Narrative Imagism and the Figurative Tradition in Northern California
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College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Thu, 3 Jan 2013 08:06:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Narrative Imagismand the FigurativeTradition in Northern CaliforniaPainting By Whitney Chadwick he revoltof the Bay Area figurative satire, morality plays, puns, and personal important development in Bay Area T painters against the canons of mythology combine with flamboyantand painting of the 1960s. In New York, Abstract Expressionism in the early eccentric personalstyles to form a visual Johns, Stella, and Warhol cooled the 1950s confirmed earlier tendencies in runningcommentary on the worldand the rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism into northern California art and made possi- history of art. Their sources range from the disengagement of Pop and Minimal. ble an art less preoccupied with mod- autobiography and Surrealism's love of In San Francisco, however, painters ernist values than its New York and Los bizarre and evocative juxtaposition to tended to heat it up. Throughout the Angeles counterparts. The significance social and culturaltaboos. Their paintings decade concerns about "abstract" and of this heritage for succeeding genera- exhibit a maverick sensibility, downplay "figurative" disappeared in favor of tions of artists, its endorsement of an obvious skill, and break the "rules" of "personalized" art. A refusal to draw anti-aesthetic stance initiated by Sur- representationin ways often influencedby strict lines between art and life encour- realism's arrival in the area in the late the directness of naive art and popular aged the use of autobiographicalmateri- 1930s, and its persistence and manipula- illustration. al. The choice of figuration, "dumb" tion by younger painters have been less The development of a narrative syn- subjects (i.e., lowbrow and derived not fully documented. tax allowed these painters to distance from Pop but from a consciously articu- Some critics have argued that by the themselves from the Abstract Expres- lated anti-intellectualism), and the kind early 1960s the figurative renaissance in sionist legacy that they found still evi- of risky gestures for which Diebenkorn painting was over. The energy and vig- dent in the scale, anonymous figures, had long served as a model became a orous experiments with form that had and rhetoric of the Bay Area figuratives, means of denying the high-art content of characterized the first generation of fig- many of whom were their teachers. At Abstract Expressionism. urative painters had passed into the the same time, they chose to retain the Art influences among contemporaries hands of a group of sculptors and cera- qualities of assertive opposition to the are often difficult to trace. In the Bay mists whose brash and eccentric expres- mainstream that had characterized Ab- Area, sensibilities overlap, groups form sionism soon flowered into Funk.' This stract Expressionismon the West Coast. and reform, influences circle among art- reading, however, fails to take into For many young painters, the struggle ists. The personal and expressionist sen- account the consistency of a tradition for a personalized imagery and a figura- sibility that marked much of the art of and attitude, as opposed to a style, that tion that violated accepted canons of the area during the 1960s made few, if during the 1960s produced figurative representation took place in art school. any, distinctions among painting, sculp- painters as diverse as Robert Bechtle But the consistency of the tradition that ture, ceramics, and performance-con- and William T. Wiley. By the early sanctioned experimentation in all me- ceptual art. It produced a group of art- 1970s, drawing new life from the legacy diums in the Bay Area produced a kind ists of international stature like Robert of Surrealism and from the arrival of of painting that, though superficially Arneson, Joan Brown, Roy de Forest, Chicago's Hairy Who in northern Cali- similar to that of Chicago's Hairy Who Jess, and William T. Wiley whose work fornia, the same tradition had generated and Monster Roster to which it has and teaching directly influenced a a group of narrative imagist painters often been compared, has a look all its younger generation of narrative artists. who use the figure in a way that is both a own: less obsessive about sex, aggres- rejection and an assimilation of the pre- sion, physical and psychological pain; he art community in northern Cali- dominant forms of Bay Area figurative more concerned with personal history fornia is centered in art schools and painting of the 1950s and 1960s. and cultural attitudes. university art departments rather than For more than a decade, James Albert- If the representational violations of in commercial galleries. During the son, Olive Ayhens, Robert Colescott, this work place it in opposition to domi- 1960s the San Francisco Art Institute Irene Dogmatic, Judith Linhares, Donna nant figurative modes, its use, and (formerly the California School of Fine Mossholder, Ann Shapiro, M. Louise subsequent transformation of autobio- Arts), the California College of Arts Stanley, Elaine Wander,and others2have graphical material into narrative syn- and Crafts in Oakland (CCAC), and the producedworks in which social comment, tax, place it squarely in line with an University of California at Davis pro- Winter 1985 309 This content downloaded on Thu, 3 Jan 2013 08:06:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions vided three important contexts for the exploration of new kinds of narrative and subjective figuration. Abstract Expressionism and Bay Area figurative painting have been closely identified with the Art Institute since the 1950s. But it was the arrival of European Surrealism in 1937 that had initiated the strong antiformalist stance taken by many artists associated with the school. Proto-Surrealism may have come to northern California as early as 1931 with an exhibition of the work of Giorgio de Chirico at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Seven of the paint- ings were loans from San Francisco pri- vate collections, and the word "Surreal- ist" may have first found its way into print in northern California when the San Francisco Examiner included in an article on local exhibitions the title of a work called Surrealistic House. Exhibi- tions by Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst in Los Angeles in 1935 and 1937 and Ernst and Mir6 at the Paul Elder Gallery and the East-West Gallery in San Francisco in 1934 officially announced the arrival Fig. 1 William T. Wiley, Slightly Hysterical Perspective, 1979, acrylic and of European Surrealism in California. charcoal on canvas, 89 x 102". Allan Frumkin Gallery. Tanguy's exhibition at the San Fran- cisco Museum of Modern Art in Jan- settle in the area bringing with him a ists connected with the Art Institute uary 1936 was probably that museum's large collection of Surrealist works. Solo began to use words as images. The writ- first Surrealist exhibition, but it was exhibitions of the work of Onslow-Ford, ing on Martin's Remember: It's Only The Museum of Modern Art's Fantastic Wolfgang Paalen, and Lee Mullican in Art, a watercolor and collage of 1962, Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition, the late 1940s were followed by a group anticipates the loose discursive script so which opened in New York in December exhibition of Paalen's Dynaton group in characteristic of Wiley's work a few 1936 and subsequently traveled to San 1951. years later (Fig. 1). A 1970 exhibition Francisco, that introduced local au- The freedom of expression promoted at the University of California's Barrow diences to a range of European and by the Surrealist technique of automat- Lane Art Gallery, Human Concern/Per- American work based on automatism, ism, the choice of figuration as the lan- sonal Torment, organized by Robert dreams, and other radical disruptions of guage of dream and unconscious, and Doty of the Whitney Museum gave rec- reality. Under the leadership of Grace the powerful imagery generated from ognition to the wide range of artists McCann Morely, who had become the study of myth and psychology drew working in this manner. Although not director two years earlier, the San Fran- many Bay Area artists towards an irrev- restricted to California artists, the exhi- cisco Museum of Modern Art joined the erent and idiosyncratic art that owed bition included work by Arneson, Bruce de Young Museum and the California much to Surrealism even as it rejected Connor, R. Crumb, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Palace of the Legion of Honor in spon- the European movement's ideological Nutt, Harold Paris, Clayton Pinkerton, soring avant-garde exhibitions in San basis and literary rhetoric.3 Among Joseph Raffaele, Peter Saul, Norman Francisco. them were Clay Spohn, Charles How- Stiegelmeyer, Ken Waterstreet, Wiley, A joint exhibition of the work of Kay ard, and Dorr Bothwell, all of whom and S. Clay Wilson. Sage and Yves Tanguy in 1941 was were on the faculty at the San Francisco followed by 31 Women, an exhibition Art Institute. T he most energeticmingling of Chi- organized for Peggy Guggenheim's Art By the early 1960s, Assemblage, cago art with local traditions took of This Century gallery in New York.