Doug Argue Book Revised 1/11/2020 by Traffic Creative Management

DOUG ARGUE 1

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Please! No Painting, 2011 Oil on canvas,78 x 55 in. (198.12 x 139.7 cm) 2

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PUBLISHING INFORMATION Published by Skira in partnership with the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota in conjunction with the Weisman’s forthcoming exhibition, “Doug Argue.”

DOUG ARGUE Letters to the Future

Essays by Elizabeth Armstrong

Mary E. Frank Foreward by Lyndel King Edited by Claude Peck

Charles A. Riley II

Painting at center, Rameses, 2016 Argueâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City. 9

Footfalls Echo in the Memory (in progress), 2018 Oil on canvas 99 x 95 in. (251.46 x 241.3 zcm.) 10

Contents Foreward By Lyndel King

17 The Past Informs the Present By Elizabeth Armstrong “To My Father/To My Future Son” 27 Poem by Ocean Vuong Another World: Doug Argue in Italy By Mary E. Frank

Ideas in Paint Interview by Claude Peck White Rings of Tumult By Charles A. Riley II

139

Plates 1980 - 1984

1985 - 1989

1990 - 1999

2000 - 2006

111

2007 - 2011

147

2012 - 2020

167

2018 - Present

233

Exhibitions 260 Acknowledgments 262 List of Plates 266

Footfalls Echo in the Memory in progress, 2018 Oil on canvas 99 x 95 in. (251.46 x 241.3 cm.)

Forward: Making Means By Lyndel King When Doug Argue emerged on the Twin Cities art scene, he created a sensation. Among other things, he painted enormous canvases—nothing new there, the abstract expressionists had done that since the 1950s. But Doug was not an abstract painter. He was not a painter of narrative realism, either. His work was enigmatic, difficult to categorize. But this is not a critical essay about his art or his development as an artist. That is better done in this book and in an exhibition of Doug’s work (organized by Elizabeth Armstrong) that will open at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum (WAM) at the University of Minnesota in 2022. Though the museum’s collection includes many works by Doug, I wish to introduce you particularly to his 1994 painting “Untitled,” better known as the “chicken painting.” Doug came to WAM’s attention in 1995—two years after the museum opened in its Frank Gehry-designed building. A WAM patron urged us to acquire Doug’s chickens for our collection. I went to Doug’s studio to see the painting, a 12-by-18-foot canvas of an industrial chicken farm. I liked it immediately. It was a tour de force that offered multiple angles of approach—perfect for us as the “entry-level” museum for many of our student visitors. I agreed it would be an important addition to our collection and set out to find donors. I took Gerry Cafesjian, a patron who’d helped with our new building, to see the painting. A few days later, Doug called to tell me that Cafesjian had offered to buy the painting outright to hang in a new house he was going to build. In the meantime, he would loan it to WAM. Through the generosity of Gerry Cafesjian, the painting came to WAM in 1995 and stayed for 18 years. It became an immediate favorite of visitors. In 2013, when Gerry decided to show the painting at his Cafesjian Center for the Arts in Yerevan, Armenia, we had a good-bye chickens party. Visitors wrote their dedications and memories on egg-shaped papers. In 2017, I received a call from Kathleen Cafesjian Baradaran, who asked if we would like to have the painting back, on loan from her father’s estate. We jumped at the chance and, of course, had a welcome-home chickens party. It was mobbed. Art teachers have used the painting to show students the power of one-point perspective. The cages and chickens grow smaller and disappear into infinity near the center of the painting. The walkway speckled with chicken droppings and the ceiling fans add to the effect. Everything seems to rotate around one point far in the distance; the whole canvas becomes a whirling fan of color. Its bravado aside, for many visitors the painting evokes the evils of industrial farming. From a group of legislators from rural Minnesota, it elicited the comment: “All those chickens and only nine hysterical ones in the bunch.” I didn’t have time to ask him to point out the hysterical chickens, and I wouldn’t recognize one anyway; you might have better luck. For me, the most moving response came from a black high-school student who visited WAM as part of a training program for teachers called “Perceive.” Its goal is to help students, many of whom may never have been to a museum before, to find personal meanings in works of art. Stopping in front of Doug’s chicken painting this student’s teacher asked him to look carefully and think about what it might mean. He resisted. (I paraphrase.) “Douglas has problems. Why would he draw all those chickens?” His teacher persisted. She asked him simply to describe what he saw. “It’s a bunch of chickens in cages, all stacked up on top of each other and side by side.” He hesitated, then took a breath and said: “I know, it’s like a slave ship—all those people chained to their bunks in the ship, one on top of each other.” And he went on to talk about the Middle Passage, the forced journey of blacks from Africa to be sold as slaves in America. Finally, he reverted to a flip comment about how the artist was probably a vegetarian, and he himself was having chicken for dinner that night. It still gives me shivers every time I think or talk about this. For one shining moment, this young man confronted a work of art and made meaning from it—a very personal yet also a very significant meaning. I am sure that it was something he never had thought he could do. I hope he remembers it. I know I do. Doug’s “chicken painting” gave a great gift to this young man, as it has to many others. I can think of no better tribute to Doug as an artist—no better way to understand why art is essential to the human experience— than to let you know the effect that his extraordinary work has had on ordinary people. We are lucky to have more than 30 of Doug’s paintings, drawings, and prints in our collection. Many of them are reproduced in this beautiful book and will be on view at the museum’s 2022 exhibition. Thank you, and congratulations, Doug Argue, and thank you to the Cafesjian family and all the other donors of Doug’s work to our collection, for helping WAM inspire and enrich the lives of so many people. Lyndel King Director and Chief Curator Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum University of Minnesota

Photography by Michael Mundy ÂŠ 2019 Paintings from left: Cascade, 2012, Hither and Thithering Waters of Night, 2009-2012 Genesis, 2007-2009 Haunch of Venison, New York City, 2012 14

Figure 1 | Untitled, 1983 Watercolor, gouache, oil, oil pastel, pastel on paper, 80.25 x 131.5 in. (204 x 334 cm.) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Jerome Foundation Purchase Fund for Emerging Artists,1985

The Past Informs the Present Restless creativity has fueled Doug Argue’s work from his wild early years to now. By Elizabeth Armstrong

On my first visit to Doug Argue’s studio in 1984, when he was 22, I was struck by the intensity of his work and by the artist’s youthfulness. He had a boyish grin, mischievous green eyes, and reddish, bedhead hair. The number of works in the studio, their outsized scale, and their sheer vitality came as a surprise. In an art world that had been dominated by more cerebral movements such as Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Land Art, and Postminimalism, Argue’s immersion in figural painting and his frenzied handling of color and line were unexpected. His subjects — the inhabitants of bars, strip clubs, sickrooms, and other dark interiors — came from his immediate environment. I understood these subjects as the artist’s interpretations of his own experiences filtered through his emotional memory and a lively imagination. In these formative works, Argue freely embedded art-historical references combined with a surrealist sensibility, dark angst, and gallows humor. He liked to work on large surfaces, applying layers of pastel and oil paint with the fervor of an expressionist. Even with the most intimate of subjects, he relished the physicality of making art on a scale requiring his whole body. One of the most personal of these paintings, an untitled work dated 1983 (fig. 1), is seared in my memory. The sole figure in the composition is a young man on a phone, seen through a window. His head is thrown back, his mouth opened in a grimace or a scream, baring piranha-like teeth expressing the depth of his despair. The autobiographical work arose from Argue’s anguished memory of hearing about the death of his older brother. It is as powerful an image of personal grief as I can imagine, painted by a young man barely out of his teens. If the past informs the present, what do the early years of Argue’s career tell us about his art and the evolution of his prolific output? Charting the underpinnings of his restless creativity, one observes an artist energized by an inquisitive mind and by the physical act of painting. Although he studied painting as an undergraduate before dropping out of college, he is largely an autodidact, and his encounters with visual art have been some of his best teachers. From an early age, he was also an avid reader — of literature, science, and metaphysics — who thinks deeply about ideas such as the effect of memory on perception and the essential nature of time. As a child, Argue remembers his father reading to him from the “Time-Life Library of Art.”1 He read the entries out loud as if they were bedtime stories, showing his son pictures of the masterpieces of Western art from Michelangelo to Marcel Duchamp. Whether or not this nudged the young Doug toward becoming a visual artist, it helps explain the art-historical references that appear in his earliest work and continue to infiltrate his painting today.

At 18, Argue hitchhiked from Minneapolis to New York City, where he first encountered Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at the Museum of Modern Art (fig. 2). A premier work of modernism, the painting was as startling to the impressionable teen as it was to Picasso’s contemporaries when it was first unveiled in his studio in 1907. (It stayed in his studio for many years and was not shown to the public until 1916.) Argue describes his experience with this painting as deeply personal. Whatever he knew about art history, let alone about Picasso’s interest in the subject of the Demoiselles, was moot. What Argue remembers most about this groundbreaking work is its visceral energy. It was a drastic departure from traditional European figure painting in many ways, including the aggressively confrontational stance of its female subjects and their fragmented portrayal. For the youthful Argue, Picasso’s radical composition offered a unique approach to visual language.

resemblance to a Thomas Hart Benton self-portrait. Nearby, a blue horse recalls German Expressionist Franz Marc’s famous painting The Large Blue Horses of 1911.3 Argue places himself at the table, albeit unrecognizably, in deep conversation with a friend, oblivious to the cacophony of the scene.

In the early 1980s, faced with the choice of staying in school or renting studio space in which to paint, he opted for the latter. Despite financial troubles, Argue thrived on the exploration of the painting process. Usually eschewing a preliminary sketch or study, he would paint directly on as large a surface as he could find (canvas, wood or oversized sheets of paper), allowing for “whatever meaning or narrative was in the paintings [to] develop as he worked.”2

For the next three years, Argue’s paintings explored the world largely from a child’s perspective. These are some of his most narrative and autobiographical works, following the growth of the child from baby to toddler to young boy. The child is diminutive, while the figure of the father is so large that we never see him in his entirety. Rather, he is represented by just a fragment: a huge hand reaching out to the child’s small one; a pair of hairy legs emerging from giant work boots hovering in front of the kneeling boy (fig. 3). In one painting the child’s expressionless face is just able to peek over a kitchen counter to watch a man gutting fish (plate 34). These images speak to the relationship between a father and a son, based on Argue’s own memories as a child and on his new experiences of fatherhood (fig. 14).

In the mid-1980s, the artist moved to a studio in a seedy part of downtown Minneapolis that had seen better days but was pulsing with rowdy activity. The subject of an untitled 1987 work is a favorite Minnesota dive frequented by the artist (fig. 5). Argue’s “Gopher Bar” is populated by a motley crew of unlikely animal-bird-human hybrids — akin to characters out of the “Star Wars” films — voraciously eating, drinking, and conversing. The painting exemplifies the artist’s free mix of art-historical sources and a vivid imagination. A disembodied, Guston-like head lies on the table, and an owl resembling Picasso stares out from a stool at the bar behind; in the lower right, a figure wearing a hat bears an uncanny

A trip to Venice in 1986 had a lasting influence on the artist, although it wasn’t immediately apparent in his work. He continued to make paintings in the darkly surrealistic and expressionist mode that characterizes his art of the decade. A turn in his personal life in 1989, the birth of his son Mattison, had a much more significant impact. Most of Argue’s energy then went into taking care of the boy, and his work of the time shifted from oversized and allegorical to more domestic in both scale and subject matter.

The fragility of childhood and the responsibility of parenthood weigh heavily on these works, where everyday events take on a sense of the ominous. And then, almost as suddenly as they appear, these images of children disappear from Argue’s oeuvre. He had a second opportunity to visit Venice to study art of the Italian Renaissance. Revisiting works by the great Venetian painters Titian

Figure 3 | Untitled, 1992 Oil on canvas, 46 x 42 in. (117 x 107 cm.) Private collection Figure 2 | Pablo Picasso | Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 Oil on canvas, 96 x 92 in. (244 x 233 cm.), Collection Museum of Modern Art, New York Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange) © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 18

and Tintoretto, who had so impressed him on his first trip abroad, Argue fell in love with them again. He was particularly inspired by Tintoretto’s Crucifixion (1565), in which the use of space gave Argue the feeling that the painting would continue expanding in all directions (fig. 4). Speaking about the painting, he said: “There was something profound in my experience of moving backward and forward and from side to side, following that painting’s almost endless patterns and rhythms that could not have been achieved on any other scale… I wanted to make larger paintings to try my hand at creating a similar feeling.” 4 It was around this time that Argue conceptualized four giant canvases on themes as distinctly secular as Titian’s and Tintoretto’s were religious. Upon returning to his studio from Venice, he went to work on a quartet of oil paintings that in various ways would engage him over the next 10 years: a field of slaughtered buffalo (plate 42), a massive pile of falling books (plate 50), endless rows of chickens in cages, and thousands upon thousands of floating leaves (plate 51). One of the artist’s main goals in these very large paintings was to create a sense of infinity and diversity in a finite space. 5 The most ambitious of the four paintings made during this period sometimes has been referred to as the Chicken Factory (plate 39). In a work 12 feet high and 18 feet wide, Argue set out to create the illusion of a never-ending room of chickens, each isolated in its own cage and piled higher than one can count, receding into the infinite distance of one-point perspective. Argue read a Kafka story about a talking dog at the time he was making this work, which has a haunted Kafka-esque feeling of a world in which bottom line considerations trump compassion and humanity. Argue also read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” a powerful account of dehumanized and unsanitary practices in the American meatpacking industry. As research for the book, Sinclair worked for a time in the Chicago stockyards. After Argue decided to make his chicken painting, he got permission to visit a large poultry processing plant.

Although Argue is not known for art with a social message, his Chicken Factory is often seen as an indictment of the harsh, alienating conditions of an industry producing billions of chickens annually. The soullessness of industrial farming, intensified by the picture’s seemingly infinite number of chickens in cages, was undoubtedly a factor in the creation of this work. But ultimately, it was the physical challenge that Argue had set for himself in this immense painting that compelled him to complete, after two years, one of his most powerful works. While he was working on this “major opus,” Argue made a few whimsical drawings of chickens (fig. 6), which morphed into inventive drawings that he has referred to as “fake scientific plants” (fig. 7). One inspiration for these drawings was a famous woodcut by Albrecht Dürer of a rhinoceros, based on a written description of an animal he had never seen 6 (fig. 8). Argue’s drawings reveal his intensifying skills as a draftsman, as well as his sense of humor and play, but these works also provide insight into his thinking at the time. Scribbled notes or “marginalia” crowd the pages. In one picture his text reveals his curiosity about theories of evolution and beauty. In the marginalia of another of these elegant drawings, he asks why chickens lost their power to fly and notes the ability of a species introduced into an alien environment to wreak havoc. He wonders if there is such a thing as Artistic Darwinism (vs. Social Darwinism) and ponders the relationship between nature and nurture. Most provocatively, he writes: “In art, is evolution used as an easy way to dismiss the past?” In 1997, Argue received a Rome Prize fellowship that included a residency at the American Academy in Rome the following year. For Argue, this year in Italy was life-changing. He traveled, read, painted, and befriended a stimulating new group of Academy Fellows. “Suddenly I had great friends who were architects and artists and poets and curators and scholars — all very serious smart people,” he wrote. “My vision of the world became much, much bigger. Suddenly things I never saw before became visible. I became capable of thoughts

Figure 4 | Tintoretto l Crucifixion, 1565 Oil on canvas, 17 x 40 ft (518 x 1,219 cm.) Scuola Grande de San Rocco, Venice

Figure 5 | Untitled (Gopher Bar), 1987 Oil on plywood, 96 x 144 in. (244 x 366 cm.) Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis 20

I could never have had in the past.”7 Most significantly, he met Mary Margaret Jones, a talented and successful landscape designer, and they were married in 2001. Argue wasn’t finished with the image of the chicken, which served as his muse for several more years. His chicken “portraits” range in scale from the miniature to the monumental. One small canvas features a magnificent portrait of a chicken in profile (fig. 9) that echoes the characteristics of a well-known historical portrait by one of the most revered artists of 15th-century Italy, Piero della Francesca, in his famous profile of the Duke of Urbino (fig. 10). Aside from the implicit humor of a face-off between the powerful Duke and a common chicken, the gravitas Argue gives his humble subject speaks to his evolving powers as an artist.

Figure 6 | Evolution #1, 1994 Mixed media on paper, 29 x 40 in. (74 x 102 cm.) Private collection

Argue’s paintings endow these lowly birds with a certain dignity. In another miniature work, Portrait (2003), just 6 by 4 inches, the top of the chicken’s head and its fiery pink plume fill the lower third of the canvas, lovingly painted and posed against a striking background of orange and red (fig. 11), (plate 61). As the paintings of heads become larger, the magnification of their highly realistic treatment makes them appear increasingly abstract. In a massive Untitled (Portrait) of the same year (fig. 12), Argue zooms in exclusively on the left half of the chicken’s head. Here, the artist revels in painting the details of its beak, its eye, and the pink folds and fleshiness of its eyelids. At 11 by 9½ feet, the painting insists that the viewer, who is dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the canvas, appreciate the fine brushwork of each and every feather painted on the chicken’s head, while, at closer range, the illusion of realism blurs into abstraction. In successive years, Argue’s work has evolved from the figurative and emotional expressionism of his early career to more controlled, cerebral painting in which he explores his interests in volume, space, and the nature of time. More than 30 years after hitchhiking to New York to see Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, he decided to reproduce the modernist classic in his own painting. The work had once opened his eyes to alternative approaches to making art. Now he returned to this image, interested in capturing the feeling of time passing and the

Figure 7 | Untitled, 1995 (plate 46) Mixed media on paper, 40 x 29 in. (102 x 74 cm.) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Figure 8 | Albrecht Dürer | Rhinoceros, 1515 Woodcut, 8.375 x 11.375 in. (21 x 29 cm.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Although undeniably interested in the art of the past, Argue does not measure himself against it.â&#x20AC;?

Figure 9 | Untitled, 2003 Oil on linen, 6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm.) Private collection

Figure 10 | Piero della Francesca | Portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino (detail) c. 1473-75 Oil on wood, 19 x 26 in. (48 x 66 cm.) Uffizi Gallery, Florence

flux of history. He first painted his own replica of the Demoiselles, but in reverse, “…as if driving away from it and seeing it in his rear-view mirror”8 (fig. 13). Then he covered the entire surface with an abstract scrim of precisely stenciled letters that allows the image to be discerned beneath the surface. In Footfalls Echo in the Memory (2018), (plate137), one is reminded of Argue’s fascination with evolution and the passage of time. Although undeniably interested in the art of the past, he does not measure himself against it. From the beginning, Argue’s bravado as an artist has thrived on his pure love of painting, interwoven with a quest for new knowledge and experiences. The act of painting allows the artist to explore the limitations of consciousness and the outer reaches of what can be known. He has what might be called the eye of the beginner’s mind, which enables his abiding quest for the unknowable. His art practice, supplemented by his travels, visits to museums, and extensive readings, has kept his mind open and in a state of continuous expansion. Elizabeth Armstrong has written widely about contemporary art. She was executive director of Palm Springs Art Museum from 2015 to 2018. Previously, she was the curator of contemporary art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, deputy director of the Orange County Museum of Art, and held senior curatorial positions at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Figure 11 | Portrait, 2003 Oil on linen, 6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm.), Private collection

Notes: 1. “Time-Life Library of Art” included 28 volumes, published in 1967. 2. Doug Argue, in an interview with Claude Peck, April 6, 2018. 3. Franz Marc’s The Large Blue Horses (1911) is in the collection of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and was generally on view there during the 1980s. 4. Doug Argue, in an interview with Chris Rawcliffe, Ambit, No. 214, fall 2013, www.dougargue.com/statement. 5. “Doug Argue: Chicken Paintings,” Cafesjian Center for the Arts. 6. Doug Argue, in an email to the author, January 23, 2019. 7. Ibid. 8. Doug Argue in a video interview with Donald Kuspit, May 5, 2018, www.dougargue.com/video.

Figure 12 | Untitled (Portrait), 2003| Oil on linen, 132 x 114 in. (335 x 290 cm.) Cafesjian Estate

Figure 13 | Footfalls Echo in the Memory (in progress), 2018 Oil on canvas, 99 x 95 in. (251 x 241 cm.)

Figure 14 l Stick Fight,1992 Oil on canvas, 46 x42 in.(116.84 x 106.68 cm.) Private collection

To My Father / To My Future Son

The stars are not hereditary. — Emily Dickinson

There was a door & then a door surrounded by a forest. your eyes.

Look, my eyes are not

You move through me like rain heard from another country. Yes, you have a country. Someday they will find it while searching for lost ships... Once, I fell in love during a slow-motion car crash. We looked so peaceful, the cigarette floating from his lips as our heads whiplashed back into the dream & all was forgiven. Because what you heard, or will hear, is true: I wrote a better hour onto the page & watched the fire take it back. Something was always burning. Do you understand? I closed my mouth but could still taste the ash because my eyes were open. From men, I learned to praise the thickness of walls. From women, I learned to praise.

If you are given my body, put it down. If you are given anything be sure to leave no tracks in the snow. Know that I never chose which way the seasons turned. That it was always October in my throat & you: every leaf refusing to rust. Quick. Can you see the red dark shifting? This means I am touching you. This means you are not alone — even as you are not. If you get there before me, if you think of nothing & my face appears rippling like a torn flag — turn back. Turn back & find the book I left for us, filled

with all the colors of the sky forgotten by gravediggers. Use it. Use it to prove how the stars were always what we knew they were: the exit wounds of every misfired word. — Ocean Vuong

(From “Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” Copper Canyon Press, 2016 Used with permission of the author)

Figure 15 | Foramen Magnum 2007-2009 Oil on linen 162 x 91.5 in. (411.48 x 232.41 cm.) Private collection

Another World: Doug Argue in Italy Titian’s revolutionary painting technique and Tintoretto’s fearless sense of scale made a big impression on a young Argue. More recently, he brought four large paintings of his own to Venice. By Mary E. Frank

Italy has played a transformative role in Doug Argue’s art and life. From his first visit to Venice in 1986, to his eye-opening year as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Italy has stoked Argue’s visual memory with experiences, ideas, and images that continue to manifest themselves in his work. Thirty years after he first went to Venice and encountered Tintoretto’s monumental painting of the crucifixion, Argue returned to participate in the 2015 Venice Biennale. He exhibited four very large paintings at the Palazzo Contarini Polignac on the Grand Canal. Creating his own work to be shown at this specific site in Venice was a milestone for Argue. Placing these works in context demonstrates the impact that Italy, and Venice in particular, have had on the artist. The Crucifixion by Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti, 1518-94) measures 17 by 40 feet (fig. 4). It is all-encompassing and all-consuming, both in scale and subject. Argue was taken by the composition’s expansive sense of rhythmic motion and how that effect could only be achieved on a large scale. Argue tends to refer to the painting as The Raising of the Cross, a title that grasps Tintoretto’s true intent, for this is in fact the subject of his mammoth work. It is not a static, contemplative scene of the crucified Christ but a document of action, as figures strain to raise the crosses flanking Christ and onlookers react to the spectacle. Narrative paintings like Tintoretto’s Crucifixion have a long and glorious history in Renaissance Venice.1 Cycles of narrative paintings were commissioned by members of a confraternity or scuola, a secular organization dedicated to performing pious acts. Each confraternity had a chapter house with a boardroom, a sala dell’albergo, which was decorated by the leading artists of the day. The paintings covered the walls of the rooms like frescoes, but were painted on canvas in deference to Venice’s damp climate. In the sala dell’albergo of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Tintoretto’s Crucifixion is joined by four other episodes from the life of Christ. Remembering his first visit to San Rocco, Argue said, “It had never occurred to me to do large-scale paintings until I visited Venice. The scale of Tintoretto’s paintings surrounded me, pushing the painted images to the edges of my field of vision and then into my peripheral vision, past the picture plane and out into the world, only to be brought back into focus with a single detail: a hand or a leaf, wonderfully painted.2 “If you stand in front of a monumental Venetian painting long enough, you will begin to feel its rhythm,” Argue continued. “The figures swirl and turn and curve back on themselves in Tintoretto’s painting. My figures or characters are letters, but they too can fall away to the movement.”

To better understand the first work in his Biennale cycle, we need to look at two earlier works — Foramen Magnum (2009) (fig. 15) and Catch My Drift (2012) (plate 100) — that reveal how Argue achieves a sense of motion across a big canvas. Foramen Magnum is a waterfall in columns of stenciled text, taken from Argue’s old artist’s statements. What was once a belief has changed, like columns that gradually crumble. The work’s title is a key to its meaning: the foramen magnum is the space at the base of the brain housing the column of nerves carrying messages between brain and body. The messages here are on the verge of dematerializing, but their motion between brain and body is undeniable. Argue is interested in the ephemeral nature of the world, the transformation of language, of knowledge, of belief. The movement and scale of the composition embodies that spirit. In Catch My Drift, a watery world creates the backdrop for passages from Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” The letters are recognizable as they emanate from the center of the canvas, moving in syncopation across the expansive, undulating surface. We are enraptured by the rhythmic motion that extends beyond the confines of the stretched canvas. Without a visible narrative structure, Argue’s surface organizes itself into waves of color and pattern, energized by the letters, creating an engrossing story. “Tintoretto made a generous gift, giving me something I could use to make my own,” Argue said. He also expressed gratitude to Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, 1488-1576), the master of 16th-century Venetian painting and Tintoretto’s close contemporary. Titian was known for the spontaneity of his brushwork and, later in life, his pittura di macchia, a style composed of broken brushwork and thick impasto, in which the motion of the artist’s hand and brush are palpable. Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), the Florentine author of “Lives of the Artists,” despaired at Titian’s spontaneous use of color to create form (colorito), as opposed to the more deliberate use of contour to delineate form (disegno). He bemoaned the fact that Venetians insisted on “painting with colors only, without doing the study of drawing on paper, which was the true and best method of working, and the true design.”3 For Argue, Titian’s colorito is inspiring. “The freedom to use the act of painting to create the image, not being restrained to work within a strict line drawing, but rather giving dominance to light over line, gives my work energy that derives from spontaneity and its associated risk,” he said.

Detail of Figure 15 | Foramen Magnum 2007-2009 Oil on linen, 162 x 91.5 in. (411.48 x 232.41 cm.) Private collection

pers of complete words spelling “consolation.” Echoing the motion in Foramen Magnum and Catch My Drift, the surface rolls from left to right. Loose, large-scale diagonal letters bind the composition together just as the ropes in Tintoretto’s work provide a clear path for the eye through an otherwise bewildering array of figures and movements.

With this understanding of the aspects of Venetian painting that make up Argue’s artistic DNA, let us turn to his 2015 exhibit, appropriately entitled Scattered Rhymes. Argue took the name from the opening line of Petrarch’s “Rime Sparse”, a collection of sonnets that the lyric poet composed over 47 years. Petrarch (1304-1374) used the working title “Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” or “fragments of matters in common speech.” The sonnets have been described as “sketching out a powerful story without following the conventions of narrative.”4 The same can be said of Argue’s paintings, which adopt the grand scale of Venetian narrative painting but create their own conventions of storytelling, using their own fragments of speech. The exhibition space in Venice was the magazzino, or storage room, of a 15th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal. With bare brick walls, exposed ceiling beams and a wooden floor, the utilitarian space created an ideal canvas for Argue. He made it his own sala dell’albergo, and created a painting for each of the four walls. Calle The magazzino has two entrances: one from the calle, a dark, narrow alley that leads off the main pedestrian thoroughfare, and another from the palazzo’s sunlit, reflection-dappled courtyard, steps from the water entrance on the Grand Canal. Argue captured the essence of both land and sea in his exhibit. The calle leading to Argue’s exhibit led to his own Calle (fig. 28, plate 115), an ode to Tintoretto and the largest work in the room. While the Crucifixion is a moment of reckoning in Christian dogma, Argue’s Calle is a dark passage through an intergalactic world, capturing the movement and rhythm of The Raising of the Cross but moving through the stars and the universe rather than climbing the hill of Golgotha. Composed of countless droplets of paint, which he applied to canvas laid flat on the floor, Calle envelops the viewer, drawing our vision out into the world only to pull us back in with tiny letters and intimate whis30

In a lovely instance of artistic synchronicity, the summer of 2015 saw the display in Venice of Jackson Pollock’s 1943 Mural (fig. 16) at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Measuring some 20 feet wide, its rolling, all-over composition has often been noted.5 As Argue and I stood in front of Mural that summer, he noted that the figures swirl and turn and curve back on themselves in Pollock’s painting as they do in Tintoretto’s. Tintoretto’s influence was in all likelihood distilled to Pollock through his teacher, Thomas Hart Benton, whose densely populated murals are intermediaries between Tintoretto and Pollock. Argue’s paintings, just a short walk from the Guggenheim, bring the art-historical narrative into the present. Time and Time Again In the next work, Time and Time Again (plate 116), Argue looks to a depiction of the pietà by Titian (fig. 18) in the Gallerie dell’Accademia. The building was formerly the Scuola Grande della Carità, a confraternity that commissioned Titian to decorate their sala dell’albergo.6 This architectural coincidence shows why Venice has been described as a city of palimpsests7, a place where buildings and works of art are reused and altered but still maintain a trace of their original identity. From the Greek, palimpsest means “scraped again.” The word originated in the Middle Ages, when scribes who needed more parchment simply scraped away text that was no longer deemed important and recycled the parchment, sometimes leaving behind traces of the first layer. In palimpsests, Argue discovered a phenomenon founded in the antithesis of his practice — removing letters instead of adding them— that nonetheless provided him with a way to impart layers of meaning and nuance to his work. This discovery came by way of Titian. When Titian’s paintings are conserved and X-rayed, technology acts as a time machine, carrying us back into the artist’s creative process to reveal a variety of palimpsests. X-rays of Titian’s Venus with a Mirror (fig. 17) reveal an entirely different composition beneath this iconic painting. Titian originally oriented the canvas horizontally and painted a portrait of a couple. The man wears a coat, luxuriously trimmed in fur—the same red coat that Venus has draped seductively around her hips in the final version. We cannot make out the identity

Figure 16 | Jackson Pollock | Mural, 1943 Oil on canvas 8 x 19 ft (244 x 579 cm.) University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City

of the portrait ghosts, but we can guess that Titian liked the painted passage of fur so well that he brought it forward to the completed work. In Time and Time Again, Argue appropriated Titian’s Pietà in the Accademia as the ghost in the background. Titian’s last painting, unfinished at his death in 1576, is the pinnacle of the master’s late style, a manifestation of Venetian colorito and pittura di macchia. An X-ray of the Pietà reveals how the artist worked and re-worked the arrangement of the central figures directly onto the canvas without any premeditated drawing. There is also an indication of the shadowy presence of a male face and a figure lying sleeping, completely obscured in the final work, suggesting that the canvas may originally have had an entirely different composition, as in Venus with a Mirror.8 Time and Again collapses time and space into a world that shimmers like a lagoon on a clear summer’s day. Closer inspection reveals ephemeral shadows that appear momentarily and then vanish when we try to see them clearly. We are glimpsing an homage to Titian. Argue made a life-sized copy of the Pietà (fig. 19) and turned the canvas upside down, echoing Titian’s change of orientation with the Venus canvas. He then obscured the underpainting, leaving a secret visible only to the initiated, like the fur-trimmed red coat. Waves of glimmering brushstrokes wash over the Pietà, obscuring and revealing, seducing the viewer with what lies beneath. A few letters appear, scattered rhymes from Vasari and Petrarch. The watery world of this painting balances the shadowy nuance of Calle on the adjacent wall just as the Grand Canal illuminates the courtyard of the Palazzo outside. Cosa Mentale The walls of the calle outside are lined with brick, as are the walls of the magazzino. Crumbling, dusty brick walls, held together with soft lime mortar, maintain just enough flexibility to endure the gentle shifts of time and tide that are part of life in Venice. Porous by nature, bricks absorb the salt air and often develop complex surface patterns. They are the backdrop of daily life in Venice. Measuring about 9 by 13 feet, Cosa Mentale (fig. 20, 21, 22) functions as a palimpsest on several levels, for covering the bricks is a cascade of white letters falling gently in front of the painted brick wall, like the dust shed by the bricks outside after a hard freeze. Like a layer of salt, they partially obscure what lies beneath and at the same time animate the surface, revivifying the crumbling old wall. The text that Argue deconstructs here is from Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists”. In that selection, Argue revels in the irony that the book that is the building block of so much of what we think we know about Renaissance artists’ lives is tumbling down in front of a solid brick wall, at the hands of an artist

dedicated to Titian’s colorito, so disdained by Vasari. Cosa Mentale is the latest chapter in an exploration of repetition that Argue has been pursuing for years. He selects an ordinary object — a chicken, a book, a leaf, or a brick — places it in its usual context and portrays it repetitively on his trademark large canvases. The common element of these paintings is their ability to suggest layers of meaning with ordinary objects. The longer we look at something mundane, the more we see. The same must have been true of the details of daily life depicted in the Venetian narrative paintings. Installed on a 15th-century Venetian brick wall, Cosa Mentale juxtaposes old and new, painted and real, permanent and temporary, creating a series of echoing palimpsests that are a monument to the inspiration of the past in the present. Indeed, the passage of time is implied in the existence of any palimpsest, giving it historical resonance. Mother Tongue The fourth canvas is another palimpsest, an ode to language and the art of painting over time. Like Titian, who turned his unfinished canvases to the wall for months at a time and then often completely recreated them, Argue made this painting over a completed painting that had been hanging in his studio. He left only a few traces of the original behind, including a few letters that emerge like a true palimpsest. Future conservators will have their work cut out for them with Mother Tongue (plate 120), a painting whose title reminds us that Petrarch wrote his “Scattered Rhymes” in the vernacular Italian rather than Latin, making them more accessible to readers. Yet, he used the Latin to describe Venice, a city he loved, when he called it mundus alter, that is, another world. Argue has embraced that world of Petrarch, Titian, and Tintoretto, translating it into the vernacular of painting today, creating rhyme and reason on a grand scale with a depth of meaning that does justice to his Italian forebears.

Mary E. Frank is an art historian who focuses on the art of Renaissance Venice. When Argue was mounting his exhibit in Venice, she was establishing the Rosand Library and Study Center at Save Venice in another part of the same palazzo, to house the library of David Rosand, a noted Venetian art historian. She is currently preparing the manuscript of Rosand’s monograph on Paolo Veronese for posthumous publication in English by Harvey Miller.

Figure 18 | Titian | Pieta, 1576 Oil on canvas, 149 x 136.5 in. (378.46 x 346.71 cm.) Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice

Figure 17 | Titian | Venus with a Mirror, 1555 Oil on canvas, 49 x 41 in. (124 x 104 cm.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Notes: 1. The definitive text on these cycles is Patricia Fortini Brown, “Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio” (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1988). 2. This and subsequent quotes come from conversations and emails with the artist. 3. David Rosand, “Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice” (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1997): 11-25. 4. David Young, “The Poetry of Petrarch.” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2014): ix. 5. Roberta Smith and Barbara Graustark, “Jackson Pollock’s ‘Mural’ Makes a Rare Trip to the Venice Biennale.” New York Times, May 7, 2015. 6. Titian’s Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, another monumental narrative painting, remains in its original place today, now part of the museum’s galleries. 7. This spirit is captured in Nadja Aksamija, “Buildings and Their Doubles: Restoration, Authenticity, and the Palimpsest in Italian Renaissance Architecture,” in “Palimpsests: Buildings, Sites, Time,” N. Aksamija, C. Maines, P. Wagoner, eds. (Brepols: Turnhout, Belgium, 2017). 8. The X-ray is reproduced in Giovanna Nepi Scirè’s essay in Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, “Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting” (Marsilio: Venice, 2008): 311.

Figure 19 | Time and Time Again (in progress), 2015 (plate 116) Oil on canvas, 88.5 x 134 in. (224.79 x 340.36 cm.)

Figure 20 | Cosa Mentale (in progress at Argueâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mana studio)

Figure 21 l Cosa Mentale (detail) seen against a brick wall Next page: Figure 22 | Cosa Mentale 2015 Oil on linen, 107 x 160 in. (271.78 x 406.4 cm.), Private collection

Figure 23 l Angry Young Man, 1984 Pastel on paper, 104 x 78 in. (260 x 198 cm.)

Ideas in Paint

Doug Argue talks about his sometimes frightening childhood, trouble at art school and inspiration. By Claude Peck

Looking, thinking, reading and then, always, painting. For more than 25 years, Doug Argue rarely has spent more than a week outside of an art studio. There were the quasi-legal spaces in urban and industrial parts of Minneapolis-St. Paul. His decade in San Franciscot found him commuting via ferry to paint on Alameda Island. A New York resident since 2011, Argue shuttles between his Soho loft and a studio in Jersey City that’s big enough to house his often monumental canvases (his oil painting Genesis, in the lobby of One World Trade Center, measures 160 by 230 inches) (plate 78). Though he’s always working, Argue’s creations can take a long time. He labored for nearly two years in the mid-1990s to complete a large work depicting hundreds of caged chickens in a vast warehouse (plate 38). The painting, inspired in part by reading Kafka and Upton Sinclair, was described by then-Walker Art Center curator Peter Boswell as a “Midwestern classic, sort of Anselm Kiefer meets Grant Wood.” Argue has had dozens of solo exhibitions and group shows. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Europe and Australia, and collected by Walker Art Center, Weisman Art Museum and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He is married to landscape architect Mary Margaret Jones (the two met in Italy, where they were Rome Prize fellows). He has one son, Mattison, aged 30. In five hours of taped conversation at Argue’s home in spring 2018, he talked about his sometimes frightening childhood, getting kicked out of art school, becoming a father, travels to view art, his evolving studio practice, and painters he admires. Though he was tired from 18 months of feverish work for a solo show that was opening the next day, Argue was upbeat, forthright, reflective — fully energized by his life as an artist. The interview has been edited for length. CP: You grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. DA: Yes, near Hamline University. CP: What was your family like? DA: My dad had a PhD. in pollen morphology, but he did not have the temperament to be around people, so he was not a professor. He didn’t make a living. He studied pollen grains. My dad would spend months with little dots, drawing different grains. He studied the evolution of plants through changes in the pollen. The drawings were from images from an electron microscope that the University of Minnesota let him use at night. It was scientific research, but those are beautiful drawings, too. And sort of strange. There’s a certain point where you have to fill in with your imagination. There’s nothing to actually copy; you have to make imaginative leaps. A lot of the drawings were published in special-

Figure 24 | Milkweed, 1972 Color crayon on butcher paper 8.5 x 11.5 in. (21.59 x 29.21cm.)

ized journals, but he also did a two-volume book on the evolution of the lily. You can find it on Amazon. My mom worked as an emergency-room nurse. She worked nights, and she did everything. She reminds me of the woman sheriff in “Fargo,” played by Frances McDormand. She would start at 10 p.m. and work all night. Her job was to be wherever the biggest emergency was. If someone’s heart stopped, she had to be there. Then she’d go grocery shopping and come home and make breakfast and send us off to school. Then to bed and wake up about the time we got home, make dinner. Do all the other stuff, like laundry, and repeat. I have five siblings. CP: What kind of young person were you? Jock, nerd, bookish? DA: I was kind of both. I was very athletic and was good at sports. I ran track and wrestled. CP: What is your earliest memory of making a drawing? DA: I was in 5th grade. I had this idea that I could make light on grass by first drawing a yellow line and then a green line and then a blue line and that would create a feeling that light was coming from one direction if I did the blades of grass all the same. I did that, using a regular box of colored crayons (fig. 24). My art teacher put it into a contest. I won a Schweigert Meat company competition. Then I learned a lot about art and the art world. When it came back, my art teacher said, “Oh, this is great!” And then my regular teacher was like, “I guess you won a prize, but I can’t see why.” I thought, “Shit, this is rough.” I used the same idea years later when I did the big buffalo painting. That was bought by the Minnesota Historical Society. They still have it up. CP: When did you first visit an art museum? DA: I didn’t go when I was little. The first one I remember was a great Picasso show at Walker Art Center. I was maybe 16. It made a big impression. But when we were little, Time-Life put out this series about

artists, like Rembrandt or Duchamp, or whatever. And my father read those books to us, sort of like bedtime tales. I remember all the pictures in those books. There must have been 30 of them at least. CP: In a series shown at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in early 1994, you depict a boy and a father in various poignant, psychologically charged tableaux — fishing, swimming, showering, burying a cardboard box in the yard (plate 37), encountering a possibly mean dog (plate 38). The paintings stand out as being narrative and, we presume, autobiographical. DA: After Mattison was born in 1989, all my energy went into taking care of him. At that moment, you see yourself as a kid, and then you see your own father. It wasn’t literally about specific things with me and my son, but about trying to get that feeling of things through generations that I think you feel if you have a kid. CP: Some depictions are tender, but others, such as the father figure kicking apart a kitchen cabinet with his booted foot, are frightening (plate 35). DA: A lot of it is — my dad was pretty scary. Part of it is me coming to terms with that, and not being the same. He was violent. He hit me. By the time we got to my younger siblings, he was worn out of hitting. But he hit me and he scared me. Sometimes I would sleep under the bed because I was scared he would come upstairs and beat me up. And he did kick all the cabinets in and break every single one of them one night. When he was sober he was OK, generally. He was a botanist, so there’s one where he’s showing me plants. You had to go into his world; you couldn’t expect him to come into yours. CP: You went to Bemidji State in Minnesota. Were you an art major? DA: I went there for two years. I signed up for only art classes. There was a teacher there named Marley Kaul who was really good, so I got

sucked into it. I just started going into the studio every day. They ended up giving me a key so I could come in for 24 hours and just work. I was a typical, angst-filled young man so it was a great way for me to get all of that out. I did photography, ceramics, art history, painting. I would read about artists that Marley thought I would like and sometimes we’d talk about them. I thought his work at that time was fabulous. Mostly I would come in after the place was empty and just work most of the night. CP: What inspired you most in art history classes? DA: The art history class I remember the most at that time was on Asian drawings and paintings. Mostly kind of Zen Buddhist, and how simple they were and they were a little bit cartoon-y, and some were very funny. But they were also just beautifully done. I really liked those a lot. CP: It sounds like you were drawn to working in the studio, as opposed to, say, theory and history. DA: I liked the physicality. Maybe partly because of my athletic background. I liked using my whole body and sort of getting just completely caught up and lost in it. Influenced by Marley Kaul, I began working with gouache on paper, things that were a little Matisse-like. Gouache dries fast, so you could add something and in just a few minutes you could add again, over the top. CP: Why’d you leave Bemidji after two years? DA: I don’t know. My older brother died in a car accident and I got the news at Bemidji. Later, I made a painting about that phone call, that memory (fig.1). I just somehow didn’t want to go back to that scene. I transferred to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. I was in studio arts. CP: How was that experience? DA: The teachers at that time were not very good. I ended up taking sculpture courses, because those teachers — Wayne Potratz and Susan Lucy were two of them — were open-minded and interested. They just sort of let me do what I wanted. I ended up doing all my work in the sculpture area. It was a conflict-ridden situation for the whole year. They ended up asking me not to come back. CP: Why? DA:I didn’t have much money, so in the summer, after that first year, I was just working on paintings in empty studios. One day I came in, and, with a clothespin right through the center of one of the paintings, there was a note saying that you can’t work in this building unless you have credits. I got mad because I either had to go to school or I could afford to rent a studio, but I couldn’t do both. They had this critique wall, and I painted all of the professors bent over with a broom sticking out their asses. On the wall. They called the police. I quit and never went back. CP: Did you already have your eye on some space where you could paint? DA: My first studio was in Lowertown [St. Paul]. I paid like $200, for 3,000 square feet! There was a shared bathroom with a very disgusting shower. I didn’t mind. It was like camping. My mom got me a job in the hospital, working as an orderly, one of the only jobs I ever had. CP: What was it like in the early 1980s, not in school, with your own studio? Did you hang out with other artists? DA: Next door to me was Steven Woodward, a sculptor, who became a good friend and something of a mentor. He always made sure to introduce me to people who came to see his work. He was fairly well known at that time, doing work for the Walker and others. But the building was close to being condemned, and it was shut down after I had been there for about two years, because the landlord tried to kill us. He thought we were squatting illegally, which some of us were,

and he wanted to convert the building to lofts. We formed some kind of class action against him and one night he turned the heat all the way up. Apparently the whole boiler system could have exploded, but instead it just broke. There was no way we could all stay there with no heat. We all moved out. They ended up paying us like three or four thousand dollars, whatever was left on our leases. CP: How did you pay rent and buy art supplies? DA: I started getting grants right away. Minnesota is great because of all the foundations and grants. The year I left the University of Minnesota I applied for a Jerome Foundation grant, and Liz Armstrong was at the Walker then, and she was on the jury. She came to the studio, saw the work and offered me a show at the Walker. That was quite a change of pace from being escorted out of school. Later I got a McKnight grant and a Bush fellowship and then an NEA one. CP: Next you moved onto Block E, in the heart of the downtown Minneapolis nightlife district. Was it conducive to getting work done? DA: I was right on Hennepin Avenue, above a McDonald’s and the notorious Moby Dick’s bar. There was a small [art] gallery called Rifle Sport, and the guy who ran it rented out some second-floor spaces. I had people peeing on my door at night. There were people evangelizing on soapboxes, and some stabbings, and prostitutes, and pool sharks who made a decent living at Moby Dick’s. I liked to watch the pool hustlers; it was beautiful to see. A lot of images of that time were on the street or in the pool hall. I didn’t stand on Hennepin Avenue and draw it, but they were sort of in my mind’s eye, re-creations of the scene. CP: You also have paintings from the hospital morgue (plate 14). DA: Yeah, I had to pull the bodies out and put them on the table for the guy. Sometimes I had to help with the autopsy. For a kid with a wild imagination it was almost too much, but it was good. CP: Were you angsty as a 20-something? DA: Yes. The way that I was painting was definitely the kind of Philip Guston, expressionist, German, figurative work, but with my own imagination. I would just start, and then let whatever meaning or narrative was in the painting develop as I worked. That often meant painting over the top of things and changing them around. But I definitely had an image of art as personal expression of feelings or angst or emotions. There’s a great quote from I think Borges who said Dostoevsky is great to read when you’re young because it’s such a pleasure to be an angry young man. [laughs] The implication being that it gets a little boring as you get older, and I think for me that is probably true. You run out of space for that kind of over-humanity. CP: How big a deal was it when you were asked to do the Viewpoints show at the Walker when you weren’t yet 25? DA: I feverishly painted for a year and a half for the show. It was fun. Once you get offered a show like that, things happen. Like Ed Kienholz had a show, he came to town and Adam Weinberg, now director at the Whitney, was a Walker assistant curator at the time, when Martin Friedman was director. Adam brought Ed to my studio. CP: What did you exhibit there? DA: Some big pastels on paper. Some big oil paintings on canvas, about 6 or 7 by 10 feet (fig. 29). All the work was fresh off the easel. I showed that oil on paper of the figure with the phone call. I used some grant money to buy a big roll of 6-foot-8-inch paper. I had a 100-yard roll and just cut it with a razor and I worked on it all day. Next day, I cut again and worked all day. The show was me and Jim Lutes, a Chicago painter. CP: You painted at large scale for that first museum show, and have gone on to create very big paintings for most of your career, including now. What attracts you about large scale? 39

Argue in his San Francisco studio in 2009 Paintings, from left: Tuffatore, Foramen Magnum, Isotopic, Genesis

DA: One of the first paintings I saw that really blew me away was by Tintoretto in Venice around 1986 or ‘87. It’s a crucifixion scene at the San Rocco, with hundreds of figures in it. Part of the experience of that painting is when you’re standing there looking at it, it goes beyond your peripheral vision and creates this whole universe in front of you that you can follow. I really liked that. I envisioned at one moment four big paintings that ended up taking about 10 years to make. Those were probably the biggest paintings I did. CP: Those were the buffalos, the chickens, the books (fig. 25) and… DA: ...and the leaves. I thought about creating this space to infinity. There are different ways of creating space in painting. The buffalo is a horizon line, the chickens is perspective, the books is sort of overlapping color planes, and the leaves are just kind of atmospheric in space. That was the basic idea, to use those different ways that the brain creates space. It’s not that painters made it up, it already exists in the brain that you see space. CP: Is there a feeling that you can awe an audience with a giant painting, elicit an OMG response? DA: I wasn’t really thinking about the viewer. I was thinking about these paintings I had seen and I was thinking about what I was trying to do, which is to create within a finite space this feeling of infinity, so they all feel like they keep going past the picture plane. If it’s too small, you don’t get that feeling. You can’t get pulled out. CP: What about the notion that we encounter a very large painting differently depending on how close we are to it? Is that a consideration? DA: Yeah, and again I’m not sure I thought about another person so much, but it was important for me. I liked lying next to the painting and looking up, or sitting in a chair and moving around. Paintings are stationary, but what you see in a painting depends on where you move to. It’s not like you’re in a movie theater sitting in one spot. CP: There’s a lot of moving around when you paint big, too. When I first met you there was a tall scaffold on wheels in front of the chickens painting. DA: I always liked that. One thing about scale is it’s a physical object and it’s fun to wrestle with something that big. CP: The buffalos landscape came first of the four large paintings? DA: Yes. It’s an imaginary picture of dead buffalo (plate 42). I finished it in 1992. The dealer I was working with said “What am I going to do with a 12-by-20-foot painting of dead buffalo?” [laughs] He sent a picture to the curator at the Minnesota Historical Society museum and he said “Yeah, I’m interested.” They took it right away. CP: Do you do preliminary drawings? DA: No. CP: Even of a very large painting, such as the chickens, that you spent two years on? DA: I was in Chicago, part of a United States art tour paid for by a Jerome Foundation grant. I was sitting at a bar. I’d been reading Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” And there was a Kafka short story I liked about a dancing dog who has the thought that where you get your food creates who you are. The image of infinite chickens just came into my head, and on the back of a napkin I drew out the radiating lines. That was the only sketch I did of it. When I got home and like two years later, I began the painting. CP: Did you visit an actual chicken processing operation? DA: I wrote to a big place in St. Cloud, asking if I could visit. They said all of our chickens are happy. They said no. I knew someone who worked for Sen. Paul Wellstone at the time, and I asked if I could maybe get into some kind of farm, like one that’s part of the U of M. He 42

had his staff look into it and they got me into a big turkey farm in southern Minnesota. I drove down. Your eyes water from all the uric acid. You walk on this boardwalk thing or else your feet get full of turkey droppings. I came in and they turned the lights on and thousands of turkey heads popped up. From that I took the boards that are on the bottom of the painting and the big ceiling fans. CP: You spent a lot of time traveling to see art when you were young. DA: I got a Jerome Foundation travel grant in the early 1990s that let me spend three months alone, circling the U.S. in a rental car and visiting art museums — Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, LA, Texas, etcetera--tent camping in national parks when I could. I kinda did the same thing, but on my own dime, in Europe. It was like, “Walker [Art Center] buys a painting, Doug goes to Spain.” It made me think of a reason I really like painting...you have to see it in person. You have to go to these places. If you want to see the great paintings of Spain you should go to Spain. CP: You mentioned your “Tintoretto moment.” In Europe, did Italian painters make the biggest impression on you? DA: No. I would say to begin with it was more German expressionist, which in a way had to do with the way that I painted, the way I built paint up and the way I used the figure, which was not particularly interested in the classical notions of beauty in relation to the figure, but in expression. Then of course there’s Edvard Munch, my fellow Norwegian. One of the best museums in the world is in Oslo, the Munch Museum. In terms of the scale and the feeling of those first big pieces, where I wanted to get that feeling of infinity, that came from specifically those big paintings in Venice, where they pretty much invented painting on canvas. CP: Your career has coincided with an era when painting often has been declared dead. DA: It’s just another way of expressing yourself, so it can’t be dead. It’s like, is writing dead? Probably not. There’re lots of ideas, not limited to the medium. The idea that it’s limited to the medium, no matter what you do, is wrong. I’ve always been amused by people who wrote some of that stuff, that they used a book that looks like all the other books to write that down in. If painting is about convention, then is your book about convention? Because it looks just like a book. No, it’s about what you wrote. It’s a very competitive business, being a curator or an art historian, and you have to be able stand on the backs of people somehow and show that you have a new vision of the history. That leads to that idea of creating new paradigms, because that’s the only way you can get famous enough to make a living. CP: In the period after you left school and set up a studio in Minneapolis, what did you learn about yourself as a painter? DA: I slowly got the feeling that if it was something that I felt was worth doing, I could do it in painting, no matter what it was. I gained confidence. The reception is always uneven. There’s so many people, so many really smart people, that you can’t imagine bringing them all along with you. If you try, it’s going to be very painful. But the idea I had, making the idea the way I wanted to, I felt I could do anything. CP: You were in your 30s when you won a year at the American Academy in Rome. DA: It was 1998. I had been to Italy three times, but this was completely different. I met some really interesting people. Now, Keith Christiansen is the head of European painting at the Met, at the Morgan library. These were serious, interesting people and I learned a lot. I met [landscape architect] Mary Margaret Jones, who became my wife. The poet Mark Strand was there as a resident for a few months. I really liked him.

Figure 25 | Library of Babel, 1997 Oil on canvas 138 x 263.25 in. (350 x 668.6 cm.) Minneapolis Institute of Art

CP: What was your project while in Rome? DA: My proposal was that I would spend one year doing one painting, of leaves (plate 51). Each leaf different, each leaf turned in space differently. It’s based a little on the Borges story where the guy looks down the street and he sees all the leaves in one position, and a second later he sees all the leaves in a different position, but he can remember how they’ve all changed because his memory is so good. I worked on it every day. Once it was all painted, I put on black glazes, slapping it with a rag in different spots, and then repainted. It creates a dark and light pattern that is unpredictable. CP: After Rome, you returned to Minneapolis? DA: Yes. I was broke, but Steven Woodward helped me get a new space above a Spaghetti Factory restaurant. A year later, I started dating Mary Margaret, and we got married in 2001, the same year I moved to San Francisco, where she lived and worked at that time. For the first year, I got a studio on Alameda Island, and I commuted by ferry--very exotic for a Minnesota boy. I was there 10 years altogether. CP: What do you recall about the West Coast as a place to live and work as an artist? DA: They were pretty lonely years. Not many people were interested in what I was doing. It was hard to make new connections. There really isn’t much of a gallery/art scene in San Francisco. I wasn’t a Burning Man artist, so I didn’t fit into that. I worked every day like I always do, and I did some really good stuff. Jim Dine hooked me up with someone for a while, but the gallery was unstable. The big paintings now at the new World Trade Center were all started in California. The big Genesis painting (fig. 26), I worked on that for almost three years in San Francisco. Too, it was out there that I began incorporating words

and letters into paintings. I wanted the chicken to start talking, so I was making little thought bubbles, sort of like a Roy Lichtenstein chicken (plate 71). I didn’t want to just write the letters, so I started ordering stencils from a sign company. I pulled the letters out so I could use the stencils to paint with, and I stuck the letters randomly to the wall. I did the paintings for a year, and then I looked at the wall and said “The wall is better than these paintings.” That wall of randomly stuck on letters looked to me one day like a painting of the universe. I thought, “text, the universe, making up the universe through text, this is a lot more interesting than a talking chicken.” [laughs] It was like champagne, an accident, but I noticed it. That’s when I started the Genesis piece, with letters. You could not actually read the words. CP: It looks like you began to twist and stretch the letters until they become unintelligible as letters. Reminds me of a Cocteau quote: “Writing, for me, is to draw, to tie the lines together in such a way as to turn them into writing or to untie them so that the writing becomes drawing.” DA: It has to be done on the computer. You can take the letter in Illustrator and use a program where you can warp the letter. You turn them in space, and then you stop when it’s what you want. I bought the machine that the sign printers use where it cuts the vinyl into the shape of the letter you created in Illustrator. The Cutting Master. It cuts the stencil in vinyl and gets into some very small detail. CP: And you draw the letters not randomly, but from literature. Where do you go for texts? DA: Depends. For the big Genesis painting that is at the World Trade Center, I took it from that book of the Bible. The idea of that was that letters were like atoms and language is constantly changing, just like life, and it enables things to keep changing. The two other pieces

Figure 26 | Genesis, 2007-2009 (plate 78) One World Trade Center, New York

Figure 27 | Triumph of Time (in progress), 2019 (plate 139)

there, the letters are from Walt Whitman, the reason being that he kinda grew up around there, in Lower Manhattan. I have used MobyDick and Rimbaud’s “Illuminations.” CP: How does it work in the studio? DA: I copy and paste a paragraph or more of text and then I might make sure that 25 percent or so are capital letters, because sometimes they look better than all small letters. I end up with a couple of hundred letters, which I turn in space until they look like what I want. They get printed in rows as stencils, which I use to paint. I had to experiment with varying amounts of stickiness for the stencil backing, with the density of the paint and the right brush. It’s very time-consuming, especially on the large paintings. CP: Can you say a word about paint handling? DA: In a way it’s like a musical composition, the quality of the notes. It’s hard to explain. You look at a lot of paintings, and there’s a feeling paintings can have that’s interesting, and then there can be somebody who’s just kind of filling in the space. It’s like the difference between a jazz player who’s improvising in something that’s really interesting, and somebody who’s just playing the notes. I like the improvisational aspect, when the paint becomes part of the expression rather than just a means to fill the space. CP: You and Mary Margaret moved to New York full-time in 2011. Has that mattered a lot or a little to you? DA: It’s a huge difference. It’s not even in the same ballpark as other places I’ve lived and worked. There are a lot more people who are interested in supporting the work. And there’s more energy and more ambition. I’ve been able to sell the work, which helps generate new work. Then there are people who are interested in writing about the work, or talking about the work. Yes, it is very cutthroat, but c’est la vie. Even if you are not living here, they are still being cutthroat here, but you just are not part of it. CP: Are you still painting a lot? DA: Yes. Six or seven days a week. My studio’s in New Jersey. I take the PATH train, usually get there there by 8, and leave about 5 or 6. I told someone the other day, it’s just as fun if I make a bad painting, so not much to lose. While you’re making it, you don’t know it’s bad [laughs], you are just enjoying the ideas, the flow of it, then you come in the next day, you go, oh, ugh.

rate copies. The Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon, is reversed, as if you are seeing it in your rearview mirror while driving away. I changed the colors on the Warhol to make it a sort of fauvist soup can, (plate 133) which I thought was funny. And I altered the scale on the Frans Snyder (fig. 27). In terms of playing around with history, I didn’t want to limit myself to paintings, so some of them are collages or photographs. In the Mary Cassatt case, it’s a small pastel [The Young Mother, from 1900]. Translating that to an oil painting was fun, because with a pastel you can kind of scribble with white on the top, which is what Degas and Cassatt and others did. CP: What drew you to the dead-critters still life by Snyder? DA: It was fun painting that. I had to paint it in the style that he painted in, which was really hard. At the time, they mostly painted in black and white, and gray. The whole thing. And then you come back in with transparent glazes of color and get the color right. That’s how that one was painted. It was really time-consuming. I liked the idea of using that painting because Snyder is famous mostly for painting the animals in Rubens paintings. Rubens would hire Snyder, and he would paint the lion or the giraffe or whatever. He did these still lifes, which are amazing, on his own, but mostly it’s like he was Rubens’ animal guy. CP: And then you tattoo the masterworks with your cutout letters. Explain. DA: I partially obscured them with the letters, and it’s different for each one. The letters are to put everything in motion. I wanted to paint a moment in time. The idea is that we see these pieces from the past differently now and people will see them differently in the future, and maybe some are relevant and some are irrelevant. The letters are in a way like atoms, so they can be put together in different ways as time goes on to create new things. New generation, new ideas, new writing. Claude Peck is a writer, editor and journalist. At the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, he was senior metro editor, a weekly columnist and, for 14 years, arts editor. He regularly reviews books for Star Tribune and other publications. He was a National Arts Journalism Program fellow at Columbia University. He was editor of Twin Cities Reader, an alternative newsweekly. He is working on a book about California architect Donald Wexler.

CP: When do you find time to read? DA: I listen to lots of stuff when I work. Books on tape, more fiction now than poetry. I listened to all of the Proust books, which were amazing. Three times to all of them. Extraordinary. Same with the Elena Ferrante novels. I think they are kind of similar, in ways. They manage to catch individuals changing and growing up and the relationship between the individuals as they grow up, and the changing culture and how the culture changed from one period to the next, which is really pretty remarkable. I don’t know if you can ever do that in painting. CP: How long did it take you to prepare for the 2018 show at Marc Straus gallery? DA: About a year and a half. It was my first show with him, but probably the biggest show I’ve ever done in New York. It’s two floors, 16 paintings, all of them new. CP: First you painted recognizable masterworks, from Titian and Frans Snyder to Picasso, Guston and Warhol, and then you floated letters over them. What led you to this shift in focus after doing your own thing for a long time, letter-wise? DA: I am interested in history, so I decided that I would improv on images that a lot of people would know. The originals are not accu45

Figure 28 l Calle, oil on canvas (in progress) Argueâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio at Mana, Jersey City, 2015 47

Figure 29 l Installation view of Viewpoints exhibition Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1985 49

1980-1984

Plate 1 | Untitled, 1980 Oil, gouache on paper 22 x 30 in. (56x 76.2 cm)

Plate 2 | Telemachus and Eucharis, 1981 Oil on canvas 60 x 60 in. (152.4 x 152.4 cm.) 52

Plate 3 | Saturn Eating His Children, 1982 Pencil on gesso and paper 36 x 28 in. (91.44 x 71 cm.)

Plate 4 | Untitled, 1982 Watercolor and ink on paper 30 x 44 in. (72.6 x 112 cm.) 53

Plate 5 | Untitled, 1983 Oil on plywood 30 x 12 in. (76.2 x 30.48 cm.) Private collection 54

Plate 6 | Untitled, 1983 Watercolor on paper 41 x 30 in. (104 x 76 cm.) 55

Plate 7 | Flea, 1983 Goauche on paper 22 x 30 in. (56 x 76 cm.)

Plate 8 | Untitled, 1984 Oil on canvas 96 x 78 in. (244 x 198 cm.)

Plate 9 | Dancing On One Foot, 1984 Oil on canvas 96 x 120 in. (244 x 305 cm.) Private collection 59

Plate 10 | Bob, 1984 Oil on canvas 108 x 72 in. (274 x 183.cm.) Private collection 60

Plate 11 |Snowman, 1984 Oil on canvas 72 x 101 in. (183 x 256.54 cm.) Private collection 63

1985-1989

Plate 12 | A Gentleman, 1985 Oil on canvas 120 x 88 in. (305 x 223.5 cm.) Private collection

Plate 13 | Diving, 1985 Pastel on paper, 72 x 132 in. (183 x 335.3 cm.) Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis

Plate 14 | Morgue, 1985 Pastel on paper, 72 x 96 in. (183 x 244 cm.) Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis 69

Plate 15 | Flying, 1986 Pastel on paper 84 x 124 in. (213.4 x 315 cm.) Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis

Plate 16 | Untitled, 1986 Oil on canvas 86 x 116 in. (218.4 x 294.64 cm.)

Plate 17 | Self-Portrait, 1986 Oil on wood, 60 x 48 in. (152.4 x 122 cm.) Private collection

Plate 18 | YMCA, 1986 Oil on canvas, 96 x 120 in. (243.8 x 305 cm.) Private collection,

Plate 19 | Kitchen, 1987 Oil on plywood, 96 x 144 in. (244 x 365.8 cm.) Private collection

Plate 20 | Self-Portrait, 1987 Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in. (91.4 x 91.4 cm.) Private collection 77

Plate 21 | Bonding, 1989 Egg tempera, plants on linen, 84 x 108 in. (213.4 x 274.3 cm.)

Plate 22 | Guilty, 1989 Monoprint 22 x 18 in. (56 x 46 cm.) Private collection

Plate 23 | Display Case, 1989 Mixed media, 38 x 20 x 49 in. (96 x 50 x 124.4 cm.) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Plate 24 | Hanging, 1989 Oil on linen, 48 x 144 in. (122 x 365.7 cm.) Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis

Plate 25 | In the Near of the City, 1989 Oil on canvas 134 x 180 in. (340.4 x 457 cm.)

Plate 26 | Pilgrim, 1990 Collage, 19 x 25 in. (48.3 x 63.5 cm.) Private collection Plate 27 | Untitled, 1990 Collage, 19 x 25 in. (48.3 x 63.5 cm.) Private collection

1990-1999

Plate 28 | Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria, 1990 Collage, 25 x 19 in. (63.5 x 48.3 cm.) Private collection 87

Plate 29 | Nightmare,1990 Monoprint, 18 x 22 in. (45.72 x 55.88 cm.) Minneapolis Institute of Art Plate 30 | Jumping, 1991 Monoprint, 18 x 20 in. (45.72 x 50.8 cm.) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Plate 31 | Rocking Horse,1990 Monoprint, 18 x 22 in. (45.72 x 55.88 cm.) Private collection 88

Plate 32 | Untitled, 1991 Monoprint, 18 x 24in. (45.72 x 60.96 cm) Private collection

Plate 33 | The Ungrateful Son, 1986 metal receptacle, fresco, wax, paper, fabric, 26 x 11 x 13 in. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 89

Plate 34 | Fish House,1992 Oil on canvas 44 x 46 in. (111.76 x 116.84 cm.) Private collection

Plate 35 | Foot and Pots,1992 Oil on canvas 40 x48 in. (101.6 x 121.92 cm.)

Plate 36 | Education,1993 Oil on canvas, 44 x 46 in. (111.76 x 116.84 cm.) Private collection

Plate 37 | Burial,1993 Oil on canvas 36 x 40 in. (91.44 x 101.6 cm.) Private collection

Plate 38 | Introduction,1993 Oil on canvas 44 x 50 in. (111.76 x 127 cm.) Private collection

Previous page: Plate 39 | Chickens,1994 Oil on canvas,144 x 216 in. (365.76 x 548.64 cm.) Cafesjian Estate, on longterm loan to Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis Top image: Work in progress Bottom image: Detail of Chickens, 1994

Plate 40 | Lobby Bird,1994 Mixed Media 28 x 40 in. (71.12 x 101.6 cm.) Private collection 97

Plate 41 | Untitled, 1995 Encaustic on canvas 36 (deep) x 84 (long) in. (91 x 213 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 42 | Buffalo,1992 Oil on canvas,144 x 264 in. (365.76 x 670.56 cm.) Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul

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Plate 43 | Comb Flower,1995 Watercolor, pencil, ink/paper 40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm.) Private collection

Plate 44 | Love Bug, 1996 Watercolor and ink on paper 22 x 30 in. (55 x 76 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 45 | White Anger, White Noise,1995 Mixed media/paper, 34 x 45 in. (86.36 x 114.3 cm.) Minneapolis Institute of Art

Plate 46 | Kapital, 1995 Mixed media on paper, 40 x 29 in. (101.6 x 73.66 cm.) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Plate 47 | Untitled,1996, Watercolor on paper, 36 x 37 in. (91.44 x 93.98 cm.) Promised Gift to the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis

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Plate 48 | Beauty, 1995 29 x40 in. (73.66 x 101.6 cm.) Mixed media on paper Private collection

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Plate 49 | Untitled, 1997 Oil on canvas 36 x 36 in. (91 x 91 cm.) Private collection 106

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Plate 50 | Library of Babel, 1997 Oil on canvas, 144 x 264 in. (365.76 x 670.56 cm.) Minneapolis Institute of Art 109

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2000-2006

Plate 51 | Some Memories, 1998 Oil on canvas, 156 x 156 in. (396.24 x 396.24 cm.) Minnesota Museum of American Art 111

Plate 52 | Leaves, 1998 Dry pigment on paper 28 x 40 in. (71.12 x 101.6 cm.) Private collection

Plate 53 | Hedge, 1999 l Oil on wood 42 x 42 x 42 in. (106.68 x 106.68 x 106.68 cm.) Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis 112

Plate 54 | Rome, 1999 Oil on linen, 48 x 48 in. (121.92 x 121.92 cm.) Private collection 113

Plate 55 | Drop, 2000 Encaustic on wood, 37 x 37 in. (93.98 x 93.98 cm.)

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Plate 56 | Untitled, 2000 Oil on plywood, 39 x 39 in. (99.06 x 99.06 cm.) Private collection Next Page: Plate 57 | Untitled (detail), 2000 Oil on linen, 76 x 129 in. (193.04 x 327.66 cm.) Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis

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Plate 58 | Untitled, 2002 Oil on linen, 12 x 20 in. (30.48 x 50.8 cm.) Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles

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Plate 59 | Weighing In, 2001 Mixed media on linen, 78 x 78 in. (198.12 x 198.12 cm.) Each panel painted by non-artist of the American Academy in Rome on supplied silk-screened drawing Artists, clockwise from left: Brien Garnand, John Marciari, Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, David Stone

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Plate 60 | Lucy, 2002 Oil on linen, 69 x 67 in. (175.26 x 170.18 cm.) Private collection 122

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Plate 61 | Portrait, 2003 Oil on linen, 6 x 4 in. (15.24 x 10.16 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 62 | Untitled (portrait), 2004 Oil on linen, 84 x 72 in. (213.36 x 182.88 cm.)

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At left: Plate 63 | Chicken Bits, 2004 Oil on linen 27 x 52 in. (68.58 x 132.08 cm.) Facing page: Plate 64 | Untitled, 2004 Oil on linen 64 x 47 in. (162.56 x 119.38 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 65 | God is Evolving, 2005 Pencil on paper, 8 x 10 in. (20 x 25 cm.)

Plate 66 | Nobodaddy, 2005 Pencil on paper, 8 x 10 in. (20 x 25 cm.)

Plate 67 | Ulysses, 2005 Pencil on paper, 8 x 10 in. (20 x 25 cm.)

Plate 68 | The Evidence is Inconclusive, 2005 Pencil on paper, 8 x 10 in. (20 x 25 cm.)

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Plate 69 | Untitled (portrait), 2004 Oil on linen, 52 x 42 in. (132 x 107 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 70 | Untitled (Portrait), 2005 Oil on panel, 12 x 12 in. (30.48 x 30.48 cm.) Private collection

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Above: Plate 71 | I Ain’t No Chicken, 2006 Oil on linen, 7 x 6 in. (17.78 x 15.24 cm.) Facing page: Plate 72 | The Future; It’s Not What It Used To Be, 2005 Oil on linen, 78 x 55 in. (198.12 x 139.7 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 73 | Nature or Nurture, 2006 Oil on linen, 84 x 72 in. (213.36 x182.88 cm.)

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Plate 74 | Untitled (Summer Letters), 2006 Powdered pigment, ink, gouache, flash on paper 30 x 43 in. (76.2 x 109.22 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 75 | Breaking News, 2006 Oil on linen, 7 x 6 in. (17.78 x 15.24 cm.)

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Plate 76 | Untitled, 2006 Oil on linen, 7 x 6 in. (17.78 x 15.24 cm.)

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138

White Rings of Tumult The Painterly Poetics of Doug Argue By Charles A. Riley II When a painting implicates beloved masterworks not just of art but literature and music, the rewards of rigorous study are especially rich. Doug Argue’s ambitious dialogues with Picasso, Léger, Matisse and Warhol, in works completed in 2017 and 2018, challenge our thinking about Modernist aesthetics and its legacy. What makes them all the more engrossing is the interdisciplinary web they weave, pulling together threads of language and literature, music and history. Operating on several levels of compositional strategy at once, they are the perfect subjects for languorous meditation on art’s wider-ranging considerations, antidotes to this era’s instantaneous disregard of detail. The prelude to this important series is an equally challenging, similarly layered body of work from 2009 to 2017, shown at such prestigious New York galleries as Haunch of Venison and Edelman Arts, that paved the way for Argue’s audacious head-to-head encounters with art history. Aptly enough, it begins with Genesis (fig. 30) (plate 78), a radiant burst of such abundant energy that it looks as though Nikola Tesla had been in the studio with him. Pulsing from its red-hot core are fragments of the Biblical text, reflecting the artist’s profound attachment to speculations about origins and the nature of light. Backing the chronology further toward chaos, he floats the Kandinsky-esque nebulae against pitch black in Prehistory (plate 93). The balance of luminous blue and flashes of his trademark white (when we met, he was extolling the virtues of Robert Ryman) gives Wordhoard (plate 105) the drama of a lightning storm. The epic scale of his literary interpretations ranges from Homer to Melville, turning Loose Fish (plate 102) into a tide of rhythmic motion and riding the energy of Melville’s favorite color, white, the way a long boat is pulled by a whale. Argue brings to the masterworks of the past that inventive sense of freedom a virtuoso brings to theme and variations in music (Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms taking on themes from Handel or Bach). Not coincidentally, musical counterpoint turns out to be one of the most useful analogies in understanding the work. By habit and training, I am disinclined to use the first-person voice in analyses of this kind. My generation was groomed

to decode “objectively,” reluctantly even setting aside the biographical and historical contexts to focus on the internal logic of the “well-wrought” text, painting or musical score. So it is a departure to reveal such a personal response to Argue’s 2018 Boogie Woogie (fig. 31), but I do so on the basis of living with this major painting for the blissful four months it was in my museum, playing a leading role in an exhibition built on color theory and practice from Titian through Rothko, Matisse, Kandinsky and others. The gallery in which Boogie Woogie took pride of place, carrying the argument with an irrefutable Ciceronian eloquence and cogency, included works by Josef Albers and Ellsworth Kelly. The main reason for its placement in this show devoted to color theory was the problem of the primary colors, because Boogie Woogie took the downbeat from Léger and Mondrian, for whom the primaries were conceptual starting points. It was soon apparent to me that the painting involved far more than this, however. (“Using” Boogie Woogie to teach the primaries was like sending the Montreal Canadiens to win a pond hockey tournament.) Argue’s large and supremely engaging painting applies exquisite tonal adjustments to his interpretation of Fernand Léger’s Two Women Holding Flowers (1954) (fig.32), sharpening and deepening the yellows and subduing the solid blues with a silvery, softer brushy surface. Just as Mondrian and Léger modulated the primaries to suit their balance on the grid or in a still life, Argue calibrates the fields of blue, red and yellow together with the underlying white, which itself is a contained, delicately irregular rectangular field inside the slightly different white field of the canvas. The interpretive use of the primaries, referring to both Léger and Mondrian, is almost a sub-genre of art history in itself, embracing not just Argue but Alexander Calder and Joan Miró (closer to the source), Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Tom Wesselmann. While direct comparisons may be drawn between Argue and any of these, surprisingly it is not the radiance of Calder or the pure flat areas of color in Lichtenstein that come closest, but the milky tones of a Johns encaustic. Argue occupies a space of his own in this lineage. Yet it was more than this classic issue in the philosophy of color that held my attention. In the evenings after the museum closed, I would descend the winding stairs of the old Frick

Figure 30 | Genesis, 2007-2009 (detail) (plate 78) Oil on linen, 160 x 230 in. (406 x 584 cm). Private collection 139

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Paintings from left: Love Letters, Tyger Tyger, Rameses Argueâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, 2016

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Figure 31 | Boogie Woogie, 2018 Oil on linen, 50 x 62 in. (127 x 157 cm.)

Figure 32 | Fernand Léger | Two Women Holding Flowers, 1954 Oil on canvas, 96 x 92 in. (244 x 233cm.) Museum of Modern Art, New York Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange) © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York

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How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty —Hart Crane, To Brooklyn Bridge

mansion, turn on the lights in the second-floor gallery and savor at leisure, and in small doses, the intricacies that make Boogie Woogie so intriguing. Discerning the detached elements from the Léger painting (the helmet-like black hair, the bent knee, the foot, floating free like the colored re-deployed planes of blue, yellow, orange and red) is part of the pleasure.

In Boogie Woogie, the letters that hover so near the fundamental origins of speech ascend to a new plane of meaning. To a major Léger painting as visual source, he adds torqued, stretched and colored letters he harvested from “Voyelles” by Arthur Rimbaud. This poem, written in 1871, is a milestone in Symbolism, especially in its quintessential use of synesthesia (the commingling of the senses).

The re-imagined parts are aspects of a dialogue with Modern masters that Argue maintains in other works with Picasso (nothing less than the monumental Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) and, just as audaciously, with Matisse’s beloved paper cut The Snail (fig. 33). As Picasso conversed with Velázquez, Léger with Leonardo and Matisse with de Heem, Argue takes similar interpretive liberties with specific paintings and ensures that his own style has the last word (fig. 34).

Argue’s already sophisticated riff on Modernism doubles down by adding a brilliant literary dimension to its matrix. Argue has put literature to work in this way in previous paintings, notably his incorporation of textual elements from “Genesis,” Homer’s “Odyssey and Melville’s “Moby-Dick” even in some of his earliest paintings. When Rimbaud in the first lines of the poem assigned a color to each of the vowels, he forged a connection among language, the sound of language and visual color that defies the slippery imprecision of so many color names and descriptions. Realizing that Argue had coyly eluded Rimbaud’s strict correspondences between colors and vowels (he confided to me that he took all the letters of the poem, shuffled them in a box and spread them by chance, but hardly randomly, over the painting), I gave in to the freedom of the flickering letters.

The mimetic connection to the women’s hair in the Léger, for example, retains the rippling highlights and some of the oddly shaped apertures and sinuous contours, even as it stretches and wanders (“errs”) on its own pathways. Argue captures the Heraclitean sense of flux in his lace-like layers in an eloquent statement about the series made on the occasion of a recent exhibition: “There are many different histories in the world, and we often see things in the current moment, yet have no idea what lies beneath. One language is always turning into another, one generation is always rising and another falling, there is no still moment. I am trying to express this flux — this constant shifting of one thing over another, like a veil over the moment itself.” The allusion to language invokes a further dimension. A Touch of the Poet Even if Argue were only operating on these two levels — the manipulation of colored planes (including the two whites of the background) and the critical dismemberment of an important painting by a Modern master made 64 years earlier— there would be more than enough to ruminate upon for four months. The next stage of the painting’s intellectual content raises the stakes. Since first visiting Argue’s studio in Jersey City’s Mana complex in 2013, I have admired his studious and inventive approach to language, which at the time related to the linguistics of Steven Pinker. Like the subatomic dynamism of superstring theory, to which I compared it, through the magnification of the basic elements of language (letters), it struck me as a brilliant way to zoom in on the visual as well as aural basis of speech.

Black A, White E, Red I, Green U, Blue O: vowels. Someday I’ll explain your burgeoning births:1 Like Rimbaud, Argue is delving into the primordial basis of language, breaking it down to letters, which he then animates with the choreographed insouciance of a marionette master. For Rimbaud, the premise is a launching pad to a sublime associative landscape, the type of moody Symbolist realm of demigods and storm-tossed oceans that the febrile mind of Edgar Allan Poe might invent or Gustave Moreau might paint. It continues: And shadowy gulfs; E, white vapors and tents, proud Glacial peaks, white kings, shivering Queen Anne’s lace; I, purples, bloody spittle, lips’ lovely laughter In anger or drunken contrition; U, cycles, divine vibrations of viridian seas; Peace of pastures sown with beasts, wrinkles Stamped on studious brows as if by alchemy; O, that last Trumpet, overflowing with strange discord, Silences bridged by Worlds and Angels: —O the Omega, the violet beam from His Eyes!

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Figure 33 | Above Henri Matisse | The Snail (L’escargot), 1953 Pigmented with gouache on paper, collage 112 in. × 113 in. (285 × 287 cm.) permission? Figure 34 | Right page The Snail, 2018 Oil on canvas, 71 x 72 in. (180.3 x 183 cm.)

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It took me the full four months to pore over the painting in its entirety, since Argue’s complexity (like Pollock and Kandinsky before him) on a large scale is best absorbed detail by detail. The Picasso, Léger and Matisse dialogues are keyed to the size of the “originals” and that means that the determined viewer has a great deal of ground to cover, taking in the many elements of these layered and expansive works that use fragmentation to make diffuse the logical focus of the “originals” (Picasso’s recessionary space, Léger’s friezelike horizontal array, or Matisse’s Fibonaccian spiral). As with Old Master drawings based on Biblical themes or earlier narrative works of art, Argue’s translations invite reading. The Léger offers gestural liberties such as the gratifying human wobble of a long calligraphic black line on the right side of the picture, as well as the deviating parallels derived from an architectural element in the Léger, but bent from their mechanical rectitude, just as the floating rectangles of orange, red, blue and green billow like fabric rather than define themselves like panels of colored ground. Even the white ground of the painting deviates from the straight outer limits of the white canvas. Dancing on a Plane In many ways, the balancing act that so awes us as we decipher a work such as Boogie Woogie is a time-honored compositional problem in art history. Neoclassical painters used this repetition that breaks down and rebuilds the picture plane. Since the invention of perspective, the illusion of depth has been a desideratum of artists determined to defy the essential two-dimensionality of the painting surface, the objective reality of the medium. For Poussin, for instance, the Funeral of Phocion affords an irresistible invitation to lead the viewer’s eye along a circuit of parallel paths from the foreground to the background, from left to right and back again. The technical term for this pattern is the boustrophedon, and its etymology is the to and fro of the ox-drawn plow tilling the field in parallel rows, making the turns at each end. As with Pollock’s similar skeins, or the gouaches of Sol LeWitt, the layers in Argue’s painting obey a spatial logic, disclosing relationships of depth and intersection. In my library there is a musty set of seminars published in the 1950s by the Metropolitan Museum as a guide to looking at two consecutive portfolios on composition as structure and as expression. “We do not wander. We are led,” wrote John Canaday, then the chief critic of the New York Times, about the Poussin, which he includes in “Composition as Expression.” I would have included Argue’s Boogie Woogie as an example of “Composition as Experience.” Poussin is held as the epitome of classical form, arranging the figures and architectural elements in an order within a bounded space, even as Argue, for all the fluvial dynamism of his abstraction (the Pollock element), divides the given area with a meticulous sense of proportion. The repetition of the picture plane in Poussin can be compared to the artificial space of a theater set, suggested by the angles of chairs or cabinet, the blocking of the actors (upstage or backstage) and the vanishing point of the flats. Just as Ingres uses the motion of the figures in the landscape to lead the eye back into a recessionary 146

distance, Argue builds a three-dimensional space layering color on color, form on form, and using the turn and turn again to wend his way backward from surface to ground gradually, almost imperceptibly. As with Pollock, the determined viewer traces the thread of red or green, noting the tell-tale overlapping to sort the top from the bottom layers. Argue’s palimpsest deepens three or four stories down, and suddenly I am reminded of the depth illusion in Bach’s fugues, which vertiginously, deliriously at times, overlay four themes or more in bravura displays of independent voices. The musical virtues of counterpoint, which originated as the intellectual extension of harmony when the individual notes of the melody were “countered” by added intervals, is an effect of simultaneity as well as development. Beginning with the polyphony of Palestrina, and rising with the fugues of Bach, counterpoint’s intellectual appeal is the challenge of discerning, much less playing, two or more independent voices that through their intersections in chords create harmonies as well as dissonances. Bach wove chord structures of five or more contrapuntal lines, braiding a complicated chromaticism that eventually was exploited by Wagner and the Serialists (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern). The layered precision of Argue’s paintings remind me not just of Bach and his Baroque symmetries but of Schoenberg’s Modernist distortions of the same fugal laws. Even the distorted letters that Argue chooses for the work, “stretches” on the computer and then produces on paper have their laser-cut edges. Argue’s three-dimensional fugue is spatial, not temporal. He builds vertical harmonies and dissonances, tones arrayed in chords made by superimposing letters on areas of color, wrapping an “O” for instance around a black filigree in a three-dimensional hint at what lies over and what passes under the floating elements, even as logic reminds us that the surface is only two-dimensional. We are back to the rhymes of Rimbaud or the frieze-like rhythms of Léger, but Argue’s fine-tipped brush dips and pivots like the flight of seagulls described by Hart Crane in his poem about the Brooklyn Bridge, “shedding white rings of tumult.” Charles A. Riley II, PhD, is director of the Nassau County Museum of Art, the author of 35 books on art, literature, music and philosophy, and a professor at Clarkson University. His books include “Free as Gods,” “Color Codes,” “The Saints of Modern Art,” “The Jazz Age in France” and “Art at Lincoln Center.” He has curated major exhibitions in Berlin, Taiwan, Amsterdam and New York. He was senior editor at “Art & Antiques” as well as “Art & Auction” magazines, and is a former reporter at Time Inc. _____________________________________________________ Note: 1.Translation by Wyatt Mason, Rimbaud Complete, “The Modern Library”, New York, 2002.

2007-2011

Plate 77 | Developing Story (in progress), 2009 Oil on Canvas, 108 x 156 in. (274 x 396 cm.) Next page: Plate 78 | Genesis, 2007-2009 Oil on linen, 160 x 230 in. (406 x 584 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 79 l Untitled, 2007 Gouache and ink on paper 50.5 x 107 in. (128.27 x 271.78 cm.) 151

Plate 80 | Far Swim (side A), 2007 Ink, marker and acrylic on Steveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mylar 36 x 48 in. (91.44 x 121.92 cm.)

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Plate 81 | Untitled (Ancient Greek), 2007 Ink on paper, 22 x 30 in. (55.88 x 76.2 cm.)

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Plate 84 | Percentiles, 2008 Gouache on panel 40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm.)

Facing page: Plate 82 | Double Modes, 2007 Gouache on paper 22 x 30 in. (55.88 x 76.2 cm.) Private collection Plate 83 | Fundamental Uncertainty, 2008 Gouache on panel 24 x 36 in. (60.96 x 91.44 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 85 | Tuffatore, 2010 Oil on canvas,162 x 162 in. (411.48 x 411.48 cm.)

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Plate 86 | South Harm, 2010 Oil on canvas 31.5 x 42 in. (80.01 x 106.68 cm.)

Facing page: Plate 87 | Splash Down, 2010 Oil on linen 17 x 11.5 in. (42.5 x 28.75 cm.)

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Plate 88 | Diver, 2007-2010 Gouache, ink, oil paint on board 30 x 40 in. (76.2 x 101.6 cm.) Private collection 160

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Plate 89 | Hither and Thithering Waters of Night, 2009-2012 Oil on canvas 114 x 162 in. (290 x 411.5 cm.) Private collection 163

Plate 90 | Weirfug, 2010 Oil ont canvas 43 x 55 in. (109.2 x 139.7 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 91 | A Mouthful of Air, 2011 Oil on canvas 76 x 89 in. (193.04 x 226.06 cm.) Private collection Next page: Plate 92 | Exhale, 2011 Oil on canvas 33.5 x 45.5 in. (85.09 x 115.57 cm.) Private collection 167

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Plate 93 | Prehistory, 2010-11 Oil on canvas, 35 x 47 in. (87.5 x 119.3 cm.) Private collection 170

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Plate 94 | Alphabet, 2011 Oil on canvas 56 x 44 in. (142 x 111 cm.) Private collection 172

Plate 95 | Strum, 2011 Oil on canvas 55 x 43 in. (139.7 x 109.2 cm.) Private collection 173

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Plate 96 | Schema, 2011 Oil on canvas 45 x 57 in. (114 x 145 cm.) Private collection 175

Plate 97 | The Doubloon, 2012 Oil on canvas 76 x 86 in. (193 x 218 cm.) Private collection 176

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Plate 98 | Randomly Placed Exact Percentages, 2009- 2013 Oil on canvas 112 x 160 in. (284.48 x 406.4 cm.) One World Trade Center, New York City

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Plate 99 | Semblance, 2011 Oil on linen, 60 x 90 in. (152.4 x 228.6 cm.) Private collection 181

Plate 100 | Catch My Drift, 2012 Oil on linen 112 x 160 in. (284.48 x 406.4 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 101 | Whale Road, 2012 Oil on canvas 56 x 44 in. (142 x 112 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 102 | Loose Fish, 2012 Oil on canvas 66 x 78 in. (167.6 x 198 cm.)

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Plate 103 | The Art of Translation, 2013 Oil on canvas 68 x 92 in. (172 x 233 cm.) Private collection 189

Plate 104 | Cascade, 2013 Oil on canvas, Three Panels at 80 x 54 in. (203 x 137 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 105 | Wordhoard, 2013 Oil on canvas 68 x 92 in.(172 x 233.7 cm.) Private collection 192

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Plate 106 l Autumn in New York, 2013 Oil on canvas, 56 x 78 in. (142 x 198 cm.) Private collection 195

Plate 107 l Straight Aâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, 2013 Gouache on paper 38 x 50 in. (96.52 x 127 cm.) Private collection 196

Plate 108 | Noctis Equi, 2013 Watercolor and gouache on paper 40 x 60 in. (101.6 x 152.4 cm.) Private collection 197

Plate 109 | Little Sorrows, 2013 Oil on canvas 75 x 89.5 in. (190.5 x 226 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 110 | Happily Ever After, 2014 Gouache on paper 36 x 50 in. (91.44 x 127 cm.) Private collection 201

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Plate 111 | Esquivalience, 2014 Oil on canvas 31 x 43 in. (78.74 x 109.22 cm.) Private collection 203

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Plate 112| Love Letters, 2014 Oil on canvas 70 x 94 in. (177.8 x 238.76 cm.) Private collection 205

Above: Plate 113 | Backform, 2014 (detail) Oil on canvas 93 x 69 in. (236 x 175 cm.) Private collection Facing page: Plate 114 | Backform, 2014 Oil on canvas 93 x 69 in. (236 x 175 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 115 | Calle, 2015 Oil on canvas 91 x 280 in. (231 x 711 cm.) 209

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Plate 116 | Time and Time Again, 2015 Oil on canvas 88.5 x 134 in. (224.79 x 340.36 cm.) 211

Plate 117 | Dancing Sâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, 2015 Oil on canvas 68 x 90 in. (172.72 x 228.6 cm.) Private collection

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Above: Plate 118 | Night Poems, 2015 Oil on canvas 70 x 94 in. (177.8 x 238.76 cm.) Mana Contemporary, Jersey City Next page: Plate 119 | Isotropic, 2015 Oil on canvas 114 x 162 in. (289.56 x 411.48 cm.) One World Trade, New York City

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Plate 120 | Mother Tongue, 2015 Oil on canvas 69 x 90.25 in. (175.26 x 229.235 cm.)

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Plate 121 | Leaves 4, 2015 Oil on lithograph 28 x 39.5 in. (71.12 x 100.33 cm.) Private collection

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Last Page: Plate 122 | Pantheon, 2015 Oil on canvas 70 x 94 in. (177.8 x 238.76 cm.) Private collection Plate 123 | Word Salad, 2015 Oil on canvas 96 x 54 in. (243.84 x 137.16 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 124 | Free Verse, 2015 Oil on canvas 78 x 90 in. (198.12 x 228.6 cm.) Private collection 223

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At left: Plate 125 | Iceland Wins, 2016 Oil on paper 41 x 59 in. (104.14 x 149.86 cm.) Private collection Next page: Plate 126 | London, 2016 Oil on canvas 54 x 78 in. (137.16 x 198.12 cm.) Private collection

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Plate 127 | New York City, 2017 Oil on canvas 60 x 40 in. (152.4 x 101.6 cm.)

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Plate 128 | Windward, 2017 Oil on paper 30 x 40 in. (76 x 100 cm.) 231

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2018-Present

Plate 129 | Babylon, 2018 Oil on canvas 55.5 x 54.5 in. (140.97 x 138.43 cm.) 233

Plate 130 | Consequences, 2018 Oil on canvas 56.5 x 55.5 in. (143.51 x 140.97 cm.)

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Plate 131 | Ghosts, 2018 Oil on canvas 58 x 75 in. (147.32 x 190.5 cm.)

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Plate 132 | I Have Known Rivers, 2018 Oil on canvas 58 x 75 in. (147.32 x 190.5 cm.) Private collection 239

Plate 133 | Tomato Soup, 2018 Oil on canvas 58 x 45 in. (147.32 x 114.3 cm.)

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Plate 134 | The Neighborhood, 2018 Oil on canvas 70 x 73 in. (177.8 x 185.42 cm.) Private collection 243

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Plate 135 | Transitions, 2018 Oil on canvas 70 x 94in. (177.8 x 238.76 cm.) Private collection 245

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Plate 136 | Neither Here or There, 2018 Oil on canvas 55 x 70 in. (139.7 x 177.8 cm.) Private collection 247

Plate 137 | Footfalls Echo in the Memory, 2018 Oil on canvas 99 x 95 in. (251.46 x 241.3cm.) Next page: Plate 138 | Magic Mountain, 2019 Oil on canvas 45 x 64.5 in. (114.3 x 163.83 cm.)

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Plate 139 |Triumph of Time, 2019 Oil on canvas 55 x 73 in. (139.7 x 185.42 cm.) 253

Plate 140 | Monsieur & Madam Monet, 2019 Silkscreen print 8 x 11 in. (20.32 x 27.94 cm.) Printed by Gary Lichtenstein

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Plate 141 | Charles Darwin, 2019 Oil on canvas 46 x 34 in. (116.84 x 86.36 cm.)

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Plate 142 | The Exorcism, 2019 Oil on canvas 40 x 35 in. (101.6 x 89 cm.)

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Plate 1443| The Vision, 2019 Oil on canvas 40 x 35 in. (101.6 x 89 cm.)

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Plate 144 | Dancing on the Beach, 2019 Oil on canvas 80 x 120 in. (203 x 305 cm.) 259

EXHIBITIONS SOLO SHOWS 2019 2019 2018 2017 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2005 2004 1998 1997 1996 1994 1990 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983

Kovacek Spiegelgasse Contemporary, Vienna, Austria Piermarq, Sydney, Australia Marc Straus Gallery, New York Waterhouse & Dodd, New York Palimpsests, Waterhouse & Dodd, New York Scattered Rhymes, Venice Biennale, Collateral Exhibition, Venice, Italy, Page Turner, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica The Speech of Clouds, Edelman Arts, New York Doug Argue, Cafesjian Center for the Arts, Yerevan, Armenia The Art of Translation, Edelman Arts, New York Catch My Drift, Haunch of Venison, New York The Study of Infinite Possibilities, Edelman Arts, New York Sherry Leedy Gallery, Kansas City Gallery Co., Minneapolis Library of Babel, Associated American Artists, New York Weinstein Gallery, Minneapolis Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Associated American Artists, New York What is the Grass, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis Annual shows at Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis MC Gallery, Minneapolis Tally Gallery, Bemidji B Square One Gallery, Minneapolis Bemidji State University Gallery, Bemidji

GROUP SHOWS 2019 2018 2018 2018 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2007 2005 2004 2003

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;Energy: The Power of Art,â&#x20AC;? Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor True Colors, Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor Expo Chicago, Marc Straus Gallery New York Art Central, Hong Kong, Marc Straus Gallery New York ARCO Madrid, Marc Straus Gallery New York The White Heat, Marc Straus Gallery New York Waterhouse & Dodd, New York 20|20 Nature Nurture, Heritage Bistro. Curated by Hossein Farmani in association with the U.S. Embassy, Bangkok. Waterhouse & Dodd, New York Monumental, Mana Miami, Miami All The Best Artists are My Friends, Jersey City Pop Culture: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Mana Contemporary, Jersey City Contained Conflict, Driscoll Babcock Galleries, New York Pop Culture: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu Abstraction: What is Real, Edelman Arts, New York, NY 2010 Tuffatore, GRAM, Grand Rapids Haunch of Venison Gallery, New York City Made in California, Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA 2006 12 x 12, Todd Gallery, Murfreesboro National juried exhibition, Mills Pond House, St. James Word Art, University Galleries, Cincinnati Millard Sheets Gallery Foundation, in association with the Smithsonian Institution, Pomona Eclectic Eye, Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu Inertia 2005, Gallery 500, Portland Will Creek Survey, The Allegany Arts Council/ Saville gallery, Cumberland 2nd Biennial International Juried Exhibition, Herbst International Exhibition Hall, San Francisco The Fran Hill Gallery, Toronto National Juried Exhibition, Phoenix Gallery, New York Alpan International 2005, Alpan Gallery, Long Island 2005 Annual Juried Art Competition, South Arkansas Arts Center, El Dorado Scope LA, Refusalon, Los Angeles Two Portraits, Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Minimalism and More, Pepperdine University, Malibu

2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1994 1993 1992 1990 1987 1986 1985 1984

Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis California Artists from the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, traveled to CSU Bakersfield Post Gallery, Los Angeles Culture Club, Oakland Refusalon, San Francisco Biennale Internazionale Dellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Arte, Florence, Italy Introductions, Refusalon gallery, San Francisco Twin Cities Collects, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul American Academy in Rome, Italy Associated American Artists, New York Thread Waxing Space, New York Composing A Collection, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Drawings Midwest, Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul McKnight Foundation Exhibition, Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD) Gallery, Minneapolis Katherine Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis The Persistent Figure, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Art and the Law, presented by West Publishing Co., St. Paul, MN, traveled to Plaza Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Albrecht Art Museum, St. Joseph, MO, Landmark Center, St. Paul, MN Eight McKnight Artists, MCAD Gallery, Minneapolis Rochester Art Center, Rochester Viewpoints: Doug Argue and Jim Lutes, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Five Jerome Artists, MCAD Gallery, Minneapolis Five From Minneapolis, MCAD Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, traveled to New Museum, New York Daedalus Fine Art, Minneapolis St. Paul Art Collective, Wall Street Gallery, St. Paul, MN 1982 Bemidji Art Center, Bemidji

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Cafesjian Museum of Art, Yerevan, Armenia Port Authority, One World Trade Center, NY Random House Books, New York General Mills, Minneapolis Target Corporation, Minneapolis, MN Commissioned in 2001 Minneapolis Public Library, Minneapolis MN Commissioned in 2001 Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis Minnesota History Center Museum, St. Paul Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul Walker Art Center, Minneapolis University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Business, Minneapolis University of Minnesota, Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis Frederic R.Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Living in the Twin Cities was a gift for me as a young artist. The area’s long tradition of arts philanthropy freed me to explore ideas and not be unduly influenced by market and other forces. For their early support at a critical juncture, I would like to thank the Bush Foundation, Jerome Foundation, McKnight Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Thank you to Weisman Art Museum director Lyndel King, who has graciously supported me and acquired my work for more than 20 years. I hope we have another delightful day wandering Rome together. It’s a beautiful circle, with Elizabeth Armstrong guest curating an exhibition at the Weisman in 2022. She organized my exhibition at the Walker Art Center almost 30 years ago, and the backing of Liz and the Walker were essential to me as an artist. She gave me my start, and I am eternally grateful. She is a brilliant person and curator and I am lucky and overjoyed she agreed to work on this project. Without the generosity of collectors, the art I have made never would have been done. It was never a given that I could afford paint or a studio. To everyone who had it in them to keep me going and to buy a painting, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you to Claude Peck who has been a longtime friend, collector, art adventurer, and who had the vision for this book and put in long hours editing the text and helping to select images. It never would have happened without him. Thanks to mentor and guiding light Steven Woodward; your passion and insights are still with me today. John Olson took a young social misfit in a green army coat under his wing and showed him love and gave him confidence. John also introduced me to David Francis, my first real collector and private advocate. David and his partner, Duke, forged an umbrella of support that helped me immeasurably. David introduced me to Madeline Betsch and Kathryn and Dean Koutsky, without whom I would not have been able to pay my rent in my twenties. He also introduced me to Sage Cowles and Martha Kaemmer, who where incredibly generous in their support of me and my work and who were such brilliant generous empathetic people you had no choice but to look at yourself and try to be better. Gallery owner Todd Bockley had the courage to show my work in Minneapolis in the 1980s and ‘90s, without regard to commercial success. Todd’s door and mind were always open, for which I’m grateful. After a trip to Venice I spent six years making four very large paintings. It is a huge commitment for a museum or collector to take on such works. The first person to step forward was Thomas O’Sullivan of the Minnesota Historical Society who had the courage to buy a huge painting of a field of dead buffalo for the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. Thank you. These paintings were like dominos—if I didn’t get money from one, the next one would not have fallen in place. The next painting was the chicken factory that has been on view for years at the Weisman. A heartfelt thanks to Gerry Cafesjian and the Cafesjian family for your early and strong support, and for loaning it to the Weisman. Evan Maurer, then director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, acquired the books painting for the museum with a gift from a patron who wished to remain anonymous during his lifetime. To the late Myron Kunin, many thanks. Lastly, the leaf painting I did as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome was bought by the Minnesota Museum of American Art through their director, Bruce Lilly. I am grateful to Martin Weinstein for his hard work in the accessions of the last two of these paintings, and for the time we worked together. Other lifelong friends and supporters I want to thank are Mike and Charlene McHugh, down to earth and constantly searching, I am lucky to have met you in “controversy corridor” all those years ago. Thank you for all you have done, including your generosity when I returned from Rome. The American Academy in Rome changed my life for the better. Through the academy I have met amazing people, both fellows and trustees, who have blown my little mind wide open. Thank you to Peter Boswell for his work at the Walker Art Center and for being there for me in Rome. Billie Milam Weisman supported my work when I left the protective womb of Minnesota and ventured west to the cool evening breezes of San Francisco. Thanks to my Bay Area friends and collectors Simon and Briony Bax, Tony Bernhardt and Lynn Feintech, Ted and LeeAnn Lyman, Brenda Way and Henry Erlich. You reached out to me in a period of some isolation for my work, and I am very thankful. Thank you to George Hargreaves, who was one of my most generous supporters while I was in San Francisco. Emilio Steinberger has done so much for me, including arranging solo shows of my work in New York multiple times in the 1990s. After a 10-year gap of showing in New York, he brought paintings I’d worked on for years in San Francisco to exhibit in New York in 2009. Emilio is not only one of my dearest friends, he is willing to consult with me on all questions great and small. Thank you,

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In 2009 Emilio introduced me to the force of nature that is Asher Edelman, who combines intellectual brilliance, confidence and hard work. He and Michelle Edelman committed themselves to my work with a passion that was truly a great experience for me. With Michelle acquiring the latest large-scale painting Genesis and Asher finding homes for almost all my work, we decided to move from San Francisco to New York. Michelle’s hard work, enthusiasm and good ideas are evident in the design of this book. By we I mean myself and Mary Margaret Jones, the brilliant landscape architect I met at the American Academy in Rome in 1998 and my loving wife since 2001. Her advice, empathy and courage have propelled me forward all these years. Thank you Patrick Coakley for collecting my work, your support in Venice and for being a friend. Thank you Billie Tsien and Tod Williams for your calm yet passionate advice and vision and for acquiring my work at a moment of dire need. Dana Prescott invited me to the Civitella Ranieri as a guest. The amazing fellows of my group there breathed life back into my passion and respect for artists all around the world who are expanding minds in a time of rising and dangerous nationalism and isolationism. Charles Riley wrote a wonderful essay for this book, and an earlier one (“The Speech of Clouds”) for my show at Edelman Arts. He included me in two shows at the Nassau County Museum, where he is director. His wide vision, including poetry, art, music, science and everything in between, is a joy to experience and read. Richard Grubman acquired my work and helped me in the ways he and I know, and I will appreciate that forever. Also, he built a house around a painting; bless the art gods for such a great home for my work. Thank you Roberto and Allison Mignone, Lisa Mignone and Larry Schimmer. Sylvia Kovacek and everyone at Kovacek Gallery in Vienna worked so hard to introduce my work to Europe. Rob Russell and Justin Callanan and Marissa Bagley were tireless in bringing my work to Australia, it’s a pleasure working with Piermarq Gallery. Thank you Ocean Vuong for giving me a poem for this book, and for his courage and friendship. Could I possibly thank Mary and Howard Frank enough for the love and support they have shown me these past 10 years? No, it is impossible. I have learned much about myself from Mary, a collector and scholar who turned her pen from Venice to me with the intuitive eye she has for art and ideas. It always brings me joy to venture out and see paintings with her, or even just to have pizza in the piazza. I am happy she agreed to write for this book. Howard’s open heart, honesty, thoughtful advice and generosity have been a lifesaver to me in more than one way. Thanks to you both, time and time again. I thank my father for reading me all those Time-Life art books when I was a child. It opened up a life and a world for me. How to thank my mother, who worked nights as a nurse in critical care, saving lives to feed us six siblings, and who did the laundry, shopping and cooking during the day? Nobody I know has ever sacrificed more and asked for so little. She has always supported everything I’ve said and done. I love you mom, and thank you for your love. Lastly, my pride and joy, my son, Mattison, who helped me in the studio as a boy and even painted (with my guiding hand) one of the chickens in the chicken factory. Thank you for your patience when I was working in the studio so much when you were a child and young man. Thank you for the sacrifices you made in coming out to San Francisco so often in your teens. Thank you for being the person you are, so curious, loving and kind. And thank you for bringing Tracy into my life. --Doug Argue

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LIST OF PLATES Plate 1 | Untitled, 1980 | Oil, gouache on paper 22 x 30 in. (56x 76.2 cm.)

Plate 21 | Bonding, 1989 | Egg tempera, plants on linen 84 x 108 in. (213.4 x 274.3 cm.)

Plate 2 | Telemachus and Eucharis, 1981 | Oil on canvas 60 x 60 in. (152.4 x 152.4 cm.)

Plate 22 | Guilty, 1989 | Monoprint 22 x 18 in. (56 x 46 cm.) Private collection

Plate 23 | Display Case, 1989 | Mixed media 38 x 20 x 49 in. (96 x 50 x 124.4 cm.) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Plate 24 | Hanging, 1989 | Oil on linen 48 x 144 in. (122 x 365.7 cm.) Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis Plate 25 | In the Near of the City, 1989 | Oil on canvas 134 x 180 in. (340.4 x 457 cm.) Plate 26 | Pilgrim, 1990 | Collage, 19 x 25 in. (48.3 x 63.5 cm.) Private collection Plate 27 | Untitled, 1990 | Collage 19 x 25 in. (48.3 x 63.5 cm.) Private collection Plate 28 | Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria, 1990 | Collage 25 x 19 in. (63.5 x 48.3 cm.) Private collection Plate 29 | Nightmare,1990 | Monoprint 18 x 22 in. (45.72 x 55.88 cm.) Minneapolis Institute of Arts Plate 30 | Jumping, 1991 | Monoprint 18 x 20 in. (45.72 x 50.8 cm.) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Plate 31 | Rocking Horse,1990 | Monoprint 18 x 22 in. (45.72 x 55.88 cm.) Private collection Plate 32 | Untitled, 1991 | Monoprint 18 x 24 in. (45.72 x 60.96 cm.) Private collection Plate 33 | The Ungrateful Son, 1986 Metal receptacle, fresco, wax, paper, fabric, 26 x 11 x 13 in. (65 x 27.5 x 7.5 cm.) Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Plate 34 | Fish House,1992 | Oil on canvas 44 x 46 in. (111.76 x 116.84 cm.) Private collection Plate 35 | Foot and Pots,1992 | Oil on canvas 40 x48 in. (101.6 x 121.92 cm.) Plate 36 | Education,1993 | Oil on canvas 44 x 46 in. (111.76 x 116.84 cm.) Private collection Plate 37 | Burial,1993 | Oil on canvas 36 x 40 in. (91.44 x 101.6 cm.) Private collection Plate 38 | Introduction,1993 | Oil on canvas 44 x 50 in. (111.76 x 127 cm.) Private collection

Plate 39 | Chickens,1994 | Oil on canvas 144 x 216 in. (365.76 x 548.64 cm.) Cafesjian Estate, on longterm loan to Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis

Plate 58 | Untitled, 2002 | Oil on linen 12 x 20 in. (30.48 x 50.8 cm.) Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles

Plate 40 | Lobby Bird,1994 | Mixed Media 28 x 40 in. (71.12 x 101.6 cm.) Private collection

Plate 59 | Weighing In, 2001 | Mixed media on linen 78 x 78 in. (198.12 x 198.12 cm.) Each panel painted by non-artist of the American Academy in Rome on supplied silk-screened drawing

Plate 41 | Untitled, 1995 | Encaustic on canvas 36 (deep) x 84 (long) in. (91 x 213 cm.) Private collection Plate 42 | Buffalo,1992 | Oil on canvas 144 x 264 in. (365.76 x 670.56 cm.) Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul Plate 43 | Comb Flower,1995 | Watercolor, pencil, ink/paper 40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm.) Private collection Plate 44 | Love Bug, 1996 | Watercolor and ink on paper 22 x 30 in. (55 x 76 cm.) Private collection Plate 45 | White Anger White Noise,1995 | Mixed media/paper 34 x 45 in. (86.36 x 114.3 cm.) Minneapolis Institute of Art Plate 46 | Kapital, 1995 | Mixed media on paper 40 x 29 in. (101.6 x 73.66 cm.) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Plate 47 | Untitled,1996 | Watercolor on paper 36 x 37 in. (91.44 x 93.98 cm.) Promised Gift to the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis

Plate 48 | Beauty, 1995 | Mixed media on paper 29 x40 in. (73.66 x 101.6 cm.) Private collection

Plate 68 | The Evidence is Inconclusive, 2005 Pencil on paper 8 x 10 in. (20 x 25 cm.)

Plate 49 | Untitled, 1997 | Oil on canvas 36 x 36 in. (91 x 91 cm.) Private collection

Plate 69 | Untitled (portrait), 2004 | Oil on linen 52 x 42 in. (132 x 107 cm.) Private collection

Plate 50 | Library of Babel, 1997 | Oil on canvas 144 x 264 in. (365.76 x 670.56 cm.) Minneapolis Institute of Art

Plate 70 | Untitled (Portrait), 2005 | Oil on panel 12 x 12 in. (30.48 x 30.48 cm.) Private collection

Plate 51 | Some Memories, 1998 | Oil on canvas 156 x 156 in. (396.24 x 396.24 cm.) Minnesota Museum of American Art

Plate 71 | I Ainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t No Chicken, 2006 | Oil on linen 7 x 6 in. (17.78 x 15.24 cm.)

Plate 53 | Hedge, 1999 l Oil on wood 42 x 42 x 42 in. (106.68 x 106.68 x 106.68 cm.) Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis Plate 54 | Rome, 1999 | Oil on linen 48 x 48 in. (121.92 x 121.92 cm.) Private collection Plate 55 | Drop, 2000 | Encaustic on wood 37 x 37 in. (93.98 x 93.98 cm.) Plate 56 | Untitled, 2000 |Oil on plywood 39 x 39 in. (99.06 x 99.06 cm.) Private collection Plate 57 | Untitled (detail), 2000 | Oil on linen 76 x 129 in. (193.04 x 327.66 cm.) Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis

Plate 72 | The Future; Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Not What It Used To Be, 2005 Oil on linen, 78 x 55 in. (198.12 x 139.7 cm.) Private collection Plate 73 | Nature or Nurture, 2006 | Oil on linen 84 x 72 in. (213.36 x182.88 cm.) Plate 74 | Untitled (Summer Letters), 2006 Powdered pigment, ink, gouache, flash on paper 30 x 43in. (76.2 x 109.22 cm.) Private collection Plate 75 | Breaking News, 2006 | Oil on linen 7 x 6 in. (17.78 x 15.24 cm.) Plate 76 | Untitled, 2006 | Oil on linen 7 x 6 in. (17.78 x 15.24 cm.) Plate 77 | Developing Story (in progress), 2009 | Oil on canvas 108 x 156 in. (274 x 396 cm.) 265

Plate 78 | Genesis, 2007-2009 | Oil on linen 160 x 230 in. (406 x 584 cm.) Private collection

Plate 98 | Randomly Placed Exact Percentages, 2009-2013 Oil on canvas | 112 x 160 in. (284.48 x 406.4 cm. One World Trade Center, New York City

Plate 79 | Untitled, 2007 | Gouache and ink on paper 50.5 x 107 in. (128.27 x 271.78 cm.)

Plate 99 | Semblance, 2011 | Oil on linen 60 x 90 in. (152.4 x 228.6 cm.) Private collection

Plate 80 | Far Swim (side A), 2007 | Ink, marker and acrylic on Steveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mylar 36 x 48 in. (91.44 x 121.92 cm.) Plate 81 | Untitled (Ancient Greek), 2007 | Ink on paper 22 x 30 in. (55.88 x 76.2 cm.) Plate 82 | Double Modes, 2007 | Gouache on paper 22 x 30 in. (55.88 x 76.2 cm.) Private collection Plate 83 | Fundamental Uncertainty, 2008 | Gouache on panel 24 x 36 in. (60.96 x 91.44 cm.) Private collection Plate 84 | Percentiles, 2008 | Gouache on panel 40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm.) Plate 85 | Tuffatore, 2010 | Oil on canvas, 162 x 162 in. (411.48 x 411.48 cm.) Plate 86 | South Harm, 2010 |Oil on canvas 31.5 x 42 in. (80.01 x 106.68 cm.) Plate 87 | Splash Down, 2010 | Oil on linen 17 x 11.5 in. (42.5 x 28.75 cm.) Plate 88 | Diver, 2007-2010 | Gouache, ink, oil paint on board 30 x 40 in. (76.2 x 101.6 cm.) Private collection Plate 89 | Hither and Thithering Waters of Night, 2009-2012 Oil on canvas | 114 x 162 in. (290 x 411.5 cm.) Private collection Plate 90 | Weirfug, 2010 |Oil ont canvas 43 x 55 in. (109.2 x 139.7 cm.) Private collection Plate 91 | A Mouthful of Air, 2011 | Oil on canvas 76 x 89 in. (193.04 x 226.06 cm.) Private collection Plate 92 | Exhale, 2011 | Oil on canvas 33.5 x 45.5 in. (85.09 x 115.57 cm.) Private collection Plate 93 | Prehistory, 2010-11 | Oil on canvas 35 x 47 in. (87.5 x 119.3 cm.) Private collection Plate 94 | Alphabet, 2011 | Oil on canvas 56 x 44 in. (142 x 111 cm.) Private collection Plate 95 | Strum, 2011 | Oil on canvas 55 x 43 in. (139.7 x 109.2 cm.) Private collection Plate 96 | Schema, 2011 | Oil on canvas 45 x 57 in. (114 x 145 cm.) Private collection Plate 97 | The Doubloon, 2012 | Oil on canvas 76 x 86 in. (193 x 218 cm.) Private collection 266

Plate 100 | Catch My Drift, 2012 | Oil on linen 112 x 160 in. (284.48 x 406.4 cm.) Private collection Plate 101 | Whale Road, 2012 | Oil on canvas 56 x 44 in. (142 x 112 cm.) Private collection Plate 102 | Loose Fish, 2012 | Oil on canvas 66 x 78 in. (167.6 x 198 cm.) Plate 103 | The Art of Translation, 2013 | Oil on canvas 68 x 92 in. (172 x 233 cm.) Private collection Plate 104 | Cascade, 2013 | Oil on canvas Three Panels at 80 x 54 in. (203 x 137 cm.) Private collection Plate 105 | Wordhoard, 2013 | Oil on canvas 68 x 92 in.(172 x 233.7 cm.) Private collection Plate 106 | Autumn in New York, 2013 Oil on canvas | 56 x 78 in. (142 x 198 cm.) Private collection Plate 107 | Straight Aâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, 2013 | Gouache on paper 38 x 50 in. (96.52 x 127 cm.) Private collection Plate 108 | Noctis Equi, 2013 Watercolor and gouache on paper 40 x 60 in. (101.6 x 152.4 cm.) Private collection Plate 109 | Little Sorrows, 2013 | Oil on canvas 75 x 89.5 in. (190.5 x 226 cm.) Private collection Plate 110 | Happily Ever After, 2014 | Gouache on paper 36 x 50 in. (91.44 x 127 cm.) Private collection Plate 111| Esquivalience, 2014 | Oil on canvas 31 x 43 in. (78.74 x 109.22 cm.) Private collection Plate 112 | Love Letters, 2014 | Oil on canvas 70 x 94 in. (177.8 x 238.76 cm.) Private collection Plate 113 | Backform, 2014 (detail) | Oil on canvas 93 x 69 in. (236 x 175 cm.) Private collection Plate 114 | Backform, 2014 | Oil on canvas 93 x 69 in. (236 x 175 cm.) Private collection Plate 115 | Calle, 2015 | Oil on canvas 91 x 280 in. (231 x 711 cm.) Plate 116 | Time and Time Again, 2015 | Oil on canvas 88.5 x 134 in. (224.79 x 340.36 cm.)

Plate 117 | Dancing Sâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, 2015 | Oil on canvas 68 x 90 in. (172.72 x 228.6 cm.) Private collection

Plate 137 | Footfalls Echo in the Memory, 2018 Oil on canvas 99 x 95 in. (251.46 x 241.3cm.)

Plate 118 | Night Poems, 2015 | Oil on canvas 70 x 94 in. (177.8 x 238.76 cm.) Mana Contemporary, Jersey City

Plate 138 | Magic Mountain, 2019 | Oil on canvas 45 x 64.5 in. (114.3 x 163.83 cm.)

Plate 119 | Isotropic, 2015 | Oil on canvas 114 x 162 in. (289.56 x 411.48 cm.) One World Trade, New York City Plate 120 | Mother Tongue, 2015 | Oil on canvas 69 x 90.25 in. (175.26 x 229.235 cm.) Plate 121 | Leaves 4, 2015 | Oil on lithograph 28 x 39.5 in. (71.12 x 100.33 cm.) Private collection Plate 122 | Pantheon, 2015 | Oil on canvas 70 x 94 in. (177.8 x 238.76 cm.) Private collection Plate 123 | Word Salad, 2015 | Oil on canvas 96 x 54 in. (243.84 x 137.16 cm.) Private collection

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Please! No Painting, 2011 Oil on canvas,78 x 55 in. (198.12 x 139.7 cm) 273