Narrative Statement
At the age of 81, after a lifetime dedicated to painting, I have achieved sufficient perspective to grasp the interrelationships between my personal experiences and my work, and the relationships between my work, the worlds of contemporary art and science, and the world of nature. Music, from the sounds of the organ grinder in the streets to classical music on our Victrola, was my earliest inspiration. Musical form and structures, transposed into light and color, are the fundamental organizing principle in my work. Dance was the primary source of rhythmic flow of movement and line. Pageantry and ceremony, from May Pole marches to Maya rituals in Mexico, were seminal motifs. Birds, trees, mountains, and the action of the waves of the sea express my affinity with the forces of nature. Abstract forms arising out of childhood — the circle, square, spiral, cross, and opposing curves — remain elemental symbols. Great works of art are at the core of my beliefs.
I began drawing at the age of five. My Russian Jewish parents possessed a rich cultural heritage and a deep appreciation for the arts. I studied piano, attended classes at the Denishawn School down the block, and went to performances by Pavlova and Martha Graham. On Saturdays, my mother took my sister and me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the Museum of the American Indian, and to the zoos and botanical gardens. By the time I was an adolescent, I was visiting the Museum of Modern Art.
The multiculturalism of turn-of-the-century New York centered in the apartment buildings where we lived. The Sholem Aleichem Cooperative, built by the Sholem Aleichem Yiddish Cultural Schools near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, held concerts, poetry readings, dance recitals, and lectures by major Jewish intellectuals and political thinkers. The sculptor Aaron Goodelman had his studio in our cooperative, and a group of us gathered there for drawing classes. This atmosphere of aspiration and struggle nourished the flowering of artistic experimentation. My creativity blossomed in a cultural world bathed in marvelous New York light.
When I received a scholarship to the Metropolitan Art School at the age of 17, I was already seeking the means to express my own individuality, which accounts for my early rebelliousness. In life class, figure drawing was based upon silhouette, light, and shadow. As an ardent student of Cézanne, I rejected this method. What if the light changed? Instead, I explored the relationship of structure, movement, and volume.
While my instructors were strict adherents of a color system based on Impressionism, I challenged the rigid use of specific colors in specific contexts. In portraiture, for example, one always used a pale rosy purple under the chin. Regardless of whether one liked the color, or whether the model had a rosy purple streak under her chin, the color was deemed appropriate.
At the Master Institute of the Roerich Museum (now the Riverside Museum), my teacher John Graham, fresh from Paris, offered excellent training in figure drawing. I learned to draw without lifting the pencil, observing the model and not the paper. Graham predicted a glowing future for me. I left to find more objective instruction and criticism under A.S. Baylinson at the Art Students League. In Baylinson’s classes, no two students painted alike nor painted imitations of the instructor’s work. His focus on composition, color, movement, and form was of immeasurable help. Baylinson guided me to my present path.
As a class monitor at the Art Students League, I received free tuition. Later, I supported my education by working as an usher at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre, where I had the extra advantage of seeing all the productions and learning more about theatre.
While working as an usher at the Theatre Union, I saw major plays by leftist playwrights of the Depression era. Thanks to my certificate in pedagogy from Fordham University, I was able to land a job as an art teacher at a WPA settlement house in Hell's Kitchen. A.S. Baylinson was my supervisor. (I later organized private art classes for individual students and groups.) After two years on the Art Teaching Project, I was transferred to the WPA Graphics and Drawing Section. I could paint full-time! Since only part of my work had to be turned over to the project, I had ample opportunity to paint and take additional art classes at the 92nd Street Y and WPA-sponsored courses.
At the height of the Depression, overwhelmed by the poverty, squalor, and urban decay of New York, I began to explore new structures, forms, and themes. My paintings, etchings, and watercolors depicted the downtown waterfront and the people living and working on the wharves. I painted women clambering up huge mounds of coal to gather fuel dumped in empty city lots. Suffused with the misery of Depression-era life, my work nevertheless was distinct from the Social Realists. Refugees [slide 1], based on sketches of backcountry people I saw on a trip to North Carolina, represents my first steps toward the portrayal of an observed ceremonial event, the precursor of my processional theme.
My representational canvases bore the influence of Cézanne, whose rootedness in nature, use of color as building blocks to create a balanced structure, and the interrelationships between foreground, background, space, and density, awakened a response to something dimly glimpsed — the unknown direction in which I was going. Rembrandt's late etchings and self-portraits evoked a similar response. Mother [slide 2], painted in 1941-43, shows Cézanne's lingering stamp on my style.
By the mid-1940s, my work was undergoing a dramatic shift from representational art to abstraction. Counterpoint #2 [slide 3] is based on the demolition of whole city blocks to make room for Stuyvesant Town. City Ruins [slide 4] is characteristic of that period. Reflected Visions [slide 5], an abstract portrait, reveals the abstract formal and structural elements — circle, opposing curves, oval, triangle, and incomplete square — that would come to dominate my work. During World War II, while I was employed as a mechanical draftsman at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, my paintings of the shapes and relationships of ship parts were inspired by the blueprints I drew and the view of the skeletal warships out my window.
Indelible impressions from my early trips to Mexico produced much of the alternative subject matter that emerged during the 1940s. I made my first trip to Mexico in 1939. I married a photographer, and we made an extensive journey by car. On the way, we stopped off at Black Mountain College to visit Josef Albers and his wife, Anni, who had spent considerable time south of the border. I admired Albers’ groundbreaking work and soon saw everywhere in Mexico examples of Homage to the Square. The abstract paintings I produced were rooted in observation and my own less static themes. Fiesta [slide 6], based on a nighttime procession in Oaxaca, Mexico, is a further development of the processional theme.
Quiet Vigil [slide 7] is derived from a trip to the Yucatán in 1949. I was struck by primal colors, rhythms, and sounds, Indian life and ceremonies, Pre-Columbian art, and modern Mexican murals. I met with Orozco, with whom I wanted to study, and we discussed art and the Revolution. Arduous journeys to Olmec, Maya, Toltec, and Aztec ruins introduced me to intricate new images and abstract patterns. I was filled with a sense of immense fulfillment, exhilaration, and awe. Mexico was a revelation, a great adventure, and the psychic stimulus for the incredible wealth of material that dominated my subject matter in the 1950s. The intensity of light and color changed my palette. I began using pure, unmixed paints.
My three New York solo exhibitions, displaying work dating from 1947-54, marked the progress of my recognizable abstract handling of material drawn from nature. A freer and more sophisticated approach, employing dynamic contrasts of color, line, rhythms, and movement, evolved simultaneously in oils, watercolors, and drawings.
New media — Lumachromes and color graphics — enriched my range of creative possibilities. These works, originating during summers spent on Monhegan Island in the early 1950s, were directly inspired by the dynamism and immense diversity of ocean, forest, rock formations, tidal pools, fog, and light. Color graphics were based on rubbings taken from random surfaces and textures and then combined with pen, brush, and ink. In my rubbings, massive rock formations appeared insubstantial, as if they had been reduced to their molecular structure. The development of the Lumachrome came accidentally when I held up a color graphic to the light, and the color on the Japanese paper glowed. I set about achieving works of luminous transparency.
As the decade advanced, a major change in style evolved, which coincided with my moving to Mexico for extended periods of time. Its first intimations appeared as small patches of color, less defined shapes, softer brushwork, and simpler composition. Emerging Light [slide 8], painted in 1956, reflects that new style as well as my reactions to the dramatic mountainous landscape of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in the highlands of Chiapas. Chamula II [slide 9] and Romerillo I [slide 10] are based on Maya Indian symbolism, rituals, and festivals.
In 1959, I began a composition in bold black and white. Transformations [slides 11, 12] is a series of 28 variations on the structural theme of opposing curves, horizontals, and verticals. Divided into four "musical" sections, each begins with a variation of the opening section and carries the variations progressively forward to its furthest remove.
Meanwhile, another change developed in my handling of color. The brushstrokes became larger and freer, the color increasingly purer and intense (Constellation, slide 13). My intention was to remove the picture frame and draw the viewer into the picture. The painting created a three-dimensional effect without depending upon perspective.
Since 1958, I had been struggling to find the right techniques for creating translucent paintings. First, I used colored inks on various kinds of translucent paper. The inks were not resistant to changes in temperature. I experimented with acrylics and consulted technical advisors. They left samples using various color combinations cut in the rain and exposed to hot summer sun and cold winter nights for two years. The Lumachromes stood the test of heat, cold, rain, and dampness. Finally, I was satisfied that they were impervious to every change in the weather.
The 1960s saw the full development of Lumachromes. Color-fast, these translucent paintings are designed for installation in architectural contexts as a viable alternative to stained glass windows or ceilings [slides 14, 15]. Smaller pieces could be framed in light boxes (Double Circle, slide 16). In 1966, I painted the five-panel series commemorating the IVth Centennial of the Death of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, patron of the city and father of human rights in the New World. My gift to the city was installed in the public library. Fray Bartolomé [slide 17] and Tenejapa [slide 18] are based on the cross or Tree of Life, a central symbol in Maya cosmology.
After 1979, I had to stop painting in oils. My last canvases captured my major themes: 4 Blooming [slide 19], Vortex [slide 20], Evensong [slide 21], Turbulent Encounter [slide 22], and Blue Ceremony [slide 23]. In these works, the underlying structural elements became clearer and sharper.
During the 1970s, I began making collages using scraps of Lumachrome rejects. Originally intended as greeting cards, the pieces grew in size, and by 1978 I had a sizable collection, which was shown in the retrospective of my work at La Galería. Collages continue to intrigue me because the process of spontaneous composition brings out the most unexpected subjects and moods.
During 1985-86, I did a group of large collages in color (Treedance, slide 24; Bird Collage, slide 25; Fantastic Figures, slide 26; Sunbird Rising, slide 27; Creation, slide 28; Heart of Darkness, slide 29). Black-and-white collages were made from torn-up drawings [slide 30]. The effect is liberating.
I also did many multiple drawings in the 1970s. Processional 1 and 2 [slides 31, 32] are part of a series of themes and variations executed to be seen either singly or together. The pen-and-ink drawings are based on the processional theme derived from a Maya Indian fiesta.
In the late 1980s, I began work on Metamorphosis, a Lumachrome series I have been working and meditating on steadily, though still incomplete. Metamorphosis is a memorial series of 13 Lumachrome panels. All the panels are variations on the central structural theme of the square, circle, and opposing curves. The evolution of elemental forms expresses the journey of life, from birth through dissolution to transformation (Eye of God, slide 33; Bird of Paradise, slide 34; Heart of Darkness, slide 35; Phoenix Rising, slide 36).
In 1993, as a change from the Lumachromes, I suddenly started a series of 17 variations drawn in pencil. Golondrinas [slides 37, 38, 39, 40] is based on my witnessing the extraordinary and rare aerial carousel of swallows: thousands of birds flying overhead, gathering into distinct groups, executing remarkable spiral maneuvers, swooping, and funneling down to settle in fields of dry corn.
What comes next? I continue to live in Mexico on a limited fixed income, remote from large galleries able to exhibit and promote my work. Isolated from the mainstream, I am at the same time steeped in ancient Maya civilization and a vibrant living culture in perilous transition. Movement, change, and opposing forces — the major themes and variations of my life — swirl all around me.
In an atmosphere of growing tension and impending war, I have begun preliminary work on another series of works on paper, Bird of Prey, a dark reflection of present political and social upheaval in Chiapas. Despair and hope, chaos and renewal, darkness and light, death, and transformation are the poles of my vision, with the transcendent spirit and beauty of art as my reason for being.