Georges and Goya and Cezanne and the NY Studio School make up a bigger difference than was apparent at the time.
After the 60's Paul began a more narrative direction.
He had made a big almost ridiculous painting of the group of artists he saw as saving the NY Art World. I guess he saw the Art World being taken over and against his ideas and the friends which had been the center. This was 1970 and the beginning of the process art of the 70's. Art made from observation was thought to be regressive.
Dan Christensen had gone to Kansas City and was leaping from the figuration taught there, in that Benton-esque way to being the new hope of the Color Field painters. He called Georges "an old fashioned, hack painter," something I add to show the atmosphere back then. Dan alsowas a friend of mine, so it was tricky.
I'm seeing a more modernist Cezanne oriented surface being taken over by what I call a Pictorialist surface, more of Goya. This surface, though narrative, is still very mindful of abstract shapes and ideas. It was creating another reality, in relation to what's out there.
Painting still made a journey through the space of the picture, although Paul thought that for it to be art it had to finally be flat also. That was the whole point. He'd pull out the Piero book and show the flat shapes between the horses legs, of a swan swimming in space, framed by the flat shape which contained it.
Paul who taught all the time, just in talking, felt he had a strong relationship to the Studio School. This idea though as everything, was chaotic and actually he held an opposing view-- though again it was sympathetic in that it was all about Art and the contradictions were fine for him.
He was a friend of Mercedes Matter, I think mainly out on Long Island and she would stop by. Paul didn't care much for her paintings or the other popular teachers, Nick Carone and Charles Cajori. He loved to shore up his own convictions with criticism of others and that is maybe why I know so much about this all. I might say though that his responses were sketchy as I think finally, he put it all in his work.
Well right away these were the differences between them. Here I use examples from the School of Visual Arts a parallel school experience in 1970 to illustrate what was going on as I saw it.
I met Paul at Peter Heinemann's workshop at SVA in 1971 or 1972. Felix Pasillis was there, an old friend of Paul's from Hofmann's school. He was gesticulating, blinking his eyes, and then-- making a mark, with charcoal. He'd erase it. Nothing would ever do. He was the extreme. This was a position from existentialism after the war, nothing would be possible again.
Peter was in between he would try to against the odds. He would make beautiful Romantic figures made of lines adjusted and remade, they created a reality of the formal surface. He also made up social ideas of community and art, actually the center of this being, this almost religious activity of communal drawing. He did for the rest of his life.
Paul was different he believed in every line he put down. He would erase although you hardly can on that BFK paper he drew on. When he did it was because he saw the form could be at service in a better way. He would usually just make another drawing. He often liked the awkward shape as he didn't like it to easy.
Here at the basis of drawing is also the philosophical idea, that I didn't know then, but what I have found later to be of importance in my own work.
In this meaningless world one could act "as if" and make the world one wanted to see.
(Paul had been a Marine and had the absurd experience of leading a landing craft boat full of men, to their deaths, himself escaping on the shores of Guadalcanal. When he came back he was never going to let anyone put him into that position again and he fought everyday to some realization of this desperate purpose.)
So I myself saw the Studio School, mainly involved in this existential exercise deriving greatly from the school of Paris and Giacometti. As it turns out it is a great teaching tool and students get their hands dirty and draw over and over. They never quite getting a final product, besides what has now become known admiringly as a Studio School drawing.
Paul loved this energy but thought it to no further use it had mainly been subsumed into Greenbergian ideas Paul was against. Greenberg is huge but more about that later.
What I realized here was that Paul was more about making a pictorial surface, and I think it mainly about Goya and his what I am calling Pictorialism. Paul after figuring out in his academic like exercise of drawing head to toe, was able then to draw largely from his Imagination, a composition of figures which he adjusted in the Romantic way, till he drew final Classic lines, which stood for exactly what he finally-- meant.
The Studio School artist in this scenario, made Romantic surfaces of failed lines finally creating a aesthetic surface of the resultant lines which might stand as a, well never ending exercise. It was all very artificial and a formal reality. It still figures in my work as a phase-- but I see as it only a part to a more complex reality.
Paul departed here, though his surface was many times indistinguishable from this NY School formal surface. He struggled finally more and more to the outer world of the reality in Long Island which was so strong as a new future he personally saw in art.
His de Kooning paint in service to his, figures in the grass, was tempered into shapes which became clearer in his drawing as his work progressed into the 1970's and 80's. The difficult contents he tackled made his paint still romantic and searching for the right idealistic forms, but he did finally find a right form, which he often then repeated more classically onto a new canvas.
Here I see this cycle in the making of his paintings which I also see extended to his whole career.
When Graham Nickson took over at the school and led it in its present direction. I think Paul saw a threat. He was unsure of this sucessful and younger English man, bringing these similar ideas of a possible figuration from England. He was involved in the almost regional Figurative Alliance and Artist Choice Museum, so the energy went more there. That's another chapter.
The interesting thing here for me is that the Studio school is all Cezanne, and formal surface. Even though Graham's own painting is very sympathetic to Georges.
Georges after the early figures never looks at Cezanne, though maybe later, the stillifes of the final phase, he looks back to him again. Also another chapter.
After the 60's Paul began a more narrative direction.
He had made a big almost ridiculous painting of the group of artists he saw as saving the NY Art World. I guess he saw the Art World being taken over and against his ideas and the friends which had been the center. This was 1970 and the beginning of the process art of the 70's. Art made from observation was thought to be regressive.
Dan Christensen had gone to Kansas City and was leaping from the figuration taught there, in that Benton-esque way to being the new hope of the Color Field painters. He called Georges "an old fashioned, hack painter," something I add to show the atmosphere back then. Dan alsowas a friend of mine, so it was tricky.
I'm seeing a more modernist Cezanne oriented surface being taken over by what I call a Pictorialist surface, more of Goya. This surface, though narrative, is still very mindful of abstract shapes and ideas. It was creating another reality, in relation to what's out there.
Painting still made a journey through the space of the picture, although Paul thought that for it to be art it had to finally be flat also. That was the whole point. He'd pull out the Piero book and show the flat shapes between the horses legs, of a swan swimming in space, framed by the flat shape which contained it.
Paul who taught all the time, just in talking, felt he had a strong relationship to the Studio School. This idea though as everything, was chaotic and actually he held an opposing view-- though again it was sympathetic in that it was all about Art and the contradictions were fine for him.
He was a friend of Mercedes Matter, I think mainly out on Long Island and she would stop by. Paul didn't care much for her paintings or the other popular teachers, Nick Carone and Charles Cajori. He loved to shore up his own convictions with criticism of others and that is maybe why I know so much about this all. I might say though that his responses were sketchy as I think finally, he put it all in his work.
Well right away these were the differences between them. Here I use examples from the School of Visual Arts a parallel school experience in 1970 to illustrate what was going on as I saw it.
I met Paul at Peter Heinemann's workshop at SVA in 1971 or 1972. Felix Pasillis was there, an old friend of Paul's from Hofmann's school. He was gesticulating, blinking his eyes, and then-- making a mark, with charcoal. He'd erase it. Nothing would ever do. He was the extreme. This was a position from existentialism after the war, nothing would be possible again.
Peter was in between he would try to against the odds. He would make beautiful Romantic figures made of lines adjusted and remade, they created a reality of the formal surface. He also made up social ideas of community and art, actually the center of this being, this almost religious activity of communal drawing. He did for the rest of his life.
Paul was different he believed in every line he put down. He would erase although you hardly can on that BFK paper he drew on. When he did it was because he saw the form could be at service in a better way. He would usually just make another drawing. He often liked the awkward shape as he didn't like it to easy.
Here at the basis of drawing is also the philosophical idea, that I didn't know then, but what I have found later to be of importance in my own work.
In this meaningless world one could act "as if" and make the world one wanted to see.
(Paul had been a Marine and had the absurd experience of leading a landing craft boat full of men, to their deaths, himself escaping on the shores of Guadalcanal. When he came back he was never going to let anyone put him into that position again and he fought everyday to some realization of this desperate purpose.)
So I myself saw the Studio School, mainly involved in this existential exercise deriving greatly from the school of Paris and Giacometti. As it turns out it is a great teaching tool and students get their hands dirty and draw over and over. They never quite getting a final product, besides what has now become known admiringly as a Studio School drawing.
Paul loved this energy but thought it to no further use it had mainly been subsumed into Greenbergian ideas Paul was against. Greenberg is huge but more about that later.
What I realized here was that Paul was more about making a pictorial surface, and I think it mainly about Goya and his what I am calling Pictorialism. Paul after figuring out in his academic like exercise of drawing head to toe, was able then to draw largely from his Imagination, a composition of figures which he adjusted in the Romantic way, till he drew final Classic lines, which stood for exactly what he finally-- meant.
The Studio School artist in this scenario, made Romantic surfaces of failed lines finally creating a aesthetic surface of the resultant lines which might stand as a, well never ending exercise. It was all very artificial and a formal reality. It still figures in my work as a phase-- but I see as it only a part to a more complex reality.
Paul departed here, though his surface was many times indistinguishable from this NY School formal surface. He struggled finally more and more to the outer world of the reality in Long Island which was so strong as a new future he personally saw in art.
His de Kooning paint in service to his, figures in the grass, was tempered into shapes which became clearer in his drawing as his work progressed into the 1970's and 80's. The difficult contents he tackled made his paint still romantic and searching for the right idealistic forms, but he did finally find a right form, which he often then repeated more classically onto a new canvas.
Here I see this cycle in the making of his paintings which I also see extended to his whole career.
When Graham Nickson took over at the school and led it in its present direction. I think Paul saw a threat. He was unsure of this sucessful and younger English man, bringing these similar ideas of a possible figuration from England. He was involved in the almost regional Figurative Alliance and Artist Choice Museum, so the energy went more there. That's another chapter.
The interesting thing here for me is that the Studio school is all Cezanne, and formal surface. Even though Graham's own painting is very sympathetic to Georges.
Georges after the early figures never looks at Cezanne, though maybe later, the stillifes of the final phase, he looks back to him again. Also another chapter.
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