Manuel Neri’s new work exhibited at the Quay Gallery picks up at a point left roughly seven years ago. The period in between has been devoted to sculpting plaster effigies of men and women in assorted states of fragmentation. The new work in aluminum echoes Neri’s sensual use of aluminum paint over craggy plaster, interspersed with thin accents of bright color. The artist’s earliest abstract wall sculptures gradually gave way to the overt figuration familiar to California art audiences. The break seen in this show is drastic, unequivocal and startling. To try and sort reasons or clues in the artist’s past work to bolster vague thoughts about “natural development,” seems specious and beside the point. Bluntly stated, Neri has willfully changed direction, the most obvious reason being his feeling that he had exhausted the potential of depicting scarred representations of human beings. Like Anthony Caro, Neri’s switch from figuration to clean brushed metal, lacking any but the most minute visual incident, seems a giant step.
To read the future possibilities into a work of art has become as commonplace (and unproductive) as reading art history into the present. Neither system, as a working hypothesis, is of course entirely wrong. But too many otherwise intelligent viewers read into the object “possibilities for future development,” as if the painting or sculpture were synonymous with an aspiring political candidate who stands loaded with long range proposals, catchy slogans and exudes benign confidence. Abstract art has always had more than its share of misinterpretation with its friends overestimating its “content” and its enemies underestimating it, both for obvious reasons. As modern art’s content falls to minimal levels, as in Neri’s sculpture, an uneasiness prevails within the audience. The will to look at it fails, and instead there are hordes of people looking into it, over it, around it, past it and in back of it for clues.
The sculptures themselves are all about as high as the average man’s horizontal sight line. This in itself is interesting to consider since a far-taller-than-average sculptor, Arlo Acton, pointed out, when he stood an ideal six or seven feet from the stacked aluminum volumes, “Notice how the top box flattens from your position because you see no top to it, only two sides, or, if you move slightly, only one.” The edges of the sculptures assumed importance owing to the fact that they were striped with bright hues one-quarter-inch wide running all along the joined edges. The top box was often askew and mortised into its lower counterpart. The four sculptures placed at various intervals throughout the gallery activated the entire viewing space and made one acutely aware of the room as a giant cube.
“East Bay Realists” at the San Francisco Art Institute brings together four artists whose concepts, schooling, age and friendships truly draw them together. Their affiliation is centered around the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California.
It was there that Charles Gill, Robert Bechtle, Richard McLean and, more recently, Gerald Gooch attended school. Both Bechtle and McLean are currently instructors at the school. All four artists are deeply articulate in graphic mediums.
Gooch, the youngest of the group, is involved with extending the range of both printing and painting by combining the two on sheets of glass, acetate and plastic. His series of prints depicting artist friends performing simple gestures in sequence reminds one of leafing through the pages of a hip Big-Little Book. His style is frankly illustrative and owes a great deal to the candid photograph. Gooch, like Bechtle, McLean, and Gill, uses photography as source material. The unposed gestural intimacy to be found in good candid photographs is transmitted in Gooch’s pencil drawing of Roy deForest (thirteen times) describing a circle while riding a tricycle.
Gooch’s paintings are less noteworthy than his prints and drawings simply because the graphics are so good. He usually allows the figures depicted in the paintings to rest on sized duck canvas without ground color. The tightly rendered figures, with quirky lost and found edges, rest a hit uneasily on the exposed duck grounds. The complete neutrality of translucent glass or plastic seems preferable to the less than discreet canvas.
If Gooch is the matter-of-fact visual reporter, Gill’s editorializing allows us to have the “eyes” to see both Bechtle and Gooch as more than just updated nineteen-forties illustrators. Gill’s loose yet accurate drawing with paint looks back to Larry Rivers’ paint handling, with some of Francis Bacon’s theatrical angst mixed in.
McLean works closer to Gill than either Bechtle or Gooch. Both share a real mania for fragmentation and jolting repositioning of sky, water, foliage and figures. They both work within an “art” framework eschewing the giant billboard scale of an artist like James Rosenquist. Gill’s Woman with Blue Carpet, has a deadpan young matron wearing a tailored outfit seated benignly in the midst of her splendidly furnished modern living room. McLean’s Odalisque Discotheque shows a supine young thing reclining on an alizarin-black couch, gazing through heavy lashes, covered by tinted, white framed glasses, looking for all the world like an emotional disaster area.
Robert Bechtle, the most sensitive and most thoroughly realized artist in the exhibit, presents the viewer with lots of questions. His greyed, beautifully painted renditions of six-to-ten year old American automobiles are wonderfully mute. His Chrysler, Cadillac, and Pontiac are testaments to a world where secondhand (but well kept and infinitely respectable) cars sit in front of inexpensive (again respectable) thirty-year-old stucco houses. Anxiety is the keynote here; the subjects are inherently anxious. How long before the neighborhood is integrated? The car is ten years old, the owner can’t afford another, things are slowing up at the plant. The social implications in the paintings are blown up because Bechtle has carefully underplayed the artness of his art. The lack of style, in the sense of showmanship, is so painfully absent, that one realizes how much the viewer has become accustomed to large doses of ego embedded in paint as a normal part of the visual diet.
Ambitious realist painting, outside of timeworn academic traditions, is hard to come by. Pop art has paved the way for many young artists who accept the avenues opened for them by it and yet who don’t accept wholesale the ironic banality underlying the Pop sensibility. These young artists are interesting insofar as they accept a number of modern approaches to painting as part of a usable visual vocabulary to he exploited in order to forge a realist style capable of depicting the heterogeneous American scene.
An enormous exhibit of Latin American Art organized by Stanton Loomis Catlin, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, and Terence Grieder, from the Department of Art History, University of Texas, overwhelmed the exhibition space at the San Francisco Museum of Art this summer. This survey, shown in a most thorough and exacting manner, traced the, painting history of Latin America from the late 18th century to the present. The exhibit was divided into five periods, 1785–1833, 1833–1875, 1875–1910, 1910–1945, 1945–1965, and was hung so one could start in the 18th century and end in the present era.
The 350-odd paintings, drawings, and prints (the original exhibit was reduced slightly for lack of space from 395 works to 350) gave ample evidence of not one but half a dozen “International Styles” going back into the 18th century. The remarkable affinity between the Uruguayan artist, Juan Manuel Blanes, active in the middle and later 19th century, and the North American artist, Frederick Remington, is but one example of similar social factors in two very different climates bringing about obvious stylistic similarities as well as choice of subject matter. This holds true of the North and South American neo-Classicists, Romantics, folk-painters and draftsmen, as well as genre painters. The Brazilian artist, Rudolfo Amoedo (1857–1941), reached a degree of sensitive technical excellence within the restrictive tenets of French academic realism rivaling his painting masters, Cabanal and Puvis de Chavannes.
This exhibit should serve as a yardstick to many alarmist art historians and critics who lately seem so sensitive about the dissolution of regional styles and attitudes in art outside world centers. It would seem the process began too many years ago to halt at this late date.
––James Monte
