A R T I S T S

Selina Trieff A WISE MENAGERIE

BY CHRISTOPHER BUSA

The Painting of Performers

OLD IS VERY SOFT. A substance so rare and beautiful must be beneficial to one’s health, people have long assumed, and sometimes gold flakes are used as a food decoration; a little bit of gold in your body is supposed to give your skin an inner glow. Gold possess- es a dull gleam that polishes to mirror brightness. When alloyed with other metals, it exhibits complex color variations. Iron turns it blue. Copper reddens it, and platinum makes it whiter. Gold is the most malleable metal known to man. A troy ounce—based on a twelve-ounce pound—can be hammered with wooden mallets to make it thin enough to cover three hundred square feet. We associate gold with medals given for great deeds, the gilded domes of Gstate houses, and jewelry deposited in bank vaults. Beyond being a store of value, gold is used to fill hollow teeth and glaze the visors of astronauts’ helmets to protect them from the searing glare of the sun when they are in outer space. The gold leaf that Selina Trieff uses in place of paint in her paint- ings costs about $800 for a box of twenty books of leaves, but, as she told me, “You get a lot of gold.”

46 PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2007 She was in Wellfleet last March in order to attend to the selection and pho- small differences are significant in the way the figure fits into the compo- tographing of about forty paintings that would be in a large survey this sition. She applies the makeup of a woman’s social face, using it to com- summer at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Having known pose the masks her figures wear when they appear on the canvas that is Trieff and her husband, Robert Henry, for many years, and admired their the artist’s stage. work, I was curious to know how they functioned as an artist couple able Trieff’s figures look more like women than men, but they reference a to do strikingly individual work under the same roof. They are featured in variety of costumed personages—court jesters with an undertone of cyni- a documentary film, Their Life in Art (Vineyard Productions, 2006), which cism, shrine seekers with personal agendas, widows wearing a cloth so provides glimpses and conversations with each in their various studios, dur- black they seem protected from their grief. Their tight-fitting costumes, ing the span of years when they raised two daughters, between New York, revealing slender, athletic bodies, suggest performers at ease, however pre- Martha’s Vineyard, and the Lower Cape. pared to tumble and leap. Slim at the waist, her figures remind us that boys Trieff began using gold leaf when she started painting portraits of her played women in medieval and Renaissance plays. daughters, Sarah and Jane, posing the children in black velvet dresses. Even though he is aware that many people have remarked about the Thinking of the way Velázquez inflected the necklaces in his portraits, Tri- apparent androgyny of Trieff’s figures, Bob Henry said he sees only por- eff began to thumb gold leaf onto necklaces worn by her daughters. She traits of women. For my part, I see an intrapsychic dialogue between two was mindful that Velázquez could paint a color that looked like gold, but, sister-images of Trieff’s ideal self. The androgyny means the two do not in her paradoxical modesty, Trieff chose to use the real McCoy. While con- have to be sisters. They could be acrobats about to do somersaults. As we ceding the talent of the Spanish artist who inspired her, Trieff discovered discussed this question, Trieff asked me, “Could they simply be people?” that the natural medium for her expression was not confined to pigment. Once, visiting Japan, the two attended a Noh play in Kyoto. Noh plays Since then, the use of gold has become something of her signature. She can last for eight hours, and Selina and Bob, being baffled tourists, sat for applies the gold leaf directly onto paint when it is tacky. Often she paints only the two-hour introduction. During that extended period, Bob over some of the leaf. Her integration of these divergent mediums creates became aware that two Japanese ladies, seated next to him, were having a shimmering equivalence that is similar to the relation of a solid subject trouble finding their place in the script. Instinctively, he remembered his to its ephemeral shadow. synagogue education in which he and his classmates fumbled the pages Just as the traveling performers in the commedia dell’arte of the six- of the book in their hand; quickly he pointed, somehow by sound, to page teenth century chose to present themselves as stock characters, improvis- 47. Without knowing how to speak Japanese, he helped the native speak- ing new scenarios by enacting an aspect never developed in the existing ers pick up the sequence. script, so Trieff reprises her cast of troubadours and their menagerie of There is an otherworldly elegance in Trieff’s isolated figures. They domestic and farmyard animals. Her people share strong kinship in their stand before us with dignified ceremony. I immediately see Manet’s crisp faces, but their bodies are mostly clothed. They huddle together, conspir- reorientation of a flute player on a red ground, but I know this is a fool- atorially whispering. They look out, not at an individual viewer, but at a ish association with Trieff’s grounds in gold leaf. Something altogether sea of faces in an anonymous audience. Her figures, both human and ani- different is going on, not about the isolation of the figure, but about the mal, wear porcelain expressions—unmoving, serenely poised, calmly pur- integration of the person into the company of surrounding color. If I men- poseful, with zones of otherworldly energy registering in their eyes. Eye- tion Alex Katz, who, along with Trieff, exhibited in Provincetown in the brows are rendered thin or thick, pale or blackly emphatic, and these midfifties at the Sun Gallery, the comparison reveals Trieff’s divergence

ABOVE: PASTORALE (DIPTYCH), 1990, OIL ON CANVAS, 72 BY 60 INCHES EACH, 72 BY 120 INCHES TOGETHER FACING PAGE: THE WISE GOAT, 1982, OIL AND GOLD LEAF ON CANVAS, 60 BY 60 INCHES COURTESY BERTA WALKER GALLERY

PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2007 47 Provincetown.” However, they found nothing they could afford in Provincetown. Once again, a decade after they left Provincetown because it was cheaper to buy prop- erty in Martha’s Vineyard, the price of real estate had become too princely for their present means. When Bob discovered a house on Commercial Street in Wellfleet, across from the inner harbor and possessing two storefront windows where each artist could hang a sin- gle work to share with passersby, Selina said, “Wellfleet is close enough.” Back in the Vineyard, her daughter Sarah was babysitting Louie, their mostly white, mixed- breed dog with yellow ears, whom Selina had painted many times, never once using the opportunity to gold leaf his ears. Selina told Sarah that they were going to sell the Vineyard house and buy a house in Wellfleet. Sarah started crying. She had grown up summering on the Vineyard. Selina and Bob liked the Vineyard. “How can you not like the Vineyard?” Selina asked me. The parents relented, choosing to keep the Vineyard property and take out a mortgage for the Well- fleet house. Over the years since their re-arrival, both have had annual exhibitions at the Berta Walker Gallery. Henry was presi- dent of the Provincetown Art Asso- ciation and Museum during its remarkable expansion and remod- eling, completed last year. In the Vineyard they had a circle TWO FIGURES, 1997, OIL AND GOLD LEAF ON CANVAS, 72 BY 60 INCHES, COURTESY BERTA WALKER GALLERY of friends who were artists, but they gravitated back to Provincetown, where they could more naturally play leadership roles in the com- from Katz’s depiction of expressionless and blank age, devoid of any expression except in the eyes, munity; here they were understood by their peers eyes. What is it about the eyes of living creatures stares back at us, out at us, as if we are invisible. for their longtime involvement with the crucial that fascinates Trieff, and makes all their emotion She does not consider her pictures to be a type issues that, like geological pressures, form each concentrated in the eyes, which glow like coals in of self-portraiture. Much of their meaning artist into her or his individual shape. the sockets of the white masks they wear? depends more on the gesture of the body than What is a successful career? Bob is clear that it She emphasizes the oval of a face by outlining the tilt of the head. “Body gesture,” she told me, is one in which the artist, aging, continues to do its shape and the key features—fleshy nose, lips “is more of a portrait than the mask of the face.” her or his work. He, personally, is not interested zipped shut, and intensely, poignantly expressive in “big money,” he said, reminding me of the title eyes. She hints that her people have ears tucked Wellfleet of the novel by John Dos Passos, The Big Money. under their caps. I am always curious if visual WHILE HER FAMILY was spending summers on The suspicion seems to be that the reward of artists consider the eyes more important than the Martha’s Vineyard, over several decades, Trieff money is excessive, unnecessary to the profound other organs of reception we humans share. was invited by Leo Manso to teach a class at the satisfaction of simply being an artist. Artists know they are talking animals, and have Provincetown Art Association and Museum. The In their view of Wellfleet Harbor at low tide, things to say beyond what the eyes see. Her fig- invitation, in the early eighties, made her realize the water reveals its essence when it disappears. ures’ eyes see what they are attracted to, what that she missed Provincetown. For about a decade An odor as strong as smelling salts invades one’s they care about. If they are attracted to goats as they had made annual pilgrimages to Province- nostrils, shocking your sleepy self into wakeful- much as children, so be it. town during the summer, exhibiting their work at ness of a dimension that painting cannot access There is a difference between raising children the Berta Walker Gallery. In the early nineties, she with its flat, merely visual surface. Every artist and painting pictures of goats. Yet, Trieff opens her was asked to teach a painting workshop at the knows the limitation of the eyeballs. How can the faces of people to scrutiny without exposing them, Fine Arts Work Center. Selina said to Bob, “While visual represent the sharp scent of goat cheese? outlining instead the contour of a tight-fitting cap I’m teaching, why don’t you look for a house? Selina’s studio is on the first floor of the or cowl or even close-cropped hair. The white vis- We’ll sell the Vineyard house and buy a house in house, and Bob’s is upstairs. One thing they both

48 PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2007 utilize in their studios is a worktable mounted on her children’s childhoods. The album reminded should I do?” the man asks. The rabbi says, “Get wheels, with each artist’s cart encrusted with me of her paintings, in which the same family, the a goat.” Indeed, the sad fellow does get a goat, thick paint, piled on like detailed topography same troupe of performers, enact different scenes. but when they take the goat in, life becomes more maps in organized colors showing badlands, tur- When she spoke to me, her voice was small. miserable than ever. A week later, he returns to bulent hills, and terrifying peaks of paint, with Often, she projected her words at the floor, as if complain to the rabbi, and the rabbi now advises, crusts hardening but with buried pigment remain- she were whispering a secret, yet her girlish impish- “Get rid of the goat.” That solves the man’s misery: ing useable if the skin were punctured to access ness was as resonant as the concussion of a suddenly he feels he has achieved true happiness. the wetness below the surface. bronze gong. Her youth shines through her age. During their college years, Henry was also tak- The aromatic molecules that circulate in their On a table in her studio were unopened pack- ing opportunities to draw in Hans Hofmann’s Wellfleet environs connote intense fertility. The ages of paintbrushes made from goat hair. She night classes in his school on Eighth Street, locat- separate studios of these artists are not so sepa- asked me to crack one open, and I did, using it ed above the Village Barn, a popular movie the- rate. Inside, one meanders from rooms where instinctively to caress the two-day stubble of my ater, attracting people from the larger community. paintings are stored, to an ample kitchen, and to beard. I felt I had been dusted with talcum pow- The young artists that Trieff and Henry drew with living areas filled with paintings by friends of the included Jan Müller, Wolf Kahn, Mary Frank, and couple. Art suffuses the atmosphere. Turpentine Bob Beauchamp. The importance of drawing and honey, pinesap and shifting winds waft—and “She applies the makeup before a figure became primary to Trieff. that brings up a curious topic: the exaggerated Upstairs, the north windows were soaped with noses of Trieff’s people, pets, and farm animals. of a woman's social face, broad, circular strokes, like white clouds. The The snouts of her pigs are both grandiose and soaping of the windows helped make the light royal. She regards pigs as pulchritudinous, a word using it to compose the steady and translucent, but, according to wit- that sounds rather nasty but actually is an appreci- nesses, the red strobe of an ambulance or a fire ation of great physical beauty. Lawrence Alloway, masks her figures wear truck could cast its vibrating hue through the writing about Trieff’s portraits of swine, connected clouded windows, and the nude model would these creatures to the sailors who traveled with when they appear on the turn pink. Here I feel is a source of Trieff’s love of Ulysses, and were transformed by Circe into beasts, canvas that is the artist’s the color of the flesh of robust pigs. and it is true that her pigs look as handsome and Newly ensconced on the Vineyard, she went to attractive as her people. stage.” meet her neighbor Ann Hopkins, who owned the Selina and Bob display their paintings to side- farm at the top of the hill that cast a shadow on walk traffic in the two storefront windows of their their little spread. Selina inquired about whether house. Bob’s work tends to occupy the left win- der, the brush was so soft. For years, Trieff has Ann had any goat yogurt, but she had none. dow, perhaps because he is left-handed. Selena’s been buying the brushes from Utrecht. They are Instead, her refrigerator was filled with butchered paintings are typically situated in the window to not expensive, she said. They hold a tremendous portions of a pig. Selina, who had made sketches the right of the door, perhaps because she is right- amount of paint, and, like the sweep of an ani- of many of the farm animals asked, “Someone I handed. Watching them paint in the documentary mal’s tail, give Trieff great gestural opportunities. know?” Something of the difference between live- film, I realized that what people do unconsciously stock that was raised for food and a domestic pet I take as authentic, honest testimony—what Brooklyn 1945–55 whom you love and feed guides the ethical line lawyers call an “excited utterance,” an emotional BOTH ARTISTS were born in Brooklyn, but they etched in Trieff’s paintings, where the face and fea- statement so compelling that it bypasses the rule did not meet until they were students at Brooklyn tures of an animal are adjusted to place them mid- against hearsay and transforms the utterance into College in the early ’50s. Selena grew up in a way between contemplation and action. Her factual evidence. home without pets. Only a few trees lined the human figures are also poised for action, but pre- How do these two artists speak to each other streets in the neighborhood where she lived. fer to pause. They seem aware that the viewer is in their art? Bob Henry is taking his time to final- Squirrels were rare. But in a figure-drawing class uncomfortable with their delay. The leotards of her ize a new series of triptychs, which is a complicat- with Ad Reinhardt she was obliged to copy a plas- dancers are the costumes of action, showing ed summary of his career. A central figure, a ter cast in an effort to make it look like a photo- preparation for leaping. Trieff arrests her perform- hanging man, appears in multiple incarnations. graph. “The moral,” which Selina said she derived ers before they can perform. Their aura of anticipa- He appears isolated in a monochromatic atmos- from the exercise, was that she would “never have tion is palpable in their attitude. This is true, not phere, but the isolation is disorienting because it to do this again.” only of her acrobats, harlequins, and pages in is not a suspension of time but is filled with a con- Reinhardt became a friend of both artists, and attendance, but of her fierce roosters, ominous fusion of whether the hanging figure is floating stayed in touch via a series of postcards he sent crows, and regal goats. upward or falling downward. We feel the motion, over the years. Toward the end of his life, in At the Hofmann School, Trieff sometimes but cannot define the direction. These new trip- August 1967, he relayed news of his travels, then drew a simple still life, but more often she pre- tychs have a central panel that shows the cosmic indicated he was back at the “old grind, nine or ferred a live model who took a series of poses. Art whole from a distance. A boat may be sinking, eleven to five or eight, day in day out, same thing, students for ages have been taught to draw with but a survivor may be saved. Both artists show same size, will it ever end, this endlessness and charcoal because the medium is so malleable, the drama of humanity, the theatricality of life, in timelessness? Love to all.” Selina said to Bob, producing a crisp line as readily as a blunt which masks, and motion, do not provide “Gee, Ad’s depressed.” smudge. Whatever is put down can be erased. No answers but add uncertainty. Mark Rothko, whom Trieff also studied with, one in Hofmann’s class questioned if direct visu- When I visited in March, Selina, who had been suffered greatly from depression. Selina surmises al expression was the only road to authentic hospitalized, was sprightly, moving at ease in her that “maybe he was too philosophical or too Jew- expression. In order to make a painting, certain aluminum walker, efficiently making her way ish.” His mood reminded Trieff of her father mut- fundaments had to be grasped as concretely as across her crowded studio like a bird in a cage that tering, Oy, Oy, Oy! about the sorry state of the cobblestones. Whether Hofmann discussed is home to her. Indeed, she was dressed in a royal world, yet remaining helpful and caring toward Picasso or Piero della Francesca, Kandinsky or costume of her own invention, and it made me the welfare of his friends. Here I am reminded of Giotto, he explicitly defined the problem for a think of how she had transmuted the distant the famous goat joke, where a burdened husband generation of artists as a translation of the three impulse of her subjects into contemporary insight complains to a rabbi about his difficult life with dimensions of actual space into the two dimen- into our relationships with those we love. She had his nagging wife and his needy nine children. The sions of virtual space in the flat picture plane. been looking at an album of old family photo- man is nearly in tears, describing the misery of liv- Hofmann taught that the paradox of painting graphs, charmed by remembering her own and ing in the same small room together. “What existed in its third dimension, not present in the

PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2007 49 picture, but animated through Provincetown implication. If there was to be Art Association vitality, vibration, life, a quiver of suggestion, a spark of animation, and Museum a felt physical sensation, then 460 Commercial Street there must be dynamic motion. Provincetown MA 02657 Hofmann demonstrated the idea 508.487.1750 www.paam.org by explaining that, if you pressed Summer 2007 your index finger into a balloon filled with water, you would feel EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS the balloon bulging on the oppo- site side. The whole volume, keep- Art of the Garden ing its integrity, is obliged to May 25 – July 15 adjust to any displacement. The Hofmann School, center of Victor and Charles DeCarlo a legendary enthusiasm, was a kind June 8 – July 29 of contemporary artistic Delphi. In the ancient city the oracle spoke Hyman Shrand inscrutably from a cleft in a rock. June 8 – July 15 Hofmann, too, spoke English with such a thick German accent that, Jim Hansen to many, he seemed to speak two languages at once. When in class— June 15 – July 22 he didn’t come every day—Hof- mann went from easel to easel, Edwin Dickinson making remarks. He was clear in Provincetown: 1912–1937 about the teacher-student relation- CHICKEN, 2007, OIL ON HYPRO, 24 BY 18 INCHES July 20 – September 23 ship; he was the teacher who sim- COURTESY BERTA WALKER GALLERY ply started with what the pupil Selina Trieff offered. Sometimes the artist had July 27 – September 2 to sacrifice in order to create, a concept he demon- ence, viewing them, but without any apparent strated, shockingly, again and again, by tearing a recognition. Theater, over centuries, has devel- 12 x 12 Silent Auction student’s drawing along a certain axis and realign- oped the convention of the “fourth wall,” where August 3 – September 2 ing what was up and what was down into a new, the audience can see the actors, but the actors revelatory juxtaposition of forces. can’t see the audience. MASS Art I asked Trieff if Hofmann ever tore her drawing Recently, Trieff found some early works from September 7 – September 23 in half. “Oh, sure,” she said. “He’d say this part the Hofmann classes in which she and Bob made should go here and that part should go there.” If drawings that structured the model along Cubist Auction Preview this demonstration did not exactly shock her, it lines. She saw that neither could tell whose work September 7 – September 22 did make her keenly aware of the tension created was whose. The dialogue with Trieff’s alter ego by moving one part of the drawing into a new may also be a dialogue with her husband. In the Lillian Orlowsky relation. She saw before her eyes how the drawing exhibition will be one of her joint self-portraits (or September 28 – November 25 began to “spin,” as she put it. She was bemused “Bob and Me” paintings) that most people have by Hofmann’s direct and casual brilliance. not seen. Here, of course, the gender is clear, but 21 in Truro:Visions and “Damn! He’s right again,” she would mutter. in others we ask ourselves, “Which figure is male, Voices of the Outer Cape The touch of the master, the laying on of hands which is female? And what is their relation to in order to transfer the feel of a creative decision, each other?” They seem related, yet almost September 28– November 4 was part of Hofmann’s Germanic culture. Trieff unaware of each other. They stand very close cannot imagine Ad Reinhardt or Mark Rothko, together, and sometimes one grasps the arm of PROGRAMS & EVENTS her other brilliant teachers at Brooklyn College, the other. Her pairs could be shadows of them- touching a student’s drawing. Rothko made clear selves, a kind of double, enshrined in literature as 10th Annual Secret Garden Tour that he considered Rembrandt the first modern doppelgangers—which may be translated as incar- painter. Rembrandt’s moody tonalism found its nations of our anticipations and wishes. Sunday, July 15 10am–3pm way into Rothko’s meditative fields of color, and The Wise Goat, for example, shows an intelli- Trieff remembers the inspiration Rothko found in gent animal sitting erect on haunches tucked Consignment Auctions Rembrandt’s career: “He painted for himself, not beneath her body. She is placed high on a royal Saturday, May 19 7pm for a patron. His paintings are personal.” red ground, as if enthroned, and an ochre-yellow Saturday, September 22 7pm Rothko’s paintings are also “personal,” per- palm tree flanks her on each side, casting strange haps less abstract than emotional in their desper- illumination—perhaps even enlightenment, con- Fredi Schiff Levin Lecture Series ate demarcation of fields of purple trauma and sidering that, beyond, a black sky is sprinkled with gray doubt. Rothko complained that people tiny stars. The long ears of the animal are lifted, filmArt@PAAM urged the artist to “go back to nature,” but he alertly attentive to the eternal silence implied in noticed that nobody suggested they go “forward the painting. Happiness may not consist of living Music Series to nature.” with a real goat, but rather with one of Trieff’s Music in the Cape Air with Dick Miller paintings of a goat, which seemingly possesses Summer Jazz with Bart Weisman Transformation of the Model the profundity of a wise rabbi. Blue Door Chamber Music THE MODEL MAY BE the mirror of the self in Tri- CHRISTOPHER BUSA is editor of Provincetown Arts. eff’s work. Her performers look out at the audi-

50 PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2007