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The Passing of Time Michael Hurson at Work 1971-2001 Curated by Dan Nadel Michael Hurson: The Passing of Time Dan Nadel Any approach to Michael Hurson needs to begin with a few salient facts and carry through with his own words. Hurson was an artist whose drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures carefully and with great humanity depicted his and his friend’ spaces, times, and relationships. He also wrote a number of plays, and quite a bit of prose about his own work with precision and an inquisitive wit. He constantly circled around the geographic and social constellations of his life – he did not want, nor did he need, to escape from where he came. He was born in 1941 to a well-to-do Christian Scientist family in Youngstown, Ohio. He had a twin sister who died in childbirth, and an older sister with whom he was not close. The family moved to Chicago shortly thereafter, where his father was a successful businessman, and his mother a well-liked person of elegance and, by all accounts, impeccable taste. Hurson attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was a star student amongst schoolmates including Elizabeth Murray, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. His painting, Ballet of the Left-Handed Piano, appeared in the Institute’s 1962 Annual Exhibition of Artists of Chicago and Vicinity where it was spotted by Henry Geldzahler, who subsequently purchased a drawing by the young artist. In his senior year he was mentored by Robert Pincus Witten, who would later write: “Hurson’s work is not critical stimulus/response art; rather it deals with a constant imagery that at its core is curiously uninflected and behaviorally white bread – WASP, spearmint, if you see what I mean – New Yorkers would think of it as Hurson himself wrote: Midwestern, down home.”1 Hurson graduated in 1963, traveled a bit, and assisted his childhood hero, the “The Eyeglass paintings represent three years’ work – 1969 to 1971. I had rented a studio puppeteer Burr Tillstrom. He was then drafted into the army for a two-year tour. The in Chicago and sat uninspiredly in the studio for a month, and one day the image of majority of Hurson’s enlistment was spent in Thailand, where he became an expert the eyeglass loomed up. The image came from a joke book I had done for friends years marksman. While he was in the army, Hurson’s father died suddenly; Mrs. Hurson before—I would think of an image and apply it to a story. One of the characters was an took a job as a real estate agent, excelled at it, and moved to a well-decorated apartment eyeglass, and I remember liking to draw the eyeglass—without any understanding of what on Michigan Avenue. After being discharged in 1967, Hurson moved to New York at it meant. Whatever image you attach yourself to, it is a vehicle to carry on some process Geldzahler’s behest. But for a brief relocation to Chicago from 1969 to 1975, Manhattan of thinking.”3 would be his primary city for the rest of his life. No matter where he was, he visited his mother monthly and spoke to her daily. Hurson had a project exhibition at the Museum Hurson was also a playwright (the Public Theater mounted his Red and Blue in 1982) and of Modern Art in 1974 that focused on balsa wood constructions of various rooms from his approach is, in its way, theatrical. Hurson often composed images of characters on his memory. In 1978 he was part of “New Image Painting,” an exhibition curated by stages or sets, following them on a spatial journey through pictorial representation. The Richard Marshall at the Whitney Museum of American Art that also included Hurson’s eyeglasses work especially well as ideograms when they spread across his canvases on friends Robert Moskowitz and Jennifer Bartlett. In the exhibition, Marshall examined swathes of brushy abstractions, as if dancing on waves of color, calling to mind animation “painting that rejects familiar adjectives: “abstract, non-objective, expressionistic … cel backgrounds. Hurson shaped the canvases –usually as stepped rectangles– to indicate representational, figurative, realist…The images used fluctuate between abstract and real. the passing of time, like a director might cut from one scene to another. They clearly represent things that are recognizable and familiar, yet they are presented The Eyeglass paintings allude to a fictional space, and Hurson would spend the as isolated and removed from associative background and environments. … Because of rest of the 1970s delineating spaces that, even when open and exterior, feel like theatrical their isolation and alteration, they create a distance between themselves and the viewer.”2 sets in which actions occur. This is especially so in the Palm Springs series of paintings, The 1970s may have been the peak of Hurson’s notoriety, if not his talent, which grew drawings and prints, which occupied the artist for the first half of the 1970s. This series over the decades, encompassing portraiture and a masterful series of paintings of famous was inspired by a trip to see Hurson’s friend and idol, Burr Tillstrom, at his home in paintings (Guernica, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte). Hurson continued to exhibit up until Palm Springs. Tillstrom (1917-1985) was best known for his characters Kukla and Ollie his death in 2007. and Beulah Witch, as well as Fletcher Rabbit, Madame Oglepuss, Buff Orpingto. The Marshall’s “New Image Painting” formal criteria applies well to Hurson, but Kukla, Frank and Ollie Show, with co-host Fran Allison, (which the young Hurson, it overlooks the primary concern of the artist’s project. While Hurson certainly did like millions of other American kids, watched with rapt fascination) ran on national employ those strategies (as well as others, such as synthetic cubism), their application television from 1947 to 1957 and as the CBS Children’s Film Festival from 1967 to 1977. was principally a way to synthesize his experiences of places, time, and relationships. His Tillstrom was determined to give himself and his creations autonomy. Refusing all offers friend, Sarah Canright, described Hurson as a flaneur: he was an artist whose daily physical to merchandise and eschewing prewritten scripts, Tillstrom improvised his shows with and psychological wanderings were primary. I first became enamored of the work while bare sets. His characters remained utterly his own, living only in their performances. wandering myself. A suite of Hurson’s Eyeglass paintings and works on paper installed at Tillstrom’s uncompromising, yet generous and willfully naïve approach is not dissimilar Paula Cooper’s 192 Books struck me and stuck, particularly because the drawings have to Hurson’s. Both presented the foibles of contemporary existence through wordplay the zip and thick-thin strokes generally only seen in early 20th century animation. I was and imagery. And like Tillstrom, Hurson refused to play by the rules of his industry, stunned to see that kind of stroke employed to such idiosyncratic and minimal ends. making scrappy, small-scale art in a time that often valued the bombastic or monumental. 1 Robert Pincus Witten, Entries (Maximalism): Art at the Turn of the Decade (Out of London Press, 1983). 2 Richard Marshall, New Image Painting (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978) 3 Michael Hurson, New Image Painting (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978) Hurson and Tillstrom first met in 1960 at Oxbow Summer School of Painting, Saugatuck, looks out at us, his features resigned to pain. By contrast, the artist’s 1970s Portrait of Michigan, and remained close friends and occasional collaborators for the next twenty- Harriet Hurson presents his mother as a faceless cubist object: her overcoat, a construction five years. Hurson assisted Tillstrom on various performances in the mid and late-1960s, of planes and patterns; her gloved hands, clasping one another; a triangular sliver of a including at the Hollywood Palace and for the Johnny Carson show. He was amazed by purse tucked under her arm. Despite, or perhaps because of his devotion to her, the only the performer’s improvisation and humanity, and would later speak to the importance of thing left unexamined is her face, which is a flesh colored oval. A blank mask. I cannot spontaneity in his own approach as well as the importance of exchanges between friends. help but see parallels to Only Child (For Paula), 1990, in which a boy is led across the Upon Tillstrom’s passing, Hurson dedicated his 1986 exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery, picture by a (his?) mother, whose face is once again out of the frame. Harriet Hurson was “Seven Drawings,” to his friend. a formidable presence who looked after and encouraged the artist his entire life. She died Hurson’s numerous Palm Springs works (or in many ways, Burr Tillstrom works) in 1996, after a prolonged illness during which Hurson cared for her in Chicago. depict scenes at his host’s pool and patio area in Palm Springs: palm trees, cacti, flagstones, Hurson’s formal portraits –of friends like Joel Shapiro and gallerists like Holly a float, a fence, or Tillstrom himself lying on his side. All of the images have the enclosed Solomon– are less personal than his one-off drawings, but perhaps more studiously feel of interiors – and, as he would in most of his drawings, Hurson gives physical weight investigatory. Drawn on overlapping sheets of vellum, they are larger than life and imbued to the air around his subjects through vigorous linework. Of the paintings in the series, with an ambitious act-of-making that he would only revisit in his 1990s examinations of Hurson wrote: “The image of the pool chair floating about seemed very much my feelings canonical paintings.

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