child’s rendering centered on a mottled terracotta field of paint. An early and influential champion of Rothenberg’s work, Solomon’s first response to Triphammer Bridge was, “I said a horse, a well painted horse, a painterly horse […] How do you miss with this one? Everyone loves horse paintings […] in monochromatic color […] couldn’t miss.”25 Once the image has been actualized, Rothenberg then allows it to lead her through pictorial possibilities; after this unwilled, nonrational sequence in the finding of an image, she puts it through a series of rational exercises, the “what ifs” of her creative process. What if I divide the horse? What if I change the axes of the horse? What if I put one horse behind another? These problems are often formal in nature, yet the process is not systematic. This series of formal exercises, although not strictly speaking part of the Abstract Expressionist methodology, unfolds in a process that is closer to Abstract Expressionist invention, accident, and playfulness than to Minimalist a priori systems. One may wonder how a “badly drawn”26 image, by Rothenberg’s own description, of an animal became iconic. In Triphammer Bridge, the crudely drawn horse

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resembles a child’s drawing, simple, sketchy, and anatomically incorrect. Associations to childhood innocence come to mind. But at the same time, these associations remain free-floating as the viewer registers the painting’s pictorial rigors. Rothenberg’s technical aptitude and artistic vision is captured in the beauty of the clean silhouette on a flickering tonal field of strokes, the monumental scale, and the flattening out of the image on a picture plane. Curator Michael Auping described this characteristic, writing, “Rothenberg’s painting process involves a juggling act between recognizable depiction, symbolic content and abstract simplicity.”27 Holly Solomon threw a party to display Rothenberg’s Triphammer Bridge. Miami Johnson, director of the highly regarded Willard Gallery, saw it and offered Rothenberg a solo exhibition. She was offered a solo exhibition by 112 Greene Street Gallery, marking the first time a painter had been asked to exhibit in the alternative space previously used for performances, concerts, mixedmedia events, and installation sculpture. She created three canvases large enough to assert themselves in the enormous space. Scaling up meant that she could work on only one painting at a time in her studio’s limited wall space. Until the installation, she had never even seen the three large paintings together at one time. Rothenberg’s career quickly advanced from that point on. The exhibition was a forceful presentation of image subordinated to composition. In three paintings—Algarve, 1975; United States, 1975; and Siena Dos Equis, 1975, (Figure 1.11)—a horse’s outline sits on an expansive field. She locked the horses in place with geometric lines, triangles, and diamond shapes, and also by the boundaries of the canvas itself, such that the horses’ extremities push at the edges. Siena Dos Equis, over 9 feet wide and 22 feet across, is the largest of the three. A monumental diamond pattern coexists with the naturalism of the horse outline—highly simplified, without features, tail, or mane—without one dominating the other. Each horse painting lends itself to a complex formal analysis in terms of the horse’s placement on the canvas. Similarly, the number of color field dynamics deserves attention; a horse on a contrasting field, a black outline of a horse on a field of the same color, and a horse atop contrasting colors on each side of the dividing line all express different feelings. Yet these formal analyses alone do not account for the emotional wallop of these paintings. The melding of formalism and naturalism becomes psychologically charged. And it is a pairing Marshall cites as one of New Image paintings defining elements. Rothenberg consciously adhered to a pictorial canon particular to the mid1970s and rooted in Minimalism, “The horse was a quiet image […] I was able to stick to the philosophy of the day—keeping the painting flat and anti-illusionist—but I also got to use this big, soft, heavy, strong, powerful form.”28

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Figure 1.11: Susan Rothenberg, Siena Dos Equis, 1975. Acrylic and tempera on canvas, 114 × 274

in. (289.9 × 693.1 cm). Collection of The Baltimore Museum of Art; Purchase with exchange funds from Bequest of Saidie A. May (1994.148) © 2022 The Estate of Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York.

This philosophy demanded economy and austerity, anti-illusionism, adherence to the flatness of the picture plane, attention to figure–ground relationships, emphasis on technical procedures, and strict adherence to geometry. Rothenberg’s awareness of the canon is well documented. For example, she said in a statement about the first horse painting, “It’s just a doodle in a minimal format, with a dividing line down the middle and Frank Stella-type square notches in the corners. I was aware of ‘keep it flat,’ anti-illusionism all the way.”29 It is paradoxical that Rothenberg used Frank Stella’s trademark geometric Minimalist format even as she thought Stella’s art seemed like a dead end for painting. Of The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II, 1959, (Figure 1.12) Rothenberg divulged, “Stella’s pinstripes caused me some despair—he almost painted me right out of painting.”30 “Geometry was my kit,” Rothenberg remembers. In fact, Rothenberg favored the horse image initially because of its ability to divide. She derived many of her formal choices and elements from Minimalism, including her reliance on geometry as a touchstone. However, Minimalist philosophies had lost their relevance for Rothenberg and many other artists, as she explained, “Things rush into empty places, and Minimalism had become an empty place.”31 By and large, New Image art filled the vacuum left by Minimalism. Rothenberg’s horse paintings represented an important shift toward personal content. During the mid-1970s, “authentically personal subjects,” to use curator Richard Marshall’s phrase, emerged in representations to which rigorous geometry associated with Minimalism had been applied. Marshall states that imagery is combined with several postwar painting styles, not just Minimalism.

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Figure 1.12: Frank Stella, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II, 1959. Enamel on canvas, 90

3/4 × 132 3/4 in. (230.5 × 337.2 cm). Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund © 2022 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

Rothenberg aligned herself formally to Minimalism but philosophically to Abstract Expressionism; in many ways she mediated the dialogue between the two. She rejected Minimalist doctrine in favor of Abstract Expressionist methods in four important ways: she favored an intuitive, flexible model rather than a fixed, systematic one; she made changes as the painting evolved rather than a totally rigid preconceived composition; she privileged the painterly field in which the hand or touch of the artist is visible rather than removed; and last, she objected to the Minimalist erasure of emotion. The most fundamental way in which Rothenberg aligns with Abstract Expressionism rather than Minimalism lies in her insistence on the presence of the artist’s hand in the painterly field. With few exceptions, Minimalism espoused the removal of the artist’s hand, whereas Rothenberg is connected to the physicality of painting. In part, Minimalism arose for those who wanted to find an alternative to the emotionally packed gestures of Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning. In contrast with Minimalist painters, Rothenberg’s work always retains a hand-painted quality. “These are not the pristine fields of Marden and Stella,”

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Michael Auping wrote, “These are not the cool organized geometries of Stella or Marden, but recall the the more unsettled spaces of the pre-Minimalist abstractions of de Kooning, Still and Twombly.”32 In fact, Peter Schjedahl devoted a brief catalog essay to his first reaction to seeing Rothenberg’s paintings at 112 Greene Street Gallery, noting that he recognized them immediately as breakthrough works that embodied “sincerity in paint.”33 Rothenberg’s work stood out from that of the other New Image artists in several ways. It was the most painterly of the bunch. She painted in a variety of smears, markings, lines, and scratches on a flurried field. The paint handling and the tonal quality announced the image to the viewer as mythical, iconic, symbolic. Unlike the other New Image artists who worked within a vocabulary of inanimate objects, Rothenberg presented a living, breathing creature, and she remained focused on this subject until the early 1980s. She was aware that when the horse image, albeit awkward and not anatomically correct, was subjected to formal constraints, the emotionally charged content became heightened. Rothenberg explained, I don’t think it could have been an inanimate object, either. I like the tension. To take something that implied motion and not use it in that way; to have something that was volumetric and not use it that way—there is a certain perversity in the way I use imagery. I don’t know if that is the right word, but I have to take something and redigest it and reinterpret it for me to get hooked on it.34

She wondered if the paintings would work with a human rather than an animal form. After completing Triphammer Bridge, Rothenberg took a series of photographs of Warhol Factory regular Mary Larionov in profile, crouched in the position of a horse. These served as the basis for a series of paintings—Mary I, 1974; Mary II, 1974; and Mary III, 1974—an exercise “to see if the human figure was as strange and compelling to me as the horse was.”35 In translating the photos to paintings, Rothenberg simplified and distorted the body, extending the arms so that they would reach as far as a horse’s legs. She subjected the body to the same pictorial rigors as she had the horse: a unifying monochromatic palette, a shallow space of subtle markings, and a centerline bisecting both the canvas and the body. Although Rothenberg returned to the horse, specific elements of the Mary paintings linger at times; the contours of the lower back, buttocks, and thigh from Mary III are duplicated in several horse paintings. After that experiment,

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Rothenberg concluded that the human body did not work for her because the anatomical specificity did not lend itself to formal variations. More importantly, Rothenberg recalls, “The horse suggested so many possibilities of working out these figure—ground relationships. I suppose, though, it’s a lot of psychological and personal material.”36 The compositional strictures imposed on the horse increasingly became metaphors for the body and states of mind, and a surrogate for the artist herself. The horses expressed her feelings of isolation, longing, claustrophobia, separation, and immobility. Between 1973 and 1978, three things happened simultaneously in Rothenberg’s work that form the crux of her evolution as she went into the New Image exhibition. She increased the psychological and personal content, she shifted from Minimalism to Abstract Expressionism in terms of paint application, and she gradually dismembered the horse until it disappeared entirely. Rothenberg increased the horse’s size in Triphammer Bridge scaling up the horse to roughly her own height. Like the horses in the two paintings that preceded Triphammer Bridge, there is no sense of the horse’s physical mass. Without specific details of eyes, ears, or tail, the horse could be mistaken for a large, lean dog. The horse is an imagined icon, a painted symbol of a life force, outside of the tradition of anatomically correct equestrian paintings. The horse evolved into a more corporeal form. In the following paintings, the horse seems to impose its physicality on the geometric divisions rather than being confined by them. The horse in Butterfly, 1976, (Figure 1.13) becomes weightier and more mobile, producing the painting’s geometries itself. The forward thrust of its gait is matched by the imposition of the vertical X in the center. Rothenberg remembers becoming involved with the “black paint that formed a horse and also formed a big broad geometry.” For her, there was some sense of mystery in “going into this darkness”37 and into the geometry itself. In a quote accompanying the image in a later exhibition catalog, Rothenberg summarized the feeling of Butterfly, saying, “The cross of the X is a deep dark secret.”38 The image is not realistic enough to be read literally and even as the formal elements seem to overshadow the image of the horse itself, its possible meaning cannot be ignored. This leads to construing the image in a symbolic, metaphoric, and/or psychological manner. Compositional structures signified psychological states such as longing, claustrophobia, and immobility. In addition to the vast associations the horse image engenders, as the work evolves, the horse serves as a metaphor for human characteristics and situations such as innocence, longing, birth, and loss. White Robe, 1974, (Figure 1.14) a hauntingly poignant painting of a horse of clumsy proportions covered head to toe with a tattered blanket,

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Figure 1.13: Susan Rothenberg, Butterfly, 1976. Acrylic on canvas, 69 1/2 × 83 in. (176.5 ×

210.8 cm). Collection of the National Gallery of Art, D.C.; gift of Perry R. and Nancy Lee Bass (1995.6.1) © 2022 The Estate of Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York.

demonstrates Rothenberg’s manner of assigning the animal human tendencies. The image can be read as a horse costume, the kind one remembers from a child’s school play or slapstick, vaudevillian routines where the person under the front of the costume is out of step with the person pulling up the rear. Playing against the childlike and comic associations is the suggestion that the artist is hidden under the blanket: the personal is masked in the image. Rothenberg has layered the image with associations to human conditions. Rothenberg painted White Robe in veiled transparent tonal layers, a style indebted to the membrane-like quality of Eva Hesse’s drawings and fiberglass sculptures. This semi-translucence is also incorporated in Rothenberg’s lesser-known drawings, images overlaid with transparent paper. The color of the blanket is a warm, almost fleshy, creamy beige in contrast to the cool white background. The legs under the tattered skirt are cropped such that the front leg can be read as either an ankle or the area above the hoof of the horse. The back leg

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Figure 1.14: Susan Rothenberg, White Robe, 1974. Acrylic and tempera on canvas, 64 1/2 × 86

in. (163.8 × 254 cm) © 2022 The Estate of Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York.

dematerializes into the background near the edge of the painting. The eyehole in the blanket is faintly suggested with the lower part of the circle represented by a grayish smudge and the upper part melting into other tonal markings. In New Image painting generally, and Rothenberg’s work specifically, meanings are difficult to pin down, similar to those in the experimental work of artists like Gordon Matta-Clark. Rothenberg recognized a kindred sensibility in the conceptually based work of Matta-Clark. He was already in New York when Rothenberg arrived and immediately welcomed her into his circle. With artist friends Alan Saret and Matta-Clark, Rothenberg recalled feeling that “I had a home.”39 Geometry had a place in both Rothenberg’s and Matta-Clark’s early work, and geometric cuttings imposed on architectures characterized many of the latter’s early works. He realized the power of a geometric cut onto an existing structure most effectively in the 1974 piece Splitting (Figure 1.15). At Matta-Clark’s request, Horace Solomon, co-founder of 98 Greene Street performance space and Holly Solomon’s husband, procured a house for Matta-Clark to work on prior to its demolition. Using a chain saw and other power tools, Matta-Clark made a vertical cut down the center, separating the house into two parts, followed by a series of horizontal cuts separating the first and second

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Figure 1.15: Gordon Mat-

ta-Clark, Splitting, 1974. Gelatin-silver print collage mounted on board, 40 × 30 in. (101.6 × 76.2 cm) Purchased with funds provided by Walter J. Brownstone and the Family of Man Fund (326.1991) © 2022 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

floors each using geometric guidelines. He was very careful to keep the division lines parallel to the structure while his cuttings created new angles, lines, and arcs. The four top corners were extracted, kept as souvenirs, and later exhibited. Holly Solomon arranged for a group of people to view the house and had photographers document the interior and exterior at various stages. Rothenberg remembers the impact of this piece: The first piece I responded to 100% was the cut house piece. (Splitting, 1974). He was cutting the thing in half the way I was cutting the horse in half. His, though, was a superpower cut. It destroyed the whole concept of a house, and it was an exposé of what the building was. The house was very boring, a dumb suburban house in New Jersey. From the outside the cut has a real formal look. The insides were a chasm opening up the earth at your feet. Realizing that a house is a home, shelter, safety—knowing what a house is—is one thing. Being in that house made you feel like you were entering another state […] schizophrenia,

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the earth’s fragility and full of wonder. It was so subtle at every level—there was a crack that fell through a door molding, through the stairs. The house was sad too. Homelessness. There was no home there.40

Both Rothenberg and Matta-Clark used simple, familiar imagery with a wide range of associative meanings. They are literary narratives, childhood memories, and archetypal symbolism. The horse symbolizes strength, power, and sensuousness; the house is a sign of family, protection, and belonging. Both artists subject the image to geometric manipulations, resulting in expanded metaphoric readings. Matta-Clark believed that by exposing, shattering, and inverting architectural and urban structures, he could establish metaphors for urban conditions, casting light on ecological and social problems. Similar to Rothenberg’s horse, Matta-Clark’s house became a symbol for personal situations. The concept of the wounded house in 1974 mirrors the isolation of Rothenberg’s horse of the same year. Moreover, the suggestion of the personal is heightened by the unexpected beauty of the divided house. A brilliant shaft of sunlight would stream into the crevice created by the two precariously shored-up sides of the house. Like an exquisite collage, the textures of the exposed walls with their layering of old wallpapers reflected the history of the house and its inhabitants. The emotional force of the project carries even in the photographs, the sole documentation of the piece. Similarly, there is a poetic beauty in Rothenberg’s imposition of geometry onto an image with such rich associations. Unlike the Pop and Minimal applicators of geometry in the 1960s—deadpan and detached—Rothenberg and Matta-Clark, working in separate disciplines, had entered into more psychological territory. The influence of non-painting sources such as film, music, history, and alchemy shaped the mindsets of many painters in this text. This was not the only example of non-painting sources fortifying and influencing Rothenberg. Her experience prefigures the importance of non-painting influences as we will see in painters of the 1980s. Performance art emerged as a separate and viable art form in the 1970s, a decade sometimes referred to as the “golden age” of Performance art. By decade’s end, a number of New York institutions sponsored festivals and symposia in an attempt to survey and acknowledge the importance of the art form. Although specific meanings are left undefined the psychologized arena of performative genres, by which I mean Performance art, video art, and avant-garde dance performances, has the ability to obliquely engage the viewer on an emotional level. These elements resonate in Rothenberg’s horse paintings.

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Rothenberg participated in several performance pieces created by Joan Jonas, an artist recognized as a major player in creating and expanding Performance art. She deals with the body and identity in veiled, ritualistic actions that are intended to create a gap between perception and meaning. The ambiguous meanings generated by pieces such as Jones Beach, 1970, in which Rothenberg was a participant, had resonance for Rothenberg who had come to understand the horse as a surrogate for the body, for herself. Rothenberg’s inclusion in the Neo-Expressionist camp emerged around several exhibitions in which her work was hung along with those of artists such as Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente, and Anselm Kiefer, and, most importantly, the 1982 Zeitgeist exhibition in Berlin. During the mid-1970s, many art styles coexisted in the various art spheres in New York. Representational styles such as Photorealism, Pop Art, and a wide range of figurative artists existed and were exhibited during this period. However, the critical discussion at that time and the discussion that was relevant to Rothenberg’s circle were dominated by stark abstraction. One has only to look through the art publications during the 1970s, such as Artforum, Arts, and Art in America, to see the predominance of reproductions of abstract work and the overwhelming majority of reviews covering exhibitions of various abstract art styles. Rothenberg’s horse paintings emerged counter to this aesthetic. They serve as early markers in a resurgence of painterly figuration in late-twentiethcentury painting and, as such, are considered breakthrough works. This ran counter to the critical consensus that representational styles no longer could embrace or express relevance during that time. Many New Image painters used a variety of images, but Rothenberg stayed with the horse for almost seven years. The horse went through an evolution, as discussed earlier, and by 1980, it disintegrated into dismembered parts and bone. At first, the action was frozen—the energy of the horse more symbolic than actualized. But by 1979, the movement was palpable, specifically in Pontiac (Figure 1.16), with a frontal, rather than profile view of the horse charging forward. Rothenberg introduced a sense of the horse’s speed and power, locked in check by a large black bone shape across the horse—a yoke from which the horse cannot break free. After this painting, the horse is contained in increasingly claustrophobic spaces. The horse continues to be a metaphor for a more human situation: birth. In Squeeze, 1978–79, (Figure 1.17) black outlines against a field of white variegated with grey tones that art historian Joan Simon states “conveys the same

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Figure 1.16: Susan Rothenberg, Pontiac, 1979. Acrylic and Flashe on canvas, 88 × 61 in. (223.52

× 154.94 cm) © 2022 The Estate of Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York.

Figure 1.17: Susan Rothenberg, Squeeze, 1978–79. Acrylic on canvas, 92 × 87 in. (233.7 × 221 cm) © 2022 The Estate of Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York.

extremes of physical and psychological struggle—the sense of compression as repression.”41 The fragmented horse head pushes against the legs, creating a viscerally uncomfortable dynamic. The picture, presented from the horse’s viewpoint, show the horse’s two legs that vertically span the entire canvas, enclosing the head of another horse, who bites at the inner left leg. The horses would gradually dismember into parts, and then into bones—horse image disappearing completely. This happened during what Rothenberg describes as “a grim period”42 when her marriage was in trouble, ending in divorce in 1979. During this period, we see more paint handling, but her work at its core was in the tradition of Abstract Expressionist paint handling. And her horse paintings display the ways in which she is aligned with Abstract Expressionism, not Minimalism. Minimalists believe that the artwork exists in the mind, complete before it is realized or fabricated in order to create a strong singular gestalt. This is not the case for Rothenberg, as she makes changes throughout the entire process of creating a painting. Erasure of emotion was synonymous with Abstraction in general and Minimalism in particular, and this was ultimately at odds with Rothenberg’s project. Rothenberg rejected the self-contained blankness of Minimalism in favor of personal expression. Susan Rothenberg’s horse paintings epitomize the qualities that characterize New Image painting. Her work not only embodied new kinds of content that imagery could express but also pointed in a direction that renewed and expanded the possibilities inherent in the medium of painting itself. Her paintings became increasingly expressionistic; this explains, in great part, why Rothenberg was the only artist from the New Image exhibition who, in 1981, was also included in the

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German Zeitgeist exhibition, which ushered in Neo-Expressionism. Rothenberg was included in many exhibitions with artists perceived as Neo-Expressionist, including Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente, and Anselm Kiefer, all of which were labeled as Neo-Expressionists as well. Only after she arrived in Berlin did she realize she was the only woman in the male-dominated exhibition, as the art world was then. Feminist protestors lobbied for Rothenberg to refuse to participate in the show. But that would result in the exhibition having no female artists. Rothenberg expanded the practice of painting by introducing symbolic imagery into the post-minimal strictures of the 1970s. She and the other New Image painters brought imagery back to painting, going against an art scene then dominated by abstraction. That trend would continue in the downtown New York art scene of the 1980s, making space for the painting revival. Endnotes 1. “Judd Exhibition Galleries: Magazine: MoMA,” The Museum of Modern Art, April 23, 2020. 2. “Stationary Figure 1973,” The Metropolitan Museum, n.d. 3. Erpf interview with Denise Green, December 11, 2002. 4. Erpf interview with Richard Marshall, December 30, 2002. 5. Marshall, “Introduction.” 6. Marshall, “Introduction.” 7. Marshall, “Introduction.” 8. Africano, “Artist Statement.” 9. Lawson, “Robert Moskowitz at the Clocktower.” 10. Marshall, “Introduction.” 11. Erpf interview with Denise Green, December 11, 2002. 12. Erpf interview with Neil Jenney, December 2, 2002. 13. Erpf interview with Holly Solomon, November 23, 1999. 14. Erpf interview with Neil Jenney, December 2, 2002. 15. Mark Stevens, Whitney Museum file on Nicolas Africano (no date). 16. Erpf interview with Neil Jenney, December 2, 2002. 17. Smith, “Flooding the Mind and Eye: Jennifer Bartlett’s Commissions,” 76. 18. Russell, “On Finding a Bold New Work.” 19. MoMA Highlight: 375 Works from the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 20. Simon, Susan Rothenberg, 18.

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21. Simon, Susan Rothenberg, 19. 22. Richard Marshall, unpublished interview, Whitney Museum. 23. Richard Marshall, unpublished interview, Whitney Museum. 24. Storr interview with Susan Rothenberg, VDB— Video Data Bank, 1984. 25. Erpf interview with Holly Solomon, November 23, 1999. 26. Storr interview with Susan Rothenberg. 27. Auping, Pinturas De Susan Rothenberg, 54. 28. Simon, Susan Rothenberg, 29. 29. Schjeldahl, “Putting Painting on Its Feet.” 54. 30. Simon, Susan Rothenberg, 33. 31. Kurtz, Contemporary Art, 1965–1990, 163. 32. Auping, email to Rosemary Erpf, October 5, 2021. 33. Auping, Pinturas De Susan Rothenberg. 34. Simon, Susan Rothenberg, 47. 35. Simon, Susan Rothenberg, 33. 36. Simon, “Scenes and Variations.” 37. Auping, Pinturas De Susan Rothenberg, 118. 38. Auping, Pinturas De Susan Rothenberg, 118. 39. Simon, Susan Rothenberg, 19. 40. Jacob and Matta-Clark, Gordon Matta-Clark, a Retrospective, 72–73. 41. Horace Solomon was married to Holly Solomon and actively involved in Holly Solomon’s gallery and other artist-related projects. 42. Simon, Susan Rothenberg, 62. 43. Simon, Susan Rothenberg, 58.

PAINTING IN THE 1980S

2 Painting as Puzzle The Downtown New York Art World of the 1980s

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his was not supposed to happen next,”1 was the art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto’s response to the 1981 Whitney Biennial, the trend-spotting museum exhibition that catapulted painter Julian Schnabel into the highest echelons of art world validation. Danto’s remark reflects the shock that expressionistic painting had resurfaced in a big way. The 1980s witnessed the final flowering of painting during the twentieth century in New York City. While New Image painting signaled the beginning of painting’s regeneration during the so-called non-painting decade of the 1970s, painting with imagery, whether recognizable, fragmented, or abstracted, continued to gain credence not only in New York, but also in Germany and Italy. The European painting resurgence will be considered in subsequent chapters, but as we focus here on American painting, we must ask: what is the common thread linking the New York painters who were labeled as American Neo-Expressionists in the 1980s? My aim is twofold: first, to point out the problematic label of American Neo-Expressionist given to Eric Fischl, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and JeanMichel Basquiat; and second, to suggest that painting in the 1980s, and afterwards for that matter, requires thinking beyond the traditional art historical methodologies of grouping artists together from a particular period. The sheer number of styles which emerged in the 1970s expanded exponentially along with the art market and its global reach, making it difficult to find an essential connection among artists. Beyond theory-ridden postmodern analyses, consideration of how meanings function in terms of the viewer humanizes our connection to the artwork. In an attempt to go past stylistic similarities and find commonality among four leading New York painters, I propose another way of thinking about how the work of these artists function—painting as puzzle. David Salle, Eric Fischl, Julian Schnabel, and Jean-Michel Basquiat have been lumped together under categories of Neo-Expressionism and Postmodernism. These artists all lived in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, a time when Modernism had been declared dead, taking the viability of painting to the grave with it, at least according to the critical discourse. Despite these claims, each of these artists made a strong case for painting as a significant genre. However, the concerns, methods, and pictorial elements of their work are not similar enough to warrant a blanket designation. Moreover, art historical “-isms” traditionally refer to stylistic similarities, though few can be found between any paintings of these four artists. They do, however, represent a sea change not from a stylistic vantage point, but in terms of how the work presents itself to the viewer as a riddling

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configuration of artistic elements. The paintings beckon the viewer to fill in the blanks, make connections, complete the narrative, and assign meanings. The puzzles are comprised of signs, images, diagrams, scenes, marks, gestures, and, most importantly, surprising juxtapositions. There is no definitive way to solve these puzzles, even as the viewer may be engaged, provoked, baffled, or intrigued. Unearthing the factors which influenced each artist is the best way to understand the puzzle pieces. To comprehend how these puzzles operate, one must delve into the factors that shaped the artists’ intentions and the environments which produced them. The place and the time are significant. New York City was a fertile ground for new art in the late 1970s when the city was bankrupt and people were moving out in droves. Cheap housing abounded in parts of Lower Manhattan for artists who shared the turf with drug addicts and other inhabitants of slumlord housing. The artist-in-residence laws allowed artists to live and work in buildings that had once been home to the light industry, buildings that have since been transformed into posh lofts owned by celebrities and millionaires. Just before the art market busted loose into the mega-industry it is today, several grant-subsidized alternative spaces afforded numerous exhibition possibilities for young artists. Storefront artist-run organizations, the rise of graffiti art, and the gritty irreverence of East Village galleries, which had their brief but important moment in the 1980s, fused street life and art in audacious new ways. Downtown clubs, especially those with an experimental or punk vibe, served as meeting places where music and art meshed. Most artists played in bands at one time or another; however, having musical talent was not a requirement. Semiotic and psychoanalytic theories were in the air. Many young artists, such as David Salle, Jonathan Lasker, and Peter Halley, favored Baudrillard’s essay “On Simulation and Simulacra,” which spells out a series of orders in which the simulacra (total fakery and artifice) are more real than that which is a simulation of the real; Disneyland was his example of a pure simulacrum.2 Of greater significance is the way each artist drew from a matrix of personal material, varied sources, social stimuli, and individualistic thinking. The factors that shaped the art of the 1970s and 1980s were as various as the resulting styles; the era when one or two styles dominate a particular micro-period, as Pop and Minimalism in the 1960s, was over. The word “pluralism” became part of the artistic parlance as a convenient catchall term, an umbrella to cover the diversity of styles. New and established art schools flourished in the 1970s, graduating an unprecedented number of students. Ambitious graduates headed for New York

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City; it remained the epicenter of Contemporary art. A great number of art schools had shifted their focus from the mechanics of art making to more philosophically based inquiries connected to Conceptual art. This fostered an innovative generation of artists who employed a wide range of operational methods and felt free to imitate, appropriate, reference, and parody images and styles from art history, mass media, and commerce. Perhaps no other art school championed a conceptual viewpoint more than the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts). Located in Valencia, California, just outside of Los Angeles, CalArts is an offshoot of the Disney Company. Ironically, the company, whose target audience was children, supported a noholds-barred art school where students and teachers painted each other’s naked bodies in one class, and no one beefed at public pot smoking. Artist and teacher John Baldessari wielded the greatest influence, and his “post-studio” classes were the stuff of legends. In one class, he threw a dart on the map of Los Angeles and wherever it landed, the class traveled to the spot and created pieces based on that location. He gave film stills or advertisements to his students as the raw material for a work, and each student had to defend his reason for selecting one image over another or for pairing two images.3 In his infamous all-day and sometimes all-night student critiques, any element that had already been done by another artist was shot down. Originality was paramount. CalArts cultivated a prejudice against painting. Baldessari had burned all of his own paintings in his 1970 action entitled Cremation Project, believing that the medium was no longer relevant. Many CalArts graduates continued to work with photographs and images taken from advertising and film. These artists were subsequently labeled the “Pictures Generation.” The tag came from two exhibitions: Pictures held at New York’s Artists Space in 1977 and The Pictures Generation 1974–1984 held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. Although the artists included in the designation Pictures Generation worked in photography and film, CalArts graduates David Salle and Jack Goldstein came to painting after working in other media. Their classmate Eric Fischl always painted, even when it was considered totally passé. In his student days, David Salle worked primarily with photography, installation, film, and performance. Although he had been Baldessari’s student and was keenly aware of the anti-painting bias, later in New York, he began to wonder why painting was not as valid as non-painting media. After all, it could serve the play of imagery and recontextualization, a key CalArts methodology. The physical reality of the medium and its metaphoric possibilities appealed to Salle, who believed his was the last generation of artists who “romanticized

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painting.”4 He posited that a key shift was occurring where meaning came from cultural signage rather than the process of painting itself.5 Salle intimated that the long-held belief that painting itself could be expressive and embody emotional, spiritual, or psychological content had passed. It was being replaced by the references and associations drawn from signifiers of culture and societal codes. “The beauty lies precisely in the unsolvable,” Salle explained, concluding that painting at this critical juncture was the juxtapositions of elements resulting in ambiguous meanings.6 Quotations from the art historical canon became fair game. Moreover, painting could be self-referential, with nods to the artists who historically redefined painting. Salle’s inclusion of art historical references is similar to the way the then emerging rap and hip-hop artists sampled tracks from pop music favorites. Salle, ever enigmatic, orchestrated his combinations of imagery in a way that prevents us from solving the visual puzzle of why the art historical reference is conjoined with the other elements in the painting. For example, one cannot help but think that the wooden relief of an ear attached to the left side of Salle’s Tennyson, 1983, (Figure 2.1) is a reference to Van Gogh, yet we are confounded when the word “Tennyson,” not “Van Gogh,” is painted in block letters in the center of the painting, partially obscuring the backside of a naked woman. Viewers believe Salle must have linked Van Gogh and Tennyson for a reason—the artist is giving us a clue with which to solve the imagistic riddle—but in fact, the artist selected the word on an instinct that this “felt like a word painting.”7 Similarly, Gericault’s Arm, 1985, (Figure 2.2) includes an image from a study of a severed arm done by the great nineteenth-century Romantic painter Théodore Géricault. The arm sits on top of a smoky grisaille female torso, a stalwart in Salle's work. Between that and another female nude, a brightly colored, striped ceramic jar anchors the composition. Finding meaning in the combination of elements and references to a classical artwork is near impossible. The mind boggles at the many possible interpretations and messages without ever settling on one, a feature emblematic of these paintings as puzzle discussed in this chapter. Salle’s appropriations run the art historical gamut. Photographs of Coney Island in the 1940s by artist Reginald Marsh, the chronicler of the tawdry urban life, provide source material for Salle’s The Muse with the Long Face, 1981. Allusions to Velázquez, Bernini, Cézanne, and Magritte occur frequently as well. Although Salle maintains that Picabia’s Transparencies series was not a direct influence, many compare the layered images used by both. These art historical borrowings situated the work in a then-timely dialogue about the genre of painting, seen by many as retardataire, peripheral at best to postmodern tenets.

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Figure 2.1: David Salle, Tennyson, 1983. Oil, acrylic on canvas with wood and

plaster relief, 78 × 117 × 5 1/2 in. (198.1 × 114 × 13.5 cm) © 2022 David Salle/ VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2.2: David Salle, Gericault’s Arm, 1985. Oil and synthetic polymer paint

on canvas, 78 × 96 in. (198.1 × 243.8 cm) © 2022 David Salle/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2.3: James Rosenquist, I Love You with My Ford, 1961. Oil on canvas, 82 3/4 × 93 1/2 in. (210.2 × 237.5 cm), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (NM 5813). Artwork © 2022 James Rosenquist Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the James Rosenquist Studio.

Moreover, Salle placed representations from painting, photography, popular culture, and commerce on an equal playing field. This leveling tends to neutralize the art historical context, recalling how Jasper Johns made imagery such as targets and flags factual, devoid of contextual clues to their meanings. Salle’s collage mentality cannot be imagined without key Pop Art forerunners such as James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg as well. In I Love You with My Ford, 1961, (Figure 2.3) Rosenquist combined seemingly unrelated images: a chrome bumper, spaghetti loops, and a woman painted in grey tones. Rauschenberg’s mixing of high and low culture and use of photography in the breakthrough Combine series of the mid-1950s provided a point of departure for many artists who would adopt an assemblage sensibility.

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The term “pastiche” refers to the incongruous combination of elements and usage, almost a parody, of existing styles or motifs. It has been used in relation to 1980s painting, referring to the disjunctive borrowing of elements, not only in the work of David Salle but also Sigmar Polke and Julian Schnabel who all appropriate stylistic elements not just imagery. Salle’s aggregation of elements differs from that of Pop artists. His paintings are neither Rosenquist’s blown-up composite of commodity imagery aping the style of air-brushed advertising nor Rauschenberg’s hybrid of painting and sculpture using found objects to link art and life. Rather, Salle ties one thing to another both visually and associatively and referencing earlier art with admiration, albeit with a sardonic withholding of the connections. It is both poetic and resistant to poetics. The impact of non-painting sources is one of the few common denominators among painters of the 1970s and the 1980s. During his formative student years, Salle first developed a taste for filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Preston Sturges. The films of Danish German director Douglas Sirk are characterized as sudsy, melodramatic camp, but Salle and other followers appreciated them on a deeper level. One film critic noted, “Throughout Sirk’s films, compositions fall into fragments. Cuts seem to split the space; camera movements alienate rather than connect.”8 This condition also resonates in Salle’s works such as Coral Made, 1975. Film techniques such as tilt angle shots, split screen, montage, and the isolated dramatic gesture are staples in Salle’s kit. Making use of skill sets associated with an art director and filmmaker, he commands attention in his large-scale works in two ways. First, he plays one compositional element against another. Combinations of grisaille with bright colors; transparencies and opaqueness; crisp outlines and tonal drawings; and objects, figures, and image contrasted with abstraction make for punchy visuals. Diptych canvas divisions and insertions of three-dimensional attachments heighten the pictorial drama. Second, the viewer is enlisted to interpret the meaning even as the paintings defy easy readings. Michael Brenson made this point: While his basic imagery could hardly be more explicit, his juxtapositions trigger an explosion of contradictory meanings. In the painting His Brain, the image of a woman on a bed is almost pornographic. Across the canvas, however, in part superimposed upon the woman, are tiny images of Abraham Lincoln taken from pennies. The Lincoln images therefore suggest cheapness, but they also suggest moral rectitude. The conflicting meanings not only compete with each other, but also compete over the naked woman, finally draining the image of its pornographic content.9

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Salle languishes in ambivalence, feeling a kinship with André Gide’s famous line, “Don’t understand me too quickly.”10 Salle drew from his own life experience for source material as well. When he moved to New York, he supported himself with various jobs, including working in a paste-up position for a soft porn magazine, which accounts for the ease with which he painted black-and-white photographs of suggestively posed women in works such as His Brain, 1984, (Figure 2.4) or Fooling with Your Hair, 1985. Feminists found Salle’s treatment of the female figure demeaning; they bemoaned a backlash against the strides made by Feminist artists of the 1970s. Figure 2.4: David Salle, His Brain, 1984. Oil and acrylic on canvas, fabric, 117 × 105 3/4 in. (297.2 × 263.5 cm) © 2022 David Salle/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

In Autopsy, 1981, (Figure 2.5) Salle displayed a photograph from a performance piece during the mid-1970s picturing a seated naked woman with a dunce cap on her head and smaller ones on her breasts paired with a genericlooking “abstract painting.” Salle believed that “everything in the visual field is an image,”11 as he wanted to bring together two unrelated images that seem inevitable once brought together. Defending the work, critic Donald Kuspit opined that dunce woman was there “to reveal rather than provoke.”12 Salle claimed that he was going for irony.

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Figure 2.5: David Salle, Autopsy, 1981. Oil and acrylic on photosensitized linen, 48 × 112 in.

(121.9 × 248.5 cm) © 2022 David Salle/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

Feminist art historians such as Mira Schor vehemently disagreed with both views. She wrote, “Salle’s work was an act of revenge, conscious or unconscious, perhaps against the total centrality which by all rights a talented young male artist might feel entitled to and would have enjoyed in any art school.”13 I am not convinced that Salle’s use of compromising female imagery was an act of revenge as much as it was a need. More likely, the contrast of a loaded image with a banal, generic one serves to keep the viewer in a suspended state regarding the meaning of the pairing. It is the combination of elements that is baffling. The abstract pattern covers more space than the photo but is less interesting than the odd image. Are they meant to cancel each other out emotionally? Is he equating the genres of painting and photography? In spite of the controversy, or perhaps because of it, Salle became the poster boy for Postmodern painting. His work is rife with the standard postmodern descriptors: multivalences, selective appropriation, fragmented narratives, hybridization of art forms, and the refusal to suggest a single cut-and-dried meaning. Salle puts these mechanics of picture making in service of a tableau of visual signifiers which do not clearly connect with one another. The intention of the artist notwithstanding, the works befuddle, vex, mystify, and elude—all synonyms of the verb “to puzzle.” In his seminal 1981 essay “Last Exit: Painting,” Thomas Lawson forecasted a bleak outlook for painting but singled out Salle as the last, best hope for painting

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in the postmodern era. He speaks to this riddling quality when he stated, “The images are laid next to each other, or laid on top of one another. These juxtapositions prime us to understand the works metaphorically, as does the diptych format he favors, but in the end, the works refuse to gel. Meaning is intimated, but tantalizingly withheld.”14 Lawson suggested that this provoked the viewer into “a deeper examination of the prejudices bound inextricability with the conventional representations that express them.”15 Paradoxically, Salle was also labeled a Neo-Expressionist, an unfortunate term that lumped together artists from the United States and Europe and was much maligned by critics who perceived the style as Neo-Conservative, more connected to Modernist rather than to Postmodernist maxims. CalArts classmate Eric Fischl was also labeled Neo-Expressionist even though their works have little in common. Fischl notes that Schnabel, Salle, and he were grouped together as American Neo-Expressionists. “It didn’t matter that our personalities or paintings styles couldn’t have been more different,” Salle states. “What we had in common was that we were ambitious and we were male.”16 In terms of a narrative, Salle gave us fragments; Fischl, whole scenes. Eric Fischl majored in painting at CalArts and remembers well the rift between the painters and the conceptualists. However, he realized that all good art is conceptual, and the basis for determining a successful work of art was whether or not the art form best embodied its content. In terms of painting and the figure, Fischl is in many ways a self-taught artist, not given the tools he needed at art school. He explained: [A]rtists of my generation […] were not given the equipment, because it was generally believed to be irrelevant. Drawing, eye-hand coordination, art history—really fundamental stuff—were considered unnecessary. Paying too much attention to history would just clog your mind; make you imitative instead of avant-garde. In fact, it’s incredibly disrespectful of the importance of history that we train people to be amateurs. I deeply resent the kind of flattery that replaced discipline. We were made to feel from day one that we were artists, fully sprung from the womb an artist. What experience has shown me is that it takes your life to become an artist.17

Fischl sought out the education he lacked. After CalArts, he spent time as a guard at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary art. There he was exposed to the great narrative masterworks at the Art Institute of Chicago, such as Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, George Seurat’s oil sketch for La Grande Jatte, and Gustave

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Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day. Figurative sculpture proved instructive as well. He studied Rodin’s works, including the clay maquettes that homed in on body language, which Fischl used to facilitate psychological readings. What separates Fischl from other artists in this chapter is that his paintings are embedded in Modernist techniques of earlier artists, including Manet, Degas, Beckmann, Homer, and Hopper, particularly in the sweeping brushstrokes, figure-ground relationships, and compositional darks and lights. Fischl is not merely borrowing a style or appropriating an image from Modernist painting. His art is so firmly rooted in Modern painting techniques that calling him a Postmodernist is somewhat paradoxical. Again, grouping artists under all-encompassing brackets such as Neo-Expressionism, Postmodernism, or Pluralism masks dissimilarities in artistic approaches. Unrelated to theory-laden dialogues of the 1980s, Fischl’s intention was to create a style that was specific to painting. He described his experiences, During a time when painting was considered dead by the art-world, I was trying to capture the authenticity of shared experiences by painting characters that were real enough, sincere enough, and vulnerable enough to command empathy. There was no intellectualized strategy at work. I was trying to paint paintings I needed to see. I was trying to create in my work […] the kind of memorable experiences I found satisfying in movies and literature, something that painting had abandoned long ago.18

Fischl realized that narratives are presented in relation to their vehicle. He derived inspiration from television, movies, advertising, and film, staples of his suburban upbringing. His generation was the first to be raised entirely with television. In addition, culture-defining films such as Easy Rider19 and The Graduate20 were part of Fischl’s artistic identity. Both films speak to aspects of human behavior during defining moments, a mainstay of Fischl’s scenes. As his work progressed, Fischl found that the power of the small gesture in an intimate setting was often more impactful than the obvious pose. He explained, I am interested in the relationship that a person has with their body. Their body is this interface between an internal world of feeling, self-regard, self-loathing and this socialized world of availability signals, desire […] you read all that. And that’s the stuff that I am riveted to […] that’s the thing I find the most compelling about watching people.21

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He packed St. Tropez, 1982, with body cues, namely the topless woman in the forefront of the beach scene. The eye is drawn to the curve of her hip and one breast jutting out as she twists her torso and head in an alerted response to something happening behind her. Is the man standing too close to her? Did the smiling child disturb the sunbather’s reverie? As you survey the scene, the viewer compares the body language of all the beachgoers to her pose, while the sun-drenched light contrasting with the dark shadows creates a slight sense of unease. What narrative can we piece together from the body language? Black-and-white photographs by both Thomas Eakins and Pierre Bonnard inspired Fischl at various periods. He was interested in how they reveal the “instant recognition of a poignant moment,”22 where something is slightly offbalance. For example, Once Where We Looked to Put Down Our Dead, 1996, bears a remarkable similarity to an 1883–85 Thomas Eakins photograph of a nude man carrying a nude female, showing “that Fischl was looking at the photograph to help him both with the technical aspects of rendering the human figure and with clues to using the figure expressively,”23 observed James Romaine. This is as close as Fischl came to a visual cut and paste from art history’s archives. Here, he copies the pose, unlike Salle and Schnabel’s fragmented appropriations from earlier artworks. Fischl was the first artist to situate his players in a suburban setting, understanding from his own upbringing that unnerving, psychological dramas are even more poignant in environments of supposed normalcy. Fischl’s settings thwart our attempts to make sense of the scene. The vision-like quality of the nude female in the center of the multi-paneled painting The Birth of Love, Second Version, 1987, (Figure 2.6) is particularly unfathomable because the apparition takes place above the trunk of the family car parked in front of a suburban house. In that painting, Fischl transforms a benign scene of children playing around the family pet after dinner into one that feels mysterious, ritualistic, even slightly creepy. The suburban backdrop seasons the narrative with an eerie sense of familiarity. We grapple to connect the children in the shadows to the naked woman who stands bathed in a strange artificial light. Constructing a coherent story line with more symbolic readings of the scene is also valid. Fischl enlists us to create a narrative from the clues—figures, body language, the small gesture, spatial dynamics, psychological framing, objects, and setting—but leaves them open-ended enough to elicit multiple interpretations. Exactly like the defining characteristic of a puzzle, his work invites us to think about it without fully understanding or being able to pinpoint the meaning.

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Figure 2.6: Eric Fischl, The Birth of Love, Second Version, 1987. Oil on linen, 119 × 142 1/2 in. (302.3 × 361.9 cm) © 2022 Eric Fischl/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Skarstedt Gallery, New York.

His storytelling in paint evolved from works on paper. After graduation, he developed a technique of taping drawings on glassine paper to the canvas while teaching at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. He sometimes layered one sheet over another, moving them around until a story began to emerge. This led to him using a trial-and-error process in painting until the scene was set.24 For example, while working on his well-known painting Bad Boy, 1981, (Figure 2.7) the bed was first inhabited by a couple, then himself, and finally an adolescent boy. In the final version, we see a young boy staring at a mature woman’s exposed body in a suburban bedroom.

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Figure 2.7: Eric Fischl, Bad Boy, 1981. Oil on canvas, 66 × 96 in. (167.6 × 243.8 cm) © 2022

Eric Fischl/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Skarstedt Gallery, New York.

The viewer ruminates about the players and their relationships in order to uncover the psychological subtext. What is the relationship of the woman to the boy? Is the boy guilty of a greater sin than stealing money out of the woman’s purse? Is the woman’s indolent, self-absorbed pose proof of her indifference or complicity? Are we voyeurs, also complicit, seeing something that should have been a secret? What conclusions are we to reach? We attempt to make sense of a disturbing scene which equates theft and sexual coming-of-age. We do not know that the narrative represents something specific coming from Fischl’s life. He offered a painful insight, Bad Boy extended the larger themes running through my work—family dysfunction, the narcissism, the careless inattention with which parents blind themselves to their children’s needs and impulses, the suburban commodity culture that blurs the line between sexual and buying power, between genuine emotion and the superficial look of things.25

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The shocking nature of Bad Boy and other Fischl paintings of the 1980s such as Sleepwalker, 1979, (Figure 2.8) invites us to weigh in on whether what Fischl shows is perverse or natural, and furthermore, why is the artist showing it to us at all, as art writer Serge Kappler points out, Bad Boy invites the viewer to imagine two stories, one about the boy, the other about the woman on the bed. The title of the painting encourages a focus on the first. Why is the boy a bad boy? […] But what about the woman? One starts focusing on her because the boy’s predicament is partly her doing. How imagine [sic] her story? Why is she receiving him sprawled naked on that bed with her legs apart? The painting suggests that she doesn’t know any better. She is oblivious to his presence. A less generous answer might be that she knows perfectly well what she is doing. She is not stupid. She secretly enjoys provoking the kid. A still less generous answer could be that beyond the delicious thrill it gives her, she engages in that provocation with a view to introducing him to a still more intimate acquaintance with the delights of her body.26

Fischl exposed the Oedipal in a middle-class bedroom setting as a way of coming to grips with his own demons. He felt lasting discomfort from his experiences as a boy when his mother went naked around the house. These early works were also his way of processing, healing, and moving on from a traumatic upbringing riddled with violent fights between his father and alcoholic mother. “She’d rather be dead, my mother said, than face the sterility of suburban life without booze,”27 he reflected. In fact, his painting A Funeral, 1980, (Figure 2.9) depicts a scene at his mother’s gravesite after she committed suicide by smashing her car into a tree. Stark and colorless, there are few Contemporary works which so clearly illustrate the unyielding potency of familial connections. The young man in the picture leers out at us. Are we intruders on a private moment, or is he inviting us to bear witness to his personal loss? Painting in a traditional representational manner gave the viewer a sense of familiarity that invited an interpretation, always with an element of uncertainty, if not uneasiness. In Sleepwalker, he depicted a coming-of-age moment as a somnambulist wet dream. An adolescent boy masturbates in a backyard kiddy pool. Here, the clandestine is countered by the brash overhead lighting, surrounded by encroaching darkness. Every detail, such as the empty lawn chairs which symbolize the absence of parental authority, “contribute[s] to the sense of mystery, drama, and isolation that marks an adolescent’s introduction to puberty,”

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Figure 2.8: Eric Fischl, Sleepwalker, 1979. Oil on canvas, 69 × 105 in. (175.3 × 266.7 cm)

© 2022 Eric Fischl/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Skarstedt Gallery, New York.

Figure 2.9: Eric Fischl, A Funeral, 1980. Oil on canvas, 60 × 96 in. (152.4 cm × 243.8 cm)

© 2022 Eric Fischl/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Skarstedt Gallery, New York.

Fischl wrote.28 While everyone understands masturbation and adolescence, it is not generally front and center as subject matter in painting. Many of Fischl’s most powerful works of the 1980s use spatial dynamics as a metaphor for interior dynamics. In Daddy’s Girl, 1984, (Figure 2.10) it is unclear whether the visual clues of a naked grown man and young child on a chaise lounge suggest a completely innocent scene or a disturbingly dark scenario. The tension of not knowing is expressed in a glass of ice water precariously balanced on a table’s edge in the foreground. The anxiety is heightened by the use of harsh light, strong diagonals, and figure placement. These works recall the psychological views of another American artist, Edward Hopper, that also beckon us to interpret the scene. With both Hopper and Fischl, the commonplace becomes disturbing.

Figure 2.10: Eric Fischl, Daddy’s Girl, 1984. Oil on canvas, 78 × 108 in. (198.1 × 274.3 cm) © 2022

Eric Fischl/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Skarstedt Gallery, New York.

In Barbeque, 1982, (Figure 2.11) Fischl transforms the enviable cliché of upper-middle-class family values to a scene of chaos and dysfunction. Everything is slightly off, such as the annoyingly tilted picnic table that gives the appearance that the painting is crooked. (The owner of the painting, comedian/actor

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Figure 2.11: Eric Fischl, Barbeque, 1982. Oil on canvas, 65 × 100 in. (161.6 × 254 cm) © 2022

Eric Fischl/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Skarstedt Gallery, New York.

Steve Martin, says that he always wants to straighten it.) The father, whose fire is going out, seems disempowered when compared to the fire-breathing son.29 Psychological content is created not only by what we see, but also in the viewer’s dithering attempts to figure out the story Fischl is telling. For example, why are the sun-drenched fish in a bowl larger than the boy’s head and slightly offcenter in the foreground? Is the woman in the pool his mother, and if so, is her nudity appropriate? These questions present themselves as fragments of a story, enlisting the viewer to weave them into a cohesive narrative, which explains the awkward tension that permeates the scene. Fischl’s work during the 1980s came from a specific time and place. “Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives,” wrote Fischl.30 Fischl’s psychodramas may be linked to the audacious, non-mainstream Chicago Imagist painters whose works he first saw when he was living there. He acknowledges, “The underbelly, carnie world of Ed Paschke and the hilarious sexual vulgarity of Jim Nutt were revelatory experiences for me.”31 The impact of these and other Chicago Imagists who studied at the Art Institute in Chicago

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in the 1960s and often exhibited together under the banner of the Hairy Who has yet to be adequately told in art historical literature. They exposed the unmentionable in obsessive patterns or gross caricatures as seen in Jim Nutt’s Rosie Comon, 1967–68 (Figure 2.12). The work was too crass, sexual, cartoonish, and downright weird to receive the critical acceptance that its New York counterpart Pop Art did. Although comics were a source of inspiration, the imagined vision coming from the Hairy Who artists were better encapsulated by exaggerated drawing, bright colors, and thick black lines, not popular culture. Each artist developed stylized figures that often looked as though they had one hand in an electric socket. They presented a profusion of penises, zits, and raunchy sexual acts unapologetically, bringing fetishes and obsessions out in the open.32 Fischl also mapped the unmentionable by exposing societal taboos in his suburban vignettes. His disquieting paintings have a snapshot quality, giving the viewer a glimpse into an ongoing story but without all the information or context. The question of what happened before this scene and how it will play out afterwards goads the viewer to imagine the larger story. Although the material Fischl draws upon is personal, it is the viewer’s subjective range of readings that shapes its meaning. The ambiguous content and the relatively traditional use of paint influence the meanings a viewer may assign to the work. In addition to the provocative nature of the subject matter, we are drawn in by specific elements such as the locations in which the figures are placed—a bedroom, a backyard, a hotel room, a beach, and so on. Fischl also utilizes the areas of spatial connection and disconnection; empty spaces, body language, and the direction of a person’s gaze all add to the dramatic impact and uncomfortable mood. The use of lights and darks, color, and composition further affect how the piece is read. The artist hints at possible scenarios but by no means makes it explicit. That falls on the viewer. Unlike Fischl, Julian Schnabel’s paintings are not story driven, but their size and materiality are so imposing that one believes there must be something there to construe. Schnabel recycles so many stylistic, thematic, and iconographic elements that it would be difficult to say he created a new kind of painting, yet he brought a spontaneous theatricality to art audiences who responded to it heartily after the ennui of minimalist programs, prompting critic Robert PincusWhitten to call him a “maximalist.”33 At its core, Schnabel’s project revisited the basic models of Abstract Expressionism with the emphasis on the physicality of the materials, the expressive gesture, and the figure–ground relationships. Schnabel’s works are puzzling not only just individually but also as a coherent oeuvre. His painting mantra was not to copy himself. In actualizing this

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Figure 2.12: Jim Nutt, Rosy Comon, 1967–68. Acrylic on Plexiglas, reverse painting, in artist’s painted frame, 37 × 26 in. (94 × 66.1 cm). The Bill McClain Collection of Chicago Imagism, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art © 2022 Jim Nutt. Courtesy of Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

principle, he changed his formats, painting marks, and imagery for each series, rethinking the idea of style where the emphasis was not on the quotations of other artists but rather on what one does with those quotations. Schnabel’s stylistic dissimilarities add to the already difficult task of figuring out the real content of his work. How can his plate painting Blue Nude with Sword, 1979–80, packed with classical references and fragmented ceramics, be reconciled with Canard de Chaine, 1989, a painting on velvet that parodies a blown-up lexicon of brushstrokes paired with a nonsensical phrase meaning “a chained duck,” or a reference to a scandal-breaking French newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné?

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Schnabel saw inspiration for a painting in anything—the color of a worn-out door, a favorite film, Mexican votaries, and a photograph of an admired Tahitian surfer. But he is disinterested in the viewer’s interpretation. He remarked cavalierly, Somebody else might not understand it, might not understand what you see, but that’s not your problem. You don’t adjust it to make it easier for them to see, unless the person who says it to you really knows better than you do and you just realize they’re right. In general, I wouldn’t listen to them, because then people get what they want rather than what you want.34

Schnabel’s inclusive iconography and style developed over time as he recognized unequivocally his artistic leanings, which tended to go toward visually dramatic statements. He loved the grand manner of Italian altarpieces and Baroque spectacle of Caravaggio’s canvases. Brooklyn-born Schnabel was a loner as a child who discovered his passion for art at a young age; he created an improvised studio of sorts, hiding under tables and drawing for hours on end. Young Schnabel developed an interest in folk retablos, small devotional altarpieces of Christ and the saints, when his family moved to the Mexican border town of Brownsville, Texas. His was the only Jewish family in Brownsville, but the Catholic culture and imagery inundating his adolescent years carried into his adulthood. Religious imagery and themes of pain and redemption surface intermittently in his works such as the 12-foot-high Resurrection: Albert Finney Meets Malcolm Lowry, 1984, (Figure 2.13) made with oil, graffiti writer’s spray paint, and modeling paste on velvet. It was “inspired by John Huston’s 1984 film version of Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano, which featured a bravura performance by Finney as the doomed, alcoholic Counsel,” explained art critic Raphael Rubinstein: [The painting] depicts El Niño de Atocha, a Christ-child figure venerated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, particularly in Mexico, where the book Under the Volcano is set. Schnabel gives El Niño his traditional attributes—radiating aureole, pilgrim’s cloak and staff—and deploys a horizon line and distant mountain to give the impression that the child is levitating. Executed on purple velvet, the picture is a veritable anthology of modernist painting moves: Picassoid face, Pollock splatter, Picabian superimpositions, squeegeed swaths of paint as luminous as a Jules Olitski Color Field painting, spray-painted lines that could have leapt off a canvas by Dan Christensen. Significantly, rather than

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Figure 2.13: Julian Schnabel, Resurrection: Albert Finney Meets Malcolm Lowry, 1984. Oil, spray

paint, modeling paste on velvet, 120 × 108 in. (304.8 × 274.3 cm) © 2022 Julian Schnabel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

concocting an eclectic abstraction with these motifs, Schnabel puts them at the service of a religious image, which he identifies, via the title, as a tribute to an imagined meeting in heaven of Finney and Lowry.35

In many of Schnabel’s works, the sheer physicality and scale of the canvases are impressive. Schnabel seemed to have leanings toward a very physical kind of painting at a young age, even before other artistic influences further shaped his work. While getting his BA at the University of Texas, he studied the Rothko Chapel monochromes and realized he wanted to counter the prevailing sense that Rothko’s fields of paint seemed to float. Instead, he worked both the pictorial and the actual weight of his materials and paid attention to anchoring them to the support. In doing so, he assembled paintings with a three-dimensional quality; Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, 1954­–64, offered a prototype. Schnabel also wanted his treatment of the figure to be immediately recognizable as his own; he played image against abstraction, concentrating on the surface in ways that flattened the image. After moving to New York, exposure to and influences from a wide range of artists propelled Schnabel toward the kind of painting he had envisioned for himself. He became friends with the brilliant, introverted, hard-drinking German artist Blinky Palermo,36 who was then living in the city. Palermo used nontraditional supports such as cloth or metal and emphasized the object quality of the canvas. Both artists engaged with earlier styles; Palermo had a droll take on Minimalism, while Schnabel’s countered Minimalism with nods to Baroque art and Abstract Expressionism. Through Palermo, Schnabel met Sigmar Polke, an artist who was in many ways the cornerstone of the German Neo-Expressionism and wielded influence in terms of oscillating between opaqueness and translucency, seemingly random juxtapositions and stylistic variability.37 Schnabel’s admiration for the German postwar art shaman Joseph Beuys was surely amplified by Palermo and Polke, both of whom studied under him at the Dusseldorf Academy. Schnabel appreciated the expansive nature of Beuys’s art/philosophy and his use of unconventional materials. He realized Beuys’s importance paving the way for many American artists who came to the work only after the revalatory Beuys retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1979. Schnabel’s many trips to Europe during the 1970s held the most sway in strengthening his resolve to reinstate the grand manner in painting. He found Renaissance and Baroque masters such as Velasquez, El Greco, Titian, and Caravaggio inspirational for their transformations of paint to image and their impressive

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Figure 2.14: Julian Schnabel,

The Patients and the Doctors, 1978. Oil, plates, and bondo on wood, 96 × 108 × 12 in. (243.8 × 274.3 × 30.48 cm) © 2022 Julian Schnabel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

architectural fittings like the ornate altarpieces that framed the paintings. These monumental works resonated with Schnabel’s penchant for large-scale pictorial drama and prompted his use of shaped canvases. While visiting Barcelona with fellow painter Ross Bleckner, Schnabel was stirred to collage crockery after seeing his paintings by Gaudi’s lively mosaics in the Parc Güell. At first, he left the plates unpainted. As the series developed, he alternated between keeping the plates unpainted, painting over the plates, and a mix of both. The first plate painting, The Patients and the Doctors, 1978, (Figure 2.14) comprised four connected panels: one juts out 12 inches making the painting sculptural. Other than a diagonal play of small patches of cadmium yellow, clay-colored paint is the ground for shards and fragments of smashed china glued on with Bondo, a cheap putty used to repair cars. Thick, black outlines of funnel-like shapes move skittishly over plate and paint creating vertical thrusts to what would almost be an all-over design, except that the plate pieces are either loosely or compactly spaced. Schnabel orchestrated materials with deliberately awkward line work. He contrasts the earthy palette against the manufactured glazes of real objects in much the same way as a conductor integrates melodic and discordant elements. The plate paintings change depending on where the viewer stands. Up close, “[you see] the jagged range of ceramic outcroppings, jumping countless tiny gaps, sometimes coagulating into hardened globs of paint, blithely ignoring or

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else artfully echoing the shapes and decorative motifs of the broken plates,”38 described Raphael Rubinstein. As the viewer retreats from the work, forms, gestures, and images emerge from that distance. Schnabel’s many oversize portraits covered with ceramic pieces and paint are less successful; they look more like blown-up versions of badly drawn and poorly painted upper torsos over crafty surfaces. Single images are not Schnabel’s forte. Rather, his mix of styles, materials, and iconography feel more inventive. Schnabel’s haptic sensibility is on full display in his paintings on velvet, a surface generally associated with small, kitschy paintings. He drew from the chintzy depictions of Elvis Presley and the tourist paintings he saw when living on the Mexican border. He takes “bad taste” to the brink in the vexingly busy She Mistook Kindness for Weakness, 1986 (Figure 2.15). Concentric circles of Day-Glo paint spin across the black velvet in front of a cartoonish caveman holding a club. In garish colors on the lower side of the painting, the crudely rendered letters “SMKFW,” an anagram of the title, are stacked vertically. Although many of these paintings were met by negative press, Schnabel’s full commitment to his excesses, even on the brink of incoherence, is admirable in its sheer gutsiness. Schnabel deftly moved from these overpacked attention getters to sparser contrasts of forms and color, such as the wax paintings from 1974 to 1980, or the gestural sweeps of paint, as in the Maria Callas series of 1982. His palette ranged from somber to sensuous, especially his authoritative use of the color red. He incorporated text in conjunction with many pictorial elements in works such as I Went to Tangiers and Had Dinner with Paul Bowles, 1980, (Figure 2.16) or as the dominating element in works such a Blessed Clara, 1987. In these works, meanings are all but completely inscrutable. As one writer put it, “I have pondered the inscriptions that erupt across so many of Schnabel’s paintings, and have been, by turns, puzzled, intrigued, and frustrated by them.”39 Rather than giving us clues on which to base our interpretations as Salle does or invite us to write the narrative for moody scenes as does Fischl, Schnabel’s works are more suited to be taken as a whole. We recognize that he is emphasizing the traditional aspects of painting; hence, we attempt to understand them through that medium. Can the brushstroke be taken seriously when it is glows in the dark? Many viewers wondered, as I did, are these gaudy, pompous, full-tilt paintings legitimate? It was not just his work in the 1980s but the artist himself who was perceived as grandiose. It is often said that artists were the rock stars of the 1980s. If so, Julian Schnabel was the first. His larger-than-life paintings (some measured 21 feet wide) were matched by his larger-than-life ego: as a matter of

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Figure 2.15: Julian Schnabel, She

Mistook Kindness for Weakness, 1986. Oil and modeling paste on velvet, 96 × 72 in. (243.9 × 182.9 cm) © 2022 Julian Schnabel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2.16: Julian Schnabel, I

Went to Tangiers and Had Dinner with Paul Bowles, 1990. Oil, gesso on white tarpaulin, 192 × 192 in. (487.7 × 487.7 cm) © 2022 Julian Schnabel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

course, he would state that he was the most important painter since Picasso. Even when he worked in New York as a short-order cook, he was known to leave the kitchen to introduce himself to an important collector who was dining. His braggadocio elicited a lot of negative publicity, which, in the hypedup art market climate of the early 1980s, was even more useful to his career than good publicity. Dealer Mary Boone matched Schnabel’s brashness and ambition. In 1981, she collaborated with the venerable Leo Castelli to exhibit Schnabel’s work jointly in her fledgling Soho gallery. The two-gallery exhibition was to the art world what the Beatles’ first American concert in Yankee Stadium was to rock music. He became the hottest artist and an overnight celebrity. Art critic Roberta Smith quipped that he was “Jeff Koons before Jeff Koons.”40 Despite what has been referred to as his “difficult public persona,” Schnabel was in the exact right place at the exact right time with the self-assurance and talent to back it up. At a certain point, the press turned on him, panning his European one-person exhibitions in the late 1980s. Even in 2003, Thomas Crow’s caustic assessment of Schnabel’s “defiantly derivative paintings as media event,”41 among other negative reviews, makes it difficult to separate the art from the outrage he engendered. The art world’s love-hate relationship with the artist-turned-celebrity has muddied the waters of critical judgment. His work has been both critically overrated and underrated.42 Schnabel became synonymous with the publicity that accompanied the 1980s art boom; his art, the art market, and the art marketing game all surged at the same time. American Neo-Expressionism was a label that gallerists leveraged to sell art, and Schnabel was the artist most thoroughly associated with that label—an assignation he rejected out of hand, referring to the terminology as “a joke.”43 Schnabel’s plate portraits of the ΄80s are uneven, his unique genius manifested itself as a director of the critically acclaimed films Basquiat, Before Night Falls, and The Butterfly and the Diving Bell. His contribution to painting, however, was twofold. First, his tenacious belief in the genre at a time when it was on critically shaky ground placed him in a leadership role. Eric Fischl recalled that Schnabel led the way for his fellow painters. His resolve to create painterly, expressionistic, juicy painting was completely at odds with the prevailing zeitgeist. When he was accepted into the Whitney Independent Program in 1973, he was an anomaly of sorts with his interest in recovering painting rather than replacing it with more conceptually driven artworks. He felt deeply out of place in the theoretical and conceptually grounded curriculum that was more attuned

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to photography. Secondly, he dispatched inventive faculties for using color, advocated gestural paint application with his hands rather than brush, and captured the interchangeability of text, image, and abstraction all with stagey bravado. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s meteoric rise rivaled even that of Schnabel’s. Young, gritty, elegant, street-smart, intelligent, fierce, and original, he sprang from the downtown scene at the moment when the art world was ready for a new art star to counter the uptown galleries’ “blue-chip” artists who were endorsed by the official art connoisseurs. Like Jackson Pollock before him, Basquiat was mythologized in his time as the addicted, rebellious artist to whom art-making norms did not apply. Basquiat came from a middle-class background with a Haitian American father and a Puerto Rican mother who put a copy of Grey’s Anatomy in his hands at a young age—a classic book of text and illustrations on human anatomy that became a constant source of imagery during his brief nine years as an artist. His mother, who suffered from mental illness and was often institutionalized, nurtured his artistic leanings, bringing him to museums where he saw Picasso’s Guernica, 1937, for the first time, a transformative experience by his own account. His parents separated when Basquiat was 7, and he was raised primarily by his father, a successful accountant who played tennis on the weekends and tried to keep his rebellious son in check. Basquiat could write and read by the age of 4, and he read constantly. He was trilingual, speaking English, Spanish, and French, but despite his intelligence, he abhorred traditional schooling. By age 13, he had attended five different schools. He left home when he was 15 and lived in Washington Square Park in Manhattan for several months, dropping acid and befriending people experiencing homelessness. In an act of desperation, his father enrolled him in City-As-School, an alternative high school in Manhattan, where Basquiat met graffiti writer Al Diaz, his collaborator in the SAMO campaign. The pseudonym SAMO, which stood for “same old shit,” was his graffiti tag. Using black markers and aerosol paint cans, Basquiat tagged lower Manhattan with epigrams such as “SAMO© does not cause cancer in laboratory rats” and “SAMO for the so-called avant-garde.” Basquiat’s poetry on the sides of buildings such as “Pay for soup / Build a fort / Set that on fire” caught the attention of downtown hipsters and punk kids. He dropped out of high school and left home for good when he was 17. During his self-imposed vagrancy, he lived hand to mouth, sleeping in a cardboard box in Tompkins Square, on friends’ couches and floors, and with welcoming women until his overnight success in the early 1980s. Despite his transient poverty, he acquired serious “street cred” as a graffitist. On the public-access

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cable show TV Party, featuring then-underground personalities such as David Byrne and Iggy Pop, he was introduced as “the most language-oriented of all the graffiti artists today.”44 In a New York second, Basquiat went from being homeless to art star when curator Diego Cortez invited him to include his earliest works in the New York/ New Wave show in 1981 at P.S.1, which was, at the time, an alternative space. Annina Nosei offered him a solo show at her SoHo Gallery based on his few small-scale paintings, primarily on paper, that were some of the only paintings in an exhibition of text, photography, and mixed media. Unlike the New York painters who were art school graduates and also pegged as American NeoExpressionists—Eric Fischl, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel—Basquiat had scant, if any, art training. With Nosei’s offer, Basquiat found himself a 21-yearold street artist with little or no art tutelage and no large-scale paintings to attest to his ability, forced to confront large swaths of canvas for the first time in a gallery basement, using only his instincts and thought processes to guide him. There may never be a better example of innate artistic expression than this. The resulting exhibition was a smash hit; his sold-out success solidified his fame as the art world’s enfant terrible. His celebrity grew as the term “multi-culturalism” became part of the public lexicon. Political correctness became fashionable, ethnic diversity, cool. Recall the stunning photographs of young faces in many shades used for the “United Colors of Benetton” advertising campaign of the 1980s, Basquiat could have sat for one of those ads. His hair styles ranged from a bleached blonde Mohawk to countless variations of tufted dreadlocks that are copied to this day. Basquiat was a style maker, not follower. He created impeccably stylish looks from cheap thrift-store finds. His clothing and persona were part of his magnetism. Even the way he danced, floating and bobbing from one foot to another, was considered hip. Rumors about his lifestyle buzzed as his fame grew, and his paintings fetched higher and higher prices. One such story circulated that gallerist Annina Nosei locked him in her basement until he finished a painting and rewarded him with drug money upon completion. While the locking in the basement story was not true, the drug addiction was. Heroin and endless cash are a lethal mix. They eventually took the artist’s life at age 27. His notoriety burgeoned with help from heavy-hitter gallerists Larry Gagosian, Mary Boone, and Bruno Bishofberger, not to mention the now-famous photograph of Basquiat on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in which he sat barefoot in front of one of his paintings in a paint-spattered Giorgio Armani suit. He was typecast as the “noble savage” of the 1980s. He became a regular at

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the elegant, 57th Street eatery Mr. Chows, hanging out with celebrities such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes, and Madonna. People clamored for the artist and his art. As a young boy, Jean-Michel had told his father that he would be famous one day, a prophecy clearly realized. Basquiat has become even more famous in death than in life. Johnny Depp made headlines when he auctioned off his Basquiat collection; rap mogul Jay Z, one of many stars who own his work, references the artist in his lyrics. Basquiat reproductions are found on all manner of merchandise such as sneakers, skateboards, dishes, watchbands, flip-flops, jewelry, tote bags, pillows, and designer fashions—men can purchase their very own Basquiat boxer briefs. In 2010, the definitive documentary on the artist titled The Radiant Child was released, reigniting Basquiat-mania. Recent exhibitions have probed further into his work, especially his notebooks, and the price of his art and memorabilia continue to climb. In 1981, Annina Nosei sold his large-scale works for $2500 each, and then in 2021, Christie’s auction house sold a Basquiat painting for $93.1 million. Much of the writing on Basquiat has centered on his life and legend rather than his work for two reasons. First, he is the quintessential tragic hero, similar to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Charlie Parker, all artists he admired. Basquiat believed his own life would follow a similar path of addiction and early death. Second, his work is raw and inscrutable, best characterized as “puzzling,” by the strict definition from Webster’s Dictionary, “to offer or represent to (someone) a problem difficult to solve or a situation difficult to resolve.” I do not believe his works are meant to fully coalesce in a way that makes them less puzzling in spite of attempts by numerous writers to do so. Rather, in order to understand Basquiat’s art apart from the hype that surrounded him during his life and continues even now, one must look not only at the elements which comprise his works, words, images, and painterly marks but also, more importantly, how they are arranged on a two-dimensional surface. Both suggest possible meanings and resist a clear-cut reading. His sources, process, and the structures which inform his way of working are key to understanding the conundrum that is Basquiat’s art. His painting method mimicked a kind of free association technique. “[I] needed a lot of source material around him while he painted,” the artist once explained.45 He often worked on more than one canvas at a time with music playing, the television on, and pages open from a wide range of books. This was the era just before words and images from computers and other devices became the norm. In addition to the multiple stimuli in his studio, he used words or images remembered from the streets as part of the mix he required to keep his art fresh. He once said he “heard the words in his head and just threw them down.”

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Basquiat’s iconography derives not only from specific books and media but from his cultural heritage as well—Puerto Rican words, Spanish phrases, references to Haitian voodoo appeared in his paintings. He also spoke about his belief in and ownership of a more deep-seated cultural memory as part of the African diaspora, stating, “I don’t need to look for it. It exists. It’s over there, in Africa. That doesn’t mean I have to go live there. Our cultural memory follows us everywhere, wherever you live.”46 Many of his works focus on African history, both ancient and recent. He addressed colonialism in South Africa in works such as Natives Carrying Some Guns, 1982, and South African Nazism, 1985. Images and text from the open books found their way to the canvas. He used words and outlines of the body taken from both Grey’s Anatomy extensively, a 1966 volume on Leonardo da Vinci and material from African Rock Art by Burchard Brentjes. He also frequently used Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols. In Riddle Me This Batman, 1987, the image of a circle means “nothing to be gained here” from Dreyfuss’s Hobo Code—signs left on walls and fences by drifters for the next vagabond during the Depression. The words “Punic War” in Jawbone of an Ass, 1982, came from a brief history of Rome he found in a guidebook. In works such as Onion Gum, 1983, the phrase “Onion gum makes your mouth taste like onions” is odd and obscure; an inquisitive viewer would not know that it comes from an advertisement in the back of an old comic book for prank novelty products. Even if the source was known, it would not explain its pairing with glyphic images of a man holding two snakes standing on a mask-like face in the center of the painting, a reference to Moses who turned his staff into a serpent. Comic and cartoon words and imagery, particularly superheroes, were appropriated in works such as Piano Lesson (for Chiara), 1983, that portray Batman and Robin. He extracted words and images from a diverse range of topics: science, cartography, history, literature, languages, art history, antiquities, music, sports, and television. He placed them in what appears to be random order on the pictorial field where associations and connections proliferate in the mind of the viewer. Basquiat’s usage of words further complicates our reading because he exploits all the vagaries of semiology. He loved words, words as symbols, signs, shapes, double entendres, utterances, labels, lists, references, nouns, verbs, sounds, brushstrokes, and as drawings. Basquiat explained that once when he was on an airplane, “I was copying some stuff out of a Roman sculpture book. This lady said, ‘Oh, what are you studying?’ I said, ‘It’s a drawing.’ ”47 In copying words, not images, this conversation reveals that Basquiat saw any compilation of words as a pictorial entity, not just as information.

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Figure 2.17: Jean-Michel Basquiat, St. Joe Louis Surrounded by Snakes, 1982. Acrylic and crayons on canvas, 40 × 40 in. (101.5 × 101.5 cm) © 2022 Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

From an exhibition titled Basquiat: In Word Only at Cheim & Read Gallery, it was noted: For Jean-Michel Basquiat, the meaning of a word was not necessarily relevant to its usage because he employed words as abstract objects that can be seen as configurations of straight and curved lines that come together to form a visual pattern. Conversely, the artist also employed words and phrases that are loaded with meaning and reference, in particular those words related to racism, black history, and black musicians and athletes. Basquiat’s word paintings and drawings often appear to be a secret, coded language that the artist devised and left for the viewer to attempt to decipher. Basquiat acknowledged his manipulation of words, stating “I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.”48

The images may or may not relate to the words themselves. The paintings challenge us to read and reread the canvases. We can connect the dots in some works more clearly than in others, but even when the topic seems clear, the viewer is not privy to those images and words that emanate from Basquiat’s personal responses, interests, or experiences. In St. Joe Louis Surrounded by Snakes, 1982, (Figure 2.17) we see one of Basquiat’s most direct statements, but still

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Figure 2.18: Jean-Michel Basquiat, El Gran Espectaculo (The History of Black People) titled

The Nile on the reverse, 1983. Acrylic and crayons on canvas, 28 1/2 × 141 in. (172.5 × 358 cm) © 2022 Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

there is ambiguity. It is clearly a shrine to Louis, one of many Black sports heroes seen in Basquiat’s corpus, including Sugar Ray Leonard, Cassius Clay, Jersey Joe Walcott, Jessie Owens, and Hank Aaron, but the viewer would not understand that the snakes were Louis’s managers and promoters, who purloined the boxer into bankruptcy. Basquiat had studied the lives of African American heroes who endured extreme racial bigotry, and it was a reoccurring theme in his work. Joe Lewis, one of the great, if not the greatest, heavyweight boxing champions and the first African American to achieve public hero status, worked as a bellhop toward the end of his life. This was not lost on Basquiat; he became enraged when taxi drivers refused to pick him up because he was Black. The portraits in his sports hero paintings focus on a given topic, but most of Basquiat’s works give us a wider variety of elements to decode. If, for example, we try to decipher Basquiat’s 1983 painting El Gran Espectaculo (The History of Black People) titled The Nile on the reverse, (Figure 2.18) we see that it taps into his African heritage. The ship in the painting recalls not only an ancient vessel sailing down the Nile during the Egyptian era but also a slave ship. By adding the word “Tennessee” below the word “Memphis,” he tied an ancient Egyptian city to a US city that was an active center of the slave trade. The word and image of a sickle could reference the sickle sword used by Egyptian soldiers, the hieroglyphic

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Figure 2.19: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Notary, 1983. Acrylic, oil paintstick, and paper collage on

canvas with wood supports, 31 2/3 × 158 in. (180.5 × 401.5 cm) © 2022 Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

sign for the sickle, or sickle cell anemia, a disease which primarily targets African Americans. He often conflates the two themes, Africa and slavery in America. Other paintings are more cryptic, such as Notary, 1983, (Figure 2.19) which includes Basquiat’s copy of a drawing by Galileo of the moon with a copyright sign after it—Basquiat quipped that he did not want Disney to sue him for using the name Pluto. Also featured are a sketch of a Roman belt buckle from the Metropolitan Museum; a drawing of a helmet with the Spanish translation casco; a symbol for the evil eye; a mask; the words “notary,” “parasite,” “leeches,” “salt,” “dehydrate,” and crossed out; the word “flesh.” How do all these images or words connect? When asked about this painting’s seemingly random composition of words and images by Marc Miller in one of the most painfully uncomfortable interviews of all time, Basquiat responded, “Sometime random makes for a better narrative,”49 but Basquiat’s narratives are not stories told through usual plot lines. Basquiat idolized William Burroughs, another writer of unconstrained and unorthodox narratives, whose cut-and-paste method has been linked to Basquiat’s practice. The influence is apparent in the way both artists spoke through the fragment. On a deeper level, however, Basquiat’s nonlinear thinking mirrors that of Burroughs, who once wrote, “I am a recording instrument […] I do not presume to impose ‘story,’ ‘plot,’ ‘continuity’.”50 In the same way, Basquiat let the sources flow through him, allowing connections to develop without censorship.

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The edgy tone and stream of consciousness rhythm of beatnik writer Jack Kerouac resonated deeply with Basquiat, who insisted on being photographed with Kerouac’s The Subterraneans in his hand for the announcement for his last exhibition. Basquiat’s process, which was fast and extemporaneous, was analogous to Kerouac’s instinctive style of writing; Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans in a three-day amphetamine-induced rush. Similarly, the fluidity of Basquiat’s image and word associations result in a sense of excitement and energy that pops when his works are seen in person. This does not translate in reproductions. Mark Twain, another Basquiat favorite, no doubt appealed to him because of his feel for regional dialect and intersecting storylines. Basquiat used connective themes such as Black stereotypes in the film industry in Hollywood Africans, 1983, (Figure 2.20) in much the same way Twain uses the Mississippi River to connect his narratives in Huckleberry Finn. In this painting, Basquiat moves from the phrases “What is Bwana?” to “sugar cane,” alluding to the roles of slaves in film to the footprints of the stars in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. It also includes drawings of two friends, graffiti writers Toxic and Rammellzee, who accompanied Basquiat on a trip to Los Angeles, home of the film industry, a personal reference the viewer might not know. The viewer is given a mélange of entities and impulses to make sense of what one writer called a “calculated incoherence.”51 Basquiat’s 15-foot masterpiece The Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta, 1983, (Figure 2.21) serves both as a tribute to Twain and as a cryptogram on race in America. The viewer tries to figure out the overriding theme in much the same way he or she might try to use the title in the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle to solve the longest clues. It is a daunting task as one critic explained: Your eyes are forced to dart from one ambiguous scribble to the next. The seemingly random bits of symbolism—a quasi-anatomical sketch here, the crude face of a cow there—appear smudged and chaotic before your eyes. The masterpiece forces you to digest fifteen-feet worth of text and color, piecing together the five canvases worth of select African American history.52

Identifying the sources of the puzzling iconography in Basquiat’s paintings can only take you so far; much remains to be interpreted and understood. In fact, the compositions of the paintings themselves are the most difficult to construe. Stylistically, the initial response to a Basquiat painting is to wonder how something so seemingly crude, scribbly, raw, and disjointed can be a good painting. Bowing to tradition, the viewer insists on asking if there should not be something more than just a pictorial word and image dump that mimics children’s

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Figure 2.20: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, 1983. Acrylic and oilstick on canvas, 84 1/16 × 84 in. (213.5 × 213.4 cm). © 2022 Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

untrained lines, changes in scale, and unexpected placements on a flat surface. This is a normative response in the face of true originality; in this case, art that does not look like anything we have ever seen before. The unschooled look was a deliberate choice. Basquiat once said, “I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child”53 and acknowledged that the art of 3- and 4-year-old children had the greatest influence on him. Indeed, his work bears striking parallels to the first three stages of childhood development in art—scribble, early image making, and preformatting. Basquiat who drew incessantly from age 3 channeled his own inner child, I believe, in order

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Figure 2.21: Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta, 1983. Acryl-

ic, oilstick, and paper collage on joined canvases, 49 × 185 1/2 in. (124.5 × 471.2 cm) © 2022 Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

to be stylistically untainted; he was smart enough to know that being dubbed derivative is the kiss of death in the art world. Moreover, his art making was as extemporaneous and direct as children’s art. French poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “Genius is the recovery of childhood at will,” and Basquiat undoubtedly demonstrated this genius. The ability to situate an artist’s work in a Eurocentric Modernist art historical lineage or context customarily provides an entry point into understanding its meaning. This is not possible with Basquiat. When asked which artists he admired, Basquiat named many, including Leonardo da Vinci, Franz Kline, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and A. R. Penck, all of whom are too diverse to point to a single art historical lineage. Rene Richard’s oft-quoted statement, “[I]f Twombly and Dubuffet had a child, artistically speaking, it would be Basquiat,”54 is an apt comment, but there are important differences to note. The combination of language and expressionistic paint handling is found in both Twombly and Basquiat, but Twombly’s writing is more calligraphic, rounded, and graceful in most cases while Basquiat’s is

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block-like. More importantly, Basquiat completely lacks Twombly’s tonal subtleties or limited palate and Dubuffet’s heavily encrusted surfaces. In works such as Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, 1982, (Figure 2.22) passages of paint splashes, brushstrokes, and gestures recall the work of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline while other influences are harder to pinpoint, with the exception of Picasso. The menacing faces in works such as Cabeza, 1982, and Untitled, 1981, recall Picasso’s brutish late work, a fact that has elicited misguided opinions that Basquiat was somehow playing the primitive and following in Picasso’s appropriation of non-white culture. Cultural art historian bell hooks refuted this opinion. “Designed to be a closed door,” she wrote, “Basquiat’s work holds no welcome for those who approach it with a narrow Eurocentric gaze.”55 Art history was not Basquiat’s orientation, although he was keenly aware of its traditions and limitations. He said when he went to museums, he noticed that there were not any pictures of Black people. He wrote “I don’t think about Art when I’m working. I try to think about Life.”56 Rather than a continuation of an art historical lineage or a diaristic notation, his art was a mapping of his own mind.

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Figure 2.22: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, 1982. Oil on canvas,

96 × 164 in. (240 × 420 cm) © 2021 Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

A singular art analysis of Basquiat’s work is further obfuscated by the lack of a consistent compositional approach. This is not a bad thing; Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”57 Basquiat’s paintings come in varying formats from fiery aggressive images to scratchy pictograms, text only to text and image, along with other various arrangements of image, symbols, mark-making, and words. He could organize any pictorial field into a cacophony of elements, somehow held together even as they challenged notions of what constitutes good composition in painting. Basquiat should be appreciated for his compositional inventiveness and for suspending the belief that art builds solely on preceding art historical models. Basquiate draws from music, books, consumer culture, and other entities to find the internal logic in his art. The underlying system of the structure across Basquiat’s work is music; it informed his work categorically. In the late 1970s, he was briefly in a band called Grey, which played (“played” may be a stretch) freeform electronic sound rather than music, per se. It was post-punk noise rock meets synthesized plumbing sounds in the spirit of Miles Davis’s seminal album Bitches Brew. Connections to graffiti and the nascent genre of hip-hop have been made to Basquiat’s work; all came of age at the same moment. It is, however, far too simplistic to say that his word and image fragments are the visual representation of rap sampling and

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scratching. Undeniably, the element of commentary inherent to rap music— critiquing society, urban pressures, “the system”—are present in the messages laced throughout Basquiat’s work. Moreover, Basquiat wanted his work to have a raw urban flavor, as in rap, and an edgy street vibe. He saw himself as a painter, not a graffiti artist, although he came up with its legends: Keith Haring, Rammellzee, and Fab Five Freddy. Basquiat never worked without music, and his musical tastes were eclectic, ranging from George Clinton and the Funkadelics to opera diva Maria Callas and other classical music. He drove gallerist Annina Nosei crazy as he blared crescendos of Ravel’s Bolero from his studio in her basement. Bebop was his unquestioned favorite. At one point, he bought up bebop records and listened to nothing else to dissect and absorb it. Charlie Parker was a god to Basquiat. His paintings are full of references to Parker and his collaborators Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Miles Davis. Over fifty Basquiat works have jazz or Parker as their subjects, which attests to his musical immersion and knowledge. The process of creation for Basquiat parallels that of bebop musicians, possibly giving greater clarity to the form and meaning of his work. Bebop, a complex and frenetic form of jazz, followed swing, music written specifically for singing and dancing. It was subversive, underground, and unfriendly to the audience; it was not unusual for soloists to play with their backs to the audience. The only composed part of a piece was at the beginning, known as the “head,” which was then recapitulated in the coda at the end. The music between the head and the coda was all improvisation. Characteristically, tempos could be whirlwind fast, and the music was often dissonant. For example, beboppers utilized the “flatted fifth,” a harsh blues chord variation referred to as the “Devil’s tritone” because of its ominous, evil sound. You hear it in the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth and Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” Basquiat’s art, with its visual dissonance, “had a snap and a snarl to it,” to use Peter Schjedahl’s words.58 Charlie Parker’s music is energetic and complex in much the same way Basquiat’s work is dizzying and disparate. In the painting Horn Players, 1983, Parker’s name and title of his well-known piece “Ornithology,” the study of birds and a reference to another Parker composition, “Yardbird Suite,” are written repeatedly on the canvas. Basquiat gives us portraits of Parker and virtuosic trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, the painting’s subjects, and the rest is improvisation. In “Ornithology,” Parker used only the chord structures that support the melody to a then well-known tune “How High the Moon” as the head followed by complex improvisations. Both Parker and Basquiat approach the melody or topic by coming at it from various rhythmic and structural variations. The repetition

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of the word “alchemy” creates a visual riff, but Basquiat’s expanded visual improvisations remain a riddle to the viewer. One wonders how the words “soap,” “teeth,” “alchemy,” and the gnarly face in the center panel are connected. In her book Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art, Jordana Moore Saggese skillfully detailed the connections between bebop and Basquiat’s work. She wrote, “The theories and methodologies of this music provide a new way to think about spontaneity, originality, appropriation, and the subversive potential of these appropriative practices.”59 She also addressed misunderstood notions that improvisation is without studied knowledge of musical elements. On the contrary, it required tremendous concentration and knowledge of existing chord structures, melodies, musical structures, theory, and so on. Moreover, each musician (or artist) draws from an array of elements which they use over and over again but never in the exact same order. Applying this notion to Basquiat’s work, he improvised from a mélange of pictorial configurations and iconography. That is how we know a Basquiat when we see one, even though no two paintings are ever the same. In Basquiat’s cachet to creole, Zydeco, 1984, (Figure 2.23) he uses three elements to set both a pictorial and thematic structure. First, the separate canvases gave Basquiat a triptych format to play with. Second, the brilliant green background pictorially unites all marks, words, and images. And third, zydeco, the lively, down-and-dirty bluesy rock which hailed from Southern Louisiana, provides a thematic point of departure. What goes in the painting, where it goes, the linkage of zydeco to other images such as the movie camera and appliances, the stark single images, the repetitions, the paint-loaded gestures, and the empty patches of white are all Basquiat’s improvisations. Glenn O’Brien, a close friend, summarizes the connection between Basquiat and jazz in this touchingly poetic verse. The very essence of Basquiat work is rooted in jazz—in the choruses and the solos. In the representation of ancient African forms with divine resonance. In the role of homage, reference, play of words, and on riffs. Basquiat, like Parker, understood the magic of quotation. He understood irony in the abstract. He understood the multiple personalities of the divine spirit. He painted in rhythm. He froze tempo on the canvas and you can pick it up where he left off, on the beat.60

We are left with the question: Was Basquiat only exercising his internal circuitry or is he sending us a message? Rene Richard believed “[he] has a perfect idea of what he’s getting across, using everything that collates to his vision,”61 yet

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Figure 2.23: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Zydeco, 1984. Acrylic and oilstick on canvas, three panels, 86 × 204 in. (218.4 × 518.2 cm) © 2022 Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

he makes the viewer work to uncover that vision. When asked what his work was about, Basquiat said, “Royalty, heroism and the street.”62 Royalty, the crown its emblem, is a pivotal clue in un-puzzling Basquiat. His three-point crown is used more than any other symbol in his paintings and drawings. It signifies childhood; he watched the trademark of the crown at the end of The Little Rascals. It alludes to his own ambition, admiration for his heroes, royalty cut down—the former king beheaded, the assignation and misuse of power, and the resplendence of his multicultural heritage. Basquiat’s work comes from a conscious intent to give his mind free rein in the creative process. His interests, associations, preoccupations, thoughts, memories, experiences, and idiosyncrasies form the content and bedrock of his work. Roland Barthes’s seminal essay “The Death of the Author” comes to mind, particularly when he writes of Marcel Proust: “Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model.”63 In much the same way, Basquiat made his life a work for which his own art was the model. Barthes goes on to say, “[T]he unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.”64 If we follow Barthes’s forecast of postmodern thinking, Basquiat’s “text” falls upon the viewer to grapple with, in much the same way one can read Proust, marvel at it, and be delightedly baffled. Salle, Schnabel, Fischl, and Basquiat developed very different styles even though they were often linked together as Neo-Expressionists. They all, however,

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require the viewer to assign possible meanings through looking at the paintings and interpreting narrative fragments, associations, and imagistic connections. This can be a perplexing task but one that rewards the act of seeing. Production of meanings is at the very heart of these paintings and central to painting in the 1980s. Endnotes 1. Menand, “Top of the Pops: Did Andy Warhol Change Everything?” 2. Baudrillard and Glaser, On Simulacra and Simulations. 3. Eklund, The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984. 4. Salle and Tuten, “David Salle: At the Edges.” 5. Salle and Tuten, “David Salle: At the Edges.” 6. Tschinkel, David Salle: Sensitized Spaces. 7. Blackwood and Kuspit, New Spirit in Painting: 6 Painters of the 1980s. 8. Camper, “The Films of Douglas Sirk: The Epistemologist of Despair.” 9. Brenson, “Art: Variety of Forms for David Salle Imagery.” 10. Nathan and Salle, “David Salle: Don’t Understand Me Too Quickly.” 11. Beckwith, curator tour MCA Chicago, “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s.” 12. Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity, 130. 13. “Backlash and appropriation in Power of Feminist Art” (Schor quoted in Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity, 249). 14. Lawson, “Last Exit: Painting.” 15. Lawson, “Last Exit: Painting.” 16. Fischl, Bad Boy, 178. 17. Tuten with Eric Fischl in “Fischl’s Italian Hours.” 18. Fischl, Bad Boy, 132. 19. Easy Rider, 1969. 20. The Graduate, 1967. 21. Fischl: The Process of Painting, Checkerboard Films. 22. Philbrick and Throckmorton, “Dive Deep: Eric Fischl and the Process of Painting.” 23. Romaine, “Eric Fischl under the Weight of Tradition.” 24. Later he would use photographs, but in the 1980s, he let his imagination guide him. 25. Fischl, Bad Boy, 154. 26. Kappler, “The Paintings of Eri Fischl, Exorcist.”

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27. Fischl, Bad Boy, 24. 28. Fischl, Bad Boy, 119. 29. Singh, “Process Painter: A New Show at the SJ Museum of Art Shows.” 30. Fischl, Bad Boy, 153. 31. “Eric Fischl,” Edge. 32. Russell, “Gallery View: ‘The Hairy Who’ and Other Messages From Chicago.” 33. Cohen, “Julian Schnabel at C&M Arts.” 34. Schnabel and Bailey, “In Conversation with Julian Schnabel.” 35. Rubinstein, “Raphael Rubinstein: The Big Picture.” 36. Palermo took the nickname Blinky, after the boxing promoter Blinky Palerman. 37. The three drove to Philadelphia to see the Duchamp retrospective in 1973. 38. Rubinstein, “Raphael Rubinstein: The Big Picture.” 39. Rubinstein, “Raphael Rubinstein: The Big Picture.” 40. Smith, “Recapturing the Past, and Then Reviving It.” 41. Crow, “Marx to Sharks: The Art Historical ’80s.” 42. Rubinstein has written on the difficulty in pinpointing a worthy assessment of his talent in his essay “Raphael Rubinstein: The Big Picture.” 43. Art Gallery of Ontario, “A Conversation with Julian Schnabel and Edward Rubin. Part 2: Water.” 44. Quiles and O’Brien, “TV Parties.” 45. Basquiat quoted in Gotthardt, “Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist.” 46. Davvetas, “Interview with Jean-Michel Basquiat.” 47. Geldzahler, “Art: From subways to Soho JeanMichel Basquiat by Henry Geldzahler,” Interview Magazine. 48. Cheim & Read Gallery, “Jean-Michel Basquiat.” 49. Tschinkel, “Basquiat: An Interview,” TateShots.

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50. Burroughs, Naked Lunch. 51. Meyer quoted in LDK, “Basquiat, Brooklyn Museum, NY.” 52. Brooks, “Jean-Michel Basquiat Creates His Own Racial History.” 53. Haden-Guest, “Burning Out.” 54. Richard. “The Radiant Child.” 55. hooks, “Altars of Sacrifice.” 56. Dafoe, “A New Book of Jean-Michel Basquiat Quotations.”

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57. Wilde, “The Philosophy of Dress.” 58. Schjedahl, “Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988).” 59. Saggese, Reading Basquiat. 60. O’Brien, “Basquiat and Jazz.” 61. Sischy, “For the Love of Basquiat.” 62. Davvetas quoted in Jean-Michel Basquiat – Basquiat. 63. Barthes and Heath. “The Death of the Author.” 64. Barthes and Heath. “The Death of the Author.”

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3 Abstraction Ideas about the Thing and the Thing Itself

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thing may be known in two ways: at a distance with perceptions drawn subjectively or up close, observed as it exists in nature. Reflecting on a bird’s morning cry, American Modernist Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself ” that his observation of the proximate and the distant gave him a “new knowledge of reality.” Stevens’s idea that something may be known in two ways broadly encompasses the outlook of Abstract artists in the 1980s. The abstract paintings of Mary Heilmann, Peter Halley, and Gerhard Richter offer three different relationships to both ideas about abstraction and painting itself without a theoretical framework. Ideas about abstraction as a concept and the lived experiences that shaped the artworks provide the scaffolding for understanding the Abstract art of the 1980s. Artist had to address the lineage of twentieth-century abstraction and the discourses that it engendered, specifically how they incorporated, referenced, simulated, or distanced themselves from this legacy. Equally important, a less conceptual genesis of abstraction emerged, and it was strongly influenced by the artists’ biography, personal sources, and finely honed ways of applying paint rather than the philosophical view of abstraction. Painters reimagining abstraction in the 1980s situated their work in relation to this duality of ideology versus lived experience, albeit to varying degrees. This framework sheds light on the practice of three highly original artists while illuminating the artistic mindset of the artists and their critics in the 1980s, specifically Mary Heilmann, Peter Halley, and Gerhard Richter. These three artists breathed new life into abstract painting—no minor feat given that painting, in all its forms, was thought by many to be played out. Mary Heilmann irreverently borrowed from reductive, geometric abstraction of the early twentieth century, the prime example of this style being Mondrian. She also drew from Minimalist art of the 1960s and 1970, à la Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly’s abstract paintings. She expertly used it as a backdrop upon which to lay her memories and personal experiences. Although Heilmann borrowed motifs in an almost nostalgic way from the iconic abstract paintings in the history of Modern art, this was just her starting point. Everything else is pure intuitive painting, witty and idiosyncratic, without the rules that governed abstraction as proclaimed by its artists-practitioners. Her work grew from past abstract art but found freedom from its boundaries. Peter Halley’s abstractions, on the other hand, intentionally referenced Modernist abstraction to the point of parody. Theoretical texts that were widely read and discussed in the 1980s influenced his art and writings. Rather than adopting themes and styles from the Modern-era Abstract masters, he mocked them.

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He  addressed the overshadowing history in an entirely different way from Heilmann, and his relation to historical precedent defined his personal style. Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings of the 1980s came from his investigation of what the medium could do. He incorporated photography, a major component of his practice, into his art, expanding the notion of what painting can be. Despite Richter’s statements to the contrary, critics insisted that he was ironically referencing Abstraction’s forms, techniques, and ideological underpinnings. According to Richter, however, postmodern negations of Modernist painting were never part of his artmaking. He was a man unto himself and rejected the artificial boundaries, subliminal and explicit. By the late 1970s, Abstraction was in a tenuous position having been buried with the Modernist movement despite its role in being a radical gamechanger in art history. Postmodernism, a new way of thinking about art which covered a large swath of styles, replaced abstraction. The term “postmodern” was assigned to much of 1980s art, and this theory meant placing the artworks in a field of indeterminacy and calling the entire notion of originality into question. It substituted a single meaning generated by the artist with a range of fragmented, appropriated, decentered, and media-influenced ones. Notions of progress and positivism, bedrocks of Modernism, had become obsolete. Cynical and suspicious of grand narratives and singular meaning, postmodern theories railed against Modern Abstraction descriptors such as utopian, idealistic, spiritual, pure, sublime, and emotional, smashing the notion that abstract painting was a lofty practice generated from the artist’s psyche. It discounted heroic singular ideas surrounding Modernism in favor of a range of “readings” similar to the codes and meanings parceled out in semiotic theory. A brief review of twentieth-century Modernism is needed here for clarity. In 1911, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque replaced all traces of recognizable imagery with geometric structures. Representations of the subject matter were reduced to shapes, an exploration of the bedrock of image itself. Cubism offered an alternative to illusionistic representation of observed reality. The space of painting anchored in laws of perspective, a norm that went back to the Renaissance, was no longer the only game in town. With that, the floodgates opened, and abstraction became the language of the Modern era. During the second decade of the twentieth century, several artists pioneered abstraction that was inexorably attached to strongly held ideologies often related to mysticism. Czech artist Frantisek Kupka, a spiritual artist who dabbled in the occult, believed that color and form revealed cosmic forces. In 1915, Russian

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artist Kasmir Malevich displayed his Suprematist paintings of rectangles, squares, and circles in the 0.10 exhibition in St. Petersburg. So earnest was his belief that these paintings represented “pure feeling,” separate from and elevated above nature, that he installed a painting of a black square in a corner touching the ceiling, a privileged perch where a religious icon would be placed in a Russian home. Another Russian, Wassily Kandinsky, thought that art, like music, could embody inner states and would lead civilization to a “great epoch of the Spiritual which is already beginning.”1 In the face of the First and Second World Wars, his prediction failed to materialize. Kandinsky was a student of theosophy, as was Piet Mondrian, who believed abstraction could represent universals of balance and harmony. He started the De Stijl Group with fellow Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg but severed their friendship when van Doesburg started painting diagonals, an affront to Mondrian’s belief that only horizontals and verticals represented cosmic polarities in the universe. In the 1940s, with the advent of Abstract Expressionism—considered the first American art movement—the unthinkable happened. The center of the art world moved from Paris to New York. In bars and coffee shops, artists, many of whom had emigrated during the war, engaged in passionate, existential arguments about painting. Of particular fascination were Surrealist painters who used random chance and automatism to produce art without conscious intent. A desire to access and express the subconscious coupled with a drastic scale shift from easel painting to large-scale canvases, influenced by mural painting, in its heyday at the time. This transition brought about Abstract Expressionism, a movement that encompassed many modes of abstraction. One strain of Abstract Expressionism featured areas of color, soft, as in Mark Rothko’s crepuscular, ethereal rectangles of layered monochromatic tones, or harshly reductive geometric works, as in Barnett Newman’s flat areas of one color. His red painting pompously titled Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950, 1951, (Figure 3.1) meaning “Man, Heroic and Sublime,” speaks to the serious dogma that surrounded Abstract Expressionist art. Another Abstract Expressionist trademark, best epitomized by Willem de Kooning, was gestural paint application emanating from the artist’s hand or occasionally from the entire body, sometimes in a kind of performance as in the case of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Experimental paint applications were continued by Color Field painters such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. The process of making the art was central if not more important than the completed work itself.

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Figure 3.1: Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950, 1951. Oil on canvas, 95 3/8 in. × 213 9 1/4 in. (242.2 × 541.7 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller © 2022 The Barnett Newman Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

All that juicy, emotive painting was entirely rejected by Minimalist artists in the 1960s. Certain that art should relate only to itself, Minimalism favored art that was void of emotion, spirituality, references, narrative, metaphor, meaning, and any trace of the artist’s hand. From the 1960s on, austere, three-dimensional structures overshadowed Abstract Expressionist painting as did Environmental art, Video art, and many forms of Conceptual art. Some influential Abstract painters of a Minimalist ilk surfaced, such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, who, when asked about his “pin-stripe” paintings of faint white lines against black, unhelpfully replied, “What you see is what you see.”2 Increasingly, Minimalism took on a self-serious, even haughty air that gave painting no quarter. By the 1970s, painting was pronounced dead by a great number of critics and artists alike, and by the 1980s, Modernism as a whole had also passed. How later artists positioned their work in relation to the history of Modernist Abstraction became the elephant in the room to a certain extent. Critics and curators tended to consider Abstraction as either a continuation of the Modernist tradition or an objectification of it in a Postmodern stance. This left little room for the gray area in which Modernism functioned as a referent rather than ideological position as is the case with artist Mary Heilmann. This historical context offers a better backdrop for Abstract painting in the 1980s.

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Can abstraction be used as a tabula rasa for memories of places, people, and feelings? Yes, according to Mary Heilmann; she offered, Each of my paintings can be seen as an autobiographical marker, a cue, by which I evoke a moment from my past, or my projected future, each a charm to conjure a mental reality and to give it physical form.3

In Heilmann’s public talks entitled “Her Story,” she projected two images. One was a snapshot from a place she has lived in and next to it a photograph of one of her paintings, a pairing that clearly links her art and biography, and a fascinating biography it is. Born in San Francisco in 1940, her family moved to a small beach town just outside of Los Angeles when Heilmann was 7. Running over sand dunes, diving into giant waves, and thriving on the fear and glory of dangerous high-board dives at a local swim club created enduring sensations that Heilmann later channeled into her art. Her father died when she was 13 years old, and her family moved back to San Francisco where Heilmann attended an all-girls Catholic school, the ideal place to fine-tune a rebellious spirit. Her high school years are best summed up in this anecdote: She and a friend went to an ecclesiastic supply store because it was the only place to buy black tights, part of a nun’s garb but also worn by hippies. Decked out in black tights and thick black eyeliner, they hung out in San Francisco’s ’beat (short for beatnik) haunts. From there, she blossomed into a full-fledged hippie in the city where it all began. While attending the University of California, Santa Barbara for her undergraduate degree, she lived on the beach and became a self-proclaimed surfer chick. She later studied poetry and ceramics at San Francisco State University. She followed that with a master’s degree in ceramics and sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied under Peter Voulkos, a renowned ceramicist whose sculptures melded fine art and craft. During this period, she met artists such as Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, and Bruce Nauman, who were soon to be superstars in Earth art, Post-Minimalism, and Conceptual art, respectively. When she left California, she was well acquainted with the dominant art currents of the day. Aggressive, arrogant, but secretly petrified, Heilmann moved to New York in 1968 when she was only 28 years old. Her large ceramic sculptures were far too organic, clunky, and strange for the arbiters of Minimalism and were not accepted in any of the “shows that clocked the moment.”4 “There were other obstacles,” Heilmann remembered. “Being a female in those days was definitely

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a disadvantage […] in those days when girls weren’t supposed to have fun. They were supposed to be fun.”5 It did not stop her from joining the men in heated discussions about art, which usually took the form of arguments. She was part of the downtown “tribe,” in Heilmann’s own words, and she found a loft in Tribeca, now wildly chic, but then a forlorn, forgotten part of Manhattan. She became close friends with Bruce Nauman, another recent arrival to the city. His influence in the early years of her career helped her find direction in her craft. Fondly, she remembered the wonderful weirdness of sitting in Nauman’s studio watching his video “Bouncing in the Corner” in which he repeatedly throws himself into corners of a room. “His work gave me the permission I needed to do my own version of deconstructed, ironic, self-referential, self-critical work,” Heilmann reflected.6 It was not in her nature to embrace the concept of the neutrality of the artwork upheld in Minimalism, the style that ruled the day in the 1970s. Because her ceramic work found no audience, she had to either give up or do something radical. When she took up painting, then much devalued, “it was a very aggressive and antagonistic move.”7 Heilmann recalled, “When I told artists like Robert Smithson, I was a painter, we would get into a kind of fight, as he had a kind of attitude towards it.”8 Nonetheless, she confronted painting head-on. Self-taught, Heilmann approached each painting as a quandry thinking about making art the same way a popular song is put together—the refrain, chorus, bridge, melody, rhythm, even the title as parts of the construction. She went with her gut, rather than theory. Heilmann admired color theorists such as Josef Albers, but she approached selecting paint colors the same way she shopped for clothes. Her motifs, squares within squares, rectangles, two-color or near-monochrome compositions came right out of abstraction’s greatest hits as she allowed for painterly passages and geometry without perfectly straight lines. Her style has been called slapdash, laid-back, brushy, dissonant, off-kilter, woozy, nonchalant, light-hearted, playful, and irreverent, attributes never before ascribed to abstraction. She playfully “dissed” abstraction without vitriol and with a dash of humor.9 Heilmann’s lines were loopy, not straight, and instead of hiding the touch of the artist, she slyly celebrated the hand-made quality, a carryover from her ceramic training. Even her titles parody the Moderns. A small 1976 painting titled Three for Two: Red, Yellow, Blue harks back to Newman’s painting Who’s Afraid of Red Yellow Blue and Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue. In the late 1970s, everything changed for Heilmann. She had worked hard and partied harder with the downtown gang where drugs and drink were part

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of the scene. In 1977, Norman Fisher, a cherished member of her urban family, died of cancer; then, in 1978, her good friend, artist Gordon Matta-Clark, also passed away. Heilmann wrote, “I left the night life behind—or better, it left me. The passion went out of my life and into my work.”10 She shifted from playing with well-known Abstract setups to making painting choices to express content. At that time, she was listening to Brian Eno’s early “ambient music” albums Music for Airports and Music for Films which incorporate several genres. Heilmann explained, “The work’s style could be the work’s content. I saw a model for my own work.”11 Eno is well known for saying, “Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” in order to “induce calm and a space to think.”12 Eno removed all recognizable or derivative melodic phrases so that his music does not become an earworm. Stretching this philosophy to visual art, Heilmann’s painting increasingly became a slow, meandering discovery of how every painted element creates the character or sensibility of the compositional whole. Influences outside of the then-accepted canon of Contemporary art, particularly new age music, impacted Heilmann’s conception of painting and distinguished her as a transformative figure in art. Heilmann’s need for more content resulted in Save the Last Dance for Me, 1979 (Figure 3.2). She painted after she fell in love, knowing instinctively that it would end badly, “I made it to celebrate love, but is full of grim foreboding.”13 Art historian Terry R. Myers wrote a wonderful small book about this painting detailing how initially simple images become increasingly complex with time spent looking at the painting.14 Are the slightly warped pink geometrics in front, next to, or behind the black? Are the pink shapes ending at the left and right sides completely within the painting’s space or cropped from a larger shape outside the frame? If so, does that account for what seems to be a sense of movement from left to right? Were the few pink drips on the black intentional, a mistake, or both? Is Heilmann’s bubblegum pink—a “girly” color that would make a Minimalist cringe—a light-hearted razz on that male-dominated art movement or an expression of femininity? Heilmann’s pink and black came from punk street fashion and the cover of the Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Pop culture, signs, video games, TV, music, album covers, hip fashion, and cartoons inspire Heilmann, rather than the history of painting. A wonderful illustration of this is when Heilmann eyed a particular pink of Marge’s dress while watching The Simpsons, which she later used in a painting. In 1983, Heilmann painted Rosebud, (Figure 3.3) her most emotional, deeply personal painting. It represents an outpouring of grief and loss after a failed romance and the death

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Figure 3.2: Mary Heilmann, Save the Last Dance for Me, 1979. Acrylic on canvas, 80 × 100 in. (203.2 × 254 cm) © 2022 Mary Heilmann. Photo credit: Pat Hearn Gallery. Courtesy of the artist, 303 Gallery, New York, and Hauser & Wirth.

of yet another close friend, Suzie Harris. “Then I was really alone and lonely, painting wounds, my wounds.”15 Rosebud, a 5-foot-high vertical, at first appears rudimentary but up close the red smudges of paint that dot a white background are full of painterly nuances and tonal variations from the base layers of red paint that warm up parts of the stark, matte white. These rosebuds look like wounds, some bleeding drips of red paints. No two are exactly alike. Does each red mark represent the variety of feelings comprising the stages of grief and the many ways sadness manifests? “Rosebud” is the famous last utterance of the dying tycoon played by Orson Wells in his classic film Citizen Kane. Just when that meaning seems plausible, another meaning presents itself, equally plausible. During the 1980s, Heilmann continued to play with formats from Abstraction’s playbook, such as the grid. Art historian Rosalind Krauss had claimed that the grid was the quintessential Modernist structure in her famous 1979 essay “Grids.”16 Heilmann wanted to create something slightly subversive by making

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Figure 3.3: Mary Heilmann,

Rosebud, 1983. Oil on canvas, 60 × 42 in. (152.4 × 106.7 cm) Brigette Lau Collection © 2022 Mary Heilmann. Photo credit: Christopher Burke Studio. Courtesy of the artist, 303 Gallery, New York, and Hauser & Wirth.

an inexact grid without straight lines. She described her rationale, “Well, I didn’t know how to make a composition, so I chose the grid. Most of them are cool, hard-edged, austere. I wanted to do something else with a grid, not be so rigid about it.”17 Without regard for the grid’s defining properties of flatness, geometry, and order, Heilmann used it as a template upon which to lay memories. She masterfully repurposed a static structure integral to geometric abstraction to express the personal. In The Thief of Baghdad, 1983, (Figure 3.4) named after an old movie she saw as a child, she presented a checkerboard of black and richly colored rectangles that relate to another childhood event. She summoned a vivid childhood memory of coming “upon a group of Arabs, their flying colorful robes flapping as they galloped on horses up a steep, sandy hills.”18 It was a film crew at work. Heilmann compartmentalizes the glory of these colors in the sun in a grid structure. In “Her Story,” Heilmann’s public talks, she projected an image of the The

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Figure 3.4: Mary Heilmann, The Thief of Baghdad, 1983. Oil on canvas, 60 × 42 × 1 3/4 in.

(152.4 × 106.7 × 4.4 cm) © 2022 Mary Heilmann. Photo credit: Stephen White. Courtesy of the artist, 303 Gallery, New York, and Hauser & Wirth.

Thief of Baghdad next to her snapshot from her New York apartment of a rooftop parking lot of brightly colored cars in a grid pattern, connecting the painting to another chapter of her life when she lived in New York City. The Thief of Baghdad can be understood as a black exterior wall with a grid of lustrous, jewel-toned windows. A carryover from her ceramic work, Heilmann retooled the look of glazing and glossing pigments and adapted it for paint. This gives each “window” a different saturation of color from opaque to watery drips, veils, and splashes. It is a veritable compendium of soak-stain-pours reminiscent of techniques used by Color Field painters. During a dark period for Heilmann, a bit of hope appeared when Pat Hearn asked her to join her East Village gallery in 1986. This was Heilmann’s first significant gallery show, and Hearn gave her the acknowledgment and acceptance she needed to propel her career forward. Hearn was an innovative, talented, supercool dealer with retro beehive hair, spike heels, and vintage designer clothes, a tastemaker in an art world that was transforming into a stylish mega-business with all the trappings of “chicness.” Without a pretentious bone in her body, Heilmann was so down-to-earth that she felt out of place when the art world became trendy. Hearn often rescued her from embarrassing social flubs at Mr. Chows and other restaurants popular with the art stars of the day. Hearn’s untimely death at age 45 was a great loss to the art community as a whole, but to Heilmann in particular, as the two had forged a close friendship over many years. In a secure place and with enough distance from her youth in California, Heilmann evoked memories in many paintings, including wave diving and surfing. “I’m not a big surfer,” she said, I never was, not even as a kid. It’s hard, it’s a big commitment, and way back in San Francisco it was all guys. Even being a radical, aggressive feminist girl, being a surfer was hard, but I really loved sitting on the beach and just looking at the guys, watching the geometry, the timing […] It’s like a stage. It’s a great culture.19

A rectangle and a square in washy aqua anchor diagonal corners in Sea Wall, 1986, (Figure 3.5) making the white surface they bracket feel as expansive as the vistas of sky and sea. Here again, her work encounters a reference to reductive abstraction and endless discussions about the corners of paintings that continued ad nauseum in the formalist ethos of the 1970s. This sentiment is echoed by Martin Prinzhorn who expressed,

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Figure 3.5: Mary Heilmann, Sea Wall, 1986. Oil on canvas, 60 × 41 × 1 3/4 in. (152.4 × 104.1 × 4.4 cm) © 2022 Mary Heilmann. Photo credit: Dan Bradica. Courtesy of the artist, 303 Gallery, New York, and Hauser & Wirth.

Her paintings always reveal a space where painterly surprises, personal memories and emotions can co-exist. While an overwhelming desire to control each corner of the painting is often present within geometrical painting, Mary Heilmann’s casual approach allows an openness that makes this striving for security look somehow ridiculous.20

Heilmann began to think about the many associations, moods, and sensations color produces. In 9th Wave, 1988, (Figure 3.6) a rectilinear diptych full of cobalt and indigo drips cascading downward again looking like glazes poured on a ceramic surface. A band of white on the top of the canvas continues until it becomes part of a blue and white design of right angles turning in on each other. This geometric spiral is known as the “meander,” an ancient pattern synonymous with Greek and Roman architectural styles. A variation of this pattern is also called the “anthora” when continuously wrapped. Contrasting with its historical roots, it was made famous by New York City diners that used the design on their to-go coffee cups. A geometric abstraction becoming a referent to something far afield from the seriousness of Minimalist art is quintessentially Heilmann. Her creations have an artless charm that draws the viewer in gradually, revealing surprising pictorial choices that delight even the most sophisticated eye.

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Figure 3.6: Mary Heilmann, 9th Wave, 1988. Oil on canvas, 60 × 84 in. © (154.2 × 213.3 cm)

2022 Mary Heilmann. Photo credit: Pat Hearn Gallery. Courtesy of the artist, 303 Gallery, New York, and Hauser & Wirth.

Heilmann retains a strain of innocence, an echo of the wonder of childhood. She speaks to that feeling when she reminisced, When I was about seven, I went away to camp and art counselor taught us how to do quote modern art by drawing loopy lines around and around the page and then filling the loops in with different colors. I never forgot that.21

This sense of naïveté kept many from fully appreciating the radical nature of Heilmann’s painting until after the 1980s. Heilmann is a painter’s painter, and those who discovered her in the 1980s were ahead of the curve. Moreover, the way Heilmann co-opted the language of Modernist Abstraction as a compositional point of departure could only happen in the ethos of the 1980s. Mary Heilmann found a way to bring humor, beauty, inventiveness, surprise, and personal content to geometric abstraction at a time when it appeared to have played itself out. In stark contrast, Peter Halley used abstraction as a metaphor for social systems that point to a slightly dystopian world of simulations. While

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Mary Heilmann’s paintings reveal more with sustained viewing, Peter Halley’s 1980s paintings of squares, rectangles, and lines in florescent colors are fully comprehensible in one take. How Halley’s paintings encapsulate a critique of geometric abstraction, however, requires deeper explanation. Unpacking Halley’s art spans four areas. The first is biographical, particularly his move to New York in 1980. Second is his admonishment of Modernist abstraction. Third is the significance of influential, theoretical texts spelled out in Halley’s published essays. Fourth is the paintings themselves. Born and raised in New York City, Peter Halley was a precocious child. His father, Rudolph Halley, a celebrated attorney in the political arena, died when Peter was 3, leaving his mother Janice Halley, a registered nurse, to raise two sons. After attending Phillips Andover Academy, Halley entered Yale in 1971 with a full scholarship but was denied admission to the studio arts program in his second year. He took some time off from Yale and moved to New Orleans. He returned, majored in art history, and graduated in 1975. Most of Halley’s time between 1973 and 1980 was spent in New Orleans, a city he loved that opened his eyes to societies different than he had known in the Northeast. Still, by the late 1970s, Halley was drawn to the culture coming out of the Lower East Side’s edgy bohemian scene and returned to New York. In particular, the music of the Talking Heads motivated him to come back. Coincidentally, David Byrne, the front man for the group, was Halley’s upstairs neighbor when he moved to New York City. Halley hardly recognized the city of his childhood. He said, “When I came to New York in 1980, the paramount issue in my work became the effort to come to terms with the alienation, the isolation, but also the stimulation engendered by this huge urban environment.”22 The Grave, 1980, (Figure 3.7) embodies this response with the ultimate image of isolation, the tombstone, represented by a whitish-gray rectangle in the center of a sickly yellow-and-burnt-umber background. The black swath on the lower third of this Minimalist composition strikes an inert, dour chord. The rectangle of the headstone became a barred window inside of a square, Halley’s visualization of a prison cell, and super-bright colors took over in Day-Glo Prison, 1982 (Figure 3.8). Halley ultimately realized the genesis of this form: On the ground floor on the street there used to be a bar or a pub that had a stucco facade and windows with bars over them. I began to do the jail paintings, paintings of prison-type facades. I was out in front of my building waiting for a friend one day and realized that I had, in fact, been using this image which I had never consciously noticed before—it was completely subconscious in origin.23

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Figure 3.7: Peter Halley, The Grave, 1980. Acrylic on canvas, 49 1/2 × 60 1/2 in. (126 × 154 cm) © 2022 Peter Halley. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 3.8: Peter Halley, Day-Glo Prison, 1982. Fluorescent acrylic and

Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 63 × 78 in. (160 × 198 cm) © 2022 Peter Halley. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 3.9: Peter Halley, Freudian Painting, 1981. Acrylic and Roll-a-Tex on unprimed canvas,

72 × 144 in. (183 × 366 cm) © 2022 Peter Halley. Courtesy of the artist.

Halley simultaneously launched his assault on Modernism with The Grave and paintings that followed. His initial intention was to wall-up the Abstract Expressionist paintings.24 Throughout the 1980s, his diagrammatic formats were cheeky references to the styles of Mondrian, Malevich, and other heavy hitters of Modernist Abstraction. Halley explained, “For me, those styles, used as a reference to an idea about abstraction.” He believed that the Modernist concepts of the absolute, the spiritual, and “the modernist dream of revolutionary renewal” were over.25 He rejected the idea that one singular meaning can be expressed in the geometric forms of abstraction or that it has any relationship to real life at all. He wrote that with the Postmodern, “the vocabulary of modernism is retained, but its elements, already made abstract, are finally and completely severed from any reference to the real. In this hyper-modernism, the modern is never discarded. It is simply replaced by its formal double.” In the 1980s, Halley aligned himself with theories around the postmodern in both his art and his writings, emphatic that Modernism is no longer a viable framework for painting. Halley continued to repurpose the geometries of abstraction to signify his feelings of confinement and isolation. In Freudian Painting, 1981, (Figure 3.9) one large and one small white cell, each with a beige window with black bars in the center, symbolize parent and child. They are spaced apart and anchored to the lower edge of a 12-foot-wide expanse of unprimed canvas. The title plays with a tongue-in-cheek reference to an unresolved Oedipus/Electra complex layered with the trauma of parental separation. Unlike paintings that would

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follow, Halley used limited neutral colors in keeping with this grim schematic of disconnection. The sparse geometry references Modernist abstractions of Mondrian and Malevich, but only insofar as Halley rejects the high ground that Modernist Abstraction occupied. “The view of modernism that I grew up with was that it was spiritual, it was about a kind of purity and Emersonian transcendentalism […] The first work was really meant to be a parodic critique of transcendentalism.”26 Although metaphysical, utopian ideas were central to the artists who pioneered abstraction, Halley rejected the notion that those ideologies were inherent in art, believing instead that those ideas were imposed by artists’ ideologies and art historical interpretations. Halley’s choice of materials further discredited the Modernist project. In a sardonic response to the gestural paint application of Abstract Expressionist works, Halley pointed to the importance of surface by using Roll-a-Tex, a cheap wall covering that he described as “the ‘stucco’ texture of motel ceilings.” He covers the sleazy finish with Day-Glo, a paint he characterized as “a signifier of low-budget mysticism […] the afterglow of radiation.”27 What Halley loved about Day-Glo was that it was a “totally fake, extra-terrestrial, science-fictional material.”28 In his devaluation of Modernist Abstraction, florescent paint checked all the boxes—commercial, industrial, unspiritual, technological, artificial, and totally unconnected to nature, which Halley believed “could no longer be an active paradigm for artists to explore, because it was no longer a paradigm that society could connect with.”29 Some argued that the term “technological technique” should be coined to describe how Halley creates a manufactured appearance. Art critic Elizabeth Schambelan justified this position eloquently, writing, Halley’s edges have a die-cut sharpness, the layers of paint crisply defined in visible strata. It looks as if you could take any one of his shapes’ corners between your thumb and forefinger, pull, and find the paint peeling away with the satisfying smoothness of the backing on a FedEx label.30

Halley transmuted Modernist painting’s most emblematic formats into graphic forms on rigid, geometric subdivisions that look like diagrams from an instruction manual. For example, Day-Glo Prison ironically appropriates the Homage to the Square series that Josef Albers painted between 1950 and 1976 to demonstrate how colors advance or recede in relation to one another. The brash neon-like colors in Day-Glo Prison pop in a way Albers’s tonal modulation of

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color never could. Moreover, Halley’s painting is not perfectly square, actively mocking and derailing Albers’s formulations of Euclidian geometry. Halley added “conduits” to his vocabulary of forms in 1981, building a new lexical connotation to simple lines. Moving from a theme of isolation to connection, conduits represent the unseen infrastructures such as electricity, air flow, and sound waves. As with the transformation of squares to jail cells from Freudian Painting, the imagery of the conduit came to him instinctively, but he did not grasp its meaning until after the work was completed. Halley’s thinking underwent a clear evolution in his combination of the prison and conduit in paintings such as Prison with Underground Conduit, 1983. He described his realization of the profound connectivity people share even in isolation, I was working alone at home, listening to the radio, turning on electric lights, being able to turn on the faucet, flush the toilet, talk on the telephone, turn on the air conditioner. I began to become obsessed with the idea that all these natural things—air, light, noise, or speech were being piped in. I began to think about conduits.31

Throughout the 1980s, Halley reevaluated what the forms represent and how they function, resulting in slightly modified formal arrangements. For example, he imagined that as conduits enter cells, they light them up as in his Glowing and Burnt-Out Cells with Conduit, 1982 (Figure 3.10). A red and a black square, representing active and dead cells, meet in the middle of a diptych format, a Frank Stella trademark from his early Minimalist paintings, creating a large horizonal with right-angled conduits feeding into the cells from below. Halley’s interest in ubiquitous, unseen networks expanded to include computer processors. Because electronics, especially computers and mobile phones, were transformative in the 1980s, Halley logically began to think of the cell as a terminus, a transformer, or a microprocessor. In Blue Cell with Triple Conduit, 1986, (Figure 3.11) a blue square set within a red square symbolizes a microprocessor. Three black lines representing conduits enter the painting from the top right, extend to the center, make sharp left turns, and pass through the microprocessor. The conduits exit the blue square below, make sharp left turns again, and exit the painting on the lower left. The stringent geometries are an amalgam of iconic geometries established by artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Sol Lewitt, Frank Stella, and Jo Baer. Like Blue Cell with Triple Conduit, Halley’s paintings from the mid-1980s became more energetic, reflecting his excitement about the exchange of ideas

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Figure 3.10: Peter Halley, Glowing and Burnt-Out Cells with Conduit, 1982. Acrylic, fluorescent

acrylic, and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 64 × 96 in. (163 × 244 cm) © 2022 Peter Halley. Courtesy of the artist.

he enjoyed with other artists, dealers, and collectors who had coalesced around his work during the same period. He felt a kinship with conceptual artists such as Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and Barbara Kruger who eschewed painting in favor of photography language and appropriation, a practice popular in the 1980s of recontextualizing images from art or popular culture in a way that suggests a new set of meanings. In the mid-1980s, the East Village enjoyed a second boom around artists who appeared to be following in the Pop/Conceptual lineage while embracing commodity culture, none more outrageous than Jeff Koons who became an overnight sensation. In 1986, Ileana Sonnabend, the grand priestess of Contemporary art, exhibited Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, and Meyer Vaisman, who were quickly labeled “The Hot Four” in a New York Magazine feature.32 They were also given the moniker “Neo-Geo,” short for Neo-geometric Conceptualism, a term used in the mid-1980s, one of so many trendy terms that started with “neo.” This label is rejected even by Halley because his work has little in common with the other artists. The dialogue among East Village artists, who Halley had once found stimulating, was overshadowed by a media

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Figure 3.11: Peter Halley, Blue Cell with Triple Conduit, 1986. Acrylic, fluorescent acrylic, and Roll-a-Tex on canvas 77 1/4 × 77 1/4 in. (196 × 196 cm) © 2022 Peter Halley. Courtesy of the artist.

blitz centered around the money-making phenomenon that the art market had become. Despite his commercial success, Halley was downhearted that, to the press, he had become famous for being famous rather than on the merit of his art. Dissecting Halley’s biographical narrative reveals his reactions to his environment, his ideas about societal isolation and connection, and his dismissal of how Modernist Abstraction was contextualized art historically. To this, I add how his work is grounded in theory and explicated in his writings, which also clearly connected his work to social structures. Serendipity, too, played a part in Halley’s foray into writing. In response to his catalog essay on Jonathan Borofsky, he wrote curator Jeffrey Deitch, an art critic who ran Citibank’s art advisory and finance division. Deitch wrote back, “Peter, you should do some writing.”33 Arts Magazine published his first piece in 1981. His essays were published in various magazines and compiled in the 1988 publication Peter Halley: Collected Essays 1981–1987. Halley’s seminal essay “The Crises in Geometry” shored up his polemic against Modernism by citing two post-structuralist theoreticians, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, written in 1975 and translated into English in 1977, echoed Halley’s dystopian take on geometry. Foucault posited that geometry was a tool for the “ordering of industrial society.” Geometry governs the design of modern structures, including housing,

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hospitals, schools, factories, military barracks, and prisons, and also systems such as charts, graphs, and clocks, but to what end? Halley restated Foucault’s assertion, postulating that geometry was “a novel mechanism by which action and movement (and all behavior) could be channeled, measured, and normalized, and a means by which the unprecedented population of the emerging industrial era could be controlled and productivity maximized.”34 Foucault’s compelling argument peaked in his detailing of geometry’s role as an instrument of control and surveillance in the modern prison system, rather than a humanitarian instrument of reform and creativity. Foucault’s premise is analogous to Halley’s dismantling of geometry as a spiritual, idealized language of the twentieth century in brazen opposition to the Euclidean purity of geometry. He states it clearly, “By putting bars on the square, I wanted to say that geometry was a prison. Structure and geometry were prisonlike and not ideal as in Malevich or Mondrian.”35 In “The Crises of Geometry,” Halley situated art in the 1980s within the postindustrial headspace of provocateur Jean Baudrillard, whose Simulations, written in 1981 and translated into English in 1983, became a postmodern bible of sorts. With his notion of hyperreality, Baudrillard holds that culture and media are based on models that have no origin in reality and that which is fake is more real than the real. Simulations resonated with Halley, who wanted to create paintings that were models and signifiers of styles and social systems rather than illustrations of the real or original. Halley aimed to create a simulated space akin to that of a video game. While Heilmann and Halley repurposed the impersonality of abstraction to represent personal ideas and social critiques, Gerhard Richter took a different tack, probing what Abstraction could become at a time when it was questioned and dismissed as an outdated construct. He explored how an abstract painting could be created, using process itself to produce a new dimension in the history of painting. His accomplishment of reinventing abstraction in the 1980s is unparalleled. The paintings he named Abstracts are legendary, fetching auction prices in excess of $30 million, collected by museums worldwide, and highly acclaimed by art experts. Never has a group of paintings been so massively interpreted as expressing ideas about art itself as Richter’s Abstracts. The Abstracts prompted the kinds of theoretical discourse rooted in revisionist art histories that were as much a part of 1980s art as the art itself. Paradoxically, while art theorists generally discredited painting, they held Richter up as an exemplar of all manner of postmodern theories, including deconstruction, post-structuralism, post-conceptualism, and the post-historical.

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In writings and interviews, particularly those conducted by renowned German art historian Benjamin Buchloh, Richter rejected claims that his Abstracts were a critique of Modernist abstraction. Although it may appear that the subject of Richter’s 1980s abstractions is what art historian Irving Sandler referred to as “expressionism-in-quotes,”36 taken at his word, that was not the artist’s intention. Tracking the evolution of Richter’s abstraction from the 1970s and throughout the 1980s outlines how the Abstracts were born of the artist’s personal and particularized exploration of what to paint, how to paint, and a deep dive into the physical properties of the medium itself. This investigation also makes claims that Richter’s project to negate the history of abstraction seem misguided. Art historian Herbert Hartel asked, “How is it possible for an artist to devote his life to such a nihilistic project as destroying the importance, appeal, and efficacy of his own creations?”37 Unmoored from theoretical tangles, Richter was self-guided. He explained his reasoning and approach to his work, “Painting was my attempt to explore what painting is still able and permitted to do. It was also the sheer obstinacy of carrying on painting.”38 While Richter’s vast and multifarious oeuvre comprises sculptures, glass pieces, and photorealistic paintings of varied subjects, including people, landscapes, nudes, townscapes, everyday life, skulls, and newspaper photos, abstractions account for the great majority of his output. Frustration awaits anyone trying to forecast Richter’s next move—he changes from one mode to another following no set pattern. His ongoing evolution artistically sets him apart—few can claim this breadth and level of proficiency. While the focus here is on his painting during the 1980s, this in no way undercuts the value and breadth of his other work from this period to the present. Writings on the artist are extensive, and many delve into his biography and insightfully connect his varied styles. Although the focus here is on Richter’s abstractions of the 1980s, one principle governs his entire practice. The first was stated by the artist. “I have committed myself to thinking and acting without the aid of an ideology.”39 He believed that ideologies are catalysts for danger; he witnessed the great harm that resulted from both German and Russian totalitarian regimes in his youth. Richter’s rejection of Modernist utopian ideologies was not cynically motivated as critics have suggested. His statement “[A]rt is the highest form of hope”40 indicates his nuanced approach to the role of art in the cultural conscience. Instead of espousing grand theories through art and writing, he leans into a more optimistic pathos. Of course, in doing so, he does show his own ideology, but he does not place emphasis in philosophizing. Art as art, for Richter, is the primary concern.

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Early in his career, critics sought to critique the breadth of his practice. Richter’s stylistic flexibility was first perceived as a weakness and/or theoretically driven. In a review of Richter’s first solo exhibition in New York City at Onnasch Gallery in 1973, a critic wrote that his “hit-and-run approach to already existing styles”41 showed a lack of conviction. Art critic Kate Linker was also negative, writing, In his juxtaposition of two contradictory styles Richter unmasks painting as a null and nugatory activity, providing a salutary counter to recent, false, expressionist rhetoric; however, in indicating the extent to which the viewer produces the referent, he ventures on more ambitious theoretical terrain.42

However, by the 1980s, critics jumped on board, seeking to interpret the photography linkage as a postmodern marker. Omnipresent is Richter’s interchange between painting and photography, a pattern I observed firsthand as interim director at Marian Goodman Gallery (a kind of art heaven), which then represented the artist. The gallery showed Richter’s paintings of photographs, photographs of paintings, and overpainted photographs. While he paints the photographic image in sharp focus at times, typically it is in a blurred grisaille to make the image, as Richter said, “everything equally important or unimportant” and “to make it look less craftsman-like, smoother and more technological.”43 The photography–painting nexus is central to Richter’s contribution to Abstract painting. The evolution from a series of gray paintings in the 1970s to the exchange between photography and painting that followed led to the Abstracts. Richter’s abstract gray paintings were born of a negative, hopeless state of mind when he did not know what to paint. In desperation, he painted abstractions in gray, the color that was in his words “the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape.”44 Although Richter selected gray because he said that “it makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations,”45 he found that it had much to offer. Instead of sameness, he saw differences among the paintings, noting that each was “capable of a serious kind of beauty and unique visual expression […] the gray paintings show something in the way it is painted, the exploration of material qualities.”46 This was a small revelation because when he started the grey paintings his thinking was in line with one of his favorite quotes, John Cage’s proclamation, “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.”47

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Richter explored countless permutations of facture, the handling of the paint, and color. Paint applications were wide-ranging: gestural, stippled, swirly, smooth, bumpy, striated, patterned, directional, squiggled, unfluctuating, scored, variegated, and more. Additionally, each shade of gray had a particular cast: inky, atmospheric, cool, light, dark, opaque, gauzy, earthy, metallic, reflective, dull, or deep, a paean to Richter’s mastery of chromatic tonalities. In what one would have thought be expressionless, the gray paintings had a psychological resonance, a quality aptly described by curator Robert Storr as “an anxious neutrality.”48 This becomes apparent when viewing several gray paintings installed together. When asked if the gray paintings were influenced by other artists working in monochrome abstraction, Richter answered that he was not paraphrasing other artists, he was “doing it for a different reason.”49 His reason was not part of a reductive strategy, but rather a way to see what is possible within a specific parameter. He gave an emphatic “no” when Buchloh asked if the gray paintings were “a negation of content […] an ironic parody of present-day expressionism.”50 Still, writers continued to position his works as a slam of Modernist abstraction despite Richter’s statements to the contrary. By 1977, Richter was officially over the gray paintings. Sweeping change followed as Richter explained: I set out in an opposite direction. On small canvases, I put random, illogical colors and forms—mostly with long pauses in between, which made sure that these paintings, if you can call them that, became more and more heterogeneous. Ugly sketches are what they are; the total antithesis of the purist gray pictures.51

Unbeknownst to Richter at the time, the small “ugly” oil paintings set him on a path that would lead to the Abstracts in the 1980s. He used projected photographs of details from the small oil sketches as the basis for larger abstract paintings until he started painting freehand painting in 1982. These sketches marked the first step in creating larger paintings. Because the “ugly sketches” were, in Richter’s words, “colorful, sentimental, associative, anachronistic, random, polysemic, devoid of meaning or logic,”52 he photographed a section limited to specific details of them in order to objectify them, in keeping with his precept of detaching from any obvious emotional content. To further distance himself from the sketches which he did not take seriously as finished artworks, he projected just a detail from a photographed section onto a large canvas which served as a point of departure for a painting. Removing

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traces of subjectivity, they become, as curator Mark Rosenthal described, “both impersonal and expressive at once.”53 Both the small oil sketches and the corresponding large paintings, often referred to as the “Soft Abstracts,” were the mainstay of Richter’s work from 1976 to 1980. In 1980, he stopped using photographs of details of paintings as the raw material, once likening them to “ready-mades,” a term made famous by Marcel Duchamp, and began to paint large abstract paintings freehand which he called Abstracts. (Adding to the confusion of labels, some curators referred to Abstracts as the “Free Abstracts” or “Hard Abstracts”; there are Abstracts that are also given specific titles such as A.B. Quiet.) The projected photographic image still served as a model for large paintings, but Richter made subtle but telling changes from projection of the photograph on the canvas to the actual finished work. For example, Abstraktes Bild (“Abstract Painting”), 1976, (Figure 3.12) one of the small sketches, is chockablock with elements that add to its peculiarity, including cigar-shaped rods with a foamy frosting on top, slightly off-kilter geometric shapes, gestural strokes, and sundry odd forms. Although one can clearly see that Abstraktes Bild (“Abstract Painting”), 1977, (Figure 3.13) comes out of that sketch, it has clear differences. Richter enlarged some compositional elements of the photograph of painting details and omitted others, changed opaque areas to cloudy passages, transformed geometric forms to amorphous blobs, and blurred everything slightly, creating a faux airbrush affect. He also sweetened the palette to roses, purples, and greens, colors one might expect to see in a cosmetic advertisement. Collectively, the Soft Abstracts are an antipode to the traditional variations-on-a-theme model in which connectivity in a body of work is apparent. Richter’s colors, often lurid and garish, vary from painting to painting as do the modes of abstraction. He employs big brushstrokes, color fields, quasigeometric patterns, hard-edge, organic, flat, or volumetric forms, combinations of which, together in one painting, can be strangely off-putting. Richter’s aptitude for juxtaposing several styles is uncanny. Although of a different era and style, one might be reminded of Henri Matisse’s Fauve-era paintings such as Woman with Hat, 1907, in the slight discomfort that draws in the viewer rather than repelling them. Richter painted his last photo-based abstraction titled Faust in 1981 (Figure 3.14). This visual ta-da punctuates the end of his five-year practice. Loud red and yellow forms in both soft and sharp focus sweep across the monumental triptych over 26 feet wide. Forms move in various directions in a space that is a cross between what resembles an infrared view of a distant nebula and a

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Figure 3.12: Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (“Ab-

stract Painting”), Catalogue Raisonné: 398-2, 1976. Oil on canvas, 10 1/4 × 9 in. (26 × 23 cm) © 2022 Gerhard Richter (0153). Courtesy of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden Gerhard Richter Archiv.

Figure 3.13: Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (“Abstract Painting”) Catalogue Raisonné: 421, 1977. Oil on canvas, 98 1/2 × 78 3/4 in. (250 × 200 cm) © 2022 Gerhard Richter (0153). Courtesy of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden Gerhard Richter Archiv.

Figure 3.14: Gerhard Richter, Faust, Catalogue Raisonné: 459, 460, 461, 1980. Oil on canvas, three parts, each 116 1/8 × 88 1/2 in. (295 × 225 cm) © 2022 Gerhard Richter (0153). Courtesy of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden Gerhard Richter Archiv.

three-dimensional tangle of visual tropes from postwar abstraction. For years Faust dazzled in the lobby of Deutsche Bank’s New York headquarters on Wall Street. Faust, and the Soft Abstracts as a group, prefigure the 1980s Abstracts with their heightened colors, compositional variations, spatial convolutions, and attention to textures, including those made from dragging paint, first with a dry brush and then with a squeegee.

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It took Richter five years to become confident enough to paint without a photographic source, but once he did, a prolific period of stylistic variety blossomed. In the first half of the decade, he changed the game when he orchestrated with authority in acidic colors, complex textures, and scale shifts that he first explored in the Soft Abstracts, his gestural abstractions in amped-up fluorescents. By 1986, he flattened illusionistic spaces with the drag of a giant squeegee, a tool central to Richter’s invention of an entirely new method of painting. Looking

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at reproductions of the 1980s Abstracts on Richter’s personal website, the most extensive online resource for any Contemporary artist, reveals the scope of his abstract corpus. He accomplished all this in the 1980s, while oscillating seamlessly between abstraction and photorealist paintings of apples, buildings, candles, his children, sheet metal, skulls, landscapes, and seascapes. He also painted a series based on photographs of the militant German anti-conservative Baader-Meinhof group, as discussed in Chapter 4. Richter brought abstraction to a space it had not previously inhabited, one fashioned by photography. He contrasted the photographic smoothness of illusionistic passages against a mix of figure–ground relationships. Even after he stopped making photo-based Soft Abstracts to paint freehand, the linkage between photography and painting remained, becoming the defining characteristic of his 1980s Abstracts. Artist and critic Stephen Ellis explained it well: Richter has so thoroughly absorbed photography’s characteristic surface, space, and color quality into his visual imagination that they remain, as it were, second nature to him, and he clearly brought elements of them to bear in these unmediated paintings […] More striking, however, is the way his internalized knowledge of photography provided him with a means to rethink the color and space of gestural abstraction.54

Richter captures the sheen and crispness of photography that gives the Abstracts a synthetic feel, especially from 1981 to 1985. Like Mondrian, Richter understood how to use the pictorial weight of color to balance a composition. The photographic aura is exemplified by Juni (“June”), 1983, (Figure 3.15) a square painting that draws the viewer into a center with intense yellows that glow like artificial sunshine. On the left, yellows blend into a vertical stack of opaque clouds of red, orange, burnt umber, and gold. More yellows bleed into a pouf of the same red at the center lower edge. On the right side in front of the yellow, tactile brushstrokes thrust downward like confetti propelled from a popper. A dark-tolight green funnel-like shape created with a squeegee adds yet another texture on the lower right as do small, hard-edge geometric shapes that tilt backward. The soft color blocks on the left contrast against the sharp focus of the painterly textures of the brushstrokes in the foreground of a slightly illusionistic space on the right. The pyrotechnic display is a purposefully calculated composition, especially in a period when, under the banner of Postmodernism, painting was seen as a banal recycling of Modern vocabulary. In 1982, Richter, who was not looking to the past, countered with an affirmation, “Abstract pictures are fictive

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Figure 3.15: Gerhard Richter, Juni (“June”), Catalogue Raisonné: 527, 1983. Oil on canvas,

98 1/2 × 98 1/2 in. (250 × 250 cm) © 2022 Gerhard Richter (0153). Courtesy of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden Gerhard Richter Archiv.

models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.”55 Color is a weapon and the canvas a battlefield in Ellis’s description of the grand triptych Atelier (“Studio”) of 1985, (Figure 3.16) writing that it “nearly immolates itself in complementary colors […] An explosion of cadmium orange and yellow on its left, scattered shards of red and green shrapnel on its right. Ragged patches of cobalt blue, allotted onto the canvas.”56 A viewer can only be vexed in trying to determine the layering, which painted area is in front or in back of another. Additionally, floating vertical pipes separate the spatial/ color dynamics into three distinct areas. Atelier is symphony of painterly effects

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Figure 3.16: Gerhard Richter, Atelier (“Studio”), Catalogue Raisonné: 574, 1985. Oil on canvas, 3 parts, in total 102 1/3 × 236 1/4 in. (260 × 600 cm) © 2022 Gerhard Richter (0153). Courtesy of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden Gerhard Richter Archiv.

that Richter orchestrated like a great conductor who brings a score to life without sacrificing the timbre of any instrument. “Technological,” “industrial,” “commercial,” “unnatural,” “synthetic,” “artificial,” and “hyperbolic” are adjectives writers ascribed to Richter’s palette, derived not from nature but from commercials, film, and media. Along those lines, consider how master cinematographer Roger Deakins describes “color temperature,”57 digital adjustment to the spectral qualities of light to create cool or warm tones. Apply this term to the heat of Atelier’s fiery yellow-oranges on the left, cooled down by the “snap”, another film term, of a deep cobalt blue on the right. Photography, particularly the blown-up image, shaped Richter’s concept of scale as art historian Camille Morneau explains in her essay, arguably the best analysis of the Abstracts paintings, in the catalogue of the 2012 Tate Museum retrospective. In 1980, after Richter had completed two commissioned works Stroke (on Blue), 1979, and Stroke (on Red), 1980, he found that they looked like giant brushstrokes from a distance, but up close they revealed themselves as little bits of paint that bore no resemblance to a brushstroke at all. Richter had come to an important realization that “[a]n abstract painting could be made without any starting image […] but the idea of the blow-up could continue.”58 This accounts for the mechanical feeling of the Abstracts, particularly in the squeegee paintings after 1986. Throughout the 1980s, Richter moved from vivid chromatics of primary colors jazzed up with acerbic greens and oranges to monochromatic blends and beautiful gray scale masterworks such as in Januar (“January”), 1989.

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These changes are not completely linear; he freely returns to earlier color combinations or motifs. Richter’s most radical change occurred in 1986 when the squeegee, a giant spatula, became central to his creative process. Richter was introduced to the squeegee as a painting tool by his teacher, Karl-Otto Götz, at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, who used it to quite a different effect. American artist Jack Whitten used a squeegee briefly in the 1970s to create paintings such as Special Checking, 1974, but Richter had not been exposed to Whitten’s work by the time he started using the tool. How the squeegee changed Richter’s process was put simply by art historian Camille Morineau: “Instead of the elements,” referring to colors, marks, shapes juxtapositions, shapes, and the like “being placed side by side, they tended to be painted in layers.”59 Richter constructed his own squeegee large enough to drag over most, if not all, of the surface to erase or leave only traces of a previous layer or layers of painting. After each layer of painting, Richter scrutinizes the composition. Sometimes he goes into it with a brush or a stick creating a line, a deeper cut into the under layers, but usually he applies the squeegee again. This process continues until he decides the painting is finished, right, proper, meaningful, without need of further correction. Richter always has an idea of something at the outset, but that idea never comes to fruition. He begins painting soft grounds in primary colors and leaves the canvas for a day or so. After revisiting the painting, he destroys it by covering it with a paint-filled squeegee. Although he wields the squeegee masterfully, there is no telling what it will produce. Chance becomes a sparring partner in the creative process, both opposing and supporting the artist. Wryly, Richter said, “I’m always astonished to find out how much better chance than I am [sic].”60 He becomes both creator and facilitator in willing surrender to randomness. Richter understands his materials so well that, as Tate conservator Rachel Barker explains, “[h]e selects paints based in part by their drying levels.”61 Choosing which paint to use on various layers is critical consideration because the degree of wetness determines the resulting kinds of surface effects such as smearing, cracking, or how the squeegee slides over the surface and layers underneath. Erasing and creating can take weeks to months. When finished, over three-quarters of the painting is hidden. Richter disparages claims that he is a virtuoso saying, “The tools are not important. Seeing is more important. Seeing, he explains is what unites the artist with the viewer.”62 The level of pressure applied to the squeegee and where the drags start and stop produce specific textures as seen in A B, Still (“A B, Quiet”), 1986, a painting that fetched nearly $34 million in the auction at Sotheby’s, New York, in

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Figure 3.17: Gerhard Richter, A B Still (“A B, Quiet”), Catalogue Raisonné: 612-4, 1986. Oil on canvas, 88 2/3 × 78 3/4 in. (225 × 200 cm) © 2022 Gerhard Richter (0153). Courtesy of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden Gerhard Richter Archiv.

2016 (Figure 3.17). The buzz was colossal, when that same painting sold for $264,000 at an auction in 1991. A trail of yellow paint left by the squeegee skips down the center of A B, Still. A squeegee smear of red paint in the shape of a vertical rectangle sweeps across the left side. The diagonal cutting out the top right corner is opaque but for a few craggy bits of iridescent blue paint that is exposed from an earlier layer. The right side contrasts with the red, yellow, and black marks seem to sit in front of marine blue. Because Richter paints wet on

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Figure 3.18: Gerhard Richter, Januar (“January”), Catalogue Raisonné: 699, 1989. Oil on canvas, two parts, each panel 126 × 78 3/4 in. (320 × 200 cm) © 2022 Gerhard Richter (0153). Courtesy of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden Gerhard Richter Archiv.

wet, layers conceal and reveal substrata of luminous colors, creating an illusion of depth even in what is a condensed, shallow space. Technique is always in service to the composition—the ultimate criteria for Richter. By 1989, Richter’s mastery of the squeegee technique culminated in a series of three titanic diptychs in white and black titled Januar (“January”), Dezember (“December”) and November, all of which are displayed in the collection of the St. Louis Art Museum. On the museum website is written, “When seen together they create an enveloping environment not unlike the experience of a nocturnal landscape glimpsed through the rain-spattered window of a moving car.”63 This is but one of many examples of descriptions of Richter’s paintings that resemble natural phenomenon. Richter’s sumptuous surfaces have been likened to lava flows, geological crusts, mineral excavations, sleet, rain, ice, and other literal transcriptions of nature. January, (Figure 3.18) for instance, approximates the look of a glacial wall about to slip into the sea. It reads areas of white, gray, and black from left to right with faint specks of orange-yellow and blue underpainting adding subtle tones

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to the grayscale palette. The viewer moves between the dramatic show of expressive painting and allusions to natural occurrences of water falling, ice melting and hardening. The downward thrust of the white squeegee augmented by daps of blue paint hugging the edge below suggest a waterfall. These likenesses are in no way Richter’s intention. Landscapes are an important genre to Richter, and they constitute a substantial part of his oeuvre. He makes the distinction between abstraction and landscape clear, “If the Abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lives show my yearning.”64 Because of the landscape references and his interest in artist Caspar David Friedrich, a painter whose reputation was tarnished because he was Hitler’s favorite, some have placed Richter in the lineage of German Romanticism. Friedrich’s famous Monk by the Sea, 1810, is a melancholic scene of the sea meeting a stormy sky, its vastness amplified by a low horizon line. One makes out the back of a tiny man—the only vertical in the composition—looking out to the ominous sky and black sea. The message hits you over the head, the smallness of man against the vastness of nature shows man’s helplessness without God and the spiritual dimension. Could the process of painting in Richter’s Abstracts be seen as analogous to the processes of nature? The viewer is engulfed by the 13.5-foot January just as the monk is engulfed in nature. In the late 1980s, in paintings such as Eis (“Ice”), the Abstracts increasingly look like big brushstrokes, often slightly blurred, reminiscent of the images in Richter’s photorealist paintings. Critics claimed this was somehow an ironic signifier of Abstract Expressionist gestural brushstrokes, specifically those of Willem de Kooning. The assertion does not hold up. De Kooning’s abstractions from 1957 to 1963 were responses to landscape or a desire to capture the sense of a particular location, as in Suburb in Havana, 1958, (Figure 3.19) and spontaneity in the creative process was essential. Richter’s Abstracts are the result of a painstaking process. As Robert Storr notes, Richter’s Abstracts are “not only ‘well-cooked’ but carefully prepared.”65 In response to those who wanted to group Richter with Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s, dismissing him as a recycling of tropes of past Abstract painting as a quotation of that lineage, Richter stated they were “not an ironic parody of present-day expressionism.”66 Art experts mistakenly read Abstracts as a cynical compendium of abstraction’s formal language, a negation of content and ultimately a statement about the death of painting in the postmodern era. Richter repeatedly rebuked these conclusions, and, although he takes great pains to mask the personal in his work, his Abstracts are an extension of his mind, his psychology, not an idea about the art. As he said, “The abstract works are my presence, my reality, my problems,

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Figure 3.19: Willem de Kooning, Suburb in Havana, 1958. Oil on canvas, 80 × 70 in. (203.2 × 177.8 cm) Private Collection © 2021 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of The Willem de Kooning Foundation.

my difficulties and my contradictions.”67 Richter’s Abstracts are the embodiment of the thing itself—painting. His exploration into chromatics, paint application, and pictorial space, and his invention of a new process in painting is about the physical entity, not an ideology pertaining to Abstraction. Heilmann, Halley, and Richter reimagined abstraction in accord with their perceptions of the cultural function of art. These perceptions came out at a

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specific time—the 1980s—when it was necessary for each artist to establish a new basis for abstract painting separate from perceptions attached to abstract painting in Modern era when it had symbolized a hopeful, progressive view of the Modern era. Necessity led to great invention. Each of these artists executed their visions in their own ways, shaping the trajectory of future art and redefining the ideological underpinnings of abstraction. In both technique and content, Heilmann, Halley, and Richter created novel works that breathed new life into painting as a genre, contributing to its revival. Endnotes

1. Kandinsky quoted in Algeo and Kandinsky, “Art, Theosophy, and Kandinsky.” 2. Stella, “Minimalism—What You See Is What You See.” 3. Heilmann et al., The All-Night Movie, 7. 4. Heilmann et al., The All-Night Movie, 38. 5. Heilmann et al., The All-Night Movie, 38. 6. Heilmann, “All-Night Movie,” 189. 7. Heilman quoted in Bitterli, “Exploring the Archive.” 8. Laster and Heilmann, “Mary Heilmann: An Interview.” 9. Heilmann quoted in Almino, “Mary Heilmann Disrupts the Rigid Systems of Abstraction.” 10. Heilmann et al., The All-Night Movie, 62. 11. Heilmann, “All-Night Movie,” 195. 12. Eno, Music for Airports Liner Notes. 13. Heilmann et al., The All-Night Movie, 60. 14. Myers and Heilmann, Mary Heilmann: Save the Last Dance for Me. 15. Heilmann, “All-Night Movie,” 196. 16. Krauss, “Grids,” 50–64. 17. Heilman quoted in Bitterli, “Exploring the Archive.” 18. Heilmann, “All-Night Movie,” 180. 19. Sherlock, “Surfing on Acid.” 20. Heilman quoted in Bitterli, “Exploring the Archive.” 21. “Questionnaire Mary Heilmann,” Frieze. 22. Fairbrother and Halley, “Interview by Trevor Fairbrother,” 95–101. 23. Peroni, “Catalogue Essay: Paul Pieroni on Peter Halley’s 1980s.” 24. Peter Halley, “Essence and Mode,” in Peter Halley, Collected Essays 1981–1987.

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25. Peter Halley, “Essence and Mode,” in Peter Halley, Collected Essays 1981–1987. 26. Peter Halley, “Essence and Mode,” in Peter Halley, Collected Essays 1981–1987. 27. Morton, “Peter Halley.” 28. Hixson and Halley, “Interview with Peter Halley by Kathryn Hixson.” 29. Fairbrother and Halley, “Interview by Trevor Fairbrother,” 95–101. 30. Schambelan, “Peter Halley Mary Boone Gallery.” 31. Peroni, “Catalogue Essay: Paul Pieroni on Peter Halley’s 1980s.” 32. Taylor, “The Hot Four.” 33. Cameron and Halley, “Peter Halley Talks to Dan Cameron.” 34. Halley, “Crises of Geometry,” in Halley, Peter Halley: Collected Essays, 1981–1987. 35. Hixson and Halley, “Interview with Peter Halley by Kathryn Hixson.” 36. Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960 to the Early 1990, 307. 37. Hartel, “Demystifying Gerhard Richter’s Gestural Abstraction.” 38. Richter and Pehnt, “Interview with Wolfgang Pehnt,” 137. 39. Richter, “Notes, 1984,” 132. 40. Richter, Documenta 7. 41. Elger et al., Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, 222. 42. Linker, “Review Gerhard Richter.” 43. Richter, “Notes, 1964–5,” in Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961–2007, 33. 44. Richter et al., “From a Letter to Edy De Wilde, 1975,” 92. 45. Richter et al., “From a Letter to Edy De Wilde, 1975,” 92.

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46. Richter et al., “Interview with Ferguson and Spalding, 1978,” 108. 47. Perlis, “John Cage: I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It.” 48. Richter and Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 57. 49. Richter et al., “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,” 178. 50. Richter et al., “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,” 178. 51. Richter et al., “Answer to Questions from Marlies Gruterich,” 95. 52. Richter et al., “Answer to Questions from Marlies Gruterich,” 95. 53. Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, 227. 54. Ellis, “The Elusive Gerhard Richter,” 186. 55. Richter, “Text for Documenta Catalogue, Kassel, 1982,” in Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961– 2007, 121. 56. Ellis, “The Elusive Gerhard Richter,” 186.

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57. Deakins, “Roger Deakins Talks about Shooting Skyfall on IBC 2012.” 58. Richter et al., “The Blow-Up, Primary Colours and Duplications,” 127. 59. Richter et al., “The Blow-Up, Primary Colours and Duplications,” 127. 60. Richter and Buchloh, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,” 182. 61. Barker and Godfrey, “How Did Richter Make His Paintings.” 62. Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schutz, 1990,” in Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961–2007, 257. 63. Saint Louis Art Museum, January 25, 2021. 64. Richter et al., Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné, 1993–2004, 33. 65. Richter and Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 71. 66. Richter and Buchloh, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,” in 179. 67. Richter and Dietrich, “Dorothea Dietrich, ‘Gerhard Richter, an Interview,’” Print Collectors Newsletter, 9.

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4 Addressing Germany’s Past Painting in a Divided Nation

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cknowledging the following two facts is necessary for understanding German painting in the 1980s. First, postwar German art cannot be extricated from the horrific history of the Third Reich. Second, artistic style itself was political in a country where the great German Modernists of the early twentieth century had been banned by Hitler and disgraced in the infamous 1938 exhibition he organized titled Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”). After the war, in East Germany’s so-called German Democratic Republic (GDR)—a misnomer, there was nothing Democratic about it—the only style taught and tolerated was Social Realism. It ranged from downright hokey to blandly illustrated, like an off-brand Norman Rockwell, comprised primarily of scenes of patriotic gatherings, tableaux of diligent factory workers, and views of happy Germans leaving their communist block housing for some quality family time in the countryside. Many German painters who emerged after the war began their practice in earnest after being transplanted from Communist-controlled East Germany to West Germany or from Berlin’s Soviet sector to the free side. As students, they had been taught that German history ended in the nineteenth century. Lost wars were never mentioned. Many of the artists who emerged from this period of German history would bear witness to their country’s savage past, and through their work, they would consciously dispel the collective amnesia that set in after the Second World War. This chapter examines several preeminent German artists of the postwar era who acknowledged Nazism in a way that their fathers and uncles who had served the Third Reich could not. German psychologist Margarete MitscherlichNielsen theorized that because the German collective consciousness, unable to confront its feelings of guilt after the war, identified with that of the victors, it resulted in a generation’s “inability to mourn.”1 Artists born during or just after the war and who hit their artistic peak during the 1970s and 1980s often exposed and exorcized that suppressed reality. In so doing, they made enormous and relevant contributions to German painting. To understand the importance of the 1980s paintings produced by the artists discussed in this chapter, their journey through the postwar years must be examined. In this context, how each artist addressed not only Germany’s hideous past, but also the tension of living in a divided nation can be fully understood. Imagine being an artist after the Holocaust. What themes could be relevant? Adorno’s oft-quoted statement “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”2 also applies to art in postwar Germany. A traditional still life, landscape, or existential abstraction along the lines of Pollock or Rothko would be irrelevant. As such,

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the challenge of how the genre of painting could accommodate postwar German subject matter led to fresh orchestrations of style, iconography, materials, and technique. It also led to reinventing painting, even to the point of questioning whether the work can still be defined as a painting. Although the major German artists such as Sigmar Polke and Anselm Kiefer were among the most original in rethinking notions of what painting as a medium could be, the artists considered here all referred to Nazism in some manner, albeit with dissimilar styles. German Neo-Expressionism, a rubric assigned to German painters who came into prominence in the 1980s, served curators and art dealers who presented these artists as part of a new “-ism” in the art world, rather than effectively describing the art itself. The term “Neo-Expressionism” suggests a false homogeneity among these artists, rather than the wide stylistic diversity that defies simple characterization. Inscrutable combinations of nineteenth-century images and commercial fabrics crafted by the mercurial and ironic Sigmar Polke could not be further from Anselm Kiefer’s serious and weighty pictorial expanses of train tracks, charred landscapes, and buildings designed by Hitler’s architect Albert Speer. Moreover, can Kiefer’s works of art, composed primarily of straw, lead, and ash, even be called paintings? The artistic climate of the 1960s and 1970s in Germany provides a point of departure needed to appreciate painting in the 1980s. Unlike their American counterparts who began painting in the 1980s or just before, German painters developed during the late 1960s and 1970s, a period when German art moved from a national to an international context, culminating in serious recognition in the booming and monied artworld of the 1980s. In addition, Penck and Baselitz’s progression to their art in the 1980s provides a window into the dual dynamics of East and West German art cultures. Any overview of this period requires, first and foremost, a consideration of the godfather of German postwar art—Conceptual performance artist and sculptor Joseph Beuys. Because Beuys understood the crises of subject matter for artists in the postwar era, he fostered political and societal exploration and encouraged his students to create participatory works which he called “social sculptures.”3 Beuys inspired artists to explore any subject matter that felt authentic. Beuys’s carefully crafted persona as the shaman and healer, one who fostered the notion of the artist/citizen in a nonhierarchical structure, served as a catalyst for unfettered artistic expression in 1960s and 1970s. Although not generally known in America until his retrospective in 1979, Beuys was the most important artist in Europe after the war and through the Cold War years. He promoted a conceptual model of art which could intersect with any discipline, set of ideas,

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or unorthodox materials, layering it with social, political, or human resonances as part of his expanded notion of art. Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1921 and raised in the town of Kleve in the lower Rhine region. In 1936, he joined the Hitler Youth movement, which was then compulsory for German youth and teens. In 1942, he volunteered for the Luftwaffe, the German air force, and began his artistic pursuits. His drawings from the 1940s are primarily spindly line drawings or watery gouaches of landscape and animal wildlife. The natural sciences would be a continual interest for Beuys throughout his career. While in the service, he worked as a radio operator stationed in then-German-controlled Crimea. However, the great healer of the German artistic psyche was also a bit disingenuous. According to his own account, Beuys was shot down near the Crimean border in Ukraine in 1944 and rescued by nomadic Tartars. They took him by sled to their camp and used ancient healing methods on him, covering his wounds with fat and wrapping him in felt to raise his body temperature. The problem with this story, which shaped so many of his artworks with themes of healing and symbolic elements such as fat and felt, is that it was entirely fictitious. This lie was brought to the public in the 1980s when accounts surfaced contradicting Beuys’s story.4 Most art critics and historians gave Beuys a pass—his status as artistic cult figure helped them claim that the false narrative was a metaphor for his message that individual actions could reshape society. Others, like the insightful Marxist art historian Benjamin Buchloh, however, called him out and characterized his theories as “simpleminded utopian drivel lacking in elementary political or educational practicality.”5 Buchloh derides Beuys’s tales as falsifications put in service of self-mythologizing.6 Despite Beuys’s misleading claims, the narrative of healing and his use of materials in his art reiterating his message did resonate with young artists during a period where a path forward artistically seemed impossible. Beuys’s mythos was based on a lie, but his messages had a profound effect on an entire generation of German artists, nonetheless. In the 1950s, Beuys took art classes, but postwar trauma, depression, and poverty left him psychologically shaky. During this difficult period, he formulated his artistic mission. James Joyce’s mythic themes and the writings of epistemologist Rudolf Steiner, who posited that scientific knowledge and spirituality developed cooperatively, influenced him powerfully as he developed his artistic mission. In the 1960s, Beuys joined Fluxus, an international Conceptual art group that originated in New York City around George Maciunas and John Cage. The group encompassed a wide range of performances, happenings, and

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other activities that blurred the line between art and life. Remnants of many of Beuys’s Fluxus performances are found in major European museums. They are often arranged in glass and metal vitrines, reminiscent of anthropological Victorian display cases. To the uninformed viewer, they look like debris enshrined in odd glass, metal, and wood cabinets. To the art cognoscenti, however, Beuys’s vitrines add gravitas to any serious collection of Contemporary art. Famed artist Marcel Duchamp declared found objects themselves to be art, and Robert Rauschenberg combined these objects with other materials to make art as assemblage. But Beuys used found objects as symbolic traces of earlier actions. This is seen in the work titled Ausfegen (“Sweeping Up”), 1972–85, which contains only debris and a broom. Absent the backstory, the viewer is invariably perplexed. In this piece, Beuys and two students pointedly used a symbolic red broom to sweep up garbage after May Day celebration in Karl-Marx-Platz, Berlin, in May 1972. The action suggested a new start for Germany in keeping with Beuys’s leadership as a cultural healer. It also emphasized his rejection of dogmatic ideologies such as Marxism and capitalism. Other Beuys vitrines display carefully arranged small sculptures and “relics” from his actions. These artifacts include elements such as fat, marrow, rancid batteries, congealed animal blood, sutures, coffee spoons, calcified blood sausages, beer bottles, iron, sulfur, and razor blades, all of which were part of earlier actions which Beuys considered as performative works of art. Most of his major performances took place in Berlin and Dusseldorf. In Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt (“How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare”), Beuys’s 1965 performance in Galerie Schmela, Dusseldorf, kept viewers out of the gallery. To catch even a glimpse of Beuys, they were forced to look through the window or the open gallery door. Envision a casual passerby glancing into the gallery window to see the following: Beuys, his face covered with honey and gold leaf, walking around the gallery for three hours inaudibly explaining his art to a dead hare cradled in his arms—an odd human–animal update of a pietà. Curator Caroline Tisdall explained this by saying, “Gold and honey indicate the transformation of the head, and therefore naturally and logically, the brain and our understanding of thought, consciousness and all the other levels necessary to explain pictures to a hare.”7 Beuys wore an iron sole on his right foot, which made him limp, and a felt sole on the left. The clank of the iron on the floor broke the quietude of his muffled murmurings, symbolizing new models of communication beyond the rational. Tisdall correctly noted,

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This image of the artist anointed, silently mouthing to a mute animal what cannot be said to his fellow men became one of the most resonant images of the 1960s. This is in part a testimony to the skill of Beuys’ most constant photographer, Ute Klophaus.8

Before art enthusiasts even understood his work, they were intrigued by the striking and odd photos of Beuys in various activities. If I was asked to list the most iconic art images from the 1970s, a photo of Joseph Beuys—not his art but the artist himself—would be at the top. Lanky and underfed, his sharp, high cheekbones formed an angular visage that framed staring, sunken eyes, giving the appearance of one who has not slept for days. Iconic and almost comical, “with his omnipresent hat and multipocketed fisherman’s vest,” one journalist notes, “[he] could occasionally call to mind Buster Keaton performing under the guidance of Samuel Beckett.”9 Beuys’s popularity with student demonstration groups of the late 1960s that wanted leftist leanings in their art did much to establish him as a cultural savior. His legend escalated when he began teaching at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, a role Beuys considered his most important. Many of Germany’s important postwar artists studied under him in the 1970s, but art students everywhere knew of his work and his theories about art as a therapeutic, democratizing social structure. His push to eliminate entry requirements at the academy culminated in demonstrations and an occupation of the school administrative offices by the artist and sixteen students in 1972. Beuys, unsurprisingly, was asked to leave the next year. An intense schedule of public-speaking engagements followed. He gave chalkboard lectures, diagraming heady topics such as “Talking about One’s Country: Germany” and “Energy Plan for the Western Man,” among others. A major Beuysian theme was such energy flow, be it psychic, national, or even continental. Tisdall tendered, [T]he energies and traumas of the continent are deeply connected and move along together, affecting each other reciprocally in the fabric of history. The crossing point between energy and trauma in Europe and Eurasia has been a constant theme in Beuys’ work.10

In these lectures, he painted a rosy picture for the future, if only we could all get behind his program. Today, those chalkboards remain as museum pieces.

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In what is perhaps his most outrageous work, I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974, (Figure 4.1) he “concentrated on an American equivalent which he feels has affected the course of history of the United States.”11 Beuys himself stated, “I believe I made a contact with the psychological trauma point of the United States’ energy constellation: the whole American trauma with the Indian, the red man.”12 Figure 4.1: Joseph Beuys,

I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974. Video still © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG BildKunst, Bonn. Digital image © Common Film Produktion GmbH/Helmut Wietz.

For this work, Beuys arrived in to JFK airport swathed in felt—his symbol for warmth and insulation—then was taken directly by ambulance, sirens screeching, to the Rene Block Gallery. In a small gallery room, he cohabitated with a wild coyote for eight hours a day for three days, after which he was taken by ambulance back to JFK airport. Beuys planned every action, including his transport on a stretcher, so he never set foot on American soil, perhaps to maintain the singular and untainted communication between him and the coyote. Whether or not the coyote was watching, Beuys stood with the felt wrapped around him with his walking stick protruding from the top, looking like a cross between a shepherd and a teepee. Ever ritualistic, Beuys performed several abstruse ceremonial actions, such as striking a triangle and throwing his gloves to the coyote. Other materials in this performance took on symbolic status. Stacks of the Wall Street Journal represented capitalism and served as the coyote’s puddle pads when he was not tearing them up. The white man’s dominance and destruction of Native Americans, for whom the coyote was a mythic spirit creature, was the subtext, but the idea that two supposed enemies could peacefully coexist was resonant during the era of the Cold War and the Vietnam War protest. Eventually, the coyote playfully pulled at the felt, disrobing Beuys of his protection.

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Gradually, the barriers dissolved between the two species who were natural enemies, and one could almost say they became pals, lounging together on the straw and scowling at onlookers outside a chain-link wall. The coyote slept next to Beuys, and by day three, he even let Beuys give him a hug. Even though Beuys remains problematic for some, he introduced topics in art which have become increasingly relevant as time has passed. He addressed oppressive governmental controls, free education, recycling natural resources, developing nations, immigration, and conservation in his works. While Marcel Duchamp forged Conceptual art initially, a debt that went unacknowledged by Beuys, it was Beuys who made it widely known to a European audience. He was ahead of the now commonplace trend regarding participatory and cause-related art. Generating referential and metaphorical readings using unorthodox materials, a key element in Beuys’s art, has become a much-used signifier of meaning from the 1980s on. Through his vitrine titled Auschwitz Demonstrationen 1956–1964 (“Auschwitz Demonstration 1956­–1964”), which displayed photographs of the death camps and continued through his public talks in later years, Beuys proffered a kind of artistic absolution. He urged German artists to acknowledge their country’s past and to use creativity to forge a new national vision. Adrian Searle noted, He once opened a talk with the following: “Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Once again, I should like to start with the wound.” And what wound might that be, Herr Beuys? The lecture was titled “Talking about one’s country: Germany.”13

By establishing new models for art and politics, Beuys gave permission to postwar German artists to dispel the demons of Nazism by taking it up as subject matter. These avant-garde works had no equivalent in East Germany. The rift between East and West Germany only became more pronounced, artistically speaking. After the war, East Germany did not reconnect with the German modernism that Hitler had attempted to erase. As early as 1947, Alexander Dymschitz, a Soviet cultural officer, rationalized that Social Realism was superior to the “bourgeois” styles from capitalist countries primarily because the Soviet government approved realism; its clear, uncomplicated themes were easier for the masses to understand.14 Art for the people had been part of a winning propaganda strategy in the Soviet Union. As Barbara McCloskey observed, “Transferred to German soil, socialist realism could now help foster a new socialist society from the rubble

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of Nazi atrocity and national defeat.”15 Others warned that the Soviet art propaganda machine had and would continue to become “a network of censorship, intimidation, and mechanisms of press and exhibition control that reprised the worst of the Nazi artworld,”16 a prescient concern that proved to be correct. In East Germany, art censorship and dogmatic control moved seamlessly from the Nazis to the Soviets, preventing avant-garde art from flourishing as it did in West Germany. In contrast to Soviet-controlled Germany, where artistic style was dictated by the state, artists in the West had to learn about Modern art movements in Germany, the history of which had been erased during the war, and to create their own style which was not merely a derivative version of American Contemporary art. By the 1950s, West Germany was very provincial, at least twenty or thirty years behind Modern art, and just becoming aware of tendencies that had been explored in other countries. As America’s cutting-edge movements of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism spread to Europe, they recoiled sharply from it as they embraced their own identity. German artists’ distrust of American capitalism solidified their desire to be German in their art, a sentiment that kept the spread of American modernism in check. Tachisme, a style of nongeometric abstraction that originated in France in the 1950s, was considered more palatable in the 1950s and early 1960s in great part because it was abstract. Michael Govan explains why, writing, “After the war, in the wake of Hitler’s masterful and painfully effective use of image figure and myth, any recovery of individual independence and freedom was possible only through the visual autonomy of the language of abstraction.”17 Abstraction represented freedom after the Second World War. Gradually, art that melded abstraction with imagery gained acceptance, as did more authentic means of expressing sensibilities unique to the postwar era. The art of A. R. Penck and Georg Baselitz, who both painted in the 1960s and 1970s, illuminates how painting became a vessel for political content. Although these artists continued to paint during the 1980s as they gained recognition outside Germany, the evolution of their practice before and throughout the 1980s reveals the original ways they were referencing not only Germany’s past but their own experiences of living in a divided nation. The history of A. R. Penck’s practice, in particular, gives a clear picture of the chasm between West and East. Indeed, Penck’s tenacity to create his unique art in Soviet-occupied East Germany complicated his career as he sought to avoid confrontation with the Stasi.

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A. R. Penck was in fact a pseudonym designed to keep his West German dealings and exhibitions hidden from the GDR government and police. It was a name he had borrowed from the real A. R. Penck, a German geologist who devised systems of classification of the Earth’s surfaces based on movements and deposits from the Ice Age. Penck chose the name because he thought of geology as a science of stored information, a parallel to the ability of visual symbols to communicate ideas. Penck would adopt several pseudonyms throughout his lifetime, including Mike Hammer, Theodor Marx, and simply “Y.” Penck was born Ralf Winkler in Dresden in 1939. When he was 6 years old, he witnessed the devastation wrought by the Allied Forces’ firebombing of Dresden from his parents’ garden in the outskirts of the city, a memory he associated with “the negative, the horror of war and destruction.”18 He knew early on that he wanted to be an artist, but at age 18 he was denied admission to the Dresden Art Academy because he would not paint in the Social Realist style. Penck was not dissuaded. He took classes as often as he could, earning himself a place in some East German art shows, often because a friend put in a good word for him. In 1969, he was turned down by the VBK (Verband Bildender Künstler der DDR, the East German Visual Artists’ League), the governing body with the power to confer the title of “artist” in an official capacity, thereby allowing an artist to make a living. Without this title, Penck supported himself financially by working as a night watchman, margarine packer, newspaper delivery man, and coal stoker. Despite the roadblocks East German officials put in Penck’s path at every juncture, he started to receive attention in West Germany with the help of fellow artist and friend Georg Baselitz. He brought Penck’s work to the attention of Michael Werner, the gallerist instrumental in bringing many major German artists to the art stages of Europe and, later, to America beginning in the 1980s. Werner arranged Penck’s first exhibition in the West at Hake gallery in Cologne in 1968. Stories of Penck’s clandestine meetings with Werner in a public park, showing him rolled-up paintings at warp speed to avoid being caught before the works were smuggled out of East Germany, are legendary. Despite his persona non grata status in the East German art system, organizers included his work in documenta 5, 1977, in Kassel, Germany. The quintennial Contemporary art exhibition documenta, established in 1955 as an attempt to bring Germany up to speed with emerging art trends, is still held and has become the premier international art festival. Penck and Lothar Baumgarten represented Germany in the 1984 Venice Biennale. Penck’s paintings of the 1960s and 1970s hold cultural and historical significance because they are among the

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first by a German artist that used divided Germany as a subject. Because these sorts of authentic responses to historic realities had been outlawed in Germany from the 1930s on, Penck’s open acknowledgment of Germany’s struggles through his work gained him both notice and notoriety. While Penck intermittently painted in a modernist figurative style in his early works—he had studied Picasso, Van Gogh, and others from reproductions—his unique contributions are his stick figure paintings, which began with the series titled Weltbild (“World View”), 1961. In this, matchstick men resembling Neolithic cave figures on a crackled white background represent a wide range of human interactions. The emblematic stick figures recall ancient Near Eastern or Egyptian styles in which changes in scale are hierarchical; larger scale denotes power and standing in society. A straight line slightly off-center symbolizing the Berlin Wall separates two groups engaged in combative gestures, holding swords and guns facing one another in stark profile. Other figures show a softer side, such as two figures holding each other or a child with a ball above his head. Symbols, machine-like structures, and placards with A=A, Penck’s symbol for truth, are interspersed among figures on a curving earth surface with flames dancing like molten lava about to erupt. It was no coincidence that Penck began the World View series the day after visiting his friend, the artist Georg Baselitz, in West Berlin, where he witnessed the building of the Berlin Wall. Two years later, in 1963, Penck dramatically depicted the theme of divided Germany in Der Übergang (“The Crossing”) (Figure 4.2). It shows a lone figure with its elongated arms extended to each side as it balanced precariously on a tightrope of flames over a crevasse. These paintings of the 1960s were visual diagrams of two Germanys and Cold War tensions.19 Although his works feel accessible because of the simple imagery and the strong graphic quality of black-and-white paintings, complex ideas shaped his artistic development. In a 1965 letter to Baselitz, Penck wrote, “I have moved away from things artistic and am applying myself to mathematics, cybernetics, and theoretical physics, or what is in my mind is a sort of physics of human society, or society as a physical entity.”20 Under the umbrella of cybernetics, broadly defined as the study of regulatory systems as well as human–machine communication, he became interested in systems, whether linguistic, scientific, or societal. He studied the East German system of government seemingly without judgment, informed by his utopian outlook, hoping that his method of informational coding would lead to a purer form of socialism. He was naïve.

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Figure 4.2: A. R. Penck, Der Übergang (“The Crossing”), 1963. Dispersion on canvas, 51 1/8 × 63 in. (130 × 160 cm). © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of Farbanalyse.

Penck was interested in a universal pictorial language, which would be logical rather than emotional. He thought in terms of pictures before he thought in terms of language. His written explanations tend to be cryptic. He confirmed that his work is “made with the purpose of achieving a total perception” of the brain’s “visual content,”21 and the perception of “this visual content can be factually determined and assessed.”22 Penck explained, “I wanted to show that signs can hide behind other signs and that my approach to these signs renders them transparent.”23 He had codified many of these symbols in the 1968 oil on Masonite painting titled Primitive Computer, a grid-like collection of ovals, circles, dots, and lines. As he intended, the viewer can assign meanings to the abstract shapes independent of the artist. This symbolic language is best seen in his 1974 work T.M. x Penck x Mike Hammer, (Figure 4.3) whose title refers to his various pseudonyms. It shows an energetic cacophony of interlocking figures, symbols, and motifs, all rendered

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Figure 4.3: A. R. Penck, T.M.

x Penck x Mike Hammer, 1974. Acrylic on canvas, 51 1/8 × 63 in. (130 × 160 cm) © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst. Courtesy of Farbanalyse.

in thick black lines. In this and other works from the Mike Hammer series of the 1970s, Penck took on semiotics, the study of language in terms of signs, which he organized into five categories: [T]he first type is the abstract image, which looks like a sign; the second is the figurative drawing; the third, the purely automatic shape or form; the fourth is a kind of illusion, and the fifth is a destructive image.24

Several of the abstract, sign-like images of the first category are interspersed throughout T.M. x Penck x Mike Hammer. The second category, the “figurative image,” is represented by bodies in everyday movement and by frontal stick figures. Finding the figures in this painting takes on a Where’s Waldo? bent in this piece, the most densely packed of Penck’s compositions. Skulls and swords fall into the “destructive type” category. A wide assortment of images, including the hammer and scythe parts of cityscapes, body parts, and eyes, complete the range of Penck’s pictographic vocabulary. There is a personal side to the works from the 1970s as well. John Yau points out, “The fragmented images convey something of the artist’s sense of being, his isolation and fear, without asking for the viewers’ sympathy. Rather, the reader tries to decode the puzzle-like composition of the painting.”25 Although the organizing systems behind Penck’s iconography may not have been readily understood by the viewer, the energetic merging of human figures

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Figure 4.4: A. R. Penck, Quo Vadis Germania (“Where Are You Going Germany?”), 1984.

Etching and aquatint, 42 3/4 × 73 1/3 in. (108.7 × 186.3 cm) © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of Farbanalyse.

with pictorial symbolism had a universal appeal that was not lost on American artists of the 1980s. American graffiti artist Keith Haring credited Penck with shaping his development of simplistic, easily recognizable human shapes that were accessible to a wide audience. Another linkage to New York artists of the 1980s is the staccato rhythms in both Penck’s and Basquiat’s works that come from a deep engagement with music. Although best known for his art, Penck said his greatest love was music; he played with a jazz band. This passion bled into his art as he visualized musical nuance on canvas. Aware that “dissident” artists were exhibiting outside East Germany, the government tightened its grip, forbidding artists to publish books or exhibit outside the GDR. Unlike other artists who left the East at an early age and identified with the West in their personal and artistic identity, when Penck was forced to leave East Germany in 1980, he felt no sense of liberation. A. R. Penck differs from other postwar German artists in that he did not leave the GDR until it was absolutely necessary. The final straw was a government raid of his studio, which

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destroyed his works from the year before. “Penck did not believe his passage from the East to the West signified progress,” notes John Yau, adding, “For Penck, the change was welcoming but disturbing. He did not see it as an escape from a bad life to a good one, but as a continuation of his awareness of Germany’s dilemma.”26 Exiled and feeling more like a tourist than a citizen, he moved often, living in London, Ireland, Berlin, Dusseldorf, and New York. Penck continued to paint until he died in 2017, but many of his important works predate his leaving East Germany. In the 1980s, he revisited old themes but with a less direct quality. The palette became gregarious, the paint application at times weighty, and the paintings often overworked. That being said, Penck considered his 1984 painting Quo Vadis Germania (“Where Are You Going Germany?”) (Figure 4.4) his most political. In this sprawling 9 by 32 foot painting, a reptilian beast with a long snake-like tail creates a looping shape that travels around the lower part of the painting to create a broken oval. The stick figure humans are dwarfed by this aggressive creature,

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placed alongside a strange eagle-headed man. Does the title suggest a cautionary tale? As an imagistic diagram of Germany’s future, Penck’s combination of figuration and abstraction made this work a natural for the Zeitgeist exhibition in 1982, which showcased this trend in artists from Germany and abroad. Paradoxically, even though Penck utilized a scientific system, his recurrent themes were isolation and dislocation. He always included a figural image because he believed his work to be rooted in humanity. Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 in the Saxon town of Deutschbaselitz. His father was a schoolteacher who could not find work after the war because he had been a member of the Nazi Party. In 1957, the young artist studied at the Academy of Art in West Berlin—the borders were still open at that time—after being expelled from art school in East Germany on the grounds that he was “socio-politically immature.”27 Despite this response, Baselitz, like Penck, rooted his art in the postwar reality of a defeated and divided Germany, as he explained, I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I didn’t want to reestablish an order: I’d seen enough of so-called order. I was forced to question everything, to be naïve, to start again.28

After moving to West Berlin in 1958, he continued to grapple with the problem that as an artist, Baselitz had no indigenous German culture to serve as a point of departure. Hitler had banished German Expressionism of the early twentieth century along with anything that did not align with his imposed aesthetic for the Third Reich—a kitschy, saccharinely sentimental realism that celebrated heroism and the heimat (“homeland”). When Baselitz did see German Modernism for the first time, he felt no attraction to it. That same year, Baselitz first saw paintings by American artists Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, and Willem de Kooning in Berlin.29 He was shocked, not only because he had never seen anything like these large-scale abstractions which looked to him like visual pronouncements of freedom but also because he found the idea of America surpassing Europe as a cultural leader astonishing. He admired the brushwork of Willem de Kooning, but Abstract Expressionism did not suit Baselitz. Neither did the then-wildly popular French Tachisme, an abstract style that had no political codes whatsoever. In an act of rebellion against Tachisme and other styles, Baselitz decided to align his practice with German art. He explained, “I’m a German artist and what I do is rooted in the German tradition,”30 a tradition he saw as ugly and expressive. Although this kind of blanket statement may not hold up under scrutiny, it

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is true that Northern European art favored realism to the point of grotesqueness as early as the fourteenth century. By contrast, the Southern European masters followed the idealized equilibrium of the classical tradition. Of the Italian masters, Mannerist painters of the sixteenth century interested Baselitz the most. They stood in stark opposition to their Renaissance predecessors, favoring distortions, strange narratives, and anxious ambiances. When Baselitz received a fellowship to study in Florence in 1965, he was introduced to Mannerist artists such as Fiorentino and Parmigianino, and he began collecting prints by these artists. Other artistic expressions outside the visual arts shaped Baselitz’s thinking as well, notably the nihilistic sensibilities of Antonin Artaud, the French poet and playwright who created the theater of cruelty, a shocking aesthetic which embraced difficult imagery, dissonances, and disharmony which became the cornerstones of Baselitz’s style. Baselitz’s paintings caused an uproar in the 1963 inaugural exhibition of Galerie Werner & Katz (now Galerie Michael Werner) in Berlin, where he put ugliness on display with full force. On ground of obscenity, the police confiscated all the paintings.31 The main offender was an 11-foot painting titled Die große Nacht im Eimer (“The Big Night Down the Drain”), 1962–63, (Figure 4.5) which appeared to be a masturbating dwarf. Guardian journalist Mike Glover’s description of the painting is worth quoting at length: This painting seems to be waging war upon refinement of any kind. It is not asserting its own beauty—in fact, quite the opposite. It is not harmonious. In fact, it is lumpen, squat, gross and lumpish. It is not tailored to appeal to any market. It would not sit easily above the mantelpiece in the home. It is the very epitome of savagery, tastelessness, ugliness, offensiveness, crudeness and ferocious defiance. It seems to exist in order to be nothing but that, a fist shaken in the face of the respectable and self-possessed onlooker. The masturbating dwarf stares blankly, not ahead, but to the side. He is ridiculously small in stature, slightly knock-kneed, dressed in what might be lederhosen. The eyes are small and mean, ridiculously wide-spaced, deep-sunken within their sockets, hollowed out, the pupils defined against the eyes’ grey-black outlining. The look is leaden, mechanized, wallowing in its own emptiness, beyond the call of morality. The nose is a flattened, mashed agglomeration of smeary colours. Everywhere there are nasty little lumps, swellings, excrescences, evidence of abnormality. […] He holds the disgustingly extended penis out in front of him, as if he is engaged in the act of swinging it from side to side, wielding it like a cosh. This is his only weapon.32

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Figure 4.5: Georg Baselitz, Die große Nacht im Eimer (“The Big Night Down the Drain”), 1962–63. Oil on canvas, 98 1/2 × 70 7/8 in. (250 × 180 cm). Collection: Museum Ludwig, Cologne. © 2022 Georg Baselitz/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin. Courtesy of Archiv Georg Baselitz.

The Big Night Down the Drain reflects Baselitz’s state of mind in the early 1960s when he “felt like a sensation of disgust or hatred” had moved him “to create something different,”33 resulting in this painting. It reflected his caustic, nihilistic assessment of postwar German culture, poetically and forcefully expressed in the Pandämonisches Manifest (“Pandemonium Manifesto”), which Baselitz wrote in 1961–62. In short, he railed against the impoverished state of German art at that moment. Baselitz resented the overdependence on French and American art styles in addition to the paucity of German artists after so many had left Germany as a result of Nazism. From 1964 to 1968, Baselitz painted a series titled Helden or Neue Typen (“Heroes” or “New Types”), comprised of paintings of oversized hulking torsos of lost warriors with disproportionately small heads. In Vorwärts Wind (“Headwind”), 1966, (Figure 4.6) a vulnerable soldier with outstretched arms, tattered military garb hanging open to expose his chest, abdomen, and genitals, is painted in a thick impasto of loose brushstrokes in brown, fleshy pink, and red. His tiny face with eyes gazing upward as if in pain contrasts sharply with the monumental frontality of the body. His left leg stands in a river of red (representing blood) curving forward from a fallen baton. This dejected, defeated soldier leans against a tree, a symbol of both the crucifixion and the mythologized German forest. The jumpy line work and blotchy areas of color bring melancholy,

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anxiety, and despair to the fore where the broken soldier is trapped between our eyes and the picture plane.34 Although Baselitz said that the hero idea came from French and Russian literature, the “heroes” appear like personifications of the postwar German psyche. Simply put, these paintings could not have emerged in any other environment but that of a defeated nation, where the concept of hero is blasphemy. Figure 4.6: Georg Baselitz, Vor-

wärts Wind (“Headwind”), 1966. Oil on canvas, 63 3/4 × 51 1/5 in. (162 × 130 cm). Stroeher Collection © 2022 Georg Baselitz/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Friedrich Rosenstiel, Cologne. Courtesy of Archiv Georg Baselitz.

In 1966, Baselitz moved from the city to the rural town of Osthofen in Rhineland-Palatinate with his wife Elke and their two children. There, he made a huge change that has persisted in his work to this day. Then in 1969, he started to paint all his images upside down, not right side up and then inverted, but actually painted an inverted image. He wanted to neutralize the message and bring more attention to the elements of painting in their most brutal expressions. As he explains, [The] ornamental juxtaposition of disharmonies may perhaps create the impression of despair, but all it’s doing is deferring, delaying coziness. The strange thing one’s learned is that after some time from this disharmony beauty sets in again, in other words harmony.35

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Baselitz was pushing ugliness to the limit to see if beauty would emerge. He found that it does. Despite what seems like intentional disharmony, strange changes in scale, awkward placement of forms, and the absence of the pictorial markers which give the viewer a frame of reference, the intensity of the color, dramatic paint application, and the mix of line and flat area of color in Baselitz’s work are guided by the formal rigor and coherence as an entity separate from observation or realism. That freedom of expression is beautiful, even as it challenges the norms of beauty in painting. Baselitz’s inverted image is off-putting for any viewer. Artist David Salle described it succinctly, writing, “Baselitz paints the world upside down, like a human retina in reverse; his visual field is upended and projected, one mark at a time, onto the canvas. It’s a demanding perceptual conversion, like walking backward through a crowd.”36 Curator Rudi Fuchs pointed out that it eliminates the natural center of gravity and changing the position in the space of the motif as it spears in the picture plane, he deliberately turned it into a construction.”37 Further, the inverted image brings attention to the fact that you are looking at a painting and, as such, you are more likely to consider every formal element, color, shape, proportion, scale, and composition in a new way. This change in perception is far removed from reading an image as a descriptive, narrative, symbolic, or illusionistic rendering. Baselitz said, [Inverting the image was] the best way to empty the content out of what one paints. When one paints a portrait upside down, it is impossible to say: “this portrait represents my wife, and I gave her a particular expression.” This method leaves no possible room for literary interpretations.38

These generally accepted analyses are true to a certain extent, whereby Baselitz’s upside-down paintings result in seeing the formal elements rather than the content, but this is not always the viewer’s first response. When looking at a Baselitz painting, the natural inclination is first to decipher what the inverted image represents before studying the composition. A tension is created both in figuring out what and where the image is and in seeing it as part of a larger pictorial design. In this way, Baselitz’s paintings exemplify one of the, if not the most important, tendencies in painting of the 1980s: the melding of abstraction and imagery. This connects him not only with other German painters, A. R. Penck, Jörg Immendorff, Marcus Lüpertz among others, but also artists such as Julian Schnabel from New York and Francesco Clemente from Italy.

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Even though Baselitz wanted to turn the image into a motif, removed from associational content, his work does not prevent the viewer from making those connections. For example, he painted several images of the eagle in his career, which have been interpreted as political because the image has long been associated with Germanic history, having been blended with the swastika and adopted by the Third Reich in 1935 as its emblem. Baselitz claimed that the eagle has “no programmatic significance.”39 In the 1972 work Fingermalerei—Der Alder (“Finger Painting—The Eagle”), one of his works created by moving paint around with his fingers rather than a brush, Baselitz give us an expressionistic rendering of an inverted, wind-tossed eagle with feathers flying as it seems to plunge to its death, an apt metaphor for Germany’s defeat. Throughout the 1970s, Baselitz moved from a kind of impressionistic style of realism to more abstracted treatments. The inverted paintings from the early 1970s included portraiture, still life, landscape, and animals—all traditional subjects. In a Fingermalerei—Birken (“Finger Painting—Birch Trees”), 1972, the landscape is realistic enough that it could be read as a reflection in a body of water. From 1977 through the 1980s, imagery became the springboard for formal experimentation. In his early paintings, the viewer wonders why the scene, portrait, and so forth are upside down. From 1977 on, the viewer is doubly engaged by first deciphering what the image represents and then questioning why it is upside down. Art historical perspectives, past and present, played a role in Baselitz’s stylistic evolution as well. With Die Ährenleserin (“The Gleaner”), a monumental painting completed in 1978, (Figure 4.7) Baselitz extended the recycling of a famous image in art history; the subject was a Van Gogh–inspired worker harvesting grain, though Van Gogh was copying Jean-François Millet’s 1854 painting also titled The Gleaners. In Baselitz’s version, however, the peasants search for food in a somber, if not existential, ground comprised of black-and-brown areas of raw paint applications with flames encroaching from the upper left and a small orange sun shape below. It looks as though it was painted in a frenzy. The term for this style is “painterly,” which “refers to the application of paint in a ‘loose’ or less than controlled manner, resulting in the appearance of visible brushstrokes within the finished painting.”40 Inspiration came from painterly masters Chaïm Soutine and Willem de Kooning. Baselitz had seen Soutine’s famous Carcass of Beef in Amsterdam in which the materiality of paint is torturously celebrated. And he had noticed the brushwork of Willem de Kooning—the consummate painter’s painter—as early as 1958. In 2014, simulating de Kooning’s style, Baselitz created paintings for a Gagosian gallery exhibition

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Figure 4.7: Georg Baselitz, Die Ährenleserin

(“The Gleaner”), 1978. Oil and egg tempera on canvas, 129 7/8 × 98 3/8 inches (330 × 250 cm). Collection: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum, New York © 2022 Georg Baselitz/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Pace, Zindman/Fremont, New York. Courtesy Archiv Georg Baselitz.

titled Farewell Bill, a significant homage to the Dutch-born leader of the American Abstract Expressionists. The art world labeled Baselitz and most 1980s painters as Neo-Expressionist, positioning it as a subset of Postmodernism, even though theoretical voices railed that painting was retardataire. I propose that the labeling was a key part of art marketing in the 1980s. Collectors were lured in with assertions that they would be collecting “contemporary art history,” adding to the escalating value of the works they would purchase. As the art market entered the go-go years of the early 1980s, Baselitz and other European artists’ work appeared in New York, London, and other venues outside of their native countries. In 1981, Baselitz’s first one-person exhibitions in America, held concurrently at Xavier Fourcade and Sonnabend Gallery, were met with outstanding reviews. As a result, the Baselitz market took off, especially in America. Many writers claimed that the painterly images of Baselitz and other German postwar artists that appeared in the 1960s and continued throughout the 1980s were fashioned after German Expressionism, an early Modern style that flourished just before the First World War, and a major part of German artistic heritage that Hitler tried to obliterate. Many of the great German Expressionists were members of Brücke (“Bridge”), a group of young avant-garde artists, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Emil

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Nolde. The term “Neo-Expressionism” seemed a more valid term in Germany than in the United States or Italy because “Expressionism” was a part of the art historical designation “German Expressionism.” However, the notion that German artists consciously reinstated the previously banned German style is an oversimplification, and indeed, most German artists claim that was not their goal. Instead, artists were interested in creating something new that would come from the time and circumstances in which they lived, not from an earlier period. Baselitz was one of the artists credited with reviving the art of German Expressionism, even though he had not been shaped by this lineage in his earlier works. As a result of these claims, he purposely studied the Expressionists in the 1980s, primarily members of German-based Brücke, which was founded in 1905. Baselitz explains, I have never been interested in renewing the world through the vehicle of art. Nevertheless, when you step back and consider my post-1980 work, there is no doubt that it has a relationship to paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde. These works represent my reaction to expressionist art during the eighties, when the theme of expressionism came to the fore in America.41

This change in Baselitz’s style and artistic influences can be seen in Oangenesser (“Orange Eater”), 1981–82, a series made for New York audiences, regarded as the best works of his career. This opinion is shared by David Salle, who wrote, “[T]here is a certitude and a clarity about them, the end point of a hard-won evolution, as well as a wiliness.”42 Scaled down to the size of the German Expressionist paintings, the Orange Eater and Drinkers paintings are portraits with flat areas of vivid color, reminiscent of the Brücke artist who painted with bold colors such as intense citrus yellow and sickish greens. Similar to Die Brücke paintings, compact forms, evenly saturated colors, and broad brushstrokes brought Baselitz to a moment of synthesis resulting in concentrated pictorial weightiness and intensity. In Orangenesser IX (“Orange Eater IX”), 1981, (Figure 4.8) all lines and areas of color seem to lock into the orange in the center, in the mouth of the inverted upper torso (perhaps a self-portrait) that looks like a cross between a punk rocker and court jester with clumpy long spikes of hair. White, turquoise, and burnt sienna tightly frame the face and arms, outlined in thick black strokes which disappear into abstraction and lead the eye back to the orange center. The brutish, raw brushstrokes, a staple of Brücke painting, also informed Baselitz’s foray into crudely carved wooden sculpture which began in 1980.

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Figure 4.8: Georg Baselitz, Orangenesser IX (“The Orange Eater IX”), 1981. Oil and tempera on canvas, 57 1/2 × 44 7/8 in. (146 × 144 cm). Private Collection © 2022 Georg Baselitz/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Friedrich Rosenstiel, Cologne. Courtesy of Archiv Georg Baselitz.

Baselitz quickly moved from the moment of synthesis embodied by this series to surprising experimentation with patterns and the integration of figures into these patterns. For example, Adieu, 1982, which is almost 10 feet wide, shows two figures juxtaposed over a yellow-and-white checkerboard; it came from a chance thought: “[A] starter’s flag of a grand prix race was floating in my imagination.”43 As he worked on the painting, he adjusted the two figures, moving them further apart, leaving only the pattern of rectangles in the center which would be a dead spot in the canvas without the pull of the two figures on either side. The figure on the right is frontal with part of the legs and torso chopped off at the side and bottom of the canvas. In contrast, the striding figure on the left is in profile with its unattached head suspended above. Compositional complexities continued in two large paintings from 1983 that directly reference the Brücke artists: Nachtessen in Dresden (“Supper at Dresden”) (Figure 4.9) and the Der Brückechor (“The Brücke Chorus”) (Figure 4.10), both horizontal formats that were unusual for Baselitz. He anachronistically extended the truncated tradition of early German Expressionism, so despised by the führer. That was not his intention, however. By his account, “That was something I had to do […] As a German, you have to show that you are a German. I don’t shout ‘Sieg Heil,’ but I did paint the Brückechor (Die Brücke Chorus).”44 In these works, channeling the jewel-like tones of Emil Nolde, Baselitz’s skill as a brilliant colorist is on display. The yellow in The Brücke Chorus is so intense it radiates outward against the black and blue on the right side of this monumental painting. The three leading artists of Brücke are positioned next to each other minimally rendered in a tumult of brushstrokes. On the right, Emil Nolde is portrayed huddled over, with head bowed and painted in black and blue. Nolde, the German Expressionist member of Brücke, was banned from painting by the Third Reich, even though he was a card-carrying Nazi and raging anti-Semite. The head of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, much admired by the group, is right side up and floats between Nolde and Karl SchmidtRottluff, the yellow figure whose hands are held in prayer. On the left with arms downward is a third artist of the Brücke group, Otto Müller. All the heads have the recognizable oval open mouths as in the iconic Edvard Munch painting The Scream. Munch was idolized by Baselitz and was very much on his mind during this period. Supper at Dresden shows, from left to right, Kurt Schmidt-Rottluff and E. L. Kirchner sitting alongside a body sharing heads of Otto Müller and Erich Heckel. Baselitz lines up the painters in front of a table, recalling the figure placements in Last Supper paintings,45 most especially Emil Nolde’s iconic version painted

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Figure 4.9: Georg Baselitz, Nachtessen in Dresden (“Supper at Dresden”), 1983. Oil on canvas, 177 1/6 × 110 1/4 in. (450 × 280 cm). Collection: Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich © 2022 Georg Baselitz/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Courtesy of Kunsthaus Zürich.

Figure 4.10: Georg Baselitz, Der Brückechor (“The Brücke Chorus”), 1983. Oil on canvas, 177 1/6 × 110 1/4 in. (450 × 280 cm). Private Collection © 2022 Georg Baselitz/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

in 1909. Thick brushstrokes in tonally matched shades of pink, blue, and black recall Van Gogh, who is, after all, the father of all Expressionist paint application. In homage to the German Expressionist style, Baselitz scales up the dynamic oscillations between the figures and the areas of color, another hallmark of Brücke painting. Throughout the 1980s, Baselitz probed the vocabulary of painterly gestures. In their gawkiness, his brushstrokes resembled Philip Guston’s transitional paintings when he moved from abstraction to imagery. Steven Ellis’s comments on Guston’s paintings could be applied to Baselitz work of this time: The strokes, as everyone points out, are alive—not merely in a formal way, but mysteriously as a psychic presence, a physical record of the hand moving in thought. You can’t fake that transmutation of the inert matter of paint into the gossamer stuff of thought, and when it’s real, it’s magic.46

Baselitz’s twenty-panel painting titled ’45, 1989, refers to the date, May 8, 1945, when Germany capitulated, a moment in that would be known as Stunde Null (“Zero Hour”). The work consists of twenty carved and painted panels, which could be arranged like a medieval German altarpiece. When shown at Pace Gallery in 1990, they were hung next to each other in an impressive 106-foot continuum. Into each of the wood panels, Baselitz chiseled a grid pattern before covering them in cadmium yellow egg tempera. He then painted in a decidedly childlike manner, smudgy and barely recognizable images of a woman’s face on each with a dark brownish red background. The grid is exposed or revealed with varying emphasis and force in each panel, altering the balance between the face and geometric pattern. The critic Thomas McEvilley positions these works as a fusion of painting and sculpture. Baselitz’s major sculptural works also date to the 1980s, entirely expected if one considers his “painterly” cuts into wood as the sculptural equivalent of brushstrokes in painting. The twenty panels of ’45 showing variations of an odd watery image of a woman’s face do not do justice to the important theme suggested by the title of the work. Rather, they function as a coda to his impressive output during the 1980s, even as it signals a change in style toward works with thin lines, softer coloration, and pictorial confusion. Although it is a striking work, it lacks the compositional and emotional punch one had come to expect from Baselitz. Paradoxically, as Baselitz was dismantling the narrative or symbolic meaning of the painted image, emphasizing the formal elements over interpretation,

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he did an about-face and sent a sculpture to the 1980 Venice Biennale that centered on the abhorrent meaning of the image. Modell für eine Skulptur (“Model for a Sculpture”), 1980, a large, roughly hewn, wooden figure still connected to a block of wood leaning back with arm rigidly extended in Hitler’s salute, was Baselitz’s first foray into sculpture. He used chainsaws and chisels to retain the coarseness of the wood, eschewing refinement in favor of hideousness. At the 1980 Biennale, Anselm Kiefer, with Baselitz, brought a wider audience artists’ content directed to Germany’s Nazi past. He gave a list of verbs, all related to the changing of a structure, as the inscrutable exhibition title: Verbrennen, verholzen, versenken, versanden (“Burning, Lignifying, Sinking, Silting”). Is Kiefer inviting the viewer to see the installation in totality, rather than just separate elements? As noted by art historian Richard Davey, [Kiefer’s works were] among the first by a contemporary German artist to reference National Socialism, and they appalled many critics, who felt that Kiefer’s associated a tragic beauty with the Third Reich, some even suggesting that Kiefer was a neo-Nazi.47

Germans criticized the overt Germanness of his subject matter while the American press and collectors launched a Kiefer love fest. Many of Kiefer’s works are in American collections. In Venice, several paintings and photographs from 1975 featuring the odd image of a bathtub were titled Unternehmen Seelöw (“Operation Sea Lion”), the code name for an abandoned German naval and amphibian attack on England during the Second World War. With no naval battle experience, German preparations were childishly inept; they used toy boats in a bathtub to plot maneuvers, inspiring the subject matter for Kiefer’s works. It was also a personal reference for Kiefer. He retrieved a discarded zinc bathtub from a rooftop, the kind that his grandmother had in her attic, a hideous souvenir from Hitler’s sanitary living campaign in which one was given to each family. Layering themes and possible meanings is a prevailing quality of Kiefer’s corpus, and he used it masterfully to explore the postwar German consciousness. In the lower part of Operation Sea Lion, 1975, an oil painting exceeding 9 feet in length, flames surge upward from toy boats in the bathtub situated in a ground of loosely brushed browns and golds that suggest fallow land. In the upper third of the canvas, in contrast to the large, stark image of the bath, tiny helmets and faces represent multitudes of soldiers in rows that, as they recede into deep space, morph into tiny dabs of paint. Three empty red chairs

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sit on top of what appears to be a glass armature above the soldiers. Kiefer uses the chairs not only to stabilize the composition but also to symbolize the Holy Trinity, a subject he had explored in previous works. Religion often emerges as an underlying theme in Kiefer’s work, including Catholicism, the religion in which he was raised; the Gnostic sects, stemming from JudeoChristian beliefs in the first century CE; Jewish Mysticism; and kabbalah. His investigation into Nazi imagery was also personal as it was the very recent history of his country into which he was born. Kiefer was born in a cellar during an Allied raid in 1945 in Donaueschingen, a city in the Black Forest region, near two sources of the Danube River. Like Baselitz, Kiefer was taught nothing of Nazism while growing up, and he recalls, [T]he story of the Third Reich was practically never dealt with at school. […] My first close contact with history came through listening to a record, when I was still at school, at the age of seventeen. The record had been brought out by the Americans for the purpose of “re-education”: it contains the original speeches of Hitler, Göring, Goebbels. I was deeply shocked by them, in particular those of Hitler.48

Kiefer studied law at the University of Freiburg before switching to art and studying at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. During 1971 and 72, he spent time in Dusseldorf where he engaged in discussions with Joseph Beuys, whose critiques of his work were encouraging: Kiefer’s use of materials and his multivalent approach to content were shaped in part through their conversations. As a young artist, he resisted the watered-down versions of American and French styles of painting. His innate originality surfaced early in his development. When he was a student, Kiefer confronted German history in a manner that exposed the omissions and deceits of his early education. Based on his travels abroad, he created Besetzungen (“Occupations”), 1969, (Figure 4.11) a series of manipulated photographs of himself standing in various locations with one arm stiffly raised in the Sieg Heil salute. Lampooning as sightseer’s snapshots, the photos laid bare societal taboos stemming from shame and guilt. For example, in one photo, Kiefer stands in front of the Roman Colosseum, a reference to Rome and its fall, while a disinterested tourist inadvertently mocks the ceremonious gesture by not even noticing him. Germany’s cultural past is parodied in his replication of artist Caspar David Friedrich’s canonical painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”), 1818, an example of German Romanticism showing a man in a puffy shirt wistfully looking out to an endless sea as waves crash on the

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Figure 4.11: Anselm Kiefer, documentation

of his actions, Besetzungen (“Occupations”), 1969. © 2022 Anselm Kiefer/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Atelier Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

rocks in front of him. Humanity in harmony with the transcendental universe is a primary theme in the aesthetics, philosophies, and literature of German Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This contextualizes Occupations—photographed in his apartment, dressed in his father’s military overcoat and riding boots, Kiefer salutes while standing on a submerged stool in a bathtub full of water, creating the allusion that he is walking on water, a nod to Hitler’s megalomaniacal workings. The staged photos were described by his professors at Karlsruhe when in 1969 he submitted them as part of his final degree. Ironically, the one professor who championed the works was an Auschwitz survivor. Its publication as a photo-essay in the Conceptual art journal Interfunktionen in 1975 caused a major scandal. What makes the Occupations series particularly disturbing is the blatant presentation of a Nazi emblem in a cool, amateurish style, akin to Conceptual art of the 1960s. Moreover, he displays images representing the Third Reich in an almost comical manner. Does it heighten or detract from serious content as they “operate on a thin line between farce and catharsis”? 49As the curator of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mark Rosenthal introduced Kiefer to the American audience. He pointed out, “[H]is appearance in a series of staged tableau recalls, too, the manifestations of performance art and happenings of that period.”50

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Figure 4.12: Anselm Kiefer,

Jeder Mensch steht unter siener Himmelskugel (“Everyone Stands under His Own Dome of Heaven”), 1970. Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper, 15 3/4 × 18 7/8 in. (40 × 48 cm) © 2022 Anselm Kiefer/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Digital image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery © 2014 The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence/ © Anselm Kiefer.

Similarly, a menacing salute seems incongruous when rendered delicately in Jeder Mensch steht unter seiner Himmelskugel (“Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven”), 1970, (Figure 4.12) a small conventional watercolor, a medium Kiefer executed skillfully. A miniscule man with his arm outstretched in the Nazi salute appears harmless and doll-like, encased in a transparent pale blue dome on the background of a cream-colored wintery field, dusted with snow and nuanced markings of frozen stalks. The insidious gesture in a poetic setting is both lovely and macabre, making a clear and singular interpretation nearly impossible. The 1993 installation piece titled 20 Years of Solitude (“20 Jahre Einsamkeit”), displayed at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City, pinpoints a definitive time frame for Kiefer’s themes related to Nazism and German intellectual history. The focus of the exhibition was a pile of recycled prints, photographs, paintings, and drawings created between the years 1971 and 1991, all stacked up to the ceiling in a quasi-pyramidal shape. Also included in the exhibition were two tables of ledgers stained by Kiefer’s semen that garnered much attention from shocked viewers. Kiefer’s approach to Nazism during those years was holistic. He tried to understand how a culture that produced visionaries such as Wagner and Heidegger also produced Hitler. He examined his own questions about the Holocaust as well:

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I wanted to ask myself the question: am I a fascist? It’s very important, and one cannot give a swift answer. The authority, the spirit of competition, the feeling of superiority […] these are aspects of me just as they are of each and every one of us. One must choose the right path. To say that I am one thing or another is too simple. I want to depict the experiences before the response.51

Through the 1970s and 1980s, Kiefer referenced Nazism while making correspondences to broader themes, including Catholicism, Jewish mysticism, and Gnosticism mentioned previously, as well as Babylonian and Egyptian mythology and the literature and folklore pertaining to the German forest. His art is always about more than one thing, obliquely linking modes of thought from a variety of cultural, ideological, and historical models. Remember that Kiefer’s exploration of Nazism was always part of the larger context of German intellectual history and culture as a whole. Deutschlands Geisteshelden (“Germany’s Spiritual Heroes”), 1973, (Figure 4.13) an enormous painting on six strips of burlap measuring over 22 feet wide, shows a heavily beamed wood interior reminiscent of a German hunting lodge. The piece is one of many paintings from his Dachboden-Bilder series (“Attic”), based on the wooden attic of a former German schoolhouse in Odenwald where he moved with his wife in 1971. In this series, he focused on wood as a material in architecture and in the forest. Under flaming sconces on deeply receding side walls, written in charcoal are names of key intellectuals in German history, including Joseph Beuys, Martin Heidegger, Richard Wagner, Arnold Böcklin, Adalbert Stifter, Caspar David Friedrich, and Theodor Storm. In the kind of room where the spoils of Nazi looting might have been stored, an atmosphere of danger created by the fire and wood make it look as if the room will go up in flames at any moment; the lower parts are made darker as if it has already been singed. Per Mark Rosenthal, fire as an archetype, in both its destructive and creative powers, is an essential part of Kiefer’s art from the early 1970s on.52 Kiefer also alluded to the role of fire in alchemy throughout the 1980s. Wood resonates emotionally for Kiefer. Stories of his infancy tell of his relatives taking him into the forest during the day to protect him from Allied air raids. Tales such as the Legend of Edda, a twelfth-century Icelandic folklore that inspired many German forest stories, fascinated Kiefer. A related theme, German love of the land, although historically associated with German nationalism, underscores many of Kiefer’s paintings. In the 1970s, Kiefer used stretches of barren landscapes on large canvases where diagonal rows of plantings or centered paths

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Figure 4.13: Anselm Kiefer, Deutschlands Geisteshelden (“Germany’s Spiritual Heroes”), 1973. Oil and charcoal on burlap mounted on canvas, 120 7/8 × 269 1/2 in. (307 × 682 cm) © 2022 Anselm Kiefer/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Atelier Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

as perspectival orthogonals dramatically moving back in space. In the Märkische Heide (“Heath of the Brandenburg March”), 1974, an empty road recedes deeply in space, vertically cutting in two what is supposed to be an uncultivated field in Brandenburg, the place where Nazi rallies were held in 1933. Is the road that stretches deep into the distance a metaphor for the heinous path of Nazism from the days of the early rallies until the end of the war? In the 1980s, Kiefer continues with landscapes often made from unconventional materials to create complicated textures. In the 1982 painting Nürnberg (“Nuremberg”) (Figure 4.14), the city for which it is named is barely visible in the distance behind a ploughed field. The words Festspiel-wiese, festival ground, are scrawled on the upper right corner, a reference to the large festivals which were held there before the war. In the prewar era, massive propaganda rallies were held in Nuremberg, and after the war, it became known for the Nuremberg Trials condemning Nazi war criminals. Deep furrows of frozen plowed land create diagonals ending at a distant point in contrast to straw meshed into acrylic paint which seems to explode in the forefront. The effect is dramatic and chilling. Although the many sprawling landscapes are clearly images of battlefields, for Kiefer, they represent the earth as a kind of manure which will transmute into a living substance. Burnt straw becomes ash which returns to the earth—also a reference to a regenerative cycle. Nuremburg is also the setting for Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger, the title of several Kiefer paintings. As Hitler’s favorite

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Figure 4.14: Anselm Kiefer, Nürnberg (“Nuremberg”), 1982. Oil, acrylic, emulsion, and straw on canvas, 110 1/4 × 149 5/8 in. (280 × 380 cm). The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection © 2022 Anselm Kiefer/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Douglas M. Parker Studio, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

opera, it was often played at official Nazi events. By giving his piece this name, Kiefer makes connections between German culture and Nazism. In the 1980s, using unusual and symbolic materials, Kiefer constructed works that challenged traditional definitions of painting in order to confront the Holocaust directly. With imagery of train tracks, Nazi architecture, and scorched earth, as well as imaginary landscapes inspired by the poetry of Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, Kiefer’s paintings take on a somber, gritty, gray-brown-charcoal palette with touches of red on surfaces that look like they have been beaten down by natural causes. A melancholy aura prevails when disturbing subject matter is powerfully expressed in monumental, dramatic works, which can only be found outside the lineage of Modernist painting. Kiefer relies on materials and photographs rather than the Modernism playbook of abstraction, figure–ground relationships, or emphasis of the flatness of the picture plane as painting. Kiefer described his method by saying, I’m not talented enough to be a painter. I’m not like Picasso or Matisse. I need nature to help me, to collaborate with me. I use the weather, the heat, and the cold, sometimes leaving my canvases out in the rain. I put acid, earth, and water on them. I don’t use conventional colour. I don’t even use paint. I use substances. What you see is red for example, is rust, just rust. I have pools of acids, chemicals, and steel all over my studio.53

Unconventional materials were conduits of meaning for Kiefer. He believed these elements would bring their own intrinsic spirit to the work. Traditional

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oil on canvas was replaced by lead, sand, straw, plants, clay, plaster, human hair, and ashes, often affixed with oil paint, emulsion, and shellac. These materials, mushed together, created a thick, fragile impasto—a conservator’s nightmare as bits of the brittle surfaces often fall off. Photographs attached to canvas or burlap are also used to great effect. Kiefer became fully engaged with the writings of Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan, particularly the excruciatingly sorrowful poem “Todesfugue” (“Death Fugue”), written in 1945 drawing from his experiences in a work camp until 1944. Using mesmeric repetitive cadences, Celan began each stanza with three lines that begin with the words “Black milk,” a symbol for the toxic labors of genocide in a concentration camp: Black milk of morning we drink you at night we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime we drink and drink

Celan’s story of the death camps is told through two German prototypes: the blonde Arian woman Margarete, and the Jewish woman Shulamite, whose hair, once black, is burned to ghostly “ashen.” Death, the “blue-eyed master from Germany,” daydreams of Margarete while summoning Shulamite to dance, work, and dig graves. The name Shulamite, meaning “peaceful,” represents Jewish womanhood in Celan’s poem. Similarly, in the Goethe and Wagner versions of Faust, Margarete (also called Gretchen) represents the innocent woman whose goodness saves her from the fires of hell, even after she succumbs to the lusty Faust. Repeatedly, Kiefer linked specific Nazi horrors to characters deeply rooted in Germany’s cultural heritage. He delved deeper than just the war years: I cannot imagine German culture without Judaism. Everything that makes German philosophy and poetry interesting to the world is a combination of Germany and Judaism. One thing is that Germans committed the immense crime of killing Jews. The other is that they amputated themselves.54

Straw played a key role in Kiefer’s response to Celan’s poem. Rather than taking bodily form, Margarete is represented by straw in paintings such as Margarethe, 1981, (Figure 4.15) made with over a dozen long, vertical shafts of straw, visually echoing Celan’s oft-repeated phrase “your golden hair, ” The flames atop the curving straw tendrils signify Margarete’s destruction of Shulamite, as does the ashen grey background. In Dein goldenes Haar, Margarete

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Figure 4.15: Anselm Kiefer,

Margarethe, 1981. Oil, straw, emulsion, and gelatin silver print on linen, 114 1/4 × 157 3/4 in. (290 × 400 cm) © 2022 Anselm Kiefer/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

(“Your Golden Hair Margarete”), 1980, the title is written in black graffiti-like script above a black line, echoing the arch of a sheave of straw affixed to a canvas showing furrows on barren farmland. The diagonal lines recede swiftly to a vanishing point in the top left corner of an extremely high horizon line which makes the landscape confrontational and claustrophobic, rather than panoramic and lyrical. Using fragile materials and imagery with multiple associations, Kiefer gave us not a literal translation of the poem but rather a visual equivalency. It is possible that works inspired by Celan’s poem actually move away from traditional painting because the horrifying subject matter required a new medium. In his style, more craft-like than virtuosic painting, Kiefer’s work shows the process of production. “[His] art reached maturity in the early ’80s, whereas earlier, content had dominated the viewer’s perception of it, now the physical materiality and visual complexity of its surfaces became major sources of interests,” writes Mark Rosenthal.55 From 1980 to 1983, Kiefer continued to mine the history of the Third Reich, during which time he used images of Nazi architecture in massive works that looked more like stage backdrops than paintings. He brought Germany’s gruesome history out of the shadows by using complex combinations of acrylic, oil, shellac, woodcuts, and photography to manipulate the surfaces, often making the imposing architectural structures look like ghostly, stark, old ruins. This visually transformed the architectural setting, once intended to be an impressive stage for Hitler and his soldiers, into a memorial to artists in Dem unbekannten Maler (“To the Unknown Painter”), 1983. The building is based on Albert

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Figure 4.16: Anselm Kiefer, Sulamith (“Shulamite”), 1983. Oil, emulsion, shellac, acrylic paint, woodcut, and straw on canvas 114 1/2 × 146 1/2 in. (290.8 × 372.1 cm) © 2022 Anselm Kiefer/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Atelier Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Speer’s design for an outdoor courtyard for the chancellery building. A palette, which symbolizes the artist, stands in the space where Hitler or one of his men would have stood to deliver some rousing address. This is not the first time in his art that Kiefer made the uncomfortable linkage between soldier and artist, suggesting a more personal inquiry. In Shulamite (“Sulamith”), 1983, (Figure 4.16) Kiefer converted a photograph of Wilhelm Kreis’s fascist design for Funeral Hall for the Great German of Soldiers in the Berlin Hall to a blackened crypt-like space with a furnace, recalling Nazi acts of mass cremations. A series of diminishing brick arches moves the eye slowly and ceremoniously to a centered vanishing point where seven candles arise from a faint sketch of the Jewish menorah. Kiefer sought to repurpose the Nazi buildings as Christians transformed pagan temples into churches. Paul Celan expert Andrea Lauterwein notes that in this painting, Kiefer “transforms a space dedicated to the Nazi cult of the dead into a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust,” and it acts as a “memorial to the one single memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust in all of West Germany’s slaughtered Jews, when in 1983, no such memorial existed in Germany.”56 Kiefer understood that Hitler linked art and architecture with Nazi ideologies, and became an underlying theme in much of his work. Hitler banned art which spoke to emotional, internal, and independent states of mind, as did much of early-twentieth-century Modernism—E. L. Kirchner, George Grosz, and Franz Marc are good examples—and allowed only realist painting illustrating Nazis conspicuously jovial in both work and play.

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After 1933, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels quickly gained control of news media, arts, and information. Hitler instituted a false lineage of German art of the 1930s with Classicism, generally perceived as a signifier of civilization’s highest achievements. The outcome was a Parthenon on steroids. What was lost in terms of balance and ideal classical proportions was gained in terms of overbearing pomposity and scale. Alluding to Hitler’s manipulative use of art, Kiefer asked a core question, “How can anyone be a [German] artist since the elements of the German artistic and cultural identity irremediably compromised by their ability to satisfy and serve the Third Reich itself?”57 In the late 1970s, Kiefer used lead in books, sculptures, and paintings; from the mid-1980s on, the material became his signature surface, one he often used with photography. Lead had an aura for Kiefer, an attribute often ascribed to his works. He was so captivated by its strange, nonreflective grey surface that in 1985, when the Cologne Cathedral was being renovated, he purchased all the lead strips from the roof. He took interest in the material properties of lead, sometimes treating it with acids to initiate chemical changes that resulted in evocative colorations and patterns. Kiefer defends this usage by saying, Lead affects me more than all other metals. When you investigate such a feeling, you see that lead has always been a material for ideas. In alchemy, this metal stood on the lowest rung of the process of extracting gold. In addition, lead was bluntly heavy and connected to Saturn, that hideous man—on the other hand it contains silver and was also already the proof of other spiritual levels.58

Lead is also associated with Saturn, the planet of melancholia that inspired many works such as the Age of Saturn (“Saturnzeit”), 1988, and Melancholia, 1990–91. In Wölundlied (mit Flügel) (“Wayland’s Song [with Wing]”), 1982, (Figure 4.17) Kiefer attached a lead wing on a landscape consisting of oil, acrylic paint, emulsion, resin, lead, and straw on canvas which was then mounted on photography and canvas. Ironically twisting the Germanic stories based on the Nordic Edda legends, Wayland (also called Völund) is the evil sorcerer-blacksmith whose wondrous weapons, made of gold and silver, were foolproof in battle. After a spree of murder and rape Wayland was revenged by Nidud, who cast him to a remote island and cut the tendons in his feet whereupon the lame Wayland casts magical wings and flies away. Kiefer’s wings of lead will never fly, and the story of power and revenge has no resolution. Lead steered Kiefer into several areas, including alchemy. He titled a work Athanor, 1983–84, (Figure 4.18) a term used for the furnace in alchemic

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Figure 4.17: Anselm Kiefer, Wölundlied (mit Flügel) (“Wayland’s Song [with Wing]”), 1982. Oil, acrylic paint, emulsion, resin, lead, and straw on canvas 110 × 149 1/2 in. (280 × 380 cm) © 2022 Anselm Kiefer/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Atelier Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Figure 4.18: Anselm Kiefer, Athanor, 1986. Installation view, Venice Biennale, 1986. Oil,

acrylic, emulsion, shellac, and straw on photograph mounted on canvas, 88 5/8 × 149 5/8 in. (225 × 380 cm) © 2021 Anselm Kiefer/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Atelier Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

transmutations. The work, which is 12 feet long and made of oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, straw, and photographs mounted on canvas, features a badly burned building based on another Speer design for an outdoor courtyard of Hitler’s Chancellery. Typical of Kiefer’s practice, multiple meanings are possible. Mark Rosenthal gave us one: Indeed, Athanor has a second level of meaning. The title written across the Nazi building is descriptive of an oven; as if utilizing an alchemical approach, Nazis pathologically believed that in burning the Jews they were involve led in a “purifying” process. Kiefer’s meaning is so black that one cringes, first, at the pretense of the Nationalist Socialists, then at the artist, a German too, who is filled with the demons of his occupation and his nation.59

Lead features prominently in what are perhaps the most chilling images from Kiefer’s work of the 1980s, those of train tracks. Kiefer remarked, “[W]e see railway tracks somewhere, and we think of Auschwitz. And that won’t change in a hurry.”60 To this day, in Auschwitz, visitors are shown a map of European railroad routes during the war, all of which end there. Tracks first appeared in Kiefer’s work in 1977, in a work entitled Siegfried’s Difficult Way to Bründhilde. Later in the 1980s, the reference to the Nazi transport of Jews to the death camps is chillingly blunt. Eisensteig (“Iron Path”), 1986, (Figure 4.19) a work over 12 feet wide, is made of oil, acrylic, and emulsion on canvas with olive tree branches, iron casts in the shape of climbing shoes (like those used by telegraph workers), and lead strips on the canvas. The train tracks move vertically through ravaged lands, creating two sides of a triangle converging in a distant vanishing point where the switching paths divide, as they did in Auschwitz. In the center of the high horizon line, clouds of gold leaf fill the skies above, a glimpse of beauty in a deathly vista. The materials suggest another reading: Alchemic symbolism is encoded into the painting through the lead rock, iron shoes and gold cloud of smoke. These materials recalled the alchemists’ project of turning base matter such as lead enters into iron silver and (finally) gold: a metamorphosis that was understood to prefigure humanity’s ultimate spiritual redemption.61

Are the gold orbs in the sky a symbol of transcendence and redemption for the persecuted? It is worth noting that the documentary film Shoah, which showed train tracks meeting and diverging at Auschwitz-Birkenau, was released in 1985.

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Figure 4.19: Anselm Kiefer, Eisensteig, 1986. Emulsion, oil, acrylic, gold leaf, olive tree branch-

es, iron, and lead on canvas, 86 5/8 × 149 5/8 × 11 in. (220 × 380 × 27.9 cm) © 2022 Anselm Kiefer/Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Uwe Seyl. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Additionally, the famous photograph of the same scene, published by Stanislaw Mucha in 1945, was well known, presumably by Kiefer as well. If ever there was a visual embodiment of the word “bleak,” it would be Kiefer’s Lot’s Wife, 1990. Material and process, both integral to Kiefer’s expressive content throughout the 1980s, seem to reach a kind of apex in Lot’s Wife, as the following summary illustrates: Oil paint, ash, stucco, chalk, linseed oil, polymer emulsion, salt and applied elements (e.g., copper heating coil), on canvas, attached to lead foil, on plywood panels. It is 11 by 14 feet and weighs 1,200 pounds. Most of this weight is from sheets of lead foil that were treated and then glued to a wooden structure underneath made of pine and plywood. On the top of the painting Kiefer poured a salt water mixture over sodium chloride that left white/yellow crystal layers. Before the canvas was mounted over a lead structure Kiefer let it age outdoors and covered it with stucco and then ash. He also burnt it with a blowtorch and on the bottom section painted over fabric and added more canvas to the corners.62

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The biblical story of Lot’s wife tells of a woman who is turned into salt as punishment for disobeying a command from an angel of God. Lead treated with salt and other chemicals creates a post-apocalyptic sky that is neither day nor night. The wooden tracks shown in detail in the foreground give the impression that the train is about to reach the switching stations where certain destruction and death await its passengers. The viewer is drawn in and transfixed by the desolate scene. The strange, chalky, matte quality of lead that is treated with chemicals, burned, and weathered outdoors perfectly embodies the unthinkable horror of the train tracks arriving at their final deathly destination. The implications of Kiefer’s work from the vantage point of the viewer have been analyzed by many enlightened scholars, including Andreas Huyssen, Andrea Lauterwein, and Lisa Saltzman. Kiefer brings the viewer into his work through means of scale, perspective, and dramatic pictorial devices, resulting in a fixated and prolonged visual engagement. We are the passengers on the train, looking out on the fallow fields, standing in the empty courtyards of Nazi architecture. Huyssen explained, [H]ere then is the dilemma: whether to read these paintings as a melancholy fixation on the dreamlike ruins of fascism that locks the viewer into complicity, or instead, as a critique of the spectator who is caught up in a complex web of melancholy, fascination, and repression.63

Among the German artists of the 1980s, Kiefer’s work garnered the greatest frenzy of press and popularity, but a different mystique developed around the less accessible Sigmar Polke, who caught the attention of other artists before the public caught on. While Polke was primarily known as a painter in the United States, his 2015 retrospective at the MoMA changed that perception. Painting was just one of many vehicles that reflect the humorous, mercurial, inventive, multidisciplinary pathways of his intellect. Painting, sculpture, drawings, mixed-media, and photography are all modes Polke used to visualize everything from the banal to the hallucinogenic, cultural history to art history, and prescientific practices to photographic processes. His paintings are so visually stunning, particularly those done in the 1980s, that they must be included in any discussion of the genre. Among the subjects and materials which Polke explored during this time are disquieting references to postwar Germany and the Nazi regime. Polke was born in Oels, Silesia, Germany (now part of Poland), in 1941. In 1953, his parents escaped Communist-controlled East Germany with their nine children to West Germany. Twelve-year-old Sigmar pretended to be asleep on

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the train to pass unnoticed. As a child, with his family always on the run, he knew great poverty. “[H]e spent his formative years in the ashes of Germany’s shame and its shaky rehabilitation,” according to MoMA curator Kathy Halbreich.64 He was introduced to art as an apprentice glass painter in a factory in Dusseldorf. Later, while raising two young children with his first wife, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts from 1961 to 1967 where he attended classes taught by Joseph Beuys. Polke, a nonconformist, eventually balked against Beuys’s theories, as he would in response to any singular, proscribed ideology. After traveling and living in a commune, he taught in Hamburg from 1977 to 1991. He moved to Cologne in 1978, where he remained until cancer claimed him in 2010. Polke is difficult and nearly impossible to pin down. His work combines unconventional materials and techniques to create wry, thought-provoking critiques of artistic, historic, and social norms. His imagery, often fragmented, comes from a mix of sources, including newspapers, advertising, reproductions of works of art, and commercial textiles. Down many a rabbit hole goes the viewer attempting to understand what the artist might be saying. Specific meanings in Polke’s work remain elusive. A hallmark of Polke’s work in the 1960s is a response to and parody of various art historical styles, including Modernism, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Pop Art. Polke’s acerbic wit takes aim at derivative versions of Modernism, exemplified in a 1968 painting titled Moderne Kunst (“Modern Art”) (Figure 4.20). He intentionally muddied the criteria for evaluating a work of art. I ask myself whether a painting is good in its own right or merely a good caricature of a modern painting? Unable to see the painting past its inane title, I wonder if capturing the essence of an artistic style, even in a satirical vein, is of artistic merit. I end up in a no-man’s-land wondering if I would recognize its merits if I saw it in a furniture store. Polke clearly did not want to situate his practice in the matrix of an already established style permanently. I see this phase as a necessary step in his artistic evolution—a passing through of sorts—in his experimental, open-ended development as an artist. His ultimate jab at the cloak of self-seriousness, which had wrapped itself around Minimalist art, was delivered in the 1969 painting Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte bere Ecke schwars malen! (“Higher Beings Commanded: Paint the Upper Right Corner Black!”), a stark white painting with a black triangle and the title in typewriter font horizontally on the lower part of the painting. Is the higher being any mode of authority? Perhaps Polke was reaching back to give us an updated, tongue-in-cheek version of the Black Square, the 1915 painting by Modernist luminary Kazimir Malevich, an iconic symbol of mystical,

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Figure 4.20: Sigmar Polke, Moderne Kunst

(“Modern Art”), 1968. Acrylic and lacquer on canvas, 59 1/16 × 49 3/16 in. (150 × 125 cm). © 2022 The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/ ARS, New York. Photo credit: Augustin, Esslingen. Courtesy of Sammlung Froehlich, Stuttgart.

unmediated realism. The year before, Polke had a laugh at the expense of Carl Andre, the American Minimalist artist known for his gridded, geometric floor works. Polke framed a delft blue tile motif fabric that looks like a dish towel one would buy in a souvenir shop with the title Carl Andre in Delft printed on the frame below. Die Fünfziger Jahre (“The Fifties”), 1963–69, gives us a time capsule of 1950s Modernist art and design, the kind that was watered down to be palatable to postwar suburban homeowners. On a white wooden lattice, he hung twelve trite, gaudy paintings of the so-bad-they-might-be-good ilk that toe the line between motel art and gallery-worthy masterpiece. It also jokingly mocked the uninspired, decorative state of art in Germany during that era. Polke snidely countered the influence of American art in West Germany and East Berlin with quotations of American styles, but beneath his sarcasm lay the sad fact that indigenous German art was outlawed by the führer, a man who failed the entrance exam to art school. Pop Art was central to Polke’s stylistic references. Schokoladenbild (“Chocolate Painting”), 1963, features a chocolate bar with the wrapper partially pulled down against a vertically striped background. Although food was an American Pop Art staple, when it becomes the subject in German Pop, a misleading term, it is not the same. Polke’s chocolate bar is generic, without a label, whereas Warhol’s images of food products are all about the packaging. There is irony as well since Polke painted the images from everyday life rather than mechanically printing them as Warhol did.65 Polke hinted at another meaning specific to postwar

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Figure 4.21: Sigmar Polke, Bunnies, 1966. Synthetic polymer on linen, 58 3/4 × 39 1/8 in. (149.2 × 99.3 cm) © 2022 The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/ARS, New York. Photo credit: Lee Stalsworth. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.

Germany: chocolate bars and many other food items, which had been restricted during the war, were just becoming available in West Germany in the 1960s. Polke’s photographs of shop windows documented his amazed response to Germany’s so-called economic miracle, fueled in part by the policies of Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, which provided a workforce by freeing Nazis from prison. Polke recalls, “I remember the first time I saw a car in a showroom window. I thought it was paradise.”66 This initial response soured over time, and Polke found the infusion of American consumer culture a double-edged sword. He reflected later, “It wasn’t really heaven […] That early painting of mine, The Sausage Eater from 1963, was critical in a way; you can eat too much and blow up too big.”67 Polke aped American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and his Ben Day dots in works such as Bunnies, 1966, (Figure 4.21) based on a photograph of Playboy Bunnies he sourced from a magazine photograph comprised of grainy dots characteristic of cheap newspaper reproductions. However, Lichtenstein worked in the least spontaneous way possible, creating his dots uniformly and mechanically with stencils and tape. Polke, by contrast, incorporated variety in what he called his “raster dot paintings.” He painted dots of various shapes and varied the distances between them underscoring the “hand of the artist,” exactly the thing that Pop Art endeavored to eliminate. Polke continued to use the raster dot

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technique in both paintings and drawings throughout his career—two chilling examples being Rasterzeichnung (Porträt Lee Harvey Oswald) (Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald), 1963, and Entetarte Kunst (“Degenerate Art”), 1983, which was based on a photo of people lined up waiting to see the art exhibition of the same name, designed by Hitler to defile Modern art at all costs. Although the dots may recall Seurat’s pointillism, for Polke, there is significance in the grid-like structure in which they are placed. “Polke himself says that his screens represent the structure of a social order; a culture that is normalized and arranged in rows, grouped and specialized,” notes one writer.68 Printing errors, magnified by Polke, could act as forms representing ideas or forces at odds with societal norms symbolized by the grid structure. This is as much of an explanation of his work from the artist who gave few interviews and allowed hardly any studio visits. His zany quote offers further proof of his refusal to seriously explain his work in the public arena: “I love all dots. I am married to many of them. I want all dots to be happy.”69 Even though Polke and his friends knew about Pop Art through journals, as Kathryn Rottmann observed, “Pop Art had no foothold in Germany in 1963,” and so the artists declared themselves to be working in a style called Capital Realism.70 This was a droll nod to both American Pop Art and Social Realism in the GDR, in an artwork similar to the kind of happenings of the 1960s staged by the Conceptual art group Fluxus. In 1963, Sigmar Polke, along with fellow artists Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, later known as the dealer Konrad Fischer, organized Leben mit Pop— Eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus (“Living with Pop—A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism”) in the Dusseldorf Berge’s department store as a critique of political aspects of German consumerism. In what was more a performance than an art exhibition, visitors and consumers had to first enter a waiting room before being greeted by a life-size sculpture of President John F. Kennedy whose “I am a Berliner” speech was still fresh in their memory. After entering a space set up as a living room of furniture for sale, visitors saw the artists sitting on couches placed atop pedestals, making the artist and the environment the artwork. The vibe was blatant disinterestedness; Richter was reading a mystery novel. Joseph Beuys’s famous felt suit was also on display, which to the average visitor was an oddity. “The nagging question whether ‘capitalist realism’ was ironic or indifferent, funny or resigned, critical or documentary,” noted by curator Stephanie Barron.71 This raises the question, was there a specific outcome intended by the participating artists?

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A dark humor underlies Polke’s parodies of American styles and runs through all of his work. It is clear that, like Baselitz, he wanted his art to be stylistically German, not American. Kathy Halbreich, curator of the 2016 MoMA retrospective, explained it by saying, “He was obviously an international artist, but his roots are buried very deep in the German soil.”72 She clearly felt that the messiness of Polke’s work is rooted in a deep mistrust of authority and a cynicism about the Modernist quest for purity in all things. Halbreich notes, “[H]e was polluted by The Third Reich’s ideas about a much more poisonous kind of purity. I think he was a political agnostic but a deeply sensitive person who was chased by the past.”73 In the early 1970s, camera in hand, Polke traveled the world making stops in Paris, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Brazil, and the United States. Photography dominated his practice during this decade, and he often altered, enlarged, or painted over his travel photos. His experiments with photographic processes and chemicals carried over to his 1980s paintings, particularly in the Hochsitz (“Watchtower”) series that will be considered shortly. During these travels, he smoked and digested copious amounts of mind-altering substances, including mushrooms, hashish, and LSD. One amazing painting in particular reflects those “high” times. If ever the adjective “trippy” could be ascribed to a work of art, it would be Polke’s Alice im Wunderland (“Alice in Wonderland”) 1972 (Figure 4.22). Lewis Carroll’s book of the same name was a symbol of the drug culture and this, one of Polke’s most well-known pieces, would itself be a party for someone on hallucinogens. In this piece, he combined several commercial fabrics, rather than traditional canvas, as a support, onto which he floated images such as Alice eating an oversized mushroom and a caterpillar smoking a giant hookah. These images come straight from John Tenniel’s illustrations for the first edition of Carroll’s book. On the left and right of a polka-dot textile is a cheap-looking fabric with a repeated motif of kids playing soccer, something that might appear as wallpaper in a young boy’s room. The sport’s subtext connects to a large figure of a youthful basketball player stretching up for a rebound on the right side of the piece, in the same semi-transparent white paint that Polke used for Tenniel’s illustrations. What do the hookah, polka dots, and soccer player, and basketball player have in common? Nothing. The juxtaposition of elements spread out on a 10 × 9 foot support is a visual account of a serious drug adventure. Curator John Caldwell explains,

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Figure 4.22: Sigmar Polke, Alice im Wunderland (“Alice in Wonderland”), 1972. Acrylic, spray paint, poster paint, and metallic paint on patterned fabric, 122 1/4 × 112 5/8 in. (310.5 × 286 cm). Private Collection © The Estate of Sigmar Polke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany. Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.

The painting depicts the experience of watching sports on television after consuming a drug, and shows the split in consciousness between a rather irritable, partial awareness of the game and a stronger focus on the experience of the drug itself.74

Even if one is not ready to go on Polke’s head trip, the robust mix of patterns, a mainstay in his oeuvre, provides a kind of visual connect-the-dots that keeps us looking. In the 1980s, Polke fully embraces painting using substances one would expect to see in a lab, not an artist’s studio, including deadly compounds such as arsenic. During his travels, he observed other cultures and their use of pigments that did not come out of a tube, causing him to rethink notions about painting. He also incorporated processes that stemmed from pre-Enlightenment practices such as alchemy, which ultimately moved him to create works with colors that change over time and in response to external elements. Polke, like Kiefer, used materials and processes in an experimental and extreme fashion, as if the subjects required new modes of expression. His 1980s subject matter reflects the encyclopedic span of his thinking and ranges from the French Revolution to the dream of Menelaus, the king of Sparta in Greek mythology. Many a time, in the service of complicated allegories, Polke incorporated reproductions from art history megastars such as Baroque Spanish master Francisco Goya, German-born Surrealist Max Ernst, Italian Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci, and the revered German Renaissance painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer.75 However, his works which directly refer to Nazism are the most inventive and unsettling of this decade. Polke’s greatest mix of images, overlays, and patterns is seen in Paganini, 1981–83, (Figure 4.23) his largest painting up to that time, measuring over 7 feet tall and 16 feet across, made using paint and pencil on patterned fabric. In the center lies a nightcapped Paganini smiling faintly on his deathbed, with sheet music and a candle on the night table next to him. His hands keep time as he looks toward the right side of the painting in the direction of a large, fiddle-playing, black demon perched on the end of the bed, his tail hanging down and curling into a large translucent, black, plinth door shape which separates the two figures. Polke appropriated this scene from an eighteenth-century lithograph by Louis-Léopold Boilly. It pictures the Italian Baroque composer Giuseppe Tartini, who, in a dream, made a pact with the devil in order to play with great technical virtuosity. This Faustian fable was associated with the well-known

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Figure 4.23: Sigmar Polke, Paganini, 1981–83. Dispersion paint, aluminum paint, and pencil on

patterned fabric, 87 3/4 × 198 1/2 in. (223 × 504 cm) © 2022 The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/ARS, New York. Courtesy of Daros Collection.

myth that Paganini made a deal with the devil in order to possess seemingly impossible technical skills on the violin. On the left side of Paganini, a sketch of a deathly looking, blinded jester propelling skulls into the air which then metamorphose into hazard symbols for radioactivity is centered in a large white area encircled by two blue bands. On the lower left corner, purple outlines of little people dressed in garments identified with various professions—nurse, baker, teacher—are lined up on a diagonal, looking outward. The viewer takes in the details of the dramatic painting as the eye moves back and forth from the vortex around the jester to the stark silhouette of the pernicious creature. Each area engages you over time while you also try to understand the correspondences among the elements detailed by the artists. After being drawn in by the spectacular drama of the painting, a multitude of questions and possible interpretations follow. Does Paganini present a continuum from Nazi Germany to the anxieties of the Cold War, with the threat of atomic bombs being juggled by an evil clown? Art critic Gary Garrels maintains that “clearly the work is an elaborate allegory with the specter of Nazi-ism at its core.”76 Along those lines, one might ask if the small figures stand as mute witnesses from a cross-section of a society, most of whom claimed not to know of the atrocities in their midst. Swastikas populate much of the painting, often in loose gestural strokes, blending with the geometric design of the commercial fabric. Kathy Halbreich explained, “There are swirls of swastikas in both small

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notebooks and epic paintings—a banned image in Germany—but one he wanted his country to face.”77 The caustic wit with which Polke addresses the taboo of the swastika is similar to that of Martin Kippenberger, a Berlin artist with serious swagger who managed a nightclub, started a punk band, and whirled many a gal around the dance floor with great panache. His excessive lifestyle and alcoholism caused his early death at age 44, though not before he completed his 1984 painting For the Life of Me I Can’t See the Swastika in This. Kippenberger, the king of the double entendre, had his moment. Under the guise of a playful title, he expressed visually “that one generation of Germans was trying to forget the symbol while a younger one was coming to terms with its elders’ willed blindness,” as art critic Jerry Saltz states so well.78 Polke’s Paganini is as involved as Lager (“Camp”), 1982, (Figure 4.24) a 14-foot-wide image of deeply receding double rows of barbed wire and electric lights taken from a photograph, is singular. On a support of mattress ticking punctured by holes Polke burned on it, black clouds of smoke on the lower part of the work, a dark vertical splash of paint, which one writer notes “suggests untold violence as well as a blot on Germany’s history,”79 and a sunset hued sky on the top heightens what is already a ghastly picture of concentration camp enclosures. The Watchtower series depicts another horrific Holocaust image. Created from 1984 through 1988, this series of seven massive works, each measuring almost 10 × 8 feet, share one constant—a stenciled image of a high scaffold topped by a platform upon which a viewing enclosure sits, connected to the ground by a ladder. It conjures up three possible associations: a concentration camp tower from which Nazi soldiers shot escapees on the spot; the guard towers placed between concrete sections in the Berlin Wall; or hunting towers, a well-known fixture on German landscapes. Watchtower, 1984, and Hochsitz mit Gänsen (“Watchtower with Geese”) 1987–88, (Figure 4.25) combine the tower image with supports of commercial fabrics printed with the most banal of patterns, such as flowers, beach furniture, a gaggle of geese, and faux weaving. Deck chairs, beach umbrellas, and a quilted bright pink textile are not normally associated with death camps. Juxtaposing a highly charged image against trite, contradictory ones excludes any possibility of eliciting an obvious emotional response and negates the possibility of a singular reading of these works. Despite Polke’s idiosyncratic treatment of an image representing the Holocaust, divided postwar Germany, and a long-held German pastime, it remains ominous.

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Figure 4.24: Sigmar Polke, Lager

(“Camp”) 1982. Acrylic and spattered pigment on pieced fabric support, 158 × 98 3/4 in. (401.3 × 250.8 cm). Gift of Charlene Engelhard (1993.961) © 2022 The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/ARS, New York. Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Although the Watchtower series fuses photography and painting, two mediums that have influenced each other since early Modern times, this is something quite different. In four of the Watchtower works, Polke uses light-sensitive silver bromides which are used in the photographic processes stage of developing to permanently fix an image on paper. Instead of this conventional usage, Polke intentionally mishandles the chemicals so that rather than fixing the image, it becomes unstable, changing, darkening, and even obfuscating the image over time in some cases. Curator Marcelle Polednik details the making of Watchtower II, 1984–85: [H]e activated the exposure of the developer but then failed to complete the process. The developer was not neutralized, which would have prevented

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Figure 4.25: Sigmar Polke, Hochsitz mit Gänsen (“Watchtower with Geese”), 1987–88. Resin

and acrylic paint on various fabrics, 114 1/4 × 114 1/4 in. (290 × 290 cm). Art Institute of Chicago; restricted gift in memory of Marshall Frankel; Wilson L. Mead Fund, 1990.81 © 2022 The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/ARS, New York. Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago/ Art Resource, NY. Courtesy of Art Resource, NY.

the developed silver halides making up the image of the watchtower from continuing to darken; the undeveloped sensitized silver particles were not removed through the application of fixture, and they linger on the campus, gradually turning into silver oxide. The campus thus remains in the state of gradual yet electable transformation. In essence it is alive photochemical reaction. Sensitized to light, heat, and moisture, the work continues to evolve, darkening and changes luster with time. It is a photograph, still and always developing.80

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To the viewer, the tower reveals itself as “a hologram or apparition”81 as the light catches it from various viewpoints bringing the leitmotif of visibility and invisibility into the production of meanings. Moreover, Polednik points out that although these works are truly hybrids of painting and photography, they are ultimately identified as paintings on canvas, characterized by “a more contemplative, elongated” response on the part of the viewer than that of a weirdly processed photograph. In both Hochstand (“Hunting Tower”), 1984, with its ghostly white outline of the tower against tonal hues of grey, white, and black, making it look like a photo negative, and Watchtower III, 1985, with the eerie white tower amid painterly washes of red and blue against greys and browns, Polke layers the outline of a hand holding a card with the word sonderausweis (“special pass”), suggesting a connection between the tower image with security checkpoints on the Berlin Wall. Seeing the six Watchtower works on one wall in the 2016 MoMA retrospective was both visually striking and oddly disturbing, particularly looking at Watchtower, 1984, with its bright green-and-yellow paint on bubble wrap. Is what looks like an almost garish, neon sign on plastic packing material an appropriate treatment for an emblem of Germany’s attempt to exterminate a race? With the exception of Camp, Polke approaches the subject of Nazism obliquely by using a complex constellation of signifiers often causing the viewer to oscillate between the “dark and the humorous.”82 His irony is born of a nuanced intelligence which demands the same of viewers; in Oscar Wilde’s words, “[I]rony is wasted on the stupid.” Polke goads the viewer to engage in what one writer called “post-modern play.”83 Polke was awarded the illustrious Golden Lion Award at the 1986 Venice Biennale where he represented Germany. The theme of the Biennale was “Art & Science,” with a subsection called “Art & Alchemy.” Polke’s exhibition titled Athanor, the name of the alchemist’s furnace, was a great fit. Kiefer had also used the title Athanor in the 1980s, in part as a reference to the furnaces in the death camp’s cremation furnaces. That year, Polke was at the height of his alchemic experimentations, and a short list of the materials used in his paintings attests to this fact. They included cinnabar, gold flakes, indigo, cobalt, meteor dust, violet pigment, malachite, azurite, light-sensitive silver oxide, and arsenic. Due to concerns that chemicals in his works were releasing toxic gases, there was a delay in opening the German Pavilion, of course, making everyone want to see it even more. For the first few hours of the Biennale, talk of the mysterious and somewhat sinister Polke installation created a major buzz.

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The German Pavilion on the grounds of the Venice Biennale was already mired in politics; it had been remodeled in Nazi pumped-up Neo-Classicism style architecture in 1938 by Munich architect Ernst Haiger, after which it briefly functioned as a public relations center for pro-Nazi art and ideals. Contaminated by its past, calls for the demolition of the building have surfaced over the years, and it has become a controversial historical site. When Beuys had the space in 1976, he directed officials not to whitewash the walls because he wanted the mold to show. The building later served to intensify the meanings behind Felix Droese’s 1988 exhibition House for the Weaponless. Part of the 1938 remodeling was the addition of a large curving wall across from the entrance onto which Polke created a mural made from cobalt II chloride, which changes color from red to blue, depending on the humidity and time of day. If the light and moisture were just so, it looked like there was nothing there. Bits of cinnabar and gold flecks were embedded into the curved wall, and in front of it, Polke placed a 60-million-year-old meteorite he had retrieved from an African riverbed. Most passersby thought it was just a large rock. On either side, four lush yellow-and-ochre spiegelbilder (“mirror paintings”) made from resins and dry pigment reflected light. Their scale was a commanding 16 × 9 feet each. In a side gallery, a large quartz agglomerate sat on the floor near four works titled Farbtafeln (“Colored Plates”), 1986–87. They were made from pigments including green malachite, blue azurite, and yellow arsenic which react with one another to darken gradually. These works are a continuation of Polke’s earlier 1980s experiments with the reactive properties of minerals and chemicals. He orchestrated them into beautiful abstractions which from a distance resemble the sweeping painterly canvases of the New York postwar paintings. Combinations of powder, varnish, dust, and silver oxides in the Colored Plates paintings resulted in pictorial fields that look like gaseous, monochromatic versions of paintings by American Abstract Expressionist artist Helen Frankenthaler, who also used then-unheard-of painting techniques.84 To some of these works, Polke added black curlicues which he appropriated from Albrecht Dürer’s 1522 woodcut, The Great Triumphal Cart. Dürer’s lively, crisp loops and squiggles are pure ornamental flourishes which serve no descriptive purpose. Pairing Dürer’s signature element with his own, different creative process suggests that Polke was seeking out his new and personal approach to artmaking. The melding of natural chemical reactions and decorative artifice, two entities which come from very different methodologies of representation, has a strange resonance.

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Polke’s masterful modulations of scale, color, and placement of diverse elements were impactful from the first step into the Pavilion, even before any thought about the underlying concepts surfaced. Athanor offered multiple thematic binaries such as nature and man, science and creativity, environment and flux, natural history, and social history. Although I know that Polke can never be encapsulated in any one thematic ideology, I propose the following: The entire installation could serve as a meditation on the act of seeing—seeing things change over time and in reaction to specific environments, seeing things that are not what they appear to be, seeing things as apparition, seeing the hidden toxicities we cannot see, and seeing how the social and political climate frame how we see. I link this to how Kathy Halbreich writes of Polke’s profound contribution. “What Polke really makes us look at is the ultimate German alibi—‘I didn’t see anything,’ the silence of the fathers,” says Halbreich, adding that the artist was also concerned with “the silence of his own generation.”85 An artist closely connected to Polke at one point was Gerhard Richter, who immigrated to West Berlin in 1961 and moved to Dusseldorf where he studied at the Academy and later became a professor. Like many others, Richter fell under the spell of Beuys, remembering that “this phenomenon […] took us by surprise 25 years ago and soon appalled us, unleashing admiration, envy, consternation, fury […] which, for all our rebelliousness, gave us a framework in which we could ‘carry on’ in relative security.”86 In the 1960s, he collaborated closely with Sigmar Polke as part of Capital Realism. They went different ways artistically in the 1970s, with Richter claiming Polke went psychedelic, and he went classical. From the 1980s to the present, Gerhard Richter is regarded as the most acclaimed and sought-after of all German postwar artists. He has exhibited internationally and been avidly collected by major museums and collectors. In 2015, one of his Abstract paintings sold for $46.3 million. Even though he was born in Dresden in 1932 and participated in Hitler Youth, Richter’s references to Nazism and historic positioning of Germany in the postwar environment is not an overriding aspect of his work, the focus of this chapter. For this reason, his work was examined in greater depth in Chapter 3 “Abstraction: Ideas about the Thing and the Thing Itself.” Regardless, a few general comments on his oeuvre and mention of a few several specific works are relevant here. Style is a complicated issue in Richter’s art. He has worked in primarily two modes, a kind of blurry photorealism style and abstraction. He has also forayed into black-and-white landscapes and cityscapes. Although Richter does not position his work in an ideological way, in fact, he says he aims for the artificial and factual, one could make the case that

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Figure 4.26: Gerhard Richter, Tante Marianne (“Aunt Marianne”) Catalogue Raisonné: 87, 1965. Oil on canvas, 40 × 45 in. (100 × 115 cm) © 2022 Gerhard Richter (0153). Courtesy of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden Gerhard Richter Archiv.

working in multiple styles is a way to destabilize the one-style demagoguery of both the Nazis and the Soviets. This is my interpretation, not in any way based on the many writings and interviews the artist has given us to help understand his position. In the 1960s, Richter completed three grisaille paintings based on photographs that refer to Nazism. Onkel Rudi (“Uncle Rudi”), 1965, is a painting of Richter’s uncle, young and proud in his Nazi uniform before he headed off to war. He was killed within a week. It was copied from a family photo, as was the painting Tante Marianne (“Aunt Marianne”), 1965, (Figure 4.26) holding her infant nephew Gerhard when she was a sweetly smiling young girl. Marianne, the subject of his painting, experienced mental illness and was institutionalized at the age of 18. She was murdered during the war under the Nazi “euthanasia programs” which killed thousands of Germans who were elderly or deemed mentally challenged, insane, or disabled. Herr Heyde (“Dr. Heyde”), 1965, is taken directly from a newspaper photo showing a policeman taking Werner Heyde, the architect of the Nazi euthanasia horrors, into custody after his arrest in 1959. German psychiatrist Heyde who had been hiding out after the war is, in effect, the person responsible for Marianne’s death, yet Richter vehemently insists that when he did this painting, he did not know that Dr. Heyde was the architect. An eerie coincidence indeed. When Robert Storr, curator of Gerhard Richter’s massive retrospective at the MoMA of 2002, asked if there was any conscious connection between the paintings of

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Dr. Heyde and Aunt Marianne, Richter replied firmly, “[A]bsolutely never, not even once. It did not exist there are no conscious connections within me at all.”87 In a lengthy interview when Storr pressed the artist about his intention regarding the political resonance of this, and also a group of 1960s paintings of the Second World War military aircraft, Richter said it was not part of his thinking at all, and despite Storr’s persistent grilling on the subject, Richter did not budge. In the same way, Baselitz denies that his use of the eagle image was a reference to Nazism. Richter’s disavowals of a linkage between Dr. Heyde and Aunt Marianne are troublesome; rather than falsehoods, these responses may reflect a kind of unintentional repression of the traumatic past, which makes their ability to address this subject matter at all even more remarkable. In 1988, Gerhard Richter completed 18. Oktober 1977 (“October 18, 1977”), a fifteen-painting series based on photographs of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, a group of incarcerated young Marxist terrorists who died in prison. The subjects of these blurry grisaille paintings include a portrait of Ulrike Meinhof, founding member of the Red Army Faction. One piece shows her as a pretty, young journalist and another of her lying dead in Stuttgart-Stammheim prison. Although the disturbing images were not directly related to the Holocaust, questions about whether the radicals committed suicide or were murdered by guards were highly charged during a time when government control and surveillance were particularly sensitive topics. Navigating left- and right-wing governmental leanings and ideology resembled walking a political tightrope in Germany. As we saw in Chapter 3, Richter is noncommittal about the meaning of his images. This chapter’s German artists all faced the challenge of creating a painting style that was authentically German during a period when the genuine, organic emergence of artistic style, which derives always from or in reaction to what has come before, was simply not possible. Indigenous German art had been banned, denigrated, and replaced with a style that was implanted artificially and, more horrifyingly, used as a manipulative tool in perpetrating mass genocide. These artists reimagined that painting could reflect the postwar condition in which the truth about German atrocities during the Second World War could move from collective societal amnesia into a crucially indispensable opportunity for acknowledgment and expression, not only of the wounds of war but of the divided Germany left in its wake. In their reimagining, A. R. Penck, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and Sigmar Polke transformed painting in a variety of ways to address a content so tragic that it required new forms, techniques, and materials. A. R. Penck created a language of graphically powerful stick figures that look like a hybrid of cave painting images and hieroglyphics to express his “dream of

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a better ‘socialism,’ […] his fight against war and injustice, against the conflict between individual and society.”88 As he made clear in his 1988 manifesto, he was not trying to make a traditional painting related to historicism or romanticism;89 his paintings reflected systems, both linguistic and societal, which he believed could be used to benefit humanity. Georg Baselitz moved from images of Germany’s fallen heroes to a radical rethinking of perception in his inversions, harnessing expressive elements in formal arrangements with a brutish ugliness that Baselitz believed to be essentially German and, incongruously, capable of a stringent kind of beauty. Anselm Kiefer exposed the Holocaust in a systematic manner, pushing the materials and how they were conjoined to such extremes as to question their being called “painting.” Using materials as metaphor for or signifier of content is also crucial in Sigmar Polke’s work. Materials, imagery, and processes increase the production of meaning, leaving the viewer in a kind of flux as described by art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto who wrote, “[T]he gifts these paintings make to us, then, is the vertiginous, anxious pleasure we derive from being freely lost, from not seeing anything clearly and not knowing anything for sure.”90 The play of seeing and knowing, seeing and not knowing, not seeing and knowing embodies the postwar consciousness in which Polke situates his paintings, while calling into question all aspects, even the identity, of traditional painting. In the 1980s, Penck, Baselitz, Kiefer, and Polke brought new sensibilities to the genre of painting following, and because of, a negotiation with the postwar rupture in the art of their country imposed by the Third Reich. As Baselitz stated, “In postwar Germany, there was no hierarchy. There was nothing, no original painting, no original culture.”91 These artists learned of Contemporary art movements after they left Soviet-controlled Germany; however, they aimed not to follow in the tradition of these movements but to define German painting anew. They reversed Germany’s “inability to mourn” by embodying or referencing the war and the resultant divided nation, all in different ways. Penck established a new visual language; Baselitz asserted the formal qualities of painting and then used it to reference the icons of early-twentieth-century German art that Hitler had vanquished; Kiefer repurposed the images of Nazi Germany and conjoined them with the use of materials as metaphor and carriers of meaning; Polke’s montage of visual and material signifiers of meaning pointed toward an alchemic transformation of the postwar era to a new definition of painting altogether. Their inquiries into materials, processes, ideas, visual languages, and content led to an individuated and authentic reimagining of painting that reverberated through the art world.

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Endnotes

1. Mitscherlich et al., The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior. 2. Adorno, Prisms. 3. Tisdall and Beuys, Joseph Beuys, 207. 4. Nisbit, “Crash Course: Remarks on a Beuys Story.” 5. Buchloh, “Beuys the Twilight of the Idol,” 201. 6. Buchloh, “Beuys the Twilight of the Idol,” 201. This is the premise of Buchloh’s essay. 7. Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 105. 8. Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 101. 9. Gibson, “Joseph Beuys, Shaman of Postwar Germany.” 10. Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 228. 11. Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 228. 12. Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 228. 13. Searle, “Joseph Beuys: The Antidote to Beauty.” 14. McCloskey, “Dialectic at a Standstill: East German Socialist Realism in the Stalin Era,” 105. 15. McCloskey, “Dialectic at a Standstill: East German Socialist Realism in the Stalin Era,” 105. 16. McCloskey, “Dialectic at a Standstill: East German Socialist Realism in the Stalin Era,” 105. 17. Govan, “Meditations on A = B: Romanticism and Representation in New German Painting,” 35–46. 18. Yau, A. R. Penck, 15. 19. The figures recall Giacometti’s attenuated figures, but Penck had never seen the work in reproductions. 20. Yau, A. R. Penck, 42. 21. Yau, A. R. Penck, 117. 22. Yau, A. R. Penck, 117. 23. Ehrmann, “AR Penck: Rites of Passage.” 24. Pfeiffer and Penck, A.R. Penck Retrospektive, 211. 25. Yau, A. R. Penck, 53–54. 26. Yau, A. R. Penck, 61. 27. Bier, “Should Georg Baselitz’s Misogyny Affect Our Appreciation of His Work?” 28. Kuspit and Baselitz, “Goth to Dance.” 29. The exhibition “New American Paintings” organized by the International Council at the Museum of Modern Art traveled to eight European cities. Baselitz saw it in Berlin in 1958 and was impressed with works by Pollock and Guston. To see the catalogue, go to https:// www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1990_300190211.pdf.

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30. Schiff, “George Baselitz Grounded.” 31. Glover, “Great Works: The Big Night down the Drain 1962–3 (250 × 180 cm), Georg Baselitz.” 32. Glover, “Great Works: The Big Night down the Drain 1962–3 (250 × 180 cm), Georg Baselitz.” 33. “George Baselitz in Conversation with Jean-Louis Froment and Jean-Marc Poinsot,” 63. 34. In modern and Contemporary Art, the picture plane is synonymous with pictorial surface, meaning that the entire image is on one plane, as contrasted with art from the Renaissance until the mid-nineteenth century, when the picture surface was considered a window through which the viewer looked into the illusion of distance. 35. Gretenkort et al., Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, 134. 36. Salle, “Old Guys Painting: David Salle on the Mature Painter’s Letting Go.” 37. Fuchs, “Baselitz, Painting,” in Georg Baselitz, 22. 38. Fuchs, “Baselitz, Painting,” in Georg Baselitz, 22. 39. Gretenkort et al., Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, 32. 40. “Painterly—Art Term.” 41. Kort and Baselitz, “Georg Baselitz Talks to Pamela Kort.” 42. Salle, “Old Guys Painting: David Salle on the Mature Painter’s Letting Go.” 43. Baselitz quoted in “Adieu,” Tate. 44. “Georg Baselitz January 21–April 29, 2018,” Media Release, Foundation Beyeler. 45. The Last Supper, 1909, by Emil Nolde is also referenced here. 46. Ellis, “Roundtable: Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth.” 47. Kiefer and Davey, Anselm Kiefer, 21–22. 48. Andreotti and De Melis, “With History under the Skin,” 404. 49. Kiefer and Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, 33. 50. Rosenthal and Kiefer, Anselm Kiefer, 17. 51. Lauterwein, Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory, 12. 52. Rosenthal and Kiefer, Anselm Kiefer, 22. 53. Wright, “In the Ruin of Barjac; Politics, Alchemy, and Learning to Dance in Anselm Kiefer’s World,” Anselm Kiefer, ed. Celant, 445. 54. Kiefer and Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, 45.

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55. Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer, 76. 56. Arasse, Anselm Kiefer, 97. 57. Arasse, Anselm Kiefer, 140. 58. Anselm Kiefer, Interviewed by Christian Kämmerling, Peter Pursche, “Nachts fahre ich mit dem Fahrrad von Bild zu Bild” in “A Golden Fleece: A Cycle of Paintings by Anselm Kiefer for the Süddeutsch Zeitung Magazin” in Anselm Kiefer, ed. Celant, 183. 59. Rosenthal and Kiefer, Anselm Kiefer, 115. 60. Kämmerling and Pursche, “Nachts fabre ich mit dem Fahrrad von Bild zu Bild.” 61. Biro and Kiefer, Anselm Kiefer, 46. 62. Hinson, “Anselm Kiefer: ‘Lot’s Wife,’” 182. 63. Harries, Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship, 82 (233); Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. 64. Loos, “Shape-Shifter.” 65. There were examples of early Pop Art paintings that were hand painted, but this did not last long. This is the topic of Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955–62: Exhibition, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992. 66. Gayford, “A Weird Intelligence.” 67. Halbreich, Alibis Sigmar Polke: 1963–2010, 77. 68. Nestegard, “Sigmar Polke—Apparizione in the North,” in Sigmar Polke: Alchimist, 11. 69. Cheri, “For Hire: Girlfriends I,” in Halbreich, Alibis Sigmar Polke: 1963–2010, 163. 70. Rottmann, “German Pop,” in Halbreich, Alibis Sigmar Polke: 1963–2010, 25. 71. Barron et al., Art of Two Germanys, 159. 72. Halbreich quoted in Loos, “Shape-Shifter.” 73. Loos, “Shape-Shifter.” 74. Caldwell et al., “Sigmar Polke.” 75. For example, Polke appropriates a print from Goya’s famous portfolio titled Los Caprichos, an aquatint of two woman with a chair on their

Addressing Germany’s Past

heads which Goya titled, Now They’re Sitting Pretty. The comical image is combined with outlines from a print by German-born Surrealist Max Ernst in Polke’s This Is How You Sit Correctly (After Goya), 1982. 76. Garrels, “Mrs. Autumn and Her Two Daughters,” 79. 77. Williams, “Sigmar Polke: Tate Modern, preview: Prepare to be baffled and exhilarated,” The Independent. 78. Saltz, “The Artist Who Did Everything.” 79. Smith, “Review/Art; Brooklyn Retrospective of the Mercurial Sigmar Polke.” 80. Polednik, “Making History: Watchtower II and Photography,” in Halbreich, Alibis Sigmar Polke: 1963–2010, 222. 81. Polednik, “Making History: Watchtower II and Photography,” in Halbreich, Alibis Sigmar Polke: 1963–2010, 222. 82. Moure and Polke, in Halbreich, Alibis Sigmar Polke: 1963–2010, 51. 83. Power, “Polke’s Postmodern Play,” in Sigmar Polke: Back to Postmodernity, 101–18. 84. Helen Frankenthaler’s techniques of pouring and staining were important extensions of Abstract Expressionist style moving toward what would be called Color Field painting. 85. Halbreich, Alibis Sigmar Polke: 1963–2010, 90. 86. Richter and Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 31. 87. Richter and Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 290. 88. Pfeiffer and Penck, A.R. Penck Retrospektive, 39. 89. Pfeiffer and Penck, A.R. Penck Retrospektive, 42. 90. Lane et al., Sigmar Polke—History of Everything: Paintings and Drawings, 1998–2003, 25. 91. “Georg Baselitz, in conversation with Jean Loius Froment and Jean-Marc Poisnot,” 62.

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5 A Sense of Place The Italian Transavanguardia

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he art of the Italian Transavanguardia has the power to transport the viewer to imagined places and create a sense of time travel through cultural epochs as well as mysterious and sometimes erotic regions of the mind. Even if one catches a glimpse of a foreboding vista from time to time, there is always the promise of a soft landing. Mimmo Paladino, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Sandro Chia1 came into prominence in the 1980s under the label of the Italian Transavanguardia, a term coined by art historian Achille Bonito Oliva. The individual styles of the Transavanguardia artists developed in relation to two factors. First, their art was informed by a sense of belonging to the regions from which they came. Mimmo Paladino drew from the landscape and legends specific to the Campania region in the southwestern part of Italy. In Francesco Clemente’s case, he was influenced not only by his native Naples and Rome but by living in New York and India as well. All three locations weigh heavily in his thematic and stylistic choices. Sandro Chia grew up in Florence in the central Italian region of Tuscany, living with the art of Renaissance masters, including Donatello, Masaccio, and Michelangelo. Enzo Cucchi’s art was shaped by the folklore, landscape, and Byzantine history of his hometown Ancona, a port city on the Adriatic Sea surrounded by hills, in the Marches region of eastern Italy. The manner in which each artist meshed a sense of place with various artistic influences is at the core of Transavanguardia painting. Second, one needs to get a sense of the Contemporary art in Italy that came before in order to understand the major paradigm shift brought about by the Transavanguardia. The artists felt the freedom to go against a rigorous 30-year investigation of three-dimensional and Installation art that began after the war and continued until the late 1970s and was centered in great part around the nature and symbolism of materials. Paladino, Clemente, Cucchi, and Chia intuitively embraced traditional painting after it had been overshadowed by other art forms in the postwar period. After looking at the distinct styles of each painter, the way in which the Italian Transavanguardia is framed by both curators and critics will be uncovered to more fully situate this painting resurgence in an art historical context. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael—the exemplars of traditional painting— set the bar so high that it was certainly a hard, if not impossible, act to follow. Every Italian painter in the twentieth century had to negotiate this art historical behemoth and decide how to make a name for themselves in that shadow. The Italian Futurists of the early twentieth century did not believe they could be Modern, which they equated with “the new” under the weight and oppression

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of Italian art history. In their Manifesto of Futurism published in 1912, they advocated for the burning down of museums and the complete destruction of their country’s artistic legacy. In a severe, cultural overreaction, they failed to see that painting will always be in conversation with its past. However flawed their thinking, they did produce beautiful paintings that captured the speed and movement of industrial-age cities, signifiers of Modernism. The two world wars overshadowed Italian painting, although there were several styles that had their moments. There was a radicalization of Italian art after the Second World War primarily in non-painting practices, but it set the stage for artists to reframe painting which in the 1980s was a radical change. After the Second World War, and continuing through the 1960s, Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri introduced art made from nontraditional materials. Working on a two-dimensional support, Burri never “violated the specific characteristics of the material he uses, but rather exalts its essence,”2 as one writer observed. He fused painting and relief sculpture by adding fabric or burning plastics and glue to the surfaces. His work was a palpable manifestation of the traumas inflicted by Mussolini and Hitler; artist Enrico Castellani recalled, “Burri was considered the artist of the bandages, the wounds of the postwar period and of certain anguish.”3 In Burri’s SZ1, 1949, fragments of the Marshall Plan’s United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation sacks are collaged to the surface, a poignant reminder of Italy’s wartime trauma. Fontana, when he mutilated canvases with what he called holes (buchi) and cuts (tagli), also gave voice to the collective grieving of a nation that had suffered profound losses. His idea was to address the space behind the canvas to create a new conceptual model which he called concetto spaziale (“spatial concepts”). Made between 1958 and 1968, it was an art form that was neither painting nor sculpture. His theoretical treatise of 1946, Manifesto Blanco (“White Manifest”) called for a new art. It states, “We imagine synthesis as the sum total of the physical elements: color, sound, movement, time, space, integrated in physical and mental union.”4 The conceptual core of Fontana’s work influenced many artists as Bonito Oliva observed. “There is a generation of artists including Mario Schifano, Tano Festa, Francesco Rosario Capra, Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, and Giulio Paolini who began to introduce a conceptual element to art.”5 Bonito Oliva is using the word “conceptual” here in the larger context of Conceptual art, a movement that emerged in the 1960s and was strong in the 1970s, where the idea dictates the making of the art. This conceptual strain fostered primarily non-painting forms.

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Of all Fontana’s followers, the most extreme was Milan-born Piero Manzoni whose art was embodied in non-art materials. Manzoni’s all-white series titled Achromes, 1957–65, was made of what he considered pure materials unshaped by the artist’s hand, such as concrete, cotton wadding, fluffy artificial fibers, rabbit skin, bread rolls, straw, polystyrene, and clay-covered canvas soaked in cobalt chloride. He did not alter these materials with traditional painting or sculpting. Additionally, Manzoni felt that art emanated from one’s state of being. Using his own body as material in 1961, Manzoni produced Merda d’Artista (“Artist’s Shit”), sealing his excrement in a tin can, and Fiato Artista (“Artist’s Breath”), his breath encased in balloons which were attached to wood bases with plaques that read “Artist’s Breath.” These art objects, perhaps the most nontraditional in the history of twentieth-century art, also functioned as a kind of critique of art and its marketplace. They spoke to the increasing commodification of art; the pricing of Merda d’Artista was based on the current rate of a gram of gold. The balloons, which often exploded in the viewer’s face, would later be read as metaphors for the bursting of an economic bubble. The Venice Biennale of 1964 made a lasting impression on young Italian artists. The casual freshness of American Pop artists stood in stark contrast to the conservative conventions of Italian society. Sandro Chia recalled seeing the young American artist Robert Rauschenberg, one of the major precursors to Pop Art, in a plaid shirt and khakis standing under the Venice sun—a new, charismatic model of a Contemporary artist. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and American artists were influencers of what is sometimes referred to as Italian Pop Art. Its main practitioners, who gathered in the Piazza del Popolo in Rome in the 1960s, recycled images from commerce and popular culture.6 These include Sergio Lombardo, Cesare Tacchi, Tano Festa, and Mario Schifano, the best known of this group, who slashed the Coca-Cola logo with a juicy brushstroke, a makeover of Warhol’s mechanical screen prints. In 1967, art historian and curator Germano Celant coined the term “Arte Povera” (“Poor art”) to group together artists Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Luciano Fabro, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giovanni Anselmo, Giulio Paolini, Jannis Kounellis, and Giuseppe Penone under the umbrella of this art movement. This designation shifted the central loci of art in Italy away from Rome to the northern cities of Milan and Turin. Arte Povera artists presented humble, everyday materials taken from nature, such as granite, wood, leather, and fruits of the earth, with a minimalist-inspired simplicity in an opposition to the traditional practices and commercial art demands.

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Arte Povera functioned as touchstones for other systems. For example, Conceptualism—particularly ideas regarding organic and inorganic materials as elemental forces—frames Giovanni Anselmo’s Untitled, 1968, in which a small chunk of granite is tied to a larger granite block with copper wire, holding a bunch of Bibb lettuce in place. The green leaves fanning out against the grain of the stone are surprisingly beautifully. As the lettuce wilts, the stone loosens and falls on a small pile of sawdust below. To keep the sculpture alive, it must be fed with fresh lettuce, making the element of time and human interaction an unseen but integral part of the sculpture. Mimmo Paladino explained that the Arte Povera movement was a vital presence when he started painting, Mine is therefore absolutely not work that reacts against what preceded us but something else, work that takes this into consideration and developed independently, I think, along completely different paths […] anti-heroic to the same extent as Arte Povera could be heroic.7

Painting during the 1980s emerged from a very specific time, after nonpainting styles had dominated. The boldness of the returning to paint cannot be understated—the legacy of Italian painting made it an intimidating medium—and it must be considered when framing this discussion. Giuseppe Penone’s sculptures made of, in, or on trees connect with Land and Environmental art. To craft Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto (“It Will Continue to Grow Except at This Point”), 1968, Penzone attached a bronze cast of his hand and forearm to a tree as though the hand was grasping it. Over decades, the tree has grown around the hand creating the impression that the hand is squeezing the tree. The result is a thoughtful poetic on man’s relationship with nature, a meditation more relevant today than it was in 1968. Arte Povera addressed more than just the natural order. Mario Merz’s Igloos series addressed sociopolitical issues as they symbolize man’s basic needs, shelter, and warmth. Giap’s Igloo of 1968 is a dome-shaped structure made of plastic-wrapped bags of clay decorated with neon letters that read, “If the enemy masses his forces, he loses ground. If he scatters, he loses force,” quoting General Võ Nguyên Giàp of North Vietnam. The fact that the igloo resembles a pile of horse manure brings the anti-Vietnam War message home. With few exceptions, Arte Povera artists rejected painting and its associative traditions and histories in favor of using the materials to address content in the artwork. Michelangelo Pistoletto said that “abandoning traditional oil paint for

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him was ‘painful but necessary,’ because it allowed him to render his images in a more neutral and objective way.”8 Despite this seemingly antithetical dynamic, elements of Arte Povera segued to Italian Transavanguardia painting. For example, combinations of art historical archetypes and the human figure are recurring elements in Transavanguardia paintings. These have precedents in Arte Povera in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venere degli stracci (“Venus of the Rags”), 1967, in which an oversized, classical Venus statue with its back to the viewer stands before a pile of worn-out clothes. Through the combined imagery, the artist suggests the “rags representing the people’s journey”9 will be rejuvenated by the goddess, a symbol of hope and beauty. Throughout the 1970s, Luigi Ontani’s tableaux vivants, sometimes referred to as “paintings/non-paintings,” were static, living pictures that contained one or more actors. These dramatic mixed media works, early markers of Performance art, were part kitsch, part farce. They effectively incorporated folklore, fairy tales, mythology, art, and history, all of which became pervasive themes in the Italian Transavanguardia. “Otani’s work in performance and photograph anticipates his [Clemente’s] generation by a decade,” observed curator Jean-Christophe Ammann.10 A Conceptual framework, a critical element in Arte Povera, was further championed by artists as the political climate shifted and intensified in the 1970s. The national mood changed when Italy’s “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s slowed as left-wing terrorism and strong responses to governmental controls emerged. Painting was viewed as a nonrevolutionary force. Alighiero Boetti, an artist associated with Arte Povera in that he used untraditional materials such as maps, pens, and textiles crafted in developing nations’ cultures and practices, so strongly perceived painting as a conservative practice that he severed his friendship with Francesco Clemente when he refused to abandon painting. “The Yom Kippur War and the oil crises of 1973 largely vanquished positivism and the belief in a kind of evolutionary progress,” as explained by Bonito Oliva.11 This appraisal of 1970s history is central to the writings of Bonito Oliva. His texts are often difficult to grasp, and they are cloaked in ideas that may be difficult to understand without specific examples of the artworks. For instance, he wrote, “Art will not accept transactions, conjugated inside the artist’s need to make the relative data of current production absolute and to create a discontinuity of movement, while the austere immobility of the productive concept exits.”12 In more lucid passages, however, Bonito Oliva set forth several concrete characteristics of the Transavanguardia. His interpretation that “with the Transavanguardia and the post-modern, the identity of the artists once again comes into play as does

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subjectivity […] a personal, individual art which rediscovers the genus loci as well as the anthropological identity of the artist”13 captured succinctly how this new movement represents a return to the imagination after an era of depersonalization. With the advent of the Transavanguardia, paintings instead stood outside of ideologies, springing from artist’s desire for pleasure, beauty, eroticism, and energy. Furthermore, he suggested that the artist moves back and forth through history, a cultural nomad referencing place, art history, and iconic symbols. Guided by memory, he created signs, both personal and mythic. The notion of liberation undergirds the Transavanguardia. Bonito Oliva opined in his 1980 manifesto titled Art without Ideologies, “After the self-flagellation of these last years, the artist has rediscovered his own specific role as the pleasure to exercise creative activity without obligation to invent something new.”14 One important element runs through all of the Transavanguardia artists’ sensibilities: locality. Though dissimilar in iconography and methods, the art is rooted in its relation to place, the terroir of art. The subjective nature of Transavanguardia painting is shaped by specific regions in Italy: for Mimmo Paladino, the Campagna; for Francesco Clemente, Naples (and outside of Italy, New York and India); for Enzo Cucchi, the Marches; and for Sandro Chia, Tuscany. Mimmo Paladino was born in 1948 in Paduli, a town outside of Benevento and west of Naples in the Campania region. He recalls his early and joyous introduction to art when he visited his uncle who was a painter: “I see myself again as a child […] entering the studio of my uncle Salvatore […] the feeling it gave me was wonderful […] the smell of the turpentine that invaded every corner of studio.”15 After studying art at the Liceo Artistico in Benevento, a local gallery showed his collages in 1968. Solo and group exhibitions followed in Europe and later in the United States. He did little painting throughout the 1960s and concentrated instead on drawing, mixed-media works, and threedimensional pieces placed in installations.16 He spent time in New York, Milan, and his native Paduli, where he kept a studio. Interested in cultures inundated with ancient rituals and animism, Paladino also travelled to Brazil several times seeking new inspiration and ways of thinking. The rich culture, traditions, and history of the area where Paladino’s was born and raised are the source of his artistic sensibilities. He remarked, I came from an island culture, a solid culture. Coastal backgrounds are more winding and redundant, full of opposite and different influences […] The countryside is rife with legends, cults of the dead and fairies, a sense of the pagan mystery, both religious and spiritual, typical of the south.17

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His plunge into painting began in 1979. Paladino, who had previously been making Installation art, abruptly changed course and began to paint on canvas. He did not agree with claims that his work was part of a return to painting. Rather, he claimed that “there are no returns in art […] there is a resumption of tools that appeared to be abandoned.”18 Throughout the 1980s, his pictorial range, much inspired by local folklore, included masks, caves, crosses, silhouettes of animals, tree branches, horns, tongues, cups, clocks, bread, flowers, and one or more figures or heads. During this decade, his palette followed a loose chronology: pastels, monochromes, soft neutrals, saturated primary colors, and black with gold leaf. He alternated between images situated in all-over compositions with delineated areas and stark, isolated imagery on flat backgrounds of solid color or deep black and handily moved between paintings that resembled altar-like grottos and those with scenes of dreamy netherworlds. Silenzioso mi ritiro a dipingere un quadro (“Silently, I Withdraw to Paint a Painting”), 1977, (Figure 5.1) announced his serious commitment to painting. Its poetic title made clear his strong, deliberate intention of going against the aesthetics of the moment. The word “silently” in the title is significant, as art writer John Sallis explains, “No word occurs more frequently in the titles of Mimmo Paladino’s works than silence; threatening but also more decisively sheltering the silence.”19 In this painting, the word “silently” denotes a hushed reverence toward returning to tradition with such a revered history in Italy. It also suggests that the simplified images of sheep, carpets, benches, bowls, and a lone figure all arranged in sections of cheerful pastel hues of blue, green, pink, and orange create what feels like a storybook setting all come from Paladino’s quiet imaginary vision. Even without a clear narrative, the combination of images and formal elements were engaging, a breath of fresh air after a painting hiatus. Although Paladino was branded Postmodernist, in Silently, I Withdraw to Paint a Painting he drew from the Modernist playbook. There are hints of Matisse trademarks—the materiality of painted surface of the canvas, painted surface, flat-colored planes counterpoised with signifiers of depth, patterned areas, and the play of opaqueness and transparency. The candy-colored pink shapes anchoring the diagonal corners of the canvas speak to Paladino’s attention to pictorial weight and balance. His images are realistic enough to be identified though still highly simplified.

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Figure 5.1: Domenico (Mim-

mo) Paladino, Silenzioso Mi Ritiro a Dipingere un Quadro (“Silently, I Withdraw To Paint a Painting”), 1977. Oil on canvas, 27.5 × 19.6 in. (70 × 50 cm). © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Photo credit: Pepe Avallone. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 5.2: Domenico

(Mimmo) Paladino, Notte di Pasqua (“Easter Night”), 1981. Oil on canvas, 79 × 120 in. (200 × 305 cm). Kunstmuseum Basil © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Courtesy of the artist.

The claim that the Italian Transavanguardia is a return to the subjective is borne out in Paladino’s work. Paladino described Notte di Pasqua (“Easter Night”), 1981, (Figure 5.2) by saying, [It is a] picture […] of nocturnal banquets. These are the images I love most. If I had to say in all sincerity what the most beautiful image of my work was, I could say this, a table crammed with things, tools, food, light.20

The 10-foot oil on canvas displays a tabletop tilting upward with a white dog peeking out underneath and a man standing behind it in front of a dark doorway. Although the scene is highly abstracted, it is easily understood that the figure is looking at an opulent feast. The walls in smoky shades of pale salmon exquisitely set off the beige, taupe, and grey tones on the table. The mood is simultaneously elegant, strange, and child-like. Paladino’s imagery often relates to ritual, mystery, death, and ancient tales typical of the southern part of Italy. The title of La virtù del Fornaio in Carrozza (“The Virtue of the Baker in a Carriage”), 1983, (Figure 5.3) alludes to the carriage of the characteristic Neapolitan hearse. A slender columnar figure in profile tilts on a diagonal at the waist with arm bent and fingers in front of a disproportionately small head sternly staring out at the viewer. Glommed onto the back of the figure is a man-animal with a mask-like face and ridiculously long, upright ears. Paladino explained that this “donkey-eared” head that appears in several of his works is a self-portrait of a painter who cannot paint.21 This kind of humorous, self-effacing attitude is a delightful contrast to the artist who projects pretentious self-seriousness. Animals or human-animal combinations are a Paladino staple; Benevento, a site for animal cults and ancient pagan sects, informed his interests and themes. The unearthly figures in The Virtue of the Baker in a Carriage are painted in shades of white against a chalky, black background. The left side of the painted black frame morphs into sculptural flourishes with gold highlights, with a black wooden spoon mounted below. Celant believed the inclusion of masks and primitive utensils pointed to Paladino’s anti-hierarchical stance without distinctions of “high and low, art and craft.”22 This piece, therefore, embodies the essence of Paladino’s project of the 1980s—ancient and fetishistic symbols fused with a palpable physicality of materials and paint application. Southern Italy grounded Paladino’s intuitive creativity, as he explained, “I find my point of non-consciousness reference in the anonymous culture of the south, in that architecture and in those works made of necessary, successive and

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Figure 5.3: Domenico (Mimmo) Paladino, La Virtù del Fornaio in Carrozza (“The Virtue of the Baker in a Carriage”), 1983. Oil on canvas, sculpted and painted wood frame, 83 × 71 in. (210 × 180 cm) © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Courtesy of the artist.

nevertheless, anonymous signs.”23 Signs and the mysterious pagan cultures that once occupied the area are present in Le tane di Napoli (“The Lairs of Naples”), 1983. Adding mystery to the artwork, Paladino attached wooden elements to cover up parts of the imagery comprised of animals, figures, and faces looking out at the uninvited viewer. Strong reds, blacks, golds, and whites crowd the composition with decorative patterns reminiscent of church vestments and altar cloths. He spoke of the specific quality of the landscape of this area, the caves and presence of spirits in the place. That landscape is reimagined in Sull’orlo della Sera (“On the Brink of the Evening”), 1982–83, (Figure 5.4) a picture of a black cave in which a man sits with a detached head, yellow-brown sketches of landscape, a snake, a hand, and a head inscribed on his torso. From inside the cave, a threatening hand reaches for his head. The surrounding rocks are inhabited by masklike heads that collectively serve as a Greek chorus bearing witness to an ancient ritual. Although the cave is the focal point of the painting, the eye is drawn to the details—two frolicking animals; the play of almost cubist-faceted rocks painted in yellow, gray, and brown; and a cross on a shield-shaped oval. For Paladino, the cross is not a symbol of Christianity but rather a “sign bound up with aesthetic beauty,”24 an embrace of the spiritual but free from religious dogma. There is a weightless quality in this and other Paladino paintings that recall Italian fourth- and fifth-century frescos with surfaces that resemble those ancient paintings on plaster.

Figure 5.4: Domenico (Mimmo) Paladino, Sull’orlo della Sera (“On the Brink of the Evening), 1982–83. Oil on canvas, 94.5 × 173.5 in. (240 × 440.7 cm) © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Courtesy of the artist.

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Paladino alluded to the alchemic nature of his use of materials. Combining and utilizing the essential nature of materials is part of his way of composing. For example, Sole Soletario (“Solitary Sun”), 1986, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, is composed of oil, metallic paint, and tar on burlap. The wood and linen attached to a gilded and charred plywood panel was one of many Paladino black-and-gold works shown that year at Sperone Westwater in New York City, when he was enjoying great success in the art world. An outline of a white face rests on the black shoulders of a figure. In profile, a small, devilish creature with a wizard’s hat rests on the figure’s right shoulder. The truncated figure is placed above a scratchy, wooden, door-like part of the support. The black figure and the white face give a stark and dramatic contrast against a gold-leaf background. The gold is punctuated with black smudges and on the lower right, a loosely drawn image of a white shovel. Early Christian icons, gold Byzantine embellishments, and pagan rituals converge in this haunting work. Paladino’s interest in the fusion of painting and sculpture developed during the 1980s; he often added wood to his paintings, either as an appendage or as a heavy, irregularly shaped frame. In Ara (“Altar”) 1982, a painting spanning more than 19 feet in width, a large stem of curving wood adorned with painted symbols moves outward from the top of the painting where the outline of a barren tree ends. It projects deeply into the space in front of the canvas and rests on the floor, providing the viewers multiple vantages to experience the piece—they can stand in front of the painting, next to the wood becoming part of the piece, or behind the wood fully taking in the amalgamation of sculpture and painting. Images of figures, arms, heads, shields, and claw-like hands stand, fly, and swoop across the rich vermilion background or in the wide curved swath of white paint that breaks up the monochromatic expanse of the canvas. Wood has a strong pull for Paladino. Of his use of wood, he said, “Such materials have a strong presence, but this does not play a decisive role. I love to transform things: the wood becomes color, becomes for material, becomes something completely different.”25 In addition to his use of wood, Paladino sometimes adhered small sculptures, readymade objects, clay sculptures, or masks to his paintings. This approach was shaped in part by an experience he had at the 1964 Venice Biennale when he was 16. He recalled, I saw the work of Rauschenberg and other Pop Artists at the time. I was shocked by their “gesture,” the freedom to include anything in their paintings. In the 1970s when I started painting, it was natural for me to assemble objects on the canvas.26

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This penchant toward assemblage was seen earlier in works such as Lampeggiante (“Flashing”), 1979 (Figure 5.5). Carrying over the poetic power of imagery and materials found in Arte Povera, Paladino uses a commonplace clay sculpture and lowly wooden cones in Flashing to open up a wide range of interpretive directions. The attachment of a clay relief sculpture of what looks like the face of an ancient god on the top center of the canvas suggests heraldic splendor. The arc of a curved red wire projecting from one of the eyes and a string of yellow-gold cones descending straight down from the mouth of the king create an intense chromatic vibration against the deep indigo canvas. He painted this in encaustic, a pigment with melted wax added to it in order to create luster and deep color.

Figure 5.5: Domenico (Mimmo) Paladino, Lampeggi-

ante (“Flashing”), 1979. Encaustic, clay, painted wood, and card on canvas, 86.6 × 51 in. (200 × 130 cm) © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Photo credit: Paolo Pellion. Courtesy of the artist.

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Paladino understands how color, placement, and the addition of threedimensional elements create pictorial drama. This is fully evident in his public sculptures such as Salt Mountain, 1990, measuring 38 yards in width and 21 yards in height where 30 carved horses emerge from what appears to be a cylindrical mountain of salt. When Paladino recreated this piece in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan in 2011, the juxtaposition of the two structures was dramatic. Art history lives in Paladino’s references to artists, including Rembrandt and the early Renaissance master Piero della Francesca who used mathematics and perspective to create contemplative works of serene perfection. In Suonno (d’après Piero della Francesca) (“Dream [After Piero della Francesca]”), 1983, (Figure 5.6) he paid tribute to someone who is considered by most artists to be a god of painting. Paladino drew from della Francesca’s Sogno di Costantino (“Dream of Constantine”), 1454–58, (Figure 5.7) part of his fresco cycle in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, Italy, depicting episodes from the Legend of the True Cross, a complicated narrative tracing the finding of the cross on which Christ was crucified. In this scene, Piero depicted Constantine sleeping in a perfectly cylindrical tent attended by his guards with an angel on the top left of the tent and touches of dramatic backlighting. The myth is that the night before a major battle, an angel came to the Roman emperor Constantine in a dream, telling him that he would be victorious if he put the sign of Christ on his shield. Legend has it that he indeed saw victory in that battle. Paladino’s version is an homage to Piero, not a replication. Instead of depth and dramatic lighting, there is flatness and evenly saturated tones depicting a white-and-beige tent on the left counterpoised by figures and designs on the right, all in various shades of terracotta. In the tent, Paladino painted a figure with a cross on his chest moving out of a bed. Behind the bed is a sleeping head on a pillow, suggesting a sequence of movements from sleep to motion. If the images on the right are the contents of a dream, then it is decidedly Paladino’s dream and not a representation of a dream Constantine might have. Fragments of animals and humans paired with other details such as a dog eating off a plate the kind of imagery that is distinctly Paladino’s. Dreams, fantasy, and images that are essentially about life and/or death also inhabit work of Francesco Clemente, the most widely known artist of the Italian Transavanguardia, whose work seamlessly melds three elements—the cultural and mythic notions of the self, the inherent poetry of signs, and a unique mastery of painting techniques. “Narrative, images, drama” are the three words Francesco Clemente stresses in describing his artistic aims.27 His thinking is nonlinear; things exist in relation to one another, freed from chronology.

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Figure 5.6: Domenico (Mimmo) Paladino, Suonno (d’après Piero della Francesca) (“Dream [After Piero della Francesca]”), 1983. Oil on canvas, 200 × 220 cm (78.7 × 86.6 in.) © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 5.7: Piero della Francesca, The Dream of

Constantine, 1464, in the series The Legend of the True Cross. Fresco, wall 329 x 190 cm. Public domain. Courtesy of WikiArt 2022.

This explains why his exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000 was not organized chronologically, the typical installation design for a retrospective. Instead, it was organized thematically with sections entitled I; Unborn; Bestiary; Conversion to Her; Sky; Amulets and Prayers; Books, Palimpsests, and Collaborations; and Sky. Clemente’s art is shaped by various locations where he has lived. Since the late 1970s, he has divided his time between Rome, New York, and India, affording him a wide range of cultural viewpoints and cross-references that operate from a distance. For example, after finishing The Fourteen Station series in New York, Clemente said, “To me the paintings I made here look as if they were made in a dark church in Naples, but to a friend in Italy, they look as if they were made in the winter light in New York.”28 Clemente exemplifies Bonito Oliva’s description of himself as a “cultural nomad.” Clemente’s immersion in multiple cultures has spawned an imagined world unlike that of any other painter of the 1980s. The diverse philosophical and cultural underpinnings in his oeuvre have been the focus of writings by art historians and critics, but Clemente’s equally staggering range of compositions and techniques has been somewhat overlooked. He is not interested in “formalism” per se, as it was pioneered by Modern artists from Pablo Picasso to Morris Louis. Rather, Clemente allowed images to surface and used materials to suggest forms that embody subjects revolving around the metaphysical, corporeal, and sexual dimensions of human identity. An overview of Clemente’s peripatetic path and key influences is illuminating. He was born in Naples in 1952, and he attended a Catholic school that focused on classical languages and literature. He lived in a part of Naples steeped in pre-Christian history where the street plan followed the roads laid by ancient pagan civilizations. He came from a place and time where one empty afternoon followed another. Clemente credits boredom, a condition which one normally decries, with the emergence of his own creative voice, believing that waiting or “making room” allows the artistic vision to reveal itself.29 Important influences shaped Clemente’s artistic development after he moved to Rome in the 1970s to study architecture. He completed the coursework but did not finish his degree at the Università degli Studi di Roma, La Sapienza. Instead, he switched paths and became an artist. He thrilled at walking past one of his idols, American-born artist Cy Twombly, who lived in Rome and whose work at that time comprised rows of free-form, calligraphic loops on primarily gray backgrounds. At age 16, Clemente had seen a Twombly exhibition in Rome, his first encounter with work by a living artist. The quality of Twombly’s line impressed Clemente.

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Figure 5.8: Francesco Clemente, Semen, 1983–84. Tempera on linen, 93 × 106 in. (236.2 × 269.2 cm) © 2022 Francesco Clemente. Courtesy of the artist.

He said, “To me the most important thing about Twombly is his line—talking about the vulnerability and fragility and nondogmatic strategy.”30 Line is the engine that drives much of Clemente’s work. Elegant lines and subtle shadings bring to life the image of a naked man (a self-portrait) floating upward in a liquid state in Semen, 1983 (Figure 5.8)—the title both literal and a homophone for “sea men.” In this tempera on linen, the acutely foreshortened torso makes it seem as if the viewer is positioned above the figure looking down. Because of the extreme perspective, the viewer focuses initially on the large head with outspread upper chest and arms, rendered with a wash of paint and lines that display Clemente’s skill as an elegant draftsman. Curved lines define the hip contour, but the rest of the lower torso is not visible except for a thumb-shaped line to indicate a protruding phallus. The focus shifts to the closed eyes and sumptuous red lips on Clemente’s outlined oval face—every writer on Clemente has mentioned his sensuous mouth. The top of the head disappears into the grey-beige washy background adding to the ethereal, sensuous mood. The image is incredibly intimate and fragile even though it is on a massive canvas measuring roughly 6 × 8 feet. Twombly and Clemente diverged on their ties to Italian antiquity, as Clemente explained, “For me, antiquity was such a weight, but for him it was a pair of wings. That was an amazing lesson to learn that there were ways to embrace the

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past so it didn’t weigh you down.”31 Another important influence on Clemente was the German artist Joseph Beuys, who Clemente met in 1974. He admired Beuys’s stance that drawing can be personal ideas made visible, more than mere representations or renderings of external objects. The making of forms connects with Clemente’s worldview. He explained, Yes, the connection has to do with this ritualistic activity, which I think is how he (Beuys) did his work. The connection with Beuys has also to do with the place where he put himself—mediating between the healing power of forms and a new—strategy of ideas. My position is more traditional than his. I’m turning my gaze away from ideas. Ideas divide people into good people and bad people. I have no interest in that, as I have no interest in formal religion, because all religions create a “us against you” situations. I don’t think our world needs that anymore. I want to turn my gaze toward the world of forms—that is a healing world. Become forms bring us together, as opposed to ideas, which divides.32

Beuys influenced all the Transavanguardia artists, changing artistic consciousness in Europe as Warhol had done in America. In 1973, Clemente met artist Alighiero Boetti, a pivotal introduction in many ways. Boetti, part of the Arte Povera movement, had an expansive communal and global view of art. The following year, Clemente traveled with Boetti to Afghanistan. As an art project, Boetti, a radical artist at his core, ran a small hotel in Kabul. Clemente admired Boetti’s unexpected originality—the idea that running a hotel could be a work of art, for instance—remembering fondly that the restaurant was well known to travelers as the only place to get a fruit salad without getting sick.33 Boetti hired artisans in Afghanistan and Pakistan to sew and embroider his large Mappa series, textiles showing nations represented by the colors of national flags and borders based on geopolitical realities rather than official geographical borders. Clemente followed this collaborative practice, working with local artists throughout his career, including Indian miniature painters, sign painters, papermakers, and an Italian fresco expert. In 1977, Boetti added the “and” (e in Italian) between his first and last name (Alighiero e Boetti), twinning himself to signify two personas in one. No doubt Boetti shaped Clemente’s interest in the dual nature of the self and the integration of global perspectives. Boetti also perceived twinning as the merging of opposites in his art such as order and disorder or the individual and the community. This was an influential concept, and in all likelihood, it opened up Clemente to the paradoxical nature of Indian

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philosophies. Clemente returned to Rome after Boetti’s mentoring but continued to travel as a way out of what he perceived to be a dead-end Italian culture. Clemente had no stomach for either the prevailing Marxist- or Catholic-based ideologies that he found stifling, so he chose geography as a way of positioning himself outside of the mainstream. Clemente left Rome several times for extended stays in India. First, in 1973, he went to New Delhi for three months and lived at a hotel and then at an ashram. Three years later, Clemente married Alba Primiceri, an acclaimed theater actress, and lived with her in India for a year. In Benares, they slept on the banks of the Ganges River “in an encampment of Tibetan monks,”34 wanting to experience Indian theologies firsthand. In Madras, Clemente joined the Theosophical Society, but rather than attending meetings there, he spent most of his time in their library, which contains one of the most extensive collections of books on Eastern thought and varying religious and philosophical beliefs, some quite rare. Clemente appreciated the fact that the banyan tree in their garden is the oldest in India. While in India, Clemente continued his practice of drawing incessantly; at one point during the 1970s, he did nothing but draw for three years. Both his drawings and The Pondicherry Pastels—eighty-two small works made from 1979 through 1980 while living in an ashram in India—provided a visual corpus which connected ideas and images. Raymond Foye expands on the role of setting for Clemente, writing, The Pondicherry pastels are also significant in that they firmly establish a method that Clemente would settle into throughout his mature career-that of working in series. Clemente has always been interested in what one might call organizing principles: how and why objects or ideas are grouped according to subject, size, shape, number, or that most arbitrary of all methods, alphabetization, and in what way these structures impart meaning to their individual elements.35

Clemente was initially intrigued by India because he knew little of the diversity of ideologies in Indian cultures. As he learned more, it became—and remains—a continuing source of inspiration for him. He was also taken with Indian pop culture, especially the range of commercial products that amount to an Indian version of the endlessly cute Hello Kitty. Kitschy but fascinating, it includes movie placards, postcards, advertisement, mass-produced painted statues of Buddha and other divinities, cards and posters of B-list movie stars and soap opera idols, and comic books about Indian folklore and the lives of its holy men. When is the last time you saw a comic book with “Reincarnation Man” as the superhero?

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Figure 5.9: Francesco Clemente, Two Painters, 1980. Gouache on handmade Pondicherry pa-

per, joined with handwoven cotton strips, 68 × 94 1/8 in. (172.7 × 239 cm) © 2022 Francesco Clemente. Courtesy of the artist.

In Madras in 1980, Clemente collaborated with painters of Bollywood movie posters and signs to create several works painted on thick, handmade paper joined with strips of cotton muslin, making large-scale works that were foldable and easy to transport. One of these, Two Painters, 1980, (Figure 5.9) is organized into thirds: left, center, and right. On the right, a naked man with sickly, pink skin is positioned in front of a stand of trees with ochre leaves. In the center, another naked man with darker skin tones stands in front of a lush landscape that gracefully recedes into the distance and continues into the left part of the painting. The landscapes and skin tones could represent different cultures or two aspects of the same person. The two naked painters stand with their backsides and upper torsos turned toward the viewer. They are pointing and poking their fingers into each other’s orifices—nose, mouth, eyes, and anus. The men who appear to be enacting a symbolic ritual are inexplicably placed in the lurid colors of the landscape. Clemente shared areas of the piece with sign painters resulting in a stylistic disjointedness that adds to the strange aura of the painting.

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In 1981, Clemente moved into a cavernous space in what was then considered one of the most dangerous areas in New York, Noho, North of Houston Street in Lower Manhattan. The city was bankrupt; only artists, writers, addicts, and drifters inhabited a large swath of real estate in Lower Manhattan. Dickens’s opening line in the book A Tale of Two Cities “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” applies to this chapter in New York City’s history. Although Lower Manhattan resembled a war zone with rat-infested buildings and empty lots filled with all manner of detritus, it was home to a vibrant and welcoming artistic community due to the implementation of AIR laws, as described in both Chapters 1 and 2. As Clemente assimilated into the exhilarating downtown New York art scene of the 1980s, the major players in that scene—Brice Marden, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and others—befriended him and often stopped by his studio. In 1984, his collaboration with Andy Warhol and JeanMichel Basquiat was somewhat forced upon the artists by mega art dealer Bruno Bischofberger. Each artist was to start a painting and leave enough “mental and physical space” for the next artist to continue. There was a sense of camaraderie and community in the early and mid-1980s. Moreover, Bischofberger’s selection of these three artists was a powerful art world imprimatur. Clemente, who was completely alone when he first arrived in New York, quickly made a place for himself and felt at home there. The first night Clemente spent in in the city, he had a dream that he was standing in the street, holding a scale model of Rome’s Classical architectural masterpiece, the Pantheon, while excrement rained down upon him. He interpreted this as his subconscious warning him to hold on to his Italian cultural history while on the mean streets of New York. That dream manifested itself in Perseverance, 1981, a painting of a naked artist from the back, twisting around so his almond-shaped eyes peer penetratingly out at the viewer. His cheek touches the scale model—a gesture often representing tenderness in Clemente’s work—as he protectively grasps the building with one arm stretching around the façade. At first glance, the brown smears against the white background appears to be just a lively pattern when in fact, they are representations of blots of human excrement, no doubt connected to Clemente’s obsession with the body and its orifices. Once in New York, Clemente prepared twelve large canvases and started an ambitious series called The Fourteen Stations, 1981–82. The title is a reference to the Stations of the Cross, a crucial part of Catholic iconography, particularly around Easter, that depict scenes from Christ’s journey on the day he was crucified. Stations of the Cross include Jesus being condemned to death, Jesus

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Figure 5.10: Francesco Clemente, Perseverance, 1982. Oil on linen, 78 × 93 in. (198.1 × 236.2 cm)

© 2022 Francesco Clemente. Courtesy of the artist.

carrying his cross, Veronica wiping the face of Jesus, and Jesus hanging nailed to the cross. Clemente’s stations do not depict these scenes, nor do they resemble the more abstract versions of the Stations done by Modern artists Henri Matisse and Barnett Newman. Instead, he painted raucous scenes of single or entwined bodies, strange bits of landscape, and inexplicable inclusions of fish, eyes, skulls, and vortices. The Fourteen Stations series was heralded as Neo-Expressionist—a blanket term applied to any artist in the early 1980s who produced full-tilt paintings with juicy brushstrokes, an assignation Clemente has always rejected. In the series,

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Clemente’s ferocious paint application with strokes and passages of painting is reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist masters such as Willem de Kooning. It makes sense that Clemente would be reminded of this style as he was in New York City where the “The Triumph of American Painting”36 occurred after the Second World War. He painted The Fourteen Stations in an expressionist mode to heighten the drama of the imagery that ranges from oddly mysterious to completely inscrutable. The Fourteen Stations series is the most aggressive of Clemente’s entire oeuvre; the active surfaces created by expressionistic paint application became flatter, more matte after this series. Before he began The Fourteen Stations, Clemente told curator Henry Geldzahler, an early champion of his work, “I know images, but I know less about colour.”37 He confronted his insecurities by using a full palette of loud and sometimes clashing colors. He started by painting the fourteen canvases with dark blues and purples so it would look as if the images were materializing from darkness. Softer colors and airy compositions followed this series, as seen in the lithe figures and pastel tones used in Conversion to Her, 1983. The imagery and formats in this series are enigmatic, if not downright scary. One painting shows two devils, each restraining a writhing woman on either side of a ghostly white, cave-like portal (The Fourteen Stations I). Another painting from the series depicts a giant, grisly, grimacing face with an enormous open mouth displaying skulls where teeth should be (The Fourteen Stations III). Another shows a headless man and a cat cut in half with blood spurting out (The Fourteen Stations V). The Fourteen Stations VI depicts a spindly Christmas tree tipped on its side with a massive red bow laid out on a landscape of snow. Underneath, a half-formed, ghoulish woman hides from an unknown threat. Particularly disturbing is the scene of a woman stretched diagonally in a suggestive pose with her shadow selves on either side of her body. Up on her haunches, she is about to be penetrated with a flame held by a man with a diabolical face in the lower left corner of the painting (The Fourteen Stations IX). Clemente excels in portraying the perverse and the macabre. The Fourteen Stations X (Figure 5.11) is a strong, vertical composition comprising a woman holding a compass sitting inside an orange-haired Amazon. On the left, steamships dash in black water, and on the right, a large rowboat morphs into a diving fish. He painted it all in loose brushstrokes that drag fiery colors out of the shadowy blacks and blues. Clemente flaunts his cultural range, presenting an amalgamation of Judeo-Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Greco-Roman

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Figure 5.11: Francesco Clemente, The Fourteen Stations X, 1981–82. Oil and encaustic on canvas,

78 × 93 in. (198 × 236 cm) Doris Amman Gallery © 2022 Francesco Clemente. Courtesy of the artist.

references, and the images provide a complex cosmology. One writer articulated it nicely, The great goddess—a western Kali—the subject subsumed (not subjugated) within her, with flaming hair (Pentecost), the compass held out in the egg-shaped distant, azure (for Paracelsus, the “arcane substance,” for Thomas Vaughan, “the body of heaven”) […] and a whaler on the right, with its open womb, ready to receive Jonah, the twice-born traveler.38

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If the painting conveys the scene as a mythic odyssey, it does so because Clemente believes that painting is the last connection between civilization and oral tradition. Poetry, rather than art, inspired Clemente primarily. His lifelong involvement with poetry began early; at ages 4, 5, and 6, he recited his own poems to his mother, and she later published a small collection of his poetry. He collaborated with many contemporary poets and created illustrations for their collections. He has worked with writers Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, Robert Creeley, Gregory Corso, Andrei Voznesensky, Vincent Katz, René Richard, Peter Handke, and Adam Zagajewski, all of whom, as Raymond Foye points out, share a fealty to the American expatriate Ezra Pound, founder of the Imagist movement in poetry of the early twentieth century.39 Clemente admires Pound, even though he strongly denounces his fascist politics and support for the Nazi regime. Regardless, there are interesting parallels between poet and painter. Pound moved from one place and time to another in overlapping narratives. In Cantos, his unfinished epic poem, he moved the setting from Hollywood to Venice, to the Ancient Greece of Odysseus. Similarly, Clemente traverses many cultures in his art. On a deeper level, both Pound and Clemente rely on the poetics of the image, delivered forcibly in multiple voices through multiple identities. Pound, who once said that “the primary pigment of poetry is the image,” believed in the succinct expression of human strengths and foibles through the images created with words. Pound believed that “an image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”40 Clemente takes the primacy of the image to a more metaphysical realm, believing that they can have a healing capacity. Consider the poetic combination of romantic and violent imagery in Clemente’s Self-Portrait with Gun Hole in the Head, 1981, (Figure 5.12) a compact, dynamic painting of a cropped three-quarter view of Clemente’s head smashed up against the left side of the painting, eyes askew. Above his right eye is a nasty gun wound with exposed bloody tissue singed with black char. The rest of the painting stretches out over two-thirds of the canvas in a pattern of creamy, pale-yellow marks—although similar, no two are the same—that look like hovering wall tiles. The bloom of a red rose is suspended in front of the background as if on a path to Clemente’s head. The rose implicitly becomes the bullet. Is the rose, symbolic of love, really a Glock in disguise? Clemente’s work revolves around representations of the self. The artist explained, “If you bare the voice to its essential nature, it is simply a voice saying, ‘I am, I am, I am.’ This is what all contemplative traditions teach.”41 Clemente’s

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Figure 5.12: Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait with Gun Hole in the Head, 1981. Oil on linen, 55

× 80 × 6 in. (140 × 203 × 15 cm) Stedelijk Museum© 2022 Francesco Clemente. Courtesy of the artist.

notions of the self often take the form of a visual metaphor of the body, with strong suggestions of an almost “libidinal fixation” with the body-image joined with animal forms, split, layered, or transmuted.42 Clemente responded to the controlling political systems of the 1970s in his interest in depictions of the body, especially in Eastern thought. He explained, The body appeared as the only place that was not colonized, that was not controlled by the big ideological dogmas of the time—capitalism and communism. But this interest in the body came also from more remote times, from traditions of East and West, which see the body as a microcosm, a metaphor of the world according to the rule that “as it is above, so it is below.”43

Clemente has three visualizations of the “I am.” One is an obsession with orifices; in his own words, Clemente confirmed, “All my works revolve around images of holes in the body.”44 Second is the tantric notion of a sexuality– spirituality connection. Third, the paintings often take the form of a self-portrait, to such a degree that critic Donald Kuspit called him a narcissist after his

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Figure 5.13: Francesco Clemente, Name, 1983. Oil on canvas, 77 15/16 × 92 15/16 in. (198 ×

236 cm) © 2022 Francesco Clemente. Courtesy of the artist.

retrospective at the Guggenheim.45 Clemente corrected Kuspit’s erroneous view when he responded: This is what all contemplative traditions teach. I see the self-portraits as a record of self, continually coming to life every time new, every time pristine, every time unknown—simply affirming that voice. Nothing more than that. You have that kind of iconography in the East, a thousand Buddhas, a thousand selves. It is an imagery of reincarnation. The point is that we do reincarnate in our daily lives.46

These selves appear in a self-portrait titled Name, 1983 (Figure 5.13). Many small images of the artist’s own face peer out of holes on the larger self-portrait face—eyes, nostrils, an ear, and mouth—many selves within the self. Art critic Roberta Smith situates this work in a cross-cultural matrix:

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The Gorgonian suggestion of souls trapped in a larger being resonates with Eastern philosophy and Western angst, and the duality seems reiterated by the background. To one side is a vivid blue sky seen through a horizontal window that’s suggests a train barreling across India, to the other side a Classical column, redolent of Italy.47

Smith’s assessment correctly underscores the East-West dialogue that takes place in Clemente’s paintings of the 1980s. Clemente’s inclusion of erotic imagery, which comes out of his interest in the Tantric tradition in many Eastern cultures, shakes up many viewers who find explicit images of persons having sex as pornographic. “Yet the artist’s intention is not to shock but to explore the erotic impulse impassively—to deny the possibility that one might be intimidated by one’s own desires,” wrote Raymond Foye.48 In Midnight Sun II, 1982, (Figure 5.14) Clemente depicted a woman, naked but for a bathing cap, mounted on top of two men, one blindfolded. It is not completely clear who is doing what to whom, but all appear to be very busy. The splayed arms and legs create an irregular pinwheel design against a white background, patterned with faintly visible hexagons. This backdrop is peppered with twenty-three simply rendered sailboats as seen from the sky. That is just the first look—details extend the narrative. The marquise-shaped hulls are actually eyeballs, some less visible when painted in dark colors. The eyes can be interpreted as symbols of the many selves. Other perplexing details emerge upon further evaluation. A sail connects to a testicle, small white wings mount on the woman’s shoulders, and a red wash of paint arises from the woman’s buttock. Denying an ah-ha moment to the viewer, the painting is an open-ended field of meaning. Looking at any assemblage of Clemente’s work attests to the fact that he is highly original, imaginative, and idiosyncratic, and he rarely repeats himself in terms of composition. Central to Clemente’s thinking is the Hindu god Shiva, the rule-maker; the reconciler of dualities male and female, contemplation and sexuality; the creator and destroyer. Shiva’s inspiration explains why so many of his images teeter between tenderness and harshness. For many years, Clemente thought of his imagery as ideograms, symbols or pictures used to represent an idea or thing. After a friend pointed out to him that forms come before ideas, he began to embrace the notion of essential forms. Clemente has continued to invent essential forms for his poetics, but the foundation for his ideas were laid in the 1980s with a rich range of visuals that reestablished painting as primary in Italian Contemporary art.

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Figure 5.14: Francesco Clemente, Midnight Sun II, 1983. Oil on canvas, 79 × 98 1/2 in. (2010 × 2507 cm) © 2022 Francesco Clemente. Courtesy of the artist.

During Clemente’s raging popularity in the 1980s, he was often grouped with fellow artists, Enzo Cucchi and Sandro Chia, collectively referred to as “The Three C’s.” The art of Enzo Cucchi and Sandro Chia embodies the defining characteristic of Italian Transavanguardia painting—the figure situated in an imaginary setting. Their work adds to the diversity of style and content in the Transavanguardia movement. Although their work can be uneven, their best pieces were created in the 1980s. Enzo Cucchi came to Rome from Ancona, an Italian city on the Adriatic Sea in the Marches region. Ancona was founded by the Syracusans in the fourth century BCE, and the rich history of folklore, fables, and ancient traditions from the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine civilizations which once occupied the region provide a cultural backdrop for Cucchi’s paintings. Inspired by the dramatic terrain of the Marches, Cucchi’s land- and seascapes suggest interior mindscapes, both moody and nostalgic. Works such as Pesche in Schiena del Mare Adriatico (“A Fish on the Back of the Adriatic Sea”), 1980, (Figure 5.15) illustrate the concept of

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Figure 5.15: Enzo Cuc-

chi, Pesche in Schiena del Mare Adriatico (“A Fish on the Back of the Adriatic Sea”), 1980–82. Oil on canvas, 78.7 × 107.2 in. (200 × 273 cm) © 2022 Estate of Enzo Cucchi. Courtesy of Alessandro Cucchi.

“genius loci,” the spirit of a location or even the protective nature of a place. It suggests an almost mystical power that is felt by the inhabitant. In this painting, a diver balancing a fish on his back soars above the water in a scene that mimics Ancona’s harbor on the Adriatic Sea. The succinct contours of the diver’s body are emphasized in black outlines, some enhanced with a white aureole. Cucchi’s stories are told with color. The diver is green; the fish, water, and sky a bright orange. A small tree and tiny scampering dog in white punctuate the continuous deep blue-black hills that rise up from the shoreline, showing what one writer calls Cucchi’s “nostalgia for the land.” As curator Diane Waldman explained, Cucchi “uses color to underscore the immediacy of the experience of landscape […] as a conveyor of mood and as a support for form; for him color and image are linked—together they function as a metaphor for primordial experience.”49 The dark hills against the vivid orange sky and sea place the diver in a fable-like setting where nature is a metaphor for feeling. Titles such as The Mountain’s Thought, 1982, and The Mountains Resist the Animals, 1982, indicate that Cucchi imbues the land with human characteristics. And in Sigh of a Wave, 1983, skulls bob on a wildly undulating sea that appears to be aflame in red, yellow, and black. Much like Paladino, Cucchi reflects on both the pagan and religious legacies of his region in his art, particularly the rituals around death. Skulls, birds, and crosses inhabit landscapes of apocalyptic flames, barren hills, and flooding seas. Many of the medieval churches in the Marches are adorned with sculptures of the Last Judgment or the Apocalypse, originally designed to frighten the faithful into compliance. He powerfully captured the specter of these images in paintings such as Barbarian Landscape, 1983, in which a giant crowing

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rooster thrusts upward scattering skulls on a torturous terrain. These unsettling landscapes recall the sensibility of Giorgio de Chirico, the founder of the Italian Metaphysical School, Scuola Metaphysica, a precursor to the Surrealist movement in the early twentieth century. Although stylistically different than de Chirico, fantastic dreamscapes also proliferate in Cucchi’s work such as Inebriated Fountain, 1980. Against a dark background looms half of a giant, oval-shaped face. Water gushes to the sea below out of a round opening which looks like the end of industrial piping in the place where there should be a mouth. An ancient city building is displayed in the lower left corner. Instead of using a quickly receding space as de Chirico did in the early twentieth century, Cucchi’s misshapen half head is placed in a shallow space creating a mood of wry irony. Like Clemente, Cucchi thinks of the image as rarified. He calls it a sign and links it to Ancona, his hometown, where he describes that, One can see the sun set and then rise. All can decorativeness, the “taste” where the corruption of the present time are brought to their extremes and upheavals by an economic and administrative crisis; yet there still remain around me here the limpid, proud signs unique to the world of form and his universal life.50

Cucchi resists sentimentality, lyricism, and “prettiness” in favor of strong, simplistic metaphors. His paintings are sparse when compared to the more expressionistic use of line and color found in those of Sandro Chia. Sandro Chia grew up in Florence, where he attended the prestigious Fine Arts Academy. After traveling extensively in Europe and Turkey, he settled in Rome in 1970 and had his first solo exhibition in 1971. Ten years later, he moved to New York and lived there for two decades. Today, he splits his time between Miami and Multacino, Italy. Like the other artists in the Transavanguardia movement, Chia was heavily influenced by the “where-ness” in his paintings, the feel and sense of the place where he was. In the 1970s, Chia remembers that artistic expression was forbidden, but this changed as the 1980s approached. International art expositions such as documenta and the Venice Biennale were an exchange of ideas creating a sense of goodwill and resolution as a more globalized sense of art came into view. As this happened, Chia recalled: [T]autological messages looked a little ridiculous. Paint was no longer painting, it was one of many possible ways […] After a period of clearing away conceptual issues in art, painting was again free. In that moment, there were many

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options; painting was one of them. The return to painting was a way to see with new eyes, with new ways, not traditional.51

This idea echoes Bonito Oliva’s concept of art returning to its “internal motives,” coming from the artist rather than theories. Chia was one of the first of the Transavanguardia artists who insisted a return to painting was needed. He wanted to “return the aura of the work of art at a time when artists were attempting to destroy it.”52 With the liberation of painting, Chia felt that artists were free to source from an eclectic group of Modern artists where none are excluded: from Chagall to Picasso, to Cézanne, to de Chirico, to Carrà, to Picabia. Lesser-known artists exerted an even greater influence; one writer explained, “The main reference for Chia was the art produced in Italy in the 1930s; Chia was mainly influenced by Ottone Rosai (1895–1957), a painter very famous and seminal in Florence in that period.”53 These references were incorporated in new ways as they provided ideas, motifs, and stimuli for Chia’s paintings. Chia was also influenced by Florence’s Renaissance Masters through a kind of cultural osmosis. He explained that as a young boy, he played soccer in the piazza near San Spirito in Florence. As a respite from the heat, he would enter Santa Maria del Carmine to cool off inside.54 There he saw the Masaccio’s famous frescos in the Brancacci Chapel; they entered his consciousness and became incorporated into his paintings in some way.55 Chia’s figures are part of his easily recognizable signature style. They have strong, rounded contours, billowy muscles, and small heads making them look like a cross between the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Michelin Man. They are usually engaged in a physical activity or labor such as drawing, diving, hunting, walking, playing an instrument, often as the center of an enigmatic and fragmented narrative. Curator Anne Seymour believes that Chia’s male figures are “searching for something, or perhaps that they are pilgrims of a sort, for they often seem bound on some unidentified mission.” They are, the artist points out, “figures born of painting and thus possessed of a strong code of morals and justice, for the rules of painting are strict and the responsibilities heavy.”56 In Portatore d’acqua (“Water Bearer”), 1981, (Figure 5.16) a vertical painting over 6 feet high, there is a three-quarter view of one of Chia’s pumped-up figures, a young man with a white top and tight, raggedy, blue pants hunched over, looking downward in concentration. His arms bend backwards straining his massive muscles to carry on his back a giant, blue-scaled fish with a bright

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Figure 5.16: Sandro Chia,

Portatore d’acqua (“Water Bearer”), 1981. Oil and pastel on canvas, 81 1/2 × 67 in. (207 × 170 cm) © 2022 Sandro Chia/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

red tail that hangs between his legs. The palette is continued in a background of curving red-and-blue blotches of paint enlivened by black marks and white filaments. The scene looks like a hallucinogenic vision rising from an everyday encounter at a fish merchant stand, but it is actually a scene common in Renaissance art, derived from the Apocryphal story in which an angel tells Tobias to carry a fish on his travels to find a bride.57 Paintings familiar to Chia from growing up in Florence, once a Renaissance stronghold, offered motifs he would make his own. Classical art and architecture denoted moral, humanistic values. Shepherds from Renaissance Nativity themes are removed from their religious context in Chia’s pastoral setting of Aroused Shepherd Boy, 1980. A shepherd clutches his lamb while hiding in a cave in the shape of female genitalia. In the distance above the cave is a typical Renaissance villa, its Classical elements symbolizing high moral ground. The high line of the horizon dotted with voluminous trees against a threatening sky heightens the sense that the shepherd and his sheep are hiding from both moral and natural elements. One writer interpreted the scene as a meditation on the carnality of youth:

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In the arrested moments of this Arcadian scenario, a sexually aroused lad embraces a sheep; the two of them, dwarfed by rocks and hillocks of grass pushing off through the earth are surrounded by an aura of light energy and vitality. Chia’s shepherd boy embodies a kind of amoral, pagan lust fullness, free of guilt of associations of perversion.58

Chia has a witty, if not sardonic, side that he unveiled in Sinfonia incompiuta (“Incomplete Symphony”), 1980, in which a figure is shown bent over with one knee on a table and his face turned to the viewer. Blasting outward from the boy’s backside are radiating lines and musical notes fanning out in a circle, which at first might be mistaken for a tutu. Blotchy, jumpy paint handling of reds surround the figure and brightly contrast the greens in the background to further draw the eye to the focal point—the man’s flatulence. Another strange but compelling image is in La cucina di Dioniso (“Dionysus’ Kitchen”), 1980, (Figure 5.17) a 10-foot-wide horizontal painting showing a young Black man dressed in a garb that could be either a blue medieval surcoat or an old sailor outfit with cap. On the right side of the canvas, he stands with his lance extended into the top left where a tiny figure is pulling the lance in a tug-of-war that is almost lost in the radiating swirls of red, orange, and blue lines. These lines are reminiscent of “force-lines” used by the Italian Futurist artists in the early twentieth century to denote movement, dynamism, and speed. As the title suggests, the god pictured wields magic; there is a sense of wizardry in the gesture. A painter of imaginary visions, Chia creates the robust hero, the comic antihero, the magic, and the mundane with great energy carried by color, line, and expressionistic painting techniques. The emergence of Paladino, Clemente, Cucchi, and Chia coincided with one of the most expansive periods in the history of Contemporary painting. In 1979, Bonito Oliva’s essay “Le Trans-Avanguardia” appeared in Flash Art, bringing the term and its artists to the attention of the public. The charming Bonito Oliva was a deft media manipulator. In 1981, when he was a professor of art history at the University of Rome, the magazine Frigidaire published an interview with him and a controversial photograph in which he was stark naked reclining on a chaise imitating the pose of a Roman god. The gallery and museum world took notice of Bonito Oliva’s “branding” of the Transavanguardia, and between 1979 and 1982, the artists were seen extensively in both solo and group exhibitions. The way curators situated these artists gives a window into the thinking of art specialists as the 1980s unfolded. They tended to exhibit artists together as if they were part of a stylistically homogeneous group.

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Figure 5.17: Sandro Chia, La Cucina di Dioniso (“Dionysus’ Kitchen”), 1980. Oil and pastel on canvas, 81 1/2 × 67 ft. (2065 × 1700 cm) © 2022 Sandro Chia/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

In 1980, Bonito Oliva and Harald Szeemann curated the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale, an exhibition space known for showing up-and-coming artists. The exhibition presented a mixed bag of European artists such as Tony Cragg, Valerie Jaudon, Martin Disler, all the Italian Transavanguardia artists, and many American artists, including Jonathan Borofsky and others. The Americans had imagery in common with the Italians, but they came from varying art movements, including the New Image painters (Susan Rothenberg and Robert Moskowitz), and from the Pattern and Decoration movement (Robert Zakanitch and Ned Smyth). In addition to reflecting the pluralism of styles that carried over from the 1970s, the 1980 Aperto selections also placed the Transavanguardia into an international context. Even though there were superficial similarities—note the lemur-shaped heads in Borofsky’s and Cucchi’s work—the artists’ intentions were different. Borofsky’s images at that time were shaped by dreams and a sequential numbering project while Cucchi’s were distorted self-portraits. A New Spirit in Painting, a major exhibition held at the Royal Academy, London in 1981, and Zeitgeist, an exhibition held in Berlin in 1982,

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are considered the most important markers that painting had returned and was again relevant. The inclusion of the Italians in both these exhibitions increased their gravitas in art circles. In a massive number of gallery and museum exhibitions, Italian artists became even more well known. In a review of several New York shows, Carrie Rickey wrote about several exhibitions in the year 1980 at Sperone Westwater Fischer Gallery and an exhibition titled Italian Wave at Holly Solomon Gallery (Solomon was a pioneering force in the art world and her place in art history has not been fully acknowledged). In the same article, Rickey notes the disunity of the rampant emergence of figuration in the United States and Germany. She wrote, The more I see, and the more the impulse behind New Imagism looks precisely the opposite of the notion of a homogenized International style. The more you look at the paintings, the more you’ll require increased knowledge of each artist’s personal iconology. If I can make a leap from the Hudson to the Tiber, my hunch is that in Italy, as in the States, what looks like an International Style, is just a constellation of intensely individual, regional styles. Make no mistake: New Imagism is not the Esperanto of Contemporary Art. It’s polyglot.59

In 1982, Diane Waldman curated an exhibition titled Italian Art Now at the Guggenheim Museum. She placed the Transavanguardia artists in a larger context of Italian artists that included Giuseppe Penone, Luigi Ontani, Nino Longobardi, all of whom combined installation and painting, and Vettor Pisani, who worked in photography, installation, and theatre. The catalogue essay cites Giorgio de Chirico and others in the metaphysical movement as important precursors, referring to his best-known early unsettling paintings of piazzas with possible danger lurking around every Palladian colonnade. It is, in fact, the later de Chirico works in which he painted traditional scenes inspired by Rubens that influenced Transavanguardia, most especially Sandro Chia. In 1985, the exhibition A New Romanticism: Sixteen Artists from Italy opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. All the art contained images or figuration of one sort or another. Chia, Cucchi, and Paladino were included. Curator Howard Fox asserted that the exhibition displayed “the disunified surge of new painting” and “as simply too diverse stylistically and philosophically to typify as a whole.”60 He spoke of the group as poets and visionaries. Fox subdivided the artists into various camps, with Cucchi, Chia, and Paladino grouped together to counter such artists as Carlo Maria Mariani, who were working

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in the grand style that dates back to the late eighteenth century when perfect Greek-inspired figures and heroic themes were particularly valued. A persistent thread in reviews of the Transavanguardia is the differences in styles and content among the artists. Francesco Clemente claims that the Transavanguardia was not even a movement. He said, It wasn’t really a movement. I think, actually, that whole generation of artists lacked a proper theoretical background and no one really bothered with that. So, there were a few labels, you know, the Neo-Expressionist, the Transavanguardia but all of these were only labels. It was more of a synchronicity of several people in different parts of the world going back to making art drawn from life and not from other art.61

Clemente’s remark notwithstanding, the label Transavanguardia stuck. Endnotes

1. Nicola De Maria, who was included in this group, will not be discussed in this chapter as a great deal of his work was three-dimensional, melding painting with sculpture and installation art. 2. Corà, Burri e Fontana: 1949–1968, 62. 3. Corà, “Conversation with Enrico Castellani,” in Burri e Fontana: 1949–1968, 102. 4. Fontana, “The White Manifesto.” 5. Erpf interview with Achille Bonito Oliva, Rome, April 25, 2011. 6. This group also included filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, among other actors, intellectuals, and members of the Roman aristocracy who all shared the kind of festive nocturnal existence captured in Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita. 7. Celant, Arte Povera, 182. 8. Christov-Bakargiev, “Space of Arte Povera,” in Zero to Infinity, 67. 9. Gorvy, “Art Basel | Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venere-Persona-Alfa, 2018.” 10. Ammann, Francisco Clemente Works 1971– 1979, 249. 11. Erpf interview with Achille Bonito Oliva, Rome, April 25, 2011.

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12. Oliva, The Italian Trans-Avantgarde: La Transavanguardia Italiana, 8. 13. Oliva, The Italian Trans-Avantgarde: La Transavanguardia Italiana, 8. 14. Pinchon and Ferrier, Art of Our Century: The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present, 757. 15. Celant, Mimmo Paladino, 45. 16. At that time, it was called Environmental Art. 17. Celant, Mimmo Paladino, 48. 18. Celant, Mimmo Paladino, 160. 19. Sallis, Paladino: A Monograph, 9. 20. Sallis, Paladino: A Monograph, 206. 21. Sallis, Paladino: A Monograph, 246. 22. Sallis, Paladino: A Monograph, 28. 23. Paladino and Corà, Paladino, 23. 24. Celant, Mimmo Paladino, 282. 25. Celant, Mimmo Paladino, 218. 26. Tansini, “Simplicity of the Gesture: A Conversation with Mimmo Paladino,” 38. 27. “Francesco Clemente,” episode Charlie Rose, August 20, 2008. 28. McClure et al., Francesco Clemente: Testa Coda, 99. 29. “Francesco Clemente,” episode Charlie Rose, August 20, 2008.

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30. McClure et al., Francesco Clemente: Testa Coda, 47. Smith, “Art Review: A Dream Sensuality Bridg99. es Time and Culture.” 31. Slowey, “Francesco Clemente Worries New 48. Foye, “Madras,” 53. York Is Too Safe a Place to Produce Great Art.” 49. Waldman and Cucchi, Enzo Cucchi, 20. 32. McClure et al., Francesco Clemente: Testa Coda, 50. Cucchi, Enzo Cucchi: Centro per Larte Contem99. poranea Luigi Pecci, Museo Darte Contempora33. “Francesco Clemente on Alighiero e Boetti,” nea Prato, 127. TateShots. 51. Erpf interview with Sandro Chia, Rome, May 34. Foye, “Madras,” 52. 18, 2011. 35. Foye, “Madras,” 57. 52. This is discussed in Gianelli, Transavanguardia, 36. This was the title of Irving Sandler’s book on 327. the American Movement of Abstract Expres- 53. Perrini, “Beyond Transavantgarde: Art in Italy sionism, published in 1970. in the 1980s.” 37. Geldzahler, “Francesco Clemente in New 54. Erpf interview with Sandro Chia, Rome, May York,” 36. 18, 2011. 38. Dennison and Pellizzi, “Rooms,” 37. 55. Erpf interview with Sandro Chia, Rome, May 39. Foye, “Madras,” 124–25. 18, 2011. 40. Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” 56. Tate Gallery, The Tate Gallery 1982–84: Illus41. Auping and Clemente, Francesco Clemente, 7. trated Catalogue of Acquisitions. 42. Kuspit, “Francesco Clemente: Neo-Symbolist 57. Tobit 6:2-3. 58. Waldman, Italian Art Now: An American Perand Narcissist,” 8. spective, 50. 43. Bacon and Clemente, “Francesco Clemente 59. Rickey, “Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, and Francwith Alex Bacon.” 44. Zullo, “Francesco Clemente,” Crown Point esco Clemente.” Press. 60. Fox and Strehlke, A New Romanticism: Sixteen 45. Kuspit, “Francesco Clemente: Neo-Symbolist Artists from Italy, 12. and Narcissist,” 8. 61. Cué, “Interview with Francesco Clemente.” 46. Auping and Clemente, Francesco Clemente, 7.

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6 Worthy Misfits Defying Categorization

Worthy Misfits

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ome artists create work that is so original in terms of iconography or content that they defy traditional categorization. They are misfits in art historical labeling, but the term “misfit” belies their vital contributions to painting in the ’80s. Nonetheless, their inclusion in this text is necessary to mark their individual significance and to showcase the diverse array of painting that came out of the 1980s. Lari Pittman “Less is more” is not in the vocabulary of Los Angeles artist Lari Pittman. His paintings are a paean to the decorative, kitschy, and overly embellished. In his 1980s paintings, decorative motifs and ornamental designs lace together a vast assortment of images taken from anatomy, architecture, media, and the natural world, including landscapes, words, enlarged penises, arrows, silhouettes, bridges, and much more. In Pittman’s paintings, symbolic iconography suggests narrative fragments. The plenitude of visual information points toward a wide range of subtexts. Gender identity, social codes, history, politics, violence, and even death coexist with love, hope, tolerance, beauty, nature, and what Pittman calls jouissance, French for pleasure and enjoyment. Entirely resistant to a fast take, Pittman’s paintings require time for looking. Pittman was born in Glendale, California, in 1952, the second child of a Columbian mother and an American father. When he was 5, his family relocated to Columbia and returned to California when he was 11. His multicultural, bilingual upbringing inhabits his art. Pittman attended UCLA in 1970 but transferred to CalArts, where his independent spirit was encouraged. Despite the anti-painting leanings of the school, painters Elizabeth Murray, Vija Celmins, and Feminist art pioneer Miriam Schapiro left a lasting impression on him. He was particularly moved by Schapiro, one of the founders of the groundbreaking Feminist art program at CalArts that addressed gender inequality and championed women’s work, much of it with a decorative cast, which had been previously devalued. Decorative, at that time was implicitly aligned with queer culture; Pittman’s usage of it in art subverted the negative connotation through the blanket of legitimacy provided by fine art. At CalArts, Pittman met his life partner, fellow artist Roy Dowell, with whom he has lived since. He returned to his first school as a beloved Distinguished Professor of Painting and Drawing at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, where he remains to this day. Regen Projects in Los Angeles mounted the first of many solo exhibitions of Pittman’s work in 1983. He was invited to participate in the prestigious Whitney Biennial in 1987, leading to his inclusion in numerous important exhibitions.

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) held a mid-career survey of Pittman’s art in 1996. Most recently, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles mounted a sweeping Pittman retrospective in 2019. Trying to see the collection of detailed paintings all in one day was virtually impossible. In 1985, Pittman was shot twice in the stomach by a burglar trying to enter his home. His intestines were punctured in over a hundred places.1 Surgeons barely saved him. Roy Dowell put a paintbrush in Pittman’s hand during his long recovery and forced him to work. What followed were six small sculptures and an extraordinary group of paintings in which Pittman redirected the traditional meaning of the memento mori, a painting or object which is a remembrance or reminder of death, or, in this case, a near-death experience. He took the traditionally religious art form out of the religious sphere, coopting it to fit his atheism, a core belief that became even more resolute after being shot. He selected the gourd as his surface for the symbolism. He said, “I don’t know of any culture who has not painted on a gourd.”2 On each gourd, Pittman painted a name of one of the virtues: charity, compassion, faith, kindness, hope, and forgiveness. He built his physical and emotional health on these qualities. Always an imaginative, nonlinear thinker, he carried the Thanksgiving connotations of the gourd into a series of paintings referencing colonial American history. In the painting Plymouth Rock 1620, 1985, (Figure 6.1) Pittman connected the attributes painted on the gourds with the perception that American values stem from colonial times. With undisguised ire, Pittman alluded to the falsity of those professed values in a country where slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people and BIPOC had been politically and culturally sanctioned. In the 1980s and after, intolerance of homosexuality was heightened by HIV/AIDS and is a personal and persistent theme for Pittman, an openly gay man. Two large gourd shapes, echoing breast and phallic forms, dominate the left side of Plymouth Rock, one inverted next to the other creating the number 69, a recurrent number in many of Pittman’s paintings. On one section of each gourd, fantastical cityscapes against a blue sky rise up from thick, muddy, dark-brown pigment. Strange black-and-beige matter in formation move upward from the lower edge of the painting, prompting one critic to suggest that with this painting what “Pittman insinuates is America’s primal scene.”3 In front of this odd landscape, Pittman painted the year of the Mayflower landing, 1620, in fancy script of white and cerulean blue. With the precision of a miniaturist painter, fluid flourishes splash out from the calligraphic numerals. The top of the painting is adorned with a row

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Figure 6.1: Lari Pittman, Plymouth Rock 1620, 1985. Oil and acrylic on panel, 80 × 82 in. (203.2

× 208.3 cm) © 2022 Lari Pittman. Courtesy of Regen Projects.

of black-and-white rectangles arranged in ways that bring to mind mid-century modern interior design. Bulging out in high relief, several small yellow gourds thickly painted to look like thatched straw add another decorative texture. Pittman continues the theme of American values in the title The New Republic, 1985, where gray intestines surround a large painted gourd, linking the memento mori directly with when he was shot. It personified both his personal trauma and the sociopolitical realities of the United States. In Thanksgiving, 1985, a pink penis penetrates a pinwheel formation of gourd-like shapes spiraling out from the center. The words “Pursuit of Happiness, Life, and Liberty” on the left side of the painting are interpreted by curator Howard Fox as “the cardinal

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American ideal of free, responsible, self-determination, he implies, must extend to certain issues of sexuality, including homosexuality.”4 An American Place, 1986, (Figure 6.2) an early painting on wood (as are all Pittman’s non-gourd paintings), although packed with imagery, is not claustrophobic because of Pittman’s rigorous compositional arrangement. Black-andwhite squares embellish the top right. Moving from the left side to the right, teal, purple, black, and white areas of color with sharp geometric edges give way to a brown background upon which suggestions of green landscape lie flatly. Soft, pink forms reminiscent of flowers cover a large brownish form that looks like a cross between an ovoid-shaped gourd with vertical furrows and a scrotum. A textured black tree moves toward the center while a small, simplified profile of a lynched man curves from a noose into the tree trunk. Also difficult to readily decipher is the long mustard-colored barrel of an assault rifle with its own black bump, which is somewhat disguised in abstract forms. From the end of the weapon comes not gunshot but a heart and eggs, both signs of life. Pittman often adds hope to scenarios of suffering. Within the eggs are embryonic shapes, many with protruding phalluses. The inclusion of a black picket fence rather than a white one, Pittman stated, is a “clear, didactic moment.”5 The white picket fence is a symbol of the American dream, but he changed it to black, the same color as the weapon and the bump stock, a straightforward commentary on unregulated access to weapons in America. The section underneath is painted in the same petal pink with a patch of thin squiggly lines, perhaps a grassy spot.

Figure 6.2: Lari Pittman, An American Place, 1986. Oil and acrylic on panel, 80 × 164 in. (203.2 × 416.6 cm) © 2022 Lari Pittman. Courtesy of Regen Projects.

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Gun violence was a core issue for Pittman even before he was shot. He considers America to be a very violent society. The decorative presentation is intended to be joyous, but it also acts as a foil for other content. Pittman explained, The way I navigate the world personally, which is also how I make my paintings, is to try to initiate a set of aesthetic decisions that can push my perception of violence as far from me as I can, so that philosophically, and as a citizen, I feel safe.6

Decoration and craft may seem at odds with references to the Founding Fathers and gun violence, but early on, Pittman questioned why the decorative and meaningful could not be fused. After CalArts, Pittman worked for Donghia, a luxury interior design brand in Los Angeles, where he learned how gendered even wallpaper design could be. Tangentially, Pittman said he learned about human nature and the money side of design more than anything else while at Donghia. His desire to pretty things up is also a strategy. He calls his approach “an enculturated transgendering—not some sort of essentialist idea of gender,” and expressing his view of the fluidity of gender, he takes an unambiguous stance on a divisive topic, For me, craft has always been an ideological component in the work because it’s about a type of focus and social comportment that usually isn’t expected of a male. There’s a dutifulness that historically has been referenced or attributed to females, so I’ve always seen my devotion to craft as a type of protest.7

His innate love of decoration was embraced by his family who treated it as business-as-usual. When he was 4, his older brother Oscar prepared a special Father’s Day meal. Pittman contributed by setting the table using all his mother’s jewelry to embellish each place setting to the delight of his family. In another childhood anecdote, he recalled that his grandmother never scoffed when he made a travel outfit for his favorite chicken. His passion for craft and the decorative is celebrated in his adult home. He and Roy Dowell collect folk art, particularly retablos and ex-votos. He sometimes uses the retablo as a source of a color combination for a painting. Cross-fertilization of cultures, realistic and abstracted images, historical and social mores, language, and time are among Pittman’s artistic influences and inspirations. The mix of cultures and ideas particular to Los Angeles are large part of why Pittman chose to live there. He finds it “as chaotic as American culture is—sadly, ironically, or even perversely—I

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thrive on that.”8 Moreover, Los Angeles is less rooted in American postwar art movements and their underlying dogmas, providing Pittman a freer artistic environment than New York. Pittman’s paintings are conceived of in terms of simultaneity, in which temporalities coexist. He grew up speaking Spanish at home, a language in which past, present, and future are simultaneous through the use of the subjunctive case. That linguistic identity provides a model for his expression of time. Symbolic images and narrative fragments allow the viewer to explore the painting and make associations or derive possible meanings. He does not try to create a specific meaning for either himself or the viewer, whom he thinks can engage and draw conclusions independently. He instead offers “a ruminating experience” and adds that he is “opposed to the staging of meaning” drawn from an a priori text.9 Pittman’s painting from 1987 to 1988 have been described by curator Howard N. Fox as “a series of utopian works”10 attested by titles such as Where the Soul Intact Will Shed Its Scabs (8624 A.D.) and Where Suffering and Redemption Will Sprout from the Same Vine (7344 A.D.). With this series, Pittman moved into the land of the hallucinogenic decorative. Old sailing ships, cartoony cyclops eyes, fantastic scenes, and a psychedelic amusement park tableau are set in rich oranges, green, reds, and purples. Images drawn from advertising and commercial design inhabit the paintings from these two years. Pittman drew heavily from the brilliant commercial designer Alexander Girard, best known for his work at Herman Miller, particularly the stylized eyes. How Sweet the Day, After This and That, Deep Sleep Is Truly Welcomed, 1988, features a giant “WHAT?” against an orange background and surrounded by all manner of decoration. In a rave review of Pittman’s mid-career survey at the LACMA, one critic captured Pittman’s visual clamor in his description, “Flaunting garish palettes and gaudy designs, and festooned with glitter-caked components and in-your-face incidents, these overloaded images put on such an electrifying show that it’s impossible to mistake them for well-behaved wallflowers.”11 Pittman makes numerous references to colonial America again from 1989 to 1989 with a series of paintings that all have the phrase “beloved and despised” in the title. He presents his figures in silhouette, a style of portraiture popular when America’s slave trade was the bedrock of American society and economy. As curator Connie Butler pointed out, silhouettes were specifically used in advertisements for the slave trade. She also noted that “Pittman appropriated the form with both an acknowledgement of its tainted history and a repurposing of it.”12 Men in long jackets and women in bustled skirts suggest colonial times,

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when the appearance of gentility was all-important. It is surprising that, in using this pictorial model, Pittman addresses sexual identity directly in these same paintings. When asked if he was adding another theme to that of violence with this painting, Pittman answered that this was not something new, “the insistence of identity and violence have always been kissing cousins.”13 Pittman has stated that The Wholesomeness, Beloved and Despised, Continues, Regardless, 1990, (Figure 6.3) is about love. It is organized in two sections. In the upper section, a red circle is inserted on the lower torsos of the two men, with smaller red circles on their hearts. The couple is much larger in scale than any other element in the painting, giving importance to the moment of intimacy. Parenthetically, when this was painted, homosexuality was under attack during the government’s refusal to properly protect citizens while the HIV/AIDS epidemic was on, provoking a number of court cases to mixed rulings. In the upper right section of this painting, in much smaller scale, is a silhouetted scene of everyday folks—families, children, people socializing—crossing a bridge, an image of an acceptable societal norm in contrast to the two men together, at that time and still perceived as a societal ill. In the lower half of the painting, the two men, one with an erection, are separated by an empty bridge, the void between their identity and social acceptance. This hopeful future is celebrated with bells ringing atop a high tower on the upper left corner. The beautiful palette of olive green, yellow, bits of red, pink, black, and gold is used for the backgrounds, arrows, numerals including 69, sailing schooners, and stars. Pittman’s inclusion of all these images and designs makes a clear reading impossible. However, the arrows pointing in both directions between the upper and lower halves of the painting bring home the element of ambivalence which allows the viewer to negotiate meanings and association freely. Pittman set out to make paintings decorative and inclusive in terms of both imagery and content, not before seen in the pantheon of paintings. Imagery of covert homosexuality, particularly in religious paintings, is abundant in the history of art. Pittman decided to be overt, bringing same-sex relationships out into the light of day. His work challenged and perhaps put to rest a negative perception of the decorative in art. In the modern age, the decorative impulse was seen as unserious; the phrase “it’s only decorative” was often bandied about. One has to go back to Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter,” penned in 1908, to read a positive usage of the term. He wrote, “Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s command to express.”14 Pittman expanded the decorative to interface with gender and other identity and give it legitimacy as an original and inspired style.

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Figure 6.3: Lari Pittman, The Wholesomeness, Beloved and Despised, Continues, Regardless, 1990.

Acrylic and enamel on two mahogany panels, 128 × 96 in. (325.1 × 243.8 cm) © 2022 Lari Pittman. Courtesy of Regen Projects.

Marlene Dumas What makes Marlene Dumas’s paintings compelling, if not disturbing, is the depth to which the painted image speaks to the troublous side of the human condition. Her 1985 solo exhibition of portrait paintings The Eyes of the Night Creatures at the Paul Andriesse Gallery in Amsterdam revealed her originality and skill as a painter. Further, Dumas demonstrated that even portrait painting could be relevant again. In the late 1980s, she began to revamp the tradition of the female nude in art through the sensibility of a female artist and the female gaze. Even when her subject matter leans toward the macabre, Dumas brings humanity to the forefront. Born in 1953, Marlene Dumas grew up in a rural area outside of Cape Town, South Africa. Along with her two brothers, she was raised in a home speaking Afrikaans, the South African language of the oppressor. After a sheltered upbringing, only vaguely aware of apartheid from a distance and a strict primary school education, she entered the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 1972. Switching to the English language was one of many firsts Dumas encountered. “I was 19 in 1972 and I’d never sat with a person of colour following the same classes before and never had dinner with a Jewish or Muslim family before,”15 she said. Also for the first time, Dumas read Allen Ginsberg; watched the films of Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Pier Paolo Pasolini; and saw plays by Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, and Athol Fugard (author of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, a revolutionary play that exposes the unjust legal practices of the apartheid system). She discovered Joseph Beuys in addition to American photographers Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, who ushered in the “snapshot” aesthetic, unflinchingly honest images from everyday life, and photographs of people on the fringes of society—outsiders. She learned about the Contemporary art movements and the ideas that shaped them. Her university experience opened her eyes and inspired her future work and thought. Dumas moved to the Netherlands in 1976, after being awarded a scholarship to the Master of Arts program at the independent art school Ateliers ’63 in Haarlem. She had considered moving to New York but decided against it because the racial inequality and tension was too similar to what she had experienced in South Africa. She left South Africa during the Soweto Uprising, a series of protests by 20,000 Black schoolchildren opposing the law that made the White-minority language Afrikaans mandatory in education. The protests led to nationwide uprisings, and the South African Army responded with massive force, resulting in deaths of children and adults. The government reported

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176 dead, though the actual number was far greater. Dumas felt a sense of guilt about escaping her country’s bleakest, bloodiest era. In the Netherlands, her knowledge of art history was firsthand, not through reproductions in books that were available in South Africa. She had a surprising reaction to seeing the works of the old masters in the flesh. She told an interviewer, I was suddenly in museums filled with art, and I couldn’t deal with that. [Laughs] Instead I went looking for all of the banned books. I went to porno. I went to see all the things that were censored and that we weren’t supposed to see. So much was banned in South Africa because of the politics.16

Before 1984, photographs were just one component in her works on paper. She later used censored material such as photographs of prostitutes as sources for her paintings. From 1979 to 1984, Dumas created works exclusively on paper, many with collaged photographs. Rudi Fuchs, director of Van Abbemuseum in Eindoven, Netherlands and an early supporter, selected several of the works in 1982 for the cutting-edge contemporary exhibition documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany. Other group and one-person exhibitions featuring her works on paper flagged Dumas as a promising young artist. In 1985, she exhibited only paintings: sixteen frontal portraits, mostly women, all based on photographs. Her ever-expanding image bank includes snapshots, Polaroids, postcards of classical paintings, film stills, and photos from books, magazines, and newspapers, which continue to be the source of her images. The title of the aforementioned exhibition The Eyes of the Night Creatures came from a spooky photograph of ring-tailed lemurs huddled together staring out menacingly. (Coincidentally, a group of raccoons is called a gaze.) This, however, was not the subject of the exhibition—whiteness was. For The White Disease, 1985, Dumas used an image from a photograph in a dermatology textbook, implying the disease in her painting is societal. Although she lived in the Netherlands for the rest of her life, the country she left will always be with her. Having been raised in the era of apartheid, themes of race and identity underlie many of Dumas’s paintings. She made this explicitly clear by saying, “South Africa is my content,”17 including its difficult history. In The White Disease, a woman’s bloated, chalky-white face looks fixedly at the viewer through beady blue eyes. The face appears oversized and fills most of the canvas; the head is cut at the top as if it is too big for the painting. Smudges of

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paint become bruised, damaged skin; a pink rash obliterates the nose. Dumas, who thinks of color in terms of hot and cold in the same way as cinematographer Roger Deakins, used a blue tint to make the sickly pallor of the skin look more ghostly. Black lines darken the blurred, scratchy lips painted the rusty color of dried blood. Dumas’s use of titles guides the viewer in the The Eyes of the Night Creatures exhibition. This strategy is most evident in Genetiese Heimwee (“Genetic Longing”), 1984 (Figure 6.4). The glaring eyes of a young woman look outward and to the side. Her pinkish-red lips are soft but set in a slight scowl. The vibrant red of her forehead pops against dark blue-black color masking the rest of her face and black hair framing her face. The dark background continues through the garment covering her forward-leaning body. Her arms are folded in a defensive gesture, heightened with the red fingers of one hand outlined against her black clothes and red paint strokes that skim the top of her yellow-orange forearm. The red and black colors convey concentrated displeasure, smoldering rage. Perhaps the title indicates that the woman’s glower is a response to racial class systems. Is the woman’s anger about her skin color a scene from a larger scenario? Dumas indicates otherwise; when asked if her work is narrative, she replied, No, it’s suggestive, it suggests all sorts of narratives, but it doesn’t really tell you what’s going on at all. Someone said that it feels as if something has happened, in the sense of an after-event, or alternatively that something’s going to happen but you don’t yet know what it is. It’s as if I can make people think they are so close to me that they believe I’ve addressed the painting directly to them. I give them a false sense of intimacy. I think the work invites you to have a conversation with it.18

Dumas’s prudent use of skillful painting techniques creates distinct facial expressions to suggest particular temperaments. For example, the expression of the woman in The White Disease is devoid of warmth. Does this lead the viewer to believe that this reflects the inner psychology of the woman? Painted differently, however, The White Disease could have been a picture of a sweet grandmother toward whom we feel pity. These questions of appearance relate to Dumas’s statement about culpability in an evil system, as she said, I was not the victim of the bad system. I was part of the wrong system. So, I don’t make work about being victimized (although apartheid as a whole was very bad for the spirit of its people). I rather find everyone capable of terrible things and I fear my own weakness and blindness first.19

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Figure 6.4: Marlene Dumas, Genetiese Heimwee (“Genetic Longing”), 1984. Oil on canvas,

51 1/5 × 43 3/10 in. (130 × 110 cm) Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. © 2022 Marlene Dumas. Photo credit: Peter Cox, Eindhoven. Courtesy of Studio Dumas.

In a self-portrait titled Het Kwaad is Banaal (“Evil Is Banal”), 1984, (Figure 6.5) the artist’s head, which fills most of the hulking 49.2 × 41.3-foot canvas, is turned with her hand resting on her shoulder. Like many of her paintings, it raises the question, at what or whom is her intense gaze directed? At the time she painted it, Dumas actively participated with other South African artists in

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Figure 6.5: Marlene Dumas, Het Kwaad is Banaal (“Evil Is Banal”), 1984. Oil on canvas, 49 3/16 × 41 5/16 in. (125 × 105 cm). Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven © 2022 Marlene Dumas. Photo credit: Peter Cox, Eindhoven. Courtesy of Studio Dumas.

protests against apartheid. This context is as significant as the title. She derived “Evil Is Banal” from a phrase made famous by Hannah Arendt, the writer who reported on the 1963 trial of Adolf Eichmann in her essay “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” To much controversy, Arendt described

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Eichmann as a “terrifyingly normal,” hard-working bureaucrat and family man who acted without evil intent.20 She wrote that Eichmann became a Nazi because it offered a career path, not for ideological reasons. Eichmann’s inability to empathize allowed him to disconnect from the evil of his acts, as though that somehow provides him absolution. Dumas explained that Evil Is Banal speaks again about the deception of ordinary appearances: This painting started with myself, or me looking at myself, in this sort of awkward position of being, you know, the blonde, friendly, spontaneous woman— which is an old problem of who you think you are, and how other people see you.

She continued, So I use myself in that sense also as an example as or of a white girl who grew up in South Africa, but in the broadest sense also the notions of what white was supposed to stand for, and what black was supposed to stand for.21

Throughout the paintings in The Eyes of the Night Creatures exhibition, Dumas’s nuanced control of her medium is manifest. Like a great writer who culls unnecessary words, she suggests a feature with a slight mark, an expression with a sparse selection of a few well-chosen paint applications. Dumas painted a square-shaped face in Evil Is Banal that appears to be bathed in a weird light that flattens the pale, pinkish-toned skin and makes the semi-transparent greyblue wash on the lower right side of her face and the top of her hand a somber contrast. This greyish gauze seems to cast a shadow that creates the line of the nose without actually painting a nose. The depth suggested by the lemon yellow of both her lips and a stroke of paint from her forehead to eye is somewhat inexplicable. Her eyes are barely defined with small blurry areas of peachyorange paint around them, the lines of the eyebrows so faint they almost appear to fade away. In contrast to this economy of touch on the face, her hair is a loosely painted riot of orange, accentuated by a black area next to the right side of her face that makes the hair color even more fiery. The Eyes of the Night Creatures exhibition is Dumas’s most autobiographical collection of paintings. Martha – My Ouma, 1984, shows her grandmother’s face. Although ravaged by age, it does not diminish her authority as a powerful matriarch. To honor her grandmother, Dumas painted two other Marthas: Martha – die Bediende, 1984, a Black domestic worker who had been under her family’s employ at one time; and Martha – Sigmund’s Wife, 1984, based on a

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photograph in Time magazine. In all three Marthas, combinations of semitransparent, opaque, wiped-away, smudged, scratched, layered, or stained paint applications create penetrating psychological portraits. Dumas’s year of study at the University of Amsterdam Institute of Psychology indicated her interest in interior states. The Marthas are also about identity, as curator Cornelia Butler wrote, Each Martha is of a different cultural origin; the Model for Martha – die Bediende particular emblematizes the problem of identity in South Africa— she adopted her name because her given African name was too hard for whites to pronounce.22

The grandmother’s identity is personal and powerful to the artist. Martha Freud’s identity in the public area is subsumed into that of her famous husband, not an identity of her own. Reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Dumas’s portraits feature spectral faces, particularly in The Jewish Girl, 1986. Black and blue paint appears to sink into the canvas, making the glare from sunken eyes look deathly. This was one of the paintings included in the 2018 exhibition Moonrise: Marlene Dumas and Edvard Munch held at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, where the art of Dumas and Munch were installed together, as indicated by the title.23 Both artists explore themes of love, death, and sexuality and use color to register emotional states, particularly in the eyes of the subject. Art critic Dominic van den Boogerd spoke of this feature in Dumas’s paintings, “In the background there is little or nothing to be see. All attention goes to the expression of the features, the gaze of the eyes.”24 The individual in relation to a group was the subject of her 1987 solo exhibition titled The Private versus the Public. Conformity is signified by school uniforms and body language in The Teacher (sub a), 1987, a painting based on a class photo from Dumas’s childhood. Staring out blankly, the stiffly frontal faces of schoolchildren are painted in various colors. The teacher in the center of the lowest of three rows is the only one with specific features, focused eyes, and a slightly turned head. She is an individual, but the schoolchildren are wooden and interchangeable. Dumas addresses the female body in the late 1980s in paintings such as Losing (Her Meaning), 1988, (Figure 6.6) and Waiting (for Meaning), 1988 (Figure 6.7). In both, the figure is understood to be a woman even though the sex is not shown, just one example of the artist’s predilection for ambiguity. In Losing (Her Meaning) the image of the naked woman face down in water came from a photograph of a scuba diver. Without the scuba gear, she is presumed to be a

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floating corpse, yet the soft, simplified curving contours and the gently lapping water painted in a beautiful spectrum of medium-to-dark blues and greens and bathed in moonlight add a poetic, sensuous dimension to this morbid sight. The mood created affects how we “read” this image. Van den Boogerd suggested that the lifeless figure could be a reference to Victorian-era painter John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, 1852, but Dumas’s paintings are privy to endless interpretations, so much so that she gave herself the name “Miss Interpreted” and used it as the title of her solo exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Holland.25

Figure 6.6: Marlene Dumas, Losing (Her Meaning), 1988. Oil on canvas, 19 5/8 × 27 1/2 in. (50 × 70 cm). Pinault Collection © 2022 Marlene Dumas. Photo credit: Peter Cox, Eindhoven. Courtesy of Studio Dumas.

In contrast, Waiting ( for Meaning) is hauntingly stark. A supine female lies on a too-small sepulcher. Her slightly open legs hanging over the edge are created with little more than long, flat slips of paint, a dehumanized suggestion of a body with neither arms, nor face, nor corporeality of any kind. She could also be a corpse, but the title suggests that the woman passively waits for sex. In this austere scene lacking narrative details, the splayed legs are particularly disturbing. Dumas eschews overt eroticism in favor of a limp figure. The image of a woman waiting for sex came from one of David

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Figure 6.7: Marlene Dumas, Waiting (for Meaning), 1988. Oil on canvas, 19 2/3 × 27 1/2 in.

(50 × 70 cm). Kunsthalle zu Kiel Collection. © 2022 Marlene Dumas. Photo credit: Peter Cox Eindhoven. Courtesy of Studio Dumas.

Hamilton’s soft porn photographs. Hamilton, a controversial British photographer known for his photographs of adolescent girls, evoked an effect of dreaminess through soft focus and romantic settings. The image, not the style, interested Dumas, whose exploration of eroticism remained an immutable element in her oeuvre. This is not garden-variety eroticism. It is disturbing, aggressive eroticism. Beyond subject matter, Dumas sees eroticism as inherent in the act of making art, “Painting is the trace of the human touch. It is about the skin of a surface.”26 After the 1980s, images of prostitutes and erotic dancers became a substantial part of her output. She said, “My best works are erotic displays of mental confusions […] with intrusions of irrelevant information.”27 The theme of waiting is carried into two paintings of Snow White, the young maiden waiting for the prince to break the spell of endless sleep with his kiss. Snowwhite in the Wrong Story, 1988, and Snowwhite and the Broken Arm, 1988,

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were born of Dumas’s obsession with a painting by the sixteenth-century German master Hans Holbein the Younger titled The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1521. With all the gruesome realism of Northern Renaissance art, Christ, dead to the point of rigor mortis, is laid out in a tomb so close that his chest practically touches the top of it. Using the same long horizontal proportions, Snowwhite and the Broken Arm shows the sleeping, unclothed heroine barely fitting in a coffin, with a bandaged arm hanging down, her hand clutching a Polaroid, the camera model that Dumas uses exclusively. Several Polaroid photos scattered on the catafalque signify the artist’s presence, one of many identities collapsed in one image. The bluish-grey skin and ashen face could mean that this is a Black woman. From above, faces of seven little men peer into the casket, referencing feminist texts about the male gaze as a means to objectify the female subject. Perhaps the seven dwarfs were perverted little voyeurs. Disney’s Snow White character created a standard for female beauty when she came to the screen in the 1930s. Her whiteness, innocence, and passivity— she had to ask a mirror if she was fair and wait for a prince to wake her up—conformed to social codes that kept women in their place and affirmed whiteness as the highest standard of beauty. Coincidently, from 1987 to 1988, Black photographer and video artist Carrie Mae Weems used Snow White to lay bare oppression of Black women in her Ain’t Joking series. A photograph shows Weems holding a mirror close to her chest, starring at a white princess in its center. The text underneath reads “LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR, THE BLACK WOMAN ASKED, ‘MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO’S THE FINEST OF THEM ALL?’ THE MIRROR SAYS, ‘SNOW WHITE, YOU BLACK BITCH, AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!!!’” Both Dumas and Weems are addressing the issue of women and social injustice. Weems’s activism is at the core of all her work. Her activism is direct while Dumas is more subtle; both are equally effective. The nude woman painted by a woman was a rarity in art history, and Dumas made no attempt to follow canonical compositions and styles firmly established by male artists. She gives us a naked female body, not a nude created for the delectation of the male gaze, the norm going back to the Greeks. The writings of art historian John Berger about the distinction between the naked and the nude had resonated with Dumas. Berger traced the female nude in art as a convention, an image for male spectatorship presented for the purpose of being viewed, devoid of agency or personal value, differentiating it from the nude as an individual woman in real life.

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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object. “Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.”28

Few naked—not nude—paintings of women had surfaced in the history of art prior to Dumas. Not only did Dumas bring new life to the genres of portraiture and the nude in art, but she also laced them with themes of eroticism, politics, feminism, humanity, and identity without the weight of dogmatism. Central to Dumas’s work is the interchange between the photographic source, the painting, and the viewer. To begin, Dumas selects from her image bank. “The source materials are about political choices one makes, they are of the times they are made in.”29 The photo provides a starting point only. When the artist paints, something completely different emerges and takes form in a way in an organic manner. The painting reveals itself to Dumas during the process. She notes that even if you “assume you know where a work started [the artist speaks about her source material or intention] [it] does not mean you […]. know what it has become, when it is finished.”30 This is the artist’s creation, but the life of the image does not end there. Again, the viewer’s relationship to the painting is yet another part of the cycle. Dumas explained, When I started to embrace the ambiguity of the image, and accepted the realization that the image can only come to life through the viewer looking at it, and that it takes on meaning through the process of looking, I began to accept painting for what it was.31

From the 1980s to the present, Dumas’s work is often difficult. Sometimes with blunt force, Dumas brings to the fore challenging moral dilemmas facing individuals alone and in relation to political, social, or moral considerations. Her paintings entreat viewer to respond or, to put it in the artist’s words, “they are about whose side are you on.”32 This may deter some viewers, but art reflects the era of its inception, a time fraught with anxiety and inequity. When Peter Schjeldahl an art critic who initially found the disturbing nature of Dumas’s paintings too hard to take, gave Dumas her due, he wryly wrote, “Surely, no one would paint pictures as aggressively uningratiating as those of Dumas unless she meant them.”33

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George Condo When first seen in the 1980s, dealers and curators struggled to place the paintings of George Condo into established art categories. Surrealism came to mind initially. Of all the 1980s painters who fell into that mode, then called “neosurrealism,” art critic Stephen Westfall tagged Condo as “the most disturbing of the group,”34 for the way he plays the grotesque against the humorous. Although the Surrealist connection is understandable, these paintings were not born of that movement’s aim to reveal the unconscious through the juxtaposition of divergent elements. Whether the paintings are representations of a clown or an elaborately dressed creature with a long, needle-like neck and a lightbulb face, the artworks are more about painting in all its glory rather than subconscious thought. This is not to say that Condo’s paintings do not have the ability to baffle the viewer; their impact, however, lies not only in the image but also in the way that Condo combines painting techniques ranging from those of Goya to Picasso. Tapping into traditions of portraiture and landscape, Condo laid out all the basic elements of his practice in the 1980s in an array of extraordinary paintings, and he continued to top himself with each succeeding decade. The triad in music theory functions as a metaphor that aids in thinking about George Condo’s paintings. The triad is the most basic chord in which three notes, or pitches, are played simultaneously. The three “notes” in the Condo metaphor are how the work is painted, the image(s) themselves, and how the image(s) represents a “mental state.” (Mental States was the name of Condo’s retrospective in 2011–12.) Continuing the metaphor, the triad is built of thirds with each note given the parity, and the three Condo elements work together equally in his paintings. Further, the four kinds of triads in music, major, minor, diminished, and augmented, produce melodic moods, bright, dark, mysterious, and so on. Condo’s paintings also range in the kinds of moods they project, the overall sensibility. A look at his fascinating path to the nexus of 1980s art scene must precede an exploration of the metaphor of the triad in his paintings. George Condo was born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1957, but he grew up in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, one of the oldest towns in the United States. He remembers the town before the malls came, when it was still full of apple orchards and cows. His father was a professor of calculus and physics at Lowell Tech, which became Lowell University and then UMass Lowell. George was one five children of an Italian- and Irish-descended family that practiced Catholicism, something Condo credits with giving him imagery and a sense of empathy. He drew incessantly from a young age; his talent as a draftsman was an early tell that Condo might grow up to be an artist. His fourth-grade teacher framed

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a drawing Condo gave him, incredulously saying it looked like, quote, unquote, “real art.”35 After this endorsement, Condo’s mother put him in some Saturday art classes, though he painted at home and remained largely self-taught. His mother was an avid reader, and Condo shared her love of literature. Music was another early passion. He studied classical guitar and spent many hours listening to the classics, Bach, Beethoven, and the Beatles, before entering Lowell University to major in art history and music theory. When he realized that Bach was structured as strictly as science, his need for a freer language of expression led to his commitment to pursuing painting. He chose not to enroll in studio art classes because his artistic vision was so strong even then; he knew that instructors would never allow him to paint what he wanted. In his second year, a music instructor asked him what he really wanted to do, to which Condo replied, “Actually, I’m really an artist, you know. I’m really a painter. I just love music. And I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, but that’s really what I do.”36 In his practice, Condo would morph toward identifying the commonalities among the languages of literature, art, and music. After two years of college, Condo worked odd jobs and auditioned to play bass guitar for a Boston punk band called The Girls. He was told, “You basically need to go boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom. Boom, boom, boom,” to which he replied, “I think I can do that after like eight years of Bach.”37 Jean-Michel Basquiat’s band Grey opened for The Girls at a 1979 gig at Pier 7 in New York City. Condo and Basquiat began a friendship continued through the time when both lived in Los Angeles and Paris. After Condo moved to New York, another fortuitous situation arose. Through a temp job at a gallery, he met Rupert Smith, Andy Warhol’s printer. This led to a job in Warhol’s studio, The Factory, where Condo edited all the screen prints in the Myths series, a portfolio of iconic figures, including Santa Claus and Howdy Doody. In less than a year, he moved on, glad to have had an apprenticeship in the studio of a great artist, a tradition that began in the Renaissance. Condo, then 24, moved to Los Angeles; he lived between there and New York from 1981 to 1983. He studied the old master glazing techniques, and in 1983, he stayed in California to prepare for his first New York exhibition recalling that it was “easier to do it from a distance, knowing to make it in NY you really had to come up with something.”38 While in Los Angeles, Condo painted Madonna, 1982, the mother of Christ, an iconic subject in Renaissance art. This work was inspired by the sixteenth-century Venetian painter Tiepolo; the volumetric figure and the red and blue colors are the same, drawing selectively from Tiepolo’s stylistic elements but with his own take. Unlike Tiepolo, Condo

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scraped parts of the paint down to the grain of the canvas before he covered the entire surface with varnish. This was the first of what Condo called the “Fake Old Masters” in which Condo combined many ways of painting within one painting. For example, he might paint a portrait with a Rembrandt palette, a Velasquez brushstroke, and Caravaggio’s “tenebrism,” a term used to describe his mysterious, theatrical lights and darks. This is not the kind of appropriation widely practiced in 1980s art—not David Salle copying an arm from a painting by Théodore Géricault or Sigmar Polke adding black curlicues taken from Albrecht Dürer’s 1522 woodcut. Condo’s borrowings of painting techniques do not align with 1980s artists Richard Prince or Sherrie Levine who “re-photographed” pictures to recontextualize and layer meanings. The Fake Old Masters is a complete reconfiguration of painting languages into something totally new. Condo stated, It wasn’t a question of systematically including art references in my work. I thought, how does a person think of art who has only seen it through a reproduction? I thought, this is the way I would imagine these Old Master paintings. All of a sudden style of other artists became unimportant; they were just more pieces in a larger concept.39

In the Fake Old Masters, Condo summoned art historical tropes of painting to create his own iconic images of imaginary creatures, odd personages, and clowns. Image, the first element of the triad model can be applied to Condo’s In Order to Think, 1983. This work pictures a three-quarters view of the egg-shaped head of a clown with a red ball for a nose and eyes that pop out. Although there is a big smile on the rubbery lips of the clown, his gaze seems somewhat apprehensive. Centered on the right side of the vertical canvas, the egghead sits on a wavy white collar with a thick edge that transitions into the surface of the underwater part of an iceberg painted in shades of green. What looks like an iceberg was actually taken from the meringue-like peaks in a mountainous landscape of the 1950s by American Regionalist painter and muralist Thomas Hart Benton. A wire runs from the right side of the egghead to a carrot-like stalactite. Condo’s virtuosic amalgamation of painting techniques leads to the second piece of the triad: how a work is painted. Backgrounds are often the most stunning part of a Condo painting. The particularly regal purple of the background of In Order to Think deepens from light to dark tones as it spreads away from the egghead, and the curving brushstrokes around the egg change to more varied

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paint applications that create nuanced patterns. Blue shadows darken as they fall from the side to the back of the clown’s face. Condo balanced the blues and purples with the orange of the carrot in a way that keeps the composition from being too weighted to the right, while also fine-tuning the palette. Condo developed his unique style by studying the compositions of art’s most brilliant portrait painters, such as Rembrandt’s modulations of light to dark tonal settings. He gravitated toward Phillip Guston’s backgrounds for his beat-up shoes or hung-over visage in particular: I’ve always loved Guston’s work. His influence on me as a painter was definitely about arranging patchwork backgrounds. I saw him as an ideal background for a clown painting. A kind of Guston-like abstraction would be a great backdrop, like that blurry photo backdrop they have for high school photos. You’re posed with painterly nothingness behind you. I thought painterly nothingness is such a great thing. But in Guston’s work you can see how those brush strokes actually turned into things. That’s what’s so beautiful about.40

The third triad component is the way the painted image suggests a state of mind. In Order to Think is melancholy and unsettling, related in part to coulrophobia, a phobia based on fear of clowns, the scary part hiding beneath the painted face. As in many Condo paintings, absurd, theatrical humor gives humptydumpty a sad, sinister edginess. For Condo, the state of mind was directly connected to the sad state of mediocracy in America: The clown for me was a symbol of American mediocrity and the idea that if you walk into many places such as barber shops or shopping malls you would see these kinds of images painted in a more or less mediocre way and there was no thinking involved other than to push out another clown painting, so the wire signifies the unconscious and what is trapped within its ethereal framework it is the link from the unknown rationale of American kitsch or let’s say a transgression, a caricature of something that is of that subject but not with a similar intent.41

Cartoons and television are key influences on Condo who recounts that at times he uses old master techniques to create “some low-culture, transgressive mutation of a comic strip.”42 Considering that the Disney drawings of the Seven Dwarfs remind Condo of Pieter Bruegel, the sixteenth-century Flemish painter of peasants, Matisse and Bugs Bunny stand on equal footing in Condo’s mind.43 In other paintings such as Yellow and Black Composition, 1985, in which a hat

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with extensions that look like floppy ears sits on a clownish face, Condo’s admiration for Tex Avery, creator of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, shines through. It is worth noting that this was the time when graffiti artist Kenny Scharf gave us wonderful paintings based on the Flintstones. The two clown faces in Artificial Love II, 1984, (Figure 6.8) read more as cartoonish than as frightening. The Looney Tunes–type faces of a guy and gal clown are stark and simplified in sharp contrast against a bright mustard-colored background, intensified by underpainting in a different color, a technique taken from Renaissance painting. The sad sack expression on the male’s long, thin, oval face is matched in inanity by the mawkish grin on the wide face of his lady. The little heart on her head adds a cutesy touch to her saccharine silliness, a foil to his tiny hat and gawky frown that makes him look stupid, pathetic, and befuddled. This clown couple could only have come out of television, possessing the emotional depth of Mr. and Mrs. Howell on Gilligan’s Island. Classic sit-coms such as The Andy Griffith Show and The Beverly Hillbillies were important influencers for Condo. He wants his creations to have the same believability as those early TV characters. Condo answered affirmatively when once asked if he was influenced by Van Dyke, the questioner not knowing that Condo was referring to Dick Van Dyke from the Mary Tyler Moore Show, not Anthony van Dyck, the famous Baroque painter.44 Figure 6.8: George Condo, Artificial Love II, 1984. Oil on canvas, 19 3/4 × 15 3/4 in. (50 × 40 cm) © 2022 George Condo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

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In 1983, Condo sold his first painting for $1,200. While most artists would have bathed in the spotlight, Condo took the money and went to Europe. He traveled to London, Amsterdam, and then Cologne at the invitation of German painter Walter Dahn and Czech-German painter and graphic artist Jiří “Georg” Dokoupil. Both were founding members of a German artist group Mülheimer Freiheit, which was characterized by a loose, expressionistic painting style. Condo reminisced, I went to Europe and I travelled around, going to museums and looking at paintings. I met a lot of contemporary artists and it seemed to me like all European art history was starting to flood into a new consideration of American painting. Painters had been fed up with the fact that they hadn’t been allowed to paint in a world dominated by Minimalism and Conceptual Art until the late ’70s.45

From there, Condo joined Dokoupil for a trip to the Canary Islands, popular with artists, cheap drugs being an allurement. He fell in love with a local woman and painted during his extended stay. Cologne gallerist Monika Sprüth offered Condo a show and advised him to paint in a way that people would remember his name. Wryly, he took her at her word and made four “Name” paintings in which the letters C-O-N-D-O take various forms against abstract backgrounds and in the case of The Cloudmaker, 1984, (Figure 6.9) a landscape setting. Large, jewel-encrusted three-dimensional letters move on a slight diagonal. The letters span a large stretch of flat land with mountains rising in the distance and bright rays coming from a setting (or rising) sun illuminating the horizon line. An enormous sky fills half the canvas with a richly textured blue. Smoke floats out of either end of the name feeding into dramatic patterns of ocher-shadowed cumulus clouds. Condo painted The Cloudmaker in the calm, measured classicalism of seventeenth-century French artist Nicolas Poussin, whose work is considered the gold measure for landscape painting. He intended to combine the subject of the tag—graffiti artists’ label—with old master painting. The Name paintings were also a nod to the branding and promotion of art and artist that were becoming the norm. A double entendre works with The Cloudmaker as each artist has a signature style, and Condo’s range of styles and subjects, go against that idea.46 He paints whatever he wants, even if that means switching from imaginary portraits to Picasso remakes to canvases packed with abstract forms and imagery. He does this not only because he required freedom in his practice, but also to avoid being pigeonholed. By 1984, a ghoulish old man,

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Figure 6.9: George Condo, The Cloudmaker, 1984. Oil on canvas, 26 × 32 in. (66 × 81.3 cm) © 2022 George Condo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image courtesy of the artist.

odd still-life objects, stacks of gold coins, a headless executioner, grotesque beings, clowns, and wooden portraits inhabited Condo’s canvases. Picasso inspired many 1980s paintings, and Condo often combines images or stylistic features from several Picasso periods. Condo riffs on Picasso’s Surrealist paintings of bulbous and odd biomorphic forms in the naked women on the beach in Nude Homeless Bum, 1990. During the 1980s and after, Condo portraits always included societal outcasts or low-level workers, not just more royal-looking personages. The Picasso tribute continues throughout Condo’s career. He used the Picasso as a model to create mental states of the portrait sitter. Condo used the grey-beige tonalities and shallow spaces of Picasso’s first stage of Cubism, Analytical Cubism (1908–12), in Dancing to Miles, 1985. The sheer number of marks and images in one painting bring a particular chaos to the broad canvas. This is one of Condo’s “Expanding Canvases,” in which he creates in terms of musical elements, tempo, and improvisations à la Miles Davis. It is worth noting

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that it is almost impossible to dance to compositions from that phase of Miles Davis’s music. “The Expanding Canvases were basically improvisations on the symbolic content of the concrete paintings.”47 Condo explained that in the Expanding Canvases, you should “[j]ust let your brain wander and go in 50 different directions at the same time.”48 He compared his process to that of a musical composition with variations. It is possible to tease out iconography, patterns, and forms in Dancing with Miles, but the painting initially appears as an all-over composition, a technique ushered in by American painter Jackson Pollock, whose drip paintings were a controlled improvisation of a performative kind. The Expanding Canvases represents a substantial part of Condo’s 1980s art. It also allowed Condo to give free reign to draw, a medium in which he excels. In dense compositions, fine lines, similar to filigree, unexpectedly transform into images in much the way Joan Miro’s abstract stains and streaks became creatures with a line or two. Musicians John Coltrane, Glenn Gould, and Jimi Hendrix inspired Condo throughout his oeuvre. Condo’s downstairs neighbor in Paris, the French philosopher, semiologist, and psychotherapist Félix Guattari articulated his connection to music, We must not forget, however, that you were trained as a musician, and you are still a musician at heart. With you the polyphony of lines, forms, and colours belong to a temporal dimension rather than one of spatial coordination. Your paintings are like non-arpeggio chords which unleash their harmonies and melodic potential.49

By 1985, the art market, curators, and gallery directors championed Condo in a big way. Counterintuitively, Condo moved to an unfashionable part of Paris at this time, where he continued to live until 1995. When he visited New York, Keith Haring, his good friend and one of the first collectors of his art, shared his studio with Condo so that he could paint, something he did wherever he was. The premature deaths of Basquiat and Haring were deep losses for Condo. Throughout the 1980s, Condo’s concept of “artificial realism” guided his practice, often manifested as strangeness. “My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness that’s around me. It’s in that sense that I’m a realist. I guess you could call it artificial realism,” he explained.50 He was painting the fake as though it was real. This idea was extrapolated from Conceptual art pioneer Marcel Duchamp’s found objects. Duchamp could select any inert object and make it an artwork by simply saying it was an artwork. Condo painted something, or someone, who was not real—artificial. The conversation of real and fake in art floated around in the 1980s as the simulated world

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became commonplace via computers and other devices. Two artificial realism paintings of great intrigue and beauty—Condo’s The Extrovert, 1984, and The Introvert, 1984 (Figure 6.10)—are part of the William Tell Suite. The Introvert is a portrait composed of several elements stacked in a totem. This is a purely imaginary (artificial) portrait, but in its ruffs and embellished surfaces reminds one of a royal portrait in which the sitter’s finery is on display and indeed defines the subject. The torso is cut off at the bottom of the painting, but the visible section has the patterns and reddish threads of a kingly garment. Going up, an oversized ruff or collar is another symbol of status. The neck looks like a finial for a fine piece of furniture, embossed with gold. To amplify the oddness, he placed a weird on-off dial in the front. A band of gold further luxuriates THe Introvert, whose head looks like a rounded chair leg. He painted more luxuriousness in the round gold pattern on the brim of a wide hat. An apple on top, an nod to William Tell, completes the portrait. Light shines behind the creature, stretching into an indigo blue. Glazes speak to his old-world handling of the paint. An introvert would detest being on display in such a glam manner. Figure 6.10: George Condo, The Introvert, 1984. Oil on canvas, 58 3/4 × 47 1/2 in. © 2022 George Condo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

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The female counterpart, The Extrovert, is similar in form, but she wears a strapless gown with a cape that spans out in a way that Bob Mackie would make for Cher. The single, centered image adorned with costume elements continued in The Austrian Woman, 1994, (Figure 6.11) and other works. Again, applying the triad model to this painting, Condo shifts from minor to major, striking a more serene chord. A soft, blue sky with misty-looking clouds provides not just a background but a way to frame the portrait and bring attention to it. The oval created by parting clouds frames the face as the sky and clouds sweep from the lady toward the horizon below. All these point to the eye of the woman standing in profile. Her oval head is devoid of features, save for a black jewel eye that stares out at the viewer. The clothes and adornments identify and define the subject as they did in courtly portraits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Braids on either side of the face hang down from the hat. The perfect triangle formed by the black coat creates a calm equilibrium, a mood enhanced the tonal delicacy of the background. From the title, one could easily assume that the red-brimmed hat is part of the Austrian traditional garb, but it is not. It is easy to forget that this portrait is imaginary and, as such, has no nationality. White fur trims the Figure 6.11: George Con-

do, The Austrian Woman, 1994. Oil on canvas, 64 1/8 × 51 1/8 in. (163 × 130 cm) © 2022 George Condo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

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collar, hem, and sleeve of the coat and intricate gold embellishments complete the look of opulence. Pearls lay on the ground she stands on. Four large fingers coming out from the sleeve are thought-provoking oddities. Although this portrait has no real-life model, Condo depicts the being in traditional portraiture of the seventeenth and eighteenth century when kings, queens, and important persons in society were presented in grandeur. “Condo’s beings whose entire identities are predicated on the outward trappings of status, clothing, posture, and context engage (both humorously and tragically) with notions of character and critiques of social pretension,” states Simon Baker.51 Condo paints human consciousness in a portrait. This often results in something grotesque, frightening, and above all, odd. Once, at a museum group exhibition, I found myself unexpectedly face-to-face with a George Condo painting. It was not the odd image that literally stopped me in my tracks—an out-of-body experience rendered me immobile—it was the sheer beauty of artwork. Painting, a genre once declared impotent and irrelevant, still had that power. Carroll Dunham Carroll Dunham is a worthy misfit of the first order. His paintings do not easily fit into any art movement, style, or category. In the 1980s, he set out to stress and stretch the limits of abstraction by painting lines, patterns, colors, and forms that resembled root systems, intestinal ganglia, penile protuberances, exploding discs, and imaginary geographies. But it is the way in which Dunham configured these visual elements that energized abstraction. Dunham’s paintings on wood bear no resemblance to any prior art. While visually intriguing, his paintings are difficult for the average viewer in that they do not conform to any known conventions of beauty or formal structure. “Psychosexual” and “cartoon-like” are recurring terms used to describe their content. However, these catchy descriptors may belie Dunham’s determination to create paintings that he felt were “authentic and true.”52 Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1949 and raised in the coastal town of Old Lyme in the same state, Dunham moved to New York in 1973 after he received his BA from Trinity College in Hartford. He found a job as a studio assistant for artist Dorothea Rockburne, who was at that time making abstractions on folded paper and linen. This was a formative experience and one that introduced him to other Abstract artists he would come to admire. It is also why when he approached painting in 1980, he thought it had been “emptied out,” reduced and abstracted too far for any meaning to remain. This perception was a well-founded opinion considering the reductive and system-based methods

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used by Abstract artists he admired—Mel Bochner, Robert Mangold, and Robert Ryman, all of whom came out of both Minimalism and Conceptual art. Bochner’s 1970s abstractions were primarily monochromatic wall installations. The title of Bochner’s famous essay “Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism”53 points to the Conceptual basis of his art. Mangold’s abstractions were based on geometry as in the monochrome painting A Rectangle and a Circle within a Square, 1975. Ryman’s project was to explore the permutations of limiting paintings to only three elements: the kind of white or off-white paint he used (oil, acrylic, casein, etc.), the support (linen, canvas, fiberglass, vinyl, etc.), and how the paint was applied. Painting had these and other limitation, and Dunham wanted to push those limits. In 1980, Dunham quit his day job, left his black line wall drawings and abstract paintings on Masonite behind, and, as he says, “went all in.”54 Because none of his friends were making or talking about painting—its nascent resurgence was unimaginable then—Dunham saw the overlooked genre as “a place I could go operate on my own.”55 He was attracted to the physical act of painting and comforted by the genre’s cultural significance dating back to Renaissance and even earlier. But how to make art that would be a part of the future of abstract painting going forward was the task at hand, one that Dunham took very seriously. The cerebral Dunham started with the hypothesis, “If you took conceptual art seriously but wanted to make something physical, how would you go about that?”56 The project of painting after Conceptual art was his philosophical point of departure. His material point of departure was wood. He started painting on plywood, the lowliest of woods, but quickly became fascinated with and painted on more exotic species. The wellspring of “information,” Dunham’s word, provided by the characteristic grains and markings of various woods provided an inspirational lexicon of forms. But equally important, it gave Dunham a starting point for his intuitive process of painting. Paintings evolved from this intersection of painter and material that catalyzed a thought process in which Dunham felt he was following an agenda that the painting revealed to him. He left parts of the wood untouched to establish a dialogue between the grain patterns and his loopy bulbous shapes, rich with associations to the body and nature. After completing a couple of paintings on plywood, something clicked with Babysitter, 1982, (Figure 6.12) the first painting that made him feel “a transparency between the painting and me,” one that “could also lead me somewhere.”57 Irregular tube shapes meander down from either side of the form’s sharp curve in the upper center of the painting. The negative space created between two sides of the shape forms an upwardly thrusting phallic shape that

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Dunham accentuated by painting it yellow. Describing the forms in Babysitter as organic abstraction is accurate, but that only takes you halfway. Associations to specific entities such as root systems and internal organs abound while tubular outcrops suggest bodily appendages. These resemblances are coincidental; Dunham’s forms came from a process of painting which continues until he finds “a DNA that felt true to me.”58 Creating imagery from something in nature or for that matter something that the artist may have seen anywhere was never Dunham’s intention. His forms emerge in the act of painting in much the same way they do in his drawings, from experimental kinds of doodles in which amorphous shapes seem to emerge from a restless line. Figure 6.12: Carroll Dun-

ham, Babysitter, 1982. Mixed media on fir, 48 × 36 in. (122 × 91.4 cm) © 2022 Carroll Dunham. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

In Babysitter, the pale tone of the plywood sets off the pinks and coral colors of strange biomorphic forms. Faint and thick black lines and shadings add to the subtle modulations of depth and flatness. Inventive spatial arrangements within a shallow space are a rarely mentioned but defining feature of the 1980s paintings. With Babysitter, Dunham made an executive decision to give color

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free rein, adhering to the precept that there was no such thing as bad color. His color decision relates to the genesis of the title Babysitter. Dunham explained, I had one rather elderly babysitter as a kid who worked with me in my coloring books. She’d use random and garish colors that had a total lack of connection to the picture we were coloring in, like purple skin and blue trees. She was very bad at following the outlines of the pictures, which I found disturbing. After I’d finished the painting, I found myself thinking of her. I think the associations of the word also felt apt because I sensed I’d entered a territory with new and unknown rules and that the painting would protect me.59

The wood paintings are all verticals, ranging in height from 4 to 9 feet. After painting on plywood, Dunham wanted to learn about and use other kinds of woods, some of which were harder to locate. This was no easy task before the internet, but he gradually connected with cabinetmakers and wood specialists. He acquired various veneers and attached them to an industrial honeycomb material to create a stable support that would keep the wood from warping. The wood conveyed an improbable amount of information, supplying Dunham with inspiration for almost a decade. Consider that even within a single species of wood, the patterns and variations in the density and direction of growth rings are as far-reaching as the changes in moisture, temperature, and environmental conditions that form them. An entire vocabulary is assigned to wood grains—flat, straight, curly, quilted, rowed, mottled, crotch, cathedral, beeswing, and bird’s eye, and to their distinctive markings, burls, bows, collets, and knot variations. Dunham’s response to various woods fueled his paintings. Zebra wood’s characteristic dark-brown striations against pale brown become part of the composition in Zebra Wood, 1982. In sections of Tall Birch, 1983, Dunham paints the pattern of the birch’s radiating swirls that resemble the contour lines of a topographic map. In 1984, Dunham began to attach rectilinear pieces of several veneers to the honeycomb support, as seen in Five Pieces, 1984, painted on cherry, walnut, zebrano, maple, and American walnut. The unruly character of Fourth Pine, 1982–84 (Figure 6.13), embodies Dunham’s notion of stressing abstraction to create new boundaries. Color relationships have always been central to Abstract painting, but one is hard-pressed to find color correspondences in the honey gold, raspberry red, maroon, light brown, burnt orange, periwinkle blue, charcoal, and myriad shades of pink, including watermelon, dusty rose, bubblegum, and fuchsia. The fern green of one of the horizontal bands completes the discordant mélange of shades.

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Figure 6.13: Carroll Dunham, Fourth Pine, 1982–84. Mixed media on knotty pine, 48 × 34 in. (122 × 86.4 cm) © 2022 Carroll Dunham. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

The painting is organized around eight bands, non-alike, stacked one upon the other. The spatial variances bear no resemblance to the spaces associated with the Abstract artists’ simplification and flattening of rectangles and other geometric shapes. In the third band from the bottom, Dunham traces the wood grain directly in yellow and brown. The brightly colored shapes in the top panel seem to be part of a psychedelic landscape, while markings and twisted tubers float in two off-white bands. The center bands serve as an armature on which Dunham drapes and weaves a large ganglion-like tangle on which two wood knot forms can easily be read as eyes on a monstrous creature. Art critic Klaus Kertess wrote of the “shocking beauty” in Dunham’s wood painting and how his shapes evoke associations. “The knots become representations of themselves and together with the grain transform in a self-hallucination which initially suggests a multiple organ transplant performed by a surgeon with a degree in Surrealism.”60 On the lowest band, a dark grey penis—not a phallic shape but the actual body part—tilts to the left. In an interview conducted by Dunham’s wife, artist Laurie Simmons, he explains its appearance: I was trying to continue abstract painting, but to find a way to let more of what felt like an inner emotional life into the work […] I was obviously aware I was drawing phalluses (I wasn’t that far gone), but I saw them as symbols, almost as boundary markers, or maybe radioactive objects in a kind of natural environment. There was also the idea of the material of the surface being another subject, or a picture of itself. I would never have made those paintings if I hadn’t been thinking about the history of abstract art and my possible place in it. Since they come from that impulse, for me they have virtually nothing to do with “figurative” thinking.61

From 1980 through 1984, Dunham repeated forms from prior paintings, not to create an iconography but rather to keep it simple. He changed the way he configures these forms in combination with the wood grains and patterns. In Second Zebra, 1982, what looks like brown-and-pink entrails in the lower left part of the painting morph into rounded hills in a slightly receding setting above. The horizontal lines of the wood are integral to the arrangement. Fourth Birch, 1983, is a crowded, active affair with confetti streaming down from the top, tubular forms melting down the bottom of the painting, and grain patterns that resemble female genitalia crowded in the center. Dynamism continues to play a greater part in 1984 and after, as seen in the exploding tubes and fissures in Elm, 1984, and small candy-colored discs that

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swish up and around against the background of mahogany, maple, and oak veneers in Oak Bottom, 1984. In American Walnut, 1984, (Figure 6.14) more sharply defined shapes appear that often look as if they are exploding or in motion. It is painted on three rectangles of oak veneer: one horizontal above two verticals that meet in the center. Round bands sit on black-outlined discs and narrow oblongs with rounded endings that burst outward from the center of the disc. Each exploding disc is in a different color—orange, red, purple, pink, and blue. Figure 6.14: Carroll Dunham, American Walnut, 1984. Mixed media on American walnut, 90 × 60 in. (228.6 × 152.4 cm) © 2022 Carroll Dunham. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

The disc shape came from a specific source. Dunham had then been looking at a book of Eugene Harold Edgerton’s famous 1956 “milk-drop” photographs. Edgerton, an electrical engineer, used a stroboscope to generate extremely brief bursts of light, to create stop-action photos showing the coronet circle

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and upward splashing of milk droplets frozen in great magnification. Following the direction of the radiating oval burls of the walnut, the discs are arranged horizontally on the upper veneer panel and vertically on the two veneers below. Further, Dunham paints the wood patterns in various colors and in combination with the discs, giving the allusion that we are looking at a watery scene. The wood paintings transition in two ways from 1984 to 1986. The first is the organic tube/organ shapes that give way to forms in motion such as the stream of small pastel-colored tori, the technical term for a donut shape, seen in Oak Bottom, 1984, as well as the red tori in True Size, 1985–86. The other change is the spreading-out of the forms in less dense arrangements of black lines, thin painterly smears of bright color, darker color, and transparent areas. One or two crisp, simplified shapes dominate, such as the cloud-like forms with small trumpet-shaped shoots in Body of Knowledge, 1985–87. This painting marks the official end of the wood paintings. In 1988, several changes in Dunham’s work make clear that wood as inspiration had been exhausted. He switched to painting a single shape on a horizontal rag board, a complete shift in style. Dunham began what are known as the “shape paintings,” each a simplified, ambiguous, horizontal form that seems to come out of the wood painting. All his 1988 shape painting are painted in one color: Green Shape, Red Shape, Hanging Brown Shape, Orange Shape, Blue Shape, Yellow Purple, and Purple Shape. The last of these monochromes is Orange Shape, 1988–89 (Figure 6.15), a title that points to Dunham’s wit. After those monochromes, Dunham transitioned to more colorful and lively shape paintings. This bridged into his 1990s paintings where the shapes become rectilinear and evolve into a funny personage that reoccurs in his work. From the 1990s onward, Dunham painted specific imagery. But it is his paintings of naked men and women that left many aghast. When seeing a young artist’s works, curators and art dealers evaluate if the artist has the capability to develop and grow as an artist. Dunham’s originality was noted early on, but even the experts could never have predicted the directions his work would take. They include women full frontal, with buttocks spread and the anus as the focal point of the composition, savage-looking men wrestling, and couples copulating. One response is summarized here: A couple years ago in the LA Times, art critic David Pagels wrote that Carroll Dunham’s paintings of women were “vulgar beyond belief […] offensive, demeaning and disgusting, as well as mean-spirited, malicious and horrific […]

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Figure 6.15: Carroll Dunham, Orange Shape, 1988. Mixed media on ragboard on panel, 60 × 80

in. (152 × 203 cm) © 2022 Carroll Dunham. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

bordering on vicious.” In short, Pagels declared, they were the best paintings of Dunham’s career.62

Much of the critical response to Dunham’s wood paintings is anchored in descriptive narratives of the associations or resemblances to gross, repulsive, and overtly sexual images. The best of these was penned by art critic and historian Robert Pincus-Whitten. He wrote, Without apology or false shame, Dunham had, at the time, taken up an impenitent range of transgressive images—comedic hard-ons for example, transcribed as if outlined upon a table or desk and outrageously striped or colored. Add scrotal dependencies, testicular scrums, turd-like masses, anal fissures, gingery tubers, and intestinal buntings, and you can easily see how repugnant all this could be.

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In the same review, Pincus-Witten also wrote that the wood paintings were “so patently consequential to the history of contemporary art.”63 Outside of the comedic, the responses to Dunham’s work reveal much about the 1980s mindset. Many labeled his paintings as ironic, a subtle sideswipe at Modernist abstraction, a conglomerate from a catalog of styles. This reading came out of a devalued view of painting, which in turn came out of theories surrounding Postmodernism. This mischaracterization of Dunham’s paintings as ironic made his work viable to those harboring anti-painting sentiments. Dunham saw this interpretation as tedious and founded in pure speculation. He disdained “the kind of writing that assumes an understanding of the artist’s intentions and refuses not to be ‘in on the joke,’”64 when, in fact, their assumptions were entirely incorrect. But most repugnant to Dunham is the Postmodern rhetoric that sees his wood painting as a “by-product of a strategy,” implying that Dunham was working from an a priori strategy.65 He was earnestly trying to create a new kind of abstraction, although in retrospect, he sees that specific imagery had more of a role than he thought at the time. Dunham acknowledges that associative imagery was not part of his thinking. “I’m not thinking symbolically or in literary terms. The things that come up in my paintings tend to be much more an expression of an attitude about process than they do the expression of an attitude about subject matter.”66 Their categorization of Dunham’s 1980s painting as Postmodern reveals that few understood his creative process and content. Rather than starting from an opinion or a predetermined point of view, he begins with a shape and goes through a series of rambling changes until he is satisfied. Dunham explained, But when it clicks in, when the painting seems to be done, is when it becomes itself. Its character is established. I don’t mean its character in terms of a character in a story. I mean its nature. The emotional tone is clear and not garbled. It must have to do with something I want to feel when I look at them. Obviously, the thing becoming finished has something to do with the thing coming alive for me and not just being a mess of stuff on a surface. And when this happens, I think I have completed a painting and then I spend a long period of time looking at the painting and trying to hear what it’s telling me. There’s an idea I have that I’m receiving this rather than creating it. I’m allowed access to these paintings.67

The seemingly overt references to the body or organisms in nature are actually manifestations of Dunham’s personal sensibility, his inner life.

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How, then, to situate Dunham’s artwork historically? Surrealism is not a good fit, though not entirely off-base. The aspect of Surrealism that appealed to Dunham was the sharp precision of Yves Tanguy and Roberto Matta, yet these artists had no more influence on Dunham than Italian frescos or science fiction literature which he reads voraciously. It is not the paint handling or expressive brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism that fuel Dunham’s paintings, but clearly delineated shapes. Dunham’s forms are crisp and defined, but the splashes have the feeling of the bursts and explosions in comic books. This is not to say that Dunham was copying cartoon art, but that he admired the way they were drawn. In her review of MoMA’s 2007 Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making, an exhibition that aimed to show how comics, animation, and film had influenced abstraction, art critic Roberta Smith found Dunham’s exclusion regrettable, stating, Especially pertinent is Mr. Dunham, whose automatist, Disneyesque excursions into the hormonal sublime, made in the 1980s and early ’90s, may be our moment’s richest, most disturbing, most perplexingly real works of comic abstraction. The efforts of several artists in this exhibition are nearly unimaginable without Mr. Dunham’s precedent.68

And while she is not wrong that Dunham’s work would fit nicely in that exhibition, his work is much more than the sum of those influences. Precursors, including psychedelia, Pop Art, and the bits and pieces from Abstract painting’s visual corpus, echo in Dunham’s paintings but only slightly. At their core, his 1980s paintings are born of process, intellect, and deeply personal connections with the medium. It seems fitting to end this chapter and book with Dunham’s definition of “painting” given at a lecture at MoMA in 2007: Painting is a relatively recently manifestation of humanity’s ancient effort to understand and exploit pictorial space generally understood to consist of sheets of colored paste spread manually across primarily rectilinear planar supports embodying illusionistic or quasi-narrative properties although each of the previous characteristics have been challenged and contradicted to great theoretical and expressive effect without the loss of basic categorical integrity testimony to paintings nature as both bounded and infinite and its ability to absorb apparently conflicting attitudes on the part of its creators. Painting operates at the nexus of intersubjective experience and consensual reality relying on both for its subject matter while remaining stubbornly self-referential, and its content extends into the areas we call psychological social, material (in both the philosophical and

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economic senses of the word) and—for the lack of a better term—spiritual giving it unusual utility as a tool for studying the evolution of the self of socio-cultural systems and of the complex reciprocities between the two, strikingly manifest within the apparent disconnect within paintings dual nature as a repository of capital and a facilitator of profound contemplation, a perfect storm of the crass, the sacred and the intimately personal.69 Endnotes

1. Brown and Rickels, Lari Pittman Drawings, 36. 2. Interview Lari Pittman and Connie Butler, Hammer Museum, 2019. 3. Holter, “Much Too Much.” 4. Pittman and Fox, “Joyful Noise: The Art of Lari Pittman,” 16. 5. Interview Lari Pittman and Connie Butler, Hammer Museum, 2019. 6. Pittman et al., “Décor, the Decorative, Decorum,” 68. 7. Interview Lari Pittman with ART 21. 8. Pittman, “Culture and Aesthetic Sensibility.” 9. Interview Lari Pittman and Connie Butler, Hammer Museum, 2019. 10. Pittman and Fox, “Joyful Noise: The Art of Lari Pittman,” 16. 11. Pagel, “A Powerful, Defining Moment.” 12. Pittman and Butler, “The Polyphony of the Now, or Why Not Have a Protest That Is a Party,” 13–29. 13. Interview Lari Pittman and Connie Butler, Hammer Museum, 2019. 14. Matisse, “Notes d’un peintre.” 15. Dumas et al., Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden, 13. 16. Als, “Up Close and Personal with Artist Marlene Dumas.” 17. Wolf, “Female Iconoclasts: Marlene Dumas.” 18. Dumas and Bloom, “Miss Interpreted: Marlene Dumas on Why Artists Should Embrace Ambiguity If They Want Staying Power.” 19. Michalska, “Intimate but Estranging Portraits by Marlene Dumas.” 20. Arendt and Elon, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 21. “MoMA audio guide for exhibition Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave.” 22. Butler, “Painter as Witness,” 55.

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23. Exhibition, Moonrise: Marlene Dumas and Edvard Munch, Munchmuseet, Oslo, Norway, September 29, 2018–January 13, 2019. 24. Dumas and van den Boogerd, “Hang-Ups and Hangovers in the Work of Marlene Dumas,” 30–84. 25. Dumas and van den Boogerd, “Hang-Ups and Hangovers in the Work of Marlene Dumas,” 54. 26. Dumas and van den Berg, “Women and Painting,” 75. 27. Dumas, “My Best Works.” 28. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 54. 29. Butler, “Painter as Witness,” 45. 30. MacKenny, “Marlene Dumas Returning Home.” 31. Dumas, “Accepting Painting for What It Is.” 32. Butler, “Painter as Witness,” 45. 33. Schjedahl, “Unpretty Pictures.” 34. Westfall, “Surrealist Modes among Contemporary New York Painters,” 45. 35. Condo and Lyon, “Oral History Interview with George Condo, 2017 May 5–June 20.” 36. Condo and Lyon, “Oral History Interview with George Condo, 2017 May 5–June 20.” 37. Condo and Lyon, “Oral History Interview with George Condo, 2017 May 5–June 20.” 38. Baker and Condo, George Condo: Painting Reconfigured, 19. 39. Enright and Condo, “The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo.” 40. Enright and Condo, “The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo.” 41. Erpf interview with George Condo, email, June 2, 2021. 42. Condo and Belcove, “George Condo Interview.” 43. George Condo: Outtake 2 Expanding Canvases, Thames & Hudson. 44. Enright and Condo, “The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo.”

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45. Enright and Condo, “The Undiscovered Famil- 57. Erpf interview with Carroll Dunham, April 14, iar: The Art of George Condo.” 2021. 46. This is discussed by Simon Baker in Baker and 58. Erpf interview with Carroll Dunham, April 14, Condo, George Condo: Painting Reconfigured, 28. 2021. 47. Baker and Condo, George Condo: Painting 59. Dunham and Simmons, “Carroll Dunham: Reconfigured, 113. Paintings on Wood, 1982–1987,” in Carroll Dunham: Paintings on Wood, 6. 48. George Condo: Outtake 2 Expanding Canvases, Thames & Hudson. 60. Kertess, “Carroll Dunham: Painting against the Grain—Painting with the Grain.” 49. Baker and Condo, George Condo: Painting 61. Simmons and Dunham, Carroll Dunham: PaintReconfigured, 113. 50. Enright and Condo, “The Undiscovered Familings on Wood, 8. 62. “Seriously, What Are Carroll Dunham’s Paintiar: The Art of George Condo.” 51. Baker and Condo, George Condo: Painting ings About?” 63. Pincus-Witten, “Carroll Dunham Skarstedt Reconfigured, 75. Gallery.” 52. “Painting Process/Process Painting featuring artists Carroll Dunham and Chuck Close,” 64. Sussler, “Carroll Dunham by Betsy Sussler.” 65. Sussler, “Carroll Dunham by Betsy Sussler.” video. 66. Sussler, “Carroll Dunham by Betsy Sussler.” 53. Bochner, “Serial Art Systems: Solipsism.” 54. Erpf interview with Carroll Dunham, April 14, 67. Sussler, “Carroll Dunham by Betsy Sussler.” 68. Smith, “Visions That Flaunt Cartoon Pedigrees.” 2021. 55. Erpf interview with Carroll Dunham, April 14, 69. “Painting Process/Process Painting featuring 2021. artists Carroll Dunham and Chuck Close,” 56. Erpf interview with Carroll Dunham, April 14, video. 2021.

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Conclusion

Conclusion

T

his book makes clear that painting in the 1980s was neither stylistically monolithic nor representative of one theme or mindset. Overarching classifications such as Neo-Expressionism or Postmodernism did little to describe a decade of painting that conforms to no single style, subject, or technique. Quite the opposite, in fact—what defines painting in the 1980s is its variousness. To put 1980s painting in a broader context, twentieth-century art—permit the art historical oversimplification—consists of stylistic, thematic, technical, and ideological approaches to painting shared by a community of artists as to characterize a movement or art historical period. Painting styles grew out of or in opposition to previous movements or styles. The established stylistic sequencing ends in the 1980s. The factors that shaped painting in the 1980s were individual, not collective. The artists here do share several commonalities such as the influence of non-paining sources, use of pictures or fragments to suggest a larger story, the appropriation of images or styles from art history, and utilizing unorthodox materials. All these factors contribute to the unfixed meanings of 1980s painting. In the 1970s, painting had been eclipsed by non-painting modes of art in New York and Italy and banished altogether in Germany as a result of Hitler’s anti-Modernist doctrines. In the face of claims that painting could no longer be original or relevant, artists enjoyed a certain autonomy when they approached it. David Salle spoke to this; when asked what the 1980s heritage might be, he responded, “Independence, freedom, and received wisdom.”1 Painters drew from their own specific sources, influences, ideas, and intentions to bring new, original voices to the genre of painting. Location played an important role. Cheap housing in lower Manhattan lured artists of many disciplines. Although painting imagery was considered déclassé, or perhaps because of it, a return to painting took root in this creative hot house in the 1970s. Susan Rothenberg, Jennifer Bartlett, Robert Moskowitz, and the other New Image painters (Chapter 1) created a hybrid of imagery and both Minimalist and Abstract Expressionist painting. This rebellion against oppressive anti-painting strictures led the way for the painting resurgence in the Downtown artworld of the 1980s. Four New York artists, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, David Salle, and JeanMichel Basquiat, were lumped together as Neo-Expressionists, but their paintings shared no similarities. In “Painting as Puzzle” (Chapter 2), a non-stylistic common denominator is established; how the viewer is engaged to figure the puzzle—narrative, meaning, themes. Chapter 3 explains how Mary Heilmann, Peter Halley, and Gerhard Richter brought new life to abstraction, the most iconic signifier of

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Modern art. Heilmann transformed geometric abstraction to embody her biography. Peter Halley repurposed abstract theory to undermine its ideological underpinnings. Gerhard Richter’s exploration of chromatics, paint application, pictorial space, and scale resulted in his inventing an entirely new method of painting. In the wake of Hitler’s expulsion of indigenous art, artists sought to create German painting anew, not a derivative of American and French painting. Chapter 4 focused on several artists who try to address German identity in a postwar world. The 1970s teachings of Joseph Beuys, a perceived shaman and cultural hero, who confronted Germany’s past and envisioned its democratic future through an expanded notion of art. Beuys functioned as a catalyst for 1980s German painting. A. R. Penck invented a pictograph-based language to visualize a divided Germany, and Georg Baselitz celebrated what he considered the ugly brutalism of German art, which led to his painted homage in 1980 to German Expressionists of the early twentieth century expelled by Hitler. Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke laid bare the taboo topic of the Third Reich in paintings drawn from mythology, history, poetry, alchemy, and unconventional materials to give a wide range of responses to the Holocaust in their monumental paintings. In Chapter 5, an overview of postwar Italian art provided the background needed to understand the paradigm shift that 1980s painting represents. Paladino, Clemente, Cucchi, and Chia revitalized painting after the dominance of non-painting art forms such as Arte Povera. These painters, often referred to as Italian Neo-Expressionist, are more accurately described as the Italian Transavanguardia, a term coined by Achille Bonito Oliva. Although their styles are vastly different, the importance of place runs throughout their work. They rooted themselves in their locality, turning from national identity to regional. We also see how these artists were introduced to wider audiences as the art world expanded. Chapter 6 explored four very singular approaches to painting in the art of worthy misfits Lari Pittman, Marlene Dumas, George Condo, and Carroll Dunham. Lari Pittman transforms the decorative to forcibly address racism, gun violence, and LGBTQ+ persecution. Marlene Dumas recasts portraiture as a way to illustrate the nature of apartheid in her native South Africa. George Condo uses painting techniques of old masters to create psychologically compelling images of great beauty. Carroll Dunham’s paintings invigorated abstraction by arranging shapes and painting elements as a result of his engagement with wood. The story of painting’s resurgence in the 1980s is told through individual artists’ exploration of their relationship to the medium at a particular moment in time. My intent was to reveal each artists’ symbiotic relationship between

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mind and making—the lifeblood of painting. In this creative process, originality depends on the artists’ ability to imagine something that does not already exist. They revealed new ways to think about painting that reverberated throughout the art world and persist today. Their creativity continues to inform and inspire artists, art historians, and art lovers alike.

Endnotes

1. Salle and Phillips, “David Salle and Richard Phillips Talk about Curating ‘Your History Is Not Our History’ at Haunch of Venison New York.”

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Tommassoni, Italo. “Alberto Burri and the Cracks.” In Burri e Fontana: 1949– 1968, edited by Bruno Corà, 66–68. Milan: Skira, 1996. Tschinkel, Paul. “David Salle—Sensitized Spaces.” Program 65, Art/new York, 2012. Accessed October 12, 2021. http://artnewyork.org/programs/davidsalle-sensitized-spaces/. Tschinkel, Paul. “Jean-Michel Basquiat: An Interview.” Art/new york, 1980. Accessed October 12, 2021. http://artnewyork.org/programs/jean-michelbasquiat-an-interview/. Tuten, Frederic. “Eric Fischl’s Italian Hours.” Art in America 84, no. 10, November 1996. Ussher, Jane M. Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. van den Boogerd, Dominic. “Hang-Ups and Hangovers in the Work of Marlene Dumas.” In Marlene Dumas, edited by Michelle Robecci, 30–84. London: Phaidon, 2010. Waldman, Diane. Italian Art Now: An American Perspective—1982 Exxon International Exhibition. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1982. Waldman, Diane, and Enzo Cucchi. Enzo Cucchi. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1986. Westfall, Stephen. “Surrealist Modes among Contemporary New York Painters.” Art Journal 45, no. 4 (1985): 315–18. Wilde, Oscar. “The Philosophy of Dress.” New York Tribune, April 19, 1885. Williams, Holly. “Sigmar Polke: Tate Modern, preview: Prepare to be baffled and exhilarated,” The Independent. September 21, 2014. Wright, Karen. “In the Ruin of Barjac; Politics, Alchemy, and Learning to Dance in Anselm Kiefer’s World.” In Anselm Kiefer, edited by Germano Celant, 445. Bilbao: Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, 2007. Wolf, Shira. “Female Iconoclasts: Marlene Dumas.” Artland. Accessed October 12, 2021. https://magazine.artland.com/female-iconoclasts-marlene-dumas/. Yau, John. A. R. Penck. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993. Zullo, Dana. “Francesco Clemente.” Crown Point Press. Accessed October 12, 2021. https://crownpoint.com/artist/francesco-clemente/#biography.

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PAINTING IN THE 1980S

Index

Bibliography

Illustrations are indicated by a page number in italic. Endnotes have been indexed only where the information would not be readily found from the page and are given as page and note number e.g. 183n.75. passim indicates several mentions within the page numbers given. 0.10 exhibition (1915) 86 9th Wave (Heilmann) 95, 96 18. Oktober 1977 (“October 18, 1977”) (Richter) 180 20 Years of Solitude 1971-1991 (20 Jahre Einsamkeit) exhibition (1993) 153 '45 (Baselitz) 149

A A B Quiet (A B Still) (Richter) 115–17, 116 Abramavić, Marina 4 Abstract Expressionism 8, 86–87, 131, 208 and Baselitz 138, 144 and Guston 10 and Halley 99–100 and Jenney 18 and Palermo 60 and Polke 177 and Richter 118 and Rothenberg 20–21, 23, 26, 28, 35 and Schnabel 56 see also Abstraction; Expressionism Abstraction 3, 12, 20, 84–86, 142, 270–71 and Baselitz 142 and de Kooning 118 and Dunham 255–57, 258, 264 and Guston 10, 149

292

and Halley 84, 99–100 and Heilmann 88–97 and Penck 138 and Polke 177 and Richter 85, 104, 110–12, 118–19, 178 and Rothenberg 33, 35 and Salle 44 and Schnabel 60, 65 see also Abstract Expressionism; Modernist Abstraction; Tachisme Abstracts (Richter) 104–05, 106, 112, 114, 118–19 Abstraktes Bild (“Abstract Painting”) (1976 and 1977) (Richter) 108, 109 Achromes (Manzoni) 188 Adieu (Baselitz) 147 Adorno, Theodor 124 African Rock Art (Brentjes) 68 Africano, Nicolas 12 An Argument 13, 14 Age of Saturn (“Saturnzeit”) (Kiefer) 160 Die Ährenleserin (“The Gleaner”) (Baselitz) 143, 144 Ain’t Joking (Weems) 243 Albers, Josef, Homage to the Square 100–01 alchemy and Kiefer 160, 62 and Polke 171 Algarve (Rothenberg) 24 Alice in Wonderland (“Alice im Wunderland”) (Polke) 169, 170, 171 Alighiero e Boetti 203 see also Boetti, Alighiero Altar (“Ara”) (Paladino) 197 American art in post-War Germany 131, 138, 166–67 schools 39–40 American Neo-Expressionism 3, 38, 47, 64, 66 see also Neo-Expressionism

INDEX

An American Place (Pittman) 229, 229 American Walnut (Dunham) 261–62, 261 Ammann, Jean-Christophe, on Ontani 190 Ancona, Italy 214, 216 Andersen, Laurie 4 Andre, Carl 166 Anselmo, Giovanni 188 Untitled 189 Applebroog, Ida 4 appropriation 41, 75, 102, 247, 270 Ara (“Altar”) (Paladino) 197 Arbus, Diane 234 architecture, and Kiefer 158–59 Arendt, Hannah 238–239 An Argument (Africano) 13, 14 Aroused Shepherd Boy (Chia) 218–19 art history and Condo 247 and Dumas 235 Italian 186–87, 190, 199 and Paladino 197 and Polke 171 art market 1980s 144 and Basquiat 67 and Condo 250 and Manzoni 188 and Richter 104, 115–16, 178 art schools 1970s America 39–40 and Beuys 128–29, 178 Art without Ideologies (Bonito Oliva, book) 191 Artaud, Antoin 139 Arte Povera (Poor Art) 189–90 see also Conceptual art Artforum (magazine) 8 Artificial Love II (Condo) 249, 249 artificial realism 252–53 artist-in-residence (AIR) laws, New York 39, 206

INDEX

Artists’s Breaths (“Fiato d’Artista”) (Manzoni) 188 Artist’s Shit (“Merda d’Artista”) (Manzoni) 188 Arts Magazine 103 Atelier (Richter) 113–14, 114 Athanor (Kiefer) 160, 161, 162, 176 Athanor (Polke) 176, 178 Attic series (“Dachboden-Bilder”) (Kiefer) 154 Audenauer, Conrad 167 Aunt Marianne (“Tante Marianne”) (Richter) 179–80, 179 Auping, Michael, on Rothenberg 24, 27 Auschwitz 124, 152, 162–63 see also Holocaust Auschwitz Demonstration 1956-1964 (“Auschwitz Demonstrationen 1956-1964”) (Beuys) 130 Ausfegen (“Sweeping Up”) (Beuys) 127 The Austrian Woman (Condo) 254–55, 254 Autopsy (Salle) 45–46, 46 Avery, Tex 249 Aycock, Alice 4

B Baader-Meinhof Group or Gang 112, 180 Babysitter (Dunham) 256–58, 257 Bacon, Francis 5 Bad Boy (Fischl) 50–52, 51 Bad Painting exhibition (1978) 10 Baer, Jo 101 Baker, Simon, on Condo 255 Baldessari, John, Cremation Project 40 Balthus 5 Barbarian Landscape (Cucchi) 215–16 Barbeque (Fischl) 54–55, 55 Barker, Rachel, on Richter 115 Barron, Stephanie, on Capitalist Realism 168

293

Barthes, Roland 79 Bartlett, Jennifer 4, 12, 19–20, 270 House Piece 20 Rhapsody 20, 21 Baselitz, Georg 3, 125, 138–50, 180, 181, 271 ΄45 149 Adieu 147 Die Ährenleserin (“The Gleaner”) 143, 144 Die Brückechor (“The Brücke Chorus”) 147, 148 Drinkers 145 Farewell Bill 144 Fingermalerei – Birken (“Finger Painting – The Birch Trees”) 143 Fingermalerei – Der Adler (“Finger Painting – The Eagle”) 143 Die große Nacht im Eimer (“The Big Night Down the Drain”) 139–40, 140 Helden or Neue Typen (“Heroes or New Types”) 140–41 Modell für eine Skulptur (“Model for a Sculpture”) 150 Nachtessen in Dresden (“Supper at Dresden”) 147, 148, 149 Orangenesser (“Orange Eater”) 145 Orangenesser VI (“Orange Eater VI ”) 145, 146 Pandamonisches Manifest (“Pandemonium Manifesto”) 140 and Penck 131, 132, 133, 142 Vorwärts Wind (“Headwind”) 140–41, 141 Basquiat (film) 63 Basquiat: In Word Only exhibition (2005) 69 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 3, 38, 64, 65–80, 206, 270 Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump 75, 76 Cabeza 75 El Gran Espectaculo (The History of Black People) 70–71, 70

294

Hollywood Africans 72, 73 Horn Players 77 Jawbone of an Ass 68 and music 76–78, 246 Natives Carrying Some Guns 68 The Nile 70–71 see El Gran Espectaculo (The History of Black People) Notary 71, 71 Onion Gum 68 Piano Lesson (for Chiara) 68 and Penck 136 Riddle Me This Batman 68 St. Joe Louis Surrounded by Snakes 69–70, 69 South African Nazism 68 The Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta 72, 74–75 Untitled 75 Zydeco 78, 79 Baudrillard, Jean 103 Simulacra and Simulation (book) 39, 104 Baumgarten, Lothar 132 Bebop music 77–78 see also music Beckman, Ericka 4 Before Night Falls (film) 63 Bender, Gretchen 4 Berger, John 243 Bergman, Ingmar 234 Berlin Baselitz exhibition 139 Martin-Gropius-Bau 5–6 Zeitgeist exhibition 5–6, 33, 36, 138, 220–21 Berlin Wall 5, 133, 173, 176 Besetzungen (“Occupation”) (Kiefer) 151, 152, 152 Beuys, Joseph 5, 60, 125–30, 168, 234, 271 Auschwitz Demonstrationen 19561964 (“Auschwitz Demonstration 1956-1964”) 130 Ausfegen (“Sweeping Up”) 127

INDEX

on Transavanguardia 186, 190–91, 219 drawing 126, 203 writing 190 I Like America and America Likes Me Bonnard, Pierre 49 129–30, 129 Boone, Mary 64, 66 and Kiefer 151 Borofsky, Jonathan 103, 220 and Nazism 130–31 “Bouncing in the Corner” (Nauman and Polke 165 video) 89 and Richter 178 Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (Basquiat) teaching 128–29, 178 75, 76 Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder Braque, Georges 85 erklärt (“How to Explain Pictures To a Dead Hare”) 127–28 Brenson, Michael, on Salle 44 Brentjes, Burchard, African Rock Bickerton, Ashley 102 Art 68 The Big Night Down the Drain (“Die Bridge (Brücke) group 144–45, 147 große Nacht im Eimer”) (BaseBrown, Joan 10 litz) 139–40, 140 Die Brückechor (“The Brücke Chorus”) Birnbaum, Dara 4 (Baselitz) 147, 148 The Birth of Love, Second Version (Fischl) Buchloh, Benjamin 49, 50 on Beuys 126 Bischofberger, Bruno 66, 206 on Richter 105, 107 Bitches Brew (Davis, album) 76 Bunnies (Polke) 167, 167 Black Square (Malevich) 165–66 Burning, Lignifying, Sinking, Silting Bleckner, Ross 61 (“Verbrennen, verholzen, Blessed Clara (Schnabel) 62 versenken, versanden”) exhibiBloodline-Big Family (Zhang Xiaogang) 2 tion (1980) 150 Bloom, Barbara 4 Burri, Alberto, SZ1 187 Blue Cell with Triple Conduit (Halley) Burroughs, William 71 101, 103 Butler, Cornelia (Connie) Blue Nude with Sword (Schnabel) 57 on Dumas 240 Bochner, Mel, “Serial Art, Systems, Solon Pittman 231 ipsism” (essay) 256 Butterfly (Rothenberg) 28, 29 Body of Knowledge (Dunham) 262 The Butterfly and the Diving Bell (film) The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb 63 (Holbein the Younger) 243 Byrne, David 66, 97 Boetti, Alighiero 190, 203–04 Mappa series 203 Boilly, Louis Léopold 171 C Bollywood 205 Bondo 61 Cabeza (Basquiat) 75 Bonito Oliva, Achille 219–20, 271 Cage, John 106, 126 Art without Ideologies (book) 191 Caillebotte, Gustave, Paris Street, Rainy on Clemente 201 Day 47–48 on Conceptual Art 187 CalArts (California Institute for the “Le Trans-Avanguardia” (essay) 219 Arts) 40

INDEX

295

Caldwell, John, on Polke 169, 171 Calle, Sophie 4 Camp (“Lager”) (Polke) 173, 174 Canard de Chaine (Schnabel) 57 Cantos (Pound) 210 Capital Realism 168, 178 Carcass of Beef (Soutine) 143 Carl Andre in Delft (Polke) 166 Castellani, Enrico 187 Castelli, Leo 64 Celan, Paul 156, 157–58 Celant, Germano and Arte Povera 188–89 on Paladino 194 Celmins, Vija 4, 226 Chadwick, Helen 4 Chair (Green) 16–17 Charlesworth, Sarah 4 Chia, Sandro 3, 186, 216–19 Aroused Shepherd Boy 218–19 La cucina di Dioniso (“Dionysus’ Kitchen”) 219, 220 Portatore d’acqua (“Water Bearer”) 217–18, 218 Sinfonia incompiuta (“Unfinished Symphony”) 219 and Transavanguardia 191, 214, 219, 221–22, 271 Chicago Imagists (Hairy Who) 55–56 Chinese Sea (True) 16, 16 Chocolate Painting (“Schokoladenbild”) (Polke) 166–68 Citizen Kane (film) 91 Classicism 139, 160, 218, 250 see also Neo-Classicism Clemente, Francesco 3, 5, 33, 36, 199–214, 271 and Baselitz 142 and Boetti 190, 203–04 Conversion to Her 208 The Fourteen Stations series 201, 206–10, 209

296

Midnight Sun II 213, 214 Name 212–13, 212 Perseverance 206, 207 The Pondicherry Pastels 204 Self-Portrait with Gun Hole in the Head 210, 211 Semen 202, 202 and Transavanguardia 186, 191, 199, 219, 222 Two Painters 205, 205 The Cloudmaker (Condo) 250, 251 clowns, Condo 245, 247–49, 251 Cluitt, Shelagh 4 Colescott, Robert 2 Cologne Cathedral 160 color and Abstract Expressionism 86 and Baselitz 145, 147 and Chia 217–18 and Clemente 208 and Condo 248 and Cucchi 215, 216 and Dumas 239, 240 and Dunham 257–58, 260 and Heilmann 90, 95 and Paladino 192 and Pittman 231, 232 and Richter 106–18 passim and Schnabel 62 Color Field painters 86, 183n.84 Colored Plates (“Farbtafeln”) (Polke) 177 Coltrane, John 252 Combine series (Rauschenberg) 43, 60 Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making exhibition (2007) 265 Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue (Mondrian) 89 Conceptual art 9, 87, 88, 130, 187, 252 see also Arte Povera Concetto Spaziale (spatial concepts) 187 see also Fontana, Lucio Condo, George 3, 245–55, 271 Artificial Love II 249, 249

INDEX

The Mountains Resist the Animals 215 The Austrian Woman 254–55, 254 The Mountain’s Thought 215 The Cloudmaker 250, 251 Pesche in Schiena del Mare Adriatico Dancing to Miles 251–52 (“A Fish on the Back of the AdriExpanding Canvases 251–52 atic Sea”) 214–15, 215 The Extrovert 253, 254 Sigh of a Wave 215 In Order to Think 247–48 and Transavanguardia 219, 220–22, The Introvert 253, 253 271 Madonna 246–47 La cucina di Dioniso (“Dionysus’ KitchName paintings 250 en”) (Chia) 219, 220 Nude Homeless Bum 251 William Tell Suite 253–54 Yellow and Black Composition 248–49 D conduits, Halley 101 da Vinci, Leonardo 74, 171 Contemporary art 102, 182n.34, 186 Dachboden-Bilder (“Attic” series) (Kiefdocumenta exhibitions 132, 216, 235 er) 154 Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel Daddy’s Girl (Fischl) 54, 54 punto (“It Will Continue to Dahn, Walter 250 Grow Except at This Point”) Dancing to Miles (Condo) 251–52 (Penone) 189 Danto, Arthur Conversion to Her (Clemente) 208 on Polke 181 Copley, William (aka CPLY), The Tomb on Whitney Biennial (1981) 38 of the Unknown Whore 10 Davis, Miles 76, 77, 251–52 Coral Made (Salle) 44 Day-Glo 62, 100 Corso, Gregory 210 Day-Glo Prison (Halley) 97, 98, 100–01 Cortez, Diego 66 Deakins, Roger 236 Coyne, Petah 4 on color 114 CPLY see Copley, William “Death Fugue” (“Todesfugue”) (Celan) Cragg, Tony 220 157 Creely, Robert 210 The Death of the Author (Barthes) 79 Cremation Project (Baldessari) 40 December (Richter) 117 Crimp, Douglas 4 de Chirico, Giorgio 216, 221 The Crisis in Geometry (Halley, book) Degenerate Art (“Entartete Kunst”) exhi103, 104 bition (1938) 124, 168 crockery/ceramics, Schnabel 61–62 and Degenerate Art (“Entartete Kunst”) Heilmann (Polke) 168 The Crossing (“Der Übergang”) (Penck) Dein goldenes Haar, Margarethe (“Your 133, 134 Golden Hair, Margarete”) (KiefCrow, Thomas, on Schnabel 64 er) 157–58 crowns, Basquiat 79 Deitch, Jeffrey 103 Cubism 85, 251 de Kooning, Elaine 8 Cucchi, Enzo 3, 5, 186, 214–16 de Kooning, Willem 5, 8, 86 Barbarian Landscape 215–16 and Baselitz 138, 143 Inebriated Fountain 216

INDEX

297

and Basquiat 74, 75 Suburb in Havana 118, 119 della Francesca, Piero, Sogno di Constantino (“The Dream of Constantine”) 199, 200 Dem unbekannten Maler (“To the Unknown Painter”) (Kiefer) 158–59 De Maria, Nicola 222n.1 Depp, Johnny 67 De Stijl Group 86 Deutschlands Geisteshelden (“Germany’s Spiritual Heroes”) (Kiefer) 154, 155 Devil’s tritone 77 Diamond, Martha 4 Diaz, Al 65 Brücke (Bridge) group 144–45, 147 Dionysus’ Kitchen (“La cucina di Dioniso”) (Chia) 219, 220 Discipline and Punish (Foucault, book) 103–04 Disler, Martin 220 Disney Company 40, 71 Disneyland 39 documenta Contemporary art exhibitions 132, 216, 235 Dokoupil, Jiří “Georg” 250 Donghia 230 Dowell, Roy 226 Dr. Heyde (“Herr Heyde”) (Richter) 179–80 drawing and Basquiat 68, 69, 71 and Beuys 126, 203 and Clemente 202, 204 and Condo 246 and Dunham 257 and Rothenberg 29 and Salle 44 Dream (After Piero della Francesca) (“Suonno [d’après Pierro della

298

Francesca]”) (Paladino) 199, 200 The Dream of Constantine (“Sogno di Constantino”) (della Francesca) 199, 200 Dreyfuss, Henry 68 Drinkers (Baselitz) 145 Droese, Felix, House for the Weaponless exhibition (1988) 177 Dubuffet, Jean 74–75 Duchamp, Marcel 108, 127, 130, 252 Dumas, Marlene 3, 4, 234–44, 271 Genetiese Heimwee (“Genetic Longing”) 236, 237 Het Kwaad is Banaal (“Evil is Banal”) 237–39, 238 The Jewish Girl 240 Losing (Her Meaning) 240–41, 241 Martha – die Bediende 239–40 Martha – My Ouma 239–40 Martha – Sigmund’s Wife 240 Snowwhite and the Broken Arm 242–43 Snowwhite in the Wrong Story 242–43 The Teacher (sub a) 240 Waiting (for Meaning) 240, 241–42, 242 The White Disease 235–236 Dunham, Carroll 3, 255–66, 271 American Walnut 261–62, 261 Babysitter 256–58, 257 Body of Knowledge 262 Elm 260–61 Five Pieces 258 Fourth Birch 260 Fourth Pine 258, 259 Oak Bottom 261, 262 Orange Shape 262, 263 Pink Shape with Repairs 262 A Rectangle and a Circle within a Square 256 Second Zebra 260 Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism 256

INDEX

Tall Birch 258 True Size 262 Zebra Wood 258 Dürer, Albrecht 171 The Great Triumphal Cart 177, 247 Dusseldorf and Beuys 127, 128 Living with Pop exhibition 168 Dwyer, Nancy 4 Dyer, Moira 4 Dymschitz, Alexander 130

E eagles, Baselitz 143, 180 Eakins, Thomas 49 Earth Art 9, 88 Easter Night (“Notte di Pasqua”) (Paladino) 193, 194 Easy Rider (film) 48 Edda legends 160 Edgerton, Eugene Harold 261–62 Eichmann, Adolf 238–39 Eis (“Ice”) (Richter) 118 Eisen-Steig (“Iron Path”) (Kiefer) 162, 163 Ellis, Stephen on Guston 149 on Richter 112, 113 Elm (Dunham) 260–61 Eno, Brian 90 Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition (1938) 124, 168 Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) (Polke) 168 Environmental Art 87 Ernst, Max 171, 183n.75 eroticism and Clemente 213 and Dumas 242 Every Man Stands beneath His Own Dome of Heaven (“Jeder Mensch steht unter seinem Himmelskugel”) (Kiefer) 153, 153

INDEX

Evil Is Banal (“Het Kwaad is Banaal”) (Dumas) 237–39, 238 exhibitions Baselitz 139, 143, 144, 149, 150 Basquiat 66, 67, 69, 72 Beuys 129 Chia 216, 221–22 Clemente 33, 36, 201, 211–12 Condo 245, 250 Cucchi 221–22 Droese 177 Dumas 234, 235, 239, 240, 241 Halley 102 Heilmann 94 Keifer 33, 36, 150, 153 Paladino 191, 197, 221–22 Penck 132 Pittman 226–27 Polke 164, 168, 176 Richter 106, 117, 168, 179–80 Rothenberg 8, 12, 23, 24, 33 Salle 33, 36 Schnabel 33, 36, 64 see also 0.10 exhibition; Bad Painting; Comic Abstraction; Degenerate Art; documenta; Italian Art Now; Italian Wave; Living with Pop; New American Paintings; New Image Painting; A New Romanticism; A New Spirit in Painting; New York/New Wave; Pictures; The Pictures Generation; Venice Biennale; Zeitgeist Expanding Canvases (Condo) 251–52 Expressionism and Baselitz 144, 145, 147, 149 and Chia 216 German 138, 144–45 and Richter 105, 107, 118 see also Abstract Expressionism; Neo-Expressionism

299

The Extrovert (Condo) 253, 254 Eyes of the Night Creatures exhibition (Dumas, 1985) 234, 235, 239

F Fab Five Freddy 77 Fabro, Lucio 188 The Factory 246 Fake Old Masters 247 Farbtafeln (“Colored Plates”) (Polke) 177 Farewell Bill (Baselitz) 144 Faust (Richter) 108, 110–11 feminism and Dumas 243, 244 and Salle 45, 46 Feminist art 9, 226 Festa, Tano 187, 188 Fiato d’Artista (“Artists’s Breaths”) (Manzoni) 188 The Fifties (“Die Fünfziger Jahre”) (Polke) 166 film 40 and Basquiat 72 and Dumas 234, 235 and Fischl 48 and Richter 114 and Salle 40, 44 and Schnabel 58, 64 Finger Painting – The Birch Trees (“Fingermalerei – Birken”) (Baselitz) 143 Finger Painting – The Eagle (“Fingermalerei – Der Adler”) (Baselitz) 143 Finney, Albert 58 Fiorentino, Rosso 139 fire, and Kiefer 154 First Horse (Rothenberg) 22 Fischer, Konrad 168 Fischer, Norman 90 Fischl, Eric 3, 38, 40, 47–56, 79–80, 270 300

Bad Boy 50–52, 51 Barbeque 54–55, 55 The Birth of Love, Second Version 49, 50 Daddy’s Girl 54, 54 A Funeral 52, 53 Once Where We Looked to Put Down Our Dead 49 St. Tropez 49 Sleepwalker 52, 53, 54 A Fish on the Back of the Adriatic Sea (“Pesche in Schiena del Mare Adriatico”) (Cucchi) 214–15, 215 Fishman, Louise 4 Five Pieces (Dunham) 258 Flashing (“Lampeggiante”) (Paladino) 198, 198 Florence, Italy 217, 218 Fluxus 126–127 Fontana, Lucio 187 food, in art 166–67 Fooling with Your Hair (Salle) 45 For the Life of Me I Can’t See the Swastika in This (Kippenberger) 173 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish (book) 103–04 found objects 127, 252 The Fourteen Stations series (Clemente) 201, 206–10, 209 Fourth Birch (Dunham) 260 Fourth Pine (Dunham) 258, 259 Fox, Howard on 1980s painting 221–22 on Pittman 228–29, 231 Foye, Raymond, on Clemente 204, 213 Frankenthaler, Helen 8, 86, 177, 183n.84 Fraser, Andrea 4 Free Abstracts see Abstracts (Richter) Freudian Painting (Halley) 99–100, 99, 101 Friedlander, Lee 234 Friedrich, Caspar David 117

INDEX

Monk by the Sea 118 Wanderer Above the Misty Sea 151–52 Fritsch, Katharina 4 Fuchs, Rudi 235 on Baselitz 142 and Dumas 235 Fugard, Athol 234 A Funeral (Fischl) 52, 53 Die Fünfziger Jahre (“The Fifties”) (Polke) 166 Futurism, Italian 186–87, 219

G Gagosian, Larry 66 Garabedian, Charles 10 Garrels, Gary, on Polke 172 Geldzahler, Henry 208 Genet, Jean 234 Genetic Longing (“Genetiese Heimwee”) (Dumas) 236, 237 Genzken, Isa 4 geometries 9 and Bartlett 19–20 and Dunham 260 and Halley 96–97, 99–101, 103–04 and Heilmann 84, 89, 92, 95, 270–71 and Mangold 256 and Matta-Clark 30–31, 32 and Richter 108 and Rothenberg 25, 27, 28, 30, 32 see also grids; Neo-Geo Gericault, Theodore 41 Gericault’s Arm (Salle) 41, 42, 247 German Expressionism 138, 144–45 see also Expressionism German Modernism 124, 159–60, 270 see also Modernism German Neo-Expressionism 60, 126, 145, 147, 149 see also NeoExpressionism German Pavilion, Venice Biennale 177

INDEX

German Romanticism 118, 151–52 see also Romanticism Germany 3, 180–81 and Abstraction 131 and American art 131, 138, 166–67 see also Holocaust; Nazism Germany’s Spiritual Heroes (“Deutschlands Geisteshelden”) (Kiefer) 154, 155 Giap’s Igloo (Merz) 189 Gillespie, Dizzy 77 Ginsberg, Allen 210, 234 Girard, Alexander 231 Girl and Vase ( Jenney) 18, 19 The Girls (band) 246 Girouard, Tina 22 Glass, Philip 22 The Gleaner (“Die Ährenleserin”) (Baselitz) 143, 144 The Gleaners (Millet) 143 Glover, Mike, on Baselitz 139 Glowing and Burnt-Out Cells with Conduit (Halley) 101, 102 Godard, Jean-Luc 234 Goebbels, Joseph 160 Goldin, Nan 4 Goldstein, Jack 40 Gornick, April 4 Got, Karl Otto 115 Gould, Glenn 252 gourds, Pittman 227–29 Govan, Michael, on abstraction 131 Goya, Francesco de 171, 183n.75 The Graduate (film) 48 graffiti 65-66, 76 El Gran Espectaculo (The History of Black People) (Basquiat) 70–71, 70 see also The Nile La Grande Jatte (Seurat) 47 The Grave (Halley) 97, 98 Graves, Nancy 22 The Great Triumphal Cart (Dürer) 177, 247

301

Green, Denise 4, 11, 12, 16–17 Chair 16–17 Trap 17, 17 Grey (band) 76, 246 Grey’s Anatomy (book) 65, 68 grids and Bartlett 19 and Baselitz 149 and Heilmann 91–92, 94 and Polke 166, 168 see also geometries Die große Nacht im Eimer (“The Big Night Down the Drain”) (Baselitz) 139–40, 140 Grosz, George 159 Guatarri, Felix, on Condo 252 Guernica (Picasso) 65 Guston, Philip 5, 8, 138, 149, 248 Painting, Smoking, Eating 10, 11

H Haiger, Ernst 177 Hairy Who 56 see also Chicago Imagists Halbreich, Kathy, on Polke 165, 169, 172–73, 178 Halley, Peter 3, 39, 84–85, 96–104, 119–20, 270–71 Blue Cell with Triple Conduit 101, 103 The Crisis in Geometry 103, 104 Day-Glo Prison 97, 98, 100–01 Freudian Painting 99–100, 99, 101 Glowing and Burnt-Out Cells with Conduit 101, 102 The Grave 97, 98 Prison with Underground Conduit 101 Hamilton, David 241–42 Hammer, Mike see Penck, A.R. Handke, Perter 210 Hard Abstracts see Abstracts (Richter) Haring, Keith 67, 77, 136, 206, 252 Harris, Suzie 91 302

Hartel, Herbert, on Richter 105 Hartigan, Grace 8 Hay, Deborah 22 Headwind (“Vorwärts Wind”) (Baselitz) 140–41, 141 Hearn, Pat 94 Heath of the Brandenberg March (“Märkische Heide”) (Kiefer) 155 Heckel, Erich 144–45, 147 Heilmann, Mary 3, 4, 22, 84, 88–97, 119–20, 270–71 9th Wave 95, 96 Rosebud 90–91, 92 Save the Last Dance for Me 90, 91 Sea Wall 94, 95 The Thief of Baghdad 92, 93, 94 Three for Two: Red, Yellow, Blue 89 Helden or Neue Typen (“Heroes or New Types”) (Baselitz) 140–41 Helion, Jean 5 Hendon, Robert Chambless 10 Hendrix, Jimi 252 “Her Story” (Heilmann talks) 88, 92, 94 Heroes or New Types (“Helden or Neue Typen”) (Baselitz) 140–41 Herr Heyde (“Dr. Heyde”) (Richter) 179–80 Hesse, Eva 29 Het Kwaad is Banaal (“Evil is Banal”) (Dumas) 237–39, 238 Heyde, Werner 179–80 Higher Beings Commanded: Paint the Upper Right Corner Black! (“Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwars malen!”) (Polke) 165–66 hip-hop 41, 76 see also music His Brain (Salle) 44, 45, 45 Hitler, Adolf and art 118, 124, 131, 166, 168, 270–71 Kiefer and 151, 152, 158–60

INDEX

Hobo symbols 68 Hochsitz (“Watchtower”) series (Polke) 169, 173–76, 175 Hochstand (“Hunting Tower”) (Polke) 176 Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwars malen! (“Higher Beings Commanded: Paint the Upper Right Corner Black!”) (Polke) 165–66 Holbein the Younger, Hans, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb 243 Hollywood Africans (Basquiat) 72, 73 Holocaust 124 and Kiefer 153–54, 156, 159, 162–63, 181, 271 and Polke 173–76, 271 and Richter 180 see also Nazism Homage to the Square (Albers) 100–01 hooks, bell, on Basquiat 75 Hopper, Edward 54 Nighthawks 47 Horn Players (Basquiat) 77 horse paintings, Rothenberg 20, 22–30, 33–35 The Hot Four 102 House Piece (Bartlett) 20 House for the Weaponless exhibition (Droese, 1988) 177 houses and Bartlett 19–20 and Matta-Clark 30–32 and Shapiro 11, 12 How Sweet the Day, After This and That, Deep Sleep Is Truly Welcomed (Pittman) 231 How to Explain Pictures To a Dead Hare (“Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt”) (Beuys) 127–28 Hunting Tower (“Hochstand”) (Polke) 176 Hurston, Michael, on Shapiro 11, 12

INDEX

Husband and Wife ( Jenney) 18 Huston, John 58 Huyssen, Andreas, on Kiefer 164

I I Like America and America Likes Me (Beuys) 129–30, 129 I Love You with My Ford (Rosenquist) 43, 43 I Went to Tangiers and Had Dinner With Paul Bowles (Schnabel) 62, 63 Ice (“Eis”) (Richter) 118 iconograpy and Basquiat 68 and Guston 10 Iggy Pop 66 Igloos series (Merz) 189 image and Abstraction 142 recontextualization of 13 image inversion (Baselitz) 141–43, 181 Immendorff, Jörg 142 Inebriated Fountain (Cucchi) 216 In Order to Think (Condo) 247–48 Installation art 9 Interfunktionen (journal) 152 The Introvert (Condo) 253, 253 Iron Path (“Eisen-Steig”) (Kiefer) 162, 163 It Will Continue to Grow Except at This Point (“Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto”) (Penone) 189 Italian Art Now exhibition (1982) 221 Italian Futurists 186–87, 219 Italian Neo-Expressionism 271 see also Neo-Expressionism Italian Pop Art 188, 197 see also Pop Art Italian Romanticism 221 see also Romanticism Italian Wave exhibition (1980) 221 Italy 3 Ancona 214, 216

303

art history 186–87, 190, 199 Florence 217, 218 see also Transavanguardia

J Jacquette, Yvonne 4 Januar (“January”) (Richter) 114–15, 117–18, 117 Jaudon, Valarie 220 Jawbone of an Ass (Basquiat) 68 Jay Z, and Basquiat 67 Jeder Mensch steht unter seinem Himmelskugel (“Every Man Stands beneath His Own Dome of Heaven”) (Kiefer) 153, 153 Jenney, Neil 8, 12, 17–19 Girl and Vase 18, 19 Husband and Wife 18 Meltdown Morning 18 The Jewish Girl (Dumas) 240 Johns, Jasper 43, 74, 188 Johnson, Miami 24 Jonas, Joan 22, 33 Jones Beach ( Jonas) 33 Joyce, James 126 Judd, Donald, Untitled 9, 9 Judson Dance Group 22 Juni (“June”) (Richter) 112, 113

K Kandinsky, Wassily 86 Kappler, Serge, on Fischl 52 Katz, Vincent 210 Kelly, Ellsworth 9, 87 Kennedy, John F. 168 Kerouac, Jack 72 Kertess, Klaus, on Dunham 260 Kiefer, Anselm 3, 33, 36, 125, 150–64, 181, 271 Athanor 160, 161, 162, 176 304

Besetzungen (“Occupation”) 151, 152, 152 Dachboden-Bilder (“Attic” series) 154 Dein goldenes Haar, Margarethe (“Your Golden Hair, Margarete”) 157–58 Dem unbekannten Maler (“To the Unknown Painter”) 158–59 Deutschlands Geisteshelden (“Germany’s Spiritual Heroes”) 154, 155 Eisen-Steig (“Iron Path”) 162, 163 Jeder Mensch steht unter seinem Himmelskugel (“Every Man Stands beneath His Own Dome of Heaven”)153, 153 Lot’s Frau (“Lot’s Wife”) 163–64 Margarethe 157, 158 Märkische Heide (“Heath of the Brandenberg March”) 155 Melancholia 160 Nürnberg (“Nuremberg”) 155, 156 Saturnzeit (“Age of Saturn”) 160 Sulamit (“Shulamite”) 159, 159 Siegfried’s Difficult Way to Brunhilde 162 Unterehmen Seelöwe (“Operation Sea Lion”) 150–51 Wölundlied (mit Flügel) (“Wayland’s Song [with Wing]”) 160, 161 Kippenberger, Martin, For the Life of Me I Can’t See the Swastika in This 173 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 144–45, 149, 159 Kline, Franz 8, 74, 75 Klophaus, Ute 128 Koons, Jeff 102 Kounnellis, Janice 188 Krasner, Lee 8 Krauss, Rosalind, on grids 91 Kruger, Barbara 4, 102 Kupka, Frantisek 85

INDEX

Kuspit, Donald on Clemente 211–12 on Salle 45

L Lager (“Camp”) (Polke) 173, 174 The Lairs of Naples (“Le tane di Napoli”) (Paladino) 196 Lampeggiante (“Flashing”) (Paladino) 198, 198 Landry, Dickie 22 landscapes and Clemente 205 and Condo 247, 250 and Cucchi 186, 215–16 and Kiefer 154–56, 158, 178 and Paladino 186, 196 and Pittman 227, 229 and Richter 118 see also place; Transavanguardia Lane, Lois 12, 17 Language Art 9 Larionov, Mary 27 Lasker, Jonathan 39 Last Exit: Painting (Lawson essay) 46–47 Lauterwein, Andrea, on Kiefer 159, 164 Lawler, Louise 4 Lawson, Thomas on Moskowitz 12–13 on Salle 46–47 lead, used by Kiefer 160–62 Leben mit Pop – Eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus (“Living with Pop – A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism”) exhibition (1963) 168 Legend of Edda 154 Levine, Sherrie 4, 102, 247 Lewis, Joe 70 Lewitt, Sol 20, 101 Lichtenstein, Roy 9, 167

INDEX

Lin, Maya 4 Linker, Kate, on Richter 106 Living with Pop – A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism (“Leben mit Pop – Eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus”) exhibition (1963) 168 Lombardi, Sergio 188 London, A New Spirit in Painting exhibition (1981) 5, 220–21 Longobardi, Nino 221 Los Angeles, Pittman exhibition (1983) 226–27 Losing (Her Meaning) (Dumas) 240–41, 241 Lot’s Wife (“Lot’s Frau”) (Kiefer) 163–64 Louis, Morris 86 Lueg, Konrad (Konrad Fischer) 168 Lupertz, Marcus 142

M McCloskey, Barbara, on Social Realism 130–31 McEvilley, Thomas, on Baselitz 149 Maciunus, George 126 Madonna 67 Madonna (Condo) 246–47 Malevich, Kazimir Black Square 165–66 Suprematist paintings 85–86 Mangold, Robert 256 Mangold, Sylvia Plimack 4 Manifesto Blanco (“White Manifesto”) (Fontana, essay) 187 Manifesto of Futurism (Italian Futurists, book) 187 Mannerist painting 139 Manzoni, Piero 187 Achromes 188 Fiato d’Artista (“Artists’s Breaths”) 188 Merda d’Artista (“Artists’s Shit”) 188

305

Mappa series (Boetti) 203 Marc, Franz 159 Marden, Brice 9, 206 Margarethe (“Margarete”) (Kiefer) 157, 158 Maria Callas series (Schnabel) 62 Marian Goodman Gallery, New York 106, 153 Mariani, Carlo Maria 221–22 Märkische Heide (“Heath of the Brandenberg March”) (Kiefer) 155 The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (Stella) 25, 26 Marsh, Reginald 41 Marshall, Richard 8 on imagery 25 on Moskowitz 13 and New Image Painting exhibition 12–13 Martha – die Bediende (Dumas) 239–40? Martha – My Ouma (Dumas) 239–40 Martha – Sigmund’s Wife (Dumas) 240 Martin, Agnes 4, 9 Martin, Steve 55 Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin 5–6 Marx, Theodor see Penck, A.R. Mary paintings (Rothenberg) 27 Matisse, Henri “Notes of a Painter” (essay) 232 Woman with Hat 108 Matta, Roberto 265 Matta-Clark, Gordon 5, 21–22, 90 Splitting 30–32, 31 Meinhof, Ulrike 180 Die Meistersinger (Wagner) 155–56 Melancholia (Keifer) 160 Meltdown Morning ( Jenney) 18 Mental States exhibition (Condo, 2011-12) 245 Merda d’Artista (“Artists’s Shit”) (Manzoni) 188 Merz, Mario 188 Igloos series and Giap’s Igloo 189 Merz, Marisa 188

306

Messager, Annette 4 Metaphysical School (Scuola Metaphysica) 216, 221 Middendorf, Helmut 5 Midnight Sun II (Clemente) 213, 214 Mike Hammer series (Penck) 134–35 Millais, John Everett, Ophelia 241 Miller, Marc, Basquiat interview 71 Millet, Jean-Francois, The Gleaners 143 Minimalism 8, 9, 35, 87, 131 and Bartlett 19, 20 and Green 16 and Halley 97 and Heilmann 84, 88–89 and Moskowitz 14 and Polke 165–66 and Rothenberg 20, 24–26, 27, 28, 35 and Schnabel 56, 60 and Shapiro 11 Miro, Joan 252 Miss Interpreted 241 see also Dumas, Marlene Mitchell, Joan 4 Mitscherlich-Nielsen, Margarete 124 Model for a Sculpture (“Modell für eine Skulptur”) (Baselitz) 150 Modern Art (“Moderne Kunst”) (Polke) 166, 166 Modernism 38, 74, 85–86, 87, 91, 156, 187 and Dunham 264 and Fischl 48 German 124, 159–160, 270 and Halley 84, 99, 100, 103–04 and Paladino 192 and Penke 133 and Polke 165, 166, 169 and Richter 105, 112 see also Postmodernism Modernist Abstraction 87 and Dunham 264 and Halley 84, 97, 99, 100, 103 and Heilmann 96

INDEX

and Richter 105, 107 see also Abstraction; Modernism Mondrian, Piet 86 Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue 89 Monk by the Sea (Friedrich) 118 Moonrise: Marlene Dumas and Edvard Munch exhibition (2018) 240 Morgan, Stuart, on A New Spirit in Painting exhibition 5 Morineau, Camille, on Richter 114, 115 Moskowitz, Robert 12–14, 220, 270 The Swimmer 12–13, 15 Untitled 12–13 The Mountains Resist the Animals (Cucchi) 215 The Mountain’s Thought (Cucchi) 215 Mucha, Stanislaw 163 Mülheimer Freiheit group 250 Müller, Otto 147 Munch, Edvard, The Scream 147, 240 Murphy, Catherine 4 Murray, Elizabeth 4, 226 Murray, Judith 4 The Muse with the Long Face (Salle) 41 music ambient 90 and Basquiat 76–78, 246 Bebop 77–78 and Condo 246, 252 hip-hop 41, 76 and painting 89–90 and Penck 136 rap 41, 76–77 Music for Airports (Eno) 90 Music for Films (Eno) 90 Myers, Terry R., on Heilmann 90 Myths series (Warhol) 246

N Nachtessen in Dresden (“Supper at Dresden”) (Baselitz) 147, 148, 149

INDEX

nakedness and nudes 243–44 and Clemente 205, 213 and Condo 251 and Dumas 234, 243–44 and Dunham 262–63 and Fischl 49, 52, 54 and Salle 91 Name (Clemente) 212–13, 212 Name paintings (Condo) 250 Natives Carrying Some Guns (Basquiat) 68 Nauman, Bruce 88, 89 Nazism 3, 124–25, 167 and Baselitz 138, 180 and Beuys 130–31 and Kiefer 150, 151–59, 162–63, 181 and Nolde 147 and Polke 164, 171, 172, 176 and Richter 178–80 see also Holocaust Neo-Classicism 177 see also Classicism Neo-Conservatism 47 Neo-Expressionism 4–6, 21, 38, 47 American 3, 38, 47, 64, 66 and Clemente 207–08 and Fischl 47, 66, 79–80 German 60, 126, 145, 147, 149 Italian 271 and Polke 60 and Postmodernism 144 and Rothenberg 33, 35–36 and Salle 47, 66, 79–80 and Schnabel 47, 66, 79–80 see also Expressionism Neo-Geo (Neo-Geometric Conceptualism) 102 Neo-Surrealism 245 see also Surrealism Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (Sex Pistols) 90 New American Paintings exhibition (1958) 182n.29 New Image 3, 10, 17–18, 220, 270

307

New Image Painting exhibition (1978) 3, Nutt, Jim 55 Rosie Comon 56, 57 8, 12–13 New Realism 17–18 The New Republic (Pittman) 228 O A New Romanticism: Sixteen Artists from Italy exhibition (1985) 221 Oak Bottom (Dunham) 261, 262 A New Spirit in Painting exhibition O’Brien, Glenn, on Basquiat 78 (1981) 5, 220–21 Occupation (“Besetzungen”) (Kiefer) New York City 39, 206 151, 152, 152 artist-in-residence (AIR) laws 39, 206 October 18, 1977 (“18. Oktober 1977”) exhibitions 4, 10, 221 (Richter) 180 Bartlett 20 On the Brink of the Evening (“Sull’orlo Baselitz 144, 149 della Sera”) (Paladino) 196, 196 Basquiat 66 Once Where We Looked to Put Down Our Beuys 129 Dead (Fischl) 49 Kiefer 153 Onion Gum (Basquiat) 68 New Image Painting 3, 8, 12–13 Onkel Rudi (“Uncle Rudi”) (Richter) New York/New Wave 66 179 Richter 106 Ontani, Luigi 190, 221 Rothenberg 24 Operation Sea Lion (“Unterehmen Marian Goodman Gallery 106, 153 Seelöwe”) (Kiefer) 150 New York Times Magazine 66 Ophelia (Millais) 241 New York/New Wave exhibition (1981) 66 Orange Eater (“Orangenesser”) (BaseNewman, Barnett 8 litz) 145 Vir Heroicus Sublimis 86, 87 Orange Eater IX (“Orangenesser IX”) Who’s Afraid of Red Yellow Blue 89 (Baselitz) 145, 146 Nighthawks (Hopper) 47 Orange Shape (Dunham) 262, 263 The Nile (Basquiat) 70–71, see El Gran “Ornithology” (Parker, song) 77 Espectaculo (The History of Black Oslo, Dumas/Munch exhibition (2018) People) 240 Nolde, Emil 144, 147 Nosei, Annina 66, 67 P on Basquiat 77 Paganini (Polke) 171–73, 172 Notary (Basquiat) 71, 71 Pagel, David, on Dunham 262–63 “Notes of a Painter” (Matisse essay) 232 Notte di Pasqua (“Easter Night”) (Paladi- paint application 86, 143 and Baselitz 142 no) 193, 194 and Basquiat 64 November (Richter) 117 and Clemente 208 Nude Homeless Bum (Condo) 251 and Condo 247–48 nudes, and nakedness 243–44 see also and Dumas 239, 240 nakedness and Halley 100 Nuremberg (“Nürnberg”) (Kiefer) 155, and Moskowitz 14 156

308

INDEX

Pasolini, Pier Paolo 222n.6, 234 and Penck 137 pastiche 44 and Richter 107, 271 The Patients and the Doctors (Schnabel) and Rothenberg 28 61, 61 painting Pattern and Decoration Movement 10, crisis in 8 220 death of 87 Penck, A. R. 3, 74, 125, 132–38, 180–81, as music 89–90 271 and photography 106, 112, 114, 167 and Baselitz 131, 132, 133, 142 and politics 131, 137–38 Mike Hammer series 134–35 Painting, Smoking, Eating (Guston) Primitive Computer 134 10, 11 Quo Vadis Germania (“Where Are paintings/non-paintings 190 You Going Germany?”) 136–37, Paladino, Domenico (Mimmo) 3, 5, 186, 137–38 191–99, 219, 221–22, 271 T.M. x Penck x Mike Hammer 134–35, Ara (“Altar”) 197 135 Lampeggiante (“Flashing”) 198, Der Übergang (“The Crossing”) 133, 198 134 Notte di Pasqua (“Easter Night”) 193, Weltbild (“World View”) 133 194 Penone, Giuseppe 188, 221 Salt Mountain 199 Continuerà a crescere tranne che in Silensioso mi ritiro a dipingere un quel punto (“It Will Continue to Quadro (“Silently, I Withdraw to Grow Except at This Point”) 189 Paint a Painting”) 192, 193 Performance art 9, 32–33, 190 Sole Soletario (“Solitary Sun”) 197 Perseverance (Clemente) 206, 207 Sull’orlo della Sera (“On the Brink of Pesche in Schiena del Mare Adriatico (“A the Evening”) 196, 196 Fish on the Back of the Adriatic Suonno (d’après Pierro della FrancesSea”) (Cucchi) 214–15, 215 co) (“Dream [After Piero della Peter Halley: Collected Essays 1981-1987 Francesca]”) 199, 200 (Halley, book) 103 Le tane di Napoli (“The Lairs of NaPfaff, Judy 4 ples”) 196 La virtù del Fornaio in Carrozza (“The photographs and photography 49, 106, 112, 114, 167 Virtue of the Baker in a Carand Dumas 234, 235, 241–42, 243, riage”) 194, 195 244 Palermo, Blinky 60 and Dunham 261–62 Pandemonium Manifesto (“Pandamonisand Edgerton 261–62 ches Manifest”) (Baselitz, essay) and Kiefer 151–52 140 and Polke 167, 169, 174 Paolini, Giulio 187, 188 and Richter 179 Paris Street, Rainy Day (Caillebotte) 48 and Salle 41 Parker, Charlie 77 Photorealism 10, 33 Parmigianino 139 and Richter 105, 112, 118, 178 Paschke, Ed 55

INDEX

309

Piano Lesson (for Chiara) (Basquiat) 68 Picabia, Francis, Transparencies series 41 Picasso, Pablo 64, 75, 85, 251 Guernica 65 Pictures exhibition (1977) 4, 40 The Pictures Generation 4, 40 The Pictures Generation 1974-1984 exhibition (2009) 4, 40 Pincus-Whitten, Robert on Dunham 263–64 on Schnabel 56 Pink Shape with Repairs (Dunham) 262 Piper, Adrian 4 Pisani, Vettor 221 Pistoletto, Michelangelo 188, 189–90 Venus of the Rags 190 Pittman, Lari 3, 226–33, 271 An American Place 229, 229 How Sweet the Day, After This and That, Deep Sleep Is Truly Welcomed 231 The New Republic 228, 228 Plymouth Rock 227–28, 228 Thanksgiving 228–29 Where the Soul Intact Will Shed Its Scabs 231 Where Suffering and Redemption Will Sprout from the Same Vine 231 The Wholesomeness, Beloved and Despised, Continues, Regardless 232, 233 place and Chia 191, 216, 217 and Clemente 191, 201, 204 and Cucchi 191, 215, 216 and Paladino 191, 194, 196 see also landscape; Transavanguardia Plymouth Rock (Pittman) 227–28, 228 poetry and Basquiat 65 and Clemente 210 Polednik, Marcelle, on Polke 174–76 politics, and painting 131, 137–138 see also Nazism

310

Polke, Sigmar 3, 44, 60, 125, 164–78, 181, 271 Alice im Wunderland (“Alice in Wonderland”) 169, 170, 171 Athanor 176, 178 Bunnies 167, 167 Carl Andre in Delft 166 Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) 168 Farbtafeln (“Colored Plates”) 177 Die Fünfziger Jahre (“The Fifties”) 166 Hochsitz (“Watchtower”) series 169, 173–76, 175 Hochsitz mit Gänsen (“Watchtower with Geese”) 173, 175 Hochstand (“Hunting Tower”) 176 Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwars malen! (“Higher Beings Commanded: Paint the Upper Right Corner Black!”) 165–66 Lager (“Camp”) 173, 174 Moderne Kunst (“Modern Art”) 166, 166 Paganini 171–73, 172 Rasterzeichnung (Porträt Lee Harvey Oswald) (“Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald”) 168 The Sausage Eater 167 Schokoladenbild (“Chocolate Painting”) 166–68 This Is How You Sit Correctly (After Goya) 183n.75 Pollock, Jackson 8, 86, 138, 252 The Pondicherry Pastels (Clemente) 204 Pontiac (Rothenberg) 33, 34 Poor Art (Arte Povera) 189–90 Pop Art 9, 18, 33, 183n.65 in Italy 188, 197 and Polke 166–68 Portatore d’acqua (“Water Bearer”) (Chia) 217–18, 218

INDEX

and Pittman 271 Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald (“RasterThe Radiant Child (Basquiat, zeichnung [Porträt Lee Harvey documentary) 67 Oswald]”) (Polke) 168 Post-Minimalism 88 see also Minimalism Rammellzee 72, 77 rap music 41, 76–77 see also music Postmodernism 2, 38, 48, 79, 85, 118, raster dot paintings (Polke) 167–68 270 Rasterzeichnung (Porträt Lee Harvey and Dunham 264 Oswald) (“Portrait of Lee Harand Halley 99 vey Oswald”) (Polke) 168 and Neo-Expressionism 144 Rauschenberg, Robert 44, 74, 127, 188 and Paladino 192 Combine series 43, 60 and Richter 104, 106, 112 “Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivaand Salle 46 lence in American Art” see also Modernism (Saggese essay) 78 The Potato Eaters (Van Gogh) 10 A Rectangle and a Circle within a Square Pound, Ezra 210 (Dunham) 256 Poussin, Nicolas 250 Red Army Faction 180 Primiceri, Alba 204 Reich, Steve 22 Primitive Computer (Penck) 134 Reinhardt, Ad 101 Prince, Richard 247 Prinzhorn, Martin, on Heilmann 94–95 Resnais, Alain 234 Resurrection: Albert Finney Meets MalPrison with Underground Conduit colm Lowry (Schnabel) 58, 59 (Halley) 101 Rhapsody (Bartlett) 20, 21 Private vs. Public exhibition (Dumas, Rhodes, Nick 67 1987) 240 Richard, René Process art 9 on Basquiat 74, 78 Proust, Marcel 79 and Clemente 210 puzzles 38–39 Richter, Gerhard 3, 85, 104–20, 168, and Basquiat 67, 72 178–80, 270–71 and Fischl 49 18. Oktober 1977 (“October 18, 1977) and Heilmann 89 180 and Penck 135 A B Quiet (A B Still) 115–17, 116 and Salle 41, 43, 46 Abstracts 104–05, 106, 112, 114, and Schnabel 62 118–19 Abstraktes Bild (“Abstract Painting”) Q (1976 and 1977) 108, 109 Quo Vadis Germania (“Where Are You Atelier 113–14, 114 Going Germany?”) (Penck) Dezember (“December”) 117 136–37, 137–38 Eis (“Ice”) 118 Faust 108, 110–11 R Herr Heyde (“Dr. Heyde”) 179–80 Januar (“January”) 114–15, 117–18, racism 117 and Basquiat 69–70, 72

INDEX

311

Juni (“June”) 112, 113 November 117 Onkel Rudi (“Uncle Rudi”) 179 Soft Abstracts 108, 110 Stroke (on Blue) 114 Stroke (on Red) 114 Tante Marianne (“Aunt Marianne”) 179–80, 179 Rickey, Carrie, on New Imagism 221 Riddle Me This Batman (Basquiat) 68 Roach, Max 77 Rockburne, Dorothea 255 Rodin, Auguste 48 Romaine, James, on Fischl 49 Romanticism 41 German 118, 151–52 Italian 221 Rosai, Ottone 217 Rosario, Francesco 187 Rosebud (Heilmann) 90–91, 92 Rosenquist, James 9 I Love You with My Ford 43, 43 Rosenthal, Mark on Kiefer 152, 158, 162 on Richter 108 Rosie Comon (Nutt) 56, 57 Rosler, Martha 4 Rothenberg, Susan 4, 8, 11, 12, 20–36, 220, 270 Algarve 24 Butterfly 28, 29 First Horse 22 Mary paintings 27 Pontiac 33, 34 Siena Dos Equis 24, 25 Squeeze 33, 35, 35 Triphammer Bridge 23–24, 23 United States 24 White Robe 28–30, 30 Rothko, Mark 8, 60, 86 Rottmann, Kathryn, on Pop Art 168 Rubinstein, Raphael, on Schnabel 58, 60, 61–62

312

Russell, John, Bartlett exhibition review 20 Ryman, Robert 256

S Saggese, Jordana Moore 78 St. Joe Louis Surrounded by Snakes (Basquiat) 69–70, 69 St. Tropez (Fischl) 49 Salle, David 3, 5, 33, 36, 38, 39, 40–47, 270 Autopsy 45–46, 46 on Baselitz 142, 145 Coral Made 44 Fooling with Your Hair 45 Gericault’s Arm 41, 42, 247 His Brain 44, 45, 45 The Muse with the Long Face 41 styles 44, 47, 66, 79–80 Tennyson 41, 42 Sallis, John, on Paladino 192 Salt Mountain (Paladino) 199 Saltz, Jerry, on Kippenberger 173 Saltzman, Liza, on Kiefer 164 SAMO (same old shit) 65–66 Sandler, Irving, on Richter 105 Saret, Alan 21–22, 30 Saturnzeit (“Age of Saturn”) (Kiefer) 160 The Sausage Eater (Polke) 167 Save the Last Dance for Me (Heilmann) 90, 91 Schambelan, Elizabeth, on Halley 100 Schapiro, Miriam 226 Scharf, Kenny 249 Schifano, Mario 187, 188 Schjedahl, Peter on Basquiat 77 on Dumas 244 on Rothenberg 27 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl 144–45, 147 Schnabel, Julian 3, 33, 36, 38, 56–65, 142, 270 INDEX

Blessed Clara 62 Blue Nude with Sword 57 Canard de Chaine 57 and Clemente 206 I Went to Tangiers and Had Dinner With Paul Bowles 62, 63 Maria Callas series 62 The Patients and the Doctors 61, 61 Resurrection: Albert Finney Meets Malcolm Lowry 58, 59 She Mistook Kindness for Weakness 62, 63 styles 44, 47, 66, 79–80 Schokoladenbild (“Chocolate Painting”) (Polke) 166–68 Schor, Mira, on Salle 46 The Scream (Munch) 147, 240 sculpture and 1980s women artists 4 and Anselmo 189 and Baselitz 145, 149–50 and Beuys 125, 127 and Burri 187 and Fischl 48 and Heilmann 88 and Paladino 197–99 and Penone 189 and Pittman 227 and Polke 168 and Rauschenberg 44 and Shapiro 11 Scuola Metaphysica (Metaphysical School) 216, 221 Sea Wall (Heilmann) 94, 95 Searle, Adrian, on Beuys 130 Second Zebra (Dunham) 260 Self-Portrait with Gun Hole in the Head (Clemente) 210, 211 Semen (Clemente) 202, 202 “Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism” (Bochner, essay) 256 Serra, Richard 88 Seurat, George, La Grande Jatte 47

INDEX

Sex Pistols 90 Seymour, Anne, on Chia 217 shape paintings, Dunham 262 Shapiro, Joel, Untitled (House) 11, 12 She Mistook Kindness for Weakness (Schnabel) 62, 63 Sherman, Cindy 4, 102 Shoah (film) 162–63 Shulamite (“Sulamith”) (Kiefer) 159, 159 Siegfried’s Difficult Way to Brunhilde (Kiefer) 162 Siena Dos Equis (Rothenberg) 24, 25 Sigh of a Wave (Cucchi) 215 Silently, I Withdraw to Paint a Painting (“Silensioso mi ritiro a dipingere un Quadro”) (Paladino) 192, 193 Simmons, Laurie 4 on Dunham 260 Simon, Joan, on Rothenberg 33, 35 Simpson, Lorna 4 The Simpsons (TV series) 90 Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard, book) 39 Sinfonia incompiuta (“Unfinished Symphony”) (Chia) 219 Singer, Sid 20 Sirk, Douglas 44 Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (Fugard, play) 234 Skoglund, Sandy 4 Sleepwalker (Fischl) 52, 53, 54 Smith, Kiki 4 Smith, Roberta on Bartlett 20 on Clemente 212–13 on Dunham 265 on Schnabel 64 Smith, Rupert 246 Smithson, Robert, and Heilmann 88, 89 Smyth, Ned 220 Snow White 243 Snowwhite and the Broken Arm (Dumas) 242–43

313

Stroke (on Red) (Richter) 114 Snowwhite in the Wrong Story (Dumas) styles 12–13, 33, 38, 39, 221, 270 242–43 and Bartlett 20 Snyder, Joan 4 and Baselitz 138–39, 143–44, 145, 149 Social Realism 124, 130–31 and Basquiat 66, 79–80 Soft Abstracts (Richter) 108, 110 and Chia 217 Sogno di Constantino (“The Dream of and Clemente 208 Constantine”) (della Francesca) and Condo 247–48, 250 199, 200 and Dumas 243 Solitary Sun (“Sole Soletario”) and Dunham 262, 264 (Paladino) 197 and Fischl 47, 48, 79–80 Solomon, Holly 221 German 124–25, 130–31, 144–45, 180 on Jenney 17 and Guston 10 and Rothenberg 22–23 and Halley 84–85, 99 Solomon, Horace 30 and Heilmann 84, 89 Sonnabend, Ileana 102 Italian 186–87, 189, 214, 220, Sonnier, Keith 22 221–22, 271 South African Nazism (Basquiat) 68 and Jenney 17 Soutine, Chaim, Carcass of Beef 143 and Kiefer 151, 152, 158 Soweto Uprising 234–35 and Palermo 60 spatial concepts (Concetto Spaziale) 187 and Penck 133 see also Fontana, Lucio and Pittman 231, 232 Special Checking (Whitten) 115 and Polke 165, 168–69 Speer, Albert 125 and Richter 105–06, 108, 178–79 Spiro, Nancy 4 and Rothenberg 29 Splitting (Matta-Clark) 30–32, 31 and Salle 44, 47, 66, 79–80 Sprüth, Monika 250 and Schnabel 44, 47, 66, 79–80 squeegees, Richter 110, 111–12, 115–18 The Subterraneans (Kerouac, book) 72 Squeeze (Rothenberg) 33, 35, 35 Suburb in Havana (de Kooning) 118, Steiner, Rudolph 126 119 Steir, Pat 4 Sulamith (“Shulamite”) (Kiefer) 159, Stella, Frank 9, 87, 101 159 The Marriage of Reason and Squalor 25, Sull’orlo della Sera (“On the Brink of the 26 Evening”) (Paladino) 196, 196 stick figures, Penck 133–35, 180–81 Suonno (d’après Pierro della Francesco) Storr, Robert, on Richter 107, 118, (“Dream [After Piero della 179–80 Francesca]”) (Paladino) 199, storytelling 200 and Basquiat 71, 72 Supper at Dresden (“Nachtessen in Dresand Beuys 126 den”) (Baselitz) 147, 148, 149 and Fischl 49, 50, 55, 56 Suprematist paintings (Malevich) 85–86 Stoutman, John 21 Surrealism 86, 216 straw, used by Keifer 157–58 and Condo 245, 251 Stroke (on Blue) (Richter) 114

314

INDEX

and Basquiat 68–69, 72, 79 and Schnabel 62 Thanksgiving (Pittman) 228–29 The Thief of Baghdad (Heilmann) 92, 93, 94 The Three Cs 214 see also Chia; Clemente; Cucchi Theosophical Society 204 This Is How You Sit Correctly (After Goya) (Polke) 183n.75 Three for Two: Red, Yellow, Blue (Heilmann) 89 T Tucker, Marcia 10 spelling Tiepolo 246 tableaux vivants (Ontani) 190 Tisdall, Caroline, on Beuys Tacchi, Sergio 188 127–128 Tachisme 131, 138 see also Abstraction T.M. x Penck x Mike Hammer (Penck) Talking Heads 97 134–35, 135 Tall Birch (Dunham) 258 Le tane di Napoli (“The Lairs of Naples”) “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) (Celan, poem) 157 (Paladino) 196 The Tomb of the Unknown Whore Tanguy, Yves 265 (Copley) 10 Tante Marianne (“Aunt Marianne”) To the Unknown Painter (“Dem un(Richter) 179–80, 179 bekannten Maler”) (Kiefer) Tartini, Giuseppe 171 158–59 The Teacher (sub a) (Dumas) 240 Toxic 72 teaching train tracks, Kiefer 125, 156, 162, 164 American art schools 39–40 Trakas, George 22 Beuys 128–29, 178 Transavanguardia 186, 190–91, 214, 219, techniques 220, 221–22 and Basquiat 67 “Le Trans-Avanguardia” (Bonito Oliva and Chia 219 essay) 219 and Clemente 201 Transparencies (Picabia) 41 and Condo 245, 247, 248, 249, 252, Trap (Green) 17, 17 271 triads 245, 247–48 and Dumas 236 Triphammer Bridge (Rothenberg) and Fischl 48, 50 23–24, 23 and Halley 100, 120 Trockel, Rosemarie 4 and Heilmann 94, 120 True, David 12, 17 and Polke 165, 167–68, 177 Chinese Sea 16, 16 and Richter 85, 117, 120 True Size (Dunham) 262 Tenniel, John 169 TV Party, Basquiat appearance 66 Tennyson (Salle) 41, 42 Twain, Mark 72 text and Dunham 265 see also Neo-Surrealism swastikas 143, 172–73 see also Nazism Sweeping Up (“Ausfegen”) (Beuys) 127 The Swimmer (Moskowitz) 12–13, 15 Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols (Dreyfuss, book) 68 SZ1 (Burri) 187 Szeemann, Harald 220

INDEX

315

Two Painters (Clemente) 205, 205 Twombly, Cy 74–75, 201–02

U Der Übergang (“The Crossing”) (Penck) 133, 134 Uncle Rudi (“Onkel Rudi”) (Richter) 179 Under the Volcano (Lowry) 58 The Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta (Basquiat) 72, 74–75 Unfinished Symphony (“Sinfonia incompiuta”) (Chia) 219 United States (Rothenberg) 24 Unterehmen Seelöwe (“Operation Sea Lion”) (Kiefer) 150–51 Untitled (Anselmo) 189 Untitled (Basquiat) 75 Untitled ( Judd) 9, 9 Untitled (Moskowitz) 12–13 Untitled (House) (Shapiro) 11, 12

V Vaisman, Meyer 102 van den Boogerd, Dominic, on Dumas 240, 241 van Doesburg, Theo 86 Van Dyke, Dick 249 Van Gogh, Vincent 41, 143, 149 The Potato Eaters 10 VBK (Verband Bildender Künstler de DDR/East German Visual Artists’ League) 132 velvet, Schnabel 62 Venice Biennale 216 1964 188, 197 1980 150, 220 1984 132 1986 176–78 1988 177 German Pavilion 177 Venus of the Rags (Pisteletto) 190

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Verbrennen, verholzen, versenken, versanden (“Burning, Lignifying, Sinking, Silting”) exhibition (1980) 150 Video art 9, 87 Vietnam 189 Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Newman) 86, 87 The Virtue of the Baker in a Carriage (“La virtù del Fornaio in Carrozza”) (Paladino) 194, 195 vitrines, Beuys 127, 130 Vorwärts Wind (“Headwind”) (Baselitz) 140–41, 141 Voulkos, Peter 88 Voznesensky, Andrei 210

W Wachtel, Julie 4 Waiting (for Meaning) (Dumas) 240, 241–42, 242 Waldman, Diane 221 on Cucchi 215 Wanderer Above the Misty Sea (Friedrich) 151–52 Warhol, Andy 9, 67, 74, 188, 206 Myths series 246 Washington DC A New Romanticism exhibition 221 New Talent exhibition 23 Watchtower (“Hochsitz”) series (Polke) 169, 173–76, 175 Watchtower with Geese (“Hochsitz mit Gänsen”) (Polke) 173, 175 Water Bearer (“Portatore d’acqua”) (Chia) 217–18, 218 wax paintings 62, 198 Wayland’s Song (with Wing) (“Wölundlied [mit Flügel]”) (Kiefer) 160, 161 Weems, Carrie Mae 4 Ain’t Joking 243 Welles, Orson 91

INDEX

Weltbild (“World View”) (Penck) 133 Werner, Michael 132 Westfall, Stephen, on Condo 245 Where Are You Going Germany? (“Quo Vadis Germania”) (Penck) 136–37, 137–138 Where the Soul Intact Will Shed Its Scabs (Pittman) 231 Where Suffering and Redemption Will Sprout from the Same Vine (Pittman) 231 The White Disease (Dumas) 235–236 White Manifesto (“Manifesto Blanco”) (Fontana, essay) 187 White Robe (Rothenberg) 28–30, 30 Whitney Biennial 1981 38 1987 226 Whitney Independent Program (1973) 63 Whitten, Jack, Special Checking 115 The Wholesomeness, Beloved and Despised, Continues, Regardless (Pittman) 232, 233 Who’s Afraid of Red Yellow Blue (Newman) 89 Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt (“How to Explain Pictures To a Dead Hare”) (Beuys) 127–28 Wieners, John 210 Wilding, Alison 4 William Tell Suite (Condo) 253–54 Williams, Tennessee 234 Wilson, Robert 22 Winkler, Ralf 132 see also Penck, A.R. Wölundlied (mit Flügel) (“Wayland’s Song [with Wing]”) (Kiefer) 160, 161

INDEX

Woman with Hat (Matisse) 108 women artists 4, 243–44, 226 and Dunham 262–63 and Salle 45 see also Bartlett; Dumas; Heilmann; Rothenberg wood and Baselitz 145, 149–50 and Dunham 256, 258, 260, 262–64 and Kiefer 154–56 and Paladino 196, 197–98 World View (“Weltbild”) (Penck) 133

Y Y see Penck, A.R. Yardbird Suite (Parker, music) 77 Yau, John, on Penck 135, 137 Yellow and Black Composition (Condo) 248–49 Your Golden Hair, Margarete (“Dein goldenes Haar, Margarethe”) (Kiefer) 157–58

Z Zagajewski, Adam 210 Zakanitch, Robert 220 Zebra Wood (Dunham) 258 Zeitgeist exhibition (1982) 5–6, 33, 36, 138, 220–21 Zero Hour (Stunde Null) 149 Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline-Big Family 2 Zucker, Joe 12 Zydeco (Basquiat) 78, 79

317