Nice photograph of Stevens, open faced, almost in the middle of saying something. Stevens though of the Oboe, August and Summer’s Day, not Guitar. Tchelitchew seems stuck in Picassoland 1903. Wonder what O’Hara thought of that Kirstein/Zwirner group of painters, Cadmus, French, Tooker (though drawing of Monroe Wheeler is fresh). Think of them alongside O’Hara’s Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, John Button, Grace Hartigan. Difference - same with Ford & Parker maybe - is they don’t question the medium they’re working with, let the materials/ words have the upper hand. Seem prefabricated perhaps.
Thanks for the tour of Huntington rarities, first issue of View, etc
I kind of like some of French's stuff but yeah that circle of painters are unfortunately pretty embarrassing and I suspect were experienced as such by the following generation of NYC gays around O'Hara. Tyler did write for ARTnews in the 50s and 60s--although I haven't read his criticism from then--so he may have had more connection to the tastes of the New York school of poets. But looking at Cadmus, French, Tchelitchew etc I can appreciate why 50s-60s gays would be excited about abstraction lol...
Maybe it was an attempt at an American PreRaphaelite anti-modernism movement. Interesting that Lincoln Kirstein could champion that group and the high modernist constructivist George Balanchine at the same time. As a student I found them kitschy and cringeworthy though part of that reaction may have been internalized homophobia. Also was then just discovering Morris Louis whose complete decentering of the canvas startled and thrilled me.
Yve-Alain Bois has a couple of essays on modernist questioning the nature of the support the “content” rests on, rather than Greenbergian flatness, via Picasso pinned paper collages and the works of Robert Ryman and Martin Barré. (You could say Gerald Murnane’s work is the literary equivalent.)
Kind of brought this up because YAB was a student of Roland Barthes. Wrote about this experience in “Critique” 425, “Écrivain, artisan, narrator,” August Sept 1982, special RB issue; in English in “Oblique Autobiography”. Thought this may be of interest to you in your Barthes investigations if you haven’t already come across it. He may be in one of the photos you posted in your account of Barthes’ unrequited student crush.
I have not read Blois! Or indeed really any of Barthes' writing on art... I'll check it out!
I'm still very ignorant about this material but as someone who hasn't done the reading on 'modernism,' it's not obvious to me that the pre-Raphaelites and Pater, Swinburne, Wilde etc decadent symbolist types weren't 'modern'--they certainly had a big influence on Eliot, Pound, Crane, etc, all of whom like purple gush and historical drag. I was recently reading Douglass Shand-Tucci's bio of Ralph Adams Cram, the anglo-catholic american church architect whose dates link the fin-de-siecle and 'modernism'... part of DST's suggestion is that Cram and his Boston-area associates like F. Holland Day trouble attempts to separate a neomedieval, reactionary pre-Modernist sort of (often very queer) aesthetics/politics from a Modernist one oriented towards formal innovation and purity...
Likewise a few years ago I saw a show of Ellsworth Kelly's gay little doodles at the Art Institute in Chicago--and they make for the same sort of contrast with his non-figural public work as, say, Marsden Hartley's and Charles Demuth's Cezannesque and O'Keefesque public work did with their drawings of guys... I don't yet have a thought on this, really, and I haven't yet gotten into the recent art-historical literature on 'queer abstraction' but even the straight modernists all seem to have been very much involved in 'content' that according to their own manifestos and pronouncements ought to have been embarrassing... If you have any other recommendations let me know!
Barthes didn't write much on art and Bois split the difference to write on the typography of El Lissitzky and the Soviet artists of the 20s for his initial class project. He studied with Barthes for six years, founded Macula magazine (four issues), then came to the US to write for Artforum and October. / Have to confess I don't find anything fruitful in Ellsworth Kelly's abstractions (SFMOMA has endless rooms of them) though I think his postcard collages are great, all the life missing in the big shapes is in the little "boxcards". His boyfriend (is that a dated term?) Jack Shear had a show of his capacious collection of paper works at the Drawing Center that bears some resemblance to the Lincoln Kirstein/Cadmus sensibility. I'm far away from the current nyc art scene but Amy Sillman and Christopher Wool, though he's not gay, seem to be pretty good abstract painters. There's also Harmony Hammond, Nicole Eisenman and Helio Oiticica's really interesting body of work, though some years past. Josh Smith?
I'm liking these Christopher Street bios
Nice photograph of Stevens, open faced, almost in the middle of saying something. Stevens though of the Oboe, August and Summer’s Day, not Guitar. Tchelitchew seems stuck in Picassoland 1903. Wonder what O’Hara thought of that Kirstein/Zwirner group of painters, Cadmus, French, Tooker (though drawing of Monroe Wheeler is fresh). Think of them alongside O’Hara’s Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, John Button, Grace Hartigan. Difference - same with Ford & Parker maybe - is they don’t question the medium they’re working with, let the materials/ words have the upper hand. Seem prefabricated perhaps.
Thanks for the tour of Huntington rarities, first issue of View, etc
I kind of like some of French's stuff but yeah that circle of painters are unfortunately pretty embarrassing and I suspect were experienced as such by the following generation of NYC gays around O'Hara. Tyler did write for ARTnews in the 50s and 60s--although I haven't read his criticism from then--so he may have had more connection to the tastes of the New York school of poets. But looking at Cadmus, French, Tchelitchew etc I can appreciate why 50s-60s gays would be excited about abstraction lol...
Maybe it was an attempt at an American PreRaphaelite anti-modernism movement. Interesting that Lincoln Kirstein could champion that group and the high modernist constructivist George Balanchine at the same time. As a student I found them kitschy and cringeworthy though part of that reaction may have been internalized homophobia. Also was then just discovering Morris Louis whose complete decentering of the canvas startled and thrilled me.
Yve-Alain Bois has a couple of essays on modernist questioning the nature of the support the “content” rests on, rather than Greenbergian flatness, via Picasso pinned paper collages and the works of Robert Ryman and Martin Barré. (You could say Gerald Murnane’s work is the literary equivalent.)
Kind of brought this up because YAB was a student of Roland Barthes. Wrote about this experience in “Critique” 425, “Écrivain, artisan, narrator,” August Sept 1982, special RB issue; in English in “Oblique Autobiography”. Thought this may be of interest to you in your Barthes investigations if you haven’t already come across it. He may be in one of the photos you posted in your account of Barthes’ unrequited student crush.
I have not read Blois! Or indeed really any of Barthes' writing on art... I'll check it out!
I'm still very ignorant about this material but as someone who hasn't done the reading on 'modernism,' it's not obvious to me that the pre-Raphaelites and Pater, Swinburne, Wilde etc decadent symbolist types weren't 'modern'--they certainly had a big influence on Eliot, Pound, Crane, etc, all of whom like purple gush and historical drag. I was recently reading Douglass Shand-Tucci's bio of Ralph Adams Cram, the anglo-catholic american church architect whose dates link the fin-de-siecle and 'modernism'... part of DST's suggestion is that Cram and his Boston-area associates like F. Holland Day trouble attempts to separate a neomedieval, reactionary pre-Modernist sort of (often very queer) aesthetics/politics from a Modernist one oriented towards formal innovation and purity...
Likewise a few years ago I saw a show of Ellsworth Kelly's gay little doodles at the Art Institute in Chicago--and they make for the same sort of contrast with his non-figural public work as, say, Marsden Hartley's and Charles Demuth's Cezannesque and O'Keefesque public work did with their drawings of guys... I don't yet have a thought on this, really, and I haven't yet gotten into the recent art-historical literature on 'queer abstraction' but even the straight modernists all seem to have been very much involved in 'content' that according to their own manifestos and pronouncements ought to have been embarrassing... If you have any other recommendations let me know!
Barthes didn't write much on art and Bois split the difference to write on the typography of El Lissitzky and the Soviet artists of the 20s for his initial class project. He studied with Barthes for six years, founded Macula magazine (four issues), then came to the US to write for Artforum and October. / Have to confess I don't find anything fruitful in Ellsworth Kelly's abstractions (SFMOMA has endless rooms of them) though I think his postcard collages are great, all the life missing in the big shapes is in the little "boxcards". His boyfriend (is that a dated term?) Jack Shear had a show of his capacious collection of paper works at the Drawing Center that bears some resemblance to the Lincoln Kirstein/Cadmus sensibility. I'm far away from the current nyc art scene but Amy Sillman and Christopher Wool, though he's not gay, seem to be pretty good abstract painters. There's also Harmony Hammond, Nicole Eisenman and Helio Oiticica's really interesting body of work, though some years past. Josh Smith?