Vasily Kandinsky, Composition 8 (Komposition 8), July 1923
Oil on canvas, 140 x 201 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, NY

July 9 – September 7, 2010

Russian artists Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935), considered two of the pioneers of abstraction, separately explored a geometric vocabulary during the course of their careers. Malevich is recognized for his circa 1914 invention of Suprematism, an abstract style expressing universal truths through the interrelationship of color and geometric forms. On the other hand, Kandinsky, who was also interested in the universal qualities of geometry, increasingly utilized geometric motifs in his art in the early 1920s, when he took up a teaching position at the Bauhaus, a school of art and applied design in Germany. Unlike Malevich, Kandinsky insisted that even his most abstract work retained expressive content. Each artist would ultimately reinvent himself yet again at the end of his life: Malevich returning to a representational mode, and Kandinsky’s formal vocabulary altering to feature a softer palette and biomorphic forms. The Geometry of Kandinsky and Malevich examines each artist’s distinctive approach to abstraction through a focused presentation of seven paintings. This exhibition is curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, and Megan Fontanella, Assistant Curator.

Rob List in The Figure Series

June 4-27, 2010

Rob List with Melissa Cisneros, Diego Gil, Constance Neuenschwander, Olivia Reschovsky, Tjebbe Roelefs, and David Weber-Krebs

Parker’s Box is delighted to announce a collaborative, interactive, performance project by Amsterdam-based artist, Rob List.

Rob List’s performance work has enjoyed a constant international presence since the early nineteen-eighties despite the fact that his practice has remained particularly difficult to categorize.

The work has often been seen as both primitive and minimal, in that in most of List’s works he actively seeks to avoid the “representation of human experience”, wanting instead to create a “source of it”. With this stated intention, while technically his pieces involve elements or suggestions of minimalist theater, dance and mime, his energy is primarily invested in a reflection on the relationship between forms and the space they inhabit. In this way, Rob List’s performances seek to engage the spectator in a direct experience of the space they are sharing with the performer(s), free of representation or narrative, and concentrating simply on stimulating our awareness of physical presence and the fact that “the world exists because of our perception”.

This dynamic and this involvement between performer and spectator gently persuades the audience to embrace the here and now of their own and the performer(s)’ presence in a given space, without analysis and interpretation of meaning. Rob List encourages the audience to “recall the authenticity and the primacy of this perception” which requires no thoughts of, recourse to, or need for the virtual and digital universes in which we all spend ever-increasing amounts of our time.

Rob List’s work relates to many disciplines, including painting and sculpture, performance, theater, dance and mime as well as certain aspects of film, video, installation etc. In so much art today, the most frequent common ground between such diverse practices would be that “every gesture and action…seems to provoke the question “What does this mean?” Again, this is precisely the area evacuated by List in favor of a pared down relationship with the “real” that may ultimately be closer to certain abstract painting tendencies than to anything that occurs “onstage”.

At Parker’s Box during the month of June, Rob List will be orchestrating a body of ongoing performances, collaborations, research and experiments characteristic of the activities he has pioneered through his company, OZU, and before that in the context of the Institute of New Dramaturgy (Amsterdam) of which he is a founder and former director. Different works will be programmed at different times throughout the project, including performances by request for every viewer who visits the gallery during the afternoon, and daily performances in the evening (starting at 4 and 6PM) and at night (11PM).

For the work On the Balcony, Rob List has invited Mexican performance artist Melissa Cisneros and Hungarian choreographer/dancer Olivia Reschovsky to create solo movement works for the space. Visitors for On the Balcony are led into a specially created room for a five-minute movement performance that occurs just at the periphery of the visitor’s sight.

In two works from the Folly series (playing on the notion of the vain and absurd act/gesture, whether architectural or otherwise), the sober minimal movements of the performers Rob List and Swiss performer, Constance Neuenschwander revolve around a painted ‘folly.’

Suggestions of hybridization or cloning hover over works like Injerto/Greffe (Graft) featuring the Belgian performer, David Weber-Krebs, Dutch mime Tjebbe Roelofs, and the Argentine choreographer/dancer, Diego Gil; or Ter Kloon (on the matter of the clone) with Hungarian choreographer/dancer, Olivia Reschovsky. These works while dealing with fusion and multiplication of course link back into the central question of the individual body and its relationship to time – as a continual falling away of the present moment – and by extension to the fragility and vanity of human experience.

For the final weekend of the project, Rob List will also be presenting two solo works: Natura Morta, and Engrave, which in different ways dwell on notions of life and death, or the insignificance of gesture in the face of eternity – ultimately homing in once again on the status of the individual in the world. Rob List’s ability to simplify and pare down the content of performance art, removing almost all meaning except what ends up being nothing more than Man’s primal musing about his existence, conversely endows his work with incredible sophistication in the face of the contrasting sophistication of the contemporary world. In his own words, he refers to this as “a desire to return to the simplicity and authenticity of the perceptual animal and the perceptual consciousness. In each performance I wish to embody this literally, in a corporal way”.

Rob List is an American-born performance artist, choreographer and teacher who has been based in Europe for the last twenty-five years. In the early 1980’s he toured internationally in the avant-garde theater and film productions of Ping Chong and Meredith Monk, as well as performing his own movement theater work at La Mama and the Kitchen in New York. Rob List is the recipient of many prestigious awards including the 1997 Dutch Theater Directors Award and a 2002 Kunstprijs from the City of Amsterdam for his entire oeuvre. He was a 2004 Fulbright Scholar and a former recipient of an NEA Choreographic Fellowship.

Rob List’s solo shows and those with OZU include performances at Accusé de Réception, Paris, the Kitchen, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He appeared with Ping Chong at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Osaka Festival, with Ellen Fischer at PS122 and Limbo Lounge, and Meredith Monk in the PBS/ZDF film “Ellis Island.” List has created and performed numerous compositions in recent years at theatres, galleries and international festivals in Europe, the USA, and South America.

Click to purchase on Amazon.com

By Tracey Bashkoff (Author), Don Quaintance (Author), John Hanhardt (Author), Karole Vail (Editor)

Exploring the origins and early days of the Guggenheim Museum — when it was first known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting — this volume reveals for the first time the Guggenheim’s complex architectural history, drawing on extensive correspondence between Founding Director Hilla Rebay and artist Rudolf Bauer (whose work the Guggenheim collected exhaustively) to reveal the leading role Bauer played in envisioning the collection and the museum. It also explores Rebay’s unusual curatorial conceptions and framing practices at the museum’s early locations. Karol Vail provides biographies of many lesser-known artists in the museum’s collection, while others discuss the museum’s early history and ambitions. Architectural drawings, installation views, photographs and color plates of selected artworks help track the rise of this great museum.

Installation view

October 16, 2009 – February 14, 2010

The French-born international artist Daniel Buren is considered one of the fiercest critics of contemporary art. It is particularly towards the museum, its circumstances and conditions, that he likes to turn his critical attention. For the “museum is the place, with regard to which and for which works are created.”

For well over forty years Buren has applied his mischievous intuition to develop works that directly play on their surroundings. Thus, in institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York or, most recently, in the Musée Picasso in Paris, he has created breathtaking installations in dialogue with their specific contexts, thereby opening these up to new perspectives. But he has frequently performed his artistic interventions in outdoor locations too, where he typically applies 8.7 cm wide stripes – his characteristic artistic trademark – to give heightened visibility to certain aspects of reality.

In Nuremberg Daniel Buren encounters the striking architecture of Volker Staab, whose symbiosis of different architectural traditions represents a milestone in the history of modern museum architecture. In the exhibition “MODULATION Works in situ” conceived exclusively for the Neues Museum, Daniel Buren explores certain distinctive elements of the museum’s design. Making specific reference to the façade, to the foyer and its staircase, and to the exhibition hall, Buren has evolved works of his own that combine light and movement to create singular and exceptional situations.

Curators: Melitta Kliege, Angelika Nollert, Neues Museum

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Golden), 1995
Plastic beads and metal rod, variable dimensions
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Photo: Thorsten Monschein

October 2, 2009 – January 6, 2010

The aesthetic dialogue between Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Roni Horn is embodied in an exchange of gold, a reciprocal gift between two artists that resonates with the poetry of their respective projects. In 1990 during Horn’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Gonzalez-Torres encountered her sculpture Forms from the Gold Field (1980–82), two pounds of pure gold compressed into a luminous rectangular mat. Set directly on the floor in an otherwise empty gallery, the work threatens to dissolve into dazzling immateriality, the sense of pure surface that its delicacy invokes. Impressed by its radical simplicity and emotive capabilities, Gonzalez-Torres shared his memory of the work with Horn when they met in 1993. A few days later, she sent him a square of gold foil as a symbol of their newfound friendship and shared sensibilities. He was so inspired by her gesture and the expansiveness of her subtle work that he fashioned his own “gold field” in her honor: “Untitled” (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni) (1993), an endlessly replaceable candy spill of gold cellophane–wrapped sweets. Having described Horn’s Gold Field in his essay “1990: L.A, ‘The Gold Field’” from Earths Grow Thick: Roni Horn, as “a new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty,” Gonzalez-Torres created a gleaming, topographical sculpture that, in the spirit of his work, is always free for the taking.

Gonzalez-Torres used the color again in “Untitled” (Golden) (1995), one of his lustrous beaded curtains, which are used as room dividers or suspended in doorways through which the viewer must pass. Though Gonzalez-Torres always distanced himself from a stereotypically Hispanic aesthetic, refusing to be marginalized by any defining label, the beaded curtains invoke thoughts of his Cuban roots, calling to mind images of neighborhood bodegas or even family homes. Like his illuminated strings of light and candy spills, the curtains suggest festive times; yet, rendered here in glittering gold, the ample, plastic-beaded curtain is both humble and sublime.

Experienced together, Horn’s Gold Field (1980–82) and the recent acquisition, Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Golden), reflect on the artists’ respect for the evocative potential of minimal form and the symbolic valence of pure color. The fragile beauty of the works suspends commonplace meanings attached to gold as a source of wealth and extravagance, inviting instead a kind of poetic reverie on its materiality and symbolic resonance.

—Nancy Spector, Chief Curator

Vasily Kandinsky, Several Circles (Einige Kreise), 1926
Oil on canvas, 55 1/4 x 55 3/8 inches
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

September 18, 2009 – January 13, 2010

Pioneer of abstract art and eminent aesthetic theorist, Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) broke new ground in painting in the first decades of the twentieth century. His seminal pre–World War I treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), published in Munich in December 1911, lays out his program for developing an art independent of one’s observations of the external world. In this and other texts, as well as his art, Kandinsky strove to use abstraction to give painting the freedom from nature that he admired in music. His discovery of a new subject matter based solely on the artist’s “inner necessity” occupied him throughout his life.

Kandinsky is a central figure in the history of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His works not only represent a part of the core and essence of the collection, but also helped to inspire the creation of the building. In 1929, Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting Kandinsky’s canvases under the advisement of artist Hilla Rebay. Ten years later, their enthusiasm for the artist’s paintings, among those of others exhibiting nonobjectivity—a style of abstraction with no ties to the observable world—led them to open the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York. Later, Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned in 1943 to design what has become one of the architect’s greatest masterpieces, which opened in 1959 as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Though Kandinsky is known for an abstraction that expressed his inner nature and Wright for his advancement of an organic architecture connected to the natural world, both advocated a spiritual, aesthetic experience of life. During the museum’s fiftieth-anniversary year, the landmark building is filled with the canvases that encouraged its inception.

Kandinsky draws from the three largest public holdings of the artist’s work—that of the Guggenheim Museum; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich—as well as renowned institutions and private collections to bring together nearly one hundred paintings dating from 1902 to 1942. Complemented by more than sixty works on paper from the collections of the Guggenheim and the Hilla von Rebay Foundation, this retrospective retraces the painter’s oeuvre, focusing on key events that informed his life and work. Marked by two world wars and the 1917 Russian Revolution, Kandinsky’s abstraction did not develop in unworldly detachment; rather, this exhibition, the first full-scale retrospective of his career in the United States since 1985, reveals the complex background to his artistic advancement.

This exhibition is curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Christian Derouet, Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Annegret Hoberg, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich

Ree Morton, Line Series, 1974
Watercolor, crayon and pencil on paper
22 1/4 x 30 inches
Estate of Ree Morton

September 18 – December 18, 2009

The Drawing Center presents an exhibition of the work of the late American artist Ree Morton (1936–1977). The exhibition highlights Morton’s influential body of work, remarkably all produced between her decision to turn to art full-time in the late 1960s and her tragic death in an automobile accident shortly before her 41st birthday. While reflecting many of the currents of Postminimal and Conceptual art of the 1970s, Morton’s work also looked to a pioneering use of personal narrative, intimacy, humor, and poetic imagination. Yet the scope of her artistic production remains largely unrecognized, as does her vital contribution to feminist art practice and the importance of drawing to her development as an artist. Repetitive, minimal forms in Morton’s early work lead to more biographically tinged mark-making, ranging from abstracted diagrams acting as topographies of memory to botanical illustrations and decorative motifs. A marked interest in phenomenology, spatiality, kitsch, and the emotive potential of materials is merged in Morton’s later work, her sculptural practice presaging the formal vocabulary and theatricality of later installation art. The exhibition is comprised of a selection of major drawings, several of which will be on view for the first time, along with drawing-based sculptural works and a selection of notebook sketches. Curated by João Ribas, the exhibition takes its title from a T. S. Eliot poem Morton kept above her studio desk.

Born in Ossining, NY in 1936, Ree Morton died tragically in a car accident in 1977 in Chicago. She first studied nursing, then married and had three children before completing her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design (1968) and her MFA at Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (1970). During her lifetime, her work was exhibited at the ICA (Philadelphia), Artists Space and the Whitney Museum (both New York) among other venues. She was the subject of a 1980 retrospective at The New Museum and solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1985) and Generali Foundation in Vienna (2008). Morton’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975 (organized by iCI), and the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007).

Installation view

September 1-26, 2009

The Paula Cooper Gallery presents an exhibition of work by David Novros. Six paintings dating from 1965 to 1969 will be shown, some of which have not been seen in public for over forty years.

An original member of Park Place, the historic New York artist collective, Novros is well known for his large, abstract paintings on irregularly shaped, multipaneled canvases. With their sensuous and reflective surfaces created with multiple layers of sprayed-on acrylic pigment and glazed with Murano (a powdered pigment which is suspended in clear lacquer), Novros’ paintings provide the viewer with new types of perceptual and emotional experiences. He not only seeks to communicate content through monochromatic color, geometric form and complex spatial issues, but he also encourages a kinesthetic viewing experience through the surface’s response to changing light.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Novros often painted murals on his parents’ garage. Thus began the artist’s commitment to “painting as wall and on wall.” Influenced by a variety of art historical sources, including Native American pottery, Byzantine mosaics, Italian frescoes and the mural-scale paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Novros likens his work from this period to portable murals and aims to communicate the emotional power of geometric abstraction.

These breakthrough paintings from the initial stage in Novros’ career in turn influenced other artists as well, most notably Brice Marden and his panel paintings from the 70s. However, unlike other artists who utilize shaped canvases, Novros’ work emphasizes the critical meeting point of the canvas and wall, as if his paintings are extensions of the walls themselves.

David Novros was born in 1941 in Los Angeles and lives and works in New York City. Most recently, his work was included in a group exhibition entitled “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York” at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Novros was also the subject of “Contemporary Conversations: David Novros and The Menil Collection,” a one-person show that was part of a series of exhibitions that celebrate living artists whose work is in the Menil’s permanent collection.

Novros has exhibited in several prominent venues, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art in Dallas, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Bremen Museum of Modern Art in Bremen, Germany.

Max Gimblett, Orpheus, 2004
Gesso, polyurethane, pencil, epoxy, pigment,
moon gold leaf on wood panel
70 x 70 inches

June 19 – August 1, 2009

Hamish Morrison Gallery presents, for the first time in Germany, New Zealand artist Max Gimblett (* 1935). His work enjoys special recognition in his home country with which he has retained many links, but especially in the United States where he has lived since the 1970s. This year his works have been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum New York as part of the exhibition The Third Mind.

The work of Max Gimblett is characterized by paintings and drawings of great virtuosity and finesse as a bridge between different cultures. The contact with artists like Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock has had significant influence on his painting in the context of abstract expressionism. However, since the 1980s his cultural curiosity which had first been aroused by Maori art has been reflected by the influence of Asian culture on his work and his life.

By using the Greek word Téménos which refers to the space dedicated to a sacred shrine or sanctuary, to describe the exhibition, Gimblett does not evoke the religious aspect of art, but its spiritual dimension. The technological and aesthetic delicacy of his paintings consisting of rare and precious materials such as sheets of silver, gold and palladium imported from all over the world and combined with traditional materials and contemporary polymers results in masterful and fascinating works. The unique forms of his paintings break the convention, which automatically identifies a rectangle suspended from a wall as a work of art or at least as a decorative image. The viewer becomes aware of this quasi-votive character of the work, allowing him access to a dimension beyond time and space, opening a space of meditation.

In the act of painting, his gestures reflect an energy, a rhythm and a dance in which the viewer can participate. This participation is made possible by the perception of time by observation; time, which according Gimblett is concentric. The spectator, by following the traces of the paint brush, witnesses the beginning, accelerations, decelerations and the culmination of the gesture. For Gimblett the process of painting is not a cold cerebral act expressing the Cartesian “I” of the proud and egocentric modern man, but the Buddhist principle of non-self eclipsing one’s judgment. His painting expresses intuitive, pure energy.

The titles of his works and their shapes reflect the wealth of inspiration and syncretism of the artist as well as his interest in different cultures and his reflections on the Jungian collective unconscious. He appears to look beyond the Jungian self which is the unknown centre of personality where antinomies and the collective unconscious expressed by myths of different cultures and embodied by certain signs, such as quatrefoil (Apricot Garden, Celestial) are reconciled. By using the quatrefoil with its association to the four elements, windows, flowers in general or lotus in particular, Gimblett convokes the vital forces and archetypal transcendence of the human psyche.

This motif explains the most recurring references such as the influence of Japanese painter Senga Gibon (1750-1837), for whom the circle, triangle and square – bases for many of Gimblett’s works – alone represent the universe. (The Gaze – For Jackson Pollock 2008, Guggenheim Enso Series, 2008). According to the philosopher of Buddhism Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, the circle corresponds with the infinite without beginning and without end, while the triangle is the beginning of all forms, and the square, a double triangle, stands for the process of duplication. The approximation of the series Guggenheim Enso with “Ten Ox Herding Pictures”, which reflect the path to enlightenment in Zen, is particularly interesting, especially the 8th picture above entitled: “Self and Ox Forgotten”

Gimblett’s work is a synthesis not only of the many questions and answers posed by the history of art, but also between cultures by bringing together opposing values and principles, such as calligraphy and geometry, abstraction and figuratism, as well as aesthetic and philosophical propositions of east and west. In bringing together these spiritual considerations and coming to terms with the seductive power of images, and the intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment, Gimblett achieves in his work the reconciliation of the Apollonian and Dionysian.

 

Left: Larkin Company Administrative Building (demolished)
Buffalo, New York, 1902–06, Exterior view
Right: Larkin Company Administrative Building (demolished)
Buffalo, New York, 1902–06, Interior court view, Print, 18 x 26 inches

May 15 – August 23, 2009

Fifty years after the realization of Frank Lloyd Wright’s renowned design, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum celebrates the golden anniversary of its landmark building with the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. The 50th anniversary exhibition brings together sixty-four projects designed by one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, including privately commissioned residences, civic and government buildings, religious and performance spaces, as well as unrealized urban mega-structures. Presented on the spiral ramps of Wright’s museum through a range of mediums—including more than 200 original Frank Lloyd Wright drawings, many of which are on view to the public for the first time, as well as newly commissioned models and digital animations—Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward illuminates Wright’s pioneering concepts of space and reveals the architect’s continuing relevance to contemporary design.

During his seventy-two-year career, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), who died just six months before the opening of the Guggenheim, worked independently from any single style and developed a new sense of architecture in which form and function were inseparable. Known for his inventiveness and the diversity of his work, Wright is celebrated for the awe-inspiring beauty and tranquility of his designs. Whether creating a private home, workplace, religious edifice, or cultural attraction, Wright sought to unite people, buildings, and nature in physical and spiritual harmony. To realize such a union in material form, Wright created environments of simplicity and repose through carefully composed plans and elevations based on consistent, geometric grammars.

In his earliest designs, such as the Larkin Company Administration Building (Buffalo, New York, 1902–6) and Unity Temple (Oak Park, Illinois, 1905), Wright carefully deconstructed the boxlike environment of his European contemporaries by opening up corners and using walls merely as screens to enclose tranquil interior spaces. While the aesthetic strength of Wright’s work has invited people to revisit his idiom, it is the ambition of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward to celebrate the basic idea behind his architecture—the sense of freedom in interior space—and inspire visitors to see the potential that architecture can carry for the here and now and for the future.

Highlights of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward include newly created three-dimensional scale models that examine the internal mechanics of functional space in relation to exterior form in a variety of Wright’s projects. Among these are an exploded version of the Herbert Jacobs House (Madison, Wisconsin, 1937); a mirrored model for Unity Temple; and a sectional model of Beth Sholom Synagogue (Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1953). Large-scale models of unrealized urban projects, including his Plan for Greater Baghdad (1957), the Crystal City for Washington, D.C. (1940), and the Pittsburgh Point Civic Center (1947), provide insight into Wright’s visions for the landscapes of the city. In addition, special animations offer viewers the opportunity to experience an interpretation of nine of Wright’s unbuilt or demolished projects as well as his own Taliesin and Taliesin West.

 

Imi Knoebel, Untitled, 1968/72
Deutsche Bank Collection

May 23 – July 31, 2009

This year’s exhibition, conceived by Deutsche Bank, is devoted to the complex oeuvre of the Düsseldorf artist Imi Knoebel. Knoebel’s works have been continually pursued for the Deutsche Bank Collection for the last twenty-five years. The work of the former student of Joseph Beuys, with its pioneering exploration of form and color (also in the context of the young generation’s return to the abstract art of the 1960s and 70s), is today more momentous than ever. The exhibition is divided into two “acts.” The first part presents new works by the artist executed between 2005 and 2009. Under the title Ich Nicht (Not Me), they give a concise answer to Barnett Newman’s question “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?” Enduros, the second part of the show, constitutes a retrospective of Knoebel’s work from 1968 to 2005, covering the entire spectrum of the artist’s abstract formal vocabulary. Around 200 collages, drawings, photographs, and prints from the Deutsche Bank Collection provide a comprehensive overview of the artist’s oeuvre. At the same time, they pay tribute the medium of paper—the focus of the corporate collection.

The exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin is being mounted in close collaboration with the artist and in cooperation with the Neue Nationalgalerie, where Imi’s Knoebel installation Zu Hilfe, zu Hilfe… is opening at the same time.

 

 

Meredith Monk performing her piece “Juice”
at the Guggenheim Museum in 1969,
Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA,
Courtesy of the Paula Cooper Gallery

“…It’s day-job time again in America, and that’s O.K. Artists have always had them — van Gogh the preacher, Pollock the busboy, Henry Darger the janitor — and will again. The trick is to try to make them an energy source, not a chore.

At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again…”

 

 

Paul Feeley: Corfu (February 22), 1962 
Oil-based enamel on canvas, 60 x 48 inches 

September 13 — October 25, 2008

The exhibition includes nine enamel on canvas paintings made between 1961 and 1964. Feeley’s abstract works with their bright colors, simple repetitive forms and symmetrical compositions occupy an important place in the history of twentieth-century American art. Feeley, alongside Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, worked against the grain of the prevailing Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s and his work is most often associated with the Color Field painters. Feeley’s distinct body of work, however, reflects a wide range of influences, including ancient Greek and Cycladic sculptures, Moorish decorative tiles and contemporary American subjects, like his motif derived from the children’s game of jacks. 

Although his work is not as well known today, during his lifetime Feeley was at the center of the New York art world. His first one-person exhibition was at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1955. Starting in 1960, and continuing until his untimely death in 1966, he had yearly one-person exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery. In 1968, he was given a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Feeley was fundamental in establishing the celebrated art department at Bennington College, where he taught for over twenty years. At Bennington, he organized many historic exhibitions including the first retrospectives of his friends Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and Hans Hoffmann, exposing his students—Helen Frankenthaler among them—to many of the most significant artists of the time.

 

Walter Rosenblum. Thomas Hess papers, 
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

July 11 — September 14, 2008

Ad Reinhardt’s Black Painting, 1960–66 (1960–66) was donated to the Guggenheim Museum in 2000 by AXA Art Insurance Corporation as a study painting after it was deemed irreparably damaged. Over the course of seven years, conservators, scientists, curators, and artists collaborated to examine the issues surrounding the conservation of this painting, including the inherent vulnerability of monochromatic and minimalist paintings to the aesthetics of aging, experimental solutions for conservation, and the associated ethics of these strategies.

Physical examination and scientific analyses of the study painting contributed to a dossier of information about Reinhardt’s working methods and earlier restoration techniques. These findings are essential to the understanding of how one perceives an imageless surface of flat planes of color, how an artist’s hand (or lack thereof) confers meaning, and how one can define the essential criteria for a painting’s authenticity.

Imageless takes the viewer into the world of the conservator as forensic scientist to uncover the mystery hidden beneath the monochromatic black painting. The cutting-edge technologies used in this research project are being tested to expand the current repertoire of conservation techniques. Science, art, and perception co-mingle in this exploration of the motivation of the artist, materials of the painting, and possible treatment and preservation strategies for artworks that rely on unattenuated surfaces to convey meaning. The inherent fragility of these paintings challenges conservators to maintain a flawless surface while adhering to a stringent code of ethics. For comparative viewing and appreciation of the subtleties of surface, Imageless concludes with a selection of Reinhardt’s black paintings. Presented in low light levels in accordance with the artist’s intent, the paintings offer a rare opportunity to appreciate Reinhardt’s extraordinary technique and meet the perceptual challenges so often neglected by the casual museum visitor.

 

 

January 12 — March 1, 2008

Jac Leirner creates installations, sculptures, and mixed media pieces using everyday objects like business cards, plastic bags, cigarette packs and banknotes, which are meant to live in transit; they circulate within our society with their final purpose to be destroyed and taken out of circulation. She dislocates these items from their known context and injects them with new value simply by stopping this throwaway product cycle and collecting these items, which then become rejoined and eternalized within her work. Jac Leirner lives and works in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She has been the recipient of awards such as the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship as well as residencies at the Walker Art Center, USA, and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. She is in the collection of many institutions such as The Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Museum of Modern Art, NY.

 

 

Ward Jackson at Kay-Mar Gallery, NY, 1964
Transit & Garden 1 (left to right)

 

Quite simply, you have to know about Ward Jackson and his work — he was an innovative abstract painter, a maverick editor and arts administrator, and a key member of New York City’s artist community.  I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Ward’s nephew, artist Julian Jackson, about his uncle’s life and work.  Our discussion that follows is published on the occasion of Ward Jackson’s first retrospective exhibition, taking place at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY, from April 27 – June 2, 2007.

 

Matthew Deleget: The first time I learned of Ward Jackson’s work was just a few years ago.  I was walking down the ramp at the Guggenheim Museum taking in the Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) exhibition, seeing all the usual work by all the usual suspects, when I was stopped in my tracks by an incredible lozenge-shaped painting, a small one, installed on a short wall near the elevator bank.  It was a work by Ward Jackson and it was slipped into the exhibition by one of the Guggenheim’s curators on account of the fact that Jackson had recently died, age 75.  As I poured over his painting, I wondered to myself, who is Ward Jackson?  So, Julian, maybe you can help me answer that question, who was he?

 

Julian Jackson: That’s really a big, if short, question. He was a painter, a writer, an editor, an archivist, an opinionated observer, a passionate viewer, and was deeply engaged, his whole life, with art. Most of all, Ward Jackson was a real New Yorker, the kind who outgrows a small town, and follows his dreams to the big city.

His early interest in art and his restless intellectual curiosity led him, via art magazines, to a precocious interest in abstraction that had to have been pretty rare in his rural hometown of Petersburg, VA, in the 1930s and 40s. While studying painting at the Richmond Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University), he began a pivotal correspondence with Hilla Rebay, the curator for the Guggenheim family who had recently launched the Museum of Non-Objective Art, which, of course, later became the Guggenheim Museum. She encouraged him to send sketches, which she would review offering comment. I can imagine him eagerly waiting for the return mail! Her interest in his work, which meant so much to him, fostered both his life-long interest in the complexities of the figure/ground relationship in abstract painting and his scholarly interest in the early development of abstraction.  When he neared graduation, she offered him a job at the Guggenheim.   After a period of study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, MA, Ward finally settled in New York and took her up on it.

He started in the mailroom where he worked with Dan Flavin (who later dedicated a light piece that curled down the ramp to him ) before the Frank Lloyd Wright building was completed, and worked through various positions until becoming the archivist in the early 70s. In that position he remained an active part of that institution until his retirement in 1996, though even then he was called upon for projects and maintained desk space in a series of ever smaller nooks of Leiderkranz Hall, the rambling building on 86th Street that housed the archives at that time. For instance, when the cafe was remodeled in the late 90s, Ward curated the photographs that still hang there as a visual history of the museum.

The last time he and I went to the Guggenheim together was in the summer of 2003. Matthew Barney’s vast project was in the rotunda then, but we had come to see the exhibition of Malevich’s brilliant early work that was installed in an upstairs gallery. Ward knew well the intricacies of the building, and led me through a bewildering series of back offices and staircases so as to avoid the Barney. Everyone knew him and he had the run of the place. Before reaching the gallery, we passed an open door, which briefly revealed the rotunda. Ward held his hand beside his face to block out the view and hurried forward to view unsullied the distant idealism of the early Malevich. As a true believer in abstraction, he felt that the Guggenheim had gradually lost its moorings, sense of mission, and drifted far from its founding ethos under Baroness Rebay. This sense of traditionalism set him apart from many of his contemporaries, but was a deep part of him and deeply informed his work. We left the Malevich via another circuitous back way heading to the basement so that Ward could empty his bulging mailbox into his own equally and always bulging shoulder bag. It was the last time that he would visit place he knew and loved so well.

He passed away early in 2004, and Lisa Dennison, who curated Singular Forms, and who had known him at the museum since the 70s, generously included that painting that you saw in the exhibition. At the opening a large group of friends and colleagues gathered there sharing wine and memories. That corner of the ramp that night felt like a crowded opening in a small gallery. I know Ward must have felt right at home.

Well, that’s a long answer to your short question, and it really only touches on one side of him. Ward was certainly passionate about his job, but most of all, thought of himself as a painter and his work will be the focus of the exhibition at Metaphor.

 

Ward Jackson
Composition, 1948
Oil on masonite, 24 x 18 inches

MD: That was an inspired answer.  Ward is clearly someone that continues to inspire you and inform your work – both as an artist and director of a gallery.  Maybe you can tell me about your experience coming of age as an artist.  How and when did you realize your uncle was an artist?  How did he impact your world-view and development?

 

JJ:  Well, art must be in the genes because I was drawn to it. I was always drawing from an early age. We had a good small museum in Richmond where I grew up and my parents often took us there after church on Sunday. Maybe that’s why I still think of art as possessing a sort of spiritual component. Anyway, my grandmother lived nearby the museum so we would sometimes swing by her house afterwards for lunch. Her dark old Victorian townhouse house was chock full of Ward’s early work from the late 40s and early 50s.  She stored it for him all over her walls. To me, my grandmother’s house felt like an extension of the museum and I loved roaming through the cluttered hallways looking for his paintings.

Among his student works were the paintings he had made while studying with Hans Hofmann, and in them, there is a free, gestural energy added to his interest in figure / ground. I loved those paintings, and to this day, keep my favorite one on a wall in my studio. Of course, I had met Ward at family holiday gatherings, but he was an adult, quiet, and didn’t have much to do with the kids. Still, I loved the idea that we had an artist in the family and felt a real kinship with him just from looking at his paintings.

As I grew older and more serious about art, the idea that art could actually be a career was made more tangible by his example. I was kind of in awe of the fact that he worked at a great museum, painted seriously, and lived in New York. In the early 70s, as I was finishing high school, Ward had a one-man show at the Virginia Museum.  It was the first opening I ever went to and it was great. He was showing the bright, reduced abstractions of his Virginia Rivers series, squares of pure color bisected by contrasting colors on active diagonals. These paintings blended tough abstraction with pop color and were very challenging. By this time I felt confident enough to talk to Ward about his paintings and, in a sense, that conversation put me on the road I’m still on as a painter and curator myself.

During that period Ward had also been regularly sending me copies of the publication that he and two partners had started called Art Now New York. It was a three-fold folio containing 8 1/2 x 11 inch reproductions of work recently exhibited in New York, accompanied by statements from the artists. In the four-year run of Art Now (which later morphed into the Gallery Guide), they published everyone from DeKooning and Jasper Johns to Brice Marden and Robert Smithson. It was a window into the art world for me as a young student and a great introduction to a bunch of interesting artists and their thought processes. I would love to see Art Now compiled into a book project because, looking back, the four years of its run (1968–72) were a moment of extraordinary ferment in American art with Pop, Color Field, Minimalist, and Earthwork artists all sharing the stage with an older generation of sculptors and painters. These folios reflect the energy in that mix. In many cases the statements that Ward solicited and edited are absolutely seminal primary statements by some of the really significant artists of that period.

When I began traveling to New York as an art student, Ward would let me stay in his wonderfully cluttered studio on Union Square. He would set me up with a Gallery Guide underlined with his choice of shows that he thought I should see and would usually take me through whatever was showing at the Guggenheim. He was a great source of information and inspiration.

 

Ward Jackson
Rite of Spring, 1952
Oil on canvas

MD: I would like to talk a bit more in-depth about Ward’s early years, in particular his time spent with Hans Hofmann.  As you know, Hofmann had a reputation for being enormously generous as a teacher and had profound impact on modern art in America.  What do you think Ward took away from his studies with Hofmann?

 

JJ: In order to fully answer that question, I should back up a little bit to Ward’s student years. I mentioned the correspondence with curator and painter Hilla Rebay, which sharpened his interest in figure / ground relationships of the sort found in late Kandinsky. This connection led in 1948 to an invitation by George L.K. Morris to exhibit with the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group in their 11th annual exhibition in New York. This opportunity, coming when Ward was just twenty, led to a lifelong, close, and collegial friendship between the two men.  Morris was himself a painter and writer.  He was the first art critic for the Partisan Review, a founding member of the AAA, and an outspoken supporter for the development of abstract art in America. Twenty-three years older than my uncle, Morris became something of a mentor to him, encouraging him in his studies and earliest professional opportunities.

Though tempered with his own restless approach to mark-making, this period of Ward’s development clearly shows the influence of his contact with these two powerful advocates for a type of homegrown abstraction employing a shallow cubist division of space and floating isolated shapes that was very much a part of the critical stance of the AAA at that time. In this period he also toyed with Surrealist automatism in a series of small-scaled works in egg tempera on panel.

This tight and cerebral approach to artmaking was given a good shake in the sunshine when he earned the chance to study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown during the summer of 1952. Hofmann’s insistence on an art based in the study of nature and grounded in exhaustive experience with drawing and composition brought to Ward’s work a looser, organic energy and heightened ambiguity of space. The experience of working outside, close to the sea and the primal landscape of the seashore with its omnipresent horizon obviously touched a nerve with Ward.  It was something he returned to again and again, and it informed his work in various ways for years to come. For the rest of the 1950s, Ward turned his back on the earlier Neo-Plastic styles that preoccupied him as an undergraduate student and plunged into the orbits forming around the key gestural painters of the time, particularly Kline and DeKooning. In this way his contact with Hans Hofmann was critical because through his summer of work with him, he was pulled from the one camp, with its foot firmly planted in styles linked to the 1930s and thrust into confrontation with the dominant aesthetics of his own moment.

 

Ward Jackson
Red Vertical, c. 1956-57
Oil on canvas, 57 x 49 inches

MD:  As a young artist, Ward had a number of ongoing “mentor” relationships with established individuals, such as Rebay, Morris, and Hofmann, and he participated in an exhibition with the members of AAA, most of whom I assume were older and more well-known in the artist community. You did say, however, that it was Hoffman who pushed Ward into the “aesthetics of his own moment.”  I would like to know a more about this.  Who were some of the younger artists, with whom Ward developed friendships at this time, the artists of his generation?

 

JJ: To tell you the truth, I know less about this period of his life partly because I was barely walking at the time and partly because Ward talked about that time in his life less than others. At this point I’m very sorry that I didn’t sit down with him sometime specifically to learn more about that important juncture in his life. Like most artists, Ward was more interested in the present than the past and, by the time the two of us were starting to become close, more than twenty years had passed since he had studied with Hofmann.

What I do know is that he moved to New York in 1952, and began his life as an artist in earnest. Over the next ten years, he explored and expanded upon the gestural style of land / cityscape based abstraction that he had first dug into with Hofmann. He was part of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists and, like so many other of his peers, he began his exhibiting career in New York as part of the 10th Street scene of cooperative galleries that grew up around Irving Sandler’s pioneering Tanager Gallery. The tenth street co-ops provided important alternative exhibition opportunities for the flock of younger artists who, like Ward, were drawn to New York in the post-WWII period.

Most of these artists were working in some variation of the abstract and semi-abstract styles one associates with that period. The big players of that moment like Pollock, Kline, Newman, Rothko, and DeKooning were dominating both the scene and the uptown galleries so the downtown co-ops, many of which were artist-run, played an important role in nurturing younger artists. Artists as diverse as Allan Kaprow and Philip Pearlstein, Mark di Suvero and Alice Neel, Al Held and Yayoi Kusama, and hundreds of others all benefited from the support and early exposure provided by these rough and tumble, do-it-yourself spaces.

New York in the 50s must have been a great place to be a young painter with its heated air of intense debate and discussion and Ward was there. He had his first solo exhibitions in the mid 50s at the Fleischman Gallery, just around the corner on 9th Street. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find out much about that gallery. If anyone reading this could give me more information about it, I’d be grateful. I have no doubt that Ward was a keen observer of the scene, as well as participant, and made many acquaintances there that followed him through his long tenure in the art world. One friend from those years that he often mentioned was Judith Rothschild.

 

MD: Judith Rothschild was an abstract painter and active in the artist community.  She was also a member and later President of American Abstract Artists.  Tell me more about his relationship with her.

 

JJ: Well, this brings us to some of the interesting contradictions of Ward’s life. Judith Rothschild was indeed a serious artist, a good one, and was very involved as a supporter in the 10th Street scene and, as you said, the American Abstract Artists. She was also a wealthy heiress, well able to support her art life. Ward, whose salary at the Guggenheim was modest at best, and whose lifestyle was always marked by utter frugality, was, throughout his life, fascinated by and drawn to the wealthy. George L.K. Morris, his wife artist Suzy Frelinghuysen, and Judith Rothschild were longtime friends and colleagues with whom Ward spent a great deal of time through the years in mutual critique and discussion of both their own works and larger movements in the artworld.

 

Ward Jackson
Bridge, 1963
Oil on canvas, 34 x 34 inches

MD: This background information, particularly about an artist’s formative years, is always so critical in terms of understanding where an artist is coming from, his/her point of view, and overall value system.  It is a great segue into the work he was making in the 1960s, the work that first brought him to the broader attention of his peers and the greater art world.  How did Ward arrive at making hard-edge geometric abstraction in the early 1960s and what territory did he specifically stake out for himself?

 

JJ:  Like many members of his generation, Ward was also struggling to find his own voice. The fevered energies of Abstract Expressionism were beginning to sputter by the late 50s. Rauschenberg and John’s were already, by the mid-50s, pushing back against the overheated dominance of gestural painting by infusing its tropes with ironic detachment. Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers were looking for new ways to bring imagery back into painting. Ellsworth Kelly had recently returned from Paris charged with a freshened approach to pure color abstraction and Al Held had embarked on his series of huge paintings based on simplified letter forms. Ad Reinhardt was deeply engaged in the process of clearing his work of the marking and emotionalism that colored so much work of the later 1950s, and the ground-clearing work of Barnett Newman was also becoming better understood. These streams of activity were clearly informed by a heightened criticality in pointing the way toward the developments of the 60s and the cooler sensibilities that came into play in that period.

Ward responded to this crux moment with a body of work, the black and white diamonds, that marked the arrival of his mature style and laid out certain themes and approaches that would engage him for the rest of his life. Beginning in 1959 or so, his notebook drawings show him experimenting with the diamond as a framing device for calligraphic linear abstractions. Over the next couple of years in dozens of drawings, he begins to respond more directly to the tough formal and symmetrical imperatives of the diamond format itself, gradually developing a set of tightly balanced compositions that utilize its radial stability and echo its prominent diagonals. Transit, the painting that you mentioned at the very beginning of our talk and that was included in the Singular Forms show at the Guggenheim, is a good example of his breakthrough work. The diamond-shaped, ‘square on end’ canvas is first divided by a broad central white vertical band that overlaps, or cuts through, two centrally-stacked black diamonds. At the left and right hand corners of this shaped canvas, smaller diamonds in black are separated from the core by white outlines the same thickness as the ‘spine’. The result, though starkly graphic, is a subtle and ambiguous play of overlapping planes in a relatively small and tightly compacted space.

Ward first showed these pieces in an exhibition at the Kay-Mar Gallery in 1964, in which he shared the walls with a remarkable group of artists — Dan Flavin, Jo Baer, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt.  The hierarchic and emblematic inner geometries contained in this and the other paintings of this series set Ward’s work slightly at odds with the heightened material concerns of many of his peers in the exhibition. In a sense he was looking back to earlier, more pictoral iterations of abstraction while his fellows were busily staking out the more reductive strategies of Minimalism. Ward’s sense of scholarship and painterly lineage ran deep, and throughout his subsequent career, he honored them with his own personal, sometimes idiosyncratic approach to pictorial space and the problems posed by figure / ground relationships. He would often tell me in later years, “Mondrian only painted 13 diamonds.” Clearly he felt that the great master of Neo-Plastic painting had only scratched the surface of the possibilities contained within the prismatic confines of that difficult format.

Ward was devoted to the ideals of Mondrian, though his own work for the most part eschewed rigorous Neo-Plastic conventions. And like Mondrian, whose early works in particular showed the influence of his spiritual engagement with Theosophy, Ward’s work was to some extent colored by his own spiritual studies. Ward practiced Kriya yoga, a meditation technique focused on the transformation of physical energy to spiritual energy by visualizing its movement up the spine and outward. From the earliest black and white diamonds, Ward was interested in the primary vertical structure of the form, and its reinforced cruciform symmetry lent itself to the punchy diagrammatic nature of some of his more mandala-like paintings, especially in later diamond works from the 80s and 90s.

 

Ward Jackson
Virginia Rivers Series: Winona, 1972
Acrylic on canvas

MD: To continue that train of thought, how did Ward’s work change and develop into the 80s and 90s?  For instance, I’ve heard he was constantly making drawings on index cards, a couple of which I’ve seen recently in American Abstract Artist exhibitions.  How would you characterize his late work?

 

JJ: Beginning in the 50s, Ward established the practice of his ‘drawing books’ as he called them, small 4 x 6 inch pads that he always carried in his jacket pockets. On each page he would line off six squares or diamonds and, in these little spaces barely more than a square inch or two in size, work out in serial fashion the ideas that would later become paintings. In this way he could work whenever he wanted and wherever he was. These sketchbooks were an important part of his process and it has been fascinating for me to go through them as I have become more familiar with his linear development. I’ve been able to see how he would gnaw on an idea sometimes over a span of years, before committing it to canvas. This helps explain the fully resolved constructions of the paintings, as well as sheds some light on the sometimes-hermetic nature of his imagery.

As I described earlier, Ward’s work throughout his life swung on a pendulum from inner concerns to outward observation resolved in formal terms and back again. There was always a tension between the seen and the imagined, but as he moved into the 80s and 90s, the free play of ideas, as evidenced in the pages of the drawing books, became more personal and less programmatic. He developed various series simultaneously and within the self-imposed confines of his chosen format was able to engage a wide range of thematic material. One key theme that I have touched on are the group of mandala-like diamonds. Ward was plagued with various health problems during those years and his inherently spiritual approach to artmaking found a deepened release in these paintings, which often featured a rising central axis that, widening as it rose, emulated his positive meditations. This impulse was also at the core of his ‘ladder’ series, which actually began with a group of studies of his view of the World Trade Towers. Those iconic towers, which he could see from the window of his studio, fascinated him with their soaring verticals framing a clear center shaft of sky. At night he was interested in the rung–like arrangements of lit and unlit floors against the darkened night sky. The metaphor of ascendance was an important one in his work, the yearning to transcend the physical. The ‘ladder’ pieces sort of reconciled his key interests as they were based on his close observation and experience of the city, and yet, were also expressive of his personal brand of spirituality.

In his last works, the ‘opening space’ group, Ward returned to more strictly formal concerns exploring once again the unique particularities of space within the diamond format. These are among the most rigorous and successful of his works in this form, I think, reflective of his years of wrangling with it. On their face these final drawings, and the one painting that was their result (Homage to Mondrian, 2001 – 2003), are composed of just two broad bars of color, one an elongate rectangle hugging the lower left edge of the canvas, the other swung upward as if hinged to form a raised horizontal axis bisecting the canvas left to right slightly above center. These bars carve the space and seem to push it to the right creating tension within the diamond while dividing it into four separate and discrete areas of color, each with a different shape and volume. The result has a tough, elegant pictoral logic that pays a final debt to his brilliant precursor.

 

Ward Jackson
Homage to Mondrian, 2001-03
Acrylic on canvas, 34 x 34 inches

MD: During Ward’s last twenty years, you clearly shared an increasingly close relationship with him, which was precisely the same time you came of age as an abstract painter.  You were undoubtedly well-versed in his ideas, process, and practice.  So, on a more personal note Julian, what was Ward’s influence on your own work as a emerging painter?  I think it is also worth mentioning here that you are currently the Secretary of American Abstract Artists, a position long occupied by your uncle.

 

JJ: Growing up in the suburbs of Richmond, VA, where all adults seemed to be either moms or insurance men, it was tremendously liberating to know that such a thing as ‘artist living in New York’ was actually a career option. I learned a great deal from him and have been inspired through the years by the toughness of his conviction and the purity of his persistence. Ward never achieved fame or great fortune, but his work as a painter and participant in the artworld was a source of intense search, discovery, and joy for him. It framed his life and filled it with meaning. What more can any artist ask?

I am also an abstract painter and inherited his interest in the lineage, development, and potential of abstraction as a mode of discourse. My own work and sensibility, though, has always had a softer focus. As a painter I’ve been more interested in atmosphere than edge. Ward never quite approved of what he considered my romantic tendencies and frequently accused me of being “too Turneresque”. He was a tough critic with a tightly-focused perspective, still, as Pollock said, having a strong point of view to push against is tonic for an artist. Gradually though, Ward accepted the seriousness of my own work as a painter, and later sponsored me for membership in the AAA. I think in the back of his mind he was always hoping to protect his legacy in the group, and sure enough, he put me right to work as his typist for the minutes. Deciphering his handwritten notes was always an interesting perceptual challenge.

 

Julian Jackson
Cloudlight, 2006
Oil on panel, 36 x 32 inches

MD: And finally, let’s talk for a moment about the exhibition of Ward’s work you are currently organizing.  You are mounting the first retrospective of Ward’s work at your gallery — Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY — which you founded in 2001 with your wife, artist Rene Lynch.  This must be a labor of love for you.  How are you approaching his exhibition and what would you like the audience to walk away with?

 

JJ: Running Metaphor is itself a labor of love, but this show is special for me. I’m seeing it as the culmination of my long and fascinating relationship with Ward. We’ll be exhibiting a small group of key pieces from each decade of his active working life from the late 40s until he stopped working due to health problems in 2003. Southerners like Ward and myself are made keenly aware of heritage and ancestry and, with this exhibition, I’m paying homage both to my uncle and to a member of the family of artists. I’m very pleased to be able to present a small selection of his life’s work, to frame a sense of the scope of that life, to honor it, and to bring it back into the light. Obviously, I’m very close to the subject of this show, which makes it impossible to be as objective and critical about the work as I might normally be when presenting an exhibition, but I do think the work speaks for itself. I’ll be very interested to learn how a contemporary audience sees and responds to his work.

Those of us involved in the artworld and artmaking to whatever degree are always most alert to the smoke of today’s fire, burning in the moment. Retrospectives are a chance to step out of time and take a longer view. Artists are made up of many things and context is one of them. Each artists’ contribution helps define and frame his or her moment. With hindsight we can see who was in the middle of the frame and who was out at the edges, but in a very real sense, the edges themselves play a constant and critical role in the definition of the center. I would like the audience to walk away from this show with a heightened appreciation of the flow of time that we’re all a part of, a renewed appreciation of the interesting contributions of my uncle, Ward Jackson, and a greater appreciation of the many fires that burn with heat at the edges.

 

Julian Jackson is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder of Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY.

Matthew Deleget is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder of MINUS SPACE.

Links
> American Abstract Artists
> Hans Hofmann Estate
> Judith Rothschild Foundation