Richard Segalman by ACC Art Books

Richard Segalman Black & White

Richard Segalman Black & White Muses, Magic & Monotypes by susan forrest castle

foreword by philip eliasoph, phd introduction by anthony kirk

the artist book foundation new york london hong kong

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Contents

Artist’s Statement Foreword

phillip eliasoph, phd

Monotype: An Impression of One

anthony kirk

Richard Segalman: Black & White Muses, Magic & Monotypes 25 susan forrest castle

Acknowledgments

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Selected Chronology

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Selected Solo and Group Exhibitions, Collections, Awards, and Teaching History 19 Selected Bibliography: Monotypes Photograph Credits

175

173

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Artist’s Statement

In art school, all projects started with a pencil, charcoal, or pen and ink. It is difficult to remember when I didn’t have a piece of charcoal in my hand. I spent hours in New York in subways, waiting rooms, and the Horn & Hardart sketching people. It seemed enough at the time. My interest in color came later. When watercolor, pastel, and oil began to intrigue me, I lost drawing. I didn’t draw at first as many painters do because I was painting instead. I found myself compartmentalizing. A sudden breeze catching a stray hair, a surprise of sunlight hitting a profile, an arm raised provocatively––these were my muses. Working with the same models for many years is a joyful, yet frightening experience. Will the magic still be there between us? They change; I change. Yet there is a thread of recognition that joins us as I continue working and experimenting, trying to find my voice with color. These are the moments that helped create my art for five decades until I found myself at an impasse with painting. It was seeing an arresting monotype at the school where I teach that led me to a new medium and eventually back to black and white. Before, prints had seemed like a world unto themselves; after studying the process, I was hooked. This medium was what I had been looking for. A monotype is unpredictable, fast, and full of accidents. This new approach was about loss of control and very exciting. Most important, the monotype brought me home to my strength. The lithograph crayon has taken the place of charcoal. When I first began to print, I let the paint dictate the next step. Either I started with a clear plate and worked into it, or a coated plate and removed the pigment. Line, flat areas, and shapes are all part Printing with master printer Marina Ancona.

of the creative process when making monotypes. The unknown is the most rewarding part of the work, and the process is as important as the subject. When it all comes together, it is the thrill of making art.

Studio Sunlight, 213. Monotype, 14 × 1 inches (35. × 4. cm). Courtesy Harmon-Meek Gallery.

An Artist’s Search for the Light

Richard segalman’s authenticity, complexity, and ongoing relevancy are unassailably confirmed, and there is little chance of denying his secure role among America’s first-ranked, contemporary, figurative Realists, as evidenced in the exquisite monotypes presented here. Truth be told, I have been chasing the art of Richard Segalman for most of my career. Almost 45 years ago he caught my attention when John Canaday, leading art critic at The New York Times, acknowledged, “There is an agreeable unpretentiousness in [Segalman’s] pictures.”1 With an exhaustive exhibition history spanning six decades and acceptance in the permanent collections among several flagship museums (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Corcoran Gallery of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Butler Institute of American Art; Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum), one could expect a reduction, a slackening. Instead, Segalman is taunting himself while daring observers to see much more beyond the window dressing. Like a daffy-looking beauty pageant queen who in reality is a Phi Beta Kappa and Rhodes scholar, Segalman’s art is too often misread, even stereotyped for its “agreeable” qualities. His late-in-career monotype explorations are daringly defiant. They project a confident, “in-your-face” recklessness; he is responding with a provoking, fingering gesticulation, as if to say, “You have no idea what I’m thinking—just watch what I’m creating!” This portfolio of monotypes is endowed with his trademark: a pristine, “first-seen” quality. With their uncannily distilled, instantaneous lucidity, Segalman’s images might be too quickly dismissed for tenderly arranged, irresistible eye candy. No apology is needed as he delves into ravishingly delicious images. Almost effortlessly, the gravitas of great art’s “big themes” emerge: figurative mastery, psychic alienation, the tension of amorous relationships, and pitch-perfect composition—all woven within romantic landscapes or urban environments.

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Monotype: An Impression of One

Who can say wherein lies the charm of the monotype––that unique print from a painted plate, which stands in the half shadow between painting and printmaking? But charm there is, and a haunting quality that more than justifies the making of monotypes and the public response to them. The monotype is not always taken seriously. For one thing, the process is so easy that anyone can make one; therefore it is often assumed that such “child’s play” deserves little consideration. It has been called a “tricky medium”––given over to superficial effect. It has been accused of owing its successes to the fickle hand of “happy accident.” But in spite of all these derogatory approaches, the monotype remains a source of joy to the artist and collector alike. Its spontaneity and freshness, its directness and freedom, place it apart from other traditional print media as a means of artistic expression that should not be overlooked.1 –ida ten eyck o’keeffe

The artist ida ten eyck o’keeffe, the younger sister of Georgia O’Keeffe, penned the preceding rationale for the monotype in an article for the June 1937 issue of Prints magazine. She made monotypes in her Manhattan apartment by painting with printing ink on a sheet of glass, laying Japanese paper on top, and then using the weight of a handheld iron, she pressed the paper into the wet ink. The firm pressure that she exerted was sufficient to transfer the ink from glass to paper Detail of Coney Island Reflections I, 213. and thereby create a unique print, a monotype. Her words on the monotype process, as pertinent a Monotype, 1 × 14 inches justification for the medium then as they are now, reappeared as a foreword to Roger Marsh’s book (25.4 × 35. cm). Monoprints for the Artist, published by Alec Tiranti Ltd, London, in 199, the year after I enrolled in Collection of artist.

art school. However, at no time during the five years I spent at art school––culminating with a postgraduate course in printmaking at Chelsea School of Art––was I ever made aware of the monotype process. I never saw any of my fellow students make monotypes nor did any of my professors teach the process. When I arrived in the United States in 1974, I was given a copy of the recently published book, The Complete Printmaker by John Ross and Clare Romano. It served me as a guide to all aspects of contemporary printmaking being practiced in this country at the time. Tucked in at the end of a chapter on relief printmaking, barely a page was given to what the authors referred to as “The Monoprint.” This brief mention was illustrated with a monoprint by Michael Mazur. Eighteen years later, when The Complete Printmaker was revised and expanded, the monotype was given its own chapter with fourteen pages devoted to all technical aspects of the process, and illustrated with monotypes by William Merritt Chase, Mary Frank, William Blake, Maurice Prendergast, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Karl Schrag, Nathan Oliveira, Ron Pokrasso, and Michael Mazur. In honor of his instrumental role in the revival of this medium––as artist, teacher, and writer––Mazur’s monotype Palette Still Life graced the dust jacket of this new edition. Just to clarify, a monoprint is a variant proof from a plate or block that has a repeatable matrix consisting of engraved, etched, or gouged lines. These same lines are evident in every print, but because the artist may choose to create tonal passages by leaving more or less ink on certain areas of the plate or block, no two impressions are alike. The monotype, on the other hand, is printed from a smooth surface such as glass, metal, or Plexiglas upon which an image has been made. With a monotype, there is no repeatable matrix; each print is completely unique. Renewed interest in monotype printmaking in this country can be attributed to two museum exhibitions, a gallery exhibition, and a survey of monotypes that traveled widely throughout the United States. All together, these events shone light on this all-but-forgotten medium by educating the public in general, and artists in particular, not only about those who made and were making monotypes but also by describing the technical processes involved. In 19, for her PhD dissertation at Harvard University, Eugenia Parry Janis presented an exhibition of 79 monotypes by Edgar Degas at the Fogg Art Museum. Degas’s oeuvre in monotype had been previously unknown to but a few. In the catalogue foreword, John Coolidge, director of the Fogg Museum, wrote, “Above all a dissertation must illuminate. This Mrs. Janis’ study has done, and astonishingly.”2 Michael Mazur saw this exhibition and responded to the works’ fluidity and immediacy; he immediately began to incorporate the monotype process into his own work. He wrote:

maurice prendergast (159-1924) At the Seashore, 195. Monotype on cream Japanese paper, laid down on Japanese paper, 7 11⁄1 × 5 15⁄1 inches (19.5 × 15.1 cm). Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.9. Terra Foundation for American Art.

One close look at Degas’s Café-Concert Singer [fig. 1] was all I needed to get started. This tiny explosive image, a spontaneous gift of the artist’s spirit, seemed to have been breathed directly on the paper in one magical gesture. A closer look reveals Degas’s labor. His fingers pushed in ink like modeling clay. His painter’s cloth wiped out black ink for luminous whites. His brush added telling contours. At just the right moment he printed his constellation of tones, not much more than a cluster of smudges. But when the paper emerged from the press, still damp and pliant, those little marks became flesh, hair, fabric: a nose and mouth in one

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Photograph: Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago/Art Resource, NY.

line; a gloved hand, corrected and redrawn. They became a spotlighted café singer, bawdy and aggressive as the strokes that made her. The spontaneity and energy in that little print lifts the medium into art.3 Along with Mazur, other artists who were teaching printmaking at prestigious art schools––such as Matt Phillips at Bard College and Nathan Oliveira at Stanford University––either saw the Degas exhibition or obtained the catalogue. They, too, became aware of the potential for the medium in their own work and they also included monotype in their printmaking course curriculums. Matt Phillips, who had started making monotypes in 1959 and had even begun to ink and print his linoleum block prints in a unique painterly way, curated the exhibition The Monotype: An Edition of One. Organized by Bard College and The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, this survey traveled across the United States and was viewed by many artists and art students. In 1979, the Davis and Long Gallery in New York mounted a survey of the monotypes of the Post-Impressionist Maurice Prendergast. Prendergast was well known for his oil paintings and

fig. 1 edgar degas Café-Concert Singer 177–17. Monotype, 7¼ × 5 1⁄1 inches (1.4 × 12.9 cm). Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, Switzerland. Photograph: Courtesy of E.W.K.

Richard Segalman: Black & White Muses, Magic & Monotypes

Black and white is perhaps the most severely limited medium, certainly in a physical sense. And yet despite this––or indeed because of this––black and white is the most stimulating and challenging medium, more likely to evoke from the artist his most creative, original and personal images. I stressed the point to students in my painting and drawing classes: “The narrower the limits, the greater the creativity.”1 –robert angeloch

Richard segalman discovered the monotype medium by accident and, as he says, just in the nick of time. Although dread of going into the studio plagues most artists at some point during their careers, in the early 199s that dread had, for Segalman, become something more than run-of-the-mill artist’s block. It was no longer a question of simple avoidance, of jumping at a call to meet a friend for coffee or any other distraction that could possibly postpone confrontation with yet another blank canvas. Segalman had even lost the ironic lilt to his voice: No longer could he make jokes about the fix he was in. It was very bad, very, very bad when I had that block. It makes you very lonesome. It makes nothing else work. Because the truth is what you are after. And if you are not living the truth it is sad, an unlived life.2 Lucy in Cerillos, 21. Monotype, 15 × 11 inches (3.1 × 27.9 cm). Courtesy of Harmon-Meek Gallery.

It was during this artistic lacuna that Segalman visited Davis & Langdale Gallery in New York, where he himself had shown in the early 19s. Standing with gallery founder Roy Davis, Segalman

recalls Davis nodding toward one of several small, enigmatic canvases by Albert York and saying something to the effect that, “An artist is lucky to find the right subject, the right size, the right medium…” While that statement sounds straightforward enough, to an artist it is anything but. And for Segalman, at that point in time, it was profoundly moving, terrifying even; he left, nearly in tears. He knew that others would tell him, emphatically, that he did have such a body of work—“right” in every respect––and that his artistic and commercial successes were indisputable. After all, by that point in time, his work had been celebrated with more than 25 solo exhibitions in New York City; Naples, Florida; Woodstock, New York; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and beyond; in countless group exhibitions at such prestigious venues as the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University; and was in private and museum collections around the world, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts, to name just a few. But for all that, Segalman did not feel he had found the sweet, deep, resonant ring of rightness for which he longed. And as he neared his th birthday, he was secretly despondent, wondering if he ever would.

Moving Pictures Richard Segalman was born on Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, on March 13, 1934. Within months, his father died of pneumonia leaving his mother (fig. 2) so bereft she could barely take care of herself, much less her newborn son. Just a few years ago, Segalman queried his older brother about that long-ago time: “Who took care of me?” “No one,” his brother replied flatly. “No, really,” Segalman asked again, “Who took care of me?” And again, his brother said, “No one.” Then they both burst out

fig. 2

laughing. After all, that was nearly  years ago, and more than just survive, Segalman has thrived,

The artist’s mother, Jean, in 191.

although not without significant work on his art and his psyche. And of course, there were friends, there were relatives, to ensure that Segalman was fed and bathed and generally looked after as an infant. But there is no doubt he was deprived of the formative love and attention that should and would have come from his mother had things been different. Perhaps having had his mother in view but out of touch is why Segalman was imprinted all the more deeply with his mother’s face, his mother’s shape, his mother’s gestures, and why that imprint was cast in concrete the moment he laid eyes on Vivien Leigh (fig. 3), another longed-for figure just beyond reach. Segalman saw Gone with the Wind the year it premiered; he was just 5 years old but he vividly recalls the moment, in a little theater in Washington Heights, when Leigh first appeared, way up there on the big screen: I saw Vivien Leigh and time stopped—and my life changed drastically—no question. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was like seeing my mother. But the image on the screen was safe; it could never hurt me and it would always be there. Sometimes I think it’s over—my

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obsession with Vivien Leigh—but it’s not. It has much more to do with my mother; sometimes,

fig. 3

I don’t know who is who.

Studio still of Vivien Leigh, circa 1937.

Watching a beautiful actress move through a black-and-white world of light and shadow, and more, a woman who looked remarkably like his very pretty, petite mother, threw Segalman back into his theater seat as stunningly as a roller coaster in a shuddering descent might; and in one fell swoop the mothering he had missed as a baby, and a cinematic ideal of female beauty, merged. Segalman has never done a portrait of his mother; nevertheless he says, “Probably every thing I do has a little of my mother in it and, simultaneously, a connection to Vivien Leigh.” While the women to whom Segalman is drawn as models and, ultimately, dear friends don’t necessarily resemble Leigh or his mother, they are mostly dark-haired and, more important, whether fat, thin, tall, or short they all share what he calls “the poetry” he saw in those indelible females. It is a poetry captured in Theodore Roethke’s sensually suggestive work about creative inspiration and female beauty, “I Knew a Woman,” which opens: I knew a woman, lovely in her bones When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain!3 The last line of Roethke’s first stanza, referring of course to a beloved’s body, calls to mind Segalman’s black-and-white monotypes that, in some sense, are containers—bright white printing paper––often impressed with the shapes and shadows of those he loves and has loved. Even to this day, when Segalman is feeling lonely or sad or adrift, he looks at black-and-white film stills of Vivien Leigh to ground himself. Though even he admits, “Yes, it’s crazy. Definitely nuts. I should have a real relationship that comforts me!” Leigh exists, perhaps like his mother, as an inchoate symbol of longed-for security, moving across a far-off screen or otherwise just out of reach. Amazingly, it wasn’t until Segalman was well into adulthood that he consciously recognized the resemblance between Leigh and his mother. When he said to his brother, “Did you realize how much Mom looked like Vivien Leigh?” his brother replied, “Are you kidding? Of course; everyone knew that!” “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” Segalman gasped and his brother said, “Would it have made any difference?” Silently, Segalman thought, Yes, the truth always matters.

Shapes & Shadows In the spring of 214, I went to Woodstock, New York, to spend a few days with Richard. Although he keeps an apartment in New York City, Woodstock is home and has been for more than 5 years. My first night there, he took me to The Little Bear, a restaurant that sits along a little stream just on the outskirts of town. We had a window table; the restaurant was not busy. I briefly focused on the signs of spring outside where a light rain fell in circles on the water. When I turned back, Richard—across the table from me—was staring into the distance. “That must be Alice but it can’t be Alice,” he said. I turned around and far off, in an adjacent room just visible, were three women sitting with only a dull burr of candlelight to illuminate them.

model | friends

Simi Stone, 214. 1 × 1 inches (25.4 × 25.4 cm). Courtesy Marlborough Gallery.

Following spread, left to right Melanie in Black & White, 214. 13½ × 17½ inches (34.3 × 44.5 cm). Courtesy Harmon-Meek Gallery. David W., 213. 1½ × 17½ inches (41.9 × 44.5 cm). Collection of the artist.

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coast | lines