1936 painted in 1960

1958-60, oil and charcoal on canvas. Although he was only 21 when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Robert Motherwell was deeply affected by the conflict, and would make over 200 works on the subject. I found this one at MoMA and took the photo with my iPhone (forgive the poor quality). A monumental canvas, stark imagery, an apparently symbolic use of color (smoldering blackness...of death?... against vital whiteness...of life?...) convey passionate feelings. And we know which side Motherwell was on: the side of the Republic, a lost cause. MoMA acquired this canvas in 1998.

Alex Katz at Bowdoin

This untitled oil painting is Alex Katz in 1960 - rendering a landscape in Skowhegan, Maine. The canvas is in the permanent collection of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. As I write this, it's on exhibit at the college through 2010, part of a show called "Grounded: Two Centuries of American Landscape Painting."

In 2006 there was a show of Katz' 1960s paintings at PaceWildenstein. (Here's a review of that.)

Here are his one-man shows of the era:


Compare the 1960 landscape with this one--below--of 1972:


(The 1972 piece is a silkscreen, called "Sunset: Lake Wesserunsett IV.")

nude descending toward formalism

We've seen poet X. J. Kennedy around (at Breadloaf). In '60 he published a satire of modernism, a poem titled "Nude Descending a Staircase" after--of course--the 1912 Marcel Duchamp painting that by '60 had become iconic of the cubist and futurist side of the revolution in art. The Duchamp painting, shown at the 1913 Armory Show, depicted the motion of a nude woman by presenting her as successive superimposed images, similar to stroboscopic motion photography. In 1913 this was scandalous.

How do we know X. J. Kennedy's poem of 1960 satirizes the Duchamp? Well, would a sincere homage be given in perfectly rhymed ABCB tetrameter quatrains? (Tetrameter with internal rhyme too: "Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh, / A gold of lemon, root and rind") Duchamp's was a form-busting breakthrough, characterized by energy. Kennedy in '60 counters with lines of stasis about the woman's movement: "One-woman waterfall, she wears / Her slow descent like a long cape / And pausing, on the final stair / Collects her motions into shape." In other words, the poem has found her at a certain moment of descent. She collects motions into shape.

There's a condescending pun here: For Kennedy the nude Duchampian woman has "nothing on"... that is to say, nothing on her mind. Empty-headed, stupid or, at best: she is the opposite of the creator of her movement--the object of the modernist subject. And to be sure she's an object, the poet of '60 looks up at her, standing beneath the banister, watching from below as her thighs thresh.

The multiplicity of places from which to observe (all at once - famously, the revolution Duchamp augured here) has become a single p.o.v., and satirically gendered ("we" are gaping at the body, nude upskirt). If Kennedy meant to praise kinetic modernism, then he created a major formal irony in doing so, and completely undoes the aesthetic of the "one-woman waterfall" he sets in stiff rhyming lines.

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to her parts go by.

One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

2001's version of 1960's version of the '50s

Pop surrealism, a So-Cal quasi-underground movement of the current decade, looks back to the late 50s and early 60s - obsessing visually over the cathode characters of that moment. Larry Reid, writing about this art, wonders why the interest in the 1960 moment today, and offers an idea of parallels. Both eras of prosperity in which conservatives extol nebulous family values while demonizing the influence of popular culture. Both eras stand at the end of the dominance of "inaccessible conceptual art and the opaque dialogue that accompanied it." I'm not sure I see these parallels, nor do I see the diminution of conceptual art now (or then). But since the reasons for interest in the 1960 moment now are obviously relevant to this project - this one here - I suppose I have to reckon seriously with such accounts of 2001's version of 1960.

I've written a longer entry on pop surrealism here. Above at right is Tim Biskup's "The Channeler."

modernism in Pittsburgh

G. David Thompson, a Pittsburgh millionaire, 61 years old in 1960, had been collecting modern art for twenty-five years by then. Klees and Giacomettis were all around the house. He owned Leger's Composition with Three Sisters. And a Juan Gris still-life: "A friend of mine owned this," he said of the Gris. "He was dying to buy a Braque but didn't have the ready cash so I bought this to help him out. No great favor--I liked the painting." At least one Mondrian. And so on.

In '59 he offered the entire collection to the city of Pittsburgh, and he threw in the house too - which the city, he said, could use as a ready-made museum.

Pittsburgh said no. Not interested. Thanks, but no thanks.

Angry and lovin' a deal, Thompson promptly sold 97 - that's 97, yes - of his Klees to a dealer for more than $1 million, and then began to buy little-known moderns. After selling the Klees, he said: "I want to enjoy once more the pleasure of bare walls waiting for new pictures."

(In '61 the Guggenheim put up a show called "One Hundred Paintings from the G. David Thompson Collection." It's easy, especially now, to gloat about the wisdom of the Guggenheim people or of the New York museum-going public: they, after all, wanted what Thompson was doing. This entry isn't meant to speak one way or the other to that. Rather, I'm thinking about what happens when a philanthropic gesture is undervalued or misunderstood. What does the philanthropist do in response? After all, he or she is typically - let's admit it - someone who is used to getting his or her way. Is pique the right reaction? Was Thompson perhaps in the wrong place? Or is it apt for him to stick it out, hoping for a better day?)

Above: Leger's "The Compass" (1926). Thompson bought this Leger from Buchholz Gallery in New York in 1953. He owned it for the rest of his life. It was sold by Parke-Bernet in '66 after Thompson's death in '65. It is now at the Art Institute of Chicago.

sources: Life May 16, 1960, with a great spread of photos from the collection; an article in Time, Jan 13, 1961.

too much like Lichtenstein

Summer of '60, breakthrough time for Andy Warhol. One night the filmmaker Emile De Antonio went over to Andy's studio and they had some drinks and Warhol began showing him two large paintings, side to side, on the wall - showing them to his friend more seriously than usual. Two pictures of Coke bottles about six feet tall. One was a "pristine" black-and-white Coke bottle. The other "had a lot of abstract expressionist marks on it." De Antonio described for Andy his preference for the "absolutely beautiful and naked" b&w canvas and told him to destroy the other.

Warhol at this point had a strong interest in American folk art and wanted to paint 20th-century folk objects like Coke bottles just the way they looked. Yet he worried that people would reject the work as that of a commercial artist. It was at this time that he began to overcome that fear.

Around '60 he began also to alter the way he spoke, now mumbling monosyllabic replies to questions. And he walked with a limp-wristed dancer's walk, what a biographer calls "a bizarre takeoff of Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe."

Ivan Karp, who was an assistant to Leo Castelli, began coming by and taking an interest in what Warhol was doing. Karp wore dark Kennedy-style suits, sunglasses, smoked cigars and called everyone "baby." He spent '60 in and out of W's studio. It wasn't until January '61 that Karp finally persuaded Castelli to come to Warhol's house. The first visit: Castelli comes to the door and Andy opens the door wearing one of his 18th-century masks.

Castelli didn't bite quite yet, though. Karp recalls: "Leo said, if we were interested in Roy [Lichtenstein], could we really be legitimately interested in Warhol?" Andy came to Leo's office a few days later and said, "You're mistaken. What I'm doing will be very different from what anybody else is doing. I really belong in your gallery." Leo said no again and Andy cried out: "Well, where should I go?" and also: "You will take me. I'll be back."

Leonard Kessler also ran into Warhol in 1960. Warhol was coming out of an art-supply store carrying paint and canvas. "Andy! What are you doing?" Without skipping a beat, Warhol said, "I'm starting pop art."

Kessler asked why. "Becauase I hate abstract expressionism. I hate it!"

A few weeks later Ted Carey praised a Rauschenberg collage at MoMA and Andy's rejoinder was: "That's nothing. That's a piece of shit!"

The term "pop art" had been around since 1958, but everyone seems to agree that Warhol began pop art for real in 1960. To do it he applied what he had learned from television and advertising. Subliminal message: sexuality without gratification. Content: dollar sign, gun, supersweet drink, fizz, etc. Do what artists are supposed to not want to do: make ads.

1960 was the year he invented pop art but it's also (perhaps not coincidentally) a time when he spent perhaps half the year having a nervous breakdown. At least that's what he called it.

Victor Bokris, in his bibliographical biography, presents this chapter title: "The Birth of Andy Warhol, 1969-61." Pop art, Bokris writes, came with it an "up attitude" and was a "tough celebration" of American culture, and he contends that its products record the early 1960s "more accurately than movies and television."

Among the sources here: Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 1989.

goodbye finally to Apollinaire

The story goes that when Manet was by the Seine near Argenteuil one day, he noticed some ladies bathing and said: "It seems I must do a nude. All right, I'll do one for them...in the transparent air, with people like those we can see over there. They'll slay me for it but let them say what they like." The result was The Picnic or Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe) of 1862-1863.

Between 1959 and 1961 Pablo Picasso did a series of sketches and paintings based on this alluring painting by Manet, and one other (Le Viex Musicien). Despite the originary tale of the painting retold above, Manet's composition of this landscape with figures had already been borrowed from Giorgione's painting (in the Louvre), La Fete champetre.

Pastoral landscape is rare for Picasso. We don't have much evidence to explain this burst of affection for Manet, nor for this obsession, which struck him at around 80 years of age, for these figures. We do know Picasso had always admired Manet, and he had even parodied Manet in his Olympia way back in 1901.

Here are three of Picasso's versions of the scene (the second I know to have been painted in '60; the third is from '61):



Much of the 1959-61 period he spent at Vauvenargues--as he was in February 1960 when he worked on this series with an energy that surprised even him. In these sketches, some of which are very large (51 x 76 inches), Manet comes and goes. In '62 an exhibit of this series was mounted in Paris, and the catalogue--stunning--is this: Peintures Vavenargues, 1959-61, Galerie Leiris, Paris.

At this time there were actually five major exhibitions. One was a show of vigor and gaiety, "Forty-five engravings on linoleum," the result of experiments and discoveries that Picasso had made in the simple process of lino-cuts.

In the fall of '60 there was a show of drawings made in the previous two years. The main themes were the "gallant picadors, favorites of the great ladies," the latter included flemenco dancers, witchy peasant women in towering mantillas, wearing flying whirling skirts, etc. Biographers talk of a new nostalgia for Spain emerging in him.

The big event at this time was a huge show honoring Picasso in London, also in '60. This was to date the largest Picasso exhibit ever. The Tate Gallery gave up more space for it than it had. Some 280 paintings by a single artist, including early pieces such as Demoiselles d'Avignon and ten canvases dating from 1900 to 1909 lent by the Russian Government. Almost half a million people visited the show in London, with the press now acclaiming Picasso unanimously as the great genis and even the Queen herself, during a private visit to the show, said Picasso was the greatest artist of the century. Picasso himself refused to go: "Why should I go? I know them all, those paintings, I did them myself." Above: the Picasso show at the Tate, 1960.

And then there was the monument for Apollinaire, who had died of the Spanish flu way back in 1918. The poet's friends and the French authorities had been haggling about this for years and years (the original commission dates to the 1920s). (Perhaps the continuing official ban on A's well-known erotic novel, The Eleven Thousand Rods [Les Onze Mille Verges], which was not lifted in France until 1970, had something to do with the delay?) The question for friends and officials both to answer was: What was the most appropriate monument to Apollinaire's memory and where should it go? Finally it was decided to accept Picasso's offer of the large bronze head of a girl, inspired by Dora Maar in 1941. Permits and formalities were complete in 1959, and with due ceremony and a great deal of emotion, the poet's old friends, Andre Salmon, Jean Cocteau, and others, including Picasso himself--and A's widow--the sculpture was unveiled at the corner of the churchyard of St. Germain de Pres on one of the shortest streets in Paris, which had been named "rue Guillaume Apollinaire." (See the map below.) One Picasso biographer puts it: "At last Picasso's tribute to the most eloquent and revolutionary friend of his youth stood modestly shaded by chestnut trees, backed by the walls of the old monastery and surrounded by children at play."*


* Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, 440-41.
The lines quoted above are from the poem "Zone," translated by Donald Revell.

art without need of literary occasion

Stuart Preston, art critic.

This entry wanders a bit, first dealing with a show featuring geometric and non-representational paintings, but then moves to the state of surrealism in the U.S. in 1960. Before I wander, let's begin with a deceptively simple summary statement about surrealism written for Poetry in 1960 by the long-time Bennington College teacher and critic of French modern lit, Wallace Fowlie:

Poetry is the power to create, to confer a new meaning on an object... The surrealist contribution to the theory of poetics ranks high today among the movement's major contributions. The poet, they say, borrows nothing that is foreign or unfamiliar to himself. He takes back what was his to begin with--those things, precisely, in which he recognizes himself... They spoke constantly of the state of poetry as something that is lived and thought of as an interrogation, as quasi-discovery.

Okay, let's go elsewhere first....to the Galerie Chalette, where in the spring there was a compehensive exhibition entitled "Construction and Geometry in Painting--from Malevitch to 'Tomorrow.'" In other words, a show of non-objective paintings. A typical canvas was Victor Vasarely's "Citra" (1955-59): the canvas is divided in half, top background dark, bottom light. Shapes (squares, diamonds, bold polygons of all kinds) are arranged together in color-relief against the background, right triangle poking out at exactly 12, 3, 6 and 9 o'clock, like a spiny, squat top.

Preston* noted that these works "sacrifice too many human impulses in achieving their ends and can only be considered completely satisfactory works or art in a limited sense." The paintings here, he said, "exist[...] on their own without need of literary or emotional occasions."

Since I'm interested these days in the situation and reputation of surrealism in 1960, I am intrigued by the way Preston manages the transition between sections of his Times review - moving from one exhibit to the next. Here he's moving from the non-objective show to Kurt Seligman's recent paintings which were then showing at Fine Arts Associates. No need of a transition, of course; readers used to the "what's going on at the galleries" round-up can shift gears quickly. But Preston writes this:

The 'pure' basis of geometrical art is absolutely repudiated in surrealism's pact with the unconscious....

The main difference between Vasarely's inhuman non-literariness and Seligman's "dense thickets of myth and fantasy" is that the former doesn't partake of mystery in the least and the latter was...well here's Preston's awkward term that he got passed NYT's editors..."one of modern art's foremost mystifactors."

The key for Preston is the imagination. Non-objective art doesn't have it, surrealism does.

Surrealism in the U.S. seems to have had three big moments in 1960: (1) Wallace Fowlie's essay (quoted at the outset of this entry), "Surrealism in 1960: A Backward Glance," published in Poetry in March issue; (2) the publication of Anna Balakian's important book, Surrealism: The road to the Absolute (Noonday--reviewed variously in April); and (3) a show at D'Arcy Galleries featuring 58 surrealist painters and sculptors put together by Marcel Duchamp and Maurice Bonnefoy (owner of the gallery) at the end of November. (I'm focused on American happenings here, so I won't count a fourth big surrealist moment that year. Back in January, in Paris, crowds flocked to the Eighth International Exposition of Surrealism. The theme that year was eroticism. Apparently, though, gallery-goers were not sufficiently shocked. "For the truth is," one critic wrote, "surrealism's erotic symbols and visual jokes [e.g. the fur-lined teacup at New York's Museum of Modern Art show in 1936] have ceased to shock or enrage the bourgeois."***)

Later entries here will surely return to the three above-mentioned American surrealist moments, but let me add a word here about the Duchamp show. When reviewers showed up at the gallery to find out about the show in advance of the opening, they found Duchamp waiting for the delivery of three live chickens, standing outside 1091 Madison Avenue. The fowl were to participate in the show. (They were set off in a corner near a sign that read "Coin Sale.") A pair of half-burned logs were set neatly on andirons against a wall in which they was no fireplace.

The premiere was held on Saturday night, November 28. The opening was a benefit for the Damon Runyon Fund for Cancer Research.

The 58 pieces Duchamp and Bonnefoy chose were meant to be more representative of the surrealist movement "from 1913 to today." In one gallery five electric clocks hung from the ceiling. There was also "an ancient typewriter" and an old time clock with which guests at the premiere punched their invitations upon entering. There was a length of garden hose, to be spread around "as a good-natured hazard." A toy electric train circled a track set up in one of the gallery's Madison Avenue windows, pulling cards marked with the names of the surrealists in the show.

My favorite part of the exhibit: From concealed speakers set up around the galleries, came a recording...of a child's piano practice, mistakes and all.**

Another report**** says that the show was organized by Andre Breton, who of course wrote the first surrealist manifesto in 1924 and still by then presided over surrealism's followers in Paris.

Recent painters whom we don't normally call surrealist were included in the show: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg. The New Yorker***** critic said somewhat oddly of Rauschenberg: "surely a Dadaist, if I ever saw one."

Generally critics in 1960 either gloated over the fact that surrealism no longer shocked the middle classes or tsk-tsk'ed that "what once seemed sick now seems strangely sane."

What interests me about the state of surrealism in 1960 is the conclusion drawn with such certainty by the New Yorker critic: "[I]t might be said that instead of Surrealism's taking over America, America took over the Surrealists."

* "Questions of Meaning," NYT, Apr. 10, 1960, p. X13. ** NYT, Nov. 28, 1960, p. 36. *** Newsweek, Jan. 18, 1960, pp. 87-88. **** Time, Dec. 12, 1960, p. 81. ***** New Yorker, Dec. 10, 1960, p. 200.