WILLIAM CORBETT: It’s 1954. He’d been an abstract painter for six or seven years, with a number of successful shows. He was a regular at the Cedar Bar, where he spoke in that Kline-ese that Frank O’Hara caught so beautifully in “Franz Kline Talking” (1958). He’d moved around, possibly rivaling Hokusai’s 734 addresses. When you see photographs of his homes, you see why Kline once said, “Bohemia is a place where a dog would go to die.”

This is a pretty big painting, at this time, but he was to paint bigger pictures. He was dead in 1962, but now he’s in his late 40s, maybe at the top of his game, though the money hadn’t yet come to him.

Let me go back: I said coming up here that one of my interests in Kline is extra-aesthetic. My early childhood was in East Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, which isn’t far from Lehighton, where Kline grew up. I was 12 in 1954 and didn’t know anything about him. But when I learned about him and saw his work in the early 1960s, I immediately recognized the landscape elements. I responded to those as if I’d come home in a way. Here you can find the train tracks he saw up and down the Lehigh River. I’m not saying he was trying to abstractly paint a landscape. I’m saying those things were so deep within him that they naturally came out when he picked up a brush.

This has associations with buildings, with timber and with scaffolding. A number of his pictures can be read that way. But I’m now seeing something I haven’t seen before: he has a number of paintings, such as Wotan (1950), where there’s an off or wobbly square. It’s starting to emerge here, and that will be a central image. He’ll clean this up in many cases, all that wonderful stuff, all that ideogrammatic stuff. He always said, “I don’t know anything about ideograms”; he liked to disassociate himself with that. And I believe him.

There’s also another quality that I associate with New York: the billboard size that he was moving toward, just like most of his contemporaries. Those guys went to the movies. They began to get a sense of scale. We know he worked from small things and blew them up with a Bell-Opticon projector. Imagine that he’s starting with intimate drawings — covering his studio floor, drawn on telephone book pages. And he’s blowing them up.

I think he was after the dream of the abstract painters, which was to make drawing and painting one. For these guys — for him, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning — it was to get the immediacy of drawing, to locate the viewer in that immediacy, and then to make it happen in paint. A work like this, it seems to me, is absolutely recognizable, because it’s a clear, firsthand apprehension of a reality. That communicates to me.

These men, and the few women, liked to remind you that they were at work; you see the uncleaned drips. For Harold Rosenberg this was Action Painting. Alright, I get that, and I think that’s probably right. With Kline it’s a little bit different, because when you know the Bell-Opticon, the action’s over! But he’s doing something else. I think it’s like when I would first go to openings, in the early 1960s, the painters would come in with their clothes and their shoes all paint-stained. And, man, it always looked so hip.

It sends a message.

But I think there’s more: he wants to show that the work he put into this is part of his aesthetic. Not that he’s going to be praised as, “Oh, Franz, what a hard worker,” but for his notion of what could come at the end of a brush. It could be a splatter, or incomplete lines where the paint has run out of the brush. He also, I think, wanted to give a sense of the moment, make you feel present. As you pointed out, he used house paint and the image is now getting lost: it’s cracking, yellowing, it’s a conservator’s nightmare. In a way, I think it’s too bad that conservators feel compelled to restore this painting to what it was.

How’s that?

Well, just like de Kooning, he used house paint because he couldn’t then afford fine paint. But it means this painting is for the here and now. And I think that in the back of his mind he may have had the idea that it would change and move into a new here and now.

I think of Auden going back to his poems and second-guessing them, even famous ones like “September 1, 1939” (1939), changing lines because he thought better of them. I’m ambivalent about that. Did he think there would be a perfect poem? What about the poem in its moment? Didn’t it have the right to be there? I think we lose something by taking Kline’s paintings away from that original impulse. But I wrote a sequence of poems about Kline, and when I opened it again recently, and began to read again, I did an Audening and made a few corrections.

I remember these paintings fresh and new, and I’ve watched them age over time. I can hold that all in my mind. But if you think of the bohemian guy, living the life he did, painting in one studio after another, using house paint, it seems to be part of his aesthetic. It would age, absolutely — needing a kind of footnoting. Those footnotes would be a little like restoring this.

I think that about a lot: it’s hard to pull the former context up with you, and it’s hard to pull the present back into the past.

Absolutely, and it’s going to be hard. That’s part of the great pleasure of looking at art. Does it take us back there? This certainly takes me back to what was, after all, a black-and-white world: the photographs, the movies. You can imagine this being an aerial shot of the city in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957). It has the life of that moment.

I’m curious about the painting’s development, because some marks (such as the drips) reveal that it was turned upside down. Do you have any thoughts about why that is, or how that works in the image itself?

Well, I wonder where this was in his studio. As soon as you said that, I thought, OK, he didn’t frame this. This is probably by Robert Kulicke, as you can see by the small gap you see all around the edge. It’s modest, and it certainly puts the painting forward.

This looks like color in the center, some gray, which is unusual for him at this time. He didn’t come back to color until very late. And some of those paintings I find the least compelling. Or I’m torn. I can’t tell: is it because he didn’t know how to use color? Or is it because I’m so used to the moves he makes and want to see them in new combinations and permutations?

Now that we’re being more formal, I’m thinking that this is a spur-of-the-moment picture; but he got to an underpinning. That’s why the Opticon is so important. I think many people imagine that Kline pulled out the canvas and the brush and just whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! But you don’t see much under this, which is where the Bell-Opticon is. The casualness, the spontaneity, isn’t mocked, it’s not parodied, but he sees it as a start with a different ending. It’s not like de Kooning, where the approach is first to get it right and then fuck it up.

He also talked about the whites being as important and the blacks, which you can see in how they’re laid on with the white dripping out over the black at the top, or vice versa along the left edge. There’re also formal echoes between the white fields and black marks in places.

It’s the blacks that I always remember, but I wouldn’t see them without the whites, so they’re at least as important in that way. Form’s gotta have a ground. He’s right. We can’t ignore the great things he did on phone book pages. It’s obviously an issue of not having any money and using the materials at hand. And it’s black on shitty paper and over phone numbers. It’s a little bit like those monotypes that show up on de Koonings, like Easter Monday (1955-56), where the pictures on the newspaper are transferred into the paint. It’s another aspect of him that de Kooning influenced, and that touched everybody. De Kooning caught all that was going on in New York so profoundly that it was hard to look at it. People were drawn to those painters. I can’t think of too many painters that came out of Kline.

Well, Brice Marden perhaps, Christopher Wool, Jonathan Lasker — painters who work at that synthesis of painting and drawing you talked about earlier. I think you could describe them as being indebted to Kline.

Yes, indebted, but indebted for what? What kind of effect did these have? I think that part of the reason why they didn’t follow him is that he takes care of all the possibilities he opens for the viewer. What you’re inspired to with this painting is that, Jesus Christ, if he can do that then I’ll do exactly what I can do. I’ll feel free. Because, again, in a world of color, he’s reminding us that black and white are colors. In a world of Action Painting, he’s putting the word “action” in quotes. This is more radical in some ways. And radical art, of course, can spawn any number of minions.

And think of the one-of-a-kind things he did: no one’s gonna come up with a phone book page after Kline, unless you’re using it ironically, or you’re doing it in such a way that it becomes part of the work.

Right, that it’s for Kline or it’s quoting him very directly.

We’ve touched on this a little already, but I wonder if you could talk about how this space affects the painting or how you feel the painting affects the surrounding space.

I’m aware of the room. I’ve been coming to the Modern since about 1959. I was young and knew very little, and I got educated here. I believed the story, and then I began to discover that it’s just a story. Maybe it’s a necessary narrative. Walking in it now is like picking up the books of poets I’ve loved: I’ve read them so much, but at times I’m a little tired of them. Other times I want that pang, want to be back there. And every once in awhile something knocks me out.

I usually don’t look at them as long as I’m looking at this. And this painting, as so often, is growing on me. This is across from a Barnett Newman and you have Helen Frankenthaler here, and near Mark Rothko, de Kooning — all people he knew. Rather than being frozen, this is part of a bigger story.

I wonder what this looked like in Kline’s studio, or in a home, what it first looked like in a gallery. Now it’s ensconced. Has it lost something because of that? Inevitably. I’m sure it affects you. But that’s what a museum does. And in this case I’m standing with this at my left and the Newman at my right; that might not happen in another place.

I wonder how his art — or this painting in particular — finds its way into the work that you do.

I wrote that sequence of poems about Kline and I know a lot about him. I have the background of Lehighton. The paintings are in my head, and I like writing documentary poems. It was fun. There were so many words that kept coming up: suave, and the black of the tuxedo’s lapel. I also wrote a suite, around the same time, to de Kooning. I keep on wondering if I’ll get another one out of somebody. Joan Mitchell keeps coming up. So first of all, there’s the viewer literally inspired by an attempt to get some of that from it. For me, as somebody who loves paintings without knowing why he loves them, and still loves them and the study of them, and wants to know more about the artist, it’s their example, in every way.

One of the things I always like to know, and is a dream for me, is how you get the compositional elements — all that flurry and hurry and bustle — into something that can come up just in the sound of words or the juxtaposition of images. Words seem to insist upon a kind of linear meaning, especially if that poetry comes through the ear as well as the eye. As I wrote about Kline and his work, it often came through finding something that got me writing about art in the beginning. James Schuyler very modestly said, “I just wanted to know what it was like to use words to describe things.” I want that, too. And this gives us new possibilities. We thought of the railroad tracks, the city aspects, the calligraphy, the scaffolding. Those become words, and it’s not just what’s there, it’s what’s here, inside you. For the reader, it’s something to give them the sense of standing here now, the delight I feel in talking about it at this minute. But it also opens it up, so that they could internalize that.

I guess that there’s something else, too. I’ve certainly spent more hours seeing movies, and now television, than I have looking at paintings. What’s the difference? Well, there is a hand involved in this and I’m always aware of it. We’re aware of it from the drips. I can see a person here; I can imaging those studios.

You can see the motion of the hand and the gestures it’s making.

Absolutely. There’s also something here that’s generational, I guess: the first painting I saw that really said to me “This could be yours” was an abstract picture. It pissed my parents off, just like listening to jazz did. It certainly separated me from the world I grew up in. But it turned me on in ways I couldn’t figure out. There are things that choose you just as much as you choose them.

As a poet and an art writer, you hope it’s still out there, and that you don’t get to bottom of it. The stuff you get to the bottom of never finds its way into your work. And if it does, you’ve gotta get over it and get out of it.

One of the things I miss in this picture and that I really love is his signature. Kline had one of the great signatures, that blocky, stick-fingered print. It always moves me. I wonder why he didn’t sign it…

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Mitchell: May 15 to August 29, 2014
547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-242-7724

Intimate Forest: April 23 to June 7, 2014
224 48th Street, between 2nd and 3rd avenues
Sunset Park, Brooklyn, 718-833-9100

Celebrating the end of a singularly unlovely winter, two galleries have burst into summer verdure.  Chelsea has an exhibition of eleven semi-abstract paintings of trees by Joan Mitchell, dated from 1964 to 1991; in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, fifteen contemporary artists also explore the theme of trees in varied styles and media.

Who would have believed that such a commonplace object could inspire such a range of responses? But there’s magic in trees. Not only are they beautiful to contemplate, and useful for building and fire fuel, but, according to Anders Knutsson, co-curator of the Brooklyn show, trees “have figured in every known religion and belief system on earth,” from the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis and the sacred fig tree of Buddhism, to the “battle cries of the Environmentalists” (aka “tree-huggers”).

Mitchell’s paintings were inspired by French landscape. Having established an enviable reputation as a second-generation abstract expressionist in the early 1950s in New York, she went on to spend increasing amounts of time in France, moving there permanently in 1959. From the later 1960s until her death in 1992, she lived on a 2-acre estate in picturesque Vétheuil, a Paris suburb painted many times by Monet.

These paintings represent – or at least reflect – her garden-like surroundings there.  In my opinion, the paintings that come off best in this selection are those that tip toward the representational as opposed to the reflective.

The statuesque 9-foot tall Tilleul (Linden Tree) (1977) faces the entryway to the gallery and leaves no doubt about what it is. The color contrasts are striking.  A taut, strong upward rush of blackish-blue lines captures the branches of the tree. They’re embellished with daubs of aqua suggesting leaves, while a crepuscular yellow surrounds the trunk at the bottom.

To the left of this painting hangs a much smaller oil of the same title. Although its surface is merely a spatter of bluish-green pats of paint, the oval shape of the canvas combines with the image on it to strongly suggest the branches and leaves of a tree.  A third standout is Green Tree (1976), a large picture whose centrally-located heavy clouds of bluish-green daubs again suggest a thicket of foliage.

Tabla Rasa Gallery was founded by Audrey and Joseph Anastasi who both have imaginative works in Intimate Forest.  His (an archival print on canvas) occupies a corner and combines trees with an angel, while hers has birch trunks incorporating a human hand. The name of the gallery is also imaginative. Most people are more familiar with the Latin phrase, “tabula rasa” (“clean slate”).  The Anastasis chose the unusual spelling because of its musical sound, perhaps with its associations with the drum used in Indian classical music. “Rasa” also means “taste” in Sanskrit.

The work in Intimate Forest ranges from very abstract painting (by Rodney Dickson) to the verism of photography (Julia Forrest using it surrealistically, while Peter White captures an idyllic group of trees in a field). Other media include sculpture (carved oak and sycamore by Eric Pesso), drawings, cut Tyvek, and graphics (Spring Gold Forest I and II, by Kathleen Hayek, are stand out in this category).

Four painters appealed to me in particular. The small oil entitled Glade, by Thomas Hagen, combines a realistically rendered background in olive greens reminiscent of Corot with dazzlingly abstract foreground brushwork.  Blizzard, a somewhat larger oil by Tom Keough, depicts in delicate whites, golds and tans a tall, graceful tree in a winter storm amid urban surroundings.

Scott Bennett has three good-sized acrylics, each lovingly portraying the trunk of a single tree in a landscape setting.  Paint application is luscious. Forms are large and gracious. Colors are rich and vigorous.  Pansdance has the most humanoid tree trunk, its bluish grays offering a dignified contrast with the riotous green of the field beyond.

Co-curator Knutsson put five of his own pictures in the show, each depicting a single tree or tree stump (no landscape background).  They have twisted, struggling shapes.  Done in black and white, or brown and white, with only touches of green, these pictures look like outsized drawings, but four of the five are acrylics based on drawings.

The artist superimposed clear Mylar with a grid over the drawings, and then, in the traditional manner, transferred the structure of the tree by plotting the outlines on a larger piece of linen. Caucasian Wingnut, a tree in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, must be a favorite of the artist’s as Knutsson has been drawing it since 1992.

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Le Tableau, curated by painter and critic Joe Fyfe, is a typical example of what happens when hermeneutic hypothesis trumps the ability to discern qualitative significance in painting. There is a tendency in synchronic exhibitions these days to foreground an explanatory text in such a way that the works chosen become merely ancillary to some theoretical proposition. In the case of Le Tableau, without the printed, accompanying text, it would be different to grasp exactly what this exhibition is trying to tell us. Fyfe separates his concerns as artist, critic and curator from the legacy of Greenbergian formalism by advocating less the concept of  “the flatbed picture plane” and more the “material means and/or structure of painting as a form or figure” as, for example, found in post-war French painting from the 1940s and ‘50s.

In fact, , I’m fully in support of reviving attention to post-war French painting, based on my own experience in seeing works of these painters in the late 1960s on my first excursion to France.  Even so, and in spite of Fyfe’s handsome text, there is a paucity of work in this exhibition that catches a glimmer of what this mid-century period in the recent French painting (at least from this American’s perspective) was all about.  Le Tableau is a gathering of a few modestly scaled Ecole de Paris paintings by Jean Fautrier (measuring just under 9 X 11 inches), Serge Poliakoff, and the French-Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle ( 7 X 5 1/2 inches) along with a recent work (2009) by Supports/Surface painter Claude Viallat, whose rise to prominence came in the 1970s.  A mediocre painting by the otherwise remarkable Hans Hartung is included, yet pales beside anything that was shown in that artist’s phenomenal retrospective at the Maeght Foundation in San Paul de Vence in 2008.  There is no work by Pierre Soulages, Wols, Gerard Schneider, or Georges Matthieu to stand in support of the eclectic, motley choice of slightly larger works from recent French and American artists. An exception is the sumptuous Untitled (1959) by Joan Mitchell, who can be claimed equally by America and France, particularly in this most heraldic moment of her development.  Fyfe is generally correct in characterizing Mitchell (from the late 1950s) as “an insouciant semiotician of the painterly mark.”  What made these paintings so eminently important for Mitchell was her propensity to stop short of de Kooning’s sweeping brushwork, and to focus intensively and unabashedly on destroying the surface. Paradoxically she maintained the force of restraint so as not to kill it entirely as her anxious marks became signifiers of an explosive, personal content, both self-determined and utterly convincing.

The exhibition also includes Kate Moran, Jonathan Lasker, Merlin James, John Zurier, Juan Usle, Jean-Francois Maurige, and the late Milton Resnick, among others.  Fyfe participates in the exhibition himself with an elegant sewn work using felt, cotton, and jute (from Southeast Asia), and thereby implies that the French approach from the 1950s is his own proper context. The positioning of one’s own work in such an exhibition is perhaps more problematic today than it would have been three or four decades ago, a time when the overall emphasis on the market was known but considerably less obvious than it has become.  While Fyfe may hold a clear commitment to the intellectual aspects of advanced painting, the presence of his work in Le Tableau appears somewhat overstated.

Reopening the book on Michel Tapié’s Art Informel and Tachisme is certainly welcome, but the kind of contiguity and consistency between then and now is simply not clear in the works selected for this display. The balance is off, and the installation is often awkward. There is not enough strong work from the early period in Paris to get a definitive idea as to where recent abstract painting from New York and France may have found an unforeseen place in the current century. Fyfe’s comparison of two nearby Chelsea buildings by architects Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel as a way to characterize the extreme aesthetic differences between America and France I find to be absurd. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the kind of abstract painting advocated by Greenberg, criticism based in qualitative judgments is still relevant. This is where the application of theory in terms of justifying much of this exhibition becomes highly problematic, and where Le Tableau falls short of its potential. Even so, whatever one may think of the thesis of this show, a  new look at postwar French painting relative to the present deserves more institutional support as better works by these earlier French artists could have turned this rather hesitant exhibition into something of real significance.

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Joe Fyfe, a painter known for his stark, almost belligerently informal abstraction, is also a critic and curator (and a contributing editor at artcritical).  In “Le Tableau,” a geographically and historically wide-angled summer group exhibition at Chelsea’s Cheim & Read Gallery that he has organized, Fyfe pugnaciously shakes by its horns the francophobia of the American critical establishment. The show pairs contemporary practitioners from both sides of the pond known for their almost semiotic interrogations of a painting’s support with 1950s and ‘60s “tachistes,” as the French liked to call their abstract expressionists: Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle, and that quietly lyrical genius of sumptuous tones, the Russian-born Serge Poliakoff. These guys were big names at the time. But while they continue to command a loyal collector base in France, where they are often found in the concluding room of regional fine art museums, they are completely marginal to the official history of post war art promoted in the United States. Such “old masters” rub shoulders with Paris-friendly yanks such as Joan Mitchell, who resided in the city of lights for much of her time, and Milton Resnick. The result of Fyfe’s revisionist experiment is, quite apart from its critical or historical validity, both a tactile and a visual orgy of raw textures, smeared impastos, and punctured supports. Until September 3, 547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212-242-7727.

A version of this article, accompanied by a work of Serge Poliakoff’s, appeared at the New York Sun, June 28, 2010

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Born in Chicago in 1925, Joan Mitchell moved to New York in 1950 where she lived and worked among artists and poets of the New York School.  Already well recognized as an important abstract expressionist painter, she left New York in the late 1950’s and moved to a Parisian suburb of Vetheuil, where she worked prolifically until her death in 1992. Her expressive works exude the visual sentiments of nature-devoid of anecdote or theater and in her own words “to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower.” Mitchell composes with long curvilinear strokes or broad stains of color, contrasting warm and cool, often on unprimed, large-scale or multi-panel canvases.

Guest speakers included Ann Gibson, Ph.D. and Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware; Irving Sandler, Ph.D., art critic, historian and professor Emeritus of Art History at the State University of New York; Robert Storr, artist, art critic and Professor of Painting/Printmaking at Yale University; and Mâkhi Xenakis, artist and author.

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