Tory Fair, In the Wall I (2010), Resin, mica and foam, 43 x 36 x 24"

Forty-one year-old, Boston-based sculptor Tory Fair likes to think of herself as a “late bloomer,” and the evolution of her artistic career is allied with her varied experiences as an athlete, environmentalist, traveler and spiritualist dreamer. [1] For her second solo show at South Boston’s, La Montagne Gallery, in spring 2010, Fair created three life-sized, self-portrait figures designed (literally and metaphorically) to look beyond the conventional boundaries of the white walls. The ‘In the Wall’ figures—cast in resin from Fair’s own body and seen from the rear—appear to be in the process of submerging their heads into the wall or floor. Sensual and strong, these hybrid figures are animated with hundreds of hand-designed and hand-cast resin flowers. fine arts magazine

In the Wall I, detail

A desire for growth, exploration and self-discovery guides Fair’s alluring images. Her self-reflective works seek to connect with the viewer in what she describes as “a shared sense of humanness and vulnerability.” As in her entire body of work—which ranges from small rubber balls to ball courts inspired by ancient ritualistic game-playing, to full-scale flowering figures—Fair’s latest sculptures blur boundaries between the mundane and the metaphysical, representing an artistic vision clearly in full bloom. Installed in public space, these lithe figures invite open relationships with viewers, leading us into a process that teases out a variety of meanings. Two pink nudes—In the Wall I (2009) and In the Wall II (2010), balanced against the walls—occupy an ambiguous silent space. Their resin skins offer fertile ground for hearty perennials. Alternatively, the flowers could be interpreted as enveloping the human frames and transforming them into mythic vegetation. Fair’s crossbred self-portraits are modern descendents of William Blake’s pastoral maidens and Bernini’s Daphne and Apollo (1622-25), in which the nature-loving nymph begins her metamorphosis into a laurel tree to escape pursuit by the amorous sun god. Myths of metamorphosis is even more appropriate in Sleeping(2009), an earlier cast of Fair’s entire body. Here, a bright red female figure lies asleep on her left side, her legs bent and her head resting on florid hands; she is covered head-to-toe in shiny cone flowers that follow her contours and gestures. The visceral red of the shiny surfaces (created by coating the entire figure with automotive clear-coat) implies that Fair becomes a latent primordial woodland goddess while absorbed in her dreams.

As the nude figure of In the Wall I leans over, back flat and left hand pressed against the wall, she appears to be peering into the space behind the surface (the sculpture is cropped at the chin to give this illusion). Dozens of pink and flesh-toned sunflowers, daisies and cone flowers, whose domed centers resemble nipples (both sensual and nurturing), emerge from the shiny pink body. The bubble-gum pink figure of In the Wall II  (left, 2010, resin and sand, 26 x 49 x 21″) balances on her toes in a deep squat, her hands and head in the process of changing into flowers. A third figure, In the Floor (2010), is a charcoal-gray self-portrait (colored with graphite in the resin), in which the figure lies prone like a daydreaming adolescent, legs up at knees and face apparently buried beneath the cement floor. Flowers cover her pony-tailed head and lower arms and engulf her face. For Fair, the seamlessly attached flowers, “are a symbolic element in that they represent an idea and its potential to expand and grow.” [2] As perennials the flowers also symbolized spring, rebirth and resurrection.

Sleeping (2009), resin, mica and foam, 2 x 4 x 3'

Fair defines sculpture as a performative act inspired by the, “direct narrative, humanism and endurance” of the 1970’s performance art. The In the Wall series, for instance, was inspired by Paul McCarthy’s slapstick, Plaster Your Head and One Arm into the Wall (1973), a photo-documented performance in which he plasters his head and left are into one side of a wall, as if his body were trapped. According to Fair, “I’ve always been inspired by images of this work and the blunt literal follow-through of McCarthy, to look past the conventional boundaries of the wall; and by doing so, to then leave himself in a submissive position to the rest of the room, backside vulnerable to any passerby.” [3] Fair adapted McCarthy’s candid response to looking inside a wall, the element of physical endurance, and the suggestion of psychologically activated architectural space with the viewer as witness. Unlike McCarthy, who eventually revealed his head and arm and the other side of the partition, Fair shows only the rear sides of her figures and implies the existence of an ambiguous existential stillness beyond spatial boundaries.

Besides being a deep thinker and art history buff, Fair is a down-to-earth borrower from popular culture. She openly acknowledges her fondness for the crude humor and crazy physical stunts enacted by the Jackass world-crew and admits to a thematic alliance between her sculptures and the often corny coming-of-age movies, “about that moment in time when you feel invincible, when your innocence compels a drive to question and explore everything.”

In the Floor (2010), resin, gliter and foam, 44 x 84 x 23"

Fair’s life-sized human/flora hybrids are fabricated from resin, colored with acrylic paint and mixed with mica, sand, graphite and glitter. Working in her Somerville, Massachusetts studio with assistant Arthur Henderson (an emerging Boston sculptor), she uses plaster-impregnated gauze to capture her body in a particular pose. After the mold is removed from her body, Fair presses resin into its surface. A fully formed life-sized figure usually requires six separate casts. The set-time for the resin is about 12 to 14 hours. After pressing the resin into all parts of the figure, Fair puts the mold back together with clamps and fills the body with expandable foam to create a light structure behind the resin. After the foam sets, she breaks off the plaster and finally gets to see the resin figure, whose surfaces she lovingly smoothes and contours by hand. The flowers are first modeled in clay and then cast in resin. After letting them set to just the right consistency (the flowers can be pulled from the molds before the resin has hardened completely, allowing them to be re-shaped), Fair carefully removes each flower and prunes it with scissors to refine the edges. Finally, she epoxies the flowers onto and around the figures.

Walking (2008), resin, glitter and foam, 7 x 5 x 5'

Fair’s flower people strongly reflect the circumstances of her life. Born in 1968 in Washington, D.C., she spent most of her youth in an 18th-century farmhouse in Morris County, New Jersey, on property bordering the Great Swamp, a wildlife refuge of over 7,500 acres. of habitat. Her mother (a gardener with a degree in landscape architecture) developed a deep love for untouched nature and founded the Great Swamp Watershed Association. Several of Fair’s drawings (which often evolve into sculpture) contain detailed studies of lady’s slippers, black-eyed susans and daisies. In a 2009 statement accompanying the first public showing of her cast full-body sculptures (featured in ‘And the Fair Moon Rejoices: Contemporary Visionaries in the Wake of Blake’, at the Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts), Fair described her commitment to nature and the environment: “My work addresses the often-troubled relationship between nature within our bodies and our communities and nature that surrounds us…My sculptures are premised on the perception that nature is the imagination; that nature is ourselves and that nature is our surroundings, however urban, deserted, bucolic, or wild.” Fair’s aspirations to integrate body, imagination and nature into a discourse on the place of humanity in the environment was nurtured by her home, her education in art and religious studies and her rich experiences road tripping across the United States. She first came to Massachusetts as an undergraduate at Harvard University, graduating with a degree in sculpture and religion in 1991; she received an MFA in painting and print-making from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MCAD) in 1997. A 1991 Gardner Fellowship allowed her to drive across the U.S. to study Native American sun daggers, medicine wheels and sacred mounds. After graduation, she moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, for four years to work as an assistant to James Turrell, at his Roden Crater Project. Recalling her experiences in the Arizona desert, Fair says, “You do feel humble in the presence of geological time. A lot of what influences me from that time was meeting people committed to living with the land. You could say that it is why I am an artist—to live non-vicariously in a direct relationship with my surroundings.”

Fair considers herself a “tomboy feminist.” She and her husband, artist John Axon, got to know one another while playing on the same Ultimate Frisbee team at MCAD. In 1997, she joined the Fine Arts department at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she teaches sculpture. Her first significant sculptures—created in 1998—took the form of small black balls. These playful minimal works, which she called bon bons, were created by ripping up her student paintings, coiling them and covering them with rubber. Motivated by the desire to put her balls in space, she created a contemporary version of the ancient Mesoamerican ball court, complete with vertical hoops on either side, in Lolly Ball Court (2000). She followed that up with Game Time Series (2002-2005), which takes the dimensions of gallery spaces and lays them out like various courts and ball fields, punctuated with high-keyed cast rubber field lines.

Bloom Block (black), 2008, cast rubber, 18 x 48 x 48"

Flowers became part of the playing field when Fair started to think about playing in her mother’s gardens with her two brothers. Dodging Daisies (2006) featured a corporeal pile of fertilized soil and grass, dotted with real daisies and artificial silk flowers. The garden figure’s splayed appendages consisted of cast rubber lines referring to soccer field corner-markings; the lump of silk flowers dashed with yellow lines marked the middle of the field. “This piece referenced how my brothers and I encroached into my mom’s garden, as we played our games,“ Fair recalls. Large flowers sprout from game fields in such works as Sideline Bloom (2006) and Ready Set Bloom I and II (2007-08). Fair continued to experiment with materials in fabricating her blooms, including 3-D computer technology and wood carving. Eventually the rubber lines of the playing courts became flower stems. For her first solo show at La Montagne gallery in 2008, Fair returned to rubber in the Block Bloom series. Her statement explains that the Block Bloom works, “developed out of an interest to translate the idea of a lily, fragile and fragrant, into the more aggressive presence of rubber.” [4]

Driving (2009), cast rubber, foam and steel, 5 x 4 x 4'

The rubber block sculptures combined with giant Easter lilies, growing from loopy arm-like stems, were decidedly anthropomorphic. Fair began to feel very physically and emotionally connected to these Block Bloom sculptures—as if they were describing her in a very important and specific way. She soon decided to use her own body as a way to get at personal narrative more directly, beginning with Driving (2009), a work in which she appears to be driving a carriage of flowers that emanates from her. Fair explains, “Where the flowers emerged or plugged into the base of the ‘Block Bloom’ sculptures, now they would be directly linked to me…they lift my body and transport me into the steady daze of road tripping. Jen Mergel, Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston described Driving as ‘down to earth yet uncanny.’ ” Fair is currently designing a multi-figured installation for the terrace of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, to be installed in 2011.

By Francine Koslow Miller ©, Contributing Writer

This article first appeared in the October 2010 issue of Sculpture magazine and ARTES e-magazine gratefully acknowledges their assistance and permission, so that it could be re-run here.

See more sculpture on line on the International Sculpture Center Web site at: www.sculpture.org

Francine Koslow Miller received her Master’s Degree at University of California, Berkeley and her doctorate at Boston University in Modern Art History. As an art critic, she is widely published in magazines and professional journals worldwide, especially Artforum and Sculpture magazines. A regular contributor to scholarly publications as well, her essays on modern art are included in the Grove Dictionary of Art. She co-authored the monograph John O’Reilly Assemblies of Magic (Twin Palms Press, 2002) and wrote Thomas Crotty: a Solitude of Space (Down East, 2003), and has published numerous catalogues. Her book, Cashing in on Culture: Betraying the Trust at the Rose Art Museum—an intimate account of the saga surrounding attempts to sell the invaluable collection of contemporary art in the collection of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University—will be published in 2011 by Hol Art Books.

______________________________________________

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from the artist are from interviews and correspondence with the author.

2. Tory Fair, Artist’s Statement (2010) www.torifair.com

3. Ibid.

4. Tory Fair, Artist’s (200-08), see Web site, above

Christopher Gann, Monster (2010) o/c, 72" x 52"

The next generation of artists faces a variety of daunting and complex challenges. Principle among them is the ever-shifting nature of the visual art world and what constitutes art, itself. Paint on canvas or graphite on paper is increasingly relegated to the mundane as installation and performance pieces vie for public attention and the critics’ affirmative nod. Added to this is the increasingly crowded field of self-declared artists who appear to bank on personal style and a well-managed public image to propel them into the spotlight. A third factor is the intrusion of technology into the artist’s studio and the exponential increase in low-cost facsimile works produced with a mass market in mind. The few galleries that attract the uninformed consumer, who is finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate between computer-generated simulations of original art or aftermarket reproductions produced en masse in foreign countries, do so in the name of revenue production. Especially in these difficult economic times, with 125 galleries going out of business in New York City in 2009, alone, the need to survive at any cost is paramount. Fine Arts Magazine

Campus, Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, Old Lyme, CT

So, what does the future hold for a keen artistic eye, a well-trained hand and the painterly results of hours, days and years spent in the studio? I followed the hallways of the gallery/studio space in the newest portion of the college, lined with drawings and paintings for the recent senior show, across the lawn to the back door of the original campus building. I was then led up a narrow stairway to a comfortable conference room where the recent graduates were waiting for me. This carefully-selected group of nascent artists from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, in Old Lyme, Connecticut believe they know and have the credentials to prove it. In this conversation with Leah Albert, Christopher Gann, Nathan Keay and Adam Matano, I discussed their views on the nature of training to work as an artist, their approach to their own work and their perspective on the art world that they are about to step into.

The common bond for all of them was a belief in the integrity of their work and its ability to impact on the world in some way. As sculptors and painters, they had honed their skills through a rigorous four-year classically-oriented training program, focusing on studio methods and the mastery of figurative drawing. They all shared the conviction that their training in representing the human figure formed an essential foundation for whatever was to come next.

Bright, ambitious and talented, they had refined their training at the college to match their own personalities and interests. “At first, we worked to please the instructors, said one, “but after a while we found our own voices and began to explore subject matter on our own terms.” Steeped in the classical forms and techniques of the Renaissance, their world initially consisted of Titian, Carvaggio and Rubens. Immersion of this kind in the Old Masters is tried and true. It may serve as boot camp for star-struck young high school students who believe they are naturally-inclined to be artists. But, the initial round of lessons teaches a different story: Good abstract art, good representational art, good conceptual art are all founded on the basics—and these basics haven’t changed very much for the last millennium or two.

Yet, each young artist was anxious to discover what lay beyond the traditional parameters of endless hours in the studio with model and still life,  gradually able to take their new-found skills and explore the greater world on their own terms. All agreed that scheduled class projects provided too limited a time for such experimentation. But, with the encouragement of individual instructors and the natural curiosity borne of youth, they eventually found their distintively creative voice.  Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs, Laura Zarrow , explained to me that, in the future, the goal of the institution will be to provide a broad range of liberal studies opportunities for Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts students, allowing them the opportunity to apply their creative skills in a wide variety of work environments outside of an artist’s studio setting.

For these four emerging artists, though, the opportunity to discuss their work in the context of an overall life-plan (two with wives and children to take into account) and to consider the issues of a challenging art market and difficult economic times, seemed welcome. A review of their current work and vision for future contributions to the fine art marketplace suggests that, with the same diligence and determination they have demonstrated to date, the art world will be stronger for them:

Leah Albert, Resized Blue World (2010), o/c

Leah Elizabeth Albert- Articulate and focused, Leah examines the work of American painters of the 19th century—specifically, the Hudson River School. Considering the sublime in its true, historical context, seen in the work of artists such as Frederick Church and Thomas Cole in their rendering of  the majesty and terror of nature’s awesome power and beauty, Leah turns ‘these hyper-romantic landscapes [which] can been seen as saccharine, contrived clichés’, by today’s more sophisticated standards , on their ear . Exploring ‘their most beautiful and poignant elements, while leaving the absurd subversions of later interpretations behind, she re-examines ‘the grandeur of the unknown’ through 21st century eyes.

An overtly physical painter who works in larger scale (similar to the Hudson School), her work brings the color and powerful forms of the landscape to the forefront, allowing for the abstraction that occurs when natural shapes are interpreted as two-dimensional objects, removed from our perceptual expectations, and expressed in their purest form. Albert plays in the landscapes of her imagination, allowing colors to drip and fuse, blend or form firm boundaries, rise from earthen tones to meet un-naturally vibrant skies and rolling mountain horizons. The artist interprets the world with palette and brush, in much the same way as the Hudson painters created an invented landscape—that is, a construct reflecting their view of an industrialized world in transition, with nature as the first victim and Man soon to follow.

Albert, too, creates an idealized world of ‘both actual and exaggerated fantastic landscapes’, with cotton candy skies, tumbling waterfalls positioned in her scenes with movie-set precision and towering pines appearing to defy gravity, raising the ante for the survival of these imaginary, fragile settings, along with our hopes for an ideal world. Irony and mild cynicism play like background music in her work, as she catalogues and documents the grandeur of nature’s splendor, but appears to understand better than most, the sad reality that this is a world no longer within our reach.

Christopher Gann, Oil Spill (2010), o/c

Christopher Gann- Serious and mindful of his responsibility as an artist with the skill set to document the world as he sees it, Gann constructs landscapes of a very different kind. His intricately-rendered, vertiginous heaps of high-tech detritus are stacked to a point of tumbling back on all of us—an apt metaphor for the technological nightmare that has befallen contemporary civilization (see above). Less a cascade than a symbolic explosion of the collective tension we all feel as privacy and free time are devoured by the machines we feel we need to own, his narrative paintings serve as a sophisticated parable for our modern-day, high-tech plight.

Gann begins with a loose sketch and builds his visual story from there. He considers his work ‘sculptural’, in that his shapes take on weight and form as he progresses. Working on the border between abstraction and representational ism, his goal is to achieve ‘a feeling of momentum, excitability and vertigo.’ In both his painting and his installation work, the artist embraces a charged social and environmental agenda. Waste and abuse, mis-use and mis-appropriation are themes that resonate in today’s world. When these issues finally spill from the canvas, out into the room, he has our undivided attention.

In a hauntingly prophetic work entitled, Oil Spill, Gann captures the claustrophobic sensation that all living creatures must feel as a glut of crude oil blankets the landscape. Dark, iridescent and viscous, heaps of the black stuff flow toward the viewer, threatening everything in its wake. A slender thread of civilization sits on a distant horizon, backlit by a narrow, but increasing dimmer (one imagines) band of light. Intelligent life is being squeezed from both directions. With all signs of life eradicated by the flood of crude, we can only be reminded of the pictures of the Gulf of Mexico disaster being broadcast into our homes each day. The fine line between art and life is blurred, once again.

Adam Matano, Zarafa (2010), acrylic

Adam Matano- This sculptor brings big ideas to the table for future galleries and museums. Focused and intent on the role he wants to play in the professional art world, his small studio office is crammed with ideas. Reflecting his focused training as a figurative artist, he has extended his creative hand into the animal world. In Barbara Kingsolver’s, Prodigal Summer, she points out that one trait of plants and animals is that they exist in the pure realm of the present. The fact that they do not have the capacity to consider their own aesthetic beauty makes them all the more worth cherishing and preserving. Matano would agree.

He points out that ‘animals simply exist. They don’t require [or look for] meaning.’ They are fully immersed in the present moment. Matano’s work is a search beyond the intellectual exercise of aesthetics in nature to the essential beauty that lies beneath the surface. He seeks compelling gestures to fit abstract ideas. He believes that the gestures and structural elements of animals, in particular, hold representations of the emotions that translate concepts like beauty, suffering and love into tangible form.

In a monumental work that clearly served as the centerpiece for the recent exhibition at the Lyme College of Art was, Zarafa, a nearly nine-foot tall, acrylic sculpture in earth tones of a giraffe, writhing in obvious distress. Its position on an undersized, three-foot pedestal in the gallery’s towering rotunda only adds to the drama. Zarafa is portrayed in an awkward and seemingly hopeless tangle of its own limbs, producing a uniquely uncomfortable emotional state for the viewer, as well. Presenting the same dilemma that many naturalists experience in the wild, the gallery visitor’s choice is to intervene in some way—to offer relief or help for this suffering animal—or to stand passively by and let nature run its course. Survival of the fittest is a primal instinct that runs deep in our veins. And so we decide, like passing strangers, stepping over a fallen stranger on a sidewalk, to move on to the next gallery. Zarafa is a brilliant and detailed study in muscular tension, anatomical features extended to the limit without breaking and the unspoken story of this living creature’s private struggle. Matano’s version of the ‘essence of beauty’ does in fact, lay on an entirely different plane that anything we might ever experience or know.

Nathan Keay, yü-ni-ˌvalv (2009), sisal string, glue, 42"x18"x23"

Nathan Alan Keay- On the opening night of the exhibition, a beaming Nathan Keay stood at the center of the gallery with his creations, as though he had just given birth to something important—and in fact, he had. His multi-media installation demonstrated his command over a variety of materials and techniques, but also his ability to bridge the gap between two apparently unrelated artistic mediums and create a coherent artistic statement. His work is a deceptively simple exploration of form and texture, as he first weaves thousands of feet of sisal fiber into tubes large enough to accommodate a Persian princess being smuggled out of an ornate palace as contraband ; but, then he shapes these amorphous, fibrous ‘pipes’ on internal stands into biomorphic forms that seem to take on lives of their own. Free-standing and wall-mounted, these sculptural objects invite closer scrutiny and perhaps (like all good sculpture demands) a gentle touch when no one is looking, to get a measure of the textural properties of these creatures-come-to-life. Simple is best in most cases and, in this case, Keay’s work takes on dramatic, life-like proportions. Painstakingly created on an 8 ½ foot tall loom, the artist interlaced one thread at a time, like a DNA scientist creating a new life form, in order to explore the creative possibilities with this mundane and plebian material. Out of the laboratory came previously unknown organisms, quizzically named after their dictionary-bound phonetic equivalents: yü-ni-ˌvalv and gas-trə-ˌpäd.

Drawing on the texture and contours of these free-form sculptures, Keay then turned the tables and had his newly-created objects serve as subject for a series of monoprints. Here, he translated three-dimensional forms into two-dimensional images. Drawing on an inked plexiglass sheet, the result was a series of images of rich black, abstracted bands, some incised with twisted lines, like thick, knotted ropes; others merely flat planes of black against warm white paper, flowing like a wide, inky river of black on a diagonal across the page. Perhaps informed by Robert Motherwell’s black and white Expressionist genre, Keay builds a seamless visual bridge between his suite of monoprints and the dimensional objects of twine nearby. But, like the importance of a bride and groom at a wedding— without one or the other in the room,there may still be a party. But with both present, Keay’s combined work becomes a celebration of form over function.

by Richard Friswell, Executive Editor

Tula Telfair, Non Invasive Methods of Examination Were Lacking, o/c (2010) Photo: Griswold Museum

Imagine a medieval troupe with a pageant cart carrying the universe inside, waiting to be unpacked. Tula Telfair could be their set designer. The borders to each of her canvases are marked by alternating strips of solid color, save for the lower edges, creating a series of proscenium stages. This is scenery in several senses, then, waiting for performances as well as observers.

But the players never appear, only the audience. These paintings throw what is the forgotten obvious into high relief; we make them appear by looking. For many of them, our observation becomes the only recognizable human presence. There is something here of the 19th century passion for the panorama, encompassing the world in a single view.Fine Arts Magazine

Telfair Exhibit, Krieble Gallery, Griswold Museum

But there is also a warning that echoes G.K. Chesterton’s: “One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.” Our humanity is diminished at a distance. In the paintings “Order is a Necessary Counterpoint to Sensuality” and “The Structure of Matter” there are dots and scatterings of light that might well be read as traceries of settlement. A photograph from the air in William Eggleston’s series, ‘The Democratic Forest’, shows the same bright dust scattered across fields of color.

But there is a thin line that divides streets alight from streets aflame. Will the end of the world look very much different from the beginning? That is a question for every one of the works collected here. While Telfair’s landscapes are not particularly apocalyptic, they are still ominous without being threatening, unnerving without being ravaged.

John Frederick Kensett, Fort Dumpling, o/c (ca. 1871). Gift of the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Co. Photo: Griswold Museum

In ‘Non-Invasive Methods of Examination Are Lacking’ (above) a small grid of what might be service roads to some secret government project appear in one small plot of ground. It is as if Robert Smithson had been at work on a landlocked jetty. The outlines are ambiguous and incomplete, with all culture’s experiments left unfinished.

Here are excesses of sky with clouds that boil and press down against the mountain ranges, with never a strict horizontal at the intersection. The topography is always invasive, with jagged intrusions of land into the resisting air. Other boundaries like those in the piece entitled “Between Sensual and Conceptual” are lost in an indeterminate foggy light, misted by invisible hot springs, leaving only the artifice of the painted three-sided frame to mark an unconvincing limit to space. We are sure that the painting extends outside the narrow opening of canvas.

Tula Telfair, Pure Formal Manipulation, o/c (2010) Photo courtesy Griswold Museum

In dialogue with her own work, Telfair has compiled in an adjacent gallery an anthology of influence from the museum’s holdings. A work by John Frederick Kensett is a concise summary of several defining attributes in Telfair’s compositions, especially the prodding irregularity of line between earth and sky But the references are clearly limited by what was available in the permanent collection. There is nothing certainly to match her scale, which more resembles Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire than it does the small study in oils by him that Telfair chose.

James Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Gold, Old Battersea Bridge (1870)

And because there are no examples of his work in the Griswold collection, what goes unacknowledged are the ways in which Telfair reinvents the apparently artificial skyscapes of Maxfield Parrish, where what appears grotesque in tonality and contrast turns out to be an unexpected accuracy the first time one notices a summer sunset with the same spectrum. In the painting “Essential Elements,” she also pays homage to James McNeil Whistler’s “Nocturnes” with their meditations on color at the edge of darkness. And Telfair finds the means to to put the impressionist technique of a Pissarro sunset to realist ends. This incorporation of various painterly traditions is unselfconscious and exuberant. It accounts for the past without either mimicry or fawning.

The titles to the paintings often seem like small comedies, benign attempts to delude an observer into a fiction of understanding. This is particularly true with an example such as “Pure Formal Manipulation,” which is accurate, while at the same time unrevealing. The forms are pure enough, although the manipulation is not entirely so. There are tricks being played here, but we are willing to be fooled by them. And this creates one final parallel to the central demand of theater: our willing suspension of disbelief in the presence of these fantasies. We are conspirators in the possibility of a world that would not exist without the artist—or without us.

By Stephen Kobasa, Contributing Writer

W

“I don’t believe in control”, the artist said, in a parallel reference to baseball pitching, observing that you learn and train, and then make your best pitch; or, you generate ideas for a work and release them. If the pitcher actually aims, the batter knows where the ball is going and may hit it out of the park. Suspense and the unknown play a part in both a killer pitch and a successful art work for Kahn, who disdains the comfort zone. Smudges that occur once a pastel work is put back into a sketchpad become the markings of an ambiguous maker – chance.

Wolf Kahn was born in Stuttgart, Germany; his family fled Nazi persecution when he was ten. Even now, he said he loves to paint the insides of forests, those of time spent in the German woods as a child. When queried as to why he chose barns as subjects, Kahn replied that architecturally they are simple and yet have grandeur. Those elements resonate for him and have only tangential reference to the barn as a symbol, as he puts it – like the Greek temple in classical times – of America’s golden age. And yet the barn also contains a sense of arrival and shelter, of safety and harboring, and it contains volumes of comings and goings, open space and undifferentiated light.

Master printmakers, Wolf Kahn and Anthony Kirk at the Kahn/Emily Mason exhibition, Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT

Defined as one of the 20th century’s foremost colorists, Kahn reflected on the good color sense that he feels is innate and emanates easily from him. That which is too difficult, should probably not be pursued, he says. As for his extraordinary juxtapositions of hue, Kahn employs color as if a language that may at first sound foreign but to which one then acclimates. It is an eloquent lexicon he alone created which speaks to inner emotional pitches and constitutes them in us.

The artist spoke of the “inner anxieties” that must come out, that necessitate and energize art and propel an artist to make it. As individualized as this process may be, Kahn affirms interconnectedness – never being afraid to be influenced by someone else. Perhaps this includes the visual dialogue with the artist’s wife, Emily Mason, whose stunning aquatint monotypes conjoin his in the survey below.

“The art world is not a pleasant place right now”, he mused in response to advice he would give to an aspiring artist. In his closing repost, CCP executive director Anthony Kirk said, “But tonight, this was made a pleasant place by you, Wolf.” The exhibition continues until May 9, 2010 and includes an all-day Monotype Masters Class, May 8, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm, a full day workshop led by Wolf Kahn, with Lisa Mackie and Anthony Kirk.

© by Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer

Battle Stations (April 8-28, 1988), watercolor and graphite on paper

 When it comes to matters of art, progress rarely takes a straight, clear, and single-minded path. Sewell Sillman’s career, however, suggests a different model—one that allows for stops and starts, for backtracking and bounding forward—in our consideration not just of Sillman as an artist but of his connection to the people, places, and events of art history. We can imagine this paradigm as a continuous, broken line. [1] That phrase, taken from an assignment Josef Albers gave at Black Mountain College in 1949, in which he asked his students to “draw a constant broken line,” is well suited to conceptualizing Sillman’s life’s work. While his tendency to build upon lessons from his teacher, Albers, and to push limits as he tirelessly evolved over the decades, emphasizes continuity with the past, he also made several definitive breaks over the course of his career. He fearlessly abandoned styles, media, and working environments when, in his assessment, they had run their course. “When Black Mountain was over, it was over; when Yale was over, it was over too, because things, attitudes dry up,” he stressed in a 1971 interview. “As soon as they codify, they dry up.” [2] Fine Arts Magazine 

Josef Albers with one of his classic color studies. Courtesy J. Albers Foundation

 Evidence in Sillman’s oeuvre suggests that lessons from so-called “basic” design and drawing courses continued to occupy him through his final paintings. His persistent engagement with seemingly simple problems proves that they were not just hollow exercises to be carried out as an art student, but vital questions to be addressed again and again. Studying Sillman’s work, one can sense, as he called it, “the struggle to make people aware — which I had been made aware of by Albers — that you have to re-examine yourself constantly with these basic things.”[3]  In transmitting these fundamental concepts through his art and teaching, Sillman served as a critical link between the traditions of the 1920’s Bauhaus, as they were brought to the United States by Albers, between art and design programs of today. His life’s work takes its place along a continuous, yet broken, line in art and design history. 

Before enrolling at Black Mountain College, Sillman envisioned a career in architecture, a far cry from his family’s clothing distribution business. By the time he graduated from the Boys’ High School in Atlanta in 1940, the German, Bauhaus had been closed for seven years and its masters spread across Europe and America. His future mentor and Bauhaus faculty member, Josef Albers, was already ensconced in a new education experiment at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. After an unsatisfying stint in architecture school at Georgia Tech and a tour of duty during World War II, he applied to the Black Mountain School. One of Sillman’s letters of reference for Black Mountain College correctly summed up his situation: “At Georgia Tech Sewell is a misfit. At Black Mountain he will not be.”[4] 

Gaining Visual Authority

As a result of his experiences at Black Mountain College, described in Mary Emma Harris’s essay, Sillman decided to give up architecture in favor of the experimentation with color and line he learned in Albers’s classes. His close attention to Albers’s lessons, adapted from similar courses at the Bauhaus, and his devotion to Albers’s teaching methods primed Sillman for his endeavors later in life. The partnership Sillman and Albers formed at Black Mountain would eventually continue at Yale University, where Sillman developed into a visual authority trusted by many students and artists in the decades that followed his arrival there in 1951. 

S. Sillman, Water Gate (1960), oil on masonite

 The transition away from Black Mountain left Sillman somewhat at loose ends. Albers’s resignation from the school in 1949 came unexpectedly to Sillman, leaving his at loose ends. “When Albers left it was just so empty,” Sillman recalled, “I stayed on but it was just death warmed over.”[5] After leaving Black Mountain, Sillman moved to Lenox, Massachusetts, where he taught at the Windsor Mountain School for one year. His sketchbooks from Windsor Mountain appear fairly continuous with the work he was engaged in at Black Mountain. “I was pretending I was still at Black Mountain,” he explained, going on in a whimsical style reminiscent of Paul Klee, another former Bauhaus master.[6] Klee-like abstract figures, landscapes, and architectural drawings dominate his surviving work. 

Though his art may not have evolved significantly with his move away from Asheville, his brief stint at Windsor Mountain advanced him in other ways. The progressive boarding school in the Berkshires gave Sillman his first opportunity to teach, an occupation for which he quickly developed a passion.[7]  In the meantime, Albers’s new position as the head of the design department at Yale, where a complete overhaul of the School of Art was underway, attracted Sillman to the Ivy League institution. Sillman applied to Yale in the autumn of 1950 and was able to enter, with Albers’s assistance, in the spring of 1951. Given his previous experience, Sillman’s course of study was accelerated and he earned his BFA in his first semester. He stayed on as a part of the MFA program, becoming Albers’s teaching assistant beginning in the fall of 1951. 

Sillman played a significant role in the transition the school was undergoing. Albers “needed help badly because he went into a very difficult situation,” Sillman recalled. “It was an academic situation in the tightest sense. They specialized in what they called the Giotto technique — the egg tempera technique. And he had to wipe out by himself a whole cast-iron tradition of art study.”[8]  Decades earlier at the Bauhaus, Albers had followed in the footsteps of other modern masters. At Black Mountain Albers began with a blank slate, but at yale, realigning the existing curriculum proved more challenging. Sillman quickly moved from acolyte to authority under that pressure. His visual authority only grew when Sillman joined the Yale faculty after completing his Master’s degree, writing a thesis expounding upon some of the finer points of Albers’s color course. 

Drawing without End

#7 (n.d.), ink on paper. An exercise in 'broken line' theory

 When examining Sillman’s artistic production during his Yale years, from 1951 through 1966, it appears that he was greatly interested in exploring color in abstract ways. His color block paintings and later screenprints reflect his understanding of color interaction derived from Albers’s methods. He approached color in his paintings as an open-ended experiment, in much the same way as Albers’s own Homage to the Square series does. Sillman, however, concurrently developed a strikingly different side to his body of work during these years — one little studied until now. His graceful and enchanting calligraphic “wave drawings” owe their origin not to the color course at Yale, but to the design and drawing courses. 

Sillman at work on a mural at Yale School of Art & Architecture, 1963. Photo by John T. Hill, collection James McNair

 To Sillman, Albers’s drawing class was as significant a step in his development as the color course he took over from his mentor. He described the course he taught at Yale as a composite of elements from Black Mountain’s basic design course and typical drawing exercises. Sillman remembered selecting the kind of problems students “would need as a means to develop control of the pencil. It was how to give them more and more control over themselves.” For the students at Yale, accustomed to a more traditional academic course of study, the problems Albers and Sillman introduced were radical. One of the most basic lessons was to learn to draw and write simultaneously with both hands. Another had them drawing the back of an envelope from memory, rather than from observation. “The figure wasn’t very important,” Sillman asserted, “the figure wasn’t the end in drawing; there wasn’t any end in drawing.”[9] 

Sillman’s nearly fifty known wave drawings, most dated between 1954 and 1964, exhibit both the constant broken line and the element of time. Sillman’s solution to these juxtaposed formal problems was a barbed line made by repeatedly stopping the movement of his pen or pencil and backtracking just a fraction of an inch. Each arresting point, and there are hundreds in a finished piece, is a moment of decision for Sillman, forcing him to carefully consider and choose the line’s trajectory. In the resulting drawings, Sillman’s barbed lines rhythmically echo one another, creating distortions of the picture plane. In their simplest form, the drawings appear to be made of fine thread stitched onto a diaphanous fabric. More complicated patterns call to mind a range of comparisons from the organic whorls of fingerprints to the natural formations of rock to ripples on the surface of water. In contrast to his paintings, which consist of calculated geometric forms precisely painted with a palette knife, these wave drawings depend upon the hand-drawn quality of Sillman’s line, making the artist ever-present, even in an abstract work. 

The Business of Color

Romare Bearden, In the Garden (1974), Published by Ives-Sillman. Courtesy Wiggin and Dana Collection

 Sillman remained at Yale until 1966, continuing to teach foundation design courses and upholding the school’s new artistic direction in the wake of Albers’s retirement in 1958. His relationship with Albers was far from over and, in fact, their most enduring work together was yet to come. When Sillman curated an exhibition of Albers’s work at Yale’s new art gallery building in 1956, he set upon a course that would occupy him for years to come: printmaking. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition contained two original screen prints from the Homage to the Square series made by Sillman and his soon-to-be partner Norman Ives in a basement studio at Yale. In 1962, Sillman and Ives, a fellow Yale professor and graphic designer, officially formed the art publishing firm of Ives-Sillman. The duo, who eventually partnered with Sirocco Screenprints in New Haven, specialized in creating high-quality screen prints for the art market, with Sillman personally mixing the inks, putting his years of color study into practice. The firm filled a void in the art publication industry with skillfully produced color reproductions of artworks that far surpassed the quality of typical lithographic color processes. 

The team of Ives-Sillman quickly proved the superiority of their prints with an edition of Albers’s seminal Interaction of Color, a series of eighty screenprints illustrating the fundamentals of Albers’s color lessons with an accompanying text by Albers explaining the principles at work in each folio. The firm went on to produce additional works for Albers, along with portfolios and individual prints for noted artists such as Romare Bearden, Willem deKooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Ad Reinhardt, and Walker Evans. 

Trials & Errors

During the Ives-Sillman era, Sillman moved from New Haven to Lyme, Connecticut, putting some physical distance between his working world of screenprints with Ives and teaching and his private life and painting. While comfortably connected with the art world, Sillman could retreat to his Lyme home and studio, where he embarked on a period of “search,” an Albersian term that Sillman himself often used to describe visual experimentation—in this case, in the medium of watercolor. 

Suspended (May 14-16,1979), watercolor and graphite on paper

 Sillman’s new direction crystallized in the latter half of the 1970s, accompanied by major changes in his life.[10]  Josef Albers’s death in 1976 cut him off from further collaborations, but perhaps put him even more in demand as an educator. He returned to Yale for some advanced classes and criticism, and taught at many other schools, including the Rhode Island School of Design, University of Michigan, UCLA, the State University of New York and Parsons School of Design. Ives-Sillman dissolved after Ives’s death in 1978, though the final years were the busiest in their partnership. 

His foray into watercolor expanded Sillman’s formal vocabulary, setting him off on experiments in gradation, measurement, geometry, and scale. His tenacious approach to the search, in and of itself, was a product of his mentor’s influence. Sillman explained what he called the “question-question game,” as a useful, if sometimes frustrating, method of working. “If you throw out a question,” he explained, “the students come up with an answer. Albers taught us that it was all a question-question game. He gave us questions, which in turn we would find [more] questions. That’s it…. He didn’t help us find solutions to anything.”[11]  After several years of playing a solitary version of the “question-question” game, Sillman’s experimentation yielded fruit. In 1983, he culled through the products of his search and compiled a portfolio, which appears as a summary of thoughts and ideas over the course of eight years, and aptly titled the group “Trials & Errors.”[12] 

Sillman first confronted the orb shape in his later waves drawings and prints. He then dissected the orbs in works like, Pursuit #2, with an overlay of diagonal lines. He applied paint in precisely controlled washes within a rigid framework, creating optical illusions with intense color combinations. This format occupied his attention from 1975-81 when he broke with the motif, largely abandoning the orb thereafter. 

The Seventh Visit, A Sketch (April 19-23, 1982), watercolor and graphite on paper

 Once he eliminated the orb, Sillman began to experiment with the remaining segments of the lattice, playing with the visual effects of the diagonals in very bright color combinations. What emerged after a year’s time was a simpler geometric shape, like a unit, or building block. The interlocking or braided shapes create the prevalent illusion of the feathers of an arrow lends a descriptive name —“flèche,” from the French for arrow — to these works.[13] 

Sillman quickly drained color from the predominantly gray and black flèche paintings, using it only sparingly in a few instances. These compositions took on the seemingly infinite task of seeking out the various possible arrangements of the flèche forms, breaking them down, flipping them over, moving them together and apart, all while playing an elaborate game with the stepped gradation of the diagonal bands that make up the flèche. 

The Goya of Grassy Hill

Sewell Sillman in his Connecticut studio, 1983. Photo by Allen buck

 Sillman created these tireless final searches in his home studio on Grassy Hill Road in Lyme, where the sounds of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts and classical recordings often filled the air. The titles of many late watercolors reflect the classical themes coursing through the music he enjoyed. Even as his health began to fail in the later 1980s, Sillman conducted all of the instruments at his disposal, deftly controlling his brush, meticulously applying layer upon banded layer of watercolor in perfect gradation, logically conceiving and executing the increasingly complex compositions on larger and larger sheets. As with the mathematics implicit in music, the calculations inherent in his late works transcend the rote exercises in design at their foundation, reaching a symphonic level with Sillman as maestro. 

Sillman again reminds us that “the element of time is important” in his final series. His habit of noting start and end dates on his watercolors indicates not only an awareness on his part of the time devoted to each composition, but also a desire to mark the passage of time for the viewer as well. As the watercolor washes build up, the blacks become more and more intense. Black Caprice is perhaps the darkest and most solidly blocked watercolor of the late works and, correspondingly, took one of the greatest spans of time to complete, nearly seven weeks. The pace of his creative output slowed at this time. Sillman was completing works in weeks rather than days in the months before his death from cancer in 1992. 

Swarm (August 28-September 19, 1991) watercolor and graphite on paper

 Years of experimentation and inquiry led him to hit upon his final major motif in the flèche paintings. Even with his advanced knowledge of color, design, and drawing, his formal vocabulary in the late works still includes, at heart, some of the essential elements evident in his earliest training. The final series is the embodiment of a crucial lesson Sillman learned over a lifetime’s work and one that he, in turn, taught to his own students. In observing more closely, revisiting or even reinventing an old problem, one can discover a new way of seeing, or a new level of meaning. It was, as Sillman called it, “basic soul study.”[14]  Sillman’s reluctance to wholeheartedly enter the broader commercial art world was a measure of his commitment to his art as a means of personal growth. “I’m less concerned about making art, or pictures, or belonging to any scene… I don’t really think that in 1947 I would have predicted isolation in a New England countryside as an end, though I doubt if it is.”[15] 

In his late work, a dark series that can appear particularly stark and painstakingly rational on first apprehension, Sillman’s presence is revealed. The culmination of a lifetime’s experimentation comes with an overtone of sadness, as with Beethoven’s late quartets, both profoundly intellectual and deeply personal. He sank into the dense black watercolor as he dealt, like the Goya of Grassy Hill, with age and illness, measures of time, and larger issues of human experience. 

by Amanda C. Burdan, Ph.D., George P. Tatum Curatorial Fellow, Florence Griswold Museum 

________________Footnotes___________________ 

1. A series of conversations with James D. McNair greatly helped in my understanding of Sillman’s life and art. His collection of art works, ephemera, and wealth of stories about Sillman provided essential support for this essay and exhibition. 

2. Transcript of Mary Emma Harris interview with Sewell Sillman, 7 March 1971, North Carolina State Archives (NCSA), Raleigh, N.C., page 32. 

3. Harris interview, 32. 

4. Letter of reference in Sewell Sillman’s application to Black Mountain College. NCSA. 

5.  Harris interview, 33. 

6.  Harris interview, 9. 

7. The extent of Sillman’s teaching responsibilities is unknown. Records of the Windsor Mountain School, which closed in 1975, were destroyed in a fire shortly thereafter. 

8.  Harris interview, 9, 10. 

9.  Harris interview, 6-7. 

10.  There are very few extant work from 1973 to 1977, which may be due to the obligations of printmaking and teaching, which required extensive travel. 

11. Harris interview, 39. 

12. A note to Sillman’s partner James D. McNair inside the portfolio is dated March 27, 1983. Its text reads simply: “Jim: I call these ‘trials & errors.’” Though collected together in 1983, two works from 1985 were later added to the group. 

13. The Sewell Sillman Foundation uses the term flèche in describing these works. Sillman titled one study in the Treasures portfolio Arrowheaded Variations. 

14. Harris interview, 26. 

15. Harris interview, 44.

David Taylor, Landscape, o/c, 45"x 36"

The Erector Square Building in New Haven, Connecticut has long stood as a landmark of American ingenuity. For decades, it served as the manufacturing headquarters for a number of well-known children’s toys, including the long-forgotten, Erector Set. Now the building’s maze of hallways, linked by well-worn and patched, honey-yellow oak floors, bear the scars of its industrious history; its imposing, sliding metal doors, at certain junctions, tell of a time when sections of the factory may have been closed off for production purposes. Their quilt-like pattern of shiny steel plates and neatly arrayed nail heads, together with a Rube Goldberg-like system of handles, pulleys and counter-weights have me imagining that these doors may have once seen service on a 19th century, Jules Verne apparatus, leagues beneath the ocean waves.   

David Taylor, A Tender Field, o/c, 47"x 35"

  But, today, because the building offers high ceilings and ample light through its large windows, the rooms of the Erector Square Building are covered with paint, inks, pigments and sawdust, serving as studio space for dozens of artists and design companies. Here, I find David Taylor standing before a large wall, which is pinned with works on paper in various stages of completion. The wall, much like David, tells a story of industry and devotion to his craft that spans many years. The studio walls are arrayed with innumerable random patterns of multi-color marks and right-angled lines—the trace remains of works that were once created on this heavily-used surface. The wall and its many scars becomes a metaphor for the work of this artist, as he leans into the sheet of paper mounted there, oil or graphite stick in hand, exacting a shape or a line with the intensity of a composer marking a score, the music only now unfolding in his mind, like a bagatelle soon to be performed for an, as yet, unknown audience. As he draws, Taylor explains, “I work in an additive-subtractive way. I put down images and lines and then prune them away, so that the final image may be hidden in a maze of layers. I think of this process as having an eye for intervals—positive and negative spaces in the drawing that balance each other out. In spite of the sense of chaos, I work in a very ‘Western’ sort of way with a balanced finished product in the end.”   

David Taylor, Hand Puppet, graphite on paper, 53"x 78"

 Taylor’s work is deeply personal, with stacks of completed drawings and painting standing like chapters in an on-going diary that few have been allowed to read, or at least understand in their fullest significance. Taylor is a story-teller and each piece he undertakes is a narrative about his own life, the irony he sees in the world around him, the humor and the foibles of our daily existence. He tells me that, “I think in terms of large shapes which anchor the work. I find that when I was younger, I wanted to paint in a representational style—to prove my competency—but now I am more comfortable in an abstract realm. I am exploring the central mystery of drawing: how a flat surface can take on the look and feel of constructed space, form and light. In a way, I am most influenced by the Baroque style, where I introduce volume and scale in my work; where a sense of movement, energy and tension are important to me. Strong contrast in light and shadow to create dramatic effects were also key elements to Baroque artists and they are for me, too. If it can be said that the Baroque artist overturned every emotion for the sake of art, I guess that would apply to me to.”   

Every work on paper is a thicket of line and shadow, as marks are rendered, erased and marked over. The frenzy of line builds into a dense pattern that draws the eye of the viewer into dense clusters of light and darkness–a trip to an intriguing but unfamiliar destination. We find ourselves searching for familiar landmarks to help guide the journey, but Taylor’s work takes us instead, like Alice in Wonderland, deeper into the paradox of his form and color maze. Taylor says, “Each piece is an exploration of the central duality in life—humor and pain; good memories and bad; our ultimate mortality and the beauty in life. I bring the viewer to a point where I want to tantalize them, taunt them with the possible explanations in a piece and then leave off, so that they discern what it might mean to them.”  In the final analysis, though, he explains, “I want this to be a good experience for you, so there is enough embodied meaning to engage the viewer.”   

Hand Puppet, detail

 In, Hand Puppet, the tangle of lines invites the eye on a texturally-rich expedition across the surface of the page in search of a ‘landing point’. The dizzying and intense journey to the center of the piece and, repeatedly, back to the edges symbolically portrays the path of our own pressured and overly-committed lives and, perhaps, suggests that there are few places left to go where we can recoup our strength and courage. Erasures and shadows of former mark-making in this work, characteristic of Taylor’s approach to each project, become the tangled threads of memories and emotions that, likewise, seem to bind us all together as people.   

David Taylor, Dropping, o/c, 60"x 48"

 Apart from his drawings, Taylor’s paintings, too, offer a dense, symbolic path to understanding. In the complex, though less-finely parsed, color-layering style of either Expressionist Milton Resnick or Contemporary painter, Larry Pooms, Taylor’s work achieves a richly autobiographical aim. His canvases are a place where objects and emotions are deconstructed into a frenzy of line, color and form. As in, Dropping, Taylor focuses his creative effort through a prism, only then to train that same beam of energy into the topsy-turvy lens of a kaleidoscope, re-inventing the conceptual version of dropping or falling as a tumult of patterns, engaging the eye in its search for a narrative resting point as it tumbles through the air.   

Taylor will often allow the original vision for starting a painting to drift or shift as he explores the surface and the spontaneous forms that begin to emerge. He explains, “I can start at one point and end up somewhere else. It is an organic process for me. What stays in the piece is the part that still works for me the next day. The final work has to have ‘rhythm.’”  Taylor remains open to unconscious connections as they reveal themselves in the course of completing a piece; a process that, in some cases, might span several years. He takes previous works from the rack in his studio and speaks in deeply personal terms about their individual meaning to himself—symbolic reference points and details of color and form known only to him–but serving as markers in a deeply personal autobiography that is represented by the body of his work.   

David Taylor, Naught Bunny, oil on paper, 40"x 25" (photo through glass)

 Like all of us, Taylor is no stranger to loss and sadness. His labors in the studio become a working-through process and he finds joy and humor in the effort. In the same way that life interrupts our plans along a carefully planned path to some destination; his work occasionally presents us with an unanticipated surprise. In Naughty Bunny, a languishing and slightly mischievous-looking rabbit lays sprawled across the center of an oil-stick-on-paper work, the figure surrounded by a jumble of vaguely-defined forms. The scene may be interpreted either as the unwelcomed party guest, passed out amidst the morning-after remnants of a raucous gathering; or an exhausted but very capable lover, one arm (paw!) hung over the edge of the bed, languishing in the memory of his most recent conquest.   

David Taylor, The Inventor (self-portrait), graphite on paper, 30"x 22"

 For Taylor, the role of story-teller and humorist occasionally finds its way into certain works in obvious, yet enigmatic ways. “I occasionally include cartoon figures in my work. For me, these comic book characters represent life’s games of struggle, chasing the unattainable and a reliance on imagined solutions in what may be the fiction of our everyday lives.”   

But behind the persona of a man with a perpetual twinkle in his eye as he speaks to me, is a deeply thoughtful artist who creates in an intensely personal way. He tells me, “My personal life is an important part of my work. But, I am willing to show myself in that way because I want my work to be seen. That is meaningful to me and helps me to decide where to look next for the stimulus behind my next painting or drawing. Reflecting back is one way for me to find content for my work; but I also believe that life has to be renewed constantly—through music, poetry and careful observation of people, in order to maintain a fresh perspective. Beauty is always at the end of its fifteen-minutes.”   

One senses in Taylor a degree of introspection and a desire to create that is both expository and self-curative. He is telling us his story through his work; a story that achieves more clarity and resonance for both the artist and the viewer, the more often it is recounted. As I left, David recited a poem from memory that he had written many years ago.  I believe, it speaks eloquently to his creative process, his life and to the richly-symbolic content of his work:   

ars poetica   

for Eleanor Orr and Mercedes Matter

Poetry is an observation   

Of rhythm in speech   

Its clarification and release.   

*   

Held to form   

As in drawing to surface,   

Pushed closed by artifice,   

Its depth is natural speech.   

*   

Form given life is a living voice   

A pulse felt through loss   

A transformation which is continual,   

Never complete.   

*   

We move through our lives   

Toward a disappearance   

We ourselves cannot meet.   

-David Taylor   

by Richard Friswell, Editor-in-Chief

Charles Harold Davis, Landscape in France (n/d), pencil on paper. American practitioner in Barbizon style. Collection of Lyman Allyn Museum

 Italy had long been the most popular destination for Americans prior to the Civil War, but by the 1870’s, France had become the country of choice. For it then seemed that every young American artist yearned to embark on a Grand Tour of Europe and study in Paris. In fact, approximately twenty-two hundred were documented there during the post-Civil War period. Many were drawn to the city of light by the prestigious government-sponsored Ecole des Beaux Arts, or by the more accessible private academies, including the acclaimed Academie Julian. American artists also discovered, Grez-sur-Loing, Barbizon, and the adjacent Forest of Fontainebleau, where they worked alongside French painters. Their interest in Barbizon was partially in response to the radically modern changes effected by the Second Empire’s urban planner and architect, Baron Hausmann. Many Parisian neighborhoods were razed to allow for the erection of the larger buildings and wider boulevards needed to accommodate the rapidly growing population. The rural life at Barbizon exemplified the antithesis of the industrialization of Paris.          

J. Alden Weir, The Tow Girl (1879-80), o/c, painted on Hudson River in the syle of Paris' Ecole des Beaux Arts. Coll. Lyman Allyn Museum

 

 The French academies provided American artists with traditional training that emphasized figure drawing.  J. Alden Weir arrived in Paris in 1873 and attended Jean Leon Gerome’s atelier for four years.  There, according to Doreen Bolger Burke, Weir spent his mornings “drawing and painting from life and his afternoons drawing from casts after antique statues.  These studies were intended to prepare him for the concours des places … a series of examinations that all students had to pass before being officially matriculated into the Ecole.”  By 1875, Weir was awarded a second-class medal for his work in Gerome’s studio, a great accomplishment for an American student.  The very basic academic principles of his French education can be discerned in the artist’s portrait of The Tow Girl (1879-80), painted after his return to America.  His loose brushwork may depart from his earlier, carefully-delineated style of Gerome’s studio, but Weir’s work retains a primacy of figure and solidity of form that reflect his academic training.     

 Gerome’s Beaux Arts studio was very popular with American students owing in part, according to Barbara Weinberg, to his historical narratives with American collectors and the related practical consideration of patronage.  American students had to “learn how to emulate French painters whose works attracted post-bellum American collectors in order to secure commissions at home.  Like Weir, Abbot Handerson Thayer studied with Gerome at the Ecole.  He had sailed for Europe in 1875 to enroll, however, the waiting list prevented his entry until the following spring.  At the Market Place, Paris (1875) was painted soon after Thayer’s arrival, while he studied in the studio of Henri Lehmann.  Once at the Ecole, Thayer’s classes focused on life drawing and Classical statuary; an emphasis on the figural tradition encouraged the young artist, who began his career as an animalier, to include the human figure in his work.  As such, At the Market Place, Paris is a pivotal work in Thayer’s career.     

The Ecole’s popularity with Americans was rivaled by that of the Academie Julian, the largest private art school in Paris (pictured here, Blvd des Capucines, Paris, 1880s). Though the former was tuition-free, it required that foreign artists pass a difficult entrance exam. The Academie, however, charged tuition without an exam and therefore readily admitted foreigners. Americans studying at the Julian included Charles Ebert, Charles H. Davis, William S. Robinson, Louis Michael Eilshemius, and Martha Walter.         

Many of the professors at the Academie were conservative artists. Some of the Julian’s teachers later taught at the Ecole, suggesting that both institutions’ academic principles were similar. However, the Academie Julian’s main goal was to prepare students for entry to the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Salon. The government-sponsored Paris Salon was the city’s annual juried art exhibition and gaining acceptance was critical for artists to attain recognition and secure commissions. Equally as important, however, the Salon allowed an artist to measure his work against international competition, within the larger context of European art.          

Abbott Handerson Thayer, At the Market Place, Paris (1875). Collection Lyman Allyn Museum

 

 American artists occasionally left behind the pressures of Paris for the tranquility of Barbizon and the French countryside. While studying at the Paris Salon, Ecole student William Morris Hunt was so inspired by Jean-François Millet’s, The Sower (1850) that he moved out to Barbizon, remaining there from 1853-1855. Though he did not formally become a student of Millet, they worked together and discussed their approaches and attitudes toward landscape. Barbizon painting became widely popular with American audiences and collectors after the Civil War. Its landscapes were characteristically intimate and frequently featured unassuming bits of nature as inspirational subject matter.         

As Robert Herbert noted in his study Barbizon Revisited (1962), the French painters, “began to restrict their slice of nature to what the eye can see without moving back and forth in place of the traditional panorama.”  Composition was subordinated to the mood of the landscape and artists worked directly from nature in oil using the vigorous brushstrokes characteristic of the Barbizon School. The most basic precept of Barbizon painting was self-expression through direct confrontation with nature. In response to the Europeans’ influence, American landscape painters began to work en plein air, hiking through the forest with brushes, palettes, and canvases in tow. One American artist related: “Sometimes we would hide our painting things under a rock for the night, sure to find them untouched the next morning.”  J. Alden Weir visited Barbizon during his years in France (1873-1877), as did Edward Potthast, between 1889 and 1890.        

left: William Morris Hunt [attrib], Boy with a Violin (pre-1879). Coll. Lyman Allyn Museum         

In 1882, when Charles H. Davis moved to Fleury, just outside Barbizon, masters Rousseau and Millet were no longer living. Nevertheless, Barbizon and its surrounding villages retained their appeal, inspiring many American landscapists. Davis focused on landscape painting and earned his reputation as one of America’s leading practitioners of the Barbizon style, having returned to the U.S. in 1891.          

The very year that Davis had moved to the Barbizon area, Bruce Crane was making his third trip abroad, passing the summer in nearby Grez-sur-Loing. Grez was popular with European and American artists alike and it was there that Crane met French painter Jean Charles Cazin (1846-1901). Cazin’s method inspired Crane to forsake his own traditional painting style. Following Cazin’s lead, he began to experiment using limited tonal ranges. This muted color palette is clearly visible in his painting, The White Mantle (1919). Like Crane, Edward Potthast also spent time in Grez, where the countryside inspired him to forsake portraiture in the characteristic brown-based tonal range of the Munich School and switch to creating landscapes instead. Potthast credited his friend, the American Impressionist Robert Vonnoh, with introducing him to French Impressionism during his stay there.          

The French Impressionists characteristically worked en plein air, for outdoors, they were able to render objects in a natural light influenced by prevailing weather conditions, impossible to achieve in the studio. Their paintings are noted for their sketchy, rapidly-executed brushwork and high key palettes. In contrast to the French academic paintings, Impressionist works looked–to the nineteenth-century eye–unfinished, rough, and unschooled. They were a far cry from the carefully-rendered history and genre paintings for which the professors at the Ecole des Beaux Arts were known. Academic painters developed their finished pieces from drawings and completed their work in the studio. In general, their paintings were meticulously executed, with special care taken to hide their brushstrokes, and to achieve a solidity of form, both characteristic of the Tonalist style.       

below right: [Robert] Bruce Crane, The White Mantle, 1919, in the Tonalist style. Coll. Lyman Allyn Museum         

Ironically, the young Americans who became Impressionists late in the nineteenth century had studied alongside the French Academic painters at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and at Academie Julian. Moreover, those American students were initially appalled by the Impressionist style seen in Paris during the 1870s and 1880s. Bruce Crane initially objected to their coarse handling and glaring colors, while J. Alden Weir declared the 1877 exhibition of the French Impressionists, “worse than the Chamber of Horrors. I was there about a quarter of an hour and left with a head ache.”  Nonetheless, within a decade of their return to the U.S., many of the American students had begun to adopt the Impressionist idiom, which ironically became their dominant aesthetic.          

With such an abundance of American artists working in France, pressure mounted on them to paint subjects native to the U.S. Henry James noted in 1887, “that when to-day we look for ‘American art’ we find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it.”  And in 1900, American critics were still skeptical of the state of American art. Ellis T. Clarke, a writer for, Brush and Pencil, art magazine, complained that American art had become, “French art with American trimmings: American artists go to Europe, and especially Paris, to complete their education, and are apparently not strong enough to resist the dominating influence of their masters in after-work. … But if American artists go abroad for instruction, why need they renounce individuality and forswear national aims and aspirations? … Expatriation is a mistake, both as regards the future of the individual artist and as regards the future of American art.”          

Edward Henry Potthast, Ocean Breezes (c.1910), o/c, showing solidity of form or 'weightiness' of European-trained American Impressionist School of the period. Coll. Lyman Allyn Museum.

 

Yet Clarke needn’t have worried. Despite the vast number of Americans studying in France, the work they produced remained distinctly American. American Impressionist paintings stand apart from those of the French in spite of the academic training received there.  As a result, Barbara Weinberg noted that, “their allegiance [to Impressionism] was often cautious and intermittent. In general, the Americans created a variant of the French style that was indebted more to Impressionist surfaces than to Impressionist principles … In painting both figures and landscapes, the Americans often appeared to be [more] ‘impressionizers’ than Impressionists, by applying chromatic veneers of broken strokes to solid forms that depended on preliminary studies and some studio retouching.”          

The persistence of the underlying solidity in the American style can be traced back to eighteenth-century American portrait painting.  Barbara Novak has observed that Colonial American painting was distinct from European painting because the American union of object and idea resulted in a ‘weightiness.’  That American ‘weight’ can also be detected in late nineteenth-century American painting. Those artists preferred to keep the objects they painted intact and were not as able, or willing, to break up the integrity of an object as Europeans were. Novak writes: “In this [twentieth] century too, though nineteenth-century moral and religious considerations have been virtually obliterated, Americans are still uniquely aware of things. For the need to grasp reality, to ascertain the physical thereness of things seems to be a necessary component of the American experience.”  That these distinctively American qualities emerged regardless of how long an artist remained an expatriate–despite the level of inspiration drawn from European art and culture– may ultimately result from the fact that, “The American pilgrim, it seems, rarely left his American consciousness behind him.”          

by Nancy Stula, Ph.D., Contributing Editor    

Part I in the Series, 19th Century American Painters on the Grand Tour, can ba found in the ARTES January archive         

                                                                         ____________________________________________________________________________          

Bibliography:          

H. Babara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers, New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.        

Doreen Bolger Burke, J. Alden Weir: An American Impressionist, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983.          

H. Barbara Weinberg, “Americans in Paris, 1850-1910,” American Art Review XV, 2003.             

Robert Herbert, Barbizon Revisited, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1962.          

Christopher Cranch, “Reminiscences of Fontainebleau Forest, By a Landscape Painter,” Appleton‘s Journal 10, (26 July 1873).         

Ellis T. Clarke, “Alien Element in American Art,” Brush and Pencil  (October 1900).           

      

notations sequence 5 (2009) Viscosity print, 22"x15"

  An industrial park is not a likely spot to discover passion, at least not the kind we report on in ARTES e-Magazine. But, the big, black SUV in the parking lot means that the ‘artist is in the house’. Print maker, Roxanne Faber Savage approaches her task with a particular passion that makes the process of creating art look both deliberative and revelatory at the same time. Roxanne is fast becoming a master of the trade, but allows herself to be surprised by the process of print making each day. This trait serves as a critic’s marker for what expertise in any creative endeavor should be all about: allowing for the element of surprise in a medium that an artist has come to know well.     

Blue Bird Box (2007) Paper lithograph, 30"x 22"

I met Roxanne here at her studio on a day when she brings her newest work together to review and consider the possibilities going forward. Prints are pinned to the walls and scattered on the floor like so many designer’s samples—each waiting its turn to be evaluated, scrutinized, critiqued and sometimes even put away for a while. Savage’s print-making style is evolutionary, where she learns from her failures as well as her successes. I watch as she sits on the concrete floor of her studio, a recently-produced piece in her hands. Sometimes the answer she seeks is clear, sometimes not immediately so. But, each work serves as a step on her journey.    

 A fair inquiry might be: Where is this journey taking us? Knowing the artist, I posed the question surmising already what the answer might be. “I let the work drive the creative process,” Roxanne explains. “This is a very tactile experience for me. I love the feel of the materials—the papers and inks. I never know where I might end up, but I let the materials I’m working with direct the outcome. Then, it’s my task to decide whether I like where we’ve arrived together.” The result is a range of deeply symbolic images linked by the common elements of inspiration from nature, graphic intensity and a personal desire to achieve visceral impact through her work.    

 Working in studios in both Connecticut (Center for Contemporary Print Making, Norwalk) and New York City (Kathy Caraccio Print Studio) and using time-tested print-making techniques that are as old as print making itself, as well as mixed media, Savage describes her work as, “feeling-based”. “I animate the materials and let them speak to me. I want the process to do what it wants to do. When ink escapes the lines or the application goes in a direction I hadn’t planned, that’s when the process becomes interesting to me. I have learned to expect the unexpected and allow that serendipitous outcome to inform me as an artist,” Savage says.    

 “I don’t need clarity when I approach a subject,” Savage explains. “I am much more excited about the unknown.” This sense of working within the margins of the unexpected has an historical foundation with other great printmakers. Abstract Expressionism ushered in a new generation of American artists, like Rauschenberg, Warhol and contemporary artist, David Salle, all of whom valued the accidental effects that the printing process could create. Picasso, too, relied on the whimsy of the printer’s press to create second and third state images that took on a life of their own.    

Half & Half, Quattro (2008) carbondum intaglio with mixed media, 22" x 22"

 Savage’s work appears to follow the subtle influences of seasonal change in New England. “In winter, when the trees are bare of leaves, the moon and sky are on my mind. Because of the dark and cold, these natural elements gain primacy in ways that they wouldn’t at another time of the year,” she explains. “Much to the chagrin of my kids, I will sometimes suddenly pull off the road and stop the car to take in some scene or spectacle of nature that others may just drive by.” Her Moon Project is the result of this kind of observation of nature. The resulting images are abstracted, interpretive and haunting. Phases of a blue-gray orb hang suspended, often repeating in slightly different iterations, offering a fourth dimension to the work—the implied passage of time. Multi-layered and enigmatic, her moon series offers that same sense of mystery that has bridled man’s imagination about our closest celestial neighbor since our earliest awareness of the surrounding universe. As is the case with, Half and Half Quattro (2009), Savage may enhance the image by drawing directly on the print. “For me, the figure of the moon carries with it a primal sense of wonder. Spontaneously adding to this piece, as it went to press, allowed me to add a sense of wonder and surprise that adds contextual meaning and a level of complexity that I am after in all the work I do,” she says.    

Heaven's Powerlines, Your Bird Can Sing (2008). Paper lithograph with monoprint, 22"x 28"

 Another motif that finds traction in Savage’s work is her Heaven’s Power Lines Series. “Objectivity doesn’t really interest me,” she says. “The symbolism or synthesis of an object is what matters.” For Savage, the bird and cloud-filled skies in her work provide a glimpse of the spiritual unknown that may lie beyond. But, for the earth-bound viewer, an array of birds, neatly ordered on power lines, reminiscent of the choir of angels hovering in Michael Damaskenos’ late 16th century depiction of The Adoration of the Magi , symbolize a gathering force of nature that lies just beyond our reach or ability to fully understand. Telephone wires are strung between poles that tilt at vertiginous angles into the scene—like primitive snares designed to capture, or at least converse, with these elusive free spirits.    

Girdles (2007), paper lithograph

 Savage’s Yin for this particular Yang is her Bird Cage Series. Heavily barred and absent any doors, these ominously-formed confinement devices are apparently over-engineered for their assigned task. Here, Savage might have us believe that containing the spirit symbolized by her birds-in-flight will be no easy task. Confinement is a theme that repeats itself in her oeuvre and serves as one of many ideographs for principle themes in her life and her print making. Topics like freedom, confinement, death and mortality, sex and intimacy and rebirth all find their way into much of her work, at present. “These are issues that matter to me. “I represent them symbolically in my work,” she says. “But when they leave my hands, the interpretation belongs to the viewer.” Savage explores the boundaries between science, literature and theology in her work and each piece is layered in meaning, not only symbolized by the images themselves, but by the extensive working and re-working of the matrix surface itself. Here, content, form and process combine to produce a complex and thought-provoking result.    

Red Box No.1 (2009), lithograph, 22"x 15"

 The Red Box Series is one such example. A fundamental shape in the everyday world (and, ironically, a starting point for every new art student), Savage treats the basic cube with the same desire to interpret anew and then reinterpret again, this most basic of forms! Her red boxes are attempting to escape their own limits—their own ‘boxness’—to become something else (or something more?). As if repetition will provide some different result, Savage’s boxes reconfigure themselves in illogical planes, teasing out nuances of shading, angularity and mass only, in the end, to remain…a box. Much like Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations in C minor, for piano, we watch (listen!) as the artist addresses a central theme time-and-again, each version providing new ways of considering the central motif.    

 In similar ways, all of Savage’s images seem to animate themselves for the viewer, as we vicariously participate in this process of  Darwinian-like evolution; much like watching a chick struggle to escape the confines of its shell, elated when the bird is finally free of its confines, but knowing we could not have one without the other. The invitation to join in partnership with the artist, who is apparently having as much fun as we are, allows us to gain insight into some of the secrets of the creative process as a series evolves. Her willingness to share her struggle and the joy of success, even with the lowly, elemental square, lies at the heart of Savage’s boundless enthusiasm for her process and becomes the reason why it can work for us.    

 by Richard Friswell    

 Visit the print making studio of Kathy Caraccio at: www.kcaraccio.com    

 See more of Roxanne’s work at : www.roxanneprints.com    

 Go to the Center for Contemporary Print Making at: www.contemprints.org   

T

Before turning to figure modeling, Zimmerman, a mid-career artist with a master’s degree from New York State College of Ceramics, at Alfred University, was drawn to large ceramic pots and container forms. During his early college years, he spent his summers carving monumental blocks of limestone in the south of France. In graduate school, he began to build large, thick-walled hollow pottery forms. When the clay became leather hard, he carved the surface, giving it the appearance of worked stone. In 1996, he put the large, totemic vessels which first brought him to public awareness on the back burner. Zimmerman, whose studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn boasts it own kiln, switched his attention to modeling the human figure.

The RISD installment, its third and most comprehensive to date, was first exhibited at the Museu da Electricidade, in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2007. On that occasion, Montepegado and Zimmerman–whose partnership began with a figure-only exhibit in 2005–decided to employ industrial archetypes to add narrative weight to the overall montage. Using cement blocks of varying heights and dimensions as their foundation, they started constructing a complete miniature city, whose dramatically-lit towers and other buildings served as backdrop to the activities of its Lilliputian inhabitants. At Leeuwarden’s Princessehof Museum the following year, again playing at city planning, they added scaffolding, walkways and a street-like grid, conjuring a vibrant city surging uncontrollably ahead.

Cobbled together from hundreds of handcrafted figurative and architectural elements, all situated on or astride the white pedestals and walls, this installation teams with mazes of buildings, chimneys, industrial pipes, I-beams, stairs, a giant ladder and an army of assorted, downtrodden masses, seen either alone or in groups. Everywhere Zimmerman’s colorfully glazed men, when not involved in real work, can be seen arguing or fighting amongst themselves. Most are carting heavy loads, carrying industrial tools, and in some cases weapons of war. A number meld into the very loads they’re hauling, while others have jugs or tubes for heads. Crowning the lot is a large ominous black bridge and an elevated viewing platform, an arresting coda to this exercise in clay-nation.

Taken as a whole, Inner City is a window on the human condition, engendering a hypnotic, if crushing experience. Think of the urban dystopia of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Here too, the viewer is left contemplating the fate of humanity.

Illustrations represent various scenes from the installation, Inner City 

by Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer

Inner City

Rhode Island School of Design

At the Museum of Art, Chace Center

Providence, RI

Learn more about Chace Center’s upcoming exhibits: www.risdmuseum.org

Charles Ebert, Church in Venice, circ. 1913, oil/canvas

Eighteenth-century American artists relied on European art long before they set sail for the Continent. Mezzotints after French and English portraits were imported by the hundreds during the eighteenth century and supplied the colonists with what was often their only contact with fine art. John Singleton Copley wrote to Benjamin West on November 12, 1766:      

“It would give me inexpressible pleasure to make a trip to Europe where I should see those fair examples of art that have stood so long the admiration of all the world. … I think myself peculiarly unlucky in Living in a place into which there has not been one portrait brought that is worthy to be called a Picture within my memory, which leaves me at a great loss to guess the stile that You, Mr. Reynolds, and the other Artists practice.”      

Yet Copley was more fortunate than most Colonial artists. He had access to the first art gallery to open in America. English-trained artist John Smibert (1688-1751) brought an art collection to Boston consisting of prints, copies of Old Master paintings, and casts after antique sculpture. Beginning in the 1730s, Bostonians could view oil on canvas copies of some of the best-known European paintings in his gallery-cum-studio. With few exceptions, colonists living outside Boston had to content themselves solely with mezzotints—mainly Baroque-style portraits of aristocracy—to learn about European art.      

John Cooper (1695-1754), Ceres with an Attendant, oil/canvas. Based on European print sources, sitters were endowed with fashionable clothing and jewelry to elevate their apparent social status.

 These prints effectively transmitted English style and aristocratic imagery to the colonists. According to Wayne Craven in, Colonial American Portraiture, ‘Mezzotints were the school for both patron and artist; from them, otherwise untrained would-be portrait painters could learn to draw the figure, drapery, and landscapes as well as about perspective, light, and shade, the representation of textures, and the proper image in which to cast their subjects.’ For most Colonial artists, these portraits not only served as a form of art education, but they were the models upon which colonial artists consequently based their own portrait paintings.      

Several colonial artists were not content to remain in America, traveling abroad to gain exposure to European art and to pursue an art education. Benjamin West began his career as a portrait painter in Philadelphia. In 1760 he left to make the Grand Tour of Europe, permanently settling in London three years later. There, West met with remarkable success: in 1772 he was named Historical Painter to King George III and in 1792 he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy. Understandably, West’s story became mythic in the Colonies and his London studio became a mecca of sorts for Colonial American artists.      

The long, narrow format of West’s, Chryseis, oil sketch is informed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy in London, who created historically-themed paintings in the Grand Manner. Reynolds’s lectures to the Royal Academy, published in his Discourses, were extremely influential on this generation of American artists and, through his writings, Americans learned the Neo-Classical method, which involved developing a painting from numerous sketches and studies.      

Benjamin West, Chryseis Returning to her Father. West's preparatory oil sketch for a larger, ambitious painting (unlocated) depicts a Greek myth

Colonial American artists ascertained from imported treatises on art—Reynolds’ Discourses among them—that the most important and ambitious form of painting was history painting. These were narrative scenes from history, literature, mythology, and the Bible offering a moral, didactic component. History painting topped the hierarchy of genres, while portraiture fell somewhere near the bottom. Additionally, history painting required an artist to be able to paint a range of figures, landscape, drapery, architecture, and still life. The problem was that history painting did not find an audience in the Colonies: Americans wanted portraits. Perhaps Americans were not as familiar with Greek mythology and Classical literature as their European counterparts and were unable to appreciate this genre. Nevertheless, John Singleton Copley grew frustrated with the lack of appreciation for history painting and he wrote to West, circa 1767:      

“A taste of painting is too much Wanting to afford any kind of helps; and was it not for preserving the resemble[n]ce of particular persons, painting would not be known in the plac[e]. The people generally regard it no more than any other useful trade, as they sometimes term it, like that of a Carpenter tailor, or shoemaker, not as one of the most noble Arts in the World. Which is not a little Mortifying to me.”     

Like West, Copley tired of painting only portraits and yearned to paint history. In 1774 he set sail for Europe in order to pursue his career as a history painter.      

This Copley study was intended for a first version of this painting, which was never executed.

 Copley arrived in London in July, of that year and before departing on his Grand Tour of Europe, met Benjamin West and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Copley would settle permanently in England and work as an artist producing portraits and history paintings. In 1778 he painted, Watson and the Shark, hailed as one of the first Romantic paintings (with its emphasis on human instincts, emotions and instincts). Copley’s success as an artist won him the commission in 1783 from the Court of the Common Council to execute an enormous canvas depicting the Siege of Gibraltar. This history painting was to depict a critical battle in the seige by the Spanish and French armies of British-held Gibraltar. In traditional Grand Manner, Copley developed his painting from numerous compositional sketches and individual figure studies from models and props in his studio. On the final figure studies, Copley drew a grid to aid in transferring image to canvas.      

The Nineteenth Century

After the second decade of the nineteenth century, American artists turned increasingly to landscape as their preferred subject matter. They saw nature as linked to religion and the landscape as a visible manifestation of God. However, the pristine American wilderness lacked human associations. In Europe, particularly in Italy, they found in the landscape a repository of history and culture.      

American artists traveled in greater numbers than ever before to make the European Grand Tour, beginning in England, continuing through France, Switzerland, Italy and often, Germany and the Low Countries. By mid-century, however, a concentration of American artists settled in Italy, some for a few months, others permanently. For these “travelers in Arcadia,” Italy was much more than a vacation spot.      

Americans found Italy compelling because of its age. America offered primeval forests and ancient rocks, but its history was, after all, a natural history. American audiences desired the cultivated, civilized antiquity that Europe could offer. In Italy, the storied past was everywhere. American artist Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892) was constantly aware of history during his stay in Rome, exclaiming, “I walk out and wherever I go I tread upon earth consecrated by the footsteps of the great of other days”[1].  The Italian landscape itself was history.  But, as Barbara Novak observed in, Nature and Culture (1980), ‘Italy was, in fact, so replete with the wisdom of the ages that it was removed from time.’      

History painting remained as enticing an art form for Thomas Cole (1801-48) as it had been for the generation of expatriate American artists before him. Responding to the ongoing American appetite for historical motifs, Cole created a painterly compromise by transferring the aims of history painting to the landscape genre. He retained the same large canvas size which had up until now been reserved for history painting; he developed his landscape paintings from numerous sketches and studies according to the tenets of the Royal Academy for Grand Manner painting; and he retained the narrative by substituting human figures with elements of the landscape. For Cole, the narrative always took precedence over formal elements in his work; linking Cole with Grand Manner history painting and predecessor, Sir Joshua Reynolds, writing in, Discourses, “Like the history painter, a painter of landscapes in this style and with this conduct, sends the imagination back into antiquity.”      

If Italy was history, it was also art. In Rome, according to one American, “there were open air pictures waiting to be painted everywhere around us”[2]. The coincidence of actual views with landscape paintings by Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa—artists whom the Americans had greatly admired—joined art and nature in a way that was unknown in America.      

Thomas Cole, Mount Aetna from Taormina (1844)

 Cole was one of the first Hudson River School artists to travel to Europe. He set sail in June of 1829 and on his arrival in London, he studied drawings by Claude Lorrain in the British Museum. In 1831 Cole left London for Italy and the next year, he rented the “Tempietto”, Lorrain’s studio in Rome. Placing himself in that studio certainly reinforced his tendency to see the Italian landscape through Lorrain’s eyes. The Claudian construct, consisting of framing trees, a central body of water, and distant mountains bathed in a golden light, proved to be a convenient compositional formula for the depiction of the beautiful landscape. The Claudian construct played a role in the Italian landscapes painted by Cole, as well as by the other Hudson River School artists. The Italian experience was key in Thomas Cole’s work: six years after he left Italy he continued to draw on his Italian experience in painting.      

Cole’s second and last trip to Europe was in 1841. In 1842, he traveled to Sicily, where he responded to the ancient ruins of the theater at Taormina, juxtaposed against volcanic Mount Aetna, smoldering in the distance. The timeless qualities of nature underlined for Cole the temporality of the productions of man. This narrative serves to elevate Cole’s landscape and exemplifies his compromise blend of landscape and history.      

William Louis Sonntag, a self-trained Cincinnati artist, made his first trip to Italy in 1853 where, like Cole, he was captured by that country’s spell, later returned to spend a year in Florence (1855-56). His, Ruins, reveals his fascination with these remnants of ancient culture. However, he does not depict recognizable ruins or an identifiable locale. Perhaps he was unable to separate the antique from the contemporary, a problem noted by George Hillard in his guidebook Six Months in Italy (1854):      

“Many of the ruins in Rome are not happily placed for effect upon the eye and mind. They do not stand apart in solitary grandeur, forming a shrine for memory and thought, and envolving an atmosphere of their own. They are often in unfavorable positions and bear the shadow in disenchanting proximities … The trail of the present is every where over the past.”      

Ruins become the symbols of the perishability of art as nature takes its course. Sonntag may have chosen to depict these ruins out of his sense of Romanticism, allowing the melancholy ruins in the landscape to serve as a vehicle for conveying his emotions. Melancholy, loneliness, and silence as sensations evocative of Italy appealed very much to Americans who, like Nathaniel Hawthorne welcomed European “shadow” to contrast with its utter absence in America.      

In Italy—a country synonymous with art—painters like Cole and Sonntag could commit themselves completely to their craft. Italy offered a supportive and aesthetically-rich environment for American artists, whereas in America, artistic endeavor was still viewed with some degree of suspicion. Some American artists found the conditions in America debilitating. The American community of artists, writers, and intellectuals who settled in Italy at mid-century was quite large and the support system among them significant.      

American artists traveled abroad not only to live the life of an artist within a supportive community, but also to learn the artist’s craft. In the 1840s the National Academy of Design in New York offered students the most traditional form of art education in America. The Academy’s Antique School, for example, enabled students to copy casts after antique sculpture. However there were few art schools in America where students could draw from live models and few public art collections where artists could view paintings and sculpture. As a result, Americans at mid century flocked to Italy. But unlike eighteenth century artists, those of the nineteenth-century artists did not go specifically to study with a master or enroll in an Italian art academy.      

The educational experience pursued by Americans abroad was constructed in part from viewing and copying works by the Old Masters and, in an effort to educate their eye, these artists studied the vast public art collections.      

Italian Costume Studies supplied the costumed figure located just to the right of the center of the composition of Bierstadt’s large salon composition, The Arch of Octavius (The Roman Fish Market) (1858); collection of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

 In Rome, some attended the costume schools, or Public Schools as they were sometimes called, where they drew and painted from costumed models in the evenings. Costumes appealed to the American sensibility and descriptions of costumes frequently found their way into guidebooks to Italy. At the costume school, models dressed in colorful Italian regional clothing and posed for the artists. John Frederick Kensett attended such a school as did Christopher Cranch, Thomas Hicks and, very likely, Albert Bierstadt, as well.      

Bierstadt arrived in Rome in 1856 after studying in Germany. In oil on paper Bierstadt recorded three poses of a model dressed in an elaborate costume topped by a red cloak. These studies were intended for later use in the studio where they served as an artist’s repertory of costumes and poses which could be inserted into studio compositions. While human figures seemingly play a small role in Bierstadt’s oeuvre, even a single figure could, as John Falconer suggested to Cropsey, either mar or set the tone for an entire landscape.[3]      

Nature, of course, remained the primary inspiration for the landscape painters.      

Jasper Frances Cropsey, Sorrento, 1848, pencil and wash on paper

Hudson River School artists continued their practice of sketching expeditions during the summer months when they were abroad. In the summer of 1848, Jasper Cropsey and fellow-artists, Christopher Pearse Cranch and William Wetmore Story (1819-1895) made an extended sketching tour into Southern Italy. They arrived in Sorrento in May and, the following month, Cropsey executed this pencil sketch, Sorrento (1848). He carefully depicted the crumbling arcaded bridge in pencil, and indicated highlights in white wash. The majority of Hudson River School painters executed careful pencil studies of this type during the summer months. These served as information and inspiration throughout the winter. Cropsey carried his pencil sketches from southern Italy back to his New York studio, where they provided specific details in his large landscape compositions. As such, Cropsey’s drawing exemplified the activities of many of the American landscape painters in Italy during the mid nineteenth century, whether they were working in Italy, France, Spain, or England.      

Sketching trips revolved around specific locations where artists gathered informally, often depicting the same views. The result was an outdoor classroom of sorts–an informal sharing of ideas and techniques–and a source of competition and encouragement. European artists had long-considered a sketching tour of Italy as part of their studies. And their American counterparts followed in their footsteps. Americans relied on English language guidebooks (Murray’s handbooks to Italy, George Hillard’s, Six Months in Italy (1854), and Piale’s, Guide to Naples and Sicily (1847) for itineraries that would lead them through the most picturesque parts of the Italian countryside. These indispensable guides were read at home in preparation for a trip, and then carried with the artist-tourists throughout Italy. Guidebooks not only suggested the most picturesque scenery, but detailed the must-see monuments on the Grand Tour. These views and the guidebook descriptions, taken together, function within the vedute tradition.      

“A ‘veduta’,” Peter Galassi explains, “is an exact visual counterpart to the guidebook,” and “parallel to the itinerary is the repertory of the vedute, a standard series of views each representing a famous place.” At every important Italian site, artists “gradually established the best vantage point from which the important monuments could be seen most clearly.” Guidebooks, such as George Hillard’s, Six Months in Italy and Murray’s, Handbook of Rome, clearly made contributions to the standardization of certain views. Galassi continues: ‘Through repetition, the favored viewpoint- and the corresponding pictorial design-achieved an iconic status. …The major views of the repertory crowded out alternatives so that each place and its history became identified with a single image….’[4]. Very often, guidebooks pointed out the most advantageous spots for viewing monuments and picturesque scenery and artists would sometimes match word for image. One guidebook described “the great torch of Vesuvius hanging over the Bay of Naples” adding that “A painter could no where find a better model from which to draw an ideal mountain…. in the Bay of Naples the meeting of the sea and the land is like the embrace of long-parted lovers.”      

Albert Pinkham, Mosque in the Desert (1883) reveals the artist’s fascination with the exoticism of his Near Eastern subject

 While most artists took the traditional Grand Tour, some artist-cum-explorers went farther afield, searching for ever-more exotic locations. Albert Pinkham Ryder spent five months traveling through Europe, even venturing into Tangiers in North Africa. Samuel Colman, a second-generation Hudson River School artist, traveled through Spain into Northern Africa on his Grand Tour. Ronda, Spain’s sublime location, along with its resident population of banditti who preyed on tourists, added an element of danger to Colman’s tour. The sublimity of the landscape was matched only by the treacherous journey undertaken by the artists who sketched there. Barbara Novak observed that “The artist became the hero of his own journey–which replaced the heroic themes of mythology–by vanquishing physical obstacles en route to a destination,” resulting in the “displacement of the heroic from the work of art to the persona of the artist ….”      

During the first half of the nineteenth century Venice also lay outside the typical Grand Tourist itinerary. Like Tangiers and Ronda, Venice held an exotic appeal for Americans.      

There were very few Americans in Venice before 1860 and the city had the reputation of being crime-ridden and immoral. When Ralph Waldo Emerson visited in 1833 he called it “a city for beavers … a most disagreeable residence”[5]. Lord Byron, whose Romantic writings (e.g. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) so influenced Americans for three decades following his death in 1824, were instrumental in transforming Venice into “a fairy city of the heart” for American Grand Tourists. Additionally, John Ruskin’s, Stones of Venice (1851) was important in altering Americans’ opinion of Venice. Excerpts of his book were reprinted in the American art periodical, The Crayon, in 1855.      

After 1860, Americans’ perception of Venice changed dramatically. Between 1860 and 1920, they arrived in Venice in unprecedented numbers, with as many as ninety American artists recorded as having worked there. Margaretta Lovell observed in, Venice, The American View (1984), that, “Venice represented an exoticism of a distinct kind, not only was it physically remote and very beautiful, it was also clearly more than any other European or American urban center, non-industrial and technologically archaic.” That archaism was also a draw for Americans who viewed the city as a time capsule preserving an important part of the past.      

End- Part I      

Part II- ‘Americans in France’ (to be posted soon)      

This article includes excerpts from the original exhibition catalogue: American Artists Abroad and Their Inspiration: Selections from the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, in New London, Connecticut, in 2004. To receive a complete 64-page catalogue, with full-color illustrations for $18, plus 3.50, shipping, please contact info@artesmagazine.com

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Bibliography:   

[1] Cranch’s journal, quoted in Leonora Cranch Scott, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch 1813-1892, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917, p. 122.  Much of this essay has been derived from my Ph.D. dissertation: Lured by the Muses: Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892), New York: Columbia University, 1997.   

[2]Cranch quoted in Scott, op. cit., p. 105.   

[3]Falconer to Cropsey, letter dated October 29, 1848, in the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.   

[4]Peter Galassi, Corot in Italy, Open-Air Painting and the Classical Landscape Tradition, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991, p. 85.   

[5]Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in Erica Hirschler, “Gondola Days,” in Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760-1914, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992 pp. 113-114.  In Emerson’s journal entry for “Venice 2 June 1833,” he commented “Under full moon, later in the evening St. Mark’s piazza showed like a world’s wonder, but I still pity the people who are not beavers, and yet are compelled to live here.” in Alfred R. Fergusen, ed., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 1964, vol. 4, p. 74.