JAKE BERTHOT’S RECENT WORK
IN 1975 JACK TWORKOV was expounding the notion of a painted screenplay. The painter was meant to outline a series of operations analogous to the outline of shots that comprises a screenplay; then he would paint within the confines of this preestablished “text.” This is a technique for structuring the immanent or taming the aleatoric, and Tworkov’s painting was a clear example of the method, but he also considered that Jake Berthot’s painting of that time participated in this mode.
So I was not surprised to find Berthot included in a show that summer at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum entitled “Fundamental Painting.” The theme of the show was work that focused on a limited aspect of painting and stressed an iconography of self-referentiality. This vaguely defined, potentially all-inclusive, theme (which is more or less close to the received definition of modernism) was used to band together some of the new bestsellers of American painting (Ryman, Marden, Martin, Renouf, etc.) with some less-established Europeans. Almost all the work followed Tworkov’s prescription.
Even considering the indefiniteness with which this show was collated, Berthot’s inclusion was odd. Berthot had even less in common with all these artists than they had with one another. He put an emphasis on following feeling that was not shared by the other work. His paintings struck me as indeterminate; the feeling was confused. Suppressed browns and greens seemed interchangeable. Berthot’s reliance on intuited color made the predetermined structure (if such it was) almost irrelevant.
Berthot’s show some months later at David McKee in New York was a revelation. The large three-panelled painting Raft, 1976, was especially powerful. Despite its deep impact, I had reservations about it. These reservations coalesced about the four “bars” at the seams of the painting, which seemed unnecessary fundamentalisms referring to plane and panel—Johnsian graffiti on a Monet field. The painting seemed released when one mentally erased those elements.
This show saw distinct departures from previous work. Composition and the dimensions of panels were no longer logically interdependent. Figure and field were newly differentiated. The curiosity of the brush as it surveyed the plane was given a new emphasis. In all these respects Berthot was countering the latest trends in abstraction—distancing himself from “fundamental painting” even further.
The most startling development was the accession of landscape space. Here was an abstract painter encouraging us to read “figure” and “field” rather literally, as person-in-landscape (an abstract “figurativeness” that I will turn to later on). Readings of landscape were unmistakable—diagonal passages, atmospheric tone, horizons and naturalistic color all insisted on this reading. Berthot’s closest model was certainly Monet’s large Water Lilies.
The ascendency of the Water Lilies over so much modernist painting is well known. For one thing, the pond is such a cogent metaphor of modernist painting: it is an alternative to the mirror or window metaphor—two other planes that have stood surrogate to the picture plane. Like the mirror, the pond reflects planes: the clouds, the trees. Like the window, it reveals planes: the subaqueous. But unlike either, it does not itself remain invisible in coalescing other planes. The modernist picture plane is like the pond in pressing its own exigencies into the equation.
A landscape is a realm of diversity, a conjunction of things in the round. A landscape painting is thus a plane of diversity. Monet’s pond, both a thing in the round and a plane, was an intermediary negotiating the two. The pertinence of the remarks is this. Berthot in 1975 chose radically to un-flatten the picture plane. In moving toward “unflatness” he doesn’t plunge directly into the full realm of things, the landscape, but wades into the intermediary realm of Monet’s pond.
It is Cézanne, however, who has Berthot’s highest praise: “Cézanne paints a painting without designing it, more so even than Monet.” Designedness has become a disparaged thing among painters. It connotes an obliviousness to plasticity, touch, viscosity, lubricity—painter’s concerns. A designer measures, balances and demarcates, all in two dimensions. And because he concentrates on two dimensions he impoverishes color in ignoring its spatial ambiguity. Despite appearances, Berthot has always striven to transcend the design mentality through paint. Even his earlier multipanelled or notched acrylic paintings show extremely attentive and flexible handling. These paintings seem unique in trying to wring a sense of the organic from acrylic, their layering and working seem necessary to the specificity of weight and distance that Berthot required.
That the paint should appear organic does not follow directly from these processes, however. In retrospect, we can say that Berthot’s imitation of oils with acrylic made a return to oils inevitable. That he did return to oils was certainly felicitous: his subsequent work would not be possible in another medium. For one thing, he needed oils to allow landscape a more overt presence.
It has been said that oils were developed to allow the painting of flesh. Insofar as we want to touch, smell and taste the depicted flesh there is truth here. Oil is the preeminent medium for synesthetic effects in painting. Thus while it is true that the discovery of oil mediums might have corresponded to a new approach toward painting flesh, it is also a prerequisite of landscape and still-life painting. For there are things besides flesh that we also want a painting to deliver in a more than visual way.
It is no coincidence that acrylic paint and an ideal of “sheer opticality” emerged together. This ambition did not last long: evidently, more was required. The painters of sheer opticality turned to Greenberg’s dictum that each art determine, “through operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself.” They narrowed the art of painting to the art of acrylic painting, and began to explore what acrylic alone could do. This limited interpretation of their art has had depressing results. It is no coincidence again that the best painters working today use oils: Berthot, de Kooning, Diebenkorn, Guston, Johns, Kupferman, Marden, Novros, Resnick. And the best works of Louis, Motherwell, Newman and Stella were not painted with purely synthetic media either. These artists were not burdened with a “new” medium to define. (This task is all the more problematic since the “new” medium was designed by commercial interests to imitate the existing medium.)
The key concept for Berthot’s recent work is what he calls “painted space.” This dovetails with the notion of “pictorial space,” and Guston’s phrase “metaphysical space.” First of all, such space mediates between ideal flatness and the full roundness of the world. Secondly, it is an ambiguous space, wherein precise relationships fluctuate. However, Berthot makes it clear that this space is not flaccid, and he is always striving to make it “solid.” Toward effecting this solidity he employs a “concern with distancing, the distance of things.” He adds: “To measure distance I need form, something concrete.”
This is the immediate imperative behind the bars in Berthot’s work since 1975. He states straightforwardly that he learned to paint from Milton Resnick’s work—work that inflects a seamless whole. To relinquish this wholeness is a sacrifice requiring strong justification. There is a reluctance to subdivide, an ambivalence about discrete forms.
One way to skirt this problem is to delegate discrete painted forms to discrete physical forms, as in the earlier notched and multipanelled work. Such work was only superficially aligned with other shaped-canvas, painted-object art of that time—work which manipulated other traditions (Constructivist rather than Impressionist, to simplify grossly). The problem with these forms for Berthot was that they were too reductionist. As Max Kozloff put it: ” . . . the more reductionist the visual material, the more conceptual is its nature. Far from becoming physically provocative it becomes rhetorically provocative.”1 Berthot’s new composition, in its greater complexity, goes far toward greater physical provocation.
Reading field as landscape, we inevitably see the bars as surrogate figures, an effect that derives also from their proportions. They stand in the one-to-seven, or -eight, width-to-height proportion that is the stereotype in the depiction of people. This can be clarified by noting the similarity between Untitled 1976 (for A.G.), and Cézanne’s Bather, c. 1888, in the Museum of Modern Art—a painting very important to Berthot. He stressed the “presence” of the bather, who seemed to him to be standing out in the real space of the gallery. “A.G.” stands for Alberto Giacometti, another follower of Cézanne, and an artist with whom Berthot feels a deep rapport. This painting is also analogous to Giacometti’s figure paintings.
There is another sense in which the bars play figure. One difference between the figure and landscape modes is over focus. We regard the landscape with a roaming uncentralized gaze, while figure painting commands our vision more strictly (still life seems to mediate between these two models). Though manifestly relishing the open fields, Berthot is also interested in bracketing more compacted foci. In the earlier work this greater concentration took place at the edges between panels. Now the bars provide the edges, and more of them; they can also be understood as expanded edges, or they can be seen as contractions of the more diffuse fields that contain them. The bars as contractions of the field are best illustrated by Walken’s Ridge, 1975–76, where the upper and lower regions, more translucent than the rest of the painting, determine the contraction as purely lateral. These readings discover a breathing motion—expanding and contracting—in the works.
The bars are “something concrete,” used to “measure distance.” They work to this end when their “distance” vis-à-vis the field is ambiguous. For instance, in the large polyptych Raft that I described earlier, they fail because they are too unequivocally in front of the field. And they are in front because the field recedes while they remain attached to the abutments on the surface of the panels. More recent work avoids placing the bars against the real edges: then the full versatility of their position is given scope.
For example, a saturated white at the middle of White Stack Red, 1978, presses forward. The lower end of the white bar fades and recedes, cantilevering that form. However the lower end is held in a thrusting green grip that rights the cantilever. Similarly, the saturated top of the white bar is held back by the receding red of the bottom of an adjacent red bar. These dynamics allow color an exact position and a movement. Berthot is at this writing reworking White Stack Red. I describe it as I saw it because it offered the clearest example of a type of shifting that characterizes the paintings in general (perhaps the clarity of the work was too great).
Berthot sells himself short when he says the bars are “something to paint,” as though they were merely something to paint. This is very close to Tworkov’s idea of a painted screenplay. It similarly provokes painterly figuration—that is, figuration merely for the sake of paint. Here is the old separation of form and content, and the declaration that content is pretext.
Applying this interpretation to Berthot’s bars suggests the following. The rectangles are a mere pretext for painterly painting. As forms they have no special interest to the artist. Then, the artist’s disengagement from these forms demands a more probing search in order to pictorialize them. This engages a common notion: in John Berger’s words,”The longer you spend with them, the more mysterious all visual images become.”2 Thus the very uninterestingness of the forms as forms is what confirms their appropriateness. This argument should be put alongside the others as part of the meaning of the bars.
I have implied that the ideas of painted screenplay—something-to-paint, painted-not-designed—separate form and content. This is not quite correct. More properly, they bracket our “composition.” Painted-screenplay and something-to-paint suppose a conceptually separate composition. Painted-not-designed posits a self-developing composition or no-composition. The difference is between Matisse, who said, “. . . to study separately each element of construction; drawing, color, values, composition,”3 and Cézanne, whose evolving structures were transmuted by every brushstroke.
Berthot is ambitious of achieving the no-composition painting of which Resnick’s work is a most powerful contemporary example. At the same time, he is a composer. Berthot often begins a painting with a diagram carefully charted on graph paper. He usually, although not invariably, adheres to his preordained chart. Beginning to paint, he will lay in the tones in grisaille. This is a technique that canons of modernist painting would not condone, because it distinguishes tone from color. In modernist painting tone and color are supposed to arrive simultaneously. Cézanne, once again, is at the source of this idea. He says: “When the color has reached its full richness, the form has reached completeness.”4 On the other hand, to pass through a grisaille stage in the process of painting is to engage Matisse’s separation of the elements.
Although Berthot begins by separating the elements, he doesn’t end there. He ends, to contradict myself once more, squarely in the Cézanne tradition of simultaneity. The drawing and composition are nothing without the color. That the plane may be defined by the diagrams is irrelevant: it takes color to define the space. Colored space engages eye-body-mind in measuring—an exacting quest for the exact measure of necessity, a craftsman’s long and patient manipulation of measure with internalized measuring tools.
There is a large, untitled 1978 painting with stacked red and gray squares. This is a painting with pressures, weights, rates of visibility, variegated reflectivities, self-declarative hues. I understand very well, when Berthot says that this painting is “without memory,” the red impinging totally in the present. He makes it seem obvious that red should do that, though it never has before. This painting is exemplary of the more recent work, where bars have widened into rectangles. I find that in analyzing these paintings I am obliged at some point to consider such forms in themselves, almost as if they were independent works; in fact, Berthot does paint as that suggests. He may complete one form of a painting and leave it untouched for months while he resolves another form of the same painting. He has commented that he is fascinated by these time lapses between the resolutions of the forms of a painting. Only its author can be privy to this “biography” of the work, although the audience can sense the intimacy of the artist with each form, and the existence of an exact chronology.
This is why to compare Berthot to Hofmann, despite superficial similarities, is essentially inapt. To lavish such attention on one form in an ensemble is an act with very little precedent in art since Cubism. Cubism establishes as inviolable the inseparability of forms. If the hegemony of this idea remains almost unchallenged, some exceptions that do come to mind are certain works of Duchamp and the figure paintings of Giacometti. For Giacometti, the issue is to portray the figure and surrounding space as reflexive. However, in the process of painting he will focus on the head or body as separate. This can be witnessed in the denser paint build-ups of these forms as well as in in-process photographs that show the background unchanged as work proceeds on the figure. These same conditions pertain for Berthot’s most recent paintings. He paints back through Cézanne’s figure paintings (which are less proto-Cubist than his other work) to traditional figure painting. This is a hierarchical tradition, the figure coming first in importance, if not in chronology. More specifically, this tradition is anthropocentric. No matter how small or peripheral the figure may be, the viewer’s identification with it ensures it a crucial importance.
The different paintings reassemble themselves in particular ways. An untitled, pale yellow painting achieves a smooth, luxurious unity despite a black graphite outline that separates the two pale areas. A cool, Naples yellow plane is poised subtly off the rectilinear, its edges, in contrast to Berthot’s usual straightness, having the agility of the arabesque. Utah was worked concurrently with the pale yellow work, and also centralizes a yellow slab in a grayish field. This vertically attenuated, somewhat uncomfortable, painting requires a more active viewer, a more forceful will to synthesize, which is the typical viewing attitude that Berthot’s work elicits.
For each painting the pitch of concentration required by the viewer is, once again, extremely particular. There has to be a difficulty for the viewer analogous to the artist’s. Too easy a synthesis will belie the “impossibility” of achievement. The painting must struggle to exist in the unitive vision of the viewer as well as the painter’s. Berthot says of painting: “The more I feel the impossibility, the closer I am.” This paradox posits each work as provisional. And it may also explain how such a knowing artist as Berthot can appear crude. If crudity here means allowing internal contradictions, one of the tasks of the artist is to convince us that the contradictions are necessary concomitants of the expression. A raw mark must not read as an appended referent—of primitivism, irrationalism or any other concept that such a mark can evidence. Neither may it be an ornamental flourish. It must be a means.
Berthot’s drawings are not obviously like his paintings. In the drawings Berthot simplifies questions of color, faces a more manageable size, and handles less refined tools; besides, drawings are readily understood to be hypothetical. All these factors determine the greater spontaneity of the drawings and explain why things are allowed in the drawings that would not be permitted in the paintings.
If the paintings can be said to present what the body faces, than the drawings contain what the hand can grasp. This is understood as a natural adjustment to the techniques of drawing, coupled with the continued pursuit of concreteness, of “solid space.” Thus we recognize hand-size images: a skull, a hand, handwriting; even unidentifiable images persist in being read as things. We might put it this way: as a draftsman Berthot finds space for the object. The drawings are worked in and out, alternating amorphous liquid fields and incised lines. The lines are inscribed with hard points and thus sever the continuity of the field. Had they been brushed, in keeping with the application of the fields, they would inevitably respond by blending with or mimicking the underlying texture. To incise the line creates a more ambiguous relationship: the line is on, in, between and behind the field. Other qualities are direct correlatives of this technique. The skittishness of the line follows the way a hard point slides along a wet surface. There is willfullness in the incising, desperation in the riving, possession in the inscribing, etc. The line is often a peculiar act against the field. The field remains relatively passive, though sometimes churning up between the lines in an effulgent physicality.
Berthot’s is a renewed visceral abstraction, one that aims above all to move the spectator. He resists the tenor of an era that seems obliged to second-guess emotion with irony. To convince as Berthot does takes more than painstaking yet flexible brushwork, although that is part of it. His confrontation of every issue is painstaking yet flexible. Thus Berthot aligns himself with the archaizers of modern art, artists who have consciously confronted old conventions: Cézanne, Matisse, Derain, Brancusi, Picasso, Giacometti, Duchamp, Pollock, Guston, Smithson. These artists (at least during a part of their career) elevated personal over historical imperatives when choosing the conventions they engaged. Similarly, Berthot’s stance on every issue—abstract vs. figurative, flat space vs. deep space, depiction vs. objecthood, tone vs. hue, logical vs. intuitive structure—is rigorously self-determined. Berthot discovers between these polarities the balance point, the fulcrum of ambiguity. It is there that the world is most deeply felt.
—Steven Kasher
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NOTES
1. Max Kozloff, “Critical Schizophrenia and the Intentionalist,” in The New Art, New York, 1966, edited by Gregory Battcock, p. 130.
2. John Berger, “Painting a Landscape,” in New Society, 1966, p. 173.
3. Jack Flam, Matisse on Art, London, 1973, p.128.
4. Conversation between Emil Bernard and Cézanne, ca. 1904, in Jack Lindsay, Cézanne: His Life and Art, New York, 1969, p. 323. See pages 323–26, however, for a discussion of Bernard’s reliability.
