We took a little sojourn on Saturday to the newly located Grey Art Gallery, now dubbed the Grey Art Museum. The lure was an exhibit entitled “Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962.”
The first work to greet us upon arrival, Parviz Tanavoli‘s “Song of Life,” was not part of the exhibit, but rather one of a handful from the permanent collection of the now-Museum. Here’s a little of what we learned about that collection:
“The Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art at NYU comprises some 700 works produced by artists from countries as diverse as Japan, Thailand, India, Kashmir, Nepal, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. Mrs. Grey’s vision was bold and simple: one world through art. Believing that art, as a universal language, could serve as a potent vehicle for knowledge, communication, and understanding, Mrs. Grey formed this unique and unusual collection while traveling in Asia and the Middle East in the 1960s and ’70s.” [cite]
It transpires, moreover, that “the Grey has the largest holdings anywhere of work by . . . Parviz Tanavoli, widely considered Iran’s leading modern sculptor . . . . When Mr. Tanavoli began making sculpture, he had few local models to follow. The tradition of sculpture in Persia had effectively ended in the seventh century with the arrival of iconophobic Islam. Even with sculpture’s return in the secularized 1960s, the question was where to go with it . . .”. [cite]
Within the exhibit itself, Shinkichi Tajiri’s sculptures stood out, and he has an interesting back story too:
“[A] child of first-generation immigrants to the USA from Japan, spent his childhood in Los Angeles and San Diego. Following the 1941 attack on the US airfield in Hawaii by the Japanese army, Tajiri’s family was sent to the Poston War Relocation Center, an internment camp in Arizona. In a combination of patriotism and his wish to leave the camp, Tajiri soon volunteered for the army and joined the all-Japanese American regiment, which later became the most decorated regiment of its size in American military history. He subsequently attended the Chicago Art Institute from 1946 to 1948, also working for the sculptor Isamu Noguchi in New York. In 1949 he moved to Paris and studied with Ossip Zadkine and Fernand Léger.” [cite]
I did enjoy that a still life of sorts snuck its way into the exhibit. Ed Clark, “[b]orn in the Storyville section of New Orleans in 1926 . . . studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1947 to 1951 and L’Academie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in 1952.” [cite] In Paris, “[h]e became a member of a social and intellectual circle of American expatriate artists and writers, including fellow African-American creatives Beauford Delaney, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Barbara Chase-Riboud.” [cite] “Clark’s breakthroughs have an important place in the story of modern and contemporary art: in the late 1950s he was the first American artist credited with exhibiting a shaped canvas, an innovation that continues to reverberate today.” [cite]
Claire Falkenstein’s elegant copper wire concoctions cast equally elegant shadows. “In a 1995 interview, [Falkenstein] said that ‘Paris was a remarkable experience, because the French allowed a kind of individual action. They have the quality of centuries of … culture and of art and it sort of spills over.’ She explored what she referred to as ‘topology’, a connection between matter and space, incorporating a concept of the continuous void in nature. She became associated with the free-form abstractions of L’Art Informel, the French counterpart of American Abstract Expressionism.” [cite]
I’ll admit I sort of hate it when artists label their work “untitled,” but what I also know is the problem is with me, not them. After all, why should an artist foreclose what the viewer might experience?
Here’s Robert Keyser’s bio in short strokes:
1942–1946: Studied at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, majored in Chemistry, minor in Psychology
1943–1946: served in US Navy
1949–1951: Studied in France with Fernand Leger, painting
1963–1991: Chairman of the Department of Painting and Drawing, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA [cite]
This is only a detail, as I wasn’t able to photograph the whole of it without unwelcome reflections. Downing was represented by two delicate works, of which this was one. Downing’s back story, as for every artist in this exhibit, was singular. Here’s a bit of it:
“Following his 18th birthday . . . Downing enlisted in the United States Army. Serving as an artillery observer in Europe during World War II, he was assigned to a unit that landed at Normandy soon after the D-Day invasion, where his unit engaged in a distinguished record of service, leading to the end of the war. Downing himself earned the Bronze Star with the citation for courage in action. It was during his time of service that he caught a brief glimpse of Europe, specifically Paris, and vowed to return one day.
“After the conclusion of the war, Downing returned home and enrolled at Western Kentucky University for a portion of the 1945-46 school year. . . . Following the wishes of his parents, Downing left WKU after one semester and turned his attention to preparation for a career in optometry, moving to Chicago and enrolling in the Northern Illinois College of Optometry in the fall of 1946.
“Shortly after arriving in Chicago, Downing was welcomed by and befriended a new group of creative individuals, who instilled in him a love of literature, reading, and most importantly art. With his newfound passions ablaze, Downing was led to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he describes his first visit and subsequent involvement:
” . . . I went for a visit and there I felt that I had rendezvoused for all of my life. So, I had this second awakening, or maybe first awakening, because when I discovered painting it was as if I’d been half asleep all my life. And as I said I felt that it was if we’d had this meeting planned forever. And very quickly I became a painter who was studying optometry and not an optometry student who painted. . . . What my family had taught me, turning me loose in the hills, they taught me turning me loose in the museums. Barefoot in both places. At least, if not physically, then morally barefoot.”
“In 1950, Downing was presented with an opportunity to participate in his first exhibition, which was held in the Oakwood Baptist church in Chicago. His dream of becoming an artist was finally being fulfilled. Shortly thereafter, he graduated from Optometry school and passed the state boards in West Virginia where his parents had recently moved. He was in the process of searching for an office and a place to live, when much to his surprise, he received a war bond refund of $300. This meager amount allowed him to embark on a return vacation to France, where he visited the alps, and the city which he had fallen in love with so many years prior-Paris. Downing soon realized that it was here where he wanted to call home.” [cite]
I wish I had something useful to note about Sal Romano, particularly as this work was a stunner. Here, at least, is something I could find:
“He served in the U.S. Navy in the 1940s.
“He studied painting and drawing at the Art Students League in New York and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris during the 1950s.
“He was a member of the Brata Gallery, a cooperative gallery in New York that included many artists involved with Minimalism.
“In 1965 Romano was included in the iconic exhibition “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum.” [cite]
There is a lot to know about Herrera, but I will leave it at this marvelous quote: “Being ignored is a form of freedom. I felt liberated from having to constantly please anyone.” [cite]
It seems only fitting to end where we began, which is with a sculpture.
Cousins’s sculpture is mesmerizing from every angle. Here’s a bit of his back story: “Like many artists and writers, Cousins moved to Paris in 1949 seeking a reprieve from racial prejudice in the U.S. He had originally planned to use his GI benefits to enroll in the art department at American University, but when the program denied him entry on account of his race, Cousins departed for France. [Once there,] “he learned to weld from Shinkichi Tajiri.” [excerpt from exhibit wall plaque]
As the exhibit explains, “Following World War II, hundreds of artists from the United States flocked to the City of Light, which for centuries had been heralded as an artistic mecca and international cultural capital. Americans in Paris explores a vibrant community of expatriates who lived in France for a year or more during the period from 1946 to 1962. Many were ex-soldiers who took advantage of a newly enacted GI Bill, which covered tuition and living expenses; others, including women, financed their own sojourns.
“. . . . While the U.S. art scene was dominated by the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Americans working in Paris experimented with a range of formal strategies and various approaches to both abstraction and figuration. And, as the esteemed writer James Baldwin—a longtime French resident—saliently observed, living in Paris afforded expats the opportunity to question what it meant to be an American artist at midcentury. For some, Paris promised a society less constrained by racism and the exclusionary power structures of the New York art world.” [cite]
To accompany you on your journey, should you choose to take it, here is George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” (1928), Leonard Bernstein conducting.
Prufrock's Dilemma 