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
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