Two years ago I met Jake Berthot in Chelsea, outside Ruth Miller’s show at Lohin Geduld Gallery on 25th Street. We were both in a state of awe at what we had just seen. “You have to paint a lifetime to make paintings like those,” Jake said.  And I had to agree as we talked about the ways in which Ruth used color and, even more importantly, light to create a vibrant sense of time and place.

Last year I found myself back on the same street, this time to see a genuinely masterful group of paintings by Jake himself, at Betty Cuningham Gallery, that were haunting, haunted, living, breathing, and absolutely undeniably alive. I could borrow from Whitman and say that they contained multitudes, but while that would certainly be true, how much better to admit that I found myself quoting Jake to his own paintings: “You have to work for a lifetime to make paintings like that.”

What I loved so much about them was that they went very far beyond the sense of sight. As your eye travelled across the painting, you felt the paint, the marks holding you in space. You felt distance, a longing for light, a sense of yourself being transported into another realm. In this day and age it might be anathema to say this, but they were sublime, in the most raw and American kind of way.

Before Jake moved up to the Catskills in the early ‘90s he was an abstract painter, and a city painter. But once he was in the country, settling in Accord, New York and taking inspiration from the surrounding woodlands, he truly shocked devotees as his work took a radically new direction.

At that point he did the thing that can be done only by the most relevant artist: he pissed people off. I certainly remember talking to many a crestfallen artist who felt that their mentor/idol/hero had stopped making the paintings that had inspired them — as well achieving critical and commercial success for Jake, including international acclaim as far afield as the Venice Biennale. As I listened to the teeth gnashing I remember thinking of the folkies booing at Dylan going electric in Newport. What could be better than that?

And when Jake went electric with his paintings it meant light, with a capital L, as he brilliantly looked for illumination in the place one is least likely to find it: the darkness. The evidence not only abounds in his work, but in recent comments about the upstate terrain that clearly entranced him, in an interview with Jennifer Samet: “I have never seen woods as dark as the woods in the Catskills. They are in constant flux.”

During a recent studio visit with Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy, in a video posted at their website, Gorky’s Granddaughter, Jake said, “I’m interested in painting. I’m not interested in theory. I’m not interested in historical possibilities… I choose to be free.”

With Jake’s passing on December 30 we have lost a wonderful man, and a brilliant artist. But the paintings that he used his freedom to create continue to live among us. As Auden wrote in his elegy for Yeats: “…he became his admirers. Now he is scattered over a hundred cities, and wholly given over to unfamiliar affections.”

We will miss the man no small amount, and for no short time.

But Jake, as a painter, has, indeed, become his admirers, and there are enough of us who feel an altogether familiar affection for his work to be certain that his accomplishments will be celebrated for a long, long time to come.

The post “I Choose To Be Free”. Jake Berthot, 1939-2014 appeared first on artcritical.

After that it took us 45 minutes to travel three blocks, with Nick marveling at each new encounter. That is how it was with Nick. He possessed a complete alert attentiveness to the world around him, had a great passion for art, and his enthusiasm for life was all-encompassing.  He was completely immersed in the world of art precisely because, for him, art was life, art was experience and every moment contained the very present possibility of new ideas and new inspiration.

Nick was born in 1917 and grew up in Hoboken, NJ.  He began his studies in art at the age of 11 with the Leonardo DaVinci school in downtown Manhattan, and later he studied at the National Academy and served as Leon Kroll’s apprentice and model.  His classical training allowed him to develop a sure and elegant drawing hand.  He could carve out form beautifully.

But it was during the War years, when he was traveling at night from his post out on Long Island to 8th Street to study with Hans Hoffman that he developed his understanding of plastic space. And that understanding not only opened up a whole new world for him, but also launched him on a singularly creative career as an artist.

When the War was over Nick was honored with the Prix de Rome and a Fulbright Fellowship, and those prizes enabled him to work in Italy for several years.  He met a wide range of artists, including Matta, who introduced him to the surrealists and, as a result, became a major influence on his work and life.

Back in New York Nick reconnected with friends from his time in Italy, including Conrad Marcarelli, Philip Pavia and Philip Guston, and took part in the famous 9th Street Show, helping to usher in a new era of painting in New York. He began to work with Eleanor Ward as a director of the Stable Gallery, and created the hugely successful Stable Annual Show, which was modeled on the 9th Street Show, and he brought new young artists into the Stable giving Cy Twombly, Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg their first one-man shows.  He also brought John Graham into the fold.  Nick himself had two solo shows at the Stable, and then moved to Staempfli Gallery.

He was a sought after educator, teaching at Cooper Union, Yale, Brandeis, Cornell, Columbia, S.V.A.  and the New York Studio School, where he was a founding faculty member and taught for 20 years.  Later, he founded his own art School in Umbria, Italy, the International School of Art.

And while the hundreds of students he taught through the years would easily testify that he was a dynamo in the class room, it was after he retired from teaching that his work gained an astonishing new energy and momentum.  Several recent shows at Lohin Geduld Gallery and Chelsea, and at Washburn Gallery on 57th Street, showed an artist at the absolute peak of his powers.

In 2007 Lohin Geduld Gallery showed monumental head sculptures that Nick carved from field stones that he found on the ground around his house in Umbria. The heads are haunting, shocking, emotive, and with their hypnotic gaze they demand a connection with the viewer on a real human level.  Nick claimed that the heads were already present in the stone, and that he simply liberated them into the light of  the present day. Perhaps that’s why they have all the enigmatic appeal of the ancient and archaic, while remaining, in the end, entirely modern.

When it comes to Nick’s work, it’s exciting to know that there is a lot more to explore: three small wax figures featured in that same show give just a hint at a branch of his oeuvre which hasn’t yet been shown to its best advantage.  These fragile, subtle wax sculptures are torsos – some with limbs some without – which are some of his most intimate and sensual works.  They beg to be held in the hand and turned.  I was lucky enough to visit him in the studio while he was working on these sculptures, and my small glimpse into his process is now etched on my brain.  He laid the sculptures out on his work table, some individually, some seemingly in a pile, next to a Bunsen burner, some pots of wax, and a series of strange bottles and jars filled with odd mixtures. The forms that he touched into being were tightly crafted, and they were almost translucent, literally shining in the light. I’d like to see them cast and exhibited.

New large-scale abstract paintings shown at Washburn Gallery in 2009 were bold, lyrical, and mesmerizing in black and white and muted tones.  John Yau wrote of them in the Brooklyn Rail: “Every move is purposeful, while all of it feels improvised; this is the magic that Carone has achieved in the syntax of Abstract Expressionism, particularly because he has made that language specific to his concerns. His lines are simultaneously elegant, unhurried, understated, and child-like.”

Nick’s painted “Psychic” portraits – that is portraits of men and women who never existed – that have been included in group shows, but have not yet been given a solo showcase.  And that’s a pity. Nick spent 50 years making these paintings, starting with his early years in Italy and continuing on to the end of his life.  You could say they are strange – because they are – and you’d have to admit that they are more than a little bit interesting. Some of them are clowns, and others are temptresses, ogres, aristocrats, sages, androgines, and modernized renaissance men. They fall somewhere between figments of the imagination and flights of fancy. Like the very best portraits, they seem to encapsulate a lifetime of experience, which is fascinating since their subjects never drew a breath outside of Nick’s imagination. They also have the strong undercurrrent of Eros that permeated all of Nick’s work – something akin to the tension and longing that occupies the moment before a first kiss – and all of those factors demand that they be treated to a truly ambitious show in the near term.

But through his career, the figure was enormously important to Nick. It was his fuel, his inspiration, his tool. The figure is the building block that shapes and drives the abstract painting: the figure is the process and the figure is the form.

Just last June Nick said to me “Don’t forget.  With the figure, anything is possible.”  I saw this idea come to life in that visit when Claude and Chris Carone, Nick’s sons, showed me his last psychic portraits, which were filled with the physical intensity, turmoil and anxiety of an artist struggling to continue his work at the end of his life, and even then, unafraid to go into the metaphysical realm.

Nick was a living legend, and that he was not out in the forefront of the art world was always hard for me to understand. But I believe that his low profile freed him enormously, and there is no question that when he re-emerged with the shows at Lohin Geduld and Washburn his work was triumphant. No question – here was an artist who was at the very height of his career, whose work was, and is – thoroughly contemporary, multidimensional and unapologetic.

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