Paul Georges and Bridgehampton

I recently saw these at the new Parrish Art Museum, Southampton NY.

                           

After loving these paintings for much of my life they seemed, diminished in the sleek new Museum.

I was surprised at how he seemed, I say seemed, an amateur local, especially in the face of the new scale of contemporary figuration.

I think I thought somewhat the same when I first saw them in 1972. I thought Paul much stronger.

Years later,  I saw this quiet reserve as a poetic virtue and still somewhat the point.

I wonder if this means the new scale and Museum ruins this poetic?

I don't mean this as an authoritative degree, I am just questioning?

Actually I think they look good on the page here again.

Paul was so much part of this reality of the Hamptons, it is hard to see him omitted. It was such an exciting time.

Above a small Katz, below Fairfield Porter and on right Jane Freilicher

I coincidently saw this today at the National Academy, Jan 2013, by Jane Freilecher and Louisa Matthiasdottir from the earlier 70's that same time. There seems to be interest again in this 70's group of paintiers from direct observation.

Goya and Georges

Goya certainly is one of the greats. His form can be recognized often in the space he portrays. His content in his realism is not so much like Valazquez' truthfulness of figuration, but more in the way one knows Goya had actually seen this and translated it into an expressive equivalent.  He is in the background of Picasso to a very deep extent but rarely directly quoted as Manet, or El Greco are.

I've thought this painting of his daughter Paulette was somewhat like a Goya in what I say above, and also this portrait of his wife Lisette as well--

This Goya at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts always makes me think of Paul.

Georges and Art History

I am more self conscious in a critical way than Paul Georges. Critical self consciousness was one of the main things he would rail against. He thought one should be unselfconscious, not thinking too much about what one was doing, but observing and doing what came to the painting.

He thought self consciousness was what killed the Muse and was the main argument with his friend Tony Siani. It is hard to explain and finally doesn't make a lot of sense. I share the idea when I make landscape paintings not thinking too much or planning, just seeing what happens as it happens.

His paintings were what he stuck with. They were his answers to questions that came up in his life.

I'm beginning this Blog as I wait these 25 years since the empty critical space surrounding Paul's work has been so apparent. I've waited for someone to take this up, and I offer that challenge now.

Art keeps moving. Paul is gone. Sadly the ideas of his passing are stalled, no one thinks of him these days.

A few years ago I marveled at Alex Katz posters waving along Chelsea advertising his show at Pace. I knew and had alot of respect for Alex's long struggle to be recognized, but I thought this type of commercialism the thing that has been eating up art spitting it out for the next.

I had coffee with Alex a bit ago, actually he had lemonade. I expressed my concern for Paul's career now that he was gone, 10 years ago.

I said it was hard for me to continue my own work with out Paul's formal recognition in the world.

Alex in his career was now cut off, " as if he came full blown from the head of Zeus." The galleries have hidden the tradition, meaning figures as Rudy Burkhardt and Lois Dodd-- Paul and Fairfield, and Jane Freilecher.

I expressed how Alex had won-- I meant in how they had each began in a similar tradition and followed it out to be come the representative of it.

Alex grinned ear to ear about this, as they were very competitive about this lineage.

De Kooning is another point, Paul in these early paintings related heavily on the brushy bravura, and Alex also in his fluid paint wet in wet. Bill is something of his own though and I guess you can see why these figures are separated from their lineage.

I said to Alex that in a show of Georges and Katz at a Museum,  Georges would support Katz in adding depth, and Katz to Georges in a surface elegance which Paul was only on the border of, but in that deeper beauty the master.

Alex only disappointingly said, Paul never wanted to be Modern. What Paul did want just as Katz, was to be considered.

60's Figures

I slept in a spare room off the kitchen many summers in Sagaponac with a similar life sized nude at the end of the bed.

I haven't seen one of these earlier paintings in 40 years. This is pretty much the problem, with Paul's career. No one really knows how huge his reach is. He was his own person and cared little for self promotion. This situation gets no better as art seems to extend commercially in our time with little regard for roots and art history or where things come from..

There seems no one that understands (this kind of art) enough to want to see the paintings again and help them be part of our culture once more. These paintings, the 60's paintings, would be a good place to start.

They remind me of Bischoff to a certain extent but I think Paul was ahead of him, though I don't really know. (see new David Park chapter.) The figure drawing of Diebenkorn's and Bischoff compete with Paul's own and allowed them all to do this type of great painting. I never heard Georges mention either of them though, it may have been a competitive thing. The relationship of the Bay Area to the Long Island school would be an interesting study.

In these earlier paintings Georges was trying to make something in relation to a de Kooning, also. Bill's figures were in the world of Myth and Abstract Paint and Paul wanted them to be in the very Real though still painterly world. This took him in his own direction. The world of that dazzling bravura life, being out there on Long Island, those summer days-- which were amazing.

It's interesting to me how the people now living out there in the potato fields know so little of that being alive and part of that reality-- These days they shop for it, buying a stand in for another's life. At any rate life any more doesn't seem to be of the quality of Paul's idea of it.

If I had some of the ever flowing cash in todays art world, I'd stop everything and see to it this stuff got out of storage. That would be a right idea for the use of all the money coursing through the art world.

This painting above is in the Parrish Museum. I've never seen it up.

This is where Paul was closest to Cezanne though probably more Poussin and Picasso's-- thinking of the whole lineage.

Picasso was so everywhere that everyone avoided him. Leland Bell took up Giacometti along with Peter Heinemann, the downtown painter, to a certain extent to avoid Picasso. Some painters were just trying to recreate the pastoral moment, which I suppose one could charge Georges with but I think it was more about continuing art and what he loved of it. The pastoral was a good excuse for the paint.

Paul also I think stayed away from Picasso as he had been in Paris and studied with Leger. I saw those paintings from then and his new paintings once back in US must have made him feel free of those darker European linear lines and surface.

It was de Kooning carrying on Cezanne now that was the competition. Paul was more a pictorialist through Goya, and I guess why he went more toward an earlier form in Titian. He used to talk of Jan Muller alot and I see there is something of that expressionism, too.

Art News in those days had articles about Titian and Tintoretto and El Greco and they were underneath Pollock and de Kooning also. Paul wanted to go back before Picasso and found his life long love, back  there in Titian.

When I met Paul he was teaching out of a book called Problems in Titian by Panofsky. He was interested in how all the subjects and contents found their abstracted representational forms.

Here though, I'm interested in how Paul really represented Long Island, the reality of the place. This along with Fairfield Porter who he discussed all this with, Porter was by the way the first to write about de Kooning.  This landscape here is very complex like a Matisse I've seen recently.

Georges

Matisse

Georges' early days and David Park and Bay Area Figuration

                                                                        David Park

I've just finished the David Park, biography and have drawn some different conclusions in what I have been writing here, though most ideas support what I have thought. I realize now Paul must have been in competition to some extent with the San Francisco school. They were older and more sucessful as he was still finding his bearings. The Staempfli Gallery show was in 1959. Most of Paul's good paintings of models in the loft on Broadway and on Long Island start in the 60's.

It seems de Kooning was a big force behind Bay area figurative painting as he was to Paul and NY School  painting. I have to see that this all was motivating Georges before I came around. It is maybe too obvious that to draw or paint in a bravura way soon gives way to a de Kooning like painting. Paul once showed to me some brushes de Kooning gave him-- he tossed them to the side, "one can only make a de Kooning with them." he said. They had long whip like hairs.

Park was being influenced by Still maybe in a similar abstract expressionist way. His figures have a monumental quality that Still's early "cave men" also have, though Park brings these into contemporary yet still mythic life. Park goes further here than Georges ever ventured.

                                                                        Paul Georges

I think Park's best work though is located in the realistic articulation of space, where Georges was headed also. Park analyzes Piero della Francesca and finds a very wonderful compressed space. He doesn't stay there long though as I suppose he was criticized as was Georges for being too conventional. To me this radical form of great art is never conventional as it is beyond the conventions and making them new, at least in those few paintings.

Diebenkorn was in NY and Washington, DC briefly and took on de Kooning more directly. He maybe was more successful at it than any NY counterparts I can think of,  Jack Tworkov comes to mind. Diebenkorn is better than any of the NY Studio School artists which I suppose is a counterpart of Park's
teaching at CA School of Fine Arts. We don't think so much of de Kooning here as Diebenkorn became successful in becoming himself though not in surpassing de Kooning. I wonder if Guston ever thought of Park?

There was an earlier figuration that Park was involved in that looks very similar to earlier Porter, and Guston figuration from the twenties and thirties, I also just saw some of this at the new Still Museum in Denver. De Kooning made some of this finer detailed work early on but Bill's was always more abstract and European.

Bischoff it seems never really came to full fruition as his switch back and forth from abstract to figure left him less than that which added strength to Park and Diebenkorn. He also went off and had a teaching career. He could have made some of the best, but his color is not the best as at times it becomes stylized drifting between the abstract and naturalistic to become confused and the space is never difficult enough, too obvious.

Georges may never have made a bravura nude as good as Bischoff though, we need to see more paintings.  He soon goes off to a more Realistic mode. I know this all gets very confusing but maybe I can get to where I'd like through ranking.

De Kooning and Still remain the best, they simply went beyond to a place that was new and now exists in our art spirit. This now familiar form though would benefit from a larger idea about Park's, and I believe Porter's deeper figurative yet abstractly concerned paintings.

Certainly Diebenkorn's career exists somewhat like this in that his earlier figuration supports his later abstractions, which grow I think grow thin, literally. ( The paint does not seem to be physically holding up, literally.)

I actually think Porter and Georges depend on each other, as Porter was not as ambitious in his scale as Park. So I guess Bischoff and Georges fill in here to some extent.

Pollock, Rothko, Newman were never as Figurative in their beginnings, though Benton figures in there with Pollock. I feel Rothko and Newman would benefit from a putting back of their Mythic concerns and content which was detached from it's form in the Formalist days by critics.

Well at some point I guess with the big Fresco like Whitney painting Georges departs from all this with a tighter Realism as Pearlstein and Lesley, did, and the new slick Pop art starts to wield an influence.

Katz follows Rosenquist to some extent, Paul reacts negatively to this influence and becomes his own artist which is what we haven't been able to cope with as of yet. I think Georges though supports the elegance of Katz and lends a richness lost in Alex's formal strategy.

Georges was diverted by Frumkin Gallery and his relation to Pearlstein and Lesley. He saw the lack of freedom in that direction and I think held on to some of this earlier zeal which has slowly left our central art form and culture in favor of a social correction necessary from the pressures of a new postmodern reality.

This art of Park and Georges now all seems a dream.

There is no one better than Georges in these relations. Park would stand up. Bischoff in a full redress would fall away, Diebenkorn will totter but stay, especially his drawing. Pearlstein and Lesley definitely fall away. Resika, Heineman, Leland Bell, don't really feel in this race.

Throw away Georges we have a much weaker Porter to represent Katz's height. Alex would not mind, though as he is less threatened.

Maybe I'm wrong, it certainly seems so by now. Why can't I leave this alone? I think Georges is necessary and inevitable.

Georges and Drawing

                                                                           Paul Georges

Any good art is Abstract, it means that reality has been taken apart and thought about and those thoughts offered in a painting or in this case a drawing.

Georges could draw as among those of the very best in Art. It's all he did his whole life. He didn't try to write as I do here. He drew his responses, and it went on and on through his days. He made drawings with strong abstract forms and they then represented a strong form of reality, in this relating of form to content.

This was one of the first paintings I saw of Paul's, here in black and white. It came directly from a drawing I remember that he made on a Thursday evening with a gathering of artists at his loft. He then arranged for the model to come back to have him enlarge it into a painting. One can see here the clear simple form which I loved.

See the line down the left hand side highlighting the fore arm, then the line down through the crotch makes another shape out of the whole right hand side, the detail in the hanging hand creates a separation, the darkened lower leg, as the whole head floats as its own shape.

None of this seems to matter except that it all aesthetically comes together then as this very simple whole. If you don't get it you can 'maybe' learn it but an artist just loves it, this poetry of parts to a whole, knows it, and it speaks to one of the order of reality.

Ridiculously out of a thousand drawings, there is no access to any, not even one on the internet. I feel they are a whole key missing from the making of art today. 

Bob Franca just supplied this great drawing for my use here.

They are amazing things on Rives BFK, large 30 x 42 "sheets, with Conte Crayon. A thousand of them, piled up somewhere!

If he was teaching he would make one draw head to foot or if reclining making each part where exactly one wanted it in relating to paper or composition. He did this through measuring, very simply with his conte stick and eye, holding it up to measure. Though I actually never really saw him do this himself. He did it in his head by the time I was there. He measured on a grid, in his head imagined on the paper. The figure, halved at the crotch. Then he noticed what was vertically in line say eye and toe, a hand in relation to that line. 

Drawing was a spacial response to the flat surface, these shapes aligned and arranged. He disliked photography and pointed out how the best were from art. I don't think he even owned a camera maybe an old Brownie I saw in a drawer. Most of his Hans Hofmann, as he also went to school there, were ideas about painting countering the distancing perspective of a photo. That is not an idea of a Luddite. He wanted reality, here, up front, now. It was his Modern.

I learned from him the idea of telephoto lens, then used in a lot of  movies. It drew the background up flat as in painting. He drew shapes that abstractly, adhered to this surface. Like Piero.

One would know what I meant if you knew any of his figure drawings. I drew with him over twenty years, no one there drawing, ever got close. He would point out the totally simple shapes in Titian. His drawings reminded me of Manet, and Bellows, and I see more and more in relation to Bay area drawing-- Rodin was in there somewhere maybe in relation to Matisse.

The link to Diebenkorn and Bischoff is unclear though Paul came from Oregon as I think Park did. This is something that needs more illumination. Paul I guess had a way of dismissing artists he thought he had gotten past.

He would figure in his mind the shape and how he wanted it placed on the page. Feeling this as he didn't analyze further, he drew sometimes a continuous line depicting a simple shape of the model. He'd go on from there with his stump and conte, more a mess of abstract marks than anatomy.

He didn't sketch. Everything had to do with it's shape in relation to a map of what was being drawn. Yes, this is a big difference. Every form was in service to a content. Form to him was what was beautiful in terms of it's order and the shapes related to the content. He was always making a composition and an order.

I guess what I am trying to say here is that Paul's drawing was a direct response to the physical reality of the figure before him, related to the physical surface of the paper.

1970's in the City, On Walker St

It seems this experience of painting with Paul and Fairfield was one of the largest in my mind. One summer day we were all painting in Georges backyard. Fairfield didn't want to compete painting Paul's view so he turned around and painted the cars in the driveway.

Fairfield Porter

I made my simple landscape and as I remember Paul made a grand landscape, he for ever showing everyone else up not that he needed to try-- everything was just a large gesture. It made Fairfield nervous, he was very quiet. I think Paul was making a portrait of Fairfield around this time.

The whole Porter family came to dinner. Well, just Anne and Lizzie and Bruno the dog. Bruno sat on my feet at dinner and I can't remember much of anything else. I was very young. I was infatuated with Paulette and this seemed the life. I was invited right in and we all would paint in the living room. Yvette and Lisette were the models as the Watergate trials played out on TV. It was this life and the art so intertwined. That's what got me.

Back in NY, I saw the big Whitney painting of all Paul's friends, come back home to Paul's studio. I don't think I saw the Biennial. Paul was working on a Taxi painting of Paulette exiting the car, to the protection somehow of her father-- the artist. The painting was somewhat corny but it is so expertly done with drawings, small paintings, enlarging into several versions and it just seems to unwrap itself. I say this as it is such a complex painting.

These were followed by a bunch of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and Kent State paintings, I think these were started in Louisiana maybe, which I helped to get up to Fishbach Gallery. Paul was making an assault on NY with these-- what could be termed awful paintings, all against the cool abstraction of the time. They had red frames and Nixon had blood on his hands.

He painted the World Trade Center being built and it was seen as a titanic type thing maybe Paul worked against as a friction. He always worked against something in NY and Tony Siani actually his best friend became the next target.

We all went to the Artists Alliance down on East Broadway and Paul and Tony argued about self conscious and unselfconsciousness. Paul was completely the second and he saw Siani as destroying art, or at least their friendship by being the first.

He made a painting called the Mugging of the Muse, a ridiculous law suit ensued which drew attention but never got far. Siani was suing for defamation of character. I thought it all pretty silly but it drew a lot of attention.

I started to be less interested in this all. I was now more interested in what was going on in the country, out on Long Island.

Paul went on furiously not skipping a beat. Supported by Lisette, making a large breakfast often from left overs of the last dinner, Paul would discuss everything on his mind and get to work. Paulette posing or maybe a hired model would be there. There would be a big lunch and I often was invited over.

We all sat there critiquing what he was doing. This was all thought of as a good thing and we all took part. Paul then, holding out one part of his painting with his hand, and then pronouncing it needed a little blue in the puddle. He would spit on a piece of blue he'd torn from a magazine and paste it to the bottom somewhere, and pronounce, "See!" This was a Hofmann idea to make the sky large and abstractly open the painting to a feeling of freedom. He had a bunch of ideas like this. They then would then take afternoon naps-- I think Lisette read a lot then. It was a regular thing everyday, helping to keep a schedule.

Paul would continue into the evening then with what he started. There would be a big dinner, and we would have large glasses of Vodka and pepper-- for a while that was a thing, with a jug of wine on the table, again the discussion was about the painting. This was what happened day after day.

He would get up to get a Titian or Bruegel book to show what he meant about the horizon line or some different kind of space. He would go off to the living room to watch the news-- it was one of these nights that Three Mile Island thing happened. Paul always joked that he was head of Health and Safety and we made evacuation plans. He usually he sat there with a book on his knee, watching the news and grabbing from behind him another book from the shelf, he'd be talking about El Greco and how the little stuff at the top of the painting was countered by the little stuff at the bottom.

Soon there was a pile of books on the floor. Everything was getting darker in the City. He seemed to feel the weight of these other artists. He thougth all painting was Modern in a sense and would pull out the Piero book.

He would toss a tennis ball to Hoppy, the poodle, who would run full stride across the brushes and palettes strewn across the floor. He'd wearily get up to wash his brushes in a ritual, which if we all were arriving to draw-- he would be doing. Lisette would be up at the top of the stairs to see who had rung the bell and make a greeting.

I looked forward again to the summer and that change into the ocean light.