This concerns representation v. abstraction art wars and some other topics.
The best truth here I can think of is to work in both worlds, representation of the human figure, and abstraction at any level. This is hard to explain, but you learn form and composition much faster and better, to greater depth by working on the figure. What you see in the figure are the dynamic forces of physical world which form the shapes and structures of plants and animals, and that are still there in the figure. With help and a lot of work you move to abstraction from a much better knowledge base. So Alice Neel was right in a certain sense there is no such thing as abstraction. On the other hand she was so dogmatic about it, she pretended her work had nothing to do with abstract forms. Well she must have known better, because she worked with them everyday in figures, their postures, their cloths and of course all the color relations.
Now I learned this the hard way. I started off loving the figure in life drawing. It was like a liberation in 1962. I was lucky and had a very committed drawing instructor who had just graduated a few years before from Otis Art Institute. He had been a student under Rico LeBrun---same as my stepfather had a decade before when I was a kid. It was like I had come home after a terrible vacation in the suburbs.
When I got to UCB, the entire department with the exception of Elmer Bischoff had become non-representational under the influence of Hans Hofman, an abstract quasi-expressionist, know for his theories and his paintings. Hofman came to Berkeley and assisted in the development of the department.
At any rate, when I arrived at the place most of the figurative students had been stamped out. After flunking the first comprensive with figurative work, I needed to come with something I considered contentless design work. Fuck it, if that's what they want, I can do that. I spent most days working construction and coming to evening seminars. The last quarter I had ten weeks to do three major works and three minor. They must have loved them, because I got my degree.
I kept up with the abstract side because that was just about all Artforum reviewed. All the figure work was reduced to small reviews from the smaller galleries. In many ways abstraction is much easier to execute because there is no apparent content, but the manipulation of formal means. But this is an illusion. The art of it comes from within in the psyche, something like Heidegger's techne. I was working with simple shapes around some of Sol Lewitt and David Smith's work. This kind of work was highly unpopular in SF Bay Area gallery scene. Part of the problem is its scale and the fact that most SF galleries were small. Then too there was an intellectual dislike of it as souless. The ordinary public considered highbrow bullshit. The politicos though it was reactionary bourgeois
At this point, Peter Selz was running UCB's Art Museum which was almost always followed NYC's lead. The same was true of Henry Hopkins at SFMOMA except he focused on LA. At that particular moment Hopkins was eager to get some of LA crew shown, Ed Ruscka and others. While I picked up stuff from LA, I didn't respect them much, except for Irwin. There was a deep strain of reactionary anti-intellectualism going on, similar to, even developed from Andy Warhol
Crehan knew both Selz and Hopkins. He didn't like Selz, but did like Hopkins. Unfortunately he had also embarassed himself at too many drunk openings and had submitted one two many art as psychoanalysis of the artist reviews. While this was the rage in 50s especially applied to AE, it had gone out of style by the late 50s when a new formalist style review became all the rage, deeply enshrined in Artforum.
By the time I came to know Crehan as a man he was considered an art pest in both NYC and SF Bay. He came over to my studio one day and said, Yes Charles, Yes! This meant he really liked the work. You like them? God Man! In other words, don't be stupid. What he was reacting to was the physical presence which is completely lost in a photograph, i.e. the portfolio. Crehan knew what he was saying, because I had seen the same thing in him, both in Mexico as boy, and later in Berkeley. In Mexico and NYC he was a big scale AE painter following Clifford Still. You have to be in front of a Clifford Still in order to understand it. The huge mass of paint hung on 2x4's and standing fifteen feet would probably kill you outright if for some reason it fell off the wall. You would not survive the crash. This is the reason Hopkins loved Still. Later Still switched to almost turpintine wash. His painting lost something in the switch, but gained in the freedom of composition.
The one and only review I tried to write was at UCB, a New York School retro curated by TJ Clark. I made a big mistake. I got all intellectual about the work, because I had listened to Clark's public lecture, which was full on postmodern cum Marx, but not as social history. What the show lacked was a big Pollock, something like Blue Poles. I knew why. The rentals were too high.
When you go to a show to review it, you have to decide and gamble on an approach, if you are a newbie. I had 2000 words. I submitted 3-4k and figured, fuck it, Robinson, be an editor and cut and paste what you want.
At a guess Robinson was not getting paid much. He sent me a rejection fee, which was the only money I ever got out of the art world. That's not entirely true. I got some record cover jackets for somewhere around fifty bucks as a student. For art students, this is a very cool exercise. Translate the music within to the design without. That's a lot harder than it sounds.
Neel's kids wonder why they had hard times as kids. Gee, boys look around. You were living on welfare in Spanish Harlem, what do you think was going on?
What the fuck can you say in 2000 words about the entire post-war art world from 1945 to 1960? I could spend 2000 words on one Still and still say nothing. I should have spent more words on Joan Brown, but I figured her one offering, a figure portrait of her baby son in a green and red zippered christmas jumb suit, made into a stuffed doll needed its own essay. You get some insight into women as mothers and artists in the Neel film, which is also in Joan Brown's very ambiguous and struggling painting. This painting was done before she got too damned polished.
Now, considering TJ Clarke's lecture. I have to lecture Clark. Stick with a more realistic social history like in Manet and His Followers. I've got Clark's Farewell to an Idea. But I already know what it is about. It is about the death of modernity. Okay, fucking write about it and forget this postmodernity method borrowed from Derrida et al. Really dude nobody is ready for that except my somebody like me. How many of those readers you got? I looked in the index, looking for Malraux and Paz, both precursors to this thesis. Not a mention. Kind of shattered my idealism over Clark. Are you a fucking scholar or what?
Now let's step back. So kid you want to be an artist? Go listen to some gravel toned old son of bitch blues about ready to die of lung cancer or liver disease, alone living in a trailor park, who gets fewer and fewer gigs turned into a museum reference considered already dead. The college circuit ran out sometime in the late 70s. I met Lightening Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Blue Mitchel, and many others in the old Berkeley Blues and Jazz festival days. Kicked myself in the ass many times for not going to Albatross to listen to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee.
But I was already married and cleaned up my act, and tried to pretend I was middle class for my wife. Just the idea of Hub Crehan scared her to death. She had seen him and me in the kitchen one night, as I cleaned out his broken glass wounds in the sink, and I cleaned up his deeply slashed hands in benadine and wrapped them in gaze with an outside wrap of a stretch roll.
Hub had found is ex-wife fucking some polish grad student in physics, pounded throught the glass paneled back door and hosed them down with a gardin hose in the backyard... You really don't want your wife to see things like that. He later referred to it as the Polish Sauage Incident.
Back to Sproul was always a treat. Just sit there say hi, and light a cigerette and wait. They used to sit on the Sproul benches on the east side opposite ASUC building during off days. Some little crowd would gather, and when there were enough, they'd start to do practice runs working up to a whole song. I was getting to watch art live. Great stuff. These guys were giants and they were dead broke. Their social impact was much greater than any money. They made major contributions to BHS jazz band which has become the cool and the true.
That's where your headed, son or daughter. Wanna go there? Get ready. You are going to pay with your life.
Years later, in the early 2000's I learned that Hub's son, Titus who was dead at 36, his daughter wanted to see me. I weeped. My god what can I say to her? She knocked on my door one day. She was seventeen and beautiful. I felt something I shouldn't. I asked her in and we sat at my kitchen table and we talked for several hours. I was looking at the genetic social evolution made physical in a young woman's body and soul. She was seeking to understand her own misbegotten life. Oh, daughter what can I tell you? Find your own direction and know there is some love out there in some other place to guide you. I wanted to kiss on the cheek so bad it hurt. Just don't. I didn't. I stupidly shook hands. Like Hub and Titus, she was very physically strong. Can you give back to the arts until it hurts? Another topic for another time.
CG