Beneath the Surface: Julie Mehretu in 2017

With 2017 wrapping up, I have been thinking about what might qualify as the most spectacular moment for American painting this year, for which I nominate Julie Mehretu's "Howl," her monumental commission for the lobby of SFMOMA, unveiled in June. It's a huge yet not bombastic exploration of the vast landscapes and violent history of the American West.

"Howl" installed in the lobby of the San Fransisco MoMA

As a diptych, the work, officially titled "Howl (eon), i. ii," is the single largest painting in the museum’s history. It clocks in at 1,728 square feet, spread across two 27 x 32-foot canvases, each of which weighs about 300 pounds! 

Mehretu's status as an internationally celebrated artist, the work's world-class museum setting, and its sheer outsized scale demand that anyone serious about contemporary painting give the work a look.



All I've read indicates it's hard to get the sense of them unless you experience them in person, but far be it from me to allow a little thing like that to deter me from pontification.


Vogue describes them this way: "The immense works are built up in transparent layers of visual information, ranging from the transcendent and expansive nineteenth-century Western landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt to current news photos of urban riots, shootings, and mass protests [these are giant, and unrecognizable, pixilated black-and-white closeups that she ink-transferred to the canvas]—overlaid with her own calligraphic brush marks. She started these paintings a few days after the 2016 presidential election and worked in an abandoned church in Harlem."


Great. So that's what the painting "is." But....

Detail from "Howl"

How are we to read this painting? According to the museum, the work probes "the competing impulses of annihilation and preservation at the heart of 19th century westward expansion, and explores how the Bay Area’s history of colonialism, capitalism, class conflict, social protest, and technological innovation have transformed the social and physical landscape." 

Mehretu's a painting rockstar and also a hero of mine. Her earlier work is a dazzling mashup of post-abstract expressionism and precision architectural draftsmanship with a contemporary political edge. Her new work is a departure as much as it is a doubling down, which seems as it should be. 

"In her highly worked paintings, Mehretu creates new narratives using abstracted images of cities, histories, wars and geographies with a frenetic mark making that for the artist becomes a way of signifying social agency as well suggesting an unravelling of a personal biography." - quoted from somewhere.

To read Howl, we have to put it in the context of the rest of contemporary art and see it in relation to "post-modern" painting (since 1945) as well as American art in general since 1850, because we're getting a critique of painting on top of what used to be called a Marxist-critical reading of America's past and present history. Yes, it's all in there, and it's what raises this work to greatness.

The work's nearest relatives, I think, are Mark Bradford and Cy Twombly. While their work is very different, all three artists have pursued a complex political and/or archetypal conceptual underlayer scored by basic, human marks: graffiti and stencils (Bradford), doodles and "scribbles" (Mehretu, Twombly). Not unlike collage-abstractionist Bradford, Mehretu is carrying forward the traditions of abstract expressionism by both extending it and grounding its language in a new cultural context.

Here's Mark Bradford (it's totally different but related in concept I think):

The Devil is Beating His Wife, billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, permanent-wave end papers, stencils, and additional mixed media on plywood

Bradford, "Devil..." detail from above.

The following is from Saatchi online: "Mark Bradford's abstractions unite high art and popular culture as unorthodox tableaux of unequivocal beauty. Working both paint and collage, Bradford incorporates elements from his daily life into his canvases: remnants of found posters and billboards, graffitied stencils and logs, and hairdresser's permanent endpapers he collected from his other profession as a stylist. In The Devil is Beating His Wife, Bradford consolidates all these materials into a pixelised eruption of cultural cross-referencing. Built up on plywood, in sensuous layers ranging from silky and skin-like to oily and singed, Bradford offers abstraction with abc urban flair that's explosively contemporary."

For Bradford the personal-conceptual context is growing up a person of color in LA. Mehretu in her new work homes in on that same context (race) and broadens it to include historical dimensions. Mehretu implicitly critiques the history of painting and its relationship to American imperialism and identity in the work by embedding pixelated reproductions of iconic American landscape paintings literally overlaid with a deeply emotional scrim of contemporary political issues (especially race and white supremacy in the Trump era, over which "howls" her painterly protest. Mehretu says the election spurred the personal sadness and rage she's channeling here.

She asks: ‘What Does It Mean to Paint a Landscape in this Political Moment?’

I'm also haunted by this question, and it's a large part of what's driving my current work, though for somewhat different reasons than it's driving Mehretu's.

“The abolitionist movement, the Civil War, the move towards emancipation, all of these social dynamics that are a part of that narrative we don’t really talk about in regards to American landscape painting. And so what does it mean to paint a landscape and try and be an artist in this political moment?” — Julie Mehretu

As such, "Howl" stands out as a powerful visual statement, especially in a 21st century art world that often views painting as less relevant than conceptual, performance, multimedia,  and interactive installations.

Julie Mehretu at work on "Howl" in a disused church in Harlem, NYC.

"Howl" is different from Mehretu's earlier abstractions, in that here her marks are calligraphic, and not so much graffiti-like (Bradford, Twombly) as raw, expressive, and primal - willfully crude. Here is her earlier work:

Julie Mehretu, Black City, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

In 2017's grittier, more gestural "Howl," amid the tightly knitted scrawls and slashes, imagery emerges and recedes, suggesting the primacy of the spontaneous, and the emotional authenticity of the "artist's hand." 

This kind of scriptural, handwriting-like mark-making was Cy Twombly's signature style (heh). Consider Twombly's "Leda and the Swan (Rome, 1962)" for example. Twombly, who died in 2011, was an ex-pat second-generation AbEx painter (like Rauschenberg and Milton Resnick, say). While at first glance it appears to be art by a naughty child of Jackson Pollock, it is nothing of the kind.

"Leda," again like "Howl," is at first glance a palely backgrounded cloud of apparently meaningless scribbles. But closer looking sees recognizable images beginning to appear - hearts, a window....

Cy Twombly, Leda and the Swan, Rome, 1962

Given a chance, the title of course contributes to the work's meaning, and as we look again with that in mind, the whole's revealed as far from meaningless indeed. "Leda and the Swan" is a well-worn neoclassical theme: the Roman myth of Jupiter's rape of Leda (the beautiful mother of Helen, over which the Trojan war would be fought) in the animal form of a swan. The great 20th century poet William Butler Yeats, for whom art and politics were always inextricably linked, treated the theme Leda and the Swan as an archetypal cycle of violence and cultural conflict:

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

                    Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power 

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

  - W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939


Like Yeats's poem, the painting is an unflinching contemporary take on the old-world European theme - what's more, it's got arguably more energy, violence, and "truth" to the theme than any of its forebears. Western artists for hundreds of years just used the myth as an excuse for a blatant hetero-eroticism in which the female is always a passive, willing participant - of which Rubens's, below, is probably the most famous example (if only because Rubens stole the anatomy from Michelangelo's work, but that's a story for another day).

To me, Twombly's painting seen this way has almost a grim inevitability about it - How else could you so effectively portray this effed-up foundational myth of Western culture for the 20th century?

In Twombly's "Leda," everything contributes as a strong coherent meaning emerges:  the painting's whiteness becomes resonant with other whitenesses, the swan's white feathers and the marble-white Greco-Roman gleam of human flesh, scratched and clawed-at with gouging yet somehow elegant traces of gestural energy ... the whole a violent tussle of animal and human body parts (I see feathers, a talon, breasts and/or buttocks), scored by understated blood-red slashes and drips. As the MoMA catalogue entry has it: "Twombly's version of this old art-historical theme supplies no contrast of feathers and flesh but a fusion of violent energies in furiously thrashing overlays of crayon, pencil, and ruddy paint. A few recognizable signs—hearts, a phallus—fly out from this explosion, in stark contrast to the sober windowlike rectangle near the top of the painting." Could the hearts be a nod to Yeats? 

Twombly's version, as a rebuke to art history's "refined" aristocratic European renderings of the myth, is like a drawing or a narrative crashing to pieces because of its inability to contain the content's irrepressible, almost super-human power. What we took at first to be childlike insignificant "sound and fury" we can now read as a layering of time and history: brilliant, erudite, sophisticated, and emotional painting that extends and re-invigorate the western tradition.

"My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake... to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt." -Cy Twombly

It's that difficult line that Mehretu takes up in 2017's "Howl." I meant to discuss Mehrtetu more but ended up tackling Twombly because it took me a while to come around and see the value of his work, and it was knowing Twombly that, in my case, provided an immediate path to understanding "Howl." It would be great to go deeper into "Howl" in a future post if I can get good enough photos of it online, but I doubt it'll happen. If you're still reading this, wow, you must truly believe in painting. Keep the faith.

Gerhard Richter: Art is Still "Sublime"

Gerhard Richter, Abstrakt Bild (1980)

Gerhard Richter is probably the world's leading painter - not just because of his dazzling technical virtuosity, but for his work's important insights into the nature of seeing and picture-making. Then there's the range of what he's done; there's very little progressive contemporary painting that Richter hasn't already done, implied, or rendered irrelevant. It's like what a friend of mine told me about B.B. King's reaction to Stevie Ray Vaughn's playing: "The kid never runs out of ideas!" 

His output at first glance appears a bit schizophrenic - much of it is polarized between, on the one hand, the hyper-realism of paintings that pretend to be photos and on the other "random" abstractions created by purely mechanical means such as dragging a giant squeegee through the paint.  The constant? the work deceptively appears to circumvent the hand of the artist. But the reality is quite different and at once more comforting and complex: it has everything to do with Richter's "eye" (his vision for painting) and the artist, of course, is always and intensely present. 

Richter's paradoxical practice, always in a sense about the nature of painting now, has succeeded in proving painting's ongoing relevance even as choruses of art world authorities continue to proclaim its death.

Gerhard Richter, Lesende (Reader), 1994

As it has many times over his long (60 year) career,  Richter's work has morphed again into two totally disparate modes: this time, apparently chance-induced paint pouring on one hand and algorithmic digital manipulation based on one of his paintings on the other (for example, see the "Strip" painting below). There's an insightful a little interview and write up in the Wall St. journal on his latest work and the new London Gallery it's put on the map. 

Gerhard Richter, one of the new poured works

Richter says, "Hope and belief are…unique to humans. Animals don’t go around hoping. [Religion] slowly broke down over time. Perhaps starting right before Nietzsche. And nowadays there aren’t many believers. But there’s an unbroken urge to believe—whether in Prada, or some other brand of clothing, or in anything.... "

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting

"Abstract pictures do indeed show something, they just show things that don’t exist. But they still follow the same requirements as figurative works: they need a setup, structure. You need to be able to look at it and say, “It’s almost something.” But it’s actually representing nothing. It pulls feelings out of you, even as it’s showing you a scene that technically isn’t there." -Gerhard Richter

Richter, spry at 82, in front of one of his new "Strips" works.

It's all a glorious, dizzying conundrum. I see abstract painting, if not all painting  as "a secular pilgrimage toward universality," as the WSJ article puts it: "Most of the Ab-Exers shared an impulse to bring the hope of the world into their art." Not Richter. Richter wanted to close the gap between Duchamp and painting, to make objects out of signs without definite referents, confronting us with the inexplicable beauty of our bewildering and often horrific modern lives. 

September, Gerhard Richter

The processes Richter uses to make his paintings are at times themselves a metaphor for human vulnerability, striving, and patient questioning. 

All of Richter's diverse works spring from the same artistic project, namely his 'belief in painting's necessity born of radical doubt in its potential .... a credere quia absurdam' (from St. Aquaina's phrase 'I believe because it is absurd.') Despite his refusal of sentimentality in any form, for Richter art and beauty are humanity's saving graces in the face of often hard-to-bear reality. 

Gerhard Richter, Sphere (note the crouching figure reflected in the steel ball)

As he has said many times, if our better selves are to survive, "we need beauty in all its variations."*  I'm down with that.

Gerhard Richter, Two Fiats

Gerhard Richter, Kerze (Candle), 1982

(*A. Borchdardt-Hume, Gerhard Richter Panorama, p. 174)

Painting a Sensation

This week in my weekly painting workshop in Lowell we set ourselves the task of painting the sensation of flowers - we were to paint not the flowers themselves but the feeling of looking at them. I did a quick demo to show some strategies for painting abstractly.

My abstract floral demo

It didn't come out nearly as "flowery" as I intended, partly because I didn't mix all of my colors as judiciously as I should have. Nonetheless, the point was made. 

Next I asked everyone to take a minute to search their memories for a time when they were moved by looking at flowers - a garden with some special significance, perhaps, or that moment when you lean in to a flower to smell its fragrance and can almost feel the colors washing over your face. 

Then they mixed colors corresponding with that sensation and began placing them on the canvas according to a few stated formal principles of composition, principally "variety within unity."

They were all game for the experiment, brave souls! And much fine work was completed and many lessons learned. Every painting was, of course, different because each was so unique to the artist. 

Abstract floral by Cynthia DeSando

Garden, by Bill Reedy

After we tried flipping it, Bill thought this resembled clematis or another vine flower. I like it in both its vertical and horizontal orienations.

Abstract floral by JoLynne Murphy

Abstract Impressionist Flowers by Suzanne Hodge

The exercise also allowed everyone to concentrate on principles of design and pictorial organization (both intuitive and otherwise). It also offered a chance to explore the emotive properties of color and the "plastic" qualities of the paint itself- different ways to apply it using various brushes and other tools.Altogether it was great exercise. They all succeeded in using paint to tap into lived experience and personal sensations (rather than sitting down in front of something and trying to represent it relatively objectively). 

It's a great feeling to essentially make something out of nothing - to compose from personal experience is surely one of the essential aspects of the creation of meaningful art.

Abstract Musings

Tomorrow evening in my weekly Tuesday evening painting workshop we’ll be pushing paint around with the goal of creating what I'd like to call delocalized beauty. 

Delocalized (adj.): 1. To remove from a native or usual locality; 2. To broaden the range or scope of.

Modern art generally dispenses with the conventionally beautiful as unreal, uncourageous, outdated, superficial, sentimental, and an impediment to doing what modern art is supposed to do: Wake people up. Beauty as Western art has known it flees from tough-guy talk like that.

So we'll use a floral theme to try to get the jump on it.  We are going to let go of figuration (the element of image) and paint the feeling of appreciating flowers rather than painting the flowers themselves. 

My own abstract floral, "All the Sweet Tints," a 14" x 30 " floral abstract (the allusion is to a garden, actually)

“I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them," said Jackson Pollock.

Is abstract art, then, about feeling? Were the abstract expressionists like Pollock just painting their feelings? No, they were also hurling themselves against a wall that Pablo Picasso had built right in middle of Western Art. After Cubism, where could "important" painting go? 

Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943

They discovered new territories and how to get there; their work further widened the definition of art's possibilities, insisting, like the Cubists and the post-Impressionists and the Impressionists before them, that art could and should accommodate more than the conventionally beautiful and the serene, making room for big ideas about civilization, time, eternity, powerful forces of natural energy, and the relationship between the human psyche and the universe at large. Most art history books talk about all this in terms of the formal pictorial elements and the history of Western art, giving ordinary viewers of art very little to go on. 

The Swan, Ryan Cobourn, from a series incorporating classical mythology

How can we, tomorrow night, credibly present the feeling of seeing flowers without painting the flowers? 

I like Brooklyn painter Ryan Cobourn's answer. In this essay/interview he discusses the WHY of what he does and also incidentally hints at the how (I think you learn more from getting the "why" of what artists do than you do from the "how" in any case.)

I like what he says about illusionistic painting (realism) vs. what he does when he removes the representational image but leaves in shapes and colors that, to him, are associated with and suggest - allude to - the subject.


"In abstract painting you don’t have illusion—like illusion of space—but you have allusion. Allusion is way more interesting to me than anything else.” - Ryan Cobourn

This distinction strikes me as analogous to that between prose (illusion) and poetry (allusion). It’s what I like about Eric Aho’s recent landscapes too.

For me, paintings like these have an extra dimension of pathos and significance; because of how they're painted, they also allude to the act of painting itself - the very human need to explore perception and our relationship to nature by scratching our little images out on the wall of history.

I also think the work of a different Ryan, Ryan Coleman, has something relevant to say about our purposes this week (abstraction with floral motif). 

Season of Light, Ryan Coleman

Untitled (Commission for the Ritz-Carleton Wash. D.C.)

This painterly work is lush with the colors, textures, and above all the feelings associated with flowers and plant life - all without painting an image of a single leaf or petal. 

Perhaps you think some of this contemporary work doesn’t get much beyond the "Ab/Ex" guys, de Kooning, Pollock or Frankenthaller… 

.... should that matter? No, you say? Perhaps you’re very right. Just as it wouldn't matter if you're painting landscapes and not "going beyond" Aldro Hibbard. Yet, this was very important to the Ab/Ex guys - they did what they did specifically to "get beyond" the precedents set by the artists that immediately preceded them. Can we have it both ways?

To me, most of these paintings work just as well as much of what I see out there and in many cases much better. What do you think? 

Ryan Coleman, Limey

A lot of people, even painters, look at art like this and, because it puzzles them since it doesn't look like or do what they assume art is supposed to, they say “meh - my kid could do that.” But painting effective abstract art is probably more difficult than painting realistically; it demands that the artist approach all of the basic tools and techniques of painting with a super high degree of knowledge and sensitivity to their inherent properties and their raw emotional value.

At any rate, learning something of the language of abstraction cannot but help you as a painter, for I firmly believe you DO need both, the language of realism and that of abstraction, in your toolbox.

I also believe it’s not that some folks just “know what they like,” as they say, but rather that, in many cases, they really just like what they know. The general public didn’t really understand or like the French Impressionists as they do now until after at least 1950. By analogy, that would put the beginning of mainstream appreciation for abstract expressionism at about 2035. I'm convinced that we're well on our way.

Ryan Coleman