Was glänzt, ist für den Augenblick geboren, 
Das Echte bleibt der Nachwelt unverloren.

That which glitters is born for the moment;
The genuine remains intact for future days.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust eine Tragödie, Kapitel 2: Vorspiel auf dem Theater (1808)

I was so cold when I left Dorothy Goode‘s studio after a visit last week that I could barely get the key into the car ignition. During our first ever encounter we had huddled, both in down jackets and hats, in front of a little electric stove in her unheated ware-house abode. The space had beautiful views, brilliant light and a damp iciness that crept into my arthritic bones. I could not help but think of Frans Hals, that radical observer of humanity, who was so impoverished at the end of his life that in the Dutch winter of 1664 he accepted three loads of peat on public charity, otherwise he would have frozen to death. (Of course he then had to portray the administrators of said charity, the Governesses of an Alms House in 17th century Haarlem – those faces all-telling.)

Not that Goode would accept alms. Ever. Fiercely independent, proud, accomplished and not at all risk-averse, she’ll probably persuade you rheumatism is the price you pay for pursuing your art. Or so I wager. After all, I have to run on the impressions of 2 hours of conversation with an artist intensely protective of her inner life.

Wager I shall. Our conversation led my thoughts back to the cautioning words of one of Hals’ landsmen, Vincent van Gogh. In a letter to his brother Theo, he was acutely aware of the temptation to exchange security for creative independence, mediocrity for daring. “How does one become mediocre? By going along with this today and conforming to that tomorrow, as the world wants, and by not speaking out against the world and by only following public opinion!” He compared himself and his brother “so the one, “a certain position or affluence and a businessman,” the other “poverty and exclusion, painter.”… “I feel that the future will probably make me uglier and rougher, and I see “a certain poverty” as my lot — but — but — I will be a painter … in short a being with feeling.” (Letter by Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo on or about Sunday, 16 December 1883)

Plus ça change plus c’est la meme chose – if you follow your own path, defy convention, are immune to Zeitgeist and pursue what you – and not the world- want, and if there’s no trust fund carefully hidden in the wings, you do lack security to a degree that can veer into the frightening.

Forget talent. Forget vision. Forget skilled craft. I think John Berger put it best in Ways of Seeing (1972): “Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their interests as narrowly as possible.This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and is not desirable.”

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The pressure to conform to “desirable standard” – dripping paint today, identity politics tomorrow, or was that yesterday? – is intense. Opting for shimmering instead of genuine is only increased by structural factors beyond your personal recognition as an artist. The number of failing galleries, often due to higher real-estate cost, means fewer options for representation, and the surviving ones will understandably select with an eye on their own bottom-line. This includes factoring in the taste of potential patrons and the artists’ ability to draw collectors in with personal connections and the like. Add to that the fact that new generations of buyers, who should replace the older ones now downsizing to their retirement homes, are exceptionally burdened with educational debt, have little homeownership that opens up space for collections and, importantly, tend to spend on experience rather than objects. The perfect storm, if you were not one of the rare break-out artists during the last few decades.

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Conforming she ain’t. Mediocrity is the last term that would come to mind when perusing the body of art in her studio or assessing the richness of the conversation. True to a vision, the first.

I had seen and liked Goode’s work across the last decade at Butter’s when the gallery was still a brick & mortar enterprise. A recent show, Transfixed, at Augen, rekindled my interest and led to my request for an interview. What drew me in was what I perceived to be exuberance in these paintings, and the sense of something moving. In fact they recalled one of Piet Mondrian’s claims (I seem to be stuck on the Dutch today!) he made about his work in response to the suggestion by Calder that some of their parts should be made to move: “Well, I think my paintings are fast enough already.”

The perceived speed of Goode’s recent paintings seemed to me in equal part giddy and compulsively driven, a perfect tension between lifting your soul up and weighing your heart down with the emotional valence behind those expressions. One part that helps evoke a sense of lightness is the medium: egg tempera painting (mixing egg yolks with paint pigments and a liquid agent) feels inherently less heavy and foreboding compared to oils, tempera don’t darken over time and they often resemble pastels, in their thin layers and matte finish. Brushstrokes have to be fast and precise with the quick-drying tempera, and crosshatching carefully thought through. It is not a forgiving medium compared to oil, requiring years of practice for the skill levels seen in the exhibits at Augen.

The part that alludes to heaviness lies in the medium as well: heavy wood panels are the base substrate, covered with an absorbent ground, often Italian gesso, that requires tons of physical labor in cooking it up and applying it to the board. Overall, of course, it is the expansiveness of the gesture, and then the unexpected, strange stopping short in those abstracts that is the catalyst for the psychological impact.

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“Mir liegt das Gefühl des sich Ineinander-und Übereinanderschiebens der Dinge. ”

(I cherish the sense of things merging and overlapping.)

Paula Becker Modersohn, in a letter to her friend Clara Westhoff Rilke, 1903.

As German art critic Adolf Behne pointed out in 1923, Paula Modersohn was not yet familiar with the concept of abstractionism since she died much too early, in 1907, with her pathbreaking work left unfinished. But the concept of constructivism that was so central to her art already contained the idea of abstraction in embryonic form. (Paula Modersohn und der Uebergang zur Bildkonstruktion. In: sozialistische Monatshefte 60 (1923). S. 294-299)

Things merging and overlapping have blossomed into full form in Goode’s abstractions, who also frequently experiments with flat fields of colors and strong contours, as did Modersohn Becker. It is not where she started out, though. Raised in rural locations in California, a life often defined by scarcity of cultural stimulation and uprooting, she graduated college from Northern Arizona University, strongly attached to representational drawing and illustration. The pursuit of a higher degree in art hit numerous obstacles, some unpreventable, health related, and never came to fruition.

Not that that stopped her. She has been painting ever since, the love for representational human form soon succeeded by increasing abstraction, freeing her perfectionist self from too many constraints imposed by reality that wanted a mirror image.

Like her painter sister, 130 or so years ago, she chose art to dominate her existence, with relationships at times subservient, and rules of social commerce or politeness disbanded. Like with her forbear, the life events of psychological importance willed themselves into the paintings, in Goode’s case often in diaristic fashion, with language serving as the underpainting for 144 panels, for example, documenting the dissolution of a relationship. The women painters also both seemed to have a hunger for experience, and openness towards it, while at the same time retreating into intensely needed private isolation and withdrawal. They would have gotten along fine. (A decent biography in English of Paula Modersohn by Diane Radycki can be found here.)

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Of all the work I saw that morning while shivering away, I was most drawn to paintings that had an added element to the fine and precise layers of tempera. The artist uses a tool that adds three-dimensionality to the flat color gesture, scratching finely grained patterns into the surface of the painting.

It struck me as joyful, in the Nabi tradition of embracing something decorative as having the right to exist, belonging in “high” art. Playful beauty.

And it was that playfulness, that geometric lightness in 3D that brought me back to Alexander Calder now talking about his own art, not Mondrian’s. In what is as close to an artist statement as you ever got out of him, he wrote to the abstraction-creation folks in 1932:

Merging. Overlapping. Nothing at all of this is fixed – certainly not how art relates to the rest of life, how varying events – or brushstrokes – bond to ever shifting constellations, how an artist’s growth becomes manifest in her choice of direction. The only thing I see as unmovable is that Goode’s art will out. If she doesn’t freeze to death in the meantime.

One of the last exhibitions I saw in Germany before I came to the US in the early 1980s was a Chaim Soutine retrospective of many of his meat paintings. The artist was curiously missing from the German art museums, and the curator’s notes were stretching psychological analyses of the reasons why he painted the way he did and, particularly, what he painted, namely dead meat. Discussions of his life-long hunger, speculations about his dietary restrictions due to stomach ulcers (the ultimate cause of his untimely death) and veiled references to the physical abuse he experienced as a child in a dirt poor family of 11 siblings abounded. His urge to draw persisted despite beatings by an orthodox Jewish father who felt this was not in line with religious proscriptions.

I had trouble digesting the body of Soutine’s work – it seemed brutal and yet exuberant in its colorization.

And here we are in 2018 where I saw many of his paintings at a recent visit to the Barnes foundation, realizing now with a more adult and educated eye the power of his vision as well as the depth of his craft. Although Barnes bought 52 of his paintings at once, and, I believe, more later, the collector and artist did not exactly take to each other – see a description here:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-ca-shocking-paris-exerpt-20150503-story.html

Here is short french film re-enacting Barnes’ visit with various French artists and dealers, showing many of the treasures now on view at the Foundation. Most interesting for the actual photos of the artist(s).

The exhibit I wish I could see is the one currently offered at the Jewish Museum in NYC, Chaim Soutine: Flesh. ( I guess  meat is too gross a title for the refined sensibilities of the New Yorkers. I guess you cringe at today’s photos as well….)

https://thejewishmuseum.org

The Schjeldahl review below seems like the perfect guide to understanding what is on offer – he has written about Soutine multiple times, but this essay struck me as the ultimate combination of description and analysis.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-vulnerable-ferocity-of-chaim-soutine?utm_source=Breakfast+with+ARTnews&utm_campaign=2aaffa45e2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c5d7f10ceb-2aaffa45e2-293486709

A classic book on Soutine by David Sylvester (Chaim Soutine, 1893-1943) who died in 2001 is, alas, rarely available and then only for a steep price.  Maybe I’ll raid the piggy bank….

And by the way, what you see is what we eat……

Harvard Art Museum

Something is in the air – and I am not just referring to mobiles, although every museum I set foot in during a short trip to the East Coast seemed to have something floating about.

Philadelphia Museum of Art MFA Boston

Rather, the air is suffused with a desire to take stock of periods of the past that just might inform us about how to handle the present, in our understanding of art history as well as that of our times. Two current exhibits are perfect examples of this: Inventur at the Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, MA and Modern Times at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

(All photographs are paired from the exhibits, Inventur in first position, followed by my best match from Modern Times.)

Wilhelm Rudolph Drawings of Dresden 1945-46/Diverse Industrial Scenes by Benton Murdock Spruance, Charles Turk, Jolan Gross Bettelheim, Ida Abelman mid 193os to 1943

Inventur (I) focusses on German art, while Modern Times (MT) covers the American departure into modernity. There are striking parallels of curatorial choices and artistic achievements in both of these exhibitions. They cover a limited period of time (1943 – 1955 for I, 1920s to the 1950s for MT,) display an incredible diversity of artists active during those periods, include painting, photography, collage and sculpture, and rely on core themes equally important for the artistic developments in both countries during the first half of the last century.

https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/visit/exhibitions/5388/inventurart-in-germany-194355

http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/866.html?page=2

Harald Duve Carnival Feast 1952/George Biddle  Whopee at Sloppy Joes 1933

The mood, in turn, is strikingly different. And how could it not be? Modern Times reflects the optimism,  dynamism and daring of the American art scene of its epoch. Inventur, on the other hand, conveys the trauma, pain, but also resilience of German artists digging themselves, sometime literally, out of the rubble of the post-war years.

Karl Hofer Nights Of Ruins, 1947/ Kay Sage Tanguy Unicorns came down to the Sea 1948

Both exhibits make room for experimentation, architecture, urban scenery and the race towards industrialization.

Erwin Spuler Bombed out Buildings 1946-48/Arnold Rönnebeck Wall Street 1925

Both represent women artists, those known and those less familiar, including two of my favorite queens of subversion, Hannah Höch and Dorothea Tanning.

Hannah Höch Poetry around a Smokestack 1956/Dorothea Tanning Birthday 1942

As someone who grew up in Germany during the the latter years covered in Inventur, I felt a stronger pull to the themes of that show: the artistic reaction to the horrors, destruction, fear, disbelief and eventually hope of those living through the aftermath of the war in Germany.

The title of the exhibit (Taking Inventory) was borrowed from a 1945 poem by Günther Eich, which I am attaching in English translation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/52394/inventory-56d230d30ccb8

This is a strange choice, to be frank. Eich, born in 1907, preached before the war that poets should not be political, and yet showed extreme conservative opinions in his scathing literary criticism of others. In 1933 he applied for membership in the NSDAP, but was rejected. He then produced some 160 radio plays that very much spoke to Nazi issues and values and were widely broadcast. After the war, he opportunistically claimed one had to be critical of the fallen regime – and went on to be a celebrated writer, winning honors ad awards, while considered by others to have been a Mitläufer, a Nazi hanger-on. To have this turn-coat’s poem spearhead an exhibit of true dissenters is puzzling, to say the least.The power of the exhibit has you forgive this, however.

The visual works take inventory, indeed. They depict the destroyed landscapes, the vagaries of every day life, the attempts to escape the post-war reality of hunger, illness and despair by either documenting the catastrophic conditions or escaping from them into fantasy worlds. There are also hints of the unquenchable desire to return to some kind of normalcy, to rebuild a sense of home and focus on things like modern furniture, car ownership and the like, to move forward.

Konrad Klapheck Typewriter 1955/Charles Sheeler Cactus 1931

The curators note that the exhibit conveys not just an artistic, but also a physical and moral stocktaking of artists who stayed – and were endangered – during the Nazi regime and the hard years that followed, with a Nazi-indoctrinated public and critics trying to suppress their work way into the 50ies. I completely agree – many of the paintings I saw were testimonials in the truest sense of a world destroyed by fascistic ideals and action – something worthwhile to remember here and now.

Modern Times, in contrast, leaves you buoyed with a sense of energy. Where the German art makes you hold your breath, the American exuberance makes your heart beat faster. Given the vast collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it also allows glimpses of lesser known artists beyond the panoply of the famous cohort.

In the end both shows pull off something extremely valuable: they evoke feelings without giving in to  irritating pathos and they link to critical thoughts about our past without yielding to nostalgia.

If you happen to be traveling to Boston or Philadelphia in the near future, I recommend you make time for a visit.