HEROI F36 12:H55 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2015
https://archive.org/details/heroicpaintingfeOOIubo EROIC
PAINI ING
FEBRUARY 3 - APRIL 21, 1996
SECCA SOUTHEASTERN CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
Sara Lee Corporation is the corporate sponsorfor this exhibition ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of people helped me understand the Douglas Bohr, installations manager/registrar, and evolving notion of the hero that is explored in Karin Lusk, executive administrative assistant,
"Heroic Painting." They work in diverse fields from coordinated the research and administration of the social services to the arts, but all in some way installation and catalogue. Their contribution far interface with the heroic acts of daily life. I am exceeded the parameters of their jobs. I would also grateful to Gayle Dorman, Suzi Gablik, Connie like to acknowledge Jeff Fleming, curator; AngeUa
Grey, Nan Holbrook, Basil Talbott, and Emily Debnam, programs administrative assistant; and
Wilson for their input. Mel White, programs assistant.
Thanks are also due to Ruth Beesch, director of Finally, I am indebted to the artists for providing the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, for helping me in insights on their work and to the lenders for their my search for women artists. SECCA's staff worked generosity. diligently on many aspects of the exhibition. — S.L.
This publication accompanies the exhibition EXHIBITION TOUR: "HEROIC PAINTING" Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, Florida May 5 - June 30, 1996 February 3 - April 21, 1996 Queens Museum of Art, New York at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, July 19 - September 8, 1996 Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Knoxville Museum of Art, ICnoxville, Tennessee
October 11, 1996 - January 12, 1997 SECCA is supported by The Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County, and the The Contemporary Arts Center,
North Carolina Arts Council, a state agency. Cincinnati, Ohio January 25 - March 23, 1997
Published by the Mississippi Museum of Art, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Jackson, Mississippi
750 Marguerite Drive, July 19 - September 27, 1997 Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27106 University Gallery
University of Massachusetts at Amherst 1996 Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art © October 22 - December 14, 1997
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States Catalog design: Abby Goldstein of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any Editor: Nancy H. Margolis
means without the prior written permission of the Printing: Herlin Press
publisher. Photo credits: pp. 14, 15, courtesy P.P.O.W.,
New York; pp.16, 17, courtesy Littlejohn
|j|)rary ol Cjiiiigress Catalog Curd Numhcr: 95-73238 Contemporary, New York; p. 24, D. James Dee,
courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; p.25, cour- ISBN: 0-961 1560-9-0 tesy Komar and Melamid; p. 26, courtesy
Chase Manhattan Bank, NA, New York; p. 27,
courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. DEDICATION
"Heroic Painting" is dedicated to the memory of James Gordon Hanes, Jr. (1916-95).
Head of the Hanes family of Winston-Salem, Gordon Hanes was a successful industri- ahst and businessman—the president and chief executive of the Hanes Corporation.
But Gordon Hanes may be best remembered as a private citizen who contributed his time and resources to nurturing his state and local community and to enhancing our nation's cultural life. Devoted to the arts and the environment, he served nationally on the Collector's Committee of the National Gallery of Art, the National Committee of the
Whitney Museum of American Art, The Smithsonian Associates, and the World WildLife
Fund. Within his home state, Gordon Hanes served two terms in the North CaroHna
State Legislature, and served as a director of the Board of Science and Technology, the
Business Council of the Arts and Humanities, the Commission on the Status of Women, the Governor's Cultural Advisory Council, the North Carolina Nature Conservancy, the
Winston-Salem State University Board, the North Carolina School of the Performing
Arts, and the North CaroHna Museum of Art, which he helped to found.
In 1977 Gordon Hanes spearheaded the decision to provide SECCA with a permanent
home on his family's estate. Throughout SECCA's 40 years, Hanes was an avid supporter
and adviser. He cared about artists and made great efforts to connect the artist and the
community. For all his philanthropic deeds, recognized and unrecognized, we gratefully
acknowledge Gordon Hanes as a traditional American hero. HEROIC PAINTING
Susan Lubowsky, Executive Director
The twentieth century has witnessed the unconventional behavior and eccentricities decried gradual dissolution of the mythic national by the Victorians as unheroic became the distin-
hero. As the hero has descended into guishing traits of the new artist bohemian so antihero and finally into caricature, elitist themes admired by the modernists. Modernism "exalted
— the great events of history in which individuals the complete autonomy of art, and the gesture of necessarily figure prominently" — have been severing bonds with society. This sovereign replaced with a "history from below" in which specialness and apartness was symbolized by the ordinary people are the prominent figures. In the romantic exile of the artist, and was lived out in twentieth Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, modes of rebellion, withdrawal, and antagonism." traditionalist historian Gertrude HimmeKarb traces As Flaubert commented: "Life is so horrible that the course of the decline of heroism and decries one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be the loss of the hero to society. The "new history," done by living in the world of art." she charges, has eliminated "those last remnants of As the concept of heroism became increasingly heroism by denying not only the idea of eminence, muddled, the artist was there to digest, concep- but the very idea of individuality." tualize, and reveal with painful astuteness the
The polarities that concern Himmelfarb — ambiguities that hover on the edge of our beliefs. historic canon versus "new history"; high culture Thus, the hero and antihero merged into one versus low culture — lead her to conclude that the dramatic persona: the figure of the artist. traditional concept of the hero has been destroyed by contemporary scholars. She might have extended the blame to the news media, who The treatment of heroic themes in twentieth- regularly reduce the credibility of public figures, century art is part of a long tradition. Dramatic, and to critics, who undermine the hero and, in so grand-scale history painting came ol age in the doing, assume the role themselves. In light of the sixteenth century, when it was considered the apex recent "culture wars" raging about such issues as of artistic pursuit. Leading the viewer to high moral
NEA funding, however, a more interesting point is ground by depicting the heroic acts of mythical and how Himmelfarb's thesis of the hero's decline religious figures, history painting was instructional relates to the role of the artist as hero. — its heroes and their ideals were models for the
In his Heroes and Hero-Worship, Thomas common man. By the nineteenth century, however,
Carlyle provides the standard description of the history painting seemed antiquated. The forefathers
Victorian hero: The hero serves "as god, as prophet, of modernism took the "academic history-painting
as priest, as king, as poet, as man ol letters." model to task by punning visually upon the
Although Carlyle does not include "artist" on his predictability of the compositions."
list, artists not only fit, hut personify the Victorian Seen as a hackneyed academic genre, the
Ideal. I)ul the Victorian ideal did not survive very tradition of history painting was not revived until
Far inlo the twentieth century, in fact, the very the early modernist movement turned the genre to of its own ends. Employing irony and realism, early realism with modernist humor and a touch modernists, including Gustave Courbet, Theodore cynicism.
Gericault, and Edouard Manet, worked in the style Traditional historians like Gertrude HimmeKarb of history painting, but twisted heroic themes into decry the replacement of the traditional historic personal ones. Courbet's Interior of My Studio, A canon with a "history from below," which replaces
Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years ofMy Life the mythic heroic figure with ordinary people. as an Artist (1854-55) is an example of grand-scale Complicit in the destruction of the heroic ideal are painting in which the artist substitutes his contem- aspects of feminism and what has been labeled poraries for the mythic figures that a traditional political correctness. In assembling this exhibition, history painting might have featured. however, I had great difficulty finding women artists
The contemporary artists shown in "Heroic whose subject and style fit the heroic theme. Suzi
Painting" continue the traditions of their early Gablik, who sympathizes with "history from below," modernist forebears. Although they depict their attributed my dilemma to her belief that "heroism
"heroes'" in the grand manner of earlier centuries, was the linchpin of patriarchy." they tinge their narratives with irony. The legends, The one woman artist who emerged in my wars, cinematic landscapes, and larger-than-life search is Julie Heffernan. Aesthetically grounded in personalities they depict are a means of presenting traditional history painting, Heffernan nevertheless a polemic on the very concept of heroism at the end has a decidedly feminist viewjDoint. In the style of of the twentieth century. the Old Masters, she paints idyllic landscapes and
verdant pastures, but she places herself within these
settings, using the self-portrait to examine
archetypal womanhood and its attendant baggage. The group of artists exhibited in "Heroic Self-Portrait as Infanta Maria Teresa Playing Painting" aU work from the "history from Coriolanus (1995) is the most disquieting of
below" perspective, dressing down and Heffernan's allegorical works. It centers on an replacing heroes like John James Audubon, George archaic Roman hero and a seventeenth-century Washington, and Frank Lloyd Wright with the Spanish infanta—and on Heffernan, who positions native American, the slave, the common soldier, herself as their medium. As legend goes, the
and the disabled child. But the artists distinguish statesman Coriolanus aspired to become a senator.
themselves by their varied styles and their varied After a victorious battle, he came home and found
views of the hero and the heroic.
Influenced by nineteenth-century
artists, including Courbet and
Gericault, and by a range of painters
throughout history, Julie Heffernan,
Vincent Desiderio, Bo Bartlett, and
Walton Ford have an approach that is
essentially serious. Lawrence Gipe,
Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, and
Mark Tansey, on the other hand,
stress the irony of their messages,
coupling the decidedly nonmodernist Gustave Courbet, Interior ofMy Studio, a Real Allegory Summing Up Seven styles of social realism and socialist Years of My Life as an Artist, 1854-1855 the mob demanding to see his scars. He demurred that has at times been life-threatening, and he
because such a display struck him as unseemly and requires constant medical care. Study for a Hero's
would make him vulnerable to the rabble. His Life (1992) shows Sammy in a hospital bed, his
hesitation branded him forever as the symbol of lifeline a snaky green tube. The canvas is small, but
snobbery. its impact is heroic.
Alluding to that story, Heffernan portrays Desiderio is an aesthetic descendent of
herself as the princess made famous by Diego Velazquez, of Velazquez' admirer Manet, and of
Velazquez, standing amidst a bovine herd — an Manet's contemporaries, Delacroix and Gericault.
unwashed mass. Like Coriolanus, she is wounded, Vast triptychs dominate Desiderio's oeuvre,
her scar veiled in a bandage. But the scar Heffernan powerfully resonating the most violent and mythic
has placed on the infanta's womb is Heffernan's aspects of history painting. He describes himself as
own scar, the remnant of an ectopic pregnancy. a painter who "jumped the modernist ship. . . into
Heffernan saw that life-threatening experience as hypermode, a post-structuralist mode."' His stories
joining her to "the maelstrom of female history." emerge through layers of meaning-coded messages
Also key to that history, Heffernan believes, is referencing a whole history of art and literature.
"a society that creates the deformed female in the "They are darkened mirrors," he says. "You see the
name of beauty." In the seventeenth century, past and the present."
Velazquez immortalized the Infanta Maria Teresa Desiderio's triptych The Progress of Self Love
as a feminine ideal, painting her restricted in corset (1990) is heavy with allegory and operatic in scope.
and bedecked in jewels. Heffernan disrobes Moving freely between world events and personal
her subject, discarding the royal vestments that despair, Desiderio juxtaposes private tragedy in the
Velazquez painted so beautifully. Heffernan's left panel with the public devastation of war in the
contemporary infanta wears her wound as a badge center, and adds a mysterious underwater scene
of endurance and her hairpiece as a relic of her on the right. Since 1990, when the work was
culture. Stripped of clothes, the contemporary completed, it has been the subject of a number of
infanta is no longer idealized. Her nakedness has analytical critiques. The art critic and historian
little in common with the titillating bareness of Sam Hunter considers it a morality tale in which
Manet's Olympia (1863) or the creamy perfection of each panel illustrates the sins of ambition and 5 Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres' Odalisque (1814). narcissism.
Like her modernist predecessors, Heffernan has In the first panel, Desiderio's studio has become
infused the mythic with the personal in a scenario the scene of a murder. A naked model, a poUceman,
"where heroism comes down to street level." and the deranged and strait-jacketed artist and
When Lleffernan and I discussed her concept of perpetrator are stars in a theater of mystery
valor, she used the example of her three-year-old and hidden meanings. Never revealing the plot,
son. His reaction to her hospitalization and to his Desiderio does leave clues. The neo-geo painting
own recent hospitalization for a minor illness dominating the back wall of the studio represents
seemed to Heffernan to exempUfy the heroic ideal. art of the 1980s, a period of easy money and art-
With great courage, he offered himself up to a world narcissism. The murder might well be the
battery of painful tests. result of that narcissism run amok.
Like Heffernan, Vincent Desiderio has personal The center panel is a theater of war — of heroic
(;xp('ri('nc(' with the heroism of a child. His eight- acts played out on a beachhead, but bearing an
year-old son, Sammy, struggles with a birth defect uncanny resemblance to a portrayal of hell in the
6 Renaissance. Soldiers have taken the cavernous everything irrevocably changed — is almost like trench in the foreground but are being shot down not letting it happen." Civil War, begun in 1994 and as they try to overtake the beach. only recently completed (Bartlett continually
The third and most enigmatic panel extends reworks the paintings in his studio) is rooted in real from the beachhead to a cutaway of an ocean. In time and space. It is based on the Battle of this theater of dreams, Desiderio metaphorically NashviUe, the turning point of the war, which gave plunges to the depths of the primal unconscious, General William T. Sherman the opportunity to the archetypal unknown. The presiding figure is move his troops down to Georgia.
Ahab, overlooking the grave of his tormentor, the Civil War was a way for Bartlett, a displaced whale. But the conclusion of Herman Melville's Southerner facing mid-life, "to find the meaning of story has been altered: Ahab, rather than joining home." The Battle of Nashville was the first in this
Moby Dick at the bottom of the sea, "wanders country to be fought in the snow, and Bartlett haplessly in search of his other half." In this panel, depicts the bleak desolation of its aftermath. In the as in so much of his work, Desiderio uses the grand distance, a Confederate wife struggles to save her myths that shape a nation's history as ways to husband, as many women did on the battlefields explore his own psyche and to comment on the of the South. The real action, though, occurs in polemics of modernism and its contemporary the foreground, at the painting's central axis, where manifestations. The final panel shatters the a bare-shouldered woman holds a dying Union dualities that Desiderio has set up throughout the soldier who was once a slave. The pose recalls triptypch — artist and model, warrior and victim, Michelangelo's Pieta (1498-1500) — the
Ahab and whale, and finally hero and antihero. "My compassion of Mary and the martyrdom of Christ.
attitude toward the heroic," he says, "is not In the dead of winter, steam rises from the woman's
necessarily intact." body, forming a small halo above her head. The
Like Desiderio, Bo Bartlett infuses national religion of Bartlett's Georgia childhood still plays
symbols with personal iconography. In the best an important role in his life, contributing to the
tradition of history painting, Bartlett isolates the deeply felt mystical implications of his work.
moments that define an era. His subjects, like the When first conceived. Homeland (1994) was to
hunter portrayed in Lamm Gottes (1989), are be titled Returning to St. Lo, as a tribute to the
everymen. Their Icinship is with the depression-era Normandy town destroyed during World War II.
heroes in American scene painting who manifested Hojueland is a liberation scene in which the
the ideals of democracy. But Bartlett's images are villagers, not aware that their tragedy will continue,
disturbing; his settings dreamlike. Inspired by go home. "They are moving through space
divergent heroes — painters Norman Rockwell and time," Bartlett explains, "moving toward
and Andrew Wyeth from his childhood, and something, but we're not sure what." Like Civil
psychologist Karl Jung and theologian Thomas War, Homeland is as much about a sense of place
Merton from adulthood, Bartlett plumbs the depths and belonging as it is about a specific war. The
of the American psyche. central figure, a girl in a yellow dress, embodies
In 1993 Bartlett began a trilogy of monumental hope and promise. Bartlett clearly acknowledges
paintings on war. Hiroshima, the first and still his debt to the great painters of history and allegory
unfinished work, depicts the moment before — to Courbet, whose Interior of my Studio inspired
nuclear impact. For Bartlett, "holding history stiU compositional passages, and to Gericault and
before the blast — before that one point when Delacroix, whose respective paintings Raft of the Medusa (1818-19) and Liberty Leading the People of a buffalo hunt described in Audubon's 1843
(1830), inspired the girl in Homeland and the Missouri River journal. Riding on a flatboat, woman in Civil War. For Bartlett, the true heroes Audubon, his back to the viewer, sketches the head are survivors rather than victors. of a decapitated buffalo. Spotlit by the setting sun,
Walton Ford's heroic themes also resound with the artist is unmoved by the slaughter around him, the tragedies of American history, from the focusing only on the "symmetry and beauty" of his settlement of the West to plantation life in the art. In portraying Audubon as antihero, Ford
South. In the primordial wilderness, Indians and comments on the elite position artists assume in homesteaders enact their struggles; on the the name of a higher calling. plantations, masters hold tight to the reins of Journals can be powerful tools for the "new slavery. Painted in the stiffly narrative style and history." Certainly Audubon's journals, read over sepia tones of American primitive canvases. Ford's 150 years after they were written, seem brutal to work looks deceptively authentic. But the veneer modern sensibilities. An equally shocking source of age disguises a postmodern interpretation of the are the journals of slave holders. Ford's ancestors myths of our national past. Ford espouses a held slaves on their Nashville, Tennessee revisionist history — one that edifies the victim and plantation, and his great-grandmother's diary, Tlie debunks the hero. Autobiography of Emily Donelson Walton: 1837-
In 1990 Ford began a series of paintings 1936, was pubUshed, Ford says, partly as a justifi- exploring the myth of John James Audubon. cation to show that the Waltons were good masters.
Audubon's wilderness expeditions and the art he But at least two of the entries challenge that produced place him securely within the pantheon intention, and they have become a springboard for of American heroes. Today, Audubon so symbolizes Ford's work: "Among the httle babies born on the the environmental movement that the Audubon plantation was one having six fingers on each hand.
Society even bears his name. But Audubon's My mother cut off the extra fingers and I buried journals present a more ruthless picture. John them under the rose bush in her flower garden. She
James Audubon — The Head Full of Symmetry was given to me and I named her Queen Victoria. with and Beauty (1991) graphically depicts the carnage I once saw a picture of the baby Queen
pigeons around her, and I thought it a
beautiful name for my little pickaninny."
Another entry tells of Uncle Guinea
George, a slave from New Guinea who
posed as a cannibal to frighten his
owners. He gained some degree ol
control over his destiny by baring his
sharp teeth (a New Guinea cosmetic
enhancement) and saying, "We do it
because we eat people."
"Using personal sources," Ford says,
"absolves me of the accusation that I am
pointing fingers at other people. This is
me. ... I would have owned slaves and
we would be at war with the Indians."
Kijf^ciir Dflycroix, Liberty Lcddtti^ the I'cDplc. 1830. The skeletons Ford found in his family closet implicate him, and the lesson he learned relates to heroism: "It is stupid to have heroes in the first place. History is too often written by people who want to keep their heroes clean, flat, one-sided." Power shifts, heroes fall, and history rewrites itself.
Ford's equestrian paintings take these issues head-on.
Mimicldng historical works that show the gentry in mastery and
• control of a spirited animal, they , , ^ - ^ ' Iheodore Gericault Tlie Raft of the Medusa, 1819 use the equestrian image as an allegory for political control. A Faulty Seat (1992), Komar and Melamid's initial inspiration was the for example, resounds with the fear induced by heroic depiction of Lenin and Stahn that was so
Guinea George. Something has spooked the prominent during their childhoods. In 1972 Komar master's horse, and the situation could explode as and Melamid were commissioned to decorate a the slaves are called upon to reign in the beast. It children's camp with likenesses of Soviet heroes. could be Ford's great-grandfather in the saddle, The camp director took them to the spot where a struggling to maintain the power structure of the bust of Stalin had been buried years before, and antebellum South. Ford's relatives, he imagines, Komar and Melamid were struck with the idea that would have collected prints by the equestrian all over Russia similar statues lurked underground. painter Stubbs and by Audubon. "That imagery is This dislodged early memories of public spaces one day," my legacy. I attack that imagery from within." filled with StaUn's image. "[But] suddenly Melamid recalled, "he was gone — everything
associated with Stalin was bad. In the summer in
The artists discussed so far share a decidedly the camp with the buried Stalin, we suddenly
serious approach to their art and to the subject of reaUzed that Stahn art isn't good art, it's not bad art,
the hero. The remaining artists have a lighter touch, it's just art. This was a great discovery lor us. . . . ,,7 stressing irony, modernist humor, and a touch of There were no taboos anymore.
cynicism. In Double Self-Portrait (1973), Komar and
Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid created their Melamid substituted their own profiles for those of
blueprint for the modern antihero during the Lenin and Stahn. Komar and Melamid's attempts to
early 1970s. As Soviet dissidents, they cannot be exhibit such work — work that mocked Moscow's
pigeonholed in the academic debate between old worship-or-destroy ideology — led to their
and new history, being neither leftwing nor expulsion from the Moscow Union of Artists in 1974
pro-heroic. Reacting to their native culture, which on charges of "distortion of Soviet Reality and
has dismantled its heroes with each new regime, deviation from the principles of Soviet Realism."
Komar and Melamid portray those national heroes Komar and Melamid could not adhere to the
with humor, irony, and a degree of nostalgia. allegiance to a collective political purpose that was
demanded of all official Soviet artists. In 1977 they emigrated, first to Israel and a year later to the painting in the social realist style, but they now
United States, where they live and work today. focus their attention on American democracy. In a
Trained in the realist style favored by the project conceived for Artforum magazine, Komar Communist regime, Komar and Melamid mimic and Melamid announced: "It's time to take the next history painting. "Our training in art was pre- step — to create new and original versions of revolutionary. Sometimes after you get to a certain American social realism. At the end of the century level of oil painting, you make a certain brushstroke and the millennium, the year 1999 will mark the and realize it's a painterly gesture from the 200th anniversary of George Washington's death. nineteenth century. Maybe the system is preserving But revolutionaries never die! We call on everyone a gesture by Delacroix, who Imows? In Russia, it's who believes that the revolutionary legacy of the preserved forever." In an interview after their Founding Fathers is threatened with extinction to arrival in New York, they explained: "Art in the create work devoted to this patriotic theme." With
Soviet Union is divided into two parts — form and the fervor of a political broadside, Komar and content. All official works are based on that Melamid's project invited "cultural workers" to principle. In a Moscow gallery, you can see Uenin "sign up for the Five-Year Plan 1994-99." As an in Courbet style, Lenin in Cezanne style — that's inspiration to other artists, they offer their painting, good form and good content." For Komar and Washington Lives II (1994). To drive home their
Melamid, good form and bad content were far more slogan, "Revolutionaries never die!", they have engaging. outfitted Washington in a business suit as though
In a series of over two dozen social realist ready to lead a new form of revolution. paintings executed between 1980 and 1984, Komar Like Komar and Melamid, Lawrence Gipe is and Melamid recount memories of the Stalinist motivated by the myths surrounding complex regime. "The real Stalin time was about life, death, heroes and their fall from grace. In large-scale blood," Melamid says. "It was a terrible time but a paintings and painting installations, he evokes deep one, a real one." It was also a time when art the grandiosity of history painting, but he served the purpose of the totalitarian regime. I Saw never actually shows a hero. Instead, he offers
Stalin Once Wlien I Was A Child (1981-82) alludes symbolic portraits, the icons of the machine age — to the nostalgia and the fear Stalin evoked. Close skyscrapers, industrial plants, planes, and
examination also reveals Stalin's resemblance to locomotives.
Melamid, whose snapshot served as a model. This Gipe's method is to appropriate artistic genres
ploy diminishes the impact of Stalin's bearing, of the first half of this century, but turn them to his
casting him as a figure who is comic and somewhat own ends. Evocations of social realism, with its
pathetic. strong ideological thrust, and precisionism,
As a counterpoint to the socialist realist series, the American modernist movement that heralded Komar and Melamid created another group industrialization and the apotheosis of the
of works they call Ancestral Portraits. Taking on machine, lend a veneer of authenticity to Gipe's
the stance of state leaders, dinosaurs pose before revisionist history. In fact, the symboUc portrait was
velvet curtains or appear spotlit, as in Bolsheviks itself an invention of modernism, introduced in the
Returning Home after a Demonstration (1981-82). early 1900s by the French Dadaists and adopted by
Tlie paintings are allegorical; the dinosaurs relics of the American modernists.
an ancient and extinct history. Gipe's The Century of Progress Museum (1992)
Alter a period of ambitious projects and instal- is a painting installation about the corruption of
lations, Komar and Melamid recently returned to power and industrialization. The title refers to the decade, Krupp was 1933 Chicago World's Fair, held during the Great against the Soviet bloc. Within a
Depression, but called the Century of Progress. among the richest and most powerful men in of the new With the instincts of today's spin doctors, the Europe. For Gipe, this bellwether antihero. crafters of the fair marketed their creation on the Germany was the quintessential Project, Gipe presents a nation's hope for an optimistic future. Gipe portrays Throughout the Krupp
Robert Moses, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Luce, and romanticized, almost spiritual view of Krupp's steel of sunUght and smoke the German arms manufacturer Alfred Krupp as mills. The dramatic effects the industrial the dubious heroes of a capitaHst era: "They were recall the precisionist vision of cathedral. But unhke the men who started out as idealists in an industrial plant as the modern in his romanticism; age," Gipe says, "but they became obsessed with precisionists, Gipe is insincere heroes. power — unaccountable power — and the results he uses it in an ironic way to reveal false portrayal," Gipe says, were often tragic." "My highly aestheticized senses critical, also inevitably Triptych No. J, from The Century of Progress "while in many Museum, continues Gipe's Krupp Project, begun in reinforces the masculine, mythmaking agenda of
1990. In his notes for the project, Gipe speaks of his large-scale painting." in the act of fascination with the Krupps, the Essen family Mark Tansey is more interested "Is dynasty that for almost 400 years dominated transformation of the hero than in the result. simphstic German production of steel and armaments. The the loss of the hero just the loss of a Krupp firm was the mythic embodiment of notion of the truth?" he asks. To address this represen- Germany's modern industrial state; the very name confounding question, Tansey chooses massive schemas he evoked a sense of nationahsm. "The Krupps were tation as his artistic mode. The history painting heroic in a way that no Carnegie or Rockefeller constructs use the conventions of
the first could hope to be," Gipe says. "They were a and have the look of works created during allude to patriarchal head in the fatherland." decades of this century. His canvases also palette True capitaUsts, the Krupps served Germany's early photography, with their monochrome
reigning leadership, from the kaisers to the Nazis. in hues that range from sepia to bluish-black.
Their fortune was amassed through centuries of The illusion of age, so common to the works in dialectic. successful political alignments. The family slogan "Heroic Painting," is critical to Tansey's with "Necessity Knows No Law" became their driving But Tansey's "history paintings" don't deal layers of images sometimes force during World War II. In a Faustian bargain actual history. Through presents "hybrid with Hitler, Krupp manned its factories with over interspersed with text, Tansey that could never 100,000 slaves, recruited from the Buchenwald histories" — ironic situations
concentration camp. When these workers became actually occur. Thus, Tansey adamantly distances contrast to the debilitated, they were returned to the camp to himself from the realists: "In
reality, work investigates how die. The phrase used to describe Essen to newly assertation of one my sees arrived foreign workers — "Hier wohnt stille des different realities interact and abrade." If one Purity herzens" or "Here dwells the heart's repose" — is a history painting when viewing works like or emblazoned across the bottom of Gipe's triptych. Test, Homage to Frank Lloyd Wright, The Nuremberg Tribunal sentenced Alfried Constructing the Grand Canyon, Tansey asks what "Within my Krupp to only ten years' imprisonment. United one expects of that history painting. jarring States intervention further reduced the sentence to pictures, any level of content might seem painting. thirty months, since Krupp steel was needed to and might break up the unity of a history
rebuild the nation, which would be a useful ally So the painting is not absolutely a history painting." This is clearly the case in Purity Test (1982). developed by nineteenth-century romantic painters
Here, Tansey conjures two incongruous moments of the American West like Alfred Bierstadt and in time, as Indian braves look down from a cliff over Frederik Church, Tansey manifests his own grand the Great Salt Lake. What holds their gaze is Robert vision. Constructing the Grand Canyon reflects on
Smithson's seminal earthwork of 1970, Spiral Jetty. how romantic conventions have been challenged by
The Indians are romanticized, depicted as noble deconstruction, the philosophic movement that savages. As Arthur Danto points out. Purity Test emerged during the 1960s. Deconstruction posits imitates the style of Frederic Remington: "Neither that texts have no absolute meaning — that all text
Remington's nor Tansey's appropriated style would is open to interpretation. Tansey explains: have had a place in the art world in which Spiral "The deconstructionists' primary method treats
Jetty was admired as an achievement. The art world everything as text. Nature too becomes a textual of the late 1960s and early '70s was one of aesthetic construct." renunciation and austerity, marked by the quest for In Tansey's painting, the Grand Canyon is being the pure essence of art, and hence a reduction of unearthed from text, and the archaeologists of this art to its most primitive components." In Purity ambitious scheme are the very architects of
Test Tansey poses this question: Woiild Smithson, deconstruction: Michael Foucoult teeters on a the hero of late modernism, measure up to the boulder at the left, and the Yale School — Paul standards of the true primitive hero? Would he pass DeMan, Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, and the purity test? Geoffrey Hartman — work at the painting's center.
In Homage to Frank Lloyd Wright (1984), Humorously, Tansey depicts these postmodern
Tansey takes on the great American hero of modern heroes in business suits or their classroom garb. architecture. One of Wright's last and most contro- The workers, muscular young men and women, are versial projects was the Guggenheim Museum in dressed in the clothes common to both
New York, criticized by many as a monument to construction workers and students. "Their goal in
Wright himself rather than an environment for the painting," Tansey says, "is to deconstruct the display of artworks. As Tansey puts it: "Wright romanticism and to rebuild it from the texts of their ignored all the circumstances that are ideal own ideology. What follows is really a kind of for showing art. His building is an example pseudo-non-heroism." of architecture defeating art." Tansey's painting
"returns that arrogant gesture." Again using the style of history painting, in particular the romanticized portrayals of the great sea battles The evolving twentieth-century definition of of the Civil War, Tansey metamorphosizes the hero does not necessarily mean that the Guggenheim Museum into a battleship, the hero no longer exists. Rather, it may perhaps the Monitor or the Merrimack. In mean that the proper defining characteristic of fact, the Civil War ironclads were transformations heroism is the ability to adapt to a milieu. The
of innocent paddlewheelers. Tansey's transfor- artists in "Heroic Painting" use the stylistic
mation of the Guggenheim, like the transformation conventions of their progenitors to question old
of the paddlewheeler, results in an "unbelievable values and to search for new ones. As postmod-
monstrosity." ernists, they cast doubt on the credibility of their
The ideals of romanticism also figure strongly forefather's heroes. As contemporary artists, they
in Tansey's Constructing the Grand Canyon (1990). struggle to maintain their integrity in a culture that
Mimicking the conventions of romanticism has cast them in an adversarial role. art As the millennium closes, it is questionable that you can avoid life by immersing yourself in whether artists will continue to play the antihero. no longer seems admirable. Today, the isolation of New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis has the artist has become a crisis that polarizes our praised the Chinese dissident Wei Jing Sheng, who nation's cultural life. Perhaps artists in the next was jailed for organizing non-conformist painting century will claim their place as agents of enlight- exhibitions: "In a cynical time," he writes, "we enment — as the heroes we long for.
Americans long for heroes."
The cycle set in motion with the advent of modernism has come fuU circle. Flaubert's belief
NOTES
Unless otherwise noted, all quotations come from conver- 6. Quotations in this paragraph are from an interview with
sations with the artists in December 1995 and January Walton Ford in the exhibition catalogue History 101: The
1996. Re-Search for Family (St. Louis: Forum for Contemporary
Art, 1994), pp. 19-20. 1. Gertrude HimmeHarb, "Of Heroes, Villains, and Valets,"
20th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, presented 7. Quoted in Carter Radcliff, Komar and Melamid (New
under the auspices of the National Endowment for the York: Abbeville Press, 1988), p. 17.
Humanities, Washington, D.C., 1 May 1991. HimmeHarb 8. Radcliff, Komar and Melamid, p. 59. also quoted Carlyle, as cited in the next paragraph. 9. Quotes in this paragraph are in Radcliff, Komar and "Changing Paradigms, Brealdng the 2. Suzi GabUk, Melamid, pp. 27 and 79. Cultural Lrance," The Reenchantment ofArt (New York: 10. Quoted in Radcliff, Komar and Melamid, p. 30. Thames and Hudson, Inc., 1991), p. 5. Gablik also quotes 11. From Project Page, "Komar and Melamid's 'The Flaubert. People's Choice'," Artforum International, Januai-y 1995, 3. Thomas Sokolowsld, Morality Tales: History Painting in p. 75. the 1 980s (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 12. Quoted in Arthur C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and 1987), p. 8. Revisions (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992), p. 132. 4. Quoted in EUen PaU, "Painting Life Into Sammy," The 13. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, p. 19. New York Times Magazine, 29 January 1995, p. 37. 14. Anthony Lewis, Neiv York Times, 15 December 1995. 5. Sam Hunter, Vincent Desiderio: Recent Paintings
(exhibition catalogue) (New York: Marlborough Gallery,
1993). BO BARTI.ETT Civil War, 1994-1995 BO BARTLETT Homeland, 1994 16 VINCENT DESIDERIO Vie Progress of Self Love. 1990 17 18 WAi;rOI\ FORD John .Iannis Ainhihon-Tlw Head Full oj Symmetry and Beauty, 1991 WALTON FORD A Faulty Seat, 1992 19 I 20 LAWRENCE GIPE Triptych No. 1 from the Century of Progress Museum, 1992 21
i 22 J II LI K HKFFP:RNArM Batlle Zone, 1991 JULIE HEFFERNAN Self-Portrait as Infanta Maria Teresa Playing Coriolanus, 1995 KOMAM AND IVIKI.AIVI ID lUilslindks KcHurning Home After a Demonstrat^^^^ 1981-82 KOMAR AND MELAMID Washington Lives II, 1994 MARK TANSEY Purily Tpst, 1982 MARK TANSEY Constructing the Grand Canyon, 1990 27 CHECKLIST
1. BO BARTLETT 5. VINCENT DESIDERIO
Lamm Gottes, 1989 Studyfor a Hero's Life, 1992
Oil on birch panel with gold-leaf frame Oil on canvas
18x11 inches 1978 X 32% inches
Collection of Adam Reich Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Gallery,
Courtesy of P.P.O.W., New York Inc., New York
2. BO BARTLETT 6. WALTON FORD
Homeland, 1994 John James Audubon—The Head Full of
Oil on linen Symmetry and Beauty, 1991
134 X 204 inches Oil on linen
Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W., New York 64% X 9374 inches
Collection of Helen Alexander, Lexington,
3. BO BARTLETT Kentucky
Civil War, 1994 -1995
Oil on linen 7. WALTON FORD
134 X 204 inches The Homestretch, 1991
Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W., New York Oil on wood
47% X 64% inches
4. VINCENT DESIDERIO Collection of Anthony Scotto, New York
The Progress of Self Love, 1990
Oil on canvas 8. WALTON FORD
Triptych A Faulty Seat, 1992
1 1 1'/2 X 34iy4 inches overall Oil on wood
Left panel: 108 x 87'/+ inches 38 X 48% inches
Center panel: 108 x 119^! inches Collection of Margot Frankel, New York
Right panel: 108 x 87V4 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Gallery,
Inc., New York 9. LAWRENCE GIPE 13. KOMAR AND MELAMID
Triptych No. 1 from the Century of Progress Washington Lives 11, 1994
Museum, 1992 Oil on canvas
From "The Rrupp Project" 72 X 48 inches
Oil on panel Courtesy of the artists. New York 114x268 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Helman Gallery, 14. MARKTANSEY
New York PuHty Test, 1982
Oil on canvas
10. JULIE HEFFERNAN 72 X 96 inches
Battle Zone, 1991 Collection of the Chase Manhattan Bank, NA,
Oil on canvas Art Program, New York
68 X 9OV2 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Littlejohn 15. MARKTANSEY
Contemporary, New York Homage to Frank Lloyd Wnght, 1984
Oil on canvas
11. JULIE HEFFERNAN 32 X 85 inches
Self-Portrait as Infanta Maria Teresa Playing Collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art,
Coriolanus, 1995 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Oil on canvas
47y4x 6 inches 16. MARKTANSEY
Courtesy of the artist and Littlejohn Constructing the Grand Canyon, 1990
Contemporary, New York Oil on canvas
85 X 12672 inches
12. KOMAR AND MELAMID Collection of the Walker Art Center,
Bolsheviks Returning Home after a Minneapolis, Minnesota
Demonstration, 1981-82 Gift of Penny and Mike Winton, 1990
From the "Nostalgic Socialist Realism" series
Oil on canvas
72 X 55 inches
Collection of Robert and Maryse Boxer, London, England
Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Art, New York
29 ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
BO BARTLETT SELECT AWARDS 1987 PoUock-Krasner Foundation Grant Born 1955. Columbus. Georgia National Endowment for the Arts, Fellowship Lives in Bala Cyiiwyd, Pennsylvania
SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS EDUCATION 1986 LawTence OHver Gallery, Philadelphia 1975- Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Philadelphia 1987 Lang and O'Hara Gallery, New York 1981
Greenville County Museum of .Art, GreenviUe, 1977- Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, 1988 South Carolina 1978 Anatomy Studies 1989 Lang and O'Hara Gallery, New York SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS 1990 Lang and O'Hara Gallery, New York "Sublimism: New Paintings and Drawings," 1988 1991 The Queens Museum, New York Cast Iron Building, Philadelphia The The MetropoKtan State College of Denver, Center
P.P.O.W., New York for the Visual Arts, Denver, Colorado
1990 Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, 1993 Marlborough Gallery, New York South Carolina
1991 P.P.O.W., New York
1992 Daniel Saxon Gallery, Los .Angeles
1993 Moore Gallery, Philadelphia WALTON FORD F.A.N. Gallery. Philadelphia Born 1960. WTiite Plains, New York 1994 P.P.O.W., New York Lives in New York, New York 1995 John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
Struve Gallery, Chicago EDUCATION
1982 B.F.A., Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Rhode Island
SELECT AWARDS
VINCENT DESIDERIO 1988 The Penny McCall Foundation, Grant Pennsylvania Born 1955, Philadelphia, Art Matters, Inc., Fellowship
Lives in Tarrytown, New York 1989 New York Foundation for the Arts, Fellowship
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Grant EDUCATION 1990 Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. Grant 1977 B.A. Fine Art/Art History, Haverford College, National Endowment for the Arts, Fellowship Haverford. Pennsylvania 1991 1992 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1977- Academia di Belle Arti, Florence, Italy Fellowship 1978
1983 Four-Year Certificate, Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts, Philadelphia SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS 1993 "Selections from The Century of Progress
1990 "The Blood Remembers," Bess Cutler Gallery, Museum," Modernism Gallery, San Francisco
New York "The Robert Moses Project (Text and Subtext),"
1991 Bess Cutler Gallery, New York BlumHelman Gallery, New York
Bess Cutler Gallery, Santa Monica, California 1994 "Selections from The Century of Progress Museum," Ruth Bloom Gallery, Santa Monica, 1993 "Procrustean Beds," Nicole IClagsbrun Gallery, California New York, in collaboration with Michael Klein,
Inc. "Lawrence Gipe," The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia "Walton Ford," The Contemporai-y Arts Center,
Cincinnati, Ohio "Montage Paintings," Modernism Gallery, San Francisco Virginia Beach Center for the Arts, Virginia Beach,
Virginia 1995 "Lawrence Gipe: Approved Images, New Paintings," BlumHelman Gallery, New York
LAWRENCE GIPE JULIE HEFFERNAN Born in Baltimore, Maryland Born in San Francisco, California Lives in Los Angeles, California, and New York, New York Lives in New York, New York EDUCATION EDUCATION 1984 B.F.A., Virginia Commonwealth University,
Richmond, Virginia 1981 B.F.A., University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California 1986 M.F.A., Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles 1985 M.F.A. in Painting, Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut SELECT AWARDS SELECT AWARDS 1989 National Endowment for the Arts, Fellowship 1986 Fulbright-Hayes Grant to West Berlin
SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS Annette Kade Grant for the Creative and
1990 "The ICrupp Project," Shea and Beker, New York Performing Arts
"Themes for a Fin de Siecle," Karl Bernstein 1987 Institute for Art and Urban Resources
Gallery, Santa Monica, California P.S.I. , Artist in Residence and Studio Grant, Long
Island, 1991 "Futurama," Shea and Bornstein Gallery, New York
Santa Monica, California 1990 Skowegan School of Painting and Sculpture,
1992 "Lawrence Gipe Monotypes," BlumHelman Painting Fellowship
Gallery, New York 1993 Centre de Rechere et Mediation Valence, Art III,
"The Propaganda Series," Galerie Six Friedrich, France
Munich, Germany 1994 Hillwood Art Museum, Project Residency Grant
"Insights Exhibition: 'Lawrence Gipe: Century of 1995 National Endowment for the Ails, Fellowship Progress Museum,' " Worcester Art Museum, Pennsylvania State University, College Faculty Worcester, Massachusetts Research Grant "Century of Progress Museum," BlumHelman Pennsylvania State University, Institute Research Warehouse, York New Grant SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS 1985 Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, London
1988 "Berlin-New York," Littlejohn Contemporary, 1986 Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Louvre, Paris, France
New York 1988 NGBK, Berlin, Germany
1989 "New Paintings," Littlejohn Contemporary, 1990 Brooldyn Museum, Brooldyn, New York New York 1994 Alternative Museum, New York 1992 "Recent Work," Littlejohn Contemporary, 1995 Herbert Johnson Museum, Ithaca, New York New York 1995 Passage de Retz, Paris, France 1993 "Paintings," Littlejohn Contemporary, New York
1994 "New Paintings," Littlejohn Contemporary, New York
1995 "New Paintings," Littlejohn Contemporary, New York MARK TANSEY
Leedy Voulkos Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri Born 1949, San Jose, California
Lives in New York, New York KOMAR AND MELAMID EDUCATION Vitaly Komar, born September 11, 1943, Moscow 1974 Harvard Summer Session, Institute of Arts July 14, 1945, Moscow Alexander Melamid, born Administration, Cambridge, Massachusetts
York. Have lived in the United Live in New York, New 1975- Graduate Studies: Painting, Hunter CoUege, States since 1978. 1978 New York
EDUCATION SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1967 Both graduates, Stroganov Art Institute, Moscow, 1990 "Mark Tansey: Art and Source," Seattle Art Russia Museum, Washington; Montreal Museum of
Fine Art, Quebec, Canada; St. Louis Art AND AWARDS SELECT ACHIEVEMENTS Museum, Missouri; Walker Art Center,
1970s Initiated SOTS art movement (Soviet version of MinneapoHs; List Visual Arts Center,
Western pop art) MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Modern Art
of Fort Worth, Texas 1981 National Endowment for the Arts, Fellowship Museum Kunsthalle Museum, Basel, Switzerland SELECT DUO EXHIBITIONS Curt Marcus Gallery, New York 1976 Ronald Feldman Fine Art, New York (thirteen 1992 Curt Marcus Gallery, New York exhibitions since 1976) 1993 "28 Pictures," Curt Marcus Gallery, New York 1978 Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut "Mark Tansey,": Los Angeles County Museum of 1985 Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland Art, California; Milwaukee Museum of Art, Wisconsin; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth,
Texas; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec, Canada
1995 "Borders," Galleri Faurschou, Copenhagen, Denmark
32 3 3091 00778 3947 SECCA SOUTHEASTERN CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART WINSTON SALEM, NORTH CAROLINA