Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 51, 1-2, Spring 2012

Archives of Americ an Art Journ al

LOOKING

From the EDItor

Endpapers: Slides of Tamara Melcher’s work, 1964–1966.

This issue of the Archives of American Art Journal is about looking, and it came about after Liza Kirwin, acting director of the Archives of American Art, found an interesting manuscript in our collections. The document, by an obscure marine painter, Xanthus Smith, contains extended commentaries on what he had seen when he visited the fine arts sections at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. Smith committed to paper the usual descriptions. But he also described in detail how they were painted and, even more unusual, made attempts to explain how the way the paint was applied affected what the artists were trying to convey. It was all there—subject, conception, facture, expression—and for painting after painting, Smith tried hard to give a clear account of such complexities, as he had perceived them.

I decided to see what else the Archives had that said something about looking and how this act meshed with other elements before, during, or after art was made. How did artists choose or find what to look at? How did they describe what they saw, to themselves or to others? How and why did they choose something to transform into art, whether directly as a motif or indirectly as an idea, projected association, or underlying quality that they wanted to express? How did images—things seen, things photographed, things sketched, things remembered—find their way into works of art and in what form?

My research yielded materials in the collections of the Archives of American Art that represent several eras and treat painting, sculpture, photography, and architecture. Kimberly Orcutt writes about the Xanthus Smith manuscript. Linda Dalrymple Henderson introduces statements and notes by artists in the Park Place Gallery group, artists in soon-to-be-post-Greenbergian sixties New York who shared a “dynamic experience of the city and a shared interest in bold, optical color and complex space.” Several letters that I selected vivify Frank Lloyd Wright’s long-running conflict with his patrons over the display of modernist paintings in his Guggenheim museum. And Douglas Dreishspoon gives us the context of a 1962 oral history interview with sculptor Herbert Ferber, who talks about sculpture, space, and spectators.

Finally, photo historians Mary Panzer and Anne Lyden each discuss an aspect of the interplay between photography and art, Lyden in an article about the early photographer of cathedrals, Frederick Evans; and Panzer in an essay on how Neo-Romantic painter Eugene Berman used photographs in his work.

ContributOrs

Linda Dalrymple Henderson is the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works; Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York; and the new edition of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, forthcoming from MIT Press.

Douglas Dreishpoon is chief curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.

Kimberly Orcutt is the Henry Luce Foundation Curator of American Art at the New-York Historical Society. She has published and lectured extensively on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art and is a past Chair of the Association of Historians of American Art. She is currently co-curating an exhibition celebrating the centenary of the 1913 Armory Show.

Mary Panzer writes on photography and American cultural history and teaches at New York University. In 2012, her essays appeared in Avedon: Murals and Portraits, Aperture, the Wall Street Journal, and the Archives of American Art Journal.

She is co-author of Things as They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955, winner of the ICP/Infinity Award for best photography book of 2005.

Cover: Karl Knaths, pictorialization of the process of vision, made to illustrate his essay “Decorative material,” ca. 1938.

Karl Knaths Papers.

Anne M. Lyden is an associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. She is the author of several books, including The Photographs of Frederick H. Evans.

Charles H. Duncan is the New York regional collections specialist for the Archives of American Art. Darcy Tell is editor of the Archives of American Art Journal.

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I n T h i s I SSUE

The Park Place Gallery and Its Artists Linda Dalrymple Henderson

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Sculpture’s Expanding Arena Douglas Dreishpoon

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The Artist’s Hand and the Artist’s Eye: Xanthus Smith at the Centennial Exhibition Kimberly Orcutt

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Eugene Berman’s Mexico Mary Panzer

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Frederick H. Evans: Camera-Work in Cathedral Architecture Anne M. Lyden

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Collector’s Notes Charles H. Duncan

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An Atmosphere Instead of a Frame Darcy Tell

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The Park Pl ace Gallery 4

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L i n da Da l ry m p l e H e n d e r s o n

The documents from the Park Place Gallery archives reproduced here represent two key moments in the history of this remarkable cooperative gallery, which was at the center of much art activity in New York in the mid-1960s. There were two primary incarnations of Park Place: from 1962 to 1964 it gradually evolved into a public gallery on the top floor of a building at 79 Park Place in Lower Manhattan; and from late 1965 to 1967, “Park Place: The Gallery of Art Research, Inc.” operated in a larger, ground-floor space at 542 West Broadway, south of Greenwich Village. In November 1965 critic David Bourdon recorded interviews with painters Edwin Ruda and Leo Valledor, along with other members of the group, in preparation for reviews and a January 1966 article he was to write following the gallery’s reopening in its new large-scale form on West Broadway on November 21.1 Bourdon’s interview notes provide an invaluable record of the exhilarating sense of possibility the Park Place artists felt, based on their past experience and the inauguration of their new venture. By contrast, Ruda’s 1967 “Informal Notes in Retrospect,” published in edited form in Arts in November of that year, offer a retrospective view of the group’s history from their beginnings to the closing of their last exhibition in late July 1967.2 The Park Place Gallery group was formed by nine core members, six of whom had come to New York from art training in California: sculptors Mark di Suvero and Peter Forakis, who had relocated to New York in the late 1950s, and painters Dean Fleming, Tamara Melcher, Forrest Myers, and Leo Valledor, who moved there in 1961 and 1962. These artists were then joined by painter Ed Ruda and sculptors Anthony Magar and Robert Grosvenor. Fleming had found the building at 79 Park Place, which was slated for demolition and offered entire floors for thirty dollars a month. Valledor, Myers, and Melcher followed Fleming to the building when they arrived in the city. The group cleaned up the abandoned top floor to create a space where they and their friends could share their work and play the free jazz they pursued for hours at Artists of Park Place Gallery, a time.3 As Ruda recounts, related (left to right): David Novros, Robert Grosvenor, Peter Forakis, Ed Ruda activities were also occurring at (in white on step), Anthony Magar, di Suvero’s studio, and a variety Tamara Melcher, Forrest Myers, Dean Fleming, and Leo Valledor. of other artist friends, including

and Its Artists Archives of Americ an Art Journ al 51: 1–2

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David Weinrib, Al Held, and Ronald Bladen, joined in the gatherings at 79 Park Place. The founders issued their first member exhibition invitation in November 1963. In March 1964 the group began its invitational exhibitions, which continued through 1967, showcasing both established and young artists and demonstrating the openness and freedom from stylistic boundaries the gallery cultivated.4 Bourdon’s interview notes and Ruda’s text testify to the idealistic goals of the group both for their art and for the context in which it would be shown. Central was the wish for a new kind of gallery structure in which artists—not a dealer—made the decisions.

Following the loss of their lease at 79 Park Place in spring 1964, the group staged several shows in temporary locations, but they also worked diligently to realize their dream: an expansive ground-floor space in which they could exhibit their large, urban-scale works and stage performances. With David Novros added as the fifth painter in fall 1965, Park Place’s November 1965 opening on West Broadway transformed the model of a New York gallery into something far more like the SoHo and Chelsea galleries of today. Hiring first John Gibson and then Paula Cooper as their director, the artists created what they thought of as a “Center for New Art,” where they could showcase all types of experimental expression, share ideas, play jazz, and express

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Opposite: Dean Fleming, Lime Line, 1965. © Dean Fleming.

Left: Edwin Ruda, Blake’s Eye II, 1966.

their social and political concerns.5 They found their freedom from the control of a dealer through an ingenious financial arrangement: four primary financial backers (Virginia Dwan, J. Patrick Lannan, Sr., Vera List, and Dallas patrons Betty Guiberson [Blake] and Virginia [Lupe] Murchison in a joint share) provided quarterly payments to keep the gallery running and received a work of art from each of the artists at the end of the year. As Ruda’s account makes clear, there was a range of philosophical and political views across the group, including di Suvero’s and Fleming’s strong objections to anything that resembled art-world commerce. The artists’ differences—along with the particular expense for the sculptors of giving away five works a year—were among the factors that led to the closing of the gallery in July 1967.

Yet, as these documents and the artists’ works demonstrate, the Park Place members were united in their vision of a new art that reflected their dynamic experience of the city and a shared interest in bold optical color and complex space. Ruda’s early 1965 Redball, titled with the slang for a fast train or truck, reflects the group’s enthusiasm for the geometry and dynamism of their urban environment, as he described it to Bourdon, as well as their pursuit of paradoxical visual illusions. Fleming’s 1965 Lime Line, for which he adopted the neon colors of the city, and Ruda’s Blake’s Eye II of 1966 both create shifting spatial effects and an “optic energy” that “warps” the space, refusing to allow it to settle into a single,

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Above: Tamara Melcher, poster design for the exhibition “Paintings / Bernard Kirschenbaum Domes,” December 1966–January 1967.

Collection of Bernard Kirschenbaum and Susan Weil.

Above: Mark di Suvero, The A Train, 1963–1964.

Opposite: Edwin Ruda, Redball, 1965.

static reading. Similar spatial ambiguity reigns in Melcher’s poster, designed for her December 1966 exhibition and derived from Bernie Kirschenbaum’s drawing for the Buckminster Fuller domes he was exhibiting with her paintings. Valledor likewise explored “optical vibrancy,” dynamic vector-like lines, spatial illusion, and the jazz he loved in works such as his 1965 Skeedo. Valledor, Ruda, and Melcher were all pioneers in the use of shaped canvases, with the former two especially interested in the perceptual effects of peripheral vision.

Ruda’s “Informal Notes” commence with his account of Peter Forakis, the group’s primary geometer, discussing the fourdimensional hypercube at the Park Place exhibition symposium in Denver in 1967.

This inclusion is a key to one of the major themes that united many of the group’s members: the multivalent term “fourth dimension.” Although rooted in nineteenthcentury geometry, this concept had acquired such a wide variety of associations during the twentieth century that the group staged a “4D” show at the Daniels Gallery in spring 1964 with a number of interpretations in play. Forakis associated the 4D with higher geometric dimensions as well as Buckminster Fuller’s tetrahedral “synergetic” geometry. For Fleming, reader with Forakis of P. D. Ouspensky’s 1911 Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought, A Key to the Enigmas of the World, the fourth dimension signified Ouspensky’s higher, “cosmic consciousness” and rejection of the false logic of three dimensions; Fleming thus cultivated paradox in his paintings in order to undercut a viewer’s confidence in the three-dimensional world. For Myers, the 4D evoked outer space as well as the ideas of Fuller, whose visionary thinking was much admired at Park Place.

Of all the group members, di Suvero was the one disciple of Einstein and Relativity Theory’s model of space-time that replaced a spatial fourth dimension with time itself; he was undoubtedly the stimulus for the title of Bourdon’s January 1966 Art News article, “E=MC2 à Go-Go.” Di Suvero’s The A Train (1965–1967) embodies perfectly his ideas at this moment, which integrated movement and time into a sculpture that grapples subtly with gravity and creates a new kind of sculptural “open space,” as Ruda terms it, between the upper and lower elements. Evoking the subway and crafted using urban detritus, di Suvero’s work also embodies the Park Place engagement with the city.

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1 See David Bourdon, “E=MC2 à Go-Go,” Art News 64 (January 1966), 22–25, 57– 59. He discussed the group’s goals in his review of the inaugural exhibition, “Robert Grosvenor Sculpture / Leo Valledor Paintings,” in “Park Place: New Ideas," Village Voice, 25 November 1965, 11, 25; see also Bourdon, “Parallelogram Backflip,” Village Voice, 23 December 1965, 13, his review of the exhibition “Dean Fleming Paintings / Anthony Magar Sculptures.”

2 See Ed Ruda, “Park Place 1963–1967: Some Informal Notes in Retrospect,” Arts Magazine 42 (November 1967), 30–33, which completely eliminates Ruda’s fascinating final “Postscript on Ideas.”

Di Suvero’s sculptures soon grew larger and moved completely out of the gallery into the everyday world. This exemplified the goal shared by most of the Park Place members of reaching viewers outside as well as inside the gallery. So did a series of buttons, designed primarily by Fleming, the artists gave away at the gallery so as to return the group’s new art to the environment that had inspired it—the city streets.

The Park Place Gallery has too long been absent from art historical accounts of the 1960s. The group members’ faith in art’s power to affect viewers, their belief in the possibility of self-expression via a hard-edged geometric style (as articulated by Ruda), and their interest in complex space ran counter to the narratives being constructed by powerful critical voices such as Clement Greenberg and the advocates of “minimalist” sculpture. The welcome publication of these documents suggests the much greater complexity of this historical moment and the importance of reexamining this group of talented young artists, who were looking long and hard at their physical environment, at modernist precursors like Mondrian, and at each others’ and their friends’ art. >

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3 For documentation of the information presented here, see L. D. Henderson, “Park Place: Its Art and History,” written for my fall 2008 exhibition “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York” (Austin, Tex.: Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, 2009), which drew extensively on the materials in the Park Place, The Gallery of Art Research, Inc. Records, and Paula Cooper Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter Park Place Records). For additional information on the Park Place artists, see Claudine Humblet, The New American Abstraction 1950–1970, 3 vols. (2003; Eng. ed., Milan: Skira, 2007), 3, 1683–1970.

4 For a complete listing of Park Place exhibitions and the artists who participated in them, based on posters and press releases, see Henderson, Reimagining Space, 81–85.

5 When the group applied to incorporate as the “Center for New Art,” they discovered the name was already in use (Henderson, “Park Place,” n.

2). Typical of the avant-garde events at Park Place were composer Steve Reich’s first concerts in New York (29 May 1966 and 17–19 March 1967); on Reich’s connections to Park Place through Fleming, see Henderson, “Park Place,” nn.

235–238 and the related text.

6 Like the interviews with Ruda and Valledor, Bourdon’s interview with Fleming in the Park Place archive is a valuable source of information on the group’s concerns, along with Fleming’s particular focus on transcendence. Thus, for example, Fleming talks of space “warp,” the “need for at least two possible spaces” simultaneously, and the “geometrical situations”— previously associated with “the logical, the scientific, and the mathematical”—now being used “totally intuitively.” See “Dean Fleming / taped interview, 11/13/65,” box 5, Park Place Records.

Park Pl ace DOCUMENT Inform al Notes in Retrospect, 1963– 1967: ED RUDA

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“ In finit y is w h er e thin gs h a ppen th at do n ’ t.”

Statem ent by a Sch oolboy

> Symposium. Denver. April, 1967. Someone in the audience is asking Peter Forakis what he means by a “hypercube.” Forakis explains by imagining what it would be like to live in a hypercube home. The real estate agent accompanies you because otherwise you might miss it.

He escorts you around and tells you there are five rooms although you count only four. You “experience” the fifth, but regardless of the number of times you make the rounds you can’t keep track of it.

Meanwhile the four other rooms have changed their appearance.You lose count of everything and one guess is as good as another. Time to go but impossible to locate the door through which you entered.

The agent kindly escorts you through a rear window and convinces you there is nothing to lock up or protect. The property is out of sight.

The audience catches it and breaks up. It looks as if everyone is ready for the fifth dimensional joke. Time & position. Either / Or. Double take. Science + fiction = practicality + dream. The Hypercube Realty Company. Park Place Gallery of Art Research Inc. 1963–1967. >> The formative months, Summer, 1963. We meet through a mutual acquaintance with Mark di Suvero and Peter Forakis. Six of the artists are from the West Coast, [Robert] Grosvenor and I [Ed Ruda] being the only “easterners.” The original confluence of Park Place artist-members includes: Anthony Magar, Mark di Suvero, Forrest Myers, Tamara Melcher, Robert Grosvenor, Leo Valledor, Dean Fleming, Peter Forakis, and myself. Then John Baldwin (1965), David Novros (1966), and Gay Glading (1967). Numerous informal conversations at the various studios to begin with, followed by a general agreement to unite on a more permanent basis. Magar, di Suvero, Fleming, and Myers form the hub of the movement. The decision to carry out our purpose by finding a suitable place where we could show work and continue the exchange of esthetic ideas. An archaic if inauspicious start: erratic, emotional, and forceful. Not exactly

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Opposite: Peter Forakis, Hyper-Cube, 1967. Aluminum, 35 7/8 x 367/16 x 361/8 in.

Collection of The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, donation of Virginia Dwan, 1985.

Our policy at first was to have continuous shows by artist-m em bers only, and no “openings .” The arr angem ent was com pletely inform al .

blue skyways and clear sailing, but rather put-downs, walk outs, and reconciliations. Lots of talk about “communal spirit” and zealous demands for totally idealistic and selfless operation. Di Suvero and Magar were adamant: Share ideas, labor, profits, property, women, everything. Di Suvero wrote a lengthy manifesto to which I and others objected . . . mostly on the grounds that art manifestos are obsolete before they are even published. It was somewhat like a call to arms for a bastion of independence and purpose. Tough-minded like Castro. Someone copped a red Con Edison flag and paraded around the room. Esthetic Communismo. >>> The first Park Place loft, Fall, 1963. Downtown, West Side Manhattan. The work and preparation led to a certain amount of organization and cohesion. We had an adequate interior space with fourteen windows and a roof to serve as an outdoor environment. A natural waterfall in one corner whenever it rained.

Our policy at first was to have continuous shows by artistmembers only, and no “openings.” The arrangement was completely informal. We simply brought a new piece when we felt we had something to show, and removed the old one. The art world is small and always curious. As word got around and more people came by to see what was up, I realized that some had misconstrued our purpose.

These misconceptions usually took the form of a) angry young artists pitting themselves against the indignities of uptown galleries, b) the desire to propagate artist-managed galleries, and c) aspiring to a communal-collectivist art image. On the other hand I had always felt that the reasons for starting Park Place were esthetic rather than moral. Or to put it another way, esthetic is moral. By this time most of us were becoming involved with sensibilities of scale that required a large functional space. The typical uptown gallery was confined for the most part to a living-room volume that would hardly suit our purpose. I don’t recall anyone objecting to galleries per se.

We also required a flexible situation that would allow us to change shows and to experiment continuously without being hampered by rigid schedules. For these reasons, it was apparent that a large artist-shared loft would be the best recourse.

For the first six months, it was straight Park Place. After that we began the long series of “invitationals.” Our own artist-member shows were like “feelers” for half-formed ideas. The results always surprised us. No one could form an overall view of what was happening or where we were headed. We had a work-path but the concepts were still hazy. In our conversations there were references to technical achievements, science fiction, amusing topologies, and the hypothetical methods of science. But artistic procedure was purely intuitive rather than rational or mechanical. >>>> The second six months. Invitationals. 1964. The insulatory period was just about over. We had gotten our bearings and were more confident with regard to individual achievements. The work struck me as being more precise and less “organic” than when we

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had started. Grosvenor was getting into structured combinations of aluminum and rubber, and Myers was dealing with highly reflective metallic surfaces and translucent plastics. Magar was working with polished and painted steel. Valledor was forcing close-valued colors to shift and blur at certain frequencies while simplifying and enlarging the color areas.

Everyone was affecting everyone else so that the exchange was fairly mutual. Impossible to say where particular ideas started or whose influence was stronger and more original.

Continued the policy of Park Place artist-member shows and invitationals through the spring of 1964, when our lease expired.

A request for renewal . . . was turned down, and we were served eviction papers. Our “landlord,” incidentally, was that cornerstone of culture, Columbia University. >>>>> Interim. 1964–1965. We needed outside financial assistance to set up new quarters elsewhere. For the time being we were drifting.

Noah Goldowsky [Gallery] and Dan Graham of the Daniels Gallery offered the group an opportunity to show, and we accepted. The gallery space wasn’t optimum but we managed accordingly. The Daniels Gallery, though it survived for only one year, acted as a catalyst for many current concepts. But we regard[ed] these “roving” shows as temporary measures. We all feel the necessity of establishing autonomous control to get the message across. In short, a special environment that would favor whole-hearted experiments with scale by individual artists or working together as a group. >>>>>> The new Park Place, 1966, 1967. Subtitled the Gallery of Art Research Inc. for the promotion of experimental art and related media, complete with director, assistant director, policy meetings, and the time it takes to get together and agree. The corporation as embodiment of rambling ideas of ten individual artists who expect to achieve a certain amount of unified action. The organization is no longer archaic or simple. The situation is tougher and more complex however you look at it. No one lays down the esthetic law or indicates what the unifying concepts are, if any. Esthetically, it’s the way it should be, every man for himself. So far so good.

The first show opens in November 1965. Leo Valledor and Bob Grosvenor. The forty-by-eight-five-foot area allows enough room for a painter and sculptor to have one-man shows simultaneously. With few exceptions the two one-man shows continue through the spring of 1967, the contexts of which are now part of history.

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Exhibition poster for the Park Place Invitational Show, March 1964.

AT Park Pl ace every thing moved. The term “ energystate” or “ system ” would sound more accur ate as a description of how we regarded the condition of objects .

After one full year of artist-member shows, murmurs of discontent. The whole purpose and function of the gallery called into question. For some, our original purpose had completely escaped us. We were being duped by our own self-interests. For one thing, we were not functioning at an experimental level but operating much like any other gallery. Lots of questions, questions. How to provide a generous environment for experimental art? Was a gallery the right structure to begin with . . . or should we aim for some type of communal art center? How to include a broad range of diverse artists lacking the means or place to exhibit? How to promote support for publicindustrial art projects? Fleming, Myers, and di Suvero were strong for discontinuing the gallery under present conditions.

Stopgap attempts in the meanwhile to widen the range of Park Place gallery activities. These included invitational shows,* experimental films, electronic music performances, and intermedia environments. There were also Park Place group shows and symposiums held in Philadelphia and Denver, Colorado.

More grievances, more wedges. A restless Spring. Three of the Park Place artists want out of the gallery structure. The idea for [a] communal type art center is proposed to replace the gallery. Plans are drawn up but nothing really gets going. Half of us are only mildly enthusiastic. Another organization, only bigger with more caretakers. Nevertheless some of the proposals sound good: a five- or sixstory building with tooled workshops, technical library, film, sound, and electronic equipment, exhibition, and performance space. I liked Myers’s idea of including a casual environment for painting and sculpture—an unpretentious spot where you could relax, look at magazines, or talk with other artists. We even get to the point of discussing names for the place, but that’s where it ends.

The decision to terminate Park Place, 31 July 1967. I suppose you would say the reasons were partly economic, partly esthetic.

Pointless to go into detail. Enough to say that the gallery could not hope to satisfy all of the individual inclinations. The final meeting was weird. We are all seated in the back room at Park Place enveloped by Bob Dacey’s aluminum-foil environment and blinking strobe lights; the perfect science-fiction ending.

Postscript on ideas: Park Place concepts were rarely verbalized or put into written form by the artists. At least not in an analytic or expository way. For the most part communication transpired by way of puns, reverse logic, paradox, ambiguous comments, and “trips.” It was our way of bridging the gap between word and action. It was also our way of saying that the senses can be amused as well as oriented.

Our reputed enthusiasm for the dynamics of science was somewhat exaggerated. While di Suvero and others were inquisitive about far-out mathematical ideas, no one pretended to be professionally competent in mathematics or related subjects. Tony Magar commented for example, that a real mathematician would be outraged by his (Magar’s) personal interpretations . . . which was all it amounted to.The notion that scientific methods could be translated into artistic

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concepts would certainly have been naïve. As artists we all felt we had our own disjointed logic and working methods to rely on . . . .

The attitude toward “objectivity” and what constitutes “objectiveness” varies from artist to artist. I suppose we accepted objectivity as a reasonable aim, but no one lauded the “object-thing-in-itself.”

The latter, like the term “art-object,” had a static ring, and at Park Place everything moved. The term “energy-state” or “system” would sound more accurate as a description of how we regarded the condition of objects.

There is a point in the micro-behavior of atomic particles that can best be described with symbols that represent probable states of energy. The variables are mixed with constants so that nothing is for certain. For those who want to pin things down for good, the situation might seem intolerable. There is also a point at which a clear description of the object begins to fuse with the observer’s own presence and attitudes. He is unable to distinguish between what he sees and how he sees it. [Physicist] Niels Bohr has commented that it’s like trying to measure the temperature of your bath water with your big toe; in the first place, you’re interfering with the temperature of the water. The relationship is ambiguous, the sensations of the viewer are intricately bound to the object itself, and the nature of any observation becomes a two-way proposition. This is my own interpretation of the conceptual attitudes at Park Place. The view is essentially dynamic and vitalistic. It is concerned more with process and probability than with mechanism or holism. Reality is a shifting pattern rather than a closed entity. Objectiveness is relative rather than absolute.

The difficulty of transposing such an esthetic view into words is a major semantic problem. The classical techniques of verbal analysis and description become a barrier rather than a bridge to understanding the art process. The language of esthetic criticism continues to hang in a “frame” that artists disposed of long ago.

Perhaps the cybernetics revolution will provide us with radical clues—appropriate semantic patterns with continuous feedbacks to eliminate gross misunderstanding. >

A partial list of artistS who showed at Park Pl ace, 1966–1967 Carlos Villa, Robert Duran, Sylvia Stone, Peter Reginato, Jake Berthot, Will Insley, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Steve Reich, Mario Yrissary, Robert Wray, Robert Gordon, Peter Hutchinson, Michael Steiner, Brice Marden, Carl Andre, Ronald Langfield, Richard Van Buren, Robert Neuworth, Charles Ross, Jack Krueger, Jerry Foyster, Steve Vasey, Julius Tobias, David Von Schlegell, Peter Wolford, Max Neuhaus, Bernard Kirschenbaum, David Prentice.

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Park Pl ace DOCUMENT INTERVIEW-STATEMENT: ED RUDA

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The following excerpt comes from the Park Place records. Taken from a typescript made by critic David Bourdon, it contains Edwin Ruda’s statements, set in black, and occasional notes by Bourdon, which are set in green.

When I first got back to New York, I met [Mark] di Suvero and [Charles] Ginnever and through them I met the other fellows. Most of them were from California except Tony [Anthony] Magar, who came from England and was disgusted with the whole dull atmosphere and immediately took in the New York scene. Fellows like Frosty [Forrest Myers], Leo [Valledor], even Carlos Villa . . . Tony especially, they would walk down a street and get turned on by everything, which was the first time anything like that happened to me. It was so affirmative and so optimistic, that was the whole point about it. It didn’t deny the association between art and the life outside, although the life outside never became the painting because then it would have to deal with Pop art in some fashion. They’d walk down a street, I remember one time, for example, Mark [di Suvero] would go down a street, and say it was at night, he’d say, “Oh look up and dig that skyline, dig the skyline of the buildings” as you walk. We’d go walking down the streets with our heads up, looking at that skyline. Or else a Con Ed truck would flash by and we’d say, “There goes [Peter] Forakis,” you know, because [of] those slashing stripes and things like that that he was working on [at the time]. And then there were the traffic signals, the whole works.

I remember one time . . . I moved into a studio at Park Row, and I told [Milton] Resnick [a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter], “You should see the scene, you should see the view I can see from my windows, it’s fantastic. I can see the water, I can see the East River, the ships moving across, the masts move by the Brooklyn Bridge, bulldozers tearing up the buildings down below me.” And you know what he said? He said, “Pull down the shade.” And that was the whole difference. Because the whole point of departure was in the mind, and he’d wander all over the canvas mysteriously looking for something to use. Milton knew what he was doing; he wasn’t guided by accident, he was guided by control. But it seemed to me that his attitude, like most of the Abstract Expressionists,

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Opposite: Buttons, a project by Dean Fleming, 1966.

Collection of Betty Blake.

was quite subjective. When they finished a canvas, everything was clear, but the starting point was different. I think that in our case the starting point is always concerned with the vision and not with psychological attitudes.

It m ay be that my concern with velocit y m eans also that I have to shape the canvas in a certain way; otherwise the velocit y will be held up, it ’ ll be stopped.

Mondrian’s color not static, you get a constant shifting. Boogie Woogie series, color becomes a kind of optic energy; the shift is not physical; it’s more of an optic affair; but he never gave up [the ] idea of relationship with a frame.

To break down the idea of relationship, as [Larry] Poons has done, means that you have to break up the whole static quality of the picture, so that things are transferring and recombining constantly, especially regarding the structure and what I call color energy. It seems as if, when you look at a picture that’s working that way, that the energy makes the structure disappear as you look at it, and then at the next instant you look at the structure and you don’t think in terms of energy, so that the two go back and forth. You’re setting up something non-static, because there’s always that shift between the two. Now the things going on outside the canvas, I guess it’s true, but wouldn’t [you] say Pollock made the kind of painting that could go on and on and expand?

It may be that my concern with velocity means also that I have to shape the canvas in a certain way; otherwise the velocity will be held up, it’ll be stopped. You never think of velocity when you look at something blunt. Now if you think in terms of velocity, the whole structure of the painting is moving. It’s not only what happens inside the painting but the shape itself has that look of moving into the space around it. In that sense, I would say it does affect the environment.

Illusions

Seeing things one way and then suddenly you see them another, that’s really fantastic, but it really isn’t illusory because it’s actually there.

When you look at [it], it’s possible to see things in a number of different ways, and when you see them in a number of different ways, it reflects a whole attitude about what actually makes structure.

(On Morris and Judd)

Because if structure can be seen in a number of different ways, then it implies that structure is a non-static affair and that it’s possible that it’s a kind of continuum. It’s also in movement, always in the process of fluidity. . . .The material dematerializes, it disappears. An artist interested in an object is not interested in transcending it. And in a sense you might consider it a kind of idealism to do that.

As I was leaving an Abst Imp [Abstract Impressionist] way of looking at things, I felt a tremendous need for limitation, a tremendous need to get tough with my own mind, my own way of seeing things. It meant that things ought to be in a certain place, that you

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had to control them, that this is what civilization is, it’s the only hope for civilization, that a civilized mind can consciously do things right, that there was no reliance anymore on a subconscious and a weird psychological attitude or a desire to startle or Dada, upsetting or any of that. It was just necessary to be straight, to discipline yourself.

And now, after the hardening and after making the object, it seems that once again the romance is coming back in. . . . The whole business is becoming very romantic now. It may be classic but it’s also expressionistic. I feel that very strongly. Even though the control makes it look . . . You know some people are going to say this work is cold, intellectual, and aloof but it has nothing to do with that. I keep thinking of Thoreau running away; the whole history of early America is running away from industrialism. And now, for the first time, it’s like an affirmation, and you begin to think, Why can’t people turn on like machines? Machines are so fantastic, machines are poetic. Why do people end up non-poetic? Why are they dulled by technological progress?

In 1949, before I went to Mexico, I saw the early work of the Abstract Expressionists at the [Charles] Egan Gallery, when they were first being show. I remember [Jack] Tworkov and [Willem] de Kooning, especially, [Isamu] Noguchi was showing there too at that time. Somehow, for some reason, I was not in tune with that. I couldn’t quite make it out, I couldn’t quite understand it. It may be because I couldn’t somehow relate my outlook or my spirit to what was happening at the time. And while de Kooning’s work looked very poetic and Tworkov’s also, I really couldn’t understand it because my attitude was different, but I didn’t believe in my attitude enough, so I simply left; I went all over the country. I lived in Mexico for three years, then I went to El Paso for awhile, to the Midwest, then back to Texas, then back to New York City in 1959.

At that point I ran into Resnick through di Suvero. (They were very good friends at that time).

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Leo Valledor, Skeedo, 1965.

these young fellows from caLifornia didn ’ t fall into this da m n j um bled m ess that was going on in New York .

And who needs that struggle and torture?

Who needs that confusion?

I was somewhat involved with a Bonnard-like figure; it was still impressionistic; I was inclined toward impressionism because it was the only painting I had seen that I felt dealt with the true plastic problems. I never felt anything in painting could be revolutionary unless it tackled plastic problems.

When I was thirty, thirty-five, New York was a goddamn madhouse. There were all these different tendencies going on at the time, you even sensed that you could no longer jump into AE [Abstract Expressionism], but you didn’t know where else to jump and you went through all these different changes. Along came these young fellows from California, and what’s their background[?].

Their background is hotrods in L.A, and R’n’R [Rock and Roll] and everything else that goes with it, and they didn’t fall into this damn jumbled mess that was going on in New York. And who needs that struggle and torture? Who needs that confusion? They moved into it beautifully, and I have nothing against it; they could see clearly.

They moved into an absolutely clear horizon.

Mark talked a lot about weightlessness at that time. [Robert] Grosvenor does too now when he talks about his big piece. But Mark had this huge house down on Front Street. It had three floors in it, and it had nets and it had ropes, and he’d make up all these crazy toys, and we’d have these wild, dazzling affairs where everybody would get on these toys [and] bump each other, leap from ropes, fly into nets. It had to involve a non-psychological state; it was physical; it was enjoyable; it was full of optimism; it was full of youthful spirit. And he had that, and so did Frosty [Forrest Myers], and so did Tony Magar. Mark shifts weight, puts it out at [the] periphery, [that’s] the way he controls all this open space. It was one of the first pieces I ever saw where the open space in the sculpture became sculptural. It had nothing to do with junk sculpture.

Park Place group club: Weinrib, Krakowski, Al Held [went] to one or two meetings; Ron Gorchov, Ginnever, Poons was at one meeting but just played with his toy cars, along with Neil Williams, who got drunk. Meetings didn’t last too long. Organized by Weinrib; we’d shift to different artists’ quarters; we had no place of our own. I remember one discussion we had about Americanism. . . . Most of us, Mark [di Suvero] especially, were very much against the idea of an American artist; we felt art went beyond the boundaries, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t distinctions between American and European art. Meetings (6) were held in 62, 63.

There’s no worry, no concern over negating things now or limiting them to a point, because that kind of limitation implies a fear that you might go overboard and reveal, even get sloppy in the way you handle things or think about things. To me, that sort of pressure is off. Look at the difference in Mondrian’s early work and after he came to America and did the Boogie Woogie series; there’s a complete liberation. And that spirit has carried over. The Boogie Woogie pictures flash all over the place; they don’t have that I-amhere, and I-am-here-all-alone and that’s-all-I-need. >

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Park Pl ace DOCUMENT INTERVIEW NOTES: LEO VALLEDOR This excerpt, from a typescript made by David Bourdon, contains remarks by Park Place artist Leo Valledor and notes by Bourdon.

Valledor’s statements are set in black; Bourdon’s notes are set in green.

Studied at San Francisco Art Institute, uninfluenced by instructors.

I loved the people I met while I was studying there who had an influence on me. That’s when I first met Peter Forakis and Wally Hedrick and Manuel Neri. Knew Frosty [Forrest Myers] and Dean [Fleming] out there. Sees no overall California influence on the group.

Found Park Place. Looking for cheap studios. There was this building down on Park Place that Dean found, and I took the third floor and Frosty took the bottom floor and Dean took the floor in between.

And I had the lease to the top floor, and we decided to turn that into a gallery space or a space to show.

Fall ’62. Met [Mark] di Suvero in San Francisco, through Manuel Neri.

Knew of, but did not know, John Altoon, [Billy Al] Bengston, etc. We

were expressionist in form. I’ve never done a figurative painting in my life. I’ve always been interested in the plastic idea, no matter what kind of method I use. I’ll always be interested in trying to make something out of the rectangle. I was interested in each part as a jigsaw puzzle.

Horizontal format. I thought it was impossible to work with a horizontal at that time. They always reminded me of landscapes. Most of my things were vertical and almost like this rectangle.

Dots. It’s kind of like moving from point to line to get a kind of

dynamic which the dots didn’t have. They were just too separate.

Only I could see them. It was just too subjective, and I wanted it to

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be more solid and more dynamic, more projecting. And this has been my direction in the color too . . . I read them like connecting lines, points of a structure. And you could connect them visually. I saw the lines there, I could actually see them between the dots and I still can.

I asked people, “Can you see the line there in between the two dots?”

And they said, “No.” And I said, “Wow! Wow! I’m not getting over.”

On edge. Even in my earlier work I was

always concerned with that edge. I didn’t want a vignette. But the peripheral idea, the idea of seeing space on the outer edges of your eye came in my earlier work. And it was like taking the dot and combining it with the earlier things I had done with color. And it was just a logical step to do that. That’s an idea I have about the complementary colors, and the rest is intuitive. I mix the colors the way I want to see it. But it has to do with the complementary color of [a] warm color vs. a cool color because it is the only way you can create this kind of vibration which I see between the colors. It’s like placing two certain notes of sound together and you get a tone. No figure-ground; optical vibrancy.

Peripheral vision. The shapes of my things

are really meant to fill your field of vision.

That’s where the shapes came from. Shapes started in ’65. Zigzags did not lead to shaped extensions. I’ve been working with random

shapes since 1959, trying to fit something within a random shape. And I started my first shaped canvases in 1962 or 1963. Up to then I had been very used to working with any kind of shape and making something work in it.

Earlier shapes on plywood.

Above: Peter Forakis, sketch, 1968.

Opposite: Leo Valledor with Echo (for John Coltrane), 1967.

When I got there [the California School of Fine Arts] they were still digging the Clyfford Still scene. It was three years after he’d left. I was there in ’53 and there were still a lot of the Korean veterans around there. One of the most explosive paintings I’ve ever seen, the first painting I ever saw of the Abstract Expressionist wave, was

by James Kelly, a big black-and-white painting. And I was just a commercial artist student , and I saw these paintings and I didn’t know you could do them, even though I had always been turned on by art, I’ve been drawing all my life, I didn’t know you could paint any way you saw things. And here I saw all these people doing wild experiments, so I thought I would do it. It was exactly what I needed.

Up until that time I had ideas for record jacket designs and things

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connected with music. Although I was always very very abstract, . . . when I saw you could paint in this way, it just opened me right up.

Park Place Look. There’s no real common denominator for each member of the group. I don’t know how easily I identify with these guys, I could just as easily have made friends with someone else. It’s just that I knew a lot of these guys in San Francisco, just sort of got together and talked about our ideas. Doesn’t see it as geometric art at all. Not at all.

It uses geometric elements, but I don’t see it as geometric art. I don’t see it in terms of mathematics, in terms of anything but a visual thing. I’ve read [about] it (topology [the properties of geometric figures or solids that are not changed when strestched or bent] and I’m interested in it, but I’ve never thought of it as influencing my ideas or my concepts of visual space.

By four dimensional color I mean the notion that it exists within time. And I have this idea about time being part of all these ambiguities that we see in dimensions, like the idea that you read a line two-dimensionally and the difference [if] . . . that line were coming straight toward you as a point. I feel the difference in that is time. Color affects space, the harmony stays the same.

Leading eye off canvas. The shape also does funny things when you look at it from an angle. A lot of the times you get the illusion of the shape coming out into the room. The other shape that I’ve been working on, like that parallelogram shape down there, seems like a “warp” with a square, from an angle. And as you walk by—this is a sculptural idea—it begins to shift its shape and change like a movie.

The shaped canvas is really a sculptural idea, although I don’t come out into 3-D. What constitutes a shaped canvas (does relief have light and shadow)?

I don’t think too much about those differences; I just try to play it by eye. All my concern is with color. Does not always use complementaries.

I was working with this kind of form, which is optic, and all I did was take out these three bands, which was the most interesting point, and make a zigzag out of them, just cut them in half, so that the two colors would interchange.

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By the time Dorothy Seckler interviewed Herbert Ferber (1906–1991) for the Archives of American Art, the fifty-six-year-old sculptor had definite ideas about what sculpture should be.1 Like other heavymetal welders of the post–World War II period—Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, Theodore Roszak, and David Smith—Ferber saw sculpture as three-dimensional form in real space, and space as the boundless arena for its projection. He knew instinctively that any sculpture, representational or abstract, commingled with space in dynamic ways that determined its character and how people interacted with it. He also realized that traditional monolithic sculpture was irrelevant in a post-atomic world, and his notion of “centrifugal” shunned the “old center of gravity” by opening up the sculptural envelope so that space could flow in and around it. In 1962, having recently completed the “Sculpture as Environment” commission for the northwest gallery on the third floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Ferber clearly envisioned sculpture as an expanding field—a total environment that defied any portable object making the rounds from one exhibition to another or destined for the living room of some private collector. At the dawn of a new decade, as the art market escalated, sculpture was granted a sense of place.

The synagogue commissions Ferber undertook during the fifties, beginning in 1951 with the Congregation B’nai Israel in Millburn, New Jersey, may have coaxed this direction. A sculptural program destined for an architectural site guaranteed, at least until the building was sold or demolished, some sense of permanence. Likewise, concurrent investigations on paper and in small-scale works conceived in roofed and cage-like configurations helped to prime the artist’s thinking along these lines. It’s also conceivable that the sculptor wandered into other fantastic environments during his rounds of New York galleries and museums and that some of these remained etched in his memory. At the beginning of their interview, Ferber mentions to Seckler something he had seen: You came into a low doorway . . . you wandered around and there were strings hanging in your face . . . you came into contact with things in the environment which are in constant relation to the works of art themselves.2

Dougl as Dreishpoon

He may have been referring to an environment dreamed up by Marcel Duchamp, an eccentric design for the 1942 “First Papers of Surrealism” exhibition at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion, a string-bound installation of paintings that resembled a spider’s lair or the inside of someone’s brain. Perhaps he had seen Louise Bourgeois’s clan of personages at the Peridot Gallery in 1949 or, a decade later, Louise Nevelson’s all-

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Herbert Ferber, n.d.

Herber Ferber, Installation view of his environmental sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photograph courtesy Edith Ferber.

1 Interview of Herbert Ferber conducted by Dorothy Seckler, 1962, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. An extract of this interview is printed opposite; the full transcript is available at: http://www.aaa.si.edu/ collections/interviews/oralhistory-interview-herbertferber-12988.

2

Ferber interview, 1.

white and majestic Dawn’s Wedding Feast at the Museum of Modern Art. Any one of these encounters would have sparked his imagination to pursue sculpture as an environmental proposition.

Being an object maker did not prevent Ferber from seeing the monumental paintings of his friends Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko as would-be environments. “They created an environment,” he explained to Seckler, “by making a picture fifteen feet long and ten feet high.” The association, not at all surprising given the sculptor’s own pursuit of painting, enabled him to bridge the perceptual gap between what a critic like Clement Greenberg considered to be incompatible mediums. Ferber’s sculptural “calligraph” could be seen as the analog of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke: a three-dimensional trope for fundamental questions about the self and humankind. The Whitney commission, a dense papier-mâché dreamscape of monumental proportions, opened up a new arena for sculpture. Others obviously saw it that way, particularly younger sculptors like Ronald Bladen, Robert Grosvenor, Barry Le Va, and Richard Serra, all of whom explored a similar idea with vastly different expectations.

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Interview with Herbert Ferber

In the following extract of H erbert F erber ’s 1962 interview with D orothy Seckler , Ferber talks about the ways he was thinking about sculpture at the time. Our selection begins just after Ferber had described to Seckler an environment he had seen somewhere; Douglas Dreishspoon thinks (see his introduction, pages 24–26) Ferber may have been referring to Salvador Dalí’s installation for the “First Papers of Surrealism” show in 1942.

HERBERT FERBER: Claes Oldenburg, I remember, in a forum that we

were on together, said that he was never interested in abstract art or nonrepresentational art; . . . [he] was really interested in recreating those bizarre and frightening accidents which we see, or those scenes which we observe in the street. I have nothing like that in mind at all. The only relationship between his kind of thing or some of the other boys [doing Happenings] and mine is that you enter a space, and you’re not looking at the work of art as an object around which you can walk in the conventional sense. . . . [T]he kind of thing I’m interested in, first of all, it’s nonrepresentational; it’s abstract, but you can envelop yourself in it in the same way that you envelop yourself in these scenes, or these Happenings, that the other boys are doing. The idea, of course, historically speaking, is not a new one. If you think of an Egyptian tomb—where you walk into a cubicle, the walls of which are decorated—there is sculpture in it; you’re in a special kind of ambience created by the . . . references to the man’s life and so on.

An attempt was made to recreate the spiritual and real life of the dead king, and it was done in a limited space. Nevertheless, the objects in that space are all visible, in a sense, one at a time. But I think there was a relationship. Michelangelo [Buonarotti] did it. When he made the chapel in Florence for the Medicis, the Medici chapel, he created an architectural environment for his sculpture. In other words, he made a space in which the sculpture would live and a space which would house the sculpture. The sculpture inhabited the space.

You can make a dynamic figure which has extensions on it, legs or drapery, which baroque sculpture has. This is different, because you still have that piece of sculpture in any space. It can be moved from one space to another. The kind of thing I’m thinking of is a sculpture in a space which is so related that if you move one, you’d have to move the other. If you removed the walls from these sculptures, you’d have nothing because the sculpture would collapse. The walls support the sculpture, and the curves of the walls, and so on, are related to the sculpture; if you remove the sculpture you’d have an empty shell. This is quite different from having a dynamic baroque form which simply extends into space the way the branches of a tree do.

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DOROTHY SECKLER: When you’re making a model for one of your new sculptures you, of course, see it as a unit complete; . . . it’s small enough that you can see it from all sides, whereas the spectator will never have that particular experience of it. How can you imagine the spectator’s experience in being so small in relationship to projection?

HF: Yes. Well, this is one of the problems. When I first made some of my small models into environmental sculptures by simply adding enough walls and putting [in] little models of figures. . . . I didn’t know how it would look, and I was indebted to Gene [Eugene] Goossen who said, “Nobody will understand what you’re talking about. They’ll look at that as if it were a stage set which must be seen from the front.” So he suggested that I make a model which was large enough so that when you put it up on stilts (you leave a hole . . . [and] put your head through the bottom of it), and then you’d look around, and your eye would be at the same level as that of a person who was walking through it, and then you could begin to visualize. So, of course, it’s a big problem, and when I made the room for the Whitney, I had three months to make it in, and I had to make that huge piece of sculpture.

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I didn’t even have time to find a new studio, and I made it in my old studio (which was too small to ever erect it until it was finished), and when it was finished, it was too big to put in the studio, so I had to wait until it got to the Whitney. And when I saw it up in the Whitney, I saw things that I would like to have changed because then the spaces and the relationships were quite different from the way they looked in the models from which I worked. . . .

DS: Was this a matter of difference in terms of . . . a slightly different sense of rhythm or a slight variation, or was it really a totally different experience for you when you saw it?

H F : It was a completely and totally different experience because, when I looked at the model, though I made every effort to imagine myself looking in one direction at a time, I could never forget what I was seeing out of the tail of my eye. When I looked at the thing in the Whitney, I could not see what was behind me.

DS: Yes. H F : You had to actually turn around, you actually had to move in order to see different parts of the sculpture; you could never see it all at once. No matter where you stood in that room, you could never see all of it at once. So that it was like opening a door of a chapel of

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Opposite: Herbert Ferber, sketch for an environmental sculpture, n.d. Photograph courtesy Edith Ferber.

Above: Herbert Ferber, maquette for Whitney Museum of American Art installation “Sculpture as Environment,” 1960. Photograph by E. O. Nelson; courtesy Edith Ferber.

a Gothic cathedral. You walk in and you close the door and you look up and you see arches and windows and this kind of thing, but you never see the whole logic of the structure.

DS: Yes. HF: You sense it. Now, of course, in architecture where you have a kind of structural engineering logic, if you see an arch going this way, you’re pretty damn sure there’s one going this way; if there’s one going behind you, you know there’s one in front of you. With a sculpture which is asymmetrical, such as these are, you can’t imagine where the other piece is going to be; you have to look and see it and then you can remember as your turn away from it and see the rest of it, so that you have to participate in the sense that you’re carrying in your head the directions, the forms, and so on, and see how they relate. But this kind of experience is entirely different from that of looking at a model or looking at any sculpture, no matter how big it is, because size is not the question. This sculpture that I’m going to do for this museum in Vermont [in 1964 for the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont, Burlington] will be forty feet long and twenty-five feet high. But the room in the Whitney was only half that size and still it gave the same impression. And if I’d been able to design the walls of the Whitney I would, I think, have been more successful. I would have produced some different result at least. But starting with given walls is perhaps not the optimum program. I think you should really start . . . from the ground up.

D S : At this point I’d like to stop for a moment because it strikes me that, although this may seem like a very natural thing for you to have thought of in terms of what’s been going on in the world recently, that it wouldn’t have occurred, of course, to a sculptor probably in another time; that there must be some particular readiness to project a viewer into this particular kind of position that would make this idea, rather than another one, become important to you.

HF: Well, I have no doubt that I’m a product of my time. I think of it now, but I think this is ex post facto reasoning, that so much painting, so much sculpture, so many exhibitions, so many museums are all around us. Not that we can do with fewer of these things; they’re important—but the constantly changing exhibitions . . . the constant acquiring of paintings and sculpture by museums leads to a terrific confusion. And one of the things that has struck me is that people go to Europe or go to Greece or go to Egypt to look at something. They travel thousands of miles and they remember what they’ve seen.

People go around the corner to the museum and they see a hundred paintings and fifty sculptures by as many artists and they hardly remember what they’ve seen because, as I’ve said someplace, you can stand in one museum, and if you stand there from October to April, you’ll see twenty-five exhibitions; it becomes a vast moving picture. Things get terribly superficial and confused. And I think one

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DS: Your sculpture at this stage, of course, comes very close to architecture. Does that pull you toward thinking of it in even larger scale at times, or of relating it even more organically to architecture?

HF: Well—yes—you mean these environments are large . . . ?

DS: Yes.

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I came to these ideas in a purely sculptural, in a purely aesthetic way, AND not in any sociological way.

of the things that the painters who made these very large canvases were unconsciously, perhaps, transcending, was the idea that a picture could be put on a wall and then taken down and another one put up, or five pictures on one wall, and so on. They wanted to make their pictures, in a sense, permanent. Now, unless they painted them on the walls, they weren’t [permanent], but by making them large, they [the artists] emphasized their sense of position in space.

They emphasized the kind of immutability, the difficulty of moving them. They created an environment by making a picture fifteen feet long and ten feet high. Now it’s true of these pictures, that if you get close to them, you become enveloped in them. You can’t, . . . no matter how close you get to a Rembrandt [van Rijn] or . . . a smaller picture, [because] the edges of it are always within your limits of vision. When you get up against a large Jackson Pollock or a Barney [Barnett] Newman or a [Mark] Rothko, it seems to curve around you, and in that sense it exudes an atmosphere or it envelops one. Now you could say, “Well, why don’t you just make a sculpture very large and perhaps this would do it?” Because you can always walk away from these pictures, you can always walk away from the sculpture, you can get far enough back so that you can see it as a unit. The thing that I wanted unconsciously to do was to make a place for a piece of sculpture which was permanent because even a sculpture in a public square can be moved out of the square and you still have the public square. The sculpture doesn’t lose anything, it’s true; the square loses, but the square is not destroyed. And although there are museums with hundreds of pictures, if you take them out and put them in another museum, the museum has lost something. It’s an impermanent kind of loss; it’s not a real loss because the museum exists. But if you make a painting on the wall, or if you make a sculpture which is so large and so fastened, so related to the walls that you can’t take it away, you’ve created an entirely different image.

Now, maybe this is just the result of the fact that there are so many paintings, and so many sculptures, and so many moving exhibitions, and so many changes in our scene that perhaps, unconsciously, I was trying to achieve some sense of permanence on the scene. In other words, it’s better than having a one-man show or a retrospective show because that comes down. Maybe it’s something of this kind. Now I don’t know whether this is really factual or not. As I say, I think that I came to these ideas in a purely sculptural, in a purely aesthetic, way, and not in any sociological way, which is what I’ve been talking about up to now. I really developed it out of my intense desire to have sculpture light and airy and off the ground. . . .

it’s not really a question of size.

I’m not involved in that idea.

IT just has to be large enough so that you can walk through it.

HF: . . . and related to architecture?

DS: In another little while these could become ramps, for instance, when people could actually walk on the various curving surfaces of them. There’s no reason why you would have to stop at this if you wanted to go on and further integrate. I just thought it had occurred to you or that architects had mentioned it to you.

H F : Well, I mean . . . sure. There are no limits to what obviously somebody else may think of and may decide to do with these original ideas. But I still, in a sense, am a classical artist in that I want the sculpture to be looked at and not used. That is, walked upon doesn’t offend me. Only [walking on] it introduces another note in the participation, which is a little bit like touching, which some people feel necessary when they look at sculpture. I don’t think it’s at all important whether you have the desire to touch a piece of sculpture or not. Your eyes are verification enough whether it’s rough or smooth. . . . As for the size, there is no limit with modern materials: plastics and lightweight alloys. These sculptures can be made gigantic. But, as I said before, it’s not really a question of size.

I’m not involved in that idea. It just has to be large enough so that you can walk through it. And I had an interesting experience when I made the first large sculpture that I made, which was only twelve feet high, for a building, for [synagogue designer] Percival Goodman; you know, that was that Burning Bush thing that I did [And the Bush Was not Consumed, 1951, for Congregation B’nai Israel].

When I made it I had to make it on the ground, and I had to work at it by crawling through it and sitting on it, and that was really the first time that I got an entirely different experience of form and of space because I myself was moving through these forms and not just looking at them and not just penetrating them with my eye. I was penetrating them with my body. When that sculpture was finally erected on the building, it lost this quality of immediacy which I found so important at that moment. It gained another quality, but it became an object in an environment instead of forming the environment, which is what it did when I was walking through it on the ground. . . .

DS: Can you recall the feeling, the specific kind of sensation you had in that case when you were crawling through it on the ground?. . .

Was it a sense of being enfolded and surrounded?. . . Could you recall it very specifically? What was it that was good about it?

HF: Well, . . . the best way in which I can describe it is that it gave

me a sense of the presence of the work of art. It was . . . just like the difference between being face to face with somebody and talking to him on the telephone. It gave you a sense of immediacy, of a kind of contact which was much stronger. . . . It enveloped one. Now I don’t mean that it enveloped one the way a tomb envelops one. . . .

DS: The way a tree or a bush—would it have any association . . .?

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H F : No, none of these things because . . . I never think of these things in relation to my sculpture. I’m not interested in landscapes.

I’m not interested in trees or flowers in relation to my work. I think of them as nonrepresentational forms which have emotional value, if you can use such a word, but which I’m also doubtful about. In other words, they [my forms] don’t inspire hate or love or anger or emotions of that kind. They invoke a different kind of feeling, which is an aesthetic one, and I think the word “aesthetic” covers it. But there was a sense of immediacy and of presence. I had an experience like that when I was in Florence. I was there just after the Second World War, and some of the figures of Donatello from the campanile [of the cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore] had been brought down and put on the ground during the war, and I was looking at them face to face, these over life-size figures. Some years later, when I went back, the figures were back in their niches and they were just little dots up there.

When they were down on the ground, I was face to face with them, and it was a sense of presence. I could feel them, I mean visually feel them, see their texture, see . . . the quality of expression.

When they were up there, they were out of contact; they became decorations. And I suppose what I’m trying to say is that when you’re face to face, as close as that with a sculpture, it’s no longer an object. It really is a work of art. Which is different. Well, by going one step further and making it so—large enough—I’m not. . . . I don’t want to say “so large” but just large enough so you can walk into it, then you get a complete destruction of the work of art as an object.

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Herbert Ferber, And the Bush Was Not Consumed, 1951. Congregation B’nai Israel, Millburn, New Jersey.

Photograph © Jane Adlman Young.

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Opposite: Frederick Kiesler, Galaxy for Nelson Rockefeller, 1947–1948. © Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.

Left: Mark di Suvero, Hankchampion, 1960. Wood and chains, 80 × 151 × 112 in. overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull 73.85 a-i. © 1960 Mark di Suvero.

Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson.

DS: Did Frederick Kiesler’s work [Galaxy for Nelson Rockefeller, 1947–

1948] a few years back—would that sculpture that was shown at the Museum [of Modern Art] have any effect on your thinking at all?

H F : Perhaps it did. I don’t know. You know, I didn’t think of it, and, as you look back, one sees that that’s a predecessor, but so is Michelangelo, the Medici Chapel, a predecessor. You might say that there were other ideas of that kind around. Kiesler. I wrote an article in which I credited Kiesler with being one of the first to make such a thing. And you could actually stand in his thing. . . .

DS: Yes, I remember it very well.

HF: . . . in his Galaxy. . . . Yes, perhaps there’s some relationship. His was self-sustaining, there were no . . . architectural structures in relation to it, which I think is important although not necessarily so. You know, there is a sculptor by the name of [Mark di] Suvero. . . .

DS: Yes! H F : . . . who did a large thing, and I had a talk with him about his [piece]. . . . He has no idea—it’s very much like the Galaxy. . . .

DS: Mmmm.

H F : . . . that big thing he did.1 It’s much more closely related to

the Galaxy than anything I’ve ever done. But he thinks of it in a . . . completely academic, conventional fashion. He says, “This is a big sculpture. I want to be able to walk around it and not into it,” and so on. It’s just a big sculpture.

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1 Di Suvero does not remember the conversation that Ferber is talking about, but he thinks Ferber is likely talking about works like Hankchampion or Barrel Piece, both 1960 (email from Ivana Mestrovic, 20 June 2012).

The Artist’s Hand and the Artist’s Eye:

Xanthus Smith at the Centennial Exhibition

K i m b e r ly O r c u t t

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Previous spread, left page: Xanthus Smith, ca. 1875; right page: Xanthus Smith, page describing the American art works at the Centennial Exhibition, 1876.

The International

Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine, in the city of Philadelphia, better known as the Centennial Exhibition, took place from 10 May through 10 November 1876. Over six months almost ten million people attended, a number equaling nearly one-fourth of the U.S. population.1 Among the visitors was the Philadelphian artist Xanthus Smith (1839–1929), who devoted more than 120 pages to a thoughtful assessment of the fine art on view at the exhibition’s Memorial Hall and Art Annex.2 Smith’s observations offer a unique perspective on the bestattended exhibition in the nation’s history. The fine arts galleries in Fairmount Park were naturally a focus of considerable critical attention, and Smith’s account offers an illuminating counterpoint to commentaries in newspapers and journals. In their reviews, most critics debated issues of national identity and the decline of the Hudson River School in the face of new works by expatriate Americans trained in Munich and Paris. Smith instead examined works of art in their own right, not as evidence in an ideological argument. His manuscript includes no sweeping introductory or concluding remarks; in fact, it begins and ends rather abruptly. But Smith’s account, intently focused on individual paintings and sculptures, evaluates the works as only an artist could, assessing how capably the artists used technique to express pictorial ideals of harmony, freedom, and originality that he prized. His manuscript elucidates the ways that artists work with physical materials in their attempts to create and convey the ineffable.

Smith’s manuscript includes careful assessments of dozens of works by both European and American artists, but for modern readers his evaluations require some explanation. He used a fairly consistent procedure that progressed from a narrative account of the action depicted in the painting to a visual analysis of how effectively the scene was composed to comments about technical aspects of the work to more subjective responses on the “effect” the work created as a whole. Throughout, Smith’s minute, objective observations on technique flowed easily into his personal, emotional responses, demonstrating the natural confidence and authority of a veteran viewer who appreciated the importance of a painting’s overall effect and was completely familiar with the effort and craftsmanship involved.

For Smith, the highest aim of the technical aspects of a work was to achieve the abstract qualities that he often characterized as “truth,” “power,” and the “ideal.” His emphasis on these particular values echoed concerns that American artists had considered for decades. In his Letters on Landscape Painting of 1855, for example,

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Asher B. Durand drew a close connection between matters of technique and effect, assuring the aspiring artist that “as you acquire executive skill, your productions will, unawares, be imbued with that indefinable quality recognized as sentiment or expression which distinguishes the true landscape.”3 The Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, formed in 1863 to promote English critic John Ruskin’s call for an intense focus on truth to nature, also carried on Durand’s ideas.4 Smith’s standards come to the fore in his assessments of the works he considered the finest and the worst. He called Alfred Elmore’s work “decidedly the best” of the living British artists represented because its technical excellences contributed to its more ephemeral qualities: it was “original and truthful looking. Good in arrangement and colouring, and so clear and powerful in effect, that it attracts and fixes the attention at once.”5 He praised the American artist John Frederick Kensett’s handling in his Conway Valley, New Hampshire because “while it conveys an appearance of truth of detail, [it] is entirely free from any hardness or niggling,” perhaps meaning that Kensett was able to create an affecting and accurate impression of the scene without resorting to the degree of linearity and detail that some critics derided in his fellow Hudson River School artists. Smith similarly commended the combination of freedom in handling and truth to nature in Worthington Whittredge’s Twilight on the Shawangunk Mountains: “While every tree and rock shows itself to have been carefully studied from nature, the work is freely and openly painted, and I think this is one secret of its success.”6 Smith criticized poor drawing and what he called a lack of truth and power, linking a lack of technical and mimetic skill with an inability to convey the subject’s essence. He had particularly severe words for the French landscape paintings he saw, calling

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Above and below: Xanthus Smith’s admission card for the Centennial Exhibition.

them harsh “unfeeling dirty daubs, such as might be knocked off in an hour or so” that lacked an appropriate subject, composition, or “effect[,] delicacy or truth.” 7 Smith epitomized his standards when he described the large and spectacular Catherine Cornaro Receiving the Homage of Venice by the Austrian artist Hans Makart, one of several attention-getting works in the exhibition.8 He praised Makart’s sumptuous, Rubens-inspired painting at length, saying [it] is truly a masterly work, full in composition, containing a great number of colossal figures, very forcible in light and shadow, broad in effect, and extremely warm and rich in coloring. The handling is free and masterly, and there is a certain fullness of contour and largeness of style in everything that is introduced which is admirably adapted to so large a work.9 The artistic values set out in his manuscript recall Smith’s own painting specialty, an outgrowth of his service in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War. As a painter, Smith was esteemed for his detailed depictions of specific sailing vessels in works that also captured the power of nature in fleeting effects of light and water.

Not surprisingly, then, he sought a combination of technical skill, deftness of touch, and expressive values like truth and power in the paintings he saw at the Centennial Exhibition.

Smith visited the fine arts exhibits several times and recorded his observations by nation, in keeping with the layout of the galleries.10 The foreign art displays were among the most anticipated features of the Centennial Exhibition: more than 540 sculptures and 1,891 paintings provided an overwhelming range of works to compare to the nearly 900 American paintings and sculptures on view. Smith devoted a great deal of attention to the artwork of Great Britain and France, the two most highly anticipated contributors to the exhibition, but he commented on most of the nations represented in Memorial Hall and the Art Annex, including Germany, Austria,

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Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Russia, Spain, and Italy. He saved the American works until the end of his account.

The most admired section by far was that of Great Britain, which occupied one of the large central spaces in the exhibition halls. The British commission sent 193 paintings and 15 sculptures, many of them from the Royal Collection, the Royal Academy, and a number of prominent private collections. Smith concurred with most critics that “we must always feel much indebted to Great Britain[’s] . . . liberality in contributing valuable works, and by the judicious selection.”11 His comments on specific paintings in the section flowed between minute technical observations and assessments of the whole. He called John Constable’s Lock “labored to death, being touched and wrought at over and over again”; said J.M.W. Turner’s Dolbadarn Tower suffered “much from darkening and dirt”; and praised William Hilton’s Rape of Ganymede for “masterly . . . handling . . . great breadth and power of effect.”12 Smith occasionally noted the responses of the other visitors, as when he observed that William Powell Frith’s works, including the famous Railway Station, “attract more attention than any of the other[s].” He admired narrative and meticulous detail throughout the exhibition, so he, like his countrymen, found Frith’s work particularly praiseworthy. Smith had a fellow craftsman’s appreciation for Frith’s many small figures, “all painted with the utmost skill . . . portraying the greatest amount of character,” and for “his delicate finished handling, quite crisp enough to be firm, yet without hardness or dryness.”13 However, like many commentators, he was much more critical of the French section.

France’s contribution to the Centennial Exhibition was larger, with 301 paintings and 74 sculptures, but far from representative. As Smith and many critics agreed, “the French have not taken as much kindly interest in the art part of our exhibition as the English,” since “none of the most eminent French painters either of the past or the

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Opposite: Xanthus Smith, page from his description of the French landscape paintings at the Centennial Exhibition, 1876.

Below: William Powell Frith, Railway Station, 1862. Oil on canvas, 46 x 101 in. © Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, Surrey, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library.

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present are represented.”14 Critic Earl Shinn agreed, including in his published comments on the French section a long list of missing luminaries that included Jean-François Millet, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Ernest Meissonier, and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, among many other famous French painters.15 Notwithstanding his criticism of their landscape daubs, Smith admired the French painters’ perfection as draftsmen and their transcendent ability to paint the nude figure and portray character and expression.16 His overall assessment of the French section was epitomized in his analysis of Georges Becker’s mammoth Rizpah Protecting the Bodies of Her Sons, one of the most controversial paintings in the French gallery.

Becker’s work, loosely based on an obscure episode from the Bible (2 Samuel 21:10), depicts the Israelite Rizpah fighting off vultures trying to feed on the bodies of her crucified sons. The gruesome spectacle of the anguished woman’s dramatic pose and bulging eyes as she protects the dead bodies of her children was irresistible for audiences and critics. The painting drew such complaints as “gloomy yet

repulsive,” “shrill and displeasing,” and a New York Times writer’s pronouncement that it was “the worst picture anyone ever painted.”17 Smith, however, approached the work from a painter’s point of view, examining the coloring (“dark and fierce”) and the variety of Becker’s brushwork; while the background was “immensely coarse . . . the painting of the naked figure is masterly.” Smith called it “a fierce, terrible picture” and observed that “people are much impressed with it, yet feel the repulsiveness of the subject and coarse treatment as being very disagreeable,” suggesting that they, naively distracted by the challenging subject, did not appreciate its virtues as a work of art.18 The artist reserved his comments on the American section for the conclusion of his manuscript. The display was the object of intense attention by visitors, and there was some anxiety about how the works would compare to the European selections. Like many critics, Smith was pleasantly surprised, writing,

And it is only amongst the American landscapes that you are taken away from canvas and paint and put before nature herself under her most interesting and beautiful effects and with all her air and brilliancy.

The art exhibit of the United States, taken as a whole, far exceeds my expectations. I felt almost certain that the New York artists would excel in landscape, but I am surprised and pleased to find that both in genre and in the more important figure subjects, we hold a very creditable position along side of the European nations.19 As his quote suggests, landscapes were a prominent feature of the American galleries, and Smith studied them at length. He found pictures by the great Hudson River School painters Frederic Church

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— X anthus Smith

Opposite: Georges Becker, Rizpah Protecting the Bodies of Her Sons.

From The Masterpieces of French Art: A Biographical History of Art in France from the Earliest Period to and including the Salon of 1882. Photogravure. Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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and Albert Bierstadt disappointing, and noted that they “fall far short” of the work of Thomas Hill, though he did not explain why. His comment seems paradoxical, because Church’s delicate exactitude was at odds with Bierstadt’s freer, more atmospheric handling, but perhaps Smith thought that Hill combined traits of both effectively.

Smith offered genuine, if qualified, praise for how Hill balanced accuracy and freedom: “Though when closely inspected they [Hill’s Donner Lake and Yosemite Valley] appear intolerably coarse and dauby, the effect at a distance is wonderfully rich, harmonious and truthful.”20 After discussing landscapes, Smith turned to American figural and genre pictures with enthusiasm. He showed particular pleasure at Eastman Johnson’s Old Stagecoach as “a very original and pleasing subject,” and, as if a vicarious participant, described the pictorial action with gusto.21 Overall, he seems not to have been caught up in the debates about national versus expatriate art that roiled critical accounts of the American paintings and sculpture at the Centennial Exhibition; as an example of his catholic outlook, he warmly praised the Paris expatriate Frederic Bridgman’s orientalist painting Nubian Story Teller on its own merits without commenting at all on the exotic, distinctly non-American subject.22 He also paused to compare and contrast the finish of Bridgman’s pictures to finishes in the work of two entirely disparate artists, J. B. Irving and Seymour Joseph Guy, a fascinating digression that a critic would not have assayed.23 In a section called “Treatment of Large Works,” Smith observed how installation affected works of art, always an important issue

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Opposite, top: Thomas Hill, Yosemite Valley (From Below Sentinel Dome, as Seen from Artist's Point), 1876. Oakland Museum of California, Kahn Collection; bottom: Frederic Church, Chimborazo, 1864. © Courtesy of the Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, California.

Below: Albert Bierstadt, Entrance into Monterey, 1876. Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Eastman Johnson, The Old Stagecoach, 1871. Oil on canvas, 361/4 x 60 1/8 in, Milwaukee Art Museum, Layton Art Collection, Gift of Frederick Layton, L1888.22, Photograph by John R. Glembin.

for artists of the period, who dreaded having their work neglected because it was poorly lit or obscurely hung. Citing the Centennial Exhibition as a special opportunity to see many different types of paintings arranged in various ways, Smith offered advice on how distinct types might be painted and hung for best effect. For instance, he recommended that large pictures, which must be viewed at a distance, should not be painted with smooth surfaces but rather be “boldly and vigorously handled” so they did not appear “weak and flat” (he cited Church’s Cayambe as a “dead failure” for this reason).

In contrast, Smith suggested that small cabinet pictures intended to be closely inspected in good light “should be on perfect grounds and carefully and delicately wrought.”24 Smith’s belief that technical performance in art was the foundation of the ideal is expounded on in numerous other writings in his papers at the Archives of American Art.25 In an undated address to the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, for example, he called “effect” the first principle of art, but explained that it could only be reached after mastering drawing, composition, design, and a balance of light and shadow.26 One can picture the artist in the galleries of Memorial Hall applying these criteria—inching close up to some paintings and stepping away from others to appreciate their technical and evocative virtues while he also evaluated the passages from the concrete to the abstract, the quotidian to the ideal, and the particular to the universal—trying to grasp the thrilling moment when one is suddenly transformed into the other.

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1 See Kimberly Orcutt, “‘Revising History’: Creating a Canon of American Art at the Centennial Exhibition” (Ph.D. diss., The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2005).

11 Ibid., frame 16. William Dean Howells’ remarks were quite similar. See William Dean Howells, “A Sennight of the Centennial,” Atlantic Monthly 38 (July 1876), 94.

2 Smith’s parents and his sister Mary were painters. He benefited from a family tour of Europe (1851–1852) and training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Smith enlisted in the Navy after the outbreak of the Civil War and began creating detailed drawings of ships; after the war he became recognized as the preeminent painter of Civil War naval battle scenes.

See the online finding aid for the Mary, Xanthus, and Russell Smith Family Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter Smith Family Papers), accessed 20 June 2012, http://www.aaa.si.edu/ collections/mary-xanthusand russell-smith-familypapers-9434/more.

12 Smith, Centennial manuscript, frames 20 and 22.

3 Asher B. Durand, Letter II, The Crayon 1, no. 3 (17 January 1855), 34–35.

17 New-York Tribune Guide to the Exhibition (New York: New-York Daily Tribune, 1876), 60; E.S. [Earl Shinn], “The International Exhibition— No. XVI: French Art,” 194; Gar., “The Great Exhibition: The French Department,” New York Times, 21 May 1876, 1.

4 See Linda S. Ferber and William H. Gerdts, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1985), 13–15.

5 Xanthus Smith, untitled manuscript on the Centennial, Smith Family Papers, microfilm reel 2040, frame 35.

6 Ibid., frames 111–112.

7 Ibid., frames 62, 45, and 55.

8 New-York Tribune Guide to the Exhibition (New York: NewYork Daily Tribune, 1876), 60.

9 Smith, Centennial manuscript, frames 75–76.

10 Ibid., frame 68.

13 Ibid., frames 23–24.

14 Ibid., frame 46. For a similar critical opinion see “The World’s Display of Art,” New York Herald, 11 May 1876, 6.

15 E.S. [Earl Shinn], “The International Exhibition – No. XVI: French Art,” The Nation 23 (28 September 1876): 193. Shinn also named Paul Jacques Aimé, Baudry, Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, Paul Delaroche, Thomas Couture, Henri Regnault, and Léon Bonnat.

16 Smith, Centennial manuscript, frame 47.

18 Smith, Centennial manuscript, frame 48.

19 Ibid., frame 110. Smith put a great deal of care and thought into his remarks on the American contribution.

They do not correspond strictly to a walk through the galleries; rather, he organized his comments by artist, gathering impressions of works in Memorial Hall and the Art Annex.

21 Ibid., frame 121.

22 Ibid., frame 122.

23 Ibid., frame 123. He commented that Guy’s finish was “generally hard”; that Irving showed “touch to some extent”; and that Bridgman’s work was “all touch work.”

Just as interesting as the works Smith commented on are those he ignored. As a member of Philadelphia’s artistic community, he was well aware of Peter Rothermel’s mammoth painting The Battle of Gettysburg, which was the subject of harsh criticism.

Smith praised Rothermel’s “fine, powerful, rich, brilliant, and harmonious coloring,” but pointedly declined to discuss any specific work. He probably also knew about the controversy surrounding the young Philadelphian artist Thomas Eakins’s painting The Gross Clinic, which had been rejected by the Centennial Exhibition jury and relegated to the United States Army Post Hospital display, but he chose not to mention it.

24 Ibid., frames 135–136.

25 These include writings on a range of subjects, from scientific essays to treatises titled “Effect in Art” and “The Ideal in Art.” Smith Family Papers, microfilm reels 2038 and 2040, respectively, no frame numbers.

26 “Paper Read by Xanthus Smith at the Women’s School of Design,” Smith Family Papers, microfilm reel 2040, no frame number, page 2 of ms.

20 Smith, Centennial manuscript, frames 110, 114–115.

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Eugene Berman’s

Mexico Artist Eugene Berman (1899–1972) is best known today as a designer of sets and costumes, but the artist considered his painting and drawing far more important. For Virgil Thomson, “Genia Berman’s art was always a staging of something, a presentation with poetry built in.”1 In the 1920s and 1930s, Berman emerged as one of the “Neo-Romantics,” a group of artists—students of Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Pierre Bonnard—who sought to create a new form of modern art, one that did not conform to the reigning taste for abstraction and appealed strongly to the emotions.

The term originated around 1925, when Berman, along with Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Leonid (Berman’s brother, who painted under one name only) exhibited at Galerie Drouet, though Berman remembered the movement as largely the creation of critic Waldemar George. The artists themselves, as Berman described much later, were bound by a complex net of friendship, but “we were [also] opponents, we were competitiors.”2 The group made very few sales in Paris, but their work came to the attention of Gertrude Stein and a number of influential Americans, including Alfred H. Barr, Jr. , A. Everett (Chick) Austin, James Thrall Soby, and dealer Julien Levy.3 In 1935, success in America and few sales in Paris sent the Russian-born Berman to New York, in the first of several long visits.

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Opposite: Eugene Berman in his studio, ca. 1947, with several Mexican scenes (top and bottom, right).

Above: Eugene Berman, photographs of architectural decoration, Mexico, ca. 1947–1948.

M a ry Pa n z e r

Above: Eugene Berman, The Living and the Dead, 1949. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of the Fine Arts Museums Society.

Opposite top left: Eugene Berman, The Cupola in a Basket, ca. 1947; right: Three Women, ca. 1947; bottom: Mexican Pyramid, ca. 1947.

He immigrated in 1939 and joined the expatriate community in Los Angeles that included Igor Stravinsky, Man Ray, and Bertholt Brecht.

In New York, Berman began to work on a larger scale. He painted murals for Levy’s Manhattan apartment and Soby’s country house, made commercial illustrations and cover art for Vogue and Town and Country, and satisfied a long-held ambition to work in the theater, establishing relationships that led to work with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the Metropolitan Opera, and to a flourishing postwar career.4 Berman’s paintings and drawings appeared in Soby’s 1935 catalogue After Picasso, in which Soby celebrated the Neo-Romantics and the Surrealists as the newest generation of modern painters. By the end of the decade, Soby came to consider Salvador Dalí the genius of the age, and following Soby’s lead, historians often see the Neo-Romantics as an offshoot of the Surrealists. It was an opinion Berman never shared.5 Berman instead traced the “key” to his art to the work of Giorgio de Chirico, whom he met in Rome in 1924 and saw often during de Chirico’s Paris soujourn in the mid-1920s.

He found the Italian Surrealist’s representations of an imaginary world, filled with fragments of Italian architecture, “a revelation” even though (or perhaps because) the prevailing Italian art establishment considered him reactionary and old fashioned. Through de Chirico, Berman said, he “understood that there really is no today in art. There is yesterday, there is reminiscence, there is the echo, there is the dream. There is the thing of today which really was yesterday—it will be tomorrow.

Today, in a way, is already gone.”6 Throughout his career, critics consistently note Berman’s apparent obsession with “ruin, misery, and decay” depicted in landscapes, city plazas, beaches, and deserts littered with derelict structures and populated by exhausted figures. In a 1948 review, Time magazine declared “his work fairly groans with heartache,” a mood that did not extend to the artist, who always “claimed to be ‘divinely happy’ (‘It’s just that I enjoy melancholy things!’).”7 In order to look at—and then represent—a world that had already begun to vanish, Berman relied on images he made on the spot in sketchbooks and, later, with a camera. From those images he worked in the studio to compose original drawings and paintings.

As Berman told Paul Cummings of the Archives of American Art, his images were always based on

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Eugene Berman artwork, clockwise from top left: Two Women in Front of an Arch, 4 July [ca. 1947]; Two Girls Under a Rebozo, 1949. Courtesy of Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers; Photograph of two women under a shawl, ca. 1947; Two women in front of an imaginary Church, ca. 1947; Cover for Forum Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1966; Man with baskets, Toluca, ca. 1947; Photograph of Man with Baskets, ca. 1947; Man in a Hat, 25 July [ca. 1947].

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something that I have seen that is then completely freely transposed, but it has a point of departure that is a remembrance of a place, a building, a particular thing, or a person, something that I have come in contact with and that has struck me, and that remains. . . . It may be something that I saw and that I sketched. Or maybe even something that I photographed.

You see, after a while I began photographing things so that I had a sort of personal archive.8

Above: Photograph of Mexican Cactuses, n.d.

Opposite: Berman's photographs of architectural details, 1947–1948.

Berman began taking photographs in Mexico in 1947, on the first of two trips funded by the Guggenheim Foundation to study Spanish colonial architecture. As Berman told Cummings, “I didn’t know a great deal about it but I knew that I wanted to go to Mexico, that I had to go to Mexico.” In the 1920s, a worldwide fashion for Mexican travel and culture attracted many of the same bohemians and intellectuals who gathered in Greenwich Village and Paris; for decades thereafter, these aficionados influenced mainstream popular taste, expressed in the form of books, exhibitions, decorative arts, and design.9 Several such books came from photographer Hugo Brehme, who emigrated to Mexico from Germany in 1905, published México Pintoresco (180 gravure images) in Spanish and German in 1923, and Picturesque Mexico: The Country, the People, and the Architecture, (250 halftones), in 1925 with captions in German, Spanish, Italian, English, and French. Historian Olivier Debroise calls Brehme “both the first modern photographer of Mexico and the last representative of its old guard and of a certain nineteenth-century vision.”10 His documentation of colonial architecture, pristine landscapes, and a broad representation of indigenous costume and craft won Brehme a wide following.

Berman’s papers at the Archives of American Art include several dozen photographs by Brehme (and some unsigned images that can be attributed to him), both 4-by-6-inch post-card style views of popular sights, and beautifully finished 10-by-12-inch prints, the equivalent of fine engravings. Berman also collected commercial post cards and architectural views published by the National Institute of Colonial Monuments.11

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Above: Man carrying sticks, ca. 1947.

Opposite, left: Eugene Berman on a bridge, ca. 1947; right: Man walking on a bridge, ca. 1947.

But most interesting of all are several hundred photographs Berman made himself using a small hand-held camera, snapshots that served as sketches of forms that attracted his eye—figure studies in markets and on the street, unusual plant forms, colonial ruins, architectural details, ordinary modern figures populating colonial plazas. The photographs show that in Mexico, Berman found a world that closely resembled the melancholy dream world he had been constructing for over twenty years.

At a time when most Mexican artists, including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and in many ways, Brehme, sought to discover and celebrate indigenous art, Berman concentrated on monuments of the colonial past, baroque churches, palaces, and ruins. Speaking to Cummings, Berman remembered that this subject won him few friends among the local art establishment because “colonial art was the art of the oppressors . . . and the people who are interested in it and come and study it and admire that art, you know, they belong to the other side, to the enemy.” 12 Berman’s unpopular enthusiasm was surely unsurprising considering how, years earlier in Paris, he had rejected abstraction and embraced the unpopular art of de Chirico.

Comparing photographs to finished drawings from Berman’s Mexico series, which formed part of his first exhibition with Knoedler Gallery in 1948, one can easily see the artist quote directly from his own images. Through the photographs, one can follow as his eye spots and pursues a shape or arrangement of figures that would make a promising “point of departure.” After printing a sheet with thumbnail-sized images, he selected individual frames to enlarge, and grouped the enlargements into albums. The same photographs show up in many sizes within the archive, and selected images appear again (and again) in his finished drawings and paintings.

In a conversation with Russell Lynes, Berman compared himself to the fifteenth-century painter Carpaccio, whose representations of Venice overflow with details and figures obviously invented by the painter, as opposed to the better-known Canaletto, who made scenes of Venice in which every shadow and line is rendered without apparent embellishment. Berman told Lynes that, like Carpaccio, his visual territory was “the imaginary true—truer than the true or real . . . which is something I never was much interested in.”13 Berman’s theatrical style, along with his use of photographs to support the representation of an imaginary world, links his work directly to the origins of photography itself. The daguerreotype was announced to the world in Paris in 1839, by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, painter and owner of the Diorama. This popular theater opened in 1822 and presented elaborate scenes transformed by light­— a ruined church yard by daylight and moonlight, for instance, or a landscape with a volcano erupting into flame. Daguerre’s invention came out of his more than ten years’ effort to improve his theatrical illusions.14 In the words of Levy, “Berman admires illusionist representation of things because, in order to be convincing . . . to the spectator, unreality must seem 100 percent real.”15

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1 “Genia” was Berman’s lifelong nickname. Virgil Thomson, “Eugene Berman,” in Virgil Thomson: A Reader, Selected Writing 1924– 1984, ed. Virgil Thomson and Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Routledge, 2002), 198– 199. Recently, Berman and his circle have been rediscovered by post-modern critics, for whom their distinctive style appears refreshingly indifferent to the modernist rule of his day.

Among the recent exhibitions that include this group, see Michael Duncan, High Drama: Eugene Berman and the Legacy of the Melancholic Sublime (San Antonio, Tex.: Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, 2005); and Michael Duncan and Peter Howard Selz, L.A. Raw: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles 1945–1980, From Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy (Santa Monica: Foggy Notion Books, 2012).

2 Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Berman come from the oral history interview conducted by Paul Cummings, in New York on 3 June 1972 and in Rome on 19, 20, and 23 October 1972, transcript, 6, 23. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

3 Berman interview, 23, 34.

4 Julien Levy, ed., Eugene Berman (New York and London: American Studio Books, 1947), ix. Berman also worked with George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton.

5 James Thrall Soby, After Picasso (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1935).

6 Berman interview, 12, 22.

7 “Art: The Happy Pessimist,” Time, 24 May 1948, http://www. time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,794392,00. html#ixzz1zVnN5d3i.

8 Berman interview, 48.

9 Ibid.; Mary Panzer, “The American Love Affair with Mexico: 1920–1970,” Archives of American Art Journal 49 nos.

3–4 (Fall 2010), 15–25; Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935 (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1995).

10 Hugo Brehme (1882–1954) immigrated from Germany in 1905, and remained active in Mexico City until his death. He was mentor to photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and colleague of Agustín Victor Casasola. Cultural historians acknowledge his importance to the modern search for indigenous Mexican culture that began with the Revolution.

Brehme’s work overlaps with the Mexican studio of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti. See Olivier Debroise, Mexican Suite: A History of Photography in Mexico, trans. Stella de Sá Rego (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Susan Toomey Frost, Timeless Mexico: The Photographs of Hugo Brehme (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011); Hugo Brehme "Eternal Mexico," Throckmorton Fine Art, New York (May– June 2012); there is a notable collection of Brehme’s work at the Getty Research Institute.

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11 A photographic project first funded by the administration of Porfirio Diaz which employed Guillermo Kahlo, the father of Frida Kahlo. See Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle, Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo: Von Pforzheim bis Mexiko (Munich: Schirmer Mosel, 2005); and Guillermo Kahlo, Teresa Matabuena Peláez, and Enrique Gonzalez Torres, Mexiko 1904 (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero, 2004).

12 Berman interview, 53.

13 Eugene Berman, The Graphic Work of Eugene Berman (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1970), np.

14 On Daguerre’s painting “Ruins of Holyrood Chapel” see http://www.liverpoolmuseums. org.uk/picture-of-month/ displaypicture.asp?venue=2& id=12; and an article from the “Dead Media Archive,” Daguerre’s Diorama, http:// cultureandcommunication. org/deadmedia/index. php/Daguerre's_Diorama; Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org/ toah/hd/dagu/hd_dagu.htm.

For information on the diorama see Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A History of Photography (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000); Robert Hirsch, Exploring Color Photography: From the Darkroom to the Digital Studio (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1989); and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002).

15 Levy, Eugene Berman, xii.

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Above: Cover for Camera Work; typography designed by Edward Steichen.

Right: Alfred Steiglitz, The “Flat-iron,” 1903. Photogravure print.

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Between the years 1903 and 1910, the British photographer Frederick H. Evans (1853–1943) contributed ten times to the American journal Camera Work, Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly publication devoted to the interests of pictorial photography. Drawing on the principles of fine art, this style of photography advocated a more picturesque approach. Evans made his Camera Work debut in October 1903, when Stieglitz introduced him as “the greatest exponent of architectural photography.” 1 The issue featured six images by Evans—all representing medieval cathedrals in Europe—that were accompanied by an essay by the photographer entitled “Camera-Work in Cathedral Architecture.” The inclusion of Evans’s work was noteworthy for two reasons: it was the first time a British photographer appeared in the American magazine; and, more importantly, it was the first issue of Camera Work to feature architectural photographs.

Stieglitz, in acknowledging that American photography was successful in portraiture and figure-work (both prominently featured in earlier issues of the journal), now thought it time to focus on architectural photography, and there were was no one greater than Evans to “show the possibilities of pictorial treatment in this realm of the inanimate.”2 Stieglitz saw architecture as an under-represented area yet one that was clearly relevant to the modern city, and it is no coincidence that within the same issue he included his own photograph of the 1902 Flatiron building in New

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York. Architecture was a subject calling out to the contemporary photographer, but Stieglitz maintained that it must be treated pictorially, and lauded Evans’s ability to “instill into pictures of this kind so much feeling, beauty, and poetry” that such work “exemplifies the necessity of individuality and soul in the worker.”3 Evans, who referred to his cathedral photographs as “studies,” approached each building in a methodical, measured way. In his essay he listed the requirements for a successful pictorial style: “Trained taste in choice of subject; working knowledge of the limitations in the use of lenses; sensitive feeling in light and shadow; delicate sense of atmosphere; enjoyment of the grandeur of masses.” 4 He recounted his experience of viewing watercolors by Joseph Mallord William Turner, whereby he was impressed by “the superb sense of height, bigness, light, atmosphere, grandeur that this incomparable artist had managed to suggest within a few inches that comprise these small pictures.”5 The photographer wondered if a photograph could ever live up to the Turners. He was pleased when, later, he succeeded in evoking these qualities in his 1899 photograph Height and Light in Bourges Cathedral by capturing, in a print that measures 3 x 213/16 inches, the High Gothic magnificence of the French cathedral with its soaring verticality and raking light. His essay continued by discussing the advances photography had subsequently made in the area

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Opposite: Frederick H. Evans, York Minster: “In Sure and Certain Hope,” negative 1902; published October 1903.

Photogravure print.

Above: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Interior of a Gothic Church, ca. 1797. from Wilson Sketchbook, Turner Bequest xxxvii no. 05536. © Tate, London 2012.

of architecture, and he dismissed the notion that photographers lacked creative expression in documenting the inanimate. For him the veracity of the photographic medium was in fact its advantage over architectural drawings and paintings. Yet he was aware of the inherent technical challenges of photographing the dimly lit interiors of medieval cathedrals, even explaining how he succeeded in creating the picture York Minster: “In Sure and Certain Hope” despite the difficulties he found with the setting. An advocate of pure photography, he was against any manipulation of the negative, cautioning that “these attempts at local control in and during development lead to all manner of false tone-values; and certainly one never gets or can get by this means a really true rendering of the exquisite values of nature’s gradations, which it is photography’s special and proud mission so adequately to record.”6 Evans’s tenacity and his deep engagement with his subjects brought him photographic success. He realized that people— photographer or visitor alike—did not spend enough time actually looking, which for him it was essential. He concluded his essay with a moving statement: And there are no more abiding memories of peace, deep joy, and satisfaction, of a calm realization of an order of beauty that is so new to us as to be a real revelation, than those given by a prolonged stay in a cathedral vicinity. The sense of withdrawal, an apartness from the rush of life surging up to the very doors of the wonderful building, is so refreshing and recreating to the spirit as surely to be worth any effort in attaining. When one comes to be past the fatigues of traveling, and has to rely on old memories, these old visits to glorious cathedral-piles will be found, I think, to be among the richest remembrances one has stored up.7 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Note: the following excerpt of Frederick Evans’s essay “CameraWork in Cathedral Architecture” is from Camera Work 4, October 1904, in the collections of the Archives of American Art. Many years ago, when visiting the Winter Exhibition of Old Masters at the Royal Academy, I saw for the first time some of Turner’s early architectural water-color drawings. What impressed me most was the superb sense of height, bigness, light, atmosphere, grandeur that this incomparable artist had managed to suggest within the few inches that comprise these small pictures. How hopeless for anything but the brush of so great an artist to accomplish so much in so little! And especially how hopeless for anything in the way of camera-work to compete with them in any sense! When, some time afterward, I began working at photography and found myself drawn to cathedral studies, I recalled these little masterpieces and wondered afresh if anything photography might ever do could merit a tithe of the praise so justly lavished on the incomparable Turner.

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After a while I took heart a little, for, seeing that my subjects did not call for color in their rendering; that the chief things needed were extreme care and taste in composition (in the placing of the camera for point of view); faultless drawing (in the sense of correct choice of lens, height, etc., of it and camera); adequate treatment of the fine detail such subjects abound in; and an exhaustive study of the conditions, making for the best effects of light and shade and atmosphere; it seemed to me that cathedral-pictures were well within the camera’s special field of work when properly directed, and that with much judgment and more patience photography might some day achieve something that should be at least on the same road as these tiny masterpieces of Turner. It must be remembered that this was the early Turner, and topographical accuracy in this work was as evident as the utmost beauty of artistic presentment.

True, Turner seemed to have got so far on as to have reached the end of the road, and my photography might never get more than a start, let alone getting a good way along it; but to be securely on the right road is of itself a distinction to be well satisfied with.

All this is doubtless a sufficiently bold and conceited assurance; and yet I will be bolder still and think that some of the prints in this issue of Camera Work . . . are quite as valuable as any other art-version of the same subjects could be. If success be to convey to another the vital aspect and feeling of the original subject, so to translate one’s own enjoyment of a scene into a visible record as to affect the critic with the very quality of one’s own original emotion, then surely it matters not in what form or method of art it be achieved, it will be as vitally valuable; and if it be possible by way of the contemned “box with a glass in it,” so much the more credit to the worker who uses that despised tool to so good an end.

Something of this may excuse my satisfaction when I made the print I have ventured to call Height and Light in Bourges Cathedral.

I was perforce limited on that hurried holiday to a tiny hand-camera for plates three and a quarter inches square; but while lamenting that fact I felt a trifle consoled in the thought that it might possibly help to prove that mere acreage has nothing to do with art, and that, remembering Turner’s little drawings and their wonderful accomplishment in the conveying of awe, mystery, atmosphere, space, etc., I might be tempted by the Fates with an opportunity of showing that even so small a camera could, if its user saw the right thing and knew it to be in the right condition, accomplish something sufficiently far along Turner’s road to merit some share of the sort of applause meted out to his drawings. . . .

One charm and advantage that a really artistic photograph of a cathedral interior has over a drawing or painting is that it is so evidently true to the original subject. . . . [T]o some minds, more bent on purely creative efforts in landscape, genre, or figure-work, this . . . has no attraction; we are here [in photography] necessarily compelled to be rigidly true to facts; there is not the latitude of composition that permits the taking a subject as a text to work up a picture from; we are limited to treating what is before us in as

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A s I was studying it the sun burst across it, flooding it with radiance.

T here is my picture.

true a manner as possible; the art side only exists in the treatment, the selection of light condition, etc. But it is for this very reason that I think architectural work has one of the highest claims on us as photographer, considering the small amount of latitude, and the inelastic conditions of our medium in comparison with other graphic methods.

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Opposite: Frederick H. Evans, Height and Light in Bourges Cathedral, negative 1899; published October 1903.

Photogravure print.

Left: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Interior of Church: Evening, ca. 1830.

Tate, d24615. © Tate, London 2012.

But to show, if I may be so egotistical, that there is a large degree of latitude for the expression of one’s artistic personality, I would venture to refer to the print In Sure and Certain Hope in this issue.

This subject fascinated but troubled me. I at once saw the making of a picture in it . . . all [was] fine and right [in the view]; but to make the whole cohere, speak, escaped me. But one day I saw what it must mean—to me at least. As I was studying it the sun burst across it, flooding it with radiance. There is my picture, thought I; “Hope” awaiting, an expectancy with a certitude of answer; and the title seemed defensible, if a little ambitious.

The technical difficulties of photographic art are many, and especially in directions that offer none, unfortunately, to the painter and draughtsman. So many subjects have to be given up from mere local hindrances; obstacles in the field of view that are impossible of removal to the camera-man can, of course, be simply disregarded by the draughtsman. Particularly is this the case when one is fain to depict the grandeur of a large composition. To do this without distortion, magnification of near portions, means using long-focus lenses; this in turn means getting a good way back from one’s subject, and this in its turn is impossible, as the walls of the building put a severe and rapid limit to desires of this kind.

But, on the other hand, there are effects of light and shade and atmosphere that are simply elusive to any but the most sensitive and accomplished of artists, and even then call for so rare a skill in putting down as to make the achievement all but nonexistent. These effects are often, however, to the sufficiently sensitive and skilful camera-man, almost easy of rendering, and with a fidelity that is certainly not surpassable in any other art method or work. Indeed, one only finds out after years of work in the wrong way and at the wrong things what extraordinary effects are possible to the camera in this field.

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1 Alfred Stieglitz, “Our Illustrations,” Camera Work 4 (October 1903), 25.

2

Ibid.

3

Ibid.

4 Frederick H. Evans, “Camera-Work in Cathedral Architecture,” Camera Work 4 (October 1903), 18.

5

Ibid., 17.

6

Ibid., 20.

7

Ibid., 21.

Collector’s Notes

Charles H. Duncan

Jimmy Ernst (1920–1984) was destined to lead a storied life. Born in Cologne, Germany, to the artist Max Ernst and Louise Straus Ernst, a journalist and art historian, Jimmy’s early years were shaped by a community of European Surrealists. In 1941, three years after his arrival in the United States, he assumed the directorship of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, and by mid-century his image was solidified by Nina Leen’s famous 1951 photograph of American Abstract Expressionists, The Irascibles. In his memoir A Not-So-Still Life, published in 1984, Ernst adroitly recounts the remarkable personal and artistic trajectory of his formative years.

In 2012, the Archives of American Art acquired the Jimmy Ernst papers through the generosity of his children, Amy and Eric Ernst.

The collection is a testament to Ernst’s wide-ranging contributions as a painter, teacher, and writer, and even as a participant in the annual Artists and Writers charity softball game in East Hampton, New York. Rich in correspondence, photographs, drafts of writing, exhibition documentation, and extensive printed materials on the artist and his circle, the Jimmy Ernst papers will be a key collection of primary resources for scholars charting the emergence of Abstract Surrealism in America.

Poignant family and personal correspondence includes a letter to the newly transplanted New Yorker from Leonora Carrington (his father’s romantic partner) and Max Ernst, written from the South of France during the tumultuous year 1938. Carrington advises, “You must not say that Max doesn’t think of you and love you, because

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Previous page: Jimmy Ernst with Lookscape, 1952.

Below: “Jazz on the River” concerts were sponsored by Rudi Blesh and Art Hodes in the summer of 1947 (clockwise from left): Wild Bill Davison, Rudi Blesh, Bob Auther, Jimmy Ernst, and Baby Dodds.

he does and is always delighted with your letters and loves talking about you and wondering what you are doing and if you are happy.”

A 1947 letter from Dorothea Tanning, the American girl whom Max married the previous year at a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, describes the challenges of life in immediate postwar Sedona, Arizona. “Sometimes during the last two months we have actually had very little to eat. And though one doesn’t mind starving for a day or two, one likes to think it will be over after that. . . . Probably we were foolish in imagining that we could live out here by our paintings alone. But Max had always managed to before and, although I hope you won’t pass this along, he would really do very well now if he had a better dealer.”

Surrounded by stellar talent in the family, Jimmy Ernst was himself a jazz aficionado, and he gained individual recognition by interpreting jazz music through painting, making visual the cycles of improvised melodies through vibrant, tangled passages of collage and oil, especially in his works of the 1940s. The structure and language of jazz spoke to Ernst, and its basis as an African American art form emerging out of the “pain of the rejected” also struck a chord.

With other displaced Europeans he enjoyed the comradeship of the jazz community, even working with jazz critic Rudi Blesh and Circle Records to design numerous covers for jazz albums.

Ernst’s style became more stable in his later years, and he made a series of bold, abstract landscapes that show the artist as a fully assimilated American working in harmony with his surroundings. This phase is reflected in the Ernst papers by materials that include a successful application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, honorary degrees, and accounts of his role as a teacher, particularly at Brooklyn College. When Ernst was on a medical leave of absence during the 1960s, his fellow artist-teacher Ad Reinhardt sent the following observations on the men’s shared profession: Jimmy: Here we are slaving over a hot old-lady master-of-artsprogram while you’re cooling it off in a nice restful hospital. . . .

Here we are sweating all day and night over the bachelors-ofdegrees-candidates while you’re taking it nice and easy with relaxing pills and injections and calming cardiographic-hicpictographic-abstract-expressionist-pictures and ideograms. Take it easy, keep, cool, stay cool, relax, be sweet, fragrant, etc.

AD.

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Left: Jimmy and Max Ernst, 1961.

Below: Jimmy Ernst with one of his Sea of Grass paintings, early 1980s.

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Above: Frank Lloyd Wright to Aline Saarinen, 24 May 1958.

Opposite, (l–r): Frank Lloyd Wright, Hilla Rebay, and Solomon R. Guggenheim at the unveiling of the museum model, Plaza Hotel, 20 September 1945. Photograph courtesy of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives © The Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archive.

Right: Frank Lloyd Wright, plan of the second level of the Guggenheim Museum, 1958. © 2012 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. / Art Resource, NY.

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An Atmosphere

Instead of a Frame It took Frank Lloyd Wright fifteen years to finish the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Much of this time was taken up with predictable delays of various kinds, as Wright negotiated the complicated terrain of New York City development. But he was also forced to cope with a number of objections from his clients and, finally, with the death of Guggenheim in late 1949. This event significantly delayed the beginning of work, as doubts and disputes were revived. The two documents published here highlight one particular, and very important, question that plagued the commission from its earliest days: How would paintings be displayed in the new building?

Museum curator Hilla Rebay approached Wright in June 1943 and asked him to design a building for Guggenheim’s collection of abstract pictures. Abstract art had not yet been widely accepted by the public, and Rebay and Guggenheim explicitly intended that the new building would correct this.1 “I need a fighter,” Rebay exhorted,

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DAR CY TE L L

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in her first letter to Wright, “a lover of space, an originator, a tester and a wise man.”2 By the end of the month, the architect and patrons signed a contract.

Wright conceived a radical design, proposing a building “six stories high . . . [with] a three-quarter-mile-long ramp, gently spiraling from bottom to top.”3 As the published correspondence shows, Rebay very soon questioned Wright’s ideas about how to hang their collection; as the plans developed, over years, client and architect debated the problem.

The architect envisioned visitors walking down his ramp looking at paintings displayed at a slight angle—as if on an artist’s easel—against the curving outer walls of the building. He saw the art and the building, inside and out, as a symphonic whole. He disliked the standard frames and straight lines of traditional museum installations and envisioned the tilted-back works set off like “signet[s]” in rings. As he put it,“In the great upward sweep of movement the picture is seen framed as a feature of architecture. This is the liberation of painting by architecture.”4 Eventually, Wright settled on niches that deepened as the ramp climbed higher, where the paintings would be lighted primarily by natural light, enhanced on dark days or at night by spots or other artificial lighting. Wright also wanted the outer walls to be painted the same color as the rest of the interior; he rejected the high ceilings, grandiose spaces, and stark white walls of other museums, dictating instead a soft neutral shade that created a luminous, sympathetic, and organic space that the architect had scaled to men and women.

By 1958, as construction moved along, Wright was forced again to defend his ideas. Rebay had resigned in 1953, but the new director, James Johnson Sweeney, also questioned details of Wright's interior design. Sweeney preferred white walls—standard in many New York museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, where he had worked. Wright pushed back on several points with increasing vehemence, especially against the convention of hanging paintings against white. White walls, he held, were a cheap effect, a shroud, a vulgar picture-dealer’s trick, a violation of beauty—and of his organic whole. “The various massive forms created inside . . . would be out of scale if exaggerated by whitewashing them all together white regardless, and you would have an effect,” he said, “something like you can see in the toilets of the Racquet Club” if you happened to look in.

This is not all. Separate these beautiful quiet forms of this organic circumstance that is our building from their character in the complete ensemble and the whole building is rendered ridiculous.5

Wright steadfastly held the line. These documents show the two sides of the dispute, and in the end, Wright never saw the final hangings. He died in April 1959, and when the museum opened in October, the pictures were displayed in an all-white interior “mounted on pikes projecting from the wall, as if floating in a white void.”6

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Opposite: Open letter from artists to the Guggenheim director, James Johnson Sweeney, and trustees, 1956.

1 Frank Lloyd Wright: The Guggenheim Correspondence, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed.

(Fresno: The Press at California State University; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 169.

2

Ibid., 4.

3 “Museum Designed by Wright to Rise,” New York Times, 7 May 1956.

4 Ada Louise Huxtable, “That Museum: Wright or Wrong?,” New York Times, 25 October 1959.

5 Frank Lloyd Wright to Harry Guggenheim, 17 March 1958, reprinted in Pfeiffer, Guggenheim Correspondence, 263.

6 Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, “A Temple of Spirit,” in The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Publications, ca. 1994), 34.

EditorIAL

Darcy Tell, Editor Jenifer Dismukes Managing Editor Design

Alex Knowlton for Winterhouse Rights and Reproductions

Wendy Hurlock Baker Digital imaging

Martin Hoffmeier Subscriptions & single issues

Individuals may receive the Journal with a gift of $100 or more to the Fund for the Archives.

Institutional rate: $75 for 1 year Back issues: $15 a copy Send all inquiries regarding subscriptions, back issues, and manuscript submissions to: Editor Archives of American Art Journal P.O. Box 37012 / MRC 937 Washington, DC 20013 T. 202.633.7971 Manuscripts submitted for publication should be based in part on materials in the Archives.

Full text of volumes 2–46 (1962–2006) available online through JSTOR. Articles published in the Journal are abstracted and indexed in the Art Index and in Historical Abstracts America: History and Life.

Opinions expressed in the Archives of American Art Journal are those of the authors and not necessarily of the editors or the Archives of American Art. ©2012 Smithsonian Institution.

Top: Theodore Robinson, photograph of two girls in a boat, n.d.

Above: Theodore Robinson, Two in a Boat, 1891. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Theodore Robinson’s painting Two in a Boat, 1891, was on view at the 1913 Armory Show, whose hundredth anniversary will be celebrated in the next issue of the Archives of American Art Journal.

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Archives of american art

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Archives of Americ an Art Journ al 51: 1–2

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Suzanne D. Jaffe Chair Barbara Mathes President Arthur Cohen Vice President Lynn Dixon Johnston Secretary Barbara G. Fleischman Gilbert H. Kinney Frank Martucci Janice C. Oresman Members at Large Warren Adelson Perry Amsellem Dr. Carrie Rebora Barratt Ann E. Berman Gerald E. Buck Edward O. Cabot Helen W. Drutt English Ruth Feder Martha J. Fleischman Diane A. Fogg John K. Howat Wendy Jeffers Judith Jones Linda Lichtenberg Kaplan Julian Lethbridge Nicholas Lowry Bridget Moore Martin O’Brien Ellen Phelan Marla Prather John R. Robinson Rona Roob Eli Wilner

Trustee Council Dr. Helen I. Jessup Samuel C. Miller Theodore J. Slavin

Trustees Emeriti

Nancy Brown Negley Chair Max N. Berry, Esq. Dona Kendall Richard A. Manoogian Marilyn Schlain Alan E. Schwartz A. Alfred Taubman

Founding Trustees

Lawrence A. Fleischman Mrs. Edsel B. Ford Edgar P. Richardson

Ex Officio

Dr. G. Wayne Clough Secretary, Smithsonian Institution Dr. Richard Kurin Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture, Smithsonian Institution

Acting Director Dr. Liza Kirwin

credits

Cover: Karl Knaths Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Page 3: (details): acrylic on canvas, unframed: 47 ¾ x 66 in. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust through exchange of the gifts of the Eighth Mid-American Annual Exhibition to the Mid-American Annual Collection, Mrs. A. W. Erickson, Helen Mag Wolcott, and Mr. and Mrs. Russell Millin, © Dean Fleming; photograph courtesy Edith Ferber; oil on canvas, 46 x 101 in. © Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, Surrey, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library; Eugene Berman Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Camera Work, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Jimmy Ernst Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; photograph: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives © The Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archive.

Pages 4–5: Park Place, The Gallery of Art Research, Inc., and Paula Cooper Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 6: acrylic on canvas, unframed: 47¾ x 66 in.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust through exchange of the gifts of the Eighth Mid-American Annual Exhibition to the Mid-American Annual Collection, Mrs. A. W. Erickson, Helen Mag Wolcott, and Mr. and Mrs. Russell Millin, © Dean Fleming; Page 7: acrylic on canvas, 84 x 73 in. Collection of Kathy Wills Wright and Sue and Don Wills (formerly Collection of Mrs. John D. Murchison); Collection of Bernard Kirschenbaum and Susan Weil; Page 8: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972, © Mark di Suvero, photograph

by Lee Stalsworth; Page 9: oil on plywood, 31 in. diameter. Collection of B. R. Ott, (formerly Collection of Vera List); Page 10: aluminum, 35 7/8 x 36 7/16 x 6 1/8 in.

Donation of Virginia Dwan, 1985, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Page 13: Park Place, The Gallery of Art Research, Inc., and Paula Cooper Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 16: Collection of Betty Blake; Page 19: acrylic on canvas, 60 x 128 in., photograph courtesy Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York; Pages 22–23: Park Place, The Gallery of Art Research, Inc., and Paula Cooper Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Page 25: Herbert Ferber Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Pages 26–29: photographs courtesy Edith Ferber; Page 33: photograph © Jane Adlman Young, 2012; Page 34: Whitney Museum of American Art; photograph: silver gelatin on barite paper, 8½ x 7½ in. © 2012 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna; Page 36: wood and chains, 80 x 151 x 112 in. overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull 73.85a-1. © Mark di Suvero.

Pages 36–40: Mary, Xanthus, and Russell Smith Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 41: oil on canvas, 46 x 101 in. © Royal Halloway and Bedford New College, Surrey, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library; Page 42: photogravure, Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations; Page 44: (top) oil on canvas, 72 x 120 in. Oakland Museum of California, Kahn Collection; (bottom) © photograph courtesy Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, California; Page 45: photograph courtesy U.S. House of Representatives; Page 46: oil on canvas, 36¼ x 601/8 in., Milwaukee Art Museum, Layton Art Collection, Gift of Frederick Layton, L1888.22, photograph by John R. Glembin.

Pages 48–56: All items are from the Eugene Berman Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, except: Page 50: oil on canvas, unframed: 451/8 x 35 3/8 in., framed: 53¾ x 43½ x 35/8 in., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of the Fine Arts Museums Society, 1981.88; and Page 52: (top right) photograph courtesy of Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers.

Pages 58–60, 62, 64: Camera Work, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Pages 61, 65: © Tate, London 2012.

Pages 66–69: Jimmy Ernst Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Page 70: (top) Aline and Eero Saarinen Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; (bottom) © 2012 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / Art Resource, NY.; Page 71: © The Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archive; Page 72: Letters and Clippings Regarding the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Page 74: (top) John I. H. Baur Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; (bottom) The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.