Reply to Andrew WErby

[zi...@interport.net]

DearAndrew,

Yes I wanted you and everyone to talkaboutwhat they care about. And I
think our interchange was worthwhile. But I would not have commented
on something negatively unless I had been chalklenged to do so.

I still believe that as someonewho does not love Schiele's work, Iam
at a distinct diadvantage in relation to someone who does. For one
thing, since I am not a ciritc I won;t look at it so closely, for
another,therefore I won't have insights.

There are just two things which came up in our discussion which I want
to thrash out a little.

One is that the human figure is a common subject and that Schiele by
using it was doing an ordinary thing. The human figure is not the
subject it is his partiular kind of human figure. Those are the
beatniks or hipsters or bohemians of his day. Not seen clothed -as in
most of Toulouse Lautrec, out in public, but seen nude on beds,
frolicing in a despairing and abanodned way. Often incouples of
various genders. Always with the persona of the artist present. Very
present sexually, too. Those paintings are not quite like any one
else's in exactly that subject matter intereaction. The linear,
vegetational line of art nouveau is all over the place and flat as a
board, although referring to forms in space.

That is the other thing I want to take up"I thought all you New York
Schook guys like flatness." [aprroximate]

It was Greenberg who liked flatness, not the artists. It was
Greenbergs post hoc document explaining whyt he made his picks which
canonized that piece of trash. Hofmann, deKooning, Kline, Motherwell,
Guston, Russell, and what I call the whole French wing of AE believed
in pictorial space as it is obtained by modernist means. Do you think
Matisse is flat? I once had that argument [in 1953] in Indianapolis at
the Herron art institute standing in front of a Matisse. The girl
thought he was flat! Well, only if you don;t know how to read a
painting!

The other branch of Ae included people who knew how to make a
pictorial space but were interested in other things. Ad Reinhardt
taken oiver his whole career rather than in the last few years,was a
consummate artist aware of space, but not interested in it after about
1945. Bradley Walker tomlin spent at least ten years as a romantic
cubist before his first, wonderful AE painting. That painting, by the
way is spatial in modernist terms. After that painting and after 1945,
both of them were not interested in modernist space nor in flatness
per se, but in ideas they were following. The same could be said about
Newman. He actually painted clous into one of his big ones. Ithought
it must be an illusion or ashine, but they were there! But he and
Still and Rothko are not traditional constructional painters. Still
does make space when you look at them in theflesh and walk around a
little. Rothko floats into the room-not traditional but not flat.

So all the flatness stuff was in Greenberg and it does show up in
thepop artists. There are several generations here in New York who
rejected opo out of hand. How can you have a successful satiric style
when pictorial construction is at its lowest ebb in generations? What
is need is to build art back up again, not to play in the ruins.

That is not a negative position, but a positive one. And it is not
said as a aprt of a rejection of modernism, but acceptant of
modernism.

I have felt for many years that AE rather than being the flower of
modernism, is the tail, wagging the dog.

I go back to the period from 1880 through about 1948 [the death of
Klee and Torres Garcia and the later more ordinary works of Miro are
the cut off -for most of my modernist inspirations.

AE is in my blood anyhow, and I do my best to get out of it, not into
it. I grew up in it, in the club and with all of them around. I knew
them all and studied with half of them. But the best studying anyone
ever does is in their own studios, or in the museums looking at what
you choose to see. Maybe a byzantine belt buckle means more to you
than the most famous living artist. For yourself, you may just be
right.

The best new [to me] painting I have seen in some months is a Zurbaran
still-life at Stair-Santy-Matheson across the street and down the
block from the Met. He has a great Goya and two great Van der Hamens,
and a weird Sanchez-Cotan.

I knew all of those Reinhardts, they were old friends. The Mondrians
were wonderful, but I don't think there was one I hadn't seen before.

I did see a painting by Daivd Smith [painting, yes painting] which
seemed to me quite wonderful [very late Braque]. Also an Alice
Trumbull-Mason abstraction [also a print maker] and a Max Weber [all
fairly small]. There is a small Boinnard show with a couple a beauties
in it. Upstairs at SalanderO'Reilly is a great sculptor- Elie
Nadelman. These are his classically inspired works. The early ones are
dull, after about 1907 he is a genius and those things predominate.
Wonderful horse influenced by archaic Greek horses, and a beuatiful
relief with horses.

How aboutthis. Most three dimensional sculpture by living artists I
see is flat. Because the artist doesn;t know how to make us believe in
the form. Nadelman does in spades. So does Giovanni Pisano. It is all
there in the Michelangelo bound slaves. I can think of only two or
three living sculptors who do it consistently.

The others, they don't live in New York

I will get around a little next Saturday.

Sincerely,
Gabriel

Gabriel