Rather ironically, there were black and white images accompanying the four-page profile, so I was able to see a small reproduction of Kuhne’s large (74” x 87” inches) 1972 The Dog-eared painting.

The painting seemed to be a sort of square format Morris Louis veil, finely combed out and downward with what must have been a 70-inch fan brush, until its split-end pony hairs emptied onto a Ray Parker flat-tire of a black splotch, smeared with a little white paint. Additionally, crude splashes and drips of paint peppered both sides of the work, in some sort of feigned gesture of spontaneity. But, contrarily, the painting appeared to be totally purposeful in intent, concise and controlled in execution. Tacked to the top left and right sides, perpendicular to the gravitational pull of the painting, stood the painting’s titular detail: a collection of brushstrokes mirroring the undeniable image of folded dog ears.

Reading through Washington Letter, I learned that the artist was 30 years old at the time and a former student of Gene Davis. After expressing concern for Kuhne’s “dependency on Morris Louis’ veils and certain works of Helen Frankenthaler,” Bourdon stated that Kuhne’s first solo exhibition “provides evidence of real talent and a genuine flair for color.”

I googled Dan Yellow Kuhne to see if I could find further information, more images, but my search revealed nothing more than a recent blurry landscape and a serigraph in the Smithsonian. After a little sleuth work, I contacted Kuhne through his wife, Charlotte Barry, who is also an artist. He agreed to send me a selection of slides from the Dog-eared series, and to answer a few questions about his life and his early work.

Kuhne was born in 1942, Oneida, NY. In 1949, his family moved to Baltimore, Maryland and he has remained in Maryland ever since. While Kuhne was growing up, he lived within a few blocks of the Baltimore Museum, which he visited frequently. In his early 20s, he says he was “floored” by an exhibition of German Expressionism. He also stated that he first understood the rhapsodic nature of painting itself at 23, while attending Turner: Imagination and Reality at the Museum of Modern Art.  This controversial exhibition of thirty-seven late oil paintings and two early works presented Turner as a precursor to modern painters, particularly those “whose principle means of expression is color and light,” as Lawrence Gowing wrote in the show’s catalog essay. It was a ground breaking event because the paintings were hung sans historical frames, in a calculated effect of contemporaneous artistic achievement.

Kuhne exclaimed that Turner hit him “with the impact of a locomotive bursting out of the mists.” The late Turner paintings revealed to the young artist the vast grounds a painter could cover, that art could be intimate while conversely soaring in dimensionless, incalculable space.

Shortly thereafter, a friend christened Kuhne Daniello, but the artist heard this as “Dan Yellow.” Seeing as he’d always loved yellow, feeling it to be the most ethereal of colors, he maintained the moniker, which reminded him of a 19^th century caricature of Turner with a bucket of yellow varnish, using a mop for a paintbrush.

After attending the University of Maryland, College Park on and off between 1960 and 1973, Kuhne began teaching primary drawing at the Anne Arundel Community College. He also took some classes with Gene Davis, who Kuhne writes “was careful to defend his accomplishments as a D.C. color painter and to mark his territory. The main idea that I thank him for immensely was that each artist should find the vortex….you came to him with your work and he’d respond, he was not a formal teacher. Defensive!”   And, like all D.C. artists, Kuhne looked hard at the holding of the Phillips Collection and the National Gallery of Art: Van Gogh, Delacroix, Ryder, Gorky, Pollock, and, of course, Morris Louis.

Dan Yellow Kuhne in 1973

By the time Morris Louis died in 1962, his critical champion Clement Greenberg had established him as a “serious candidate[s] for Major status,” as stated in his 1960 Art International article Louis and Noland. The article not only positioned Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland on the frontline of color abstraction but also put Washington D.C.’s burgeoning art scene on the map. As a result many local artists, such as Leon Berkowitz, James Hilleary, Anne Truitt, Howard Mehring, Alma Thomas, Willem de Looper and Paul Reed became forces to be reckoned with, forces that greatly influenced Kuhne.

Dan Yellow Kuhne, Untitled, 6’ x 7’ 1972, acrylic on canvas, collection of the artist

Dan Kuhne’s Dog Eared series was created between 1970 and 1974. It is comprised of approximately 45 canvases, most of which are around 6’x7’, plus a couple hundred smaller versions on paper. These works introduce the modern viewer to a young artist not just proficient at assimilating style, as Bourdon’s review implies, but also interested in the structural and behavioral elements of paint, elements particularly located in a series of paintings by Morris Louis now known as the triadic veils.

Dan Yellow Kuhne, Molton Molt, 6’ x 7’ 1972, acrylic on canvas, collection of the artist

One of the main anomalies found in the Louis’ triadic veils, the one for which they’ve been named, seems to have informed and generated Kuhne’s early paintings. Louis incorporated the shrouded imprints produced by the manipulation of liquid paint over wooden stretcher bars, creating a form of triptych in his compositions. These perspicuous vertical divisions within the color space, which produced a structural framework for Louis veils, can be seen clearly in 1958-1959 canvases such as Blue Veil, Turning and Dalet Aleph.

Morris Louis Blue Veil, 1958-59, 8’ 4 ½  x 12’ 5”, acrylic resin on canvas, The Fogg Art Museum

Morris Louis, Turning, 1958, 7’ 8 1/4” x 14’ 10 1/4”, acrylic resin on canvas, private collection

Morris Louis, Dalet Aleph, 1958, 7’ 6 1/2 ” x 12’ 6”, acrylic resin on canvas, private collection

By dividing the canvas this way, Louis was able to successfully address issues of asymmetry, allowing a structural pinning down of his color improvisations to the vertical edges of the canvas. These edges appear to be internalized and repeated, almost as a memory within the transparencies of color.  Such vertical divisions of space are not the basis of Kuhne’s paintings, which are clearly bisymmetrical and almost static, but their extension of Louis’ interest is obvious.

Dan Yellow Kuhne, Untitled, 5’ x 7’ 1972, acrylic on canvas, collection of the artist

As a side note relating to both artists’ work, I came upon an odd ­­­suburban feature near Morris Louis’ home in Northwest D.C. It’s quite possible Louis took notice of this wishboned walkway on the corner of 42^nd  St. NW and Military Road. This mirroring, or Rorschach like folding, of pictorial space is one device that both Kuhne and Louis­ use successfully in their paintings.

Little information on Louis’ visual source material can be found: Some, however, has been implied. In Narrating a Proto-Minimalist Misfire. Or Noland’s Largeness…, Shepard Steiner wrote that [a Morris Louis] “… very often seem to be sopping wet from a recent downpour.”  To a close observer, the residual effect of rainwater on the pedestals of the abundant public statuary in Washington D.C. can be viewed in great detail.  Witness an example below, in a photo of the Liberty Statue in front of The National Archives after a downpour.

Here rivulets of descending and evaporating water upon the fold of the reed molding and around the corner die of the pedestal produce similar pictorial effects to the mirroring found in many of Louis’ triadic veils. One can easily imagine Louis taking in this particular effect in relation to his painting, possibly even attempting to reproduce it.

When questioning Kuhne about his compositions, I asked if “the pleating and imprints that produce the structural vertical divisions within the space of the triadic veils inform your use of bisymmetrical composition.” In commenting about the cropping and pooling of paint at the bottom of many of Louis’ canvases, I queried: “How important was this to you when making your paintings?  You seem to have taken this almost literally, creating fountains in response to his pooling.”

Dan Yellow Kuhne, Untitled, 6’ x 7’ 1972, acrylic on canvas, collection of the artist

Kuhne replied: “These pictures, although abstract, took on a highly suggestive effect: mesas, WWI airplanes, fountains, valleys. I was working very intuitively. I’d start by wetting the paper or canvas, then I’d spread beads of watercolor from the tube, or acrylic bands on the canvas, irrigating and eroding them with H20 or washes. I was thinking of color and imagery…”

Dan Yellow Kuhne, Untitled, 6’ x 7’ 1972, acrylic on canvas, collection of the artist

Surprisingly, Kunhe worked on the Dog Eared paintings without ever discussing them  with his fellow artists. He confronted the pictorial legacy of Morris Louis and the overarching influence of Washington Color School alone. The paintings were included in several exhibitions, including a prominent 1973 show of works on paper at The Phillips Collection. Then they were rolled up and placed in storage, where they remain to this day.

Dan Yellow Kuhne, Chief, 6’ x 7’ 1972, acrylic on canvas, collection of the artist

In a form of radical regionalism common in different degrees to many of the D.C. color painters, Dan Kuhne has never shown his work outside of the Baltimore/D.C. area.  This is a profound loss to artists and art enthusiasts living elsewhere, as even in reproduction, these 40-year old paintings can generate great excitement. For those who’ve wondered what sort of challenges young artists working in the direct shadow of the Washington Color School faced, the Dog Eared paintings by Dan Kuhne provide some beautiful clues.

Mark Dagley, 2012

Mark Dagley’s 222 Bowery studio (1987)
Photo by Ivan dalla Tanna

A good artist does not need anything.
—Ad Reinhardt

When NYFA Current asked me to write a first-person account of the circumstances surrounding a not-so-recent exhibition of my paintings, a show that took place at Tony Shafrazi Gallery nearly a quarter of a century ago, I was surprised by their interest, but gladly jumped at the chance. I never hesitate to admit to any and all who care to listen that my 1987 New York City debut was considered a failure by local critics and collectors, not to mention the disappointed dealer. While preshow interest was high, in the end little work sold, and a well-regarded ARTFORUM writer snarkily dissed my efforts. Paradoxically, this perceived failure launched me on a fairly successful trajectory in the European art world: Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland—but that’s another story.

Back to my Shafrazi solo show, which was perfectly planned and executed. An incredible studio at 222 Bowery—“The Bunker”—was secured with funds from prior sales, allowingme the necessary space to create the ambitious exhibit I had proposed, a group of paintings unlike any I’d made before: shaped canvases using video-game-referenced imagery, along with checkerboards, diamonds, and Picasso-esque harlequin designs. Cardboard models of all the shapes were experimented with for months before the full-size wood constructions were built. The long labor of painting and finishing these works came off without a hitch. In August of ’87, the 14 canvases were delivered to the gallery on Mercer Street. Soon after, advertisements appeared in several glossy magazines. Tony designed and printed a playful color poster. A brochure was also available, featuring an essay by George Condo.

Opening night, September 12, a steady stream of New York art world luminaries flowed through the gallery. Their sleek black limos flanked the entrance. An exclusive dinner at Indochine followed the reception. Yes, it was an absolute ‘80s cliché. But the party ended long before the decade. What initially seemed to be an uncontested success—three of my works sold immediately, another four were placed on hold by a very prominent collector, and two drew significant interest without a commitment—quickly proved otherwise, thanks in part to Black Monday, October 19, when stock markets around the world crashed, making history as the largest one-day percentage decline. By October 20, it became clear that the paintings on reserve would not be purchased and that any additional interest had instantly withered. Were there a doubt in my mind, or in Tony Shafrazi’s, it was soon assuaged by Kate Linker’s ruthless pan in that December’s issue of ARTFORUM.

Since the economy wasn’t entirely global at the time, I was able to continue my life as an artist abroad. In this present-day recession I suppose going overseas isn’t a realistic option. My advice to young artists back then was: “Go where you’re wanted.” Nowadays, I say: “Keep your day job.” Anything to prohibit dependence on dealers, critics, curators, or collectors. Anything to keep hold of your creative ideals. Chances are, given enough time, they’ll come into vogue.

Mark Dagley
Clone (1987)
60” x 90” x 4”
Vinyl acrylic, acrylic, polymer resin on canvas, mounted on wood

The pre-digital, low-fi fundamentals of the imagery in my early work have recently been discovered by a techno-savvy contemporary audience. Artists and writers who grew up with cell phones, laptops, and the Internet are able to understand and appreciate what was once dismissed as ironic neo-geometric endgame painting. This interest peaked curiosity about my newer work—paintings, drawings and sculpture—and spawned a resurgence in my New York career. Perfect timing. Some things never change.

I’m sure most Current readers follow Jerry Saltz’s New York Magazine column, which has, for the past eight months, focused largely on the recession’s effect on the art world. With titles like: Frieze After the Freeze, Art on a Shoestring, and After the Orgy, Saltz’s recent articles deliver fairly dire economic news along with predictions of a slew of commercial gallery closures this coming summer. Time to pull ourselves up by the sandal straps, or, according to Saltz: “It’s time to get over 1968; if we’re going to think of the past, let’s reconsider 1988, when artists, suddenly broke, were left to themselves.”

Having been a student in ‘68—does grammar school count?—and a suddenly broke artist in ’88, I can easily relate. It’s surprising to me how many artists, age regardless, can’t. Why go into the arts, after all, if not to be left to ones own devices?

In summary, while the economy (and the hairline) may recede, art—good art—goes forth. And sometimes conquers.

Mark Dagley is an artist who studied painting and sculpture at the Corcoran School of Art and electronic music at the Boston Museum School. His work can be found in the public collections of the Broad Art Foundation, University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Dagley is co-owner, with playwright Lauri Bortz, of the Abaton Book Company, a publisher of artist books and audio projects.

 “For an undetermined period of time I felt myself cut off from the world, an abstract spectator.”

‑J.L. Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

 The Character in the short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Borges participates in a detective story that occurs in parallel universes. As an abstract spectator of his own fictional mental construction, he discovers a long lost symbolic labyrinth. It turns out to have been “constructed” by his great, great grandfather over a thirteen-year period. Here we asked to consider complex metaphorical situations of infinite continuity, a meditation on the nature of time and family. This short story could be seen as an analogy to the most recent exhibition at UP&CO.

Entitled “ A Country of Mine” and including painting, photography, film and performance documentation, this exhibition features the work of Joe Andoe, Angela Hill, Antonio Longo, Daniel Miller, Uscha Pohl and the group p.t.t.red. Unfortunately, the restricting title may have been a tad euphuistic. It was uncharacteristic of the content of the majority of the work I found on view. To ask to be identified with any place or state of being is tough enough for many of us. To get behind concepts such as “country” and “mine” would seem to be a recipe for disaster. For many Americans of a certain generation, or of a particular class structure, this country of theirs is full of racism, sexism, and a political system that seems to be out of touch with everything but it’s own survival. To many others this country of ours is nothing but what the power-structure imposes upon us. It is an abstract concept, a myth. This country of mine is McDonalds, Coco-Cola, TV and Rock-and-Roll. It’s DUMB. In general, this is the perception of the United States throughout popular culture in many countries.

The exhibition attempts to address issues of place, and of the global change that is happening with the breakdown of the post-war structures, of the DDR and West Germany, the Berlin Wall, and the continual erosion of the British Empire. It is a metaphorical exhibition on the themes of being and change, and the results of those changes, either actual or perceived. The relentless assault on the natural order is touched upon. “A Country of Mine” does address a broadness of poetic imagination, with a few hints of possible spiritual renewal thrown in for good measure.

Antonio Longo, who lives in a small town outside of London, seems to have taken the position of the “abstract spectator.” His black and white photograph of his father is distant and aloof. One cannot help but notice that connections have been severed, at least symbolically. No one is there, not the father or the father’s father. Longo has to witness this, and in an abstract way this is the strength of his work. Longo’s work functions best as a type of conceptual documentation, well removed from the particularities of his sources and surroundings.

Angela Hill, another photographer from Great Britain, portrays a physiological sensibility completely different from Longo. She is best known on this side of the Atlantic for her full-frame portraits of young teenagers. There is a seductive visual strategy at work here, akin to advertising and employing a lot of the same techniques. Hill is able to direct the gaze of both the image she seeks to record and the viewing of the image. Programmatically, there is an effort to control subjectivity which is interesting because Hill is expert at re-routing visually through a filter of mythology. The end result is a kind of timeless impressionistic space.

Uscha Pohl contributed two works in a strict autobiographic context. Nomadic in experience, these works allow a glimpse into her private reflections and past personal experiences. “Plane Glass” is a film and photographic installation that focus on the sensation of returning to a familiar but unresolved situation. The nice thing about this work is its early experimental film quality. The 8mm format contributes a rawness that is absent from the other works in this exhibition. This film loop was shot out the cabin window of a flying plane; we only experience the continuum of descent. The loop is projected upon a photograph of a misty country road that disappears into perspective; the knowledge that this all is intimately connected with the artist’s childhood adds a special poignancy. Another work, Diary of a Traveler” is a curious memento to thoughts, feelings and random musings on travel, coupled with a small diamond painting of a landscape by Joe Andoe.

Andoe also exhibits a large painting of the prototypical symbolic subject, the she-wolf. Andoe’s technique is interesting because he really isn’t painting with brushes, but by the application and removal of layers of oil paint with rags and paper towels. This archeological approach to painting, of unearthing and of removal, is in harmony with the majority of the images he chooses to work with. Andoe, who is from Oklahoma, has been able to access some of the more primal iconography in the classical genre. His paintings of birds, horses and, more recently buffalo and wolves all demonstrate an ongoing concern for the endangered or the disappearing.

The break up of the former Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall were a few of the defining moments of recent post-industrial development. Daniel Miller is able to salvage some compelling images from the crumbling facade of theses areas, enabling one to visualize the dire consequences. I am reminded of the social documentational format practiced in this country through the great depression by Walker Evens, Dorothea Lange, and many others who were able to capture rapidly changing moments of social and political development.

The performance group p.t.t.red (paint the town red) rounds out this exhibition with a selection of images from their performance “Ursa in Orbit/Ursa in Motion”. This performance, either by calculation or happenstance, touched upon deep historic symbolism. Within and beneath the construction of German identity, they were able to uncover dormant mythological areas, which they demonstrate as almost-entertainment. We see the two artists together in these photos dressed in what looks to Americans like Smokey the Bear costumes, minus the hats; typical pop stuff at first glance, but here it gathers resonance. It seems that someone mistook the artists for actual bears, but bears have been absent from Germany for almost a hundred years. The return of this species of wildlife to the Berchtesgaden National Park would be like discovering a woolly mammoth in Yellowstone. Its implication to German national heritage, not to mention prestige throughout the world, would be enormous. Unbelievable as it sounds; the news got around, “Bears have returned to the national forests of Germany”. These artists are famous for this, and even had to take photos of themselves, bear heads in hand, looking over the forest in a Casper David-Friedrich-like pose to prove the truth—“Not in this country!” The Berchtesgaden National Park, like the Rhine, is one of the most symbolic natural spaces in all of Germany. Bavarian folklore claims the Frederick the first (Barbarossa) lies in mystic slumber in this area, soon to awaken, bringing peace and prosperity throughout Germany. Hitler also took refuge high above these forests in Obersalzberg. Evidence has been discovered of prehistoric circumpolar cults of bear worship that extended all the way down into Nuremberg, the heartland of Bavaria. These alters of arranged bear skulls and bones date back 200,000 years to the era of the Neanderthal man and point to ancient preoccupations with this animal. “Ursa in Motion” was the constellation around which the strongest elements of this exhibition revolved.

Mark Dagley

Newton, New Jersey

1998

First published in Zing Magazine, vol.2 Fall 1998, pg 248-250

Paul Reed, April 2011

At 92 years of age Paul Reed is the last surviving participant of the Washington Color Painters exhibition, a pivotal event in the annals of the Washington, D.C. art scene. This traveling museum show, curated by Gerald Nordland, included a group of artists–Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Morris Louis, Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, and Paul Reed–who would come to be collectively known as the Washington Color School. It opened on June 25^th 1965, at the now defunct Washington Gallery of Modern Art, and continued on to the University of Texas, the University of California, and the Rose Art Galleries at Brandeis University, ending its run at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Of all the Washington Color Painters, Reed employed the most non-programmatic approach to painting. His work is enigmatically structured and unabashedly chromatic. He always seemed to be separated aesthetically from his pack. Reed created some of the most confounding geometric color field paintings with his aerial view series, works that view extreme close up floral or mandala patterns through a field of color and wedges of geometry, as if seen from a great height.  He was, and still is, the only original member of the Color Painters to continually use Nature itself as a referent in his work (Reed’s daily walks on the Potomac River provide him endless inspiration). His preference for painting plein air when the weather permits would likely be antithetical to his contemporaries, were they still among the living. This experience imbues Reed’s work with “a precise blending of intellectual and sensual experiences,” as David Gariff, Senior Lecturer of the National Gallery of Art, describes it.

Paul Reed, Number 17, 1964, 67x67 inches

On April 25^th of this year, a warm, sunny spring day, I visited Paul Reed in Arlington, Virginia, at the quiet suburban home he shares with his wife Esther. The house, a modest dwelling surrounded by flowering bushes, trees and a well kept lawn, is a stones’ throw from the Potomac River and about 10 miles from Fairfax County, where I spent my entire childhood, where my parents live to this day.

Upon entering Reed’s home, my eyes were drawn to the windows, which are covered by muslin “canvasses” painted with translucent washes of color, amplifying the incoming light like stained glass and transforming the room into a diaphanous spectrum. Only after extended viewing did I realize that these paintings are views of tree trunks, leaves and branches, as seen through those very same windows. I soon came to understand that Reed’s interests lie far beyond the formalities and martial scheme of reductive color geometries, or even color field painting (which he has a right to lay claim to), and purely in color itself, apart from the materiality of paint, color in its most allusive but observable property, that of illumination.

Throughout the rooms of his house, more than a half century of dedication to Reed’s ideal of color painting can be found hung on the walls, or in the process of being photographed and archived. Additionally, downstairs in what Reed called Monet’s Tomb, is a large cabinet holding hundreds upon hundreds of his works, carefully rolled up like rare Chinese scrolls, a treasure chest awaiting revelation to future art historians.

Like the original progenitors of abstraction, whose works were conceived in an altered state of occult contemplation, Paul Reed demonstrates again and again that such principles can provide an ideal ecosystem for germination. His introverted approach to life and painting has served him well, keeping his own discoveries peculiarly eccentric and, even today, shrouded in mysticism.

Mark Dagley, June 9, 2011

The author & Paul Reed

www.http://youtu.be/DvX78YQ5EHs

Twentieth century musical composition contains many unique and cultic personalities. Lili Boulanger, Henry Cowell, Conlon Nancarrow, Harry Partch and Edgard Varèse all have devoted and/or fanatical followers.

Lili Boulanger was the younger sister of the world-renowned Nadia Boulanger. Lili, who was born in Paris in 1893 and died in 1918 at the age of twenty-four, was known as the “first important woman composer in history”. She produced some of the most beautiful and haunting music of the first decade of this century. In 1913, at the age of nineteen, Boulanger won the coveted “Primier Grand Prix de Rome,” (the first woman to do so). She composed a variety of works including the opera  “La Princesse Malaine,” which was left incomplete at her death. Her cult status can be confirmed by hearing the 1960 Everest L.P. # 6059, entitled “Works of Lili Boulanger,” conducted by Igor Markevitch.

Henry Cowell was born in Menlo Park California in 1897 and died in 1965.  He was one of the great pioneers of experimental musical composition. Like Boulanger, he was a child prodigy: As early as 1911 his radical innovations, such as the use of complex rhythms and dissonance, had begun to appear in such works as “Tides of Manaunaum,” which predates Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” by two years. Cowell’s configurations of piano keys struck with the fist or forearm were called “tone clusters” and were first performed in San Francisco in 1912. His most famous student was probably John Cage, who adopted some of Cowell’s techniques in his own compositions for prepared piano. Henry Cowell said, “I was influenced by Ives, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and lots of others before I ever heard of them.” His cult status was attained by not following any “schools,” and by his fearless search for pure originality. His 1951 Circle L.P. # L-51-101 “The Piano music of Henry Cowell,” on which Cowell performs his own compositions, is VERY hard to find.

Conlon Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas in 1912 [and died in 1997]. A former jazz musician, Nancarrow is best known for his compositions for player piano. Nancarrow constructed a machine that allowed him to compose on fresh piano rolls, punching the notes in one at a time. It sometimes took him a year to complete a composition with only a five-minute duration. Nancarrow’s music has its foundation in the improvisational quality found in jazz and the barrelhouse and ragtime syncopated styles of piano playing. His first compositions were a type of jazz-blues reflection, somehow still related to human piano playing. His later works have been called “superhuman.” Conlon Nancarrow has lived in Mexico since 1940, and his distance from the scene has kept his music fresh, unaffected by trends and fashion.  Nancarrow’s music can be found still on vinyl: look for “The Complete Studies for Player Piano” Volume 1and 2 on Arch Records for a “cultaural” experience.

Harry Partch’s music has been called the “first truly American music since the American Indian.” Partch was born in 1901 in Oakland California, and died in 1974. He was a visionary working on the extreme edge of the accepted musical landscape. Partch is a favorite with many rhythmically oriented composers. His ideas can be found, smoothed out and processed, in the works of such “minimalist” composers as Terry Riley and Philip Glass, but his rhythmical ideas, and concern for a theatrically based musical ritual are probably more accurately located in Punk Rock. Harry Partch developed his own unique musical language based on a system of tonalities called Monophony, which “does not present any tone as any specific tonality…” He invented his own musical instruments to play these non-specific tonalities, with names such as “Zymo-xyl” and “Quadrangularis Reversum.” Try to find his Columbia L.P. # MS 7207, entitled “The world of Harry Partch,” and listen to the unusual sounds you have been missing.

Edgard Varèse was born in 1883 in Paris and died in 1965. Here we have a composer of such cult status that it is impossible to calculate his influence. In the field of percussive composition, electronic music and musique concreté, he is considered the major innovator. Even today with the current interest in “electronica,” we are hearing nothing that Varèse did not hear before. His early training in engineering and mathematics allowed him the understanding to produce sounds seemingly independent of one another. He was one of the first to work with magnetic tape, creating sounds artificially. His 1950 EMS #401 L.P., entitled “Complete works of Edgar Varèse” Volume 1, is quite hard to come by. The same disc, numbered and pressed in red vinyl, is almost impossible to find.

These five composers rejected the played-out forms of musical composition (late romantic, serialism, and twelve-tone) in vogue during the first decades of this century. Exploring new sound architectures and techniques of composition, they approached music non-manneristically and with a true visionary spirit.

Mark Dagley

Originally published in VERY issue #11, 1998

Giotto, in his cycle of murals at the Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi, demonstrates this, the demands placed on the painted surface when forced into a confrontation with structural situations. Each scene of the life of Saint Francis reorganizes the structural dynamic of the interior. A conception of painting that dissolves and obliterates its architectural/structural limitations. Or do they? This coupling may be seen as seamless.

Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi, Assisi, Italy

I lose sight of the fact that my paintings are on canvas…If the visual act taking place is strong enough, I don’t get a very strong sense of the material quality of the canvas, it sort of disappears. (Frank Stella)

When ever I travel to Madrid, I always return to the Prado Museum to view the Painting by Roger Van Der Weyden, “Descent from the Cross”. I always see this painting as a shaped canvas; it is and it isn’t. Its shallow space and crowed composition is suspended figuratively and literally in a situation of intense and felt passion. A  self-contained structural fact. As with the St. Francis cycle, this work is able to conform to, while obliterating its own format. It seems to be accomplished by an unprecedented attention to it’s internal narrative and external shape, a format dictated by the architectural niche and/or frame where the painting would be placed.

Rogier van der Weyden, The Descent from the Cross (c.1435) Oil on oak panel, 220 x 262 cm, Prado

This coition of formal concerns, interior/exterior, is resolved by the artist placing on an equal conceptual level, the narrative of the Christ Passion and the elongated (and upside down) “T”- shaped cross format of the support. In other words, the external shape of the painting, a cross exists equally with the internal compositional subject matter, the descent from the cross.

The absoluteness of integration in the Van der Weyden is complete and radical.

This close correlation of painted support and structural shape is what I would like to address. What I want to avoid is a judgmental position of issues or formal analysis of structure versus color, picture versus frame, etc. I propose a more ecological fusion of the two, similar to the Van der Weyden or to the massive altarpiece The Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Angelico now housed in the Louvre Museum.

Fra Angelico ~ The Coronation of the Virgin (c.1430- 35) 2.94 x 2.10 cm,  Louvre

Mark Dagley ~ Ambient Accumulation, 1988, 104 x 118 inches, acrylic and mixed mediums on canvas.

The two issues exist but they absorb each other.

This third position, total integration is, in a way, the “zero degree” of  radical structure. One cannot exist without the other. These arguments for a unification of internal and external pictorial space is one of meta-integration, where two levels of visual dynamics acknowledge the completion of a given work.

One concern is not more or less important than the other, this is their radical nature.

I prefer to view the making of a painting as a situation which develops. In addition, I understand the construction of space to be a situation that is more fixed and unchanging. This dichotomy is a given, inherent to the nature of painting and structure making. It is not necessary that the viewer be bound to preconceived metaphysical condition when viewing these paintings. By the same token, as Barnett Newman would say, “aesthetics is for me like ornithology must be for the birds”. The painting/structures should be left free to live their own inborn condition of being.

One could say that “itself” is a quality of metaphysics, the nature of oneself perhaps, but these are works of fine art, not consciousness itself, but rather it’s mirror, a projection or optical illusion of consciousness. These works are a meditation on the innate qualities of a given structure (form) and content (color). A personal, intimate metaphysics of being.

Mark Dagley 1991

First published by the Kunstverein St Gallen, 1991. Republished in Rogue Magazine #20 in June 1993.

1924 -2010

I’ve followed other artists gratefully and I hope I’ve also followed my own path…. sometimes along side other artists. I’ve also been willing to share any help that I could give to any other artist. I love art and I love the life of art and I only wish that the real life of art could affect social change in a good way and that the invasion of commercialism in art and the invasion of entertainment into all areas of our lives hadn’t brought some of the worst features of our culture into the realm of art.

 Kenneth Noland

“The Bennington Years” symposium, University of Hartford, March, 1988

I heard of Kenneth Noland’s death through a text message from my friend and fellow painter Don Voisine: Kenneth Noland RIP. This isn’t the sort of thing artists kid about, not Don’s idea of a practical joke; still, I clung to a small shred of doubt. Moments later, I googled Don’s exact words and found that Noland had indeed passed away. Well, I figured, at least he made it to his 85^th year. Not a bad run, not a bad run at all. But it’s difficult to fathom: One of the last great colorists of the 20^th century is no more.

A week has passed, and that test message remains on my cell phone. My last link, I suppose, to a lifelong hero.

I never met Kenneth Noland, but as a teenaged artist in the Washington D.C. area during the 1970s, I couldn’t help but be heavily influenced by him and the rest of the Color Field painters. Their work surrounded me, in the museums and the art galleries, even on the asphalt of the streets (Okay, that was in Philly, but I saw it on TV). I watched these artists, who’d ascended the heights in my infancy, tower mightily above, only to be knocked back down years later, but in my eyes they were never anything less than Great.

When I arrived in New York City, winter of ’79, at the ripe old age of 21, I felt like the last surviving admirer of what I’d come to know as post-painterly abstraction. It seemed the world had moved on, and nobody had bothered to tell me. None of the young artists I met found Kenneth Noland the least bit interesting, let alone a master painter. I didn’t even mention The Washington Color School to my newly acquired colleagues. “What the hell is that, some kind of kindergarten?” would have been their likely response.

But several decades and plenty of stupid trends have passed. Post and Neo no longer apply as current art world terms. A place has been made for almost everything, and everyone, under the sun. Kenneth Noland has claimed his corner fairly, squarely.

Noland was born on April 10, 1924, in Asheville, North Carolina to an amateur musician mother and a father who’d studied art. In his early teens, he visited Washington D.C. with his father and was inspired by the astonishing holdings of the National Gallery, most notably their Impressionist collection. Shortly thereafter, he began his pursuit of painting.

In 1942, Noland was conscripted. He served four years in the U.S. Air Force. After WWII, he and his brothers, Harry and Neil, enrolled in Black Mountain College. Among Kenneth’s teachers were Ilya Bolotowski, John Cage and Peter Grippe. He also spent a semester under the tutelage of Joseph Albers. After two years at Black Mountain, Kenneth departed for Paris, where he continued his studies with Ossip Zadkine. In spring of ’49, he had his first solo exhibition at Gallery Creuze.

By 1950 Noland was back in the United States and living in Washington D.C., where he taught at the now defunct Institute of Contemporary Art and at Catholic University. He returned to Black Mountain College that year to attend summer courses. There he met his first critical champion, Clement Greenberg, who exposed him to recent developments in Abstract Expressionism.

Noland continued teaching in D.C., adding night classes at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts to his busy schedule. Morris Louis was also working there as an instructor. Inevitably, they became good friends.

On April 3^rd, 1953, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis and Clement Greenburg visited the New York studio of 24-year-old Helen Frankenthaler. They saw her recent painting Mountains and Sea, which expanded on the implications suggested by Pollock’s 1951 black enamel works. Energized and inspired, Noland and Louis returned to D.C., where they began months of experimentation with unprimed canvas and paint thinned to the consistency of watercolor. Often, the two artists worked together on the same canvas. Unfortunately, none of their four-handed paintings have survived.

What has remained are Louis’ first “veils” and “florals” and Noland’s “proto – circles,”   living proof of unprecedented artistic breakthroughs in the late 1950s. Noland soon arrived at his definitive concentric circle configuration. Fifteen of these works were shown at French and Co. in 1959. With this exhibition, Noland’s reputation was firmly established.

His “circles” are often incorrectly described as targets. They are, in actuality, purely abstract, intuitive color extrapolations. Noland had little interest, at least at this time, in the geometry of the circle, but he managed to explore most of its other aspects. The catalogue for a 1994 exhibit at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston entitled “The Circle Paintings, 1956 – 1963” mentioned 175 known circle paintings, the smallest being only 13 inches square, the largest, 117.

At the 32^nd Venice Biennial in 1964, Noland and Louis were two of eight artists representing the United States. This biennial introduced the world at large to Pop Art, with Robert Rauschenberg bringing home the Golden Lion. It took another two years for Color Field painting to fully surface worldwide. In the 33^rd Venice biennial, works by Jules Olitski and Helen Frankenthaler were included.

Back in the U.S. Noland and Louis joined forces with Gene Davis, Paul Reed and two of Noland’s C.U. students, Thomas Downing and Howard Mehring, to create The Washington Color School, named for an exhibition, The Washington Color Painters, which took place at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1965. Many of these artists and newer adherents, such as Sam Gillian, Alma Thomas, Anne Truitt and Leon Berkowitz, exhibited their work at the Jefferson Place Gallery, cementing the strong identification with Washington as the home of color painting.

Noland pushed on like a juggernaut with a solo exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1965. A few years later, he was so commercially successful that Piri Halasz wrote in the April 18^th, 1969 issue of TIME:

 His latest work, marked by a softer, subtler spectrum of colors, and currently on view at Manhattan‘s Lawrence Rubin Gallery, is so much in demand that the gallery is charging up to $28,500 per painting. The artist himself and his svelte wife Stephanie can afford to divide their time between a farm in Vermont and Manhattan, where he recently bought and is renovating a flophouse on the Bowery. (It should be noted that in 1969 $28,500 had about the same buying power as $168,776 does in 2010).

In spite of this enormous success, Noland maintained doubts about his own work, frequently destroying paintings that didn’t meet his lofty standards, stopping short with at least one series that was critically acclaimed. An example of this can be found in the catalogue text for Noland’s Jewish Museum show. Michael Fried remarks: “after having executed no more than a few large-scale asymmetrical chevron paintings, Noland gave up the solution—one which a lesser painter would have spent a lifetime repeating, if he could have made his way to it in the first place—because it was no longer true to his feelings,…”

One can only surmise what Noland really felt about his asymmetrical chevrons. They seem to have been made in response to Louis’ “Unfurleds,” of which, by 1961, there were over 120 variations. Noland’s chevrons are large not only dimensionally but also experientially. They are ambitious paintings, a throwing down of the gauntlet at the feet of his elders: Pollock, Newman, Rothko and his buddy Louis.

The work Bend Sinister, 1964, found in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum, clocks in at a respectable 92 ½ x 162 ½. Bend Sinister is an off-axis, five color chevron consisting of two different values of blue: a chilly cobalt and a lighter cerulean, stacked on top of a lemon yellow and bordering a warm orange. Then, in a move worthy of atonal musical composition, Noland concludes with a jump to an odd gray-green, an effect which fellow Washingtonian Gene Davis would go on to exploit to full effect.

But in the midst of these halcyon days, trouble was brewing. Consensus amongst a new critical establishment concluded that the framework constructed around painting had become unsustainable. Painting was now considered retrograde, artistically bankrupt, its principles undefendable. Color Field painting was easy prey.

Michael Fried, who had written so eloquently of Noland’s early career, abandoned the sinking ship of high modernist painting, while Rosalind Krauss launched articulate attacks on the notion on modernist criticism itself in Artforum and October magazines.

Things were looking so bleak for painters in 1969 that Joseph Kosuth, in a footnote to his landmark text “Art after Philosophy,” concluded “the conceptual level of the work of Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, Ron Davis, Anthony Caro, John Hoyland, Dan Christiansen et al. is so dismally low, that any that is there is supplied by the critics promoting it…”

By 1974 Donald Judd was quoted as saying “It looks like painting is finished.” It would be almost 40 years before the funeral celebration came to an end.

Nonetheless, Noland’s career proved to be unshakeable. Throughout the 70s, he exhibited at some of the world’s finest art galleries. A solo show at the Guggenheim Museum opened on April 15^th, 1977.

During the 1980s, Noland ransacked the storehouse of newly available iridescent acrylic paints, extenders, textured gels and mediums. In a move seemingly inspired by the postmodernist quotation that was very much in vogue at the time, he brought back his chevron and diamond motifs for a surprising second act. Noland pressed forward into the 90s with a renewed sense of urgency, as he squeegeed and pushed paint relentlessly across the modularity of his “door” and “flair” series of shapes.

By the turn of the century, Noland had returned to his most recognizable emblem: the concentric circle, this time, on a much smaller scale. He instilled his signature motif with mysterious mandala-like spiritual and cosmological references. The sixty-year-plus career of this great American color painter ended with the artist absorbed in deep meditation on the nature of paint as a carrier of transcendental light.

At the time of his passing, Noland’s final exhibition was still on view at Lesley Feely Fine Art. The show consisted of twelve eccentrically shaped paintings from the early 80s that were selected by the artist from his personal collection. The orientation of these works, derogatorily referred to as the “surfboard” series, appears to be up for grabs. Two of the paintings were previously reproduced in a major publication as horizontals, while at Lesley Feley, the works, except for one, were installed vertically, at the artist’s request, giving them the look of contorted full-length figure paintings, an allusion Noland must have perversely enjoyed. Completed 30 years ago, these pieces seem surprising fresh and of the moment. They are sleek shards, informational bits of some unknown technological stuff, floating, nay, surfing in slow motion CGI animation, self-critically probing the edges of paintings’ existence.

 Mark Dagley

First published in the Brooklyn Rail February 2010

“…by drawing I mean all those things that can be formed with the value, or force, of simple lines.”

Agnolo Bronzino

Although many unique events occur at any given time in the New York art world, few represent true advancement in scholarship and major historical significance while offering a once in a lifetime aesthetic experience. Such was the case in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of all known drawings by or attributed to the 16th century Mannerist master Angnolo Bronzino.
Mannerism, derived from the Italian maniera, or style, as the term was used by Bronzino’s contemporary, the artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari, is one of the first examples in Western “art about art.” The Mannerist artist expects an audience to understand the visual clues and the indirect quotations found in their work. Delighting in artificiality, Mannerism is style at its most thoughtful, fully self-conscious of its rule breaking and its deliberate exaggeration of classical canons.

When used in the service of transcendence of the real, Mannerism concentrates on an almost complete rejection of the ideals of nature itself. As Stanley Freeber wrote in Observations on the Painting of the Maniera, it’s “art imitating art, rather than an art imitating nature”. With this in mind, we can begin to approach this prodigious and confounding exhibition.

Organized in collaboration with the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi and the Polo Museale Fiorentino, The Drawings of Bronzino presents approximately sixty works on paper. From his student work in imitation of his master Jacopo da Pontormo, to the drawings for the frescoes and altarpiece of the private chapel of Eleonora di Toledo, to later works such as the Story of Joseph tapestries and the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence fresco, the exhibit was arranged chronologically over three rooms, methodically dividing Bronzino’s output and allowing his extant graphic style to gracefully unfold.
Born 1503 in Monticelli, outside of Florence, Angnolo Bronzino spent most of his life in that city, dying there in 1572. Court artist to Cosimo de’Medici, know poet and member of the Florentine literary academy, he was, as well, one of the founders of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, the first art academy in Europe.
As a teenager Bronzino entered into the workshop of Pontormo and was producing work under his own signature by 1528. Unlike Raphael, who left many completed works on paper, both Pontormo and Bronzino left few “finished” drawings. From the extant corpus, we can only surmise Bronzino’s actual drawing strategy.  We are left with a selection of preparatory sketching, various compositional studies and, from the more elaborate projects, well articulated designs and plans employed in preparation for his tapestries, altarpieces and frescos. Many of the drawings that ought to exist simply don’t.
A clear point made in this exhibition and the extremely well researched accompanying publication is that Bronzino’s formidable appeal as a draftsmen  comes from his dissipating mysterious style, which effortlessly approaches the elegiac at its most profound. This same intemperate but sure charm lends itself to a surprisingly improvisational, almost slight, provisional form of drawing. It appears with many of these works that graphical delineations to Bronzino are nothing more than the result of ideas quickly notated, to be construed with metaphorical meaning at a later date. Actual space, which seems so allegorically complex and formally intense in his painted portraiture is graphically shallow, even non-existent in many of these works. It’s as if he had no need for drawing in many instances, or that he couldn’t be bothered, that the paintings could just paint themselves. While this is unlikely, we are left to acknowledge a system of mark-making totally removed from many of those highly finished paintings. Contrarily, for example, in one drawing, the modello (demonstration piece) for the tapestry Pharaoh Receiving Jacob into Egypt we get a glimpse of the profound understanding of atmospheric perspective the artist had at his command using only the simple means of ink, chalk and wash.
Many of Bronzino’s drawings are quite informal, almost sketchy. Some seem to have what look like children’s doodles along their borders, giving them a contemporary, tossed off feeling. Many are two sided and displayed on pedestals, enabling the viewer to experience the sheet in the round.

Typically, the artist’s precisely drawn outlines are handled with a slightly mechanical touch and then worked into a smoky finish. Underneath the soft atmospheric haze are the remnants of a variety of sophisticated drawing techniques: hard outlines, refined crosshatchings applied with a variety of pressures and a blending of chalks resulting in a distinctive soft, warm atmosphere of evenly graded modulation. But Bronzino in so many instances rejects the effects put to such good use in his paintings. He seems to deliberately turn his back on ostentatious displays of virtuosity and technique in his work on paper. The elegance of Raphael or the graphic mastery of Michelangelo are almost completely at odds with many of these works. Except for a few examples, such as the black chalk drawing Study of a Left Leg and Drapery (originally attributed to Michelangelo) or the extremely lovely and delicate cartoon fragment Head of a Smiling Women in Three-Quarter View so reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci, there is only a suggestion of these older artists’ dexterity.

And at the exhibition’s most disappointingly pragmatic moment, the very important modello for the Frescoed Vault of the Chapel of Eleonora di Toledo, it’s evident we’re looking at a showy but lack luster proposal prepared for a client. One is left wondering what these works on paper have to do with his mind-boggling and technical paintings.

At almost every turn we are brought back to Bronzino’s well articulated and studious figure studies. Subtle and even tempered, these drawing are brought to life with warm graphic shimmer. Ignoring the running script of attribution, one can almost visualize how the artist is able to effortlessly capture and transpose dramatic essence of form to his confrontational but mysterious paintings.

Absent from this exhibit is any definitive explanation for the astonishing discrepancy between Bronzino’s paper works and the artificially serene and polished enamel-like surfaces of his paintings. Also missing is any discussion of the rarefied and crystalline air or any notion of the “dark side” found in his official portraiture. Works such as the well known and incestuous An Allegory of Venus and Cupid found in the National Gallery, London, or the equally explicit codpiece wearing Portrait of Ludovico Capponi in the Frick Collection clearly demonstrate, any connection between these paintings and the collected drawings on display will have to be left to a different exhibition and for now, the realm of our imagination.

With this in mind, the restlessness of many of Bronzino’s drawings can be seen illuminated by the unreality of Mannerism itself, an artificial world of delightful surfaces and expressionless faces, where psychologically compelling portraits and claustrophobic allegorical figure compositions live in a world apart, forever in their own space and time.

Mark Dagley