WILLIAM BAZIOTES: PRIMEVAL SENTIMENT
“Every picture tells a story.”
—Rod Stewart
IN MY STILL UNCOMPLICATED traversement from collegiate adolescence to artist, one painting is crucial: a pale little minor picture by William Baziotes entitled Toy in the Sun. I used to see it regularly when I would stroll from the University of Southern California across the street to the old Los Angeles County Museum in Exposition Park to ventilate my head of the ready-made poignancy of some Salinger short story from lit class, and to soak my soul in the more universal profundity of paintings. Toy in the Sun was a bridge; its pastel yellows, blues, and pinks, its naive, delicately delineated Eiffel-Tower shape with neighboring sphere, and its insistent, feathery brushstrokes somehow combined to remind me of sitting forelornly on a suburban lawn when I was four, running my fingers disconsolately through the grass while I watched the other kids on the block trot off to kindergarten––which I was prohibited by age from attending. Toy in the Sun, by its understatement, its formal solidity, was more than an abstract version of one of those boy-and-his-dog-on-their-way-to-the-fishin’-hole heart-string tugs your uncle has pinned above the lathe in his Nebraska garage. That small painting was for me, for a long while, the reconciliation of two worlds, and I returned to it frequently, for soothing if not for sustenance.
When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art moved to its sumptuously tacky Wilshire Boulevard premises in 1965, the picture found its way onto the not-for-public wall of the Department of Modern Art’s downstairs offices where, on the infrequent occasions business with the museum afforded me access, I saw it again, with no diminishment in feeling. Last year, the museum “deaccessioned” a boxcar-load of what it considered lesser art, and Toy in the Sun disappeared.
My experience with that painting is not unlike aspects of William Baziotes’ posthumous career (which, to counter anticipated charges of tastelessness, I must maintain artists do have). At his death in 1963, Baziotes was considered a moving, if minor New York School painter (compared to, say, Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, or Hofmann) whose early connections with the fertile Surrealists-in-America made up for the fact that he painted—bottom line—pretty illustrations of a paleontologic subconscious rather than really hairy paintings-as-paintings. In the years immediately following, the art world’s obsessions shifted toward formalist theory and visual horsepower (e.g. Barnett Newman), and the newer proponents of tough-but-lyrical gigantism (Stella, Noland, and Olitiski). Baziotes, save for a few near-great paintings, almost fell into the oh-so-you-have-one-of-those storage racks, along with Brooks, Stamos, Tomlin and others. After that, “de-materialization” and “de-definition” took over and painting per se was held to be an outmoded Burgher Delight whose death throes could be witnessed in the mindless effect-mongering of “lyrical abstraction” and the desperate accommodation by “semi-painting” of the aggressions of process art.
But, as Toy in the Sun slipped from public view to the subdued acceptance of good-enough-for-the-office, then to outright dumping, and finally to some sedate Renaissance before private eyes, painting itself has shaken its near-fatal attraction to chutzpah, survived its incarceration in the esthetic dungeon for the politically incorrect, and emerged to clearer, wiser minds as the majestic, if quiet, mode it always was. The question of how in this changed context we see Baziotes is answered in part by a tasteful, but hardly sweeping, retrospective mounted last spring at Southern California’s Newport Harbor Art Museum, and now traveling.
Baziotes, to his credit, is still a problem. To be sure, he benefits from (and perhaps owes this show to) the current painting revival. But he doesn’t quite fit; where the thicker, smaller, duller, evener, uglier, headier New York paintings are the products of hard-hat art dialectics, Baziotes has more in common with the Romanticism rife in a helluvalotta trendy “post-studio” art. Moreover, Baziotes paints with scumbled color gradations, biomorphically “sensitive” shapes, and a parlor-sized scale. He’s obviously akin, even in the later works, to Picasso, Synthetic Cubism, and an unsophisticated Surrealism which, in a lesser artist, would relegate the work to the level of a matron trying to “go modern” in a Saturday afternoon extension class.
Then there’s the matter of the surrounding art-writing rhetoric. Baziotes’ own evocation of the “primeval,” and statements about feeling like he’s found the skulls and bones of his ancestors in a cave, sound, these days, like so much stoned Topanga Canyon trippie bullshit. When it comes to the catalogue (nicely produced, with two academically purple essays by Barbara Cavaliere and Mona Hadler), you wonder whether the artist inspires the critic or the critic creates the artist:
Baziotes’ paintings are the vivification of his life, dedicated to the spirit so defined. Ensheathed in an aura of wonderment, they speak of the torments of a mind at its highest emotional pitch, mining the rarest gemstones hidden deep within the psyche, working them through multiple layers toward the surface, reaching toward the light which glimmers faintly from the most distant star. They speak of his treacherous search to retrieve the irretrievable, his inexplicable ability to hint at the future by drawing on the half-seen or forgotten. It is this spiritual intensity informed by psychic intuition which Baziotes recognized as the essential quality inherent in an ancient wall painting, an Egyptian sculpture, a Rembrandt, and a Mondrian. (p. 27)
I don’t think is any denigration to think of Baziotes as simply a pretty good semiabstract painter who managed, through dedicated hard work, to convert his Saroyanesque youth and taste for the elegantly rounded shapes of dinosaur bones into a few memorably gossamer pictures, like Pompeii, 1955.
Baziotes is possessed of more, however, than a mere artisan’s talent for lending architectonic substance to amoebic shapes and sweetly muted colors. His “mirrors of my mind,” which he hoped, through “tender melancholy,” would “obsess and haunt” the viewer, are sustained at a remarkable intensity (in important paintings like Dragon, 1950; The Flesh Eaters, 1952; The Beach and The Pond, 1955; plus the regrettable omissions from the show, Dwarf and Cyclops, 1947) only through an uncommon spirit that almost lives up to the catalogue’s rapture. Baziotes saw, and was thrilled by, both sides of the coin of life; he liked dwarfs and beautiful women. With the coupled sensibilities of a Mark Rothko and Diane Arbus, he wrote that his painting is a combination of horror and humor. In his elevation of automatism into a “frozen state” of the primeval, in his slow conversion of fear into hope, it is tantalizingly uncertain whether Baziotes is depicting his own unconscious imagery, or fabricating visual switches to trip the viewer’s.
Inevitably, Baziotes is compared to the Gottlieb/Newman/Rothko pictographic primeval, especially since the latter three enjoyed longer, loftier careers by gradually exorcising representational elements (Gottlieb’s calligraphy might be an exception), while the former stuck to his original muse like Don Judd to Minimalism a generation later. At a Newport Harbor Art Museum symposium on the artist, Baziotes’ fascination with pre-history was said (a) to include a “psychic dimension” instead of a purely formal appreciation, and (b) while not as entranced with the “primitive” cultural aspect, to derive more from pre-Columbian than Oceanic grist.
Spirit is, however, worthless without know-how, and Baziotes was openly guided by Paul Valéry’s instructions: learn your craft thoroughly, develop your own morphology, blend the two and work until the synthesis is effortless. In Clown and Clock, and The Parachutists, 1944, he works with a sense of the whole pictorial surface, and Cubism dissolves into an easy, drippy, on-top line suggestive of early Motherwell. By The Mirror, 1948, or The Egyptian, 1951, Baziotes has muddled through to the dull luminosity he shares with Rothko. And that is a lovely quality, so much better seen in actual, visceral paintings than through the artificially brilliant projector-lamp pimping of transparencies—and there’s a lesson about painting’s intrinsic beauty (as opposed to all that dreary “art information” junk-mailed from darkest Italy).
In the late ’40s, it all starts to come together as Baziotes takes longer and longer—sometimes six months, or even a whole year—to complete one painting. In The Flesh Eaters he presents, in a wonderfully “unrealized” tripartite composition, the guttiest version of his line device—a bouncy sort of swamp spider drawn in thickened oscillation against a typically complex and homely shape. Subsequently, Baziotes converts to a painted line that is more integral to his painting’s basic brush-and-tube nature but, I think, less daring in its surrender to contrast and risk. If there were trophies for painters’ specialities, Baziotes would have on his mantlepiece the golden brush for best employment of line in painterly paintings.
With the Whitney Museum’s The Beach—which I prefer to the Modern Museum’s Pompeii, because it’s braver in its smaller format and its extreme proportions and more restrained in figure-ground tricks—the painting is entirely a prolonged exercise in automatism, and completely true to its process of creation: thousands of strokes of thin, ever-so-slightly viscous paint applied in myriad directions. Whether these paintings are preferred to earlier, nastier nuggets like The Dwarf and Cyclops is an internecine argument of taste. The point is that Baziotes’ virtue as a painter is his sticking to his sometimes mawkish Jungian guns and painting pictures whose buried constructivism turns millennial nostalgia into poetry.
Now that painting is, while not exactly running rings around contemporary art, at least sitting up like Lazarus and taking solid food again, we might look at an artist like Baziotes refreshed. And, if we listen to his intermittently corny echoes of the “primeval,” he might tell us that painting is too deep and wonderful to concern itself solely with something so limited as painting itself.
—Peter Plagens
