The San Francisco Museum’s summer gargantua entitled “Arts of the Bay Area” is a broad front local review of all the artistic activities (other than certain very important developments in film making) taking place at the present moment. The painting and sculpture section follows the general format of the total exhibition, revolving each month with a new installment of a small group of works by each artist exhibited, as against the more usual one-man-one work method of display.
Such an exhibition is an invitation to sort and group the ideas motivating artists here, but the first installment took no introductory form and was an extremely mixed bag of age groups and ideas. Noticeably missing were those older or more established painters who do, both directly and indirectly, have a strong influence on Bay Area painting, namely Frank Lobdell, Elmer Bischoff, Hassell Smith and Richard Diebenkorn. The sculpture section was a packaged deal (complete with catalogue) called the “Molten Image,” centered around a metal casting eruption, by some of the sculptors teaching in the art departments on the Berkeley and Davis campuses of the University of California. Typical of the apathetic handling of the contemporary arts by the local museums, is that this, the most important artistic event of the season, had neither an opening nor a catalogue, other than the one provided by the sculptors themselves.
When we come to the second phase of the exhibition (further sections to follow) the insight and cultural depth of John Humphrey, the museum’s curator of painting, emerges as a potent factor. To a large extent Humphrey has built this exhibition around a powerful but irreverent painting by William Wiley (b. 1937), entitled Columbus Re-routed 111. Wiley is obviously consciously or unconsciously involved with the Hipster concept of revolt and disaffiliation which Kenneth Rexroth, the poet, and sometime granddad of the Beat generation, first postulated:
“The youngest generation is in a state of revolt so absolute that its elders cannot even recognise it. The disaffiliation, alienation and rejection of the young has, as far as their elders are concerned, moved out of the visible spectrum altogether. Critically invisible, modern revolt, like X-rays and radio-activity, is perceived only by its effects at more materialistic social levels, where it is called delinquency”.
Norman Mailer in his White Negro etches deeper:
“. . . the hipster had absorbed the existential synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be called a white Negro.
To be existential, one must be able to feel oneself—one must know one’s desires, one’s rages, one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustrations and know what would satisfy it. The overcivilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic. To be a real existentialist (Sartre admitted to the contrary) one must be religious, one must have one’s sense of the “purpose”—whatever the purpose may be—but a life which is directed by one’s faith in the necessity of action is a life committed to the notion that the substratum of existence is the search, the end meaningful but mysterious; it is impossible to live such a life unless one’s emotions provide their profound conviction.”
Wiley has absorbed this existential attitude and it becomes a basic percept of his art, giving it an authenticity of expression which is instantaneously and intuitively decodable. In hipster argot, his whole attitude to painting is to “funky”, i.e. studiously ignore all conventions, to be visually naive, to see at first hand rather than through the filter of culture. A recent graduate of the San Francisco Institute of Arts, he interlards his paintings with imagery borrowed from two of the staff, from Lobdell, the striated, sludge-like bacon forms, and from Fred Martin, a kind of snide and insidiously expressive drawing which he bites into hard-edge forms, mixes with comic strip lightning bolts, and, in an oblique homage to Clyfford Still, paints a typical Still edge and then deliberately smudges across it. Audacious as he is in handling these diverse elements he preserves a taut and plastic picture plane.
Robert Hudson (b. 1938) is a colleague of Wiley from the same school. He is a sculptor who works in welded iron which he manages to fold, crush and shape with such a apparent ease and assurance that it excites the envy and admiration of older sculptors; but it is not his mature technical ability that is important, but his existential vision, where every bit of his sculpture breathes with a life of its own through a series of expressive relationships which are acute and plastically witty.
Take Richard van Buren (b. 1937) for an intense hip image, but who has also invented his own technique to express his vision. Onto canvases painted with hard edge forms in baby blue and yellow, he places, in such a way that they completely overlap and are often well outside, large wax-like excresences. They are a biting and savage satire on that arch, coy, sugary and debased fantasy world of Walt Disney.
Fred Martin (b.1937) is not only affected by hipsterism, but also by the religious and spiritual qualities of Zen. His paintings made with gouache on common papers (as against the handmade paper, “my work for posterity” school) are a few inches either way in size and are closely linked to the medieval withdrawal of the monks to the monasteries that produced such works as the book of Kells. His art is of the prayer and the poem at one and the same time, but also a document of his disaffiliation.
Two hipster sculptors are Alvin Light and Arlo Acton (b. 1933) who work in wood, both with an intense and very personal vision. Light’s timber presences, sawn, chiselled, joined and dowelled, contrast organic, rough and smooth surfaces. They rely for their imagery on a deeply felt and sought-for interrelationship of the surfaces and internal voids. Acton is much more dramatic; his bolted and dowelled timber members, often parts of sawn-up, yellow, varnished office chairs, contrasting against rough red and dark timber, sweep, thrust, and curve out into space off a central pivot. Whereas Acton’s art depends on dramatic juxtaposition and colour, Light’s has a more total structural entity.
Perhaps for Ben Langton I can do no better than to quote from Phil Leider: “Langton is perhaps the first of the Bay Area artists to concern himself with the imagery of the ‘angel-hipsterism’ so characteristic of the region’s poetry. His canvases abound with the nymphs, angels, wild growths of flowers, dream landscapes, and narcotic hazes which grow out of the metaphors of the ‘San Francisco Renaissance.’ Often enough, as if to complete the identification, verses themselves will be found scribbled on the canvases.” But I do not think that Langton’s haunting vision matches his plastic ability as yet.
Sydney Gordin (b. 1918), originally a New Yorker and once a noted contributor to the American geometric movement, is a sculptor who should be grouped with these young existentialists. Although he probably has no direct contact with them, his art since he became resident in San Francisco has changed to a small scale organic imagery, very two-dimensional in technique . . . sometimes a delicate wire calligraphy, or hammered brass forms, or oxyacetyline cut-outs from sheet metal. His images rarely exceed eighteen inches or so in their greatest height or width and because of this small scale often provoke contemptuous remarks from more rugged sculptors about his work’s affiliation to jewelry. But the essence of Gordin’s imagery is his withdrawal from the big time race, in order to create an intensely felt microcosmos. Compare Gordin, for example, with François Stahly, a well known Parisian, who creates sculptures suitable for adorning public places and buildings. Stahly has scooped a couple of hundred thousand dollars on this coast in commissions over the past few months, but while he will nevertheless produce sensitive and intelligent responses in his work for these commissions, the whole idea of an art produced either to order or for decoration is anathema to Gordin.
What is important to understand about this group of hipster artists is the profound effect on their work of the backlash of the Beat Generation. The major lasting outcome of the San Francisco Renaissance in literature was to take the poets out of the libraries and into the streets. The stranglehold of Culture (Eliot, Tate, the Southern Agrarians), was finally broken, and the parallel situation occurs with these artists. They have no need to turn to New York (de Kooning, Kline, Newman, Hofmann, etc.) for their iconography or plastic ideas, but draw on life around them, as they interpret it.
Roy de Forest (b. 1930) and Jeremy Anderson (b. 1921) are two artists with a certain similarity of ideas which may be connected to popular art as seen in the gaudy colours and decorations of the fairground, the pinball machines, amusement arcades, the extinct cigar store Indians, an urban equivalent of the dying or dead peasant art of much of Europe, which was a joyous art, ribald, vigorous and eye catching. There are still small pockets of it alive, the pearly button costumes and horse and cart decorations of the costermongers, Gypsy caravans, and in other forms such as folk dancing. In the East it is common in huge cities like Calcutta on amateur shop signs, and in Japan in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century woodcuts of Hokusai, Utamaro, Hiroshige and many others, which are now valued as fine art through the interest of painters like van Gogh and Degas, who admired and absorbed in their respective art many of the plastic ideas contained in this popular art. Probably the most American “Pop Art” (as it is currently labelled) would be the comics, but it has existed for a long time in an enormous variety of forms and places. It arises from the irrepressible instinct of often rude and unlettered people to visually spin a yarn and to decorate outside of the professional canons of art and design. Roy de Forest’s painting has the same joyous, ribald, vigorous and eyecatching quality that the best popular art had. His virtuosity, his spirited and unflagging inventiveness, place him in a class by himself. Jeremy Anderson is a wood carver. He is not only poorly displayed but very inadequately represented in this exhibition, in comparison to his influence and inventiveness. He derives from another aspect of the popular tradition, that of the whittler, and has a poetic image of very great distinction. David Simpson (b. 1928), a painter, and Dick Faralla (b. 1916), a sculptor, represent at its very best the current mainstream of art. Simpson paints in a cool international style extremely lucidly. His image is a mixture of tachiste pools of thin stained colour laid between hard-edge horizontals. He has an acute sensitivity towards scale and has recently hit the top exhibition circuit via the Carnegie and a good New York gallery, but I felt that his work in this exhibition, in comparison to what I have seen in the past, with one exception, looked like potboilers of his own style, souped up with last year’s House and Garden colors.
Humphrey locates Dick Faralla in a gallery by himself, where his four formal and excellent pieces are shown to their best advantage. Lawrence Alloway’s restatement (“Notes on Rothko”) that “renunciation and restraint do not lead to (artistic) poverty, but concentrate and essentialise the artistic process” is particularly applicable to the work of Faralla, who makes constructions of a certain uniqueness. With simple formats, a column, an oval, or a pair of door shapes, he creates an overall image out of small industrial scraps of wood, often machine cut at forty-five degrees (framer’s offcuts), placed continuously over the surface, but overlapping and in depth, finally coated with either flat black or white paint. Superficially only, there appears to be some resemblance to Nevelson (the use of wood and flat black) but his material derives from an entirely different source, has no overtones of junk or neo-dada and the organization of his pictorial elements owe more to Mondrian and surrealist automatisme in a unique mixture.
Three artists that are linked together, Louis Siegrist (b. 1899), the father of Lundy Siegrist (b. 1925), and Arthur Okamura (b. 1932), are involved in landscape imagery, but the Siegriests have refused the commercially successful and easy way out of Arthur Okamura as a solution to their dilemma, and unimaginatively tried to resolve their problem via the New Spanish Painting’s use of thick, earthy material. But any attempt to fuse New York innovation, which arises out of an urbanscape, with the Spaniard’s landscape answer can only result in a pastiche, which is exactly what Lundy Siegriest comes up with . . . a heavily sanded Donati image. One notes the father’s painting with a certain sense of respect even though his solution is unsuccessful too. At least it was he, the older artist, who first tried to move out of the dilemma that Simpson so successfully evades, but that traps not only his son, but other landscapists such as Joel Barletta and William Morehouse. Okamura is given an impressive display which is out of all proportion to his present inventiveness or talent. He shows a series of landscapes with a small figure and recreates aspects of Victorian genre painting with Courbet overtones. They are dull, unexciting, nostalgic paintings, well-executed from the point of view of academic canons. Whereas one would have little hesitation showing such artists as de Forest, Simpson or Wiley (to name only three of his contemporaries) in the best international circles of art and claim them as young artists with a strong quality of vision, in comparison to figurative painters such as Dubuffet, Bacon, Larry Rivers or Diebenkorn, an equal claim on behalf of Okamura would be farcical.
Four artists deal with new materials in their particular way. They are all sculptors, Seymour Lockes (b. 1919), Roger Bolomey (b. 1918), Bella Feldman, and Ruth Asawa (b. 1926). Lockes’ particular brand of bizarre aleaticism which uses every type of conceivable material juxtaposed in the most unconceivable manner, could be likened to either a Claire Falkenstein sculpture gone mad or a formless monster from outer space of science fiction, with whom Terrans realizing it is intelligent, can neither communicate nor even understand what its organs represent. Bella Feldman’s new material is aluminium. She exhibits a series of technically virtuous semi-figurative sculptures cast in that material, but her images are graphic, two-dimensional and completely lack any drama in the interplay of surfaces. Her work is an endless elaboration of these surfaces rather than of ideas that lead to form invention. Bolomey uses polyurathene foam and latex which is somewhat similar to elephant or rhinoceros hide in colour and texture, but with both these animals one at least ponders over the mystery of their survival, let alone their peculiar shape. But faced as we are today with a continuous stream of new scientific wonders a new material is of only passing interest. It was Max Bill who originally stated that a new form can only arise from a new material, and certainly such artists as Gabo and Pevsner have contributed new forms to twentieth century art via plastics, but a new material could equally be anything from old sacking (Burri) to omnibus tickets (Schwitters), in that it is new to art. But Bolomey’s forms arising out of his new material are naturalistic and can be likened to portraits of the dried river bed or sharded black rock face. Ruth Asawa creates large hanging sculptures of wire mesh baskets built one into the other, that hang in a perfect state of equipoise without any of the feeling of precariousness so necessary to involve the spectator in a work of art. The uniformity of the colour, which hardly varies, and the size of the mesh, which does not vary, may have something to do with this.
Arthur Holman (b. 1928) cannot be grouped in this exhibition (except much too broadly under landscape), in that his work appears to be dealing with light. He shows four paintings, two of which consist of delicate touches of whitish or sombre colours. I feel hesitant and cautious in saying anything about his art, through my own lack of perception, rather than anything lacking in his work.
In conclusion, George Culler, the Museum’s director has made an excellent and imaginative move in providing the overall format of the exhibition. But, assuming that a museum has a vital interest in the art of its area, there seem to follow at least two more responsibilities.
First, to provide enough and the right kind of space for any given artist’s work. Faralla, shown in a small room on his own, got exactly what his work deserved, but throughout this exhibition the essential precariousness of many artist’s work was destroyed by the lack of proper space, in particular the three sculptors in wood, Alvin Light, Arlo Acton and Jeremy Anderson. And to fracture the overall flow of the exhibition by the introduction in the middle of it of the California Street sculpture competition, was senseless.
Secondly, the more scholastic side of the museum’s function surely is to provide the accurate useful documentation needed now as well as in the future. That is a catalogue. It is ironical indeed that the city museum of Turin, Italy, concurrently with this exhibition in San Francisco, is showing forty-two artists of Europe, America and Japan in a show entitled “Struttore e Stile”. Three of the artists in it are from, or currently working in, the Bay Area, namely David Simpson, Frank Lobdell and Wilfrid Zogbaum. By the production of a lavish catalogue, measuring ten by nine inches across and exactly four times as thick as this magazine, each artist having a full page of both color and black and white plates, the exhibition dismounts the walls and travels in time and space. Even when the exhibition closes and the works are dispersed, the event and the content continues for the life of the catalogue.
Is the San Francisco Museum of Art so poor that it cannot even provide in a mimeographed series of sheets a portable record of this event? (Critic Alfred Frankenstein of the San Francisco Chronicle, instead of discussing the works in depth had to waste space to provide this essential data.) If this is so, then surely the museum should restrict its continuous and almost super-mart series of often quantitative rather than qualitative exhibitions until it can provide both quality of display and documentation as an equal factor in all its activities.
––John Coplans
