Susan Weil | Now, Then and Always by Sundaram Tagore Gallery

SUSAN WEIL

NOW, THEN AND ALWAYS

SUSAN WEIL

NOW, THEN AND ALWAYS SUNDARAM TAGORE CHELSEA APRIL 22–MAY 28, 2021

SUSAN WEIL AT 91 Selected as one of Art in America’s must-see shows of the season, this retrospective of work by Susan Weil pays tribute to one of the boldest and most inventive artists of the 20th century. Originally slated to open in spring 2020 just before the lockdown, the exhibition coincides with the artist’s 91st birthday. Weil is among the key female figures who pushed the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism, a movement largely defined by male painters. As the narrative of modern art is rewritten and women artists are finally entering the spotlight, Weil’s contribution is coming to the fore. Curator Sundaram Tagore says, “Susan Weil is one of the most intrepid artists working today. I’ve had the immense honor of showing her work for 20 years and her expressive power continues to inspire and beguile me.” Tracing the arc of her career, which spans more than 70 years, this exhibition features Weil’s early landscapes from the 1950s, iconic blueprints (1949–2020), seminal figurative paintings, series inspired by the natural world and work made this year. Although Weil was active in New York during the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, she was not afraid to pursue figuration and reference reality, gaining inspiration from nature, literature, photographs and her personal history. Throughout her career she has brought to life intangible qualities of time and movement, creating multidimensional works in which she fractures the picture plane, deconstructing and reconstructing images. She consistently experiments with materials from everyday life, including found objects, metal, paper, Plexiglas, recycled canvas and wood. The dynamic and playful results are crumpled, cut and refigured compositions that invite viewers to contemplate multiple perspectives at once. Left: Leafing Blue (detail), 2019, collaboration with José Betancourt, cyanotype on canvas, wood, 82 x 51.25 x 6.25 inches/208.3 x 130.2 x 15.9 cm 5

Susan Weil studied under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, the rural mecca for young artists, composers and choreographers. She often scoured campus rubbish dumps with Robert Rauschenberg to find materials to incorporate in their experimental works. “It was very revolutionary. Black Mountain put together creative people from all the fields,” recalls Weil, who studied painting but also explored dance and poetry. “We’d sit around in the big dining hall and talk about different things we were working on. It was great sharing. We participated in all different mediums.” This spirit of innovation shaped Weil’s art throughout her career. She moved to New York in 1949 with Rauschenberg when the art scene was erupting. She came of age at the center of the New York School with its eclectic cultural influences and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her peers included artists Cy Twombly, Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns as well as dancer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage. Highlights of this retrospective include Weil’s rarely seen early painterly landscapes and striking figurative works from the 1960s as well as pieces she’s made in the last two years. Five Generations (2019), for example, is a collaborative work that began in 1930 when Weil’s mother embroidered stars in an accurate constellation onto a sheer tablecloth encircled by a poem of her own creation. Almost 90 years later, Weil’s daughter Sara Kirschenbaum created a cyanotype of this embroidery evoking the night sky. She commemorated the intergenerational nature of the work with written text hung alongside. Weil then added a series of energetic figures that she drew with her eyes closed and cut out of copper mesh. Her granddaughter Flint Kirschenbaum completed the piece by attaching the figures, which appear to leap from the blue fabric. Weil’s nebulous human forms in motion have been appearing in her work as far back as Swimming Figures from 1958. Articulated in ebullient, gestural brushstrokes, the composition beautifully embodies themes the artist has returned to again and again and still explores today, namely, time expressed abstractly and in relation to nature and the figure in movement. “I’ve spent a lifetime working,” says Weil. “It’s been both a serious and a joyful journey and I have no intention of slowing down.”

Swimming Figures, 1958, acrylic on linen, 51 x 51 inches/129.5 x 129.5 cm

Early Landscape, ca. 1958, acrylic on canvas, 52 x 52 inches/132.1 x 132.1 cm

MOTION PICTURES, 2008 SUNDARAM TAGORE BEVERLY HILLS 12

WALKING FIGURE One of Susan Weil’s earliest Plexiglas sculptures, Walking Figure is a powerful example of her fearless experimentation and innovative use of materials. She continues to explore figures in motion even today, but here she liberates them from the canvas. Weil skillfully captures sequential movements in time using colors formed by the overlapping sheets of acrylic. This work debuted in the 1968–69 exhibition PLASTIC as Plastic at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York (now the Museum of Arts and Design). Out of more than 200 pieces included in the show, Weil’s was one of only a handful highlighted in a review by Hilton Kramer, then chief art critic for The New York Times.

Walking Figure, 1967, Plexiglas and aluminum, 44 x 25 inches/118.8 x 63.5 cm 15

Walking Figure, 1967, colored Plexiglas, 12 x 8.75 x 2 inches/30.5 x 22.3 x 5 cm

Walking Figure and Shadow, 1968, acrylic and metallic spray paint on Plexiglas, 13.75 x 13.75 inches/34.9 x 34.9 cm

Walking Figure, 1969, acrylic on linen, 51 x 72 inches/129.5 x 182.9 cm

Standing Figure, 1967, acrylic on Plexiglas, 48.5 x 65 inches/123.2 x 165.1 cm

TREES, 2008 SUNDARAM TAGORE CHELSEA 25

APEEL Weil has cited the tactile folds of fabric in Renaissance art as inspiration for her Soft Canvas series, which she has explored for decades. Using only color and form, Weil can suggest a sense of weight and mass or lightness and buoyancy. In Apeel, for example, her crumpled painted canvas draped just below the picture plane conveys the sense of gravity, as if the painting is slowly peeling away from its frame.

Apeel, 1983, acrylic on canvas, 36.5 x 25 x 5 inches/92.7 x 63.5 x 12.7 cm 27

Horizon, 1972, acrylic on canvas and steel rods, 22.5 x 74.5 x 2.75 inches/57.2 x 189.2 x 7 cm

Homage to the Tear 2, 1980, acrylic on paper, 31 x 66 x 5.25 inches/78.7 x 167.6 x 13.3 cm

Field, 1992, acrylic on panels, 40 x 56 x 2 inches/101.6 x 142.2 x 5.1 cm

Leaves Figure, 1998, acrylic on cut paper in glass frame, 30 x 22 inches/76.2 x 55.9 cm

Copper, 1999, acrylic, charcoal and watercolor on paper, 60.5 x 66.25 inches/153.7 x 168.3 cm

MOTION PICTURES, 2009 SUNDARAM TAGORE HONG KONG 39

Torso, 1999, acrylic on paper, 39 x 27.5 inches/99.1 x 69.9 cm

TRISHA DANCING Weil has always found inspiration in the work of her creative contemporaries, especially those from other disciplines, including dance, music and poetry. In her portrait of American choreographer Trisha Brown (1936–2017), a pioneer of the postmodern dance movement, Weil sets the figure in motion by fracturing the picture plane. What was once a single image is now represented over multiple canvases, infusing the composition with rhythm, energy and movement.

Trisha Dancing, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 85 inches/152.4 x 215.9 cm 43

Man in Red on Bicycle, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 49 x 49 inches/124.5 x 124.5 cm

Winter Interior, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 70 inches/61 x 177.8 cm 46

This and That, 2009, acrylic and Plexiglas on canvas, 65.75 x 48.5/167 x 123.2 cm

REFLECTIONS, 2011 SUNDARAM TAGORE CHELSEA 51

Realism, 2010, laser-cut mirrored Plexiglas, 36 x 25.5 inches/91.4 x 64.8 cm

Half Moon, 2011, collaboration with José Betancourt cyanotype and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 13 inches/50.8 x 33 cm

Small Phases of Moon, 2011, collaboration with José Betancourt cyanotype and acrylic on canvas, 19.5 x 24.5 x 5 inches/49.5 x 61 x 12.7 cm

Moon Cycle, 2012, collaboration with José Betancourt cyanotype and acrylic on canvas, 56 x 81 inches/142.2 x 205.7 cm

Tears, 2012, collaboration with José Betancourt acrylic and cyanotype on canvas, 24 x 26 inches/61 x 66 cm

Time’s Pace, 2012, acrylic on wood, 37 x 37 inches/94 x 94 cm

FRONTIERS REIMAGINED, 2015 56TH VENICE BIENNALE 64

Body Shelley, 2014, digital image on backlit Plexiglas and canvas on Sintra board, 77 x 55.5 x 2 inches/195.6 x 141 x 5.1 cm

Perspect, 2014, archival digital print on paper and acrylic sheet, 48 x 27.75 inches/122 x 70.5 cm

Awing, 2017, engraved panels, 38 x 18 x 3.5 inches/96.5 x 45.7 x 8.9 cm

Awing, 2018, acrylic, fabric collage and found paintings on canvas, 25 x 20 inches/63.5 x 50.8 cm

FIVE GENERATIONS This collaborative work was begun in 1930, when Weil’s mother embroidered stars in an accurate constellation onto a sheer tablecloth encircled by a poem of her own creation. Almost 90 years later, Weil’s daughter Sara Kirschenbaum created a cyanotype of this embroidery evoking the night sky. She commemorated the intergenerational nature of the work with written text hung alongside. Weil then added a series of energetic figures that she drew with her eyes closed and cut out of copper mesh. Her granddaughter Flint Kirschenbaum completed the piece by attaching the figures, which appear to leap from the fabric.

Five Generations, 2019, copper wire mesh on cyanotype on fabric with wood dowels, 85.5 x 63 x 4.25 inches/217.2 x 160 x 10.8 cm 75

Leafing Blue, 2019, collaboration with José Betancourt cyanotype on canvas on wood, 82 x 51.25 x 6.25 inches/208.3 x 130.2 x 15.9 cm

NOW AND THEN, 2017 SUNDARAM TAGORE CHELSEA 79

Time’s Pace Time Space, 2019, acrylic on acrylic sheet, digital print on PVC, steel, 30 x 20.5 x 8 inches/76.2 x 52.1 x 20.3 cm

Scissors for Matisse, 2020, archival digital print on acrylic sheet, 40 x 25 x 2.5 inches/101.6 x 63.5 x 6.4 cm

Sitting in Space, 2020, acrylic, linen and charcoal on canvas, 53 x 33 inches/134.6 x 83.8 cm

Holy Roly Over, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 35.75 x 35.375 x 4.25 inches/90.8 x 89.9 x 10.8 cm

Primary Hidden Secondary, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 36.4 x 21.5 x 6.75 inches/92.5 x 54.6 x 17.1 cm

Squared Circle, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 33.5 x 33.5 x 3.75 inches/85.1 x 85.1 x 9.5 cm

MY BLUE JOURNEY By Susan Weil

My parents were creative characters. My dad was a writer of short stories, poems, and plays. My mother was an eccentric. She quietly, though not professionally, wrote stories, made watercolors, and brought wild, creative endeavors to our family. In the late 1920s, my parents bought a small island within an archipelago off the coast of Connecticut in the Long Island Sound. Known as Outer Island because it is the farthest island from shore, it was my family’s home for many years. Shortly after becoming islanders, my parents had my brother in 1928 and I came along a year and half later. Throughout my childhood we spent summers on Outer Island. Sometimes we slept outside on army cots so that we could watch the stars. My mother became a licensed lobster woman. She had fifty lobster pots, and I often set the nets and baited the pots. When my brother Danky and I were kids, soaking up the sun and salty sea on Outer Island, one of our summer activities was to make blueprints. We would put unexposed blueprint paper in a glass frame and cover it with leaves, grasses, and other finds. We would briefly place them in the bright sun, rush the results under water and add a sponge of peroxide to stabilize the sweet silhouettes of the plant forms. Island life was rigorous. For starters, our faucets ran cold saltwater. Dishwashing was a nightly communal family activity, and my mother had to boil the saltwater before she could wash the dishes. My brother Danky and I would dry them. My father’s job was to read to us. He read The Odyssey, chapter by chapter. He read his own writing. He read Chaucer and Finnegans Wake. Although I didn’t understand everything I heard, it sounded like music to me. Left: Five Generations (detail), 2019, copper wire mesh on cyanotype on fabric with wood dowels,

85.5 x 63 x 4.25 inches/217.2 x 160 x 10.8 cm

We had a unique, happy family life until the summer of 1941, when I was 11 years old. As we were returning to the island one summer afternoon, our boat caught fire. My brother and I were trapped inside the cabin and severely burned. My brother died. I spent Susan Weil, in the summer of 1940, on Outer Island in the Long Island Sound, off the coast of Connecticut

six months in the hospital. Subsequently, my parents

adopted first my sister and then my brother. In the years following, I was the builtin babysitter for my infant siblings. My family moved to New York City when I was a teenager and I went to The Dalton School. My art teacher there was Aaron Kurzen. In our first class he had me close my eyes and draw a rooster with charcoal, encouraging me to fill the entire page. I found this exercise thrilling and freeing. That day I knew that I wanted to be an artist. After graduating from high school, I spent the summer in Paris. During the day I took painting classes at the Académie Julian and in the evenings I drew at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Staying at the pension where I lived was a young art student, Bob Rauschenberg. He was also painting at the Julian and drawing at La Grande Chaumière. It was heavy-handed of destiny to throw us together like this all day, every day. Bob and I would sometimes cut school and paint out in the world. Never content to stop painting at the end of the school day, Bob and I set up our easels in the parlor of the pension where we were staying. The floor had an Oriental carpet and naturally paint landed on the carpet. Bob and I copied each paint spot in the other three corners of the rug to make it look symmetrical. A successful restoration! (And we never got in trouble for it.)

The We il fa mily

55 19 . a ut, c ctic e n with fa n ke eyes in Stony Creek, Co

I had enrolled in Black Mountain College in North Carolina to study with Josef Albers, and by the end of the summer Bob decided to go there as well. Black Mountain College was very small. There were almost as many faculty members as there were students. Students, teachers and other workers from the college would drop in on classes. Sharing thoughts, ideas and experiences with a mix of people enriched Bob and myself in myriad ways, and would influence our collaborations with others for the rest of our lives.

Albers’ classes were very strict and rigorous. In his color-theory class we did “vibration” color studies and explored the effects of colors, one on another. In his drawing classes he challenged us to use the fewest lines to express the most form. I was still a teenager at Black Mountain and I had a defensive response to Albers’ authoritarian, exacting style. And yet I can see how his teachings have influenced me to this day. Especially about color. Albers could be very critical. For one assignment involving leaves, Bob made a portrait of the music teacher’s dog by carefully assembling leaves. Albers had a fit—he wanted abstraction—he didn’t want a dog! In 1949, Bob and I left Black Mountain and moved to New York City and began participating in the extraordinary art life of that time, sharing our thoughts and our work with de Kooning, Kline, Tworkov, Pollock, and others. The interdisciplinary collaborations that we had enjoyed at Black Mountain were also blossoming in New York with events that combined dance, photography, and music. Fences separating different disciplines came down. “Happenings,” with their heady mix of art forms, further expanded the parameters. We had a sense of astounding leap and stretch. Bob and I spent the summer of 1949 on Outer Island and I thought of the blueprints my brother Danky and I had made. Bob and I bought a roll of blueprint paper. For our first full-scale attempt we put my six-year-old brother, Jim, who was a reasonable size, on the unexposed blueprint paper. We surrounded him with leaves, grasses and flowers. We were thrilled with the results, and in the next couple of years we made many full-scale blueprints (cyanotypes). Bonwit Teller used them in their department store windows. Then Life Magazine printed an article about our blueprints and one of the cyanotypes was shown in the Museum of Modern Art’s abstract photography show. My great grandfather was Dankmar Adler of the architectural firm Adler and Sullivan. Once when our unruly family visited my grandmother in Chicago, she showed us a blueprint she had made in her father’s architectural office when she was eight-yearsold. She had placed a glass negative of herself on the blueprint paper and developed it. I now have this treasure, made in 1870. 96

In 1950, Bob and I got married on Outer Island and moved into an apartment in New York City. We studied at The Art Students League and made work in our small apartment. Bob and I enjoyed drawing together. We once went drawing at the Bronx Zoo where with one sketchbook and two pencils, we drew the animals. In 1951, Bob and I produced our most wonderful collaboration, our son, Christopher. We briefly went back to Black Mountain so that Bob could teach there and we spent a summer on Outer Island together with baby Christopher. Bob and I eventually separated but would always remain friends. Painting and childcare filled the hazy period following the breakup of my marriage. Sea and sky horizons have always made a powerful impression on me. I remember, as a child, trying to see the crisp horizon line as the curved edge of the earth. I was also enthralled by the work of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who at the beginning of the 20th century tried to capture increments of time in his photography. Since then I have made many drawings and paintings to express time’s movement. Some of these paintings are figurative and some are totally abstract. Through the years my work has reflected my interest in both rg

the abstract and au sch

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In 1958, I married Bernard

Bernie

designed

geodesic domes. I commissioned

become

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Kirschenbaum, an architect

him to build a dome studio for me in Stony Creek, Connecticut, near Outer Island. The dome, which still stands, was the first residential dome built in the world. Bernie and I have a daughter, Sara. Together, the four of us— Bernie, Chris, Sara and I—forged family ties that were strengthened by our shared interest in the arts. In 1977, I met the Swedish art dealer Anders Tornberg, who found my work exciting. Anders was an important art dealer in Sweden. He exhibited many artists from the U.S. and Europe. I showed with his gallery Galeriet from 1978 to his death in 1997. He arranged many shows of my work all over Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and France. Thanks to him, I have put down artistic roots in Scandinavia and Europe. My attunement with Scandinavia and the archipelagos outside of Sweden and Finland has been a rich reminder of my youth on Outer Island. One important highlight of my European venture was my installation in Munich’s Haus der Kunst. This imposing museum was Hitler’s pride: It was here that he exhibited his “acceptable art.” I went there and toured its grand rooms and met its delightful director, Dr. Carla Schulz-Hoffman. As a Jewish-American

Soft Landscape

artist, I had qualms about showing there. I am joyful that I went ahead, making a two-part installation. I turned one large room in the museum into a day-sky room with all manner of sky and bird cut-paper clusters. Another vast room was made into a night-sky room with dark cut-paper arrays of leaves and constellations described by painted steel structures. Between the two rooms I made an abstract painting of darkness to day that led from one room to the other. Ever since my earliest collages and paintings from the 1950s, I

have

experimented

with

altering the surface of my work. In my work, I am always trying to exceed the limitations of the medium. For example, at Black Mountain, I made a piece called Secrets where I wrote my feelings on a piece of paper, then tore them up and glued them together in a random sequence. One of my methods Secrets, 1949, pencil, torn paper, collage, 10.5 x 10.5 inches/26.7 x 26.7 cm

for

experimenting

with imagery is to play with its physical form in threedimensional work. I have cut

and folded paper, cut and crumpled canvas, and made pieces where the image sticks out perpendicular to the wall. I enjoy the rich painted folds in Renaissance painting and many of my works give a nod to those faux folds by actually bending and draping the canvas. Often I will cut up an image and reassemble it in another array. By continuously shifting images, I am walking through the experience in time—seeing the painting from different perspectives. No longer static, the image comes to life.

In 1984, I met Vincent FitzGerald, the publisher of livres d’artistes. We met at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop in New York. At the same time, Vincent was working there on one of his complex and exquisite artists’ books. Over the weeks, we came to admire each other’s work. He invited me and Marjorie Van Dyke, etcher and artist, to work together on a book. He asked each of us which writer interested us the most. Answering independently, we both said James Joyce. For three years, Marjorie and I studied Joyce texts, filled sketchbooks with drawings and shared thoughts. Finally we completed our work with the publication of The Epiphanies of James Joyce. Vincent and I subsequently made two more Joyce-based works: Giacomo Joyce and from Finnegans Wake I created Brideship and Gulls. In all, I have illuminated eleven books with Vincent, as well as having made many editions of prints. Since 2001 I have exhibited at Sundaram Tagore Gallery. Exhibiting in his galleries has brought me a broader American audience. After many European exhibitions it was very fulfilling to show my work more extensively in my own country. Sundaram is a sensitive and passionate person. I love being part of his galleries. My life as an artist has been deeply satisfying. I stand on a Susan spot. The world and the art world shift and change around me. I also deepen and build. It is a special perspective to watch this double cycling.

Excerpted from Susan Weil: Moving Pictures, published by Skira Editore, Milan in 2011

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SUSAN WEIL Notable exhibitions of Weil’s work include Frontiers Reimagined, a collateral event of the 56th Venice Biennale; Bauhaus and America: Experiments in Light and Movement at the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Germany; and Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957, which premiered in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and then traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, Columbus. Her work was also shown in James Joyce: Shut Your Eyes and See at the Poetry Collection, University of Buffalo, New York; and in Our Own Work, Our Own Way, at The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2020. Weil is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her work is included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Helsinki Art Museum; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas. In 2010, Skira Editore published Susan Weil: Moving Pictures, a comprehensive monograph documenting her large and diverse body of art, livres d’artiste and poetry. Susan Weil was born in New York in 1930 and lives and works in New York.

SUNDARAM TAGORE GALLERIES We have been representing established and emerging artists from around the world since 2000. We show work that is aesthetically and intellectually rigorous, infused with humanism and art historically significant. We specialize in paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations with a strong emphasis on materiality. Our artists cross cultural and national boundaries, synthesizing Western visual language with forms, techniques and philosophies from Asia, the Subcontinent and the Middle East. We show this work alongside important work by overlooked women from the New York School. The gallery also has a robust photography program that includes some of the world’s most noted photographers.

NEW YORK Chelsea: 547 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001 • tel 212 677 4520 Madison Avenue: 1100 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10028 • tel 212 288 2889 gallery@sundaramtagore.com

SINGAPORE 5 Lock Road 01-05, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108933 • tel 65 6694 3378 singapore@sundaramtagore.com

LONDON 4 Cromwell Place, London, SW7 2JE Opening Summer 2021 President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Senior Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Singapore: Melanie Taylor Director, New York: Kathryn McSweeney Registrar: Julia Occhiogrosso Designer: Russell Whitehead Editorial support: Kieran Doherty

WWW.SUNDARAMTAGORE.COM Text © 2021 Sundaram Tagore Gallery Photographs © 2021Susan Weil All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN: 978-0-9967301-6-7 Cover: Holy Roly Over, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 35.75 x 35.375 x 4.25 inches/90.8 x 89.9 x 10.8 cm