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Jack Youngerman ^^^^H 1 -Hhb \S JACK YOUNGERMAN ^^^^H 1 -HHB ' tr.vU 1 ,f ', . "*V ,1k .Mi ..\A \ .' J , I \i Y*j", 1 £*&•£ >\"\>- I i.':v ' r t ..'Kiaf/.' IB— i»J. A' tiro KtrfX raw; Hi UKi'j) HMotth ; ' ;v. ;' ''': ! '. :'' :' I''.:''','.'".' IHSiiliPi! r-- '".''..:.'' mm BR •.'••. .<'' JACK YOUNGERMAN New York, 1982 JACRYOUNGERMAN by Diane Waldman This exhibition is supported by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Waldman, Diane. Jack Youngerman. Catalog of the exhibition held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Bibliography: p. 100 - Exhibitions. 1 . Youngerman, Jack, 1926- R. I. Youngerman, Jack 1926- . II. Solomon Guggenheim Museum. III. Title. N6537.Y68A4 1986 709'.2'4 85-30397 ISBN 0-89207-055-2 Published by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1986 © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1986 Cover: Swirl II. 1981 (cat. no. 33) Courtesy Washburn Gallery, Inc., New York Coenties Slip studio, 1959 n First Fulton Street studio, ca. 1965 Chase Manhattan Bank, N.A. Dolores and Merrill Gordon, Florida Walter and Dawn Clark Netsch Frank Stella, New York Jack Youngerman Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo The Art Institute of Chicago Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh The Museum of Modern Art, New York Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts Washburn Gallery, Inc., New York LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION My sincere thanks are extended to the New York State Council on the Arts for its generous support of this exhibition. I also wish to ac- knowledge the support of the lenders, who, in graciously parting with their works, have significantly contributed to the project's success. My appreciation is expressed to Joan Washburn, Washburn Gallery, Inc., New York. Gratitude is due as well to the following indi- viduals whose contributions to our research efforts were invaluable: William P. Rayner, President, and Marilyn Cohen, Curator, Betty Par- sons Foundation; Arnold Glimcher and Susan Ryan, The Pace Gallery, New York; Judy Throm, Associate Curator, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Jock Truman; and Jack Tilton. On behalf of Jack Youngerman, special acknowledgement is made to Christopher Janney for his technical assistance with the sculpture. The efforts of the Guggenheim Museum staff are greatly valued, and I would like to single out those who have been most centrally involved with the exhibition and catalogue. My thanks are extended therefore to Lisa Dennison, Assistant Curator, who has skillfully coor- dinated all aspects of the show; Carol Fuerstein, Editor, for intelli- gently editing the catalogue; Diana Murphy, Editorial Coordinator; David M. Heald, Photographer; Stephanie Stitt, Assistant Registrar; Lisa Yokana, Curatorial Assistant; and Sophie R. Hager, Curatorial Fellow. Finally, my most sincere appreciation is expressed to Jack Youngerman: working with the artist has been an enlightening and rewarding experience. D.W ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First Fulton Street studio, New York, ca. 1965 10 New York, 1985 When Jack Youngerman returned to the United States in 1956, he faced an art world very different from the one he knew as a young painter in Paris. There, the most compelling postwar art was, as he observed, a "soft kind of abstract impressionism" practiced by painters such as Jean Bazaine or, more important, a revivified geometric abstraction exemplified by the work of Auguste Herbin, Max Bill, Richard Lohse and other participants in the Salon des Realties Nouvelles. Youngerman also noted that "Neither was a direction for me. But that was what 1 found to relate to. So I ended up using hard- edge or Constructivist elements in a lyrical way in those early Paris paintings." 1 Youngerman's early efforts, like those of Ellsworth Kelly, with whom he became friendly in 1948 when both attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts on the G.I. Bill, represent a young artist's assimilation of the then predominant Parisian modes of painting. Although few works remain from that period, extant examples (see fig. 1) already reveal Youngerman's predilection for frontality, flatness and simplicity - seen in bold and forthright imagery and uncomplicated color sequences - and for the embellishment of a relatively static, highly structured rectilinear composition with an occasional fanciful curve, irregular edge, asymmetrical thrust (see fig. 2). The initial experience of Paris was a heady one, for it brought Youngerman into his first real contact with art. During his residence there he encountered artists of his own generation, such as Cesar and Eduardo Paolozzi (like Kelly and himself, students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts), and such venerable masters as Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp whose pioneering use of organic form offered a viable alter- native to geometric abstraction. When Youngerman began painting in Paris, he was not aware of artistic developments in the States. As he said, "I went straight from Kentucky to Paris by way of the Navy, be- 2 cause in 1947 all the art schools in New York were full." Because Youngerman had no artistic education prior to his training during and after the war, he was formed by his studies in Paris, his exposure to School of Paris painting and his travels to Italy, Spain, Greece, The Netherlands and Belgium. Fundamental to his development as well were travels in the Middle East in the mid-fifties: he visited and worked in Beirut, where his father-in-law Henri Seyrig was Director of the Institut Frangais d'Archeologie (Youngerman had married the actress Delphine Seyrig in 1950), and journeyed to Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Turkey. A fascination with the East continues to inform his art to JACK YOUNGERMAN 11 by Diane Waldman fig. 1. Jack Youngerman, Untitled, 1951. Oil on plywood, 29'/2x39'/2". Collection of the artist fig. 2. Jack Youngerman, Silver/Blue, 1951. Oil on canvas, 40x60". Collection of the artist 12 fig. 3. Youngerman's Paris this day. Seyrig, a highly cultivated intellectual and connoisseur who studio, 1956 later became Director of the Musees de France, helped to open up a new world of history, art, literature and philosophy for the young artist. Although he worked in what may be characterized as a highly for- malized geometric abstract style during his Paris period, Youngerman was also searching for other alternatives at this time. He frequented the Salon de Mai shows to see the most current Paris painting and sought out nineteenth-century Japanese woodcuts, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's posters, the woodcuts of Arp and Vasily Randinsky and Henri Matisse's ink drawings. Arp's woodcuts and ink drawings as well as Randinsky's abstract woodcuts were among the "...things that unlocked the door..." for Youngerman as "Shapes existing for themselves." 3 While Younger- man indicated an early appreciation of Arp, he did not fully explore the potential of Arp's spare biomorphic forms until he began to evolve his single image paintings in the late 1950s (see Black-Orange-Red Orange, 1965, cat. no. 19). Matisse, on the other hand, offered Youngerman more immediate and direct inspiration. The silhouetted forms and expressive shapes of Matisse's drawings were particularly important for him: they dictated his own early attempts to freely render organic forms with emphatic positive/negative, figure/ground relationships (see fig. 3). 13 fig. 4. Henri Matisse, Dahlias, grenades et palmiers, 1947. Brush and India ink on paper, 30x22'/4" Collection Musee Nationale d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris Matisse revealed to him the potentialities of shape, the possibilities of manipulating its contours and approaching it as flat plane or as volume. Furthermore, the simultaneous fullness and economy of Matisse's ink drawings, such as his depiction of pomegranates (fig. 4) in which he captured the lusciousness of the exotic fruit with highly simplified shapes and density of medium, attracted the younger artist. As Younger- man has explained: A black ink drawing by Matisse has a kind of starkness of a Mondrian. It is all in contrast. And that appealed to me very much. The clarity of it, the starkness of it, and the voluptuousness of it. This got me away from constructivist work. Those Matisse drawings lead almost immediately to a certain number of things that I started doing 4 using what you could call organic shapes. Which for me is the basis of my work. He saw in these drawings, and in the woodcuts of Arp and Kandinsky, far greater freedom and spontaneity than in the then much acclaimed new French painting. At Betty Parsons's urging, Youngerman decided to return to the States in 1956. During his first years in Paris he had felt liberated and open to the experience of living and working abroad. Now, however, he was estranged from the insular French art world (he could not relate to Tachisme, then the rage in Paris) and no longer relished the role of 14 fig. 5. Jack Youngerman, November 1956, 1956. Oil on canvas, 64x38". Collection of the artist expatriate. Upon his arrival in New York, Youngerman settled with his wife and infant son Duncan at Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan; there his neighbors and friends included Kelly as well as Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, Fred Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg and Barnett Newman. He was instantly propelled from the obscurity and isolation he had known in Paris into a highly-charged milieu of painters who were forging new directions for American art. Nothing he had encountered in the art world in Paris could have prepared him for the revolution that had taken place in painting in New York.
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