Hervé Télémaque, Escale, 1964, oil on canvas, 41 by 57 inches.

Hervé Télémaque was only 20 years old when he left Haiti. It was 1957 and François “Papa Doc” Duvalier had just come to power. Télémaque’s first stop in a life of exile that continues to this day was New York City, where he enrolled at the Art Students League and absorbed the influence of Abstract Expressionism. In 1961, dismayed by U.S. politics (especially toward Cuba), the country’s racism, a fear of losing his Francophone identity and the calcification of Abstract Expressionism into an academic style, he moved to France, where he has lived ever since.

There, Télémaque soon forged a style that retained the improvisational energy of Ab Ex while engaging explicitly with the society around him. With the Roland Barthes-inspired 1964 group show “Mythologies Quotidiennes,” he emerged as a leading figure of the “Narrative Figuration” movement. If the work of New York Pop painters appeared to totally reject gestural abstraction, in Paris in the early 1960s there emerged an arresting hybrid version of Pop art and gestural abstraction in the studios of Télémaque, French painter Bernard Rancillac and American expatriate Peter Saul. Although Rancillac soon turned to a more stable iconography, both Saul and Télémaque, while purging their canvases of gesture, retained an improvisational plasticity that linked them to Gorky, Pollock and de Kooning. Both also, in their very different ways, remained caustic social commentators.  Télémaque’s painting My Darling Clementine (1963) now in the collection of the Pompidou Center, embodies the freewheeling kineticism of his early work, while also satirizing the deep racism of Kennedy-era America.

Hervé Télémaque, My Darling Clementine, 1963, oil on canvas, collaged papers, painted wood box, rubber doll, Plexiglas, 195 by 245 by 25 cm.

In the late 1960s, Télémaque emptied out his compositions so that isolated, neatly painted objects could float against white or colored grounds. His imagery came from comic books, commercial package design, newspaper layouts and daily street life. The paintings are often boldly horizontal, encouraging, or even insisting on, a lateral reading rather than being graspable in a single glance—as in a colorful 1965 jibe at U.S. imperialism titled One of the 36,000 Marines or a series of enigmatic paintings featuring camping tents. Sometimes (as with My Darling Clementine) the paintings feature sculptural attachments.

As he has pursued his particular painterly obsessions, Télémaque has remained alert to the world around him. In the mid 1980s, when the Haitian people overthrew the Duvalier regime, he for a time reduced his palette to red and blue, the national colors of Haiti. In the 1990s, following extensive travels in Africa, he created a series of paintings titled “Trottoirs d’Afrique” (Sidewalks of Africa).

Hervé Télémaque, En oblique, la canopée, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 146 by 114 cm. Courtesy Galerie Louis Carré, Paris.

In his most recent work, Télémaque has reintroduced gesture, especially in a series of paintings inspired by the concept of the forest canopy, a place one can’t see from within the forest itself and is always in the state of becoming.  More abstract than anything the artist has previously done, these arrays of patterned and solid-color patches suggest that separate paintings have been shattered and recombined into mosaic-like arrays.  They also give surprising proof to Télémaque’s assertion that Georges Braque was his “premier maitre.”

Noël Dolla, Structure à la tente d'indien, dyed cloth, towel rack, 160 by 140 by 80 cm, 1968.

Would you believe me if I told you that some of the most significant statements in and about painting have been made with dishtowels, handkerchiefs, fishing lures, pillowcases and rolls of 14-centimeter wide muslin? Would you believe me if I told you that one of the most important contemporary artists has spent his entire working life on a single street in a sleepy Mediterranean city? Whether you believe me or not matters little to the person I’m talking about: Noël Dolla, a French artist who was born in Nice in 1945 and currently lives and works a mere two blocks from the building where he grew up.

Although he is defiantly local in his daily life, Dolla has been totally committed to an artistic practice of widest import ever since he first emerged in the late 1960s as the youngest and most artistically radical member of the Supports/Surfaces movement. While contemporaneous with Arte Povera and American Post-Minimalism, and similarly concerned to reject the business-as-usual of the postwar Western art establishment, Supports/Surface was surprisingly attached to the medium of painting. Drawing on Greenbergian formalism, French Maoism, post-structuralist philosophy and the legacy of Matisse, Supports/Surfaces artists such as Dolla, Claude Viallat, Daniel Dezeuze, Patrick Saytour and others embarked on a literal and ideological deconstruction of painting.

Noël Dolla, Tarlatans, fabric dye on tarlatan, studio view, 1970. Photograph by the artist.

Dolla’s early breakdowns of abstraction included works such as Structure à la tente d’indien (Indian Tent Structure), a multi-pronged towel rack from which hung several pieces of color-stained cloth, including one patterned like a Native American teepee, and Etendoir aux mouchoirs (Drying Rack with Handkerchiefs) in which 10 handkerchiefs, partly dyed pink and yellow, are suspended from a store-bought rack. The handkerchiefs are sewn together to form two strips of unequal length, each of which hangs free in space. These flimsy, boldly domestic inventions sneak up on the heritage of artists such as Vladimir Tatlin, Barnett Newman and Morris Louis, and set the stage for Dolla’s subsequent practice of repurposing everyday items to make raids into (and out of) abstract painting.

Noël Dolla, “Leurre de Noël,” fishhook, tinsel, feathers, 1998. Photograph by the artist.

Restlessness has marked Dolla’s entire career, at least from the mid 1970s when he stopped making the “Cross” paintings that galleries around Europe were clamouring for.  This refusal to frame his critique of formalist abstraction with an infinitely repeatable trademark motif dramatically set Dolla apart from the BMPT painters (Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni), as well as from many of his Supports/Surfaces companions. The freedom that Dolla claimed in the 1970s came at a price: very few people knew what to do with this artist who could move from finger-painted monochromes to land-art (large colored dots on beaches and snow-capped mountains) to tiny fishing-lure sculptures, to large sulfurous paintings made with smoking tapers, to hilarious combine paintings that featured window shutters, to labyrinthine installations created with yards of unrolled muslin fabric. Among Dolla’s most challenging series are the “Chernobyl Paintings,” canvases he painted in 1986-87 with only his right hand (he is left-handed) while wearing a patch over one eye. Atypically figurative and expressionist, these works were the artist’s response to simultaneous tragedies: the nuclear accident in the USSR and Dolla’s two brothers being diagnosed with AIDS. In his recent paintings Dolla has again departed from his generally abstract/conceptual practice to create a series of large-scale, boldly decorative allegorical canvases that pair process-oriented technique and a Constructivist visual style.

Noël Dolla, “Fumées,” at the Centre d'art de Vassivière, 1998.

Noël Dolla, “My Mother I,” triptych, acrylic on canvas, 612 by 340 cm, 2006-2007.

Fascinated by domestic readymades and also by pure color, passionately committed to painting and intelligently irreverent towards its pretensions, equally ready to uphold the legacy of Malevich and Barnett Newman (his two greatest influences) and to pursue what he has called “humiliated abstraction,” Dolla presents us with a bouillabaisse of seemingly contradictory positions. It’s only when you pause to consider his entire career—as was possible most recently in an ambitious 2009 survey of his work at the MAC/VAL Musee d’art contemporaine outside of Paris—that his underlying fidelity to himself, and to the old modernist dream of socially transformative painting, comes through.

Still from Jean Eustache's Photos d'Alix, 1980.

The penultimate film by Jean Eustache, the French director famed for The Mother and the Whore (1973), is Les Photos d’Alix (1980). It’s an 18-minute, 35-mm color film in which we see a photographer—Alix Cléo Roubaud—showing her photographs to a young man (Eustache’s 20-year-old son Boris).  As they work their way through a stack of black-and-white prints, the young man asks brief questions and Roubaud tells him where and how each photograph was made and what her intentions were, what interested her about the images. The photos often feature double exposures and other darkroom techniques (solarizing, masking, dodging, burning). In one of a man lying on a bed, the photographer has used a supplemental exposure to stretch the curving, old-fashioned headboard into a strange sinuous shadow. Another dreamlike images shows a bare-chested man floating in an expanse of milky white light. Later we see a landscape divided by nested rectangular zones of light and darkness created during the printing process.

About halfway through the film, something strange begins to happen as Roubaud’s descriptions of her photographs cease to match the images we see when the camera cuts to close-ups of the prints. Eustache, who was a close friend of Roubaud’s, stages this disconnection with great subtlety: the photographer’s hands pointing out details on one of the prints seem perfectly synched to the rhythms of her verbal descriptions, even though she is describing an altogether different image. At one point, Boris Eustache asks Roubaud if the woman in a photo is her. After telling him that he shouldn’t ask such questions, she says, “All the photographs are me.” Eustache underscores her point by matching this exchange to a blurry image of an empty room in which Roubaud is pointedly absent.

Photograph by Alix Cleo Roubaud

An economical treatise on the gulf between verbal and visual descriptions, Les Photos d’Alix is also an invaluable record of an artist who passed away far too soon: Roubaud died in 1983 at the age of 31 from a pulmonary embolism.  We also are given glimpses of her in many of the photographs that she left behind. She often posed nude for her own camera, and frequently, thanks to multiple exposures, more than once in a single photograph. Si quelque chose noir (If Something Black) is a 1980 series shot in a nearly empty room into which light penetrates from a single window, illuminating the naked artist, standing or prone on the stone floor. In several pictures Roubaud is joined by a ghostly vignette of a young girl seated underneath the sun-blinded window. In her posthumously published journals, she bluntly describes what’s happening: “myself as a laughing child in front of my dead body.”

Alix Cleo Roubaud, from "If Some Thing Black" series, 1980.

Death pervades Roubaud’s work, and also her journals (recently published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive), which present a heart-breaking chronicle of a young artist struggling to hold on to her creative vision amid extreme psychological and physiological pressures. But her journals are also filled with profoundly intelligent observations about photography. (Roubaud’s meditations on death and photography have striking parallels with a contemporaneous investigation of the same themes, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida.) Yet amid the encroaching shadows, her writing and photography are permeated by empathy and love, for troubled friends like Jean Eustache, who killed himself the year after he made Photos d’Alix, and, above all, for her husband, poet and scholar Jacques Roubaud. Anyone interested in the aftermath of Alix Cléo Roubaud’s death, and brave enough to read a harrowing chronicle of grief, should search out Jacques Roubaud’s Some Thing Black (also published by Dalkey Archive).

Outside of France, it’s been hard to see Alix Cléo Roubaud’s work.  Believing that “the negative is the palette,” she made it clear that she didn’t want any posthumous prints made, and because she died before her public career took off, there are relatively few existing prints. Her images were so dependent on darkroom magic that she sometimes worked from negatives shot by other people. Happily, both the journals and Some Thing Black include reproductions of her work.

Alix Cleo Roubaud, Journal 1979-1983, 1984, pages 78-79.

Although Eustache’s film warns us against identifying photographic images with the words we apply to them, a 1980 photograph of some barely recognizable cypress trees titled Fifteen Minutes Night to the Rhythm of Breathing is, for me, inseparable from Alix Cléo Roubaud’s journal entry about printing it and Jacques Roubaud’s poem “The Art of Seeing” (in Some Thing Black), which concludes:

“Image engulfed by breath

No trace of fear in this attention”

Mary Bauermeister, The Great Society (detail), 1969

An exhibition I would love to curate, or see someone else organize, would survey the use of lenses in postwar art, excluding all official “lens-based” art. The show would include something from Sigmar Polke’s “Lens Paintings,” and an example of Raymond Hains’s distorted text pieces, one of Daniel Spoerri’s lunettes (eyeglasses subjected to perverse alterations) and, if it could be borrowed, Yoko Ono’s famous Ceiling Painting with a magnifying glass attached to it so that you can read the word “yes” in tiny letters. At the center of this imagined show, and its inspiration, would be a selection of work by Mary Bauermeister.

During the 1960s, Bauermeister gained attention for her boxes which invite viewers to look at her image-and-text drawings and collections of natural objects through an array of lenses embedded in glass. Designed to be seen either from above or on the wall, these lens boxes, which sometimes feature elaborate frames, are wondrous microhabitats in which one can keep making new discoveries. They have the hermetic poetry of a Cornell box, but without Cornell’s suffocating nostalgia. Instead, Bauermeister’s boxes exude the freshness and clarity of a naturalist’s notebook, with a dose of trippy 1960s idealism. In works like The Great Society (1969), she addressed the political turmoil of the era. Signaling her turn toward nature, Bauermeister also began making wall relief from carefully patterned, inscription-bearing river rocks.

Mary Bauermeister, Untitled, 1965, pebbles on fabric covered panel, 46 by 46 inches. Courtesy Allentown Art Museum.

Describing herself as “pre-Fluxus” because she began working experimentally in her native Germany in the late 1950s, before Fluxus officially got underway, Bauermeister is sometimes linked to Pop Art. Her affinities were more with John Cage’s circle—circa 1960 her studio in Cologne was the site of important performances by Cage, David Tudor, Nam June Paik and others. Bauermeister moved to New York in 1962 (she claims it was seeing Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram with its stuffed goat at the Stedelijk that inspired her migration) and remained there until 1973, when, in her own words, she “withdrew into the German forest, brought up 4 children, grew vegetables, got involved with ecology, geomanthy and mysticism, meditation, silence instead of verbs.” [From an interview with Bauermeister in the Spring 2009 issue of Art Conservator. http://williamstownart.org/news/images/bauermeister_interview.pdf] Bauermeister recalls her early life in a 2011 memoir titled Mein Leben mit Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Mary Bauermeister. Peng-cil. 1966. In Stimmung, für 6 Vokalisten, nr. 24, by Karlheinz Stockhausen (Universal Edition, 1969).

Why isn’t her work better known? It could be that the intimate, non-spectacular format of much of it has impeded the kind of rediscovery enjoyed by, say, Yayoi Kusama. Maybe a certain confusion of nationality has also played a role: because her best known work was made in New York, Bauermeister has not been fully embraced in Germany; because she left New York in 1973, she hasn’t been given her rightful place in the history of New York art. And, of course, she had to cope with the biases against women artists. Happily, she was featured prominently in the 2007 exhibition “WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution.”

It’s pretty hard to get a sense of Bauermeister’s work from reproductions, which obviously make it impossible to shift your focus among her multiple lenses, but a recent recording by two Amherst College students of some of the words and phrases that appear in The Great Society effectively conveys her playful, pinball-machine kineticism.

https://www.amherst.edu/museums/mead/publications/podcasts/europeanart/036

Paul Georges, My Kent State, 1970-71, 91 by 142 inches, oil on linen. Copyright 2011 Paul Georges Studio, New York.

As a painter, Paul Georges (1923-2002) worked with brio and fearlessness in every genre he explored: figure painting, self-portraiture, still life, landscape, political allegory. His style, while immediately recognizable, is a marvelous amalgam of painterly French modernism, Rococo exuberance, Northern European brooding and New York street attitude. Georges’s achievement in any single of the modes he explored would be enough to make his name; taken as a whole his oeuvre presents a grandness of ambition that few viewers during his lifetime could understand.

Georges emerged in the mid-1950s as one of the New York School artists who sought to bring the energy of Abstract Expressionism to representational painting. Along with Fairfield Porter (who wrote perceptively about his work), Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers, he infused a gestural approach into figuration, while also engaging traditional painting genres. In the 1960s, however, Georges felt compelled to respond to the social and political turmoil, often in the form of large-scale history paintings, though his first overtly political work was a deceptively modest study of JFK’s Dallas motorcade.

Paul Georges, JF Kennedy Motorcade, 1964, oil on linen, 24 by 32 inches. Copyright 2011 Paul Georges Studio, New York.

When they were first exhibited, Georges’s political paintings were often the target of critical attacks from politically conservative critics. His painting The Mugging of the Muse (1972-74), an allegory set amid the urban decay of 1970s New York City, was at the center of an unprecedented libel suit. His work was also controversial for its stylistic excess and brash sensuality. In the 1980s, he found permission in the work of younger Neo-Expressionist painters to introduce a rawness into his paintings that is still startling. Perhaps even more striking are his prophetic paintings from the early 1990s that denounce religious extremism against a backdrop of the Twin Towers.

Paul Georges, Liberty and HIV III, 1989-90, oil on linen, 114 by 96 inches. Copyright 2011 Paul Georges Studio, New York.

The political content of Paul Georges’s paintings is inseparable from his reinterpretations of art history. His highly topical paintings are always steeped in precedent, in the past of his medium. He frequently reworks compositions and motifs from Breughel, Goya, Courbet, Manet and Ensor, with an unmistakable bravura style.  And yet, his work never falls into historical pastiche—it is always emphatically of its own moment.

Georges was equally himself when painting gritty responses to AIDS and urban homelessness as he was concocting luxuriant allegories teeming with beautiful women floating naked in Tiepolo skies. Late in his life he divided his time between downtown New York and a farmhouse in Normandy, taking visual inspiration from both places. In New York, Gefosse, Columbia he paints a veritable treatise on global politics by simply blending into one canvas images of New York City, the French countryside and a massacre in Latin America.

Paul Georges, Roses with Vapor Trail Study, 1996, oil on linen, 59 by 40 inches. Copyright 2011 Paul Georges Studio, New York.

Among his Normandy works are a series of paintings in which vapor trails shoot cross blue skies above dense rose bushes—I can’t imagine a better late-20th-century version of the pastoral.

There have been almost no opportunities to see Georges’s paintings in recent years. Some older viewers have been hampered by a narrow, biased sense of his work; younger viewers are simply unaware of it. It’s my feeling that when Georges’s work finally does emerge as a whole he will be recognized as a significant figure in postwar American painting, and, as so many times before, history will have to be rewritten.

Cora Pongracz, cover of "Verwechslungen," 1978.

If you happen to be familiar with Vienna’s art and literary circles of the 1970s, you will probably recognize a lot of the people in Cora Pongracz’s photographs, quickly identifying these distinguished looking older figures and spirited young men and women (sometimes with children cavorting around them) as significant presences of the Austrian avant-garde.  But don’t get the idea that these are formal portraits in the manner of Robert Mapplethorpe or Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. In Pongracz’s black-and-white photos, young and old alike are captured in casual poses, clowning around, standing awkwardly, laughing at the camera, even trying to hide from it. And yet, these are not faux candid shots. Rather, they look like rejects from a photo session, as if the photographer had discarded all the “good” pictures and presented what was left. This impression of Pongracz’s work as a series of outtakes is strengthened by both the title and layout of Verwechslungen, the catalogue of two 1978 shows at galleries in Vienna and Graz. In German, verwechslungen means mistakes, confusions or mix-ups, and the images are laid out in a series of irregular grids so that no two pages look the same.

Cora Pongracz, from "Verwechslungen"

Of Hungarian background, Pongracz was born in Buenos Aires in 1943. By the mid 1960s she was working as a commercial photographer in the U.K. and Germany, specializing in travel guides. She began photographing Viennese artists and writers in the late 1960s and had several shows during the 1970s. At first, according to a February 1999 Artforum review by Christian Kravagna, Pongracz “shot her art-world protagonists, in public and private moments, much in the style used by the glossies in covering the wild lives of pop stars, paying special attention to poses and masquerades.” For her 1974 “Extended Portraits” series, she photographed eight women friends and asked each of them to suggest other images that were then added as “extensions” of themselves.

Although none of the subjects are identified in the Verwechslungen catalogue, the name “Jandl” on a director’s chair that one man is sitting on (he is seen in various rooms of his home, always taking pictures with a camera) reveals him to be experimental Austrian poet Ernst Jandl (1925-2000). Pongracz’s connection to Austrian literature was strengthened by her marriage to the influential but short-lived poet Reinhard Priessnitz (1945-1985). On another page we see five frames (shot on a sunny day) of a dark-suited man sprawled on the ground in a variety of poses that suggest fatigue, drunkenness or sublime boredom. One can’t be sure, but he looks awfully like sculptor Franz West.

Cora Pongracz, from "Verwechslungen"

A long illness restricted Pongracz’s public activities after the 1970s. In 2001, the Galerie Fotohof in Salzburg and the Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck co-published a monograph on her work. She died in 2003, at the age of 60.  Her photographs are an irreplaceable chronicle of a particular time and place in postwar European culture, but they are also expressions of a unique visual sensibility. As a photographer, Pongracz clearly valued improvisation and accident, sometimes within precise conceptual frameworks. Even more importantly, you never have the feeling of her imposing on her subjects; they retain all their autonomy and privacy in front of her beautifully discreet, nonintrusive yet insistent shutter and lens.

Cora Pongracz, from "Verwechslungen"

Valerio Adami, Gli omosessuale--Privacy, 1966, acrylic on canvas, 200 by 300 cm.

For a long time I’ve wondered why the paintings of Valerio Adami aren’t better appreciated in the U.S.  His excursions into history, especially the tragic history of 20^th century Europe, are as subtle and probing as those of Kitaj (though markedly less emotional); his distinctive use of flat color, which he has been employing since the mid-1960s, brilliantly marries the color printing of Hergé’s Tintin books and medieval stained-glass; the stylized eroticism of his sinuous line and his eye for the fetish object is every bit as seductive as John Wesley’s, and often much grittier, especially in the early work; he is incomparable in his deployment of writing as a visual motif; his paintings feature densely layered, thought provoking allusions to European culture, from Classical mythology to notable writers, thinkers and composers of the modern era.

Perhaps the density of cultural allusions in Adami’s paintings—often presented with extreme fragmentation—has been an obstacle for some viewers, who find his works too imbued with a certain European refinement, a refinement that finds embodiment in the smooth tapering black lines that slice through his planes of bold color.  Take, for example, Finlandia, an acrylic painting from 1987 of a man and woman embracing in the stern of a wooden boat that a third figure appears to be launching onto a vast body of milky water. Adami has recounted in an interview how in the 1950s he was a passionate reader of Adorno’s essays on music and how he attempted to apply aspects of 12-tone composition to his art.  Then, during a stay in Finland in the mid-1980s he began to listen to Sibelius, whose music Adorno famously detested. Having fallen in love with Sibelius’s Finlandia, Adami felt compelled to create his work as, he says, “a sort of mea culpa.”

Valerio Adami, Finlandia, circa 1987, acrylic on canvas, 76.8 by 104.3 inches, courtesy of Fondo Adami, Fondazione Europeo del Disegno.

Other Adami paintings are equally dense with historical references, from his early 1970s series of rebus-like paintings about Freud to more recent works on the theme of melancholy. But he has also created paintings that pointedly turn from the realm of high culture to its supposed opposite. I am thinking, in particular, of his 1960s paintings of distorted figures in public toilets, hotel rooms and other seedy loci of sexual assignations.  Often based on photos he took during visits to London and New York, paintings such as Gli omosessuali—Privacy (1966) and Hotel Chelsea Bathroom (1968) are like Pop versions of Francis Bacon’s meaty psychodramas or illustrations of scenes from the writings of William S. Burroughs.

Born in Italy (in 1935) and working for most of his career in Paris, Adami was initially associated in the 1960s with “la Figuration Narrative.” Although he has always been better known in the U.S. than most of the other Pop-inspired Paris painters of the 1960s, he has still suffered from New York’s longstanding rejection of European Pop. (Maybe other parts of the country are less caught up in old biases: last winter there was a small Adami survey at the Boca Raton Museum of Art.) Adami is probably best known here not for his art but for Jacques Derrida’s 1975 essay on his work (reprinted in Derrida’s book The Truth in Painting that features an Adami drawing on its cover). Many well-known authors have written eloquently about Adami’s work (including Italo Calvino, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Hubert Damisch and Jean-Luc Nancy), but Derrida’s punning, grapheme-obsessed approach is particularly well-suited to the subject, especially when engaging the mise-en-abyme confusions sparked by Adami’s drawing of some pages from one of Derrida’s own notebooks.

Valerio Adami, Sigmund Freud in Viaggio Verso Londra, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 116 by 89 cm.

Among the many pleasures and provocations offered by Adami’s stylish excavations of the European unconscious is his distinctive handling of drawing and color. To close, a few words from Derrida’s essay (translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod): “Because the gush of color is held back, it mobilizes more violence, potentializes the double energy: first the full encircling ring, the black line, incisive, definitive, then the flood of broad chromatic scales in a wash of color.”

Suh Se-ok, Line Variation, 1959, ink on mulberry paper, 29 by 37 inches.

In the late 1950s, South Korean artist Suh Se-ok, born in 1929, embarked on a painterly practice that borrowed from traditional Korean ink painting and modernist Western abstraction. What’s striking about his early work (which launched a noteworthy career that continues to this day) is not only its melding of “East” and “West” but how Suh dismantles the assumptions on which these two modes were then operating. Using the traditional tools of the ink painter—brush, ink and paper—he developed a language of marks and ink application that rejected the conventions of Korean ink painting in favor of stripped down, seemingly haphazard sets of links and blots. At the same time, Suh declined the muscular gesturalism and labored scaffolding that pervaded so much Informel and Abstract Expressionist painting at the end of the 1950s. His late 1950s-early 1960s paintings, often done on mulberry paper, but also sometimes on cotton fabric, are speculative, “weak” and provisional; they anticipate the radical deconstruction of painting that would only get underway some years later in the U.S. and Europe.

Suh Se-ok, Point Variation, ca. 1960, ink on rice paper.

Suh Se-ok, Where Clouds Disperse, 1977, ink on rice paper.

Suh banded together with other South Korean artists to form the Mungnimhoe or Ink Forest Group, whose aim was to forge a new kind of Korean painting.  Most viewers are familiar with the notion that Informel and Abstract Expressionism were indebted to Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, but too little attention has been paid in the West to the emergence of a vibrant abstract practice in postwar East Asia. This may explain, in part, why such an important painter as Suh Se-Ok is so little known in this country. My own accidental discovery of his work came on a visit to “Where Clouds Disperse,” a condensed 2008 survey at the Museum of Fine Art in Houston. Since the review I wrote of the show for Art in America isn’t available on line, here’s a paragraph from it on Suh’s recent work:

“More than half of the show was devoted to large ink paintings on mulberry paper dating from 1997-2007. Although these gridded and stacked compositions of linear forms initially appear abstract, their titles (usually People or Person) point to their figurative content. Thus People (2000), 91 by 54 inches, for instance, shifts from reading as a loose net of brushstrokes to a depiction of dozens of human figures linked by their outstretched arms and legs. Possibly taking clues from Korean ideographs, Suh’s intertwined formations oscillate between representation and sheer mark-making. Even after having grasped the figurative function of his strokes, it remains easy to reengage with their abstract qualities. What helps here is the amazing variety of things he can make ink do—sometimes it hovers like a cloud of iron filings held in place by an unseen magnet, other times it seeps deeply into the paper, but it can also pulse with dark, quasi-sculptural presence. I especially like the way he often seems in no hurry to dip his brush back into the ink again, allowing successive marks to grow lighter—an ‘imperfection’ that adds immeasurably to the power of his work.  Two fascinating videos included in the show (one made by Suh’s son Doh-ho Suh, an artist who is better-known in this country than his father), showed Suh at work in his Seoul studio, sometimes wielding baseball bat-sized bamboo brushes to apply strokes to large sheets of paper laying on the floor.”

Suh Se-ok, People, 1986, ink on paper.

In a provocative article titled “The Curious Case of Contemporary Ink Painting” (Art Journal, Fall 2010), art historian Joan Kee has recently suggested that despite being chosen to represent South Korea in international biennials in the 1960s, Suh and other Mungnimhoe painters were marginalized in their own country by being classed as “ink painters” rather than as contemporary artists. (She also links the birth of the Mungnimhoe style to a traumatic period of Korean history, noting that the Ink Forest painters grew up under Japanese occupation and that for them “ink painting was an opportunity through which to free the mark from what its members saw as the obligations imposed on it via the dominance of nihonga, the body of paintings made according to traditional Japanese artistic conventions.”) Happily, any attempts at marginalization haven’t prevented Suh from creating an outstanding oeuvre of primary importance to the (still unwritten) global history of postwar abstraction. Let’s hope viewers outside of South Korea will soon have a chance to see much more of it.

Installation view (east wall) of Rachel Hecker's 2009 exhibition at Texas Gallery, Houston.

There’s a collision in Rachel Hecker’s paintings of two great, and usually segregated, modes of art-making. One of them is the ultra-precise hard-edge painting tradition that leads from Mondrian through Ellsworth Kelly, Bridget Riley, Peter Halley. The other is the practice of salvaging scraps of everyday ephemera and recategorizing them (with lesser or greater degrees of alteration) as art: Kurt Schwitters, On Kawara, Joseph Grigely, Danicia Phelps. Hecker’s canvases are exquisitely finished, with barely a trace of the immense craft that goes into them, while the subject of her paintings are mostly scaled-up pieces of throwaway printed and written matter: shopping lists, to-do memos, store receipts, ticket stubs—items that seem the ontological opposite of a slowly built-up abstract painting.  What happens in these collisions is not what one would expect: there’s no attack on painting’s elevated status and no pop-inspired celebration of quotidian artifacts. Instead, Hecker steers her work toward the dynamics of social transactions, toward autobiography and toward philosophical meditations about art and life.

Walking into her 2009 show at Texas Gallery in Houston (Hecker has been living in Houston since the early 1980s, after getting an MFA at RISDI, but her work has consistently rejected the weathered surface and expressionistic touch that marks so much Texas art), it was easy to think that you’d come on the wrong day: dozens of canvases were leaning against the long walls of the gallery’s large space, sometimes stacked two or three thick. It looked as if the show was either not yet installed or already concluded. In fact, the show was neither over nor not yet begun but fully up and running, exactly as the artist intended.  Hecker’s decision to emphasize the objecthood of the paintings was meant to push them toward another medium. As she says, “I refer to this work as painting for convenience, but I approach and think of it as sculpture.” (Hecker also makes things that are emphatically sculptures, including supersized charcoal briquettes and burnt matches.)

Rachel Hecker, 6a.m. 8oz., 2008, acrylic on canvas, 60 by 30 inches.

One painting in the Texas Gallery show depicts a sheet of pale-blue notepaper adorned with a cute Sanrio-style monkey and two hastily written columns of numbers, one noting times of day, the other quantities of ounces. Numbers appear in many of the works: a hardware store receipt with the product number of a purchased item and a dimension (36 x 51) someone has scribbled onto the receipt and Hecker has faithfully reproduced; one of Hecker’s business cards with additional phone numbers written onto it, alongside notations in Spanish and misspelled English.  The Sanrio stationery has to do with the care of the artist’s aging mother (a frequent topic of her paintings); the business card records an exchange between Hecker and a couple looking for house-cleaning work; in a neat bit of conceptualist tautology, the dimensions on the hardware store receipt refer to the very painting they appear on.

As resourceful as she is patient, Hecker seems to relish the challenge of fashioning convincing simulacra of everyday items. Not strictly engaged in trompe l’oeil, Hecker doesn’t try to fool us into thinking we are looking at the real thing: she always scales up her subjects to 10 or 12 times actual size. Through trial and error, she has figured out how to make paint look like pencil or felt-tip pen marks, like the printed text on a fortune cookie message, like a sheet of stickers. She has a love of difficult making and a passion for making her labor invisible that reminds me of Vija Celmins.

What first drew Hecker to this kind of material was her desire to escape self-consciousness in her choice of subject matter. For many years, she made large-scale photorealist paintings that combined cartoon and film-still imagery. Executed with an airbrush, these paintings offered a sly, feminist-influenced commentary on the society of spectacle.  By contrast, her ephemera paintings leave intended meaning open. They also engage abstraction: her scaled-up notes on hotel stationery exist as gestural marks on monochrome grounds (most obviously with her paintings of color sample cards), often of a startling beauty made all the more affecting by its humble origins.

Rachel Hecker, Table #17, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 32 by 42 inches.

On one level, the work is a record of the artist’s life, but you don’t have to know the backstory to Hecker’s paintings in order to respond to their chronicling of the daily grind we all face. A fancily printed card from a gala dinner informs its holder that he or she is seated at “Table 17” (I’m reminded of the “prize” paintings of Martin Kippenberger, with whom Hecker shares a love of hotel stationery); a shopping list that runs from pizza to soymilk shares the page with handwritten words of wisdom from Rumi and the Ashtavakra Gita.

Hecker’s work is not entirely without precedent. In the 1960s, Alex Hay began crafting meticulous enlargements of items such as a sheet of legal-pad paper or a cash register receipt. More recently, Jonathan Seliger has been showing scaled-up sculptures of brand-new shopping bags, take-out food containers and pizza boxes; and Austrian artist Stefan Sandner has been making large-scale paintings of handwritten notes. In contrast to these other artists, Hecker emphasizes the transactional nature of her source material. Much of her work also charts (sometimes literally) the relationship of our bodies to the regimented systems they exist within, whether it’s a medication schedule, seating at a gala dinner or the colors of paint available at a hardware store. Her work can also laugh at its own place within the art system.

Rachel Hecker, Garbage / Food, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 60 by 30 inches.

Hecker’s loving re-creations of the scraps we thoughtlessly acquire, and just as thoughtlessly discard a dozen times in the course of any given day, can be understood as contemporary vanitas paintings, reminding us of the brevity and fragility of human life. In one painting of a page torn out of a spiral notebook, notes for a weekly schedule happen to share space with the penciled-in observation that “everything in my house will eventually be garbage and I will eventually be food.” A grim truth, but by presenting it as a ripped out page (the torn holes of spiral bound notepaper are to this artist what lace was to 17^th century European painters), Hecker quietly suggests that art, even when depicting the most quotidian subjects, can still be a vehicle of transcendence.

Gastone Novelli, Il Grande Linguaggio, 1963.

When, in a Milan gallery years ago, I first saw paintings by Gastone Novelli (1925-1968)—including some of his early 1960s nearly all-white compositions in which washes of paint and drawn lines create an airy, fluctuating ground across which the artist inscribes with paint brush, pencil, ink and pointed instruments series of delicately drawn letters and words, sometimes distributed upon irregular grids—the thought came to me, after the initial exhilaration of discovery receded: why didn’t anyone ever tell me about this fantastic artist? Maybe if I’d been longer in Italy someone would have, but no one in New York had ever mentioned his name. Did American viewers think his work was too close to Twombly’s? In fact, Novelli emerged from the same 1950s Roman art scene that nurtured Twombly and Rauschenberg. Far less gestural than Twombly’s writerly practice, and closer in spirit and form to experimental poetry and Paul Klee, Novelli’s alphabetic paintings are more likely to evoke maps than graffiti-covered walls. Billowing and diaristic, expansive and soft, they have more affinities with a current abstract painter like Joanne Greenbaum than with any of his contemporaries.

Gastone Novelli, Con un Segnale.

For all its apparent playfulness and gentle palette, Novelli’s work has a far darker side that only emerged fully some three decades after his death thanks to the attention of two of Europe’s greatest writers, French novelist and Nobel laureate Claude Simon (1913-2005) and German writer W.G. Sebald (1944-2001). Near the beginning of Austerlitz (2001, translated by Anthea Bell), an artfully digressive and haunting meditation on memory and the Holocaust, Sebald mentions “the fragmentary tale of a certain Gastone Novelli” which he came across in Simon’s book Le Jardin des Plantes (1997). In Sebald’s retelling, at the end of the war Novelli is so traumatized by the imprisonment and torture he has undergone that “he found the sight of a German, or indeed any so-called civilized being, male or female, so intolerable that, hardly recovered, he embarked on the first ship he could find, to make his living prospecting for diamonds and gold in South America.” In Brazil, Novelli lives for a time with a jungle tribe whose language consists, Sebald (paraphrasing Simon) tells us, “almost entirely of vowels, particularly the sound A in countless variations.” Upon his return “to his native land” (Sebald doesn’t identify him as Italian), Novelli begins to paint pictures: “His main subject, depicted again and again in different forms and compositions. . .was the letter A. . .in ranks of scarcely legible ciphers. . .rising and falling in waves like a long-drawn-out scream.” Now let’s shift from Sebald to the beginning of a longer passage in Simon’s Le Jardin des Plantes (translated by Jordan Stump, Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001) on which Sebald’s acount is based:  “There recurred [in Novelli’s paintings] a checkerboard construction with uneven lines, the horizontals sometimes leading toward a vanishing point situated outside the canvas, disappearing, with, inside the squares, an alternation. . . of letters, numbers, more-or-less-erased fragments of sentences, vague scrawls in which one can make out what might be bodies, interlaced limbs, awkward ithyphallic silhouettes, breasts.” On the next page, Simon tells how Novelli’s last step is to smear the canvas with a “thick, white, creamy paste whose composition he kept secret, into which, sometimes using the handle of his brush, or a pencil, or a wider scraper, he would inscribe those superimposed lines of uneven letters, wavering like a scream, repeating themselves, never the same:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”

Penetrating through the successive layers of Sebald’s and Simon’s narratives (and mine?) resembles the experience of looking at one of Novelli’s actual canvases, navigating through its palimpsest structure. (I can’t help thinking, here, of another writer, Marcel Cohen, whose collections of fragmented, Holocaust-haunted narrative prose are filled with second and third hand retellings in which witnessing and distance are given equal weight.)

Gastone Novelli, Paura Clandestina, 1959.

Novelli’s first appearance in Simon’s book (when he is initially identified only as “Gastone N——-“) is on the beach at Ostia, where writer and painter have gone swimming with two women. Before they enter the sea, Simon asks Novelli to translate some lines from the catalogue of his latest show. “After the preface he began to translate the title of his paintings as well. I told him that those I’d understood but he continued all the same and suddenly, when he’d just read Voule dire caos and Paura clandestine, he stopped. He was still holding the catalogue open in his hands and seemed to be reading the titles to himself when suddenly he told me that at Dachau they had hung him by his wrists until he fainted. Maybe he would have told me more, but just then the two young women, one Greek and one Spanish, emerged from the waves and came back to us, wringing their hair.”