Summer 1969
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Konrad Klapheck, Soldier's Brides [1967] oil on canvas, 47 1/4" x 67"
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Konrad Klapheck, Exigent Wife [1968] oil on canvas, 39 1/2" x 31 1/2".
While participating on two separate panel discussions, it struck me that a recurrent theme was the relative absence of a style, mode, or fashion. An absence of tyranny. You know, like Abstract Expressionist, or Pop; that kind of thing. One was either doing it like all the other fellow travellers, or was ostracized. Of course there was always a "leader" whose edicts one ignored on pain or isolation - and indeed the loneliness was painful and baffling. Such tyranny inevitably set up the kind of confusion and resentment which often leads to tragedy. I don't know if the other artists on the panel, artists who also write and are historians, were feeling close to celebration at this freedom, and were conscious [here in New York] of just how much a sense of purpose the open-ended situation gave one - or whether they were casually observing the fact. I like to think that it was not the latter. It didn't take long to understand that what we were really remarking on and pointing up was New York. After a brief sense of unbelievable disappointment. I began asking myself questions. Is it a fact that everyone wants to come to New York? That one I found I couldn't answer. What, however, is true is that it is important, for specific aesthetic reasons, to exhibit here. The influence of American art and artists has so dominated, changed, and vitalized art concepts, that it is imperative that an artist measure his stature against what's going on here. The polemics are nothing, if not active and productive.
I began to wonder, at this point, if this isn't really another kind of tyranny. Granted one couldn't label it so, but whatever the blanket term happened to be, if this was the case, no matter how one spelled it, tyranny was tyranny. With this in mind, I reflected, with a certain skepticism, that there are artists working in parts of Germany, Wordswede, Dusseldorf, say, or England, London, St. Ives, whose work we never see here. This season, however we have had a good look at three artists of stature [in their own countries if not here] who are in their early thirties. Of the ones we saw, Konrad Klapeck and David Hockney could be cast in starring roles. Then there was John Hoyland, whose show just closed at Robert Elkon.
The Klapheck exhibition was a great success early in the season, and Hockney's at the Andre Emmerich is presently enjoying the same aura. I think what distinguishes these two artists, one working in Germany, the other mainly in England, is the almost total lack of influence American painting has on their work, [unlike John Hoyland]. Let me say at once that the Hockney exhibition is a beautiful and successful show. The paintings, however, as individual objects, do not measure up to this abstract, general, kaleidoscopic impression. It is one of the biting, scratching dilemmas of our time that if one does "know" an artist and his world, it compounds the problems when discussing his work. David Hockney is a good artist who successfully inhabits and articulates the world he has chosen, or rather, has leanings toward. These paintings are as good, or successful, as that world he inhabits. If it is the studio and the context of painting that are to be assessed, this is at least a half way decent performance. If it is painting, then I'm not so sure.
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David Hockney, Henry Geldzahler & Christopher Scott [1969], acrylic on canvas. 7' x 10'.
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David Hockney, Parking Prive, [1968] acrylic on canvas 3' x 4'.
This exhibition, however, should not be missed. Like Klapheck, Hockney paints the recognizable world. I myself, though accepting the difference between their individual painting, feel there is a connecting thread in their individuality - thin, I admit but there. That twin-headed mystery which runs through so much intellectual and creative endeavor in Germany -disciplined, controlled, seemingly reasoned [yet certainly going beyond my understanding of reason], though on the other hand romantic, excessive in sentimentally, yet ending up roughly the same place - is baffling. At best the effort is really rather brilliant - for no apparent reason. Klapcheck's work is centered on the former. However, this is only tangentially my point: there is a transcendental malignancy lurking in the work of both artists. It is obvious in Klapheck, but rather timid and dandified in Hockney. Put far too simply, Klapheck's Germanic, if up-to-date, version of Surrealism is well within reach. Mostly this work is just merely academic. But when it's good, as I suspect Klapheck's is, it bears invertigating. There is a certain bombast and removed pomposity that keels over into edginess, arrived at purely via cerebral passion. A kind of intuition by way of thorough, well-learned, retained [drilled] knowledge of pictorial possibilities, and the adept manipulation of this to keen and very deliberate purpose. No, I'm not suggesting that this is arrived at by some predetermined [grand] design - as would befit the arrogance out of which facism is the natural outcome. Rather, there is a deep commitment, agony acted out and overcome, which lends itself sympathetically to aspiration through endeavor. In many cases it feeds envy. The precision and deliberate pictorial manipulation toward this transcendental end is spoilt, for me, in veritably all of Klapheck's work, beginning with my first confrontation with this truly striking picture-making phenomena first in Dusseldorf, and then more closely at the Robert Fraser Gallery some years back in London, by an unexplained and purely physical [perhaps unjustified] revulsion against the actual picture surface. It is odd, I will readily admit, and perhaps weakens any legitimate case I might have in the painting mark-making area, that such a highly idiosyncratic reaction in the face of obvious ability is trying. But bear with me. [I need hardly stress my admiration, sympathy, and involuntary seduction in this area by the idea lying very stern, uncompromising, and open here.] The question is: is painting about marking up [I use the word "marking" as opposed to, say, scratching in a [deliberate] attempt to point up a physical difference from say, sculpture] a certain surface with purposeful or deliberate intent to establish, define, and distinguish a specific, in this case painting through its attendant handmaidens, paint: acqueous based, oil, etc, canvas: canvas supports: rectilinear shaped, etc. Or otherwise? The answer I am suggesting is that since by accepted implication, any mark, or set of marks, must have a legitimate case for access, and exposure the requirements of painting must be fullfilled in terms of value judgement. I am speaking strictly about painting as essence, i.e., a first order activity worthy of human endeavor, or more simply the sort of thing at which one can justifiably spend one's precious time, whether doing it, looking at it, or thinking about it. The "excuse" or theme is unimportant. The point I want to stress, difficult to deal with, even in its obviousness, is one's overall reaction - you know; "I don't know much about art ...but I know what I like ..." as the saying goes. Well as I began suggesting above, for the life of me I cannot get on with the way Klapheck marks up the surface. Regardless of the interest, time spent and ideas; I find myself reacting, or, more accurately, resisting. Missing that quality which for me can only be equated with, or called, seductive and soothing in paint as substance. In short, if painting has anything which both distinguishes it from and links it to everything else, it is Poetry. A term which may frighten a lot of people but this, I submit, is what makes David Hockney a more interesting painter than K. Klapheck. Hockney's work might suffer from the understatement and hesitation which dances about somewhere on the borders of conviction [the lack of it perhaps?]. but whereas one feels that Klaphech might have handled a passage [for example, the stack of books in the Isherwood Portrait] much more firmly and suggestively. In this Hockney Painting [surely the most satisfactory individual work in his showing] what it amounts to is that this passage is a demonstration of the illusive, weird by virtue of the whimsical quality found in so much English painting. It doesn't strike one as sinister, as say the swastika armband in a Bacon painting, but it has the same literary fascination which brings one back. Why is it there? And since it is there, why didn't he do more about it? What does it mean? In fact the couple in this picture could well have provided a limitless source of pictorial speculation in close and meaningful juxtaposition with Germanic transcendental fascination, about which, surely, at least one of the subjects could bear witness.
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John Hoyland, 25.2.69 [1968], acrylic on canvas, 78" x 144"
With the Englishness of English art; gawky in its hesitant expressiveness, and all that literary bias resplendent in Hockney's show, John Hoyland is, it it's at all possible, the exact opposite and this may go a long way towards explaining the disaster: Hoyland's work is overwhelmed by the influence of American painting. There's no point in discussing scale - most young British painters looking across the Atlantic sooner or later begin to grasp this aspect. It's obvious that even an artist like David Hockney has been touched by his American experience. But the spirit of this show, this exhibition at the Robert Elkon Gallery, was not so much bad as weak and decorative. There was one painting, with a rather sweet-hued drift, which may have been on its way somewhere, however, even this one didn't arrive. For the rest the less said the better. What I found totally lacking in the spirit of this work was that lively questioning of pictorial values which goes on with great strength, intelligence, and resolve in American painting. The sort of proposing and re-proposing of large fields of colour; tightening and narrowing, the dismantling of old values, formulas, discoveries, is done with rigorous painting intelligence and daring. At the moment, Hoyland is stuck somewhere between Rothko and Hoffman. Stuck, I venture to say, because the information may be available. "... what happens in New York today, everyone in Tokyo, Sydney, and London knows the next." But what it's about is certainly missing. It's questionable to bracket this with tyranny of any kind, but I venture to place this distressing phenomena. Hoyland, was, after all, not so very many years back, an artist who other young artists looked towards. He at least appeared adventurous. Pointing away at other possibilities in painting where there was a dearth of real painting ideas in a swinging London. Artists might visit one another, but the subject, the activity to which one is presumably going to devote one's life, is very rarely, if at all, discussed. England is known for her tradition of great rugged individuals in art, but how does that help one, or sustain one, if the questions being posed and explored, with which one is attempting to deal, are not being dealt with - in fact being dealt with elsewhere? What does one do? I must say it seems to me that the tyranny must lie in that isolation and loneliness.
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Neil Stocker, The S.S.Rethink on Love, [1968] construction, steel and leather.
A real life victim of this tyranny was Neil Stocker, a young Australian sculptor just into his mature style after a long struggle through. Considering his life and his art, one can only wince at the crushingly philistine token acceptance and the lukewarm encouragement that masks a deepseated chauvinism and thoroughly unwarrented and misplaced arrogance. Like everyone else, Neil was eventually forced to join the pernicious desperate scramble - playing the art school politics that the London art world seems to depend on for survival. It is probably bad manners to name-call, but it remained a consistent and degrading mystery to me why Neil should preoccupy himself with people like Bernard Meadows, Nibs Dalwood, Bryan Kneale, and the like. One could perhaps say that Stocker only had himself to blame -if he didn't know the rules of the game, he shouldn't have tried to play it. But there is one glaring fact which overturns and makes nonsense of such an observation. Having done all of whatever they do in those colonial countries [I mean that whole gaggle from Lands End to John O'Groats and the islands in the Atlantic, the Channels, and the North Sea], the one thing the British didn't do, was to leave much cultural awareness behind [in fact they did mainly the opposite]. Having left us with a deepseated belief in "The Mother Country", it is to the Mother Country we all went. It is on the English Art Establishment doorstep that the blame must be placed, quite squarely, for this recent, most tragic suicide.
The least they can do now is put together a retrospective exhibition in homage to a man who not only devoted his energies to helping fellow colonial products like Billy Apple and myself but also worked very hard at helping establishment artists because he sincerely believed, not only that they liked and admired him, but that through them he would be liberated. Added to this was all that earnest and compelling teaching he did with such devotion and belief. Neil Stocker, with his great sense of irony, his knowledge of modern American art, would get a kick out of how deluged, harnessed and cheated he was by swallowing all that garbage about the New York art scene. The trouble with the bitter pill, alas, is that finding out can be too late. One's already swallowed it.
