The Market & The Muse: 18 19 IF AN ARTIST PAINTS IN MONASTIC SECLUSION, IS IT ART? BY CHRISTOPHER REARDON IF AN ARTIST PAINTS IN MONASTIC SECLUSION, IS IT ART? CHRISTOPHER REARDON THE MARKET & THE MUSE: Congdon, who was born the night the Titanic sank, believed that he, IF AN ARTIST PAINTS IN MONASTIC SECLUSION, IS IT ART? too, was destined to go to an early grave. Certainly in the 1950s he kept on a collision course. In a letter from Guatemala City in 1957, he told his cousin, the poet Isabella Gardner, a descendant of the Boston collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, of the hazardous nature of his creative process. “In order to have a pure birth,” he wrote, using a metaphor he often applied to his viscer- al style of action painting, “I must go through scenes little short of suicide and not a bit short of madness and destruction.” No model of stability herself, Gardner saw his paintings (and her own writing) as the flowering of an oth- erwise noxious ancestral weed she called, in a poem so titled, “The Panic Vine.” Ultimately, though, Congdon found a way to untangle himself both from the manic tendencies that were said to run through his family and from the self-annihilation that came to characterize the New York School. In August 1959, he went to Assisi, Italy, and converted to Roman Catholicism. n the outskirts of Milan, just By then, some of his spirited cityscapes of New York and Venice, often 20 seven miles from the dazzlingO fashion district where Gianni Versace and rendered in thick strokes of black and gold, had already entered the perma- 21 Miucci Prada launched their careers, a two-hundred-year-old manor house nent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern stands among several acres of barley, corn, and soy. The estate, a working Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of farm and monastery, is home to a dozen Benedictine monks and, until recent- American Art in New York, as well as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and ly, one artist in residence. the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Congdon continued painting to The artist, who died earlier this year at the age of eighty-six, was an the last days of his life, in his studio at the monastery near Milan, but gradu- American painter named William Congdon. Famous, then forgotten, he was ally he retreated from public view. He held his last significant American show the last surviving member of the New York School, the cluster of abstract at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1967, and seldom exhibited or sold his work expressionists who shook up the commercial art world in the late 1940s and thereafter. His long absence from New York, coupled with a growing mistrust 1950s. Apart from Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning, who died not of organized religion in Western society, led most artists, critics, collectors, long before him, Congdon didn’t have much competition for the longevity title. and curators to overlook his earlier paintings. Consciously or not, they wrote After all, the New York School cemented its reputation for nihilism with the him out of the annals of the New York School and, by extension, the history of early, violent deaths of four of its members. Arshile Gorky hanged himself in twentieth-century art. 1948. Jackson Pollock wrapped his Oldsmobile around a tree in 1956. David If Congdon’s life reads like a case study in how to derail a promising Smith died in a car crash in 1965. And Mark Rothko put a razor blade to his artistic career, it also raises some salient thoughts about the relationship wrists in 1970. between art and commerce. The paintings from his monastic period, freely THE MARKET & THE MUSE CHRISTOPHER REARDON executed yet rarely seen, show some of the countervailing rewards and risks “The relentless pressures of the so-called marketplace have distorted all our that await artists who work outside the economic mainstream. His descent culture industries, placing far too much emphasis on whatever might seem to into relative obscurity, in fact, suggests that there might be limits to how far sell the fastest to the most people.” artists can cloister themselves while still calling their work “art” in any cultur- Miller adds a welcome counterpoint to the dominant tune of our time: ally meaningful sense. At times, even Congdon found it hard to take the the anthem of free markets, globalization, and economic growth. Yet he leaves measure of his work. “I ask myself if I’m really religious, and if I’m really an us wondering, what’s a serious artist to do? Opting out, as Congdon did for artist,” he said one foggy afternoon last winter, after painting a small, unin- arguably more complex reasons, may not be the best response. What if it turns spired landscape. “But it’s difficult to know what religion is, and difficult to out, after all, that the commodification and commercialization of art also has know what art is.” A few hours later he “canceled out” the painting, scraping some salutary results? That the imperative to transform creative process into off the still-moist oils with a spatula. It’s tempting to attribute such self-doubt product can light new creative sparks? That the market might somehow serve to the weather, or senescence, or the nature of making art. And given the tenor the muse, and not the other way around? My intention here is not to peddle of Congdon’s many other reflections on his life and work, it would be unwise capitalist bromides, but to show that for all the damage that money may wreak to put too much stock into this one. Still, his comment highlights one of the on the arts, the arts cannot exist without it. It’s not simply that artists need many perils of working in isolation: the recurring belief that one’s own work money to buy their materials, or even to eat. Surely the Florentine Renaissance is somehow deficient or illegitimate or, still worse, irrelevant. The absence of could not have come about without the Medicis. Nor, to take a more recent 22 critical feedback, as many people engaged in solitary pursuits will attest, can and contested example, could painters like David Salle and Jeff Koons have 23 often have a crippling effect. prospered as they did in the 1980s without the influx of investment bankers The alternative presents its own pitfalls. Indeed, it’s said again and looking for stylish ways to spend their bonuses. But the relationship between again that the prevailing consumer culture is poisoning art, and surely the cor- art and commerce runs deeper than that, for it’s only by concretizing the cre- porate mentality that governs much of the film, music, and publishing ative impulse, by transforming raw inspiration into sensate objects—poems industries—to name a few—has many corrosive consequences. In Hollywood, and paintings, films and audio disks, even something as “ephemeral” as a special effects and promotion take increasing precedence over story line and dance—that artists can share their vision with others. character development. At major record labels, the need for new hits propels The dilemma for serious artists, then, is how to sell without selling many musicians to short-lived stardom before their talent has had time to out. Some walk the tightrope by taking money as their theme. A few years mature. And in the book trade, the consolidation from more than fifty ago the performance artist and choreographer Ann Carlson prepared for a American publishing houses as recently as 1976 into four behemoths today has new solo by enrolling in a livestock auctioneering school. The piece, called created a climate that allows unpublished celebrities to draw seven-figure “Sold,” fused Marxist, feminist, and postmodern sensibilities by casting advances while acclaimed midlist authors go begging. “Serious books are cer- Carlson as a latter-day bartered bride. She danced in a white wedding dress tainly in deep trouble, just like serious movies, serious reporting, serious while soliloquizing on the auction block. The choreographer Karole popular music, serious magazines and, for that matter, serious newspapers,” Armitage took a similar tack with “The Predator’s Ball,” her 1996 hip-hop the media critic Mark Crispin Miller told the Chicago Tribune earlier this year. opera about the junk-bond king Michael Milken. It was, admittedly, an THE MARKET & THE MUSE CHRISTOPHER REARDON unusual subject for a choreographer. “What Drexel and Milken did was ter- to promote an album by headlining the 1995 Lollapalooza festival, the sum- rible for the country, the industry, and the businesses involved,” the mer road show for alternative rockers. It took its earnings from the tour and financier Felix G. Rohatyn, a former board member of the Alvin Ailey built its own sixteen-track recording studio, where members of the band can American Dance Theater, told me shortly before the premiere. “I would be now develop new material at their own pace. “We can operate in these two surprised if this were a subject that lent itself to dance. It seems a bit far- different worlds,” guitarist Lee Ranaldo told The New York Times last spring. fetched.” But Armitage, who jolted the dance world in the late 1970s with “We’ve got one foot completely in the indie camp, which is basically where our her unorthodox blend of ballet and punk rock, has a reputation for flouting hearts have always been. But we also get to see how the other half lives, convention.