ClaimsDepartment I ’ve waited more than a decade to do this issue. That seems to be a theme, and maybe it’s because I’ve finally got to the point where I can do the ones I’ve had ideas for because there’s time now. Kids are older, I’ve got more money so I can limit my need for contracts, and now, you might have heard, we’re sheltering-in-place. That’s instant time! The ideas of Abstract Expressionism is one of those things that you either love or hate. It is art that is about being art. It is art that is not meant to be about anything but itself, and the artist, honestly. It is the single most arrogant kind of art, and the kind of art that could only come from America. Which is funny because it never would have happened without the inspiration and teaching of a ton of Europeans. Like Hans Hoffmann. And Arshile Gorky. And Wassily Kandinsky. In other news, NASFiC was cancelled. I’m bummed. It was likely the one chance I’ll ever get at being an Editor Guest of Honor. Sigh. This issue features a lot of art by me. The majority of this issue is that, and there’s a lot more I’ve been doing. I’ve been really enjoying it during the lock-down, which has been OK with me, as far as I’m concerned. The family has been good, and we’ve been cooking a lot! Ultimately, we’re safe and while things might get hairy and on our nerves, we’re doing what we can. Anyhow, if you wanna lemme know what ya think, [email protected]. Clearer from the Other Side by Chris Garcia, Oil & Ink on Printer Paper, 2020 The Lesser Known Abstract Expressionists I do a podcast, many of them actually. The one about Art is called Three Minute Modernist. In each three minute episode, I look at a single work of art, and talk about hos it effects me on an emotional level. That’s right, I do a completely unapproachable podcast that talks about my feelings. Just like this zine. Anyhoo, I made it a point to look at art by women artists. It’s something a lot of people do, but I also didn’t want to make it a stated concept, but something I took into account when I was looking for works to talk about. I did a series about the Women of Abstract Ex- pressionism since there was a HUGE exhibit about them put together by the good people of the Denver Art Museum. I started digging in and found an artist whose works spoke to me. She was one of the few sur- vivors of the era, and a wonderful artist who I had never heard of – Mary Abbott. She was one of the second wave of AbExers, and notably, she was in many ways every bit the master of the style that Joan Mitchell was (and I’ll talk a lot about her later) but she had a much more impres- sive mastery of working within a color. Her work All Green shows this so well. The work feels as if it is speaking about green as the idea, and this was her working within it to show that it is not connotational. This is not a painting to stand for the verdant impact of greenery on the senses, but of the color green on a canvas. There is no context, thus there is only content, and that means it can be anything, though in all honestly, that means it is a painting about nothing but the fact that it is a green painting. While an all-black canvas may give that sense off more easily, here it seems Mary Abbott is specifically saying “this isn’t a forest; this is a painting.” Mary Abbott died in 2018, at the age of 97. She outlived almost every one of her contemporaries, and while her work after the 70s was not nearly as powerful as those works from the 50s and early 60s, she was still playing with image and stripping down context. I love her work more than I should. Mary Abbott Philip Guston T he Anderson Collection has at least two two very good Philip Guston works, not to mention the Robert Arneson (All Praise Be Unto He!) Homage to Philip Guston. Phil was a guy who liked imagery, but he also liked being a work- ing artist, and if ANYONE understood the idea of the Respectable Artist vs. the Detestable Illustrator, it was Phil Guston. Guston went to high school with Jackson Pollock, and the two of them even got expelled. He worked on murals through the Depression, was a fig- uratist artist in the 1940s, found academic gigs, and then Abstract Expression- ism hit. Guston took to it, and used the instantly recogniseable technique. It was a series of tightly grouped vertical and horizontal strokes, right in the cen- ter of the canvas. This gives this sense of claustrophobia, almost anti-thetical to the idea of expansive AbEx. His works, like the masterful pieces For M and White Painting at SFMoMA, used a limited colour palette, and strokes that did- n’t feel like they were exploring the canvas, but collapsing into it. It’s wonderful stuff, and that limited palette is so much smarter because it turns out to be a way to limit the experience. It’s an ever-closing circle, and it works so damn well. And, somehow, as things started to go on, they became less and less AbEx. Oh, in the late 1950s and early 60s, they were still abstract, but he was doing less and less of the central and more exploration of the entire canvas. This was accompanied by a slight change in his color palette, or maybe it was simply the weight. They started to seem far more, for lack of a better word, car- toony. It was as if a comic book artist was trying to paint in an abstract expres- sionist style. These are super cool, and were basically a warning shot: he was going back to figuration. Not just figuration, but more or less comic figuration. He began painting hooded Klansmen figures, simple forms like cigarettes and hands, loaves of bread, heads, and coats. At the Anderson Collection, they have one of his coat paintings; SFMoMA has the backside view of the same. They feel cartoony, and not in the Lichtenstein way. They are new images, invading the academy, the gallery space. This was not well-received at first, but of those folks who left AbEx and went on to figuration, it was Guston who made the fur- thest leap. More than Diebenkorn, certainly, and the style Phil adapted as his own later work is almost as much without context as his abstract work. Loaves of bread and a coat? But the coat is standing stiff, as if it is being work by an in- visible model. It’s an interesting, but utterly meaningless image. Guston died in 1980. He had out-lived Pollock by 25 years, though he has never been taken to as strongly as Pollock. I love the works after 1968, and his 50s works. I can’t think of an artist who left AbEx so thoroughly, and there’s no other artist whose later works made me as happy. W ikipedia is amazing. It’s the ultimate library browsing experience for those of us who like to lay under weighted blankets all day. I troll about, feeling for the bumps of links to other info that might take me to a new concept or person I’ve never encoun- tered. This happens a lot with lists. There are THOUSANDS of lists, and my three favor- ite: List of Sandwiches, List of Reportedly Haunted Locations, and List of Abstract Ex- pressionist Artists. I probably visit each of them about monthly, and always come back with something great. One month, it was the Barro Luco sammich, but this month, it happened to be the artist John Opper. Opper was a great artist, and his work in the 30s was very geometric, certainly speaking from the same pulpit as Irene Rice Pereira, one of my favorite painters of the 1930s. it wasn’t quite Cubist, but perhaps leaning a bit that way. It was gorgeous work, and it holds up today. In the 40s, he moved more towards biomorphic forms, like so many of the other later Abstract Expressionists. After a while, at least partly because of his interactions with Hans Hoffman, he went full AbEx. Now, there’s a few reasons for this, but he summed it up pretty well - "the more I became aware of color and design the more I came in conflict with the object that I was painting. So it soon became a problem either I let the color go— and keep the composition as it should be, naturalistically or representationally— or I should take freedom with color and design." The connection between Abstract Expressionism and Design is not as clearly spoken of as the effect OF Abstract Expressionism ON design. Here, you can see it go- ing the other way, showing that ultimately it was the rules of design, constantly be- coming more and more codified throughout the 20th Century, that helped to make Ab- stract Expressionism possible. The important thing is the idea of what made something draw the eye and the impact emotionally of design aspects that helped inform what Abstract Expressionism became.